Table of Contents

Volume 1
Spring 2002

About Us
Submission Info
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Essays

Uxbridge, or, The Rural Survival Guide to Overcoming Sublime Relizations of Meaninglessness
- Eric Aldrich

Walden Pond:
Then and Now
- Sara Campbell

The Pure Pond Known
as Walden
- Kristina England

Sleep-Walking and The Art of Manipulation
- Leslye Ford

Maturation within Margins
- Steve Muscatello

Editor's Prize

Invictus
- Lauren Lashley
(Chosen by
David Gessner)

Invictus

Lauren Lashley

The table is hard against my back. The wood rubs painfully where my shirt has come up. There is a nail that is loose in the wood and it digs into my skin, ripping it. His hand holds my hands above my head, pinning me to the table. He is so much bigger than I am. He is sixteen.

I am thirteen.

He begs me to be quiet, to lie still. There are tears in both our eyes, but he doesn’t stop. His belt buckle stabs me in the stomach. I try to scream, to cry out. No sound comes out. I push. He pushes back. I cry. Please No Don’t. He does not listen. I am slammed against the table repeatedly. He wants me to stop crying. I cannot.

I am six. My feet hit the dirt. Pumping, pushing, kicking. I go higher. The chain links of the swing turn my fingers brown. I can feel the beginnings of blisters from my excited death grip on the chains. My long hair flies into my face. I am going so high, I feel as if my feet could touch the glossy leaves of the magnolia tree that hangs over the swing set. But quickly, horribly, the safe firmness of the seat disappears. The scenery shifts. I am flying. Instead of the tree, I see the sky. The sky—so blue—and the weather—so warm—oddly contradict the fear in my chest. I see my legs above me, pointing toward the sky. And I feel the painful thud of ended movement of body against hard ground. There is a loud crack. My teeth close down around my tongue. The blood flows down the back of my throat, gagging me. Heat flows from my side, my head, my arm. I want to cry out for my mother, but I do not remember how. I hear the other children yell. I see faces above me. I see him standing nearby, hands behind his back, toeing the dirt, head down, eyes up, transfixed by the sight of the intermingling blood and sand. I was pushed.

He stops because he cannot finish. I am dry and in pain. Pulling up his pants, he picks up his keys off the ground and walks back to his truck. The truck he got for getting the winning touchdown in the biggest game of the year. The truck that makes a lot of noise and is constantly surrounded by numerous girls, many not much older than I am. He picked me. Why did he pick me? I straighten my skirt and debate whether to run. If I run, he would catch me. He is golden at running. I am not supposed to be here. I am supposed to be at a basketball game. I hate basketball. I hate him. I hate his fucking truck. I hate the smell of Joop cologne. I hate the sound of the lake lapping the shore. I hate the smell of the pine trees. I hate picnic tables. I get in the truck.

I am ten. It is summer. Kathryn, my best friend since the second day of kindergarten, and I are riding our bikes around the neighborhood. I am a tomboy, who refuses to tie her boy’s black high top tennis shoes. We ride our pink bikes up one street and down another. We are far from my house in an unfamiliar neighborhood. There are toys in lots of the driveways though, so I feel safe. I feel a tug on my shoe and look down. The laces of my shoes are becoming wrapped around the pedal of the bike. We are in the middle of the road, so we ride down a side street. By that time, though, the lace is wound so tightly that I cannot pedal anymore. I fall over in someone’s yard. I am not supposed to be this far from home. My foot hurts and I cannot move. My elbow is bleeding and I am frightened. Kathryn goes for her father. I lie, half in the street and half in a stranger’s yard, fearful of kidnappers or some other evil that we are warned about constantly in school. The door of the house opens. An older couple walks out. They are concerned and attentive. The man cuts the lace off with a pocket knife. I thank them profusely and then ride away. I do not wear laces in my shoes for the rest of the summer.

He pulls around the corner from my house. I open the door as he reaches across the seat and touches my shoulder. I whimper. He releases me and I speed across neighbors’ yards and arrive in my house. My parents are already in bed. I secure the door to my room, take my clothes and throw them in the closet. There is blood in my underwear. I put on my pajamas, but I am so cold. I put on pants, then a long sleeve t-shirt, then a sweater. The cold does not go away. I do not think it ever will. I am unwilling to close my eyes. I am sore and my head hurts. The pounding in my eyes demands for the light to be extinguished. I check under the bed. Put all my dirty clothes in front of my door so it can’t be opened. I do not understand what has happened. I hesitantly turn off the light and lie in bed, staring at the ceiling. I drift off around three am.

I am eight. I sit on my front porch with my Barbie dolls scattered around me. Barbie and Ken are on safari in South America, but the bus left, stranding them in the jungle (my yard). They find an ancient temple (my front steps), abandoned and forgotten for centuries. Suddenly, evil drug lords appear from the jungle curtain shooting their guns at Barbie and Ken, who are at the top of the temple. They rappel down the side of the ruin, but, sadly, the drug runners clip Ken’s rope, and he plummets to his death. Barbie escapes successfully. In reality, I have thrown Barbie and Ken off the top of the porch and Ken’s head popped off. I pick him up off of the cement. Mother always said men were weak.

The weeks crawl by. Christmas arrives but I am not in a holly jolly mood. I am not ready for school to start back. I am not ready to face their faces. Those girls who want him so desperately, as I once had. I wear t-shirts in a size 3x. School starts back and my grades drop. I am frightened of the boys who sit next to me in class. I am frightened of bathrooms alone.

At least I do not have to see him, as he goes to high school in another district. I do not tell anyone. I do not write about it, terrified that someone will find it and know. I am afraid my parents will blame me. He is so perfect and so nice on the surface. I have a hard time reconciling his persona with his act. I disassociate. I disconnect. I do not know what that R word means. I do not say it. I do not think it. I cry at night, at first, but that stops as I stop letting myself feel. The phone calls begin. "You fucking slut, if you tell anyone, I swear I’ll cut you, I swear I’ll make you bleed." It isn’t him, but his best friend. The calls terrify me, cause sleepless nights and interminable days. I am afraid my parents will find out. I am afraid that he will hurt me; I promise to never tell.

My parents blame my "moodiness" on the fact that the summer previous, Kathryn had been stolen from me, by her mother, without a chance to say goodbye. If Kathryn had been there, I would never have gone to the lake that night. We had been inseparable, and she had always been the voice of reason. I begin to lose the light. Time stops.

In my dreams I am drowning. The waves crash against my face, each one larger and more violent. The waves are like fists and they punch me down until I can look up and see the surface, serene, crystalline. I see the moon through the surface, full and yellow, affecting the tides. My hand reaches up as if to grasp it, but I only sink deeper. There is a pain in my chest, perhaps from lack of air, or increasing water pressure. The moon grows smaller. I sink further. Everything narrows into a tiny pinpoint with the moon in the middle.

There is a melting point. Mine comes in the form of my grandmother. A well-meaning, if slightly annoying, woman. An obsessive cleaner, she decides her next project will be my room. The only place I feel safe. I keep things scattered around, messy, for a reason. It makes me feel safe. The clutter holds me as surely as a mother’s arms. A womb-like peace. A warmth generated by objects in close proximity. I come home from another horrible day at school, find my room defiled by neatness. My sanctuary desecrated. My safety obliterated. I stand there sobbing, feeling violated all over again. I trash. Throw books off the shelves, throw clothes in the floor, took clothes off of hangers, and upturned furniture.

The anger subsides and the guilt takes its place. I am afraid of what my parents will say when they get home. I am afraid of what my grandmother will do. Their wrath is unlike any I have seen. I have always been a good child, have never done anything like this before. My mother is concerned. But when I begin to cry she tells me to stop. She can’t deal with my tears and my father’s anger at the same time. But I don't think I will ever be able to stop. Their disappointment is crushing. The next week I begin to see the therapist. Vergüenza is Spanish for shame.

I am ten. My next door neighbor, a sweet old man named Mr. Osmos, has died. I remember the numerous times when I have been locked out of my house after school, and I knock on his door to use the phone. He is like a grandfather to me. He has a rotary dial phone. After I call, he always sits me down at his table and gives me Coca-Cola in the glass bottle and cookies. The week before I went over to his house and sang him hymns. That Christmas, when our street was all lit up with milk jugs, he said that it looked like heaven. I guess he knows now. My mother told me a few days before that he was not doing well, that I should go see him. I did not understand what she meant. I went to play with Kathryn instead. I came home from school one day, and she tells me he is gone. I cry, howling with anger because I did not get to say goodbye. I write my first poem for this man, this man who let me use a real axe to chop at a tree in his yard, who used to clap when I did flips on my trampoline. It is my first taste of loss.

Therapy is a joke. She is a Christian therapist at the Pastoral Institute. I go for several months. I begin to take Zoloft. It does not help. I feel the pressure from my father to "just get better." He is from one of those old southern families that believes you don’t talk to strangers about your problems. Obviously, he thinks, I do not go to church enough. Depression is a sin, the Bible allegedly says. I, wanting to calm to constant lurching of my life, begin to say the "right" things. I am released from therapy, and I quit taking Zoloft. I learn how to play the game. Outside, to the rest of the world, I am happy-go-lucky. I am smiling and happy and smart. I do not cause problems at home or at school. She’s such a sweet child. I do not remember much of high school. Once you put a mask like that on, it is easy to maintain. It is easy to tune out. I counted the days until I graduated. It is not hard to lump four years of high school into one category. I had boyfriends, on and off, but they were never more than phone calls after school and notes passed in the halls. At graduation, I was salutatorian, and as I walked across the stage to receive my diploma, I said a silent goodbye to all that I knew in high school, including most of my friends. I would never instigate contact with them again.

I am sixteen. I go to school. All the girls are crying. He is dead. Car wreck. Drunk driving. I am expected to mourn his loss, but they do not know that I have prayed for his death for years. But, at the same time, something in me dies with him. The prayer for an apology, the hope for some sort of justification of the years of screaming silence. I will never get those things now. I am on my own. I cry, but I do not shed tears for him. My glee at his death is slammed hard against the Christian guilt I feel for wishing for it. I still mark the damned anniversary with silence and tears. December 12th will never be the same for me, I don’t think...it always looms before me on calendars, it always lurks around the corner. I receive more phone calls prophesying my violent death. But I am glad he is dead. I turn away from the God that tells me it is wrong.

I begin college prepared to be the same girl I was in high school. But some things don’t go according to plans. I became friends with a girl that had been through the same experience, but unlike me, she told people about it. All the pain and anger she was expressing, I felt inside. I could not hold it in any longer. I had kept this inside for five years, never telling a soul. I told her one night and we cried together. I felt the first wisps of peace, the first tendrils of light.

I am twelve. I go to visit my sister in Montevallo, where she is in college. She is seven years older than I am, and I think she is perfect. I sit in her dorm room. It is Springfest, the windows are open, the breeze is sweet, and the Indigo Girls are on the stereo. We dance around the room with each other, laughing. All sweet spring days remind me of this one. All happy memories revolve around this one. The grass will never be as green as it was that day, the wind never as sweet, the sky never as blue. We laughed as if there was nothing to it. It is days like this one that I live for. Days like these are the reasons I never took my own life. The spring would always come in time to save me, save the world.

I met Andy through my first college boyfriend. Mark, the boyfriend, was a manipulative jerk, and we had absolutely nothing in common, only that he smelled good. Then his cologne was stolen, he didn’t buy any more, and I lost interest but didn’t know how to break it off. Andy was the stuff of which dreams were made. Romantic in a good way, and intelligent to the extreme. Meaning, he was completely different from the boys I had dated before. Our first "date" (which shouldn’t be called a date because I was still technically dating Mark at the time) was on the night of a meteor shower. We went out as friends. We took his blanket, and laid on the green. It was quite cold that night, and we huddled together for warmth. Around four in the morning, we kissed. For the first time in a long time, I smiled as I went to sleep that morning. The next time we kissed we were watching Casablanca. Andy was one of the first steps towards healing. He taught me that all guys are not bastards, that some of them actually do care, and maybe there was hope. He didn’t mind if I cried. He would hold me then, and just care. Andy’s life was busy and I felt privileged to be a part of it. We grew in different directions, but his impact was enough. I was left, after Andy, with a slowly spreading feeling of contentment, of inner peace, bordering on inner joy. I never thanked him properly. Perhaps I might do that. Don’t think twice it’s alright.

I am twenty. It has been seven years since it happened. I cannot say that I have forgotten the event, but I can say that it doesn’t haunt me with the same ferocity that it once did. I still get the same upsetting phone calls, but I can handle them better now. I am stronger now, heading back to school for my sixth semester. Some days are rough. But, today, as I drive along, I start to smile. Listening to the Indigo Girls sing, "Feels so funny to be free..." and I realize that I am. I am free now. Of most of the pain. I know that I will never fully "get over" what happened, but I know that I can get through it now. I realize now that I am lighter, and my world is bright. I find myself smiling more, and crying less. I feel as if I have been born again to a new life. I hardly notice December 12 now. Only weeks later will I realize that it has already passed. I do not think about what happened every time I meet a new person. I am moving on with my life. I am feeling free. Amazingly free, exceedingly free. It is a bright, sweetly breezy, green-grassed day. And I am enjoying it. I am dancing in the room, with the music turned up. I am whole again, for the first time. It is like swinging with no one to fear. Like swinging.