Stillwater Magazine 2013 - 2014

STILLWATERLITERARY MAGAZINE

2012-2013STILLWATER MAGAZINE

2013-2014

Cover photo by Robert Hummel

THE

EDITORS

Editor-in-Chief

Assistant Editor-in-Chief

Nonfiction

Nonfiction

Fiction

Fiction

Poetry

Poetry

Copy Editor

Art & Photography

Layout

Layout Assistant

Publicity & Events

Publicity & Events

Web Editor

Web Editor

Faculty Advisor

Olivia Consol

Isadora Herold

Liz Levine

Rachel Drachman

Jeremy Gosek

Patrick Morey

Kirsten Samanich

Andrew Hinkley

Anna Schenk

Andreas Jonathan

Olivia Consol

Nicole Maturo

Brianna Pennella

Alexandra Vasteno

Steven Fowler

Kimberly Nicolas

Katie Marks

A NOTE FROM THE

EDITORS

Stillwater magazine is a growing on-campus publication that believes in the importance of letting people’s voices be heard. We work hard to make the submission process as fair as possible, conducting blind submissions for every piece. We do not look for one exclusive voice, but rather a variety of voices exemplifying the diverse backgrounds and thoughts of each student author. In addition to the magazine publication, Stillwater has gone online. This year, the Stillwater staff created a website to give writers on and off the Ithaca College campus a place to publish their work. Our website is a place to look back and remember old pieces, and to look forward with more non-traditional types of writing. Please, check us out at icstillwater.com. This year we also held two “Read, Write, Improv Nights” during which students were given an opportunity to share their writ-ing and quick-thinking imaginations with their peers. Finally, Stillwater Magazine would not exist without all of its hardworking, dedicated editors. We have truly enjoyed working together and with the fantastic writers and artists on campus. This year’s edition of Stillwater is not only a compilation of exquisite pieces of writing and art, but it is a compilation of hard work, emotion, and true-life experiences. We sincerely hope you enjoy it. Kindly, The Editors of Stillwater Magazine

TABLE OF

CONTENTSL’Appel du Vide by Meg Ritchey Poetry..........................................................................................................................................................Of Dragons and Wisdom by Jared Povanda Nonfiction.....................................................................................................................................................Finitude by Garen Neil Poetry............................................................................................................................................................Haven by Nina Varilla Poetry............................................................................................................................................................Havona by Kirsten Wise Fiction..........................................................................................................................................................Roadkill by Taryn Pire Nonfiction.....................................................................................................................................................Seasonal Decay by Caleb Grant Poetry..........................................................................................................................................................A New Generation of Wild by Kelson Goldfine Nonfiction.....................................................................................................................................................Red Irish Lord by Matt K. Schultz Fiction..........................................................................................................................................................Metamorphosis by Gabriella Billadeau Poetry............................................................................................................................................................Star Wars by Tom Maher Fiction..........................................................................................................................................................Voicing by Josh Rollin Poetry............................................................................................................................................................An Indispensable Book by Caleb Grant Nonfiction.....................................................................................................................................................The Big ‘A’ by Tess Le Moing Poetry............................................................................................................................................................The Places Mark Has Been by Kirsten Wise Fiction..........................................................................................................................................................Sequoia (Vows) by Amber Donofrio Poetry..........................................................................................................................................................The Lion Will Sleep Tomorrow by Matt Kelly Nonfiction.....................................................................................................................................................

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Stillwater Magazine 6

L’APPEL DU VIDEby Meg Ritchey

There’s a French term: l’appel du videor, “the call of the void”which describes the urge you sometimes feel,when standing at the edge of a very tall buildingto take just one more stepand let yourself fall out into the air.Not a death wish, but rather a searchFor some confirmationthat we are, indeed, alive. It’s in that moment afterharnesses are double-checked andcarabiners are locked tightand thick, colored ropeis pulled taut at your waist.As you start upward,feeling the cold curve ofsteel rungs sunk deepinto the soft core of the tree,you can’t help but feela little bit insane. Who can say whythat unseen forcedraws us forwardwhen we knowwe want nothing morethan to keep our feet on solid ground?But in those brief moments of free fall,I can almost put my finger on it.After my stomach drops into my feetand my breath catches in my throat,all that exists is the empty airand my outspread fingertips,catching the wind in little ribbons.

Stillwater Magazine7

OF DRAGONS AND WISDOM

by Jared Povanda

They told me all four were coming out at once. The top wisdom teeth were usually an easy extraction, but the bottom teeth were the ones that would hurt. It isn’t actually the teeth that hurt, though. They are just victims like the rest of us. Evicted from their soft and pliable homes when they start to become big and problematic, the neighborhood watch simply can’t deal with them anymore. Our wisdom teeth connect to our gums through a series of stringy ropes that crisscross and cascade; pink and red tethers that, when severed, cause excruciating pain if the person is not drugged beforehand. When I had my first appointment with the doctor in February, he explained exactly what he was going to do, where he was going to slice. I had turned into a slab of meat as soon as I sat down; they appraised me for parts. I thought it was funny that our wisdom could be forcibly removed from our own heads; that the connection to adulthood was so fragile and tenuous, a few sharp turns of the knife could eradicate all connection to our past childhood. When I was in kindergarten, I could not fathom being removed from my family when I turned eighteen. I matured, like the wisdom teeth, and my classmates and neighbors became semi-permanent fixtures. I was unaware that the home I had made eternal in my head would be exposed as a mere container. It was the vessel that I would grow out of, the place where I would spread my initial roots, only to see them get hacked away at their bases. My dad told me a few weeks later, “Everyone gets their wisdom teeth out, so there’s nothing to be afraid of,” and, “It’s a rite of passage, Jared. You

just have to do it or it’ll get a lot worse.” My parents wanted me to get the teeth removed before college, so I wouldn’t have to worry about my mouth hurting while I was away from home. At the time, I didn’t think that was very sweet of them. I looked up rites of passage on the internet, and no website counted “Oral Surgery and Facial Reconstruction” as one of the gateways to adulthood. I realized that wisdom teeth weren’t needed in our modern world, and that they would get infected if they stayed inside any longer, but I still felt bad for them. They were evicted too early, forced to swim figure eights until they decomposed in their opaque glass jars. I wasn’t able to receive the wisdom their namesake promised me, and I’m not sure if I ever will. Childbirth is another form of extraction, but one that ends in a joyous celebration. The proud parents go home with their little bundles and, if they’re lucky, never return to the hospital again. The same cannot be said of wisdom teeth. Once they are gone, the only boon is four oval shaped holes that serve to remind one that some doctor had a wonderful time bloodying the mouth. For the next few months until doomsday in early April, I often woke up at night, thinking of all the things that could go wrong. Navigating WebMD with the elegance of an Olympic figure skater, I read story after story about the procedure. Most of them were positive accounts that bounced around similar ideas like, “The waiting is the worst part!” and, “You’ll have some crazy dreams when you’re high off the stuff they give you. I dreamt of pink elephants and polka dot pandas…” They read like


advertisements printed in bold colors: “Verbal hot-potato! The new game sweeping the nation!” In February, the doctor gave me a pamphlet outlining all that could go wrong in surgery for liability’s sake. Infections, the loss of the use of my mouth, death in extreme cases. The usual. He and his nurses told me exactly what would happen on the day of, and told my mom that she would need to pick me up a bottle of prescription mouthwash to use in the weeks leading up to the “big day.” Jan, the nurse, must have thought she coined that term because she looked so proud of herself as she said it. All of a sudden a “simple procedure” (another one of Jan’s spectacular lingual creations), leapt from a surgery to some kind of event in which I would have to perform. I couldn’t wear anything nice just in case blood or saliva meandered down to the collar of my shirt, and I had to wear a t-shirt so the IV could be set up properly. The mouthwash tasted salty and sweet all at the same time. It was as if two knights were dueling to see which flavor would attain dominance over my palette. Maybe they were fighting over who would be first to fight the dragon at the end of the fairy tale. Nonetheless, it scared me, and after a while I had trouble tasting the distinct notes of those two flavors. What if the two knights killed one another, and what I tasted now was their final effort to live? Slowly, I was getting ready for that same battle. Resolving to be a knight similar to the ones who lost their lives on the barren expanses of my tongue. I knew I did not want to become muted like they had. Being a person, who ultimately was lost between the sweet folds of childhood and the crusty salt-laden world of adults was worrisome, especially when high school graduation was approaching in lockstep soon after. As time ticked towards the date of the sur-gery, my oh-so supportive friends tried to quell my fears. Some said things not so unlike the anonymous cloud on WebMD, while others loved to heckle:

“It’ll feel like you just got punched in the face twenty times and then run over by a truck! You might not even be back when school starts again!” One of them told me the story of how this junior named Charlie tried to go to school after his “big day,” and almost fell off the bleachers in the orchestra room. Hearing those comments and remembering that story didn’t help ease my worries, and by the time I left school on Friday, I knew I was going to have to don my own suit of armor to survive. The morning of the surgery, my mom hugged me and said that she loved me numerous times. Even though I wasn’t in the mood to talk, she couldn’t stop worrying for my sake. Once the dams broke, all the water came surging out: “Make sure you take a few deep breaths! You look pale! Doesn’t he look pale, dear? Oh, Jared, don’t be nervous! We love you!” It went on and on until my dad and I finally stepped into the lukewarm embrace of the sun and piled into the car. The clock read 7:39; we were right on time for the 8:00 appointment. The drive didn’t take very long, but time seemed to slow down for me. I gripped at the black jacket I had thrown over myself, my fingers turning into talons and my body starting to ache. I kept swallowing over and over again. There was this stubborn piece of phlegm that just wouldn’t go down and I didn’t want to start gagging. My dad the doctor tried to calm me down, but his words didn’t follow the same patterns as my mom’s. Hers surged and sloshed over the ear, but his made it feel like I was listening through molasses. Arriving to the battle in a red t-shirt with fad-ed AC/DC lyrics on the front and black sweatpants, I knew the dragon’s maw was the operating room, that the doctor and nurses were its masters, and that the fire felt on my skin was all of the trepidations escap-ing my body in a mass exodus. Every single fear was running for its life. We walked up the ramp to the waiting room, and to my surprise and disappointment, there was no escort there to lead me to the dragon, to deliver


me in sacrifice like a goat. My leg moved on its own accord, up and down in the waiting room chair like a jackhammer ready to drill through the plush purple carpet into the boards below. A shadowy mantra of worry and fear wound itself up in my head, a perpetually moving music box. Instead of playing a soft tune, the ballerina at its core was caught in an ungraceful pirouette. I rubbed my palms on my sweatpants, and by the time Theresa, the other nurse, called me in, I could have sworn that there were holes where the fabric stretched from thigh to knee. His name wasn’t Doctor Close, but I feel like it should have been, as he was going to be putting his hands down my throat. He really couldn’t get any closer to me if he tried. Close and his lackeys were gleeful that morning, and they left me wondering if they happened to be the Wicked Witch’s monkeys that were somehow still alive in 2013. The chair under me was lumpy, and from it, I had a wonderful view of the wall. It reclined backwards with a squeak, and as they pinned the musty-smelling blue bib around my neck, I couldn’t help but marvel at how vulnerable they made me feel. I wonder if they teach that skill in medical school. If they do, I’m sure they all received A’s. They hooked me up to the heart rate machine soon after, and my nerves projected outward for the first time in a great symphony. The shrill beeps were so close together that other nurses and doctors were coming in to see what the commotion was. The room didn’t deserve to hear such a racket that early in the morning, so I tried to will my heart rate down. I didn’t want the dragon to wake up yet. The walls were white and sterile, brown unfeeling cabinets and grey machines lined each one. I thought to myself that it would have been a lovely setup if they were going to kill people in there, and in a way, they were. They were going to extract my wisdom. The veritable electric chair they had me sitting in helped me realize that society no longer

viewed me as a child, regardless of this fact. Even if this rite wasn’t documented online, I knew that things were going to change for me then. Even if the gateway to the next day was the only thing that opened, I would consider it a metamorphosis. I stared straight ahead as Jan placed a funny smelling rubber tube around my nose. The gas was only supposed to calm me enough so that the anesthesia in the IV wouldn’t have to work so hard to knock me out. The doctor was really only being considerate of the drug, not me—I was just another body, another appointment in the books. I tried to relax, but it was so hard. I couldn’t stop thinking of those horror stories where the anesthesia didn’t work properly and the person was stuck, aware of what was going on the whole time, but unable to call for help. To me, that sounded reminiscent of drowning. Drowning in molasses like I had in my dad’s words. Eventually, the world started to blur around the edges of my vision. I didn’t dream of pink elephants or polka dot pandas. In fact, I didn’t dream of anything. I was still so nervous that they had to use more gas before it was safe to put in the IV. I have never been stung by a wasp, but I’m sure that is what the IV felt like as they put in my left arm. There was a sharp pinch and I yelled out, my eyes squeezed together tight and tears welling up beneath the lids. I started laughing at one point, but it was unnatural, horrifying. The sound and sensation was stolen from my own lips, as if they were mad at me for selling out their wisdom teeth neighbors. The mouth is a community itself, and it was about to be razed. No wonder my lips were betraying me. I heard Jan and Dr. Close kibitzing in the cor-ner like two flighty old women. They said something to me about my laugh, my smile…were they flirting with me? I will never know; it all sounded like a trash compactor was placed inside my head. “We’re almost there, Jared. Just fall asleep. That’s right, fall asleep…” I was sure that it was Dr.


Close’s voice. I could hear the sweet upturn of his tone at the end of the sentence. He thought that made him sound like he was your friend, just like Jan thought her creations made her seem clever. These doctors were crazy. I was pulled backwards into a sleep that was not of my own design. For whatever reason, the only thing I was afraid of in that moment was that Jan and Dr. Close were going to turn my “big day” into an episode of Seinfeld; the one where Jerry hazily awoke to see the dentist and his assistant becoming intimate while he was still in danger of drowning in the flow of the drugs. I woke up surrounded by white cotton sheets that weren’t soft enough to be clouds, but weren’t slimy enough to be a dragon’s digestive tract, either. I tried to sit up, but I couldn’t, not yet. My dad was there smiling, his words this time whispers of encouragement: “You did it, Jared. I’m so proud of you. Just take it easy.” It took me a few moments to realize that I had four massive and bloody cotton balls stuffed in my cheeks. I had to change them every hour or so, and alternate from an ice pack to a heating pad to make sure the nerves both contracted and swelled. They were the two knights reborn, protecting my face to make sure it didn’t expand like a balloon at a children’s party.

As I ambled out of the office with my dad, I ran into two walls and the side of our car. It wasn’t very adult of me. That was the surprising thing. After puberty, we’re trained to be self-sufficient in college and in the workplace, but the drugs were able to undermine that training in an instant. As my dad guided me along, I realized that I was just as useful as that newborn child, the joyous extraction. It is expected of babies to rely on their parents and other adults, but when I did it in the office, everyone just suppressed their laughter. My dad told me that I looked like a zombie walking across that waiting room, but I think that I was actually just a shell of myself. I was infantile again, not the person I once was, or the person society expected me to be. Running into things, slurring my words, watching the world flow in and out of focus—this is what I was reduced to. I defeated the dragon, but just barely. I was bruised and battered, without wisdom. I escaped feeding time to live another day, but the dragon would come back. Just like my four extractions swimming in their opaque jar, I was, and still am, caught in an ever-moving circuit, transitioning between child and adult. As I stumbled over my own feet in that parking lot again and again, I knew that Jan the nurse was inside, readying the next patient. I hope he bit her.


FINITUDEby Garen Neil

Moments / are created illusions / of the human mind. All life / is a moment / A problem is solved / as it is created / And all is equal

Meaning / is a forsaken land / its problems have / no consequence In the grand scheme Human beings / are a sentient product / of the Earth trying to understand itself We are the acne-self-destruction / of a planet / realizing / its finitude.



HAVENby Nina Varilla

blinking, eyelashescurl like your slow smilestill toothless and alien from your mother’s belly paper membrane foldingaround your bending framecanvas of red andblues blushing, bruises and your blue green veinsclimb your wristslike the etching of your scarsreminding you. that quiet poetry in your voicequivers and catchescircles murmuring,tracing shapes with our breath. to me she was red lipstick and lilacsstifling gaze, scoliosis and small handsburning Christianity on my forehead,feeding me second generation guilt but i loved her because it was in menucleic acid linking us togetherblood and water and toxinspinching stitches that never healed. the reality scares meto fill that hollow space

another beating heart and tiny wingswaiting on breath

lest i curl back into that empty womb

and the green sky in your eyes.


by Emme Woollard


HAVONAby Kirsten Wise

Room 9, The Bernie Furness Rehabilitation CenterOctober 8th, 2013, 11:00 AM

Hey, I’m Elise, but you already know that. So what are we doing, starting these meetings at eleven every day?I’m OK, I guess, I’m on that Serax stuff. They said it was some kind of benzo-benzodia…. Benzodiazepines, that’s it. Thanks, Doc. Oh. OK. Dr. Phillips-but-call-me-Sheryl.Got it. Anyways, I’m supposed to be happy-dandy on this, right?Well.When I started high school, all the older boys were into jazz. The ones I cared about, anyways. Man, maybe I paid attention to the wrong ones from the beginning, ya know? Eh. Weather Report, Herbie Hancock—we would sit around and listen to B. B. King in the morning and drive through the night with “Havona” blaring out the windows. I was a back seat girl, I played tag-along, the little sister kind of freshman who was young and wasn’t afraid of small talk, would say “Hey, how are ya?”…I learned that from them, though... the boys, I mean. They were old school in that way, not afraid to talk to a stranger, someone passing by, and saying hello… they were catching stories. I remember one time when this guy Dhruv and I were at this café and we’re drinking and there’s this little duo playing like they have for years—they were old Mexican men—and in between sets, seventeen-year-old Dhruv went up to talk to them. I just nodded and smiled. I didn’t know young men could still be that way, easy-going and chill and…and uninterrupted. There were just the immature boys in my classes and the only men I knew were my old grandpa and the fathers of my friends. The boys taught me all that. Being smooth, genuine. They were restless, but they kept all that in between relaxed shoulders…It doesn’t do much for me now, except with the older lunch and maintenance people around here. No one talks like that anymore.

Office 343, Johnson Hall, University of Pittsburgh

October 11th, 2013, 4:00 PMMy grade. I know it’s a C. It’s bad. It’s just, Professor Lancey, I just don’t understand writing. I don’t get what you guys do. You say you sit and think and take long drives and an idea comes to you. I don’t get it. I just don’t got the stuff; I’m a normal guy. I’m not a storyteller and I don’t know why I thought it was a good idea to enroll in this writing class. Honestly, I’ll do anything to get this grade up; I need it for my Gen Eds. Just don’t expect me, Mrs. Lancey, to be able to hash out all these feelings you’re telling me I have about my town or my mom or my sister or anything.

Room 9, The Bernie Furness Rehabilitation Center October 8th, 2013, 11:05 AM

Yeah I started the ninth grade in 2004. I know. I’m almost at that sad age for someone like me—it’s supposed to be the best years and it’s almost too late—I’m like those ladies with a bunch of cats. Except they can hide


those kitty cats, while I guess I basically have my problems labeled all over me. I used to be beautiful, if you can believe it. My hair was actually blonde and not this in-between limp shit. I didn’t wear makeup until the eleventh grade. But back then I did it all wrong. My God, do you see all these marking on my skin? I fucked up my face. I never thought I was all that pretty. But Dennis, my brother—he’s at Pittsburgh now and—when I was saying goodbye he gave me this old picture from when he and I were teenagers and I guess I know now that there is such a thing as too skinny. Look at my wrists, how big the bone is. It’s gross…Oh come on; you know I’m ugly now. Look at me. Don’t tell me you don’t see some fucked up chick who threw her life away. I know it.What? Sheryl c’mon, don’t give me that bullshit. OK, OK, OK—I’m looking you in the eyes…I don’t believe you. I’m done with this. Hey, I was with that other counselor—what the fuck is his name? I don’t like him. Oh, Greg. Yeah. He told me I suck at eye contact. He’s right. But guess what? Before I got here I read that that whole thing is overrated. But what do I know. Just because something’s new doesn’t mean it’s better, right? The kids are on their devices all the time. They don’t have eye contact. No one’s bothering them, right? So why did he tell me I was so fucked up? I learned how to draw in a restaurant when I was a kid and my brother and I would play tic-tac-toe. We went outside. I would walk him to his pee wee football games…I know, that was a while ago, apparently. My brother grew up to be a good person, though. Not me.

Office 343, Johnson Hall, University of Pittsburgh October 14th, 2013, 3:59 PM

Here’s my homework. Sorry it’s late, I just had to do some stuff and, well…Do I have time to talk? Um, about what? OK. So that thing you were talking about in class about where ideas go. Like landfills. That so many of our memories are in this wasteland and it’s filled with chairs missing a leg and broken lampshades and busted couch. Sets and sets of furniture about to be crushed or—or burned or something. It’s like a junkyard…. Do you think it’s possible to try to forget something? I tried. I don’t think it’s a thing because it could be months and months and all you have to do is see a frickin’ dandelion and there is all this shit that had piled up, I guess. And you try to walk by this dandelion but you can’t. You stop and rip it out of the ground and tear the bottom of the stem, but don’t do anything else. Like, I wanted to rip that dandelion into little pieces. But I didn’t. I just stood there. I just stood there and people were passing me and probably looking at me like I was a weirdo and I just wanted to shred that flower but I didn’t. I stood there like, like a dumb-ass…I’m wasting your time I guess…Sorry for bothering you with that. I know you said you wanted to talk because I don’t say much but that was just a little thought, OK. Nothing big. Nothing personal.

Room 9, The Bernie Furness Rehabilitation Center October 9th, 2013, 11:30 AM

Why don’t we have a drink? It slows me down. You’d like that, I know. Oh, you don’t? But what’s wrong with a few gin and tonics? Let me see who’s outside here. Somebody get me a gin and tonic. Don’t worry, Sheryl, I got this. Hey. It’s real easy to make for me, I don’t even have a huge preference these days, hell, I drank the cheapest shit before I got here. Hey, Nurse Michael, Hot Stuff, yeah you. C’mere. Gin and tonic for me, and…well, Sheryl, I’m guessing you’re a vodka kind of gal, huh? Whiskey—oh! Ah, c’mon, Mikey…Yeah I’ll shut the door, fine…That Nurse Michael’s a little prick, ain’t he? These walls are sound proof, right? Ah, you know I was just kidding. I figure, this is the one place to act up?


Can I have a smoke? What? I can’t smoke in here either? I thought you let people smoke in these kinds of places, anywhere they please, because we got needs, ya know? So now it’s a pollutant, too hard to handle in these close quarters. I get it. But c’mon, Sheryl, I’m shaking here. No, I am not faking it. You’re killing me here. You’re lucky I’m this friggin’ open book on the second day, my God…Can you at least get me gum and a pen to chew on? Thanks...Hi, Michael. Make sure it’s not one of those thick kinds, OK? He’s shy, ain’t he? OK, so back to whatever the hell we were talking about. Wait, hey, remember those candy cigarettes? God, I loved them. Still do. That little corner store in um…um…Brookhaven, yeah, that place, they still got them. Fifty cents. Can I have those? No? OK, I’m good with the gum and pen. What the hell’s it called, an oral fixation? Well, I guess that’s what I have. A fixation.

Office 343, Johnson Hall, University of Pittsburgh October 16th, 2013, 3:59 PM

Professor Lancey. Yes, I’m fine. Hey, when’s the baby due? So you have some time. I was born in February, too. My hair was so white my mom told me that I was the snow that didn’t happen that year. My sister was six and her dad had already left. I think mine was never even told about me. It doesn’t matter. Mom tries her best, I guess…What’s my sister doing now? She’s um, um, she’s away doing some program, yeah. What is she really doing? Hey you’re lucky you even know I have an older sister. What’s your partner’s name again? Sheryl’s a nice name. What does she do again? Oh, OK, yeah, I think I might have heard of that place, but I’m not really sure.

Room 9, The Bernie Furness CenterOctober 10th, 2013, 11:30 AM

Jesus, I’ve been talking to you for the past two days and you’re pushing for more? What the fuck, man. Don’t you have a partner to go to? Yeah, I asked that Nurse Michael about you. I heard your wife is going to have a baby! Partner, sorry, right—that’s amazing! Is it a boy or a girl? City or surburb? Private, public, or Catholic? Probably not Catholic—never mind. We don’t know much about boundaries where I’m from and hell, you know so much about me anyway. Are you going to carry the next one or is the other one going to have your eggs or whatever…Oh. Your eggs don’t…OK. Well, you have Jessica’s, right? I bet she’s really pretty.

Office 343, Johnson Hall, University of PittsburghOctober 16th, 2013, 4:02 PM

I can tell you other stuff about my life. I can go on and on about what football meant to me. I played since I was in the pee wee league and I really liked defense. Why? I don’t know. I guess I just never really had that kind of “offensive” thing in me. Catching the ball and running and avoiding people, eh. I was an offensive lineman for a while, protecting the quarterback and stuff. I know. I seem more like an offensive lineman. Maybe because I’m always protecting people in my regular life? I’m not sure about what you’re saying. How about I talk about basketball for a while? I played both sides.

Room 9, The Bernie Furness Rehabilitation Center


October 10th, 2013, 11:38 AMOK, fine, I’ll talk to you about my troubles. Oh, you want the troubles of my family? That’s me, man. That’s me. You know how Lindsay Lohan’s family makes money off her shit? Well, they have it lucky because most American fuckups just leave their family high and dry. Like my friend’s dad’s cousin. He’s—if he’s still alive—a fuckup and he had three sons in jail all at once. Carson. That was my friend. Ah man, Carson. She was so put together. Hell, so was I. There were all the other snooty, perfect people in high school, but they didn’t know the shit Carson and I knew. She surprised me. I remember it was just her and me sitting on the tennis court and she nudged me and she said, “We come from somewhere else.” Poor girl. She never got a break. She was lesbian and the world treated her like shit half the time if she didn’t hide herself. But she came out in college, the easy way like most people do.And me? Oh, we’re going back to that, huh?


Hi Professor Lancey. It’s OK if I call you Jessica, right? Oh, yeah I guess everyone else does, too.My sister. Right. OK. Well, her name is Elise. We got along really well for being six years a part. Mom would work and Grandpa still worked and so Elise would take care of me. When she got to high school, I saw her less, but that’s normal. She had a lot of guy friends. Some of them were cool. She loved design. Her whole room was full of designs of houses and office buildings and stuff. But that stuff of kind of slowed down after a while. I don’t know, I guess it was a little after her sixteenth birthday when it started. She, um…was sad. I was just ten so I didn’t know, and Mom was too scared to ask. Mom was…I don’t know. She was a hard partier in high school too, so I guess she just assumed Elise was just going through a phase. We all did.

Room 9, The Bernie Furness CenterOctober 10th, 2013, 11:40 AM

Well, it took sixteen years but I finally started to see the world as the old piece of shit it was. I guess I knew it was coming. Why did I hang out with people that I knew would just leave? To hurt myself ? Maybe that’s the reason I hung around with all those older guys. The seniors left. When it was the whole group together, the seniors and juniors, they would let me leave when the night was getting too long—Dhruv would walk me home. Then sophomore year things got hazy. They weren’t as nice as the ones that had left, and things were different…sometimes they kept me a little too long in the night. I saw a little too much with the other girls. I…They weren’t the fellas you saw in the hallway on the way to third period or the ones hanging at the snack shack or heading into the woods after dinner anymore…they changed…I was tagged along to places where I wasn’t just cute or bold anymore—they used me for something else, too. They saw me like they saw some girls…C’mon, let me have something. A drink? A smoke? please?

Room 9, The Bernie Furness Center October 10th, 2013, 12:30 PM

I can stay this quiet for another half hour, it doesn’t bother me. Sheryl, I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t want to…it just…it started with one guy touching my waist every now and then. And then the small of back, rubbing his hand up and down my back…a couple guys started to notice what he was doing and


they started to lean on my shoulders, put their head by my hair…it was subtle but then it became one of them coming from behind in the kitchen when everyone was in the basement and holding their arms on either side of me, trapping me to the counter, to the table, to the wall…they would say, “Elise, how’ve you been?” And it wasn’t like before, when we were all cool. It was a mask coming off, or a sick joke they decided to play…they’d say, “Come on, baby, come on to me”…What was I supposed to do? I would brush them off and they would eventually let me go but they had me for two or three seconds…stone stiff and in pain inside. And then one time…I never told anyone, and I was proud of that. I just kept it to “fine,” “OK,” “oh, you know how he gets.” Who would believe me anyway? No one would believe me if I told them…that guy, who um, started it, he shuffled me to one of the corner bedrooms and, well.No one did anything. Acted like they didn’t hear my muffled screams because he had his hand over my mouth, and…I left after that. It was August. Everyone thought I stopped hanging out with them because they were leaving and no one had an idea, or they would have done something, right? Things got shitty after that, and…that’s all I’m going to say. No one ever really looked at me, OK?


She graduated. Went to Penn State. Not for architecture, though. One night I heard my mom crying about something my sister did: She drank too much and they found her sitting up against a tree. She barely made it through the first three semesters before she dropped out. Then she got a job, and we all kind of thought that she was normal again, like she was just not that happy at college. She was doing well, I guess. She kept changing houses. She tried to find her dad for a few months. Mom was hurt by that, so she focused on me. I was in high school and I played football and basketball and did track, and I got really good grades, so…I guess we kind of let Elise go on her own for a while.That’s what she wanted, anyway. But she got bad again. I…oh shit look at the time! I got to go, Jessica.

Room 9, The Bernie Furness CenterOctober 10th, 2013, 12:40 PM

I had a job before this, ya know. I’m probably fired now. I managed condominiums, or at least helped to. The office was nice, and there was Shelly, and Carrine, and Barbara…I was hanging with older ladies and a couple of the young girls and they thought I was a real knockout. Shelly told me that once. I guess she was right. I knocked back a few, I knocked into people, some men thought I was a knockout…and I let them know that. I… had it under control. I did. I had been sleeping around and being a party girl since I was sixteen and that wasn’t going to change. I…I…I had it under control, Doc, I did. I was happy! Just last week I was I in the real world and I was…I was…I have friends. Dhruv sent me a letter. Becky, from high school—we used to go out and she sent me a letter from her place once my mom told her mom and, and…Mom hasn’t called me, but I get it, I do, I do…Man, where’s that pack of gum, right? Where did it go? Where’s…where’s… I don’t feel good, Doc, I don’t. Why did you have to cut me so cold turkey! I can’t do this. I can do arts and crafts and bitch about the weather and go on walks but I can’t sit in a circle or be here with you…I have to go back. I need to see Dennis. I need Dennis. I used to care for him, OK? I used to be the big sister, the one who…who…I just looked out for him, man. I just did what I had to do. I just did what I had to do. I was good then, I was good then, I was good then! I! Was! Good! Then!



The thing is that Grandpa died a year ago from today.Yeah, I miss him.He didn’t say much, but he loved us, you know? He was five-foot-five. He sold couches. He loved football and that’s how we bounded. That’s how everyone bonded with me. Mom loved to come to the games with her boyfriend to feel normal and Grandpa loved to watch Rudy every August and say how I was the whole package, I was sports and grades and a good guy who has to deal with our messed up family. But then he died of a heart attack and I tore my ACL. Done for the whole year. No scholarship. Mom just made sure I went to a state school and then she moved to Florida with her boyfriend. Elise was elsewhere because she didn’t care about sports like that. And then she…I have to go, I…I’m good, yeah. I just have to go, OK?

Room 239, The Bernie Furness CenterOctober 14th, 2013, 10:37 PM

I don’t want you around me, Doc. I don’t want you near me. You pushed me too hard. This shit is supposed to be ninety days. Yeah, I know I haven’t seen you in four days. Whoop-de-do, it’s Day 7 out of fuckin’ 90.Hey, what are you doing with my music?…Ah, “Havona.”Damn, really listen to this song, Sheryl. The energy! Jazz fusion—uh, here we go. Listen to Jaco Pastorious’ bass lines—that guy could play. Man, he could play. Dhruv gave me this album. And that day I was blasting this song in my room. Mom wasn’t home and Dennis came in. I had dandelions in my hair—I was teaching the boys how to make strings of them earlier that day—and I put the crown that was on my head on my brother and I said, “You are the runaway prince. You will make a kingdom of your own.”… Don’tcha feel it?


What, are we listening to music today?I know this song. My sister Elise used to listen to it. This song made her feel…I don’t know, alive? She would say weird stuff sometimes, most of the time because she was probably high, but, this was before she always did the stuff and she wasn’t high or drunk or anything…she was just happy… She called me a prince. She said I would run away. I would make my own kingdom. I was nine and I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, but…how is she?


ROADKILLby Taryn Pire

“Hurry up, mothafuckas! We gon’ be late,” Chris yelled unabashedly down the street to Jacob and me. We were walking along Plaza Road, a main street on the quiet suburban side of town, to some ambiguous destination that only Chris knew. He swaggered ahead of us with his pants belted intentionally at his knees. Jacob and I watched Chris’s large silver chain swing on his neck from side to side in response to his aggressive steps. “What a fucking moron,” Jacob said. I laughed at his comment, like I always did—even when what he said wasn’t that funny. Jacob was my first love. He had big green eyes that were lovely but perpetually glazed over. He was six-foot-two with rough hands and a beefy build. He had just gotten his stereotypical skater hair cut short. I hated it short. He was the first guy who took me out to lie in the grass and look at the stars. Even on days that he forgot about me, I would have looked up at the night sky with him until curfew anyway. It had been over two years since we had broken up at this point, but I was still crazy about him. He always said that he knew I was the girl he was going to marry, but he wasn’t ready for that type of commitment. We were sixteen, so I didn’t mind waiting. We would date other people every so often during the years we were apart, but we’d always check in on each other to see if the new girl or guy was actually a threat. During the times that we were both single, though, we always went back to each other. Always at night, always hidden: behind bushes, under unlit gazebos, on the side of train tracks. Anyplace that would keep our bad decisions between us so no one would ever know about them, anyplace that would make sure our bodies never made

us promise anything more than that to each other. Just bad decisions. Finally we caught up with Chris. “Where are we going again?” Jacob asked. “To Jeff ’s. He thinks he can get some bud and then we can get T-Dawg blazed!” Chris responded. T-Dawg. That’s what he called me. For a big period of time in high school, I almost exclusively hung out with scumbags. Boyfriends, acquaintances, strangers: all of them the same breed of asshole, but addictively charming and enduringly disturbed. At some point during my early adolescence, I figured out that if I tolerated someone for long enough, I could bring out some shrouded redeeming qualities in him to prove he was in fact a decent person. These were the kids that no one liked, not because they were weird but because they sucked. At the same time, people like Chris and Jacob weren’t all shitty. In my experience, most “bad” people have depth to them. They’re not necessarily despised because they’re bad people, but sometimes because they see the world in a different way and have the balls to act on it. As good or bad as they were, it was as though I was on a mission to save social rejects from their own lack of normalcy, or in some cases, their lack of morality. I probably could have done without people like them. But there was something about the complexity of boys like Jacob: they kept me wondering if I’d really figured them out. There’s always the possibility of there being more than what you’ve uncovered, something left to dig up. Chris looked down at his phone for minutes at a time while walking. This gave Jacob plenty of freedom to hold my hand behind his back. He took me by two fingers and squeezed, the front of my


palm pressing against the back of his damp t-shirt. We were always loving each other in secret. My friends didn’t think it was so profound, and maybe I didn’t either. But in moments like this, every second counted. Every instant was new and fresh, yet a nostalgic reminder of every other time I thought we were evolving in the past. He would take my hand in his and it would be as though he had never touched me before. He felt different every time; more wrinkles in his knuckles, fewer lines in his palms, thicker calluses on his fingertips. Maybe this was true, or maybe enough time had passed that I forgot what I thought I never could and called it change. A grassy island split the street in half. We always used the island instead of the sidewalk. Chris yelled some joke from a short distance ahead of us, probably something racist and juvenile. I turned my head robotically upwards to meet Jacob’s eyes, but I noticed he was looking over me into the street. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. Holy shit, dude!” I swung around and found myself looking at this giant raccoon attempting to cross the street. It was still light out, so I automatically deemed the thing diseased and malicious. I soon noticed that it wasn’t the raccoon Jacob was cursing at, but the oncoming driver that didn’t seem to notice the animal in front of her SUV. There was a moment that I thought it would stop. There was a moment when I wasn’t even actu-ally scared, because there was no chance of the per-son actually hitting the animal in front of us, in front of me. There was no chance we’d have to watch. The raccoon got tapped lightly on the back end of its body. It could have been over, but the driver didn’t stop. She rolled past another house and a half with the raccoon tangled in the tire by its tail. We watched in horror while the raccoon’s entire body was turned over and over and over again around the tire. The car was moving slowly enough that the raccoon never bled or broke open under the weight of the car, though I’m sure there were broken bones and internal bleeding that we couldn’t

see, wounds we couldn’t heal. The animal seemed to be attempting to wriggle free, as its head was still moving back and forth while the car rolled further and further. For the most part though, it was helpless. Stuck. Around and around and around. Ceaselessly being spun in circles. Then the driver finally stopped, allowing the raccoon to escape the grip of the rubber. We looked at her in disbelief, our mouths gaping. We could see the vast whites of her eyes; she looked shocked at what she had done. Nevertheless, she drove away, leaving us with the battered animal lying in the street waiting to die. The raccoon started seizing mere seconds after she left. This was more than simple twitching. Its entire body jumped feet into the air, its mass no longer a slave to gravity. White foam dripped from what we assumed was its mouth onto the hot summer asphalt. We could see the froth fly every time the body jolted. We couldn’t stop staring. We watched the raccoon in silence until it convulsed on the steamy tar one last time and ceased moving. Finally, after roughly two minutes of this, it was dead. I turned to Jacob and buried my face in his chest. In the back of my mind I felt grateful for the awful experience we had just had, thinking maybe it would be something we’d talk about in a few years, a story we could tell people together. He swallowed me in his arms and ran his hand up and down my back as he and Chris yelled obnoxiously about how sick “that shit” was. That shit. We didn’t spend much time dwelling. Chris became disinterested and continued walking, and then so did Jacob, which meant I had to keep moving too. The tears in my eyes welled up as I tried to bite my cheek hard enough to keep them from falling. I reached out for Jacob’s hand, to which he responded with his signature indifferent smirk. He looked at my eyes, swollen and wet, and he seemed to understand. He parted his lips to say something; something I like to imagine that would have been comforting and


monumental. But Chris called him over to look at a picture of a car on his phone, so Jacob never said anything. He lost eye contact and let go of my hand without hesitation, leaving me to catch up with them on my own. I fantasized about the words I never heard. Maybe he would tell me later, if they were important. I blinked a few times until I felt my eyes dry and then ran ahead to the boys. Eventually the sun set on us as we loitered around town, moving in

no particular direction as always. I remember Jacob hugged me from behind at one point, his bronze arms glowing under the streetlamps that traced our trail. His hands hung parallel to my hips as we clumsily and desperately attempted walking in sync with each other, wrapping our ankles together and lifting our feet at the same time. Left right left right, our steps were heavy and slowed with the weight of our forced rhythm. It took us twice as long to get home that night.


The sky might have screamed, but it could not.

So it watched us dance slowly on the ground.

Our feet moved with a certain rhythm, placed with a delicate conviction.

They carried us into winter, when the snow fell, and buried us deep underneath.

Our movement froze with the cold, blood running slower than our feet.

My hand, still as a stone, rested on your cheek.

With the thaw we sank into the water, the sky blurring, far beneath the surface.

Rays of light stabbed us with their warm colors, until we could not breathe.

The sky watched as we laughed and cried, and the orange and yellow leaves fell.

We held on tightly, while the day drifted away, and I choked on my own voice.

I might have screamed, and the snow fell, until the world was full and I was tired.

The cup in my hands spilled as my hands shook, and my mouth burned, engulfed in fire.

My eyelids drifted closed, and I watched from inside, as my thoughts turned to fists.

Flooded by warmth, I lie awake, the air changing with each breath I take.

SEASONAL DECAYby Caleb Grant


by Sara Gaechter


“Kelson, can you hear me?” “Yes, Dad.” I stare at the Skype screen on Ivan’s PC laptop, perched on the cherry wood dining room table. I sit alone in the room far away from my father and his big Mac computer. A tin plate of cherry baklava pastry sits nearby on the table. The openhearted Bosnian woman who has generously taken me, the young, American friend of Ivan, her son, into her home, sits outside on the porch in a baby-blue linen dress. Her legs fold into a wicker chair and she glances at me every once in a while through the glass door. I don’t remember her name. She speaks little English, I no Croatian. “How’s State College?” I ask. My father fumbles with the webcam. His office, the Pumpkin Room, painted orange, shakes with the camera. My father’s cowboy hat and collection of thrift-store dress shirts tilt with the room, as if to slide down the metal pole from which they hang It’s mid-afternoon where I sit, time for Ivan’s mother to smoke her third cigarette of the day. I could not tell you what time it is in Pennsylvania. Life seems to move so slowly where I am not, sometimes even to stop—my family frozen at the airport, or at the base of the driveway, where I saw them last. But here is my father, moving and breathing still. “Sorry —Kelson, can you hear me? I didn’t get that,” he says. “I said, ‘How is State College?’” He would still be running long on Saturdays with his old-folks club. We run together, whenever I’m home. It was on those stretches of road and trail that my father first began to tell me about his wild travels. During long, dewy morning 10 milers around Caulier’s lake along gravel roads peppered with green ferns and

road kill. I remind myself, once again, that life con-tinues in all other time zones, though the only watch ticking is mine. “Oh, it’s great. I wish you could have been at the dinner table last night. Mom made chicken pot pie. It was really, really good.” “Oh yeah?” “I couldn’t decide between an acidic white or a light red wine. I went with the white. It balanced … nicely with the pie.” “Sounds great,” I say. My father is focused. He goes through fazes—cheese, bread, wine, soup, marathon running. He’s a half-time teacher with summers off. Cheese, wine and marathons are what he does in his free time, complete with bouts of self-righteousness, wanderlust, calling things ace-and-ace, Whitman and Ginsberg; Jazz, English teaching philosophies, baggage from a strict Jewish childhood, and spiritual messengers like the holy Llama, Joseph Campbell, David Foster Wallace and Richard Rhor. He talks about it all like he’s a little kid with a new toy. And though he isn’t so untamed anymore, he is still known for his spark around town, and to our extended family, even among my friends, and, especially, through the hallways of the high school where he teaches. I got lucky, I think. “I so, so wish you could have tried my ham-bone soup the other day. I’m on a soup kick,” he continues, slowly putting his hands together, cupping his palms as if soup was running through them. When I’m home, I like to sit with my father in the kitchen while he cooks, or kneads a new bread

A NEW GENERATIONOF

WILDby Kelson Goldfine


recipe, or chops cilantro and tomatoes, watching him work. I’ll tell him about my day, and college, always trying a little too hard to show that I’m getting smarter, worthy of adulthood and his friendship. “Hang on Kelson—let me get your mother.” I watch my father flip his braid over his shoulder as he bellows down the stairs. My mother rushes from deep inside the belly of our house to see me. My sister saunters apprehensively, her red hair bobbing slowly to the top of the stairs, not looking thrilled to see me. It seems she doesn’t recognize this wild, cyber version of me. As my sister, my father and mother line up in front of my father’s big Mac computer, I picture us all together, though I have put myself a continent away from them. I would be lying if I said I was not in small-town Croatia because of my family, but it was not abandonment. It was not teen angst, or even strictly my baggage that led me across the Atlantic. A restlessness, rather. I wanted my own spark. I don’t know what else they expected of me. My mother had traveled too, through rural China, teaching English and riding bikes with other 30-somethings from California dwelling overseas. “So—where exactly are you?” I hear my mother’s brain struggle to ask this question slowly, no anxiety in her tone. I tell them about Ðurdevic; I tell them it’s up north, near Hungary. I describe the old farms, the houses modeled after western suburbia, except dustier, with old cars and tractors and wheelbarrows dumped in the front yard. I recount the peacock festival; the honey rakia and the green peppers stuffed with meat and rice Ivan’s mother cooked up for dinner in her blue, linen dress. I mispronounce the name of the festival. I can’t get a handle on Croatian–j it’s not at all like French or Spanish. I tell them about the Slovenian countryside: the little churches painted with ghoulish skeletons, Tito’s summer house near Bled, white-walled, set in the middle of a lake with floating swans and painted

boats. The sandy roads cutting the countryside in half, and the bottle-blue Mediterranean; the pink, stone walls and bridges of Ljubljana, and my newfound dislike for Nora Jones after a six hour car ride, the same CD on repeat. When I’ve tugged enough stories out of the last few weeks onto the table, and my mother is satisfied, my father announces he has something to tell me. My sister rolls her eyes and I try to imagine what might come next. My father is full of plans. Usually, they are no bigger than a new pair of running shorts, or a GPS watch, but something about this one makes the pixilated airwaves between us seem to tremble. He glances at my mother. “I’ve decided I’m going to backpack through Europe next summer.” His puppy tail wags behind him. “I want to be where you are, in a home, eating home cooked meals in the houses of peasants. It kills me to sit here while you’re out there. I’m so, so envious of you.”As he waves his hands through the air, articulating the numbers he has crunched; that we have a little wiggle room, and we can afford this sort of trip right now, I am suddenly high up above the old, Bosnian woman’s house, the Croatian cornfields, the gypsy camps and the long, skinny highways full of German cars zooming from Zagreb to Split. Envy is a tender emotion. One exists not between fathers and daughters but in fiction books and myths, or among friends who wish to stand in the other’s place. My father, envious of me. I was doing something wild and adventurous, yes. But my father’s whole life was adventure—it was all wild. He was—is—an intense traveler. I know what it’s like to follow him around third-world countries. He’ll ask three different people for directions, practically yelling, completely unaware his voice has risen. Usually he mispronounces the road or the city he’s looking for. To this day he still calls Cusco “coos-coos.” He haggles as if two rupees make a fortune and aggressively shoves his way into taxis and rickshaws.


When he was younger, my father hitchhiked across the United States using only his thumb to get him from place to place. He worked on a slime-line in Alaska and lived under a tarp and two fallen trees across a dry stream. This man has sat on sandy, windy bus rides across North Africa traveling from the Pyra-mids to Casablanca, hiked up Mount Sinai to stand where Moses once stood and accepted rides from Tibetan truck drivers all the way from Chengdu to Lhasa. At some point, he got lost in a jungle in Nicaragua. Nobody has a more adventurous spirit than him. No matter how hard I paw at the world, digging to extract all the meaning and wisdom, I can hardly expect to outdo my father, with a shadow so large and fantastical. Though I would be lying if I said it had not crossed my mind. Here I was, following canals through Amsterdam till my feet ached so hard I could barely stand, roaming beneath Paris through gutted metro stations, and bruising my legs and loosing my way on bikes too big for me in Berlin. Taking black coffee in china bowls from French hippies, attempting to explain in broken French the value of a sports team, and running up curvy mountain roads in American-made sneakers past cows and crumbling, 400-year old stone houses. Fending off Greek ticket officers that wink at me as they take my passport, my skin crispy and sunburnt. Here I was, standing completely alone in train stations and markets—combing the Earth for my own adventures. Trying to grow up and seek my own wild. My father’s approval is not hard to come by, but one has to do things on his terms. Running, schoolwork, and books had been my routes to success and appraisal for nineteen-years; but now, perhaps, something that was becoming such a big part of me also meant something to him, to my credit. My father was envious of me and maybe, just maybe, impressed. Nineteen sounds old. But as my father’s mouth moved to form words about his latest runs in State College, my mother’s giving me updates on her raspberry bushes, I knew it was not as pure an age as it sounds. I knew my father could picture me, sweaty

and embarrassed on the side of a road in Padua, tired and sad in Kreutzbur. And yet, he still wanted to be with me. Having his blessing to fly overseas alone had been enough. To have his will and want to ride the train tracks with me made that nineteen-year-old impureness, the unoriginality of my first attempts at navigating the world, seem alright. He had not dismissed my attempts to scrape something from this world. “So, this trip is working? It was a good idea?” My father’s steady voice calls me back. His hands rest on the square of my mother’s back and I focus on my family again. My sister seems to be listening now. I wonder briefly how much time they have spent guessing at what drove me out here. Traveling is gritty and gut-wrenching, they know; but thank God for that. I had not been looking for easy tests. All I know now is that it’s that mystery and admiration for the way things have been done before propelling me forwards. My ghosts, their ghosts, and the photo albums in our living room. The stories I was born from, the tales I’ve been told and the fables I’ve read of great adventurers and those frightful, dirty, rainy, messy, yet triumphant, moments. Trips that don’t quite change a life, but leave it inexplicably different than it once was. That’s what I’m up against if I am ever to find my own wild. “Yes, Dad, I think this trip is working.” “Good—well, then, till next time,” he says. “Be safe! Email us!” Coos my mother. Then they are gone, receding once again into the vortex of time in which their world halts and mine speeds on ahead. The woman on the porch looks at me one more time through the glass door and I hear Ivan’s footsteps on the stairs. I half expect to see my father standing in a corner of the kitchen. But, of course, he isn’t there, though I can feel his presence and know I will always be able to see him in small, shadowy ways. I’m on my own. Completely—and gloriously—on my own. A plane ticket to Istanbul clutched between my thumbs, I know there is more to come.


by Kristi Gogos


by Ben Bishop


by Emme Woollard


by Emme Woollard


Stillwater Magazine33 by Robert Hummel


In his dream, they were whole. Oran wakes to the turns of wind outside, nothing else. Inside the cabin, the air sucking through some cracks, pushing through others. Each cycle, the structure breaths. In. Out. He sits up and rolls the chill from his shoulders and, rising, breaks the phlegm in his chest. The fire had blinked out during the night and so he walks the few dark paces to the stove and pulls open the door, creaking, and drives the poker into the ash and chunked wood and folds ash over ash until he finds the dim orange beneath the cinder and takes up the bellow and coaxes the dust to fire. He leans forward, piles tinder atop embers, centers a log in the flame and waits for it to catch. He closes the stove door, and stands. A window opens the wall and through it Oran gauges the morning. Blue light fading westward. April mist. No new snow, but enough still to use the sled. It’s yellow, black decals, parked beneath the window. The cabin squats one story, thick, knotted logs, stacked. Each seam flush, black with resin. The roof is hand-laid shingle. A band of aspens poke from the ground on all sides, each one stunted and black-speckled white, a light sway to them when the breeze is steady. The snow layer is a rag-tag churn of gray and black and recedes into patches of grass, sickly-green, lank against the black of aspen stumps. He leaves the window and moves toward the pantry. Passing the desk he runs his hand across the surface, down, under the lip of the drawer, follows a shallow groove channeled by this routine, smoothed by his skin, and time. He doesn’t open the drawer. Inside are talismans. Memories. Isa. Thomas. From shelving beside the pantry he pulls down a pouch of Caribou hide and twine and unknots the twine

RED IRISH LORDby Matt K. Schultz

and pinches out tobacco to roll into paper. To smoke it outside the cabin. To sit and smoke slowly. Where he’ll think of his dream and how, within it, they were whole. Isa’s head resting on his chest. Her breath a heartening weight, warm and moist against his skin. Thomas, asleep in the nursery. And how there never was a nursery. And how the cadence of her breath had then stopped. How his wet skin had chilled, and then dried. Thomas and her in his dream, part of it. There, and then not. He smokes (she will leave you) and he stares (you blew it)at the fading moon. At the sun rising back east. He watches the clouds materialize, and judges their consistency, their velocity, their way. How each twists and morphs at the beck and call of wind. A cold system coming in. It will storm. But he needs to fish today, gather supplies, and so he’ll fish the shore. Take the Ski-Doo. In then out. He leans off of the bench, dragging a last time on the burning paper before standing to walk inside and dress. He’ll fish a different spot today. Somewhere new.

*** The sculpin dwells in the shallows, solitary. He guards a mound of eggs, a mass of orbs. Each one translucent. Each with a thin, gray membrane housing a tumbling pupil. They have been abandoned by his mate. They are his charge now. And he waits alone, amongst the sand and stone floor in the seawater, protecting the unhatched so that they may in turn mature, then breed, then abandon each other in accordance with their nature. He knows not that he is fish and this is water, but that he is father to


his kin, and he is now alone in that responsibility. He cannot say if his life is chosen, or a matter of circumstance. Only that it is. That it happens, and will happen again. A small crab ambles by, the sculpin ambushes, mouth wide and ready, he devours the crab, and swims back to the nest of orbs and spreads his spines flat to the floor, his fins shielding his brood. Something breaks the light above, shining and narrow, bent to a curve, drawn out to a point. A small wad of gray hangs from it, tattered, and the tattered fibers moving with the current. A meal. The sculpin lunges forward, mouth wide and ready. He clamps down. The fish does not know regret. The eggs do not know they’ve been orphaned.

*** Oran reels in the hook, dragging the line from the shore and wrapping it around his hand into a tense coil until he sees his catch breech the surface. Walking backwards, he toes the line over the matrix of rocks wet and slipping and turning beneath his feet, shale, andesite, basalt. To either side the shore stretches toward forever, off into a cloak of mist. He edges near the water coiling the line, the hooked fish thrashing then submitting, spasmodic and blank-eyed. He doesn’t recognize what he’s caught and dragged to shore. The creature. Bending to it, he cannot say if he’s ever seen one. Or if it’s edible. If it’s poisonous. Twenty inches long and deep arterial red. Upon the red, patches of olive green and sand-brown mottling. Blotches of black speckling the gore-red. Large dorsal spines, ten of them. Larger pectoral fins fan out to either side, barbed and rigid. But this is it, and he’d have to accept it. The new spot didn’t prove out, and the day had escaped. The fish, its edibility, he won’t leave to chance. And now the night will be racing against storm, riding into town and trading with Amaruq, fish monger and general go-to, he sold Oran the sled nine seasons back. If he can find him, maybe get more pork. If he’ll trade, maybe some gas for the sled, too. The

clouds shift and splay against the sky and they grow thicker, darker. The air rolls downward, cold, and the atmosphere throbs electric charge, a storm’s tremor. Flakes take flight. Now or never. Oran snatches up the fish and it jerks its spine through the web of his thumb and finger and the sting is brilliant and, when he yanks the spine free, it conjures blood from both holes. He curses. The curse then echoing from the bluffs and back to him, a reply of self-condemnation. The blood slides down the barb and collects on the fish’s back. A fair price, he concedes. And then it stops moving. He walks to the snowline to get snow to pack against the wound, ease the bleeding. He sees the tracks again, a grizzly’s pacing. He’d crossed them before coming over the crest to the shore. He rested the sled and dismounted to gauge the time of them. They looked recent. The webbed, grizzled fringe still visible in spots. Each print about a foot long, nearly as wide. Each of the stubby toes tapered to points like candle flames frozen in the frost. Each paw connected by the one prior with a series of long scrapes, the scratch and drag of claws scarring the crust. While he fished, Oran kept the rifle close to his side, cocked, safety off, then and again looking down at it, then behind him, then back to his line. He wraps the fish into a fold of hide and fastens the hide to his shoulder and packs away the hook and line and sits on the rocks gathering his energy. He packs fresh snow into his palm. It goes pink and melts, trailing up his wrist. The wind calms.He breathes and the vapor freezes before him in the stillness and he waves a line of vision through it like fanning away smoke. An ice drift before him floats thirty-so feet from the shore and he sees a bear atop it. It’s small, only a cub. It stares at Oran on the shore, its eyes locked to his. The bear drops his head, raises it, slaps at the ice with its paws. Oran watches, distracted, reverent, drawn into the cub’s play. It turns and tumbles from the ice and into the water, swims under the ice, then breaches in a sleek


blur of brown, landing and sliding across the ice, practicing ambush. Still, Oran watches. Still, the bear begging his attention. It splashes its paws into the shallows on the ice drift and then stops. It sits back on its haunches, looks past Oran, through him. It swings its arms up, waves both paws in the air. And then a hush. A stillness. The air tenses, wind turns coldly. He begins to rise, his breath held dear, his chest thrumming, his muscles wound and set tight. He hears the rocks behind him shift and he twists to the clamor to see the mother, full-blitz, a flash of stretched muscle and hair, jaw like a set trap. He drops back and lands his hand on the rifle and takes it up and levels it at the bear and yanks the trigger. She slams her paws into the ground, halting her body, thrusting her neck and head forward, teeth shattered and red and hanging, and she bellows and blood sprays and fans out across Oran’s shadow. He jerks up, breaks across the shore, levering a round into the chamber and sprinting for the snowline where he left the sled parked. It starts on the second try and he winds the engine as tight as he can, full throttle, the rifle balanced across his lap, the jagged shore and beast behind lost in a whir of snow and engine. At speed, carving toward Tulugaq, Oran eases his breathing, pulls a hand from the brake and signs the cross, kisses his thumb. The mother isn’t dead. But she can’t eat like that, not torn open like that. Spring’s nearing and she’s hungry. Out of hibernation, her reserves depleted. She may starve, but he can’t go back. He’ll phone Fish and Game from town, and let them put her down. Her cub soon orphaned. Oran signs the cross, kisses his thumb. At speed coasting east he doesn’t think of Isa. He doesn’t think of whom Thomas could’ve been. Or what. He doesn’t again damn the years that passed and proved only what he feared: Isa couldn’t love him back, and so would leave. Traceless. Thomas in utero. The both of them there, and then not. A whisper. But he does think of the grizzlies’ ambush. Of his life. Of how it was nearly snuffed out. And of how much strain that would have caused the world. And of how little.

He brushes it off, focuses. Tulugaq is the course. Amaruq, the target. Trading the trash fish and getting supplies, the object. He thinks of this, and he thinks of what he is willing to accept. He’ll accept grain or potatoes or tobacco for the trade. Maybe some pork. This is all he needs. This is what he accepts.

*** The sun has begun to set and drags a deepening blue over the land and hills, the bluffs silhouetted, the mountains shadowed, the sun riding low, only a line of fading orange. That time at dusk identical to dawn. The clouds flatten and mirror the colors of ground beneath, like a lake reflected in the sky. Oran comes to the edge of Tulugaq by the town burial plot and sits the sled in idle. The town is distant but visible, flat and compact in its arrangement. A hundred-so structures with resin-brown walls and pitched roofs under snow, and small pipes reaching out and puffing trails of smoke densely gray amidst the frozen air. Each squat structure tethered to the next by a complication of wires and tall poles lining the town from which the wires generate. He pauses in deference marred by the sled’s engine. The cemetery grows as the town dies. A little more on each visit, he notices the stretch of plank crucifixes pinning the land, the wind-toppled piles of rock beneath each. Every visit, fewer lit windows in the distance. Every visit, a few more grave markers. Full dark. Oran switches on the sled’s headlamp, and in its beam a man sits propped against a cross; the whir of flakes and the cone of light, a sullen snow globe scene. The man raises his hand gaunt and bare against the lamplight and brings the other arm up in a curl and touches his wet lips to a flask and sips for a while before lowering his arms and then his head. Oran calls to the man and asks if he needs fuel. If his sled’s run dry? The old man looks up, raising his arm to visor the light and speaks. Oran reaches down and kills the motor and all’s silent save a gust of wind scraping snow. He asks the man what he’d said.


The man motions his arm over the town behind him, Tradition, he says. An absence of it. He pauses and studies Oran, and Oran, him, and then continues. All the dying, my friend. What I can tell you of it. See, with commerce came gain and with that, greed. The values we agreed upon before have been cast off. Now, now we want to own things, he nods at Oran’s sled. Now, the children want to own things. And these children, they have no tradition. No sense of it, you see. It is merely whisper. Whisper on the wrinkled lips of the old and dying. And what we whisper of is an interchange, you see, between town and town cemetery. A full migration over time. And the snow will fall and cover all, and Tulugaq will exist in the memories of no one…The man pauses to drink, belches, and then starts. What we had was each other and that was what we lost. What kept our spirits alive was a unity under Nature’s hardship. Our most bonding element, you see, is what we cast off. To ease our existences. He nods again at the sled. We may have once lived in the dark, but now we die in the light. Oran stiffens and speaks, Not sure I follow. No. I suspect you wouldn’t. I am visiting my grandson, the man says. This is his grave. You see, still fresh. The man waves his hand over the pile of rocks, deliberate, like a mystic in summons. He was to be thirteen this week, he says. But he opened his arteries with a pocketknife. My sister says to me that he was depressed. But, it is more. We are poor, you see. The children they watch the television and they see. They want what they cannot have. What they want it cannot be sustained. No one here, can live like that there, and he draws his arm up, points and turns south on his axis, an ancient weathervane. Oran thinks of Isa. I had a son once, he offers, and I’m sorry for your loss. The man stays mute. Oran offers condolence again and then pauses, then asks if he knows a man by the name of Amaruq, and if he knows where he might find him.

The man scoffs, and says that he did at once, but no longer in either instance, but that he is guaranteed to be in one of two places. That was there, and he gestures out over the town, or here, and he sprays a wheezing laugh and swings his arm up and over the stretch of grave markers, and then stops. He brings the flask to his lips again, finishes it, holding it out and downturned to verify to himself. It only matters when you get to him.

*** Oran enters a stout tavern and the night has taken dusk, blue turned pitch. From the inside of the tavern the light is minimal and radiant in small orbs glowing from a few staggered tables, and the wind pushes behind Oran and the dim orbs flicker and brighten through smoke wind-swept. The wax smell of burnt candles, the sweet lamp oil. The door claps shut. The bartender doesn’t lift her eyes, just stares deep into some tattered edition, a book devoured a thousand times. A chandelier hangs in crooked mount over a long but narrow table near a jukebox and two women wearing black sit mostly still, their hands cupped bloodily to their mouths sharing from a bowl of raw seal. Oran pulls back his hood approaching the women, and the women pull their hands away from their mouths, thin ancient skin dark with blood smear. They stop completely and watch him pass and they remain silent and still as he nods in acknowledgment, his implicit veneration. One woman’s eye is only socket, a thick fold of skin yellow in the light, an eyebrow drooping across it. Oran looks away. At the end of the room come the only voices in the tavern and Oran knows the voice heading the pack. There are six, and all are drinking and unaware of his gain on them. Oran approaches slowly, gripping the twine that fastens the fold of hide to him, the damned fish. He moves forward. Some men hold cards, and others hold cards while pinching black cigar stubs. Amaruq sits at the end


of the table, perched in the corner atop the backrest of his chair like some circumspect owl. He’s wearing dark lenses that reflect a scattering of light points in the room, black plastic frames that wrap around his head, behind his ears. A gold necklace and medallion hang across his neck, drawing his shoulders down, his head straining upward against it. Amaruq makes a joke, the table laughs. He notices Oran approaching. Oran, chimo my man, chimo, he says, standing, gesturing a circle around his chest, a fan of cards in his fingers. Oran gestures back. Hey brother, how’s that sled run, huh? She’s good to you, yeah? Treats me just fine. Fact, saved my ass today. Yeah? Yeah. Damn grizzly near took a chunk from me back a ways, high-tailed it right out of there. Glad I had her. No kidding? No kidding, Oran confirms. What about the bear? What about it? And neither speak for a spell. Oran looks over his shoulder, over the empty bar, and the bartender now gone, and the women in black that chew gore with closed mouth continue watching, staring dead-straight at Oran from across the room. He turns away when Amaruq breaks the silence: Well, hey, glad you’re still with us, my man. So, and he claps his hands together, a whip-crack in a silent room, what did you bring me? Actually. I was expecting you’d tell me that. How is business, anyway? Oran asks, stopped at the end of table, What can I say, it’s good man it is good. Here, come sit, come sit, you all the way down there looking lost. Oran moves behind the backs of the men at the table and they stiffen in posture and the air goes stagnant, only the smoke and singe of cigars being dragged. And then Amaruq reaches down from his perch to offer the empty seat, and offer Oran a view of his wrist.

Rolex, he clarifies. Sit there my man. My father, he’s off pissing in the wind, you know, preaching to the dark. You can have his seat. Thanks. How is the family? Oran asks. The men look away, anywhere but each other. No answer. What’s the occasion? he tries again. Well, my son he’s not doing so well you know, actually he, and then turns to Oran and slides his glasses down the bridge of his nose, shows his eyes and says, he died, you know. And he signs the cross from forehead to chest to shoulder and slides his glasses back up over his eyes. What can be done? he says. Life does not forgive. Does it? No. It does not. I’m sorry for your loss, says Oran. Well, here’s to moving on, yeah? And he lifts the tumbler to his mouth and the other men do so in unison. Chimo, man. Open that thing up. He watches Oran unknot the twine and unfold the long roll of hide and points his head down over the still fish. He pokes its dark flesh, turns it over, and says, Red Irish lord. Come again? Oran says. The fish, man. It’s called a red Irish lord. A little far from home, but a decent catch. Amaruq studies Oran, and Oran him, and then, So what will you take? Oran considers it for a step, adding some figures, and stalls, What’s the name mean? Amaruq thinks for a moment, and then of-fers that it is a play on ethnic enmity. That it refers to the English, and to the Irish. A mutual hostility between cultures, he adds. But all cultures inevitably collide, assimi-late. It is in our design to merge, if only for one purpose.He pauses. So what will you take? Thirty. Twenty-five. Deal. Oran refolds the hide and fastens it to him and folds the bills once, then twice, and stuffs them


deep inside his layering. He pulls his hood back over his head and walks to the door and again the women in black scrutinize his passing. The door claps behind him and he stands taking in the absence of shape ahead of him, beyond Tulugaq, stark-black under cloud cover. Snow falls thickly now, and the wind grabs it in sheets and folds it over and sideways and spins the flake into funnels that dance across the thoroughfare and then collapse. To his left sits a boy, about Thomas’ age, nestled in a mound shoveled against the tavern’s front. His white boots smudged with gore jut out in front of him. Between his legs is the saw-severed head of a caribou, detached beneath the jawline.The boy holds it by the nub antlers, idly shifting it down and around and back, a gawking stump

gesturing dazed bewilderment. Light cracks the sky in a flash-white streak, at once solid, then shattering, then webbing out through the sky in jagged violet dendrites; the tumbling precipitation caught up and vaporized, the graves and their tattered white crosses burning like neon, the churn of land and trees and hills like thermite waves, ashen. And the boy and he both watching. The lightning there, and then not. Then muffled thunder waxes, and then it wanes.Oran steps and circles in front of the boy and the severed head and he asks the boy what he is doing and he calls him son. The boy doesn’t look up. His chin in his chest, he offers, I don’t know. Nothing.


METAMORPHOSISby Gabriella Billadeau

To say that you are a let downis an understatement.I trusted you after you proved that you werethe equivalent of faulty wiring,spontaneously setting my body ablazeonly to soothe me with another dose.You are not the answer to my questions. Pieces of me leftfrom your last combustible event,charred bits, deserted and unwanted by the rest,yearn for the warmth of your return.Embers lusting for disgracethat only you know how to serveto me and my mind.Your body, the epitome of hell,held me down and convinced methat a certain level of pain is necessary. So I’ll take myself to Californiaand use your style.I’ll burn along side the brush,igniting my heels and watchas the flames ascend and surgefrom the bottom of my frame.When I am finally engulfedthen I will rise from My ashes,and become a version of myself freefrom your flint inspired fingerprints.


by Stanislav Mehne


STAR WARSby Tommy Maher

“Lucas had so much to work with. Liam Neeson was breaking his back carrying that movie along, and then they kill him off in the last ten minutes. Darth Maul too! Two of the most underused characters ever,” Sam said, passing off the bong to his friend Jake. “What really pisses me off is that Jar Jar Binks lived until the end,” Jake replied as he fiddled with the white lighter. “He wasn’t in the original trilogy. None of the Gungan race was. For all we know they all died in some sort of mass genocide.” “I hope they died in a mass genocide.” Jake took a hit from the cheap plastic bong and exhaled a thick cloud of gray smoke. As they sat on the soft grass of the hillside, they looked out over the destruction of their hometown. Planes dropped bombs from the sky. Soldiers fired off machine guns at childhood friends. Houses they had gone to for birthday parties as kids burned into ash and rubble. “Out of all the movies in the second trilogy, I gotta say I definitely liked the third one best,” Jake said, passing the bong back to Sam. “Revenge of the Sith? Undoubtedly. But on the whole, the new trilogy was morbidly lackadaisical.” “…Morbidly what?” “…Fuck off, the world’s ending. I gotta cash in on as many big words as I can.” Off in the distance, the south side of town erupted in a fiery explosion as a squadron of fighter jets were shot to the ground. Sam put the lighter to the green herb and the bong started to bubble. “Do you think it was necessary? The new trilogy?” Jake asked, playing with a leaf that had fallen from an oak tree nearby. “Do I think it was good? No. Do I think it was necessary? Yes.” “Why?”


“Cause then Darth Vader’s inspiration to be evil would be nonexistent. He’d just be a weird robot dude with a boner for power.” “I kind of liked that about the original trilogy, though. Why humanize Darth Vader?” “Cause everyone’s human, even if they don’t seem it sometimes.” Jake exhaled another plume. “Deep,” he said. Sam chuckled. “But it’s true isn’t it? ‘Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering.’” Somewhere in the distance a group of guerillas with bombs strapped to their chests dog piled on top of a tank and went out in a blaze of glory. “Did Yoda say that?” asked Jake. “The guy knew what he was talking about. People who are more in tune with the world usually do. That’s why Jedi’s rule. Bad people only want what’s hard to get.” The radio next to them started playing a news broadcast: “This is a public service announcement for the New York area. Twelve nuclear missiles from unspecified locations have been launched toward the following cities: Chicago, Boston, New York City, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles. In retaliation, America’s nuclear armaments have been deployed as well. If you have not already done so, report to the nearest designated fallout shelters. Nuclear radiation can still drift up to a hundred miles away from a point of collision.” “There’s a dark side and a light side. The best place to be is right here in between,” Sam said as he lay down in the cool grass. “This thing’s kicked,” Jake said placing the bong on the ground and laying back. The only thing left to do was wait.


VOICINGby Josh Rollin

A friend whose voice is like a hug

and though he looks like he’s always fighting his sound stays close

slightly shifting its weight, rubbing its handsalong your back, caterpillaring arms tighter in

an endeavour to squish ribs,

comfortably refusing to unstick from you skin and let go

until it reluctantly puts on its shoes and leaves.

Other friends: a Long Island nasallonging for Brooklyn, a soft

mid-day nap that can surprisewith toffee patwa, a playful

black lab with a laughthat unabashedly begs you to play fetch,

then takes your tennis ball and runs away.

Sometimes, the many take the form of one

as with the tenor in the stairwell

arising out of silence

a bronze bell warmed by the day’s slivered rays of sun

Nothing, here, without breath resilient heat (upheaval of chest) rising from lungs to sing of love


Most often, it can be found in the dusty corners of my closet, shoved in among the stacks of comics and other books. The colors of the books appear dimly, a light encased in a dirty and smudged plastic covering barely illuminating the closet shelf. Mutts, Foxtrot, Dragon Drive—they’re all there. The stacks almost reach the ceiling. I often open the closet door, struggling to grasp the sharp screw, the remnants of a knob long gone, now hiding in the dark depths of my room. I run my finger from the top book, letting it bump up and down over the rocky landscape of comics, long, short, fat, wide, feeling my finger drop and hit the smooth spine again. Eventually, my finger comes to a rest. The white spine, etched with tall green letters shines from beneath. The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes. Since the moment I purchased it as a young child barely six years old, I’ve continued to pull out Bill Watterson’s masterpiece. I can hardly remember where I got it. Maybe at the since abandoned Bookland, which disappeared from the strip of chain stores, or perhaps at the very Barnes & Noble that pushed it into extinction. Every part of the book feels as familiar as my own skin: the rough exposed paper where the spine tore off, the curling and frayed cover, the food crumbs, nestled into the crevice between pages. The feeling of the various dried cheerio, granola, and bread bits crunching under my fingers as I attempt to scrape them out, is all too familiar. A tattered old yellow sticky peeks out the top, marking a particular strip for reasons I haven’t known for a decade. If there’s anything that has truly been mine, this is it. Letting the pages fan out, I listen to the sound of page hitting page, humming through the air. Stopping somewhere in the middle, I watch Calvin’s face turn from content to nauseous, as he shovels green goo into his mouth. The corners of my mouth stretch into a habitual

AN

INDISPENSABLE BOOKby Caleb Grant

smile. How old am I? Nineteen now? It seems so irrelevant, inexplicably unimportant, while the antics of Calvin and his dear friend Hobbes dance across the page. For some reason, long after the day I first rushed out of the car, waving it in my hand, I can still be found up, after the light has fallen outside, the book resting on my legs, a desk lamp casting its warm glow on the smudged and stained pages. Somehow, The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes became truly indispensable. If you open the cover, you can find inscribed on the picture of Calvin and Hobbes in a wagon, “This book belongs to Caleb Grant, nobody can day it!!!!” Though my young self-mistaking the word “take” as “day” may have muddled the message, this was clearly an attempt to let any thieves or brothers inter-ested in stealing my most prized possession know that the book was mine, and mine to keep. I’ve never spent much time pondering why I continue to come back to it. It might be the endless jokes, the insurmountable joy created out of reading about the duo’s adventures, the wonderfully artsy cartoons, or maybe even the incredible knowledge and thoughtfulness of a kid so young. In Calvin and Hobbes, I always found the world beautiful and complex, joyous and depressing, playful and sad. I found solace when I was upset and laugh-ter when I was bored. I found whatever I wanted to find. Thoughts of being Spaceman Spiff, or lying by the fire with a warm tiger have never left my mind. I doubt they ever will. For now, sitting in a chair hun-dreds of miles from home, the pages of this book are my home. The words in bubbles, read hundreds of times, will never grow old. I’ll never stop being pro-voked into deep thought by the wisdom and words of Calvin and Hobbes. I turn the first page. I smile.


What is this?What to do with it.Dar-Babe says “a toothbrush.”Still don’t know what it’s for.It’s long, has bristles, and fits in my hand.I put it in my mouth and don’t know why.Back and forth it goes.Choo choo! It is a train. Hm, what happens now?What I’m supposed to do?Where do I go?I am bored.Bored of not remembering.I want to see the airplane show again. What is this room now?Dar-Babe says to sit on this.People talking fast and loudBlah blah taxes blah blah nursing homeAnd I want to talk but I don’t know whatBlah blah ACME blah blah insuranceNo way to keep up so I will just sit here.

THE BIG ‘A’by Tess Le Monig

“Here Gerry,” that’s Dar-Babe.A sandwichBut I’m not sure how to eat it.My hands shake, about to perform.Hands sandwich the sandwich.Like this? I hold it? I put it in my mouth?Choo choo! Like a train.But oh, first we must say GraceSay Grace before you eat:In the name of the SonAnd of the FatherAnd of the Holy Ghost.Amen. “Here Dad,” who is this calling me Dad?I know that face. I know this voice.Connie? Kathy? No.My hand on her faceTo feel and try to remember.“Is this my Valerie Anna?”A cookie. How very sweet of her.I feel good! Like I know I should!I feel nice! Like sugar and strawberry wine!


Harrisburg Hospital, ER. North Front Street, 70 MPH. Ceolta’s Irish Pub, until close. Jennifer, No, Jes-sica, No, Janine’s (?) bed. Kathleen What’s-Her-Name’s bed. Veronica Dunbar’s bed. Governor’s Man-sion, alone. Red Cross Foundation Fundraiser, following Sheila around. State Capitol, Governor’s Lobby, Sheila’s busy. American Cancer Society Fundraiser. Governor’s Mansion, with bags and boxes unpacked. Voting Booth at Grover High School, casting a ballot for Sheila. Comcast Inc., farewell party. Philadelphia Mayor’s Office, to meet Sheila for lunch. Penn Museum, Philadelphia, Groom’s Suite. Belize. Benari Jewel-ers, near that expensive salon where Sheila goes. Special Olympics Fundraiser. Philadelphia’s Mayor’s Staff Office, to pick Sheila up for dinner. Jackson Pub. Comcast Inc., Financial Department. Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center Courtyard, commencement. Madame’s daughter’s bed. Madame’s Fortune Telling. Salt Hill Pub, an older man telling him to “look up and see the sunshine already.” Bed, missing Macro. NH Liquor and Wine Outlet. Macro. NH Liquor and Wine Outlet. The cafeteria, with Kendra’s dirty dishes still on the table. The old man—a hand reader’s—place. An Internet café, with his computer breaking down be-fore his bus. New Delhi. Stopover in England. The old road Kendra and her high school sweetheart used to drive through. Maynord Lot, Relay for Life. In the snow, trudging through army crawl style, in only box-ers as his future brothers watch. Kendra’s bed. Kendra’s dorm. Room 202, Microeconomics, sitting next to this girl he saw last weekend. The ΦΔΑ House. Dartmouth, where Mark turns to Marcus for a time. The gym, Graduation. The bottom step of the courthouse. The Pike Diner, corner table. The Palawskis’ house, only her Honda Civic in the driveway. The Days Inn off Route 303. Brenda Palawski’s car, with her stack of papers to grade in the backseat. Mrs. Palawski’s classroom. The wet bar at John’s house. Harriton High School. Welsh Valley Middle School, county track meet, gold medal in hand. Aunt Jodie’s House, ev-ery day after school. St. John’s Church. Grant Funeral Home. Mom’s old house. Living room, mom on the floor. Neal’s Arcade, where the plastic fortune teller told him he “is going on a short journey…” before the lights faded and he stood there, waiting. Belmont Hills Elementary School. 129 Carver Avenue. Bryn Mawr Hospital.

THE PLACES

MARK HAS BEENby Kirsten Wise


by Sunny Leerasanthanah


SEQUOIA (VOWS)by Amber Donofrio

I read Atlas Shrugged in the back of a car headed north on the 405 in L.A. to meet pine needle pricks and Sequoia skies, the sun dripping down in a pool of rose-stained canvas ink petals drawn from the fingertips of light. The hum of highway rubber sped like a cataclysmic shot of crackling roots against concrete grains, unbound from dirt and breath escaping up in sighs. You turned once to ask me the line, your voice muffled over the rippling of speed-wrought metal surged against air particle streams. I responded with a second’s pause, a flipping of pages with tiny text:

Whatever we are, it’s we who move the world and it’s we who’ll pull it through.

I wondered how we’d come to this, sitting on the padded seats with our windows up against the roils of outside. You grinned as you stared at the road as if hurdling toward the sharpened edges of Time’s final request: a breech between the unknown and the present, the created and the as-of-yet unformed. The earth below us creaked in momentary complaint at the weight we placed on its weary, tar-soaked heart. I closed my eyes, took in the shifting of upholstered and plastic man made parts around me, drifting inward like the walls of Alice’s self-made prison: drink me or I’ll drown.

Indeed, I felt the shrinking as buildings soared and the hacking of engines’ indigestion spat upon the endless off-white of marked road. I envisioned our destination’s airy seething, the green sight of towering bark and sun bears bathing amidst the undeserved accolades of shining trailer doors and tire tracks. And was it true, I wondered, as Ayn Rand proclaimed, that by the essence and nature of existence, contradictions cannot exist?

In these cars we strove to surpass all offerings of nature’s calling. But here we were, attempting to speed faster than time, as we hurried to return to the primal state of our own true desires: to be one with the world around us, backs pressed against Earth’s soil ground and fingernails dug into the wood-chipped heat of forest.

I opened my eyes to moving road and the bent novel still splayed across my lap in paraplegic disarray. A pine-scented air freshener swayed from the rearview mirror. And I listened to you humming faintly as you drove, pulling me back into the world. Pulling me through.


THE LION WILL

SLEEP TOMORROWby Matt Kelly

It is 2:15 in the morning of another unremarkable January day. After braving subzero temperatures to down cheap plastic cups of beer at the bar and mouth jumbled words to popular songs I don’t know, I have decided, for some reason, to spend the rest of the night watching live tennis matches. I should clarify. This was a remarkable night for all of my friends, since it was their last semester and the last time they would ever have a first day of classes. I graduated a month ago, so I have been there and done that. Now I simply have the countless numbered days of life to look forward to, and so I say, “Why not?” to all-night tennis. And by all-night I am not joking—the match I am waiting to see is scheduled for 3:30 a.m. on the east coast. For many, night owl tennis might fall somewhere between pointless and masochistic, but I have my reasons. The first is that I adore the sport; that’s an easy one. My roommate brought a girl home and his room is next to mine; that’s another. But there are more complex reasons, too—“complex” being code for “terrifying.” I’m watching because I’m newly single and I don’t want to be alone in my bed. I’m watching because I’m unemployed and aimless. There are no footholds and no guidelines for what I am supposed to do next, so sacrificing my functionality tomorrow to watch sports all night tonight suddenly becomes a rational idea.

*** I am watching the Australian Open men’s quarterfinal matches via a live Internet feed. The Aussie is the season’s first major tournament and is a ‘Grand Slam’ event, meaning it is infinitesimally more important than other tennis tournaments. The

matches take place in Melbourne, which technically means they are being played tomorrow. But since text alerts, blinking notifications and streams of tweets are as commonplace as furniture these days, all sports must be watched live if they are to be organically enjoyed. That’s why I’m here in my pajamas. Watching the Aussie here in America is a test of endurance. It requires commitment regardless of what the clock says, because I know that the tournament’s most mythical matches are traditionally saved for when the rest of the world is asleep. In the past three years I missed many signature matches because of my foolish predilection for sleep, including five-hour epics between titans like Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal. But I will not sleep tonight. I warm up by watching the last half of a match between Nadal and a Bulgarian youngster named Gregor Dimitrov. Dimitrov has prodigious talent and moves superbly around the court, prompting some analysts to give him the nickname ‘Baby Fed’ in honor of Roger Federer. (Everybody is the next somebody else, it seems.) However, this is a cute affectation and nothing more, because nobody is Roger Federer.

*** Watching anything through the night is difficult, but powering through late-night tennis requires a special kind of determination. Many minutes may pass where the only sounds I hear are the squeaking of sneakers on synthetic concrete, the polite applause of the crowd, and the familiar dialogue of a cheeky insurance ad that plays during every commercial break. If I’m not careful, these harmless cadences might coalesce carelessly into a long, fluid slumber.


My friend Pat said he would try to stay up and watch with me, which was nice of him, but he has quickly passed out on the couch. I can hardly blame him. Watching tennis in the wee hours may seem novel and cool, but I may as well be watching cricket or handball. It is only for the diehards and the strange. In reality I will always be watching tennis alone, gleefully oohing and ahhing to wonderful shots and rallies in hushed tones. That solitude never bothered me before, but tonight my remarks echo a bit too loudly. At 3 a.m. the world around me is too quiet; horribly devoid of human interaction. When my romantic relationships end, as my last one did five days ago, I yearn for companionship—even during the things I’ve always enjoyed doing alone. It’s silly, but I wish my ex was here as an audience for my one-man commentary, even if she would likely be fast asleep. Soon enough, Pat’s rhythmic snores add another voice to the apartment’s muted chorale.After dropping a lackluster first set to the spry Dimitrov, Nadal suddenly wakes up and remembers who he is. The indomitable man from Mallorca sweeps the next three sets and moves on to the semifinals. Now there’s an hour break between the first and second matches of the night; a great expanse of time. When Nadal walks off the court I immediately start yawning. The feed on my television shuts off, as if even the Internet needs to rest. The ensuing silence makes me nervous. In the five days since my ex and I broke up, I have avoided being alone in quiet spaces as much as possible; such silence leaves room for reflection, then yearning, then darkness. I ponder a short nap, but I can’t trust my body to start back up. I have to find something stimulating, so naturally I turn to junk food and video games.

*** Video games are the opiate of my apartment; they are a vehicle for escape and avoidance from more important tasks. What’s more, they serve as means for release. We had an Xbox last year – a luxury for my apartment – and on one of the basketball games

I created a virtual player named Ernesto Mendoza. Through practice drills, sneaker contracts, TV commercial shoots and several hundred NBA “games,” I formed a deep emotional bond with this pixelated being. His triumphs were my triumphs, and his off-days would send me into a tailspin. Ernesto Mendoza, nicknamed “The Little General” by both myself and the game’s digital announcers, frequently dribbled his way into my dreams. I created a detailed backstory of Ernesto’s childhood: How he would stay up late and watch NBA games on his family’s rabbit-eared television. (He would watch them on mute, so he wouldn’t be caught past his bedtime). How he practiced dribbling with a soccer ball because it was the only ball his family could afford. How he snuck across the border one teenage night in the back of an American’s U-Haul truck, then hitchhiked his way north to the Big Apple. How he became a mythological legend on the courts of Harlem’s Rucker Park, proving day in and day out how well he could ball. And how the pro scouts finally noticed him at the age of 26. I forced myself to permanently delete Ernesto’s file because he was threatening my grades and my relationship with my girlfriend at the time. Now it’s 3 a.m. on a bitter January morning and I’m done with school. Not one but two failed relationships have come and gone. As I stare at the black TV screen, I find myself desperately missing Ernesto.

*** My watch finally trudges to 3:30 and it’s time to snap to. Typically the two opponents walk through the tunnel together, weaving awkwardly through the guts of the stadium. Murray looks characteristically skittish, but Federer looks uncharacteristically tense. The walk is a long one; a forced custom of civility between two men who are about to hurtle little yellow projectiles violently at each other for several hours, each with the intent of physically breaking his adversary down. The gladiator walks next to the tiger.


Federer’s brow muscles are curled and his lips are pursing. Even this is more emotion than I’m used to seeing from him before a match. I mentioned earlier that nobody is Roger Federer—and that’s true because not even Roger Federer is Roger Federer these days. Tennis, like American football, consists of frenetic bursts of action followed by long pauses to prepare for the next explosion. Such pauses allow the time for a gratuitous amount of slow motion replays, and it was through these replays that I fell in love with watching Federer. When I was in high school I spent lazy July mornings watching the Wimbledon tourna-ment in my bathrobe. Groggy and sweating in the morning humidity, I sat still and drifted with Roger’s body. Dressed in puritanical white, Federer seemed to levitate to the ball. His flight was inherent; the camera’s hyper-slow depiction simply augmented his awesome trajectory even more. There was no other way to describe Federer’s striking motion other than to say he hit the ball precisely the way it was meant to be hit. His torso coiled and then poured upward like a gentle fountain, his racket and wrist connected with the ball in perfect symmetry, his legs lifted from the ground, floated weightlessly, and returned to the weathered grass without disturbing a single blade. “Grace” is a word that will always be used in conjunction with Roger Federer, but the word I will always think of is “effortless.” His elegant pirouette when he hit the ball was the stuff of poetry and luxury watch commercials, and each of his movements carried an air of such certainty. This assurance rang within my own soul: I was a straight ‘A’ student, my essays were always applauded by my teachers, and I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up. Roger Federer was going to win and I was going to be a famous writer; these were my interpreted facts of life. But in the past year things are tenuous; lately those same slow-mo replays show a different story. Federer’s feet are heavier and seem more in conversation

with the ground than the air. His weight is a few degrees too forward when he makes contact with the ball, and when he lands he falls backwards on his heels. I’m troubled by the flashes of doubt that leak from his furrowed brows. The losses, not only to formidable foes like Nadal and Murray, but also to fringe challengers, have created this unsettling reality: Roger Federer is 32 years old and now the sixth-ranked player in the world. Sixth, not first. He’s suddenly playing the same game as his companions, a game of brutal parity and unpredictability. Likewise, I’ve been shoved out of the warm shelters of collegiate life and into a crowded pool of ‘aspiring writers.’ Roger is no longer top dog and I am no longer a 15-year old in a bathrobe. We step gingerly now, aware of our new fallibility. That’s why tonight is so strange. There is an ur-gency in Roger’s eyes, an ember suddenly flickering from the ashes of resignation. Roger is striking the ball with authority, his racket sweeping through the yellow orb. He is serving well, he is pumping his fist, he is...my God, he is charging the net. He is flinging poor Andy Murray to the farthest corners of the court and stepping forward with regal confidence, slapping Murray’s rallies aside with the flick of his wrist. Tonight Federer has rediscovered his Axis Mundi; he is floating again. The graying lion takes the first set in a half hour. Surely that flash of dominance was just a tease, a brief reminder of past brilliance? But then Federer steals another break from Murray to pull ahead again. In a blink of my tired, heavy eyes, Roger is up two sets to none. The third set races by and now Roger is toeing the baseline to serve out the match. When a player has his best stuff going, serving out the match can have a processional feel. Like the incoming winner of the Tour de France, there is nothing left to do but steer with one hand and sip champagne with the other. But—what’s this? —Sir Fed implausibly feels the need to soil his own celebration. His serve breaks down and his groundstrokes spray wildly. I blink and suddenly Roger is moving like he’s trying to


avoid several wads of gum. Federer extends Murray relief on a polished platter, and the sour Scotsman happily snatches it, converting the break point and tying up the set. Just minutes later we enter a tiebreak and I am sweating profusely. Murray is pummeling his groundstrokes, swinging at the ball like he’s in a longest drive competition at the local golf course. Federer, on the other hand, is still timid. The young bull smells fear, and the matador’s sword is shaking. Murray bats one match point away, and then the second. Five years ago, nearly any Federer opponent would back down. But this is a different time; no one is afraid of Roger Federer.

*** The final point is hardest point to win in tennis, but there was an extended run of time when the quiet man from Switzerland possessed the greatest killer instinct that tennis has ever seen. At the peak of his powers, Federer was Napoleon in 1812—and he showed just as little mercy. But because tennis is a sport and because sports dictate that almost nothing lasts forever, there had to be a shift; a slight fissure formed from years of simple friction. When a famous athlete gets older, the cracks in his chest plate are first revealed in subtle ways, signs that only a long-time fan will notice. But Federer’s first omens were not subtle; in fact they were loud, sharp and concentrated in one highly visible moment. That’s when King Roger’s foes realized the crown was vulnerable. It was the semifinals of the U.S. Open in Queens, New York, September 2011. Roger matched up against a surging Djokovic. The manic Serb was heavily favored, but Professor Fed seemed primed to give the young man a history lesson. The old man took the first two sets easily and called for his sword. But Djokovic started playing other-worldly tennis with his back against the wall, a tendency that has defined him ever since. The Serb’s shots seemed to find the outer reaches of every line on the court, a phenomenon I crankily chalked up to luck.

Djokovic took the next two sets with alarming efficiency, playing like he just downed a Big Gulp of Michael Jordan’s “secret stuff ” from Space Jam. It was a hot day and I was sweating through my collared tennis polo. My windows were open and I’m sure everyone on the quad could hear me cursing. By the end of Djoker’s improbable comeback, Federer and I were reduced to adjacent puddles. My hero Fed fought as valiantly as he could, despite his foe’s incredible precision. But what was the use? He was fighting a moment clearly beyond his control, an en-cyclopedia entry so anomalous that it had to be pre-determined. Djokovic bulldozed his way through the last three games to win the match, and in my book Roger Federer has never been the same.

*** I can still recall my reaction to seeing Djokovic improbably win that day: it contained the same string of obscene curses I yell when I stub my toe. But after several minutes, when I realized my vitriol wouldn’t change the outcome (and was making my roommate noticeably uncomfortable), a more sobering reality set in. It was the beginning of my sophomore year and the hallucinogenic novelty of everything around me was wearing off. There were new expectations forming that dictated I couldn’t hide behind the facade of “scared freshman” any longer. Soon I would be expected to produce, to flourish, and to differentiate myself. This was in regards to my writing, of course. But as I sat there cross-legged in front of the television, my face covered in rage sweat, I felt the unsettling notion that I was no longer at my tiny farm town high school. I was going to have work much harder on my writing than I was used to. And, even if I succeeded, there would always be a chance that some punk like Novak Djokovic—a punk that, admittedly, is superbly gifted in his own right—would come rushing up to rattle my equilibrium. Since that match in Queens, there have been many times when Roger Federer has had his foot on an opponent’s throat, only to stand there and watch


his foe squirm away. Yes, there have been physical erosions in Federer’s game—the slow-motion replays tell me that—but these failures at el momento de la verdad hint at a deeper problem: a lack of confidence. Fed knows that he no longer owns preternatural control, that he cannot simply overpower every player on the planet with one mythical forehand stroke. Even as I write these sentences, I sympathize. My pen feels disturbingly light and impotent.

*** Back in Australia, Murray’s battering ram prevails and he takes the third set. I sigh and start forming it’s-not-so-bad rationalizations in my head. Pat continues to snore on the couch. Murray will still have to win the next two sets to take the match, but his current momentum makes that outcome seem imminent. Federer, meanwhile, has the flummoxed look of a math professor whose pupil just disproved his formula. I’ve seen that look too often, and it makes me more angry now than worried. I wish Federer would simply find a resolution; either reinvent himself or walk away. But that’s the case with watching so many great athletes get older—the fans are often quicker to accept change than their stubborn heroes. I’m unwittingly evoking the ghosts of that Djokovic match, cursing audibly now at the silent room around me. I’m left to wonder whether I really want to see this landslide continue all the way until dawn. The set continues with each man holding serve, meaning there’s a good chance there will be another tiebreaker and the match will go even longer. I initially hoped this match would be a saga, but that was before I learned that the narrative would involve a dull guillotine. My body can sense my waning motivation; it turns stiff and lethargic. Relief comes in the form of Murray’s ailing back, as much as I hate to say it. It’s been troubling the Scotsman since he had surgery over the off-season, and as the match has worn on he’s walked slower and slower between points. The mano-a-mano nature of

tennis, laid out in the center of the stadium, means every ache and twinge is made visible. Sometimes this can actually be a detriment to the opponent, who will see his foe struggling and ease up, only to watch his adversary summon some deep courage to rally back. This happened to me a number of times when I played tennis in high school—it happened when I played fat kids, too. But tonight the pain is too much for Murray, and he struggles to hold each of his service games in the fourth set. Finally at 3-4, Murray’s levees collapse and Federer, perhaps more due to the law of averages than his own fortitude, finally wins the break point he needs. Thankfully, serving out the match for the second time at 5-3, Fe-derer floats by on muscle memory and ends the night.

*** The crowd in Australia rises in applause while Roger and I pump our fists, 10,000 miles apart. Federer will face Nadal, his Kryptonite, in the next round, and he will probably lose. But for the moment I feel at peace, like everything is stable. This may be a ridiculous notion, posing that my emotions rise and fall with the fortunes of a highly successful athlete that I have never met, nor have even seen play in person. When I see Federer win a big match, however, I’m reminded of easier times. My poor body will definitely pay for this tomorrow, but for this one night I can forget about insecurities and heartache and job applications, and I think that’s a successful night. Finally, I unleash a big old yawn and smile. This lion will sleep tomorrow.

Stillwater Magazine is a publication of the Ithaca College Writing Department. For more information, please visit Stillwater’s website.

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