1. family and parenting
2. children

The Skirmisher Staff
The Senior Editors:
Anya “I’d Like to Thank the Academy” Markowitz
Jake “Leonard” Lyon
The Staff:
Poppy “Bluth” Wilder
Jeremiah “Man” O’Mahony
Emily “Heart of Gold” Davis
Jacob “Silent Giant” Dannenberg
Molly “But I Vetoed This” Montgomery
School Sponsor/Spirit Guide:
Lisa “Please Stay On Track” Fisher
Art/Design Editor:
Mark “Transformed By The Power Of Love” Garrett
Table of Contents
Erin Tyra (New Vision Award)..................................................................................................................Cover
Hannah Witkowski..................................................................................................................................................3
Maps Kevin Weiss (New Voice Award)...............................................................................................................4
Sarah Schulz.............................................................................................................................................................5
Teaching the Ants to Race Molly Montgomery.....................................................................................................6
I’m Coming Down Fast but I’m Miles Above You Anya Markowitz...................................................................7
Halia Harvey.............................................................................................................................................................9
The Last Word Jeremiah O’Mahony.....................................................................................................................10
On Sickness Kendall Lawrenz...............................................................................................................................11
On Grammar Allison Stertzer..............................................................................................................................11
On Nudists Dawson Nance...................................................................................................................................11
Alex Tomes.............................................................................................................................................................12
My Discoveries of Joy Isabel Oakley.....................................................................................................................13
Jake Lyon.................................................................................................................................................................14
Sunsets Gabrielle Defrancesco............................................................................................................................15
New Age Emily Davis..........................................................................................................................................16
The Wildcatter Aaron Stevens..............................................................................................................................17
Callie Duksin.........................................................................................................................................................19
YOLO Jacob Dannenberg.....................................................................................................................................20
Eliza Harrison........................................................................................................................................................21
Emily Deissler........................................................................................................................................................22
N the Variable Noah Gollin..................................................................................................................................23
Calm Adrenaline McMiller...................................................................................................................................25
Poppy Wilder..........................................................................................................................................................26
“Keep the Car Running” Poppy Wilder...............................................................................................................27
Kate Martin............................................................................................................................................................29
On Dating Montana Maxwell...............................................................................................................................30
On Senior Year, On Memories Sofia Franklin.....................................................................................................30
On “Shine a Light” Rhe Civitello.........................................................................................................................30
Griffin Sides............................................................................................................................................................31
Graham Sides.........................................................................................................................................................32
Up From Burlington Jake Lyon............................................................................................................................33
Zaide Mendoza......................................................................................................................................................35
Muddy Water Francis Castillo y Mulert.............................................................................................................36
Mark Garrett..........................................................................................................................................................37
On Trains Jake Lyon.............................................................................................................................................38
On True Love Alec Tilly........................................................................................................................................38
The Girl with the Golden Gun MK English........................................................................................................39
On Disease Zoe Shapiro........................................................................................................................................41
On Cultural Evolution Owen Peterson................................................................................................................41
Gavyn Pendleton...................................................................................................................................................42
The Female Fog Olivia Carroll..............................................................................................................................43
Personal Philosophy Lydia Abernathy................................................................................................................45
Isabel Oakley..........................................................................................................................................................46
Wes Jansen..............................................................................................................................................................47
Hannah Witkowski
3
Maps
Entire worlds with nothing inside
Rest on paper
In the form of ink.
The towns are all abandoned
The lakes are all dry
And the mountains are all flat.
The continents have no earth
The forests have no trees
And the deserts have no sand.
Maps do have one thing on them
That the earth in which we live
Does not:
Borders appear where reality saw fit to put nothing.
Kevin Weiss
4
Sarah Schulz
5
Teaching the Ants to Race
I’ve dreamt of ants pouring from my eyelids at night
and climbing into the parched velvet sky scorched by rice whiskey,
they’ve led me across worlds to your beloved face.
But beyond, to the despondency of our nature,
which perhaps you are teaching me to overcome.
My teacher, eyes lit up like a brilliant chrysanthemum under the darkness, and
I swear I can feel every inch.
I swear I can feel each
raspberry of warm blood pulse through my strange, milky skin.
The skin understands our god-like time, knowing the years as we cannot,
yet it is we who thought we knew the skin.
Thought we knew all of its test-tube colors,
and based on worn-out assumptions,
carelessly strung up walls around the fragile necks of our borders
like chintzy pearls yanked from the mouths of slimy, bleeding oysters.
And, when pulled off, our motion was that of tugging off a wine-stained party dress:
we rushed, breaking the clasp, and our prejudices clattered across the floor,
so we forgot to pick up the fallen pieces.
And now you, teaching me to gather them like chords,
string them together as ringing words,
hold them against my breast so I may know the firm feeling of an education.
Molly Montgomery
6
I’m Coming Down Fast But I’m Miles Above You
You are sitting on the living room floor with the open box inches from your toes. You
survey the faint stains on the sturdy, coffee-colored cardboard from the countless times you
have pulled it down, nestled it into the plush carpet, and stared empty-eyed at its contents.
It is full of relics: dinosaur bones masquerading as pealing Polaroids. You tried to cram your
youth into re-sealable containers, label them, and stick them on the highest shelf in the
closet so that your children couldn’t knock them down; they don’t need the anxiety. And
as the face in the mirror started to look more and more like your mother’s, the trips to the
closet became more frequent, the intensity with which you sifted the remains more feverish.
Survivor’s guilt is a terrible burden.
You took the box down today because you heard the song again. Someone had haphazardly stuck it into the lineup on the classic rock station like an orphaned skirt draped
over the shirt rack in a department store. So it appeared, somewhere between “Band on the
Run” and “Benny and the Jets.”
“And here is an underrated Neil Young classic…” the DJ crooned, “Revolutionary
Blues.” So you took deep breaths the rest of the way home, made sure to let the cocker spaniel out, ironed seven button-down shirts, let your fingers latch mercifully onto the unsophisticated cardboard, and prepared to journey again. You wanted to find a clue that Neil Young
might have missed.
It was sitting at the top of the pile. You always put it back in the same place to save
time. It sat confidently above smiling, sun-tanned ghosts, piles of dead birch bark, and other
people’s toddlers. You grasp the two white corners. Your thumb lightly grazes a patch of
gravel and your own smiling face.
And once more, you close your eyes.
It is July 1969, and the air smells like honey. You are sitting cross-legged on the lawn,
sweeping the long grass left and right with your toes and sliding a joint someone gave you
between your fingers, newly calloused from your steel guitar strings. Around you, peachcolored bodies slide in and out of focus, limbs locked like knots, twisting like puzzle pieces.
You can’t quite remember how you ended up here, in the shadow of a pop star’s house
in Laurel Canyon, but someone wearing imitation prayer beads had grabbed your hand
through a haze of smoke and now you could taste the sky on the tip of your tongue.
So you decide to walk – past upturned ribcages and knees protruding from underneath the geriatric willow trees, past little girls swimming in the pool, and over the discarded
hookah hoses sleeping like snakes in the grass. Someone you had seen on an album cover is
lying face down in the sun, and another is dreaming with his back against a wall, his stringy
moustache fluttering with every breath. It feels like you are walking in a delicate diorama;
with each step you might shatter these perfect miniature replicas or tear down the paper
walls of their world. And then you hear laughter. It is loud and self-possessed, out of place in
this quiet utopia. You walk towards it without really meaning to. It slowly morphs from indistinct muttering to voices yelling, a man’s harsh bark like metal scraping frosted glass. You
7
can see them now, sitting in a circle, an artistic anomaly in your diorama: too many girls,
too skinny, and all looking adoringly at the man standing above them.
“Hey Beautiful!” Before you can fully register the details of the crowd, you are spun
around. A man with horned-rimmed glasses and a large bulky camera is standing in front of
you smiling. “Souvenir photograph?” he asks, jostling the camera a little. You nod, push the
hair out of your eyes, smile widely, and shake the sound of the laughing man’s voice away.
The man in front of you hands you the Polaroid. “A little something to remember us Canyon
rats by. I’m Henry by the way.”
You point at the group of girls, “I’m Sara. Who are they?”
“I don’t know man,” Henry laughs. “They’re sort of nomadic... wanderers. I’ve seen
them at Dennis’s place, at Cass’s, once at Neil’s.”
You interrupt. “They seem kind of… odd?”
Henry laughs again, hitching his camera back around his neck. “God, Sara, aren’t we
all?”
Aren’t we all… It only happened a month later. August had barely tumbled out of bed
when that dark group of nomads became murderers. The cops dragged them away in fluorescent squad cars grinning like deranged prom queens, and everything got deathly quiet.
No one felt like sitting out on the lawn any more, and peace and love became something to
laugh at darkly under your breath, instead of to adorn banners. Everyone wondered how
he had done it. The Canyon ladies drank tea from mismatched mugs and speculated with
cracking voices how they had ever let him through their gates and into their courtyards.
With pained desperation, they asked each other if anyone had ever noticed anything… odd.
But they all shook their heads sadly, because the truth was that no one had thought to look
that closely… no one except you. On a hot July afternoon, you had seen the man who painted his message across the Canyon in blood and said nothing at all.
You are shaking now. You make space for the familiar waves of guilt that slowly ebb
towards you, the vestiges of second-hand misery. There is nothing you could have done or
said that would have made a difference – you know that now – but somehow looking at this
picture, it feels like you let evil slip right under your nose. Because, back in 1969, Charlie
Manson is looking right at you. His sallow face is turned almost imperceptibly towards your
smiling, unaware one, and the blacks of his eyes are sharp and piercing against the blue sky
behind him. No matter how much you torture yourself, you could never have shifted those
eyes from their purpose.
So you replace the picture. On top. You slam the lid of the cardboard box quickly,
like you would dispose of a large, spindly insect, and shove it back onto its shelf. You finish
the ironing and let the dog back in. And despite yourself, you find yourself singing the last
phrase of “Revolutionary Blues” under your breath.
Well I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars, but I hate them more than lepers and
I’ll kill them in their cars…”
Anya Markowitz
8
Halia Harvey
9
The Last Word
The day is as cold as your heart.
The snow dances a slow waltz through the sky,
alighting on your skin of nearly the same color with a sigh of relief,
a respite from the infinite dance.
You’re smiling, with another of your jokes on your blue lips.
“Cold? Be a man, it’s four degrees! Positively tropical!”
The ghost of the smile that crosses my lips is the jeering sun that is so mercifully
absent on this winter’s day.
It’s so difficult to remember. It’s so difficult not to remember.
I can feel the ghost of laughter from years long past,
times long gone.
The memories force their way out of my eyes,
and in their mad flight they freeze before they hit the ground
You look ridiculous in a suit.
I could swear your smile twitched at that last dig,
lips already forming around a scathing retort in the instant that the lid swung shut.
The box fell six feet and came to a rest with a soft thump at the bottom of the hole.
My smile was heavy with the weight of us.
I turn to walk away, but after a single step I hear your belated quip.
“Look who’s talkin’, Quasimodo.”
My smile grew too heavy to bear.
I left it at that and walked away, disappearing into the snow.
You always liked to have the last word.
Jeremiah O’Mahony
10
Short Talk on Sickness
On Monday you wish you were sick.
On Tuesday you think you might be getting sick.
On Wednesdays you feel like you might die.
On Thursday you feel like you might die.
On Friday you wish you weren’t sick.
On Saturday you pretend you aren’t sick.
On Sunday you are feeling better, and again wish you were sick.
Kendall Lawrenz
A Short Talk on Grammar
Just because no one says “the reason is that”
Instead of “the reason is because”
Doesn’t make it okay.
Just because no one comes to
A complete stop at a stop sign
Doesn’t make it okay.
Allison Stertzer
Short Talk on Nudists
I never understood the
appeal of a nudist colony
until I had to do my own laundry.
Dawson Nance
11
Alex S. Tomes
12
My Discoveries of Joy
People often ask me why I am joyful, so it must be apparent that I am. I have searched
for the answer to this question ever since I can remember. I have rummaged my insides this
way and that and fished for a slight sliver of a clue. Now the answer is apparent to me: I am
in love with the simple pleasures hidden in the world around me.
I embrace the feeling of hot dirt beneath my bare feet and in between my toes. I
whistle frequently. I revel in the wind playing with my hair, twirling it until my head turns
into a tangled, jumbled nest that any bird would be proud to have created. Ah, the incredible sensation of licking my lips! Excitement overcomes me at the first signs of storms. I
delight in the awkward moments in conversations when each person is absorbed in his or
her own thoughts and a silent anticipation hangs in the air. I marvel at foreign languages. It
is a joy to wake up to realize I just dreamt in Spanish. Oh, how sweet the smell of pine trees,
autumn, grass, shampoo, victory, and new books. I find satisfaction when looking at the
faces of elderly people and the way their skin falls, droopy and delicate, their bodies worn
thin with years. I love the feeling of crinkling up and tearing paper. Photographs greatly
please me. Ah, the sheer pleasure of skipping stones, biting into apples, opening soda cans,
sneezing, shouting, and lighting matches. Spinning in circles is simple yet profound. Diving
into cold pools, my body is overwhelmed by a moment of shock and sheer amusement. I
say certain words with relish as they roll off my tongue: exquisite, luscious, blue, mariposa,
comfortable, and nifty. What a lucky tongue I have, for it also gets to catch snowflakes,
raindrops, M&Ms, and grapes! Merrily people watching, I bask in the differences I discover
between other individuals and myself. After looking at a bright light, I enjoy the little colorful dots that crowd my vision. Isn’t it wonderful that two hands can fit perfectly together, as
if meant to be? I find children fascinating, for one day they will, like me, ponder the beauty
of the world with awe. I adore the moment when the sun’s last rays have cast the world into
a state of gold. Watching living beings sleep captivates me. I like swallowing cold water. I
blink slowly, chew thoroughly, and breathe deeply.
I am a merry soul. These simple pleasures have enabled me to withstand the hardships that life has thrown my way. I have had to start over time and again in Oregon,
Boulder, Santa Fe, and Mexico. I’ve learned Chemistry, French, and History completely in
Spanish as the only white person in my school. I’ve balanced school, work, the musical,
volunteering, sports, and difficult relationships. I know that everything will be okay because
I have that hot dirt between my toes.
Isabel Oakley
13
Jake Lyon
14
Sunsets
He sits down in the short tree’s long shadow to watch the sun paint
the sky violent shades of red as it retires for the night. The boy likes to imagine that these sunsets are actually the sun’s way of stealing attention so that it
won’t be forgotten in favor of diamond stars and the mother-of-pearl moon.
The sun wants to be remembered with reverence. From his vantage point, the
child watches shadows highlight the terrain’s imperfections as though it, too,
has rough skin from laborious chores and wrinkles from wisdom. Sunset is the
most deceptive part of the day: everything is fool’s gold during the jealous sun’s
display. The boy is thankful for the honesty and transparency restored by the
moon’s humble glow. For even the stars, in all their glamour, are modest.
Gabriella DeFrancesco
15
New Age
Buried in the bowels of countless cinemas
Are movie reels:
Silver, gleaming, flat as burnt-black pancakes,
Fuzzy & disposable as blurred brain cells, dormant in hollow graves.
They are silent now, these reels.
Never again will they grind ceaselessly
With a sound like thumbnails on sandpaper,
Feeding out ribbons of skin-slashing tape.
The flickering light projected on the screen
(Half creamy, half the grey of a fading memory)
Is permanently dimmed, leaving only a 22-by-52-foot rectangle of darkness
With a blank milky eye at its center.
Now, we hurtle toward a garish bombardment of
Fluorescent glitter that glazes our souls.
Faces trained on the ground, we insolently beg that this vision
Will transport us to a universe in which
There are no burst cells, muted tongues, or stagnant blood.
& as we gnaw on our smashed popcorn
We feel that a door has been slammed in our faces.
(Has been slammed? More appropriate to say that
We have eased it shut, infinitesimally, with the stealthiness of starving raccoons.)
That starry world has been lost, tossed hopelessly away with each
Plop of moist earth on the coffin of enthusiasm.
& the faces on the reels, the ones
Abandoned in the cavernous intestines of the cinemas
Seem to mock us, quivering with silent laughter.
Here’s lookin’ at you, kid, they whisper.
I would tell you we’ll always have Paris,
But even that slipped away when
You stopped finding problems to care about.
Emily Davis
16
The Wildcatter
I can still remember the first time I saw Renaldo Watkins. It was a clear, windless September afternoon, a scorcher in typical Hobbs fashion1. He emerged out of the lifeless flats like a mirage, the fabric of his being rippling from the heat waves, gaining solidity as he approached the
small, concrete patio strewn with sun-bleached plastic chairs at the back of Jane Addams Hall on
the University of the Southwest Campus2. I was farting around the JA commons, too depressed
to go to class—otherwise I wouldn’t have seen him.
He was dressed head to toe in western wear, all of it shrunken to fit his sub-six-foot frame.
He had a leathery, whiskery look that reminded me of a hung-over Harry Dean Stanton. From
the way he was staggering along with his sweat-stained Stetson pulled low over his eyes and the
soles of his beat-up Tony Llamas scuffling across the dusty hardpan, I thought he was drunk. But
then I realized that his stumbling was due to his intense focus on the ground in front of him, not
intoxication. He was concentrating so hard that he almost tripped over the NO TREPASSING—
UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTHWEST sign arbitrarily placed fifteen feet beyond the patio. He
glared at this unexpected obstacle, then straightened up and strode purposefully toward JA Hall.
To my hyper-active imagination, the approaching black-clad figure looked like a cowboy ninja
assassin. But when he came through the sliding glass door into the JA commons, a blast of hot
air at his back, he was holding a business card rather than a revolver or samurai sword.
“Afternoon, son,” he said, offering me the card that identified him as Renaldo Watkins,
“Independent Oil Man” operating out of Denver City, just across the border in Yoakum County,
Texas.
“There’s an ocean of untapped petroleum under the ground about ten yards beyond that
goddamn sign,” he said as I gaped at him in stupefaction. “I’d be obliged if you’d take me to the
president’s office so’s me and him can talk business.”
“P’troyum,” he pronounced it. “Bidness.” I’d never heard anyone talk that way before.
“I don’t know,” I stammered. “President Perry’s pretty green. What I mean is, he’s a committed environmentalist and….”
“Son,” Watkins said, shaking his head like a long-suffering parent correcting a confused
child. “The only green anyone gives a shit about in this world is the green of cash money. Now
lead on.”
I led on.
Had an odder couple ever strolled across the USW campus3? Me, a dorky kid with so
much Spicy Cheetos dust on my fingers that they resembled little firecrackers4. Him, the man in
black, face so wrinkled and weather-beaten you’d have sworn he was Johnny Cash on meth.
1 For those lucky readers who neither have heard of nor been to the city of Hobbs, New Mexico, population 43,405, it is
located in Lea County, within pissing distance of the Texas border.
2 The University of the Southwest is the Harvard of Hobbs. I was a nineteen-year-old sophomore there, still regretting my
decision to take a full-ride scholarship from USW instead of paying in-state tuition at Western Texas A&M, when Renaldo
Watkins waltzed into my life.
3 For a no-name school in a bumfuck town, University of the Southwest has quite a campus—fourteen buildings and two
athletic fields. And it’s only five miles to the nearest Sonic Drive In.
4 The flavor of my underclass years was defined by JA Hall vending machines stocked only with Red Bull and Spicy Cheetos, both of which I developed a crippling addiction to.
17
As we walked, Renaldo told me his life story. He was from Yoakum County, the son of
an alcoholic who happened to be a hugely successful wildcatter5. Pop Watkins’ luck eventually
ran out, though, and he ate the business end of a twelve-gauge pump gun three weeks before
Renaldo’s eighteenth birthday. Despite his dad’s alcohol-anesthetized DIY dentistry gone wrong,
Renaldo became a wildcatter himself. He used Pop Watkin’s super-retro technique—walking
around the desert, no geological reports or seismic equipment, just looking at the lay of the land
and exercising heavy-duty intuition. “I get vibrations through my boot heels,” he explained to
me. “They run up my legs and make my balls tingle.”
His testes had tingled a-plenty at first. Well after well came in, and his bank balance blew
up bigger than Deepwater Horizon. But then his luck petered out, a series of dry holes pushing
his accounts into the red and his reputation to dead. He’d been driving down County Road 74,
about a half mile due north of USW, when he’d spotted something that spoke to him of prehistoric swamps and millions of years of decay under hellacious heat and pressure. He ditched his
truck and started trespassing on foot, his boot heels singing and his balls jingling, convinced that
he’d found the mother of all oil fields.
As we climbed the stairs to the Admin Building, Renaldo draped his arm around my
shoulders and gave my elbow a proprietary squeeze. “You a pal of this President Perry?”
“I don’t think he likes me. I’ve missed chapel five weeks in a….”6
“Son, you ever think about getting into the oil business?”
No, I had never thought about getting into the “o bidness.” But I had a feeling it was going to happen whether I liked it or not as Renaldo barged into the president’s office, dragging me
behind him.
Aaron Stevens
5 Old-school wildcatters are a dying breed. They are the ultimate gamblers, willing to stake everything on a nondescript
patch of ground the might contain millions of dollars in oil or absolutely nothing at all. Why wildcatters haven’t garnered a
Discovery Channel reality series is beyond me.
6 The University of the Southwest was originally called Hobbs Baptist College—enough said.
18
Callie Duksin
19
YOLO
The man who wakes up to spend eights hours in a cubicle,
pay the bills, mow the lawn…
And when you go to sleep, do you expect anything to change the next day?
You sit at the booth boasting about your family, friends, and stable career. Your eyes
begin to bounce around the room, and your voice vibrates as you try to hold your
lips stretched across your teeth.
I realize that you lie to trick yourself into being happy, and I am afraid of what I could
become.
I tell myself that I can stay away from the white-collar suburban life, that I will
choose happiness over success. My fear is to end up as another middle-aged man
who
can’t remember the fun times.
An alcoholic once said, “You only live once.” I take advice from illiterate rappers very
seriously.
Jacob Dannenberg
20
Eliza Harrison
21
Emily Deissler
22
N the Variable
23
Ssssnnnnn…
The creature’s burningly cold breath falls against my face. It lurches closer to me, raises a grotesque, malformed claw, and begins to run a slimy finger down my cheek. Soon, the monster’s scaled,
horrid face is pressed against my own. It released a pained hissing, and I come to the conclusion that
this is how I die. Suddenly, its form begins to bubble and deteriorate. The monster reels back and begins to howl. It falls into the sand below and melts into a puddle. The puddle lurches and dances before
my eyes and is suddenly consumed by the earth. The monster is gone. No, it never existed. Just my
mind playing tricks again, I would assume. There’s no such things as monsters.
With the sun beating down and drenching the sandy landscape in heat, I decide that I should
start walking, but I realize that I have no idea where I am. I don’t know in which direction to go. After staring for a short while at the featureless expanse of the desert, I am suddenly stopped. My legs
become heavy, as if lead. There is a flash of bright light. I look up to find the sky folding into itself,
eventually forming a face. Clean and composed, but disdainful and commanding. I am faced with the
stern visage and omnipotent clout of Ondator. There is such a thing as Ondator. Not only that, but he
always seems to appear when I’m not doing something right.
“To the south, N,” bellows Ondator. “You must travel south, nowhere else. To the people,” he
says, hissing at me. “You must head due south,” he repeats. “You will know why. Go to the people. You
must.”
He’s probably right in what I should do, but I don’t like to accept commands. I open my mouth to
protest, but I am stopped by a sudden stinging in my chest. The stinging grows until my whole body is
enveloped in a blistering pain. After falling to my knees, I see that Ondator is now quite satisfied with
what has just occurred. I begrudgingly agree, and he takes his leave. He falls into the wind, flowing
with it and dissipating into the air. Suddenly, there is nothing.
Before I have the opportunity to begin my trek southward, I am interrupted again. The wind picks
up, and a twister of sand is formed. In the center of the twister is Samvetet. A strange creature, human
in form, wearing a tattered suit. Samvetet casually steps out of the tornado, greeting me with the tip of
a hat that doesn’t exist.
“Hold your ground, friend,” Samvetet whispers. “You shouldn’t trust him. You never should. Would
I lie to you, N? Stay here. Or go north. Don’t go south.”
He spits out the statement hastily and without emotion, but he seems like someone I should trust.
Like a big brother. And I’ve grown acquainted with the small area of sand I presently inhabit. Going
south would just lead me to places that are even more unfamiliar. I’m about to agree to stay, but I think
back to the pain inflicted upon me by Ondator just moments ago. I cannot deal with that again and
am forced to go against Samvetet’s suggestions. He passive-aggressively sinks into the sand beneath us.
Gone.
Traveling south proves to be rather similar to traveling randomly, at least. The sand stretches across
the horizon indefinitely. Eventually, in the distance, I see what seems to be an assortment of buildings.
Upon getting closer, I find that all of them have been destroyed and left in a miserable state. Blocks
of wood and rock litter the area. Near the edge of the “town,” there is one building that remains fairly
intact. Curious, I look inside.
Within the building lies a single woman, collapsed against the wall. Her hair is short, red, and
frayed. She is wearing what was probably once a white and green outfit. The woman appears to be rather frail and petite, and this is in no small part because she has no limbs. Upon closer inspection, I find
that there is a bandaged stump in place of each limb. I notice her eyes quickly darting left and right, as
if afraid someone is going to find her. She notices me and freezes up. Before I have the opportunity to
ask her where her limbs are, she starts screaming and wailing. The noise hurts my ears.
Samvetet pops into the building through a wall.
“Hold on there, friend. Don’t trust the girl. She’s dangerous.” He walks up to her casually,
but she doesn’t seem to notice him. “Look at her. She’s evil. Kill ya’ the moment she has a
chance.” He looks back at me, shooting daggers with his eyes. “Kill her. You have to kill her.”
I hesitate and consider what is going on. Samvetet wouldn’t lie to me, would he? My
hesitation appears to agitate Samvetet, and he begins to yell. I try to listen, but all the noises
around me start to fade in my mind. He’s shouting something about “trust” and “warning,”
and she is continuing to scream incoherently. I feel confused, scared, and most of all, light. I
feel very, very light. The whole world fades to white, and I fall unconscious.
I wake up slowly some time later. I groggily begin to stand. After managing that, I observe
my surroundings. Both Samvetet and the girl are gone. Where she was, though, the sand
appears to be moist and red. A chill runs up my spine. But I look and see that wherever
the sand is wet, it turns a darker color. Maybe it was just wet sand, I tell myself. Wet sand. I
hastily leave the building and continue traveling south.
Eventually, I see a large structure of stone and wood in the distance. Happy that I am
probably nearing my goal (whatever that may be), I start to move towards it at a brisk pace.
As I come closer, the sand starts to stir and shake. The world seems to growl at me, and earth
begins to fold over on itself. The sand lurches and lifts, making me feel as if the whole world
is going to tip over and fall. Everything starts vibrating. Suddenly, Samvetet appears in the
sand, popping in from seemingly nowhere. “Don’t go a step further south,” he says. But I go
southwards, further and further. Samvetet starts to shake violently and mutters something
unintelligible. He falls over into the sand, as if dead. Everything begins to spin and flip. Suddenly, I feel very heavy again. The world turns dark. I sit still until things stop spinning.
Once again, I blearily observe my surroundings. The world has settled, and Samvetet is
gone. I decide to continue towards the structure. Coming closer, I see that it appears to be
some sort of fence. There is a large wooden gate being stalwartly guarded by a tall man. After
noticing me, he nods his head and opens the gate without a word. I enter through the gate
and find an enclosed settlement. While the change of scenery is nice, I am left unsettled. The
whole of it seems eerily familiar. I instinctively take a specific route through this town I have
never seen, and find myself before a building secluded from the others. I know to go inside
it, somehow, open the door and enter.
Inside, everything seems even more familiar. In the corner of the room, there is a lone
woman dressed in a clean, bright white and green outfit covering her thin, frail body. Her
hair is short, red, and well kept. She lazily looks over in my direction, and a smile forms on
her face after she sees me. She waves to me and begins to walk towards me. She takes my
hands in hers and looks into my eyes.
“Welcome home, Father,” she says. “Were you out wandering in the desert again?”
Noah Gollin
24
Calm Adrenaline
The thrill of frigid
liquid lightning
rushing through veins.
A primal shock of exhilaration in the cold
sun
as the wind sweeps by
the feel of newly
made air
spotless and crisp against the
hard blue sky.
The gusts punctuated
by the dot of a soaring raven
caught up in an ancient dance
with the sky.
Through juniper,
over rocks,
with a feeling unexplained
and wonderful.
25
MC Miller
Poppy Wilder
26
“Keep the Car Running”
I’ve got a plan, I’ve got an atlas in my hands
I’m gonna turn when I listen to the lessons that I’ve learned
-Benjamin Francis Leftwich – Atlas Hands
Archer1 hummed blue in the background of our band-poster-studded dorm room. Charlie lay on the floor with her hair splayed around her pale face and her watery green eyes shut.
A crumpled, frayed map rested in her hands. I would always find her like this; she would often
be wearing nothing but her black and grey polka-dotted underwear, and little bubbles of drool
would pool in the corners of her mouth.
“Charlie, get up. We need to get you into bed.” I’d drag her into the single bed against the
window where she’d curl into the fetal position, the pools of drool rolling down her face, and
mumble, “Thank you, Bee.”
In my freshman year of college, Charlie was my roommate. She was from Leucadia, Cali2,
fornia and came to the University of Washington because she liked the fact Kurt Cobain3 was
born and died there; as well, Charlie wanted to get lost in 600,000 people. It wasn’t until later
when we got drunk off Jack and Coke together for the first time that I found out why she wanted
to get lost so badly.
“The problem was I liked being gone too much. I liked getting into my car and seeing
how far I could go before my gas ran out. I’d putter to a stop, smoke a Marlboro, and then call
someone to come bring me a can of gas. My parents hated this. You have obligations, you have a
nice house, there is no reason to be ‘out of control.’ I’m not out of control; I’m just sad. No matter what they said, I kept doing it. I loved the feeling of going down hills really fast. I liked to
push down the clutch; it made me feel like I was floating. Whenever I felt like I had lost control
over my life, I would scream and scream and scream in my car and no one could hear and I liked
that.”
Charlie really was sad. If you put all the sad indie songs4 I listened to together, you’d have
Charlie. Charlie often described how she felt as empty5: “It’s like everyone else got that white
fluffy stuffing in them and whatever Build a Bear factory I was made in forgot to put mine in.”
1 Archer was an animated sitcom on FX started in January 2010. It was about a group of spies who work at ISIS (the International Secret Intelligence Service), in New York City. The main character, Sterling Archer, is a self-centered lady’s man
with mommy issues. I watched the whole first two seasons one hot night in high school with the boy I was in love with at
the time.
2 Leucadia is a part of Encinitas, California and is a small beach town near San Diego. It’s like any other beach surf town;
laid back surfers and skaters with sand permanently in their hair.
3 For those of you who don’t for some odd reason know who that is, Kurt Cobain was the lead singer and founder of Nirvana, one of the most popular bands ever, probably. He shot himself when he was 27, obviously dismembering the band. If
you don’t listen to Nirvana I suggest you get on that because they’re incredible.
4 i.e. Skinny Love, Crown of Love, Lonelily, Paper Aeroplane, Into Your Eyes, Ashamed, My Door is Always Open, We Are
Nowhere Its Now, That Was the Worst Christmas Ever, Small Hands, Before You Cry…
5 I always thought of the song Empty by Ray Lamontagne when she said this: Will it always feel this way? So empty, So
estranged?
factory I was made in forgot to put mine in.” At college she mostly stayed in our room playing
Bright Eyes6 songs on her worn acoustic guitar.
“Charlie, don’t you want to come out with me? There’s this party and I think it’ll be pretty
fun.” No, was the steady answer. “I think I’ll watch Freaks and Geeks7 . I’m re-watching the episode where Sam, Neil, and Bill replace Lindsey’s party beer with non-alcoholic beer, you know?
And then Bill gets really drunk off the real beer. Besides, James Franco is better than any boy I’d
meet at your party.” How could I argue with that? Of course James Franco was better than any
boy at the dumb college party I was attending.
“My parents got so fucking sick of me being ‘out of control’ that they decided they needed
to take some kind of action. They fretted over it for weeks. ‘Oh, Charlie, what are we going to do
with you?’ I didn’t really think I was something that could be done away with. When they asked
me how I was to be dealt with, I just picked off Essie’s ‘No Place like Chrome’ from my nails and
grabbed my keys to leave again. Then one day I came home after screaming in my car; I was
humming ‘Twenty Miles’ by Deer Tick to myself when I walked in, and my mom didn’t even
seem angry that I had been gone for the past five hours with no explanation and that I had wasted all my gas, again. ‘Charlie, we found it. We figured out how to fix you.’”
“Do you know how hard it is for everyone around you to think you’re crazy? I think I
started to believe my sadness really was craziness. How the hell would I know? I was only seventeen.”
Poppy Wilder
6 Bright Eyes mainly consists of Conor Oberst who I might go as far as to say is the angstiest singer you can imagine.
Charlie would start to play the chords to one of his songs then slowly let it fade, biting her lip and getting Dior’s Rouge
Blossom on her teeth. My favorite Bright Eyes song was called Land Locked Blues and brought out all the sadness in me and
could make me sob after two verses.
7 Freaks and Geeks was a show on NBC from 1999-2000 produced by Judd Apatow. It was mainly about a brother Sam and
his sister Lindsay. Sam was friends with the geeks, Bill and Neil, while Lindsay was a part of the freaks, Daniel, Nick, Kim,
and Ken. During the time Freaks and Geeks aired it was not very popular and got cancelled after twelve episodes, however
it has formed a cult following. I still don’t understand why it got cancelled so early. It starred James Franco, Seth Rogen, and
Jason Segel together. Come on people!
Kate Martin
Short Talk on Dating
I have always complained to my boyfriend
that he never takes me anywhere expensive.
He promised me that he would take me to the
place with the highest prices in town.
He took me to the gas station.
Montana Maxwell
Short Talk on Senior Year
Suddenly green chili, turquoise, and your bed become a
whole lot more important.
Short Talk on Memories
Memories are better than photos because anybody can
look at your photos.
Sofia Franklin
Short Talk on “Shine a Light”
A certain character is meant to portray a child who is
afraid of the dark. I can’t tell if it’s her sleepy moon-face or
the blue, gathered shape of her dress that makes her seem
so young and lost. Both are round, like delicate pale bird
eggs or tulip bulbs that have yet to peek above the dirt.
Rhe Civitello
30
Griffin Sides
31
Graham Sides
32
Up From Burlington
A boy sits alone on a tire swing in the pouring rain watching cars on a nearby
highway. “Randall,” he says to the tree trunk next to him. “Randall…” his voice trails
off into the pitter-patter of water droplets crashing into the leaves above him. He stares
silently off into the misty haze engulfing the highway and surrounding hills. Headlights
break the stillness for a fleeting moment before receding into clouds. “Randall…” he
pauses again and lets the two “l’s” drift into the shower. “The sun’s out back today. He’s
weeding and the office is closed.” The highway slides by and by, slithering down towards
Burlington.
A toad hops though the grassy river and comes to rest on an extruding root of a
hop hornbeam just below the boy’s dangling foot. The two figures stand in harmonious
solitude and tranquility. The moment lasts ten minutes for the body and an hour for the
mind before the toad’s croak shatters the quiet peace. Hardly noticing, the boy looks
down at the toad and studies him for a minute. “Will you marry me, Mitchell?” He nonchalantly yet earnestly asks the toad before picking it up and placing it in the hood of
his jacket. The boy always wears his stained, grey hoodie backwards so the hood droops
forward in front of his chest. The boy softly strokes the wart-and-slime-covered back of
the toad.
“Randall, Mitchell’s a witch. Mitchell and I are married just like you are my
brother.” As with most things the boy says, he is met with an understanding silence, free
of judgement, except for the rain which indifferently jumps to its death. Splish, splash,
splish, splish, splish, splash.…CRACK! A branch of the tree snaps from its high perch
and smashes into pieces upon landing on the saturated, muddy ground. The boy jumps
from the swing, tightly clutching his hood to keep the toad from escaping. “Randall!” he
shrieks. “Randall! Randall! What have they done?” Tears well in his eyes; his gaze holds
fixed on the branch lying at his feet. “The sun is out back weeding, but his lion attacked
my brother,” he sullenly tells the toad, now trying to work its way out of the hood. The
boy pushes the toad back. “Randall…” He waits for a reply. “Randall…” Again he waits
but receives nothing. “RAANdall…RAANNDALLL!” Panic fills inside him to the brim–
a panic so real and so powerful he walks away from that tree never to return. “Mitchell,
Randall’s dead,” he whispers as he shuffles his soaked sneakers towards the highway.
The boy walks awkwardly forward, weaving slightly like a drunkard. His backwards grey hoodie, faded blue jeans with frayed bottoms, and old muddy Converse
shoes are wet and heavy on his fragile, bony body. Periodically, a car rushes by on the
road. “Mitchell…” He exhales heavily. “Mitchell, why do the cars run so fast? It’s like
they know I’m here.” He pauses and looks up into the dark clouds above him. “Do you
think they know I’m here?” The toad responds with a small croak and an attempted leap
from the hood, which the boy closes before it can escape. “Mitchell, you know I’m here
. . . You are here . . .I am here . . . They are here for only a second. Do they know we’re
here?”
33
The boy steps over the guard rail and onto the side of the road. Small streams of
water rush off the street and over his feet as they flow towards the tire swing he had just
come from, digging a small trench in the malleable dirt. He stares down the road and
waits for a car to appear out of the thick mist. While the boy waits, he tastes the rain
with his tongue and squints into the falling rain. “The rain is the sun’s rays.” A car materializes in the distant, its lights reflecting off the water in the air, obscuring its rusty
silver body. It looks like a shark moving through the murky ocean. The boy crouches and
takes the toad from his hood. He holds it tightly in between his two hands and intensely
watches the car approach. He feels the ground vibrate in his toes and the groan of metal
in his ears. Just as the car is about to pass him, he drops the toad right in front of its
wheels. A whoosh of air from the car causes him to close his eyes as the tire pulverized
the toad into a small pile of goop plastered on the road.
The boy stands up, crosses the road, and defiantly remarks to himself with a little
nod of his head, “Mitchell was a witch.”
Jake Lyon
34
Zaide Mendoza
35
Muddy Water
He drove up in a digital camouflaged Chrysler 300, without caution, as if he had
been on this road numerous times. His calves flexed as he pulled himself out of the car and
stretched out to 6’0. His dark complexion shadowed his expression and gave him the appearance of a cop. He then maneuvered towards a chain link cage that served as an antitheft
system for the small adobe store structure and held the padlock like he had just caught a
fish, then released it, letting it slip through his fingers.
He observed the panoramic: a small clay pot with plastic flowers from Wal-Mart, a
stop sign stolen after Joey was run over by a speeding car, the country road sign graffitied
with “mota lives,” the semi-abandoned fifth wheel where Dolly and Santana spent the summer sweltering in the microwave trailer, the little Chihuahua outside keeping guard. That
was the summer Dolly escaped Paul, a short ten yards beyond the house, weary of his beatings. The skin on his forehead crinkled up in a desire to forget. He rapped on the sad broken
glass in a singsong kind of way.
Clowny Paul, completely bald now, gawked for a couple of confused and long looks.
Paul’s face, mouth open and alert, “Hey man!” and then Paul attempted to rationalize everything: about how Santana wasn’t there, about how Dolly wasn’t there, about how he’s mad
because Dolly wasn’t there and he needed to cash his check. Paul was suddenly done, bored
quickly, “Catch you later, man,” ending the conversation with a chuckle.
His face sank like a mud bubble reminiscing about that last time he visited Dolly on
Graduation Day. She smirked at him with no teeth and said, “I’m so proud of you, mijito.
But if you don’t bring me back a Route (pronounced Rowt) 49, I will kick your ass.” Alone
in his own presence, he relived the sweet sour feeling of the porch: Sweet summer popsicles
and cokes purchased from Moises’ illicit liquor store next to the magic circle of the San Antonio Church.
When he and Santana were twelve, they performed in La Posadas as Joseph and
Mary. He was costumed in an itchy woolen Shepherd’s cloak and Santana patient as the Blue
Mary. Cloaking his face, it was like they were married. He inserted his grown hand between
the rusted, decorative, wrought iron circling the porch. When he was thirteen, he could
squeeze his whole body between the two poles that grounded the porch roof.
He ducked his height under the roof to glimpse whether the elm tree had crashed
through the house yet. The tree was over fifty feet tall now, inclining cautiously over Paul
and Dolly’s bedroom. He wandered down the steps, running his hand along the broken
glass of the window. A torn curtain crudely rested on the rod as he glanced inside. There
was Santana’s old quilt neatly tucked on the bed. Her brother Vidal rested against the wall,
flicking the pointy head of a syringe with his thumb and index finger. Hastily evading Vidal’s eyes, out of respect, he drifted back to his 300, exaggerated the volume and drove his
car quietly disappearing up the road.
Francis Castillo y Mulert
36
Mark Garrett
37
A Short Talk on Trains
When someone loses his train of thought,
where does it go?
It probably goes to the same place as single socks.
Alec Tilly
Short Talk on True Love
You’re always there for me–sitting patiently, your placid clear water smiling back at me.
Nalgene. That’s such a pretty name. Is it French? Swedish, maybe?
Remember that time we hiked up Atalaya to watch the sun set over the
town–
my hand wrapped tightly around your waist.
I brought my mouth to yours,
and you quenched my lusting thirst.
Jake Lyon
38
The Girl with the Golden Gun
Along with hours of useless anti-derivatives and research papers about the Jay
Treaty, high school brought peer pressure, and peer pressure brought procrastination:
an obligatory practice for students of all ages. Always opting out of the social scene, I
spent my nights and weekends doing homework and was never one for procrastination.
But when lethargy finally struck as a freshman in high school (better then than now),
I chose to participate enthusiastically in the tradition by purchasing a new toy, an antisocial one that my parents never would have let me have when I was still too young to
drive my own truck to school.
It came a few days after I ordered it from some sketchy site online. I was down
sixty bucks, but now I had power. After furiously tearing it from its bubble wrap blanket, I marveled at the airsoft gun. Silver and black, large for a pistol; in the real gun
world, it would fit somewhere between a .22 and a Desert Eagle1. The spring-powered
projectile launched plastic bullets at four hundred feet per second, just enough to leave
the victim with a nice welt for a day. It didn’t matter whether it was real or not – I had
a gun, and I could shoot things. Targets, animals, people. Watch out, MK’s childhood
bully. You may have hit your growth spurt already, but I have a weapon.
After filling it with BBs, which sounded like a small-scale jackhammer going off
in a gravel pit, and hoping my kitten didn’t choke on the ones I’d spilled on my bedroom
floor, I set out into the woods. Armed and dangerous, I was the Daniel Craig, the Sean
Connery of my neighborhood. Watch out, world, here comes the female James Bond.
Creeping around quietly on the dry ground, I perched on the first rock I saw, my victim
in clear view: a robin in a Ponderosa Pine, maybe fifty feet from where I crouched. I
got ready to shoot. It took me a couple of tries to successfully cock it back, as the spring
was tighter than I had expected, and nothing like a real Colt at all, as my dad would later
critique2.
All right, Bond. You can do this.
In my hesitancy I could almost hear Atticus Finch: “Remember, it’s a sin to kill a
mockingbird.”
Hey, Atticus, I thought, I’ve been to the South, and listening to all those mockingbirds made my ears bleed.
Replaying the car chase scene3 from Casino Royale, I pulled the trigger. After all,
this was a robin, not a mockingbird. What do robins do? Show us when spring starts?
We have a groundhog for that. Robins only had suicide races into my bedroom window.
Pardon the cliché, but it is quite possible that with the power of the gun, the angle
of the shot, and the New Mexico afternoon wind, I missed by more than a mile. Damn
39
1 Congratulations, you just learned 90% of my gun vocabulary.
2 “Why doesn’t the hammer work? When I was your age, I had a real gun, and you pushed the hammer down.
This is bullshit.”
3 Oh, how my heart was broken to see that Aston Martin destroyed. Bond should consider a tank. Same price,
but less soul-crushing when it gets blown up.
bird didn’t even look up. Thus began the process: creep closer, cock the gun, aim, shoot, miss.
Creep closer, cock the gun, aim, shoot, miss. This continued fourteen more times until I finally
managed to hit a cluster of pine needles within a foot of the bird, at which point it flew off. Two
years later I still haven’t hit one, even with my new gun, which has a scope and holds 220 BBs in
its magazine. And just what the hell do you do with two hundred BBs? Stand twenty feet away
from me and give me five minutes; I’ll use them all, and you won’t get touched4.
One day in a particularly boring world history class, I began to ponder the gun. What was
the big deal with it, anyway? Why did I need a gun? My brother always wanted one, but then
again, all of his friends had one: nobody I knew did. No one pressured me to get one. Was I vulnerable? Lonely, perhaps. I had just started at a new school where I knew exactly three people,
all of whom formed a very exclusive clique.
I looked around: other people had begun to pass notes to each other. No one was sitting
within a note-passing distance to me. So what? Humans evolved to live in groups for protection5. I was more evolved than that: I had a Swiss army knife on the keychain in my backpack,
and two more in my car. And seeing as I never had a passenger in that truck, much like Mr.
Bond never does, I kept the knives easily within my reach, both on the driver’s side.
Now we’re even.
MK English
4 If everyone shot like me, there would be exactly zero deaths from gun violence each year.
5 Fun fact: that’s also the reason women tend to go to the bathroom in groups.
40
Short Talk on Disease
I used to say Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, and I got blank
stares. Now I just say POT syndrome, and they asked me how they can get it.
Zoe Shapiro
Short Talk on Cultural Evolution
The Day Disco Died was also the day disco had never lived. Out of the
shame of the American people was born pop music. It is the denial of
the past, not hope for the future, that is the genesis of the next cultural
generation.
Owen Peterson
41
Gavyn Pendleton
42
The Female Fog
I am always careful about my appearance, so you could not say that I spent much more
time than usual over myself that morning. The only difference between this and any other day
were my thoughts. As I put on my Covergirl #7 blush, I was acutely aware of them. Normally, my
head would be filling with mundane thoughts concerning my future breakfast plans, or the math
test third period, but not today. I wrapped a black hair tie around the higher layer of my beach
blonde hair to create the “half up-half down” look. This style was made famous by size two celebrities who one day forgot to put a vast majority of their perfectly curled locks up but kept it that
way because they simply could. It didn’t matter if half of their hair was down and limply laying
on their neck, they were still beautiful. This is not true for the mortals, the girls whose legacies
die. We are punished for taking a risk.
I ripped out a three-hole piece of paper from my Hello Kitty notebook and chewed the
pink eraser of a pencil my 4th boyfriend gave me. It had hearts on it, meant to be a token of his
affection. I had no respect for the pencil, and by the transitive property, I had none for 4 either.
As I chewed and chewed, I racked my brain to try to complete my thought into a rational idea.
Next, I wrote down three things:
1. Paint nails lavender
2. Tell Johnny he’s no longer #6
3. Get out of the female fog
I folded the list carefully so as not to smudge the freshly casted graphite. Once folded, I
kissed the letter for good luck, getting pink Revlon Color Stain sealed to the cover, and placed it
carefully in my pocket. I was fourteen, not a day older or younger. That is to say, it all happened
on my birthday. It was my birthday and I am crazy. I can’t remember if my mother got me a present or said happy birthday, all I remember is the story. This only happened this morning so don’t
be surprised if the details are perfectly accurate. I would know, I was there.
I see a doctor three times a week that gives me pills and tells me that I’m insane. Obviously
he cleans up the language a bit, but I know what he means. He takes notes on a thick clipboard,
as if I’m a throat culture with potential strep in it. My mother cries at night, I can hear it clearly
through the thin walls. She’s sad, I think. That’s what it seems like. I’m sick because I’m a female.
My brain is sick because it is trying to hard too be girly and perfect, that’s what Dr. Brown said.
“You need more attention than most girls to feel at ease.”
Next, it was twelve o’clock; time for lunch, according to the school. I always thought onethirty-five was a better time to eat lunch. I ate three slices of cucumber before Warren came to sit
with me.
Warren is my best friend, and quite frankly, the only person on this God forsaken planet
who understands me. He is in love with me and always tells me I’m beautiful as he chips the
paint off of the white park bench we always sit on with his medium-sized fingernails. He makes
me feel good about myself. He notices my hair, my lips, my dresses. I don’t love Warren, but I
love to keep him around. Warren and I have been friends for two and a half weeks at this point,
but that doesn’t mean he’s not my best friend. We understand each other better than anyone
else. That day was no different from usual. He told me he loved me, and that he wanted to elope.
43
I said “No, Warren. You know I cannot. I’ve got things to do here.” This obviously made him very
upset, because he crossed his arms and scooted seven inches away. His brown floppy hair slid to
one side of his skull and made his face look lost in his own hairy forest of secrets. I was tired of
the female fog now. Tired of trying to be a girl. I wanted to just be myself, but I couldn’t.
“Please come here, Justine.” That was my teacher, Mrs. Jones. She always wanted to talk to
me. “Whom were you just talking to?” “Warren, obviously.” I tried to reply with about 68% sass. That way she knew I wasn’t in
the mood to mess around.
“And who exactly is Warren, Justine?” She was mocking me. She had done this before with
Tommy, Jim, Andre, and Dexter. She claimed they all didn’t exist, and then told my mother. My
mother always had them shipped them away, never to be seen again, and now it was happening
once more.
“Don’t you dare take Warren away! You don’t even know him! You would like him if you
got to know him!”
“But, Justine, Warren doesn’t exist. He’s not real, just like all of the others. I’m going to
have to call your mother again, I’m afraid.” My mother is jealous. That’s why she cries at night.
She knows how beautiful I am and she wants to see me suffer. That’s why she takes all my friends
away. I wouldn’t let it happen again. I couldn’t let her win, so Warren and I ran away. “Mom” has
called the police, I know. She’ll cry to them and tell them she wants me back because she “misses
me” but I know the real story.
We’re sitting on the sidewalk next to a dirty gas station convenience store where one can
purchase 78-cent Slushies. Warren is trying to hold my hand, but I don’t want him to today. He’s
my best friend, but he’s in love with me. It is cold out. Very cold, and the wind is starting to chip
away at my tender skin like a chisel on a block of marble. That is why I told you this story. This is
what happened. I finally took a stand. There are days that I wonder if my insanity is what makes
them upset, or if they are angry because of their own insanity.
“Let’s go,” I say harshly to Warren. He doesn’t budge. I’m so sick of this female fog, I could
die. I take 3.7 steps before turning around to Warren on the sidewalk and shout, “WARREN,
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU LET’S GO, NOW!” The people getting gas stare at me, like the
doctor stares when I talk to Warren. They’re all out to get me. They all want revenge.
Olivia Carroll
44
The Golden Axiom of Human Existence
Every precious tick of the clock is counting down to the start of an eternity in which you
no longer exist. A forever where you can’t listen to music, shampoo your hair, lick envelopes,
shiver, or dance. A beyond where you can’t remember, laugh, poop, or spell your name. An infinite tomorrow where you’re no longer a character in the story, and the novel progresses without
you.
From this, we may derive two truths that together form the most magnificent paradox of
which I know.
Truth #1: Everything matters.
Every moment you’re here, present, and alive, you are a queer expression of the universe,
uniquely flawed in the way of a flower or a firework. You are fleeting, you are beautiful, you are
true. And everything you do matters, becomes something, is something. Is the only something
you’re ever gonna have. Tomorrow is promised to no one, so you must live in the slippery sense
of now and make every second count.
Truth #2: Nothing matters at all.
Someday all of us (and by ‘us’ I mean us alive now, us alive past, and us alive future) will be gone
and none of this will have mattered. No one will know any of the pain you caused, no one will
know any of the kindly deeds you performed, no one will know. All will be as if it never were, so
what does it matter what is?
Then, implicit in these two truths there is a third, greater one, which marks the foundation of my
personal philosophy:
Surprise Truth #3: We can decide what matters and what doesn’t.
We are the ones assigning meaning to anything in this universe and when we die, all that meaning will die with us. Whether we do it consciously or not, each of chooses for what reason we
live, decides in what something we believe.
It’s like you’ve each been granted two metallic gold cans, and you can place your doings, your
troubles, your hopes, whatever you want in either of them. You can sort your life laundry in any
way that pleases you. Or even in a way that doesn’t please you—and I think a lot of people end
up doing that without really thinking about it.
But I am going to think about it. And I’m going to get it right, for me. And that’s what this is.
Lydia Abernathy
45
Isabel Oakley
46
Wes Jansen
47
The Skirmisher Staff Would Like To Thank
Lisa Fisher
The English Department
Eliot Fisher
The Mountain School
Jake’s Nalgene
Baby Goats II
Mark’s Girlfriend
Drunk Magician
Entymology
Kenneth Parcell as Willie Wonka
Herman Cain and his Pokémon
Anyang
The Rural Juror
Jeremiah’s Goatee
Walter White
Augusta M. Gronquist
Oedipus
Festivus
Sam Ritter
Kierkegaard
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Awkward Hour
...And of course, The Costanzas