Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.
Fiction • Spring 2026 - Fear
Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
From the Archives
Fiction • Fall / Winter 2023
The last of the leftover punch was a little cloudy but still tasted about the same. Eusebia and I sat on Pete’s stoop passing the sticky Vitaminwater bottle back and forth, waiting for him to come down so we could all walk back to her place together. Pete’s apartment was a seventh-floor walkup so nobody ever climbed all those stairs on purpose. Pete himself went up and down all the time and swore it didn’t bother him. He was above-average athletic and had once been a serviceable high school tight end: not slow, not small, good engine. In the first game of his senior year he broke three ribs on a doomed passing play, his opposing defender having correctly anticipated the ball’s flightpath and time of arrival. The football landed in Pete’s chest and cradling arms a fraction of a second before the defender’s shoulder, and Pete heard the arpeggio of his ribs cracking in quick succession, click-clack-clock, top to bottom, like the opening xylophone of “Gone Daddy Gone” by the Violent Femmes, which played on a loop in Pete’s head as he lay on his back in the mud, struggling to breathe. Thus ended Pete’s athletic phase and began his phase of post-punk folk rock, which in turn ended abruptly a few years later, in a Columbus, Ohio coffee house, just as ignobly, though with less violence. There was a story about this, too. And an anecdote about moving to the city, and on becoming an artist, and so on, so that Pete’s life always seemed like a string of colorful vignettes, a series of small, brightly-lit dioramas. I have zero anecdotes, I feel like. I don’t know what I end up talking to people about. For instance just now on Pete’s stoop I was telling Eusebia about how I’d been thinking about competitive bodybuilding, how it seemed connected to conceptual poetry, but I was not yet sure how. The punch was gone and she was smoking and checking her phone and only half listening. I felt pressure building behind my eyes and ate a Sudafed of indeterminate vintage.
Poetry • Fall 2009
There are days blurred like the skin
of fruit rotting, when we look into the water
and cannot tell if the dark stripes
shuddering over the surface
are the reflections of street lamps
or just our shadows. Such days
do not have matching nights, unless
they are white nights, but then
each night is crossed out
by the black stroke of a morning
where a dead man lies on a table,
already a stranger, like a
simple object at which a child
peers through a rolled up notebook page,
willing it further and further away.
You wake and press your face
to the plaster, folding your hands
on your lap, your starched sheet,
a prayer passing from your cheek
to the wallpaper. No, you are not
God’s favorite doll. We open and close
our eyes for Him dutifully, but He
only uses us for our ability to forget.
** **
Features • Fall 2014
There is an urban legend commonly whispered among schoolchildren in southeast Queens, New York City, that goes like this: A high school girl has been babysitting for some kids in her neighborhood. (In local retellings, it’s usually Bayside, Glen Oaks, or Bellerose.) One day, she’s putting the kids to bed and sees a life-size clown statue in the corner of the room. She inspects it and concludes it’s just a recent, unpleasant addition to the nursery. Satisfied that her charges are safely asleep in their beds, she heads to the den and flips on the TV. A news channel announces: Escaped Mental Patient On The Loose from Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, Believed To Be Dressed As Clown.
The rest of the story is prone to variation. Tamer versions have the hapless babysitter call the parents and the police, who remove the deranged clown to a padded enclosure where he is never again to be seen. Others recall the clown hacking the unsuspecting babysitter and sleeping kiddies to bits. In these accounts, the clown remains at large to this day.
The children who pass along this story do so on ragged scraps of paper, in hissed, stolen gossip. Each weekday, they are trundled by tired parents or aged buses along a winding path framed by massive buildings on either side. To reach the two regional middle schools and single district high school in a cul-de-sac at the road’s end, a driver must take its passengers past older structures, decrepit ones with bars on their windows. Barricaded abodes squeeze and shadow the road, until the vehicle finally emerges into a courtyard of tasteful stucco and slate playgrounds. The schools glimmer in the morning sun, as precious offspring are placed safely in the hands of their teachers. A snake of SUVs and hybrid sedans creep away from campus and directly onto the tree-lined Long Island Expressway. The brand-new grounds are a welcome substitute for the older local schools, all in desperate need of funding. It’s a shame they were built behind a cluster of mental hospitals.
*
Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, established by the Lunacy Commission of New York State, took up residence in Queens in 1912. The name of the outpost, a portmanteau of Creed’s Moor, is a lasting jeer at the previous owners; the large plot of land on which the Center was built was originally billed as a farm, though moors are notoriously useless for producing crops. The state-owned plot, purchased from the Creed family in 1870, was first lent to the National Rifle Association and National Guard as a firing range. Situated in a far-flung corner of the borough, its activity only irritated some livestock and their owners. The first hospital building took in 32 patients and quintupled its population in six years. When it ran out of beds, patients slept in abandoned barracks left on the property.
An onslaught of development in the mid-20th century sought to catch Queens up to its shinier siblings, Manhattan and Brooklyn. Farmlands like the Creeds’ were destroyed in favor of housing developments and strip malls. Commuters took up residence from the head to the tail of Long Island, a land mass whittled by the Atlantic to resemble a Florida-bound flounder. Creedmoor continued to establish outposts along the island as if punctuating its shape, defining the vertebrae of the fish’s spine. The number of admitted patients to the Center swelled to over 7,000 by the 1950s, filling over 50 massive, dingy yellow outposts to capacity.
Along with the purchase of the moor, the state bought one of the few neighboring farms that had been left undeveloped. Working on the farm became a component of treatment for the patients. The labor was thought to be therapeutic, budgets were tight, and the number of mouths to feed kept rising. Felons deemed too insane for prison were sent to the most secluded regions of the vast premises.
In a dark basement, Dr. Lauretta Bender would place a soothing hand on the head of a trembling child, and turn it to the left or the right. A schizophrenic child, she believed, would yield to her touch; a normal child would turn away. Those deemed psychotic by her diagnostic tests would be administered the fruits of her most recent labors, the newly experimental electroconvulsive shock therapy.
The advent of antipsychotic drugs like thorazine allowed many patients to return to the world beyond the bars of the windows. Some went on to lead normal, happy lives, adding daily pills to their habitual, all-American nine-to-fives. Many went back behind bars, greeted this time by cold prison floors. Others tried the former, served a stint in the latter, and ended up huddling for warmth beneath layers of clothing on the city streets.
*
My father grew up in the house we live in now, three blocks and a long, uphill walk from the Creedmoor site. He remembers a different Bellerose, one where he and his friends were forbidden to play around the mental hospital and farm by worried parents. But the pristine rolling lawns of the grounds were too tempting; the neighborhood boys often took to the hills with their wooden toboggans after a particularly enticing snowfall. When we drive past a certain exit on the Long Island Expressway, my father sometimes waves a finger over the passenger seat at some overpasses and trees, saying, “In my day, this was all Creedmoor.”
The administration of antipsychotic medication, an outpatient treatment that did not require 50 buildings’ worth of beds, caused the patient population at Creedmoor to dwindle from 7,000 to 500. Today, only a few active buildings remain, relics of an empire for patients who require something more than pharmaceutical care. Purged of its reluctant participants, the farm became a public park in 1975. With too little money to fill it or even demolish it, one of the Creedmoor outposts—referred to as Building 25—was left abandoned for 40 years. Amateur photographers who delight in grotesque, abandoned locations have published pictures of its interior. Multicolored pigeon droppings form stalactite formations that coat the walls and ceilings; wallpaper and paint peel back to free the asbestos beneath; a collection of rusted cash machines and typewriters, already outdated when they were left behind, rust by a broken window. But you would never know Building 25’s interior decay from the outside. Its façade, better-kept than those of many still-active facilities, bears no mark of the deterioriation within.
I attended one of the intermediate schools constructed behind Creedmoor. My mother says she never truly got used to the dismal morning drive to deposit me behind a mental institution for eight hours a day. My father worked as a clinical psychologist, performing evaluations of at-risk students in public schools and overseeing outpatient treatment at a clinic in Staten Island. He had a long commute from our home in Bellerose to the clinic each morning that required him to leave while I was still eating breakfast in my pajamas. One day in eighth grade, I came downstairs to eat and noticed that he, too, was in his pajamas. He was going, he informed me, to a conference at a new clinic for children that Creedmoor had built in a lot right next to my school’s campus—today, we could walk to our respective day jobs together. I passed that lot every day on my way home from school, but I had never noticed that the perpetual construction had come to an end. I was stunned to learn that there was something new being created for an institution that had seemed so static and quiet beside three schools of screaming children. He came home that day to report that the new facilities were beautiful and modern, worthy of comparison to the brand new schools that now mark the campus.
After the creation of the new center, I always wondered why my father didn’t transfer jobs to work closer to home, but deeper down I knew that his work in outreach was more important to him than it was to cultivate a new career to avoid a commute. Some evenings, when he and my mother locked the office door, I knew he was telling her horror stories from work: parents abusing their children and children abusing their parents. And these were the patients deemed well enough for outpatient treatment, leaving my mother to wonder about the condition of those who remained in the facilities next door to the school.
Only once in my three years on campus did I ever see someone emerge from the remaining Creedmoor buildings. We had just been released for recess. In the distance, I noticed a slow row of people emerge from a Creedmoor side entrance. They milled around the enclosed playground, some stalking the perimeter, others half-heartedly tossing a basketball. I thought of all the times kids in my middle school would ask each other if they were “in the wrong building,” a joke I now understood as a cruel jab at the actual sick people who were our neighbors. I stood paralyzed by this realization. A few minutes later, a guard rounded the Creedmoor patients back into a line. Our lunch aide blew the whistle, signaling the daily headcount and the dreaded return to math class. The inmates returned to their respective institutions.
*
On January 28, 2014, Raymond Morillo escaped from Creedmoor during a psychological evaluation. Though he had recently maxed out his 1998 sentences for slashing and manslaughter, authorities deemed the 33-year-old too dangerous for the city streets and sought to place him behind a new set of bars. Around 11:30 a.m., Morillo quietly exchanged clothes with an insider friend and strolled off of the premises. The hospital did its best to hush up the breach, and my mother only found out a week later in a community newsletter: Garage Sale, Church Fair, Escaped Convict. By this point, Morillo had been caught boarding a Greyhound bus outside Memphis, Tennessee, one step away from anonymous freedom out West. I have not been back to my middle school for several years, but I can already hear the phony, prepubescent chatter: Those in the know can guarantee that Morillo evaded capture by donning a clown suit.
Features • Winter 2009
At Harvard’s Houghton Library, you can examine a telegraph Marcel Proust sent to one of his friends during the Dreyfus Affair. Dozens of words, several lines, all of it one convoluted sentence forced to a halt at the bottom right margin of the blue form. All capitals, the lines typed up crookedly, it seems to shout at you with clumsy, irate long-windedness: the perfect parody and the perfect antithesis of Proust’s easily ignited, well-worded sensitivity. A draft of Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower scribbled in a rapid, nervous hand, then overwritten with corrections. On one of the first pages, Hardy describes the novel’s eponymous tower. In the initial draft, the tower affords the protagonist a glorious view of five neighboring counties. Looking closer, we note that the first half-line has been crossed out in reconsideration—the number five replaced by a more modest three. In another one of Houghton’s indigo carrier boxes are several notebooks of drafts and sketches by E. E. Cummings, replete with joyous doodles and happy faces.
Textual artifacts writers leave behind can all too easily become unconscious parodies of the very qualities whose more controlled, artistic form we have come to admire. Proust’s unforgivingly complex syntax, Hardy’s sensory enthusiasm, Cummings’ delighted pantheism, assume a comic quality as soon as we start treating their quotidian expressions with the interpretive sincerity and high standards with which we approach their masterworks.
Though it affords some guilty pleasure, there is something wrongheaded in this deadpan parodic approach towards archival materials; not simply because it is mean to authors we want to love, but because it misrepresents the aesthetic qualities which draw us towards such drafts or sketches in the first place, the kind of artistic object they constitute. That the difference between a manuscript and a published work might be one of aesthetic category, rather than degree of perfection, was signaled in recent debates around the publication of Elizabeth Bishop’s drafts. When they were posthumously anthologized a few years ago (as Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box), many of her critics and friends protested. They were not appalled by the fact that the drafts were being made available to the public: many of them had already found their way into scholarly articles. It does not take away from Bishop’s talent that she wrote poems arguably inferior to the ones she published, or that her first stab at “One Art” bears little resemblance to the polished version achieved after a painstaking series of rewrites. The publication of her drafts was most shocking as a violation of the limit the poet had set between her personal space and her public image, the things that surrounded her and the voices she heralded her audience with. What the poet intended to remain a crossed-out, half-intelligible scribble on a crumpled piece of paper should not be given the communicative transparency of a clearly typeset composition. An object should not be made into a text.
Walter Benjamin has long alerted us to the difference in the way we respond to a reproducible and a non-reproducible work of art. We admire in a work of art which cannot be reproduced its aura of uniqueness, the fact that its beauty can only be accessed in one physical location. Disseminated widely, a work loses this aura and begins to draw its power from other sources. Transient and less intimidating in each of its many manifestations, it gains in status through the persistency with which its copies keep being spread, the rapidity with which its many versions infect the minds of societies.
Conventionally, we treat masterpieces of writing as belonging to the latter category. A writer’s canonical work is not the collection of the pieces of paper whose content she personally penned or dictated, but the nebula of multiply copied texts which she decided to release into the cycle of printing and reprinting. The effect of their works does not depend on any single, however authentically manuscripted copy.
What distinguishes writers’ drafts and sketches from their public work is the continued Antaeus-like dependence of the former on their physicality and the moment in time that first brought them to life. Seen as a part of a writer’s unique personal space, palpable like his lamp or chair, they are mysterious and instructive: a window onto the author’s private thoughts in their more fragile, momentary expression, a silent observer of one or many instants of their lives. Seen as additions to a public persona or mirrors of the author’s inner self, they appear silly and comparatively amateurish, deflations of the artistic efforts which originally made the writer into a publicly interesting figure.
Unlike their canonical cousins, drafts and sketches are therefore at their most powerful—as objects of art and as expressions of the person who wrote them—when they manage to convince us that they are physical objects rather than full-fledged texts. We appreciate them, and their connection to the authors we love, not because they accurately express their heights of genius, but because they remind us that these writers were fragile, non-reproducible individuals whose material selves we have irretrievably lost. They conjure up before our eyes not a trusty substitute of the author’s self, but a space made empty by his absence which they refuse satisfactorily to fill. Tantalizing us through their connection to works whose many reproductions we have seen, they pull us back towards an older, more idolatrous aesthetic mode, making us imagine—as printed books do far less ostentatiously—how much we are missing because their author is not there to be addressed directly.
Part of the mission of archivists and collectors is thus to resist the temptation of uprooting the manuscripts they are entrusted with: to make them available to the public in a way which emphasizes their uniqueness and physicality, preventing us from approaching them merely as texts. The Brontë sisters’ juvenilia, tiny books of stories about a fairy kingdom in minuscule childish handwriting, are kept in inch-by-inch compartments distributed evenly in a large case: a collection of butterflies we could imagine Emily and Charlotte finger and patiently gather. James Joyce’s galleys of Ulysses are preserved in their original, uncut form. With several pages on each giant sheet of paper, it is a map rather than typescript of Joyce’s master work, a mute account of the bodily acrobatics he must have subjected himself to in perusing and richly penciling its margins.
Poetry • Winter 2016 - Danger
*[Text spawned from YouTube's closed captioning attempting to render sound materials*
*being generated by analog modular synthesizers into text. Also, occasionally the *
*uploaders of the videos use various complex technical language to discuss the analog *
*modular synthesizers' computational patch networks, and the CC system fails to render *
*that text properly, and furthermore, it frequently fuses that spoken language with the *
*abstract electronic sonic material and attempts to hybridize the two into text. Each *
*poem corresponds to a different video.]*
* *
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*These are selections from a longer series of procedurally generated poems. You can *
*see the **rest of them at the artist's website [here](http://samwolk.info/text/). *
Fiction • Winter 2009
When Sylvester first saw the Buddha in the shop window, it was marked at $200. With his right hand he fingered the felt-like softness of a worn five-dollar bill in his pocket, and with his left he held on to a wriggling younger sister of five. Her brown curls bounced as she stomped impatiently at being kept in the empty parking lot. She was not interested in the old and dusty statuettes, or the smiling fat man who sat on his rump and was as bald as an onion. She clutched a tousled Barbie to her chest and skipped impatiently on feet clad in clean white loafers — she wanted to go home.
“Five more minutes, Ruth,” he said, without taking his eyes off the display. Stout painted kittens waved their paws in endless homage, and red-blue dragons arched their scaly, snake-like bodies. The Buddha, however, was king. His golden stomach, as round as a pumpkin, radiated opulence, and his ears hung down as if they were weighted with heavy jewels. His eyes slanted like moons and his mouth was open in laughter. Sylvester’s chest tightened with desire.
His parents brushed his request aside.
“Do we really need it?” asked his father, sitting in his paisley armchair and not looking up from his copy of the *Times*. Sylvester pressed further — they hadn’t gotten him a birthday present this year, but Ruth had gotten a Barbie.
The ends of his father’s moustache turned down and he seemed to think for a moment. Then he ruffed Sylvester’s mouse-brown hair and said, “Ask your mother.”
“No space,” said his mother from beneath a criss-crossed curtain of leaves. He saw only a mass of frizzy brown hair, a plaid shirt, faded jeans. She was bent, snipping at leaves, and her rump stuck up in the air. The fern would need repotting soon, and there were some new sprouts. And her dahlias — they were incredibly successful this year, red-purple-yellow bursts blooming under her care. She was estimating that by next month all the ledges and corners of the house would be occupied, and under the windows too.
Ruth got the Barbie, he pointed out once more.
“Mm.” Leaves rustled uncomfortably. “Could you pass the shears, honey?”
He turned on his heel and stomped away.
Ruth refused to hold his hand the next day on the way home from school. Instead she trailed behind him, jerking the doll’s stiff legs like chopsticks along the curb. Sylvester sat cross-legged under the store window, where the Buddha smiled benevolently at him over its golden belly. There were seven dollars in his pocket, and his stomach growled for its missed lunch.
When he came home, his mother was sitting on newspapers, between piles of dirt and mulch. He couldn’t see an inch of carpet in his family room between the dirt, the papers, and the plants. “Well!” said his mother. “This will all get cleaned up soon.” She cupped a baby dahlia in her hands and beamed at him. “How was school?”
He asked her once more for the Buddha — slowly, in his best grown-up tone. I’m serious, it implied. I mean business.
His mother looked up and wrinkled her nose at him. Both of their eyes were almond shaped and almond colored, but his nose was sharper and mouth tighter. Were it not for his small face, weak chin, and baby skin, he could have had the older face. He was so severe, she thought. Except for the pleading in his eyes, which would have moved a machine, he was too old for his age.
“If you’re good, I think Santa will get it for you for Christmas,” she said, and winced to herself. Once again she had failed at saying the right thing.
“That’s too late!” His lower lip pulled downwards, showing his bottom teeth. “You * never* give me anything!” He spat these words like venom, left the room. His mother eased the baby dahlia into the flowerpot and tucked it gently into the soil.
***
It was getting harder and harder for Sylvester to get to the front door. An army of newly potted plants crowded the walkway and Sylvester needed to push past a few ferns before he could see the doorknob.
“Goodbye, dear!” his mother’s muffled voice came from somewhere upstairs. “Watch the plants!”
When he rounded the corner on his way to school each day, the sun would still be low in the sky, glaring orange off the shop window. He had followed the fate of the glass case’s inhabitants since July. They came in with the rich luster and exotic breath of the Orient. Then slowly, as summer wore into fall and fall into winter, they lost their shine, grew dusty. Their price tags became slashed with red ink, and each bore the humiliation of mark-downs until one day they disappeared, borne off in the arms of some pitying stranger. This fate awaited his Buddha, and he resolved to interpose on its behalf.
Under the sun the statue glowed bright and incandescent — a golden orb nestled in the store window. Ruth swayed sleepily by his side, her plastic pink backpack clashing with the store’s warm, Oriental tones. She took her Barbie with her everywhere. Its ice blonde hair and skinny rubber legs irritated him immensely when it chanced to venture near enough to the window for him to see both it and the Buddha at the same time. When his five minutes was up Sylvester would squeeze his eyes shut and pivot himself away in one brisk motion, walking with quick, knee-locked strides. He only allowed himself five minutes in the mornings.
His curious walk, and the constant companionship of his little sister, put him at the mercy of blacktop bullies like Jim Burkle and Big Joey.
“It’s Sylvester the Cat! Is Tweety-bird chasing you?”
“Why is he always doing that with his eyes? He must a eaten something sour!”
“Stinky Sylvie!”
Ruth latched both hands in the crook of his arm, and the closer she clung to him the louder the voices would scoff. Sylvester kept his hands in his pockets and his shoulders scrunched high up to his earlobes. Today a raspberry flecked spit onto his neck, but he walked straight up to Big Joey.
“I’ll do your homework for you if you give me a dollar,” he said. The bully narrowed his mean, beady eyes at him, but Sylvester didn’t flinch.
Big Joey had the nose of a pig. He wrinkled this at Sylvester. “One dollar?”
Jim Burkle overhead this and shouted it to the whole blacktop. “Sylvie the Cat here says he’ll do your homework for a dollar!” A crowd of boys gathered instantly around him and Ruth.
“I want in, too!”
“Do mine, I’ll give you * two* dollars!”
He stayed after school for three more hours, finishing the math problems of all the boys in the fifth grade. He was shrewd and auctioned positions in line, and he collected the money up front. That night he walked home by himself (he had told Ruth to leave on her own), and his tired hand was closed tightly and tenderly around a wad of thirty-four dollars.
The parking lot was empty as usual. His eyes caught the red smudge immediately. The Buddha had been marked down to $150 — a shiver of excitement tickled his bones.
His mother tried to scold him for letting Ruth walk by herself, but she could barely be heard from behind a thick layer of palm leaves. He nearly tripped over a geranium going into the kitchen, but he caught himself on a chair. “Oops, son,” said his father, and Sylvester looked at the chair with surprise. Indeed his father was sitting in it, with a bonsai plant on his lap. Sylvester squinted to see him more clearly — he didn’t look quite right. Ruth was playing on the kitchen floor. Barbie’s clothes were beginning to fray, and the dirt clumped up in her synthetic hair.
When Sylvester went upstairs for bed, treading carefully over cactus bulbs, he found his room jammed with azaleas, Chamaedoreas, hyacinths, and ponytail palms. His pillow was wedged between a potted gardenia and a bluebell plant, whose drooping flowers hung over his head like teardrops. “They’ll only be there for a bit,” his mother assured him. “They can keep you company when you sleep.” Sylvester turned onto his side — the look of the blue flowers made his temples hurt.
“Sylvester, I can’t sleep.” Her small voice came from the doorway. Her pink flannel shirt was much too big for her and draped over her shoulders, and the tips of her toes were pink from cold. He felt sorry for her, clutching her Barbie and forever playing on dirty floors. She shifted over and she climbed into his bed, wriggling her small body against his frail frame. He hadn’t eaten lunch for two weeks. He felt a matted tuft of hair brush against his arm, and looked down to see Barbie staring at him with unnaturally large and blue eyes.
“Get that away from me.” He pushed it off the bed. Ruth began to quiver and to cry.
“In the land of Buddha…” he began quietly. They played this game nightly. He cradled her head in the crook of his arm as a means of apology, and as he talked, he began to doze, so that he half spoke, half dreamed of forests, temples, and cloud-ringed mountains coated with gold. The crying ceased, and the two lay side by side in sleep, like two tadpoles among the lilies and the reeds.
He began to feel a sense of urgency. At $100, it was a steal. He wished the shop window were made of lead, so that no passing stranger could witness its discounted shame. Someone would realize it was beautiful, someone would take it away. He had exactly fifty dollars.
He had stayed after school until dark this time, adding and multiplying in the woods behind school property for roughly four dollars an assignment. He changed his handwriting after each sheet, stopping only when he could no longer see his pencil in the dark. Counting up his revenue, he had made fifty-eight dollars, and had fifty more in his pocket. It was enough.
He ran from school down four blocks to the store, as quickly as his jerking gait would take him. Paranoia nipped at his ankles. Thirty feet away a terrible thought-vision came to him. An old woman was hobbling past the shop, and chanced to turn her head. Twenty feet — she looks at the Buddha, and she takes a liking to its grinning face. Ten feet — the lady is inquiring within. What would Sylvester do now, if a stranger snatched the prize from his grasp? He paled at the possibility. His backpack bounced up and down his back, as if to hurry him along.
The setting sun glared red off the store window, and there was no old lady in sight. In fact, the store was closed — 6pm closing time on Fridays. He pressed his face to the window, his breath coming in shallow gasps — it was there, it was still there. The Buddha looked back at him, lazy eyelids drooping over its smiling eyes. Tomorrow was Saturday; he could buy it first thing in the morning. It would be his by this time tomorrow.
When he reached home he saw that vines had crept up the sides of his house to an alarming extent. He could not find the door, so he climbed in through the living room window. His mother lay stomach down on the ground on matted palm leaves, untying two bickering vines with her fingers. A young, yellow vine snuck impudently up her wrist and she slapped it off lightly. She didn’t seem to hear him tumble in. Sylvester bent and kissed her cheek. It was soft and mossy.
That night he stuffed one hundred bills in his coat pocket — wadded it tightly and pressed it down as far as his pocket extended. He spoke breathlessly and squeezed Ruth’s hand. “In the land of Buddha…” he said, and could hardly contain himself. “In the land of Buddha, there was a little boy with glasses. He was the wisest boy in all the kingdom...” Whispered words slipped from his mouth like pearls. He spoke quickly and quietly late into the night.
“Good morning sleepyhead.” Ruth came into his room, her white loafers dancing from side to side. For the first time, she had risen earlier than he had. She stopped in the doorway when she saw him flinging clothes and sheets over his shoulder with violent motions. A white shirt flopped disconsolately at her feet.
His fingers were raking ferociously at the sheets, at the vines, at the insides of his pockets, which he already knew were empty. It was there last night, a definitive lump of bills against his stomach, the thick wad of his after school labors and hunger pangs stuffed in his coat. Where was it now? Had his mother cleaned? Impossible—there wasn’t an inch of furniture to be seen beneath the room’s layer of plant-life.
“Good mo-orning, I said!” Ruth planted herself in front of him and pointed her freckled chin at his chest. “What are you doing?”
Sylvester’s eyes riveted upon the Barbie in her hand. Its clothes were strangely new — an outfit of a matching green and gray. George Washington gazed back at him from the front of its shirt.
He grabbed her by the shoulders, fingers clamping on either side of her small frame.
“What have you done?” His voice was high. Her eyes grew wide with an uncomprehending fear.
“Sylvester, you’re hurting me.”
He shook her until her teeth rattled. “*Why is your Barbie wearing my money*?”
She squealed and started crying, the sound bouncing up and down in her throat. “It’s not my fault,” she whined between jumping sobs. She said over and over that it wasn’t her fault.
In the next room he found dollar bills strewn all over the ground. Some had been cut up, and one missed a chunk in the shape of a boot. Another crawled slowly across the floor, being pulled into the overgrown carpet by one curling vine. He caught it and tugged it out viciously. What he could salvage came to exactly thirteen dollars. It wasn’t fit to buy the Buddha’s left foot.
She didn’t understand what she had done. Sniffling and smoothing out her Barbie’s new skirt, she couldn’t understand why he looked at her so, eyes like black beetles in a thinning face.
Tuesday was a rainy day. No sun hit the store window, and Sylvester stood for a quarter of an hour under the elements regarding the spot where the Buddha had been. Someone had bought it on Monday, because it was no longer there when he came back from school. Perhaps now it sat in a forgotten corner of an old lady’s house, where her Pekingese took leaks in its lap. A rickety Chinese temple stood there now, made of painted straw and rice paper.
“You can ask Mom for that. It’s almost Christmas.” Ruth said in her plastic lime-colored raincoat. She looked up at him meekly. Even their mother finally moved the pots and groomed the vines to let daylight back into the rooms, but his eyes had remained beetle-black. She had the feeling that she had done something very wrong that day, so she tried to say something that would please him.
He considered the item, but realized he didn’t want it that much. “Let’s go.” He took his sister’s hand and directed their umbrella homeward.
“We never play that game anymore,” chirped Ruth, opening her stride to keep sync with his brisk step. “In the land of Buddha.”
Their reflections slid in and out of view as they stepped over puddles and pavement.
“So?”
“So—” She drew out the *O* in a long and dipping pout. When she received no response, she began: “In the land of Buddha, there was once a beautiful princess—”
He cut her off irritably. That game is over, he said. Ruth was hurt, and she clamped her mouth shut and jerked her hand out of his. They walked for a while in silence — a slouching fifth grade boy with one hand stuffed in his pocket and his kid sister in an insolent lime green. The rain beat dirt off the rooftops and ran in oily rivers into the gutters. After one block Ruth had already forgotten all offense, and she skipped and scuffed her rain boots ahead of him. Her fingers slipped back into Sylvester’s hand like a small, wet fish, and he let her pull him home.
2026