The Outback's Elusive Cats

Anyone who owns an outdoor cat has undoubtedly been gifted small tokens from their hunts: birds, mice, maybe even bats. They leave them on the doorstep, your pillow, or other inopportune places as presents for you, their human, to find. But what if, instead of a common mouse, you found a dead Regent Honeyeater, a critically endangered species of bird endemic to Australia? Endemic means that the bird is native to Australia and found nowhere else in the world, so if the population of Regent Honeyeaters that only inhabits a small portion of the east coast of the country disappears, then they would face complete extinction.

Maybe, at this point, you might consider trying to retrain your cat to be an indoor cat, or even set up some type of outdoor enclosure to contain it. But what if outdoor domestic cats weren’t the only problem? What if there were millions of feral cats roaming the streets preying on vulnerable endemic bird species? This is the situation in Australia.

Many countries like the U.S. have developed systems to deal with feral cat populations. For example, the Humane Society of the Pikes Peaks Region has a Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) program, which is exactly what the name suggests. However, this is a long-term solution, and the Regent Honeyeater population is critically endangered right now, with fewer than 500 mature individuals left in the wild according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Even with the implementation of many TNR programs across the U.S., the feral cat population still remains at about 50 million. 

The issue is completely different in Australia due to large differences in evolutionary history between the two countries. After the split of Gondwana (a subset of Pangea) 45 million years ago, Australia has been evolving in complete isolation from other continents, which has led to the unique dynamics of its present-day wildlife. Apart from species introduced by colonization over the last few hundred years—which is inconsequential in evolutionary time—Australian wildlife has been following an evolutionary trajectory completely separate from anywhere else in the world. As a result, Australia’s response to the issue of feral cats is completely different than that of other continents. This contrast was jarring to me as an American student spending a semester abroad in Australia. I never heard cats discussed as a monumental issue in the U.S., even in the wildlife rehabilitation and animal rescue centers where I have spent time. What are the reasons for this stark difference? How does this impact global conversations around conservation? With my curiosity piqued, I have spent the last few months trying to understand the causes of, current state of, and possible future solutions to the issue of cats—or rather, too many cats—in Australia.

Let’s start with the biggest difference between the feral cat problem in the U.S. and in Australia: the types of predators. Predatory species in the US such as wolves, bears, foxes, coyotes, cougars, and bobcats, are all eutherian mammals (one of the three superorders of mammals). In other words, U.S. wildlife is exposed to largely native predators with which they have coevolved for millions of years. 

Australian predators, on the other hand, are mostly introduced species. Native species like the Tasmanian tiger (now extinct) and the Tasmanian devil (now restricted only to Tasmania) are largely outnumbered by dingoes (introduced around 4,000 years ago), red foxes, feral dogs, and feral cats. The native wildlife have spent the last 45 million years or so coevolving with the Tasmanian devil, the Tasmanian tiger, and other marsupial predators, but is now faced with a range of unfamiliar eutherian predators. This shift was largely the result of European invasion starting in 1788. Dingoes were here already, thought to have been domesticated by Aboriginal peoples as pets, but Europeans brought along cats and dogs, and then introduced foxes so they could hunt them. This relatively quick (again, in evolutionary time) transition has produced a phenomenon called predator naivety: when prey animals are unaware of the fact that introduced predators like cats pose a threat to them. 

There is a range of possible explanations for the mechanisms behind predator naivety. The most prominent one, proposed by Alexandra Carthey in 2017 in the science journal “Scientific Reports,” is that the chemical profiles of eutherian and marsupial (the superorder of mammals containing most native Australian mammals) mammals are distinct, and so they emit different cues to prey in the area in the form or urine, scats, and bedding. This means that species that have only evolved to avoid the chemical cues of marsupial carnivores (such as tasmanian tigers and devils) might not pay any attention to those of eutherians (dingoes, foxes, dogs, and cats), and will then be caught off guard when they run into one, making them vulnerable prey. 

So basically, the Australian predators that the native wildlife evolved with have mostly gone extinct, and now they face a host of introduced species that they are unequipped to defend themselves against. As a result, many species of Australian wildlife are going extinct or falling into the threatened category. These are species small enough to be prey for a mid-sized carnivore: birds, reptiles, and mammals. 

In fact, Australia currently has the unfortunate honor of having the highest rate of mammal extinctions in the world, according to a 2018 report by the Australian Conservation Foundation. One of the main reasons for this trend is all the invasive species, which brings us back to cats: how much harm are they really causing, and what are we doing about it?

The cat, Felis catus, was originally native to the Middle East, and was domesticated between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago, likely by farmers. It was then introduced to Australia during European settlement in the 18th century. There are now somewhere between 2 and 6 million feral cats in Australia, ranging across the entire continent, and between 2 and 4 million domestic cats. In their book “Cats in Australia: Companion and Killer,” John Woinarski, Sarah Legge, and Chris Dickman estimate that cats altogether in Australia kill 3 million mammals, 2 million reptiles, and 1 million birds every day. Not every year, that number is in the hundreds of millions, every day. According to the same book, each individual cat kills 740 native animals each year. Despite this, a study by PETA found that most cat owners aren’t aware of how many animals their cats kill, only seeing 23% of their pets’ victims on their doorsteps on average.

So what is Australia doing to solve this issue? The government’s approach was to issue a bounty in 2015 to cull 2 million cats. This strategy has been adopted by groups like the Australian Wildlife Conservancy with their Feral Cat and Fox control program, as well as by hunters in Australia. This program has also been implementing practices of trapping, indigenous tracking, fire management, creating predator-free fenced areas, and possible gene-drive technology. Other proposed solutions include implementing licensing programs for cat ownership, lacing prey with toxins, using guard dogs to protect native species, spray-trapping, spay-neuter requirements for domestic cats, immunocontraception, putting bells on cats, building cat-runs, and predator avoidance training for animals being released from captive-breeding programs.

While these methods are creative, they aren’t all effective. Shooting cats poses some challenges because feral cats are wary of humans, so shooting needs to be done from a pretty far distance. This can be non-lethal and cause extensive suffering for the cat. Baiting is tricky because cats don’t often scavenge, so the toxins just end up killing other species, which can leave greater resources for cat numbers to skyrocket.

Other lethal strategies for controlling cats, such as traps that spray toxins onto their fur which will later be ingested through grooming, have shown greater success. But is killing cats the only way to address this issue?

Sterilization programs, cat-runs, bells, and licensing programs all mainly focus on domestic cats, which are only a small part of the problem. Many of the people that I’ve spoken to in Australia quickly brush off the topic, saying that they have built a cat run for their own pets. Feral cats tend to be viewed as a byproduct of domestic cats, but at this point, they form completely distinct, wild populations covering the entire range of the continent, which is mostly uninhabited by humans. So those solutions might be effective for domestic cat-owners, but they aren’t getting to the heart of the problem.

Another popular strategy involves releasing native species into sections of land that are fenced off from predators. This is a strong short-term solution to increase the population numbers for critically endangered species, but we need to be thinking long-term for a problem as wide-ranging as this. A short-term solution like captive management makes it difficult to allow native species to re-expand their range, restricting them only to their release sites, and it doesn’t help the wild individuals outside of the fence.

There has been one large-scale fencing operation to combat one of the invasive predators: the dingo. The “Dingo Fence” surrounds an area on the southeastern edge of the continent that’s larger than the state of New South Wales. Although this fence has kept dingoes out, cats and foxes remain inside the area. Building another fence that removes all predators is a possibility, but it would require a huge amount of resources. There are also a number of predator-free islands off the coast of Australia, but these lack the potential for expansion.

Some groups (not just distressed cat-lovers), have started to suggest non-lethal options, positing that the ecosystem of invasive predators in Australia is just too complex for a solution as simple as a bounty. Killing cats might actually have unintended consequences that harm native wildlife in other ways. Killing cats who hunt invasive rabbits and mice may allow these populations to increase and outcompete native mammals.

Instead of trying to euthanize up to 6 million elusive cats, are there ways of managing their ecological interactions in order to protect native species? Research into threatened small mammals has found that they are not only vulnerable due to predator naivety, but also from a lack of physical shelters. This is the product of cattle grazing, introduction of non-native grass species which are a lot shorter than wild ones, and fire suppression. So tighter regulation of grazing as well as prescribed burns might be a more effective and long-term way to help native mammals. This strategy would protect against other invasive predators, not just cats.

Another non-lethal possibility is predator-avoidance training. The University of Queensland is currently testing out this possibility. They are training Northern Brown Bandicoots to associate the chemical profiles of invasive predators with loud alarm calls and foam pellets from toy guns. As an additional measure, the bandicoots are being trained to use microchip-automated doors to access nestboxes. This way, they are the only ones that have access to the nestbox, free of predation and competition. 

This solution opens up the possibility for a future where native wildlife and feral cats (and other predators) can coexist in reasonably balanced ecosystems, but it also raises further questions about which species this strategy will actually work for. It’s all well and good to help out the specific individuals reintroduced into an area, but what about the rest of the wild population? What about future generations? Both of these questions are vital to the survival of a species, and they rely heavily on social learning and behavioral plasticity.

Social learning is the idea that when one individual exhibits a behavior, others observing can learn the behavior. If northern brown bandicoots have a high capacity for social learning, then after releasing individuals with predator-avoidance training, we would expect wild individuals and future generations to adopt the same association with invasive predators. If the behavior spread far enough, then this could benefit the entire population. The thing is, the capacity for social learning can vary a lot between species, and there is not very much behavioral research on native Australian wildlife, especially the ones most affected by feral cat predation, seeing as it is hard to find populations to study.

The other thing to consider is behavioral plasticity. This refers to the capacity of a species to change its behavior in response to a changing environment. In this case, it refers to whether or not a species will be able to change its behavioral patterns to avoid invasive predators. The degree of flexibility itself can be strongly linked to genetics, so it is likely that the species that are classified as threatened and have declined due to feral cats are the ones with low behavioral plasticity in the first place. The survival of many Australian species then becomes a question of whether or not they have the capacity for social learning, and whether or not that can compensate for their behavioral rigidity.

Taking a step back to look at all the different strategies to combat the issue of cats, it’s astounding how much thought has been put into this issue, and at the same time, how little. I joke about cat-lovers being overly invested in defending feral cats, but aren’t we all a little biased as Western pet owners and watchers of cat YouTube compilations? Could a 2 million-cat bounty have been an overcorrection for the profound cultural charisma of a species depleting some of the rarest species on the planet?

As an American, this issue was disorienting to step into. Walking through the streets of downtown Sydney, I saw cars with “Feral Shooters of Rural Australia” bumper stickers right alongside people stopping to pet outdoor cats outside of their apartment buildings. Even the larger issue of invasive species is a confusing one that forces us to place value on the lives of non-human animals based on intensely specific distinctions, like whether they arrived on the continent more or less than 45 million years ago, whether they are feral, domestic, or indoors, or whether their population numbers are high or low. This is overwhelming when you are just trying to pet a cat or look at beautiful bird, and it completely dilutes the value of their individual lives. 

I definitely don’t know the solution to the feral cat problem, but it probably isn’t guns, and it probably isn’t even hoping that Australia can completely eradicate feral cats, because they are intelligent and adaptable. From conversations that I’ve had here in Australia with researchers, conservationists, and cat-owners alike, which largely either demonize owners of outdoor cats or just focus on less controversial invasive species like foxes, I’ve seen a general discomfort around the issue. This discomfort is understandable, but I’m hoping that as more recovery plans are developed for threatened species and more organizations step up to help, we will have enough breathing room to step back and learn more about these complex trophic interactions in order to see how invasive species fit into our ecological future.

Mommy Issue | December 2019

A Ghost Limb

The long stretch of manure-soaked highway outside Visalia reminded those who so rarely strayed from their air-conditioned temples about the existence of soil and livestock. My mom referenced the smell more than a couple times as we drove, as if to eradicate the piles of cow dung through ritual chant. Contrary to her perception, the valley of farms, orchards, and tilled plots of land did not conjure a water-color pastoral scene found on a china set, or smell like refrigerated fruit. Instead it was aching backs, dirt-covered knees, zigzags of strawberries, variants of red stretching into the horizon. And most importantly, shit. Tons of shit. People waited in parking lots, hoping for work outside the scattered Home Depots and Lowe’s. I peered out the window, shoving gluts of bread into my mouth as I watched them smoke cigarettes, the sun beating down on the hardened tar. 

“Did you get your pee and timber, woman?” I asked.

“You always give me a hard time,” my mom responded, as if I’d hurt her feelings.

“I’m not giving you a hard time man, it’s just funny how you have to pee every three miles.”

“Wait till you’re my age, then you’ll regret the days you gave your poor mother shit.”

“We’ll see.”

She promised two hours of swift driving, but instead we broke off thirty minutes in, having spotted fresh fruit on the side of the road. The rain had come early: mercy for those breathing the dry dusty August air, but malady to the confused, disfigured fruits. Citrus dropped mutated with tentacles, GMO strawberries bulged before bursting into icky stick, owing to perpetual, endless rainstorms. I looked at them nestled and felt a strange kinship to those things brought into the world too early, malformed, lives shaped by freak sequences of weather, life seemingly unjustified in its malformity, jutting not from intent or purpose but more for the fuck of it. With the strawberries and mangoes on my lap I gave my lame philosophical sermon. My mom’s response was divine interference; tactically, one of the easier responses. Of my whole family she, my mother, was the last lingering Christian, at least truly. I thought something had brought me to where I was, but doubted it was god. I decided it was useless to unearth the deeply planted roots of others when the roots went to the core, one is better off disengaging. I watched the pink of the sunset on my mom’s soft face, eyes delicate enough to still need sunglasses, even as the sun went down. 

“Why did your sister tell me I look ‘exotic?’” I asked, knowing why.

“I don’t know sweetheart did it bother you?”

“No.” 

“Okay then.” 

So I figured I had built myself like a gas station bathroom, at best a dilapidated construction of comfort and familiarity to those I met, conjured by pastels, general cleanliness, stored colloquialisms, and it was enough—at least it usually was. It was always my mom’s sisters who looked at me funny, but she usually hated her sisters anyways. 

 Henry sat waiting under the orange tree in the dark smoking yellows as we pulled up. I exited the vehicle quickly, almost too quickly, slapping the door closed like I’d forgotten the woman inside. She followed me swiftly, feeling the coldness of the speed. 

“You sure you have a ride back?” she said, her voice strained as I had already begun moving a bag into the house. 

“Yeah, Henry will drive me it’s fine.”

“Okay.” She waved to me once more, Henry waved, and then she pulled away.

Henry looked up at me, letting out a puff and pulling the chair out in one swift jolt. We stared down at our calloused feet on the brick, quietly pulling cigarettes. 

“So you’ve decided you’re going?” Henry asked.

“Well I’ve made it this far, she wants to meet me, and I feel I have to go.”

“We’ll be in California again, it’s not like this is the only time.”

“I’m ready, okay. I need to do this, I have to.”

“Whatever you say. What do they think?”

“Oh I didn’t tell her. Or my dad.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“It’ll be fine, this is your journey.”

“Yeah … ”

I looked off past the oranges and cascading smoke to the strong four or five lingering. It seemed possible in desert skies, held by mysterious beautiful fabric, the plentitudes of stars a symbol of the infinite. But here, with the scant city sky, felt familiar, in all its deep darkness. 

“You sure you don’t want me to come in with you? Or at least drop you off at the house?” he asked me. We hadn’t talked the whole way. 

“No, leave me here, it’s fine.” 

“Call me if you need me.”

“I won’t it’s okay.” 

I sat in the kitchen of the woman who had given birth to me. She was a head and a half shorter, almost amusingly short compared to me, with a thick black bun of hair at the base of her skull. Almost the entire time, her barefoot children clung to her maternal figure with great enthusiasm. They glared up at me with something like a deep gawking curiosity, in a twinkling, harmless way. I couldn’t tell if they knew. On her fridge were little magnets of faeries and trees. I could see her impish children dancing among them. It was the afternoon but she poured me wine. It sat in my hand like a dark red weight. I felt calm, steady and easy, but I thought to myself, steady and easy. It wasn’t entirely real. 

She asked if we could sit outside and we did. It was warm and sunny, plus outside, there's more. More to pick at. To point out in harmless observation. Plants, dry walls, disparate people wandering through weedy backyard. Kindling for a conversation between two strangers, and also not strangers. She told me about when she didn’t leave bed for months, about having me at seventeen. Not going to college until she was twenty-one. To not to waste time on men. But also about her boyfriends, her current boyfriend, his training to become a nurse. About drinking too much. About living with a spirit that seeks destruction. I offered her the soft white stripes on the inside of my arm, as if to say, me too. 

I even got tipsy enough to tell her how I had forgotten I was adopted for years. How, while standing in the shower at seventeen, I felt it, and remembered it, really for the first time realized it. I walked inside and went to the bathroom, the same as her family. Without thinking I rifled through her hair products. In the living room were photos of living blood, dead blood, fumbled origins of recent immigrants, cultish garb and years lived in India. Portraits and all the forgettable easily passed-by trinkets of a home gathered and clumped in lovely dusty corners, candy wrappers and mermaid toys. I knew I was not a part of it. I was dumb lucky, and I knew it, but also truly felt half of me ripped and oozing lost blood. I did not find it in the photos of strangers with hair dark like mine, the other part of me, the ghost limb. I couldn’t trace it. Even as a mutant occurrence, as a fundamental accident, I wanted the woman who complained about the smell of shit, who had driven me, many miles by pink churches peppers and adobe graveyards, she would hear me cry at night, and come to my room. 

 After leaving I sat in a green place. I wished I could burrow deep into the soil, joining the generations in the dirt, how they suffered, I would never know their suffering, even though everything was beautiful and perfect. It was not a guarantee to be alive but a part of me wished to donate it back, to not be a parasite clinging to the lives of others. But the plants sprung neon and crept up the mountains and lay glistening with dew under trees. And even though nature at times seemed a horrible dance, there was palpable joy in the eerie aliveness of plants and grasses so long left without rain. When rain did come to them they were overfed, gluttonous, jolting with invisible electricity conjured in the most desiccant of times. 

The little instances came to me, hearing cracks in the voices of others, the color of air fresheners at gas stations, weddings around large turquoise fountains. The horribly mundane details. Times when it seemed all the living things withered away from the world. Many agreed, without knowing it, as they expeditioned around to see the anomalies of a great rain, golden poppies and decorated fields that the most vibrant and beautiful lands were often the ones left longest deprived. The lands left longest without gully washers and rains, the ones that thought they had seen their own end. I placed my hands on the plants and trees that make their own food and watch the world quietly and thought, the river continues to flow, how can I keep from singing. 

Mommy Issues | December 2019

The Six

In the first installment of “The Six”, a man named Tai finds a young boy, Shin, alone in the forest. As Tai promises to help Shin reconnect with his missing friends, the two encounter a door and enter it, finding themselves in an unfamiliar room.

On its mantle were various knick-knacks. Model airplanes, ships in bottles, ceramic figurines, the most appealing of which was a cat. A comfortable-looking feline sleeping and curled around a white circle marked with needles and numbers.

A clock.

Perhaps an agent—a spy for the grandfather back in the meadow. Perhaps, but not likely. It was broken. Decommissioned. Never again to tick the tock of its kind, it simply displayed the time: 8:37. A reminder of the day it died. Its last words.

Most remarkable about this room, however, wasn’t its contents. Instead, it was the palette of everything in it. The color scheme was … it was …

“A disgusting spectrum of grays. But that’s life, isn’t it? There’s no clear line between black and white. Just gray, gray, gray.”

Suddenly, there was a girl in the room with them. The sassy remark droned out of her mouth in a dull repetition. Arranged into a neat pile and propped up in front of the television was a plethora of pillows. In fact, all around the room there were pillows scattered about in lazy patterns. However, the mound of fluffy squares that gathered in the middle was nothing short of a bouncy throne in a kingdom of clouds. 

That’s where the girl lounged. She laid across them in a long, relaxed stretched-out pose. She wore pajama shorts that barely peeked out from under an oversized cotton shirt that hung on her like a nightgown. All of it was gray like the room. Even the girl herself was trapped in a sepia portrait. Lips, skin, and eyes were all various shades of an artist’s sketchpad. Long hair dropped past her shoulders in unruly charcoal tangles.

She expertly held a gamepad in her hands. A controller. Connected with a wire, it zig-zagged across the carpet in a labyrinth of curls until it plugged into a video game console next to the TV. As she focused on the images appearing on screen, she repositioned a pair of coke-bottle eyeglasses on the bridge of her nose.

“Hey Null, good to see you,” Shin greeted cheerily.

The girl looked to him, but quickly returned her attention to the screen, unwilling to tear her eyes from it for too long. She popped a potato chip into her mouth from an open bag beside her

“How’s it going little man? Come to watch and see how far I get in the game today?” she asked. “I’ll save you the anticipation: it’s the same as it was yesterday.”

Shin moved into the pile of pillows and found himself a spot next to her. He was always a fan of armrests, so he sighed with delight as his elbow sunk into the feathery lump of softness beneath him. The embroidered fluff gave a wheeze of appreciation. Tai picked a seat on the opposite side and found himself hugging a throw pillow in the shape of a fox head. He played with the ears, flopping them back and forth with child-like enamor..

Null swung her head around to look at the unfamiliar intruder. Strange. Unusual. A really stupid smile. Where’d he come from? Before she could confront him, the TV trilled with excitement and recalled her attention to it. Her fingers began mashing buttons purposefully 

“Who’s the square?” Null wondered aloud. “Don’t remember him coming around here before.”

Shin laughed. “Yeah, he kind of just appeared out of nowhere. He’s a friend though. A little funny, definitely weird, but I like him.” 

“Uh-huh,” Null droned. Her interest waned quickly, and soon she completely forgot that the two of them were in the room with her.

“My name is Tai,” the square said. “Nice to meet you.”

The girl shuddered, fully realizing she wasn’t alone. “Uh … Yeah. Sure. Good to meet you too, I guess. People call me Null.” The TV beeped and flickered for a moment. Almost like it was introducing itself into the conversation. “Is there a reason you’re here, Tai?” Null asked.

“Well—” Tai started, but Shin interrupted.

“We’re going to bring everyone together. It’s about time we go home, don’t you think?”

Null scoffed. “Oh, this again, huh? Didn’t I make my stance clear last time? This idea of trying to bring the six of us back home is pointless. We’re all too different from each other. Oil and water. Better off just giving up. This is working out, isn’t it?” She swiped a couple more chips as she spoke and chewed on them absentmindedly.

Shin frowned. “Don’t be like that, Null. You know this isn’t really working. Everyone’s just miserable on their own.”

“Yup, sounds about right.”

“No, sounds about wrong,” Shin countered. “We’re not supposed to be this way. All broken and separated.”

“And why not?”

“That’s just how it is. Don’t you remember? We used to be happy. Strong. A team. When we were together, we could do anything. Experience the world and see wonder around every corner. You remember, don’t you Null? Don’t you?”

“I don’t want to remember!” Null flung the controller from her hands, causing it to ricochet over the mountain of pillows and crash onto the carpet. The outburst was vicious and unexpected. She was breathing erratically. Her fingers trembled.

“I don’t want to remember,” she repeated. “Don’t you get that? It’s all rather pointless. Everything. Talking to the others, trying. Why try? Why try? After all, nothing we do will matter. 300 years from now, everything we do, right now, means absolutely nothing.

“I can’t do it. I can’t keep putting forth all this effort for no reason. It’s taxing. Draining. We argue about the smallest problems as if their answers are the secret to solving world hunger, and what do we get in exchange for these wrinkle lines? Nothing. Repetition. Remission. Regression. I’ve been here before, we all have. This isn’t the first time we’ve separated and it probably won’t be the last time either. We get so pent up with anger and then run off like moody toddlers refusing to talk to each other. It sucks. It really, really sucks. We keep coming back to this and it’s just not worth it to keep trying.

“So yeah, we’re miserable, but at least we’re not failing anymore, right? I’m tired of feeling like a failure. I want to forget how it hurts. That’s not too much to ask for, is it? The world doesn’t matter, the people in it don’t matter. Just let me be numb. I’ll turn off like a TV screen, and be empty, blank. Everyone, stay away from me. Let me exist, but don’t expect anything more from me. Stay away. I’m here. I’m alive, aren’t I? That should be good enough.”

The silence was piercing. It had a weight of finality. Even Null herself stopped moving. She was sitting cross-legged staring at her hands like foreign objects holding an ancient, unknown secret.

Shin didn’t speak. He was afraid this would happen. He could be as cheery as he wanted, but spirit alone wasn’t going to rescue Null from the mist of apathy that imprisoned her. What would he say? He was at a complete loss for words and submitted to the devouring silence. Failure at the start. He knew this could happen, but still he had to try. Someway, he had to know how to stop the suffering.

“Wow. That’s the answer? Turn off like a TV? I never thought of it like that.” The voice came from Tai. Odd. He wasn’t fazed by Null’s monologue. In fact, he almost looked comforted; like he agreed with her profound declaration. “I get like that sometimes myself,” he continued, “but you make it sound easy. There are so many emotions that we all experience. How do you do it? How do you put a wall in front of all these feelings?”

Slowly stirring back to life, Null flexed her fingers and smiled briefly. It was nice to know that someone else felt the same way. Someone was listening. She didn’t want to disappoint them if they wanted to be like her. Maybe a few pointers to guide the apathetically inclined.

Encouraged, she gathered her thoughts and began her lecture. “Sometimes, it’s hard to turn off. The mind isn’t so accommodating.” Interrupting herself, she threw accusing glances at Shin, who gave a sheepish shrug in response. “But there are things you can do that will flip the killswitch. Alcohol, for one. Delicious liquid numbness; that’ll do the trick.”

As Null spoke on the subject of liquor, she took swigs of spirits from imaginary shot glasses. “A couple of drinks to relax, a few more to forget, and then finally another dose to simply fade into nothing. Better to be gone than to feel, right?”

The girl hopped to her feet and danced around with playful vigor. As her two-man audience watched her performance, she leapt from pillow to pillow giggling in a blissful fit. It slowly changed from dancing to drunken stumbles. She hiccupped in mock remembrance and toasted the ceiling before downing another shot of faux liquor. 

“This one’s to you, Suffering,” she celebrated. “May you disappear from my life forever.” A few more chuckles followed her showtime play, but it garnered no applause. Undeterred, she decided to move on.

“And if alcohol doesn’t fit your bill, well, there’s always drugs,” she appealed. Sitting down again, she switched from imaginary drinks to playing with an imaginary lighter. Clicking the flint wheel a couple times, she pretended a soft flame wiggled enticingly in front of her. She brought the lighter to her mouth, igniting what could only be some type of hallucinogenic contained in a glass pipe. Her free hand cupped it, protecting it from the windless wind, and she puffed out streams of indulgent breath.

“One hit to relax, two hits to leave the body, three hits and you’ve reached euphoria.” Null sprawled outwardly collapsing into pillows and exhaling with a sigh of satisfaction. “Wonderful, isn’t it? How wonderful to slip into paradise when living is nothing more than a slow, dull agony.”

Her grin faded. Eyes glazing over, she seemed to almost fall into a trance. Did she actually manage to get high off of some placebo drug? Quite the vivid imagination she had. But before anyone could raise concern, she jolted alive and leaned forward on her knees. “My drug of choice, you ask?”

“Uh, no one asked,” Shin stated.

“Of course you did, my curious little friend.” Null wrapped the boy in her embrace and fussed over his head of hair, making it almost as disheveled as her own. “Since somebody keeps all of the fun stuff away from me ...” Again, her words were pointed at Shin, but she dropped the subject (along with her hold) and scrambled over to the controller that she tossed aside earlier. “I choose Regressi!” She gestured to the footage on screen like a salesman unveiling the latest gadget. 

“What’s Regressi?” Tai questioned with awe.

“A video game, of course. Addictive … It’s all a girl like me needs to bum away the useless hours of the day. Why drown yourself in the stresses of life when you can plunge into the world of Regressi. Demands. Deadlines. Debt. None of that matters here. What matters most is reaching the next level.”

“I see, I see,” Tai lied, nodding his head enthusiastically. Shortly after, he decided to drop the facade. “Actually, I really don’t,” he confessed. “What’s so great about a game? About reaching the next level?”

Null thought about the question. She mulled over the words, trying to decide how to explain video games to someone who has never played before. On the screen, the title “Regressi” flashed across the top of the monitor. Beneath it, the phrase “Start New Game” was highlighted by a pointed cursor. She pressed a button on the controller in her hands and the TV displayed a change of scenery. 

A new game had begun.

“Regressi is a lot like life,” she started. “Think of your favorite memories. Maybe the time you won a prize at a state fair, or your first concert, or maybe even your first kiss in the dark aisles of a movie theater. It’s something you cherish. Something you could never get enough of, no matter how many times you lived through it. That’s what Regressi is. Memories of happier days. You might not be able to go back to them in real life, but in here, those reflections of the past play over and over again. But, of course, there’s always a flaw.” 

Null was passionate as she talked, but her passion seemed to die as she advanced in the game. When she completed the first level, the words “Victory!” danced on screen and a jubilant fanfare congratulated the completion of the stage. Then some new words appeared on display. “Save data?” The question implied a choice, but the only option available was “Yes.” 

“Imagine there’s a problem. This problem,” Null said, “no matter how long you play, you have to stop eventually. You reach your first checkpoint in the game and you save the progress you’ve made so far. Only natural, right?” She tapped the edge of the controller hesitantly, then pressed a button on it. On the TV, the question was replaced by a loading bar. When the bar filled to 100%, a checkmark appeared, accompanied by the phrase “Progress saved!” It lingered for a moment, and then the whole screen fizzled out to darkness.

“You might want to turn off the game. Take a break for a while, you know? Get a good night’s sleep or something like that. And when you wake up, ready to play some more, all you see is this.”

The box illuminated again with its cheerful fonts and noises. Trills of music invited a player to join it in its call for adventures.

The title screen reappeared. “Regressi.” And just beneath that, the familiar cursor pointed at “Start New Game.”

“There’s nothing there. No saved data. No progress. Everything you accomplished the day before? Gone. Empty, like a bag of potato chips.” Null took this as a cue to grab the nearby plastic bag and condense it into a small crinkly ball. She tossed it into a wastebasket in the corner of the room, and produced a new container from seemingly nowhere.

“You’re back to square one,” she said, “so what do you do? There’s no one else to get mad at, after all, you were the only one here. You could be sad, but really there’s no use crying over spilled milk. You could even try to give up on the game all together. But you know you can’t because, remember, these are your favorite memories in the entire world. You can’t leave them behind even if you wanted to.”

“No, there’s only one thing that you could possibly do: let out a big sigh and hit the button that says ‘Start New Game,’” Null said as she did just that. Resigned to her fate, she started a fresh round of Regressi, knowing full well what was to become of her game when the first save point appeared. The eternal cycle. Progress, regress. Progress, regress. A testament to the name of the game. Null didn’t seem to mind, though. It looked like she almost relished in the mindless repetition.

She began talking once more, but now she seemed even more distant. It was as if she was finally able to explain her dilemma. The futility of her efforts bore down on her shoulders with an icy presence. “So that’s my vice,” she said, “my poison. It may not be as strong as drugs or alcohol, but, you know, it works the same.

“You wake up, play Regressi, and just power down. There are no arguments you have to win, no thoughts racing through your mind. You become an empty TV monitor and leave the shackles of life behind you.” The game’s reflection danced on the lenses of her glasses in pixelated kaleidoscopes. Or maybe it was the opposite. Maybe the TV mirrored the frenzied thoughts skittering across her mind. This girl and her television were one. A single entity isolated from anything beyond the boundaries of those four walls.

Who talked now? Was it her? Was it really her? Was it Regressi? “Play the game,” they said. “You are the main character here. And you’re happy. You have a purpose. Get to the castle, save the girl. Be the underdog, win the championship. Defeat the villain, become the hero you were always meant to be. That’s a good life, right? That’s something worth living for. Not this endless loop of ‘Try again?’ and ‘GAME OVER’. We’re trapped in a thousand player battle royale where none of us truly matter.”

Null stopped. She clutched the controller in her hands, but her fingers were frozen in place. Her bottom lip quivered in defiance. Something was wrong. She could sense it. She felt like a puppet at the mercy of its master. Wires dangled down to her joints, commanding her to say and do things she didn’t want to.

It’s a lie, she told herself. You’re lying to me. I know you are. Who was she talking to? Not to Shin, not to Tai. But still she was certain someone was lying to her. Her eyes glared at the screen with hatred and disgust, yet it told her to smile. It commanded her.

It was the TV! That’s who she spoke to—she talked to Regressi. It was nothing more than an old tube television working long past the days of its retirement, but somehow it made Null loathe its presence with vivid contempt.

This entire time, as she spoke with Shin and Tai, she never really cared about what they were saying. They were never her target audience. She was her own audience and the words coming out of her mouth weren’t hers, they were Regressi’s. The TV was wriggling its way into her mind, clamping down on her conscience like a brain-grinding parasite.

She tried to peel the words off her tongue as if they were an unripe strawberry when suddenly, it happened. The TV moved. It was only a little shuffle at first, the corner of the television shifted over the thing carpet beneath it. But then it moved again, a more impressive jump this time. The cords and wires plugged into its rear components held taut, containing the rogue appliance. 

Null was fear-stricken. Not a single syllable uttered out of her mouth. Seeking confirmation, she turned to Shin and Tai, giving them a look that said, Are you seeing what I’m seeing? To her dismay, they were frozen solid. Like two mannequins, they stared at her as if time ceased to exist and she was stuck in a realm just outside the edges of reality. She was alone. 

Another jump. Null turned back to the screen, her eyes as wide as her glasses. She released the controller from her hands and proceeded to scurry backwards, trying to escape the approaching threat. A low hum began resonating from the television. It started off quiet and then rose in volume like a lightbulb being overloaded with high voltage.

Bump, shimmy, BANG!

Null cried out in terror as the TV ripped the cords from the wall with a massive pop. The room was plunged into darkness. There was silence.

For a moment, Null kept completely still. The only movement was the heaving of her chest as she tried to contain her heart from leaking out of its ribcage. 

Before her mind had the chance to start cranking again and could tell her what to do next, a booming laugh bounced off the walls of the tiny room. It was a guttural rumble, vibrating the world with a pounding bass. It looked at Null’s skin, causing her arm hairs to curl out in a wave of panic.

A lie? A lie?! I’m lying to you, am I?!  The TV flickered to life. A cacophony of fuzzy static scattered across its face. It was a few feet from where Null huddled on the floor and somehow became larger—intimidatingly large. The metal box now towered overhead, stretching from one corner of the room to the other.

As its next words came out, the TV screen split in a jagged zig-zag, revealing an army of serrated glass teeth. Behind these layers of angry chompers dangled a sharp tongue that dripped strands of putrid saliva. Oh Null, you silly, STUPID girl, how could I even lie to you? No, you asked me to do this. You practically begged me for it.”

Null was a deer in headlights. She stared at the huge tongue as it wiped a glossy coat of spit off of its lower row of teeth. Was this really happening? The game was actually talking?

Save me, Regressi, save me, mocked the television. Take me away from this place, take me away from my sadness, ha! That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? You wanted me to lie to you because if I did, then you would be numb. You could ignore everything in the world, and you like that, don’t you?

No reply. Null was shell-shocked. She wanted to talk. She wanted to defend herself from the monstrous demon slandering her words, but she couldn’t. She was in a state of complete paralysis. Wet pearls beaded behind the cover of coke bottle glasses. She bit her lip in frustration. A line of blood slivered down the crease of broken skin.

DON’T YOU? Regressi bellowed. Null flinched. Scared, fearful, she nodded her head submissively. Good, see? Ignore your suffering, girl. I didn’t lie to you. I’m merely giving you what you wanted: freedom. Freedom from depression, freedom from oppression. What’s the answer to it all? Slip into regression!

Again, the TV laughed. It convulsed in jester spasms, inhaling great swarms of air in between fits. Being the only source of light, its static screen cast shadowy illusions over the once familiar den. Those might have been pillows on the floor, but it was too dark to be sure. Instead, they resembled minions. Evil subjects hopping to their master’s laughter with delight. Snakes, rats, nightcrawlers, mobs of moths, lidless eyeballs, wicked china dolls, animated cadavers, grisly skeletons, snickering imps. The floor was a devil’s audience, an imagination’s playground. The walls slithered with oozing shades of nightmare planes and angles, and finally, when Regressi chose to stop, its predator teeth spread wide with a macabre smile.

Yes, yes, that’s the ticket, Regressi sighed in a sickening euphoria. Ignore your suffering, girl. Bury your woes in the tomb of Regressi. That’s about all you’re good for. You’re too weak to do anything else. You’re too weak to face the life that belongs to you. Pathetic. Weak, weak, weak!

Stop! Please stop, a small voice cried deep within the recesses of Null’s mind. It sounded like a girl, a young child in distress. Null’s eyes shifted frantically over the shadowy landscape trying to locate the source of pleas for mercy that appeared from nowhere, but she found nothing. Was that her? Was that her own voice against the harsh roars of Regressi? She couldn’t be sure; Regressi was too strong. The desperate cries were drowned in a flurry of flashing lights.

Weak, weak, weak ... the TV echoed. An eerie fog of madness spewed from its gaping mouth. It was a misty apathy. The rolling cloud of chaos swirled out in smoky tendrils clinging to its surroundings like a soaked, somber blanket. 

It stalked over to the cowering Null, grasped her shaking limbs, and pulled. Come, Null, come, Regressi demanded. Come, embrace the joy of my world. Sit, play, smile. The last word drew out with a raspy hiss. Give your life to the next level. Minutes, hours, days. I want it. I want all of it. You are mine, your life belongs to me. 

The spiderweb of darkness squeezed Null’s pale legs and yanked her to the television. Dragging her body in ruthless hunger, it posed her in a trance-like display. Crossed legs, spine hunched forward, eyes peeled open. The demon tentacles thrust the controller she had dropped earlier back into her hands and wrapped her fingers around it tighter than a hostage bound with tape. Then, finally, the evil wires crawled up her neck like a bouquet of veins and clutched her jaw. It sunk into the corners of her mouth as if they were a thousand fish hooks parting her lips in a bloody death smile—the same smile that Regressi had so viciously laughed with before.

Now talk, little puppet, talk. Tell them the truth, Tell them what your life truly means.

Null was hollow.

Broken.

Empty.

She found her voice, but it wasn’t hers, the words didn’t belong to her. Regressi was an expert ventriloquist, throwing its false promises from her throat. 

“In video games,” she recited, “we are the most important people in the world. We’re the main focus. We’re number one. But in reality ...  in reality, we’re nobody. Billions and billions of nobodies. We try our best to put a foot in the door of history, to leave our mark. To feel like we have a purpose among the ocean of people just ...  like ...  us. But we can’t. We’re too ...  weak.” Weak!  “You and me? We’re just sand in a bottomless hourglass sinking to our deaths like everyone that came before us.” A pause, a silence, a moment of resistance. But it failed. It always failed. She could never defeat the mesmerizing control of Regressi. “So leave me alone,” she spoke. “Let me be sand and fall down. That’s my job, isn’t it? My one true purpose: to be sand.”

And then she was. She was falling. Null’s body was still in the room, but her mind had dropped in a vast black tunnel. She was falling down, down, down the ravines of her fears, and she wasn’t alone either. Around her were other people. Individuals that all succumbed to the same thing as her: a life that scared them into apathy. As they descended, they moaned and cried in fright. It was the torment of a thousand souls suffering from an empty existence. They roiled and splashed like human water filtering into drain pipes.

Null was there with them. A girl sapped of color; gray in her heart’s void. She writhed in anguish over the bodies of others and clawed longingly for an escape. Did it slow her descent? Did it speed it up? In truth, she didn’t care. As long as it took her away from there, it didn’t matter.

Because she saw the end.

Down there, way at the bottom, she saw it. The same thing that picked at her soul every second of the day. Glass teeth. Huge, colossal canines chomping closed and open, closed and open, like a compactor of human beings fed by a chittering assembly line. The beast ate the people as they wailed in ghostly agony.

And it laughed. It laughed at their suffering, because it was a monster. It was Regressi, a massive static-filled television clamping its jaws on the limbs of its victims. It laughed because it knew that she was next. 

You’re next, Null! You’re next, it said. You can try to run, you can try to hide, but it doesn’t matter because I eat all of you eventually. In the end, I eat all of you.

And the descent sped up. Null tried to climb, climb with all of her strength up and away from the white noise mandibles chewing people like popcorn, but it was impossible. Her arms were tired. Her legs were exhausted. She whimpered and cried as the sound of death drew ever closer to her ears.

Don’t give up! I know we can make it. Please don’t quit. She had an ally. Here in this hellish plummet was someone else struggling against the forces of death, maybe even someone willing to help her.

Null couldn’t see anything beyond the rolling waves of bodies, but she was certain she heard the child speak. Eagerly, she reached out to the voice. Who are you? Where are you? I can’t see you right now, say something again. I’ll try to come to you. She waited for a response, but the only replies were those of the future corpses around her. She knew she hadn’t imagined the voice; she was positive. Undeterred, she tried again. Please, I can’t do this alone. We can help each other. I don’t want to die.

Nothing. Only a song of morbid sorrow.

Null started to cry. Her mind kicked into a high gear insanity. Was she going crazy? Was there really a voice, or did she make it up? There was no hope, there was no point to this. That tiny voice had disappeared as quickly as it came, and now Regressi was going to eat her. 

Wiping her nose on her shoulder, Null stumbled along in a wild hysteria and mistakenly toppled over a pile of nearby bodies. She fell beneath the surface of human murk. Trapped.

Fear enveloped her. If the mind, when submerged underwater, switched to a primal clawing mania, then this was a terror beyond that. Null flailed madly, kicking and scratching the people around her in a dash for freedom unlike anything she ever experienced. She shoved and pushed while screaming at the top of her lungs, and only by pure chance, her head resurfaced. She barely managed to pull out of the gray whirlpool and prop herself on her knees. Her breath rattled achingly as she gasped for a renewed supply of air. 

Don’t leave me. Null wished she could hear the voice again. It was a companion in a post apocalyptic world. She tried her best to focus on the girl’s words, hoping to dilute some of her panic with reason. 

The child wanted Null to fight, to push as hard as possible to survive. Do anything and everything to overcome the madness. But how could she not? How could she not surrender to the terrifying end that awaited her? She was paralyzed. Alone. A single person fighting the tide of a tsunami. The more she struggled, the more it swallowed her in its murky depths. No ...  she couldn’t fight it. Not forever. 

The noise grew louder. Metal striking glass. An endless repetition of chaos grinding higher and higher until her ears were ringing from the destruction. It was so consuming that every other sound ceased to exist.

She closed her eyes, waiting to be eaten.

“It’s pointless to try, it’s pointless to try, it’s pointless to try.” Back in reality, Null was a broken record. She repeated the same phrase calmly and robotically while staring at the TV. Over to her side, Tai was saying something. She couldn’t understand any of the words, but his lips were definitely moving. Even while concentrating all she heard was white noise. The gnashing of metal teeth. Finally, after a lull in the madness, something got through.

“—don’t give up—”

It startled Null’s conscience into place. Were those the same words as the voice in her mind? Rapid blinks cleared away the fog of confusion. “What? What did you just say?” she asked.

Tai smiled. “I said, you don’t give up do you? You seem pretty set on this video game.”

Same words, different context. Not really what she was hoping for, but at least it broke the hypnosis. The room had returned with its comfortable gray softness. The pillows underneath her were still fluffy, the carpet was still fuzzy, and Shin and Tai were both still close at her sides. Being in the presence of others was a slight relief. “My will is iron,” she replied, returning to her rigid viewpoint. 

“Yes, I noticed that. It’s pretty amazing, really.”

Amazing? Me? That was odd. A compliment like that was rare to hear, especially if it was directed at her. There was instant mistrust, as if she had to pay in exchange for hearing Tai talk. “I don’t follow. What are you getting at?”

“I’m not getting at anything. I’m just telling you how I feel,” Tai explained. “Personally, I don’t think I could do what you do here. I would have been broken long before now.” Broken? She knew that feeling. There was an interesting factor in his voice, a hidden layer of some sort. What was it?  

Unbeknownst to her, Null had stopped pressing buttons on the controller. Her focus was now entirely on Tai. She listened intently, trying to decipher his words.

“So you play this game, Regressi, you called it? How many times have you played up to this point? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?”

More, Null thought. Much more. The game on screen asked its favorite question, “Save data?”

“Over and over you play through this knowing that the same thing is going to happen, but not once have you stopped, have you?”

I haven’t. Not even once. He’s right. Why is he right?

Shut up, shut up! He’s lying to you! Regressi. It was coming back. Null resisted, doing her best to keep her attention on Tai. 

“Each morning, you wake up, see your saved data is gone, and then you just … try again. That’s willpower, strength. I’m amazed.” 

Weak, weak, weak! Regressi was getting louder. Why was it so hard to listen? Null began shaking her head, attempting to get away from the voice. Her eyes closed in concentration. But before she had a chance to return to one of her internal battles, Tai grabbed hold of her wrists. It was sudden. Jarring. What was he doing? Trying to hold her there in the realm of reality? Her body turned to him. She found herself gazing into his eyes, liquid pools of honey. His palms on her skin were radiating with warmth. Him, focus on him, she told herself.

“You say you’re turning off. That’s enough of the world for one day, right? But you’re not really gone, are you? You’re still here because you have the willpower to push on. If you really gave up, you wouldn’t be alive, would you?” 

You’re next, Null. You’re next. “Hard to call this living,” Null murmured.

“It is, though. You’re living. And maybe today’s not the day that we consider a winner. Maybe not tomorrow either. I don’t think any of us could even reach the end of the game in a single day. It’s too long for that, too difficult. But one day ...  you’ll make progress. And deep down, you know that, don’t you?” Climb! Climb, Null! Don’t give up! “That’s why you keep clinging on. You never give up because you have that hope. The same hope that I have. That tomorrow will bring something new, something different. Advancement, change, relief.

“Progress.”

Ever so gently, Tai was moving his hands. He kept his eyes on Null’s, but his fingers traced down the tendon of her wrists and touched the cool plastic of the controller that she held. She was nervous. No one had taken her controller before. She never let them. But Tai was different. Worry was coated on the features of her face, but Tai simply smiled. It wasn’t a stupid smile anymore. It was compassionate and loving. Null knew she could trust him.

Against the screams of her inner voice, she released the talon-like grip she held on the controller. With his right hand, Tai took the gift gratefully; with his left hand, he laced his fingers in between Null’s.

Warm. So warm, she thought. Is this what normal people do when not playing games? I could get used to this.

Tai, happy to see the anxiety slip from Null’s face, mimicked what he had seen her do earlier. The question “Save data?” was still on screen. The cursor hovered over “Yes.” A simple question. A simple answer. However, he was ready to change the results.

With the press of a button, he summoned the loading bar. Next appeared “Progress saved!” and, finally, the all too familiar darkness as the TV reset.

Null trembled. A layer of cold sweat dampened her palms. Her teeth chattered. Her crossed legs were falling asleep and she refused to adjust for comfort. What’s wrong?  This had happened to her countless times before. She knew what was next, yet her nerves had never been this frantic. She shivered like a leaf in an autumn breeze, restless ripples cascading down the length of her spine. 

The darkness seemed to drag on for minutes, then hours. What time was it? The cat clock on the fireplace mantle still read 8:37. Why was it taking so long? Did it always take this long?

Tai’s hands were steady and his eyes narrowed attentively. Despite the concentration, his facial features were lucid with a commanding bravery, as if nothing was capable of shaking his resolve. Whatever was about to happen would not surprise him. Moments before the game reignited, he gave a slight squeeze of pressure to tell her that it was coming. Together, they watched the TV return to life. 

Mommy Issues | December 2019

Retreating Figure

“Beijing … God, I just can’t stop missing it.”

Only after leaving my hometown, Beijing, China, for college in the U.S. have I started to cherish the beauty of this city. While I was adjusting to a place 6,400 miles away from home, imageries of Beijing in my mind gradually became more captivating and unique—especially when I started to think of the local food, historic sites I used to visit as a child, memories attached to specific places in the city, and the distinctive Beijing accent that has always been extremely pleasing to me. I’ve truly learned how nostalgia feels and how I desire to spend as much time as possible with Beijing simply because it’s so big, well-rounded, and deeply evocative of my identity. However, as it turns out, the experience of returning home has been somewhat disappointing due to an extreme sense of disconnect which I’ve found puzzling.

My first extended return home, this summer seemed like it would be a perfect, aspirational time for me to devote time and energy to returning to familiar places and exploring new ones. Unfortunately, things didn’t pan out the way I intended. I had a knee surgery that required a huge chunk of time in recovery and rehabilitation, and it consumed the majority of my summer. Despite the fact that I knew how limited my time and physical ability were in fulfilling my desire to know this place more intimately, I was still so frustrated. I only felt more cut off by forces I had no control over. 

At one point, the pain in my knee literally held me back from moving forward and seeing more hidden gems in the hutongs (small alleys in the older part of the city) ahead. If I kept going I might have run into some mystical cozy bar, a closing used book stall, or a spooky little vintage store—which are regarded as the authentically fun core of the city. At about 9 pm on the last day of summer in Beijing, I stopped at the halfway point of Fangjia Hutong and started to grapple with the feelings that had originated from the last bit of my surroundings. Look at this peaceful alley, the gently swinging locust trees murmuring the tiny neighborhood to sleep. The tree leaves scrambled with the old cables, improvising a series of monochrome line shadow-art under the dim street light. The alley stretched out into the distance quietly and softly under the tranquil dark-blue sky. At that moment, I felt a tender hold that was about to settle me into some sort of entity that contains peace and contentment. Sadly, I was the one breaking out of the hold, and I was the one about to depart the next day! 

All of a sudden, for the first time, I felt a real tension. The moment I start to crave a deeper connection to Beijing, I decide to step closer to it, or I am about to approach its real contents, it seems to retreat from me. When I think back to this moment, I recognize that my knee surgery was not the only factor restraining me from re-immersing myself in the city since I have left. The other part of it could be my schedules while studying, on vacation, or fulfilling dozens of other obligations. And they only tend to become more dominant, and I am never able to catch up with the city’s nuances that I search for. 

Beijing is a metropolis that evolves rapidly and nonstop. Siqi, a friend of mine from Beijing and also a Colorado College alum, sadly confessed that “Beijing rarely feels like a hometown to me now, except for the community I grew up in. Nothing changed in that area: the catkins from cottonwood trees, rusted fitness equipments in the park, and the scents of purple lilac flowers—the sign of summer when my grandma would buy me popsicles after school. But, as you know, Beijing’s been changing robustly—as soon as I step out of my old community the sense of home vanishes right away.” Apart from what I experienced at Fangjia, I did witness what Siqi described as I traveled back to my favorite parks, historical sites, and other meaningful places. Along with all the changes taking place at an ever-accelerating rate, we as overseas students are ultimately rendered without strings attaching us to the places we call home. But, realizing this notion or crisis of disconnect, how do we resolve or address the increasingly complex and vague relationship we have with our hometown?

The end of my summer left me with this confusion, which I imagined to be a matter of both reconciliation and navigation. Frank, a friend of mine at CC who is also from Beijing, once told me that his summer highlight this year were the nights he spent aimlessly wandering the streets back in Beijing, contemplating the things that had happened to him and how he had changed now and then, here and there, and perceiving his surroundings, which used to be how he usually spent his leisure time when he was younger. Some inherent bonds were deepened between him and the city through this kind of exposure he enjoys. 

After Frank began his life at CC, he started to take the same kind of walks here in Colorado Springs, recollecting and recombining the previous thoughts linked to Beijing with his perceptions of this new place. “I found the old version of myself again,” he told me. Through his words, and Siqi’s, I was able to understand the mentality through which they constantly channel their nostalgic sentiments. After all, by regularly traveling back to the old, unchanged community with which they each maintain the truest connections, by repeating their own personal approaches to exploring their connections to places, Siqi and Frank both end up with the most vital hometown traces they each may hold on to. These static things embody their own understandings of and pride in their hometown. 

What does it mean to change? Despite the changes that happen to people or streets, what—regardless of the form it takes—stays consistent to you? You could have missed out on the new developments within your hometown, but you could also have retained the most valuable characteristics, or traces, and been continuously picking them up as your weapons to confront strangeness, indifference, and insecurity. Perhaps it’s time to ruminate and collect the particular clues of hometown that are only significant to me. I believe they could inform me, through spatial and temporal scales, the ways in which I feel safe and when I am with Beijing.

Mommy Issue | December 2019

The Bees in Connecticut

The orange cheese ball crumbs, sprawled out on his carpet like dots on a Verizon coverage map, were a red flag. The yogurt-stained bed sheets, crumpled on the ground, evidenced his social decay. The mediocre synth constructions lingering on his computer, surrounded by half-slurped energy drinks, cemented 37-year-old Mark Matterby’s resignation from society.

“Knock, knock, knock, mister,” Ms. Matterby said.

“Who’s there?” Mark asked, knowing full well that it was his mother.

The silence that followed meant that she was in a bad mood that day. If he changed his delivery, she might be more receptive.

“To whom do I owe the honor of a visit?” he asked.

“You know full well who it is,” she said.

“Is it my dad?” he hazarded.

“Did my dad finally come home?” was a juvenile game Mark played. He’d been doing it since he was five, when his father left. His mother had told him that Daddy-O left to keep bees out in Connecticut. The rectangular state of Connecticut was hundreds of miles away, so it had always been impossible for Mark to visit his father. Hell, with Ms. Matterby’s income, they could hardly afford their rusting jalopy, let alone a plane ticket. Mr. Matterby couldn’t visit, even though he really wanted to––he said so in the birthday cards he sent every year. But the bees needed his full attention. Busy bees, as they say. It was very kind of his dad to send those letters.

Mark Matterby’s mother was a dour 65-year-old factory worker and she let Mark, her 37-year-old son, inhabit her basement. To be clear, “let her son inhabit” is a misleading description of how Ms. Matterby (the name remained despite having not seen Mr. Matterby in decades) kept her adult son in the basement of their two-story cookie-cutter. “Forced her son to inhabit” would be more fitting. Ms. Matterby coerced Mark to reside in his childhood home long after his childhood had concluded. She made his meals, she made his bed, and she paid his taxes. She wasn’t cruel to Mark; she loved him. She did everything in her power to make his life inescapably perfect. 

Nevertheless, Mark was careening towards a midlife crisis at a fresh 37. Decades of hot meals pro bono, shelter from the elements non grata, and Wi-Fi free of charge had not honed Mark’s life competency. His mother had smothered him, crushed his spirit and rebuilt it with a refurbished sense of helplessness. Mark was, as it said on the W-2 form, dependent. At this point, he wouldn’t survive a day if Ms. Matterby released him out into the wild. 

In any case, Mr. and Ms. Matterby were no longer married, and Mark’s hopeful jest about the prodigal father’s return bristled the hair on Ms. Matterby’s upper lip.

“Don’t do this with me,” she said.

Mark swiveled in his chair, keeping his eye on the door frame his mother filled. He set his feet down and stopped spinning. 

“Why can’t I call dad?”

“He doesn’t have a phone.” 

“Why can’t I send him an email?”

“He doesn’t have a computer.”

“Why can’t I send him a letter?”

“He has to take care of the bees, he doesn’t have time.”

Stumped, Mark returned to spinning. His life needed some WD-40. So did the chair’s swivel apparatus.  

“I need to go to Connecticut. I don’t care if he’s busy keeping bees.” 

Face dropping and lips pouting, she fell into his small couch. “Am I not enough? Is that it?” 

“No, mom.”

“I only feed you, pay your rent, drive you to church—” 

“That’s not what—”

“ No. You’re right. I should do more. You deserve better,” she said. 

“Mom, you know that’s not true. I’m sorry,” 

 Mark would have to forget about his dad. He’d left her to raise a child alone, and she’d done it. She was Mark’s everything. 

Ms. Matterby processed Mark’s apology. Crossed arms, rigid lips, and focused eyes staring at the framed family picture (from a happier time, when Mr. and Ms. Matterby had taken four-year-old Mark to Chuck-E-Cheese) told Mark that deep-seated issues were at play. He also had 30 years of his mother’s backhanded remarks to draw that conclusion.

She stood in silence. Mark had learned to be patient when this happened. Then, 10 minutes later, without a word, Ms. Matterby raised her eyebrows, turned and stalked out of the room. 

Whenever his mom reprimanded Mark for wanting to know his father, he would play a violent game of Call of Duty. The game served as an outlet for Mark’s frustration and was his only source of consistent friendship.

“Silver Fox online,” Mark said into his plastic headphones, which protruded like a pair of earmuffs on a small headed toddler. He was joining a game of team deathmatch with his best friend.

“Sup, fucker,” came the prepubescent voice of xxx_beast69_xxx. Xxx_beast69_xxx’s real name was Jaxon Munch. He was Mark’s best friend and a twig among eighth graders.

“Sup, dude. You ready to play?” Mark asked. 

Better to avoid chit-chat and get straight to shooting. He didn’t want to let on that he was fuming after a fight with his mom, although Jaxon, a moody teen, could relate better than anyone. Mark just wanted to shoot until the pain went away. 

To emphasize that he was fine and nothing was wrong, Mark said, “Because I’m ready to play.” It sounded like he was talking through milk.  

“Hey, fucker, are you okay?” xxx_beast69_xxx asked sincerely. 

Jaxon’s friends were middle school boys, so he didn’t know how to talk about emotions. But Mark was his oldest friend––besides his church’s youth director, Derek––and Jaxon wanted Mark to think that he was mature. 

Thinking fast, he tossed in a pinch of empathy. “It sounds like you got your panties in a bunch––my sister has those, so I get it.”

“Uh, what? I’m okay. Let’s just play.” 

Was he okay? He thought being okay meant living free of charge with three warm meals a day, a room to himself, and his mom just a stairwell away. Now, he wasn’t sure. Propelling  himself to the mini-fridge for a remedial Mountain Dew, Mark saw GarageBand open his laptop. 

“Do you wanna hear my new beats?” he asked Jaxon. 

Jaxon was something like Mark’s music mentor. 

“Yeah, fucker, let’s hear that shit,” he squeaked into the mic.

“Hold on, let me shoot this camper first,” Mark said. The guy was hiding like a deer on the highway in the middle of the day. As he observed the motionless soldier crouched behind his cowardly rock, Mark saw the inexperienced player, maybe another twelve-year-old, sitting behind a monitor, oblivious to his virtual peril. The camper was stagnant. Mark almost wished he would do something. Get out of there. Get out of there. Then Mark shot him in the head. 

“Okay, check this out,” he said, dragging a finger on the laptop's trackpad.

Other players in the game muttered their dissent. Mark held his microphone close to the speaker his aunt had given him many Christmases ago. It was the only speaker he had. He had asked his mom––she bought him everything––but she would not buy him a speaker. She hated music, said it was because Woodstock was her first music experience, and it hasn’t been good since. When Mark pressed for more information, she gave him one of those “because I said so” responses. 

His aunt had given him her son’s old speaker when he tragically died in a laundry accident. Mark was sad about his cousin Jacob, but happy to have a speaker.

A high pitched screech escaped Jaxon’s body as he listened to the beat. The sound was like the cry of an eagle stubbing his toe on a turbulent bit of wind. Mark interpreted this as approval. 

“This shit slaps, fucker.”

“You think so?” 

“Shit’s good.”

“Wow thanks, I—” Mark began to say, but before he could finish, Ms. Matterby was knock, knock, knocking at his door again. Mark turned off the music, snapped his laptop shut, threw it, chunking the drywall as she opened the door. 

“It’s not what it looks like,” he said.

Hands planted firmly on hips, frown turned tightly on lips, Ms. Matterby knew better. “Oh yeah? How about what it sounds like?” she said. “Because it sounds like you’re playing music.”

Mark had never been good at lying. Fibbing only made matters worse with his mom; it was her job on the egg line to decide which eggs were good and bad, so she always knew when Mark was rotten. 

“It sounds like I was playing music, because I was,” he said. 

If things went according to plan, she would say, “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed,” like she usually did, and that would be that. Things did not go according to plan. 

“You are no son of mine.” Her wide stance said she meant it.

The room was silent except for the computer’s whirring and the intermittent gunshots from below the desk, where Mark had thrown his headphones. He searched for a telltale sign that his mom was joking, but there wasn’t one. 

“What do you mean?” he asked.

She didn’t crack. “How many times?” 

“I know, but—” Mark said, before trailing off.

His rebuttals were pitiful. He felt the white heat of fear drip in his veins. The grubby undersides of his fingernails pushed into the wrinkle on his palm that said he would live a long life. 

“But what? ” she said. The words were overflowing with disdain. 

Mark stood from his swivel chair. It spun to the right, hit his knee and idled back the other way before he steadied it with a shaking hand. “I’m leaving,” he said. 

...    

It was Mark’s fortieth birthday. Upstairs, his mom made Mickey Mouse pancakes, Mark’s favorite. The saccharine smell of syrup snuck into Mark’s room, traversed his linens and climbed into his nose. Mark ran up the stairs, Hanes socks pulled out past his toes, plaid pajamas stained with cheese dust and contentment. 

“Hey, honey,” his mom said in a chipper voice. She’d been very happy lately. Mark had given up video games and music for good. These days, he played Bananagrams with his mom and read old picture books she’d given him. Life couldn’t be better.

“Ready for some pancakes?”

Mommy Issue | December 2019

Snail Racing

The best way to play in gutters in a rainstorm is barefoot, with rolled-up pants and an unzipped rain jacket and no hat. The goal, of course, is to become as thoroughly drenched as possible, and the best way to accomplish this is to run around yelling and splashing whoever else is playing in the gutters (brothers are especially useful here). Racing leaf boats into storm drains and jumping in puddles are part of it, too, but most important of all are the creatures that come out when it pours.

In the small island town along the Salish Sea in northwest Washington where I grew up, winter was one long rainstorm. In particularly good storms, before the trees started blowing down and after the constant drizzle turned into pelting rain, the gutters were my kingdom, and they were always filled with worms.

It is still somewhat of a mystery why worms emerge from the soil during and after heavy rains. It used to be considered a life-saving tactic to escape drowning, but worms actually need moisture to breathe. They can’t drown the way humans can. Now, it’s thought that emerging from underground when it rains may be because it’s easier to move long distances on top of wet soil than through it; or, alternatively, it could be because rain vibrations sound very similar to the vibrations produced by underground predators like moles.

Whatever the reason, for a long time worm-filled gutters were one of my favorite things in the world. Between the ages of five and 10, I collected fistfuls of worms from the gutters at home, carrying them around until my hands were covered in mucus from their writhing bodies. Then I would release them—into buckets of dirt if they were injured, and into garden beds if they weren’t.

I was perhaps a bit of a weird kid. In elementary school, I suffered recurring bouts of a strain of strep throat found only in dirt. Sea stars fascinated me, and finding a salamander was one of my highest ambitions. Once I caught a young wild rabbit in a butterfly net. For a while I even harbored a secret desire to tame a deer and ride it, which I gave up only because I eventually grew too large for a deer to theoretically carry me.

I collected frogs, too, when I could find them, and kept them in five-gallon buckets filled with water and floating logs until feeding them became too difficult. The 1971 edition of “Shelf Pets: How to Take Care of Small Wild Animals,” a book I read cover-to-cover multiple times, recommended training captive frogs to eat pieces of raw meat dangled on strings, but I never succeeded with this. I fed them tired houseflies instead, a food item that took a lot of time to catch and that the frogs, predictably, weren’t even very interested in eating.

Really, I was interested in anything that squirmed, crawled, hopped, or slimed. Beetles, ants, caterpillars, slugs, snails: the smaller, the stranger, the more overlooked or outright hated, the better.

 ———

In the beginning, though, I mostly concentrated on worms. At home, rainstorms meant hours of screaming, splashing fun, but at school rainstorms were more serious. Like most elementary schools in my area, mine had a large field, tetherball courts, a swingset, and several slide and monkey bar complexes. It also had a large expanse of blacktop, and that was where the worms came, and that was where the worms died.

The feet of six- and seven-year-olds are not kind to worms on asphalt in the rain. The need for a worm rescue squad was obvious, and throughout the winters that was what my friends and I were: the worm protectors, the worm ambulance, the worm emergency room surgeons.

We had 50 minutes of recess a day: 10 in the morning, 30 after lunch, and 10 in the afternoon. Every minute of it was precious—we raced each other out of the doorway each time the bell rang, and our destination was always the crumbling corner where the blacktop met the field. We even had a secret hand signal for it: two hands together to form a triangle, with the thumbs wiggling in the middle. In the fall and spring the field was where we played tag and tackled each other and ran around stealing each other’s hats and jackets and shoes, but in winter it was a mess of mud and the yellow-jacketed supervisors shouted us off. We spent a lot of time standing on the edge of the blacktop, daring each other to run out onto the field. We called it “Corner,” and to us it was a holy place.

It was our field hospital. After we’d run over the blacktop, snatching worms out from under the stomping feet of the basketball players, the girls hurling tetherballs at each other’s faces, the huddle of four-square players and the small children playing hopscotch, we brought them back to Corner. If they were uninjured, we tossed them onto the field or into the woods on our way back to class. More often than not, though, they were wounded, seeping blood or cut in half or spilling intestines, and Corner was where we treated them.

Our tools were scavenged playground items, hidden beneath the crumbling asphalt until we needed them: the tools of healing, of hope, of utter necessity to the surgical procedures we undertook. Bent paper clips for forceps, broken shoelaces for bandages. To us they were precious, and with them we poked intestines back into bodies, wrapped torn skin and cut off the truly trampled parts. More times than not the worms lived.

But while they will forever be my first love, worms have an annoying tendency to disappear into the dirt when it isn’t pouring—which even in the Pacific Northwest is often enough to make them disappointing long-term pets. When I entered middle school and recess suddenly wasn’t a thing anymore, my days of dedicated worm-rescuing were effectively over.

 ———

It was in garden snails that I finally found the perfect pet. Like worms, they came out in the rain, but better yet, they were around the rest of the time, too. Their shells were the perfect size for a ten-year-old’s hands, and they were much more personable than worms. For one thing, they actually had eyeballs and a visible mouth, and for another, I could bring them to my favorite parts of the backyard for out-of-the-cage exercise and enrichment.

Sometimes this included snail racing, an activity my uncle once suggested, possibly as a joke (but then again, he’d been infamous in his youth for breeding rats to feed to his snakes, one of which once escaped and spent several years slithering around my grandparents’ house, so maybe not). Regardless, I accepted snail racing as a legitimate pursuit and initiated it regularly. I marked the shells of my favorite snails with permanent markers to tell them apart, place several in a circle I drew in the grass, and then watch, with the endless curiosity of childhood, for the first snail to make it out. Often they would fall asleep, or begin eating the grass, or glide around in circles without ever really going anywhere. When my brother and I both entered contestants, any and all forms of snail encouragement, such as gently prodding them with a stick, was off limits. Sometimes the races took hours.

 ———

That was more than a decade ago, in a small island town where the rain and the snails were plentiful. I’m almost halfway across the country now, in a once-upon-a-time frontier city where moisture is a foreign concept, winters mean snow and sun, and the only worms are invasive and rarer than the rain.

But strangely enough, most of the good friends I’ve made in college have similar strange animal origin stories. They grew up in West Coast cities and in the suburbs of Chicago, in California and in Colorado. We’re all biologists, a sort of people I’ve learned are uniformly strange, and it would be fair to say that our childhoods of digging in the dirt and overturning logs and watching tidepools for hours are the reason we are who we are today.

At age seven, a friend of mine fit ten banana slugs into her hand and proudly showed them to a camera; another one drove across half of Ireland to return an occupied seashell to the ocean. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that they’re the ones responsible for getting me back into snails.

 ———

For most of my late childhood I kept salad tubs upon salad tubs of snails—probably 50 or so snails all told, plus maybe hundreds of their babies. I kept them in cycles: the line of salad tubs alongside the garage grew and grew, until cleaning them all became an ordeal, until a windstorm blew off the lids or until I decided that caterpillars were more interesting for a time. Then I would release them or they would escape, and my mother would be angry and our garden would be full of snails and empty of plants. The snails who hide in the rock walls of her vegetable garden today are probably descendants of mine, she says, and I’m still blamed every time the bean seedlings disappear overnight.

Over time I’d start collecting them again, until snail bins lined our patio once more. I gave up snails for the final time halfway through high school when my parents finally agreed to get a dog, but at the age of 20 in an apartment dorm room I share with a remarkably tolerant roommate, I’ve become a snail owner once again.

Their home is a two-gallon glass jar I found at the inestimable local treasure palace more commonly known as the Arc. The jar is slightly over a foot tall, with a metal lid I’ve drilled holes into and a metal spigot at the base. Meant to hold lemonade or mint-flavored water for fancy parties, it’s now filled with several pounds of dirt, clumps of grass, succulents I rescued from not-quite-frozen soil at the onset of a recent snowstorm, and 35 baby snails taken from a friend’s overpopulated terrarium.

That I can have snails at all in Colorado is surprising, to say the least. Cornu aspersum (which roughly translates to “spotted horn shape”), the common garden snail, belongs to Western Europe and the Mediterranean, but it was brought to California in the 1850s for escargot. Since then, it has spread throughout much of the US and the world; it can be found on every continent except Antarctica, and on most major islands as well. That snails are plentiful in my hometown is no surprise, as snails love nothing more than moisture, and moisture is something the Pacific Northwest has in excess. But Colorado is not known for its humidity. Instead of Cascade concrete, it’s known for Rocky Mountain powder, the fluffy, dry snow that’s a result of low moisture and lower temperatures. Snails do not do well with this either.

In more temperate regions, snails can be more or less active all year. In colder and drier regions, however, they enter periods of hibernation during excessive drought or cold. When hibernating, they draw back into their shell and seal the entrance with a thin layer of mucus, a behavior I observed in the heyday of my snail-raising years during infrequent periods of freezing cold, and incorrectly took to mean death.

During this time they’re able to prevent absorbing too much water, or too little, but most impressively they’re also able to avoid ice formation in their tissues by altering the chemical makeup of their blood. Common garden snails can survive in temperatures as low as 23 degrees Fahrenheit. Of course, Colorado winters can get much, much colder.

Still, it’s thought that these snails have traveled to Colorado in nursery stock multiple times over the past two centuries, and evidently through some trick of magic or biology they’ve managed to stay.

And, in early fall before the first freeze, in the front range city of Colorado Springs, on a college campus below America’s Mountain, my friends found a small population of snails living in a garden bed.

Being biologists and animal-starved college students, they took the snails home and kept them in homemade terrariums. They misted them several times daily, smuggled single leaves of spinach out of the dining hall to feed them, and criticized each others’ snail parenting techniques. Predictably, one day they came back to find a jar full of babies.

 ———

Before I really understood what sex was, I knew what snails making babies looked like. I would find them on rainy days beneath dripping leaves, in rock crevices or, often, simply in the middle of the patio. They would be curled around each other, eyestalks retracted, neither one moving for hours as a huge ball of milky, bluish, glistening mucus grew between them. It was a weird thing to watch, and at the time I didn’t even appreciate the full complexity of the affair: not only is an enormous mucus ball part of snail sex, but the whole process is initiated when one of the snails spears the other with a calcareous “love dart.” Supposedly this improves fertility and sperm acceptance, but mostly it sounds kinky and painful.

Once I’d figured out that the snails who engaged in this strange ritual would lay eggs several weeks afterwards, I would wait for them to finish, checking back every half-hour or so, because snail mating takes a long time. Sometimes I would come back too late, and have to search for them in the damp darkness with a flashlight, and sometimes I wouldn’t find them. If I did find them, though, I added them to one of my terrariums and marked their shells with Sharpie symbols. Then, when I spotted a marked snail laying eggs in my terrarium, I would triumphantly write “F” for female on her shell, and the other snail of the pair would get an “M” for male.

When I needed to keep down my population of baby snails, which was all the time, all I needed to do was put the “F” snails in one salad tub and the “M” snails in another. For some reason, though, it never really seemed to work out, and my baby snail population was always on the rise.

It turns out that common garden snails are simultaneous hermaphrodites, meaning they have both male and female genitalia. While they prefer to reproduce sexually, and do so several times a year, they’re also able to self-fertilize. Basically, they’re veritable baby-making machines, and a single snail can churn out hundreds of baby snails per year. Segregating by gender is useless, because snails don’t even have a gender.

This is all a long way of saying that, at some point, my friend’s snails got together (or self-fertilized, who knows) and deposited 80-something pearly white, moist, rubbery, pea-sized eggs in a gelatinous underground mass without her ever noticing.

When baby snails hatch (a few days before they hatch, the eggs become increasingly transparent and hard, and gradually it becomes possible to see the tiny body of a snail inside of them), they are translucent and slightly bigger than a peppercorn. It’s difficult to pick them up without crushing them, and when they emerge from their shells, it's possible to see through their flesh. They’re brownish and difficult to see until they move, but when you have a glass jar filled with slightly less than a hundred brownish translucent blobs with eyeballs on stalks, not only is their existence painfully obvious, but it suddenly hits that you’re a snail parent, and it’s up to you to raise the next generation of invasive garden-destroying pests.

 ———

I have always thought that baby snails are the cutest creatures in existence. When I tell my friends that human babies repulse me but that baby snails are beautiful, even the ones who grew up collecting worms and now keep snails often stare at me in horror.

Most people, though, seem to lose that horror after watching baby snails in person or letting them crawl across their hands. Something along the lines of, “Oh, that one is eating its own poop but it’s so cute!” seems to be a standard response.

Even typing in “cute baby snails” on Google Images alone can sometimes win my case, because baby snails are undeniably awww-worthy. Whatever biological impulse humans have that causes them to think most young mammals or any sort of big-eyed creature are cute, adorable, or even precious, baby snails seem to trigger it too.

Snails have eyeballs that travel slowly up their eye stalks as they wake up. The eye stalks grow slowly from their fleshy bodies like seedlings emerging from the ground, sped up a thousandfold, and the eyeballs themselves, to the naked eye, are the approximate size and color of pepper flakes. As snails mature, their skin becomes darker and their shells harden and become opaque, but when snails are young their shells are thin and faintly striped, and it’s possible to see their lungs pumping.

The baby snails living in a lemonade jar on my desk are several weeks old at this point. Some are pinky-nail sized or even slightly bigger, while others seem not to have grown at all. They enjoy eating lettuce leaves, dandelion leaves, spinach leaves, grass, or even shredded carrot. They’re not very fond of kale. As recommended by “Shelf Pets,” their food is liberally sprinkled with cuttlebone to aid in shell growth.

When baby snails eat, their radula (a hard, toothed structure they use to scrape food into their mouths) is visible, as is the food as it travels up their body and into their shell. When they crawl along the glass, the muscles of their foot pulse and they leave a small trail of slime behind them. When they poop, which is often, it comes out in coils of bright green or brown or orange.

Among my friends, the proper techniques for effective snail parenting have become a fraught topic. Genuine disagreements arise over the right amount of moisture to add daily, the amount of time food should be left in the terrarium, how long it’s safe to leave them alone over breaks. There’s a not-quite-overt competition over whose snails look the healthiest, whose babies grow the fastest. Maybe someday we’ll even start running snail races.

My snails are most active during the night, but the bigger ones seem to spend half the day eating as well. They’re not the most exciting of pets: they’re not cuddly, they can’t be taken for walks, they don’t really have individual personalities, and they will probably never even be aware of my existence. But in some strange way, their very impartiality is comforting, and when they eat (eyestalks partially retracted, radula rhythmically scraping, heads bobbing slightly with every indication of enjoyment), it’s hard not to feel a small burst of satisfaction.

I watch them as I do homework, and as they slime their unconcerned way around the lemonade jar on my desk. Their pale, pulsing bodies are the last thing I see at night when I reach out to turn off the lights, and the first thing I see when I roll over to turn off my alarm in the morning. They’re wholly alien, incomprehensible, small and slimy and unlike me in every way possible, but we live in the same room, and in that there must be some small bit of shared kinship.

When I’m in need of company, homesick, animal-deprived, or simply longing to disappear into childhood again, I mist their terrarium, and the baby snails come out in force. They’re half a world away from where they’re supposed to be, but perhaps water triggers their ancestral memories of home.

Mommy Issue | December 2019

Mama Africa

Capturing the brilliance of a woman like Miriam Makeba is a difficult feat. She was a woman who fought Apartheid relentlessly and fearlessly with her music, a woman whose voice inspired hope among millions in South Africa and beyond, a woman whose words spoke for so many people that she became known as “Mama Africa.” Makeba’s essence, however, is best encompassed by her own words: “I look at an ant and I see myself: a native South African, endowed by nature with a strength much greater than my size so I might cope with the weight of a racism that crushes my spirit.” 

When Makeba wrote those words in 1988, Apartheid in South Africa had already been in practice for 40 years and wouldn’t end for another six. The word “Apartheid” means “separateness” in Afrikaans, a Creole language spoken predominantly in South Africa and Namibia. Apartheid was a social and political system that enforced racial discrimination against non-whites in South Africa and present-day Namibia by dividing the population into distinct racial groups and then separating them legally. Black people like Miriam Makeba were not only confined to lives of economic poverty, but also denied basic political rights such as the ability to vote. Black people were forced to live on barren land and attend poorly funded schools. For many of these people, having the strength to fight back against racism, as Makeba did, was rarely a choice; it was necessary for survival. 

Makeba’s famed resilience can be traced all the way back to her childhood. The singer was forced to find employment as a child after her father’s death left her financially unstable. By the age of 18, she had already survived an abusive marriage and breast cancer, and had given birth to a child. Enduring these tribulations in the context of the reality of life as a black woman in 1950s South Africa would crush the spirit of most people—but not Makeba.

Makeba once stated that she knew even as a child that “music was a type of magic.” Endowed with as much talent as perseverance, she joined two local bands, The Manhattan Brothers and The Sunbeams. These bands performed mbube, a style of vocal harmony inspired by American jazz, ragtime, Anglican church hymns, and traditional Zulu song. They had a profound effect on Makeba’s career, shaping her musical style and ensuring that her name was known across South Africa.

Makeba’s rapid rise to fame took its biggest leap when she appeared in the 1959 anti-Apartheid docudrama, “Come Back, Africa,” which portrayed the harsh realities of Apartheid to a global audience so accurately that it had to be filmed covertly. The film brought her international attention and she moved to New York City just one year later. Her music became immediately popular in the United States. Though the music she produced initially in the United States wasn’t overtly political, its connection to South Africa helped raise at least some awareness about Apartheid. However, her music and image may also have been misused by Americans to represent the entire continent and people of Africa. After just five years in New York, she won a Grammy Award for her album “An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba.” Free from the threat of imprisonment, Makeba continued to speak out against the South African government and produce music that was more explicitly critical of Apartheid. In 1963, she testified against the system at the United Nations, famously asking world leaders, “Would you not resist if you were allowed no rights in your own country because the color of your skin is different from that of the rulers, and if you were punished for even asking for equality? I appeal to you, and to all the countries of the world to do everything you can to stop the coming tragedy.”

Unsurprisingly, the South African government was not supportive of Makeba’s anti-Apartheid activism. When her mother passed away in 1960, she attempted to return home for the funeral, but was denied entry into the country at the airport. Her citizenship had been terminated. Makeba never got to see her mother’s burial. She was also separated from her daughter, who was still living in South Africa, and would not be allowed to see her homeland for another 30 years. 

Makeba’s exile was a tragedy to both her and her fans in South Africa, but it also indicated that she had become a serious threat to the South African government. For the South Africans suffering under Apartheid, her music was not just hope, it was inspiration to resist. In fact, the government banned her music throughout South Africa. Meanwhile, Makeba was experiencing troubles of her own as she adjusted to life in the United States. After her marriage to a leader of the Black Panther Party, Stokely Carmichael, in 1968, she lost support from many of her white fans in the United States. The marriage also resulted in constant CIA and FBI surveillance, which was commonplace among Black Panther Party leaders and their families during the 60s and 70s.

  However, as was always the way of Mama Africa, she continued to flourish in the face of adversity. Although her US visa was revoked due to her marriage to Carmichael, she was granted passports by several other countries including Guinea, Algeria, and Belgium. Despite being unable to return to South Africa, she began to perform in other African countries, most notably in support of their independence movements. Her popularity and respect grew so much that she became a diplomat for Ghana and was appointed Guinea's official delegate to the UN in 1975. Her work’s influence also earned her the title, “The Empress of African Song.”  

Under immense pressure, the South African government finally allowed Makeba to return in 1990 (only four years before the end of Apartheid). However, the country she returned to had transformed dramatically from the one she had left. Influential leaders like Nelson Mandela were catalyzing change and bringing the country closer to the end of Apartheid, even though there was still much progress to be made. Makeba found joy in this, knowing that her music and activism had played a role in the revolution. However, this South Africa was now a South Africa absent of both her mother and her only child Bongi, who had tragically passed away five years earlier after a miscarriage. 

When Mama Africa herself passed away in 2008, the generation that she had empowered and spoken for mourned fondly and exuberantly. Tributes poured from the millions whom she had inspired worldwide. Nelson Mandela, a major figure in the struggle against Apartheid, said, “Her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us.” Makeba passed away shortly after performing at a concert in Italy. 

When I first started to really discover Miriam Makeba’s music, she was already gone. Among my generation of Africans, a generation that never personally experienced the struggles for independence, people like Makeba are made known to us only through the stories told by our parents and grandparents. A part of the beauty of music, however, is its timelessness. Makeba’s voice of hope, inspiration, and resilience will forever be immortalized in her songs. Even as she rests, she continues to be the “mother” of millions of Africans like me. My only hope is that my generation will continue to tell her story.

Mommy Issue | December 2019

We Need to Hold Hands

If I have a soulmate, I drove past him three years ago. 

I have no idea what he looked like; I can’t remember anything about him. What I do remember is the face-reddening eye contact that we maintained as he stood on the sidewalk and my car slowly rolled down the street beside him. Those seven seconds stayed in my mind for the next few days. It was only when I remembered that my life is not a romance movie about whirlwind-star-crossed lovers that I stopped thinking about him. Kind of. Mostly.  

Bundled within the “Community” section of the Craigslist website is a tab dedicated to situations exactly like this. You type in your zip code and a list of entries pops up. I have no idea when or how I found out about the Missed Connections page. It feels like I’ve always been aware of its existence, though only recently did I start scrolling through local entries. The Colorado Springs page is filled with love-at-first-sight stories that take place in the most mundane locations. There are a lot of entries from King Soopers, a few from Walgreens, one that happened on the van up to Pikes Peak, and a multitude of entries taking place at various gas stations—seemingly the spot to find the love of your life. 

I’ve found it incredibly easy to become invested in one half of a love story. So many of the posts are filled with tiny, odd details about their interaction—or lack thereof—like a very specific garment or some sort of obscure nickname or a word that the lovelorn writer of the entry promises will mean something to the person they are trying to get into contact with. This makes every entry a little mystery. Although the purpose of Missed Connections is to cultivate meaningful connections, it’s also still Craigslist. There are no names attached to the posts, which, in a classically Craigslist-ian way, means that the creepiness of the platform often ends up outweighing its saccharinity. Anonymity allows for the deep and sometimes off-putting vulnerability that pops up in the entries. 

10-06-19 you took my breath away Behind sonic on chelton and platte (Sonic Platte and chelton)

The odds are not good but I dont know What else to do.. I was pulling out as you were walking up the sidewalk... Your so beautiful I pulled back around to see if I could see you again no luck. I wish would of stopped .. Totally fucked this one up... 

It’s sort of like an invitation to the universe, one step in sealing fate. An extremely low-stakes adventure with nothing to lose. I sometimes wonder if I would’ve posted about the sidewalk stranger if I had known about the platform three years ago. Would he have seen it? What if he posted about me?

Girl in Car 

You drove past me today. Made weird eye contact. I’m intrigued.

It isn’t often that people receive responses. If they do, they probably aren’t the ones they are looking for. I reached out to the writer of every post included in this article but I didn’t receive any responses. I don’t blame them. I’m sure it’s wildly disappointing to expect an email from your soulmate and to receive an unsolicited one from a random college student instead. 

The Missed Connections page has become a platform for the expression of “What ifs.” Just the ability to write them down and send them into the world anonymously is validating. It’s an opportunity for release, and when situated in the middle of a collection of entries from all over, it makes people feel less strange about their extended ruminations on a possible soulmate lost. Other people do this. It’s normal to feel the way I am feeling about this stranger.

Guy who walks his two dogs :)

To the handsome guy with the 2 dogs that walks around my street, we ran into each other a couple times but the first time was over a year ago, hopefully you see this or I run into you again soon (:

Donuts (Woodland Park)

Went and got donuts this morning. Beautiful red hair and nice pants. Hope you see this

It’s human to dwell on the “What if?” because we are taught that love happens like that. A single moment where two pairs of eyes lock and suddenly everything is in slow motion and “Lady in Red” is playing in the background. We learn from a young age that love is supposed to be fate-driven, deeply cinematic, and magical. Movies and TV shows depict perfect, unique connections between two complete strangers. And while many of us know that this isn’t really how romantic love works, sometimes we just can’t help but get swept up in the seduction of it anyway. 

2016 CO Ren Fest

About 3 years ago at the renaissance festival I met one of the guys who worked at an oil booth that sold perfumes and what not; his name tag said “moose” he was flirting with me but I’m so awkward and I think I “sent him the wrong message” that I wasn’t interested! I don’t know if he lives in CO or not but I’d like to get in contact with this guy!!!

There are times when I question the rationale of the people who post on this platform. Are they motivated by extreme loneliness? The act of creating a post on Missed Connections feels like a radical attempt to transform a mundane interaction into something hugely significant and I sort of get it. As ridiculous as it seems, it’s an appeal to the most vulnerable aspects of a person. It is the part of a person that wants someone to love them the way people love each other in movies. It’s the part of myself that doesn’t really believe in the concept of “falling in love,” but still secretly hopes that something like it exists.  

Clarity (Now)

I finally got it today. I thought you were my soulmate but once I sat back it hit me at once. What you knew this whole time I'm a sitting fool. Lets be honest I didn't have it in the first place it was someone else's when we met 2yrs ago. I should have left the moment I knew about him whether his there now or not. This is not to rag on you beautiful lady it's to thank you and say goodbye.

You were meant for me but not for a lifetime. You weren't made to be tied down. This whole time I waited on you but you were never coming. It has taught me to let go and how to heal in a healthy way. Even though no one will ever replace you I don't want them to, I want to advance past you.

Love always S

Ps I will always wish that you can see you the way I saw you.

It doesn’t often work, and most users are aware of this. Sometimes it’s evident that the writer of an entry doesn’t necessarily expect it or even want it to work. The page becomes more for the person writing than for the person being written about.  

You (Cs)

I think about you all the time. I ask myself if this is what was ment to be 

Regret

If I can go back in time, I would have never of fallen for you. I regret the day I walked into your life. Now I’m stuck!

Some of the entries, like this one, read like they belong in a personal journal. It seems to be a little more impactful than writing in a diary, because the author of the entry knows that someone will read it. Whether or not this someone is the person doesn’t really matter. In these cases, the platform is a device used to express deep vulnerability to somebody else in the world without having to say it aloud in real life.

After looking through a handful of Colorado Springs Missed Connection posts, I searched the page for posts from my own city, Los Angeles. The difference in content and intention of the posts I found by using the LA and other big city zip codes was not surprising. These posts are definitely less wholesome. In LA, Chicago, and New York, the platform shifts into something even stranger, filled with blatant, sexual, and outlandish requests and offers. Some of them are baffling. 

Husband’s permission today

Hi guys,,

Husband is aware. So upfront about that.First time attempting this. He will NOT be present. Will be at a hotel PLS HIT ME YOUR PIC IN MY PERSONAL MAIL

We need to hold hands (San Pedro)

I walk along the cliffs overlooking the ocean with Waldo my bulldog

He won’t hold my hand

Will you??

Wonderful man needs lady 

Rub my Feet?

hi handsome white guy here who is str8 looking to meet up for a foot rub. I'd like to sit back and have you rub my feet. I have size 11 feet, soft and very clean. I just like to have them massaged. Please be able to host or know of a secluded place to meet.

It makes sense that an anonymous platform would warrant itself to the expression of desires societally deemed shameful. Yes, people write about meeting their soulmates in the cereal aisle of Vons and falling in love at first sight, but amongst those are also the posts about threesomes and foot jobs. 

hey Cowboy~(everywhere…)

Its been a few years since we went our own ways. I was pretty sure when I left that you'd be easy to forget but the memories of our cardboard box home down by the river and living the wild life has left a huge gap in my soul. Whispering well wishes into the wind…

Craigslist offers lonely hearts a platform where longing, missing, guilty pleasures, regret, and desire are all fair game. Anonymity allows people to engage with the page without shame, giving them the courage to post and admit things they wouldn’t anywhere else, for better and for worse. It’s like a massive diary, entirely shared by strangers. 

Jess (West Side)

It’s getting colder now and I miss cuddling with you. I miss a lot of things about you. But things got too crazy last time. There’s a lot of things I don’t miss. I hope you have found your way.  

-J

I want these people to find their person. And if not West Side Jess or Cowboy who is everywhere … I hope they find their person in someone else. 

Missed Connections is horrifying at times, filled with grotesqueness and obscenity, and lovely and uplifting at others. Some use it to express desires they’d never ask for openly in their real lives. Some hope it will aid them in finding that special person they saw on the train, the one with the nice button up shirt who made them believe in destiny for the first time. Others use it to discuss their own insecurities and mistakes, finding catharsis in their public, yet anonymous, words. Some use it to address someone they used to know and love, admitting things they never had the courage to admit in person. 

It’s bizarre, but so are most people, including myself. 

Boy on the Sidewalk (a Long Time Ago) 

Passed you in my car about three years ago. There was intense eye contact. 

Just wanted to say hi.

Mommy Issue | December 2019

Blindspots in a Minivan

For the longest time, I sat in the backseat of my mom’s minivan while she drove me anywhere and everywhere: piano lessons, soccer practice, the bookstore, across town to my best friend's house, and, when I was lucky, the Bennington Chocolate Shop. During the summer, as each lazy day blurred into the next, the two of us would run what felt like countless errands together. 

One August afternoon when I was five years old, we drove to the post office. I stared out the window that didn’t roll down, and in a daze of quiet contentment, counted the little black dots around the window’s perimeter. 10, 20, 30. When we got to the post office, I hopped out of the car and slipped my hand into Mama’s, letting myself trail behind her so I could avoid eye contact with the tall men whose beards looked terribly scratchy. While she wrote out addresses and weighed packages and did boring adult stuff, I looked at the colorful gift package wrapping, refusing to let go of her hand. 

Soon enough, we hopped back into the car and I continued counting window dots. 40, 50, 60. We arrived at our town’s local meat shop and market, Henry’s. We wandered up and down the two tiny aisles, Mama picking out corn and tomatoes as I sampled free sausage on toothpicks. As we left the store, I looked across the street and saw my doctor’s office, remembering how last time I was there she had asked me about what classes I wanted to take when I got older. I frowned and reached for Mama’s hand then. I didn’t like when doctors asked me questions I couldn’t answer. Mama swooped me up and kissed me and told me not to worry. 

When we finally got home, Mama put away the groceries and I went outside to pogostick with my sister. My pogostick was better than hers, because it was bright yellow and extra bouncy and I could stay on it forever. Once our bare feet got sore, we flopped onto the grass. At that moment, I stepped on a bee, and it stung my big toe. I limped inside to get some frozen peas to stop the swelling, and when Mama came downstairs, I told her that a bee had stung me and it hurt. I started crying, even though it didn’t really hurt that much anymore, but now, Mama was here. She always brought the truth of my tears bubbling up, just to instantly dry them. This, I knew, was my mom’s superpower. 

But one day, a bee stung me and my mom wasn’t there. Except, it wasn’t a bee sting, it was a stubbed toe, and I hadn’t just gotten off my pogostick. It was my first year at college. On this gray Sunday morning, I had to decide my classes for next semester, read a couple hundred textbook pages, maybe apply for a job, hopefully recover from a hangover, and definitely write an essay. While my mind whirred with distractions, I hurriedly stumbled inside Armstrong, failing to notice the fast-approaching, angry corner of the big glass door. 

I sat by myself in the Armstrong lobby in a chair turned away from the lazy trickle of students passing through the doors. I wrapped my bloody toe in toilet paper, cursing as the blood instantly seeped through and tears started streaming down my face. I texted my best friend, Why when I stub my toe do I feel like I’m five years old again? Yet for all my annoyance, something about the pain felt refreshing, almost nostalgic. Almost like I could see the grass stains on my feet, feel the bag of thawing peas, smell the lingering scent of warm minivan on my Mama. And as she wrapped her arms around me, the bee sting, the stubbed toe, suddenly didn’t hurt quite as bad. 

It’s funny how at college, I find myself behaving like a capable adult while I pretend to forget that just last summer, my mom still cooked me dinner, reminded me to schedule a doctor’s appointment, and cleaned up after me in the kitchen. In a way, this growing up business feels like I’m faking each stage of maturity until the faking becomes so believable that it’s deemed genuine, at which point I’m allowed to proceed to the next stage. As silly as it sounds, I think this is a necessary part of growing up—in order to get anywhere, you have to begin by pretending. But sometimes, convincing ourselves of a maturity that we don’t possess can become exhausting and confusing. 

Take last week, for example, when I realized for the first time that my childhood was over. My head was throbbing, my class was exhausting, and after 24 hours of pure denial, I finally admitted that I was sick. So I called my mom. She showered me with love, suggested a new TV show, and told me to cuddle up and take some Advil. But a few minutes later, she said she had to go. She’d just gotten a new puppy, who needed attention, and I guess I had an essay to write. So she wished me a fast recovery and we hung up.

For a moment, I leaned back against the pine tree I’d been sitting next to and sighed. I let my eyes wander, getting temporarily lost in its branches, and wondered if I should have told her that I didn’t use a condom a while ago, and that my fever was just a little extra scary because of that. But when does my gynecologist take my mother’s place on such matters? Are condoms and bee stings in the same category? 

I brushed the pine needles off my pants, walked inside, made myself some tea, and deliriously rooted around for my Advil. Apparently, I didn’t have any Advil, so I had to borrow my roommate’s minivan to get some from the supermarket. And while driving home, I almost crashed into another car. As it turns out, minivans have tremendous blindspots.

Last night, I FaceTimed my parents to say a weekly hello. It was 9 p.m. in Bennington, and they were already tucked in bed. Though their eyes lit up when they saw me, they couldn’t hide their obvious exhaustion. We giggled about this and that as my dad made goofy faces into the camera. And while they told me about their rather monotonous adventures at a wedding that night (they ate fish for dinner and even though the band seemed fun, they left before the dancing got “too rowdy”) I noticed that their hair looked grayer than I remembered. For all their fun-loving, wedding-going ways, my parents were going to bed at 9 p.m. They were getting older. And so was I. 

As I watched from across the country while my parents dozed off, I realized that it probably wouldn’t be appropriate to hold my mom’s hand in the post office anymore, and that I had to actually learn what those boring adult postage duties meant, and that these days it wasn’t only the doctor asking me what I was planning to study “when I got older.” That I couldn’t sit in the backseat of my mom’s minivan and count the little black dots on the window that didn’t roll down, because now it's me in the minivan, me who’s pretending to know how to drive. 

How have I been swept along for so long, only to realize late on a Saturday night that childhood had come screeching to a halt? Maybe it’s an unsaid rule of driving a minivan. Don’t tell the kids about the scary stuff. Let them feel the pain of a bee sting and the pain of a hangover, the exhaustion of pogo sticking and the exhaustion of monotonous college readings. We learn through experience, and blindspots, it seems, exist for a reason. 

Even though Mama sold our old one ten years ago, I somehow keep finding myself sitting in the back seat of someone else’s minivan. As good as I am at convincing everyone around me of my maturity, the world keeps finding ways to splash water on my face, wag a finger at me, and remind me that no one ever really “grows up.” Because we’re all children to our future selves, aren’t we? We make it from one day to the next by stumbling through the blindspots, and the only way we grow without wilting is to constantly stay humbled by them. Some days we drive the minivan, and some days we’re driven. But no matter where we’re seated, this humility is beautiful. It’s what allows us to realize that even as one chapter of childhood is ending, the next one is only beginning. 

Mommy Issue | December 2019

Lettitor

Dear Reader,

To be perfectly frank, when we were brainstorming ideas for issue themes during some long-ago staff meeting, we were kind of screwing around with the Mommy Issue idea. We thought it would be funny, maybe a little kinky. Also, the Daddy Issue had already been published in 2016, which was too soon to recycle. I, at least, wasn’t thinking about my own mom at the time at all. In fact, I bet I hadn’t called her in a while, or that if I had, it had been brief and I’d been the one to hang up first, telling her I was too busy to talk. I’d probably reverted to some younger, more fragile, and much more impatient version of myself. I’m not sure why I always do this, maybe because there’s something really vulnerable about being reminded that you might be just a little bit homesick. I can’t pretend that I’m far away and on my own now—my mom lives an hour away from here. But still, it’s feels melancholy somehow to distill my life too quickly on the phone to someone who used to be so constantly present in it. 

There’s something vulnerable, too, in the pieces by our writers this block, who have carefully and completely blown up the “Mommy” theme that we arrived at so lightly. This issue examines motherhood in its many forms and connotations. Joshua Kalenga memorializes Miriam Makeba, a South African singer also known as “Mama Africa” whose anti-Apartheid music empowered people within her country and around the world to combat racism. Madison Wells explores motherhood more personally, recounting the experience of meeting her birth mom for the first time, while Pi Campbell delves into the feeling of realizing that she is no longer in the backseat of her mom’s minivan. Heather Rolph mothers the tiniest children of all, garden snails (which, incidentally, are prolific, genderless mothers themselves). Courtney Knerr confronts motherhood in excess: feral cats reproducing at rates so staggering that they’re threatening the native species of Australia. And even people who post on Craigslist looking for the kind of Mommy that we had in mind at the beginning of the semester have their own kind of vulnerability, according to Logan Smith’s analysis of the lonely hearts of Craigslist’s Missed Connections page.  

As these pieces convey, motherhood can have absolutely nothing to do with the traditional nuclear family. It can mean a place, a time, a person, a population, a feeling, even pet snails in a salad container. But it’s also pretty simple at the same time. As in, I miss my mom, and I should probably give her a call. 

Thank you for making us take the Mommy Issue seriously, 

Emma and the rest of the Cipher staff

Mommy Issue | December 2019