2016 North Texas Review

FACULTY ADVISOR
Raina Joines
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Jennifer Buchan
ASSISTANT EDITORS
Jake Ferguson
Kristy Mayo
BOOK DESIGNER
Kelly Stark
PRODUCTION EDITOR
Holly Kerr
ART DIRECTOR
Megan Rhoby Dale
EVENT COORDINATOR
Craig Green
WEBMASTER
Sebastian Barnes
FICTION EDITOR
Brandon Ohl
ASSISTANT FICTION EDITORS
Jayd Newbold
Carlos Roque
POETRY EDITORS
Devin Hardin (Fall)
SamTjahjono (Spring)
ASSISTANT POETRY EDITORS
Bria Jones
Brittany Moore
ESSAY EDITOR
Tarah Dykeman
ASSISTANT ESSAY EDITORS
JessicaYoung
Hayley Bond
READERS
Rachele Blick
Lauren Bowman
William Capper
Tom Cook
Leta Cunningham
Kimberly Delgadillo
Samiee Espinoza
Cynthia Garcia
Mikesha Guice
Bonnie Hittle
Kyle Killion
David Oostenbrug
Sara Pekny
Collin Stephenson
ScierraWaldron
MarissaWeddle
BryanYalta
north texas review
STAFF
2016

Thank you to the UNT students who submitted their work for this
publication. We especially thank you for sharing your creativity
and working with our staff to make the 2016 North Texas Review
possible. We loved getting to know you, and we’re honored to share
your work.
We would also like to thank those who have supported this year’s
publication. Thank you to the Student Service Fee Committee for
making this publication possible. Thanks also go to Debbie Stevens
and Jean Roelke. We would especially like to thank Raina Joines, our
faculty advisor without whom this journal could not happen. Her
clarity of vision and persistence inspired the entire staff to produce
our best work.
The Editor-in-Chief would like to thank Kelly Stark for her
perseverance and immense talent. She also thanks Jake Ferguson
and Kristy Mayo for their tireless dedication and integrity. They
daily went beyond the job title of Assistant Editor. It would’ve been
impossible to make this journal without them.
And finally, we would like to thank the entire North Texas Review
staff. Your tenacity and passion drove this publication forward. Thank
you all for your time, your hard work, and for the late nights spent
reading and editing. Your work shines in these pages.
north texas review
THANKS

A Pandemonium
rosieNINESLING
and I am balancing bobby pins on the tips of my fingers while
my sister rattles the locked door knob, there’s no fire but her voice
speaks flames, tongues of red that echo off the tiles and slowly burn
out,
delicately folding me in smoky haze
and I let the faucet run away with itself and it gladly agrees and
I crack open the window because I’m still learning to breathe.
And hell to it all when I turn on the radio and my sister’s still
screaming and maybe the house really is burning down, but I
wouldn’t know;
the only balance I’ve ever felt is at the edges of my hands,
so I pin my hair back and I go.
Poem
01

02
Photograph
H is for Hill
dejaDeMOSS

03
Two to Six Minutes
emilyCORNELL
W
e were always asked if we would stay together. What about
when you go off to school? Are you guys going to try? Is it
worth it?
It was simple; it was easy. The answer was always yes.
When we met, it was our senior year of high school. As much
as I would’ve loved to believe I was strong and independent,
I still had a fear of crying whenever I was called on in class or given
too much attention in front of an audience. I had—and, actually,
still currently have—an obsession with the Percy Jackson and the
Olympians books and all the wacky Greek myths. The walls of my
room were covered in posters of cute British boy-band types.
But, sometime around then, in stepped Dean.
Most people can’t pronounce his name on the first go—it’s actually
Constantinos—and he had the weirdest fascination with making
his own chainmail in his room. Whenever he was embarrassed or
clueless as to what to say, he’d chuckle to himself. It was the most
endearing thing. When he was little, his family moved to Greece,
and he still remembers the car ride he was on when his father broke
the news to him. He told me about how his father went over the
different colors in Greek with him as they drove down the highway.
I asked him to prom in Greek, as nervous as a girl subjecting
herself to public humiliation in a foreign language could be. Just
like that, we were inseparable.
Biologically, there are three types of tears—all with their own
purpose. Basal tears exist to lubricate your eyes as well as to
nourish and protect them. Then there’s the reflex tear, which rids
your eye of irritants like wind, smoke, gross onions, and that kind
of thing. Reflex tears are there for protection as well, but current
research suggests that they might actually be chemically different
Essay

04
than basal tears. When put to the test under a microscope, basal
tears will split and crack like tree branches, while reflex tears—
especially those caused by close contact with onions—will form a
clustered, snowflake design.
Last on the list is the kind of tears that everyone has probably
experienced: emotional tears. The average length of time a woman
cries in one session is about six minutes, opposed to
the two to four minutes that men might experience. But, then
again, these are averages.
We had the perfect day planned.

It was raining and a gray haze was cast over the Houston skyline,
but my spirits couldn’t be dampened. I was back for one more day
of our winter break. I was in a car that smelled like comfort, holding
Dean’s strong, tan hand. Even the traffic into the city couldn’t stop
my loud, scatterbrained talking and his chuckling at my assertions
about the cars around us.
Classic rock was playing, which was exactly how it always was in his
car. Everything felt how it was supposed to.
Niko Niko’s was white and blue and incredibly Greek. A black fence
encased the restaurant, and the greenest shrubs I’d ever seen in
the city fought their way around the metal enclosure. Despite the
horrendous cold outside, the atmosphere of the restaurant was warm.
“We’re definitely going in there next,” I said, pointing to a little
building next to the restaurant. Magician capes beckoned from the
storefront window and drapery hung whimsically above them. It
looked fantastic.
Dean put his jacket over my shoulders. “If you want to. I’m not sure
it’ll be what you’re expecting though,” he said.
Soon we were eating the best gyros in downtown Houston and
pretending to have a dynamic conversation in Greek. Well, maybe
the pretending was on my part. I just nodded along to his fast-paced
soliloquy and interjected the four words I could remember how to say.
CORNELL

05
After I was outrageously stuffed, we hit up the magic shop. Once
inside, we overheard a woman at the counter complaining about
the lack of white candles in stock, and the cashier explaining how
an influx of black candles had arrived in their place by accident. I
realized my mistake, but we couldn’t back out.
“Five minutes good?” I whispered.
He nodded. “Once around the store—”
“And then quietly slip out.”
So, that’s what we did. We passed by a shelf cluttered with a
jumble of dusty books and did a little bit of rearranging with the
Greek statues on another display. Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t
vandalizing anything. We simply moved them back to their correct
places above their respective nameplates—how can you mix up Ares
and Hades?—before ducking out, giggling furiously to ourselves.
“I just wanted a cape,” I said, laughing into his shoulder.
“I just wanted to see your reaction,” he said. “You were expecting
Harry Potter, weren’t you?”
Once at the car, I socked him in the arm.
He smiled down at me. “Ah, but you love me.”
I rolled my eyes. “Let’s get going. It’s freezing out here.”
Sixty-five percent of crying sessions for women result in sobbing,
while sobbing only occurs in six percent of situations for men.
The definition of sobbing is to “cry noisily, making loud, convulsive
gasps.” So, essentially, the majority of times women cry statistically
result thusly, while men have a low statistical rate of the same kind
of escalation.
These are things you don’t really think about until you see them
firsthand.
“You want to watch an episode before I leave?” Dean asked.
essay

06
I nodded, sitting down on the fluffy maroon blanket at the foot
of my bed, which always left red fuzz around my room and on my
clean laundry. He closed my matching curtains, sending a reddish
hue over the room.
You could sense the melancholy in the apartment as if it had a
physical presence. It felt as if it was sitting there on the bed with us.
The ever-present friend of a long-distance couple.
This moment was a little over a year after our black magic
adventure, and two hours remained for us for that particular spring
break. Each time I glanced at the clock, it seemed to be playing a
trick on me. How can time move so slow on a normal, lonely day
but move so quickly on this day? Mopey thoughts that weren’t
altogether original flooded my brain. Before that Saturday, there
had been exactly eight separate, equally gut-wrenching times I
looked into his eyes and pretended I didn’t see them fill with tears.
This moment would be the ninth.
The episode of Archer ended with a few half-hearted laughs. He
grabbed for his bags, and I dutifully picked up the pillow and blanket,
trying not to pick a fight about being able to carry anything heavier.
It was a silent walk to his car. There were a lot of pathetic arm
squeezes on my part and, for an interesting turn of events, I was
repeating good things over in my head. Only two more months! You
can call and Skype and write letters. You have boxes of mac’n’cheese
in the apartment! You’re doing great.
But then, as usual, it didn’t take long to pack the car.
His dark eyes seemed even darker when he asked, “Do you want to
sit for a little bit?”
I nodded, already on my way to the passenger side. The car always
felt like the summers when we would go out with friends on
downtown adventures or to the beach or just out to Whataburger
at midnight in our sleepy little hometown. Even the hula dancer,
lovingly placed on his dash, and the old Pink Floyd car freshener
held my warmest affections.
CORNELL

07
“This is always so hard,” he said, not looking me in the eyes. “It’s
hard to leave you and it’s hard to be with you.”
I didn’t notice at first, but I was stroking his arm. It was like I knew I
had to do something to comfort him, but I didn’t know what. Once,
a few months back, he told me that I’d “broken him”—which was
all in jest and confessed with a crooked smile—since, before me, he
had only cried at The Last Samurai and his grandparents’ funeral.
Broken him. The simple phrase, coupled with the terror and softness
in his eyes, made something within me deteriorate. Should I have
felt proud that he has so much of himself invested in me? Because
of me, he was in agony. All I knew was that I wanted him to not
have to keep wiping at his eyes.
He moved my hand.
“Please don’t,” he said. He made eye contact for just a second before
looking back out his window and over the rest of the rooftop
parking lot. “I thought this would be getting easier but it’s not. It’s
getting harder.”
My breath caught in my mouth. I’ve heard the term “color draining”
before, but it felt more like a tingling in my cheeks. The draining
happens more on the inside of the body, right below the windpipe
and next to the heart.
His face softened. “Oh, no, don’t look like that.” He picked up my
hand and let me rub my thumb over his—my coping mechanism to
keep from crying. Even when I’m alone, I can see my thumb going
and going and going.
But sometimes it doesn’t work.
Jesse Bering once said, “Crying seems to elicit compassion and
guilt, and that [crying] itself may be an evolved mechanism to save
relationships in distress,” which makes sense.
“I think we need to take some time apart,” he tried to say, tears
falling. His brown eyes had swollen into red-lined ones. Hot tears
scattered over his cheeks, trailing down to his chin, dripping off one
by one. His hands were balled into fists.
essay

08
Emotional tears.
In ten seconds flat, I felt as if someone had stuck a dull knife into
my side and then left the blade to slide out on its own. My lungs
were void of breath, as if a heavyweight champion had socked me a
good one right between the collarbones—and I ached just the same.
My eyes burned with wistful thoughts like Dear God, please let that
be exactly what happened because I would be able to heal faster
from that.
“Oh, God, Emily, I’m so sorry.”
Silence.
“What are you thinking?” he whispered, staring at me.
I hiccupped—I couldn’t really help it. “Did you read the letters I
sent you?”
I found a statistic for the worst sight I’ve ever witnessed. Supposedly
six percent of the times that men cry, they escalate to sobbing. Dean
threw his head back against the headrest, tears seeping from the
crease where he was squeezing his eyes closed, fighting it. His dark
brown hair flopped over his forehead, wet with tears from running
his hands through it.
“I never opened the one that said When You’re Rethinking Us.” His
voice cracked.
On our second Valentine’s Day together, I sent over no less than
thirty Open When cards as his gift. I thought they were sweet and
would ease the soreness of me being upstate for school. That card
in particular was unbearable to write. So, instead of relentlessly
repeating all the reasons why, I simply grabbed a notecard and wrote:
Don’t.
“I need to go,” I said, climbing out of the car. He quickly followed
me out onto the windy rooftop parking lot. We stood there in front
of each other for a second before he inched closer to me, arms
extended.
CORNELL

09
Without thinking, I stuck my hand out to shake his, stopping him
in his tracks. All I heard was a desperate “Fuck.”
I grabbed him then, sobbing into his shirt.
I didn’t let go until I was already late for work.
In all my time researching tears, I never found out what I wanted
to learn. None of the articles I pulled up in my room told me the
percentage of sessions that went past sobbing. Or how many times
crying could turn into walking down a hallway, doubled over, not
having the strength to push open a door. Or how many people
understood the weeping that gave way to sliding to the kitchen
floor, watching tears splash in miniature puddles on fake wood,
while a dinner beeped in the microwave above them.
Or how many resulted from heartbreak.
Lauren Bylsma once commented, “Crying, as well as other sorts of
intense emotional experience, can help highlight for us what’s
important and what we need to focus on.”
Seeing your priorities through your tears can be uplifting.
Somewhere—deep in there—you will find that you care about
ideas that are wonderful and worthwhile. You care about holding
on to the person you thought you wanted a life with; you care about
losing a friendship. Through those tears, however many that need
to fall, you’ll find yourself.
It can take weeks or months, and numerous nights of waking up at
2:00 in the morning to channel heavy sobs into your pillow. Little
by little, the basket will weave itself back together. The shards of
your heart will wear down and only leave a dull throb when you
touch the edges.
Sometimes letting go can bring relief.
All it takes is two to six minutes of vulnerability.
essay

10
Good Idea
justinHAZELTON
Poem
“I think it’s time you saw someone.”
The light bulb disappears into my mouth,
only the base sticks out.
“…met a girl.”
The bulb turns on—
visible through my cheeks, unspoken words swim like small fish.
“...you’d be a great father.”
I bite down.

11
Fiction
Guilt
anthonyRUSSELL
L
oose gravel lifts up from underneath the bicycle tires on a
newly paved road in some soon-to-be-overgrown suburb.
My father rides ahead of two similarly-aged boys down
a modest hill. The front wheel of his brown Raleigh bicycle
collides with a patch of particularly uneven road, lifting his
back tire up and sending him flying over the handlebars. For
the brief moment that his body is suspended in mid-air, my
father can see all the world in front of him. It is a feeling not
unlike being thrown from a cliff.
In the same soon-to-be-overgrown suburb a few years later,
my mother sits atop a brick ledge on the backyard patio of her
mother’s home. The smell of petrichor and cigarette smoke
lingers. My mother’s Border Collie unexpectedly leaps onto her
lap, sending her backwards off the ledge toward the pavement
below. For the brief moment that her body is hanging upside
down between earth and sky, my mother sees all the world in
front of her. It is a feeling not unlike being thrown from a cliff.
Many years later, my parents stand hand in hand at a church in
some overgrown suburb. My mother wears a white gown from a
nearby secondhand store, while my father wears a powder-blue
tuxedo. They both stare intently into a camera as if they can
see the whole world in front of them, in its lens. The moment
is immortalized in a photograph displayed in an anatomically
inaccurate heart design, placed inside a photo album that I
have lost.

12
Photograph
Lost
ameliaMICKELSEN

13
Essay
Linger
jayaWAGLE
W
e like to linger on that sunny rectangle, our bodies ensconced
in the warmth of the sun. We stand under the leaky canopy
of a chaiwalla, waiting for the downpour to stop.
I cringe every time I hear someone ahead of me order a “chai tea
latte” at the local Starbucks. See T-shirts scribbled with witty
sentences—”I live for the thrill of flight.” I thought I could find
happiness by escaping my old life. But I miss my mother’s nagging,
my father’s rules, my sister’s whining. My tired eyes observed the
curlicue highway ramps and barren trees along the roads with an
inexplicable sadness. To sit cross-legged on the mat, breathe in and
out rhythmically for ten minutes. Drinking Red Label every night.
Sense the snakes hiding under innocuous garbage bags.
The drawer in my nightstand is filled with nebulizer paraphernalia,
transparent tubes of Albuterol and Budesonide, hand lotion, and
odd bits of jewelry. The brass pots that sat on a ledge above my
Aajji’s gas stove I claimed as my own. I have witnessed them inhale
the sweet aromas of my Aajji’s ginger-cardamom chai, my Baba’s
spicy mutton curry.
We stand, alone, on the edge of two worlds. We wait for the tea
leaves to seep and settle on the bottom, for the water to turn a
deep, mud red. A bead of sweat trickles down my back. I hope the
earthquake is not a foreshadowing of our married life to come.

14
Sculpture
Giotto
isabellaTHORPE

16
Poem
appetition: a prayer
lexGOMEZ
my mouth feels unclean
as if I cannot touch you with it.
my fixation has always been oral:
pacifiers to sweets, cigarettes to tongues
but they have all slithered in and
taken things from me.
hollowed out, like some lush gourd
whose seeds and insides have been scoured.
I make water-drop, limestone sounds:
a cavity, cavernous
but not emptied—because empty
would be clean; not I—
(oh, that I could be empty and
hold you in my hollow.)
I want to place my lips on the skin
stretched over your heart
to taste you, if you are somehow
different there.
but my fear—oh my fear,
is that I would reach into your chest
and take it from you.

17
Essay
A Hot Lunch on a Cold Sunday
jayaWAGLE
O
n cold winter weekend mornings, my sister and I hauled
woolen razais, bound in white muslin, out to the balcony of
our house. We spread them on the wrought iron railing to
bake in the sun.
We liked to linger on that sunny rectangle ‘til Ma’s summons sent
us scurrying, squinting inside the dark cold house to finish our
chores—sweeping and dusting, washing our hair, spreading laundry
on the line—while she cooked lunch. Instead of the usual weekday
meal of dal, chawal, sabzi, roti, she was busy preparing a special
meal—spicy chole in an onion-tomato-ginger-garlic gravy or paneer
in creamy sauce. Sometimes she made chicken curry, if Pappa
agreed to cut and clean the raw chicken and slide the pieces into
the simmering gravy. Ma is a vegetarian and on these occasions she
cooked her favorite vegetable, eggplant or bitter gourd.
By mid-afternoon, we sat down on the warm balcony tiles, cross-
legged, our backs to the soft sun that was just hot enough to dry
our wet hair while we ate in the shadow of the razais. As the sun
moved south, we piled up the dirty dishes and the empty pots and
carried them all into the kitchen.
Our bellies full, each of us claimed our warm razai, trooped back
into the dim house, and settled down for an afternoon nap, our
bodies ensconced in the warmth of the sun.

Fiction
18
“Y
ou’ve reached the twenty-four hour Suicide Prevention
Hotline of Chicago,” I said. “My name is Eli Paisley. How
are you feeling right now?”
“I am in love with you, Mr. Paisley.” The girl’s voice spilled from the
phone. “I always have and I always will, I love you so much, do you
realize how much I love you, Eli? Do you?”
There was a long break of silence as my mouth hung slightly open.
I was startled by the change of tone and the extreme emotions that
flooded the telephone line. I nervously looked around at all the
other slate-gray cubicles surrounding me, checking to see if
anyone had heard what I had.
“Excuse me ma’am. I’m sorry, but I think you might have called the
wrong number. Are you in emotional distress right now?” I asked,
my voice slightly lowered.
“For you! For you, Mr. Paisley,” she said.
“Well that’s…okay, tell me, are you needing assistance tonight? Are
you…at risk?”
Silence, then a prompt click from the other line. She was gone.
I held the phone to my ear for a few moments, my mind swirling
with confusion. This wasn’t what I was used to. I was used to quiet
voices, shaky words, gasps of crying. Apathetic responses. I had
never heard an “I love you” from the other line, and it had been five
years since I last heard those words in person, five years since a girl
had any interest in me. Gross and foreign, yet new and unusual.
I’d read in National Geographic about a new species of fish found
thousands of feet below the surface of the Mediterranean. It had
fang-like teeth and bulging eyes. The scientists surrounding their
Formed in 18 Sketches
rosieNINESLING

fiction
19
discovery, however, wore curious smiles. That’s how it felt to hear “I
love you” from the stranger. Disgusting but rare, a creature I didn’t
want to swim with.
Igot off work at 5:30 AM and walked my usual route home,
stopping first at Grant Park. Today the fog was dense and dark,
sticking to my skin and wrapping its arms around my body,
blanketing me in gauze-like mist.
Grant Park was silent and smelled like fertilizer. In between two
magnolia trees was a metal bench that allowed me to watch people,
which is what I usually did.
Typically, I would draw the faces of everyone I wished I could talk
to, wished I could meet, in a yellow sketchbook. Some people
call it social anxiety, but I wasn’t anxious. I was afraid of human
connection, not because people scared me, but because I was afraid
that I wasn’t worth connecting with.
I first started drawing when Janie, my first and only girlfriend,
left me. There wasn’t ever a goodbye, nor was there a fight. One
night I went to bed next to her and the next morning I woke up
to the subtle indentation in the mattress of where her body once
was. The morning she left I wasn’t surprised. I was too depressed
to feel. I’m assuming it was that same depression that caused
her to leave—my continual heaviness, my lack of laughter. After
I realized she wasn’t coming back, I started drawing. Five years
after she left, I was still drawing. I hadn’t thought of her in years. I
didn’t think much in general.
That’s why I liked working for the hotline. I could give a single
person a few minutes of dedication, the phone call would end, and
then it would be out of my hands. I did everything I could, and I
would be left to deal with the possibility that the person on the
other line never put down the gun. Click. Next caller.
It was a short-term commitment, and I didn’t have to worry about
people leaving. Phone calls were easy when attachment wasn’t involved.
That morning, as the fog fell off the skyscrapers and away from
the streetlamps, I sat in between the magnolias and drew the
face of the old lady that fed the pigeons every morning near me. Her

20
cheeks were sunken and leathered; her hair was thinned so badly
that I could see the pink of her scalp.
I started drawing her walnut-shaped eyes, then her line-like lips, but
it wasn’t until I looked down at my paper that I realized I wasn’t
drawing an old lady at all—rather, I was drawing the girl that had
called earlier that night. I didn’t know her name or anything else
about her, but from her rough voice on the other line I imagined her
eyes to be dark and her lips to be thin, and with that I created her
on paper.
I didn’t just draw her at the park. When I got home, I lay in bed
with my eyes closed and drew her over and over again in my mind. I
imagined her collarbones and the arc of her forehead till I fell asleep.
The next night at exactly 4 AM, she called again.
“You’ve reached the twenty-four hour Suicide Prevention Hotline of
Chicago. My name is Eli Paisley. How are you feeling right now?”
“Oh, Eli. You work so hard. I love you for that. I love you for a million
reasons, but I love you especially for how hard you work. Why don’t
we get coffee? Wait—let me guess. You’re more of a tea person. I’ve
always been more of a latte girl, but I can go for tea, I really wouldn’t
mind, as long as you were with me. What do you say?”
“You have the wrong number, ma’am,” I said firmly, secretly hoping
she’d keep talking.
“Ah-ha! You think I’m joking! This is why I love talking to you, Eli.
You aren’t easy. I called the hotline over and over till I heard your
voice. I don’t want to talk to anyone else. I love you Eli, I really do.”
Click, again. I held the phone to my ear for a few seconds
afterwards, again.
This is how the nights repeated themselves—4 AM phone calls
from a girl I didn’t know, dramatically pouring out her love and
then hanging up. Occasionally it was different; instead of a love
confession she would yell at me.
On the sixth night she announced that she hated me, hated me
NINESLING

21
“more than most anything I’ve ever hated,” then hung up on me as
usual. On the tenth night she told me in detail everything about her
day, even though I didn’t ask.
Each day after work I would stop at Grant Park on my way home
and draw. Every time I drew someone, the ink lines under the tip of
my ballpoint pen would morph into a new image of the girl on the
phone. My sketchbook became a catalog of her.
On the eighteenth night of calling she added on to her usual
confession. “Meet me in front of the Sears Tower as soon as you
leave work tonight. I don’t know what time you get off, but I’ll be
there, I promise I’ll be there, Eli Paisley, I love you so much. Please
come. Please…please.”
Ididn’t go. I sat between the magnolias in the park instead. I could
handle phone calls. I could listen to her and respond and let her
carry on about how much she loved me because I had thousands
of feet worth of telephone wires between us that were sending the
sound waves back and forth at lightning speed. What I couldn’t
handle was seeing her, connecting with her, knowing her face. I
couldn’t handle watching the lips that had once told me they loved
me, sometimes hated me, over and over again until my ear had
become numb and the line disconnected.
I sat on the bench and waited for the fog to evaporate off my
shoulders so I could draw another version of her, but nothing
happened. My pen slept in my hand. I flipped through all the other
drawings I had done of her. I imagined who she was, if she was a cat
or dog person, who she would vote for, and who the last person she
kissed was. Did she even love me? I shut my sketchbook and walked
in the direction of the Sears Tower.
When I got there, the sky was stained an impressive indigo. The
sun was still nestled underneath the horizon of the city. Only
a few businessmen drifted in and out of the building. I didn’t know
who I was looking for, so I just stood there.
“Eli? Is that you?” she called. She waved her hands, grabbing the
attention of the businessmen nearby. They looked up, shook
their heads, and quickly looked away. I blushed. Her cheeks were
already raspberry-colored, chapped by the wind. Her outfit was a
fiction

22
combination of primary colors and patterns that hurt my eyes; her
patent leather boots were dull and scuffed.
“Yes, uh, my name is Eli. Correct,” I said, looking past her at the
brass doors of the Sears Tower. I could see a warped version of
myself in the golden reflection, my long brown hair brushing the
top of my eyebrows, my crooked nose, my narrow face. I could see
my throat swallow as I took a few steps backwards.
“Oh, Eli! I honestly didn’t think you’d come, I honest-to-goodness
thought I was going to wait here all day which made me feel so…
bummed out, you know? But then I said to myself, ‘Emily, get a grip!
Take a chance! Besides, you love this boy!’ and so here I am—and
here you are! Wow, what a morning! We’re both here in the flesh,
I can’t believe it.” She placed her chapped hands on my shoulders,
gently shaking me. I tried to move, but I was trapped underneath
her overbearing personality.
“Oh, Eli! Tell me, how was the rest of your night after I called? Did a
lot of people call after me?”
She reeked of cheap perfume. She embraced me in her bony arms. I
felt her warmth and was surprised at how small she felt pressed up
against me.
I stared past her for a few seconds, stunned. I felt like the fish in the
National Geographic magazine, after the scientists pulled it up from
the bottom of the ocean, unfamiliar with everything that was going
on. Emily had the same curious smile that the scientists had.
“Let’s go to the top of the tower. I want to see the sunrise. I haven’t
seen it in so long, I almost forgot that it comes up every morning!”
“Okay, we can do that if you’d like,” I said. I watched the sunrise
every morning, but it had been years since I had watched it with
another person. I followed her into the building.
When we got to the observation deck I couldn’t hear anything.
The wind was trapped in my ears. I couldn’t smell anything except
the distinct shallow scent of cold air. As the sun’s earliest rays cut
through the clouds, Emily pointed to a distant billboard.
NINESLING

23
“‘Smile, life’s a beach?’ Are you kidding me?” She turned and
stared at me.
Then, after a few seconds of silence, we laughed—loud, hard,
steady. I wasn’t quite sure why I was laughing, but as I shivered on
top of the Sears Tower and gusts of wind whipped her hair around
in a mad frenzy, the wild hair of a girl I didn’t know, I let myself
laugh. “Smile, life’s a beach” was the funniest damn thing I’d ever
heard. The wind blew and we laughed until Emily shouted over the
wind, “I think I’m going to jump!”
The wind didn’t stop, but I did.
“What?” I shouted. “You mean, jump? Like, from here? You mean,
kill yourself?”
I made eye contact with her, something I had been afraid to do this
entire time. She was nothing like my drawings. Her eyes were calm
and steady, not crazy like I had envisioned. Her nose was small
and childlike, and she seemed to have just enough freckled skin to
cover her bones. Her hair was a tangled halo around her face. It was
as if she had already died and all that was left was her essence, the
product of a chemical experiment gone wrong.
“Why?” I asked. Her voice changed from excited and adrenaline-
pumped to flat and defeated. She swallowed.
“I want to. For once in my life I want to make my own decision.
I’m not in control. Some days, you know, I feel like conquering
anything, everything, and I honestly believe that I can. But then
other days my thoughts are punctured with something dark and
heavy and I’m reminded that I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, Eli! I’m either
feeling so good that I’m off the ground, or I’m feeling so low that
I’m buried alive—there is no in between. And if I’m going to be
buried alive against my own will, I might as well be dead. I am tired
of this constant change between ups and downs, I crave balance,
but I don’t even know what that is. I’m either ecstatic or depressed.
Which version of me is the real me? Am I depressed and just able to
occasionally shake it off? Or am I happy and just sometimes forget?
I don’t remember who I am. Does that make sense?”
fiction

24
I had been trained to talk to people in this state, but I couldn’t
speak. Telephone calls were so distant and unrealistic. This was
intimate; this was right in front of me. My mind went through
a long list of possible things I could say in what seemed like
nanoseconds. Stay alive for your family, it will get better! Death
won’t fix things, someone loves you!
All I was able to do was pull out my yellow sketchbook from my
backpack. “I brought this sketchbook with me, Emily, and I think
you should look at it,” I said. My voice was hesitant and small. “Here
are eighteen different drawings of you. Eighteen different versions
of how I envisioned you. Every single one of them is different, see?
Each night you talked to me, I pictured you as someone else. Who
you were changed daily. But you were still the same voice on the
phone…right?” I looked at her directly, but she said nothing.
“So who you are right now, and what you’re going through, and how
you’ve changed is nothing permanent. It’s fleeting. But who you are
is still you, no matter how high or how low you feel.” I placed my
sketchbook down on the ground and held on to the railing.
Emily started to cry. The wind was still blowing hard. The city was
awake now, but we were up so high that the sounds from the street
couldn’t reach us. She took a few deep breaths. They mixed with the
cold air and created small clouds. A few times I opened my mouth,
but closed it without saying anything. Finally she faced me and
smiled. It lasted a fraction of a second.
“Let’s go back down,” she said.
“Okay.”
We started to walk back towards the door. She seemed lighter, as if
she had shaken something very dark off her birdlike shoulders.
“Oh—Eli, you left your sketchbook.” She ran back and gently picked
it up off the ground. About fifteen feet from me, she stood and
flipped quickly through the pages, then smiled and hugged the
spiral close to her chest while leaning against the railing.
“Eli,” she called. “These really are me, you—you got it right.”
NINESLING

25
The last look she gave me was heavy and tinted with a certain
sadness. The wind was still loud in my ears when she jumped.
Istill don’t know who she was. I don’t know if she was a cat or
dog person, who she would’ve voted for or who the last person
she kissed was. I still don’t know why she called me to tell me she
loved me (and hated me) and if it were really true. But I missed her.
Maybe I only missed hearing someone say “I love you.”
I remember how her dress had looked like a parachute as she fell
without the soft landing. All my versions of her, trapped between
the thick pages of my spiral, jumped too. In seconds she was off
the map. Facedown on West Adams Street. The sun kept rising;
the wind kept blowing. I struggled with the fact that I would never
know her—she was buried under a catalog of faces that I created in
my mind. A masquerade of all the possible hers.
fiction

26
Statue of Hebe
michaelaWARE
My grandmother chisels
my sister’s bones
and frames them on her bedroom wall: a shrine
of holy femurs, ribs, and jaw.
She throws discarded vintage jewelry
over her shoulder. I collect
those abandoned ornaments,
rusted and resilient.
I step over sports medals, mementos,
and crushed roses.
Clumped and
cast in bronze,
preserved in infinite youth;
it is a statue of Hebe
my grandmother kneels
and prays to before she falls asleep.
I stalk across the room,
poking and budding, making
mistakes in my nature.
I feel my collarbones nudge my chin and pull them free,
offering them,
bloody, broken, flawed.
But still—
still you call,
still you say, “You know, I do
love you.”
Poem

27
My Father’s Helper
nickolaiLANIER
Photograph

28
Essay
M
om called while I made my way to the corner of Bonnie Brae
and University Drive. Dad’s cancer was inoperable. “We’re
going to put a hospital bed in the living room.” Mom’s
numbed voice breathed through the cellphone. “Treatment” was
no longer the word of the day. Now it was “comfort.” I thought
about her first phone call, and how fast things had progressed
since then.
The fall semester had ended that week. An ice storm had
rendered Denton still and mostly silent. Most of my final
exams were rescheduled. When Mom called about Dad’s cancer,
December was halfway through. I was taking one of my finals
online.
“Just call me back after you finish your exam,” she said. She
sounded hollow and hesitant. “We need to talk.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked. Something was seriously off. Mom’s
voice was steely with fear.
For five seconds, our words tumbled over each other’s. She tried
to get off the phone, but I pried the truth from her. Finally, she
blurted, “Your father’s got a tumor in his back!”
The room got twenty degrees colder. Suddenly, I itched and
tingled everywhere.
As December faded, our hope that the tumor was benign melted
like the ice outside. Mom later recounted to me how she and
Brandy, my sister, wheeled him laboriously to his own truck for
an in-depth exam at the Wichita Falls hospital Brandy worked at,
an hour from Graham. By that point, his mind was being eaten
away just like his body. “Do you have a cigarette?” he asked my
sister repeatedly.
A Long December
justinHAZELTON

29
essay
She doesn’t smoke.
The diagnosis shouldn’t have surprised us. I came home one month
earlier for Thanksgiving to find my father barely able to move. He
likened the pain to a dentist drilling a nerve during a root canal.
He was not a man prone to letting his pain show, so watching him
attempt to walk like a sick baby animal was something I couldn’t
deal with. I would freeze, my lips parting unconsciously to drink
in deep draughts of air. At the time, we all assumed that he had
a simple back injury, one that he had aggravated with the sort of
macho bullshit posturing that made him think he didn’t need to go
to the doctor, no sir, just needed to wait it out.
His skin during that Thanksgiving had taken on a hue of dusty
air-pollution yellow that matched the bad brownish-gold of his
teeth. He got out of bed one night and the hernia protruding from
his belly button—one he’d nursed for several years as it grew larger
than a golf ball—leaked a viscous medley of blood and pus, which
seeped between the thin planks of our hardwood floor while Mom
cried out in concern, fear, and exasperation.
My whole life, she’s always been a bit obsessed with keeping a clean
house, and ever since she got sick—a combination of liver cirrhosis
and COPD in 2008—one of the primary points of her depression is
that she’s not always well enough to clean.
The day before I left for Denton to complete my last few weeks
of class, Brandy attempted in a casual way to convince Dad that
he needed to see the doctor. “So what, you’re just going to lay in bed
‘til you die?” she asked with my family’s traditional morbid sense of
humor.
Dad responded with a wry smile. “I can think of worse fates.”
The evening before returning to Denton, I picked up some fast
food sandwiches and told my father I loved him. I psyched
myself up all day to say that to him. Two weights had been holding
my tongue down on that statement: the vulnerability of telling him
that, and the implications of it needing to be said. The men in our
family do not express love for each other verbally, except on special
occasions. I didn’t want to admit to myself how serious it was.
But the timing turned out to be perfect: when we said we loved

30
each other—and then when Dad started telling me to watch out for
ice on the roads—it was the last actual conversation we ever had
in which simple words and phrases didn’t need to travel through a
thick fog of spite, agony, and inadequate painkillers.
Weeks after that pitiful Thanksgiving, on the same day I had
driven 100 miles from Denton to Graham through tears, I
drove with Mom another 60 to Wichita Falls. The pain had settled
in my stomach like a hibernating bear settling in for a long winter.
We met my sister on one of the hospital’s highest floors. Outside
the window, the people below looked like ants.
“I could just slap him for not taking better care of himself,” she said,
her voice cracking. Her face was a stark pinkish-red that clashed
with her white nurse’s uniform.
Dad had been fastened to a hospital bed in a cold blue room with
plastic cuffs around both wrists. He had just gotten out of surgery.
They removed the tumor from his spine, a gesture that only
served to give him mild comfort that he wouldn’t live long enough
to appreciate. He was shouting with delirious rage, “Get these
goddamn things off!” to anyone in his line of vision. Once, that
turned out to be me.
“Justin! Take these things off!”
I was in the middle of leaving the room, unable to watch him suffer
anymore. When I turned around, he was staring through me.
“I… don’t know how,” I said. It was the best I could come up with.
He growled. “Well, goddamn it, someone has to!”
He had to wear the cuffs because he refused to stay in his hospital
bed. At one point, he had grabbed one of the IV wires they had
stuck in him and yanked it out without even flinching. He was a
stout boar of a man, so it was an endless struggle to contain him.
That night, my mother was set up nearby in a special hotel just
for relatives of patients. Most of her “luggage” consisted of
medicine and portable oxygen. In that little red room, lit dimly like
HAZELTON

31
a scene in a horror movie, the long-familiar feeling of her slipping
through my fingers came back. There wasn’t going to be a father
around to catch the ashes in his own cupped hands anymore. I
never thought it would be him first. After all of the collapsing, the
hospital visits over ammonia buildup in her stomach, the diagnosis
of liver cirrhosis—I never thought it would be him to go first.
When Mom became Dad’s primary caregiver during that agonizing
December of 2013, I finally saw things for what they were.
When I drove back home to Graham that night, I did so through
a dark so thick and sweltering, the car swayed and nearly buckled
under it. Headlights in the distance were white pill eyes, staring.
The next morning, I cleared out space for a hospital bed in the
living room. I pushed a scarred leather couch across the wooden
floor and kitchen tile, setting it by the doorway between the kitchen
and my parents’ bedroom. Many people would be taking shifts on
that couch, napping when they could while Dad smoldered like
a bomb waiting to go off. When the hospice man arrived with the
bed, he mentioned something about recently going through this
same situation with a family member of his own. Why do we think
the knowledge of another’s suffering will help mute our own?
Shortly afterward, Brandy and my mother were followed home by
my father, who took an ambulance. After they wheeled him in and
dumped him unceremoniously onto a mattress that, for his back,
may as well have been a concrete slab, Mom lifted one of our three
small dogs—Ted—into his line of vision.
“Look who it is!” she said.
“Whatcha doin’, Ted?” Dad rattled off thoughtlessly, in the same
childlike and teasing tone he always reserved for the dogs. I couldn’t
help but fall into tears. It was those faint passing moments of
normalcy, of routine, that kept me awake for the next two weeks
when all I wanted to do was collapse.
Looking back on those ten days feels like trying to focus on the
spinning blade of a ceiling fan. I never quite understood suffering
and what it meant until those weeks. But even the titanic pain my
father must have been experiencing in his last mindless moments
isn’t what I remember most. What remains in my mind is the final
essay

32
loss of his dignity.
When they first got him home, he was barely able to string
sentences together without herculean effort and time. When he
screamed and cried, saying the words “Help, please,” as if they were
incantations against some unseen force, we—myself, Mom, and my
brother and his wife who lived just down the street—begged him
to try and help us understand what he wanted help with. So many
times, we lifted him out of the bed to sit him down on a potty-chair
because we thought he needed to piss or shit. When he didn’t, we
lifted all 300 pounds of him onto the bed and the whole process
started all over again.
Eventually, as he sat and groused out nearly incomprehensible
curses and yelps of pain, a steady stream of whisky-colored piss fell
out of him. He missed the chair under him entirely, darkening the
floor with a liquid that reeked of rotting onions. After, he continued
to babble and cry out until Mom could shove enough morphine into
him to put him down. In the meantime, he went on yelling, naked,
the stretch marks on his belly slithering like snakes, his hernia
like an immovable mossy boulder, beard nesting spittle. I knew he
was still somewhat lucid when he shielded himself with his hand,
because it meant he knew we were there—and he was there.
My father was a lot like me insofar as he was a private person.
Having his own family surrounding him in a hospital bed, changing
his sheets if he pissed himself, watching him suffer the worst pain
he’d ever felt, crying out for his mother, regressing into infancy right
before our eyes—this was his worst nightmare.
In the midst of his drug withdrawals during the terrible summer
of 2012, he told us, in his frustration at not getting a painkiller
prescription from the doctor, “I ain’t afraid to die, but I don’t want to
die in pain. I want to be able to say goodbye to friends and family.”
I went to Denton for a couple of days, just so I could bring some
things back and deal with a couple of counseling appointments, one
academic and one personal. I called Mom while I was there, to ask
how Dad was.
“He sang ‘Scooby-Doo’ for us a little while ago, while he was awake.”
HAZELTON

33
She said this in a tone that suggested I should know what the fuck
that meant. At no point in the previous 22 years of my life had I ever
heard him reference “Scooby-Doo” in any capacity. I didn’t get until
the next day: He was asking us to scoot him up or down the bed into
a more comfortable position. Another thing I had missed while in
Denton: him falling out of bed and shitting all over the place, with
only my disabled mom around to heave him back into bed. She
ended up having to call my brother to help out as she cleaned slurry
off the floor.
This was life for me and my mother until he died: sleeping whenever
we could between bouts of cataclysmic wailing and screaming and
shifting about. There was a noise he used to make before all this
started, whenever my mom or someone else would start to grate on
him by talking too much. He’d imitate us by making this mocking
sound like that of an overgrown chicken. For a few days, each time
he was having a fit, he made that sound when someone close to him
started talking, staring at them totally blankly and jacking his jaw
up and down, showing off his brown, incomplete set of teeth. He
seemed to be doing it solely from instinct.
My brother looked away from him slightly and, in a choked voice,
said, “I wish you hadn’t started doing that, Dad.” He sounded like a
little boy. Dad didn’t stop.
One of the last clear sentences came when I was face to face with
him during a wind-down from one of the attacks. I stared dumbly at
his face, not sure what to do at the moment except wait for the pain
meds to kick in so a brief peace would return. He looked back at me
at one point while his eyes shifted about. Mom’s voice came from
the other side of the bed: “Do you know who that is?”
“No,” Dad growled as he looked through me, “and I don’t give a shit.”
I thought little of it at the moment, because I knew how fucked up
he was. “He didn’t mean that,” said Mom. I didn’t need her to tell
me. However, much later on, when I looked back on that moment, I
understood two things.
First, my father had a lot to atone for. He and Mom fought a lot in
my childhood, a lot more than they seemed to get along sometimes,
and it was over either drugs, or money, or both—mostly both.
essay

34
He wasn’t afraid to be physical when he was furious enough. Not
often, not even once a month, but it happened. It took filing those
moments somewhere far away in the back of my mind for me to
continue respecting the most prominent male figure in my life.
One incident I distinctly remember. I was about eight, and I had gone
with my parents to Fort Worth. To the best of my knowledge, they
were only there to go to the methadone clinic. Some check had gone
missing from my father’s truck and Mom, in the midst of her drug
addiction, was the one who took it. I woke in the hotel room early
in the morning to my father viciously shaking Mom down for either
the check or her admission of guilt. Maybe both. All I could hear was
loud arguing, the occasional slam of something—probably her—
against the bathroom wall, and crying. Before long, my own crying
harmonized with Mom’s, and that’s when they both came out.
I stood up on the bed and Dad put his arms around me and said,
“It’s okay.” Mom stood at the foot of the bed. “It’s not your fault your
mother’s a no-good bitch who steals from her own kids.”
Little incidents like this would occur and be quickly resolved until
I was college-aged and Dad—unemployed because of health and
financial crises—started to disintegrate. Then, they became much
more frequent.
Another incident: It was two or three in the morning. I heard
a succession of loud thudding noises through my door, then
some voices full of muted anger. Upon walking in, I found my father
was standing, fuming, in the kitchen while Mom looked around for
something, cursing under her breath.
What I heard at the time was that Dad was looking for his weed,
because he was hurting and couldn’t sleep. He never really slept
during that terrible summer. Mom had cursed at him for waking
her to look for the drugs, and my father grabbed her by the hair, put
his hand on her throat, and slapped her, pushing her against a wall.
No one, he said, was going to talk to him like that.
Once she found his box, she grabbed a blanket and made for the
living room. At first. She went back to the bedroom after about five
minutes, with no real coaxing from my father. I went back to my
room, terrified that my disabled mother was in legitimate danger.
HAZELTON

35
The next morning I awoke and found Mom watching TV by
herself in the bedroom. No one would have known what happened
between her and my father unless they talked to her about it. I
silently went into the kitchen and grabbed the first large knife I
could find. I brought it to her and said the next time Dad tried to
pull any violent shit like that, she needed to defend herself. She
scoffed at this. When she told me, long after my father died, that
he had been taking heroin to treat his then-undiagnosed medical
issues, I understood a little better. Dad probably wouldn’t have
thrown that kind of fit over pot.
Yet another incident: Mere days later, Dad was having what I
consider to be one of his three sickest days. From his bed, he
moaned about his back and legs in an enraged and sorrowful daze
while Mom pan-fried hamburgers. She wanted him to eat. He rolled
over and opened the bottom drawer of his bedside table, and then
pulled out one of his guns. It was silver and had a long nose.
“What are you doing?” I exclaimed, thinking this was it: he was going
to put that nozzle in his mouth and blow his brains out onto the
curtains. He threatened suicide often during these episodes. I froze.
But instead, he pointed at a nearby wall clock and pulled the trigger.
Click. The gun wasn’t loaded. He called the gun a piece of shit and
dropped it on the ground, where I immediately retrieved it and
put it away somewhere. Sometime later, when he was sane again, I
asked him why he did that.
“Oh, it was just something to do.”
I wasn’t willing to explore that statement any further. Some abysses
are too dark and deep to go spelunking in.
Another: On a separate day in that same summer, Dad was
violently ill, dealing with a combination of Xanax and
withdrawals. Mom had a doctor’s appointment set up for him that
morning. He’d been complaining of terrible pain in his back and
lashed out at her for it. Mom wasn’t the kind of person who backed
down from my father, though, and as we were heading out the door,
she said to him sarcastically, “Break a leg.”
essay

36
“Fuck you,” he growled back. “Why don’t you just go lay back down
and die?” Mom had no response. We knew he was only lashing
out childishly, not thinking about what he was saying beyond how
much it could hurt her at the moment.
Instead of going to the doctor’s office, Dad absolutely insisted that
we take a detour. We went to his friend Tommy’s house on the
street behind our own. Tommy wasn’t there, and Dad said we could
just let ourselves in. The house was without air conditioning and
brutally humid. Felt like you could grab the air and shape it like clay.
We went to Tommy’s bedroom and Dad laid down on the bed,
unable to walk. There was a brown jacket in Tommy’s closet. Dad
told me there were some pills in a pocket of that jacket. I rummaged
around and eventually found them. They didn’t do anything to
curb his pain. We got back home, and Mom must have expected
that we’d miss the appointment, because she didn’t say much about
it. Dad was the kind of man who, when he made up his mind,
changing it was like kicking at a brick wall.
So, yeah, lesson number one—my father had his wealth of sins
to atone for. But then, the second thing I learned, the one that
really overpowers my senses when I think about his face twisted
into a grimace of tremendous suffering, his rotting teeth sticking
out of his mouth, is that it didn’t even matter. None of it mattered.
This was not triumphant vengeance, not a nest of chickens coming
home to roost—nothing like that.
All I feel when I look back is the overwhelming pointlessness of
it all. My Dad was going to die alone, trapped in his own decaying
flesh, unable to say goodbye, and Mom and I would still have to live
with the memory of all the wrongs he did. And all of that wrong
could not hope to overtake the right he did, for which I still miss
him deeply. He hurt our hearts by showing us the worst of him,
then hurt them worse by dying and depriving us of the best of him.
He bought me almost every guitar I’ve ever had. He cajoled me
into writing poetry, because he knew I would be good at it—
had nothing but good to say about everything I wrote. He insisted I
go to college and suggested UNT because of its music program.
He went to work in the oilfield and clawed through the decades to
HAZELTON

37
become a consultant, where he could make around a grand per day,
and he did it for us. He worked in relentless heat, surrounded even
in his sleep by ceaseless grinding and churning. The smell of oil, to
this day, permeates his clothing.
He stopped drinking when he found out, early in my life, that he
had hepatitis. He helped Mom do the same. He fought an addiction
he’d been nursing since well before I was born, and held off his own
demons for as long as he could. He lost the fight, but helped me
understand just as much about who I should be as who I shouldn’t.
He was my father, and all of the bad memories that float to the
surface of my mind like dead insects when I think about him cannot
truly disturb the depth of the love I have—and had—for him. I
make no excuses for him, nor for how I feel about him.
On the morning of the last day of his life, he was silent, like a dog in
a corner whose spirit was broken, head lolling to the side. I wonder
even now what it looked like inside him as the cancer finished the
job. I picture a virulent lasagna of melting organs and innards,
boiling and hissing, dressed with a series of coal-black tumors
jutting out like coral. I smell a stinging, eye-watering cocktail of
gangrenous viscera and pharmaceuticals rising, in vain, to dam up
the surges of pain. The waste of it all.
When the morning-shift nurse told us he didn’t have long left,
I went to my room and tried to catch up on the sleep I’d been
deprived of since before Christmas, a day that blended in with all
the others.
Around 3:30 PM, Mom started coming in and out of my room,
breaking my sleep, to tell me that Dad was going soon. But I was
so tired, and he’d been dead to me for the past week. This was all
a formality.
When I finally left my room, my family cried in the kitchen as Mom
wept bitterly and hugged my father’s body, telling him we’d be okay,
telling him she loved him, and he heard none of it. How could he?
His corpse was a horrible milky white, as if all his blood had fled to
the darkest recesses of his body and dried. His eyes were shut and
his mouth hung open in a soundless scream.
essay

38
A stone-faced nurse pronounced him dead at 4:30 PM. Before they
took him away, I stole one last touch. I rubbed my hand on his stiff,
graying beard as I stared into his seemingly bottomless mouth.
These days, his remains are caged in an immaculate blue urn on
a bookshelf with a sliding glass door that is always shut. He was
claustrophobic. It no longer matters.
When sleep is late coming in, and the night is so quiet that all I
hear is the swaying pull-strings of the ceiling fan, whispering their
imitation of death chimes, I think about how dark it must be, and
what he saw when everything dissolved into brown dust behind
his eyes. What did he see? What will I see? I think I will dream of
falling through a chasm ripping open the floor beneath my sleeping
body. The last thing I’ll see is the hole I just fell through shrinking
from view, lined with jagged brown teeth, agape in a scream.
I still dream about him now, though not with the same frequency as
right after it happened. In my dreams, he is almost always suffering,
sometimes spread out on the ground. In one dream, he was just
there, on the front lawn of his parents’ house out in the country,
bent into shapes I remember vividly as impossible.
The worst part of these visions is when I look into his dying black
eyes, because they speak to me and say: “I have been to the void,
and it is cold.”
HAZELTON

Photograph
39
Durky
gregoryPEOPLES

Poem
40
A gray day sighs in
through the windowpanes.
Socked feet shuffle and blanketed shoulders
shiver–she pulls the yarn taut around herself,
a brown and honey barrier.
Half a step forward, close as she can be,
blue flame flickering
beneath a mustard kettle.
Her hardened hands cup
a crackled cinnamon mug.
Gauzed clove and cardamom wait.
Whistle.
Steam rises. Warmth
clouds her cheeks,
fills her lungs,
fogs her window
panes.
Chai
amyTURNER

Poem
41
“Sweet dreams” are so humdrum.
Wish instead for popcorn dreams,
with adventure bursting at the seams,
leaving kernels in your gums.
Tuck In
amyTURNER

Painting
42
Untitled
julietteVAISSIERE

43
jayaWAGLE
Essay
Breathe
T
he drawer in my nightstand is filled with nebulizer
paraphernalia, transparent tubes of Albuterol and
Budesonide, hand lotion, and odd bits of jewelry. The
nebulizer is for my son’s upper respiratory syndrome. On days he
has too much physical activity—soccer during recess followed by
PE—he comes home wheezing, his breath raspy.

The nebulizer hums loudly as it converts the liquid Albuterol and
Budesonide into cold vapor that he inhales through a face mask.
Within twenty minutes he is breathing easy. He’s so used to the
contraption that on days when his condition is severe, I can strap
the mask on while he is sleeping and he doesn’t miss a wink.
It pains my husband to see our son strapped to the plastic mask,
breathing in chemicals to ease his breathing. He too suffers from
upper respiratory syndrome, which is triggered more by allergies
than physical excursions. Over the years, he has learned to control
it with Pranayama, yogic breathing exercises. Every morning, he
practices synchronized deep inhales and exhales, energizing his
body, mind, and lungs by filling them with fresh oxygen. It took
him thirty-six years to figure out that Pranayama works for his
condition. He wants to impart the knowledge to our son, give him
a head start.
My nine-year-old does not want to sit cross-legged on the mat and
breathe in and out rhythmically for ten minutes, which prompts
my husband to shake his head in bewilderment. He tells him, over
and over, “Do this for ten minutes every day and you will never
have to use the nebulizer again.”
“But Pappa, I don’t mind the nebulizer. I can watch TV while
it’s on.”

Poem
44
I Cannot Keep Up
adamWRIGHT
with band talk, nor the enormous stack of flyers forced in my hands. Yeah, I saw
Ty Segall and Efterklang because confessing
never heard of them is embarrassing. So I used to want
to play here, before I got old. Still do, I suppose.
Too old though. Maybe, too old. It’s loud. Crowded.
Like a carnival—a hipster’s Woodstock—
compressed to ten city blocks. The opposite of chillwave. A mob
coats the street but Moby—we’re still able to make him out. Twice, I see
Perry Farrell at La Zona Rosa, and Badly Drawn Boy at Antone’s. Somehow,
that’s all part of it. We came to people-watch and tell people
who we saw. To say things like “Vincent Gallo and Drew Barrymore
were at the Brooklyn Vegan.” From a barstool, my friend asks
if celebrities make for more interesting people. We came to see
them, after all. Or is this jealousy manifesting? Maybe
I just want to be famous. Maybe that’s why I told my friend
celebs are just talking posters
constantly saying how much we need them. But no spectators
are left. Only participants. And they have a new poster
to sell. Kundera, I think, would have called this
just another insurmountable
doctorate dissertation. Just more culture on top of culture. This week, Austin,
everyone’s a concert promoter, and I have most of their handbills. A venue
can be anything. Your band can set up on that other band’s flyer. We all think
we’re too smart for MTV but they’re paying
for the Heineken and barbecue, and so the Buzzcocks
might as well play to it—the booze, food, the swarm and
the spectacle. We’re throwing a Super Bowl party for football fans
because NFL aesthetics play here. Athletes, at least, brave the elements, including

poem
45
fair-weather. There have never been professional sports
in Austin—the kind of town where you play your guitar
at a bar, say thanks, and set it on stage for the next cowboy
to rock on. But everyone used to pick old, beat up
Washburn acoustics or a Tele—always a Tele—when ready to go electric. A few fools
have delusions of shiny Rickenbackers plugged into vintage Vox
but can’t meet the pawn shop’s layaway plan, not even for
the guitar that crackles with any patch cord. In the beginning,
no one’s supposed to know your name ‘cause
“it’s about the songs.” At least no one knows me here, except
my friend. There has to be more to life than the two of us
getting the latest Grizzly Bear or The Flaming Lips. Is that really the supreme
struggle
of the suburbs? What happened to the years after Roky Erickson, after he went
crazy,
and before Daniel Johnston, before he did the same? No one raises cigarette lighters
anymore. Forgetting the romance of butane, we hold our cell phones
high. I don’t know. To shed a little light on the world, you have to stay
plugged in. Your call. Echo & the Bunnymen have long left the charts
but play a nostalgic show at the Parish, while Thurston Moore strums
a noisy wall of sound, and Radiohead takes center stage
at a restaurant buffet. Of course, Radiohead’s “The National Anthem” is dissonant.
Melodies
are for commercials and Olympians. None of us slackers have won
medals. For us, there is no such song. I might have a lighter
in my pocket. I never check anymore. There must be others
hoarding fire. Have to be. For the first time since defending the obscure,
the overlooked, the best-kept secrets, we
are the uninformed. Unaware of the one thing that unites us:
disbelief in unity. We could start from there. Or just watch Thom Yorke
squint his lazy eye at the microphone. Crooked people.
A crooked eye sees more of the devil than a screaming Daniel Johnston.

nickolaiLANIER
Family Portrait
Photograph
46

Fiction
S
hrubs crunched underfoot as the Woodsman picked his way
through the dense underbrush, following the same path he’d
taken many times before. The sun had not quite set but the
dense canopy of the broad-leafed trees already blotted out the
light, giving the Woodsman a sense of the night to come, dark and
encroaching. As his mind wandered, the Woodsman’s foot caught
a low vine and he tumbled forward. His shoulder landed on a
rotten log. It released a wave of decay that assaulted the senses. He
lay face-to-face with the corpse of a rabbit. It stared back at him
with maggot-filled holes where the eyes once were. Flies swarmed
up around his face. He batted them away and pushed himself up,
then kicked the log aside and freed himself from the accusing
stare of death.
He glanced back through the trees a ways down the proper path.
He could see the girl’s red cape fluttering in the fall breeze. She
was no different than the one that had come before her, or the one
before that, maybe more freckles, maybe a little younger, but they
were all the same. He never bothered to learn their names, not
since the first one. Not since Meagan.
Up ahead he saw a crumbling old road marker. Moss had crawled
up and engulfed the sides of the small cairn, and paint had peeled
from the post that rose from the stones. That the road marker
stood at all was a testament to the power of the forest. It seemed
to choose what lived and thrived and what was buried and lost. He
thought back on the rabbit he had nearly fallen on. How it must
have felt, darkness all around, retreating into someplace darker
to die. “Was it hunted?” he mused. He saw no snare on the corpse
nor did he know any hunter who dared venture in these parts. To
the south one could find plenty of game, but everyone knows that
the northern woods belong to the Wolf.
The journey was not a difficult one. Hardly a day’s trek north
from the village, but still he felt the wear in his old bones. The
peterREIDY
A Girl in Red,
AWoman inWhite
47

48
Woodsman had already taken this journey twice in the last decade,
and it wore on him each time. He always returned, but with more
lines on his face, a new streak of white in his hair, his eyes sunk
deeper into his skull. He knew he’d make it again the next year
or, if not then, the year after, and the one after that—forever until
his death.
Among the rocks he found a comfortable place to wait. He dropped
his ax by his side, and nestled himself between the moss covered
rocks and the wooden post. He could almost read the sign. Names
of old towns that used to lie within the forest. Hamlets with
villagers who didn’t make the proper appeasements. All gone now,
consumed by that ever-hungry monster. Unlike his village, they
had they not found a way to stave him off. His mind wandered back
to that first autumn night. He paused in the woods, looking back
at the path he’d made through the trees. He stopped then, and
he shivered.
He had been a boy of six when the elders of the three towns
met, a storm raging with reckless abandon as autumn finally
crashed into the country. It was his first fall as apprentice to his
father and he had seen the carnage. Trees uprooted, stags torn to
shreds with their viscera steaming in the cold air, entire houses
swallowed whole.
He’d clutched his father’s hand tightly as the carriages of the elders
rolled into the sleepy hamlet. His father was the first to greet them,
stepping up toward the carriage, offering his cloak to stave off the
rain. Elder Whickett was a small, crooked old man with a handful
of yellowed teeth. Waving off any help, he hobbled into the light
and warmth of the great hall. Elder Brennan was younger, though
still graying around his temples. He refused the cloak and walked
proudly through the rain.
The final guest arrived amid a bright flash and a crack from the
sky. As the lightning finished, an ethereal figure stepped out of
the dark spots fading in the boy’s eyes. She wore a white veil and a
white dress, unsullied by the mud that swallowed everything. She
walked slowly, almost stepping between raindrops. His father had
been gripping the boy’s shoulder. The closer she got the tighter that
grip became. But then his father’s hand relaxed and he offered it to
the woman.
REIDY

49
“Grandmother.” A whisper barely audible over the torrent of rain
that was coming down around them, but the sound of it frightened
the boy. Under her veil he could see ashen hair, but the lace
smoothed the lines on her face, making it impossible to guess her
age. She laid a gloved hand on top of his father’s calloused one, not
the dainty hand the boy would have expected, but one the same
size as his father’s. Wordlessly, she allowed herself to be led into
the hall.
There wasn’t a single person in the village who didn’t come to
the great hall that night.The crush of people overwhelmed the
boy, but as his father led Grandmother to the front of the room,
the crowd parted around them and the entire building fell into
silence. A line of chairs had been placed at the front of the room on
the stage, three of them already occupied by the two visiting elders
and Mayor Yearling. The veiled woman nodded her head to the
Woodsman’s father and took the seat on the farthest right, next to a
brazier that dimmed in her presence.
When everyone was seated, Mayor Yearling rose to the podium.
He was a pudgy man, with watery eyes and sweaty palms, the
image only made worse by the attention thrust upon him. His
voice cracked as he began to speak. “Thank you, excuse me,” he
coughed, “thank you all for being here.” The boy scanned the faces
of the crowd. Dirt-stained faces looked around at each other, hands
comforted shoulders, tears soaked the shirts of loved ones. From his
seat on the stage, all the boy could see was fear.
“Yes, thank you Mayor Yearling.”
The boy’s attention turned back to the podium. Elder Brennan
had taken the mayor’s place. He gripped the podium with his thick
hands. “I’m sure I don’t need to remind you all why we are here. The
Wolf is upon us. For months now, his attacks have grown more and
more daring. At first it was livestock, a sheep or two slaughtered,
a cow here and there. Tragedies, yes, but nothing we haven’t been
able to deal with before. We are strong folk. We sent hunters into
the woods. Strong men, courageous men. Now, they are simply
dead men.” A sob could be heard in the audience, muffled by hands.
Elder Brennan nodded and continued. “Yes, our little town too has
lost folk to that beast. Despite our best attempts at trapping him,
he has remained elusive. His taste for the flesh and blood of man
fiction

50
has only grown. Three days ago I found the house of Ezra Trapper
a smoky ruin.” Murmurs began to grow again in the crowd. “Ezra
brought us furs in the winter, and good leather in the spring, and
now he sleeps in the belly of that monster, along with his wife and
daughters. Something must be done. I propose we gather a group of
men between the three villages, the largest we’ve ever had, and end
this once and for all!”
This must not have had the anticipated reaction, for as Elder
Brennan brought his fist down on the podium the hall exploded in
cries of outrage.
“And feed the Wolf more?”
“I’ve lost my husband, I won’t lose my son!”
“You can’t slay the devil with steel!”
The crowd roared, but it wasn’t anger that the boy saw on their
faces. It was terror in its least restrained form. He saw mothers
clutching their full-grown sons as though they were still babes, men
fighting back tears at the thought of a grisly death. The boy himself
was trembling at the idea of going back into those woods. Those
deep, dark woods.
“Gentlefolk.” Elder Brennan raised his hands attempting to regain
the control of the hall. “I’ve spoken to the men of my village and we
are prepared.” He shouted over the tumultuous crowd. “We need
able bodied men. We can’t do it alone.” He had to duck to dodge the
first bit of refuse thrown at him. In defeat, Elder Brennan lowered
his hands and retreated.
Elder Whickett rose to take the podium. He moved slowly, giving
the crowd time to take their seats. There was a tension in the air
that raised the hairs on the back of the boy’s neck. Elder Whickett
cleared his throat, a rasping gurgling sound that spoke of infirmity
and age. “Like many of you, I disagree with Elder Brennan. The Wolf
will not be slain with the slings and swords of mortal men.”
Perhaps it was hearing an elder speak aloud that which they had
feared most, or perhaps it was the matter-of-factness with which he
said it, but as he spoke, the boy felt himself start to cry. If the Wolf
REIDY

51
couldn’t be killed, then surely he would die. He looked to his father
for comfort but found none there. His father was intently staring at
Elder Whickett, eyes wide.
“But perhaps the Wolf may be reasoned with,” Elder Whickett said.
“Sated. Appeased in some way.”
“How?” a single voice rang out from the crowd.
Elder Whickett turned to face the veiled woman. Grandmother. She
rose from her seat, and the boy leaned forward, trying to catch a
glimpse under her veil. Her chin was soft, her lips red. Just before he
was low enough to see her eyes, she turned to him. She gave him a
broad, toothy smile that made goose pimples race down his spine,
and he sat back quickly, rockingchair on its heels. She spoke with a
voice that raised the boy’s hackles.
“I have read the bones. From the entrails of an autumn raven I have
communed with the Wolf and it is with his authority that I speak.
His hunger grows. It is all consuming. He finds no satisfaction in our
huntsmen, our townsfolk, our livestock. He craves innocence.” Her
words wormed into the boy’s soul, covering it with frost and leaving it
to die. “And it is with innocence that we may appease him.”
The crunch of a twig and the rustling of a cape brought the
Woodsman back into the darkening woods. He followed the
waving cape as the girl passed in front of him. The sun had finished
setting but he didn’t need light to know that she was pretty. Pretty in
the way only children are, rosy cheeked and bright eyed. She carried a
basket filled with raw meats. Drops of blood from the basket marked
the path she had taken from the village, and her cape, crimson
against the black of the woods, marked her as chosen.
The air smelled like electricity. He waited for the rain, but nothing
fell. The sky was holding its breath, waiting for something. Looking
ahead, he could see smoke rising in a quiet column from the small
cottage deep in the woods.
His father had never told him what went on in that cottage, only
that he should never stay once the girls were delivered. Only on his
deathbed had his father passed down his duty as woodsman—to
make sure the sacrifice reached the Wolf. “Turn back when she
fiction

enters, my boy. ‘Tis a fearful thing what goes on in there.” The fear
in his father’s eyes was still seared into the Woodsman’s mind.
Grandmother’s cottage was old, the rough-hewn stones of the wall
were long covered invines. The Woodsman was close enough to
smell the mildew of the thatch. As the girl in red approached the
cottage, he could see Grandmother through the front window,
not a day changed from his boyhood, glide towards the door. She
welcomed the girl into her cottage and led her around to the back.
Behind the cottage stood a monolithic altar: two columns of black
rune-carved stone standing on either side of a massive slab of
granite. Grandmother took the meats from the girl’s basket and
rung them of their juice. Blood dripped down and over the stones,
its metallic smell filling the air.
The Woodsman had seen this ritual before. He remembered
watching from his hiding place as Grandmother took Meagan’s
basket. As they trudged toward the altar, Meagan’s weak knees
couldn’t pull her feet from the mud fast enough, and she fell.
Grandmother had pulled her up with a jerking heave and
dragged her to the altar. He remembered his daughter crying out,
remembered using every inch of his will not to rush to her rescue.
Now he simply stood to bear witness.
With an unholy strength, Grandmother threw the girl in red onto
the stone slab. Lightning streaked across the sky, and the girl looked
up in horror as Grandmother climbed onto the altar and pulled
her veil back, revealing her yellow glowing eyes, devouring the
raw meat she had been brought. As she ate, Grandmother’s bones
crunched, broke and reformed. Her skin stretched. Thick black fur
sprouted from her shoulders and continued down her arms, down
her back, covering her body. Her face elongated into a muzzle, a
tail burst from her backside, and she grew ever larger. She grew to a
monstrous size, until on all fours she barely fit on the granite slab of
the altar. The girl in red, finally finding her courage, began to run,
screaming for help.
Meagan had also tried to flee. But her legs simply couldn’t bear
her weight, and she’d fallen forward off the altar. The Woodsman
remembered the primordial fear take control of his body as his
daughter crawled towards him. He remembered the Wolf leaping
52
REIDY

from the altar, batting him away like a cat might play with a mouse.
He remembered how his arms had sunk in the mud as he struggled
to stand. He remembered the crunch and the scream.
“Oh, Woodsman!” the girl in red cried, barreling into his chest.
“It’s Grandmother! She’s the Wolf, it’s been her all along!” Tears
streamed down her face as she continued her pleading.
The Woodsman held her in his arms and looked into her soft hazel
eyes. “Oh, child. I know.”
He lifted the girl gently into his arms and carried her back into the
clearing. He looked back at the altar, now lit by the full moon. The
transformation was complete: a wolf the size of a horse now stood
upon the altar, its piercing yellow gaze meeting the Woodsman’s
tired blue one. The girl screamed her protests, her fingernails
digging into the flesh of his face, but he continued forward. As the
Wolf stepped down off the altar and a low growl rippled into the
night, the Woodsman threw the girl at its feet.
The girl continued to fight against the inevitable. For a moment she
scrambled free again, but a swipe of the Wolf’s claws shredded her
legs. The Woodsman could only stare and listen to the crunch and
the scream as the Wolf tore the girl in half.When the girl was nothing
more than the blood-stained tatters of a cape, the Wolf looked up at
the Woodsman and in a low growl that shook him to his boots said,
“You know, Woodsman, you needn’t watch every time.”
“Yes, Wolf. Yes I do.” With that he turned his back on the beast and
took the wooded path back towards the town.
53
fiction

54
Poem
Portrait of Self at a Funeral
ceriseGIDEON
Measuring time in strangers’ voices,
I untangle my sense of self, fearful
of the pause, the silent breaths of acceptance,
—or dissent, that follow speaking.
The clock face stretches
around the disfigured circle of forms
I haven’t seen since childhood,
their expressions somber and foreign.
The elegy for the dead
questions the meandering course
of our own lives as I amble
around the church remembering
myself to the people I used to be—
to the person I’ve become.
In this trial forced upon us, we both judge
and are judged by each articulation.
When our eyes meet, the sudden
attention brings us into precise, deadly dimension.
I realize I have been feigning wisdom,
pretending to understand the invisible strings
of our worldly mobile and these resolute ends.
I feel disjointed, a dancer on a delicate tightrope
trying to reconcile the absence of my empathy.
Should I tell the truth—or lie?
When my monologue stops, the world moves on
though I am left behind to dolefully recount
how my own words have tied me back in knots.

55
Essay
tylerSONES
T
he guy with the flattop plays chess with the guy with no
flattop. Tables and chairs and wooden walls, like an outdoor
hallway. Ashtrays invite you to smoke if the spirit moves
you. One of us says, “Drugs like white elephants,” meaning,
presumably, piles of them, and we make an obnoxious show of
laughing, tumbling out of our chairs, spilling our drinks. This is
when I start wearing earplugs in public. They sit on the wobbly
table in front of me like orange buttons to press if things go bad.
We fall out of our chairs when we laugh. I already mentioned
that. Earnest pontification is the favorite mode of address for
everyone around us. Aryan poster children with country drawls,
blonde hair arranged just so, gold and silver jewelry hung with
the death instrument of their personal Lord and Savior. We show
up on drugs or with a bottle of gin, lemons, and a stack of Dixie
cups. Everybody else drinks the sugar-and-whipped-cream coffee
the place serves. We don’t pontificate. Like I said, we fall out of
our chairs laughing, at whatever. The homeless guys like us best,
as if they detect a kinship. They tell us improbable stories about
murder and gasoline fires, ex-wives and precisely where their
trains derailed.
Whenever Gene, a homeless, gets mad, which he does unprovoked
and frequently, he drags his laden shopping cart across the uneven
stone tiles, between the tables, and shoves it onto Eighth Street, just
in time for some kid in a Mustang or an oversized pickup truck to
collide with it. Gene’s belongings spill all over the street. That’s what
Gene needs to laugh. And he laughs the whole time as he collects
his shitty possessions and redeposits them in his cart. The kids
threaten to call the cops, and Gene throws his head back and laughs
in their faces. “Call the cops, motherfucker,” he says. He does a little
dance. The kids always drive off, baffled. Gene returns to our table
and cribs a cigarette off whoever has one. We drag ourselves off the
ground and wait for something else to laugh at.
SoundsWorth Hearing

This is the table where I break up with hobby girls, adding them
to the discard pile. They keep coming back though, and we keep
on being friends. If you have to run around with one of us, I’m your
best bet. I’m a gentleman on paper, asshole being one of those terms
like hipster and douche bag that are rarely self-applied.
I finish my first short story at that table. Jeff and a girl named Tawny
snort Xanax off a different table and argue over something irrelevant.
One of them is my ride. He keeps yelling “Let’s go.” And I keep telling
him to hold on. This is the year when the dude that prosecuted
President Clinton for getting fellated on the clock becomes president
of Baylor. Or not the prosecutor. The Solicitor General, or something.
I can never remember. In any case, out with the queers, at least the
seminarian queers. Out with my buddy’s dad who, as professor of
Jewish Studies, had the audacity to actually be Jewish.
This is when my friend Tibra, a physicist from Bangladesh with
an Oxford accent, gets booted for being insufficiently evangelical.
He asks me to take him to a church, to help him pass, so that the
documentarians of churchgoing can document his attendance. I
oversleep and promise him next time, which never comes around.
He teaches in Canada now, and I don’t blame myself.
My story’s called “The Whiteness of Bones,” which T.S. Eliot says
atones to forgetfulness. Whatever that means. Tibra reads my story,
at that same table, and he tells me not only that it’s bad, but why
it’s bad. Not just a bad story, but bad writing. He calls it poor. He
loans me books to read, European shit that’s way over my head,
Witold Gombrowicz and Saint-John Perse, books I return to him
with equivocations or shrugs, unable to even fake an opinion.
He’s the first avowed atheist I ever meet. When we play chess he
deconstructs my self-esteem. He explains his physics to us, not in
the lay-terms that connote mystical oneness, but in number-heavy
shoptalk. We lose interest. He tries to explain vectors, as if that will
help. We say we get it, but we don’t.
There’s me and a Jeff and a David and a Chris and a handful of
girls. There’s two Stephens. Slow Stephen and Worrisome Stephen.
They’re fringe. Worrisome Stephen wants us to act in his movie.
He wants to film fucking Twilight of the Idols and doesn’t seem
to understand why that’s a bad idea. We prevaricate. Guess how
his movie turns out. We start ignoring him. Supposedly the F.B.I.
56
SONES

finds reams of kid porn on his computer. Supposedly he goes to
prison. Nobody knows for sure. We never see him again. We have
somewhere between four and eleven friends in prison; it all depends
on who’s telling.
The other Stephen, Slow, rents a car under his dead dad’s name,
drives it over a cliff in China Spring with the intention of shooting
it until it blows up. It might have been our idea. He shoots it but
it doesn’t explode. We’re pretty sure he’s not in prison, or not
currently. The movies are another thing that lies to us.
Weekends we comb our hair and trawl fraternity parties for
free booze. Or drugs, or whatever is lying around. So many
interesting medicine cabinets, full of orange bottles like organ pipes
playing music only we can hear. If we don’t recognize the names of
pills, we take them anyway and record the results.
Tonight, the pills we snort turn out to be for narcolepsy. We can’t
decide what we’re feeling, but we’re wide awake and brimming
with ideas.
Two of us drive to Austin, to Donna’s house. At some point,
when no one is looking, the hippies and ravers combined forces,
assimilated, and became Burning Man Idiots. Donna’s one of these,
and wealthy, and, like ergo, a drug philanthropist. We’re weaned
on ecstasy from when it was cut with powerful things. For us, we
claim, MDMA alone is like baby aspirin. We keep lists of effective
combinations. Our standards are high and messy, and Donna shares
these standards with us. She says things like “ooh-la-la” and “that’s
so European.” We drive to Waterloo to buy her some records. Donna
likes music with persistent rhythms, stuff she can dance to with her
hands. We buy her “Bright Flight” by Silver Jews and a Simon Joyner
record, music you’d have to be deranged to dance to. We give her the
gifts and we’re rewarded with a bag of pills and a bag of mushrooms.
She calls records “vinyl.” One of us tries to explain how everything’s
mastered on CDs these days and then transferred to vinyl, so it’s not
as if records are more authentic or anything. It doesn’t diminish her
enthusiasm. I don’t know how we know her, but that’s the last time
we see her, ever. We don’t know what happened to Donna either, but
I’d wager she’s not in prison.
57
essay

The table is at a coffee shop. The coffee shop is owned by a woman
who finds us sympathetic. We amuse her. One of us, the eldest, is
her boyfriend every once in a while. We live at her house when she’s
away. Her house abuts the woods. We get high, stumble down the
hill into the trees, and return in time for breakfast.
Waco embodies principles of the most sluggish inertia. Mattress
stores as far as the eye can see. Roofs pitch at uniform angles. Bulbs
glow flicker-orange like in flophouses, or else supermarket bright.
Savory and unsavory people shake hands. May there be commerce
between them.
We’re friends with local sportscasters and members of the lay clergy.
With us they can get high with impunity. We still have maps for
where we buried things. If we look for them, we won’t find anything.
I make it through my first semester at Baylor the way a drunk
driver makes it home from the bar. We arrive on time for chapel,
which means mandatory church. It happens twice a week. ROTC
people stand sentinel, recording attendance and ensuring that
nobody sleeps, studies, or otherwise distracts themselves from the
overwrought pageantry on stage. We sit close to the exit and watch
the Christians do their dances. This is the day the Lord has made.
It’s also the day the chaplain is electrocuted, along with the guy he
dunks in the baptismal trough. The heavy green curtains are drawn.
They actually die in the water, the chaplain and the neophyte,
behind the curtains. A microphone malfunction. The crowd
murmurs and shifts in their seats. People say the word consolation,
meaning that today the dead will be reunited in Heaven.
I imagine Heaven as something like a vast parking. Cones of light
fall from high poles. Affixed to the poles are signs emblazoned with
numbers or letters, so you can find your car, or, in this case, the dead
that precede you. Everyone waiting in incandescent haloes for their
loved ones to hurry up and die.
No one confirms the deaths, which, if you look at it in a certain way,
could be deemed death by resurrection. Instead, the ROTC people
escort us from our seats, single file, out the doors. No one wonders
why the baptismal sacrament seemed like a good idea in mandatory
fucking chapel. No one wonders who carted in the trough or how
many gallons of hose water it took to fill. No one remarks that this
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would never happen to Catholics.
The deaths are announced next chapel, Thursday. Christians don’t
make those kinds of jokes, so nobody laughs. Because it’s weird
to laugh at the dead. And no one knows if the deaths are actually
ironic or not.
The visiting entertainment today consists of a dozen men in
American flag spandex who call themselves the Power Team.
Evidently, they were big in the nineties, big among evangelicals,
big in the Midwest, big in times and places where bigness was
super-relative. They were themselves very big, elephantine. Big,
not chiseled, like the men that haul airplanes and uproot trees
on TV in the middle of the night. These men perform for the
bereaved-by-proxy feats of really dumb strength. Smashing through
things, tearing things asunder. Handcuffs are applied to wrists
and handcuffs are broken from wrists. Handcuffs are explained
to represent the bondage of sin and the breaking thereof to have
something to do with Jesus and his abundant something. Metaphors
are held to abysmal standards. We cheer, however, because who
wouldn’t cheer. It’s cheerful, like guitar solos or fireworks. A man
rips a phonebook in half. Another man bends a handful of rebar.
Another lifts something very heavy above his head.
But nothing works perfectly. Something happens. The Christian
equivalent of cock-rock blares from the speakers. Something goes
wrong. The man with the heavy thing above his head fucks up. He
hurls the heavy thing forward, onto the front row of cheerers. It’s
an accident. The muscled evangelists freeze dumbstruck, their jaws
slack in horror. The heavy thing does not only appear heavy, it is
in fact very heavy—heavy enough to break several people’s legs in
the front row. Apparently it’s happened before. In Colorado and
Arkansas. This instance doesn’t even make the newspaper. On a
long enough timeline, everything’s happened before.
We’re all kicked out of Baylor for different and very valid reasons.
Most of us at the same time, more or less. Same semester. I hang on
longest, seeing as I’m youngest and I’d only just begun. None of us
has any business being there in the first place. We’re all smart and
lazy, scholarship kids accepted to fill the poor people quota. We can
show up stoned or drunk and still make As. We conspicuously do
not belong. But none of us so much as my roommate. A redheaded
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gay fella, seventy-five pounds overweight, and prone to making
comments calculated only to rile. He struts across campus wearing
t-shirts that espouse the PLO, veganism, and bands you have to be
on serious drugs to tolerate. He keeps a couple skinny gay boys flush
with drugs, and they repay him by spending noisy nights with him,
in the bedroom next to mine. He calls them the “twinks.” They all
three play parasites with one another and it’s only terrible for me.
He’s in prison now. He skips town after one of his twinks dies in
the other’s arms, still wearing the needle when he arrives at the
hospital. The living twink names him as the party responsible for
their heroin. I come home to no note, get a text message two weeks
later that avoids apology but places him in Montana. Montana
doesn’t like him, though. He eventually finds sanctuary in Colorado,
where, after a couple years pass, he himself overdoses. This leads
to the crosschecking of databases, and his extradition to Texas.
Criminal manslaughter means a mandatory two years. I find his
name and photograph on a website, appended by the sterilized
circumstances of his crime. Visiting him in Huntsville sounds like a
good idea, but only in the way that doing volunteer work sounds like
a good idea. Instead, I add him to the list of friends too lost to find.
We’re stranded at the diner with the lady who carries plates by
the dozen, whose mouth doesn’t move right. My earplugs are
in, but they never work as well as I hope. White noise conversation
and the thrum of soulless music combine forces to become just
shrill enough to penetrate the orange foam. I pull the earplugs
out, reshape them, and cram them back in. I’m writing a paper in
longhand, something about Emerson. I’m drinking burnt coffee and
more moving eggs around on my plate than eating them. Jeff and
Chris sit across from me, books turned upside-down, their mouths
moving in unison.
They gesture for me to uncork my ears, then for me to listen. At the
table behind me somebody’s holding forth. A white guy decorated
with patchy facial hair, sunglasses indoors, a necklace bedazzled
with non-precious stones. Beside him sits a woman with her eyes
closed. Across from them, an older man with a bad laugh. The
decorated guy seems to be rapping. He raps:
Pterodactyl,
Green apple,
That’s the color of my car,
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It’s a Jaguar.
I’m a superstar.
My friends try to keep their food in their mouths. The rapper says,
“Then this part about how my dick is slumming, but I don’t know how
to fit it.” The old man laughs like a car alarm. My friends can barely
suppress their own laughter. Their beards are speckled in yellow food.
I know why it’s supposed to be funny. I know I should be laughing or
trying not to laugh, but I can’t. It’s all so unspeakably sad—the bad
rhyming, the bacon smell, Emerson, the table arrangement of sugar
and sugar substitutes, all the fucking noise – and any way I could try
to explain it to my friends would just make it sadder.
Waco is homogeny made flesh. This fact assures that those who
differ in even slight ways stand out like comets on a clear night.
I meet my new best friend at the grocery store. She’s sixteen, there’s
a sponge in her mouth, and her pupils have devoured her irises.
She’s alone, trapped in the cage they enclose the makeup aisle in
after midnight, applying mascara in a mirror. I ask her if she needs
assistance and she looks at me with as much hauteur as a teenager
with a sponge in her mouth can possess. She garbles, “No, thank you.”
I scan the aisles for my friends, but they’ve vanished. They’re known
to abandon carts full of groceries to go outside, smoke cigarettes,
and recalibrate, to collectively reconsider their grocery decisions,
debate each item point for point. They’re not outside, though.
A girl clatters past me in high heels, a blur of black and white and
threadbare patience. A girl who, at least in Waco, you can’t help but
gawk at.
“Hey.”
I turn around. “Hey.”
“See a girl with a sponge?”
“Yeah,” I say. “She’s in the makeup cage.”
“Excuse me?”
“Um, here, I’ll show you.”
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I time my footsteps to the report of her heels. They’re tall heels,
even so, she barely comes to my chin. Her hair is cut like a boy’s.
“Y’all sisters?” I ask. It’s obvious.
“Yes.” She’s terse. She’s beautiful too. Her face at rest, though, is not
inviting.
“I’m Tyler,” I say.
“Becca.”
“Makeup cage. See?”
There’s nothing else to call it. I point. Her sister is not inside.
Behind us, a fake Dixie voice drawls, “My heroes.”
The officious sister drags the one on drugs away from me, pouring
protest in her ear. The makeup girl tears herself away and skips back
to me.

“You have weed?” she asks in her real voice.
“Yep.”
“What are you doing?”
“I was gonna spring you from cosmetics jail. Now I got nothing.”
“No, you got weed, remember?”
“Totally.”
“I’m Sabina. You got a car?”
“I do. Where’d your sponge go?”
She says, “You don’t need to worry about that.”
Somehow she convinces her sister that I’m responsible enough
to get her home. Becca says, “Whatever,” and clacks away. I buy
Sabina cigarettes and drive to a park with tiny graffitied log cabins.
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2016 North Texas Review

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2016 North Texas Review