ed cents · “okay, that’s great, mr. comedian, but i still haven’t seen my babies yet.” he...

ED CENTSGOSHEN COLLEGE CREATIVE ARTS JOURNAL

Red Cents is sponsored by the Goshen College English

Department. The ideas and language are written and

i[b[Yj[Z�Xo�ijkZ[dji�WdZ�Ze�dej�e¥Y_Wbbo�h[fh[i[dj�Goshen College.

Copyright 2013, Goshen College, Goshen, IN.

Cover print by Jess Sprunger

Mary Roth, Editor

Emma Brooks, Design Editor

Rikki Entrekin

Lavonne Shetler

Lauren Stoltzfus

John Miller

Hayley Brooks

IjW¢

IjW¢

Jessica Baldanzi

Ann Hostetler

Faculty Advisers

Student Board

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Sophie Lapp

Au Naturale

Sophie Lapp is a senior Bible major. She likes reading fiction, making lists, and watching British TV shows. When she grows up, Sophie dreams of becoming a Pirate Queen.

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Nikita Zook is a senior Social Work major. She particularly enjoys Sunday afternoons, feminists, and the color blue.

We don’t end at our skins,we live with wisps of ourselvestrailing along behind us,attached with invisible bits of string and rope,tied to our wrists and ankles.

I am certain they exist,these wisps, I am sure,bound so close, but stretching out andsifting the world as it rushes by, so thatdepending on where we arehow we feelwho we are with,we see and know differently, so thatno moment is the sameand each sorrow or thrill is some new miracle.

Nikita Zook

Wisps

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Their babies are born early, too early, much too early, as though the amniotic sea of the in-between had no more room for another formation. The first baby comes out before he has fully landed, one of his feet still stuck in his mother. His father stands close, huddled as against a brisk wind, hands over his cheeks, cheeks sucked in.

The second baby comes within minutes, a girl this time. She gasps for air, her rounded gums still forming and open as if to swallow the room, and her father thinks, Oh god, so tiny, how can they be so tiny? Immediately they are taken from the room in blue-skinned gloves, the tiny boy and the tiny girl, barely rinsed, to be put on the air that will save them, the breath of cold machines that will pump them through the night.

“Bring them back,” says Julie, hands still shielded around breasts only beginning to fill with milk.

Her dark hair is spread in place of the pillow, swollen body now lapsed with hollow skin. Two attendants are at work with tweezers and string to sew up the mouth of the incision close to her left hip. She doesn’t care what she feels. She is numb and shaken from the waist down, her skin made of invisible plastic with only the faintest whisper of touches. The only way she knows something is going on down there is to look, and to look is to see lots of blood, her own, the love of her babies poured out—that was where they came from, that was where they had been only a moment before. Where the hell had they taken them and why?

Kate Stoltzfus

Two

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She isn’t sure how many drugs they’ve stuffed her with but she knows her mouth isn’t numb and her arms are empty and someone better give her a reason. Every mother, if not given something to hold after it’s all over with, senses something isn’t right.

The doctor looks at her and peels off his rubber gloves before slipping on new ones.

“The babies were born very small, so they’ve been taken to the ICU so we can get them some help. If you like, someone can wheel you down to see them after you’re all stitched up.”

“Oh, I’m stitched,” Julie says. “See me? All in one piece, ready to go. James, let’s go. Grab an end.”

“Baby, we gotta wait. Still a landmine down there,” James says. He feels faint looking at the hole in his wife’s stomach, so he looks at her eyes instead, full of holes themselves.

“What did I tell you about the humor right now?”“You know it just comes naturally, mi amor.” He runs a hand

through the hair on her head, all soaked with sweat under its own weight.

“Okay, that’s great, Mr. Comedian, but I still haven’t seen my babies yet.”

He doesn’t say anything and takes her hand. She has always had great aptitude for patience, even before they knocked her with pills and anesthesia. He feels the room pulse, get small and then round, as he stands on his feet for what must be the fortieth hour of the day. His shoes might have holes in them. She was so brave for the first few hours, when the doctor said they might be able to hold off her labor, and then brave when they said the babies had to come, and then someone switched on the crying as soon as they got into surgery.

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“They’re not ready; I’m not ready,” she said to him, her face close to his ears, her mouth pressed hot to his cheek.

“I know,” James said, because there wasn’t much else to say. She was right, no one was ready, they hadn’t even packed a

bag, they hadn’t even bought the right crib yet, the shower was supposed to be next week, the babies were still probably growing eyelashes, for god’s sake, and she’d only just finished with the morning sickness, first trimester his ass.

He’d held that mop of hair over the toilet bowl for hours, and now again he was holding that beautiful hair, the hair he’d noticed across campus, the hair that made him fail gen. ed. geometry, starring at the black of her head instead of starring at the black of the board, and now here they were having babies, grown up all of a sudden. For the past several hours, he’d felt very small and young, and wished he could curl up inside his mother’s closet like he used to do, behind the curtain of cotton dresses.

Instead he squeezed Julie’s hand and tried to act like he knew what was going on. It was going to be fine. It would all be completely fine. Technology was at its peak these days. They could do anything. Doctors were walking around with iPads sewn into their uniforms. Surely they could make their babies breathe until they could do it on their own. He had no doubt now. They were going to be fine.

He would go see for himself soon, find the room where they had been taken, but for now, he could picture it in his mind, large and expansive and blue, the machines noiseless and airy, the whole room open and light like a lung, and the tiny girl and the tiny boy that were his, theirs, in small plastic boxes, as though they were eggs about to be hatched. The boxes would be warm

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and lit red like an eyelid from within, the babies peaceful and sleeping and tubes pumping them healthy, injecting skin and life and blood and oxygen into their arms and legs. Nurses like the ones he used to watch on General Hospital would surround them, laying cool hands over their bodies, dabbing lotion on their wizened limbs. There would be no more blood or whatever that fluid was that came out on them, their perfect arched noses clear, breathing without the weight of tubes.

James can see Julie starting to come around again; she even lets him kiss her on the forehead near the line where her gorgeous hair begins. He runs a finger across that line, slick with sweat, thinks how much he loves her, how much he loves those humans that came out of her, how he has had to pee for a good solid hour and hasn’t been able to slip from her sight.

“Hey,” he says, and gets down next to her. “A couple more minutes and we’ll get to go see them, right? The doctors are taking care of them right now, getting them cleaned up for us.”

She starts to nod. “You okay?”She nods again. “No. Yes. Yes, I think so.”She stares up at the ceiling now, as the assistants put their

tools away. The room they’re in has four thick blue curtains drawn around them, a surgery room, bigger than the one they’d been brought to first where she lay hunched in the corner and wouldn’t get on the bed because of the pain. She thought maybe if she made herself small the pain would shrink too. That’s what she’d whispered to him.

James can see a pool of sun leaking around the frames of the curtains, sliding toward the bed. There is a big gray light above

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them, like a shower head, that had come on full blast when the surgery began. He thought he might pass out, but thank god he didn’t.

“Hey, would you want some coffee? While we wait?”She tries to turn on her side and winces, then yawns. The

pain medication they’ve just put into her IV, the weird blue liquid that he imagines sidling through his wife’s veins, has started a tremor of peacefulness in her forehead.

“Oh, you can just go get some. I know your angle.” She crooks an eyebrow and closes her eyes. “I feel nauseous.”

He kisses her again. “I’ll be right back,” he says. He goes in search of coffee and finds a machine down at the

other end of the corridor. Other babies are crying in faraway places. The cries sound too guttural, too large, to be coming from his kids. They need to get those kids some names. The coffee spurts out a sickly grayish color, but James gets a cup for Julie anyway. She might wake up and find her addiction is back.

He helps Julie get wheeled from surgery to a small room, where another curtain shields them from a couple that sit close in bed with a seriously fat baby. James wants to shield Julie’s eyes when they go past. He doesn’t want her to see something they don’t have quite yet. He’s pretty sure he’d rather their twins be born with a million fat rolls than be born barely there.

The light rolls over them slowly as the morning settles. Julie asks him about the babies every ten minutes when she isn’t asleep, and when he falls asleep around her knees, she wakes him up to ask again, just as his lids are closing. “Go find out what you can,” she says after a nap, her face jutted with pillow creases.

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“Go see how they are. Come back and tell me every little detail, every hand curl, every little knuckle. Memorize, Coffee Boy.”

He finds the elevator marked with ICU and an arrow and rides it up. The hospital is eerily quiet in the late afternoon, no activity, all the sterile carts and people in a haze, walking as armies down the hall.

Hospitals make people into instruments that all look alike. Any notion of life outside these walls is lost. Everyone becomes the same, slowed down, adrenaline sped up, whether here for a dying relative or a body sliding into the world, too big or too small or just right. He thinks of the empty nursery at home, three walls painted yellow, the other only primed.

James reaches a glass-windowed room just past reception and it looks nothing like he thought. A dozen babies the size of birds are hooked and tangled with tubes. One baby in a corner, cocooned in a white blanket with feet, is sleeping with shiny lids, her finger curled inside her mouth.

A few doctors are huddled around some beds in the corner, doing combat with needles and unattached tubes. Best not to look. He focuses on the sleeping baby instead, then on the three blue-dressed boys in the beds in a row. They all look the same, genderless except for the color. Odd how someone decided pink meant a girl and blue meant a boy.

He feels an odd heaviness in his chest that preludes weeping, and presses his hand to the glass, leaving prints on purpose so his kids know his mark, know that he and Julie are here and holding them and loving them from outside. Let the machines do their work, and he’ll just send love like it’s going to go through the wire hooked up to his little boy’s chest, right there, Baby Boy 27E.

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He walks back to elevator and cries softly, wipes his hand against his sleeve, gets in the elevator and loses it for a moment, then pulls himself together. They’re fine, he thinks again. A little while longer and they’re going to be down here with us, or we’ll be going up in scrubs like the doctor said, when Julie stops hurting, and we’ll get to hold them suited up with surgical gloves and masks like we’re playing dress-up in practice for real life.

Kate Stoltzfus is a third-year English Writing and Journalism double major. She prefers extremely black ink pens and wouldn’t use a pencil unless you paid her.

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Aardvarks waltzed among the daisies,before the First King marched across Earth,calling out to the others, “I will remain here forever.”Drifting smells of flowers invade the kingdom, andeven the King dies in the castle.Friends push friends into the bloody path of smells,growing oaks and elms to commemorate where the dead have fallen.

Howling, the vicious Queen wolf stalks the aardvarks.Insomnia claims another victim, for fear is dominantjust before the Queen wolf pounces.Kings fall before the daisies, bewitched by withering stalks and swirling petals.

Long live the bottom-dwellers: the new Kings!May they conquer the world likenever before. The gray waters churn and bash shipsopulent captains steal and thrust against the damned waves,perceiving the hook-nosed devil in their midst.

Quiet! screams the sky to the verdant land below:Righteous honor belongs to the Queen wolf !She is the only child of the First King and the sky.Turn away from the sin of the bottom-dwellers,unflinching as you praise the true masters.Vanish into the void; follow the daisies as they pass.

Rikki Entrekin

The Z of A

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Rikki Entrekin is a senior English Writing major from the Goshen area. He enjoys reading fantasy novels and has a tattoo of the Deathly Hallows on his left calf. Poetry is also enjoyable for him.

Winter has arrived, bringing sleep to all exceptXXI wolves who cry out in unison, to scare the Kings in their squalid tombs,Yellow! Blue! Gold! they screech to the heavens,zealous converts to the antiquated religion of the aardvarks.

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The bulb in the corner shines fromits teal Ball jar holder, lighting Emily,who sits with mukluk foot under sweatpant leg,her back to our pineapple printed couch,who holds me in her ever-sinking fluff,and we both watch Emily work.

She twirls her ring,made with love but too big fornurse, guitar, about-to-be-married fingersand this starts us thinking,as pineapple couch and I are often apt to do:

Lamp-lit friends who sit in our roomsstand to hug goodbye sooner than we would ever like:yawning, stretching, zipping coats to leave beforedripping dishes dry or hunger pangs strike again—

Because yes, I do need to know about Islamand wedding colors and the class of pregnant high schoolersthat Emily is teaching not to smoke.

We, pineapple couch and I, watch her stand,stretching towards the fluorescent sky,pulling on blue sweatshirt, pulling off mukluks,fixing chair, situating hair, and we knowwhat’s going to happen next.

Lavonne Shetler

Pineapple Couch

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The fast walk out through thick wooden door,lamp light too much for our eyesnow that no one else is hereto help absorb the glare.

Lavonne Shetler is a fourth-year English and Secondary Education major. She enjoys co!ee, Sherlock, and looking at cats on the internet.

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Emma Gerig

Duck Tales (excerpt)

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Emma Gerig is a third-year art major and really likes ducks.

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1.

Asphyxiation: Deficiency of oxygen to the point of death. Don’t we all learn to swim in fear of this?

2.

Warm-Up 400 EASY 4X100 KICK 4X50 DRILLS 6X25 SPRINT 200 BREATHING CONTROL

I feel the plastic tread at the starting block like sandpaper beneath my toes. Goosebumps burst on my skin as I slice into the 76-degree water. Assuming the streamline position, I hold the water as a friend, lacking nothing until forced to come up for the cut of air over my shoulder.

3.

In other pools across the nation, Olympians prepare for Beijing. Rebecca Soni lifts dumbbells in the weight room, bulking up her shoulders that will pump her to the breaststroke world record. Michael Phelps flutter kicks out of a flip-turn in his morning swim drills as he fantasizes about gold medals.

Grace Parker

Breathing Control

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The swimmers labor and strengthen and hydrate. NASA hopes to give them a further boost—the LZR racing suit nears completion. Mimicking a shark’s slick body, the suit enables swimmers to shave seconds from their best times.

I readjust my own practice suit between kick sets. In the dark of my closet at 5 a.m., I had grabbed the tie-dyed size 26 from three years ago. My hip bones jab out from the seam and red lines crisscross my shoulder blades where the straps press into my skin. I return to the muffle of underwater limbs.

4.

After swim practice, back at home, I answer the ringing phone. The receiver presses my hair into my face, the reek of chlorine reminding me I still have to shower. I don’t recognize Grandma’s choked voice and ask who is calling.

“Let me talk to your dad,” she breathes. For serious matters, I always put Dad on the line. Up until then, serious matters had only meant potential customers for Dad’s house-painting business, requests from State Farm Insurance or AARP, and politicians pleading for a vote.

Today, a new type of serious enters through the phone. Dad’s hand covers his forehead as he listens to Grandma. He slumps onto the kitchen nook bench. The phone beeps as he hangs up.

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For five minutes, we are silent. He peers up from his hands and reminds me that Grandma, Grandpa and Uncle Kenny are in Colorado at Rainbow Lake for vacation.

Then he gives me an image: Grandma wakes up and looks for Kenny fishing on the lake. From her porch, she sees the boat, but no Kenny.

The paramedics found him in the water within the hour. Floating, his breath long vanquished by the water.

5.

A few weeks after the accident, Dad moved his studio upstairs. Halved milk jugs housed his pens. A shoebox, his paint supply. A slab of wood, his table. He began to revamp sketches from past phases, darkening lines and filling in new stories. His pens etched while we watched episodes of Sherlock Holmes or Star Trek with him. We liked the shows, but we liked watching him work more.

Sometimes he asked my opinion, holding the pad up to the lamp. I’d pose with my hand on my chin and pretend to be a critic when, really, I loved every drawing. Later, he’d descend the basement stairs to his real studio and douse his drawings in melted beeswax. Encaustic, he explained: art with wax.

When he pulls them out of the electric skillet, they appear as

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translucent underwater landscapes. The images paralyzed yet alive in the swirling wax layers.

6.

Uncle Kenny worked as hairstylist and lived as a bachelor. As a hairstylist, he told jokes and gave discounts often. He shared his salon with three women, all with bright dye lacing their trendy cuts. I used to imagine him giving them haircuts after all the clients had gone. They’d sit with their hair spreading in the sink as his fingers massaged conditioner into their scalps. Closing their eyes, they’d no longer see the designer aerosol cans or the bottles of blue Barbicide. They’d slump into the cup of his hands, trusting.

Sometimes, during the holidays, he dragged Grandma’s retro salon chair into the kitchen and set up shop. Instead of washing, he’d soak our heads with a spray bottle. He would hot-iron Grandma’s pile of hair, trim my aunt’s straight ends, and refuse again to give my mom another perm. On the floor, my cousin and I would devour his hairstylist magazines and ask for every style displayed by the models.

At the end of the makeshift salon-session, before he swept up the hair from the linoleum, he would slip us miniature bottles of Redken. Vinyl glam finish and mega shine spray were our favorites.

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After the accident, we stopped using his products, placing them on our bathroom shelves so we could see them every time we did our hair. We seemed to believe they would bottle up his presence forever.

7.

Main Set 50X3 + 100 (1:10) + 25 SPRINT (Repeat 4X) + 50 SPRINT + 75 SPRINT + 100 SPRINT 3X100 Drag Sets

The challenge of sprints is not to breathe. I let my eyes burn and ignore my egg-salad lunch rolling in my stomach. Just three more strokes. After the flip-turn, I catch up to the girl with the suit covered in big-eyed goldfish. I force the water under me and fly my arms up straight. I refuse to breathe.

My fingers out-touch her and I reward myself with a few breaths before tackling the next 50. I suppose the other challenge of sprints is not to think. But when my cap slips off in the second lap and my hair clogs my mouth, I can’t help it. I stop in the middle of the lane and let the goldfish girl pass me. I forget to swim again.

All I can think of is him, beside the rowboat.

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8.

In Kenny’s house, the hush of the mannequin-heads surrounds us as we open the study door. We hear the ruffle of sheets as Grandma strips Kenny’s bed. We hear the spray of a cleaning agent as Mom attacks the bathroom floor, soiled from a bachelor’s negligence. My cousin’s body presses against my back, pushing me into the room. We leave the door cracked behind us.

The window blind, stuck at an angle and missing a few slats, frames the light that hits the computer, the spread of lidless pens, and the receipts strewn across the desk. Through the glass, the oak leaves’ shadows lace over the boxes of hairspray and barber’s shears on the floor. There, under the windowsill, sit the heads in formation like an army, or a sisterhood. Fifty identical faces stare at us. Their noses, petite; jaw lines, high; lips, pursed. The foremost one sports spiked magenta hair. The ones in the back, with muted browns and even grays, slump against the wall or into the others. Some heads have two different styles on either side of their plastic skulls, looking dismal next to the hanging silk of their sisters.

We slide our knees onto the wood floor beside them; we drop our dust-rags, upsetting tangles of cat-hair in the corner. I choose a blue haired one and rock it in my arms. Its weight tangible, a remnant. I smooth its hair and blow off the dust coating its painted eyes. My cousin removes another and a few others tumble forward, breaking ranks, falling in the grief that cradles the house. We fall too, our tears making flowers on their hair.

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9.

In Beijing, Olympic planners face criticism from all sides. The party committee upsets environmentalists when they decide to implement weather-modification techniques. A base, outside the city, will launch rockets into rain-swelled clouds if they happen to threaten the opening ceremonies. Armed with silver iodide, the rockets will force the clouds to release their water before reaching the city.

The rain, shocked, will fall where the overseers want it to.

10.

Warm-Down 50 DOUBLE ARM BACK 100 BREATHING CONTROL 100 EASY The sprints, the workouts end. My body, hot and stretched like rubber, sinks into the warm-down.

Breathing control—the exercise to train your lungs to expect regular oxygen deprivation. Breathe every three strokes, never less. five, if you can. Hold for three dolphin kicks after the flip-turn.

The breathing pattern dulls the hammering of my pulse against my temple. Closing my eyes, I focus on the drill that propels my swimming and sustains my life.

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11.

I wonder sometimes if the trout heard your heart drum against the cloth of water.

At least, I wondered this before the autopsy told us about your seizure. As you threw your last line into the water, epilepsy came to meet you in the boat, seizing your ability to swim.

I imagine your head slipping into the sink of the lake, trusting the trout coming to hold you after the convulsions, soothing your scalp with the stream of bubbles from their gills, sliding through the riverweeds of your hair.

12.

A year later, Dad hangs a new painting on our living room wall. It is one scene, split between three frames.

In each frame, muted green and grey wax forms pine trees that melt into mountains fed from a lake spanning the bottom. The frames to the left and to the right guide the eye, without conviction, upward—to the dusk of the sky. All is still.

Only in the middle frame is the shadow interrupted by two objects in acrylic. A log fire sits by the shore, dwarfed by the pines. Nearby, a slit in the river mud points to a rowboat parked beside the fire’s glare.

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Together, the fire and the boat inhabit an area of only four square inches in the wall painting. Still, they challenge the shadows that threaten to pull them, with everything else, into the mountains, into the sky, into the water.

Wanting to do something more “practical” her senior year of college, Grace Parker decided to take up creative writing. As it turns out, it has been way more fun than she expected and has made the career path of starving artist more tempting.

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Laurel Woodward is a fourth-year Art major. She can’t resist anything that involves tea, a good book, and a rainy day. If you ask her about her future, she can’t give you a straight answer.

MirageLaurel Woodward

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WavesThe sea of school childrenhas spilled (shut the gates!)

& stretched the distance

betweenhere &

there. -

Wishthat teenage curiosity

wasn’t so loud.

that the boy who can only say “banana” —stringy hair, plastic jacket, “bananer, bananer!”—

would learn a new word& hush, hushon my walk home.

-

Cell PhoneI should have answered—

her voice can break the rhythm of lonely days.-

Becca Kraybill

Wen Hua Lu (Fall)

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Becca Kraybill is a senior English Writing major. She lived in Sichuan Province, China in fall 2011, which has since been an inspiration to her writing, cooking, and thinking.

HappyDog we call “Otis” watches every day from

the hair salon. Fur on his chest likevelvet. (one yawn)

(two yawns)Rolling rolling over.

He licks a moist paw…(yum)

-Lovers

A grandma carrying sleeping infant in straw basketthrough morning rain

-Holy

Steamed buns stack high on the counter—fluffy bean curd, twisted pepper,

melted dough: The market is flushed with smells.

The man sells ginger by the handful (grace)The woman brings machete across fish head (grace)

eateateateateateat (!)-

EveningCandles glow in windowsills

across the valley.Dusk settles in Jincheng.

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Phil Scott is trouble.

Phil Scott

9e¢[[

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Ida Short is a second-year Art major from Iowa. “Symbiotic Friends” explores di!erent types of relationships that may look crazy from an outsider’s perspective.

Ida Short

Symbiotic Friends

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I swear I smelled the summer air,that faint sweet of warmth remainingon dry grass like sun-baked pottery.Of the cicadas pulsing in the background in the midday heat.It smells of dried sun, looks of yellow,like sepia photographscurling from humidity and fingered edgesfrom many a reminiscence.The cool mornings that dissipate quicklyas the warm nights linger, breezesgrazing fingers over sleeveless shouldersand glistening collarbones sitting on porches trying to figure outwhat we are going to do with our livesand when the next rain will be.

I swear I smelled that summer air. Have you ever smelled the aged wood in upstairs rooms of an old house in July?Folding laundry on the floor,watching the red and orange temperatureslob across the Weather Channel map.Of jumping from hay bale to hay bale, avoiding hornets’ nests and falling down.The wet washcloths and no air conditioning

Kristin Martin

Scents of Summer

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Kristin Martin is a senior Biology and Biochemistry double major. She enjoys summer and always prefers to be burning hot rather than freezing cold.

as ever-present perspiration beads are brushednonchalantly from backs of knees and temples.Noon-rays beating down harshly, backs hunchedwhile hands grasp green beans and snap peasfulfilling the chore list and thinking aboutwhat can still become of this timeor if the dog days are already here.

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Jess Sprunger is a child of the arts, born and raised by pencil and paper. She has managed to form lifelong bonds with hot glue and rarely folds under pressure unless making origami.

Jess Sprunger

Jam

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1.

I come from what some would call a “broken” home. I hate that word—“broken.” I have never believed that there is anything about my family that is broken. We aren’t broken. And as a member of this family, I am definitely not broken.

It wasn’t until I was at a Fellowship of Christian Athletes retreat that I heard the word. Two girls were on stage giving their testimonies and said that they came from broken homes. Even though I had never heard the word, I knew that that is what others thought of my home, and that offended me.

Ever since then, I have heard it in other religious settings. The church is broken. We are broken.

I am not broken. My family is unique but it sure isn’t broken.

2.

By the time my mother was my age, she was well into adulthood; she was going to school, on the volleyball team, working, and taking care of me.

My mom had a wonderful relationship with both sides of her family. She would go to Michigan to spend the summers with

A Nickel for Every Assumption, Please Dominque Chew

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her father’s parents and have cold, snowy Christmases with her mother’s family in Pennsylvania.

My mother is bi-racial with an African-American mother and a Caucasian father. She’s the “lucky” kind of bi-racial, though. She has lighter skin, could probably even pass for Hispanic. She has hair the texture of a white person is but it’s curly rather than straight.

I’ve always envied my mother’s hair.

3.

I don’t know much about my dad. My mom told me that the day I was born, he had a basketball game. Supposedly, he played the game of his life. I like to think that I am the reason for that. He was good already, of course. The star of the Bethel College Thresher basketball team with a tall, athletic build, he could jump out of the gym and was the best at playing off fouls. From what I understand, my grandfather was Creole. I have virtually no recollection of ever meeting him and cannot recall ever seeing a picture. I have met my grandmother once and have spoken on the phone with her once. She is a tall woman—that’s probably where my dad gets it—with very light skin. I think she’s from Mississippi, and I’m told that she could have some Native American in her.

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My mom says that I am definitely my father’s child. Sometimes she chuckles as her eyes follow my actions. Everything from my facial expressions to the way that I hold my fork is just like him. My mom is funny like that. She remembers the tiniest details.

4.

My parents never got married. I don’t know what happened between them. I have never wanted to know, and therefore have never asked. It has always been just my mother, myself and a dog at home. I don’t think much of it because that is how it has always been.

I have only seen my parents interact a few times—at my big events like 8th grade promotion and my high school graduation. I don’t have a picture of me and both of my parents together. Not even a baby picture. My mom hates getting her picture taken. I’ll force myself to believe that’s why.

5.

My maternal great grandparents had a connection to the Amish church. The two lived a life of service, like any other good Mennonites, and spoke Pennsylvania Dutch at the dinner table. I was lucky enough to know them and even remember meeting my great-great grandfather at his 100th birthday party.

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At Christmas, we make “Grandma Cookies,” a famous recipe of my great-great grandmother’s. The cookies are special because there is brown sugar and sour cream in them. They are extra soft and very brown in color. She always put the frosting on the flat bottom part of the cookie rather than on the rounded top.This recipe is for Wyse family members only. Even though I look different than the rest of my cousins, I belong to the Wyse family.

6. Ida Stokes is my great grandmother; an African-American woman with eight children and who-knows-how-many grand- and great grandchildren. She was a hard-working woman during the time of the civil rights movement, and when my mother and I called her the day Barack Obama was elected, she responded with, “I didn’t think I’d live to see the day.” She told us she didn’t vote for him, though. She said she didn’t want to get her hopes up.

She turned 87 this year. As each day passes, I regret every chance I never take to ask her questions—questions about life as a minority during the civil rights movement, questions about being a minority and a woman, in general.

Supposedly, my great grandmother is a proud woman, probably too proud. It exasperates my grandmother to no end, but I like it. At the age of 87, she is still sassy as ever.

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7.

I hear that identity crises are real. They affect both the present and the future and also entail much more than identity. I do not know what triggers them, but I’ll venture to guess that it’s pressure.

Pressure from each side of the family to associate with their own kind and to avoid “the Other”—a mistake that your parents, or grandparents in my case, already made.

I have had my fair share of identity crisis scares. They started when I left my predominantly white hometown. When I first stepped foot on a college campus, I felt more out of place at a school with more minority students than I did at a school where I was literally the only minority in my graduating class.

In Hesston, Kansas, the place I call home, people understand me; they know my family, my story. When I go to a new place, I have to explain myself to people. Even worse, people ask. They fumble with their words when they look at me, trying to think of how to express what they want to say in the least offensive way. Usually it comes out as something like,

“So… um, what are you?”

I guess I would rather them ask than assume, though. Nothing is more offensive than an older woman approaching you, every wrinkle on her face deformed by a smile from excitement at the

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sight of diversity. Her voice strains as she asks, “Do you speak English?” She sighs at your response and disappointedly answers with, “You aren’t from Haiti?” As if I’m the one that is unsure about where I come from.

A nickel for every assumption, please. 8.

This summer, my family gave me a small collection of old photos—they are a little bit faded in color and are terrible quality. They were all photos that I had never seen before—my mother pregnant with me, my dad holding me, my grandpa holding me, and my grandmother and grandfather on their wedding day. One photo in particular resonated with me. It was a photograph of my great grandmother, Mary Wyse, holding me.

We are sitting at the dinner table. Her cream-colored jacket leads me to believe that it was winter; it looks like the kind that makes a lot of noise when you walk. I’m wearing a pale yellow onesie that looks almost white compared to the cream-colored wallpaper behind us. My head, full of thick, dark hair, cuddles with my great grandmother’s cheek. Both of her arms are wrapped around my tiny body—her left hand caressing my back.

It is a beautiful thing—the image of an old woman, a recipient of a well-lived life, within ten years of her last breath holding a new life—a newborn baby, unable to speak but already aware of the need to be loved.

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Dominique Chew is a second-year studying English and Women’s Studies. She loves Kansas sunsets, NPR, and a good cup of co!ee... or five.

This image represents the shattering of tradition, and perhaps of the rules—this history of hate between black and white, wrecked. Two family trees with pure roots becoming intertwined and creating a new set of genes.

This image, though, is one of love and acceptance—of beauty in diversity, ethnicities, and generations. A photograph of two people separated by two generations and two lifetimes of untold stories.

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Mohammad Rassoulipour

Androgynous

Mohammad Mahdi Rassoulipour is a senior Art/Bible and Religion double major from Tehran, Iran. The painting “Androgynous” is a part of Mohammad’s independent study on “Visual and Social Implications of Androgyny.”

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Hayley Brooks

Roots

She is a bark away from madness,a nomad child of the dark.We were of the same tree,branches escaping from the trunk,an abundant mess of life.It must have been fifteen yearsof cutting every cell between home and growth for gravityto exert that much pressureon her.

She is a runaway, a departure,a flailing of bones.She could have defied gravity,been a homage to the sky,a reckless organ of flowering,she could have touched groundwith her limbs instead of flingingher whole body to it.

Earth and I have been conversingabout what it is that let her goso quickly.An evasion of self, how romanticconsuming your body appears,the thick muscles of boys

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Hayley Brooks is a sophomore English Writing major from Denver who eats too much nutella.

whose livers are oceans.Was I too stationary,a branch too far awayto keep her from falling?

She is a boneless frame,a howl from stepping too far,a vacancy, a fatigued, wearybeing. I was not enough to save her.

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“Wrung like a rag!” brags freak-show ringmaster,leading eyes to the sign stamped,“Twisted Torso Boy.”

It is I, in demise, cursing breakfast cream piesin a curdled cage of aches

and surprise gurgles.

My unkeeled mother mustn’t know how I feel,for her clown-of-a-son despises

Quaker oatmeal, apple segments, and a glass of milk,a balanced breakfast worthy of a trapeze artist

or tightrope walker. But not me, a freak.

Why, God? Why me?

Thoughts interrupted, I find myselfthrowing up in the grocery store for all to see.

Unwound, I regain my composure.

Alright folks, show’s over.

Phil Scott

Performance at Aldi

ed cents · “okay, that’s great, mr. comedian, but i still haven’t seen my babies yet.” he...

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