Lettitor

Dear Reader,

We asked you about Odd Jobs, and people had A LOT to say. We expected summer camp, but what’s with the birds? In this issue, you’ll find a semiotic deconstruction of the flamingo, the feeding habits of vultures, and tales of violence at the Bird Sanctuary. We have more questions. How did you all find yourselves picking boutique corn in rural corners of Montana, peddling crepes and bagels on California side streets, disseminating mulch around the Old North End, caring for fragile plants and more resilient children, and bagging your power-drunk ex-theater teacher’s organic produce?

In the stories that follow, you will catch snippets of conversations from behind the gas-station cashier counter, stolen between the cigarettes and the soda fountain. You will hear reports from inside Midwest family cars at 3 a.m. There are some jobs so unbelievable our authors doubted their own memories – was there really a child-run mock metropolis hidden in the south Florida sprawl? Are the two editors who visited this theme park misremembering? Sometimes, the job is so odd that your boss doesn’t remember you either. These odd jobs come to you from the unfinished crevices of DIY home renovations and the bounced checks of a dog-walking scam.

The idea for this issue’s theme emerged from our editors’ own strange time in our suspended condition as not-quite adults — doing borderline exploitative tasks we know we’ll never get to do again. At least you can spin it on LinkedIn… fake it till you make it, right? We like to think these odd jobs, at the margins of social acceptability, say something about the world. Or at least, the way these authors see the world — stranger and more beautiful than you could ever know without looking in the cracks.

We’d offer you a job but our budget just got cut.

– Cipher

Barbecue Joyride

Maybe don’t become a musician

Article by Sam Johnson Art by Jennifer Martinez

I stole beers from the bar at my parent's restaurant. I worked shifts on Friday and Saturday nights, so I was always late to the party, but never empty-handed. My dad never noticed the missing stock because it was my job to take inventory. 

I was a terrible employee. I started working at my parent's restaurant when I was eight years old. You could find me hiding in the back closet and playing games on my phone during the rush. My dad fired me several times only to hire me back the next day washing dishes.

I was shafted the shit jobs working with my two older siblings. Sometimes involving actual shit. The basement flooded with sewer water on several occasions, and my dad would send me down there with a water pump. I was like fucking Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs. 

When my siblings left for college I took over doing the cool things. I became a pit master and smoked meats and built fires for the pit. I started to smell like smoke everywhere I went. 

My dad smelled like BBQ all the time. His aesthetic was greasy. He only wore white Stan-Smiths (that turned black), jeans, and a beige Carhartt jacket. He never had time to change, so he would show up to parent-teacher conferences looking like Ricky from Trailer Park Boys. A lot of people saw my dad as a little odd. During my youth baseball games, he would sit far away from the other parents and read the newspaper the whole game. Opening a BBQ was crazy considering his only knowledge of smoking meats came from books. Because he was good at everything, it didn’t take long for him to perfect the craft.

When I was twelve, I met Guy Fieri when the restaurant was featured on Triple D. Fieri had the swagger of a stepdad. He gave me knucks and drank Heineken. Word got out in my small town that I was going to be on TV, and all my classmates watched my family take Guy to Flavor Town. I ruled sixth grade that week. People ask me what he was like, and I only remember that he was kind of drunk the whole time. Sorry, Guy. 

Although being on the show was a big deal for my family, my dad was more excited about having his favorite musicians play shows at the restaurant. When I was ten, Kenny Brown came up from Mississippi to play in the little dining room of the restaurant. This was a big deal for my dad (and underground blues fans of the Twin Cities area) because he played slide guitar for legendary hill country bluesman RL Burnside. The place was packed and fire codes were broken. Fuck the authorities. It was the first time I realized that my dad was doing something special here. My dad gave everyone a chance to play, even the shit shows. There were nights when no one would show up to listen to music. During one of these desolate sets, my dad turned to me and said never to become a musician.

After my freshman year of college, the restaurant had been sold and my summer was free from mopping floors and making cornbread. I told my dad I wanted to do something with music for my summer gig. He got me an unpaid internship with this guy named Johnny Walker. He was in a band called the Soledad Brothers that made it big in the late 90s and early 2000s. They were part of the Detroit rock scene alongside the White Stripes. Johnny taught Jack White how to play slide guitar, and they spent a lot of time together being broke in Detroit. 

Now Johnny has a PhD and is a licensed psychiatrist. He lives in Cincinnati and runs a recording studio when he is not being a doctor. He lives in a large house on top of a hill that overlooks the Ohio River. It was one of the last stops on the underground railroad, and they used it to check if it was clear to cross into Ohio.

I slept on his couch in his “living room.” The room only consisted of said couch that I think was there when he bought the place. Johnny told me the house was only haunted by friendly ghosts and not to worry if I saw anything. It wasn’t the ghosts that kept me up, though; it was his gross-ass cat. It was albino and had red eyes and I would wake up with this thing crawling on my stomach. 

I worked at his studio for little over a month and learned some things about the recording process, but for the most part I hung out with the band that was there recording. They were a group of three dudes who were the same age as me from Detroit. Johnny told me that part of my job was to roll joints for them and to keep them fed. I had to use my fake ID when they would send me off on beer runs or to buy them more Camels. 

I must have done a decent job working for Johnny because he hired me as his tour manager for the next month in the UK. Considering I had nothing lined up for the rest of summer I got on a plane and flew to London. I was in charge of selling merch, driving the van, booking hotel rooms, etc. But my least favorite responsibility was to get Johnny’s girlfriend into the van after every show. Talk about a fucking Yoko Ono. 

I met a lot of good people on this tour. Most of them offered me some sort of drug. One guy who we stayed with lived on a houseboat in London. He was also the first person to ride a motorcycle around the world. His wife was the first to ride a motorcycle through Iran and published several books about her adventures. He told me it was good that I'm studying math, but also that life is supposed to be more adventurous than reading a textbook. 

My dad also studied math and he ended up doing nothing related to it. I guess at some point someone gave him similar advice to take a risk and see what happens. 

I complained a lot growing up about having to work. I just wanted to be a kid and play with Legos. Yet, I think my dad knew that one day I would appreciate everything he did for me. The restaurant was my dad’s big adventure, and he took his family along with him. There are nights when I wish my dad and I were sitting in that dining room watching a show, just the two of us. 

Mulch Madness

Breaking up with your landlord

Article by Lucy Chant Art by Claud Garcia

I met Danny three years ago. My friend and I stepped into his office, got on our hands and knees, and begged to rent his house. This was protocol, the way he preferred it. This summer, we reunited. I knocked on his door and was met with a small rodent-like dog named Frank. From behind piles of unfiled court papers and documents peered a pasty-looking man. 

"Who are you?"  

"The tenet who texted you two minutes ago asking for a key." 

"Eh."

Danny appears to be in his 60s, so his lack of remembrance and inability to complete basic tasks are mostly due to his age. As I was leaving, he asked if I had a boyfriend who might be interested in some extra cash to re-mulch his yard. “No,” I said, thinking this would be the last of it. But to my surprise and Danny's, this inquiry led to a summer of late-night phone calls, unattainable asks, and cashed checks. Maybe it was because I needed some fast cash or something about the underlying sexism in Danny's comment that pushed me to send the text: I don't have a boyfriend, but I can move the mulch myself. He replied: Great— the dump truck will come tomorrow with a full truck.

With a shovel and a broken wheelbarrow, I quickly found myself moving 1.5 tons of mulch. Although I did not have an internship this summer, I gained excellent experience networking with the landlord community of Colorado Springs. Just one day into mulching, I was introduced to my neighboring landlord, who suggested I grab a pitchfork from his dark shed — a major upgrade from the shovel. I was breezing through the task when, to my surprise, I was greeted by another landlord who whizzed by on his electric scooter, attempting to court my services. “Sorry,” I said. "I'm in a time crunch." Eager to get this mulch out of the alleyway, I started to ask myself, "What doesn't need mulch?" When dealing with so much mulch, your sense of reality becomes skewed. I began putting mulch wherever I felt inclined: on top of the leaves in the front yard, filling cracks in the fence, and in corners of the garden shed. Impressed with my shoveling skills or because I didn't walk off the job, I was asked to mow Danny's lawn. 

I found myself following Danny's car to his house. Our relationship seemed to be moving faster than expected. After successfully mowing his office lawn with only a few hiccups, i.e., starting the machine, I was invited to mow his personal lawn. While he watched through his windows, eating Chick-fil-A and commenting on the crooked lines of my mowing, I thought about all the ways I could destroy him — little ways, of course. While weed-whacking and operating the electric trimmer, he'd ask me to power wash the house or do a better job at cleaning the trash cans. Dangerous, I thought, operating such machinery... 

How could someone operate in such a way? Danny's ex-wife, who I got to know when it was her turn to take Frank (they shared custody), seemed normal. But Danny's odd hours at the office and lack of verbal communication skills made me wonder who this man really was. His house was pristine on the outside, thanks to me, but inside were empty rooms and floor-to-floor carpeting with no furniture. I looked for signs of a past life, such as photos or mail. But all I found were coupons and a framed portrait of Frank.  

I told myself I would continue to be at his beck and call until August, and then I'd cut it off. It wasn't me, it was him. Sorry! But when the opportunity to stain his fence arose, I couldn't resist. It seemed like a quick job, and I could coerce a friend to help me. Quickly, I realized staining twenty feet of fence was no easy feat. When we arrived at his house, he pulled out two large containers of varnish that appeared to be the same color as the fence. But we said it was a pop of color, encouraging Danny and his artistic liberty for his property. Five hours later we were a quarter of the way finished. The varnish fumes made time seem all too manageable as we stumbled out of the bushes coated in our own layer of varnish. Sometimes I still get whiffs, or flashbacks if you will, smelling the varnish baked into my shirts from the August sun. We stumbled toward the backyard gate in need of water and non-toxic air. Just as I turned my car on, Danny knocked on the dash and told us he wanted his neighbor's side of the fence painted, which was not disclosed at the beginning of the endeavor. On the third day, after going through almost eight quarts of varnish, we were determined to finish but needed more ammo. We asked Danny to pick up more varnish so we could finish today, to which he suggested I go pick it up myself. Begrudgingly, we drove over to Ace, covered in a yellow hue and slightly delusional from the fumes, and walked into the air-conditioned epicenter, a happy change from the midday heat. 

As I stood at checkout, Danny said to put him on speakerphone to pay. 

Cashier: That will be $75. Cash or Card? 

The cashier looked at me, expecting an answer. I shoved the phone toward him. 

Danny: Hello?

Lucy: I am at checkout, can I have the card information? 

Cashier: That's not possible. We don't do that here, ma'am.

Lucy: Danny, can you come to the store?

Danny is silent…

Cashier: How are you planning on paying? We have customers behind you.

Danny: Lucy will front the bill. 

Lucy: Right…sure, I can do that. 

Cashier: $75 

Danny: How much is it with the veterans discount? 

The cashier sized me up. I suddenly felt self-conscious. Based on my sheepish demeanor, it was clear that I had never served in combat. I hung up on Danny and paid. 

As August came to a close, my time with Danny seemed to be wrapping up. One lazy afternoon, I awoke from a nap. I heard Danny's voice calling out my name, then, to my horror, the sound of the staircase creaking below his weighted steps. He pounded on each door, looking for me while I lay paralyzed under the covers. It was clear he was not leaving. I could hear him walking up and down the stairs of the house and into the basement. Trapped in my own home, I felt defeated. I slinked out of bed to be greeted by Frank and Danny at the foot of the stairs. Finally, a power dynamic I felt comfortable with. From the top of the stairs in my groggy voice, I stated that I simply had other responsibilities these days, and I could not make him a priority. 

Today, our communication is limited to a few texts and waves through the window. As his office is in my backyard, we never truly leave each other's side. When I reflect on my summer, I remember the good times and those small moments. Sometimes, I walk past his office, hoping for a glimpse of Frank through the window. But just yesterday I went to his office looking for help with a key replacement. I stepped onto his porch, excited for our reunion. He opened the door. Time had aged him, but his documents remained piled on his desk. 

“Who are you?” he asked without any sign of recognition. 

Driving Me Crazy!

Hottest midwest hobbies: cigarettes and roller skating

Article by Emma Langas Art by Jennifer Martinez

​​It only takes my mom one glance at my swollen lymph nodes to declare I have mono. Two months earlier I hooked up with an English major boy and I’ve paid for it in full. I haven’t felt fully rested in a month and my sinuses are so swollen, breathing, and swallowing have become a chore. I vow to be celibate, or at least ensure all future hookups don’t listen to Elliot Smith. My liver aches and so does my Midwestern heart when I realize I can’t participate in Blackout Wednesday, the alcohol-filled tradition the day before Thanksgiving. The best way to celebrate corn and potatoes is to drink its distilled version and barf in the bathroom while your uncle spouts Republican rhetoric a room away. With a viral infection and, perhaps worse, a body full of shame, I am stuck watching Sing 2 in the basement, waiting to pick up my drunk siblings from the only bar in our suburban town, contemplating the benefits of becoming a born-again virgin. 

This isn’t the first time I’ve been assigned the pitiful role of designated driver for my siblings. Whenever I am home for a break, I spend most of my gas mileage toting around my sister and brother as a glorified Uber, with no pay and no appreciation. Sometimes even my parents force me in the driver’s seat. However, no one abuses my generosity more than my older brother, Will. Two years my senior and yet he has the tremendous power of making me feel infinitely small, a feat only an older brother can achieve. In high school, Will was the epitome of a golden boy. He was a white man in STEM who planned his daily schedules in his countless moleskine notebooks and always had a tall leggy blonde girlfriend on the dance team, a habit that eventually caused fighting among the team. His first girlfriend was a Mormon with eight siblings who got caught posting topless on Snapchat with a bottle of Svedka between her boobs, but by the time they made things official, she was in her redemption era, ala Taylor from Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. She returned to regularly attending church and hopefully drinking better brands of alcohol, but thankfully because I did not have my license yet, I was spared from being their chauffeur. 

Miss Mormon and Will had a messy breakup the following summer, ending in her dropping all his borrowed clothes on our front steps. Inexplicably, she also had some unkind words to say about me, an innocent bystander in their sinful love affair. Truthfully, I had no business being near my brother at all in high school. I had never had a semblance of a relationship, besides my Snapchat military boyfriend in 8th grade. I was in Model UN and choir, and my only experience partying was at the cast parties after school musicals. Will would often let me tag along with him and hang out with his friends, but I always felt I was a dorky sidekick he couldn’t shake loose. We got along, mostly, until I would ask him for a ride. Despite my older siblings driving him everywhere, and despite the fact my parent’s sole reason for giving him a car was so they wouldn’t have to drive me everywhere, every time I would ask for a favor I was met with passive-aggressive grunts and an interrogation on if I had exhausted all my options. He couldn’t seem to understand that I did not have friends with licenses like he did at my age, or that I didn’t have his breadth of friends in general. 

Bono as a frighteningly sexy lion fades to black and the credits roll. This is my fourth time watching the movie and still, I wipe away tears. I can’t quite explain the deeply emotional effect Bono-Lion’s dead wife has on me as Scarlett Johanssen-Porcupine belts out U2. My phone rings – it’s my sister telling me to pick her up, a surprising ask considering it’s only midnight. Whatever, now that the movie is over, I have nothing else to stay home for. My long-time crush was watching with me but was too high to have a comprehensible conversation, and it was becoming increasingly clear he would be getting back together with his ex soon. Not that I could instigate anything with my lymph node necklace. I pack up, say my goodbyes, and leave for the two-minute drive, trying my hand at parallel parking. My sister and my brother come out with six friends, and I sigh at the impending drive. As I prepare myself for the daunting task of talking to drunk people sober, I spot a silver lining approaching the car: my brother’s best friend, Mark. 

By the time Will’s second girlfriend came around (on the same dance team), he was in college and I had my license. I liked her much better. She was a year in between us and helped me escape my Model UN bubble. She introduced me to cigarettes and roller skating, arguably the two hottest hobbies. The only reason this era in my life is stained is not because of her at all, but because of my brother deciding that I owed him two years worth of rides. I would have provided them without complaint if he didn’t ask me at the most inconvenient times. Despite my integration into parties with alcohol present (although some of these were still theater cast parties), I hadn’t yet progressed to staying out past curfew. And I definitely hadn’t progressed to sneaking out at three a.m., which often became an issue when I refused to drive him home after his call woke me up. Will and I got along better when he went to college. Him, his girlfriend, and I would often get drunk in our basement together and gossip. Still, moments like these had their limits. To quell his growing resentment, I picked them up from his friend’s house every time they wanted a ride before curfew, which often got me in trouble with my mom when she would find water bottles full of Svedka in my backseat. Some things never change. 

My siblings and their gaggle of friends pile into my car, packed like sardines. There are a variety of characters stuffing themselves into my Hyundai, but my eyes stay locked on the 6’4’’ boy finagling his long legs into my trunk. Mark is quiet, and I don’t know much about him besides the fact his parents are insane, but he is so beautiful nothing else matters. I have had a crush on him for forever and the fact he plays D1 volleyball only intensified the appeal. My sister thanks me for driving, my brother couldn’t care less, as if this was expected, and then the crew starts to debate the best deep-dish pizza. I don’t care; I tune them out and look in the rearview mirror for far longer than I need to. My parallel parking attempt was shotty, but I try to sexily pull out in one motion anyways. God, maybe I do like driving my siblings around. If Mark joined every single time, I wouldn’t complain. 

The past summer, Will was freshly single and living in California for the summer, and I enjoyed my newfound freedom with my car. My sister Mary became my passenger, and the difference was astounding. Rides were short, at a reasonable hour, and especially exciting when she was drunk. There was no significant other to leave behind a mess or gossip behind my back. Instead, we talked about coworker drama and listened to One Direction. It was enlightening to see how much less stifling a car could be when I was actually part of a conversation, and there was no built-up animosity. In the same way Will can make me feel small, Mary has always made me feel larger than life. In my long line of service as a sibling chauffeur, it was only in these car rides with my sister where I felt my generosity came with no strings attached. Truthfully, I felt lucky just to spend time with her.

I drop them off at home, sneakily watching them (Mark) out the window as they yammer in the backyard. For the first time in a month, I feel energized. My nose cleared, the aches in my neck long forgotten. I’ve held so much resentment over the years for being forced into the front seat, but at the same time, I’d never tried to reap the benefits. Admittedly, there are far worse fights to have with siblings than driving. And I know logically that this divide and anger I feel towards Will is mostly internal, a manifestation of years of insecurity that will one day burst like an airbag. Until that day occurs, why can I not seize every opportunity to make this situation good for me? The following summer, when Will asked me if I could drive him and Mark home, I didn’t complain once. In fact, I offered to do it as many times as he needed.

The 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act

Article by Marynn Krull Art by Willa Schendler

Vultures don’t eat their own kind. In fact, black vultures are said to be scared of the carcasses of other vultures. They couldn’t prey on themselves, on each other, even if survival required it. The 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act protects vultures from human tampering — physically, if not psychologically. 

To deter vultures’ bullying and predation of livestock, it’s recommended that cattle farmers string a dead vulture upside down and hang it where they keep their animals. What the fuck? I thought as I read the AgProud Idaho article. 

Unlike most other hunting birds, vultures have eyes on the sides of their heads. This characteristic is typical of prey animals. So the maxim goes: “Eyes in front, I hunt. Eyes on side, I hide.”

This makes human vision predatory. We have a crescent moon-shaped view of the world. But of course, we can’t really see everything all at once. So we developed selective attention, without which, we would constantly be staring at our own noses. Our brains decide there are more pressing things to notice around us. 

In high school anatomy and physiology, I learned about predators and prey, and the eye placement thing. Having eyes on the front of your head gives you better depth perception, but a narrower field of vision. It’s optimal for, say, an eagle, to hone in on a mouse in a field from over 10,000 feet off the ground and snatch it up in one fell swoop.

In high school, I went to a youth group because I was desperate to learn how to forgive, and supposedly, God is the expert in that arena. Sometime around the tender years of 13 and 14, I began to feel like this gangly, socially awkward, strangled version of myself. Squawking involuntarily, I watched myself from the outside as a parasite took me over from the inside out.

One Wednesday night, we were playing a game involving blindfolds and partners. I was paired with my twin brother. He was supposed to be directing me on where to go to achieve some unclear end — no doubt a metaphor about life under God. Distracted by his knucklehead friends, my brother shouted, “Run! Run!” And that’s what I did —  right into a cement pillar in the center of the church basement. I collided nose-first. 

I’m sure it didn’t make a crunch, like biting into a stack of Pringles, but that’s how I imagine it sounded. 

I clawed the blindfold from my eyes, letting the fluorescent overhead lighting sparkle into my vision like sunlight from beneath the surface of the ocean. 

Tears flooded my eyes as all the blood in my body rushed to my nose, like iron filings to a Texas-sized magnet. I proclaimed, “I’m alright. No, really, I’m totally fine.” I fumed with frustration so visceral I couldn’t force my tears in either direction, forward or backward. I forgave my brother later that night. 

My nose has been a little Picasso-esque ever since then. After observing a depiction of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, shortly after her passing, I had a conversation with a friend about political cartoons. A big nose makes for a good caricature. We have big noses in common, Ruth and I, which comforts me. It’s a symbol of resilience, a badge of honor, like a yellowing bruise. It’s all about what you see in the mirror, not how you see it.

And I suppose my nose helps me remember that if I can appreciate mine, I can appreciate something about my dad. He’s a chaplain these days. Maybe if I can forgive him, I can forgive myself too.

Once, I found myself sitting in the backmost row of the highest pew in the chapel. It had been years since I set foot in any religious space. With a shadow of stained glass at my back, I looked down into the empty rows below, engulfed in a too-thick silence. I waited for forgiveness, for someone to say to me, like I did to my boyfriend, “It’s just nature. We don’t judge mother animals for cannibalizing their young.” When you’re in the middle of eating, crouching in the weeds, it’s all pink and dripping and stuck in your teeth. It’s survival.

Vultures can fly up to 37,000 feet, which is much higher than an eagle. I always assumed they were ground-bound birds, like turkeys or geese, and mean like them too. But they do fly, and they’re actually very friendly to humans.

They’re poor, misunderstood creatures, I think. They’re somewhat brilliant because of their eye placement, not in spite of it. They hunt at the same height as many commercial planes, nearly unable to see their prey. Some vultures kill and others scavenge, picking discarded bits from ground-level. Some do both.

It’s rare to find a dead vulture. Typically when you see them, they’ve only come out to eat and circle the sky, so I guess they’re doing alright.

In Economics, I learned that productivity is relative: given your resources, how much can you procure, produce, or perform? By this metric, vultures, considering their evolutionary disadvantage, are much more productive than other birds. It’s perhaps their inability to really narrow in on what’s in front of them, but instead take in all that’s around them, that allows vultures to soar so high and somehow still succeed at catching prey. Unlike eagles and humans, they can get out of their own way. Selective attention creates blind spots of its own.

When vultures find their prize, they circle in the sky to alert one of their triumph against the odds. Alone, but not for long. 37,000 feet from all the bodies in the closet, from the shreds of carrion in the soil. 

How-to Transcendence

Article by Bella Nevin Art by Kristopher Ligtenberg

Plastic oozed with layers of clotted popcorn ceiling lined up in our garage that summer. Lockdown had left the neighborhood apricots to ferment in the high-altitude sun, their sweetness heady and thickening with wildfire smoke. 

“I’m just trying to make it look nice.”

We redid the ceilings. 

My mother eventually bought herself some goggles somewhere along the job. Then eventually a mask. My sister, maybe growing stir-crazy and sick of the popcorn ceilings, finally convinced her to remove the popcorn which was unfortunately slapped on every ceiling in the house. All it took was an intense water sprayer, a scraper, and the ceilings were made new. But the process needed a willing participant to hold a plastic bag above their head and catch the congealed droplets as they fell. She worked with a meditative rhythm, like it sustained her. Spray, scrape. Spray, scrape. I didn’t hold the bag right, so I was demoted. 

My sister ended up taking most of these shifts. 

Renovation meant cyclical trips to Lowe’s, and watching YouTube tutorials on my mom’s 11-year-old Microsoft computer, which whirred and huffed under the devoted scraping, priming, caulking, and painting. The furniture was sheathed away, the windows were protected, and the living room was aglow with the sheen of thick plastic. 

The chair facing the southern window, with the “million dollar view” we had stumbled into years ago, was covered up. Until then I had spent my empty days reading, snacking, and staring out from the wide Southwestern-patterned seat. When I was smaller I used to lay in, on, and over it, always remembering how it held me just right. But the house had work to do, and it was covered now. 

“I’m gonna relish my time off, it’s called use the drill.”

It was how-to transcendence. We cheered as the last bits of popcorn downstairs were auspiciously shaved, bagged, and carried away. We each came out of our rooms and back from the dog-walking and hiking, converging on the house, staking a claim. 

It wasn’t our house I suppose; Mom still sent checks to a man out in Iowa, part of the first family there who had grown up and left — just as my sister and I would, as high school slid away into lockdown. 

Floors

The carpet was ripped away leaving every staple that the builders had haphazardly gunned into the wood plank floors. My sister and I crouched with hammers and removed each one in whatever line we could form from the speckles of nails and staples. I remembered the red shag carpet originally in its place when we toured the house many years ago; now it was gone without a trace. KMTS country music played over the radio. We laughed.

Mom bought the supplies for redoing the floors and pack upon pack of vinyl flooring, all of which she nailed in and measured herself, while my sister and I took turns on standby with instruments for her work. No, we did not buy wood floors and, no, we absolutely did not hire someone to help. My sister’s friend asked at one point why we didn’t. Her family had built their home on prime riverside real estate out of thin air. We had the bones of an old '70s house, lingering from when there were orchards, not doctors in pool houses, in the neighborhood. Our home’s renewal was hodgepodged, DIY, and by the skin of our teeth, as some things always had been. But maybe — and to my sister, definitely — our home could look clean-cut, with bright whites and clean fixings, as these new houses and new people did. 

Kitchen, Walls

My contribution was the sage green that we painted over early 80s cabin-brown cabinets and fireplace, calming with the warm lighting we had installed above similarly retro countertops that not much could be done for. Laboratory overhead fluorescents begone! 

Ripping away tan textured wallpaper, I chipped at layers of pattern, relics of trends tightly folded against the plaster. I scraped and found a red heart scrawled with names from the first family who lived here, sealed away for forty years. They had long since left. Did the plaster hold their laughter, their family meals, their cherry pies from the backyard tree, their high-functioning dysfunction? Or did these weave into the shag carpet that had been tossed away years ago? 

We primed and painted the walls. 

Bathroom, ceilings…

“See, I can be your mom and your dad,” Mom ironically quipped as she dislodged a ceiling fan, wearing a full painter’s suit and goggles. She moved like a force of nature; we always joked she could talk to the animals since the chickadees in the yard lept into her hands. She and my sister yelled about whether she was holding the ceiling droplet bag properly. Their work started before 8:00 AM most days. I went on lots of walks. 

After months of painting, trimming, and finishing, the home was renewed, or at least its anatomy was. My sister and mother turned to new frontiers for transformation. I helped, albeit idly, while they learned plumbing basics, installing a new sink and bathtub in the downstairs bathroom. A new glass door was drilled into the house while I slogged through a virtual AP Physics exam. They took on amateur electrical work as they installed new ceiling fans in every room, and slowly began to refurbish, guided by the heather-gray and white hues of “modern” houses. Our colored glass chandelier was toppled by a black aluminum spherical fixture. Mom bought the house. 

I started to feel dizzy. My chair found its new permanent home in the basement. It was tucked away from that “million dollar view” a man in cargo pants had appraised two months earlier for 'the market,' pocketing a postcard panorama. We had ritualistically excised what we didn’t like about the home, but I stepped back from many of my duties. All of the movement blurred into an in-between, and it seemed everything was just passing through. My last months in the ongoing newness of the house were spent blindly fixed on the horizon. 

…

“I’m never gonna be a contractor, let’s put it that way.” I chuckle over the phone, after a pause. For the first time in months, my mom has a day off and has taken her pilgrimage to Lowe’s for another project. Years after my sister and I left, we came home to new fixtures. The momentum is relentless, and my surroundings adhere to some tacit uniform. New developments below the mountain. The tub has been replaced. New apartments along the highway. The bathroom has been retiled. Traffic where there never was. My bedroom has been refurbished, sheets and all. 

I hear about the house, either as a bane of existence or a good find, endlessly renovated to sell it and hit the road, or covet it forever. The metronome steadily sways. Sometimes I miss it, but maybe in the way you miss what you can’t quite remember. Working two jobs and pouring over home projects, my mother’s motion never stops. Years later I search for some sort of peace in resting. Renovations, as I always hear, almost never go to plan, and there are always gaps and patches, crevices of some kind. If you squint you can see them. My mom isn’t a contractor, but she is a maker, for better and for worse. She made me, a sister, a life, an education, and a world she never had access to, but still stubbornly chips at tillings and trimmings. Maybe we’re all seeking newness, chasing sameness.

All I know is my chair is mine to take when I ask for it. 

All Forms of Care

A point of conversation

Article and Art by Nathalie San Fratello

The kid in middle school who always wore a winter jacket inside everyday no matter what. He was scared of people looking at his body. I did that too but in other ways.

This is not about just me or just you. It's about how we touch every single thing we pass, together.

Sewing and touching peoples clothes:

I never know when someone will ask me for a repair, and it always feels personal, adorable and insider. Never will I turn down sewing up a hole. It just feels good. Usually I say no you don't have to pay me it will take five minutes but then people I don't know super well insist. I’ll take the money; it is my time and my cute pink string that's saving your life. Have a look into your most personal of personal lives, see how time and wear have distressed your beloved item. I always start sentences with the same words, and it feels weird. I start sewing with something familiar and it never feels weird. Makes my hands feel at home. Maybe I will forget to patch your pants or the part of your sweater that covers your armpit. I will probably forget because I have to get groceries and see a friend and do some homework. I will also probably forget because I like to return to something charming like repairing something for someone when I feel lost. Two weeks will pass and I will get to your awesome hole, admire the loss, praise the open space, the possibility, and cover it up real nice. This is an ad for my patching services. I will embellish your hole, address its emptiness with a loving blob of colors and a scrap from someone else's scrap. 

Saltwater fish tanks:

I have always wanted to work at an aquarium store ever since I was young. It was my backup plan if I couldn’t be a marine biologist or a scuba diver. Those are not happening so I have to find my aquarium gig. Actually, I met a bus driver today that builds aquariums in the Springs. I will have to reach out to him. Since my earlier dreams of glowing water and colorful bodies, I have gone scuba diving, and I don’t think I liked the way it made my ears feel. Some of my earliest memories are teal and white, of me and my dad cleaning a 60 gallon fish tank together. He put a piece of painted chipboard, aquamarine, behind the supposed backside of the tank. Viewing. The tank itself was actually placed in front of a window in our house, on the other side of that window was our breakfast nook. Essentially, you could peek through the fishtank and see someone sitting with a bowl of cereal on the other side. It was a point of conversation. I often think about how people dream up points of conversation. It’s a strange thing to be thinking with space. A lot of time that means imagining the negative in beautiful ways. Conjuring glow with crystalline accents and flounders and metaphors. 

The people who made the fish tank installation at my childhood Rainforest Cafe had some kind of weird demented power. They placed glass tubes everywhere and filled them with big brown fish, the kind of lake fish that's supposed to stand in for tropical rainforest type fish. I never really asked him why he liked fish so much but I think he knows how pretty they are. Only a few times in my life have I met people that also grew up with a fish tank in their house. It’s a different commitment than a fish bowl or a reptile terrarium. Every day you should check to see that the filters are clean. This can be done with your hands or by looking. It would feel too mushy and slimy if it was dirty and needed to be changed. Then you also have to scrub the glass with a little green stick that has a cotton sponge attached to the end. You can make this device yourself with a green stick, a cotton pad or sponge, and a rubber band. This is really satisfying because if you don't clean it for a while, a filmy layer of green begins to build up. Once a week you measure the amount of salt in the water in the tank. You probably pull the rocks out to be cleaned if you’re really a good fish tank keeper upper. 

Holes and holding.

Fish tank I miss you.

Removed because my dad is getting older and so am I. The fish were still alive but we had to give them away.

Fish tank and taking care of fish. Cause maybe the fish take care of you by being pretty and reminding you to float. 

Change the filter, scrub the glass, feed the fish. No, it's actually more complicated especially if you really need the fish to survive. There's a hole in the tank! How are you gonna fix it? If you had a fish tank and you were 8 years old would you disagree about eating fish as food? Would you instead eat the fish’s food? Did you ever want to eat one of those cubes of shrimp? 

Helped Dad Clorox the front of the tank, scrub the salt off the base of the stand where it all accumulated in intervals of memory and escapes. The fish are a reminder to a young girl that things just float. Things including you and your parents and your kitchen and your sock in the washer.

Enjoying the feeling of being too bright:

The color orange takes care of me. I feel more visible when I cover exposed parts with muted neon oranges or something too bright. The kind where anyone who sees it has a headache. A me headache. You know I am there. I don't have to speak for you to hear what I have to say. I think color is magic like that. Touching becomes less literally tactile and more realistically ephemeral. It can do work for you, and tell stories that words can’t do. The use of color actually feels very intentional in a lot of things we interact with. Enjoying the feeling of being too bright. Something about me is attracted to knowing I don’t have to do the work of speaking, I can just move around as orange and eat yogurt and be myself. Lots of great things are orange! 

Do you like traffic cones? Can you describe one to me? Do you own one? Have you ever stolen one and not known what to do with it?

List for the times you could get cold feet:

First dates

First dates with a new friend 

A competition

Singing in front of people

Job interviews

Sitting outside without socks on

In the airport around all those strangers

Going to the grocery store alone

Going to a party 

Important conversations

Leaving the house in clothing

One Moon Cycle in Montana

Article by Evelyn Baher-Murphy Art by Jake Greenblatt

The year I turned 18, I spent a short time in Montana. For a little over one moon cycle, I worked in exchange for food, lodging, and occasional gas money. I collected wisdom, conspiracies, tall tales, and additions to my ever-growing collection of far-right propaganda (have you heard about the freedom flag?). Some of the people I worked for I would now consider friends or family in the sense that they are my surrogate-cowboy-adventure-uncles. These misfits had a whole lot to say and sure made me learn to listen. This then, is a letter of appreciation for the strange men and women who shaped me in that time. 

Full Moon

Two hundred sled dogs howl at the full moon, 8 bodies lie awake, patiently waiting. Then, at the whim of an elusive conductor, decrescendo, the howling stops. Chaos gives way to the serenity of nightfall, and in the warmth of the fire, I dream of a world where I live my life in widening circles. A world where those I meet while passing through are the same those that I will meet again and again and again. 

Waning Gibbous

Crossing from the living room to the kitchen leaves my feet marked by a bottomless layer of dust. Each day we will try to sweep it away, but still, it remains. Layered in those particles are the scents of mildew and dog piss. The odors rise, coating the brisk air and enveloping the space. These characteristics leave me feeling grateful that my hygiene standards are amendable and perhaps more importantly, make the land outside the house increasingly magical by comparison.  

At the foot of the prairie, the sled dogs, Minka, Freya, Deuce, Luna, Kishka, Garnet, and Koba reside. Before the sun makes the hidden Eden too warm, we harness ourselves to the dogs and run them—or they run us. Arms flailing, and my mouth gaping open with glee, one step feels like I am traveling fifteen yards. Flight. In the afternoon, the jar of peanut butter slowly makes its way around the table. We eat it by the spoonful. It is in this kitchen, with its distinct smells and a stomach full of nut butter, that I learned about Kelly and Anthony Estrella’s story.

Fundamental to their story is their renowned artisanal cheese business. A business that 

the federal government shut down as part of the FDA’s campaign against raw milk. As a result, the Estrellas would be barred from selling hundreds of thousands of dollars of their product and would be embroiled in a multi-year legal battle that they would end up losing. Ultimately, this uprooting of their livelihood would lead them to fall into alcoholism, and then, salvation in Jesus. 

Their story explains the church they attend, although “church” may be the wrong word for it. I am told it’s more of a libertarian militia group that is also religious. Some speakers at the church espouse views that, in the moment, were startling–climate change is a hoax, racism is overblown, and mask mandates are a sadistic means of government control. This was my first interaction with people who had opposing viewpoints to those found in my liberal Californian bubble. I was taught not to like these people. I was taught to find them ridiculous, or in Hillary Clinton's words, deplorable. Instead, despite their misgivings, I could not blame Kelly and Anthony for the way they arrived at their beliefs. Their story made sense. I too would be distrustful of the government if they took away my livelihood. I too would love Jesus if religion saved me from my own self-destruction. And maybe in their unfortunate scenario, I too would start a sled dog team while finding community in a group that merged libertarianism with guns, religion, and pseudoscience. 

Waning Crescent

It does not take long for us to discover that there is not much to do in Big Sandy, Montana, and that there is even less to do when you are camped by a cornfield several miles out of town. So we drink gin and chase it down with raw carrots. Then, feeling artificially warm, and with straw dangling from our mouths, we climb the stack of hay bales and lie clumped together peering up at the stars. A shout goes up when a shooting star is spotted. “How long was it?” “7 inches at least!” This, a measurement system of our invention, determined it was the longest one that we had ever seen. 

In the mornings, methodically row by row, we harvest. Twist, Rip, Peel Peel, Toss. Repeat. The colors of the painted mountain corn are wonderful. There are galaxies, vibrant sunrises, and on occasion deep monochrome uniformity. We are instructed to inspect each cob to ensure that genetically defective ones are removed. The mutants, however, are my favorite. They are hermaphroditic, containing tassel and cob, or they are eight cobs smashed together such that they share one base. The nonconforming shapes bring me a unique joy, the kind I want to hold onto and save for later. In this constant engulfment, I find myself to be the pinnacle of inefficiency, and I am grateful that corn-man Dave doesn't fire volunteer laborers.

At times we harvest in silence. At other times, we listen to Dave, our joyous guide, as he shares how some kernels contain antioxidants and others complete proteins or how the overlapping layers within each kernel create the multitude of colors we witness. Then the corn-talk shifts to how all beings are in relationship to each other, making the corn our sibling. I am inspired by Dave's deep connection to the land. Season by season he breeds the unique colorations into existence. I wonder if I'll find that one day. My rainbow corn, my something to dedicate my life to and live with. 

At the conclusion of a long day's work, we sing Leonard Cohen's “Passing Through.” Dave leads us in rounds. 

Passin' through, passin' through

Sometimes happy, sometimes blue

Glad that I ran into you

Tell the people that you saw me passin' through

This song will follow me, playing on a loop in my mind. I will think about the gatherings Dave told us about, where twenty or thirty people come together in a circle and sing this refrain. I envision it being sung at my funeral and at his too. Then the music stops playing and instead ringing in my ears is Dave's voice: “It doesn't matter what you believe as long as you have faith.” The problem is that I don't know what I have faith in or what faith really means. My mind is spinning; the harvest is over and I am glad to have met Dave Christensen.

New Moon

Of the collection of persons who have influenced my being, Nick Larson is one of the most formative. Mostly for the way his worldview quite wondrously contradicts itself. And also for the ways he frequently comes to the right conclusions for the wrong reasons. 

For us free laborers, some linear (albeit chaotic) chain of cause and effect led us to work on Nick’s farm: an unfortunate car crash, a rainbow corn harvest where we first met him, a lack of food, and a Montana that was growing too cold to camp. For Nick, our arrival was a divine vision that came to life. The vision came the week before we did. It told him that people would arrive and stay on the farm. Our atheist and agnostic bodies fulfilled that message from God. 

That October, the farm was ladened with snow and a flock of roaming turkeys that occasionally drowned themselves in the dog dish (they forgot to lift their heads out of the water). Some vegetables remained in the field yearning to be harvested before being buried too deep. And the soil was tough, tougher than Nick would like. An affliction he was trying to heal. As we’d soon find out, Nick was trying to do a lot of things. 

Sitting in an old grain bin with our heads bowed down so as not to breathe in the smoke from the fire, we listened as Nick laid out his worldly concerns. First, was his plan to fashion the grain bin into a yurt of sorts, providing that he could figure out how to have a fire in it without asphyxiating the inhabitants. Second, was his plan for when, within the next decade, all metal on earth disappears. When all the metal disappears, his house will collapse, as all the nails will be cosmically destroyed. The new-fangled grain bin will be no longer. Not to mention that the tractors and all the other machinery we depend on will simply cease to exist. But those like Nick, who know this time will come, will be prepared and perhaps ready to host their neighbors as the seven-headed dragon tears through town and doomsday takes over the land.

I felt I was having scrambled morals for breakfast. Sorting through Nick's wisdom and religious fanaticism became an exhausting and thoroughly entertaining daily chore. It was difficult to reconcile the absurdity of his beliefs with the practical knowledge he held. I wished it could all be wrong. It would be easier if I could write off everything he said. Yet, he still knew a whole lot of things that I do believe in and find true. For instance, Nick was exceptionally handy. He had engineered the property and land in complex ways. He mobilized his chicken coop to spread nitrogen across the soil and terraced the hillside to recharge the groundwater of this increasingly dry landscape. He knew how to butcher and store a pig and fashion an industrial smoker out of an old refrigerator. He knew how to eat organically from the land. He knew that one day I would have to make a decision between making money and living in accordance with my own values. 

For all that he knew in these respects, it was starkly clear that he knew things that most others do not hold to be true — the impending arrival of the seven-headed dragon, for instance, or his belief that at some point in time two of every animal in existence boarded a great big boat and survived the greatest flood in history. Do not ask for specifics. He is just a peasant farmer, he will say. The scientific complexities of how the Ark was constructed or how all metal on earth will disappear are beyond the pay grade of his social and spiritual status.

I find myself admiring the unwavering quality of his belief system. Maybe part of me hopes that through sustained contact I can change him. And I am sure he thinks he's changing me. Regardless, he grows the best carrots I have ever tasted and makes a damn good salami. Two things that are good for your mind, body, and spirit, no matter what you believe. 

Waxing Crescent

It's dinner time at the Republican Headquarters in Havre, Montana. Nick is driving separately and says he’ll pick up food on the way. In the hours prior we were overcome by a strange giddiness to attend our first militia meeting. For us, this is a somewhat rare opportunity. We don our best farming clothes and fanciful nail polish. 

The TV clicks on with a buzz. Doctors from well-known medical schools stand in front of a distinguished building. One by one they emphatically state that the pandemic is not a threat. This video is no longer accessible, but luckily Jerry Taylor Jr., the leader of this particular militia group, had the foresight to save it. We would later have Jerry and his family over for Taco Thursday, where we would learn he is a naturopath and friend of the Bundys — the notorious founders of the People’s Rights Network and occupiers of the Oregon Wildlife Refuge. At this time Jerry is offering to prescribe his constituents hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19. 

To close out the meeting, they do an activity, perhaps a weekly tradition. Raise your hand if your Facebook page has been taken down. This week a human rights group had conducted a strike on the Facebook pages of the People's Rights Network. Off to one side, I try not to laugh at the unbelievableness of it all. I am at a meeting of the far right or the furthest right or not right altogether but libertarian instead. I am eating what could hardly be considered an organic meal, triple-decker Ritz cracker sandwiches filled with layers of spray cheese. Nick explains to the assembly how you can make a new Facebook account with a different name. The show will go on.

Beautifully contradictory and utterly fascinating. It is strange to think I consider this man a friend, yet I am grateful to have someone to contact when I am feeling distrustful of my microwave or am curious how the Postmaster General is affiliated in an epic scheme to control all banking on planet Earth. Nick will send me a video and I will watch it and notice that he is not alone in these views. But hundreds of thousands of religious fanatics and freedom seekers are there with him. Later the videos will be inevitably removed from social media and I will be lucky to have received a unique look into a frightening world. 

Waxing Gibbous

We leave Nick's farm. Not because there isn’t more to learn but because if we stay, we might forget why we believe the things that are foundational to our beings. As a parting gift, he offers us a live turkey. Her name is Diane. Whichever one we caught would have that name, predetermined as she or he will die soon. Nick gives us a rabbit leash. The kind of leash you take your pet rabbit on a walk with. We plan to use it to walk our turkey. 

It is not long before Diane is nearly strangled by the leash and we decide that road-tripping with a live turkey is too much stress for all beings involved. Following Nick's instructions entitled Diane’s Demise, we sever her head with an axe. Her body lies motionless for some time, then chemical signals innervate the muscles in her wings such that her headless body leaves the ground on its own accord. I skin her and gut her. It feels right to feel the warm flesh on my hands. And it will feel right when we eat her. My body and spirit will be more nourished than any food I have eaten before. I am thankful for this experience. The gift of killing an animal and the profound feeling of respect for Diane that I garner from it. This experience will make me loosely vegetarian. I will eat meat if I kill it. I will eat meat if it can nourish me like Diane did. 

Full Moon

Two hundred sled dogs howl at the full moon. A concerto we are now used to and yet I find myself left with more questions than answers. I know one thing for sure. I will see most of these people again. I can feel it in my bones. I will pass through again and again and again.

Epilogue

Clayton and Shane talk cowboy stories. Each is completely enthralling: the time the sauna tent burnt down and they were left naked in the cold Montana winter, and the time they galloped away through a great valley as the game warden called to them, guns blazing from above. And one of my favorites, the time Shane broke in the wild horses: after a long day of ranching, Shane was eager to surprise his partner with a new cabinet he had picked up in town. He tied up his formerly wild horse to the deck of his home and then brought the new china hutch out from the garage and onto the deck for the surprise. With everything set, Shane opened the door with a bang and called out to his partner. In the clamor of Shane’s gift-giving, the formerly wild horse took off, and the deck went with it, china hutch and all. As they tell it, the more Shane ran, the more the horse galloped into the distance. Clayton and Shane talk of a time I thought was past. A wild west of pure adventure and potential disaster around every corner. Enough accidents and near misses for all of our lives and more. 

The Odd Job that Never Was

Article by Georgia Rankin Art by Kristopher Ligtenberg

I haven’t ever considered dog walking to be an odd job, but boy was I wrong. My quick stint over the summer resulted in my nearly losing $3,500. But maybe that’s a dramatic way to begin my story. 

The day was sticky, and I was sitting in my brightly lit kitchen, scrolling through my phone. Taking a bite into my sour punch straw, I contemplated.. Should I have a fourth one?  Suddenly, a text message from an odd number popped up on my phone. It was one of those numbers that you know is not a friend but rather a random company reaching out to you again. This time, however, it was not an annoying company, but Rover! Beloved Rover, an app I used for walking dogs during a summer living in Somerville, MA. My new message was from a woman who I knew as none other than the niece of a William McPhail. It was an innocent message, simply asking if I would be willing to walk her uncle’s bulldog, Eddy. Or, rather, De Eddyyyyyy (as listed on his profile). She said he would be willing to pay $300 for 1-2 walks per week. That was an offer I could not pass up.

So began several emails exchanged back and forth between Mr. McPhail and I. He told me many things, like how Eddy was a gift from his late father, and how he, his Australian wife and his 3 year-old, Desmond were all good Christians. Most importantly, he explained his reasons for moving to Colorado Springs: I am an HIV/Aids cure researcher/critical care specialist. I will be relocating to your neighborhood  from Paris… I am coming down there to manage the health of the CEO of a private company. Naturally, I had to continue my correspondence.

William McPhail began to seem more odd with every email I exchanged with him. This was no ordinary dog-walking job. Looking back, it seemed as though Mr. McPhail was casting me in a game of Clue, where his financial clerk, estate manager, and store manager were scheming against me. At the time, I just thought he was really weird. And French. To my dismay, his thoroughness got the best of me. 

I am not one to place blame. However, I would like to add that several people around me, including my own father, were encouraging me to entertain Mr. McPhail and his job offer. Having recently purchased a brand-new (year 2000) little white pickup truck from my landlord, the idea of being able to pay it off in a matter of months was all too appealing. For $300 a week? Dad said, “Something a little bit strange might be worth it for that much money…” Also, I would like to add that I was being encouraged and reaffirmed that Mr. McPhail was real by not only my father, but none other than my confusing summer situationship.

Let that be the context in which you read through the following email. (I will let his words speak for itself). I firmly believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt!

On July 20th, 2024, at 11:51 a.m., Mr. McPhail wrote:

Good day to you Georgia,

How are you doing?  I and my family look forward to meeting you, I promise you won't regret working with me and my wife. We are calm, cool and fun to be with. Eddy is so Adorable, fun to be with and playful as well. I got an update for you, My wife just told me that she has a personal Store Manager that would be taking care of the items/groceries needed, she said she has already contacted the Store Manager so all you will have to do now when you get the Check is deduct $300 for your first week pay in advance as a sign of commitment on my own part and please get the rest sent to the store manager via western union or any method of payment she later decided, I so much count on you and your words and I know you are a Honest and God fearing person so I trust you to take are of this perfectly, Please am so sorry about the changes. I respect my wife so much and she also has a say and that's what she has just made me understand...I will get in touch with you as soon as we have the tracking number so that you can be sure of the delivery time and date. I so much count on you and do hope you can understand and take care of this. 

Hoping to read back from you soon.

The moment I knew (cheers, Taylor Swift) came quickly after receiving this email. Despite William’s assurance that he was “calm, cool, and fun to be with,” I was sure I was being swindled. And I was angry. Why had I devoted so much of my time towards emailing this man for him to ask me to transfer over $3,000????? This is probably too confusing to explain, but, in short, the “lady who owned the house” (or was it the store manager?) asked for a hefty Western Union transfer. Despite my rage, I still wanted answers.

I decided to take my confusing summer situationship with me to the mail center, as I needed emotional support picking up the suspicious check from Mr. McPhail. Sure enough, after tearing open the large white envelope I had received, I slid out a very odd looking check. No bank. A woman’s name I didn’t recognize. And the strangest part– the address of a women’s health care imaging corp, based in New Jersey. New Jersey…?

Thank god for my friends from New Jersey! (I think this a lot.) And thank god for women and ultrasounds! My good friend, Darby (Princeton, NJ), had been to the address listed on the check.

Darby and I got to work. We found the phone number for the women’s health care imaging office, and dialed it. A woman picked up, and Darby started telling her our situation. (“My friend is a dog walker, and she just received a check in the mail with your office’s address on it… We are concerned it’s a scam… very confused…") Unbeknownst to me, that hadn’t been the first call the office had received that day.

The woman instantly knew about the “dog walker.” She asked us, “You mean the one who called earlier?” We were flabbergasted. 

Although I came out with $0 and a wounded ego, Mr. McPhail helped me realize that I am both Honest and God-fearing. And maybe a little too hopeful.

The Lost Theme Park

Article & Art by Tasha Finkelstein

Florida gets a bad rap, which is fair. The politics are utterly cruel and the drivers extremely dangerous. Naturally, my biggest secret is that I have loved Florida for as long as I can remember. When winter break came to an end, I would lie in my grandma’s bed crying over the fact that it was time to go back home to the cold. But I loved Florida not because of the sunny weather or the various species of lizards or the warm ocean I learned to swim in. I fell in love with Florida because of Wannado City: The Promised Land for Overzealous Children. The real world just didn’t compare. 

Wannado City was located in a part of Florida called Sunrise, though my mom describes the theme park as “subterranean” (she doesn’t remember there being any windows). You’d exit the sunny parking lot of the Sawgrass Mills shopping mall and enter a dreary castle of dreams, leaving your inclination for sunshine behind in place of something far more exciting: role-playing a 9-5 job in a pretend mini-metropolis. With its emphasis on the fun and endless possibility of entering the workforce, Wannado City seems like a symptom of late stage capitalism, marketed to parents who wanted their kids to get a head start in the working world. I think my parents were just happy they found a place for my brother and I to run around while supervised.

When I talk to my family about Wannado City, I like how all of our memories vary. My brother remembers a dinosaur themed restaurant that he loved. My mom doesn’t remember the restaurant at all. She just remembers the food being really bad. None of us can remember if there was real water in the hoses at the fire department. 

My brother, Noah, is two and a half years older than me and remembers Wannado City feeling utterly massive, like the center of the world, which is as funny as it is surprising considering we grew up in New York City. It should be stated that Wannado City was just as corrupt as any other city, subject to its own set of laws and enforcement. According to my brother, they threw a kid in jail for chewing gum, another one for having untied shoelaces (basically anything you’d get in trouble for at elementary school). My brother’s clearest memory is of the jail cell, a small area guarded off by rubber bars. Though Noah had the job of policeman himself, he says he was really scared of getting in trouble and going to the cell because who knows if you’d ever get to leave. There was one kid who escaped jail — someone older and bigger and faster who decided to make a run for it. Noah says catching him was the proudest moment of his life at that point. His memories of being a fireman are more limited. They mainly center around sliding down a pole. He recalls getting in a firetruck, passing all the other kids in the city, and feeling like a part of something real. 

My recollection of Wannado City is quite sparse in comparison to my brother’s, and what I do remember certainly does not feel real. Nevertheless, this surreal place houses some of my very first memories, however hazy they may be. I remember seeing a fire truck zoom through the streets of the dark city. I don’t remember my brother being on the back of it. I remember being in a nail salon and painting someone’s nails white. Or maybe I was the one getting my nails painted. It doesn’t make much sense that Wannado City would hire an adult to sit still so us little kids could paint their nails. But it also doesn’t make any sense that I would be trying a career out as a manicurist for it to end with getting my own nails painted. The whole thing puzzles me. All I can remember is white nail polish. 

When my memory runs out, I ask my mom about what I got up to at this theme park. According to her, there were only two jobs I ever wanted to have: a manicurist or a nurse (eerily gendered, I know). I ask my mom whose nails I was painting. She can’t remember either. I ask her about being a nurse, and as soon as she describes baby dolls wrapped up in blankets in the hospital, one of my memories comes back to me like finding an old shirt you didn’t know you still had. There I am, the same but smaller, standing in a brightly lit room sectioned off into compartments where blanketed dolls lie under incubators. A simulation of the real thing, down to the details. I stare out of the glass window and see my mom in the hallway, watching me all dressed up in little-kid scrubs. Outside of her role as parent at Wannado City, my mom is a doctor and did really work at hospitals. I wonder how it felt to be on the outside of the glass, looking in on me doing a job she knew so well. 

Trying to beat my memory leads me to interesting parts of the internet, parts I do not often explore. I find the Wannado City webpage archive, a frozen relic of the theme park’s old website before it closed. With some classic mid-2000s style graphic design choices, there is a picture of a kid, probably about 9 or 10, with a speech bubble attached. Written in a subgenre of comic sans, he says, “You can DO and BE so many things at Wannado City!” There are “Tons of Jobs!” listed for kids to try out like TV Director, Dance Club DJ, Police Chief, Rock Climber, Model, Theater Actor, Fashion Photographer, Bailiff, Theater Director, and Prop Master. My absolute favorite is Master of Ceremonies. I wonder who was getting married. 

In my internet sleuthing, I find an article on Wannado City written by someone named Alex Novell. I honestly can’t figure out if this person was a parent or a kid when they went to Wannado City, but they bring up a question I had never thought of: what went on there during the school week? Turns out there are gaps that other people’s memories can’t seem to fill either. I try to soak up everything I can from the comment section of this article. One internet user says there wasn’t enough space for parents to hang out. Another user remembers there being a bar for parents. I relish the thought of kids running around the place in utter chaos while parents are drunk out of their minds. But more users seem to back up the point that the theme park didn’t have any designated space for parents. One of them says that if Wannado City ever comes back, the new owners should seriously think about changing that. 

There’s something utopian about a place where adults don’t have a space for themselves when, more often than not, it’s the other way around. Being a young child in an adult environment can be both confusing and wonderful. You’re surrounded by large figures who you have to stare up at to see, and you know they are doing adult things and that you aren’t. The space wasn’t made for you but you’re content right where you are — close to the ground, understanding little to nothing of what is happening around you. I’d like to think that the isolation parents experienced at Wannado City is the inverse of what it feels like to be a little kid at a museum or dinner party. Maybe the parents were happy about it, maybe they weren’t. Whatever they were, it didn’t matter. Wannado City was about the kids. 

Like any other city after 2008, Wannado City was dealing with its own set of financial problems. I find multiple articles referencing the “lost theme park” that Wannado City became after it closed in 2011 in the wake of the financial crisis. But an entity as enormous as Wannado City seems too big to ever be lost completely. My family had already stopped going a few years before the place shut down, and I wonder if we lost anything in the process. Noah remembers the heartbreak of it all, never understanding why we couldn’t go back to this wonderland. I don’t remember ever being aware of not going back. It sort of just escapes me at a point. 

When a place so ephemeral sticks in your mind, you get the sense there is a reason why. I imagine my four-year-old self is still at Wannado City, years after the theme park closed, wandering around the empty shopping mall. I don’t know if she’s painting nails or watching a fire truck go by or maybe, if she read the rules, spitting out her gum and tying her shoelaces. I don’t know what she’s doing now but I have a feeling she’s still there, watching the adults on the other side of the glass.

INCREDIBLE KING GOOSE TODD WEBB

My boss I loved at my job I hated

Article by Kannita Cheah Art by Jake Greenblatt

In the summer of 2023, I made the absolutely ridiculous decision to not work at the summer camp at which I’d grown up and instead decided to take on a film internship at a different summer camp in Mt. Ida, Arkansas. 

Truly, it was not that ridiculous of a decision. I don’t know. My mom asked me to do something related to my major, and she was already relatively cool with me studying film. So I said, okay, I’ll look. And this camp I found seemed like I’d get real experience: I would be shooting every day, editing every day, and walking around all the time. Seemed like a good job. A reasonable job. Much more interesting than any big corporation coffee-fetching, paper-sorting internship. So I interviewed. And I made it to the second round. 

(“Oh, she’s got a Lord of the Rings poster in the background, she’s probably cool.”)

I was hired within two weeks. Everyone was proud of me. My parents drove me from Colorado to Arkansas with my dog. It was a 17-hour drive. They weren’t allowed past the gates of the camp, which I thought was insane. I was dropped off in a parking lot, and my things were loaded onto a mule; most of the higher-ups had little carts to drive around the camp because it was hot and took a long time to walk, and they were important. I hugged my parents goodbye and the lead of the HR department drove me into the “campus," giving me the small-talk-plus-tour-spiel as we went. I felt like I was in an amusement park. The people at my camp, the one I grew up at, couldn’t even imagine the scale of this place when I explained to them the three areas of camp, how there were two separate dining halls, 11 waterslides, at least three different football fields, three basketball courts, four tennis courts, an “arts and crafts palace,” two camp stores for merch and toys and ice cream, and that there were bathrooms with plumbing in the kids’ cabins. 

I met my boss at the Lodge, where our computers for editing and the gear room with cameras, GoPros, and lights were. I met the team. My name tag was printed out and slipped into a plastic sleeve with a clip so that I could wear it on my shirt. It said “K”. When I put it on during opening day, one of my coworkers said,

“Wait, your name is just the letter K?”

“Well, it’s not really my name,” I told him. He had a biblical name. “It’s just what I put under the preferred nickname tag in the online form.”

“I thought it was K-E-I,” another said. I wrote to my girlfriend about that later: he probably just thought that because I’m Asian.

“Nope. Just K.”

(“K, let me know if you need anything. I’m going to be shooting tonight for our staff video, so I’ll be running around, but if you see me, come say hello. Jackie can show you the ropes if the event’s not too overwhelming for you.”)

I went through four weeks of genuine existential crisis. It’s hard to explain why. I can lay out my reasoning but I still have people asking, why was it that deep? Let me make an attempt:

The camp I grew up at taught kids values I believe in. It taught me how to hold myself accountable, to be a participant in a community bigger than myself, to slow down and appreciate nature, and how different people are compatible in different ways. Aside from the fact that it’s small and friendly and everyone makes themselves approachable and inclusive especially when you’re new; aside from the signed walls of the cabins full of love, names from years past all the way back to 1929; aside from the fact that the people there know me better than I ever thought I could be known, that they’re definitely invited to my wedding no matter how long it’s been since I’ve seen them.

(“You’ve taught me that a summer camp can really be formative for kids. It’s not just a place their parents dump them when they want to go on vacation.”)

The camp I decided to work at in the summer of 2023 taught kids values I did not agree with. It taught them to put their all into everything, to look for the next adventure even while they were in the middle of learning a skill or task, and to never stop giving more than one hundred percent. There was no part of the day in which they were ever held accountable for their actions. I watched kids sprint to activities, cutting each other off. I watched kids not pick up their trash. They didn’t do their dishes. They didn’t help each other improve their skills. Counselors barely helped campers improve their skills. It was rare that they cheered for each other on high ropes courses when kids overcame fears. They were more often impatient in line behind a kid struggling than encouraging them to move forward.

(“This place will really suck the life out of you sometimes. You just can’t take it to heart. Trust me, I’ve been here for seven years.”)

Why would I want to work for a place I don’t believe in when I know that there’s a place I could work and be happier? Why would I put myself through a job that makes me sad, defeated, upset? Why would I support and work for the marketing department of a place I actively don’t want people to attend? On the other hand, why would I not put my all into something I know I’ll learn something from? Why wouldn’t I put effort into something I agreed to? Why would I back out of helping people I want to help? Why would I give up when everything I’ve learned has taught me to push through and make meaning out of a tough situation?

(“I’m your boss and I’m telling you to come take a break with me. Come talk to me about what’s going on.”)

(“I trust you’ll do a good job, you know, you’re a hard worker. You’ve improved a lot even since last week.”)

(“K’s in charge while I’m gone. Walkie me if Carter gets into trouble.” / “WHY WOULD I BE THE ONE TO GET IN TROUBLE, TODD?”)

My boss, Todd, was incredibly supportive of me during my crisis. For some reason, he really understood what I was going through. For that, I’m eternally grateful and eternally confused. I know he didn’t like the place, and yet he was grateful for his whole experience there. My coworkers, bless them, were all around my age, and they also seemed to understand what I was going through. They told me to do whatever felt right to me. Apparently, the media team is always a little bit “weird”, relative to the other summer staff. Thank God.

(“I’m really glad you decided to stay. I know it’s not where you want to be, but I’m still grateful. We’ll still have fun here.”)

Our first shoot was always at 8:55 AM. Sometimes, my teammates and I would show up so tired that we would brush our teeth in the office bathroom. If I arrived with enough time to make a cup of coffee in the complimentary Keurig machine – benefits of working for a rich institution – Todd and I would play the Wordle, the Quordle, and the Octordle while I waited for the coffee to drip. 

Late at night, when I was done editing but still wanted to hang out, I would put on a sweatshirt and play the Semantle or the Blossom Sequence. Word games were very popular. We would also take online quizzes on Sporcle and play Scribbl.io while trying not to look at each other’s computer screens. We even watched the last game of the Stanley Cup Final on the office TV. JC would put Oz, the weighted stuffed animal, around my neck and ask me how work was going. I cried once a week. I laughed every day.

(“No! Do the 90s quiz! I don’t know any new bands!”)

(“Stop looking at my computer, you’re trying to cheat the Octordle!”)

(“I feel so dorky wearing two walkies. I’ve got the all-top-staff one and the baby one for y’all. But you guys have way more fun conversations.”)

I decided to stay. I didn’t want to back out of something I’d agreed to; I was upholding my personal values by staying. To some extent, I argued to myself that I would be upholding my personal values by leaving, too, but my teammates made me want to stay. It even made me find fun. When I made the choice to stay, my boss assigned me the biggest project of any given session: a twenty-minute long, two-week coverage recap of the session. It involved getting extremely specific shots at extremely specific locations, making sure we had enough shots of boys and girls, and getting lots of younger kids waving at the camera and acting like they were having fun.

These session videos were mildly scripted. Specific special events had to go along with specific parts of a specific song. We had to alternate our clips boy-girl-boy-girl. Certain activities needed to be shown in a certain order. I didn’t quite understand why, beyond the fact that it streamlined the process. It made me sad that the marketing was so disingenuous. But the work that was required of me still let me have a good time with my team – ultimately, even though I didn’t believe in the job, I believed in myself and my choice to stay. I told myself, I’m here for Todd, for the media team, to make their lives easier, and to make myself proud.

I started getting excited about certain events. I made a couple of non-media-team friends—one of them, I’m still in close contact with to this day. We try to call every weekend. Sometimes we don’t make it happen, but we’ll text each other a random question about the past week so that we know what the other is up to. I started a couple of projects I didn’t have to do but that I knew would make Todd happy and his job easier for the next summer. And I was really proud of my session video. I even helped a teammate that was struggling with his deadline. We stayed up late in the office together one night when the power went out. We waited for the computers to boot back up and gave up after twenty minutes, around 4:30 AM. On our walk back to the staff house, we saw an incredible shooting star: a cherished, delirious memory.

The co-director of the camp drove up to us as we were walking back as a part of her after staff-time patrol to make sure there were no counselors up to no good in the dark.

“Hi,” she said, sickly sweet, “what are you guys doing out here?”

“We’re on our way back from work,” Thomas said bluntly. “We’re on the media team.”

That was not the answer she was expecting, of course. But she told us we were working hard, and that she was proud of us and sent us on our way. We told her goodnight.

(“Hello, this is King Goose, checking in on things back at the…. nest. How’s it going?”

  –  “Um. Hello. This is – the nest. Thomas is working on the session video, and Carter and I 

just got back from mish-mash. Taylor’s still out.”

“Okay. Thanks for the update…. Mother Goose.”

– “Uh, anytime. King Goose.”)

Todd made a squawking noise into the walkie. Somehow, we all understood the bit and ran with it for the rest of the summer.

By the time the end of the summer came around, I had completed four projects of which I was extremely proud including a funny compilation of the media team’s cutest moments. I’d genuinely made meaning out of a crisis of a summer. I made relationships that I still hold on to. I made projects that still make me happy to this day. I learned that as long as I am in a place for a good reason, I can have fun and it’ll help me survive. I remembered how important showing up for people is. 

On Todd’s days off, I would write him little Post-it notes with updates from the day. For the last couple of weeks of the summer, I would write, Hi King Goose instead of Hi Todd at the top of my pink squares. 

Right after I decided to stay, I wrote him: Todd – THANK YOU for having faith in me. He taped it to his desk, right next to his keyboard, and kept it there all summer.

Bookworm Blues

Article by Raychel Stark Art by Perry Davis

Assigned to clean and arrange the chamber of dust and novels, I felt inclined to reflect on my childhood.

The library might have been the first place where I was given independence. When I was five, I picked up Winnie the Pooh and nestled myself into the corners of the towering shelves. Surrounded by dark, unopened books, where angels, wizards, dragons, fairies, and witches, huddled cover to cover, I felt at home. The angels were once as plentiful as species of flies. I was away from the clutter — distancing my mind from the long car ride to the library, one full of exchanged screams between my parents. Far removed from the pull and push of being a rebellious six-year-old, I escaped from the crime of being too small to know. But I knew. I knew about Pooh, Christopher Robin, Eeyore, Tigger, Owl, Piglet, Rabbit, and I knew I wasn’t an average six-year-old. I knew my parents were arguing about my inauspicious future. I composed myself in the fort of the books I made, later breathing in the authors so distant from A.A. Milne–  Malcolm X, Marx, Melville, Merwin, Millay, Milton, Morrison. 

I’m seventeen now, and rather than looking at an assortment of picture books, I’m ordering them from A-Z by the author — a treacherous task to anyone who has worked in a library. When did life become so monotonous? So stale and soulless? William Trevor: The Children of Dynmouth, Henry David Thoreau: Walden, Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Book after book. Stack after stack. No longer could I sit in the corner, knees to chest, and indulge in The Hungry Caterpillar. Now I am old. Now I am made for sorting and dusting. 

I envied Winnie-the-Pooh’s tight friendships. If I ran deep into the shelves, would I eventually reach 100 Acre Wood? Would I get to the house at Pooh Corner by 1:00? If I read enough fantasies, could I reach my own fantasy, touch my own imagination? 

The one person that understood me the most has always been myself. I investigate my hands; they smell of antiquity — old, rotten, rusted knowledge, the crevices filled with dust. I bend one finger after the other. The mind communicates with the physical body in such confusing ways. I explore each wrinkle and vein on my hand trying to understand how my brain and body are connected. Can I think without it being a thought? Can I change without being seen? What is shown more to my parents, my hands or my soul? They think I don’t know, but I know.  

The golden, capitalized titles of each book glisten and bulge out. The letters flirtatiously mock me and tell me what I have the possibility to wallow in. I can only peek behind the cover and playfully stamp the return date. The head librarian pulls out each date card. She shows me, with a loud chunk-chunk, how to stamp an almost purposefully crooked due date on it, below a score of previous crooked due dates that belonged to other people, other times. My boss is a beautiful, shriveled woman, part of a clan of bergamot-scented, timeworn bookworms that I would never fully be a member of. She felt she owned the library with fussy self-possession. She established the sanctuary as a place where she would secretly write her 25-stanza flowerful poems as children whispered about her vile, dismissive, condescending sniffs and stares. 

My first memory of librarians was in a big room with heavy wooden tables that sat on a creaky wood floor. My creative, sincere, young mind wide-eyed the room. A cone of bright, white light encircled the heavy oak chairs that were too low. Or maybe I was simply too short. 

Maybe that’s why I chose to sit on the ground with a too-big book. My childhood librarian had a welcoming smile. She sensed the anticipation in my heart of all those books — an entirely new realm just waiting at my fingertips and a space to sort the rainbow while inhaling the odor of the words of zealous authors. She knew I loved Winnie the Pooh and pushed me to read The World of Christopher Robin. 

My mother often forgot to pick me up, or maybe she came late on purpose. Maybe I misbehaved and deserved the silent treatment. I often expected to be in the library for longer than usual. I watched families pass by — mom, dad, and child, all holding hands, embracing one another’s warmth. My tiny body held so much grief; my repressed frustration with the order of the world led me to scheme about what could be. I never wanted to think about my tantrums or losing my mother’s clutch or why I sat alone. I stretched out my four-inch hand, staring at its incompleteness, stretched my other four-inch hand, wondering what about me was never enough, and suddenly both hands grasped one another, in the same manner as the mom, dad, and child, as I read The Giving Tree, holding back the screeches that so desperately wanted to escape.  

It’s getting late in the library and the moon is full. It’s as full as it was in that poem by Coleridge, which I often recite in my head. The one where he carries his year-old son into the orchard behind the cottage and turns the baby’s face to the sky to see, for the first time, the earth’s bright companion — something bright to make his crying seem small. If I want to follow his example, tonight would be the night to carry some tiny creature outside and introduce them to the moon. I gather myself into my arms, the sleeping infant of myself, all limp and full of dust from my work day. Drunk with the light, all I want to do is put my knees to my chest and rock back and forth. But, instead, I run circles through the lawn; I attempt to lift myself up, wrapping my arms around my chest, my eyes nearly as wide as when I was an infant.

I disliked school. Sitting in class, receiving instruction, I could not be passive. I had to be active, learn for myself what I wanted, in the way that suited me best. I was not a good pupil or an attentive, mannered child, but when I roamed the stacks and shelves, I had the freedom to select whatever I wanted, to follow paths that fascinated me. Free to roam and enjoy the quiet companionship of other readers, all, like myself, on quests of their own. What my class, what my friends, what my family did not provide, I would find within a book. 

Now, I could step foot into the big kid room: the shrine of knowledge my mom and dad attempted to keep a secret from me. Something was hidden in here, whatever revealed my inadequacy, why I was undeserving of nurture. The books were mostly brown, black, and blue, as if the authors forgot the whimsical gift of creativity. 

The moon is not full tonight, but the stars stick out. I go outside and reminisce. I sink into the sky’s dark sea of black as I ponder over burnt-out stars, wishing their beautiful light could somehow be brought back. But that dust has crumbled, scattered like ashes in the brisk solar wind. The memories stand transfixed, unaltered by time, suspended, in infinity’s domain without end. I am forced to navigate the sea without stars for direction. It leaves me rambling without course, scrambling to find out why. My hands rub against one another to create heat, but my burning passion is extinguished without a real fuel source. I could be shot across the atmosphere driven by high tides of lonesome tears. Maybe I am fit for the picture books — an alien, a witch, a dragon — belonging to some distant constellation. Up there, I fly through galaxies of milky ways. I create spaces and gaps and absences in the field; far from home, I am what is missing. 

Bloodbath at the Bird Sanctuary

The Paradox of Preservation

Content Warning: Description of Dead Animals

Article by Nalani Wood Art by Ciara Wiesner

On the northern slope of Maui’s dormant volcano Haleakala, the house of the sun, an old prison now serves as a sanctuary for critically endangered native Hawaiian birds. The Maui Bird Conservation Center cares for a population of Akikiki birds, native to the Alaka’i Swamp on Kaua’i where only five ‘Akikiki birds still live. Clever Hawaiian crows, given the name Alalā which resembles their caws, are also cared for at MBCC. The goal is to eventually release these birds back into the wild, but freedom from their necessary captivity is still a long way off. 

The wooden A-frame entrance of the Maui Bird Conservancy is barely visible from the narrow road that winds up the mountain. Once through the heavy wooden doors of the sanctuary, the first thing you’ll see is a wall with kupu kupu ferns growing from floor to ceiling. The sprinkler system that waters the fern wall periodically breathes a cloud of mist, disrupting the stiff quiet of the room. 

My first day as an intern at the bird conservancy was a bloodbath. I started my day shadowing the quiet caretaker of the nectar birds at MBCC. Within the first 20 minutes, I realized that bird people are pretty weird. I asked her name, but she said it so quietly that I had to ask her boss what it was later because I couldn’t hear what she said the first or second time I asked. After three hours of silence, walking from aviary to aviary with only the chirping of birds to keep me entertained, I was starting to wonder what my role as an intern was. 

I was relieved when I was told I would be working with someone new for the second half of the day. Apparently my silent companion had had enough people time for the day. The head chef for the Alalā crows, extinct in the wild since 2002, asked me to help with some meal prep. He called the job “protein processing.” I followed him into a small room with a large cabinet incubator and a sink. We heard soft chirping coming from inside the cabinet, and the head chef, a man of more words than my previous mentor but still not exactly talkative, pursed his lips and nodded, then handed me a large pair of scissors. He opened the cabinet to reveal dozens of baby chicks, some so fresh out of their shells that their little fuzzy feathers were still coated in mucus. 

My stomach dropped and the queasy tightness of anxiety rose in my throat. I forced myself to repress the ohmygod-tiny-fluffy-delicate-orb-babies instinct. The crow chef looked at me with what I interpreted as a combination of humor and regret, then demonstrated how to hold the baby chicken by its little body in one hand and snip its head off with the scissors. He said to let the bodies rest in the sink for a while so they’d stop twitching and bleed out. 

By this point in the day, I just wanted to be useful. It was my first day on the job and this was the first task I'd been given that wasn’t just holding things or opening doors. I gritted my teeth and accepted the scissors. I winced each time the sharp blades of the scissors closed on a delicate neck and the severed body thunked into the sink. After an hour, there were no more cheeps to be heard. I was surprised that almost 100 severed heads fit into one 24 ounce Rubbermaid Tupperware. Among the mass of yellow fuzz and beaks, I saw hundreds of little eyes. Some were closed peacefully almost as if taking a little chicken nap, but so many were open and lifeless, staring directly at me. The sensation of sticky blood on my hands, the sudden absence of any sounds other than the whirring of the incubator, made me uncomfortable, but not debilitatingly so. For the first time since starting my task, I let myself look into the sink at the heap of bloody feathers and stiff, protruding chicken feet. I picked them up one by one, some by their feet, or by a tiny wing, and placed them in another Tupperware. As I finished my task, I felt a pragmatic sense of accomplishment mixed in with my lingering nausea. The bird conservancy was a known dump site for unwanted chickens and roosters, but rather than letting that be a burden, they turned it into a sustainable food source. I looked out the window at the sky and thought to myself how tragic it was that all these baby chicken heads were snipped off before they ever got to see the light of day. 

I went home that day and wondered at the sanity of the place I found myself working. What kind of operation kills babies!? But as I thought more about it, I came to respect the dedication of these crazy bird people. There are an estimated 26 billion chickens on the planet and only 120 Alalā crows alive today. Maui’s valleys are overrun by chickens, where before the invasion of foreign cultures and species, there might have been hundreds of Hawaiian bird species sipping nectar from flowers or pecking at papaya. I learned an unexpected truth on my first day as an intern at MBCC: to save the birds, a bunch of baby chickens have to die. Over the course of the summer, I worked with seven other organizations, ranging from native forest conservationists to tide pool caretakers. I got to see a huge variety of ecosystems, and in each one, the threat of invasive species and climate change loomed like a dark, roiling thundercloud. Hawai’i will never regain the plant and animal life it used to have, and even just preserving what is left feels like a sisyphean task. Conservationists are faced with compounding problems and a lack of funding, and the only way to overcome those hurdles is dedication. I’m proud that I overcame my horror at decapitating baby chicks. I know that conservationists face horrific things all the time, like the rapid extinction of hundreds of species, and walking away just isn’t an option. 

A Love Letter to Summer Camp

Love you still…

Article by Alice Schubert Art by Liz White

Hey. 

I remember the first day we met, I had just stepped out of one of the old dusty vans, my feet hitting the gravel road. We had driven hours from the airport, an hour since the last real town, with the van jostling full of teenagers: half-familiar faces, happy to be back together again, and half like me… new. I don't know if I counted as new, I had been here before, visiting the place my dad cited as his growing up place, his work for a decade. I knew the faces, those who started as his bosses, who eventually became his friends and family, and would one day, hopefully, be mine. But I hadn’t yet stepped out of the van, new, ready to meet my hopeful friends, to find who I was in the mountains and do the work that came with it. And then, there you were. 

I don't remember what you were wearing, or really anything about you. I am sure that you had pulled the people around me, your friends, into hugs. Passing sentiments of the year elapsed back and forth. Introductions kept happening, meeting those who had already arrived, meeting my counselors, and re-meeting the people who had been in the van but far away. It all blurs together, and you are in that blur. It took some time for us to become friends, back then when it felt like we were opposites, but somewhere in the mix of it all, you were there. 

Do you remember when we met? I guess I don’t. I do remember when I first saw you. We were sitting in one of the cabins. I am sure we weren’t supposed to be in there. Looking back, it's the kind of thing I would be annoyed at campers doing now. Life was so simple, we were simple, the kind of summer moments I now daydream about in the last days of school. We sat there and talked, the first of many hours we would spend doing so. The first of many years. Before it was work, before we were counselors, and when it was all make-believe. 

I remember all of the hours spent over all of the years—well, I know they existed. Talking over Facetime, you said you hated texting. But we did that too. We used to think about what it would be like to work there. To have more skin in the game, to build legacies like the counselors we had before. To have the adventures we could only dream of and to build up the tiny moments we felt cementing in our souls. The work is a lot less glamorous after all the years, and yet we both keep coming back. 

For me, it’s been seven years, five of work, and two of wanting it to be work. Over twelve months, a year of summer camp all in all. Of feeling at home in the mountains, of the same log cabins, and of different faces. For you, it's been longer. It's been seven years since a van dropped me off at a place that would become a home, a paycheck, a source of tears, laughter, and love. Seven years since I met you. I think I might only have seven years in me. I don’t remember when I last heard your voice. That's a lie. I know we said goodbye on the last day of the summer, and I am sure you said something, I just don't remember what it was. 

Do you remember the feel of my hand squeezing yours, my voice squealing with yours as we ran jumping into the freezing water, that shock to our systems as shocking as the summer dwindling away.

Do you remember when this was our world, when we counted the ten months to get to the part of the year that really mattered? When our conversations were filled with dreams and Buzzfeed quizzes, talk of classes and friendships, I knew all your problems better than my own and you could tell how I felt in a moment by looking at my face. Or do you remember when we stopped talking about life and started talking about work? When it went from “How are you?” to “Can you do…?”. When I had to ask a mutual friend of ours if you were even coming back. If you had a girlfriend. When we started to pass each other on our breaks and just kept walking. Sitting next to other people at meals, and prefacing any favor from each other with “if it’s okay” when we didn't know what would be okay. 

When my dad talks of the people he remembers working with, most of them I don't know. They just exist to me in the stories. You exist to me in the stories. I guess the place stays the same every year. The same cabins fill with new campers, tears, and laughter feeding off of the sounds of glee and adventure. The same hills that hold scraped knees and many firsts. The same plates with the same meals, day after day, generation after generation, summer after summer. He tells me about the songs he sang; they have the same words as mine but different tunes. The work: same tools, different hands.

I don’t think you know this, but I remember this past summer I told one of our friends that I wish you would go fuck yourself. You had been an ass that day, frustrated about the job, tired from a long night, and feeling like no one understood how hard you worked. I wanted to understand. I was frustrated because it felt like you weren’t doing any of the work and that meant that I had to. It felt like we were the only two there, the only ones that mattered. I remember when summers were my favorite part of the year because we would be together. Summer's still my favorite part of the year, but it has nothing to do with you. I look forward to my check more than your smiles, and I haven't talked to you about anything other than the job for years. 

I have to think to remember now, our first moments, our long conversations, our shared dreams. What the stars looked like when we were lying next to each other. I remember the feel of the blanket and your arm around me as we sang along to the campfire tunes. I remember the nights when you'd meet me outside the door, bathed in shadows. I remember the first time you held me tight, the first time you comforted me, the first time I thought we could be more. I don't remember our lasts. 

The songs I sing around a campfire will change. I need to learn the new tunes. 

Love you, still. 

Alice 

(At least I remember that.)

Bagels, Crepes, and Spectacle, oh my!

 “To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.” - Rousseau

Article by Charlotte M. Art by Ciara Wiesner

There was a period, a period that lasted four years, when I would sell things under a tent in a parking lot. That is what a farmer’s market is: ex-convicts, undocumented immigrants, and morally corrupt hippies selling unregulated fresh food and expensive woodwork under tarps held up by rods. As though technological innovation doesn’t exist to combat this very thing. The average citizen seems to find the whole affair extremely romantic, as if buying salad at a place where there’s no sink is a very chic thing to do. As if selling mushroom extract under a hand drawn sign is a very stable way to live one's life. I loved the market, of course, the way any mother would love her worst child. It’s the home of my creative inspiration — what some call a myopic and offensive narrative style — and my favorite people in the world, who would generously gift me their handmade amethyst jewelry and pots made of local clay, or help me recover thousands of deli papers that I would lose to the dimmest breeze. My fondness for the people I met, however, didn’t mean that they weren’t profoundly unhinged. There was a professional boxer that sold ghee, a sewage employee that just loved fermented spicy carrots, a police-officer-turned-alcoholic-pig-farmer and a Japanese-political-refugee-turned-artisanal-tea-maker. There were a lot of affairs, overdoses, and knife fights. Many vendors were banned from more markets than they were allowed at. One need only remember the nature of the market, its nearly carnival presence, to recognize its participants as fiscal and spiritual outlaws. It’s no surprise then that four years amongst them robbed me of normalcy and rendered me good at nothing but navigating a freakshow. But it wasn’t just the vendors that changed me. A four-legged monster, set on stage as a wonderful attraction, sees a show himself: the people, the common folk, gazing up at him to bear naked their rotten souls. 

Every day, we vendors would watch people of this great country cosplay medieval peasants, like Marie Antoinette and her model village, buying unwashed eggs that cost twice as much as they did at the grocery store. What was even more astounding, particularly to some of the Central American and East Asian refugees amongst us, was that this cosplay included even the most destitute American proletariat. One didn’t need a particularly keen eye to notice that everyone, from the homeless to the hipster elite of Silicon Valley, would place dirty potatoes into baskets. Made in Africa, but only if it's fair trade! I will never forget a starving man — pocked in sunburns so terrible I thought to give him my entire tent — refusing the free food I offered because it wasn’t organic. Didn’t he know, say, that the blonde lady selling ten dollar fresh-pressed juice just poured Tropicana into mason jars the night before? That the “authentic” food, sold by the charismatic Indian couple, was from Costco’s frozen food aisle? But that was the farmer's market: making one's way, not by reaping from what they so valiantly sowed, but by ripping off the poor souls — those patrons that have been so fortunately robbed from doing back-breaking labor themselves — who then refer to the farmer’s market vendors as something lost to the good ol’ days. 

What may be of greater interest to you are the vendors that employed me and the business models to which I became an unfortunate participant. It might be important to note, for instance, that my first job at the market was for a Jewish deli, where I sold bagels and knishes. The shop was owned by an extremely forgiving but childishly reactive convict that used to be a psychiatrist. He had to relinquish the title some years ago after he “stole large sums of money from elderly patients to buy a vacation home in Cabo,” or at least that’s how the town gossip described it. Regardless of what gave the ankle monitor, this ruined but creatively talented doctor started a small business, which peddled heritage baked goods. The modest cash grab spun quickly into a fairly popular brick and mortar. That was when he needed me, an employee, to continue his venture in hospital parking lots across the county. 

The Bagel Man, despite having made the reckless decision to hire sixteen-year-old Charlotte — someone who, at the time, had the work ethic and voice inflection of Paris Hilton — to run his business, was an extreme neurotic. He demanded aesthetic order, like the display board’s perfect symmetry on a soot-stained picnic table. He had admirably even eyebrows, sesame seed always had to be in line with cinnamon raisin, and so on and so forth, even as we wore flip flops and, I cannot stress this enough, were in a fucking parking lot. I respected these phobic tendencies, anyway, seeing as he was a reasonable boss otherwise. I think that Freud would have found the whole affair very hilarious, but I thought it dismal, waking up at dawn every day to answer the question, “Are they... doughnuts?” 

One Saturday morning, two summers ago, I was arranging some bagels, poppyseed, everything, bialy, asiago, on a grimy board I had forgotten to wash. I was trying to concentrate on bread placement when I heard,  

“Hi! Question.” 

I looked up to see an ethereally cervine face, whose golden eyes made a person flinch with their likeness to a flirtatious doe. The woman had a bobbed bowl of velvet hair, which swung in a single movement as she spoke in a thick German accent. It was another vendor, I realized, the one that sold French crepes, and only approached those she needed for small tasks — or sex. “Can you work for me?” She batted her eyes cartoonishly, seducing me with this blunt question and ironic gesture. She was, and this is the best way to describe her, very European. 

I said yes and would go on to spend the next two years splitting my time between a Jew and a German. My two bosses, as it turned out, had a complicated sexual relationship themselves, which I found neither romantic nor particularly interesting — seeing as it was not unusual for the Crepe Woman to be equally invested in four or five men at a time. She had moved to the US, in fact, to stray away from the "soft and ladylike” men of the European continent and find the chivalrous cowboy of her Western dreams. She soon discovered, of course, that these strapping buccaneers were long extinct, and so her little adventure in the states became nothing but an everlasting merry-go-round of trying to choose which man was the best of many evils, a circumstance that caused our entire working and personal relationship to revolve around the boy problems of a 35 year old sex tourist. Last summer, the main event of the season was her inability to choose between another food vendor, who had a beer belly and debilitating sex addiction, and a gang member with no shortage of face tattoos. Upon my council, she settled for neither, seeing as the food vendor had a written schedule of who he was to have sex with each day of the week — Crepe Woman on Mondays and Thursdays, which hurt her feelings — and the gangster, who during coitus, once said that his gang’s meetings were held at the local Roundtable, something that made her buckle over in second-hand embarrassment. Even murderers, she found, were really very unmanly and ridiculous.  

This summer, I spent every waking hour either selling and describing schmear to wine-drunk tourists at 10:00 AM markets, or folding crepes for tequila-drunk locals at 10:00 PM wedding afterparties. The crepe trailer would get up to 120 degrees, and the batter would bake whilst still in the mixing bowl, making it impossible to spread with the whimsical ease which customers came to gawk at. Our perspiration would drip onto the stainless-steel floor, and at the end of the day, we would wipe away half-burnt cheese and the puddles of our own making, my sweat the odor of moldy rosemary mixing with the Crepe Woman’s exotic scent of expired oranges. It was so hot, this season worse than the last, and I spent it in passive delirium. I would sit with my eyes closed in the Crepe Woman’s Nissan, which struggled to pull our trailer over the hills of Bodega Bay, and listen to her rant about boys while Taylor Swift played on the radio. Despite her general intelligence, the Crepe Woman had the concerns and tastes of an NPC, reporting to me her genuine crush on Glen Powell, or a belief that the new Colleen Hoover movie was “so incredible.” She was, and I don’t mean this pejoratively, a true Capricorn, with unmatched competency and little artistic talent. She could only count in German, a quality that I found to be in poor taste. I was very touched, however, by what she stood for: that anyone could come to this great country of ours and hook up with anyone, regardless of creed, to the same banal and disappointing result, and moan about it to the employees of their small business, which brought worldliness to the ever-expanding makeup of the US. “God bless America!” I wanted to sing out from that sweltering trailer and across the gravel parking lot, suffering from heat stroke and what I thought was a very astute observation. 

After a particularly brutal workday, I found myself sucking on a lime paleta in the back of a butcher’s white pickup-truck, watching him pack up some unsold stock, which was mostly miscellaneous bones and, oddly, cuts of premium filet. Earlier, a small child had run under my display table, causing it to knock over and every bagel along with it, to which the child’s mother simply cooed,  

“Ale, what did I say about running away? Not nice…”  

And so I was done for the day, having nothing viable to sell while the bagels baked further on the concrete. I loitered lost, from tent to tent, until the Butcher eventually invited me over. His shirt was off, revealing back muscles only possible when life consists of stringing up cattle corpses. We had briefly dated in the past, back when I could poetize his ostensibly honest life, until I realized that he never wanted to leave his dilapidated RV on the pasture. He was avoiding the responsibilities of contemporary existence, something that was at once enlightened and weak, and as I was made desperate by the brutality of his figure, I was left dissatisfied by the very declaration it made. I was a student, very talented in the modern games of societal esteem, and here he was, living like a rustic of antiquity. I complained about having to study Rousseau while he sorted eggs and gave me the practical advice that, if I didn’t want to read it, then I simply shouldn’t! 

Humans are strange everywhere, but the two-way mirror, which so easily disguised itself as a particularly opaque window, had exposed a certain and unavoidable duality, where man was either a bratty prince demanding a good joke, or a traveling con-man selling from his decked-out wagon of mysterious potions. There were, of course, the occasional saints, who came to the market only for what they could not grow in their own plots of diverse squash, or even vendors that found some honest joy in raising lambs for slaughter, but these were the exceptions. By and large, customers of the market were coddled children of the first world, so far removed from true destitution that pre-industrialization may as well be magic, role played at a heavy price like a Bridgerton Ball, and the others were nothing but salesmen of some long-lost connection to a mysterious common root. A well disguised renaissance fair. The entire ordeal had me tight roping the nonexistent wire between audience and performer, rendering me a nihilistic carnival act who hated the patrons and vied for their throw-away pocket change all the same. We were Martians observing Venusians, or perhaps the other way around. Savagery and idealism ran rampant, regardless, and so there on that pick-up truck, I felt like the last serious person in this world. The market was a thing that Kafka, or possibly Dr. Seuss, would dream up and never write down; it was too ridiculous, too bizarre, to properly articulate, even with clever prose. To watch, as you might imagine, a woman buying unrefrigerated, unlabeled meat from another woman selling unrefrigerated, unlabeled meat, day in and day out, left me profoundly disillusioned. I compare the whole thing to warfare: a peek into the nonsense of human nature, and no one is really the voice of reason. I wrote this, then, in hopes that it might lift up the veil which so often clouds this disturbing phenomenon, the act of the farmers market, in illusive airs. As Nabokov once sang: “I am no poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder,” and so I did my best to report what it was, as much an oddity as anything else. 

I Can Take That for You

Musings from a porter

Article by Noah Stephens Art by Claud Garcia

I can hear the five Jetboil canisters of fuel clanking around in my backpack. Every other step, one of the two fifty-meter ropes slides from one side to the other, shifting the weight from my left hip to my right shoulder. I’m hungry and can almost smell the 18 backcountry freeze-dried meals sitting in one of the three Ursacks. I’m tired and still can’t see camp. 

It was my fourth day working as a porter in the backcountry of Wyoming. At that point, I had been in Wyoming for three months, working for the NOLS Rocky Mountain branch in Lander as a cook. Initially, I had felt that even though it wasn’t the best money to make, it would get me out of my job in the kitchen and give me a good break. “Forty pounds of gear, and whatever you need,” the head of the company told me I would carry a few days before the trip. I have carried heavier packs, so, on the day I met with the guides to organize and distribute gear, I eagerly offered to take more than what I was asked to.

On the morning the trip started, the guides and I drove up to the Crowheart Trading Post and met the clients, three middle-aged men from Alabama. I got into the back of a pickup truck with one other guide. As we bumped along a decrepit Jeep trail, ice axes shoving into us marked the beginning of the trek.  

Within a few miles, the Wyoming landscape can go from desert to steep, mountainous terrain with high jagged granite peaks and lush green valleys below. Rivers meander between towering mountains, and all sorts of wildlife wander within.  

Typically, a porter who is just carrying gear for a climb can travel alone, at their own pace, for multiple days only to deposit the gear at the final campsite. In my case, I was also carrying the group’s food, so I had to walk with them. I hiked in the back and didn’t talk much. I wore a sun hoodie and dark sunglasses to blend into the background. At camp, I unloaded the food and filled the water dromedaries for the clients. One of the clients asked me if I usually did this kind of work, and I told him that I had worked full-time at the NOLS base, cooking for students. By chance, it turned out that he had taken a NOLS course in the 90s and went on to ask me, “How’d you get out of scrambling eggs to come carry our stuff?” He said it with a smirk on his face and a soft laugh, and though I wanted to snap back at him, I understood that this was the job, and I must act professionally. So, with my hoodie and glasses on, I calmed myself and laughed at his joke with him. It was then I came to understand that, though my pack was heavy, the clients I would be traveling with for the next five days would impose their own weight as well. 

The hikes were not hard; we sauntered, and though the weight wasn’t comfortable, it was manageable. Despite my underlying issues with the clients I was traveling with, I found new excitement in my other companions: the guides. Each night, after the clients had gone to sleep, we sat down together as they evaluated how each day was and how it could have been better. They went over the plan for the following day and what different situations could occur. Over the five nights I spent with them, I learned countless skills about safety and professionalism in the mountains.  They told me about their past experiences as they became guides: learning from various mentors they had and stories about good and bad times with different clients. 

During my job as a porter, the money I earned ended up becoming less valuable to me in comparison to the mentorship I gained from my newfound friends. As the guides I worked with had been mentored in the past, now I was being mentored by them.   

Friendships are found in peculiar places and at times when you least expect it. Saying yes to unfamiliar opportunities can lead to both good and bad experiences that, in my case, provided me with both a new set of teachers to learn from and friends to count on. Now, I feel excited to return to Wyoming next summer, knowing that the work I get to do is educational to me, useful to others, and just a great time out in the woods.

Checking Out

How to run into your archnemesis at the local gourmet grocer

Article by Esa George Art by Gigi Perkins

And what is so odd about working in a grocery store? You might ask. The tasks of scanning, bagging, and directing customers to specific aisles where they might find organic cat food or Alaskan smoked sock-eye salmon reads as pretty self-explanatory, which I will agree with, but it was another aspect of the job which made me weary going into work each day. When you live in Palos Verdes, Torrance, Redondo Beach, Rolling Hills, or the bordering cusp of San Pedro… the part with all the winding roads sending you down to catch a glimpse of the port, the containers, the boxes, the colors, it is all a cloister you know of gigantic serene things. Yet the human eye portrays them just far enough from the freeway to be picturesque. When you’re just trying to cross the Vincent Thomas Bridge into Long Beach, you will all of a sudden run into neighbors of elementary school classmates who became middle school classmates who left to go to PV or Penn High. 

Now you’re ringing them up and pretending you didn’t notice them when they first walked in. Or you’re doing that thing once you start bagging their groceries after they’ve already paid, where you say, “I think I recognize you,” but you’ve suspended the truth a little. In truth, you saw their Instagram post last night about their dog of 13 years whom you met and threw sticks to on the soccer fields, who just died. If you’re me, this job is about lying, and a trial of who can last the longest without admitting we totally know each other’s first and last and maybe even middle names. But you don’t say that part out loud, you just finally narrow in on how you know each other, pretending you don’t know exactly where. It had to have been the “Bumble Bees” when you were 10 and made it to AYSO’s 'Queen of the Hill' tournament. That’s how it felt every day going to work at a neighborhood Gourmet Grocer. You live with that anxiety of figuratively running into someone only to remain completely still; you can’t avoid their aisle nor look down, and you’ve already taken your 10-minute break. 

I didn’t think I’d ever encounter my archnemesis at work. This visitor caught me off guard about a month in, when I saw those automatic doors strike ajar. (You know it’s a good store when you swear you can even see the air conditioning seeping out when the glass separates.) In walks… we’ll call him Neville. He looks so British, oh my god. And his wife, who I still really like and don’t blame for everything that went down is standing beside him, and of course she’s pushing the cart.

You might think, Esa, aren’t you a little too young and peaceful, or non-confrontational (as I often describe myself), to have an archnemesis? And well, yes, my arch nemesis is a married man, but his maturity level is of someone who should still very much be in the courting phase, as he would call it, and be avoided by women at all costs.

I got myself into a bit of a feud in my sophomore year of high school. The theater program at my school consisted of people at the very top of the social hierarchies; no one gave a shit about the so-called 'jocks.' I hate to perpetuate the narrative of high schools having a social ladder, but this one was extraordinary – it was like a continuous loop of that Glee Halloween episode that aired right before the Superbowl in 2012, where the football team is forced to perform at halftime with the Glee Club, as punishment for their continuous harassment of the acapella singers. 

No one attended football games; we all pitied the President of the Parents Association for the impossible job of rallying the student body to show up for games. The events with the largest attendance were always the theater productions: the fall play and the spring musical. Those were the glory days, before the downfall of our theater director. I may have been the catalyst of his demise.

Auditions were fucking intense. Our eight-man football program couldn’t have mustered all the toxicity in the world compared to how competitive those auditions were. When you started singing, you just knew everyone was hoping you did poorly. You couldn’t be involved in a fall sport if you wanted to make the fall play, and you had to fill out an intricate conflict sheet, indicating every single potential conflict you could have with the auditions. It was terrifying to have such an obligation, and so I kept myself available in preparation for the fall.

During the week leading up to September auditions, I was invited to have coffee with the theater director, Neville, when he spotted me sitting at an outdoor table at our local Starbucks, a place it was common knowledge you could expect to see him. Nervous, of course, I sat across from him, and he got right to the point, ensuring that I didn’t sign up for Girls Volleyball this year because he was really “looking forward to [my] involvement in this year’s Fall Play.”

All of this dramatic setup… for the play to be announced as Puffs the Musical, a Harry Potter spoof, parodying the first four books/movies. Regardless of the unseriousness of the play’s contents, the campus-wide energy reflected a ruthless, merciless sentiment. I would leave that audition process a changed person, as would everyone who dared to try out for a role.

It was pretty clear to me after my Starbucks one-on-one with our theater director that I had a role secured, or at the very least a cameo. I would at least make the casting cut. The loyal following he had assembled by being so terrifying, so good at his job, yet so unphased by the emotional agony he placed on teenagers, was enough for parents to constantly salivate in his presence and enable him. No one challenged this tyrant. No one countered his toxic environment, even in the monthly parent council meetings for all parents whose children had somehow become involved in the performing arts department.

When I spotted him in Gourmet Grocer, sporting a button-up and looking like he had really aged since I’d last seen him, I remembered the ways he would categorize the female body types of young girls, speaking of the size of their “busts” and “behinds.” What a 64-year-old can dish, he couldn’t take!

The power trip he was on was brought to a bitter halt, and it may or may not have been because of my social media post which a former friend of mine had sent to him. I posted it when I didn’t make the cast list for the fall play, as implicitly promised. And I had lost it all.

So from my little corner of the store, aka register number three (my lucky number), I prepared for the performance of my life. I rehearsed what to say to someone who put me on academic probation and further suspension. I rehearsed what is visibly vengeful yet civil. I considered the things I could get away with as a grocer without losing my job. But then, it no longer mattered, for he was the real loser. He had finally been “let go” from our school and exposed for a series of teacher-student violations, while my life was taking off.

So really, how bittersweet a surprise it is, coming out of something that used to feel like it meant everything to me while years later spending my day-to-day in a comforting grocery store, to be reminded that the world is small. Yet not as small for me as it must be for him; bumping into former students who secretly can’t stand the thought of him, their performative gratitude for what he did for them, and knowing that everyone around him is performing for him for the rest of his life. Cheers to drama! 

Resumes and other lies

Article by Asta Sjogren-Uyehara Art by Eden Miller

— Christmas, 2023

I’ve spent every Christmas morning I can remember in the Portland airport (PDX, to those in the know). And that’s not sad to me at all — lots of people with big families and siblings and still-married parents find that shocking, but it’s what I’ve always done. The few times I’ve had a “classic Christmas morning” (during Covid) I’ve been thrown off by the normalcy of it. Waking up midmorning, meandering upstairs for presents and stockings…that’s not Christmas to me. It helps that my Swedish family, on my mom’s side, celebrates Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. This morning, for example, I woke up at 6:30, packed my bag full of clothes from college and presents I had opened the night before, got in our rental car, and headed to the airport. Right now I’m on a plane to Chicago, and then I’ll transfer over to Raleigh, since that’s where my dad lives now. 

This part is new. I always used to fly home with my mom, and get picked up by my dad at the Oakland airport. People now, who don’t know Sean, seem concerned that I have this absent father. “He lives where?” They must think he’s lived there forever and that I’ve only seen him on holidays and summers my whole life. I correct them when appropriate, but sometimes it doesn’t make sense to. I always have this weird disconnect with those people, as I’ve rarely had a bad thing to say about my dad.

— October, 2024

This new schedule makes it near impossible to make any money over winter break. Bouncing between my home in Northern California, Portland, and North Carolina I obviously can’t hold down anything substantial, so I work for my mom. Britta is a filmmaker and she needs me to transcribe some interviews for her. This is listed on my resume as “Transcribist, Dire Wolf Productions.”

The rest of my resume is scattered, generally unimpressive. This past August, I used one of those weird scammy services to organize it and forgot to cancel my trial before it charged me $20. I describe myself on my resume as a “motivated student seeking to maintain a part-time position that offers professional development with excellent customer service, communication, organization, and problem-solving skills,” but someone like that wouldn’t forget to cancel their AI-resume-organizing trial. If I was being honest, I’d say “distractible writer seeking to make a steady paycheck in a job that allows me to chat and look at my phone,” but if I was honest no one would hire me. And the dishonesty on my resume got me the summer job I’ve had for the past two years: Operations Coordinator (Bay Area Community Services, Oakland, CA). 

Operations Coordinator, in my case, is a really fancy name for a receptionist. I answered phones, sent out faxes, and greeted clients. And by clients I mean homeless people living in the Bay. Mostly, I sat at my desk and waited for the phone to ring. No air-conditioning, in heels, on a stool with no back. For eight hours a day. 

Every workday, during the year of the cicadas, I thought about how I have never cared about cicadas — we don’t get them in Berkeley — and how I had started wearing gold jewelry and how that seemed like a metaphor for entering adulthood. I turned twenty-one and started going to happy hour with my best friend and waiting for my train with sweat dripping down my back in my work sweater. I wrote poetry about the same boys who I always wrote poetry about and told myself that it was different now, mature. I beat myself up for always writing about myself; self-centered, narcissistic. And for never being able to close the page. I have this obsession with the word and — no idea stands alone, it must be accompanied by a second thought, another phrase. 

I’ve never been any good at ending things — friendships, relationships, stories, anything I write. It always feels like there’s something left unsaid, some kind of closure needed. 

The Age of Okay

No, I’m not a psychiatrist

Article by Maddy Meister Art by Liz White

The oddest job I work

Is one I cannot mention

But I will say this

It’s sweaty and silly

Involves some non-disclosure

And lots of guts and somewhat glory

I struggle more when it comes to working on myself: trying to understand my actions, reactions, and relationships. When I say working on myself, I tend to mean reflection, and trying to be “good.” But what does it even mean to be “good?” Is there such a state? I can get myself to work, go to class, do my homework (sometimes), and enjoy spending time with my friends. Shouldn’t that be enough? But fear of the future, fear of being alone, clouds my brain, and forces me to stay busy. I stay busy by working to keep my mind from wandering towards self-hatred. 

My part-time job is relatively common

Consists of giving medicine

Emotional support

Tools to deal with anxiety

And dealing with others’ shit (literally)

No, I’m not a psychiatrist. I occasionally dogsit for some incredibly loving and somewhat high-maintenance dogs. The problem with this job is that I have a LOT of time to sit and do very little. I’ve never really enjoyed spending uninterrupted time with my thoughts. I end up turning on the TV, tuning out the many things that make me sad or mad or confused. Then I begin to worry that I am not okay, which only makes me more anxious.

My last and favorite job

Is greeting and seating people

Running around carrying armloads

Of full and empty dishes

Snaking around customers and coworkers

Sweeping

Wiping

Stealing 

People’s leftovers from the dish pit

Laser focus

They say time is money, and my job as a hostess takes up my time and gives me a decent paycheck each week. It is input and output focused, and ultimately a distraction from figuring out a “greater” purpose, whatever that might look like. For the most part, I enjoy the job, it is pretty straightforward and I get to focus on the tasks at hand. Now I find myself getting sidetracked again… not getting into the nitty gritty of why I am not okay. I really haven’t come close to figuring out what being okay looks like. Is it even possible? I have days where I go through the motions and have a good time and do feel okay… and nights when I lose control and come close to hurting myself, hating myself. Why do I feel this way? I’ve been trying to figure it out in therapy for years. There is usually something going on in my life I can blame, some person who hurt me or some fear of the future manifesting itself as me not wanting to go on. 

My eternal work

Not a job

Or something I need to do

More so a state of being

I’m always trying 

Even when it seems out of the blue

I go to therapy and try to identify when I’m not feeling well and what’s happening at specific times when I am doing “well,” like when I can crack a joke and hug someone to make them feel better. This task involves grappling with the specifics of my self-destructive behavior, and the ways it affects me within and outside of intense episodes. 

And no,

I’m still not a psychiatrist

But I’ve definitely been encouraged to see one. 

Beneath the Cigarette Shelves

Article by Sophia Murphy Art by Kristopher Ligtenberg

He has sharp blue eyes, dark eyebrows, a missing tooth, and, when I first met him, I thought he was 20 years old. He has the energy of a middle school boy in a neon Nike outfit. He’s 5'10 and wears a baseball cap, carries two huge iced coffee cups from Dunkin Donuts, and is usually gripping a vape. He’ll quickly tell you that he knows vaping is bad, but that it’s much better than his previous alcohol addiction. I’ve only known him within the walls of the J & S Mobil Gas Station, on our Saturday six-hour shifts in the sweaty station booth in front of the cigarette packs. The smell of lingering gasoline and the sounds of shots from the mechanics next door provided the perfect ambience to tell obscure stories, to share all we knew. People often mistook us for a couple, or siblings, or father and daughter. Whatever it was, our comfortability with each other was distinct. It was obvious how fascinated I was by him, even though he was a random 40-year-old man I met at work. Half of the time, I was interested in what he had to say because I had a desire to disagree and fight back. In retrospect, besides our perspectives on guns, I actually don’t think we’re too different. He’s the most eclectic person I know, isn’t afraid of change, and isn’t scared to confront his past. He approaches life with wisdom and growth, something I work to live by.

Neil grew up in Newton, MA — a town known for its esteemed education, but he knew from a young age that schooling wasn’t for him. He couldn’t focus and thought most of what he did was dumb — his school projects, his afternoon job. He worked at the same Mobil gas station, with our same boss, John, but he got fired due to skipping most of his shifts. He graduated the year of 9/11, and felt it was his patriotic duty to fight for our country. He went to Iraq and was the man at the front of the line, the one who stepped on bombs if they were there, the one who called a halt or attack, and the one who would first be shot. He never told me why he was okay with this, but it never came across as a suicide mission to me.

At the Mobil, it would be 8AM — maybe I’d be hungover, maybe I’d be heartbroken, it didn’t matter. I’d be in for casual stories of bombs and death. One day, he was walking alongside a large truck that rolled over a bomb. Shot up in the air and fallen onto rocks and soot, he survived. This conversation casually moved into banter about the Red Sox game that Neil got tickets for with his brother, also a mechanic at the gas station.

I also spent a lot of time working with Isaiah. He had a one-year-old daughter and a new puppy named Capone that would pee on the gas station’s broken tile floors. Isaiah would disconnect our security cameras to play Call of Duty on the monitor. Paying me $20 to keep quiet, at times I paid attention to the game. Shooting, animated voices dying, animated bodies falling, blood, death, all that stuff. Once, I asked Neil about the ethics of Call of Duty replicating war. He told me it was scary how accurately they depicted the bunkers and scenery. He’s glad that people see the truth but doesn’t understand why anyone would want that trauma, which was real for him. 

After the war, Neil tried to stay with his high school girlfriend and moved to Texas with her. They split up. She didn’t understand. How could she? How can someone ever understand the horrors of waking up every day and wondering if this is the day you die, this could be the last. And maybe eventually you don’t feel that way anymore because it’s normal, war is your life now. And maybe that’s worse? 

He moved to Las Vegas. Afghanistan was recruiting, and he felt like he needed to go back. The way he tells it, it sounds like he wanted to go back. But in Afghanistan his role was different. This time, he was teaching the locals how to fight. I realized how little I knew about this war. How many actual lives were lost, how much trauma still exists in our country, and how little I knew about the reality that shapes the nation we live in.

In Afghanistan, he told me, the children ran up to soldiers in their military outfits because they knew they had candy in their pocket. I have no idea how Jolly Ranchers, snipers, and assault rifles could all coexist on the same body, in the same pockets. 

After Afghanistan, he came back with more trauma, but he doesn’t talk about it like I should pity him. He talks about it like his life could not have turned out any other way, that it was just something that happened, like breaking your foot, falling in love, or making the game-winning shot. But I think he knows the pain he felt wasn’t normal. He turned to drugs and alcohol, which became a life-altering, brain-killing addiction. He started to drink his trauma away while simultaneously digging himself into a hole of regret. He had support, but nothing, no one, could erase what he had endured the past ten years. If he couldn’t erase it, at least he could numb it.

He’s never gone into depth about getting out of rehab and becoming clean. I only know he’s proud because he smiles when he talks about it now. He’s in such a better place that he can casually drink a beer now. I think that’s awesome.

On Sunday’s Neil is a part of a veteran golf league at Granite Links in Quincy, MA. He explains to me all of the different strokes in golf, the different clubs you use, the scoring system, and sometimes he even teaches me when work is slow. He brings in all his clubs, and we use a cardboard box he marks with a sharpie to show where my club should skid against the ground for the perfect hit. He says I’m a natural.

He gave me a book once that laid beneath our cigarette shelves. It is a book about philosophy and a Buddha. It is a book I never had time to read. He tells me that after he came back from Afghanistan and after he became clean, he was trained as a yoga and meditation instructor. In Afghanistan, when he was teaching people to fight and kill, he wanted to teach peace. I think a lot about him telling me that. I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard in my life besides “I love you.” 

Neil and I had a lot of other conversations. He explained to me how my ex-boyfriend’s best friend had a crush on me. He could just tell, man-to-man. We filled up a random old couple's coffee pot with a creamer they bought from the Walgreens across the street. He told me if I ever wanted to smoke weed for the first time, he was the expert. He showed me pictures of the weed growing in his house. He told me his spirit animals are sharks and owls. He loves tracking sharks on the Cape Cod Shore. He told me if I ever get in a tussle with a shark to punch them in the nose, but he tells me that that strategy wouldn't work on him; they’re just spiritually connected. We gawked over the cuteness of his pitbull. We watched the Red Sox. He watched my college orientation videos with me and joked about the alcoholism one, and gave me words of advice about the sexual assault prevention videos. He told me he’ll always be the first to beat someone up if they hurt me and points to the bat below our register. We laughed, but I know he wouldn’t hesitate to protect me. He always had so much to say and, while at times I honestly just wanted to bask in my sweat in front of my cigarettes, I was never bored around him. And I could say anything around him.

My hardest goodbyes before college were at the J&S Mobil gas station, a ten minute walk from my house. A little confusing, as I only spent three months here in comparison to most of my fifteen years worth of farewells. But I knew why. This bubble of blue-collared conservative workers where the walls were lined with Blue Lives Matter flags, Second Amendment quotes, and Trump memorabilia, was surprisingly where I grew the most. I want to remember the awkward moments when Neil starts ranting about how important guns are for our country or when the 80 year old man wobbles in and asks if he’s my husband, or when the smell of weed he reeks of causes me to get dizzy and I have to surplus the air with Febreze. 

Neil makes me patriotic, not for war, or killing, or fighting other places to put us on top, but patriotic for the voices and the stories our country holds. For the opportunity for an underage girl who knows nothing about automobiles to sit in a sweaty booth and sell cigarettes to the moms she grew up with (who make her keep the secret about their addiction), and talk to people about their lives for six hours every Saturday. Neil lived: he felt and he lost and he loved. And he loves a lot now. His story is far from beautiful. It’s full of hatred, but his ability to tell it somehow brought much more beauty into my life. He inspires me to be a little deranged, and maybe not be on the frontline, but let myself get blown up and laugh about it and then mend it and forgive myself and go back to the wobbly stool I sat on twenty years before.