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Acknowledgements
Bill Roorbach Dedication
Submission Info

Archive:

Volume 1 Spring 2002

Volume 2 Spring 2003

Volume 2 Spring 2004

Volume 2 Spring 2005

Volume 5
Spring 2006:

Contest Winners

Editor's Prize

Tumbling Dice
- Steven Shattuck-

Honorable Mentions


My Peripeteia
- Tara Sumrall-

A Charming Red Stiletto Is Dangling From A Cloud
- Allison Davis-

Nicole Dellasanta
Assumption College

American Humour
         
I was shaking out my wallet when Lindsay marched into my doorway.
          “Find any moths?” she said, eyeing me mockingly.
          “No,” I retorted, standing up and scanning my room for the pair of shoes that hurt my feet. “And no money either.”
          “What are you going to do with those?” she asked as I unearthed them from under a pile of dirty or maybe clean clothes.
          “Return them.”
          “You can’t return shoes you’ve already worn.”
          “That’s in America. Things might be different here.”
          The store was a five minute walk away, Clarks, down on the lower end of Cornmarket Street. Lindsay stopped at the entrance and folded her arms.
          “What, you won’t even go inside with me?”
          “Nope. You don’t need me to make a fool of yourself.”
          I went inside with the shoes in my hand. Less than a minute later, I came out with the shoes still in my hands.
          “Don’t even say anything,” I told her as she was opening her mouth.
          “I was just going to ask what you were going to do about money. I mean you’ve got what you need saved for tomorrow for the plane ride home, but what about today, your last day? Didn’t you want to take that bus tour of the city?”
          I thought about it for a minute. “Nah, I guess I don’t really need it,” I said, eyeing the graying skyline. “I’ve got what I need for tomorrow. I’ll be all right for today.”
          *                 *                 *
          Leaving for England was like leaving for any place unfamiliar for me: an obsessive-compulsive near-breakdown. I went over in my mind everything I had done and still needed to do five times; I went over it again ten minutes later; then I kept worrying. Eight thousand what ifs ran through my head in a matter of ten seconds, then repeated themselves a minute later. When it was time to go to my gate and join the other study abroad students from across the country, I broke down about five times, and had the overwhelming desire to turn around and go back home. Somehow, I carried my chin up and walked through the metal detector and into the Gate 53 area, waving goodbye to my family until they were out of sight. I looked ahead. There I was: panic subsiding, excitement growing, and about to be air bound for England and out of the United States for the first time in my life.   
          The stewardesses said something that sounded like “Hello” when we got on the plane. Oh my God, I thought. I can’t speak British. Maybe this was a bad idea.
          “Can you understand them?” I asked the girl in front of me
          “Nope,” she grinned back. So it wasn’t just me.
Where was my seat? Oh, there it was—already occupied. “Um, excuse me,” I asked stewardess number one, “am I supposed to be in this seat or was there a mistake?”
She flashed an Austin Powers smile at me and said, “Oh sorry, love, we had a lil’ switch-around. That student there in your seat gave up her seat for an older couple ’oo wanted to sit together. There’s a seat just two rows up there, there you are. Al’right?”
“Oh sure,” I said, “no problem,” wondering if when they woke up that morning that those old probably very nice folks knew they were going to give me a heart attack. 
I plopped down in my new seat. More room, I thought, shoving my backpack to the side. And a window. A definite improvement.
          “Hi, I’m Danielle,” the girl in the seat next to me said.
          I introduced my self and asked where she went to school.
          “Muhlenberg,” she said.
          “Really? I have a cousin who goes there.” I told her my cousin’s name. She knew her by sight.
          We chatted about families, friends, fears about living and studying in a new country for ten weeks for almost the entire six hour flight. About a half hour before we landed, and in the middle of debating what comedy movie was the best of all time (the sequels of Jim Carey’s Ace Ventura vs. Mike Meyers’ Austin Powers), my stomach turned itself inside out. Nerves, I thought. But it persisted. Danielle tried to tell me the hippo scene in “When Nature Calls” was more hilarious than the end of “Goldmember,” and I had to turn my head away from her to stop from being sick all over her backpack.
“Are you all right?” I heard her ask.
“Ahh…yeah…I’m sure it’ll pass,” I cringed as my head swayed to a beat of its own. I opened my eyes. From the small window of the plane and through the threaded clouds, I could just barely make out what was below: quilted patches of pristine greenery, some the color of lime, some the color of dark evergreen. We’re here...that’s British grass...I thought in broken clips. The nausea started to clear as the clouds moved aside and I leaned out a little to look closer. The hills. And the broccoli trees that dotted the lines between each patch. My God. So this is where Crayola gets their colors from.
          “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Heathrow Airport.” The green gave way to  rows of planes, all safely on the ground that I would be walking on in two minutes’ time. Then I was outside. I inhaled my first breath of British air. Remarkable—just like American air. Except cleaner. And much more appreciated.
                                      *                 *                 *  
          “What should we have for our first meal in England?” I asked Ashley, my London roommate for the week.
          “I could go for Italian.”
          “Yeah, me too. Let’s go.”
          The study abroad program was kind enough to give us a week of orientation in the bustling city of London to introduce us to British life. Soon after they dropped us off from the airport at our hotel in Notting Hill—the only place that made Hugh Grant famous, not infamous—we realized airplane food wasn’t satisfactory for a time-change appetite. 
          The café looked like a cheap take-off of a North End family-run establishment, but we were slightly charmed by the mix of accents in the cook/waiter’s vernacular. We each ordered a ziti dish that had everything we recognized in it. 
We underestimated our appetites, because the dishes ended up being too big for us to finish. So we each only ate half of each.
The cook/waiter insisted that we didn’t like it.
          “No, no,” we protested in unison. “It was delicious, but it was too much for us to eat.”
          “Can we take the rest with us?” I asked.
          Ashley nudged me in the ribs. “You don’t ask for doggie bags in Europe,” she muttered out of the corner of her mouth. “It’s the rudest thing you can say.”
          I looked up at the cook/waiter. He folded his arms and stared at me.
          Dear Mom and Dad, today is my first day in England and I got kicked out of an Italian café.
He studied us for a full minute. “You only pay for one,” he concluded finally.
Oh God, now he thinks we’re crooks.
Ashley pulled out her wallet. “Are you sure?” she asked, putting down a ten pound bill on the counter top.
“Only one, I insist,” he said, giving her five pounds back from the register.
          “Wait…is he serious?” I whispered to her. He smiled at us and motioned for us to skedaddle before we polluted his café with any more dirty American customs. We left quickly, profusely thanking him, and walked out into the busy streets, me noting to myself for future reference never to leave an airplane hungry again.
                                      *                 *                 *
          The Welsh live much like working-class America, spending their days working in small businesses they usually own. Then they parade out to the pubs for long nights. So of course, we wanted to integrate ourselves entirely into Welsh life for the weekend right after London orientation we would be staying there. So of course we followed suit and spent our nights out at the popular White Rose pub. You could see the ocean—the good old Atlantic—out of the dusty windows, if the light was right. The tables were wooden and look perfect for slamming a pint down on. A pirate might walk in at any minute.
          After a fun Friday night, most of us sober Americans were close enough to our host families’ homes that we could walk. I needed a cab, though. I tried to track down the girl I was staying with, but she was nowhere to be found.
          “I think she went to that club across the street,” a guy with a heavy Welsh accent told me.
          I was too tired to go in and find her, so I told him to tell her that I’d leave the key to the house under the front doormat. I walked next door to the Oyster Cab Service, which was about one-fourth the size of a doctor’s waiting office and ten times dingier, and chatted with the American boys who were there waiting for a ride too.
          “Need a ride?” they asked when their cab pulled up.
          “Nah, mine’s coming,” I waved them off.
          The waiting area wasn’t much of a circus; it was just me and another girl who looked like she needed seven days of sleep, and the cab lady who answered the phones who looked like she had been permanently molded into her chair. She asked if I was by myself. I said yes, and she looked friendly, so I agreed when she said she’d have her best driver take me home, since he was just about to go up that way anyway. He emerged from the back; age was hard to guess, but he was the same height as me, and wiry. I could take him, if need be. We got in the cab, and before he closed the door, the lady sent another guy out to go along because he was learning the ropes. A newbie, they called him. A problem, I called him. He was bigger. Two might be a little harder.
          I tried to conceal the fact that I had my hand on the door handle—did I really think I was going to jump out at the speed they were going?—while they talked in Welsh for the first five minutes of the drive. The driver finally turned around to ask me in English where all of us Americans were headed.
          “Oxford,” I said. “We’re studying abroad.”
          “Wow, some smart kids,” he said, laughing good-naturedly to his buddy who retorted the same laugh back, a laugh that I echoed. I took my hand off the door handle. When we arrived at my family’s driveway, I tried to count out the pounds I had in my wallet, but he insisted the ride was on him.
          “Good luck at Oxford,” they said in unison as they sped away.
          I slept soundly that night, in a strange bed in a strange country.
                                      *                 *                 *
          I woke up a week later in itchy bedsheets and ducks quacking. 
          Worcester College is considered the third most beautiful of the thirty-nine colleges part of Oxford University. The quad looks like it was ripped from the quilted patches of green I had seen from the plane. The lake looks like a painting in the late afternoon. Our dining hall could rival Harry Potter’s. Ducks waddle freely around campus. But the only thing I saw the second Sunday into the term was the screen of my American friend Lindsay’s laptop, because the computer lab with a total of six computers was surprisingly full.
I was in the middle of King Arthur’s moral peril when my overhead light blew. Just like that. All of a sudden, three-fourths of the light I was working by was gone. If I had had a candle, an ink well, a feather, and a piece of parchment, I might have sat down to write the great American novel…in England. But my first essay was due via email at six o’clock to my professor, and I’d known that morning, judging from Saturday’s progress, I’d be hitting “send” at 5:59.
I called Lindsay.
“Is my computer still working?” was all she wanted to know.
“Yes, thanks for your concern,” I said.
“Well, as long as the computer’s working, you’re fine. And you’ve still got your desk lamp, so what are you worried about?”
“It’s an omen,” I whined, “I’m going to do horrible on my first paper and then they’ll realize I’m not smart enough for here in the first place and then—”
“Stop.” Her voice had laughter in it.
“Are you laughing at me in my hour of need? I’m like Arthur, morally torn between—”
“Just shut up and finish the paper.”
She hung up. I worked by desk lamp. I finished at 5:45, checked it over three times, and hit “send” at 5:58, according to the laptop’s clock.
“Excellent paper,” my professor told me in his gentle voice when he handed it back to me the following day. I looked at the top. Alpha-beta. The equivalent of an A-minus in America. “Have you experienced the true study life of an Oxford student?” he asked, small spectacles just barely reaching the bridge of his nose.
I looked up from my paper at him. “Just about.”
                             *                 *                 *
It’s impossible to look down when you walk around Oxford. Nothing of interest is on the ground; the buildings were built centuries before the idea of America was even dreamt. There are gaudy buildings, subtle ones, elaborate, exuberant, exaggerated—all are contained within the few miles deep in the heart of the city. The city of dreaming spires.
The term hadn’t been three weeks old when I was walking along Beaumont Street with my head up, admiring still the buildings I walked past everyday, headed over to the Bodleian library and running my usual errands, when a middle-aged couple stopped me on the street.
          “Pardon me, ma’am, but can y’all tell us where them Oxford shops are?”
          I wanted to hug them. “Sure,” I said, accenting my Americanism. “Where are you from?”
          “Houston, Texas,” the man replied proudly. “We been here before to visit, but we can’t remember where them dang shops are.”
          “I’m from Massachusetts,” I said. I walked them over to where the shops were, right before the Bodleian.
          “Y’all take care now,” he called after me.
          “You too,” I said. “Have a wicked great day.”
                                      *                 *                 *
          I hadn’t played an organized sport since fourth grade, which didn’t really count because it was soccer without uniforms after school. But I figured since rowing wasn’t a contact sport, I’d try out for it.
          I made the WC crew, the very least inexperienced rowers, a team of people who had never been in a boat before in their lives. We had our first and second practice sessions in the tank, a contraption that looked like a giant hot dog in the middle of a pool, in the Oxford Sports Complex, a twenty-five minute walk from Worcester. After the second session, Claire, my coach, declared me most improved rower since our first practice, and I was privileged to wear the coach’s black and pink Worcester College Boat Club wind breaker the following day for our first outing on the river Isis, a part of the river Thames.
          One practice led to another. I loved it. Early morning practices were few and far between; the afternoons, when the sun was giving its last hurrah before settling in, was our time of the river, speeding across the water at a wobbly and breakneck speed. I didn’t get to wear the jacket again for the rest of the term, but it was fine when we finally ordered our own hoodies. And when we entered Christ Church Regatta, the end-of-term race when all Oxford teams race against each other, we knew we were going to win at least one of the three-day event’s races.
          And we did. Day two. We beat the others team by a mile, or so they said from the riverbank.
          Not a contact sport my foot. Water counts as contact, and we were drenched enough to fill a bathtub. But we were grinning.
                                      *                 *                 *
          “Have you emailed the Highs yet?” Mom was more adamant on the phone than she was face to face.
          “Yes, Mom,” I said. “They’re taking me out to dinner tomorrow night.”
Before I had left the States, my mother insisted I have a contact while I was “over there.” It was the small foursome—a husband, wife, two daughters—of the extended family of a woman she works with, who lived about forty-five minutes from Oxford. I agreed to send them an email, just to be in contact, but they invited me out to a Chinese restaurant with them for dinner.
I was nervous, of course, before I met them. Their entire perception of America could depend on me tonight, I thought as I was getting dressed. I looked in the mirror. What would they see?
          They saw something, apparently, as I did in them. They turned out to be the nicest people I had met since I had been over there. They asked me if there was any place I’d like to go that I hadn’t seen yet. I said that I heard Bath was pretty—plus it had quite a bit of Jane Austen attraction sites, which almost pathetically excited me to no end. The following weekend, I was walking the streets of Bath with Mr. High, watching street performers, eating in covered marketplaces, and trying new delicacies.
          “What’s in this tuna?” I asked him, pulling out a yellow lump that looked like a tooth.
          “That’s sweet corn,” he said. “It’s what we put in tuna here….you don’t like it?”
          I tried not too indiscreetly to cover my mouth with my napkin. “Not exactly.”
          He chuckled. “I’ll make sure we don’t have that when you come over for dinner at the house next week.”
          I didn’t expect when I left the States to come back with an entire new family of friends. Someone who I only thought would be only be an email safeguard for my mother ended up inviting me to their home, feeding me a homecooked British dinner—roast and potatoes, the best and most authentic I’ve ever tasted—taking me places, and having me meet the rest of the family. When Mr. High visits the States this summer, he’ll be making a stop at my house. I promised him a real Italian dinner, courtesy of my dad. Tuna and sweet corn will not be on the menu.
          *                 *                 *
          “I’m not going in first,” Megan said, walking behind Lindsay.
          “Neither am I,” Lindsay said, hiding behind me.
          “Fine.” I opened the giant door of our dining hall and walked in against the stares of the students and faculty already through their appetizers.
          Formal hall is served every night except Saturdays at 7:15 as a more delicious alternative to regular dinner hall at 6. The only caveat: you have to dress “smartly”—skirts or black pants for us, ties for the guys. We didn’t care about the dress code that night. We had just gone to see the premiere of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire at the Odeon Theatre in Gloucester Green across from our college, and we looked like we were ready for the Yule Ball. The movie got out later than we expected, though, and our plans for formal hall were slightly ruined. We were about ten minutes late. No problem, we thought; we’ll just miss the appetizer.
          We sat down quietly at the end of one of our three long tables, trying to avoid the glares from the dining hall staff, who were crowded in a corner waiting to clear the appetizer dishes. One of them came over to us and asked us to please be on time next time. We said we knew, we were sorry, and the movie we had been at got out late. He said fine and walked away.
He came back less than thirty seconds later.
“Why are you sitting there?”
He had a hint of a French accent that sounded fake to me. “You told us we could still stay and eat,” I said.
He looked away for a moment and laughed. “But how can you eat with no dishes? There are places down the other end of the table that are already set up. Didn’t you know that?”
We didn’t know that. But we appreciated him telling us in such a clearly polite manner. He walked away, looking back and visibly laughing to the other staff. We rolled our eyes at each other as we moved down the table.
          We were really looking forward to dinner. We were starved; if we had brought a few bottles of wine, we would’ve had the courage to ask our courteous waiter for seconds, or perhaps a doggie bag.
          “There you are.” Dinner was served.
          I looked at it. “Are those…fishsticks?”
          “They’re quite good,” the boy sitting next to me spluttered in between mouthfuls.
          “Did they get the fish off the English coast?” Megan the geographer wanted to know.
          The boy thought for a moment, chewing and concentrating like he was the final contestant in a spelling bee. “No, actually, I think they come frozen. In the package. Just like you lot have back home,” he said, gesturing to us with his fork.
          Late for fishsticks. I tried a bite. Actually the boy was right. They weren’t half bad. And they did taste like home. I ate them all, but thought better of asking for seconds.
                                      *                 *                 *
          “I could never do something like that,” Lindsay said to me as we walked back to Worcester, my shoes in hand and pockets empty.
          “What?” I said, gazing for the last time at the poignant top of the Bode through the cloudy afternoon.
          “Try something that I think I might fail at. I get so worried that things aren’t going to turn out right and I’ll make an idiot of myself in the process.”
“Everybody has that fear,” I said. “I guess you just…do it. Maybe it’s an act of faith.”
The light turned green.
She looked at me, exasperated as we crossed the street. “We’re in Oxford. The city of great minds. Minds, not hearts.”
“Wasn’t there some Oxford student who said that a good mind isn’t complete without an accompanying good heart?”
“I don’t think so.”
“There should be.” I looked back at the overpowering verticality of the Bode. It looked like it was challenging the sky to a duel. I wondered how many times its architect had tried before he got the style he wanted. I wondered if all of a sudden he closed his eyes one day while he drew and came up with the perfect structure. A perfect structure, I thought, looking forward. Wouldn’t that be so…predictable.