1. I believe in you.
2. I trust in you.
3. I know you can handle life’s situations.
4. You are listened to.
5. You are cared for.
6. You are very, very important to me.
The Dead Dogs of Dale Street
Who Killed Dylan Redwine?
Oh, don’t be such a man, give your mom a hug,” said Elaine Redwine, an Associate Director at Colorado College’s Office of Financial Aid, to her 13-year-old son, Dylan, before she left him at the airport on Nov. 18, 2012. Dylan was on his way to visit his father, Mark Redwine, who lived in a remote area near Lake Vallecito in southwestern Colorado. This is the last time she would see her son alive. The next morning Dylan vanished from his father’s home without a trace.
Letter from the editor - Bones
For now, I treat death the same way as Woody Allen’s nervous-wreck-of-a character in Manhattan: slightly aloof with a touch of dark humor. In one classic scene, Isaac (Allen) stands next to a skeleton in a classroom, describing its life as one of the “beautiful people dancing and playing tennis.” He follows this with a healthy dose of fear: “It’s very important to have some kind of personal integrity. I’ll be hanging in a classroom one day. And I wanna make sure when I thin out that I’m…well thought of.”
Labor Laws
Chile is obsessed with pregnancy. The Virgin Mary, the archetype of baffling fertility in Western culture, presides in some form or another over almost every city, town and village in the country. “Legend has it that the Virgen de la Merced appeared in the river here in this village,” a vineyard worker in Isla Maipu relates as we tour the vineyard chapel. “She’s been our protector ever since.” It’s a rigidly Catholic country where abortion is totally illegal, including in cases of rape, incest and when a woman’s life is in danger. In 1989, the government of Augusto Pinochet, a military dictator who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990, prohibited abortion and made it punishable by up to five years in prison. Engraved in stone on a wall outside La Catedral de Valparaíso is a tribute giving voice to aborted children. “They tore us apart,” it says, “they strangled us, they poisoned us with the indifference of an executioner. For our death, they pay money.”
The Domino Effect
Letter from the editor - Desert
Artwork by Britta Lam
This Land
Vacationland
When we think of vacation, we think of places where lush gardens meet golf courses and kiss swimming pools under the upper hand of palm trees. We picture cocktails shaded by paper umbrellas and glassy pool tiles wetted by overflowing, chlorinated swells. Islands where waterfalls feed sparkling ponds and exotic plants lead the way to white beaches.
For Americans, these visions of vacation originated in the suburbs of Southern California.
Desert Kinks
Below the Belt
Business as Usual
Our enemy surveys. It imprisons. It tortures. It breaks. It severs. It kills. You must know this. You must know that to struggle for liberation is to commit your entire being. It is to struggle for the fruits of a freedom you may never taste. A war that cannot ever be understood as won. It is suicidal.
Suicide Station
I did not kill myself. The car did. I didn’t cut myself, hang myself or hurt myself. The car did it. So I didn’t choose death, it chose me. I just want to be clear about that.
It is not for the dead to explain their deaths to the living. I have an uncomplicated identity with an uncomplicated death. But for context, let’s just say two steps forward, no steps back.