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S O R I N O A K R E V I E W

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The Sorin oak reviewThe sT. edward’s UNIVersITY LITerarY aNd creaTIVe arTs joUrNaLVolume 22

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The Sorin Oak Review is an annual publication of St. Edward’s University. The views expressed in this journal are those of the individual authors and artists and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editor, staff, or the university. To receive more information or to contact the current editor, e-mail [email protected].

sT. edward’s UNIVersITY

3001 soUTh coNgress aVeNUe

aUsTIN, Texas 78704

512.448.8400

coVer aNd book desIgN bY Erica Stivison and Kathryn O’Neill

2012 sorIN oak reVIew prINTed bY capIToL prINTINg co., aUsTIN, Texas.

This is the 22nd annual issue of Sorin Oak Review, the creative literature and arts journal of St. Edward’s University. Every year, students, faculty and alumni of St. Edward’s are given the opportunity to submit their original work to be reviewed and possibly selected for publication by an all-student staff. I have had the opportunity to work with the journal for three years now, ever since Professor Carrie Fountain, the journal’s new faculty advisor, introduced me to the publication as a sophomore in her Introduction to Creative Writing course. I’d like to thank her for inspiring my interest in the journal and for all of her help this year. ThishasbeenasignificantyearforSorinOakReview.Weweregiventhe great opportunity to work with the library in archiving past issues of the journal online. From here on, the journal will continue to be printed and distributed as well as archived in the Scarborough-Phillips Library Digital Collections.Incredible thanks go out to Eric Frierson, Pongracz Sennyey, and April Palmore Sullivan of the library for making this preservation possible. Also, thanks to Deidre Acord and Capitol Printing Company for your consistent work with us in printing. A special thanks to last year’s editor, Carl Mamula, for his continual help and advice. I’d also like to thank lead designer Erica Stivison for all of her work on the journal. I’m so glad we were paired up together. Congratulations and good luck to Kelsey Howard and Katy O’Neill in taking over as chief editor and designer next year! Lastly, I would also like to mention thanks to all of my friends on the Sorin Oak Review staff. We enjoyed having the opportunity to read, view, and discuss the work of our peers, and we feel as if the creative community at St. Edward’s University is unlike any other. I hope that in opening this journal, you will be inspired.

Lindsay Young Editor-in-Chief

Dear reaDer,

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adams Two Ultrasounds

goNzaLez Apparition of Goliath’s Secretary Appears to David

boweN Night

caNTU Bruise

coUrTrIghT Regret

coUrTrIghT What I Have to Say to You

goNzaLez The Night Dinner Was on the House

meLsoN He Came For Dinner

recker Rain Dream

boweN Oil

goNzaLez Full of Blood and Blues

meLsoN Before Sleep

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heagerTY Untitled ( for Robert)

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goNzaLez Brutal Spouse-Fighting Ring Discovered in Miami Basement

hIssam Puppets

oTTmers The Pencil

oTTmers The Old Man and the Chair

goNzaLez The Tuff Boys Club

browN The Island

craIg Burwell Road

adams Presque Vu

TomLINsoN The Memorandum within the Glass Bottle

groTzINger Why I Hate Benjamin B. Folly

heagerTY Second Drawers

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beaUchoT Cracked

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LLoreNce Fun at the Circus, Juggling, Seal of Approval

sIVIN Highland Mall (1), (2)

sepULVeda Fall

Thomas Walter White

beaUchoT Level 8

marTINez At It Again

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sIVIN Place du Beguinage (1), (2)

brIeN The Kitchen of Meaning Mnemonics

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“Because I was tired of the way his feet stank. That’s why.” Handcuffed to a stop sign, bloodied khaki pants, muddied knit sweater, bruised and swollen eyes, Ursula Mills had had enough. Was it because her marriage had failed, or because she’d been caught choking her husband with the strength of her thighs in the middle of a humid basement in the Little Havana District, the whole neighborhood applauding and whistling? “And how long have you been married?” As she huffed overmyquestion,InoticedOfficerWhobehindmereachforhis club. Ursula Mills’ husband must have spat at my partner. Who’d never pulled out the club before. Except for the time the boy blew his nose on Who’s sleeve. Who was really beating down on her husband now, but her husband only laughed. I wrote in my notepad, Interest in S&M? I almost felt sorry for thechump,butWhodoesn’tlikeroguebodilyfluids,andIcan’tblame him. “Officer,if Itoldhimonce,Itoldhimeveryday.”Onelookat her driver’s license and anyone would know she was on the wrong side of town. “Wash your feet before you sit next to me. It’s easy.” She said something about common courtesy before I looked back at her. She reminded me of a pair of gym socks.

brUTaL spoUse-FIghTINg rINg dIscoVered IN

mIamI basemeNT FIcTIoN

Nancy Lili Gonzalez

Nancy Lili Gonzalez knits sweaters for bisons on Sundays. On Mondays, she hunts ships in bottles, then smashes them on nearby curbs for pleasure. Tuesdays, rabid toddlers bully her for lunch money. The rest of the week, she avoids people who have spaghetti for brains.

“Whatcanyoutellmeaboutfightclub?” Ursula Mills began to cry, and I noted so in my notepad before sticking it back in my breast pocket. I excused myself and went back to my car. It smelled like cinnamon, and I felt at home. I took a cake donut from the box on the dashboard and watched Ursula Mills weep. She must have been looking at Who wipe off the blood of his club on her husband’s trousers. That or she worried about tainting her spot-free criminal record. Her husband was face down and motionless on the sidewalk, one ankle handcuffed to a light pole, blood pouring out, just pouring out of him. The boy with the snot on Who’s sleeve didn’t even get it that bad. Who came back to the car, sat beside me, and reached for a jelly donut.

“Too damn humid outside for this shit.” “Good thing we left the a/c running.” The leather seats were cool on the back of my hand. Who took a knowing bite from his donut. He looked at his lap as if he were looking across a distance, nodded. I pointed, uselessly, at the couple. “We should arrest them.” “You think?”

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’s From his peripheral vision is a steady image of a purple woman in a station wagon, eyes the color of a Tyrannosaurus Rex —tangy and toxic— with a long cigar and a yawn that says Dearest darling, us bad ones can triumph with perseverance.

apparITIoN oF goLIaTh’s secreTarY

appears To daVIdNancy Lili Gonzalez

ThefirsttimeyouwereanEasteregg, round and wobbling in a pool of dark dye. All I could make of you were round, white edges andtheflashingspeckof light they told me was your heartbeat. The second time you were the answer in a magic 8 ball. A little shake of obscurity in black and then you bubble up to the surface. The solar eclipse of your cranium, the pulsing beans of your kidneys, and -- clarity! -- the swift kick of your perfect footprint. It wasn’t until they cleaned the red off the the pink of your skin, shone a light into the blue of your eyes, dried the soft yellow into your hair, and handed you to me, footprints still stained with a bit of black ink, thatyoufinallyhadaface.

Two ULTrasoUNds Gloria C. Adams

Gloria C. Adams is a senior English Education major. She is also a poet, a filmmaker, a mother, a student, a teacher, and an expert apple pie baker. She has spent the last three years with the Blue’s Clues theme song perpetually stuck in her head--because she has a baby.

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Garrett Hall likes a lot of things. He hopes you like his photos. You can view more of his photography at cargocollective.com/garretthall.

marLIN, Texas Garrett Hall

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For Theodore Selby, clipping his petunias was the most exciting part of his day. His green garden boots were always pulled on with the upmost care and he wielded his garden clippers and hoe like legendary weapons. After all, his darlings needed him astheirfirstlineof defensefromthearmyof weedshell-boundtodestroyhisflowerykingdom.Throughthesewilddaydreams Theodore escaped his plain life, becoming a wild adventurer afraid of nothing – not death or life or any of the in-between. The world and all it had to offer bristled with excitementbeneathhisfearlessfingertips. That Wednesday morning, he would have done anything to be there instead of where he was: tied crudely to the dark oak pillar in the center of his living room like a game animal being prepared to be bled, his skull cracked, with three intruders making themselves comfortable in his home. Theodore could seetheirshadowsmovinglikefishjustabittoofarbeneaththewater’ssurface:theteenagerstretchedoverhisthriftstorefloralsofa with the baseball bat laying over his lap as if it were a lounging cat; the short, dumb looking redhead crossing from the kitchen with a stolen bag of corn chips clutched in his chubbyfingers;thedirt-smeareddriverwhohadshothisgoodfriend Sheriff Henry Cullison standing in front of him with a

pUppeTsFIcTIoN

Jessica Hissam

Susannah Bowen is an English Writing major with a focus in Creative Writing. She enjoys writing poetry and painting portraits. Through these mediums, she aims to capture small moments that reveal hidden insights about the human experience. She is graduating in May.

I’m sorry for all those times I pretended to be sleeping, while I heard you ask over and over if I was still awake, peaking and retreating, monkey-like, slurring my name, with your thumb in your mouth, each suck like a dripping faucet, and I was tense with excitement, the kind when you’re hiding. I can’t be needed.

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Berkeley Beauchot is a Photocomm. student at St. Edward’s University, supposedly graduating in 2013. Harry, I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.

cracked Berkeley Beauchot

sick smile on his face and the proportions of a teenager who had never left his awkward phase but the eyes of something old and dark. Exhausted, Mr. Selby shut his eyes, cheek lulling against his shoulder. He imagined walking off of his porch in the same fashion he had just an hour before. It was as vivid as a repeated reality, and he felt it all over again, cherished it like he never had before. ∞ Thefirststepintothesquishymulchmadehimgiddywithanticipation.Hesethisplasticstooldownandfixeditintotheunevenearth,arthritickneescracking as he lowered. As he always did, Theodore took a moment to look over his garden shrubs and past the white picket fence to the Ferrywich Crossing Police Department. Sheriff Cullison had just parked his squad car in his designated spot by the door. “Rafflesiaflowers,Mr.Selby.Thebiggestflowerintherainforest,”theSheriff called across the street. Theodore looked up from under his visor and smirked. “I told you that one last February,” he said. “Nice try. Do your research for next Tuesday.” Sherriff Cullison laughed, his big belly shaking. Theodore smiled as the officerwalkedintothestation.Theyhadbeenexchangingthenamesof exoticplantlifeeveryTuesdayfornineyears.Evenif Henryhadanaffinityfortopiary carvings over petunias, the long-lasting challenge had brought the gardeners together. Finally alone, all of Theodore’s attention was brought to his petunias. Their purple petals smiled their hellos up at him. “Hello, my friends,” Theodore said. “Looks like it might rain today.” He hummed a tune following each clip, watching the offending weeds fluttertotheground.Thefulfillmentof perfectlygroomedpetuniasmadeTheodore’s whole life feel centered. Snip by snip, his spirits rose so high that he did not even see the rainclouds rolling in and blotting out the sun… ∞


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A pain slammed into his ribs, and Mr. Selby groaned, forcing his eyes open. The two goons had gotten up from their seats, and the lanky one with the metal baseball bat was jabbing it into his side. This morning had not followed its normal schedule. Instead, it veered off onto an unusual path. He should have known. Nothing around Ferrywich Crossing was ever unusual. “Come on, gramps,” the redhead in front of him said, brandishing his bowie knife in the air with long, slow strokes, coming closer and closer to Theodore’s chest. “I asked you a question. You better answer it.” Mr. Selby let out a noise, but his spinning vision from the pain of his split skull made his eyes droop shut again. He should have known, he scolded himself. Maybe then something would have been different. Maybe… ∞ A screech of tires interrupted the quiet of the small town. Frowning, Theodore looked up again, eyes shaded from his visor. An old Buick was swerving wildly into parking space beside Sheriff Cullison’s squad car, blasting rock music. It jumped the curve and hit the pole of the handicap parking space sign, making a loud ding. Without turning off the engine, the sedan’sdoorsflewopen,andthreemenwearingraggedclothesandtightjeans climbed out. Theodore squinted to see if he recognized any of them. He didn’t, and that was strange in itself. The town never got many visitors, anddefinitelynoonewholookedasroughastheydid. Oafs, Theodore thought, getting into a ding in front of the police station. They were probably all drunk. Somehow, though, being drunk at eleveninthemorningdidn’tquitefit.Heloweredhisclippers. Thedoorof thepolicestationflungopenastheredheadeddriverapproached, and Sheriff Cullison stepped out, looking surprised. He said something that Theodore could not hear over the rock music. Without responding, the driver raised his arm. The gardener had barely registered

that the glint in his vision was a gun before he saw the driver shoot Sheriff Cullison square in the face. He crumpled to the ground in a lifeless pile. Jerking, the witness fell off of his stool into his petunias, huddled silently within the greenery. The other two rushed into the station after him: another redhead in a studded leather jacket with a pistol and a lanky teenager with a steel bat. He heard shots like softly distant dreams over the blasting music and watchedtheflashesof lightastheysystematicallymassacredeveryunpreparedofficerinthesmallstation. A wave of tremors raced through him and after they passed Theodore’s fingersandkneesfeltnumb.Hecouldseethemanhehadmetwhenhemoved here at the ripened age of forty- three, twenty-two short years ago, through the shrubbery. Sheriff Cullison did not have a face any longer, just a gaping crater of blood and bone facing up at the tumbling grey clouds. Thedoorflewopenagain,andtheassailantsfiledout.Theodorehadsatup at exactly the wrong moment and made eye contact with the one with the baseball bat. They sprinted across the street, and though he turned to bolt to his patio, their footfalls caught up quickly. There was a whizz of a bat cutting through the air, a horrid pain, and then... well. Nothing. ∞ “Seriously, fuckhead. I’m not playing. Open your eyes.” There was an odor. Each word was punctuated by a foul, bitter smell. He could smell it particularly well with his eyes shut. It brought Theodore back to his boyhood, when he had punted his kickball into the bushes surrounding his back yard. Upon retrieval, he had found a dead deer halfway decomposed in the grass. The deer had been picked at by scavengers and insects and through those openings in its fur the most rancid stench had plumed out. “Trev,” said a dumb voice between crunches of stolen corn chips, “I don’t think he’s gonna last all that much longer. He’s old, you know? These old people, they’re real fragile-”

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Greg Thomas was a very enthused senior the year this book was published and went on to do sensational work in the years to follow. This Graphic Design Major’s time was spent slaving in front of the computer, doodling in his sketchbook, watching “Breaking Bad”, and consuming an overwhelming amount of “5 Hour Energ ys”, fine IPAs and tasty food trailer grubbery.

FIre reLIeF Greg Thomas

“Shut up, Mikey, damn. Did I ask you?” Trevor, with the jack knife, was the leader of the pack, Mr. Selby gathered. The way other two timidly followed his every move and said his name as if they were going to be swatted like bad children said it all. Mr. Selby felt the cold point of a Trevor’s weapon pushing beneath his chin. He forced his eyes open. Mikey, the shorter of the redheads, stood on the left of Trevor, while the lanky teen with the baseball bat was on the right. “Say, gramps, answer the question,” the lanky one said. “Trev don’t like to be kept waiting.” The knife remained beneath his chin, and he felt the wielder twitch with irritation. “Bruce, I swear if either you or Mikey say one more thing I’m gonna keep this guy all to myself and you two can starve.” Bruce and Mikey glanced at each other and unanimously quieted. Theodorewatchedtheroomgetdarkerasif thecloudshadfinallysmotheredthe golden sun. “Answer the question, gramps. Do you believe in ‘the afterlife’?” A little prick of pain popped up on his neck. Trevor was slowly applying pressure, and the jackknife’s blade was beginning to cut. “God and Heaven and Hell?” Cautiously swallowing, Mr. Selby whispered what he hoped he wanted to hear. “Yes.” The leader chortled. Remarkably similar to hyenas, the other two began to snickeruntilthelivingroomwasfilledwithstupid,savagelaughter.Theodore’s brain volleyed between being anxious and annoyed. The rotten stench grew stronger, so pungent that he had to suppress the need to gag. “I wish it was that easy,” Mikey chimed in, voice youthful. “For all of that Heaven jazz to be true. You think life’s hard? Man, let me tell you…” BrucelookedatMikeyandranhisfingersthroughhisownunkemptblondehair. “Right? The things I used to bitch about, man, like you remember that one time we went mailbox bashing and got arrested? I think this was the bat that we used, too, ‘cause we had to go and get it from the bushes after I threw it-”

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“Can it, Bruce,” Trevor snapped, lowering the jackknife down Theodore’s chest, catching it on his shirt and going down to his round belly. “You too, Mikey. You just shut up. We’re gettin’ off focus here. This guy,” he prodded Theodore, “this guy’s our focus. We ain’t got much time.” Like a dead car battery being jumped, Theodore’s heart sputtered out a few uneven beats and then steadied into a quick, nervous pattern. Silencing, both of the hooligans perked up at the exact same time and stared at him. It was as if they could hear his little rhythm, the only thing that gave him life. Mr. Selby could have sworn they looked hungry. “You oughta not.” Trevor said. Mr. Selby wished that Bruce and Mikey would keep babbling so that the sick, wrathful thing he could catch glimpses of swimming around in Trevor’s eyes would lash out on them instead of him. Instead the knife caught on his shirt and tore the front of the mint sweater open, revealing his grey tufts of chest hair and old, leathery skin. “It really was a big waste of time. All three of us, we used to go to church every Sunday.” Mr. Selby plastered himself against the oak pillar. The tip of the blade drewacirclearoundhisheart.HiseyescrawledfromTrevor’sdirtyfingernailsup his arm, over his chest, and then stopped and narrowed. Above the neckline of his dirty white shirt were stitches like the top prongs of a “Y”, sewn cleanly to close two surgically straight cuts. Beneath their leather jackets, Bruce and Mikey had them too. “Youcan’tknowthat,”Theodoresaid,finallylookingintoTrevor’scoal-black eyes. “You’re just kids.” “Oh, gramps, you’d be surprised what we know. You’d never even guess in the ballpark.” The redhead pushed the knife down, and it broke skin. Mr. Selby whimpered with pain. Bruce and Mikey shifted on their toes like eager children. “If you want, though, guess. Actually, why don’t you? Go on.” “I don’t know.”

“That wasn’t even a guess.” There was a full, red circle around his heart, now, trickling slowly. “But I’ll give you a few hints. First one. You know how when you die they say you see a light at the end of a tunnel?” Mr. Selby nodded. “Well, it ain’t true. See, we’ve all been there.” A nostalgic smile spread over his face. “Don’t matter how much you want to see it, or how much you want to turn around and run back, especially once you realize you been lied to all yourlife.”Wherethesickthinghadswam,somesortof sadnessfilmedoverTrevor’s black eyes. The hints were forgotten. Both Bruce and Mikey were staring nervously at their hands while he spoke. “By the time you get there, gramps, it’s all dark.” Mr. Selby’s head drooped. All three pairs of their sneakers were covered with dirt. It had trailed into his spotless home and soiled his carpet with dark trails. Beneath Bruce’s shoes, he could see the peeking petals of a crushed petunia. “Is there anything in that darkness?” Mikey and Bruce looked at each other, and Theodore recognized the expression as shame. They didn’t, couldn’t, look at their victim in the eye but instead at Trevor, who now held a visage of stone, blank and yet somehow disturbed.Theredheadflippedthejackknifeinhishandandgrippedittight.Theodore knew the banter was over. “If there wasn’t,” Trevor said, raising his arm across his chest, the knife angled over his shoulder, “then I wouldn’t be doing this. But you’ll see.” Mr. Selby looked directly over Trevor’s shoulder. He heard the knife slice through the air but didn’t see it, only felt a searing pain on his neck and the impressive warmth of life leaving spreading over his body, as slow and inevitable as the retraction of the ocean tides. However, with the new perception of a dying man, Mr. Selby saw Mikey. Handraisedtohischest,hisforefingerpointedtowardstheceiling,theshortredhead mouthed, You’ll see.


(continued from page 13)

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Gerald Llorence had a hard time writing his bio, so he asked his friend Jen to do it. She thinks he could be better at playing Mouse Trap, but his mix-tape-making skills more than make up for it. It should also be noted that Gerald once wrote a poem about pancakes that sadly did not make it into this journal.

FUN aT The cIrcUs Gerald Llorence

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e Gatheringthelastof hisfleetingstrength,Theodorelookedupandforthefirsttimesawit. In the last moments of Mr. Selby’s life, he was not frightened, or hopeful, orsad.Inthelastmomentsof Mr.Selby’slife,hewascurious.Aboveafigurehung from the high ceiling in the fashion a bat would. It seemed almost human, as if someone had been hung upside down and covered in tar. He could make out a wide torso, an extended and twisting neck, a lopsided globe of a head with six long and thin arms oozing from sharp shoulders. It dripped inkyblobsbuttheyneverhitthefloor. Even if he had never truly believed in complications of God and the Devil, Mr. Selby had the overwhelming feeling that the essence of the thing thathewasseeingabovethem,withitslongfingersrootedintheheadsof thewalking corpses of Trevor, Bruce, and Mikey, was very simple. It was neither good nor evil. It was hungry. Right as his beloved living room began to spin and tumble into darkness, Theodore Selby was sure that he saw it, whatever it was, look at him, and smile.

Jessica Hissam is a sophomore Psycholog y major at St. Edward’s University. Her aspiration to become a fiction novelist is fueled off of peppermints, coffee, and curiosity. In her free time, she enjoys long walks on the beach and preparing for the imminent zombie apocalypse.

Michelle Cantu is a recent graduate of St. Edward’s University with a BA in English Writing and Rhetoric. Michelle plans to work as a technical writer and spend the rest of her days raising her beautiful daughter Lola. She has been published in the Southwestern regional literary arts journal Open Ear of the Universe, and wishes to thank her mother, sisters, and Carrie Fountain for making her the writer that she is today.

A week before you died Mrs. Garcia told me thatshesawyouatthefleamarket. You should have seen her face she whispered as she sheared her mangled hedges. I walked away from her thinking of your eyes instead. Warm thick pools of hazel turned into baby doll eyes- rolling away in your head when tipped back clicking and clacking when you are shaken. Iwonderwhatthatfirstbruise must have looked like: thefirstbruiseof yourhappymarriage. Was it like when you peel a banana andfindthebrownflesh underneath the promise of thick yellow skin?

brUIse Michelle Cantu


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By the time you read this, Margo Sivin will be graduated and enjoying spending Sunday afternoons brunching, reading, and lounging (instead of staring at a computer screen in TH108.) But she’ll have lab fever forever.

hIghLaNd maLL (2) Margo Sivin

hIghLaNd maLL (1) Margo Sivin

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There is a pencil. It’s about a centimeter away from the page and quivering. It’s the most vibrant color of sunshine I’ve ever seen and it’s just waiting to pour stories of a nurse bandaging a soldiershewillonedaymarry,of achildtakingherfirststeps,of a businessman reaching for the one thing that he knows could save his life. But it can’t. It can’t, because I can’t. In my mind, I see pages and pages of scrawling elegant script; long, drawn out poems of epic proportions that would make the Iliad look like a kid’s bedtime story. I can see myself pushing this neon colored pencil into the paper,watchingasthegraphiteflakesawaywitheverymark,everyletter, every word. I can feel the welcome pain in my wrist as the pencil glides across my notebook in complete control of whether thattornadotearsapartthehomeof afamilyof five.Icanenvision days turning into nights as I sit at my desk, not looking up from the woman staring across the dinner table at the chair where her husband used to sit. And days do turn into nights, one by one, yet the pencil still quivers over the page. The graphite still holds a perfect pointed edge. And those stories still stay locked inside the mind that cannot findthewordstotellthemliketheydeservetobetold.Sotheystaythere—untold, unknown and eventually forgotten, lost—because I

can’t bring myself to write even one wrong word. Because I am so concerned with perfection, that I would rather scrap a story that is begging to be shared to avoid the shame that I, as my own worst critic, would irrationally force upon myself. I am my own kryptonite, my own weakness. I am the only thing standing in the way of these stories. I am the only thing standing in the way of myself.

The peNcIL Gretchen Ottmers

Gretchen Ottmers is a senior majoring in English Writing and Rhetoric. When she is not writing, she enjoys playing video games, watching movies, and spending time with her fiancé and friends. After graduating, she hopes to become an editor at a publishing house or a technical writer.

c o u r t r i g h t / w h a t I h a v e t o s a y t o Y o u

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c o u r t r i g h t / r e g r e t

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re

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wh

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I ha

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To

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Y T

o Tocallafirealive,tocallaghostawake, to call a ghost asleep, or to call it on the phone,

pressing redial one two three four twelve twenty-one times andalwaysbeingsenttovoicemail.It’syourfirstlove

again, and it lives.

Atwhatpointdoesthefiredie, does the ghost pick up the phone and whisper

I knew you’d keep calling until I answered, so now I’ve answered, what is it you have to say to me?

regreT Nick Courtright

whaT I haVe To saY To YoU

Nick Courtright

We are bound to this earth, and no matter how we try to leave

we still are bound.

No rocketship spiraling into the thin openness of time

changes that, no bootstrap shenanigans

hightailing their rubberpeeling path into history

where the future rests on an old desk

like an apple.

One apple who is just that,

core, seeds, stem, meat, skin, in many ways the apple is us causing the fall of us

from the ideal and into this:

day, night, awake, asleep, dead, alive, alive, alive, alive.Nick Courtright, an Adjunct Professor of English, has been teaching at St. Edward’s since 2009. The poems here are from his debut book, Punchline, which is available for purchase online and at local bookstores. See more of his writing and interviews at nickcourtright.com.

o t t m e r s / T h e o l d m a n a n d t h e c h a i r

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His name is Roy and he always sits in that chair right there. No, not the pretty white one that looks like it was made from apicketfence.Thebrownonewiththeflakingpaint;theoneright next to the bird fountain. He sits there for hours, just watching. It has a great view of the sidewalk, you see, and most everyone from the neighborhood walks by there at some point during the day. Like right now, there goes Mrs. Felder from 638 Lincoln Street. She’s a sweet lady. Roy used to help her carry her groceries into the house when they were both younger. Now she just walks up and down the sidewalks while he sits in that creaky old chair. That old shed in the back there, you see, that shed hasn’t beenopenedinprobably40years.ItwasoldRoy’soffice.Atleast, that’s what everyone thought. He used to go in there and the people walking by would hear all sorts of noises coming from inside: scrapes, thuds, wails and everything else. After a while, he stopped going in there, then one day there was that lock on the door. That big rusty padlock from the 1950s or something. You could probably go over there andhititwithyourfistandit’dbreakoff,butnoonewillgoover there and try. No one even sets one foot on Roy’s lawn. They just walk by like he’s just another lawn ornament or

The oLd maN aNd The chaIr

FIcTIoN

Gretchen Ottmers

something and he just sits there, staring out at who knows what. Everyone wonders what’s in that shed though. You know, all those noises people heard, they got people thinking. Some of them were pretty loud, you know, and no one knows what he was doing. See, Roy’s wife died around the same time he stopped going in there. Well, there were these two weeks after she died that he was in there just about every hour of the day. He’d go in at sunrise and come out just after sunset, go straight back in the house and then do the same thing the next day. Only for those couple of weeks, though. Two weeks after she died, that lock was on the door and Roy had drug that broke-down chair to the bird fountain and has been sitting in it every day since. You’re probably wondering about the white one; that chair that looks like a picket fence you can sit on. That was his wife’s chair. For the last few months before she died, she was real sick, you see, and she’d do the same thing Roy does now: just sit there by the fountain and watch. No one really knows what she was sick with. People just assumed she was either really depressed or had cancer. No one ever asked. They were pretty quiet people. No sense in disturbing them about something so sad. Anyway, she’d just sit there almost all day, and old Roy, he’d bring her some lemonade or tea and set it on that little table there – he made that for her, you know – only they weren’t young then. They must have been about in their 30s or so. At least, Roy was. His wife was a few years younger. It was real tragic when she died. The day she wasn’t in her chair, the whole neighborhood knew, but no one said anything. Everyone just showed up to the funeral the next week and said meek apologies to Roy when they arrived and left. Even the preacher didn’t say much other than what was written in his book about the proceedings and of course his personal sympathies. Then there were those two weeks where Roy just worked and worked on whatever it is that’s in that shed, and after those two weeks he dragged that


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old chair over and has been sitting there ever since. But you already knew that. It’s been some 40 years now. Seems longer, doesn’t it? Well anyway, Roy sits there every day now and people just walk on by like it’s no big deal, like you saw Mrs. Felder do just a few minutes ago. Not one person says a word to him that anyone else has heard. No one knows what to say, really. What would you say? Yeah, nothing comes to mind, does it? So he just sits there, watching. Maybe he’s waiting for someone to say something to him. Maybe he’s not really watching at all. They had a kid, you know, Roy and his wife. A boy. He was still pretty young when his mom died—only a few years probably. Took a big hit when Roy started sitting out there like that. The kid had to be his own father and mother as he grew up. Now he only comes by the house every couple of weeks to check and see if Roy’s still there. He doesn’t really understand why Roy just sits in that chair and he was probably too young to remember his mother doing the same thing. No one even knows if he remembers her or knows how she died. Not that they could help, you know, since no one else has any idea either. It’s just kind of sad to think about. He really raised himself and now he’s something successful in the city, you know. Always comes out here in nice clothes and driving a real nice car. He’s even brought a girl with him a few times. They’ll probably be married by now. She looks younger than him, but that’s probably not unusual for a man like him. He’s getting on in years now too so he may as well have someone around who keeps him young. Anyway, he’s the only one alive other than Roy that’s seen the inside of that house now. Every so often, when he stops by, he goes in and maybe cleans or restocks the food or something, then comes back out, says a few words to Roy and leaves. He’s even been seen putting his hand on top of Roy’s, real gently, you know, but no one knows if Roy ever actually responds to the gesture. Even that pretty girl that come with him to the house always stays in the car while the son talks to his father so no one hears what’s said

either. It’s real odd to watch. But then the son leaves and Roy is left alone to his thoughts again, like nothing ever happened. Time just kind of stands still over there. Everything is overgrown and that lock keeps getting more and more rusty, but Roy just comes out of the house in the morning and sits in that chair until night. Every day he gets older but it seems like nothing actually changes. He just sits there, watching the world with those blank eyes that no one ever meets. And everyone just leaves him be, like he’s part of the scenery or something. Every time someone new moves in, it’s like they already know not to bother him. He’s been in the neighborhood longer than most everyone anyway. Well, everyone except me. That’s how I know so much, you see. Because every day that he goes and sits in that chair, watching the world pass him by, I sit over here in my own creaky wooden chair, watching him.

g o n z a l e z / T h e Tu f f b o y s c l u b

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g o n z a l e z / T h e Tu f f b o y s c l u b

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When the scent of rotten eggs and dog breath enveloped the tunnel, we knew someone had shit their pants. As the grey twister neared us, taking our basketball and Gatorades hostage from the court, crusty leaves smacked our mouths like a sign of warning. Dirt settled on our loose tears and sweaty foreheads. It sounded as though we had stuck our heads inside a conch shell’s fold, a whirling sound louder than a sea breeze. I could hardly hear Damon yelling at Ernesto the Bacon to shut the hell up about the shit in his pants. “We’re all going to die, Bacon. No one gives a damn.” Julio clamped his Chicago Bulls hat onto his head with both arms and tried to keep lookout for us without actually sticking any part of his body into the wild. Outside, the twister slapped the sky silly as if telling the sun and its gang of clouds, You brought a knife to a gun fight. I said, “Holy smokes, are we just gonna stay here?” “Where the hell else are we going to go,” hollered Ernesto the Bacon. “It’s stopped up back there with cement, and it’s God’s vomit out that way,” he pointed at our grey light source with the hand that wasn’t holding the back of his pants. When I’d woken this morning, I hadn’t expected this. Not whenmywhitesocksfirsttouchedthewoodfloors.Notwhen

I drank milk straight from the plastic gallon, hoping mom wouldn’t walk in and see. Not when I noticed my new chest hairs in the bathroom mirror. “Holy Mary, mother of Jesus.” Julio ran toward us. We were all hunched against the tunnel’s ridges. Ernesto the Bacon was a bit bow-legged. Julio looked like a chicken who had just had its head curled off. I tried counting the tears on their faces to make sure I wasn’t the sissiest one. Damon, probably because he was the oldest, squinted at us in a way thatcould’velitafirecracker.Hewastheonlyonewhounderstoodthatourmothers would never see us the same way again.

The TUFF boYs cLUb FIcTIoN

Nancy Lili Gonzalez

s e p u l v e d a / F a l l

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s e p u l v e d a / F a l l

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Fa

LL

FaLL Rolando Sepulveda

Rolando Sepulveda is a double major in Photocommunications/Communication with an emphasis in Media Arts and enjoys roaming around a number of places in an attempt to capture space.

b r o w n / T h e I s l a n d

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g o n z a l e z / T h e N i g h t d i n n e r w a s o n t h e h o u s e

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Th

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At the enchilada shop on the corner of my abuelita’s block my cousins and I sit at a fold out aluminum Coca-Cola table drinkinghorchata,shiningflashlightsupourchins, telling ghost stories, whenaflockof hyenagirlsenter with bellies folded over tight pants. One girl exposes her teeth like a chimp and stares right at me, my luminescent skin. Whatareyoulookingat?Hervoicepopslikefirecrackers. MycousinsandIturnoff oursmiles,clickoff theflashlights. Her hoop earrings shake left and right, scratching her cheeks, Girl, you don’t even know me. Fernando says she’s right and that I don’t know her. Guero slaps the air, signaling the waitress’ attention. Manuelito laughs, nervously. She cracks her knuckles. Her friends say, Vamonos, but she howls, in slow motion, No. Herfatfistflies.Hercellulitereverberates, knocking my eye back in my head like a migraine. The gorilla manager kangaroos over the cash register to peel her off me as if she’s a leech and I am the lion’s precious paw.

The NIghT dINNer was oN The hoUse

Nancy Lili Gonzalez

Iwastaughtthattimeislinear.It’safinethread,anarrow,aflowfrom one moment to the next. My personal experience aligned with this theory until last summer. As the days grew longer, so grew a strange and disquieting shadow behind me. I packed and followed the sun westward. I drove to the foothills of the Wyoming Mountains and started climbing. Like most travelers who cross into the high country, I went to be alone. There in the wilderness, that thread got snagged. It frayed and unraveled and wound around itself. Time got tangled and I was in the middle. I was cut off. I was stranded in the present. I was pure. Seven days later I found my way back home, at least physically. An old friend called me right away and asked to meet at the lake. He wanted to know how my trip had gone and if I had seen any bears. “First,” he said “let me catch you up on all that you missed.” Night fell, our car doors slammed, and we began to walk thelongellipsisof thelake.Myotherfriendsmighthavefilledme in on the latest social drama but Sam is different. He’s the activist, the mediator, the boy who traded a lifetime of sleep for the chance to speak behind a podium. Sam was going to be a diplomat and he had a week of headlines saved for me. The sound of gravel breaking beneath our feet was soon drowned out with words like “debt-seal,” “bipartisan,” and “right-wing-nut-jobs.” I

The IsLaNd creaTIVe NoNFIcTIoN

Chelsea Brown


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listened hard and looked into his face. I fumbled to keep up. These were violent sounds. Sharp and clear, but oddly beyond comprehension. I felt more alone on the trail with Sam than I had in the middle of the wilderness. There I had found clarity in questions unanswered. Ancient stories etched into stone. Sam’s words meant nothing to me now. After only seven days of solitude I had forgotten how to speak his language. It hurt to remember. Sweat broke out on my face. The softness in my eyes grew rigid. Old wounds resurfaced, serenity escaped me and once again, I ran. I tried to pretend that I was sitting in perfect silence on a snowy mountain pass. I strained to hear the whisper of Aspens. As I faded into the recess of my mind, black ridges thrust upward out of the ground. The lake changed shape andtemperament.Thesunwasup.Samwasgone.Afishwasonmyline. I leapt from my perch to the water’s edge and set my pole on the ground. My fingerswrappedgentlyaroundhiswetandspeckledside.Abrookie.Icouldtellbythepinkspots.Hisfleshtensedwithlife.Myfingerstracedtheclearthreaddown into his throat and I stopped smiling. Brookies are beautiful but their jaws are too soft. They are delicate the way that quaking leaves are delicate, or starlight. I hesitated before tearing the hook from his mouth. A ripping sound disturbed the silence.Painshotfrommycheektomyspine.ThiswasnotthefirstfishIhadevercleanedbutitwasthefirstoneIhadmurdered.Imovedquickly.Italkedmyself through it. Pinch down on ridge of his jaw. Push the knife into the softness below. Slice down the length of his body. Splay him apart. Tear out the entrails. Scrape out the excess. Cut off his head and watch him go limp. My eyes were too wide. My hands were shaking. Once, when I was young, I asked why we couldn’t cut the headsoff first.Experiencetaughtmethatthejawissimplyeasiesttohold.Catchingthisfishmarkedthesixthdayof mytripandmyfirstdayof enlightenment.Iwasdelicate again. For a long time I sat hunched over his body with the sun at my back. Something unnatural stirred the air around me. I wondered at the violence of such a common act. I wondered when I grew to value convenience over mercy. “Chels?” I blinked and was back beside Sam. We had made it almost two miles and

Chelsea Brown is a junior Philosophy major and an active member of campus ministry. Her natural habitat is the mountainous regions of North America, but domesticated versions can be found in libraries, rock g yms, or city parks. Typical behavior includes: eating plants, reading Russian literature, procrastinating, and coloring stuff.

he had stopped walking. His face was in shadow. He had saved the worst story for last, “You don’t know about Norway, do you? Some man, radical man, got on a boat and went over to Utoya Island where a youth summer campwasgoingon.Thenhejusttookoutagunandopenfiredonthemall.They panicked and he hunted them down. Shot them as they were trying to swim away. Kids Chels, they had nowhere to go. Killed something like 80 people. Kids at a summer camp, just terrible. Tragic.” It was too much; a cry broke out in the darkness. I collapsed under the weight of his words. I imagined the ripping noise of the brookie’s jaw, then of children screaming. The air thickened in my lungs. The stars grew dim aboveus.Allatonce,themountainsbecameamemory.Timehadflattenedback out. I was no stranger to evil and I was ashamed. The world of man was twisted. It was insensitive, it was ungodly, and it was my own. Before leaving Iwouldn’thaveflinched.BeforeleavingIwouldhaveremarkedonthissinincavalier tones. This man’s violence was my violence. Sam’s pettiness was my pettiness. Nature’s beauty endured where mine could not and no matter how far I ran, my shadow would follow. I was told that somewhere in those woods IwouldfindGodandforabrief momentIhad.Thelastdivinebreathleftmy lungs before I even had the chance to unpack. I have to confess, I never looked up the news story until just now. I didn’t want to know the details, to see the pictures. I thought that by not knowing I could stay sitting on that mountain pass forever. I thought that by isolating myself I could hold onto one last shred of innocence. In a way, that is something the kids on Utoya and I have in common. Even in the summer of our lives,darknessfoundus.Howsadandbeautifulitisthatrealityfindsitswaytoallislands in time.

c r a i g / b u r w e l l r o a d

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Millions of cicadas hiding in trees—oak, pecan, mimosa, and magnolia--are intermittently replaced by clunking water as my body rises and falls in the swimming pool’s surface. Light burns orange through my eye lids, which protect me from anything it seems but the full June sun. My skin burns too. I should put on more sunscreen, but that means leaving the barely cool water, drying off, and waiting for the lotion to set without sweating before I dive back in. The pool water tastes as good as it does in the glass, the sink, the tub, and the hose: healthy and clean from the well in the back of the property. Safe. On the patio, Poppa, my grandfather, pulls two Marlboro Lights out of his shirt pocket. One for him, and one for my Grandmom. Fresh. They smell like Fig Newtons. Four scraping clicks and the lighter ignites. Now the odor changes to rot as the glow burns closer to mouths that boast, “I love her more.” I’ve spent a few days here, so my nose counts the minutes before the next one to be lit. After dinner, Grandmom and I will play cards in the den, and I’ll make her laugh so hard her nose will scrunch up while Poppa growls in the bedroom.

Grandmom says he’s protecting us. Every summer, the day after school ended, I spent a week at Grandmom and Poppa’s house for my special time without

bUrweLL road NoNFIcTIoN

Jenna I. Craig

sisters. They lived on the same forty acres off of Burwell Road in Highlands, Texas, where Poppa grew up, and in the green wooden house in which my father was raised. Most days, I ran through the pecan orchard and then the thicket to meet the creek. I only entered the creek once, and then by accident. On Thanksgiving Day, my dog jumped in not realizing it was deeper than he was tall. I waded into the waist deep water, picked him up—he weighed over sixty pounds--and carried him out like a baby. I caught a turtle there on a cane pole once too. But I never heard of anyone swimming in the creek. I guess it must have been dangerous. You never know with East Texas: bacteria, snakes, mosquito larvae, what have you. Poppa said the creek’s name was “Bluff Gully.” The creek had so much more aesthetic value than its name indicated. The trees branches stretched across the way and met each other, blocking the viewanymorethantwentyyardstotheleftandright.Ithoughtitwasinfinite. I named their “plantation” Emerald’s Bluff. When you drove down the road, the trees and the grass blended with the house and formed a cloud the color of my sister’s birthstone: emerald. A stone more valuable than my garnet, which Jordan pointed out to exert her position as the eldest. I was in the fourth grade, and had just discovered Gone with the Wind. Grandmom proclaimed the name “Fantabulous!” They never had anything close to a plantation. Poppa’s family had raised cows when he was a kid, but they were long gone by the time I was born. My grandparents’ pool was turquoise with splotches of deep green where the plaster had worn off. Older than my parents’ marriage, it rubbed the bottoms of my feet raw if I wasn’t careful. So I either wore socks or just floatedonmyback.Thecicadasscreamedallday,allsummerlong.Iimagined they were protesting their exclusion from the pool. I used to think they were rattlesnakes, then locusts, in the distance, but they were far less dangerous and much closer than I had imagined. Grandmom and Poppa rarely swam but never complained about sitting outside. They smoked their cigarettes and watched me.

T h o m a s / w a l t e r w h i t e

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Grandmom and Poppa were lifelong smokers. They coughed up mucous all day. I never knew them healthy. Cigarettes were kept above the kitchen telephone, which was nowhere near the Fig Newtons. Every time Grandmom lit up she said, “Now don’t you ever start this habit.” She never needed to worry. When I returned, my mother and I immediately emptied my suitcase and washed every piece of fabric. We even applied Febreeze to the suitcase and let it air out in the garage for a few days. As soon as you’re in a cigarette-free environment, you realize your clothes, hair, and skin reek. I never smelled it on either of my Grandparents, they both smelled like warmth. My mother and I never mentioned this task to either of them. It was part of the trip. I’ve been dating a young man who smokes the same brand of cigarettes, although they are now called “Marlboro Golds” rather than “Marlboro Lights.” I don’t like the way his mouth tastes, but when he touches my face, I breathe in for as long as I can. They still smell like my favorite cookie, which I have learned are the perfect companion to Dos Equis. As a couple, Grandmom and Poppa were pretty much unbearable. They called each other all sorts of names—bitch, jackass, moron--and constantly criticized each other for Grandmom’s talking too much and Poppa driving too fast (even though Grandmom told me she broke up with a boyfriend because he drove too slow). Holidays would always go awry when everybody’s in the kitchen and we’re just about ready to eat. He’d carve the turkey below her standards, and suddenly he’s almost torn the door off of its hinges and she’s moved on to when he over trimmed the pine trees in 1973. One argument they had over and over, every day that I spent with them, without fail. One of them would start it by saying, “Jenna, did you know that I love you?” My varied responses never affected the conversation’s course. “Well I love her more!” This would go back and forth a few turns, while they both beamed at each other. They would kiss each other and then kiss me. I know their marriage went through a lot over the years, and I’ll never know the full

waLTer whITe Greg Thomas



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story, but they had the love of their family in common, and Poppa was just not the same without her. Grandmom died of smoking-related cancers on January 10, 2007. Poppa andIturnedfifteenandseventyonoursharedbirthdaysevendayslater,andwe cried on our chocolate cakes. That summer I spent two weeks with Poppa. We didn’t swim in the pool this time. I lay across the porch swing in front of him drifting in and out of sleep while he smoked one after the other. His hands never stopped between him putting out one cigarette and lighting the next. At night, he’d take me on “dates” to all of his favorite places. He would order his favorite meal from the menu of that restaurant, a hearty steak or a platter of oysters, something he’d been ordering for thirty years, but he could only eat a few bites. He’d always been a quiet man, but now that we were alone, he had a lot to say. I learned about his childhood on Burwell Road, how heregrettednotfinishingcollege,andwelaughedabouthowdifferentwewere. We never had much in common other than our birthday. He never had much interest in novels, and I always sort of nodded along when he was explaining the difference in aquatic radio signals versus radio waves sent over land. But I did learn the values of frequent oil changes and that education is the only thing in this world nobody can take from you. Under his direction, I fixedthewashingmachineandpromisedtofinishcollege. He died the following summer. It kind of relieved me because it was too hard to watch him lose Grandmom; but at the same time, it was like someone ripped my scab off of Grandmom’s death. I still love to stay up late and play cards. My sisters and I miss that time. It took us a few months to notice that we all scrunch our noses up when we laugh too hard. My dad does it too. Sometimes, we’ll all get to laughing really hard, and we end up crying together as we’re reminded of the part of her that we are so lucky to have within us. Poppa used to snore so loud the windows rattled. This would terrify any

kid, but Grandmom told me that Poppa’s snoring was to protect us and scare the monsters away. After she told me that, I can’t ever remember having a nightmare in that house. Now when someone snores, my heart rate slows down,andIhavetofighttokeepmyeyesopen.Porchswingsandcicadashave a similar effect. It is interesting to watch people die, how it just happens whether they’ve accepted it or not. Grandmom was comfortable enough with her death. She told me she knew where she was going and would wait for me there, which was reassuring for me, but I knew she regretted missing me grow up, get married and have babies. Poppa welcomed death like an old friend. He knew he was going to miss a lot, but he missed Grandmom more. I used to love wakinguponJanuaryseventeenth.I’dcallPoppafirstthingandwe’dsingHappy Birthday to each other; now I almost wish I could pretend I didn’t haveone.Myfirstbirthdaywithouthimmyparentsthrewmeahugesurpriseparty to distract me from everything. It was really wonderful, but as my friends and family were singing to me, I looked down at the cake, and the void became apparent to me in print. My name in icing stood alone on the cake, perfect cursive, as if it was meant to be seen that way all along. The family ended up selling the property because out of the three sons, nobody could afford to buy their other two brothers out of it. I haven’t been back there because I know it won’t feel like coming home. Not to mention, another couple lives there now. My grandparents are buried in a cemetery, but my childhood is buried on Burwell Road.

Jenna Craig is an English Literature major specializing in Creative Writing. She enjoys bacon, funny people, and long drives accompanied by Patsy Cline.


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Le

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LeVeL 8 Berkeley Beauchot

m e l s o n / h e c a m e F o r d i n n e r

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m e l s o n / h e c a m e F o r d i n n e r

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he

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A man walked in my house- eyes like a centipede’s legs. He wore a Seersucker suit- hair like a Neanderthal. He made me a dinner of Amaryllis buds dipped in soy sauce. Then, he massaged my calves. Then, he massaged my wife. I asked him, “What is your name?” He said, “Zaripudo.” I told him, “shut up.” He told me, “sit down.” Then, he gave me a foot rub. Afterwards, he placed me and my wife on our slipcovered couch. He began to sing, “You were sitting down

he came For dINNer Steven M. Melson

bythefire, telling stories you couldn’t remember when you thought you heard the sound of a puppy snoring. It turned out to be an 18-wheeler laughing. You know your house is colder than your friendships of December. You must get over the stop sign formation. You must get over the judgment nation.” I told him, “Stop mocking us.” Before he left, he got a phone call. “Yes.” “No.” “I’ll be there in a minute. I’ve got to handle a new client. He can’t deal with softness.” I opened my lips, buthisfingers blocked my tongue. They tasted like pink crayon. “See you next week.”

Steven Melson was raised in Sugar Land, Texas. He currently studies at St. Edward’s University. If you ever meet him, consider yourself lucky.

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Rheo Martinez enjoys doing graphic design, photography, and eating pancakes. However, he does not have the slightest idea how to make pancakes. This is also his first time submitting anything to a publication of sorts. Someday, he hopes to become an accomplished traveler and DJ/emcee and still waits for this day.

aT IT agaIN Rheo Martinez

cheVroN Garrett Hall

a d a m s / p r e s q u e V u : a r e v e l a t i o n o f m e m o r y

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Stephen Recker is a soon to be 2012 graduate. He loves reading anything non-school related to maintain sanity during the semester: short stories, poetry, novels, fiction, nonfiction, etc. He has been writing short stories and plays for several years, but poetry has become a more recent and constant practice for him.

On one of those hot summer days in Texas, Ifinishedworkearly and lay down in the shade of a sycamore tree. The grass had given up living several weeks earlier, and the rare breeze would kick up enough dust tostartacoughingfit. I stared up at the clear, blue sky, hopelessly searching for some sign of rain. All I found was one slight wisp of a cloud that had appeared to spite the dry air. Thin and transparent, it must have struggled for weeks to form. Taking moisture from the droplets left on the edge of drinking fountains, the sweaty palms of men shaking hands outside of mass, the exhausted exhale as every person looks up to the sky at once and, seeing nothing, sighs.

raIN dream Stephen Recker

cast:

Lola—A grown woman Sera—A janitor in Lola’s memory Cassie—Lola’s college roommate Mom—Lola’s mom Dad— Lola’s dad Little Girl— Lola, age 7

setting:

A park, conceptually

Time:

Dissolving quietly.

(Lights up on a deconstructed playground. A chair serves as a swing, a large square of paper stands in for a sandbox. There are broken things everywhere. Two pairs of grown up shoes sit empty near the swing. Frozen in time, CASSIE sits at a table to the side with her back to the audience. There is a lamp on, upstage center.

presqUe VU: a reVeLaTIoN oF

memorY FIcTIoN

Gloria C. Adams

“We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.”

– Cesare Pavase

presqUe VU: almost, but not quite, remembering something. The failure to retrieve a memory, combined with partial recall and the feeling that retrieval is imminent.


s i v i n / p l a c e d u b e g u i n a g e ( 2 )

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pLace dU begUINage (1) Margo Sivin

pLace dU begUINage (2) Margo Sivin


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SERA pushes a garbage can onto the stage and begins to toss the broken things away.

LOLA, an adult-sized child, enters the playground with wonder that slowly shifts to disbelief.)

LOLA: Where are they?

SERA: They don’t belong here anymore. And neither do you. I sent them home. You should go home.

LOLA: But- I told them to meet me here, they said-

SERA: They’re not coming. And you should get out of here, this place is being dismantled.

(Lola sits in the sandbox. Her dress covers her legs. She pulls a flower out of her pocket and begins to pluck the petals.)

SERA: What is that, a daisy?

LOLA: Yes.

SERA: Are you asking it questions?

LOLA: Yes.

SERA: If someone loves you?

LOLA: No.

SERA: Then what?

LOLA:I’maskingtheflowerwheremyparentsare.

SERA: Flowers only tell you yes or no.

LOLA: Well then I’m asking if they’re coming.

SERA: I already told you they’re not.

(Lola picks the last petal.)

LOLA:Theflowersaidthat,too.

SERA: So you believe me now?

(Lola stands and steps into an empty pair of shoes. She pulls more flowers out of her pocket and smells them.)

LOLA: Be careful sweetie!

SERA: What are you doing? You can’t do that.

LOLA: If they’re not coming then I’ll have to do it myself.

SERA: You’re not allowed to be them.

LOLA: Then how will I remember?

SERA: You won’t.

LOLA: I have to remember this. I promised myself I wouldn’t forget what she said.

SERA: Look, kid. I don’t decide which memories you get to keep and which get torn down. But you haven’t thought about this scene in years and we don’t like to waste space by leaving the façades up. This one is almost gone. I mean, look. This isn’t even a sandbox anymore. It’s a large piece of paper with the word sandbox on it. You don’t even remember the sand box.



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b r i e n / T h e k i t c h e n o f m e a n i n g m n e m o n i c s

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Heather Brien is a Graphic Design major from College Station, TX. She is currently a member of the St. Edward’s Women’s Tennis Team.

The kITcheN oF meaNINg mNemoNIcs

Heather Brien

LOLA: I remember my mom.

SERA: So where is she? She’s moved on to some other memory, something morerecent,orfonder.Gofindherthere.Assoonasyougetoutof hereyouwon’t even realize it’s gone. And I can move on to a better memory.

LOLA: Why would you even be in my memory? I don’t remember you.

SERA: Sweetie, even your memories need maintenance. I’ve kept this one up as long as I can. You’re the one that abandoned it.

LOLA: But I want to remember.

SERA: It’s too late. All the props are gone, the set is falling apart. The lights are going to go out soon. And you can’t be here when that happens.

LOLA: But I have to remember what she said in the park!

SERA: I can’t let you do that.

LOLA: Why?

SERA: Because this memory is going dark. I’ve lived here for 15 years andinthelastfiveyearsyou’verememberedthiswhat-twice?Sonowjustbecause you drove past the old park and all the equipment is new you have to remember what it was like before? You didn’t care about this an hour ago. So don’t drag me back in here, I want a new memory to maintain. Ideally one of those sexy college ones I’ve heard about. Or one indoors.

LOLA: But this is important. I have to remember, please?

SERA: If you reenact it now, it can’t go dark and I’ll be stuck here. Besides, thefiguresof yourparentshavemovedontoanewmemory.They’relearning


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how to reenact you leaving for college, and we’ve already got them in their old age makeup. It will be a waste of resources to think about them here.

LOLA: That’s where they went? To another memory?

SERA: Yes. You should go look for them there.

LOLA: So that’s why I remember them looking so young that day. I knew it didn’t make any sense.

SERA: Yeah, we get mix-ups like that all the time. You remember your high school boyfriend breaking up with you in a cafe wearing his football jersey, but really he broke up with you in the back seat of your car without any pants on. It’s healthier to remember it the other way. The time you thought he was going to break up with you and didn’t. Then you can just forget all that crap the last two weeks you dated him. And your parents from here were supposed to go to that trip to the ocean memory- we all thought you’d remember that forever but it went dark before this one did.

LOLA: What trip to the ocean?

(Sera smiles condescendingly.)

LOLA: Oh.

SERA: So come on. Stop trying to get this one. You’re already mixing it up. Imean,lookatalltheflowers.Theydon’tbelonghere.Everytimeyoucomehere you bring the wrong props. It just makes my job harder.

LOLA:Theseflowers!They’refromValentine’sDay.MydadbroughtmymotherflowersandIpickedoff allthepetals.Mymomwassomad,butthenmydadaskedwhatIaskedtheflowers.IsaidIaskedtheflowersif Daddy

lovedMommy.HeaskedwhattheflowerssaidandItoldhimthattheyallsaidyes. Then mommy started to cry and she didn’t yell at me anymore. They were both so happy, and they had just been so mad at me.

(Lola drops the handful of flowers.)

LOLA:That’sawholeothermemory.Mymothersmellingtheflowers-shedid that in the kitchen, not the park.

SERA: Great, another mess to clean up.

LOLA:Butif I’mnotsupposedtohavetheflowers,whatamIsupposedtohave?

SERA: (yelling) It doesn’t matter. You can’t have it!

LOLA: I had a.. a... My father bought it for me!

SERA: Nope.

LOLA: No, no, it was my grandmother’s. It was white, it was made out of.. brass? No, no, it was porcelain? Was it porcelain?

SERA: See? You don’t even know. Now get out of here.

LOLA: It was a porcelain duck! No, a Goose! It had a bow around its neck and I called it Waddy because my mom told me ducks and geese waddle when they walk. And my mom told me I was going to break it but I told her he was my friend and I would never hurt him- but then I went on the swing, and I fell off.. and my parents camerunningandIwasfinebutWaddy’sheadbrokeoff andIjustkeptcryingandto comfort me, my mother said... my mother said.. What did she say?

SERA: (gently) You’ve already forgotten that. I’ve been trying to keep you from paramnesia.. but you were insistent. Trying to remember something


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you’ve completely forgotten.. it’s ill advised at best, but when it’s something of suchemotionalsignificance...I’msorry.There’snothingIcando.Ishouldhave gotten this all cleaned up before you got here. How was I supposed to know you were driving through the old neighborhood?

LOLA: So it’s really gone? Forever? I’ll never remember what my mother said?

SERA: I don’t think you can. Unless..

LOLA: Unless what?

SERA: There’s a way, but it’s a tricky memory loop kind of thing, you may not have set it up for yourself, and if you didn’t, well then there really isn’t anything I can do.

LOLA: Alright. Ok. What do I need to do?

SERA: Did you ever tell anyone this memory? As a story, I mean?

LOLA: You mean, did I ever tell anyone about breaking Waddy? And what my mom said?

SERA: Yes. Exactly. You might not be able to remember it happening, but you could remember remembering it, but only if you said it out loud. You can remember remembering something if you didn’t say it, but then you only remember that you remembered it once. But if you tell the story, if you say what happened, then you will remember remembering it in a way that helps you remember what you’ve forgotten.

LOLA: Yeah, ok.

SERA: The logistics aren’t important. What’s important is that, if this is important enough to you, you had to have told someone about it some time.

And if not.. then it really isn’t that important and you shouldn’t let yourself worry about it.

LOLA: No.. No, I had to have told someone. Cassie! I told Cassie all about it.

(Lola crosses to the table CASSIE has been sitting at the whole time.)

LOLA: We were eating donuts, and talking about our childhoods, and our parents, and then I was trying to explain how awesome my mom was, and I started talking about the park.

(MOM, DAD, and LITTLE GIRL exit the audience and approach the stage. MOM and DAD put on the empty shoes, and the LITTLE GIRL sits on the swing on the stage. As Lola tells the story they mime it out.)

LOLA: I told her all about the duck, and how I fell off the swing, and how my parents rushed over to see if I was all right. They didn’t even notice that the duck was broken until I started crying. And my mother hugged me tight and stroked my hair, and just told me that it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter. Nothing that really mattered could ever really be broken. And, I don’t remember what she said next, I thought I’d never forget it but that’s not important. What’s really important to know about my mom is the way she held me, and the way she forgave me for breaking that stupid duck. And the way that my whole life, no matter what I did or what I broke, she would always hold me like that, and stroke my hair, and tell me that as long as I was safenothingwasbrokenthatcouldn’tbefixed.There,inthatpark,that’swhere I realized that I was loved. I was really loved. Before that, I wasn’t old enough to appreciate how scared she looked when my chin hit the concrete, or how, after she’d nagged me all day about not breaking that duck it didn’t matter that the duck was broken so long as I was ok. I was just old enough, finally,toreallyunderstandhowmuchmymotherlovedme.AndIdon’tthink

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oILI knew it at the time, that that was the meaning of that moment. But I get

that, now. Looking back, there are dozens of memories just like that. I’d screw something up and everything would be ok anyway. Because I was loved.

(The lights go out, but the lamp upstage center is still on. SERA crosses to the lamp, smiles with pride at LOLA, and turns off the lamp.)

END OF PLAY.

When I was eight years old,

I saw him standing in the sunroom, dustparticlesfloatinginthesun’sglare, in his plain white boxers, lips pursing a thick Cuban,

he was painting some oranges and apples he’d set up in a bowl on top of blueandwhitefloralfabric.

His thick, graying chest hair was offensive, like the plank of ashesflakingoff theendof hiscigar ontothewoodfloor.

Sometimes he would prop his legs on the ottoman and ask me to massage his feet— he chose me to do this—

and I would ask him to tell me the story that made that rush in my stomach every time, about when his boys were bad and he had to spank them.

My mother would then walk in, in that disgusting powder blue silk nightgown that let her nipples show through.

When he told her to take the cigar while he painted, it was time for me to go back up to my room and listen to what I was missing.

oIL Susannah Bowen

To m l i n s o n / T h e m e m o r a n d u m w i t h i n t h e g l a s s b o t t l e

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Lauren Tomlinson

andIsleptinthefieldwherewethrewtheratsnearawallforperhapsthreeyears, because there was always plenty to eat there if need be. Riddhi didn’t know how old she was, but she was taller than me so we decided that she is older. At night we would pretend to be rich women painted with henna, and sometimeswewouldstealflowersfromthetemplesandputtheminourhairand pretend to be beautiful. In the mornings I would see a man in a car the color of the chrysanthemums you once loved so much, so if there was a cow stopping his car I would sing to the cow to call it to me. He always looked angry when he was driving, but one day he called me to his window and asked if I would like a piece of candy. He began to bring me a piece of candy some days, and one time he even took me to drink rose milk, and I will also take you to have rose milk one day. He told me that I reminded him of his daughter who I think must have died, and he let me work in his house cleaning and cooking. Sometimes Riddhi comes to visit me and he let me serve her biscuits in the kitchen as long as she didn’t use the front door. Ibecameeightyearsoldtheyearhefirstletmeworkinhishome,andonedaythemanaskedmetotakehisshinyorangecartothepostofficeinthebigcity. I had never driven before, but I couldn’t bear to disappoint him so I learned quickly. I began driving his car many places for him then, and he gave me a big bag of lentils to sit on while I drove so that I could see over the wheel. Sometimes I would meet Riddhi when I was out with the car, and we would smoke cigarettes together as I drove, like the beautiful woman who we alwayssawfanningfliesoff of herpineappleinthemarket.Iimaginethatyoumust look like her, but more beautiful and wearing bangles. Sadly, the man became very angry when we smoked in his car because Riddhi burned a hole into one of his seats. He told me he would send me to jail if I ever spoke to her again, so I have not ever seen her since that day. One day when I was driving his car, I saw the monkey who had stolen biscuits from the kitchen the day before. I was whipped because he thought I

Hello. Please know I am always thinking of you; I miss you very much and I want to tell you about my life. I hope you will forgive me if I write too much, I am always told that I speak much longer than a girl my age should. I am eleven years old this year, and I am supposed to start school soon if I behave well. My schooling will be in India, although I know you left me in Nepal. My apologies Mama, but you see, when the mother of the children’s home sent me to the market one day I climbed in the back of a small blue truck to see a cage of chickens and it drove me to India by mistake. I wasn’t frightened though, I laid still and looked up at the clouds, and at night I laid with the chickens and slept inside of an empty rice sack. In the morning I woke up when we hit a big rock, and decidedthatIshouldfindmywaybacktothechildren’shomein case you returned for me. I didn’t know I was in India at first,butthepolicetookmeintoabuildingandIstayedtherefor maybe a week. They could not take care of me, but they sent me to a man who said he would pay me a few rupees if I killed rats at night with a pole. I had to bring the rats with me to show that I had worked hard, and then I was to throw them inafield.AgirlnamedRiddhikilledtheratswithme,andshe


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had eaten the biscuits, but I had seen the monkey that was missing a paw climb through the window and steal them! I tried to kill the monkey with the car, but he was very clever and I hit a cow by mistake. As I stared from the juices leaking from the cow to the juices leaking from the car, I knew that I had done something I could not be forgiven for and I left the city. I walked for many days through the country by myself. I was scared that I would be robbed or beaten, but I tried to stay away from the road where I could travel for many days and not see another person. Although I didn’t want to cross anyone’s path, I prayed that I might meet you while I was walking. I feel quite certain that when you see me again you will know me, even though I was just a child when you had to leave me. And so, I walked to the hills. When I came to them one day I laid down in afieldtorest,andIfellasleep.WhenIwokeupIwascold,andIcouldseepeoplearoundafirenearalargecave.IwenttothemwhenIbecameveryhungry,butIwasafraidtheywouldbecrueltome.WhenIreachedthefire,the men were waiting for me. They looked very strange because they weren’t wearing very much clothing and they painted themselves with white, and in some places with yellow. They told me they had been waiting for my arrival. Suddenly I realized who these men were; they were the NagaBaba holy men. The smoking pineapple woman from the market once said that her cousin had gone to be a Baba Ji holy man many years ago, but Riddhi and I didn’t believe her and threw small rocks at her pineapples from around the corner after she told us. One day though, we saw her cousin; everyone saw him. He rode to town onamotorbikewearingonlypaint,aringof orangeflowers,andasmallchainaround his waist that he had fastened his money pouch onto. He rode to her pineapplestandandplacedtheflowersaroundherneck.Thentheysharedacigarette and a pineapple, and people started yelling at the NagaBaba to purchase clothes and mocking him. The pineapple woman spat at them for laughing at her dear cousin, and then she climbed on his motorbike with a

cigarette hanging from her mouth and has never been heard from again. I tried to see if one of the NagaBabas was her cousin, but it was hard to choose his face because they all had such long beards and hair. I stayed with the NagaBabas until my ninth birthday, and they taught me their holy ways. They taught me how to read the future from staring into clouds of smoke, and one man told me that he had held one arm over his head for more than eight years to learn discipline—I always secretly wondered if he had started holding his arm in the air on my birthday, because I wasn’t nine years old yet. I never saw him put his arm down, but he often disappeared for many nights at a time, where I bet you he was resting his arm and eating fruits. He never showed much discipline, and he would sometimes throw pieces of cow dung at me when I was sleeping. One day he even told me that he had put a curse on me! The other NagaBaba broke it though and put a curse on him in return. He was the man who was chosen to return me to the city just after my ninth birthday, and he was always picking his nose on the long motorbike ride. We rode into the city, and he stopped the bike at the edge of town and spit in the dirt. I waited for a moment, and then he pushed me off of the motorbike and sped away. An old woman who was walking down when he dropped me off started throwing rocks at me and telling me that my kind was not welcome inhercity,soIwalkeddowntheroadthewaywehadcomeandtookthefirstturn I reached. That is how I came to the catholic convent. I thought that maybe you had become a holy woman, and had been called away from me by God, so I asked to live at the convent in the hopes I would meet you again. There were seventeen nuns living at the convent, and four other girls like me. The four other girls were almost as mean as the nuns, who made me kneel on bottle caps when I showed them how to see the future in smoke clouds. Every Thursday we prayed for the studies of the girls who the nuns had sent out to schools before I came, but I always prayed that I would be able to leave the convent and receive an education myself. I thought that perhaps if I


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receivedaneducationIcouldbecomefamousandthenfindyoueasily.Itoldone of the other girls this one night, and she reported me to the Mother Superior. The nuns made me say seven rosaries for being so greedy and foolish, and I was told that I would never receive an education. They were wrong though, because I learned to read and write while I was there; I knew I needed to learnhowtowritesothatIcouldwriteyoualettertellingyouhowtofindme. So I worked in the convent every day for just over a year, but it felt like so much longer than this. I knew you would want me to behave well though, so I didn’t complain once. Finally a strange man came, a man who changed everything. The women had planned to send the girl who had reported me to Mother Superior to a private school in the south of India. The nuns had fasted all week—and we had also been made to fast— and they prayed day and night during that time that she would be accepted to the school. The night before the man from the school was to come interview her, the nuns bathed her to wash her as clean as a saint. She slept so peacefully that night that I became bitter and decided to run away. I thought about taking food with me, but couldn’t stand the thought of stealing from the convent in case the Lord was watching so I ran down the road with nothing, back to the NagaBaba men. When I tired of running I walked, as when I tired of walking I sat. When I found a clear place to sit beside the road, I saw a man approaching in a taxi. The man tipped his hat to me and I waved back to him, and the taxi stopped. The man called me to the window and asked for my name. I told him my name was Piya. He asked if I knew where the catholic convent was located, and I gave him directions. He told me he would give me a ride to my home in his taxi, and I told him that I lived at the convent. He smiled and asked if I had been praying for an education and if I had been working very hard, and I nodded yes. You see, this man thought that I was the girl who would attend the school and that the nuns had sent me down the road to meet him. He took me to the train station with him in his taxi. On the train I began to cry

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because I knew I would go to hell for taking the other girl’s place, and I told him that I was not the one meant to go to his school. He became very angry with me and said that I would be put to work until hefiguredoutwhattodowithme.Westayedonthetrainallthewaytotheocean, near Bombay. He put me to work for a friend of his who was a fisherman.Icutthescalesoff of allof thefishhecatches,andattheendof the day I dump the scales in the alley. Everyone is so pleased with my work that they say that I may be able to study at the school soon! I have been so excited Mama, I had to tell you! I shared my news with my friend who sells ourfishatthemarket,andshetoldmethatshesawanAmericanmovieoncewhere people sent messages to each other over the ocean in glass bottles, and that if I want to send you a letter then I must put it in a bottle and cast it into the sea. I wish that I had realized this sooner, but I will be sure to search for your response every day. I love you. Your daughter, Piya

Lauren Tomlinson is a senior Social Work major with a focus on refugees and asylum seekers. When she was a child she dreamed that she might be kidnapped by Indians and raised as their own. Today she hates writing biographies about herself in third person, but loves spicy food, motorcycle rides, and growing flowers.

Arms folded, eyelashes clenched, she walks away from him as he hits the wired fence, bellowing vowels like a lumberjack who has accidentally sawed a limb. He won’t follow her orsobfluentapologiesanymore.Instead he’ll let the sidewalk’s bench educate him on the perils of being in love with someone who won’t love you back. He’llsit,staringataflashback:banjos from the boom box, his hands on her elbows then softly on her face, her saying yes all night, the white sheets crinkled.

FULL oF bLood aNd bLUes

Nancy Lili Gonzalez

s i v i n a n d s t i v i s o n / Tw o a t a T i m e

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Margo Sivin (left) and Erica Stivison (right) have enjoyed collaborating, brunching, and “co-presidenting” for the past year. This diptych spawned from a transcontinental summer project that spontaneously paired a photograph per week.

Two aT a TIme Margo Sivin and Erica Stivison

A mechanical noise- like pulling a rusty metal gate or loosening the blue entrails of a pig to make the vocal chords gyrate and pop- comes when the night licks itself in humid gravy, and it gives breath to red, plastic lizards buried in the ground. Their eyes beam into the dirt like headlights, and they ache for a cartilage mandible to prod open their clothespin mouths and allow them to articulate beyond chest deep moans that sound like hot air rattling a jug. Their naily digits quiver like Parkinson’s as they picture a mate.

beFore sLeepSteven M. Melson

g r o t z i n g e r / w h y I h a t e b e n j a m i n b . F o l l y

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...Huh. Well, this is awkward. What should ah do? Should ah just stay here? Should ah push her back? What should ah do with my hands? She’s kind of grippin’ my shoulders tightly so ah guess there ain’t nothin’ ah really can do. Ah should pull away. Ah mean, really, she don’t know or don’t get it or somethin’. But, damn, how many times is a short, silly bastard like me gonna get somethin’ like this? An’ with a girl like her? Ah mean, ah know it’s weird an’ kinda creepy but she smells fantastic. Like sweet sweat an’ skin. An’ her lips. That feelin’ from it. They’re warm. They’re buzzin’. Talk ‘bout good vibrations! I forgot how excellent this was. That said this is takin’ an awful long time for closed mouth. What should ah do? Ah guess ah should push her away... Oh. Oops. How soft an’...awesome. Oh man. Oh man. She’s pullin’ away! Bad move! Bad move! Stupid, stupid, stupid! Now she’s gonna hit me! An’ it ain’t even like it’s my fault, really! Wait. No pain? Ah guess she ain’t gonna hit me.

whY I haTe beNjamIN b. FoLLY

Katie Grotzinger

Wow. Her face is real pink. Ah think mine is too. It’s hot as hell anyway. Um. Okay. Ah mean if ya want. Ah never thought she’d be guidin’ my hand ta do somethin’ like this. Hold on now. This is all happenin’ ridiculously fast. One minute ah’m just screamin’ at this girl an’ then she’s liftin’ me onto a soap box ta, I dunno, yell at me at her eye level because she’s a freakin’ giantess. (An’ it ain’t like ah’m the tallest around either.) An’ she’s tellin’ me all this stuff ‘bout how stupid an’ common ah am an’ ah’m tellin’ her that she’s gotta get off her high horse cause Miss Perfect, ah ain’t a mind reader. Ya know, usual conversation between us. An’ then, out of nowhere, she just gets allflusteredan’plantsthishugesmoochonmean’encouragin’metagraboneof the ol’...man what’s a more royal-like euphemism? Hm...Ah got it! One of the decorative pillows as it were. Ah have ta admit, it’s pretty cool. Nicely sized an’ feels fantastic coupled with the cotton fabric of her dress. But ah can’t be distracted by these “decorative pillows”! Ah got ta trudge on an’ move away because this weird an’ wrong an’...stuff. An’...done! Phew. Now ah’ll jus’ keep my arms at my side from now on cause that weren’t too effective. This is gonna be one of those awkward moments we never talk ‘bout again, ain’t it? This eye contact is makin’ me feel all sorts of uncomfortable. Why do we have ta be at eye level for this? She’s gonna make me fall off this freakin’ box with nothin’ but that damn gaze packed with deafenin’ silence. Ah’m gonna look at somethin’ else cause this is gettin’ weird an’ I guess neither of us feel like talkin’. Okay. Right. A rack of suits, some wigs, some props...Backstage is actually pretty bare right now. Usually things are strung around all willy nilly. Not now. Just a few things left over from last night’s show. Stuff we were supposed ta use ta rehearse but instead ended up yellin’ ‘bout how do the


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Briley Dockery has a love of shooting film, along with a weakness for chocolate milkshakes and delta blues. She can often be found taking pictures and baking instead of doing her homework.

TaYLor Briley Dockery

LorI Briley Dockery


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routine like always but ended up like this. ...Yup. Ah wonder where Cesario found a soap box this big. Ah really want ta put my feet back on solid ground... “Benjamin.”Shefinallysnaps,bringin’myattentionback.Sheseemsdisappointedthat ah can’t just sense what’s goin’ up in that pretty blonde head of hers. Ah dunno what ta do so ah play the fool like ah always do an’ grin at her, lettin’ her see the big ol’ gap between my front teeth. Ah mean, this is kind of a ridiculous situation, don’t ya think? So ah says, “Yeah, Lady Lenore?” “AreyounotatallcuriousattowhyI-”Shebegins,flusteredenough,butbuildswitheachword.Shecan’tfinishsoshejustclearsherthroat. Ah really don’t know how ta respond. Ah am mighty curious. But my mind is still pretty clouded from the euphoria of gettin’ smooched an’ feelin’ some boobage. It’s kinda like ah’m too dazed to be as surprised as ah should. Maybe she wants ta add it ta the routine? Maybe she just found out a new way ta shut me up an’ win all arguments for all time? You gotta understand, my mind ain’t exactly workin’ at full capacity here so ah guess ah’ll choose the route of keepin’ my pie hole shut an’ stare ahead. Ah don’t want ta offend her. Goodness knows she can get awful mean. “You have got to be joking,” She says, eyes wide. “You have not the faintest ideas as to why I would do a thing like that?” Again,ahfigurethesafestthingtadoistakeepmymouthshut. “Benjamin,” She says, bitin’ her lip. Even though she’s tall as can be, she seems so small with that look on her face. “I sort of...what I mean to say is...” Strugglin’, she closes her eyes an’ takes a breath. When she reopens her eyes, she stares at me real hard. Like she’s concentratin’ on meldin’ what she’s tryin’ ta express in my oh-so-empty noggin. “I like you. In fact I sort of...” She trails off again, still shrinkin’. Somethin’ clicks in my head. Somethin’ wrong. Laughin’ nervously, I says like a weak joke, “Hey, Lady Lenore, you ain’t sayin’ you like love me or anythin’, right?” She closes her eyes real tight, sighs, and nods. Well, shit.

Naturally,mykneejerkreactionisaflat,“What?” Now she really does hit me. An’ hard. Ya wouldn’t think a dainty thing like her could punch but hell, when she hits, she leaves a mark. “Ow!” Ah yell. “What the hell, Lady Lenore?” Geez. Sometimes ah wish ah wasn’t in show business. The ladies an’ gents around here are so gosh darn dramatic an’ so damn touchy. Ah mean really. “What’s with that reaction, commoner?” She blurts out. A real regal Lady embarrassed because of some gap toothed, freckled, big-haired bozo commoner like yours truly. It’s quite a sight. Ah mean, she’s a nice gal an’ has been a real trooper since we washed up on this backwards island an’ ended up workin’ at Club Cesario together. That seems like ages have passed even though it was just a couple of months ago. A lot has changed. Ah’ve learned ta tap dance, juggle, an’ sing some pretty unseemly but hilarious tunes. An’ Lenore, a Lady, has been my partner in a comedic singin’ act if ya can believe that! She’s learnin’ ta work like anyone else even though she used ta be one those Ladies in Waitin’ for the Queen of The Old Country. Ah laugh cause that’s what I do when stuff gets too uncomfortable. Her face is super pink now. She’s pissed. “Why are you laughing?” “Because you ain’t in love with me, Lady Lenore,” Ah tell her. “Of course I’m in love with you,” She says in a quiet frustrated voice. She says it like it’s obvious or somethin’ Ah shake my head. Ah never thought ah’d ever have ta give this speech. Much less ta Lady Lenore. So ah tell her, “Nah, ah don’t mean ta say that ya don’t think you’re in love with me. Ah mean, that the me that ya think you’re in love with don’t exist.” Her face tells it all. She ain’t gettin’ it. “Lady Lenore, have you forgotten what profession ah’m in?” Ah ask her. “This,” Ah motion down with my hands ta show her my clothes - white button up shirt, suspenders, plaid pants, an’ worn out shoes. Everythin’ of course bein’ too big for me. This coupled with my bein’ a foreigner with a “lazy way of


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Daniela Galindo is from Houston, TX. She is a Photocommunications major and a French minor. She likes art, film, music and cats. She often feels like a character from Seinfeld.

UNTITLed Daniela Galindo

speakin’”, as Lady Lenore calls it, really drives the image home. Ah’m a real clown. “This ain’t me. You should know that but you ain’t never see how ah look. Ah mean how ah really am. Ya think ya do but ya don’t really.” She looks at me all befuddled. Her eyes look green in this light. Jus’ like that workin’ bandanna she’s been wearin’ ever since she stopped bein’ a Lady an’ joined the work force tryin’ her best like the rest of us common folk. It’s a shame really. Pretty eyes like that gettin’ desperate over someone like me. “You think I do not really like you because of how you look?” She asks. Her voice nearly screeches an’ she huffs an’ puffs like I offended her delicate senses, which ah knew would happen. She’s grippin’ clumps of her hair in frustration an’justlookin’atmeutterlyflabbergasted.“Icantakethedifferences!HaveInot proven that? Even if I have to put you on top of a box to have a serious conversation I don’t care! I don’t care how weird we look standing next to each other or that you have peasant’s dental care or stupid hair!” “Hey,” Ah interject. “Say what you will ‘bout my height an’ teeth. The ladies love the hair.” That’s true actually. My hair’s just like clouds of comfortable awesome. “Could you kindly refrain from interrupting me? It is extremely frustrating!” Lady Lenore yells. Even yellin’ she’s gotta be all ladylike. “Nah, ah’m not talkin’ ‘bout how we’d look like a joke walkin’ down the street together.” Ah say, though it ain’t like the thought ain’t amusin’. “Then could you please inform me why you think I’m not serious somehow?” Lenore asks. Ah sigh. Ah didn’t think ah’d have ta point this out but since she ain’t seem ta realize it, ah guess ah gotta. “Cause ya only see me as a guy.” “What ever do you mean?” “Have you really forgotten that ah’m a girl?” She looks like ah punched her in the gut or somethin’. Thought so. “Ah know it ain’t your fault. Considerin’ what kinda entertainment we do



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here. Ladies, except for you of course, only wear men’s clothin’ an’ all. But ya ain’t seen me in a dress. Ya ain’t seen me when ah had long hair or before ah went by Benjamin. Nah. See. That’s who ya love. Yeah. Ya gotta a crush on Benjamin B. Folly. But ah gotta tell ya somethin’, Benjamin B. Folly don’t exist. An’ ah’m sorry. But Benjamin’s only for the stage an’ cause ah’m on the run. It ain’t for personal stuff. Especially ain’t for love cause ah don’t love as a Benjamin, a man. Ah love as me, a woman.” Now ah’m lookin’ at her, tryin’ ta get somethin’ through her thick head for once. “But I have already thought about that!” She shoots back. She’s all frazzled but still manages ta be self-righteous. This ain’t goin’ quite as she thought. “Have ya?” Ah ask, but ah know better. “Yes, and I think that I could love you anyways.” She says it so immediately it breaks my heart. Ah guess ah gotta show. Ah frown. She don’t get it. “Ah don’t wan’ cha ta love me ‘anyways’. If ya really loved me I’d wan’ it ta be part of the ‘because’.” Ah begin ta slip off my suspenders. “What in blazes are you doing?” She asks, all scandalized. She ain’t used ta men undressin’ in front of her. Guess that’s the life of the royal folk. “Jus’ wait a moment,” Ah say as ah began ta unbutton my shirt. She looks away. “C’mon, now! Ah ain’t got nothin’ you ain’t seen before!” She turns hesitantly as ah remove the last button an’ take the shirt off. An’ there ah am. My chest is wrapped up, pressed down. It is meant ta be invisible. It is meant ta disappear so on stage an’ on the run ah pass for a man. Ah should be embarrassed. It ain’t like ah go takin’ off my gear in front of everybody. But ah ain’t embarrassed. Ah’m jus’ tryin’ ta get her ta understand that she ain’t got the capacity ta do what she thinks she can. She backs up a little farther. After all this time we spent together, she ain’t never seen me without a shirt. She knew ah had em but she ain’t never seen actual proof of my lady bits. Kinda like royals know we common folk exist

but most of em ain’t never seen us before. An’ it rattles her ta see me as ah am. Just like ah knew she’d be. Even though she knew, cause ah did tell her time an’timeagainwhenahgotthefeelin’shewasgoin’onmixin’upfictionan’reality, she never wanted ta believe it so she just pretended not ta know. Cause she couldn’t possibly like me as ah am. An’ it hurts. It hurts so much ta see her look at me like ah’m some kinda alien. It hurts so bad that ah feel relief when she turns around, an’ don’t say nothin’ or make the slightest sound. An’ when she leaves me, lookin’ like a jerk on that box, it feels better than havin’ ta see that repulsion. Ah sigh an’ pick up my shirt an’ step off of the box. Ah put back on my uniform of perceived masculinity an’ sit down on that lonely soap box. Ahthink‘bouthomeforoneof thefirsttimesincewe’vebeenhere.It’sfunny ta think that now that ah created Benjamin B. Folly, this caricature, so ahcouldrunawayfromhomean’findlove.Ahleftmybrother,home,an’bestfriendsoahcouldtraveltheworldan’findagirlthatwouldloveme. The disguise was just supposed ta be so no one would force me back home but when ah ended up in Illyria it became a profession. Who knew there was an island that uses crossdressin’ as a main source of income? Ironically enough, here’s a girl professin’ her love in front of me but not ta me. Ain’t that a bitch? Ah hate Benjamin B. Folly. Ah hate that he’s more lovable just cause he wears slacks. Ah hate him cause he gets the girl an’ ah gotta be the one ta turn her away. But ah think most of all, ah hate him because ah created him.

Katie Grotzinger is an English Writing and Rhetoric major with a specialization in Creative Writing. As true native of Portland, Oregon, she has a number of offbeat interests including cross dressing, wig styling, robots, and Keanu Reeves. Her ultimate goal in life is to be like Matt Stone and Trey Parker.


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s Ashley Dennington was born in April 1989 and currently is pursuing an undergraduate degree in art with an emphasis on ceramics from St. Edward’s, as well as obtaining a teaching certificate. She was the intern in the ceramics department at St. Edward’s University in Fall 2011. She hopes to eventually obtain a master’s degree in ceramics.

Lace, orb Top To boTTom

Ashley Dennington

To me, I was just a dumb seventeen-year-old girl, snooping in my older brother’s room when I happened to stumble across hisstashof heroin.Atfirst,itwashardtomakeoutexactlywhat it was. The only thing I knew about drugs were the wadded up plastic baggies of what was really more seed and stem than smoke-able marijuana that we shoved deep into our pockets on Friday and Saturday nights, praying our parents wouldn’tsmellitonuslater.That,andMatthew,myfirstkiss,who raided his Grandma’s medicine cabinet for things that made him feel funny, and who once, while holding my hand in the 3 a.m. dimness of my parent’s kitchen, asked if he could have the bottle of pain meds sitting on the red Formica countertop that were prescribed for my recently neutered puppy. This drug was unfamiliar. Hidden inside of a varnished silver cigarette case engraved with the arabesque cursive of our grandfather’s initials inside my brother’s drawer, were six or seven little balls, each no bigger than a raisin. They were wound up in bits of colored balloon; pink, orange, green, blue, tied off at the top, encasing the tarry, brown-sugar looking substance. At the time, I had no idea what heroin really looked like. I’m not even sure how I knew they were drugs. Maybe I had seen it in a movie

secoNd drawers NoNFIcTIoN

Cayley Heagerty


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somewhere, or had a resurfacing of some latent 90s D.A.R.E. campaign assembly.MaybeitwastheheavywhirringsensationIfeltuponfindingit,likeI was a spun coin, winding around and around myself, until instead of landing heads or tails, I just stopped, completely vertical, erect, immobilized. Maybe it just reeked of trouble. I couldn’t bring myself to tell my parents, at least not right away. I simply stewed in the putridity of my own discovery for weeks, rationalizing that I would say something when I thought his addiction was getting out of hand. Really, I didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant. I suppose I thought he could handle his problems himself, somehow deluding myself that someone can just use heroin without being addicted. I knew nothing. The fact that I sheepishly, and rather nonchalantly, mentioned to my mother while she was drinking iced tea on our back porch with her best friend on a Saturday afternoon, that I had found heroin in my brother’s drawer, proves that you couldfillalltheseconddrawersintheworldwithwhatIdidnotknow.Iremembered thinking she was overreacting, immediately charging into his room and demanding an admittance of guilt, when really, it was exactly what should have been done. All I did was waste time. Later, much later, everyone will pat me on the back for looking in that second drawer. They will even tell me I was brave. They will say I did the right thing.Strangers,theirpallidfaceslitwiththeunflatteringfluorescentlightingof the family therapy room in Shoal Creek Hospital, will talk at me with their good intentions. “What if you hadn’t looked in that second drawer? What if something horrible had happened before you’d gotten a chance to tell anyone?”TheywillactlikeIamaveryspecifickindof hero.Iamthehandsomefirefighterwhorescuedthekittenfromthetree.Iammymotheryelling at the kindergarten version of myself to not stick a fork in the toaster. I am your friendly neighborhood pool lifeguard, blowing my whistle at your kids when they can’t help but break out in an excited trot around the slippery tiles, because I genuinely care if they bust their bony asses. These people think

I shit sunshine. I am a cathartic band-aid, the kind that says something cute like “kiss here to make it all better.” To them. I began piecing together all of the changes I had seen in my brother over the past three months, before I had looked in that second drawer. My brother had been tortured, ever since I could remember, for being the chubby smart kid in school. The taunts followed him everywhere and I tried as best I could, being two years younger than him, to swat them away, yelling at that snot-nosed red head boy that sat in the back seat of the bus that he was a snot-nosed red head. By the time my brother was in high school, he had grown to a robust230lbs,butatsixfeettall,hecarrieditinadignifiedwayhenevercould as a short, pudgy child. I watched his healthy looking nineteen-year-old body wither away within those few months, the months which were revealed later as the deepest period of his addiction. He had transformed into a skeletal jumble of unsettling right angles, his once bright chestnut eyes, identical to our fathers, were now sunken and dull, peering out beadily from sallow sockets. Revealed, was a gaunt bone structure to his face my parents and I could hardly recognize. We had known a welcoming face, one that looked friendly and kind, the same face I remember looking into as he carried me up the steep hill on General Williamson Street, hot thick blood oozing out of mymouthfromquiteliterallytakingabiteoutof theasphaltafterflippingover the pink-streamered handle-bars of my childhood bike. It was the face of a beloved brother and son. I tried to make jokes about his miraculous weight loss. HEY, SOVIET RUSSIA CALLED. THEY WANT THEIR FACE BACK. I couldn’t even get him to crack a smile. He was so over me, his little annoying sister, I’m sure made even more annoying when trying to balance the precarious see-saw between the high and the come-down. We witnessed, on a daily basis, these changes in temperament; the intense irritability that got so bad I stopped tryingtotalktohimentirely,counteredwithfranticfitsof thewrongkindof euphoria, the kind that made him not notice, or care, that’s he’d been rubbing


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Erica Stivison remembers a time spent in the backyard, barefoot, perfecting her cat-catching techniques and developing her inquisitive nature. She is ecstatic for the completion of this publication and for what the future holds.

mINT jULeps aNd eUNIce

Erica Stivison

his scalp too intensely for too long or that in public, he’d been standing way too close to now apprehensive strangers. He’d tried to pass off this erratic behavior at my high school graduation as some sort of frenzied excitement about the accomplishments of his younger sister, but it wasn’t that at all. He was blown out of his mind, only none of us knew. We didn’t really want to know.Therewasaninvisiblefirerightinfrontof ourfaces,ragingmoreandmore every day. None of us even smelled smoke. It all seemed to make so much sense now, sitting in the beige family therapy room at Shoal Creek Hospital, the treatment facility where my brother was admitted for his profound addiction. As he paces around his small, scarcelyfurnishedroomonthesecondfloor,pumpedfullof Methadonetohelp make his skin crawl less, my parents and I sit in orange plastic chairs, motionless, scanning the big bold print of the Twelve-Step Alcoholic Anonymous posters. God is mentioned in every one of those twelve steps, in some form or other. I imagine my brother, the atheist, having to repeat these steps out loud, as they try to make them apply to all addicts and not just alcoholics,rollinghiseyesdramaticallyathavingtopraytosomefigurativebeing we stopped believing in around the same time we found out Santa Claus was really just our tired dad in a bath robe at 1 a.m., stubbing his toes on shit in the dark. I ask the psychologist woman with the heavy-lidded eyes, crunchy gelled curls, and white doctor’s coat, what my brother is supposed to do if he has no desire to plead to Santa-Claus-God for a cure to his addiction. She explainstomethatoftenpeoplefindalternativepathsforamorepersonalrecovery, one that is just as effective as the Twelve-Step program. Bullshit. God is a farce. Stubbing His toes on shit in the dark. I stop talking. My father wants to say something. He is angry, angry about all the lying and stealing, angry about the life his son’s been wasting, until at some point, the angers turns, and his face blooms into a deep shade of crimson, his thick chest sputtering like a dying beast. He is crying. I’ve seen my father cry twice; once when his dad died and once when I almost died in a car accident. We are not a

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My parents’ marriage did not end so much as it snapped in half like a perforated cracker, leaving behind two whole selves and a mess of crumbs. This is not how my grandparents’ marriage ended. It fell apart, soaked in liquor and disintegrated, leavingbehindonlyasaltyfilm and a bullet hole above the door that wished it was in my grandfather’s head. I never heard my mother screaming the way my mother heard my grandmother screaming. What I heard was my mother’s heavy footsteps on the stairs, the slamming and mechanical hum that meant she’d started a load of laundry. That night, my mother sorted the whites from the darks while my father sorted out what he was taking with him and what we wouldn’t let him take anymore.

saLT Gloria C. Adams

family of criers and his sudden display of vulnerability scares me, like I’d just watchedhimloseafistfight.He’sembarrassedthough,andwhenmyrational-to-a-fault mother hands him an emasculating tissue, he reigns in his sadness because someone told him once that that’s what men are supposed to do. This is the session where I tell everyone I was the one who found the heroin in the second drawer. The second drawer I tattled to my mommy and daddy about. This is the session the sunshine hero speeches and hearty pats on the back for being brave and right start, the session where my brother is branded“bad”andI,“good.”Thisisthefirstof manysessions,heldintherehab center where my brother will be treated not once, but twice, for another relapse into heroin addiction a year down the road. This is the session where everything gets worse. I was never the savior, the rescuer, the fate changer. I was the one who searedthelabelintohisflesh,exposingtheangryredaddictionforeveryoneto see while I let the waves of praise lap at my feet. I was the one who made everyone forget about that day on the General Williamson Hill, when I looked upintohisface,wide-eyedandhorrified,andhewipedthebloodfrommyface with his sleeve.

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T “GettingstuckonKStreet”wasanafflictionandametaphorinthecity long before a graduate of the local high school became a popular country and western singer, and wrote a song by that title. The song was a hit, and the title became a nation-wide term meaning “intoxicated to the point of being unable to move.” Considering the local origin of the term, this was apt. K Street was a one-lane-one-way street running from east to west across the city. To the north there was no outlet, as the street bumped up against a large historical estate. For three-miles stretched an eight foottallprivacyfence.Tothesouth,onlyfiveroadsconnectedtoKStreet. All were northbound one-way streets. Anyone who failed to turn off of these streets before intersecting with K Street was forced to drive all the way to the major highway west of town. When a boy who grew up in town invented a revolutionary hardware device for cell phones, started his own company, and built a factoryinthecity,thepopulationof thecitytripledinfiveyears.Between demands for workers, restaurants, malls, and schools, the town begat a city. K Street went from being inconvenient to being a gridlock nightmare and a less than subtle metaphor for the high cost of progress in a small town. Whenthestreetlightswereredesignedtofixthetrafficflowtheproblem got worse; at each street about three cars could get through a

k sTreeT FIcTIoN

Gloria C. Adams

Thereisarollof film on my desk back home - a token from the time our ten cent Goodwill camera devoured our thirty six exposures and threw them up in a heap of ruin. That long strip with its pathetically torn end, the result of that abrupt tug (snap) fromwhichouranxiousfingers onthatflimsyrewindknob were the ultimate cause. Thin plastic permanently damaged by the sun. Just a sheet of plastic, yet we took time to mourn as I silently re-wound our failure in my unreliable hands, only to forget it halfway through the brief drive home. It’sfitting(initsownbitterway) that this recollection should come to mind now, seeing as I have recently come to the conclusion - the unsettling realization - that somehow our friendship has come to an incomplete end. Blank memories. Where delicately planned shots should have been developed and preserved on glossy 5 by 7 sheets of paper, there is a somber shade of warm gray. As if none of it ever happened.

FraNNY gLass Katy Morris

Katy Morris is a sophomore English Literature major and English Writing and Rhetoric minor. She has a slight coffee addiction, overuses“snarky,” and is currently plotting out ways to steal her friend’s cat without his noticing.


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greenlight.Theredlightslastedbetweenfiveandtenminutes.If adriverfailedtoturn in time, they could expect to spend nearly an hour and a half traveling the three miles down K Street to the highway. ∞ Greg and Elizabeth Harris were driving down Samsan Avenue and not speaking. Their radio was broken and their car was in a condition that caused it to shake slightly as it drove, not enough to send them to a repair shop, but enough that the interior of the car buzzed and rattled the way loud white noise does- the more silent it is, the louder the sound seems. They passed a mural on an abandoned building on L Street that read : turn right now or be left to suffer purgatory Elizabeth had just enough time to consider the poetry of the fading mural before it dawned on her where they were. “Greg. Greg, turn.” Greg hit the brakes, but it was too late. They had passed through the intersection. There was only one way to go. “Just back up and turn around, Greg. You have room.” “Liz, it’s a one way street. I can’t do that.” “Are you fucking kidding me?” Elizabeth rolled down her window. Greg said nothing. ∞ The city knew things that Greg and Elizabeth could not know. In the apartment building they were driving past, a worn out mother of three was changing the seventh diaper of the day. In the gas station, a clerk called Rafa waschewingonacandybar,andamiddleschoolerwaswanderingthestore,fivefingersitchinginhispocket.Threeblocksoveramanwasusinghiscartojumpstart the battery in the car of a girl he worked with and had secretly loved for two years. ∞

Alicia was an undergraduate literature major with an undeclared emphasis in nihilism and existentialist misery. She’d grown up in the city, but went to a university four hundred miles away. Every day while visiting her parents over the summer she ate in a cafe on K Street. The café had a parking lot, but no outlet to L Street. The hardware store next door had closed down years before, and the wall facing the café was falling apart and covered in sprawling, spray-painted text. Alicia thought this was the most beautiful masterpiece of public art she had ever seen. Her favorite part was the large, blocky, bright pink text that read, “I always say I’m in it to win it, but then I always booze it to lose it.” Alicia found the pessimism endearing,butthefirsttimeshetoldanyoneaboutittheytransformedintoaguffawing dude-bro. After that she kept it to herself. Every afternoon she sat on the patio, drank black coffee, and watched the frustration mount on K Street. The cafe was on one of the last blocks of K Street before the highway, so by the time most cars pulled across the intersection its drivers exuded the exact qualities Alicia wanted to see in people. Her father, who had taken a minor in psychology a decade before she was born, claimed she was manufacturing her misery in order to justify her belief that her life was more meaningful than the lives of those around her. Her mother thought she was weird. Her phone kept vibrating. Each time she would lift the phone to see the same name and photo displayed: Renee calling. Each time she mashed the ignore button and put the phone down. As she sipped her coffee, Alicia couldn’t help but think how little she actually liked coffee. ∞ “How do you not realize you’re barreling towards K Street? Not just you. All of these idiots.” Greg shrugged and rolled his window down. In addition to the broken radio, the air conditioner didn’t work. He was stuck in the hot car with his wife, who was angry at him again. He counted the cars ahead of them. Ten before the intersection. “Why don’t you ever say anything to me?”

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hoUse park, aUsTIN, Texas

Garrett Hall

It had been so quiet for so long, and she had spoken in such a gentle tone, that he almost mistook her voice for his own interior monologue. He turned to look at her. She looked small in the passenger seat, glistening to the heat. “Idon’twanttofight,Liz.” “Butwe’realwaysfighting.Evenwhenwe’renottalkingwe’refighting.” Elizabeth looked out of her window. Greg stared at the truck in front of them. After an hour, Elizabeth leaned her seat back, took off her shoes, and panted in the heavy heat. Greg had little beads of sweat trickling down his forehead, which he brushed away with the back of his hand. He inched the car forward, using the little spacebetweenthecarstosimulatemovementintraffic.Heatethemarginsaninchatatime. This was how it went, creeping down K street. Greg could remember the back of every car he’d been stuck behind on K Street. Every clever bumper sticker, every fender bend, every white sticky glob of clinging bird poop. “Where are we now?” Elizabeth’s voice crackled in the heat. “Apple Orchard. Not through it yet, but almost.” “Two to go, then. How much longer do you think it will take?” “You never can tell, can you?” “Not from here, you can’t.” Elizabeth opened her eyes and looked around. To the right there was nothing but fence. To the left was an abandoned building coveredingraffiti.Againsttheuninspiredtagging,thefaceof ayoungboystoodout, created with spray paint but designed and executed like a museum piece. She wondered what the boy had done to get his face on a wall on K Street. The longer she stared into the meticulously rendered face the more she was certain the boy, the real one, had died. Where better to memorialize a fallen brother, than on a deserted building on K Street? No one in their right mind would buy that building or renovate over the face. Every day hundreds of people sat gridlocked in front of that building. How many eyes had stared into the face? She shuddered. “Something wrong?” Elizabeth glanced at Greg. He looked so genuinely concerned. It was irritating. “Nothing new.”



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“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” “Nothing.JustforgetIsaidanything.”Elizabethshovedherfingersthroughher hair and leaned back in the seat. “Like you do when I talk?” “I don’t forget what you say to me.” “No,Liz,youjustdon’tlistentomeinthefirstplace.” “Don’t listen to you? Shit, Greg, it’s not like you ever say anything. You just shrug and grumble and expect me to read your damn mind.” Theyhadhadthisfightbefore.Theyweremechanicalatit—twogearsgrindingwell-worn grooves—they couldn’t stop now if they tried. The inertia was easy. “Just tell me what you want me to say, Liz.” Greg didn’t look at her. “Say something meaningful. Stop expecting me to know what you want. Tell me what you want, Greg.” “I don’t want anything, Liz.” “Of course you do—“ “I don’t want anything.” “Greg, everyone wants something just tell m—“ “I want kids, Liz. Are you happy? I want a real family. I want to stop pretending this shit with us is good enough.” A whip cracked against Elizabeth’s heart. Her face fell slack. “I can’t believe you just said that.” Gred tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “Neither can I.” ∞ That afternoon the city council was meeting to discuss K Street. They all had different ideas of what would solve the problem. They all believed that everyone else’s solutions would make the problem worse. When the meeting adjourned they had come to no solution, as no council before them ever had. ∞ Alicia pulled a cigarette from her purse and lit it, holding the thing between her

indexandmiddlefingersandflickingituselesslyattheashtraynowandthen.Thething never touched her lips after it was lit. Her phone buzzed. A text message. From Renee. Please talk? Did I ruin everything? As the cars shifted slowly with the new green light, three or four making it before the red returned, she examined the new crop of tortured beasts and wondered what the point of feeling anything unobservable was. ∞ Honking was the next thing Elizabeth heard. She and Greg stared at each other silently, fumingly, for nearly a minute, and had missed the light. The horns started their chorus just as the light turned yellow. Greg stomped the pedal, jerking forward through the intersection at Apple Orchard. “Even if we did have kids—” “Don’tfinishthatsentence.Idon’twanttohearit,Liz.” “We wouldn’t be any happier than we are now.” “You don’t know that.” “Ido.Babiesdon’tmagicallyfixeverything.Youcan’tbringalifeintoamiserable world and expect it not to be miserable.” “Before we got married, you said—I asked you—and you said you wanted kids.” “Yeah well back then when you were quiet and moody I thought you were mysterious.” “And now?” “Empty.” “What am I even supposed to say to that, Liz?” “Something. Say something, for Pete’s sake. Just talk to me.” “I’m not happy.” “I’m not happy either.” “How are we supposed to be happy together if neither one of us is happy?” Silence rode in the car with them. AstheypassedtheCafé,Elizabethexperiencedthefirsttouchof magicof herlife.From yards away her eyes locked with the eyes of a girl she had never seen before. ∞



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caLLaN Briley Dockery


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Alicia felt the same pull, the pointing of the Universe, the command to open their eyes and look, and see. Elizabeth and Alicia leaned into the cold shock of each other, knowing with a fullness and a suddenness, believing in that moment that happiness was possible in the world. The thread that connected them communicated their stories. Alicia saw Elizabeth marry at nineteen, saw her drop out of college to follow her engineer husbandtoacitywherehecouldfindajobandshecouldn’t.Shesawtheexploding cyst on Elizabeth’s ovary. She saw Elizabeth and Greg getting the news thatshecouldneverconceive,sawthefightsaboutadoption,thefightsaboutmoving,thefightsaboutnothingmorethanthedesiretofight.ShefeltElizabeth’sdesperation to feel capable of love again. Elizabeth saw Alicia’s quiet childhood of non-literal abandonment, saw her being offered all the things other people seem to want. She saw Alicia two nights before, barefoot and bikinied, laughing with a friend beside a backyard swimming pool. She saw the friend lean forward and kiss Alicia, and Alicia pull away—and regret it. She felt Alicia’s desperation to feel something genuine, even pain if that was the only genuine truth available. Here they met, on the physical manifestation of mounting frustration, eyes pouring into one another, feeding off the weight of the transaction: enlightenment for perspective. The streets were no better designed, pain no easier to manage, life no less disappointing, and yet, as meaningless as it all seemed, it was somehow also beautiful. And that was enough. ∞ The light turned green and Greg accelerated. The tenuous connection snapped and Elizabeth poured back into herself. She looked at Greg, really saw him for the firsttimethatday.Itwasbesttosaynothing.Insteadsheleanedover,filteredherfingersthroughhis,andsatinthesilence.Theycreptdownthestreet,towardsthehighway, ever on. Soon, the light turned green.

∞ Alicia parked in her parent’s driveway, opened the door and ran the three blocks straight to Renee’s house. Her head throbbed. She reached Renee’s porch, rang the doorbell, and waited. Renee’s mom answered the door, told her she could go straight up to Renee’s room. It all blurred- the stairs, the hallway, Renee’s door. Renee was on the bed, phone cradled in palms and thumbs. “Did you mean it?” Alicia’s ribs ached. “What?” Renee sat up, anxiety in her blood. “Did you mean it?” Renee held her breath for a moment, bit her lip, nodded. “Are you mad at me?” ∞ Though the connection established on K Street had been broken, Alicia and Elizabeth shared one last lingering burst of synchronicity. It was simple, really, understanding what the Universe had meant them to understand. They looked at their partners, took their hands in reassurance, and the last red lights turned green. “Iwanttoloveyou.I’mtryingtofigureouthow.IknowI’mcapableof it.Iknow it’s worth trying.” ∞ Inthecityadogwassniffingtheair,andherearsperkedtohearhernameonthe wind. Four young boys on bicycles charged down the sidewalk. In the abandoned building to their left a clutch of high school kids were gathering around, passing a single joint. The city kept breathing. Cars honked on K Street. Life, such that it was, remained frustrating and beautiful.


h a l l / m u e l l e r , a u s t i n , Te x a s

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Garrett Hall

mUeLLer, aUsTIN, Texas

Garrett Hall

h e a g e r t y / U n t i t l e d ( f o r r o b e r t )

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h e a g e r t y / U n t i t l e d ( f o r r o b e r t )

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I watch them draw out the plastic tubes that snake around your threadbare bones,

like a sinking battleship raising its anchor.

I can’t think of what to say so I turn up the volume on the Sunday football game between God and the Devil

and wait for you to slip out of your skin into that

black inky nowhere.

But you wait until we all have our backs turned to waft up through the holes in the Styrofoam ceiling tiles, blanched sterile by the fluorescentflickering.

Theyshuffleusoutof theroom, offering lukewarm cups of instant sympathy

UNTITLed (For roberT)

Cayley Heagerty

and suddenly I’m six years old again— standing barefoot in the cold, wet grass of your garden on New Year’s Eve,

holding a sparkler,

cryingasitfizzlestoa sleeping cinder.

Cayley Heagerty graduated in December 2011 by the skin of her teeth with a Bachelors in English Writing and Rhetoric, specializing in Creative Writing. Born and raised in Austin, Cayley shares a deep love for bad puns, swearing, and word-smithing. She enjoys parallel sentence structures, referring to herself in the third person, and irony.

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1/

4 Lauren Winnicki is a Photocommunications major and shark lover.

1/4 Lauren Winnicki

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STaff bIos NoT LIsTed are LocaTed

Near FIrsT coNTrIbUTed pIece

Lindsay Young edITor-IN-chIeF

Carrie FountainFacULTY adVIsor

Kelsey Howard assIsTaNT edITor &

prose commITTee Leader

Kelsey Howard is an English Writing and Rhetoric major with a specialization in Creative Writing. She loves studying interactive narratives and hopes to find something in the real world that lets her follow that passion. She is desperately looking forward to her upcoming senior year and everything that entails.

Erica Stivison Lead desIgNer

Kathryn O’Neill assIsTaNT desIgNer

Kathryn O’Neill is a Graphic Design major and Communication minor. She likes hot tea and the lighting created by overcast skies.

Margo Sivin VIsUaL arT commITTee Leader

Stephen Recker poeTrY commITTee Leader

David GarciaDavid Garcia is a sophomore Communication major. He enjoys BBQing, sampled instrumentals, and witty people.

Gerald Llorence

Miranda Petrosky Miranda Petrosky is a Graphic Design major and art minor at St. Edward’s University who likes classic novels and video games and spends her spare time drawing, watching cartoons, and sleeping. She has a cat named Ferdinand and a husband named Shawn and they are pretty okay too.

Travis RiddleTravis Riddle is a guy who watches a lot of television, writes books, and makes rap songs with his friends under the moniker DWHB. Right now his dog is taking a nap and he’s jealous of that dog.

Gloria C. Adams

Ari Auber Ari Auber, an English Writing and Rhetoric senior, wants to be a journalist but will always have a soft spot for short story and novel writing. In fact, she promises herself that someday she’ll leave the newsroom to write a trilog y (because all good books these days seem to belong to trilogies). She has a mild fear of parking garages and elevators, an addiction to crime shows, and a regret that she never submitted a piece to the Sorin Oak Review.

Candy Greer Candy Greer is a Communication major. She lists her favorite movie as O Brother Where Art Thou and her favorite pastime as reading and writing. She’s also very excited to be experiencing her first trip to Europe this upcoming fall through the Angers, France program.

Gretchen Ottmers

Gloria C. Adams

Cameron Busby

Nancy Lili Gonzalez

Erin GrayErin Gray is an English Writing and Rhetoric major with a specialization in Creative Writing. When she isn’t working on her latest class assignment, she is writing poetry and reading novels by Joyce Carol Oates. She likes Britsh television, gossip columns, and cats.

Carl Mamula Carl Mamula is a senior English Writing major. He is pumped about graduation and all the strange journeys that he will inevitably embark on in the “real world.” He has thoroughly enjoyed working with Sorin Oak Review for all of his 4 years at St. Edward’s.

Steven Melson

Lyz Rausch

prosegeNeraL poeTrY VIsUaL arT

sT

aF

F

2010, VoLUme 20 First Place

2009, VoLUme 19 First Place with Special Merit

2008, VoLUme 18 First Place


2005, VoLUme 15 Best College Literary-Art Magazine

First Place with Special Merit



The Sorin Oak Review title comes from the giant oak tree on the St. Edward’s campus. Named after the founder of our university, Father Edward Sorin, it is over 120 years old and believed to be the oldest tree in Austin. The benches around the tree provide a view of downtown Austin and a quiet place to study or read a book like this one. The Sorin Oak will always represent strength, tradition, perseverance, and beauty.

The 2011 sorIN oak reVIew was prINTed

bY capIToL prINTINg compaNY. TYpeseT

IN goUdY moderN, VINYL aNd sUdbUrY

basIN 3d. coVer sTock: 110# dTc sTraw

mohawk Loop recYcLed . TexT sTock:

80# eNdUraNce sILk Fsc. The desIgNers

woULd LIke To heLp eVerYoNe who gaVe

INpUT To The LaYoUT aNd geNeraL desIgN

oF The eNTIre pUbLIcaTIoN aNd reLaTed

desIgNed maTerIaL.

american ScholaSTic

PreSS assocIaTIoN awards

Find the new online archive at: omeka.stedwards.edu/about For further Sorin information: www.sorinoakreview.org

S O R I N O A K R E V I E W

SORIN OA

K REV

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