Category Archives: Prose

stressed student by Umi Keezing

By Umi Keezing

as papers fall around me enveloping me

in calculus problems and physics tests and grades

I bat them away with a pencil but they only withdraw

when the graphite forms the words or numbers that solve the puzzles

which I attempt to address in the vain hope

of completing my homework in time for a brief reprieve

before the next onslaught of assignments threatens to engulf me

because I immerse myself in academics the view through my window becomes

abstract art the tree house in my backyard a fairytale

from my childhood while the story in my English binder

becomes increasingly real the letters sharpening as the autumn leaves outside

blur with my deteriorating vision whether or not

I study obscure concepts to gain insight into reality I end up

distancing myself from the scent of my backyard the hubbub of Northampton

and the embraces of my long-lost friends who also

abandon the world to better analyze its mechanisms

to be accepted to college where the workload piles higher

and higher as offices replace dormitories the ceaseless cycle of studying

synchronizes with the sleep cycle more than the revolutions of Earth

dizzying me though I barely feel the lightheadedness due to

my perpetual headache that only abates when I have time

to pause on the sidewalk a breeze caressing my face and remember

that tangibility exists outside of hands-on chemistry experiments

and poignant poetry for an instant I recall the existence of a third dimension

and search for escape routes from the two that imprison me

before realizing that no such route exists without exertion

that is not merely mental and is therefore beyond my brain-dominated

self so I avert my nearsighted eyes from the treetops and fix them

on my desktop of artificial wood and sharpen my pencil

Salt Peels Beneath My Footsteps By Nick Pattison

Salt Peels Beneath My Footsteps
By Nick Pattison

Most people think of others as adjectives and pictures and faces and bodies, but I think of people as cheeses. Yes, cheeses, like Fontina and Asiago and Parmesan and American and Cheddar.

I enjoy, during my free time, sitting by the steam of a large green tea on the porch of a coffee shop in downtown, looking across the street and watching the cheeses melt, slice, and cube in front of me and my tasteful tea.

My first peculiar cheese today was a man, dressed finely in khakis and a blue blazer, strutting heels-first by the soles of his “shined-so-I-can-see-my-own-reflection” penny-loafers. He’s so Mozzarella. I can imagine him sitting down tonight, with a fine glass of imported French wine, sipping it with utmost care, while reading the Opinion section of “The Republican.” He’s like the kind of mozzarella that is fancy and fresh, bubbling milky juice when you unfold the surrounding BPA-free plastic wrapping to reveal the fresh, soft, cloudy, expensive, classy wonder inside. Maybe even drizzled with balsamic vinegar and garnished with a slice of tomato and a leaf of fresh basil, yes, that’s you, Mozzarella Man.

Behind him, in line for a smoothie, is a girl with short, spiked hair, a few tattoos, too many bracelets and a bag that looks like hungry children in Africa once stored rice inside the beaten leather flaps. Her black leather jacket makes her look like a Pepper Jack. A spicy, flarey cheese, like seeing the Fourth of July fireworks in a boat going sixty miles an hour straight towards Turtle Island rock. Like the bird that jumped out of its nest a little too soon before it was strong enough to fly, and no mama bird was able to catch it and bring it back up to the safety of the nest. It was left to live on the ground, vulnerable and young, to find her way among the foxes, rabbits and hawks. Maybe that’s why her bandanna looks like clown vomit on cotton. But even though her clown vomit shows her rough beginnings, she still has some spunk and liveliness to offer to this little coffee shop. Thank you, Pepper Jack Girl.

Next is another girl, maybe nineteen, with dark black mascara and deep red lipstick, making her mouth look bloody and eyes beaten and bruised. I am ashamed to even have looked at her as she walked in with her low-cut tight tanktop with a few inches of midriff that led to shorts that were pulled far enough down I could see the top of her ass, but still shorter than my boxers. American Cheese. The whore cheese, too many cheeses combined, too overly processed. It’s the cheese for greasy hamburgers and oily French fries: cheap and gross and impure. An invalid cheese, an invalid human. A void disaster. Like a spinning wheel into dark madness, even the ocean stood up and walked out on her, and now she’s left slaving her body for pay.

A man, your classic disheveled middle-aged man with graying hair and bunny-ear pockets turned inside out in a rush to get his coffee this morning. Parmesan? That’s him, with his staple-cotton garments showing his personality like cheap and shaky wood shavings in a bottle. Too gross, too factory made, like a bunch of fine-pressed cows, or the smell of an industrial linen factory. Even the real Parmesan is too weak, too little, too much of a topping, can’t make a real hearty meal by itself. Can’t hold its ground for what it is. Mr. Parmesan, grow a little more gray hair, then you’ll be the main-course cheese.

After seeing all these cheeses, I wonder what I really am, like what cheese other people think I am, or even looking into a mirror and seeing my own cheesiness.

I look up to the coffee bean studded ceiling and fill my lungs with the smoothie-machine air, seeped by the quiet cringle of my tea like water between tennis balls. My legs kick the floor, pushing my hips up and away from the chair, through the swinging doors and into the grass.

Lying in the sun is like hearing the voluptuous soprano of a woman’s voice in an opera. It’s the tree above you, take a deep breath in, and dissolve into pieces of diced cheese on the grass. I squirm between the blankets of air and earth, a snake across water, a spider behind the wooden panel. The pine tree waits, static from the amplifier sizzles, frying my mind, pink slime to scrambled eggs.

But, after some thought, wrapped in the bark of a tree, caught in the green circle innards, the salt of the ocean peels beneath my footsteps. I take up the crusty salt flake and peer through its crusty-white window.

Cheddar. That’s me back there, real Upstate New York-made Cheddar, straight from the farmer in the market. Extra sharp, the flannel shirt says. Eat me and pucker your lips a little, make a clip-clap noise with your cheeks, like a farmer slapping the ass of his cow, yelling at it to speed up. Cheddar opens your eyes a little and makes you want a little more. Cheddar’s natural, light, airy, down-home twang needs no combing in the morning. Cheddar can stand alone on a plate, but can accompany a cracker, a sandwich, a pizza, or a quiche, with no extra processing. Cheddar keeps well, is hardy, is pleasing in any form, and is balanced.

A block of cheddar left out in the sun, left to melt, to break off into thousands of pieces, lie unassembled in the sun, happy, content, until a server—dressed in a white shirt and black vest, black slacks, black bow tie—steers your way, with a silver plate and stabs toothpicks into you, puts you on a plate to be thrown into the lavish tusks on the gutters of the sea.

 

The Museum by Oliver Demers

The Museum
By Oliver Demers

With a careful eye and a steady soul, I determined what beauty I saw: faded or alive.

My first dance in fifth grade was in the old Putney town hall, a decrepit and dusty building where town meetings and art auctions used to be held thirty years prior. Being that the town had no further use for it, it was now reduced to a site of tween hormones gone rampant.

My first steps into the building were accompanied by the rude squeaks of floorboards that should have been replaced years ago. Their rickety cries for mercy unsettled me with a frigid shiver down my spine.

I peered into the glowing haze of disco lights and sweat vapor. Throughout the room, I saw an array of kids huddling in different social clusters to stay cool (meanwhile in Antarctica, penguins huddled together for warmth and the survival of their species). Everyone was dressed up in clothes that almost made them look older: basketball shorts that hid the knees, button down shirts that had never been worn before, and bras that held little to nothing. It was a race to age.

The chaperones were here too and looked straight through me as I entered the building. They were a woman and a man, parents I presumed. He had his arm wrapped around her frail body in a stagnant pose as if mimicking American Gothic, but with forced smiles. Their smiles said “welcome” but their eyes said “stay away from my child, you hormonal little animal.” It wasn’t the warmest greeting I had received but I was sure they were having a far worse time than me.

The inner walls of the building were shedding their paint like a grandfather’s painting sitting in the attic. It was peeling either from their old age or from sheer fright at the dance “etiquette” they had seen over the years. I reached my finger out to touch the wall’s dried skin. It crumbled on contact and fell to the ground, slipping down the cracks beneath the floorboards. Its delicacy was like that of a dandelion’s seeds getting blown into the wind.

Make a wish.

I wish I could hear myself think again.

The music was turned up to a blood rippling volume: so loud that you had to scream to simply talk to someone five inches from you. I saw two people trying to have a conversation in this cacophony of sound and while I couldn’t hear a word each other said, it might as well have gone something like this:

“HEEEYYY!!”
“HEY, WHATSUP???”
“YOU WANNA DANCE???”
“NO I’M FROM AMERICA, I DON’T EVEN LIKE CROISSANTS!!”
“YEAH ME NEITHER, MY AUNT SHOULD GET A NOOSE!!”

The icing on the cake of this dialogue was the brief moment of quiet between each song, creating a foreign, surprising silence to its listeners. It was music to my deafened ears.

“YOU LIKE OLIVE JUICE???”

*the music sharply cuts*

“WELL I LOVE YOU T-…”

Stares and whispers filled the silence until the music came back on, relieving them from their exposed youth. It was hard to be twelve, but even harder when you wanted to be something much different, older, less of you and more of someone else.

The music’s lyrics varied from a listing of incoherent reasons as to “Why I’m hot” to describing a man’s travails of owning a candy shop and generously letting his girlfriend lick his lollipop, free of charge! Not exactly The Beatles but it got your foot tapping.

There was a sizeable girl in the back of the room with all sorts of different people crowding around her. I went over to check out the scene and was abruptly greeted by the very girl herself. She reached out to grab my hand. Perhaps she wanted to dance? She pried open my clasped fingers and slid a sharpie in my palm.

“Hey, do you wanna sign my boobs?”

My eyes went straight to her plentiful breasts in curiosity of her suggestion. What I saw was either a miracle of community participation, or a travesty of parenting. A mural of names, numbers, and even some creatively placed pictures had been drawn all over her bosom. I was reading all of them intently before she got my attention back.

“Hey!”
“Hmm?”
“You gonna sign ‘em or not?”
“Oh, no thank you!” It didn’t look like there was any room left on her canvas any way.

I walked away from the writing circle, along the back wall, to head to the bathrooms. On my way over I passed my old colleague Danny, leaning on the window sill, with something smoking hanging from his lip. In fifth grade, Danny had been kicked out of my school for bringing bullets into class, not a gun, but bullets. I heard he threatened a teacher with them and lost his temper in the process. But what would he have done, flicked the bullets at them? I was too scared to talk to him nonetheless.

His scent crawled its way up my nostrils as I walked by. It reeked of skunk and shame and it was clearly not a cigarette in his mouth.

I scanned the exhibit of tweens one final time before withdrawing to the bathroom. “Cotton-eye Joe” began to play nearly every person jumped on the dance floor and did the dance they knew, each with his or her own added flairs and personalities. The floorboards bent at their stomps and bounced them back into the air. They were making their own trampoline; having their own fun. They didn’t care about growing up when they were dancing. It was a synchronicity of blissful naiveté. A masterpiece.

A Hormonalisa.

After shaking twice and washing my hands my gaze rose up to meet itself in the mirror. I looked intently and critically at my face, sliding my fingertips across its tiny pores and aptly placed dimples. I sighed a relief.
Then I did something dangerous.

I reached my finger out to the mirror. I wanted to feel what the mirror felt. It didn’t have a name, or a single face. It was all encompassing, and never original in what it displayed. The faceless surface of all faces. But then my finger abruptly stopped for I remembered:

Don’t touch the art or the colors will fade.

Broken Beauty by Brittany Collins

Broken Beauty
By Brittany Collins

Streams of salt water flowed down her face—a cooling contrast to her flushed cheeks. Her knobby knees were reminiscent of the fetal position as her body lay over them, folded into the wooden floor.

Her mind was strong, but her body had cracked. Tears a foreign concept, she swiped the liquid diamonds across her mascara-stained pores, making warrior lines with her fingertips.

Her hands curled into fists—their natural state. The limp toile of her torn skirt created a sea of cotton-candy fabric.

Her life whirled through her head, but nothing stood out. She couldn’t bear to remember her past; recollection made her hungry for innocence. She blockaded her memory, creating an impermeable wall through which she could not break. Snapshots of her life entered her head, but her mind shut them down before they came to fruition.

She reached, unsuccessfully, for the shards of a champagne glass that lay near her head. She felt remarkably connected to the remains, her quivering fingertips longing to salvage what would become trash.

As dusty beams of sunlight began to dance with the night’s darkness, they revealed the purple bruises that tattooed his presence upon her body. She gasped for air as she remembered his cold grip and the twisted smile he had worn when he whispered “I love you.” Those deadly words had violated the fairytales she longed to believe in.

Focused exertion allowed her eyes to scan the room; the sight of a flowerpot gave her pause. A single daisy sprouted from the pot. She remembered planting it. Its isolation saddened her; she longed for a garden. One day, she would plant a garden of her own. She would save the daisy—immerse it in a field of blossoms. One day.

Without recognition, her daydream had moved her painful body across the room. Her knees skinned the floor as she thrust herself forward, clutching onto the flowerpot. It was hers. For once, she had something to save.

Waves of guilty excitement coursed through her veins—a pulsation that made her feel alive. Reborn. With less exertion, she saw her room for the first time. The creaky floors, the grand piano, a stack of dusty books, a broken picture frame with his face inside—all seemed new. She observed.

Feeling foreign in her home, she longed to breathe. She craved oxygen, space, and room to exist. Claustrophobia consumed her. Numb to her physical state, she took the flowerpot and left. She pushed through the door, without pausing to close it. Ignoring the worried stares of passersby, she streamed through the building, onto the concrete, and into the field.

Her sturdy feet penetrated the ground as she ran into the woods, arms outstretched. She ached, but as the sun kissed her tie-dyed skin, she felt something as strange as her tears: freedom.