Things That Went Missing

I remember redwood picnic tables, still wet from the rain on a Sunday morning before the dogs and nude sunbathers came out. You weren't there to see, gone missing. Microscopic creatures swarmed like jellyfish in puddles although the shore was 100 feet away.

And I never wanted to lay a hand on you. The things that went missing were the things we never had a hand on in the first place. The things nibbling at the edges of our imaginations that were not to become tangible, or completely visible with the naked eye. Neither knowable, nor close enough to tear apart or off.

Maybe we didn't see the things that stood right before our eyes. The things that were visible were the ones that disappeared first, without being missed, in the light evening of an undiscovered promise, the summer night of a California beach with water too cold to skinny-dip with strangers. We obsessed over what wasn't there, and took for granted what was there all along.

I saw you in your red underthings doubling as a bathing suit. A cool breeze swirled the aluminum torches along the patio edges, with laughter and unheard insults floating across the beach in choppy whispers. The bonfires lit in dancing crescents, the bronze bodies with nylon stitching, and a backbone of fiberglass surfboards hatcheted into the sand like a prehistoric animal with no ancestors. With no future past August.

The things that went missing were never offered. The air teased the elastic of our flirtations as you picked sand from between my toes with our legs crossed in artificial modesty, up on the bamboo railing. I saw you looking. And the apocalypse of the tide made my memory obsolete.

You blamed your brother for the ride you missed. Ochre smoke hung innocently on the inseams of your bathing suit. The nylon of the jacket held just so but was safety-pinned in a secret place to preserve the illusion. The beach was suddenly empty. The pepper lights hung on a wire that squeaked in the salt wind.

The things that went missing were the ones we weren't paying attention to. The price of gas that made Chet stop driving the Cadillac. The storage shed filled with mother’s photo albums, grown dank and green. Your desperate hold on the neck of a Guinness, stolen from the bottle shop. Fresh-caught fish on a line, smiling and circling in the pails.

We saved them from the shark surf. Later you would fry them over phonebook flames with a steel claw made of hangers, like evidence you were determined to destroy.

The promise of summer, paved in gilt-edged bible pages, seduced me into unwinding the regrets you never replayed for me. You only agreed to see me when everyone else was gone. The sunset burned the smog into unnatural colors. And the windshield filtered the light in that starving morning, bringing a touch to your skin and the hidden elastic below the fold, discarded on the backseat floor. The crease left wet, your silent tear glistening along the cheeks that still burned with the force of that accidental reversal.

The things that went missing were a foreshadowing of our death and of the birth. The religious poise of a creature, found floating towards deeper water, the wave of a new world simple in its proposal and fertile grace. Missing were the things never seen. My stories were jokes you didn't hear, the punchlines an insult they took the wrong way, your secret an opportunity you'd backed into by accident. You let him watch you change in the shower stalls down by the lifeguard station after the festival.

I'd have worn a mask to enter your light, splintered with styrofoam vertebrae and warmed by the driftwood furnace. But I was up on the hill overlooking the summer houses built deep in the shale, and the plan fell in the vast sea of night. My plan drowned by Poseidon, lost beyond Apollo, in the parking lot of the Scop Cafe in the backseat of the Cadillac, whispered at lunchtime the following Monday.

Did I tell you? The sharks went hungry.

Your indignation was a pose against this Sodom and Gomorrah business, that Guernica night that began as it ended, a grand embrace of our last night alone, the desperate attempt to find what had already gone missing, your smiling teeth dark in the shadow, a trick of the flame while tequila smoke coiled from the cement rings on the dirty sand like a broken necklace, spilled in an amorous struggle.

Butts and pop tops and clear plastic wrappers. The slow curves pitched with duckweed that damselflies swarm around like high school. I lit the flame and you let him have it. I wore another suit of clothes. Last call before we take inventory of the supplies.

The things that went missing had to be reconstructed later in a hand-held reading where I passed my own poem over to let someone else read, with broken rhythms I had no way to put my hand on, to twist back in shape.

Waist ties poked in my thighs at the joint. I imagined the burn of your hand for hours. The color was an illusion of the printer, and should not reflect your final result. Once you live by the coast, you never get it out of your blood. Grains of sand circled at the bottom of the empty shower stall, beads of glass a blind memory of something never consummated.

The man with the orange blazer would hose it down come winter, during the rains. At the naked clearing dotted with redwood picnic tables, I held you down to make you confess, holding the lapels of someone else's windbreaker, which you tore off then never reclaimed.

It fell apart that August. The things that went missing were not there to begin with.


Written by: Roger Leatherwood
Photograph by: Garrett Carroll

Wasted Youth

I have a disease that some might call a curse. I have never met anyone else with my particular affliction so it must be rather unique. That being said, I have not met everyone, so perhaps it’s not as special as I think. But instead of beating around the bush, I’m going to try my best to explain it in a simple and easily understood manner.

In a way, my physical appearance is not my own. I can choose which clothes to wear, but I cannot control their level of wear. I can choose to cut my hair, but I cannot choose its length and I cannot control its neatness. I am a product of other people’s actions, which isn’t as bad as it sounds. We are all a product of other people’s actions to one degree or another.

I apologize for being so vague, but it’s a difficult proposition to get someone to buy into. I have to walk my way slowly into the pool, instead of jumping right in. The best I can try for is simple and pure honesty. In the most basic terms, I am a mirror to youth’s actions. Does that make sense? Probably not. To be honest, I don’t understand it myself. I see the what, but never the why. And it’s not just youth’s actions either. It just so happens that they are the ones that inflict the most damage.

My physical appearance is linked to the humanity of the society that I am a part of. If you’re familiar with the tale of Dorian Gray then you’re aware of the tenuous link between physical appearance and moral behavior. In the classic novel by Wilde, the protagonist stays young and beautiful while his portrait accumulates his sins and other despicable behaviors. The portrait shows the true nature of the monster.

My condition is in some ways the opposite. My physical appearance has been broken and twisted for years now, and will only continue to get worse as people’s behavior toward me slides further into contempt. I once met a child who asked why I was so ugly. When I tried to explain my situation, he could not grasp it. So I had to simplify as best I knew how. I had to discard my own pity, and tell this innocent child what exactly was “wrong” with me.

“Every time someone is mean to me,” I began, “I get uglier.”

The boy dipped his head to the side, a weak neck, as if he was examining a painting.

“People must always be mean to you,” he said.

I nodded. I wanted to tell this boy about my pain. I wanted to tell him how it all began. The reason was unknown then and it is unknown now. I wanted to tell the boy that I was once young and beautiful, and that I treated people poorly. I was lost in my own vanity and one night in a storm, a man came to my door for assistance. Like any fairy tale, I turned him away. Fairy tales are for children. In the nights following, the process began. Harsh words took on a new meaning. My hair began to fall out and my face began to stretch. I became ghoulish almost over night, and that was only the beginning. Lastly, I wanted to tell the boy about my fear and anger in the early days, but how a resignation and beauty fell upon the whole thing. A sort of irony that can only be laughed at.

But the mother pulled the boy away from me before I could say anything. As she dragged him down the sidewalk he kept looking at me, and I at him. She glanced back frightfully, and I don’t blame her. A beggar, a vagabond, a drunk (though I haven’t had a drink in years), a hobo; you would be best advised to stay away.

That brings us to the present. That brings us to the nasty powers of youth. That brings us to the tears I shed as they danced on the ashes of my Oklahoma xanadu.

The house, my home, had been abandoned for some time. I was born in Oklahoma and I made my way back there, north of the city. The land was polka-dotted with houses and suburban compounds. There was a grid of roads running north, south, east, and west with stop signs at all mile intersections. But if you went a bit further north, where the pavement ended and the road fell into disrepair and dirt, nearly a mile off the road surrounded by felled mesquite trees and overgrown high grass, piles of dead things home to snakes and rats, you’d find my lodgings.

The youth in the area, boys in cowboy hats impressing pretty young girls with their courage and cockiness, found the house. Many Friday and Saturday nights, I would sit in the underbrush and watch them break the windows, rip up the floors, piss on the walls; all by the faint light of their cell phones. Sometimes they would come in with spray paint and graffiti the walls that still stood. The roof caved in one year after a rain so I could always see the stars at night, which was an unexpected gift.

And then, on a summer night, they burned her down simply because they could. Because they were young and why not? They wanted to see her burn. How could they know what it meant to someone like me? Why would they care?

I was lucky to get out of there at all, and managed to escape just in time and take up my usual view in the trees. I shed tears as they laughed, drunk on booze. And then the fire took over faster than I would have thought possible, faster than they thought possible, and before they knew what they had done they had escaped and left her torched and burning.

I fell asleep not caring if the flames overtook me in the night. I had practiced as much patience as I knew how, but I was done with all that. I had enough viciousness for a lifetime and wanted no more.

In the morning, the fireman must have thought I was dead. When he rolled me over and looked upon my face, he must have thought I was burned. But the fire had not done me in, and they loaded me into a truck to take me to the hospital, and that is where I tell you my tale now, from a bed in a white room covered in bandages. The doctors come, but they don’t know what to say, so they simply hold me here. Out of sight, out of mind.

As they drove me away, I glanced out the truck window for one last look at the remains of the house, all gray and smoking.

“Thank God no one was hurt,” said the fireman to no one in particular.

I wanted to reply, but had nothing left to say. He was very young and couldn’t have heard me anyway.

Written by: Logan Theissen
Photograph by: Anna Westbury

The Tour

“This is it,” he says, opening the bedroom door. He flips on the light switch and steps out of the way, allowing me to move into the room. A small twin-sized bed is pushed against the wall, with a plaid comforter tucked military-style around the corners of the mattress. The room is bare—as if someone never slept in it. The mirror is clean and unblemished. A single comb and a tray of coins rests on the dresser. No photographs on the night stand. I turn to look at him. He shrugs, leaning against the door frame.

“This is my room.” He flicks off the light switch and nods toward the hallway. “The tour doesn't end here.”

We walk past the kitchen, and I notice a rotary phone mounted on the wall. “No one has those phones anymore,” I say, immediately regretting it. It’s as fixed as he is.

He leads me to the back of the house, toward a wall of tall, wide windows facing the back yard. The tree line is deep, and after sunset, the houses in the distance fade from view. The overhead lights cast our reflection on the windows. We look spectral. I see myself in the reflection, see this ghost woman move as I move. She sits down nervously on the sofa, and a man sits next to her, polite, and afraid to move.

My ghost self looks so calm and womanly, but I feel so small sitting in front of him for inspection. I can feel him wrestling with age and time and space all at once. He frowns.

He pulls a photo out of a book resting on the coffee table. The photo is cropped and faded. A young man sits on a picnic bench at a wooded campsite. His long, tan legs stretch out like tree limbs from his khaki shorts. He wears a bright blue collared shirt that pops against the green background. The young man's hair is thick and dark, pushed to the side of his face. A new beard grows around his giant grin.

“I wish you met this man,” he says.

We both wish a lot of things: that we aren’t forty years apart, that I am not just a young girl trying out womanhood, that he wasn’t married to the wrong woman for the last thirty-five years. We have a lot to wish for, and nothing can change.

I feel heavy, like I am starting to drift underwater. He is talking to me, but he feels far away. I can see the current pulling the ghost in the window down. I see her body start leaning toward the floor, and I realize I am falling into his lap. Those lean knees from the photo are no longer there, but instead they are knotted and gray like roots. I feel my heavy head drop to rest on his thighs.

I want to tell him that our situation isn’t real, couldn’t be real. Earlier, when he had come to pick me up, we stood in my kitchen. I was barefoot, my high heels strewn aside. I struggled with a bottle of wine, chipping my front tooth as I tried to pry the cracked and broken cork out of the neck. New to wine, I drank too quickly, choking down something more bitter than I'd expected. I was afraid for this man to look into my home, to see my childhood relics.

Would he notice the photos of friends on the fridge? Would he notice my diploma framed on the wall? The cat toys and women's magazines littering the living room? I thought of these things as marks of my new independence, but as his eyes moved around my kitchen, I felt young.

Now the wine from earlier catches up with me. All my nerves reveal themselves once more. I run my tongue along my front tooth, feeling the new jagged edge where it chipped. I lift my head, overwhelmed and too warm. I can’t see the ghost in the window anymore. Pulling myself from the couch, I stumble down the hall and toward the bathroom he showed me earlier. The bathroom he said belonged to his wife.

I lock the door behind me, hearing a rattle against the door. I look up to see hooks, each one shining with long strands of necklaces. I stand there, my feet sweating through my stockings. I peel off my tights and absorb the coolness of the tiles. I pull a long strand of beads from the hook, running my fingers over each section like a rosary. How many sins am I committing by being in this woman's home? How many sins am I committing by tempting this married man? What am I doing here?

The swirling in my head returns, and I drop the necklace, lowering myself to my knees and bowing my head over the toilet to vomit. I try to keep quiet. The wine is too much.

I flush the toilet, close the seat, and pull myself up against the counter. Opening drawers, I poke around looking for mouthwash or breath mints—something to take it all away. I pick through toothbrushes and combs and make-up. I find an old tube of lipstick; it looks familiar, one that maybe my own mother might have used. The dust on the cap leads me to believe it hasn't been touched in a while.

The ghost woman catches my eye in the mirror. She is pale but not sickly, but she looks tired, or is she older? I lean toward the mirror and pinch my cheeks—an old trick to add color to my face. I smooth the lipstick onto my lips, blending the color by rubbing my lips together. I reach for the necklace on the floor and wrap it around my neck twice. I clear my throat, inhale and walk out of the bathroom and into the den.

“Are you okay?” He stands up from the sofa, still holding the photo.

“Fine,” I answer, walking toward him.

“That's a beautiful color,” he says. “I've never seen anything like it.”

Written by: Whitney G. Schultz

Photograph by: Emily Blincoe
 

Hail Caesar!, or The Extended Obituary of Nell Riley Foster

Nell Riley Foster, 23, of Brooklyn...

I can't do this.

Okay, fine - I don't want to do this. I volunteered. It's too late to back out now.

Nell Riley Foster, 23, of Brooklyn died early Sunday morning because some fucker got greedy and decided to rob the corner bodega with a loaded gun.

I shouldn’t say that, but you know when people your age die there's always that morbid curiosity about how it happened. I have to say something, Nell.

Nell Riley Foster, 23, of Brooklyn, died early Sunday morning. She was the victim of a violent crime.

Happy?

Nell was born to Patrick and Lori Foster, March 15th, 1990, in Cambridge, Mass. After her brother learned about the Ides of March, he called her 'Caesar' and staged elaborate fake assassinations on her birthday. He feels a mixture of discomfort and joy about this now.

Of course I won't include that when I send it. That is too personal. Still, if only I hadn't tempted death or God or karma thirteen times.

Nell graduated from Cambridge Rindge & Latin School in 2007 and received a BA in English from Brown University in 2011. Nell studied abroad in Italy the summer before her junior year. She took an intensive language immersion course but still mistranslated dishes at Italian restaurants. She dated a guy who doesn't want to come to her memorial because it's "too hard, bro."

You'll note that out of respect, I did not call him a douchebag this time.

He is a total douchebag, though.
Nell worked for an online literary start-up. She blogged about Shakespeare's wittiest, dirtiest double entendres and why Northanger Abbey is a better Jane Austen novel than Pride & Prejudice. Her favorite response to readers' angry messages was "haters gonna hate." Her editor's favorite response was "I appreciate your comments and will keep this perspective in mind."

In her spare time, Nell wrote haiku poetry on fogged windows and steamed-up mirrors. Her goal was to finish the poem before the glass cleared. She became really good at it, dissecting syllable counts with an invisible abacus.

Nell spent a staggering amount of time contacting “those Iron Chef people.” She engaged in a one-woman campaign to have Nutella appear as the secret ingredient. Her emails bordered on propaganda.

Nell ran every day. Her brother would sometimes join her, but not enough for his own health, he thinks now that he has an opportunity to reflect and to regret.

Her legal name was "Nell," not Eleanor. She was very happy her parents skipped right to the nickname.

Nell preferred Thai curry to Indian curry, naan to pita bread, and coffee to tea. Her favorite taste was “Nutella” although she liked to use “umami” when the occasion arose. Based on her own ordering and cooking preferences, it seldom did.

This has turned into “Fun Facts about Nell.” I had to Google “how to write an obituary.” It seems like content shifts from salient biographies to trivia. Maybe I can contact your old editor and write a piece about it. It would either be hilarious or macabre. I’m betting the latter.

If our places were reversed, you would have made it a personal challenge. It would have been the former; it would have been brilliant and pitch-perfect, probably the best piece you’d ever written (but not the best piece you’d ever write). It would be a glorious memorial.

It should have been me, Nell. I should have gone with you. I could have pushed you out of the way. I could have done something. Even if it all played out the same - the stumbled-upon robbery, the gun, the shot - I would have been there with you.

What's the old saying? The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long. You burned so bright you left pieces of yourself behind, and you linger like the light people see when they close their eyes. I swear I see you everywhere. Faint lines of you glow in panes of glass; your laugh smolders in my dreams (and nightmares); your smile flickers in the corner of my eyes. There is something comforting about walking into an empty room and it not feeling so empty anymore. Maybe I’m going crazy - I probably am; crazy is what happens when you intertwine your sister’s obituary with a letter to her, a letter she can’t see, a letter she’ll never see because she - you -

I need to take a break.

Nell is survived by her elder brother, Chase Foster, of Brooklyn; and her parents, Patrick and Lori Foster, of Cambridge. She is also survived by a chubby cat named Hazelnut and a betta fish named Cocoa.

Hazelnut and Cocoa seem to be adjusting to life with Mom and Dad. We try to adjust to life without you. It doesn’t always take.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made in Nell's name to 826 National, a national literary charity.

You mentioned trying to find a place to volunteer, and when I came to get Hazelnut and Cocoa I saw the pamphlet on your desk. It wasn't in the recycling pile, so I am almost positive it was on your shortlist and we would have talked about it.

For the record, I would have said "go for it!"

A private memorial service will be held at her family's home in Cambridge.

I will cry because you are gone. I will laugh at the good memories you gave me.

I miss you. I love you.

I know I will see you again when a room is empty. I will feel your presence fill it. Empty rooms are the dominion of the dead.

I will keep trying to adjust to life without you.

It will take. Eventually.

Written by: Erin Justice
Photograph by: Whitney Ott