Barbara Esgalhado
Kifigeledjo N. 13
Shrouded
Response

Version 1.0
Amanda Miska
Inspiration piece

In the beginning, they wrote letters from one coast to the other. She told him the worst of it, all the ugly and strange, the old bruises and the long-buried secrets, and he comforted her with his own tales of love-gone-wrong, of hurts that still hurt.

It feels like we’ve known each other forever, they agreed. She imagined a split screen of the two of them smiling wistfully at the pages in their hands.

Bu they knew only pieces. Versions.

It feels like I’ve known (this version of) you forever, they should have said. This is the version I want. This is the version I love.

***

But people in three-dimensions packed into four walls cannot maintain a single version.

When they moved in, just days after their first kiss, fuck, fight, they started to meet other versions they didn’t like. They brought them out of each other like exorcisms. An angry drunk who slammed doors. A teenage boy who mindlessly played video games for hours, taking up every inch of sofa. A little girl who hid her crying face in books. A skilled eye-roller. A heavy-sigher.

She tried to salvage the man that she loved from beneath the rubble of the men that she’d grown tired of. That first best version. The one that had wooed her into crossing a country. But she couldn’t find him. The other men were everywhere, bumping into her, leaving bruises without apology.

“What happened to you?” his Version 1.0 asked one night in bed when she was turned away.

He pressed the bruise, no longer himself. She winced.

“I don’t know,” she said, pulling the blankets back over her skin. “Sometimes I’m careless.”

She was not her Self either. Her Version 1.0 was taking a walk around the block in her slippers with a cigarette. Some nights she didn’t come home at all.

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Barbara Esgalhado
from the Kafigeledjo Series
Inspiration Piece

The Tarot Reader
Amanda Miska
Response

Her friends confess to moving the Ouija board planchette, applying more pressure and direction to control the movements to their own whims. The fortunes in the cookies from the Golden Wok have devolved into inane wisdoms, lucky numbers, and random language lessons. And the Magic 8 Ball has gone blurry-blue. Newspaper horoscopes say vague things about happiness, about paying attention, about “next steps.” Nothing worked anymore. Everything was broken and without magic.

Her grandmother tsked at her tarot deck splayed out on the living room floor, saying that to try to predict the future or divine what someone else thought of you was “like trying to rhyme with orange.”

She was 17 with a smart mouth and a hopeless crush on a boy.

“Orange Borange,” she said as she turned over another card onto the shaggy brown carpet. The Queen of Cups.

And her grandmother said, “That’s not a real word.”

“I made it up.”

She flipped through her tarot guide, skimming the description, nodding her head.

“Just because you made it up, that doesn’t make it real.”

The girl flipped over the third card, The Emperor. She flipped through the book again. She sighed, slid the cards back together, reshuffled the deck, and started all over.

She would deal until she got the answer she wanted.

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Note:  All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it.  Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and writing permission fro the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Caroline Evey, “back to you”
Inspiration Piece

Almost Whole
by Amanda Miska
Response

He is leaving again, and it’s times like these that I’m glad the heart isn’t just a metaphor for the part of us that loves someone.  Because if the heart was the only  thing that kept us alive, the metaphysical heart, I would be long dead, as beaten and broken and opened as mine has been.

Sometimes it almost seems easier that way: to die rather than suffer the anguish of loves lost. Maybe Romeo and Juliet had it right back in the day (even though we call them extremists in our literature classrooms). And they were only teenagers.  I’m 30 years old and still find it hard to bear any kind of loss with dignity. No one remembers the girl who cries in the back of the cab, who soothes herself with pizza and glossy magazines and new shades of hair dye and TV shows with heroines half her age.

There is nothing grand about modern love—not in this digital age of Facebook profiles and nude text messages.  Great romances are rare. We all know too much about each other, but all the wrong things.  The life that goes on inside us, the part no one else can see, it is burying itself deeper and deeper until we’re lucky to find it ourselves—let alone allow another person to plumb those depths and come out on the other side and decide to stay.  It takes superhuman courage.

And I don’t know why, but suddenly I am the lucky one.  I have not been a good enough person to call him a blessing. I have not done enough good in the world to call him my fate.  But I have found this one, this one who takes the ache away. This one who has seen all there is to see of me and chose to keep looking.

It’s his hand against my cheek, my skin flushing back into his palm. The commotion inside of me stills.  The world outside of me slows down and softens. One moment, a single touch, and that is all:  we are suspended in some place where we just exist, without words—or maybe we are the words on some blank page, and we are becoming this story.  And it is realer and more romantic than anything else. It is transcendent, this thing our hearts do, called love.

Usually, disappearing is bad.  But when he reaches for me and everything fades away, it is good. It is the only place where I feel that goodness is possible in this world, in that space between two people as it goes from an expansive plain to a tiny sliver of light. Almost whole: that’s as close as we can get.

Cinthia Lozano
Self-Deceit
Inspiration Piece

Jezebel
by Amanda Miska
Response

Who’s seen Jezebel?/She was born to be the woman we could blame/Make me beast half as brave/I’d be the same…  -Jezebel, Iron & Wine

 If you stare at the ground long enough, it will seem to rise to meet you, and if you lie in the grass looking up at the stars long enough, they will seem to fall down on you.
If you look at yourself in the mirror long enough, you’ll begin to see the cracks, what’s behind the smile, the small droop in the eyes, hair that badly needs to be washed–or stroked.

We spent too much time alone, but we were always finding ourselves in one-on-one situations. In hindsight, maybe we were making them. The last two hanging in the library, prepping for an exam. The last two at the bar, tossing back shots of whiskey. The only two of our group parked half a mile away in the upper parking lot of the university. We talked like old friends, even though we were new ones. There was electricity in the pauses. Every night seemed to end with our faces close enough to touch, waiting on a train platform or by an open car door in a dimly lit lot.
“Kiss me,” I would say.
“I can’t,” he’d say, then–correcting himself, “I won’t.”
“Just once, just so we know what it’s like.”
“No.”
“But you want to,” I’d say, more a statement than a question.
Silence was always his response.

We sang off-key late into the night, the last of our crew at crowded local kareoke bar. Slightly sweaty and tired, we plopped down next to each other on a dirty sofa in the back of the bar. I opened my purse to get out a smoke and noticed my cigarettes–and wallet–were gone. I chased down the bartender, asking him to leave a detailed note for the manager in case my things were recovered, then began to cry. I excused myself to the restroom, and when I returned, he was waiting in the same spot on the couch. The music was loud, so he waved me over. The music got even louder, so we sat close, thigh to thigh, and had to talk even closer.
I said, “I feel so stupid. I’m sorry.”
He leaned in and pressed his lips to my forehead.
“There. You got your kiss,” he said in my ear.
“Take me home with you,” I said. He shook his head, then handed me a small wad of cash.
“For a cab. Be safe,” he said, standing up to distance himself from my body.
“I already have a brother,” I told him, standing up and grabbing him by his shirt to pull him even closer to me. He pushed me away, and I stumbled backwards in my heels, landing right back on the couch, watching him practically run out of the bar.

The next night, I found his car where it always was, parallel parked 12 inches from the curb in front of his apartment he shared with his wife. The apartment he almost kissed me in. At two in the morning, it wasn’t so much decision-making as it was pure impulse. The bar of soap and a small bucket of water sat on the floor of the passenger seat. I pulled into the empty space behind him. The pure white bar felt firm, but slippery in my hand. I held it like a child with a piece of sidewalk chalk and scrawled ASSHOLE on his windshield. I took a step back to admire my work, then got into my car and drove away.

I hadn’t felt such calm in months.

He called the next day and asked me to meet him for coffee immediately, his smooth voice like a siren’s song to my lonely heart.  I agreed.
“Was it you?” he said, as soon as I sat down.
I nodded, eyes focused on a stain on the coffee shop rug.
“I knew it. I never, I mean NEVER want to see you again. Ever. We can’t be friends. We can’t be anything.”
“No, I…”
“I almost lost it. I had to tell her it was a random act of vandalism.”
Her. His wife. He was my him, but she was his her. I knew this, I always knew this, but sometimes when we were both working and our eyes locked across the table, I could see his uncertainty. I wanted to excavate it, dig deeper, lay him bare.

I said, “I’m sorry. I feel so stupid.” I reached over to touch his hand. I couldn’t help it.
And he pushed my hand away, got up and left.

I sipped my tepid coffee, all the while watching the door. I said a little prayer, then felt ridiculous for doing so, as though a righteous God would summon a man to return to the woman who would cause him to stumble, like telling Adam, Go eat that fruit she’s holding out to you, man.

Hours or maybe days later, I finally went back home to my echoing walls and cold sheets.

Love is confusing, but lust has a one track mind and wears blinders. Combine the two and the explosion is inevitable, like being possessed, an out-of-body experience. You approach the ledge and jump, the sweet feeling of vertigo washing over you until you’re simultaneously drowning in dark water and looking down over the edge in dry clothes, wanting to rescue yourself.

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Amy Souza
Inspiration Piece

Snow Day
by Amanda Miska
Response Piece

The street is perfectly still and white against the backdrop of a pallid sky. No school buses, no skidding tires, no barking dogs, no angry car horns. It’s barely morning–the street lights have turned off. There are no tire tracks and no one has been up yet to scrape or shovel.  I imagine the joy and relief of school-aged kids, peeking out their windows before their alarms go off. I imagine lovers pulling each other closer under the blankets, cold toes against warm legs.  Fires are crackling, coffee is brewing, plans are changing.  My favorite part of snow days used to be sleeping in, but I didn’t know I was missing this–the beautiful silence, the pure white world, everything so uncomplicated.

I light up a cigarette to warm up and get to thinking about you.  The smoke and my breath cloud around me like an apparition. In the crispness of the air, I am wide awake.  I lace up my boots and take a few sips of liquid heat (a combination of coffee and whiskey) from my thermos.  I shovel out the driveway and sidewalk, cheeks red with the cold and exertion, arms burning, sweat beading up on my skin despite the temperature.  The township has yet to plow, so despite my hard work, I’m still stuck.

In the middle of the street, ankle deep in snow, I light up another cigarette, breathe in deeply, and take off my knitted cap–a handmade gift from you that I can’t throw away because it’s useful. I can just hear you joking, “You could send it to freezing kids in Antarctica.” You could make me laugh like no one else.  That’s what made me want you. We met at a bar and talked for two hours straight.  I took you home, you moved in, and we survived on sex and laughter and canned soups.

The start of love is always simple. You can live off the newness for months, even years. Familiarity: that’s what complicates.

In autumn, your face fell as the leaves did. I could sense you pulling away. I’d ask you what was wrong, and most days you’d change the subject with a story.  You told me about your elementary school Thanksgiving play when you had to be the turkey.  That was the year you made the connection that turkeys died so they could be eaten, and you became a vegetarian and refused to be part of the show. But your parents bribed you to do it just for that evening by promising to buy you a hamster.

“What did you name the hamster?” I asked, but heard only your soft snoring in return.

I don’t know where you are now, likely in another city every night on tour, completely untethered and free, just like you wanted. I wonder if there is snow where you are, if you are cold, if you are lonely, if you still wear my wool socks you stole the first winter we were together.  I would make you laugh, prancing around the kitchen in my snow overalls and nothing else.  I built us great fires to read by.  I made hot chocolate that was fifty percent marshmallows.  You always said you hated winter, but I said I’d make you love it. And I tried really hard.

Spring always brightened you.  You smiled more, and we made love more.  Maybe it was the sunshine, the potential for life, all of those green buds like promises.  I liked it when you were so alive–maybe I was better to you then, kinder.  I was never good at dealing with your sadness. I wanted to come into the darkened room and tell you, “Just stop being sad,” but I didn’t occupy that space in your mind, and I knew it wasn’t that simple for you.  In springtime, that haunted space got smaller, and there was more room for me.  I brought you flowers, and you kissed me instead of waiting for my kisses, and we’d ride our bikes through downtown on Sunday afternoons.

You left me in the summer, but in my memory, that day is always painted like winter.  Your lips were icy against my cheek and then you were gone.  You said you were too young to make a commitment, you wanted to see the world, you didn’t want to have regrets. I see now that it wasn’t sudden–you’d slowly been unraveling every season–but in the moment, I was so stunned I didn’t even respond with a single word. I couldn’t stop you anyway. When you were determined to do something, you did it.  It was something I admired about you, but of course, now I loathed.

The next door neighbors’ boys come out into their yard in full snow gear, toting a toboggan and plastic saucer.  I see their mom wave from the window.   She sees me, and I lift my gloved hand in greeting, guiltily stomping out my cigarette butt. They are already wrestling each other into the deeper drifts, laughing and shouting.  Another neighbor, two houses down, scrapes the ice off his car in an expensive suit tucked into heavy boots.  I can see the plow lights several blocks down on the main road.  Soon it will all be ash and salt and slush.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying
or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or
artist is strictly prohibited.

Brian McDonald, Durick Library Student

Inspiration Piece

Flesh and Blood
by Amanda Miska

Response

1. Flesh
Jane was always larger than life:  big blue doe eyes and a heart of gold.  She was the pretty one; I was the smart one.  So people said and so it was.  People like categories.  They make things easy.  Check a box, know the answer. Don’t think, and whatever the hell you do, don’t feel. I wasn’t not pretty.  She wasn’t not smart.  But like a prophecy uttered by a well-intentioned fairy godmother, we became what we were called.

I came home from school with a personality inventory.  In health class, we were exploring future careers that might suit us.
“What am I good at?” I asked, chewing on my pencil eraser.
“You’re good at being weird,” Jane said.
My mom swallowed a laugh.  She thought I didn’t see, but I did.  She swatted Jane playfully.  Jane looked proud of herself.  I went up to my room and put on my headphones, blaring The Cranberries, wanting to scream.

They watched TV; I read books.  They went to McDonald’s; I experimented with vegetarianism.  They went to church; I consulted my horoscope (Aquarius) and Magic Eight Ball each morning before school.  I was a great big angsty teen cliché, but at the time, it didn’t feel that way.  I felt everything. And everything hurt.

My mom put Jane in pageants from the time she was six.  Her hair was a thick and wavy blonde and she had a natural pink flush to her cheeks.  Jane was always runner up, which she blamed on my mom not being as dedicated (read as: psycho) as the other pageant moms.  I was most jealous the time she won a Caboodle full of cosmetics.  She tried to share them with me (she was kindhearted; I was a bitch), but I refused her charity.

I could stand to lose a few pounds, my doctor told my mom at my pre-high school physical.  We stopped at the grocery store on the way home and my mom bought things like chicken breast and broccoli and skim milk.  I had four boxes of Little Debbie snack cakes hidden under my bed: sweet, sweet solace.

I begged my mom to let me bleach my hair.  Like early Madonna.  Or Courtney Love.
“Absolutely not.  Bleach fries your hair.  Kills it,” she said.
“Hair’s already dead,” I said.  She heaved that sigh that I read to mean, Sometimes I wish she’d been born mentally challenged.  Or mute.

Later, at a friend’s sleepover, I dyed it anyway and was grounded for a month. My mom bought a box of L’Oreal Light Brown at the store and made me dye it back, but the hair color combined with the bleach turned my head the color of murky coffee.  I’d never felt so ugly, so I asked for a bob, even though all the girls at school kept their hair long and all the boys liked it that way.

2. Blood
I marry a boy from my hometown who I don’t meet until college (where I am [surprise!] a liberal arts major).  I get a job right out of school [this is a fiction piece].  We buy a house.  And a dog.  We shop at Lowe’s.  We talk about children.  We have dinner parties.  We don’t have sex.
I stray.  It is guilty and empowering all at once.  It is a drug.  I try the various methods of saying no:  the good excuse (I have other plans.), the broken record (No. No. Nooo.), but they don’t work.  He tells me, You’re so pretty. So, so pretty, as he kisses me up against the wall in the work stairwell.

No one is surprised when we divorce:  There she goes fucking up her life again.  Never expected that to last.  She’s just not cut out for it.  She’s never happy.
I remember how, the night before the wedding, when we slept in our childhood bedroom, Jane had whispered, “Why are you doing this?” and I’d pretended to be asleep.

I get a few tattoos and a facial piercing.  I think they make me look tough, so I can fake it when I don’t feel it.  I lose 30 pounds on a cigarette and coffee diet.  No one tells me I look good. It’s all:  You could stand to gain a few pounds and You’re wasting away.

I go out dancing every weekend.  I like the way it feels to move my hips, the slight sheen of sweat that forms on my skin like dew, the way it feels to have eyes on me, the way I pretend not to notice.

I meet a boy.  He breaks my heart, but not without playing with it first, making it pound when he’s near and making it drop when he doesn’t call when he says he will.  He says he just can’t commit.  He stops calling altogether. He moves to San Francisco with the girl after me.  They live together there.  I see her photo on Facebook.  She is so pretty.

Jane is a lesbian.  No one can believe it—myself included.  She could have any man on the planet, yet she wants a woman?  Typical Jane.

Jane is a lesbian and suddenly, I’m the golden child.  Mom calls me several times a week, wondering what to “do.”  She uses the word butch once—sounds like something my dad said that she’s just repeating—and I correct her, like I always do.
“Butch is more the masculine half.  Jane’s definitely the femme in the relationship.”
“Relationship?” my mom asks.  “You call that a relationship?”
I don’t call it anything because I have no idea what I’m talking about.  I haven’t seen Jane in months.  I don’t know if she’s seeing someone, but I like to let my mother think I do.  And I don’t know shit about relationships.  I date boy after boy after boy. If you can call it dating.  I never make it past the third date. My friends say it’s because I always let them sleep with me on the first date.  I think it’s because they can see it in my eyes, the longing, like a stray dog that shows up on the back porch:  Feed me.  Love me. Pity does not a relationship make, nor is it an aphrodisiac.

When Jane shows up at my door late one Wednesday night, I just hug her.  We stand in my doorway silently holding onto each other for five minutes.  I step back to let her in.  She is larger than life, she is beautiful, my big sister, my flesh and blood.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.