Volume 2, Issue 1
Under the Influence
Letter from the Editor
Welcome to the sophomore year of quarterlife literary magazine. The magazine is changing. For Volume 2, we've completely revamped the layout with an eye for visual aesthetics, invited a new flock of submissions through the inclusion of cover art, and substantially increased our printing numbers to account for the swelling ranks of our readers.
Thematically, "Under the Influence" extends far beyond its initial connotation of substances. Each person is inevitably caught under the influence of a variety of factors and individuals: social norms, religion, authority figures (parents, professors, politicians), friends, significant others or lack thereof, our need to relate to others, our emotional patalysis, our own subjectivity. Many of our influences have been so inculcated that we might spend the majority of our lives trying to shirk, accept, defy, or redefine them. Particularly during our quarterlives, we experience a sharpening awareness of the existence of these influences and, subsequently, find ourselves struggling against these externalities in an attempt to uncover our true selves (whatever that may mean).
This is your quarterlife.
The Thing
Sophie Johnson
“I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary! So let us always sit.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance"
I know Mr. Elliott. I met him three weeks ago at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Portland after a service entitled “The Gifts of Melancholy” – the sermon was not particularly memorable save the title, and the title only memorable for the word “melancholy,” which I consider an exceptionally beautiful word. Mr. Elliott, a slightly balding man who made up for his thinning with a handlebar moustache, sat two seats to my left that Sunday morning and shook my hand after the service. I can’t remember exactly what he said – something like he had been coming to this church every week for x years after y months of mourning for his tragically deceased wife, who had died unexpectedly of illness z – but I remember his name and his face. We’re both early today and he hasn’t noticed me because I’m sitting behind him. He refolds the parchment paper Order of Service in his lap and sighs softly. I wonder what’s on his mind.
I don’t like for people to introduce themselves to me after church. Unfortunately, at Unitarian Universalist churches the typical custom is to “greet your neighbor” after the service; I usually try to avoid this ordeal by leaving right before the musical postlude ends. Sometimes, though, the last song is so beautiful and the audience so transfixed, to even stir would be a sin. On “The Gifts of Melancholy” Sunday the postlude was performed by a wan fourteen-year-old boy who played Tchaikovsky’s Chanson Triste on the cello. He closed his eyes and bent his neck a little so the immense chapel light brought out the rigid lines between his brows; during the entirety of the eight-minute arrangement he never once looked at the music in front of him, as though he played the piece not just from memory but from sheer instinct. The lady next to me wearing a pearl necklace and orangey foundation wept like she was watching a movie about her own life, considering the things she had lost. I felt the song resonating in strange places on my body – my elbows, my calves, the soles of my feet. The moment was rare and angelic and the congregation gave the performance a standing ovation.
So I had to meet Mr. Elliott that Sunday because I couldn’t leave in time to avoid our encounter. I don’t like meeting people after church because I would prefer for them to remain mysteries: unopened boxes arranged in the seats adorned with the same calm expressions. I like to watch people like Mr. Elliott and channel their tranquility before and during church services; I inhale their calculated composure.
Now the choir is beginning to sing. There’s a new woman in the soprano section who has dyed-blue hair. She’s singing louder than the other sopranos, and her voice has a certain pinch that stands out. But she’ll learn better. Church is the only place I know of where human beings allow their dissonant voices to unfold into a network of unlikely unison: God is good; or Love is good; or Goodness lies within us all. We sing together, pray together, stand together in the eyes of Something Bigger.
I went to the Bayview Baptist Church in San Diego, California last fall. The Bayview Baptist Church rarely fell silent – the preacher SHOUTED to his congregation: “You CAAAAN and WIIIIIIIIL find JE-HE-HE-HE-HE-HE-SUS IN YO LIFE!” And the congregants SHOUTED back: “HALLELUJIA!” Still the focus was there, knotted up in the shouting and the crying and the standing and the singing: an ideal unity; a belief in Something so solid and powerful that human beings fall to their knees in front of It; bow before It and become a single immovable stone in an irrational river. I experienced the Bayview Baptist Church’s passion; rocked back and forth on my heels and felt The Thing in me wake up – The Thing that moves us to unabashed emotion and a perfect (albeit momentary) understanding of The Meaning Of Life. I got inside those high cedar ceilings and the red curtains falling like holy blood and the smell of sweat and parched clothing and believed something in everything Dr. Timothy J. Winters said – though I don’t remember a word of his sermon.
I would be deceiving you if I told you I believed in God. I don’t believe in God. I don’t really believe in Anything – except maybe People. I lost God in Daniel Smith’s bed when he told me to shut up because no one could hear me and wrapped his vast hands across my eyes so he wouldn’t have to see me cry. The alcohol on his fingers stung and his hip bones like scalpels under his skin stung and God escaping through my mouth stung. In Daniel Smith’s bed I let God drift through the high glass windows that opened to the roof; I let God evaporate. I didn’t try to catch God. The effort would have been futile.
We are standing and singing “Amazing Grace.” I start to feel The Thing in my bones. “Amazing Grace” is one of my favorite hymns, partially for the brilliant shift between major and minor chords and the unexpected jumps in melody. Sometimes I think I believe in Music. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now I’m found; was blind but now I see. Lyrically, the song is dull. The metaphors are old and the rhymes obvious. But set against slow, churning chords that break into quivering sevenths and ninths, the words are heartbreaking. Yes, I’m feeling The Thing move into my skin. I’m feeling The Thing in my eyes.
But I know “Amazing Grace” itself did not provoke me; the sound of heavy voices filling the chapel did that; the sound of people coming together.
People are peculiar. We long so much for connection but keep ourselves separated. I said I believed in People, but only when they are what I call “raw”: when they commit acts of unseen compassion or unprovoked love. An example: In New York City during a summer dry spell, a woman notices a haggard, distraught-looking man lying by the side of the road, and she asks if he is all right. The man says he is, but the woman is unconvinced. She has a meeting to get to and ten dollars on her. She has a few choices: give the man some money, call for help, or trust the man and let him be. The woman chooses none of these. She sits down next to the man and asks him how his day has been. They sit and talk as SUVs and sports cars whir by; as the heat gets hotter and the day stretches out. And that is the end of the unlikely, simple story. I am trying to say that there are pockets of time in which I believe in People; believe they are bigger and higher than any quantum dimension or sacred heaven. People are unopened boxes.
The boxes are opening up. Everyone is standing, singing in the eyes of their various Gods, finding filament in their lungs to add to the web, becoming Something Bigger. Mr. Elliott is gazing at the ceiling as if God Himself is reclining in an easy chair up there, snapping His fingers and humming along, basking in the glow of a simple song made marvelously complicated by such varied voices. The organ player is swaying; the notes spilling from the pipes fill up the place; there isn’t a recess in the entire building not filled with sound.
Today’s sermon will be on “Dwelling in Possibility.” I will listen but I won’t hear what the minister is saying. I will see the sweat gathering on his forehead and I will notice when he shuffles his manuscript; I will watch the faces of the white-haired women in the front row and I will note the degree to which they nod; I will fold my hands when the time comes to pray and close my eyes and repeat over and over again in my head, “Love. Love. Love. Love. Love.”
Afternoon
Claire Navin-Poleson
The clouds flicker electric and the rain spills down
charges of bass plowing the thick sky
I jump off the porch
and grasp the earthly gravitation of the grass
such strength rooted in tiny slick strands
urging my toes to grip on and hold me down.
I dance for the rain and ask it to make me beautiful for you,
beg it to lend me some of its dark shimmer
and I spin and spin and
stop
just in time to see you on the step.
Happy breaks across your face
creasing your freckles and sparking your eyes
and you laugh and I laugh
hoping it will cause you to laugh again.
The warm rain sinks in deeper and chills my insides
I think of what it might be like
to be wrapped in you
and this causes me to shiver more.
A Rising Sun, A Setting Sun
Robin Lewis
I’m walking, shakily, on the railroad tracks that run through Walla Walla. It’s a therapeutic sort of thing, something I did as a kid whenever life got to be too much. I just jutted my head downward, and stared at the ruddy brown of the iron rails until everything was gone and I wasn’t seeing, I was only moving. I’m trying to get back to that place, to feel that soft, comforting throbbing on my forehead, right above my eyes, but I think my brain is just holding in too many thoughts and voices and questions and fears and hopes to settle down, empty itself, be that little eight year-old mind again.
I want the most difficult question of the day to be chocolate or vanilla ice cream, David? I want that to be the reason I’m visiting the tracks this evening.
Instead, I realize it’s rising through my body again, surging towards my brain; I try to force it down, but it’s a futile attempt and I succumb to the question. David, do you have courage?
Yes, I do.
No, I don’t.
Circle one.
Get off the rails.
Go finish physics.
I’m angry that I can’t produce the right answer, but I’m even angrier because I know why. Semester after semester, I stay at a place I don’t want to be, go through the academic and social motions even though I think that’s seriously fucked up, and act like all this stuff means as much to me as it does to my friends and teachers and classmates. Which is a lie.
The birth of David. I can see, faintly, the doctors, the nurses, my parents, their friends gathered around my red, wet head, already pounding into my brain that boys like me, boys who have wealthy, well-educated, liberal parents, who have unimaginable privilege, who have twelve years of intensive preparatory school ahead of them, are to go to college. It’s the only thing a person with that kind of position in the world can and should rightfully do. That idea festered and grew inside my head crowding out those few and far between voices that told me life without college can be good; not everyone turns to meth and has too many kids and can’t speak no propah inglish and dies a lonely bastard.
I met Molly when I was sixteen. My father told me that I needed to get a summer job, to learn the strife of the working class, to understand how good I had it, so I biked east from the house, up the one sloping hill in the city, and went into the café at the top. I told the owner I would like a job please, sir, and he tossed me an apron, said come back tomorrow at nine sharp and don’t be late, young man. I was there at 8:55. I spent the morning clearing tables, smiling at customers, wearing my oversized apron, and staining it, staining it, staining it, until the man who hired me told me to go in back and get some lunch from Molly, son. Who’s Molly? I pondered this as I pushed the kitchen doors open, looking around and taking in air tinted with the smell of both the yeasty bread loaves rising on the table and the rotting food scraps lying in the garbage next to the dishwasher.
“David?” I turned towards the voice.
“I’m David,” I said.
“I’m Molly.” She was in her mid-thirties, aged in her face, but possessing the body of an awkward teenage girl, except she wasn’t awkward, not at all; she was smiling easily. She put a sandwich on the counter before me and as I ate ravenously she asked me about school and sports and music and my first day as a working boy. With surprising ease I told her about everything; each day after that I told her about everything. She worked from 4 am until 2 pm so I caught her at the end of her shift, when she was most honest. She hadn’t gone to college, or traveled Eurasia, or done anything that by the standards of my world outside the realm of the café would have been especially noteworthy. Yet she was intelligent in a way I’d never seen before, plodding, unrushed, compelled to prove her right to exist and matter to no one.
I started to come before work to talk with her, each week earlier and earlier, riding my bike toward the eastern sun, seeing a smaller sliver of it every day until when I got to the top of the hill one August morning, I was looking down on it and it rose to meet me.
Then school started and the next summer I figured I’d be back with Molly just like before, but my parents insisted I get an internship and volunteer at an old folks’ home in order to bolster my college application.
And I did it.
I have no courage.
So here I am, ignoring what I’ve known for five years -- that college just isn’t for me -- fully aware that as I write my fifteen page paper, I don’t give a shit; I am wasting my life, but my fingers continue to type it, type it, type it. I just can’t escape the pounding voices in my head that tell me how college is the only way to be legitimate, successful. Happy.
I am so fucking scared. I don’t want to loose my house or my stuff or my friends or my family, but I’d like to feel free, feel the pressure in my head subside, feel what it’s like to live honestly.
I’d like to watch that sun rise again.
The light is morphing the tracks from ruddy brown to copper red, making them glow brightly, too brightly, so I look up and there is the sun, setting, slipping below me, and in one swift motion I jump from the track.
Life beckons.
Written on Rock
Jonathan Loeffler
news over history over millennia.
ghostly scarlet figures.
prints of hands repeated
on the sheer walls, petroglyphs
pecked into the patina
beneath rock overhangs.
we are drawn to them. face-to-face
with bighorn sheep, antelope, and lizards
we are inches from three-toed footprints,
bear tracks, and centipede, the shaman, his headdress,
shields of warriors, old humans holding hands.
spirals and circles of power or population?
zigzags of rivers or lightning?
white dots carefully spaced to show
how long they stayed, how far is the water?
a large bear is chiseled
far above the road;
men on horseback aim arrows
at its belly, back, and nose.
Boys’ names are scratched
nearby; bullet holes pierce
the bear’s body, shattering rock.
so many passings have left a mark.
who, though, shoots at art?
Man Complex: A Story in Eight Acts
Sarah McCarthy
I am three. My favorite game is to put tennis balls under my shirt, press my plastic doll Winifred up against them, and pretend to nurse.
“I’m very busy,” I tell my grandfather when he asks what I’m doing. “But you can nurse Katina."
And because I am his only granddaughter and because he does almost anything I say, he goes, fetches the doll I have named Katina, and sits down next to me. I lend him a tennis ball. We both very seriously nurse and burp our babies.
I am five and I will not wear anything but dresses because I like the swish swish sound that they make. I become a girl from another era, with patent leather shoes, tights, and flouncy dresses. My hair is cut short in little orphan Annie curls. I have a poochy tummy. I am profoundly unselfconscious about any of these facts.
“Don’t you ever wear pants?” people ask.
“No,” I say.
One day I decide to try to be a tomboy like heroic girls in books always are.
I go up to huge fifth grade boys playing tetherball and ask, “Can I play?” They look down a moment, taking in this crazy pink-clad ruffle-skirted kindergartner.
“Get the hell out of here,” one finally says. I flounce off. I am secretly delighted.
I am seven and I do not let the fact that I only wear dresses stop me from hanging upside down on any and every bar-like object. I like the way the world looks that way, when I can see it. Sometimes, I can’t see it since my dress has fallen down in front of my eyes. I stay upside down so much that my parents become concerned about my exhibitionist ways.
“You’re getting a little old to be doing these big underwear shows,” my dad tells me.
I am still too unselfconscious to care.
I am eight. I still only wear swishy things. I have a special sunflower dress for the first day of second grade. My hair is still very short.
“Um, my friends and I were just talking and we were just kind of wondering, are you a boy or a girl?” A fifth grader demands.
“Girl,” I say.
I now see that this was meant to be an insult, not a sincere question.
That is the day that I begin a 2 year campaign to stop getting monthly haircuts.
I am still eight and I am in my first play: Charles Wallace in a children’s production of A Wrinkle in Time. I have 131 lines, 133 if you count the lines that say “All.”
Playing a boy bothers me not in the least. The director, thrilled to find a girl who doesn’t mind playing boys, takes extreme advantage of this over the next year and a half that I sign up for his plays.
I am Pa in Little House on the Prairie, Michael in Mary Poppins, Ferdinand in The Tempest, Gazeen in Aladdin, Avery in Charlotte’s Web, the main character man who I can’t even remember the name of in Around the World in Eighty Days, and Captain Ahab in Mobey Dick. It is Ahab that breaks me. I am nine and I am deeply unhappy to have to draw on a mustache and clomp around the stage with a cane and talk about wenches and whales. I pull a neat trick and leave out half my lines in the actual performance, saying only those ones that aren’t too embarrassing.
The next play, I ask the director not to make me a boy this time. The play is Pippi Longstocking.
“But you’d be such a good Tommy,” he laments.
Begrudgingly, he casts me as Annika. The girl he does cast as Tommy begins to sob. The director looks at me pleadingly and I shake my head. I have won. I have been affirmed as a real and bona fide girl and Tommy will just have to deal with that.
Being a girl, I learn, is not something that you just are. It must be pleaded for and earned.
I am in junior high and I feel bad for being a girl. There aren’t enough boys for everyone and I am clogging up space. I am not junior-high-hot and resign myself to having an ugly husband, if I manage to snare one at all. It is the girls that use self-tanner who will get the attractive ones. Late at night at a sleepover I tell Jessica my worst fear: what if, in 1986, there were like a billion more girls than boys born? What if the balance is all off?
I am seventeen, in high school, and I have tricked a boy into acknowledging my girlhood and wishing to date me. I have just gone on the worst date of my life. The first part of it had been fine—we went to a laser show and, in that most delicious cliché of early high school couples, made out during pretty much the whole thing. I kept thinking the whole time WOW! I am kissing someone! This was a novelty that had in no way worn off after our first week of dating. After not kissing anyone for years and years, suddenly I was constantly kissing and being kissed and my mind reacted with reeling shock every time.
The show got out around 8:30 and my curfew wasn’t until 10:30 and I felt certain that because he had chosen the laser show it was now my job to come up with a suitable new activity. “So, we could go to Starbucks,” I said. “Or…walk around Ravenna Park…or something.” I had no idea what one was to do with a boy at 8:30 at night when you had two hours and you both had already eaten dinner.
He gave me a look of knowingness. “I think we should go park somewhere,” he said.
“OK,” I said. So that’s what you do with a boy at 8:30 in the evening when you have two hours, I thought. You park. OK. OK, I am totally comfortable with that. He had said it like it was an obvious suggestion when it honestly had not crossed my mind. I had been hoping he would choose Starbucks—I had developed a large craving for a mint mocha.
We found a fairly uninhabited parking lot down by where I had once taken swimming lessons as a small girl, a fact that I tried not to think about as we climbed into the back seat. High school cliché! High school cliché! my mind blared loudly, amused at me. I was secretly impressed with myself— since when did I, Sarah, do anything other than read or, on daring nights, have a (girl) friend over to watch a movie on Saturday night? Since when was I ever on the other side of steamy windows?
What I think happened precisely is that he was, while kissing me, slowly working his hand up my leg. He stopped then and said “May I continue?” Because I liked him a whole lot and because I naively thought he was referring to the kissing, I nodded.
I then had no idea what to do. In very twisted logic I was pretty certain that my female anatomy would be repulsive to him. So, as he studied my face intently, I sat motionless and pretty much tried to ignore what was happening. I did not know what reaction I was supposed to have, so I simply did not have one at all, except for lying straight and stiff and blushing fiercely. I could tell that he was trying very hard. I was trying very hard to have him keep liking me and, what’s more difficult, to preserve both his self-esteem and my own dignity.
Dear God, I wanted him to know I was a girl, but he didn’t have to prove it that much.
I am in college and I wear dresses and skirts. I like the swish-swish sound. I have never wore jeans. I still feel strangely complimented when someone says, “she” in reference to me.
“Of all the people to have a man complex, Sarah, you’re the least likely.” I hear it anytime I reveal my phobia.
Yet still I live in a constant state of fear and compensation, wearing pink and baking bread, wondering how much of me is driven by this deep fear of secret testosterone lurking in my blood. Wondering why, exactly, I am afraid; why, exactly, being manly would be so bad.
gra ceful
Rebecca Macfife
This
; what we
have/do
is
not gra
ceful
.
It has all the flow
Of 17-year-thick hormones
(the excessive t’s in my stuttter
When I asked you out by the bike racks)
It has all the rhythm
Of a pigeon’s head
(bobbing and weaving—
Our first kiss)
I never imagined snuggling
to be so itchy,
or me
to be so twitchy.
I never imagined kissing
to be so loud
(whenever the good guys kiss in movies
it must be the romantic overtures
that cover up the soundtrack of reality.)
Th
Is(us)
is
not gr
aceful
It i
S cho
ppy
Awk/ward
Blushes and(&) ki n ks
and I can’ t wait
to get used to it.
Linoleum
Jamie Soukup
I hold back the hair of this Woman that I love as she empties her stomach and her tears in the toilet. It is four a.m. and she is wailing and whimpering why doesn’t he love me and I hear a glimpse of myself in her voice; but I keep my mind on the linoleum and my hands in her hair.
Here, kneeling in the third stall on the fourth floor in the first bathroom, I half hate This Woman.
This Woman’s name is Beauty and she wears it with grace. She moves too slowly and her eyes are too wide, and even now as her whole body heaves with lost regrets and last drinks, she is stunning against the porcelain of the toilet and the sink; and as her words slur, she grasps my face with her hands and looks at me with thanks and for just one moment—I want to smash her face against the mirror, or at least leave her collapsed and alone; lying on the linoleum.
[Nobody was there to hold back my hair.]
This Woman says she loves me and she tells me I can go and I want to, but instead I keep crooning soft noises and rubbing her back.
But to her hair, I whisper, so softly, Stop crying.
Beneath my murmurs, I breathe to her, Crying only makes it worse and he’ll never love you no matter how long you wait or how beautiful you become, or how many drinks you toast to him in the dark that lets you imagine he’s there. And you can close your eyes as long as you want but it won’t make it any easier to pretend that the hands and the voices of strangers belong to him, because he never spoke to you or touched you that way, but I let them touch me anyway and I’m grateful for the darkness so he won’t see the shame in my red face, even though he’s not looking at you anyway.
Stop crying, I want to tell her. But I know that in the morning she won’t remember I spoke, so I half love her half hate her until I put her to bed.
It Will Be Different This Time
Leslie Beach
I remember
the last time I had a body:
it entered the room,
compact and silencing
and I let other things fling off their wires
and orbit the vaguest edge of my perception.
This body I had was so definite.
I gripped its contours
prodded its crevices
and let the mind within it
dominate my mind,
so long as my fingers
were free.
The possibility of another body
still diffuse
still marginal
just coming into its form
beneath casual finger flicks and hope-flecked eyes
strikes my brain.
My thoughts writhe with mind-body, body-body, mind-mind,
(how mental a response,
how unprepared I show myself to be
for this exchange of lines and limits
impulses and
culminations).
Give me your earlobe.
I’ll give you my hum.
Offer your iliac crest
for me to rest my dappled notions on.
I have this hope your shape won’t silence me.
To Order Words of Sea and Self
Kim Hooyboer
She could no longer feel the rain. For weeks, the sky had maintained a fairly perpetual precipitation, spanning from violent downpours to almost snow-like drifts, flutters of rain best described as a torrential mist. Niki sat on the edge of a plastic lounge chair, ignoring the water seeping through her jeans. It was cold and the rain did not agree with her cigarette. She jammed her free hand into the pocket of her coat to escape the chill as she watched the wind ripple the surface of the leaf-strewn swimming pool. She smoked quickly during breaks in the rainfall, when only a light drizzle created shadowed rings on the cement floor of the pool. It was mid-June and the unseasonal chill was starting to become tiresome.
When Niki threw a garbage sack of clothes into the back of a stranger’s pick-up truck and followed her whim across the country, she imagined a grand new life for herself, filled with new people, new opportunities, and a new Niki. Four months later, she was working at Dunkin Donuts making $7.30 an hour and spending Friday nights alone by her apartment complex’s tacky swimming pool, hood drawn over her head in an absurd attempt to stay dry, scribbling stories in a rain-spotted notebook by the aquatic light. When she spoke to her parents, she told them she was working in a bookstore, she was living in a studio apartment on Beacon St, she was applying to some local colleges, she was dating again. She spent her days hiking along the beach with friends and her nights discussing Nietzsche in beatnik coffee shops. They were so proud. Niki justified these lies by insisting to herself that she would find a better job soon so she could afford a place where the hot water ran for more than four and a half minutes and the neighboring train tracks wouldn’t wake her at 5:30 every morning. As for now, she couldn’t stand the thought of the disapproving tones, the I told you so, the We’re sending money for you to come home now. She couldn’t stand the defeat of crawling back through the miles of wheatfields to the one stoplight town where everyone remembered the break-up and her failure to keep a hold of the one person who really mattered. If only Kathryn could see her now, more trapped than ever before, despite the ostensible freedom. Four months and Niki hadn’t even seen the ocean.
Niki angrily twisted her cigarette into the wet concrete and stuffed her rolled notebook into the back pocket of her jeans. The metal gate of the pool enclosure clanged shut behind her. She left no footprints on the rain-soaked ground and her skin was slow to dry in the cool night breeze.
The wind whispered softly in the trees, teasing the leaves from their branches, transforming the shoreline into a whirling kaleidoscope of reds, oranges, yellows, browns. The roar of the waves tearing at the stone ten feet below overwhelmed the breath of the wind, sheer rock crumbling under the ocean’s power in an act of relentless diminishment. August gazed out at the writhing horizon, eyes straining vainly to separate sea from sky, trying to hold this limitless expanse in sight. At seventeen, he could not bring himself to truly fathom the infinitude of the ocean, foam-capped waves concealing vast potentialities. He inhaled profoundly, gorging himself on the salt-laden air, imagining he could breathe in some particles of the past. August saw standing at his side a mass of people, predecessors of himself, who had dared glance upon these waters. He saw the prophet-poet, lost in solipsistic contemplation, mad eyes rolling at the sea, calling out to the waves I am back now winter’s come! A pair of lovers held each other, wrapped tightly in a tattered blanket, for the blackened coals beside them provided neither warmth nor light. They saw reflections of their devotion in the boundless deep by the faint glow of the moon. A young boy threw stones at the waves in retribution for their attack on the fragile ridge, each rock landing further and further out amid the waves until his eyes grew tired of tracking their course. An old lady, blue-haired and brown-eyed, sat on the ridge’s ledge, her feet dangling barefoot over the raging waves, too-white tennis shoes placed carefully at her side, socks neatly folded on top. The cool spray licked her toes and she wrapped her shawl, threadbare though well-kept—much like herself—more tightly around her shoulders. August wanted to know these people. He wanted to know how the couple could see in the dim light, why the old lady untied her sneakers, where the prophet-poet had come from, and why the boy chose only smooth stones to throw.
As the summer continued and the nights grew shorter, the rain finally stopped and the weather warmed to temperatures somewhat resembling summertime norms. The first night in weeks that Niki saw the stars was the first night she saw the girl. Niki had become accustomed to the solitude, so when the pool gate’s hinges whined laboriously, Niki was quickly startled out of her reflections. It was shortly after twelve, according to the passage of the midnight express train, its resonating whistle marking the last run of the night. The girl had long, dark hair, pulled back into a messy ponytail that she untied upon entering the pool area. She draped her towel—vivid crimson with jet black waves in orderly rows crashing violently against each other—across a plastic chair and entered the water without a word to Niki. Niki noted the deliberation with which she entered the water, striding down the steps of the shallow side and walking steadily toward the deep end, never slackening her pace, until her legs disappeared, then her stomach, her shoulders, her head, until her dark hair was left floating across the surface of the water, then nothing. She emerged at the far wall and began swimming laps, alternating between front crawl and breaststroke. Niki counted the laps, 5, 10, 20, 40. At lap 47, the girl slowly exited the water and wrapped her towel around her dripping navy swimsuit. She didn’t acknowledge Niki’s presence, the smoke drifting casually into the air, the scratch of her pen on the water-stained notebook.
August slowly made his way across the beach, favoring the woods to the water. The ocean was still so new to him, so terrifying. He saw in the waves the limitlessness of thought, an excess of possibilities that left him feeling both invigorated and alone. He stopped at an old oak tree at the edge of the wood and slowly reached out his hand to feel the rough bark. It seemed out of place amid the aspens, as if it were the sole survivor of a long line of elder trees. August could see the entire coast riddled with majestic oaks, their craggy branches twisting against the ocean breeze. Grasping the branch closest to the ground, August lifted himself up, feet fumbling against the trunk, until he had positioned himself on the bough. It was a sturdy limb, as thick at its base as August himself, so he wiggled out as far as he could on the branch, where he could have the best view of the ocean and the nearby beach. Two little kids, clothes damp over wet swimsuits, beach sand plastered to their hair and feet, rushed by underneath August’s branch. Laughing, the smaller one, a boy no older than seven, grabbed his friend’s hand, tugging her toward the woods. “What if my tiger got to run away and we’ve got to find him and your wolf pet can help cause she can smell my tiger so we can find him in the trees where he’s run to.”
His friend, who was at least taller, if not older, nodded solemnly, her hair falling messily from her ponytail. “Raven’s real good at smelling. But your tiger ran away last time. What if he got taken by the pound so we have to save him.” The boy nodded emphatically, so she continued, “They might try to hurt him if we don’t find him soon. Or they might take him back to the jungle and he will have to live on his own, but he can’t do that because he doesn’t have any friends in the jungle.” At this, the boy took offense, insisting that his tiger was perfectly capable of self-sufficiency in the harsh wilderness. Shrugging, the girl allowed for this amendment to the game and they pressed on into the woods. August gazed out at the waves and tried to put the ocean into words.
The girl with the red towel returned every night to swim laps, and Niki made sure to take a cigarette break shortly after midnight each night. She marveled at the girl’s routine, the way she always entered the water with a steady stride, the practiced movement of her strokes, the sight of her long hair drifting momentarily on the water’s surface, silhouetted against the pool’s green glow. Every night for a week, the girl came to the pool to swim her laps and every night for a week, Niki sat on the green plastic chair and smoked and wrote and said nothing. She made the mistake one night of glancing too soon at the girl as she entered the gate and they established eye contact. The girl smiled at Niki as she let down her hair. With an awkward half-smile, Niki quickly averted her gaze to her notebook and took a shallow drag from her cigarette.
As the girl started on her fourth lap, Niki silently berated herself. This is precisely what Kathryn was talking about, this inability to act, this awkward paralysis. Niki replayed their last conversation over and over in her head. They had memorized the script at that point; the fight was nothing new. Every accusation, every plea was well-rehearsed, and they both knew how it would end, with Kathryn crying and Niki swearing to change and both of them well-aware that the play would just begin again in a week, a month, two months if they’re lucky until Kathryn finally told Niki it was over and she needed to be with someone who would be willing to invest herself, to commit, to fight for her. Niki already knew about Megan. She had known for a long time that she was losing her girlfriend. But she couldn’t bring herself to do anything. Except leave.
This was supposed to be the pivot upon which Niki could turn her life around so that, soon, she could go home and show Kathryn that, this time, she had changed. This time, she was ready.
The woods slowly made way for the beach, the primary destination for most visitors to this part of the coast. August removed his sandals in order to feel the sand beneath his feet, in between his toes. The sand here was soft to the touch, like the sand he imagined on deserted islands, fine grains molded by the ocean through the years from the harsh cliffs, sole vestiges of grand precipices now reduced to transitory castles made by children who derive half their fun from watching their creation melt with the rising tide. If rock walls could be tapered so effectively, what would become of him?
What would become of him? Niki set aside her notebook. Another week had passed and still Niki held her poolside vigil, watching (with the utmost discretion) the girl swim her laps with the same steady determination she had when entering the water. Niki attempted to force her body to move towards the pool’s edge or to let her eyes linger on the girl when the gate squealed its greetings, to initiate a conversation, a word, a smile, a look. But, still, Niki did not speak.
The crowd at the beach distracted August from his thoughts. A frisbee drifted to a stop next to him, followed by an apologetic teenager who offered August a spot in their game. Graciously declining, August found himself utterly incapable of reflection. He watched the people playing in the surf, parents with their children, an old man with a steadily beeping metal detector, another group of teens playing volleyball sans net. August noticed that there was one girl, about his age, who stood complete motionless in the midst of the crowd, not ten feet from where August sat, staring at the ocean pensively. Her long, black hair was wrapped in a messy ponytail and she carried a red towel framing rows of black waves. He realized she had been standing there for quite some time, towel slung casually over her shoulder. As he watched, the girl dropped the towel on the sand, nudging it with her toe in order to pile it more thoroughly. Then, she began to walk out towards the water. Her pace did not waver when she reached the water’s edge, but she walked steadily on, the waves rising around her. The ocean rising to meet her did not swallow her up, but rather she became part of it, took it into herself. August rose to his feet. The girl disappeared into the sea until all August could see was her black hair floating among the waves, swaying with the ocean’s current like seaweed. August followed her, hesitantly at first, toward the ocean. As the first wave seeped across the sand and touched his feet, August breathed sharply, the cold water unexpected but not necessarily undesirable. As he paused, he saw the girl emerge from the water in front of him, her form bobbing with the swell, a part of the waves, as integral to the waves as the water itself. August walked forward, his steps battling the flow of each swell, water splashing against his body, his feet becoming accustomed to the cold, his stride becoming more confident.
Niki sat down on the edge of the pool and curled her toes over the ledge, testing the concrete border for weakness. I would walk across the surface of this water, she wrote, but the stones in my pockets keep weighing me down. She dipped her feet into the pool, watching as they became distorted through the water, rippling like a fun house mirror. Niki heard the groan of the gate, but did not look up. She stared at her water-warped legs, eerily bright next to the pool’s green light. The hushed slap of bare footsteps on concrete. A soft thud as the towel is draped across the plastic chair. Ripples sliding across the water’s surface, around her legs and on toward the other side of the pool. August dipped below an approaching wave, feeling the water rush over him toward the beach, his muscles straining against the natural flow of the tide. Niki watched the girl walk past out of her peripheral vision. She only dared look up when she knew the girl would be entirely submerged. Looking down on the underwater figure, Niki saw how her dark hair waved in the water, how her skin glowed in the artificial aquatic light, how her form shimmered softly through the watery lens. August swam steadily, eyes closed to the salty water, seeing only the vision of the girl disappearing into the waves. Niki swung her legs underwater, feeling the liquid’s cool resistance, relishing the experiential connection between the girl and herself. The girl swam two laps, one front crawl, one breast stroke. Niki looked up as she noticed the girl diverting her usual course. She shot underwater and emerged a few feet from Niki. August stopped swimming and slowly opened his eyes, shoving his wet hair away from his face. She was barely three feet from him, bobbing along with the small rolling waves, gazing at him intently. Her eyes were pale blue, vivid against her dark hair. His dark brown eyes met her pale blue. They waited. The girl smiled. Her lips curled gently upward, but it was in her eyes that the smile was truly apparent. Niki set aside her tattered notebook. “Hi.”
Masthead
| editor-in-chief | Kim Hooyboer | |
| assistant editor | Leslie Beach | |
| layout editor | Deirdre Gorman | |
| copy editors | Leslie Beach Stazh Zamkinos | |
| staff | Jullianne Ballou Meghan Carlson Avi Conant Ben Kegan Robin Lewis Dena Popova |
