FICTION
Elvis
By Mary Banks


I moved into Mr. Jones’ neighborhood when Daddy left us for a raggedy woman who was known for going around braless and stealing church women’s husbands. Anyway, me, Ma, and my little sister moved in the brick rowhouse on a Saturday evening. There was still light outside when me and sis were playing hopscotch on the baking sidewalk when we saw him, and boy, was he a sight!

Mr. Jones was on his porch conversing with some old woman who had a red bandanna tied around her head. She was the color of cream and he the color of asphalt. His skin looked like soft velvet. So smooth and rich that it looked like you could peel his skin with a razor. He was tall. So tall that he could shame the giraffe at the Baltimore Zoo. And to top it off, he had eyes the color of sun and grass mixed together.

Once we got to know him better, we would jokingly call him “the black kitty giraffe” behind his back, but he never heard us. And I doubt he would’ve cared if he had. He would’ve probably smiled his big smile, exposed his perfect teeth, and flashed his pink kitty tongue.

And, boy, could Mr. Jones talk!

He talked like a Princeton scholar. He would use words like “splendid” and “tremendous” to describe things he liked. Like the time Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Everybody was crowded around their TV, huddled like football players discussing an important game-winning play. Of course, we didn’t have one, but it didn’t matter because Mr. Jones described in minute detail everything that happened: Armstrong raising the flag, Armstrong hopping like a bunny, and Armstrong saying the now-famous quote, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

And Mr. Jones spoke with a British accent, even though he had no family in England.

He was born and raised in Baltimore City. We’d ask him why he talked like that and he’d say, “Because I do, kiddies.” And he flashed his big smile, white teeth, and pink kitty tongue.

And not only did Mr. Jones speak the Queen’s English, he could add, multiply, subtract, and divide any numbers you threw at him, like 789,647,712 times 592,758,956.

And he memorized every city, capital, and country in the entire world.

And he had a photographic memory. If you showed him a page from a book, he could recite the passage verbatim.

And he was a walking encyclopedia. If we had a trivia question, we would knock on his door, and he would look at us with those cat eyes and give us the answer.

Mr. Jones was the smartest man I known.

But all those things I mentioned weren’t his best talent.

Mr. Jones’ best talent was reading people or predicting the future—whatever you want to call it. He discovered the gift at age 10, when a White man came to kill his mother. I know you probably think that I’m pulling your leg, but I’m not. Mr. Jones, who towered over his mother at the time, was dribbling his basketball on the sidewalk when the White killer man demanded to see his mother. As the White man was talking, Mr. Jones felt needles repeatedly stabbing him in the gut. They weren’t real needles, of course, but that’s how it felt—like sharp edges digging into his epidermis.

Anyway, Mr. Jones wanted to throw up the bacon-and-cheese sandwich he ate earlier at Melba’s Place—his mama gave him a treat for his birthday. He trembled and shouted, “No, you can’t see Mama!” Years later, we found out that the White man was a serial killer stalking and preying on impoverished Negro women and children; in the newspaper articles, he was dubbed “The Ghost.” But at the time, nothing about the White man suggested this, but Mr. Jones knew those pangs in his stomach meant something … killer, killer, killer! So Mr. Jones told the White man that his mother was long dead and gone, and the White man called him a nigger bastard who deserved to be beat to a pulp and Mr. Jones called the White man a devil and told him to get off his damn porch. Then his mama came down the stairs, demanding to know what the commotion was, but by this time the White killer man had disappeared like an apparition.

Where was I?

Mr. Jones was brilliant!

He read novels and plays and the Bible and magazines and newspapers. I would watch him as he sat on his porch, surrounded by newspapers with the sun kissing his ebony skin. To me, it looked like he received newspapers from all over the country: Los Angeles, Texas, New York, Newark, Richmond, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

Mr. Jones told me the first time he saw a newspaper, he was intrigued by all those words against that white texture. The smoothness and smell of the paper made him feel that he entered a magical world, where there were no broken-down water fountains for Colored children and pristine fountains for White children, no not being able to try on shirts and pants and shoes at the major department stores downtown, and no signs that read, “Whites only. No niggers allowed.”

During his childhood, Mr. Jones was a big fan of The Baltimore Afro-American. He would read about what was going on in the community and the nation, who was getting married, who was promoted, and who became the firsts of their race. And even then, he instantly knew who was guilty and who was innocent. Like the time, he saw the Afro photograph of Eddie, the bald man, who lived up the street from him, under the headline “Murder Suspect.” Mr. Jones knew he was innocent. A voice told him. It said, Jones, that man is innocent. The guilty man is Corey, the cook at Melba’s Place. Mr. Jones refused to hear that voice. Corey was such a soft-spoken man. In fact, Corey always put extra onions, tomatoes, and lettuce on his hamburger. How could he do such a thing? Nonsense. But sure enough, a week later, the cook at Melba’s was the lead suspect, and Corey was let go from jail.

Mr. Jones kept hearing the voice for the next seven years—when he was writing papers for school, filling out job applications, and driving the car he paid for from his summer jobs. He heard it so much to the point that he thought he was going crazy, until he confided in his best friend, Sylvia, who moved to Baltimore from North Carolina.

She told him that he had a gift and that he should use it to help people.

Mr. Jones told Sylvia that he needed a real job, that no one would believe him to be a prophet, so he just laughed and tried to block out the voice, but fifteen years later, after jobs as an office clerk, teacher, and postal worker, Mr. Jones bought himself a commercial space. He placed a huge sign—“The Future is Yours”—in his window. Brown people with Afros walked by the storefront and wondered who the distinguished dark-skinned man reading the New York Times was. They would come in smelling like cigarettes, fruity body sprays, cocoa-butter lotion, powder, or plain funk, asking, “Who are you?” And Mr. Jones would look up from his newspaper, examine them in a second, and tell them that he was a prophet, that he could tell their future, and that he used his gift to help people, not to make money. Some would walk out of the store muttering under their breath, “That man crazy.” Others would sit down and shell out $3 to hear their fate.

And before he knew it Mr. Jones became a local celebrity.

And Mr. Bell didn’t like it.

Mr. Bell was the White palm reader who had his own shop, The Magnificent One, down the block. Within a month, he began to lose his customers once word got around about Mr. Jones. At eight in the morning, there would be a line of people—brown, white, and yellow—waiting for the tall Colored man to open his doors to The Future is Yours. And yes, the future was theirs, all right! Mr. Bell’s store had been on that block for years. And now this Mr. Jones was going to beat him—hell no! First it was affirmative action, and then it would be him out on the street eating from the garbage can, begging for food, and selling his services out on the street! And Mr. Bell would be damned if an Afro-American would make him go out of business, so he cut his rates and placed huge signs in his windows with bold letters that read, “Free Reading” and “Half Off,” but he still couldn’t outdo Mr. Jones, the superstar, who even appeared on the front page of the Baltimore Sun when he helped solve the murder case; you know the one that involved the little Colored girl found strangled with a pair of Snoopy pajama pants wrapped around her small, fragile neck.

That was huge, considering that we rarely made front page in those types of papers, unless it was to say how we Negroes were making trouble with protests and demonstrations and riots. 

Ten years passed and everything was going well for Mr. Jones.

Until he heard a disturbing voice one day.

It happened on a Sunday after church services. The voice said, You’re going to die, in a child’s voice. Mr. Jones knew he didn’t hear correctly. Who was going to die? Surely not him. But Mr. Jones heard the voice again on Wednesday. This time you’re going to die was said in an old man’s voice. The sandwich that he was eating simply sat in his stomach like a rock. The voice came a third time when he was reading a dashiki-wearing, freckled-faced young woman’s future. She wanted to know if her husband would come back after running off with her best friend. He almost told the young woman she was going to die, but he remembered that voice was for him. You’re going to die. After that day, he heard it constantly—you’re going to die—when he was reading the newspaper, eating dinner, sitting on his porch, and talking on the phone.

Mr. Jones was determined to find out how he was going to die.

He tried to convince the voice to tell him more details.

He tried tarot cards. He even went to a psychic. No answers.

Mr. Jones went to The Magnificent One as his last resort. He walked in the store wearing his brown suit and shiny black shoes. He asked Mr. Bell to read his hand, and Mr. Bell told him that he couldn’t help him, that he didn’t have the ability to read another prophet’s hand. And as Mr. Jones was walking out, he could hear Mr. Bell’s loud snickers. 

Who else could help him?

Sylvia!

“Darling, I keep hearing this voice that says, ‘You’re going to die. You’re going to die.’ What should I do?” he asked her over the phone.

“Child, we all going to die. Don’t be afraid,” she said in her thick Southern accent.

Mr. Jones felt a little better after talking to her. Why should he be afraid of death?

Death was a part of life, so he walked outside to buy the Baltimore Sun.

And as he was crossing the street, he was hit by a speeding car. Isn’t that crazy?

People couldn’t believe that Mr. Jones was stretched out in the street. The paramedics came, but it was too late. We couldn’t believe it when we heard the news from our sobbing mother.

How could Mr. Jones die? But he did.

And now I’m telling you this story to keep his legacy alive.

People from all over the city came to his funeral. It was like he was Elvis.

Our Elvis.


Mary Banks is a student in the M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts program at the University of Baltimore. In 2007, she earned a bachelor of arts degree from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She is interested in writing stories that are voice- and character-driven.





FICTION
Mr. Ganf
By Brian Moore

Since I am nearing the end of my days and my sanity is steadily slipping, I will admit to something that I have denied my while life: I killed my college roommate, Tripp, and his girlfriend, Amy, when I was 24.

Amy was an accident. I had no way of knowing that writing a scathing letter to her and mailing it to Mr. Ganf, an imaginary friend forced into retirement, would result in her disappearance. Tripp, on the other had, was completely deliberate. I wasn’t certain he would disappear as his girlfriend had when I fed the envelope to the mailbox, but I hoped he would. And, sure enough, he did.

To say I wasn’t pleased would be lying. I felt some guilt at first, but it was trifling, something akin to a fly trapped under a lampshade that futilely flaps its wings every once and while. It eventually vanished altogether.

Tripp and Amy didn’t deserve to die, which is partly why I kept this secret for the entirety of my life. I was once afraid of appearing as a monster to anybody I would tell, but I now realize a monster is exactly what I am, and denial won’t make it untrue.

Amy, as I said before, was an accident. Having not liked her in the first place (for no good reason, I’ll freely admit), I let a particularly rotten encounter with her and Tripp boil over until I had to excuse myself. When I returned to my apartment that night, I wrote her a scornful letter, never intending to actually give it to her. In it, I used my pen as a dagger, writing things that would result in her death if implemented. This, I rationalized, was my catharsis.

I had originally intended to burn the note once I finished it, but I was so proud of my composition that I found it impossible to dispose of. Unsure of what to do with it, I carefully folded it and slid it into an envelope. Bored and absentminded, I wrote “Mr. Ganf” on the front of the envelope. I found this mildly amusing at the time and put a stamp on it. Then, to complete the joke, I dropped it in the nearest mailbox.

Amy was reported missing two days later. Tripp told me what her mother told him, which was that Amy’s roommate said she never returned from her morning class. The professor who taught the class said she wasn’t present on the morning in question and that it was the first time he marked her absent that semester.

A strange concoction of emotions regarding Amy’s disappearance brewed within me. I felt a tinge of sympathy for Tripp and how afraid for Amy he was, but I experienced a sense of delight as well. Deep down, a part of me knew she was gone forever and celebrated the fact that I would never have to deal with her again. It didn’t take long, however, for me to connect my letter to Mr. Ganf with Amy’s disappearance. The part of me that was so certain she was gone was equally sure that it was Mr. Ganf that had removed Amy from my life.

For a little while, I was certain I had gone mad. Was it possible that Amy had gone missing because of a letter I mailed to an imaginary person? During this time, Tripp hardly existed to me. It wasn’t until after he, too, disappeared that I realized he was absent for much of that time. This makes sense to me, in retrospect, since he seemed to become more maddening than ever about a week later. What few housekeeping habits he had before were abandoned. I have vivid memories of coming home to an apartment choked with the acrid stench of body odor and rotten food. Since most of my time was devoted to homework and studying, dirty dishes were hardly ever attended to. (We didn’t have a dishwasher.) I began tallying every little thing he did that irritated me and decided I would mail another letter to Mr. Ganf after I drew the hundredth mark.

I am almost ashamed to say so, but it didn’t take long for the tallying to become fun. Every day after school, I rushed home to be with Tripp just so I could add more tallies to the list. I even began skipping my last class of the day to get home earlier. It took me a week to seal Tripp’s fate.

The note I wrote to Tripp was considerably longer than Amy’s. (Five pages longer, if you must know.) I elaborated on all one hundred tally marks I made against him. (After all these years, I only remember the hundredth one, which was finding his toenail clippings on my living room carpet.) I typed it up on my laptop after I finished writing it to make it more formal, then printed it out on some fancy paper my grandparents gave me as a going-away-to-college gift. I even savored the taste of the bitter material on the back of the envelope after I slipped the letter into it.

The walk to the mailbox was one of the best walks I’ve ever had in my life. The stars sparkled in the night sky, singing a silent chorus of jubilation to accompany my steps along the sidewalk. The air was still and clear, free of the usual city musk. Putting the letter in the mailbox was every bit as gratifying as I hoped it would be. My only regret was that I couldn’t do it again.
   
I wasn’t surprised when Tripp’s bed was empty two mornings later. The following days were like breathing fresh air through new lungs. I tidied up the apartment, fixing everything the way I wanted it. I put most of Tripp’s things into boxes and piled them on his bed. I kept what few items of his that I wanted.
   
The ramifications of Tripp’s disappearance didn’t affect me until almost a week later, when the police pulled me out of class to question me. Though they never said I was a suspect, it was quite clear to me that I was being investigated. Of course, there was no evidence suggesting I was involved with either Amy’s or Tripp’s disappearance, so I was left alone. I was certain, however, that their eye was still fixed on me, so I decided not to mail any more letters to Mr. Ganf. And to this day, I haven’t.
   
I’m confessing because I’m afraid. Maybe by telling the truth, I can set things right with whoever or whatever will decide my fate. I don’t know what will happen to me after I die, whether I’ll be judged by God or simply rot in the ground. Frankly, neither one of those sounds bad to me. I just hope Mr. Ganf won’t be there to take me away.


Brian Moore is a 24-year-old Towson University senior majoring in English with the hope of writing for a living. He mostly writes science fiction and horror.




FICTION
Story of the Lakeside
By Miranda Pfeiffer


That winter, you fucked around. Each one of your sweaty admirers fell in love, and you, poorly dressed for cold in your tube top and torn overalls, washed about the reckless ranks of kneeling men with brute sensitivity. I was paying attention. Your island-nation emotions—your perfect shared September—passed you by. No longer did you and Cameron, despondent and sexed, hunch loose-legged and romantic in the front of our sculpture class.

At boarding school, secrets don’t keep. You ricocheted back from winter break seeming taller, showing bones. I’d heard mentions. It wasn't just the coke, Marie; you were prettier with little wrists.

I didn’t know what fucking you would be like. While the thought of you obsessed me, I wasn’t even on your radar. I can’t recall a single conversation between us. What could I, so boring and insufficient, be to a thrift-store beauty queen like you? I noticed when your nails were bitten bloody and when you botched your black hair—the way it bounced more. You were pretty in a new way: Easy for an ugly fuck but hard to know.

I stood at the front of the studio with my arms crossed and my hands on my elbows. We only knew how to make personal paintings. I told them the train tracks were very important to me, just really really important. It was a short critique.

I crossed my legs on a desk behind the group, watching you carry your painting backwards. You limply hammered one nail into the wall.

We tilted our heads from side to side. Patricia, our teacher, asked you for context. From the colorless haze at the painting’s rim, I smelled the warm vapor of afternoon rain. Speak clearly, Patricia said, but you were class quiet, like always. The skinny side, helpless and dark, in crystal sweet murmur told us. The last time you saw your father was near the flattest part of Kansas by a lakeside. You shifted your weight; it was hard to speak about it. From just your voice, I swore I felt those same grey clouds forming. Then, how did it fit? You told us about your mother and she was so much like my mom, a lonely ghost, so sad. Poor kiddo. Poor you.

“That’s all right, Marie,” Patricia said.

I held my breath. Even though we expected you could tell us beautiful sad things, we were still surprised by our tenderness. I was a lie. My own voice could never be so light and helpless.

When breathing became gruff and loud, I left class to hide in the bathroom. Kneeling on the floor, I gnashed my teeth. “Fuck fuck fuck,” I moaned, biting hard on my arm’s muscle. My skin was gross flesh, just fleshy layers. I pulled ’til it broke. “Stupid stupid,” I sucked the slight blood. My breathing became fast and uncontrollable. Laure came in to pee. She understood, even without seeing the bite marks. From the cool distance of the mirror she stroked her dreadlocks and said, “It’s totally OK. It happens.”



In boarding school you fuck just about anywhere people aren't likely to see you. Robert and I, like most, had sex in the practice rooms. If some musicians found out you were in their workspace—and there was only one reason you would be there—they might rat you out. Before she had her breakdown, the clarinetist, Liz something, caught us leaving the practice rooms one night. She looked stern, “Excuse me, but these rooms are for working!” To which Robert and I thought of many good replies, but only later. The college musicians gave out the key to their room because they empathized. They knew we needed it.

Initially, I liked fucking in those rooms. Most had big mirrors on the door so that the musicians could see their strums. I liked to watch my hands too. I’d be on my back, legs up and staring at the wall, when suddenly I would hear the familiar voices of another couple in the next room. After in-room curfew, the girls would talk about it. I might skip down the hall and say to Leah, “Yeah, I heard you with Josh Degarcino in the next room.” “Oh, I thought that was you!” she’d reply.

I was waiting for sex with Robert to become exciting. He was tall and so pretty, with clean skin and obvious blue eyes. I saw Lolita at the on-campus theater in the fall and thought Robert bore a striking resemblance to Sue Lyon. I wanted to feed him thousands of Thousand-Island soaked sandwiches. I’d never eaten a Rueben before. I’d tie him to the practice room doorknob with my mother’s silk scarves. Later, we’d hold hands on the bench swing. We laughed about the accidents, when I would take my habits too far beyond that established threshold, bite his lip open so the blood would spurt back into my mouth. I can still taste those moments. I didn’t mind what he boasted to the boys about us after curfew. Following sex, I’d look at myself in that practice room mirror.

But a few months later, I longed for beds and covers and cushions. Marie, you should have lived in Monaham Hall. It didn’t suit you to have lived in all-girl Deifanbach, not that you wanted to sneak around with the high-school boys, anyway. Monaham girls—I was one—had wild reputations. The hall was composed mostly of modern dancers and a few visual artists. We lived above two male floors. There were many opportunities for mischief in Monaham. Though the RAs never checked the tapes, we’d ghost costume cover our bodies in patternless bedsheets and creep down the stairwells at two in the morning. A boy’s hall smelled like their towels.

If there was a random room check, I had to climb into the closet and hold my breath. We’d fall asleep in Robert’s top-bunk twin bed. I always twisted my arm funny so that by 5 a.m. when I left I’d feel sleepless and sore.

We did it once in the riverbed at Washington Park. It was maybe the best we ever did it. I bit his palms as he pushed my face and he smeared Carolina red clay across my nose. I would have stayed there long hours waiting for night cold to come, but our opening was at 8. I didn't have time to shower. Maybe you remember. Maybe you smelled it on me.

Or was it already chilly? Was the ground cold?

I don't know where you had sex, Marie, but it wasn't near the rest of us. Probably they laid you down on some brown mattress cradling your jagged pelvis in the back of the Mexican pool bar down on Wahtown Ave. I’ve seen pictures of you there.

Robert was not attracted to you; he couldn’t see past your hairy legs and pine nut teeth. Kitty didn’t like you either. When we saw you at parties you always looked dizzy, not sloppy but sleepy. I did well with boys.

Some Saturday when it was near winter cold, Kitty, Julian Wood, Bear and I went to a place Julian called the Magic Parking Lot. To get there, you walk past the church on Lommond Street and cross under 85. You get to one of those PODS storage parking lots. Behind that are woods and then a river and on that river there is a tunnel and you go through that dark tunnel with the water running through it and come out on a glassy still pond. A few hours later, we emerged from the forest. There was a policeman standing outside the gates of the parking lot. I was so stoned I could hardly focus. Julian pocketed his Exxon-bought corncob pipe and nudged me forward. I stumbled but said hello to the policeman, smiling wide. He smiled back and then we walked on to school. It was almost suppertime. That night, we ate big bowls of Cinnamon Toast Crunch in the dining hall.

I skimmed over long emails from home, pretending that because I didn’t read them I didn’t have to feel the burden of my mother’s insomniac anxieties. I felt alone in those emails, but in class I felt like a bee in a swarm.

After leaving, you couldn’t feel right in the place where you came from. It didn’t take long for you to want to say you came from Winston-Salem instead. We hated our old high schools with their dress codes and soccer games and our boring friends. Not that we felt secure in Winston. Class was ten hours a day Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Ballerinas had breakdowns daily. Everybody was nuts; we were all on the verge. Our instructors were wolves.

Patricia would rip up drawings right in front of us. There was nothing we could do. “Being a bitch will get you nothing in the real world,” she’d say in crit. She liked you a lot, Marie. It seems silly now to give her so much power.

When Robert and I broke up, I built a fort out of my bedsheets and only let Kitty come inside. I kept Absolut Mandarin in my sewing box.

If someone was willing to help you get it, maybe one of the college boys, it was best to get hard liquor in large plastic containers. Alcohol in boarding school was precious. You never knew when you’d need it and when your next opportunity would be. It was all right if you were drunk in your academics and while there were varying opinions on intoxication during arts classes, most think it’s OK to be stoned. Drinks were drunk quick but if you went to a party and you didn’t want to drink beer, you might share a one-and-a-half liter of $6 white wine and sip it out of the same plastic cups for the keg. I never paid for cups.

Courtney Hernandas covered my ass one night. “You smell like booze,” she said, and gave me Sour Patch candy to mask it. If your breath was strong enough, they could quarantine entire halls. Courtney laughed as I stumbled, rolling around on her shag carpet and linoleum, singing, “Arrest this man he talks in maths, he buzzes like a fridge, he’s like a detuned radio-oh.” The RAs knew plenty.

“I heard about that,” Julian said Monday night, as we twisted our legs together on the model stand after drawing class, lingering before curfew. The weekend before, at some college musician’s basement, I had burned a square into my leg with a cigarette.

My Film and Literature teacher, Dr. Borland, was my favorite adult. His tattoo could be seen through his collared button-down shirts: a two-headed dragon that spanned the length of both arms. “Don’t smoke,” he’d say. The last class before Thanksgiving break, I told him I was desperate for the days off. “I need mental rest,” I said. He recommended wine. Although there would be no chance of my drinking alcohol while being home with my mother, in his British accent, that sounded fucking amazing. The following week, I turned in a ten-page handwritten essay on Godard’s A Bout de Souffle, to which he replied with such sensitive care that I rubber-cemented his lengthy response in my diary.

One night, Julian came to my window and stripped down to his underwear right there in front of all the other windows. The leaves blew horizontally. “Julian!” I screamed then, but the night he took me down the dorm stairs to tell me, to confess with dog-like sincere eyes, I didn’t say much. I was distracted by the many ants crawling in the dim flickering light. They moved dreamy slow.

Premature epitaphs cluttered the school. Lizzette Rosen spray-painted her name on the swing, and my roommate hid concrete spiders in the bushes. Kitty grew herbs behind the dance studios. My favorite, contributed by an anonymous writer, was carved into my Earth Science desk:

Elise Millot
likes butt sex a lot
I love her a lot
she’s so fucking hot
give her a shot
call her a lot
732 746 8792

Sometimes my dorm smelled like cucumber and vomit. I never identified the source.

In the spring, Julian, Kitty and I started working on a film we’d never finish. After some half-hearted incidents, we attempted a three-way monogamous relationship. Julian’s roommate was jealous.

“It has to be that early,” he said. Kitty and I were unenthusiastic about filming at six in the morning. Still winter sick, camera in hand, I climbed the wobbly bookshelf in the studio. Touching the ceiling, I left loogies on the gray pipe near the clock. Kitty made cardboard shoes and showed us her solo in Spring Dance. The campus was silent. We took off our clothes and played Rachmaninoff on the record player. As we swayed, I stained our six lips with red red lipstick. In a shoebox, I still have the pink filter of our shared cigarette.

Those were hasty mornings blurred by selfish decisions.

It was around that time that I saw you in the sculpture studio weaving together long strands of fabric. Paige Lowing told me you were making a puppet of your brain. It was going to have electrically illuminated fish swimming near the cerebellum. It remained unfinished. Though I never saw you turn in one completed piece, in early stages, even without electrics, your work had a glow.

I spent spring break at home, feeling bored and quiet.

Like you, my mother is also dark and beautiful. She sees no rewards, no comebacks. She doesn’t laugh. She leaves me tired. Save the kill and consumption, I think of her like you, like a spider. No hesitation; everything you touched died. It wasn’t that you did it for fun. It’s not like you enjoyed it. When I heard about her, I always imagined that your own mom was really really fat.

I wanted to trap that slow numbing sensation. Off campus, before curfew, Robert and I would walk the train tracks that led to the abandoned tobacco factories; the smokestacks spoke the old words of that world, small-town Winston-Salem. We’d accidentally make out, falling to our knees near the cat bones and beer cans, only to silently walk home before curfew. Sometimes, we would run into other kids from school. You went there too. I heard about the warehouse with the homeless guys. I don’t know what I would have done. I wonder if you ever got scared of scary things.

Occasionally, your face was your voice and your clean clean sweat. Other days, you were too much your bad teeth, your puffy lids.

In April, before eight-thirty, Winston-Salem is orange and hazy. All the chimney birds circle round. After sunset, it’s ink quiet. The buildings become their shadows. Kitty biked fast but I closed my eyes on the downhill before the junkyard, trying to like the slow moving snapshot of wind on my face.

Lizzette told me about it. She was peeing on the third-floor bathroom the night you stormed in screaming. The RAs surrounded and you, loud and bold, threw your shoes at their face, barricaded yourself in the stall for hours. You howled on loop, “I want to talk to my mom. I want to talk to my mother.” Your little voice echoed and bounced through every room in Deifanbach. We had no explanation for your behavior.

When you returned a week later, nobody talked about that night, at least not to your face. By summer break you had gained back the weight.


I was swimming in the cold water on the warm summer night I got arrested. I was drinking free beer and flirting with boys until Kitty got angry and hit me in the face with a glass bottle. It was awkward because all the macho men in their board shorts, so different from the artists with which we were familiar, tried to sweetly touch my bloody shoulder. “What dude hit you?” I wanted to kiss every one of those boys but answered voicemails from Robert instead. From the sand’s edge, I saw the Milky Way. I saw the moon rise.

The morning after, Kitty's parents picked us up. I called my dad. My mom was furious, especially because I told him first. The phone rang all night. My grandfather called to tell me how selfish I was. “You've set her back,” he said. I listened in the bathroom of Kitty's beach house, tenderly prodding my swollen-shut black eye. When I got home, the bedroom that I had not lived in for a year was an explosion, every private space unsheathed. My face had not healed. A week later I crashed my mom’s car. It was the last summer I ever came home.

The first day back you weren’t in class. We wondered but waited until Paige Lowing told us: Because of your poor attendance and multiple violations of school code, the instructors had kicked you out.

For all the time that has passed, I still think of that year and me or even you. When I write it right, it’s too painful to pursue because I realize I haven’t changed. I feel like I did in that critique, like a failure, like something bad and inevitably my fault is closing in on me from behind. Though I have some insight on the past, if I could act out what I’ve learned, I wouldn’t need to write it down at all.

When I write it wrong, I'm living in my nostalgia. Despite the lovely image of you at the front of the studio, despite my jealousy and real adolescent inadequacy, the story says nothing. They really were good times, weren’t they, Marie?

Miranda Pfeiffer is a junior majoring in general fine arts with a printmaking concentration at the Maryland Institute College of Art. In addition to writing short stories, she enjoys writing and illustrating comics. Her comics are sold at Atomic Books in Hampden and Normals Books in Waverly. More of her writing can be viewed at www.mirandapfeiffer.com.




POEM
At Druid Hill Lake
By Lindsey Citron


it's Easter, and wet
webs are leaking like
spit from the pointed
tongues of the gates.
“Prime real estate,” I
scoff, because the
spiders aren’t home to
hear it.

A woman, with hair the color
of an old metal rake, shovels
cold mutton from a plastic
bag into her mouth. She sits
on the park bench “because
she has no dining room,” you
shrug, and look away because
it isn’t funny.


Originally from Baltimore, Lindsey Citron is a Bryn Mawr graduate and in her sophomore year at New York University. She is majoring in English literature and creative writing. In the past year, Lindsey's poems were published in two literary magazines, Grub Street and The Preface.




POEM
Mummies
By Amber Moyles


I’ve been thinking about the way
she was erected from the trash of him.
Fingers transparent and plaster packed.
She grew cataracts like a horse grows blinders. but how I pined for her.
 
The same way the building frets:
I shake to think or fear
those concrete extenders break
from her hips to brush brick that blushes
 
And the static in between the two
would molt and stick. forever?
And I’ve been thinking about laughter,
Those frigid toes that tap
 
Deeper than the scratches drag through sulfured water.
I think about the every-limb
The cutter who carves air from an oiled other.
Like the poles that never meet eachother.
 
Like the space between
A woman and her brother.


Amber Moyles is a senior studying interdisciplinary sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. This poem is based on a short film by Zlatan Vukosavljevic.




POEM
Sonnet
By Edgar Kunz

This is not a poem. It will never find itself
wandering the wide halls of literature, never
read alongside the love poems of Ovid,
or the lofty steeples of Wordsworth’s abbey.

In fact, it will probably join the long list
of things you’ve forgotten, jotted down
next to the birthplace of Millard Fillmore
and the inventor of the convection oven,

each stanza a little room shuttered
against the light of memory. That is where
I am today, laboring in the dark, arranging
and re-arranging the heavy furniture

of language—waiting for the part where the
raindrops sing like piano notes on the roof.


Edgar Kunz is a senior creative writing major at Goucher College.



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