Jane Brinkley
Smith College Northampton, MA

With a tower of seabirds that coughed in tandem, the trudging ferryboats rang in the New
Moon. Heaped up with green fish whose unlatched jaws winked in the bright air, the sailors bent
over at the waist and rested ashore. Their skin, slapped up by the heat, shone with that Saturnine
yellow stuff that bellowed off the fish piles like a heavy shroud. I watched as the torsos curled
into the earth, their loads cascading into one of seven enormous leaden troughs on those banks.
The first men, relieved of their duties, sprinted toward the white oasis tent, stripping themselves
of their shirts and masks which snapped and curled in the wind. The shore teamed with the hot
odor of work. The first rain came, and the men gave thanks to God.

When I was fifteen and an outlaw, I used to sneak past my mother’s room on curled toes to
witness this return. Far off to the South, the broad mountains braided into the sky, to the North a
beggar’s platoon approached. Were it night, a stranger might mistake the barges for a solar
system– an entire golden litter of stars tossing its constituents into the dark. Now that you
mention it, I’d be inclined to say that I spent most moons like that– prostrate on the chin of some
great water tower to hunkered down in a cold chimney, pressing the palms of my hands to my
gripping surface so that the shiny redness was easier to hide come breakfast the next morning. I
languished on those moments like a wilting grape.

How do I describe this place? It isn’t beautiful, though it is ours, you see, and in plain
terms it amounts to no more than a few spherical crofts and lean-tos snuggled in the belly of a
hill. In a standard unit, the lower hemisphere draws up water from the soil and filters it, sending
it through a great arm that obeys invisible commands and turning it into steam power. We sleep
above, and sometimes on stormy nights there are big gaseous waves that crest over the glass
bubble, and in the morning it is green and dusty. If at some point the structure kept smogs away, I
don’t really recall, being too young and so on. As it is, we’ve made a habit of wetting towels to
stitch at the place where the wall meets the floor, as well as the exit. We get fat on fish skins in
the winter and we are very grateful for what remains of our planet.

Maybe you, like I, marshaled the terror of your childhood in a paddock called stories. If it
wasn’t the new testaments with their tungsten spines it was kid’s books set in cardboard shells
about pirates and royalty. I liked to sit with my back flat against the floor, my heels meeting the
glass ceiling, and behold the images of children whose faces and bodies looked much like mine.
When the harvest season crowned my house with restive festivity I’d risk a sheepish “could we
read this” at the dinner table, barely containing my joy at the deliciousness of the little private
moments that followed, the glittering fauna and rusty ghost towns and babies with fresh bottles
to drink from. Night fell.

If there was any question of my fitness for the moon journeys I thwarted it when I betrayed
my interest in stories to the committee. In a grey room, just a few paces long and weathered by
sand, I was told that the trip was beyond my bumbling snatches of masculine ability. The fishing
grounds lay at the foot of the Tumults, they said, where danger lies. It is not a job for those
citizens amongst us whose wills are weak. It is at this juncture that I mention the Tumults for the
first time, for because historians might herald them as the defining character of this time I have a
larger place in my heart for other parts of this particular story. Should you want to see them for
yourself, you’d need only paddle a pirogue for six or seven hours until you felt the fabric of your
clothing lift from your skin and your face felt smoother. Only at this point would your eyes begin
to pick out the shapes from the fog, and you might guess that you’re looking at a vast bed of
needles, infinite in number and staggeringly large. Your gambit would be to stay as far from the
foot of this needle-bed as possible while still encroaching on the cobalt atoll that houses the fish,
for if you were to venture too far, you’d succumb to whatever was lurking therein. Of course,
none of this was of any concern to me. I nodded and struck out home to count down the days
until thirty again.

There is something I have neglected to tell you about my home. Though I find myself
generally honest, this piece is a thorn in my side and I fear for my life to admit it. For although I
spoke of books like benign instruments of pleasure, there was one story that made in me a divine
rapture from which I’ve never quite awaken. One afternoon while everyone was sleeping, I
found a volume in a hidden station of my father’s bookshelf. Its jacket was stiff and rough to the
touch, but its pages were as thin as lamb’s skin and porous from age. It told the story of a man in
a place called Athens who entered a maze made of towering matter who, upon losing his way,
fell into a fit of hallucination and saw a horned beast. I say it here in secret, though perhaps you
have already made the inference that it has taken me all these years to come to. I know that the
island, the one written about in a 1955 almanac of ancient mythos, is the very same one that
bears us fish– I know that, many thousands of years before these Greeks, some powerful empire
snuffed out the embarrassing chemical byproduct of its labor in this massive grave, and tried to
hide it so that no student of this “labyrinth” would discover it. Many must have tried and failed,
my friend, because the men who leave the tumults stink of a foreign poison and dream of
monsters, still.

Isadora Kianovsky
Smith College, Northampton, MA

Tell me when you realized you were beautiful.

Was it when you spent a summer morning lying in the grass? Bees buzzed around your head, thinking you a flower from the vibrant hues of your shirt and the floral perfume you decided to roll onto your wrists that morning. Your eyes glazed over while staring into the depth of the bluest sky you’d ever seen. You nestled into the grass like you belonged there, the damp dirt cold on your skin. The breeze rustled through your clothes and turned them into wings, and you thought that you could fly, if you wanted to. 

Or was it that autumn afternoon during the first few days of school, when you sat outside with your friends during lunch? None of the teachers had assigned homework yet, so your lunch hour was just for you. Sitting in a circle, surrounded by the kind of friends you never thought you’d have, you couldn’t help but smile. You smiled so much your cheeks hurt. Everything was silly jokes and pasta out of tupperware and picking at the grass until your fingertips were stained green. You laid down for a moment, staring up at the swaying trees that stood tall on the front lawn, and wondered if you’d ever felt more grown-up. 

Maybe it was in winter. You stood out in the falling snow, feeling the flakes settle on your eyelashes and adorn your messy hair. You looked like some kind of majestic figure, you thought. Divine and graceful. The snow drifted peacefully for a while and then gained speed, swirling rapidly in all directions. The once soft flakes now whipped wildly at your skin like tiny, frozen blades. Eventually you ran inside and began stripping off your boots and jacket, leaving morsels of packed snow all over the wooden floor. The heat of the house made your fingers and toes go numb, and you felt the pink rising in your cheeks. You made your way to the kitchen, grabbing the milk and your favorite mug, already tasting the sweet hot cocoa on your tongue. 

But perhaps it was in spring, one of those golden evenings where your hair glowed auburn and the scent of sweet flowers wafted around you. The air sat atop your skin like a gentle blanket, just enough pressure to feel like a hug. As days melted into liminal stretches of time where nothing mattered, you felt your soul expand into your whole chest because the world was yours for a little while. You sipped on iced chai and admired the specks of white and yellow and violet that peppered the lawns. Everything seemed so soft, so young. Honey-colored shadows rolled along the walls of buildings, and the sunset turned the clouds pink, and you felt welcome in your body. 

To me, you have been beautiful in every moment. I just didn’t know how to tell you. 

Serena Keenan

Smith College, Northampton, MA, USA

She sat in the passenger’s seat of the car, feet propped on the dashboard, all sunshine orange and summer regret. Lazily shifting her head to the right, she moved her hand to brush a long strand of hair out of the other girl’s face as she drove, the wind whipping through the convertible on the freeway. “I think we should make a stop soon,” she said, drowned out partially in the chaos, which she supposed was fitting for the two of them, speeding on the open road like a teenage dream.

“Okay,” the other girl mouthed, red lips parting and then closing, the sound eaten greedily by the wind. She tapped her head softly to the music they couldn’t hear anymore, the ghost of a rhythm still haunting through the steering wheel.

It was summer and it was not summer, the sunshine still here but the forgiveness gone. It was liminal now, just the two of them, but in theory they were infinite, phantoms on a forever road.

In reality, she didn’t want to stop. Out here they were just Lila and her, red and orange, and out there they were anything but. Forever isn’t really forever, though, even in this stretch of road down the Midwest, because sometime they have to find the East, no matter how hard they tried not to. Maybe if they stopped somewhere first it would last longer, this honeymoon period of the suspension of disbelief.

“I think I love you,” she said, and it’s over.

“Yeah,” the other girl said quietly. She did not look away from the road, but her fingers on the steering wheel shook. “I don’t think I can answer you here.”

Why not, she screamed, why can’t it be here, the only place we ever exist. Why not here, where I love you without anything, where I love you uncontrollably. Why not forever, out here, where we last until the ocean.

“Okay,” she responded, fingering the necklace on her swollen throat, and they were quiet for a long time.

They eventually pulled off the road where there is nothing except a diner with a name they’ll never remember. Inside, they sat down, neon lights flashing, facing each other in a worn down booth with stuffing sticking out of the vinyl.

Lila, with her red hair and her almond eyes, faced her, looking both lost and found, alone and together.

“Can you answer here?” She choked out, barely audible, legs wrapped around each other under the table.

Lila closed her eyes, her beautiful big eyes, and said nothing. She inhaled slightly, holding on as if she were savoring it, as if this last breath would end her completely. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I can answer anywhere.”

In this truth, this ultimate, painful truth, she felt the break most completely. It was more real here where she was herself, where Lila was Lila, where they were meant to be forever, or until the East and its sun swallow them whole. It hurts less later, as most things do, but when has that ever mattered?

“Okay,” she said, and she ordered a milkshake.

Lila ordered a strawberry one, and everything about her was red, red, red. Red like hearts and red like blood, like heartbreak and stop, like berries and like bricks. Red like cherries, red like love, red like everything in sight, everything that will ever matter. Red like forever.

After a while they leave. It has been quiet, conversation not quite gone but not quite needed. Lila handed her the keys and they switched places, she propped her boots up on the airbag like a mirror image of three hours ago, hands on the steering wheel but her nails were orange.

Lila turned up the radio a bit louder, but she couldn’t find anything except 70s music, the kind that makes the world seem a little bigger, a little less connected, and a little more free.

In this space, the red gold desert, the plain wheat fields, there was no one for miles. Being the last person on the planet would be lonely, like blue. Blue for the ocean and blue for the end.

The heat bore down on them and Lila put her hair up before looking over at her and then softly trailing her fingers down the side of the other girl’s hand that was resting on the compartment in between their seats.

Lila sighed, and slid her round sunglasses from her forehead to the bridge of her nose and she leaned her head back, slipping her fingers in between the other girl’s.

They kept driving, Lila singing the words to the songs under her breath, and she remembered when they could talk through the silence. Before her and Lila were this, whatever it was, before they were infinite. Those girls might still be inside, but there is only so much you can go through with another person without it changing you.

They still spoke, though. It’s just a little harder now, with this great beast of heartbreak in between them.

She supposed that they were never meant to last. They were and they weren’t, their names spelled out forever in this car and on this road, but never inside a house or in a mouth. Secret, forever. A secret between two people and a car, two people and two graves.

So soon, too soon, they were under the gray sky, still in hot desert but outside the houses. They were out of place now, somehow. Lila used both of her hands to pull her ponytail out, and left them both quietly in her lap, her form of soft shade.

She sighed and it’s over, pulling up in front of a blue house with white trim and a white fence. She switched the car into park, the click of the transmission echoing forever and ever and ever.

Lila turned to her, mouth pursed, hands shaking as she quickly squeezed her hand. “Goodbye,” she said like a promise.

“Goodbye, Lila,” she said softly, mouth full of cotton, and it’s all she could see.

Lila, slightly taken aback at hearing her name, looked over her shoulder, not entirely out of the car. Opening her mouth only to close it again, she nodded before subconsciously tugging at the hem of her yellow shirt. “Yeah,” she said. “Goodbye.”

Lila, in all of her warm glory, walked into the blue house like a funeral.

She drove away.