table of contents
Collapse
by Olivia Wang
On Abstraction
by eve shapiro
Trial; Unmasked
by olivia wang
six Poems
by milana zivanovic
After
by Katie Heim Binas
A Morning at Hancock
by Elsie Shoemaker
Drawing
by Sarah Rahman
Tiger Portrait
by Sophia Seitz-Shewmon
The Demeter Plant
by Angelina Yu
Unsubstantial Territory
by Katie Heim Binas
Art
by olivia Wang
8/21/17
by Eve Shapiro
Noblesse
by Olivia Wang
The Hourglass
by Caro Taylor
Art People
by Dava Sitkoff
cover art by Olivia Wang
Collapse
by Olivia Wang
Everyone loves me
and everyone is waiting for the collapse
of American society
Whet your teeth on this, kids, a delicacy
crisp, green, a just-right crunch—a poison apple immaculate
Sure it’s bitter, but it’s good for your immune system
and your jawline and your skin
Little darling, bite down while you still have the teeth for it
His sneeze bends like the scream of a ghost
which howled around all night, quite rudely–
boomerang in limited space, bores notches on blank walls
like mosquito bloodstains dotting the car fender
Ran around loony clamor waking all the neighbors up
He slept peacefully through the night
There’s no need to regret the choice, having chosen
This happiness to live. Keep grasping contentedness in a chokehold,
hold yourself above the precipice of ruin.
Telecasters in the frame keep talking ruin,
probabilities of grief and war, brawling on the floor
many miles away. Everyman prophets on the street outside
keep tolling, high ringing in my ears tin-can oil
and flames for the next life.
12 o’ clock:
When I lay down in the earliest snow of my childhood
on your doorstep, the slow accumulation
of millions on millions of white flakes from the cold sky
It was a slow freeze, it was a quick thaw
It was no reasons since my words dried up
Would you wring the stormwater out of me and set me down?
Forgetfulness comes easily, little droplets
evaporate into invisibility, vapor
of a later condensation
But I’ll remember again
So elegantly, storyteller, like you foretold this
Every other fire drill was just rehearsal
till you punched through glass and pulled the lever
Spared no mercy for the unprepared, dramatic irony for the uninitiated:
I earned my condescension, it can do me no harm;
I’m telling you this, I’ve done this before
I fell asleep before intermission
heart in my throat and woke up with the chandelier
cracked jewels lights spluttered dust
settled already in the ground.
We learned to row around it.
I am telling you this: escape,
and I will tell you, when I’ve learned the trick of it,
that there is no altar
and no sacrifice to prove.
on Abstraction
by Eve Shapiro
1. The Holocaust Tower
In this one, the cold hits first. It isn’t the burn of ice gripped too long or the sharp shock of a polar plunge, but the simple chill of nighttime air. It isn’t nighttime and you aren’t outside. You stand in a sort of crevice, transported from shiny museum hallway to a strange stolen corner of a long ago atrocity. Dirty concrete walls rise up around you, stretching up towards a faraway blackness. The scope of the place contradicts itself. The height of the walls and that faraway implication of a nighttime sky contrast with the tiny perimeter of the space, creating not just an overwhelming sense of being trapped, but a heightened awareness of the hugeness of the outside world and the freedom you suddenly feel that you don’t have. The quiet, too, is overwhelming. You’ve never been so aware of a lack of sensory experience before. There is undoubtedly a powerful sense of emptiness here; you feel, too, a sense of incredible loss, but you cannot help but wonder if you would feel the same without the prescribed context. Is it truly the art that is evoking that experience, or simply your own awareness of the tragedy it attempts to invoke?
2. The Memory Void
If quiet was the lynchpin of the Holocaust Tower, here, it’s noise that’s your undoing. Metal faces clash against one another as you walk over them, echoing up the walls of the void and around the corner into silent exhibits. The faces litter the ground. Crudely drawn mouths open in screams, crashing and clanging relentlessly. One part of you, concerned with museum etiquette, cringes at the racket you’re making, while another is busy spinning ideas into emotion. The creator’s intent, identified quickly as conveying the impossibility of avoiding complicity in violence, weaves itself into what you expect is the desired horror and grief.
3. The Garden of Exile
Here a plaque warns you explicitly: you will lose your balance. The lines run at odd angles. Columns rise straight, maintained in a perfect grid (read: a surface level picture of order and logic in the worlds that refugees fled to). Trees are planted in the tops of the columns and sunlight filters down through the leaves (read: hope of freedom, safety, life). But the ground tilts, cobblestones protrude; you stumble even as you consciously attempt to keep your balance. (read: disorientation of refugees unaccustomed to this particular system of cultural logic. Something more than disorientation. A fundamental wrongness in the tilt of the supposedly ordered.)
4. Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
Unlike the others, this is labeled only if you’re on Google Maps. Unlike the others, it’s not within shiny museum hallways but dropped in the middle of bustling central Berlin. When you Google it later, you’ll find countless critiques of the structure. It’s unspecific; how is one meant to know it's a memorial and not simply an art piece? It’s passive; by whom were these Jews murdered? In the moment, you take for granted that it must be well made, impactful. A grid of gray slabs, resembling graves, or perhaps coffins. All of the structures are different heights. At the outer edge, where you stand, they rise, on average, to your hip. Some spaces around the edge, where there should be a slab, are instead empty. As you walk down narrow pathways towards the center, the ground dips and slopes downwards, and the pillars grow taller and taller, slowly surrounding you until you can’t see the street, can’t see cars or people or anything but sky and towering gray pillars. You’re relieved when the ground starts to slope up again. Once on the other side, you write down in your notes app, “the enormity of it, the feeling of being swallowed up, the uneven ground, the perfect grid but with such different heights, the empty spaces where there should be stones. The scope and disarmingness.” When you walk back through you hear men’s voices near you and again you can’t see anyone, but they sound drunk and you’re suddenly very aware that it’s nighttime and you’re alone in a foreign city in the middle of an all encompassing structure closing you off from the world, and you walk faster until you reach the other side. When you walk away, your heartbeat still speeding, it’s this experience that you’re thinking about and not the horrors that the structure tries, ostensibly, to force you to consider. When you google the memorial later and find critique after critique, you’ll see also the written intent of the creator, to represent an ordered system out of touch with human reason. Overlaying this onto your memory of the plaza, it seems a powerful message.
Trial
by Olivia Wang
Unmasked
by Olivia Wang
Six Poems
by Milana zivanovic
The Sea, the Sky
A tear, a rip in the sky
Beyond the grey of patchwork clouds
Which gently support the moon
The moon—
A pearl at the bottom of the sea—softly glowing,
Muddy fish pass it by,
Overlooked
The clouds trace a ripple from afar
As sea meets sand and sand meets star
Sea meets earth and sky and moon
The tide pulls in
Stars ebb and flow as dawn dusts the moon
And the sky is buried in blue
Still dip a hand in murky waters
Fingers amongst the stars
And bring out dull pearls
Orbs, smooth as white pebbles
Flung up to the sky
Marigold Yellow
A marigold standing in a field,
Deeply, richly, Yellow,
A golden, molten, Yellow,
Drenching velvet petals
Then a black dart:
A crow, a nimble shadow
Picking through a sea of green
Wading through the waving blades
(Strands bent under wind)
Stands beneath that marigold
Shielding by the Yellow,
Protector of that gold,
That,
Yellow
Delicate Trust
Bare your soul to me
And I will bare mine in return
Trust so deep can only keep
After it’s first earned
But if we fear that drawing near
Like flowers, shying from the moon
We turn away
Unable to stay
Resigned to the soft
The safe
The gloom
Orchids
Some people, like orchids, require the most delicate care
Not too much rain or sunshine
Neither too cloudy nor fair
A gentle touch may coax them out
Unfurl their petals to bloom
But a touch too soft
And:
There is no sun
No stalk
No bloom
Autumn Leaf
A leaf falls gently
Gracious, its tips curl only slightly inwards
Smoothly, it twists
Falling, an ember caught in the breeze
A daring red (glowing blush)
As if licked, gently, by a flame
Touching ground it stills
Pauses,
Breathes,
Until the wind picks it up again
Gossamer White
A spider dances across the floor
Spindly movements
Give only a glimpse
Of a weaver so pale and white
—never sickly, but translucent—
An invisible bite
After
by Katie Heim Binas
Funny.
I thought that, here, I wouldn’t
Eat or drink. And yet,
I now gnaw on a cheeseburger I found on a nearby rock,
And plan to dunk my head
In the ocean nearby
This afternoon.
Funny how my body
Has not moved an inch,
Unless you count it being carried
From my home and buried
Under the ground—
I can only assume that is, in fact,
What has happened to me.
The first day I woke up
(Though it didn’t feel much
Like waking up, more like I’d been
Daydreaming and then poked)
I thought: I’ve really outdrunk myself
This time. And I was right, perhaps,
But not in the way I had thought.
I didn’t black out and hitch a ride here;
No.
I’m just on an island where
I cannot die—and where
I go about my days
Eating what I am given, and drinking the saltwater
(Out of habit, maybe, as much as thirst)
Even though I know doing so
Will only make me want more.
The island is long, and narrow,
And packed full of pine trees.
Sometimes the weather is warm, sometimes
Cold; it varies from hour to hour.
I don’t pay it much mind, these days
(If you can call them days—
There is no sun, no shadows, only
Dim light, under a monotone gray sky.)
Funny—
Funny how often I speak
Even though I’m all alone.
I sometimes wonder if I’m going crazy.
But I know the truth:
I will only go crazy
If, finally, after all this time,
I reach the end of the island:
The opposite end from where I was dropped,
Dropped without arms or legs
So I could not swim or climb the trees,
So I could only roll forward along the grass,
Searching, hoping, giving some meaning
To my life in this place.
I will only go crazy, I think,
If by the time I reach the end of this island,
There is no one else to roll underwater
And breathfully drown with me,
Rolling through the sand with some reasonable hope
That there are more of us
On some island, somewhere,
Beyond all of the horizons.
A Morning at Hancock
by Elsie Shoemaker
My hands and feet gently flexed as I awoke. My eyes fluttered open while I pulled the corner of my sleeping bag tighter around my body. I felt the world come into focus in front of me. The sounds of slamming cabin doors and early morning chatter filled the air. If I listened closely I could hear the faint sounds of water droplets falling down our rain tarp. My head turned to the left, then the right to see if my tentmates were still asleep. It took a minute for my eyes to differentiate between the tops of their heads and the edge of their sleeping bags. A slight shuffle informed me that my turning was stirring their sleep, so I returned to my previous position.
My attention was now drawn to the voices outside who were already out and about. I could just make out a word or two, and although I strained to try and catch more, it was futile. The warmth from my arms spread as they folded over my chest. Now I could feel my breath as I assessed the situation. I tensed and released my leg muscles slowly and quietly to avoid crinkling in my sleeping bag. I felt an exaggerated sigh come from my right—the noise of disturbed rest and sensing too much light in the air. I turned just in time to see her eyes open—the day had begun.
Drawing
by Sarah Rahman
Tiger Portrait
by Sophia seitz-shewmon
The Demeter Plant
by Angelina Yu
Only an occasional gust of wind blew the shivering leaves or rustled the withering flowers. No birds were chirping and no cars honking; there was not even the slightest sound other than the howl of the wind. For the first time in centuries, the Earth was silent. Thick roots resembling green vines formed layers of mesh across abandoned streets, and from those vines grew enormous plants. Fruits the sizes of refrigerators hung from each plant, their strong stems drooping under the weight. The vine-like roots crawled up crumbling brick buildings and the gigantic plants poked out from shattered windows, their flowers reaching toward the sky. The roots crawled up lamp posts and covered windows, they flooded the roads and overtook the ground beneath the soil. They crept up skyscrapers and traffic lights, covering cities and suburbs in a blanket of artificial, shiny, green.
Sitting underneath a mountain of sprouts and plants, tucked below the driver's seat of a decomposing, vine-covered car, was a small, red, notebook. Through some sort of miracle, a few of the pages were still intact.
December 25, 2052:
I wish I could eat real food. Not the tin of soggy green beans we ate for our Christmas dinner or the rotting box of chicken noodle soup cans Mom bought in bulk five years ago. Yesterday, we watched a Christmas movie about a girl and her family on a snowy Christmas day. She and her brother spent the entire day outside, sledding in fluffy white snow and building snowmen for hours, their cheeks rosy and their noses runny. They were greeted with a big, bubbling, hot pot feast. The table was brimming with plates of fresh vegetables, everything from white cabbage to bok choy, and bowls of thinly sliced pork-belly meat ready to be submerged in the hot pot. I had only ever dreamed of such foods, so the whole time my stomach was reeling in jealousy. Needless to say, I didn’t like that movie very much.
Now, in the dead of the once-infamous New England winter, we’re lucky to have a day that dips below sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit. Only yellow weeds populate the garden in our elderly neighbors’ backyard. It used to produce buckets of cherry tomatoes, a batch of fresh cucumbers each week, and never-ending baskets of crunchy snap peas. Mom told me they used to send vegetables over when she was little. Now, our pantry is spilling with stacks of disgusting canned vegetables and sickeningly sweet apricots and pineapple slices. At some point, fresh food grew scarce and canned foods became a cheaper alternative. Companies began mass-producing canned goods, and slowly fresh produce disappeared from our diets altogether. Dad’s a scientist, he tells us it’s because fewer and fewer species of vegetables and fruits can survive the rising temperatures. And now, mass production of food from man-made ingredients is our only choice.
But honestly, I don’t really care how it happened. I just want whoever is in charge to fix this. Sixth grade sucks, it’s my first year of middle school, and I still haven’t even tasted a fresh strawberry. I hate sixth grade and everything else that’s wrong with this world.
February 2, 2055:
Today, Dad came home with the brightest smile I’ve seen on him in a while. He joined us at the dinner table practically tripping over himself with excitement. He announced that a group of scientists in his department had a breakthrough, rambling on about some genetically modified “Super Plant” that was extremely good at “carbon fixation.” When I asked what that meant, he explained it was a plant's process of taking carbon dioxide and locking it into biological molecules, like sugars, that plants use to build themselves up. He continued, gushing about a new method of gene therapy they developed through computer-aided gene reconstruction. He said when the computer was given a desired shape and function of a protein, it would propose an amino acid sequence and therefore the nucleotide sequence to produce the desired tertiary structure.
His colleagues found a way to inject fragments of the genome of a fern (a fast-spreading plant), and the genome of bamboo (the fastest-growing plant), so the “Super Plant” could reproduce and grow at “unprecedented” rates. He explained that this would dramatically help with slowing down and even reversing global warming, as it could effectively absorb the overwhelming amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. He also said they could inject other genomes into the plant, allowing it to produce foods packed with nutrients and proteins for humans using the same process of gene therapy.
My biology knowledge is limited, so I understood about a fraction of what he said. What I do know made it clear that my Dad and his fellow scientists may have developed a solution to global warming and the food shortage. My Dad’s excitement is contagious, so now I’m pretty thrilled about this solve-all “Super Plant” too.
April 10, 2057:
My Dad’s lab announced their innovation this year and news spread like wildfire. I’ve been excited about the “Super Plant” for a while, but now it seems even more amazing. Since then, they’ve successfully tested a handful of “Super Plants” and renamed them “Demeter” plants. They released the plant seeds to the public in packets and since then, the packets have been selling out across the globe. Of course, the moment it hit the shelves my Dad rushed to the store to buy a packet. He carefully sprinkled a couple of seeds in a pot with some moist soil, and the very next day a dozen green sprouts were sticking straight up. A day later, we had a full-grown plant in our living room and Dad replanted it in our backyard. Within the next week, we had an entire backyard full of these plants. They began growing beautiful red flowers, and when those flowers withered away, big fruits replaced them. Within another week, the Demeter plants produced a hybrid between a vegetable and a fruit, and at its maximum size, it was the shape of a butternut squash, the color of a golden apple, and the size of a small child.
This morning, as I was helping Dad water the garden, I noticed a bee pollinating one of the flowers. When I asked how the fruit of the plant emerged from the flower, he launched into a detailed explanation of each part of the plant. He started with the roots, explaining that the Demeter plants were good at carbon sequestration, the ability to pull a bunch of carbon underground and lock it away where it won’t affect us humans, due to its strong, deep roots. The roots also contain starch, a rich, edible source of carbohydrates for humans. Then he moved on to the stem, which he explained was packed with fiber and a range of vitamins. He explained the leaves were extremely effective at photosynthesis. At the same time, they could emit chemical fumes, preventing pests and disease. Lastly and most importantly, the fruit-vegetable itself was rich in protein, dietary fiber, fats, sugar, and water.
When I had my first bite of the crisp exterior, a wave of mildly sweet juice flooded into my mouth. For the first time in my life, I experienced what my Dad described as “a refreshing flavor.”
October 14, 2062:
Today I walked around my college campus, and as I followed the winding brick path, I just closed my eyes and enjoyed the cool breeze. Sweater weather is here again, and when I go outside, my cheeks get rosy and my nose gets runny. I never realized how beautiful fall was, with bright red, orange, and yellow leaves drifting to the floor to create a mosaic of colors on the ground. But even among these bright colors, Demeter flowers are the brightest of them all. Demeter gardens are all around campus, brimming with vivid golden fruits and bright red flowers.
Recently, scientists discovered a way to create Demeter plants specialized for different regions, allowing them to grow effectively in different climates and produce food with different flavors. More importantly, Demeter plants have worked tremendously in absorbing the greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere, and we’ve been rewarded with cool autumns and chilly winters.
Anyway, I’m so excited for winter. Last year, for the first time in my life, we had snow. It was a magical experience, watching the glorious specks of white, fluffy, snow blanket the ground. Our world has gone through a tremendous, incredible change for the better, and at the rate we’re going, maybe we will have flying cars by 2080.
October 18, 2074:
Today, I was walking around the neighborhood with my daughter, when she suddenly tripped over a root. I had never noticed it before, but as Chelsea sat bawling on the pavement, I realized it was poking up from the ground, breaking straight through the pavement.
The other day I was cleaning the house, and I found this notebook wedged between a stack of books in one of my desk drawers. A layer of dust had collected on the cover because I had completely forgotten about it. It's been years now and I'm a mother myself. Demeter plants have done wonders in transforming our world. The carbon dioxide level decreased over the years and we’ve achieved global carbon neutrality. Demeter plants are the core of every meal, and they replenish us with copious amounts of nutrients and protein. I tell Chelsea to appreciate what she has, because twenty years ago I could never have imagined how our world could look like it does now.
November 21, 2078:
Earlier this morning, I was watching the news. A reporter was interviewing a scientist; apparently, she had helped develop the Demeter plants. Throughout the interview, she expressed her concerns about the plant’s current reproduction rates. She said she had worked with her fellow scientists to design a plant that prioritized fast reproduction, so it could meet the overwhelming demand for food while also keeping food affordable. However, she admitted that her team had been seeing reproduction rates that exceeded their original predictions. She warned that this may lead to undesirable consequences, without specifying exactly what kind.
She also addressed the public's rising concern regarding the plant's thick roots. Recently, there have been cases across the globe in which homeowners woke up to see roots sticking up in living rooms and kitchens. The scientist waved the worries away, promising that these “rare occasions” were exaggerated and extremely uncommon. The interview concluded with the scientist assuring the uncalled-for developments of the plant were “being handled” and that there was “nothing to worry about.”
I can see how some people may be overreacting. Often, when something new is developed, people tend to hyper-focus on the dangers of the product, while ignoring all the benefits. But I’m also a mother, and the last thing I would want is for our world to fall apart just after it managed to pick itself back up. I know how fast things can change, and I think we should still be cautious. If it’s not for the sake of ourselves, at least we should protect our future generations.
December 23, 2084:
The other day, as we were cleaning out the attic (we’re getting ready to move out) I found this dusty little red notebook. When I showed it to Mom, she told me I could write in it if I wanted to. I just spent the last hour or so reading through her entries, and it’s cool how Mom was my age when she first started writing. Anyway, I want to write an entry of my own:
First of all, I hate this. I hate the world and I hate how people aren’t doing anything about the Demeter plants (though we often refer to them as “demon plants”). I hate that we have to move out of our house because those stupid roots won’t stop crawling up the walls. Each year, the roots grow thicker as the demon plants grow bigger, until eventually they break through the surface of the ground and stretch across lawns until they’re able to climb up the house and swallow it whole. We can’t do much about it. The plant is pest-resistant, chemical-resistant, and fire-resistant, even animals can’t eat it. People tend to keep their Demeter gardens in their backyards, away from their houses, but the plants make elaborate systems underground that can stretch across miles, like veins stretching across the body of our planet.
There really is no escape. It isn’t just houses either, the roots are blocking underground subway systems, breaking sewage pipes, and polluting our water sources. Airports have shut down because the runways are overtaken by roots, and I read on the news last week that “Manhattan has been evacuated after multiple skyscrapers were deemed vulnerable to collapse due to compromised foundations.” We’ve tried cutting the roots, but just like the necks of a Hydra dragon, the more we cut them, the faster and stronger they grew back.
As if that wasn’t enough, the roots are also killing our livestock. Apparently, the demon plant was never edible to anyone other than us humans (why the scientists didn’t mention that extremely vital detail when they released the plant into the world, I’ll never know). As the plants grew and reproduced, their roots began taking all the nutrients in the ground. The roots began restricting the growth of any other crop other than the demon plant itself. Ever since the demon plants took the primary food source of livestock away, meat has become extremely scarce and expensive.
December 25, 2084:
Today is Christmas. We spent the day huddled in our car, freezing, since the heating in our house got cut off and the heating in our car was malfunctioning. We were supposed to move into an apartment in the city, away from the demon plants in the suburbs, but we had already signed the lease to move by the time we heard about the crumbling cities. On Christmas Eve, Mom was notified that our apartment slot was no longer available. The suburbs are plagued with demon plants, and now the cities are even more dangerous. We have nowhere to go.
Honestly, I don’t know what will happen next. I’m shivering in the backseat, and my fingers are trembling as I write this entry. I don’t know if we’re going to freeze to death or starve to death (Mom says I’m being dramatic and that we still have demon plants as our food source, but I’d rather starve than eat another one of those.) Plus, the other day, I read an article saying that humans may be able to survive solely off the demon plant for a while, but not for long because we don’t know if the plant will evolve to become inedible to humans as well. Who knows, maybe we’ll die of some unpredicted side effects of the demon plant.
To cheer me up, Mom put on a movie in the car. It was a Christmas movie about a girl and her brother and the big hot pot feast they had. Throughout the movie, I couldn’t stop thinking about the winters I had enjoyed as a kid, coming in from playing in the snow and being welcomed into the warm house. And I didn’t like that movie very much.
Reminiscing about our house led me down a rabbit hole. I began dreaming of riding the subway again, stepping into the bustling city, and eating demon plants without gagging. Most of all, I yearned for the normal life I once took for granted. I just want some brilliant scientist to fix our planet, but this time, I want them to actually fix it, unlike they did years ago. I just hope it’s not too late.
A sudden, strong gust of wind shook the frail vehicle until it tipped onto its side. The notebook tumbled out from underneath the seat and fell through the rusting window, landing onto the vine-covered ground with a soft thud. A second powerful gust of wind picked the notebook up in the air, ripping the remaining few pages clear off the spine of the notebook until they all fluttered away. It was as if a chapter had ended, and a new page was turned. As the pages flew in all directions, any lingering whispers of the past fluttered away as well, both now lost in the wind.
Unsubstantial Territory
by Katie Heim Binas
Note: This is a short story I wrote in response to a prompt that told us to make our own continuation of a part of someone else's story. The italicized beginning of this story is excerpted from Virginia Woolf's novel "The Waves," and my writing begins where the text first returns to normal.
‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’
‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’ said Susan, ‘spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.’
‘I hear a sound,’ said Rhoda, ‘cheep, chirp; cheep chirp; going up and down.’
‘I see a globe,’ said Neville, ‘hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.’
‘I see a crimson tassel,’ said Jinny, ‘twisted with gold threads.’
‘I hear something stamping,’ said Louis. ‘A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.’
‘Look at the spider’s web on the corner of the balcony,’ said Bernard. ‘It has beads of water on it, drops of white light.’
‘The leaves are gathered round the window like pointed ears,’ said Susan.
‘A shadow falls on the path,’ said Louis, ‘like an elbow bent.’
‘Islands of light are swimming on the grass,’ said Rhoda. ‘They have fallen through the trees.’
‘The birds’ eyes are bright in the tunnels between the leaves,’ said Neville.
‘The stalks are covered with harsh, short hairs,’ said Jinny, ‘and drops of water have stuck to them.’”
‘A caterpillar is curled in a green ring,’ said Susan, ‘notched with blunt feet.’
‘The grey-shelled snail draws across the path and flattens the blades behind him,’ said Rhoda.
‘And burning lights from the window-panes flash in and out on the grasses,’ said Louis.
‘Stones are cold to my feet,’ said Neville. ‘I feel each one, round or pointed, separately.’
‘The back of my hand burns,’ said Jinny, ‘but the palm is clammy and damp with dew.’
‘Now the cock crows like a spurt of hard, red water in the white tide,’ said Bernard.
‘Birds are singing up and down and in and out all round us,’ said Susan.
‘The beast stamps; the elephant with its foot chained; the great brute on the beach stamps,’ said Louis.
‘Look at the house,’ said Jinny, ‘with all its windows white with blinds.’
‘Cold water begins to run from the scullery tap,’ said Rhoda, ‘over the mackerel in the bowl.’
‘The walls are cracked with gold cracks,’ said Bernard, ‘and there are blue, finger-shaped shadows of leaves beneath the windows.’
‘Now Mrs Constable pulls up her thick black stockings,’ said Susan.
‘When the smoke rises, sleep curls off the roof like a mist,’ said Louis.
‘The birds sang in chorus first,’ said Rhoda. ‘Now the scullery door is unbarred. Off they fly. Off they fly like a fling of seed. But one sings by the bedroom window alone.’
‘Bubbles form on the floor of the saucepan,’ said Jinny. ‘Then they rise, quicker and quicker, in a silver chain to the top.’
‘Now Billy scrapes the fish-scales with a jagged knife on to a wooden board,’ said Neville.
The dining-room window is dark blue now,’ said Bernard, ‘and the air ripples above the chimneys.’
‘A swallow is perched on the lightning-conductor,’ said Susan. ‘And Biddy has smacked down the bucket on the kitchen flags.’
‘That is the first stroke of the church bell,’ said Louis. ‘Then the others follow; one, two; one, two; one, two.’
‘Look at the table-cloth, flying white along the table,’ said Rhoda. ‘Now there are rounds of white china, and silver streaks beside each plate.’
‘Suddenly a bee booms in my ear,’ said Neville. ‘It is here; it is past.’
‘I burn, I shiver,’ said Jinny, ‘out of this sun, into this shadow.’
Jinny’s voice slowly echoes once, twice, three times before finally fading away. The world around me slowly comes into view. I’m in a dark hallway, and there are six people in front of me—except, I quickly realize, they’re not people. Not quite. They have no faces, no defining features; all of them are blank, gray silhouettes. They have baggy, gray dresses to match.
The six are standing in a straight line, in the same order in which they spoke. Left to right: Bernard. Susan. Rhoda. Neville. Jinny. Louis. Had they told me their names? I can’t recall them doing so, but how else could I possibly know them all? And how can I so clearly tell who is who, even though they have no distinctive voices or features?
Though the silhouettes have no features that could indicate whether they are facing towards me or away from me, I can feel them looking at me in such a way that I feel like I have to look back. As if it would be rude or disrespectful not to. The area that I can see behind them is pitch black. I can’t stop myself from looking away, just for a moment.
The instant my gaze switches to the world around me, it feels like my body is on fire. I can only imagine how horrible this would feel if I were still human—but I’m not. I was yesterday, but not today. Today, I don’t know what I am.
Things are changing in an instant: instead of hot and burning, now I find myself cold and shivering. I can’t help but be reminded of Jinny’s words: ‘I burn, I shiver.’ I try to look back at the figures, but I find my eyes frozen, glued in place. Even my limbs are frozen; I can’t bend my torso, or kneel down to try to angle my head towards them.
I burn, I shiver... What comes next? Out of this sun, into this shadow. It’s infuriatingly exact: I’m in a dark hallway, though I was in the sun just yesterday. I’ve already come out of the sun and into this place, the story is over and done because this place is the shadow.
With that final, panic-filled thought, my limbs release with such abruptness that I fall to the ground. I’d been relying on it to support me without even realizing it and now I’ve fallen down on my face that I already know is no longer a face. Ten seconds ago I could remember my name and now it’s gone and my thoughts are going so fast: what’s going to happen? Can I get out of here? Will I ever get out of here?
‘Yes,’ says Bernard, and I scream because I’d forgotten he was there, and the acoustics of this hallway make every word so loud! And as my scream echoes down the hall, I notice my voice sounds strange. It’s deeper, more hoarse, than it used to be. It’s almost more of a yell than a scream, although I was sure a scream had left my mouth.
‘But not yet,’ says Susan, and it takes me a moment to realize that she’s responding to my question: ‘will I ever get out of here?’ Because they can hear my thoughts. Of course they can. Why not? Nothing makes sense here anyway, why should that? I want to scream again and demand to know why I’m here, and who I am, and I want to ask them: did you take my memories? But my mouth is frozen, like my eyes were, except I don’t think it’s ever going to release. I have no mouth anymore. I have no eyes anymore, either. No nose. No ears. I’ve become featureless like them. I’m a silhouette of the person I used to be. I can feel the baggy dress on me rather than my usual t-shirt and shorts.
I’ve stood up again, too, though I can’t remember when that happened. And my thoughts are slowing down a bit. Still rambling, but definitely slower. Are the others waiting for me to finish thinking? Are we having a conversation right now? If they can hear my thoughts, why can’t I hear theirs?
‘You can,’ Rhoda says.
‘That’s all you can hear,’ Neville says.
‘This hallway is your mind,’ Jinny says.
‘All of our minds,’ Louis says.
‘WHERE AM I?’ I demand, except it’s not my voice anymore. I’d already heard how strange it was, but now I understand why: it’s just like theirs. They’ve taken my voice just like they’ve taken my face, and now I’m just like them, only I’ve forgotten my name. I’m panicking again; I need to calm down, but how? I can feel my memories from back home fading away. Everything I try to hold onto just disappears into colors and shapes and sounds, vague descriptors like those the silhouettes had told in their story.
The silhouettes are telling me more. They’re telling me that I can’t go back. That my memories will always be like this—vivid, fragmented. Maybe, I think to myself, if I can articulate even these few outlines of a memory to them, I would remember enough.
And the silhouettes fall silent, because they know that now I understand.
‘I see...’
As I begin to speak, my name returns; the words of my story flow out.
Conversation
by Olivia Wang
Courage
by Olivia Wang
8/21/17
by Eve Shapiro
it’s the cold, really, not the synths or the stars or the jagged right edge grasping
at profundity
no, it’s the cold that does it, the jagged edges of it that can
rip
into your skin until you start to think you understand
and now someone has left a molten star in my room and there’s a note carved into its side, inscrutable but unmistakable, and my skin burns at the touch, explodes with sizzling curiosity, or desperation, whichever word you want to use, and i’m tempted to say that it means something which I call it, but probably if I ate a bagel and then they asked again my answer would change, so maybe there’s nothing to it at all, or maybe the world realigns anytime anyone eats a bagel, maybe that’s the answer, and anyway they keep asking me what it means, or at least I keep hearing them ask me what it means, so I look for an english to inscrutable-hieroglyphic-language dictionary and I stare through hazy chlorinated air and bring shovels to the endless night desert in my mind and I pick apart the clouds and the foam at the edge of the waves until I find the shredded contents of the translation I’ve torn apart
the wind bites at my hair and catches
something
try this: turn your head towards it
let it pull the leftover casing off, the shiny plastic skin and hardened gelatin
it won’t reach anything important, probably, and if it doesn’t cut deep enough, you can always
finish
the job, slash neon red drawings into the shell until you can feel the cold of the jagged
silver
on
skin
hope they (don’t) fade
pretend it’s the same effect as the cold, pretend you’ve found the translation you destroyed
close enough, right?
every chapter foreshadows the next and every chapter lies
there’s a trashy teen drama playing in the background and it’s always slipping into the conversation. the girls are wearing plastic gelatin and red plastic cups and artfully blackened under-eyes, but that’s not the point, I don’t think, we’ve got to get back to our conversation.
sorry about that. I won’t let it happen again.
what I was saying was, I’m starting to think that it might be impossible, what I was saying was, the world is getting smaller, what I was saying was, please do you think that you could help me find it.
do you know what I mean, at all? is it ok if I hope you don’t, a little bit?
Fireworks collapse prematurely into a pond outside. No pinnacle, no lights, no smokey aftertaste. I plan for the next eclipse. The first time, the molten star pulled all its brilliance to the edges until the world cooled and the wind bit into my skin. I forgot to bring a sweatshirt. Next time I’ll remember.
Noblesse
by Olivia Wang
We source our connective tissue from tidal waves,
coral branches, altostratus, cirrus clouds. It’s a constant search,
for the lightning, one brush stroke of genius,
one word to remake the world
in the form we’ve always known it to have,
etc. Some diagnosis for social psychosis,
bronze platter on the gallery wall
that proclaims in the jargon we drew up:
the emperor’s new clothes
are cruelty-free and ready to be picked up from the dry-cleaner’s
at your earliest convenience.
Wasn’t I asking for the meaning of it all
to be handed down to me in such terms as I’ve learned
to parse, to interpret in these manifold manners?
Syllables made anew in the crucible smile brighter
than you ever could and point you down the hall,
It’s just to the left, ma’am—didn’t you see the map in the waiting room?
the art, or the commentary on modern life as we know it, the cure
you were looking for, a veil drawn over
helplessness
atrophy in terrifying degree.
Now we’re speaking in the common code
with a wink and a smile, now
we’re fluent, we don’t mean any harm
but we can’t help but erode
the ship that bore us, we don’t see the structure changing as it shudders
and with all this familiarity I still can’t identify the stress
that rendered your sentences abrasive, off-pitch
to an untuned ear. How do I tell you
what I can’t even utter?
We ask this of all our candidates.
How your eyes are full of kindness! And how your gaze burns, bright blue
as the words that fall from your mouth
lily-gilded, upturned lilting upon the carpet threads, this infinite kindness
as a matter of course, we institute it as a policy here
From the 43rd floor, our windows outstretched over the whole sky
are perfect metal frames to throw
my malformed phrases from,
impact crash on asphalt
feather-light, crack and quiver of the eggshell, river
of yolk left glistening like an oil stain
Blow me a kiss and bring me a flower before the landslide buries us
or tell me something novel, a daisy on your tongue
sit with me—maybe in the next room
or the next town—as I pull at my scabs
and watch the yellow pus drain out, whimsy flowing out of me
into the sea (as it should be)
How I adore my artistic conventions
that keep me in realm of my neighbors and friends
This is what I meant the first time, the last time–
I play the black keys and it’s the ringing of a hollow bell I hear
The Hourglass
by Caro Taylor
There is sand spilling out of your paper cuts, from the skin that falls away in slivers, bloodless and clean. Your body empties like a bucket, rushing to the bottom of the hourglass again.
The bulb fills. Each hour streams to the bottom, crystals of water and blood and tears and all of the things that heroes are made of, shimmering like fairy dust, piling up against the glass walls. They once told you that all that glitters is not gold. You think they were right.
The hourglass chimes again, as if some huge, horrible creature has tapped on the glass. You shudder as it tips and there you are, sand pouring back into you from the top of the hourglass. It does not grate against your veins as it should, settling into some semblance of balance in your skin. You are unblemished. You always are.
Again, your skin splits, revealing rivulets and rivers of sand. It is a painless process, but when it is what you are, every passing second, minute, hour, year… it becomes a weary existence.
After so much time to ponder it, you know why you are here. You thought you had been the chosen, the favorite soldier, the shiniest side of the coin. But you know the truth now. There is fault in even the most honest of heroes.
The sand shifts, finding firm footing as it reaches the top of the bottom bulb. The hourglass shudders and sways as your skin opens wide to embrace the sand again.
Again, the hourglass turns.
Art People
by Dava Sitkoff
“Madeline Eshler-Davidson’s parents became therapists for the same reason that Lester Broadhurst became a doctor.” The sentence materialized last Saturday, when (as they often did) my passivity and Lester’s obliviousness led to the two of us getting lunch.
I can’t remember whether I ever liked Lester, nor do I remember how we first met. The most plausible theory is that we met in college through a Rube Goldberg machine of friendship—I must have known someone who knew someone who knew him, and as such we saw each other with enough frequency that he decided we ought to be (or already were) friends, and began occasionally inviting me to lunch. After we graduated, I made no effort to hold on to our friendship, but I never actively let go of it either, and so Lester must have assumed the polite thing to do would be to invite me to lunch during the few weekends a year that we ended up in the same city. I imagine Lester has many friends of this sort—he never seems to take issue with always being the one to reach out, nor with the fact that I always drive home from our lunches knowing far more about him than he could possibly have learned about me. Lester rarely bothers to ask me questions about myself, and when he does, it is in the form of disinterested pleasantries sprinkled between monologues about his own life. They are always the sort of questions that a distant aunt would ask in a birthday card, betraying an understanding of who I am that is a few years out of date and shifted slightly to the side. “Have you had any luck with dating these days?” (No, I have not). “Would you like to read this article I found, which I think is related to your thesis?” (No, thank you). “Are you still writing?” (I would rather fill my pockets with stones and drown myself in a river like Virginia Woolf than think about anything I’ve written recently).
Really, the fact that he continues to believe we are friends is indicative of the ways in which we are both flawed people. Evidently he must derive some sort of pleasure from the opportunity to talk about himself, and it’s not like I ever have anything better to do on a Saturday afternoon such that I might be excused from the obligation of lunch.
This specific Saturday, Lester was in the city because the girlfriend he met in medical school was attending a three-day conference about colorectal cancer. He was very apologetic about her being unable to join us for lunch despite being in the city, and I assured him that it was really more than fine, purportedly because I was sure I’d get to see her some other time, but actually because she ran a Baptist youth-group and had the most off-putting way of smiling. When Lester’s girlfriend smiled, she opened her mouth in an entirely horizontal manner, drawing the outer corners sideways instead of upwards and lifting her upper lip as one, exposing, like a chewing horse, the entire top layer of her gums. I suppose it is a rather objectifying and unkind thing to do to compare a woman to a horse, but the resemblance is truly inescapable. I am convinced that no facial feature has ever made anyone look as much like anything as Lester’s girlfriend’s smile made her look like a horse.
Enough about Lester’s girlfriend. I always go on tangents like this. The only reason I started writing about Lester was to explain the thing about Madeline. The reader doesn’t care about any of this other stuff. This is why I never finish anything I write. Just start over, and get to the point quicker this time. I’m running out of time. I’m forgetting details of that summer. I’m forgetting the feeling that doesn’t exist.
“Madeline Eshler-Davidson’s parents became therapists for the same reason that Lester Broadhurst became a doctor.” The sentence materialized last Saturday, while I was getting lunch with Lester.
I always found Lester’s choice of profession rather ironic—he himself could have benefitted from a few visits with a good doctor. He was always sick with something, especially when we were in college together;
allergies or food poisoning or some sort of sinus infection that left him with a hacking cough for weeks. The fact that Lester was always sick combined poorly with the features of his body and face—Lester was thin and narrow, with these huge eyes that bulged out so precariously one might think a single sneeze would send them catapulting out of their sockets. When I’d had my insight about Madeline, I was tuning out Lester’s high, nasally voice as he told some story about an experience he had volunteering with his girlfriend in Costa Rica. I was focused instead on estimating whether his eyes would splatter onto the table or my new shirt if they were to pop out of his skull, and it was after he descended into a coughing fit that I had the following train of thought:
Why did Lester even go to medical school if he himself is so sick? It reminds me of something my mother once said to me: that people go into the professions they would’ve needed most as a kid. She gave the example of people who struggled in school becoming teachers, or people with their own psychological issues becoming therapists, or [need another example]. Madeline’s parents were both therapists, and were both messed up people.
I can’t do this. I can’t write it. I need to get it all out at once and that just isn’t possible. There’s too much. The symbolism of the car hitting the deer, the storm that picked up a whole nest of bats and dumped their corpses in Lake Michigan. Braiding dunegrass, the blue catfish that surfaced with its stomach in pieces, zebra mussels spilling out (750 trillion zebra mussels lie at the bottom of Lake Michigan, waiting to eat my bones. They came from Russia in 1988, clinging to the ballast water of a cargo ship). Look what you’ve done, Madeline. Your eyes are like an oil spill, I am the sea turtle and you are a plastic bag around my neck. Do you have any idea what I thought you were going to be?
“Madeline Eshler-Davidson’s parents became therapists for the same reason that Lester Broadhurst became a doctor.” Madeline Eshler-Davidson had two last names. Before she was born, there was much debate about which one should come first. If her dad’s name came first, it might send the message that men were more important than women, which her parents obviously didn’t want to instill in their baby girl. But if her second last name was her dad’s, then her mom’s name might look like a middle name, and people might default to using her dad’s in contexts where only one last name was necessary.
Both being therapists, Madeline’s parents were rather perceptive. When they divorced, it was because they had developed a very special sort of resentment: the personalized sort of hatred you have for someone when you know them so completely you understand those pernicious psychological flaws they will never be rid of. As such, both parents recognized the other as deeply, irredeemably, insecure. So, while they both understood it to be against all principles of child psychology to put a kid in the middle of divorce, each parent believed that the other was so insecure that they would almost certainly try to turn Madeline to their side. Trying to turn a child to your side in a divorce is awful, of course, but if the other parent is going to do it first, the only thing one can do is fight back. So Madeline, at a very young age, understood her parents to be in need of constant reassurance. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, either one of them would pick her up from soccer practice, dig their hands into the steering wheel until their knuckles went white, and ask, in all sorts of coded ways: “what has your other parent said about me recently?” It was up to Madeline to reassure them. That was where she went wrong. That was where she developed her disdain for insecure people, her habit of taking advantage of them, and her understanding that all people really want is to be liked. That was where she learned to create the feeling that doesn’t exist.
I can’t capture it right. All I want is to make the kind of art that makes people feel like they’ve been turned inside out and are just exoskeletons trying to find the needle in the haystack, trying to put their fingers into the holes that are the stars and tear apart the night sky like wrapping paper so that everybody else feels it too. I need the reader to feel it, to feel the symbolism of the last thing she ever said to me. The overwhelming, unavoidable symbolism of it all. Work like words like water grow(s) to fill whatever space you leave for it and like a baptism she had to carry me out of the lake and how I felt like a ghost walking through the world for the next year and a half. How I never quite felt like a person. How I’ve been looking for a feeling that doesn’t exist, how I found it that summer, and how futile my search for it has been ever since.
“Madeline Eshler-Davidson’s parents became therapists for the same reason that Lester Broadhurst became a doctor.” After my lunch with Lester ended, I made my way to my car, and I tried to write down the insight I’d had about Madeline and her childhood. Everything reminds me of Madeline. I had a whole lunch with Lester, listened to his high, nasally laugh and at least five of his long, winding stories, but the moment I thought of Madeline I was gone. The thought of that summer pulls me out of myself, pulls me out of the monotony of being an adult, and reminds me that I’m supposed to be searching for something, and I’m supposed to be a writer, and I’m trying to write a book about Madeline. The insight about Madeline’s parents joins hundreds of little snapshots I’ve written in more notebooks than I can count: it happens often that I get pulled out of whatever I’m doing, think of a sentence or a memory that I know I need to include, write it down as fast as I can, and then stare back at it, knowing that it’s not going to be enough. I could analyze the last thing she said to me like a poem. Sixteen syllables. The fact that she put the stress on the word “love” the second time but not the first time. The overarching themes. The symbolism. The deer we hit with the car. I think of that great, gray midwestern sky, how I felt like it would suffocate me, sitting breathless at the top of a dune, shaking, crying like I’ve never cried before. You were supposed to be the answer, Madeline. You were supposed to be my escape.
“Madeline Eshler-Davidson’s parents became therapists for the same reason that Lester Broadhurst became a doctor.”
The problem with that sentence, of course, is that the reader must know Lester Broadhurst to infer any meaningful information about Madeline. It’s the same problem I have every time I try to write about her: that you can’t understand how I felt without understanding everything I’ve ever done or thought. It was so rife with symbolism, real as it was, the glassy eyes of the deer carcass with the reflection of a great-gray midwestern sky. But it won’t ever mean as much to a reader as it means to me. I have sentences upon sentences, hundreds of thousands of little snapshots and images and feelings, all strung together like the polaroid pictures in a row on the wall in her bedroom. I’ve tried all sorts of metaphors, all sorts of story-structures, shed and picked back up different understandings of Madeline’s psyche like a snake that hoards all its old skins. There was a feeling that didn’t exist, and you had to be there and you had to be me to feel it. You had to have grown up like I did, passive like I was, believing something big was bound to happen, constantly looking for that thing in everything. You had to have grown up like I did, devouring every book ever published in which a main character is swept into some magical world, pulled out from the monotony of life and into a feeling that doesn’t exist. You have to have known what it felt like to think Madeline would be that something. You have to empathize with the mass-grave of bugs inside every streetlamp, with the pigeons electrocuted on powerlines, with those pictures you see in National Geographic of seagulls, hundreds of seagulls, drowning in an oil spill. You have to give me the benefit of the doubt, to consider that maybe I’m not one of those crazy Art People who makes something out of everything and believe that maybe I really do have something to say. You need to understand Plato’s chair, the theory of magic as definitionally impossible. You need to be Lester, and you need to be me, and you need to be Madeline, and you need to feel what it was like to be the deer we hit with the car and the sky and to be pulled apart by stars and to be a zebra mussel, destroying something from the inside, brought against your will to a place you don’t belong.
After I went out to lunch with Lester, after I gave up on trying to get something from that sentence, I sat in my car and I cried. I cried because I am in my late twenties with a PhD from Michigan, and I feel like I won’t be satisfied with my life until I write about a girl I met as a teenager. I cried because Lester went on a trip to Costa Rica to volunteer with his girlfriend, and all I’ve thought about for the past ten years has been writing. And I cried because as I was crying, all I could think about was the symbolism of sitting in my car and crying about Madeline. Sobs and sobs shook my body and I thought of myself on the top of that dune and I thought of the deer that we hit with the car and I just cried.
“Madeline Eshler-Davidson’s parents became therapists for the same reason that Lester Broadhurst became a doctor.” The sentence materialized last Saturday, and I realized that if I don’t stop trying to write about her, if I don’t stop trying to express the feeling that doesn’t exist, I will be no better than the blue catfish with a belly full of zebra mussels. That’s the thing about Art People—they’d all have been better off when the only thing anyone worried about was food. They’ll die miserable in an era of unprecedented abundance, those Art People, rich kids who went to college and will waste their last god-given breaths explaining why something with “post-realist” or “post-modern” in front of it is worthy and important. Us Art People, we’ll die spending conversations thinking only of the next thing we want to say, thinking of our bodies only as vessels for our brains, choosing aesthetic misery over whatever actually feels good. We’re all searching for the wrong thing, I’m sure of it, like opioid addicts and evangelicals. When we die, us Art People, we’ll die still insisting there was something we had to say, that we’d encountered something new and special, that we were destined to write the Next Great American Novel. Lester Broadhurst will have happy children with huge eyes and horse-teeth, and where will I be?
I don’t want to look for you forever, Madeline. But I fear that’s what’s going to happen to me. I fear that’s what’s going to happen to all those Art People still looking for a feeling that doesn’t exist. I fear that before I know it, I’ll be lying there dead beside billions and billions of birds, drowning in oil, eyes open wide and pupils dilated, faces turned in ecstasy towards a microplastic mecca.