The Fish Tank

Photographer - Tobi Brun

The Fish Tank

I’m sixteen.

The boy’s dishwater blonde hair is just long enough to cover his eyes. I call him a boy, but my memory contains no detail of his age. He could be a man. He is older than me—that much I’m sure of. I let my mind tell me he is something between—on the verge, maybe, of
manhood or of an adolescence that will stretch on longer than it should. Or, of something else I can’t quite name. I gaze at him through the fringe of his unwashed hair. His eyes aren’t what hold my attention, but the knowledge that he’s high on painkillers. He parts his hair so strictly down the middle it makes me think of Moses striding through the Red Sea, sandals on dry ground. The boy rubs my feet between his warm palms. It’s intriguing—the way he asks permission to do this. My heartbeat hammers my ears. Without hearing myself say yes or no, I watch him reach down and slowly lift one of my feet into his lap, followed by the other. Another boy exists somewhere in the dark periphery, in the back of the trailer with my best friend, L.

She follows him, her hand in his, until they disappear into the bedroom at the end of the hallway. They stay quiet for a while, long enough for her absence to become a marked presence in my memory. As the boy rubs my feet, I stare across the room into a fish tank casting a purple glow into the dusk. Late summer clouds flare up inside the window frame above the aquarium, pink and orange, before they fade, and the sky goes slack. The darkness turns to nothing, a deep canvas for the pinprick of stars and the sound of cicadas wailing at the new moon. The purple glow reflects off the inky glass. In hindsight, I understand the nothing that happens that night is something. He, the boy with the hair parted in the middle, addicted to pills, doesn’t require anything of me but to lie still while he touches my feet. Yet, there is an unasked question—some dread I can’t put my finger on. I feel the purple lure of the fish tank stain me as I lie on that couch. It lodges in me then, leaning me toward neither red nor blue, but a sick leaching of both together—something secondary, a stalling in the middle. The purple is inextricable. I define it now as the yearning of my adolescence—the desire to be desired. I don’t want this boy, but I do want more than this.

Last year, I turned forty. Since then, I’ve been toying with the idea of reckoning, wondering what the enduring questions of my life are as I allow myself to peer over my shoulder, back into the blank spaces, the irrelevancies that seemed so important to my younger self. Why did I think certain trivialities were important and would remain so, even after the memory faded from view?

Out of the ether of my past, this foot rub materializes to something concrete, like an anchor keeping me in place, dropped somewhere deep into the purple glow of that fish tank. It marks time, denotes context. Now, I look back at myself and think, this is the first thing that ever happened to me. I am born here. But, really, this foot rub is the birth of my curiosity. About myself, about what can happen—about L. and what she does in the back bedroom with the boy she follows there. The question grows inside me—when will whatever is happening for her happen for me? When will a man look at me like that? Take me by the hand, lead me somewhere dark? When will I be chosen?

Something in the fish tank’s purple glow reminds me of a fever dream, some unknowable landscape unleashed in my psyche. There is the feeling of being sunk, delving under. Of something not quite right. It is like the flicker of a television into a dark room, only nothing moves. The purple should be banal—simply the color of the pebbles at the bottom of the aquarium flinging their hue on the far wall. But, nothing is always something, the way the color floats up, skims the surface of memory. The purple emerges from the depths. I imagine the fish study me through the bleary wall—they wonder why I let that boy touch me at all.

This—the fish tank and the foot rub—is the first of many times I’ll wait on L. That night marks the beginning of something I can’t yet see, how she is becoming older than me, even though we are a month apart—my birthday in June and hers in July—Cancer and Leo, the best of
friends. That night, when L. follows the boy back to that bedroom, down the dark hallway, she begins to know things I won’t know until much later. This widening distance between us plants the first seed of jealousy in me. Even though I can’t define it yet, I want her freedom. There is nothing holding her back. Where I am constrained internally, L. is always completely herself.

So much of who I am back then is wrapped up in almost. In falling short of what could happen, who I could be. L. is different—she acts, makes decisions. She goes places, does things. Has relationships with boys. I tag along, always an outsider. An observer. I am forever on the couch getting foot rubs from boys, while she is inside a boy’s room, doing something else. It seems to me that L. lives as if she has nothing to lose. Carefree, grown-up. Sophisticated, even when we are still too young to know what that means. She seems headed, sometimes, for destruction, but her consequences glitter like sunlight on a rain puddle. I want this lure, this shine. Sometimes—often—she follows the voice of the Sirens, but even when she crashes on the shore and burns like a shipwreck aflame on the horizon, it is a beautiful burning. She makes sure of that.

Now, I think back to the version of me who is there, staring into that aquarium. I wonder, what do know now that I didn’t know then? That night is near the beginning of something big and disastrous in L.’s life. But I am still on the verge, still looking for whatever it is that will catapult me into adulthood. I am still looking for the thing—the boy, the love—that will take me off the rails. I believe then that growing up comes hand in hand with heartbreak. On some level I am right. Something about the inertia in the scene frightens me. I can’t be bothered to say no to something I don’t want. I can’t be bothered to turn on the light or tell L. I don’t want to wait on her. Or to tell that boy no, I don’t want him to touch me.

Any difference in the realm of memory, any alteration, a slight shift, and the tectonic plates of the past can move. Everything I know could be different, shifted slightly to the left, just one degree off. But, then, I wonder, is it possible to remember something wrong? Or are things just how they are, and how I remember them is how they exist, hard and fast, in my memory— incorrect or not? That’s the kind of moment it is, looking into the fish tank, into the purple murk. It is pivotal, a hinge. Something in my perception tells me the fish tank and the foot rub isn’t all there is, isn’t the whole evening, the whole story. There is everything else, too—and, how I feel about it. L. is in the bedroom at the back of the house. In my mind this amounts to her being chosen. I am on the sofa cringing as the boy grazes each of my toes with the tips of his fingers. This is the first and most pronounced of many tiny moments of comparison. I don’t want to be chosen by the same boy who chooses L., I just want to be wanted, desired. And, I want to be anywhere else but here.

Whatever is right in front of me is there because of what lies behind me—I am a product of accretion, an accumulation of pasts. I am made of little litterings of light flung on the path after I already walked it, the half-dried footprints leading me through wet, disintegrating leaves. This single memory of having my feet rubbed is the context of all my accumulated selves at one point in time, staring into the swirling purple water. It comes to mind the way a shadow might materialize. An image floats up, out of the darkness, like a candescent creature in dim water. I’m surprised by the persistence of this memory—such a seemingly meaningless event, but an experience all the same. What other moments are there just like this, ones too insignificant to even remember?

I don’t want to imbue meaning into a scene that holds none—I can only say it was a turning point. A scene I look back on now and think oh yes, that happened. And, and then, everything changed. It’s a flag planted in the soil, marking the place where everything ended, and everything else began. It’s the kind of thing only picked up on the trail walking back, only noticed in hindsight, on the return journey. It comes to mind that I may never know what I was doing—when I let that boy rub my feet. The soft accumulation of my experience may never make sense to me.

Behind me, silhouettes creep slowly. The room I occupy—so recently filled with golden radiance—now brims with cool shadow. I watch as the dog follows a warm block of light cast from the storm door across the wood floor. The sun disappears, buried in blue. I sit wondering if what I feel is regret, or if it is simply the way time passes, how memory discards absence, abandons it on equal footing with presence.

Anna Oberg is a professional photographer based in Estes Park, Colorado. When she's not arranging family portraits with the perfect view of Long's Peak as backdrop, she focuses on writing tiny memories and small stories. She has been published in Hunger Mountain Review, The South Dakota Review, Mud Season Review, Pidgeonholes, Causeway Lit, The Maine Review, decomp Journal, The Festival Review, and Split Rock Review, among others.

What You Look Forward To

Photographer - Tobi Brun

What You Look Forward To

Do you smell that?
A charred scent that fills my nose
and draws water from my eyes.

The smoke clogs my lungs,
forcing me to grasp at whatever
air I can find.

Soot hammers my taste buds,
leaving a burnt sensation lingering
in my mouth.

My skin bubbles against my bones
as the heat rages through my body
from cinders that were once trees.

The screams of people fleeing drown out
the blaring sirens of a dozen firetrucks
and the crackle of dancing flames.

A clear accident, planned by those
who deny allegations, who hid their pollutants,
who turn away from the damage they have caused.

A planet killed and for what?
The push for innovation and change
lead only to death and destruction.

Do you smell the smoke? Taste the ash?
Hear the screams? Feel the flames? See the end?
This is the future you have to look forward to.

Magdalena Broderick is a 2024 Bridgewater College graduate. She spends her free time reading, writing poetry, and spending time with her horses. She enjoys exploring the idea of how the passage of time affects individuals, society, and the planet in her poetry.

Birthdays Are for Redefining

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Birthdays Are for Redefining

I stare at the names in my Snapchat contacts and idle my finger above the “create group chat” button. I am in the early stages of creating a plan to celebrate my twenty-second birthday, which is a week away, and I need to decide who I will invite to a party that has not yet been planned. As I look at the names of people I have known for years, I hesitate over whether to pull them all into a virtual room and discuss the details of a day celebrating me or if I should scrap the idea altogether. The names of these people once felt comfortable in my mouth along with the words “they are my friend,” but over the last few months, I have found a sour taste poisoning the confidence in that sentiment. It is normal to grow apart from people you were once very close with. That’s what people older than me would say. But is it normal to question if someone is your friend at all or if they ever have been? I question this after years of built-up papercuts that have turned into a gash, scarred over, but still sore.

In the past, my birthday was a sacred day, it was a day that got to be about me. People were nice to me on my birthday and that was huge to a little girl who spent most other days being picked on or excluded. Everyone wanted to come to my birthday, as I spent weeks planning the themes and details of the celebration. It didn’t matter where we went. The arcade, the waterpark, or my mom’s basement where we set up couch forts and stayed up all night. My birthdays were the most fun. Even though I had lots of people to invite to a birthday, the group of friends I grew up with were not very healthy. They talked violent amounts of gossip about one another, got into fights (sometimes physical), and played other friends against the one they were mad at, leaving them

isolated. I knew at the time, even at age eleven, that relationships like that were toxic, but I wanted to be liked, wanted to have friends, needed to have “friends” to invite to a birthday. At age eleven I felt like a friend was a person you should be loyal to no matter what, but my notion of loyalty was to allow others to walk all over me, while I provided support and companionship to those, who in hindsight, didn't even like me.

Merriam-Webster defines a “friend” as “A person who has a strong liking for and trust in another.” Strong liking. Trust. By this definition, I have only ever had one fully platonic “friend” that I had been sure liked me and who I felt mutual trust with, a girl who I no longer speak to because of her lifestyle choices involving drugs, men, and morality. I held onto her for a long time while she continually chose her lust for self-destruction, I wanted to be loyal, but you can only tell someone so many times why she shouldn't be doing hard drugs and why nothing is worth getting put in juvie before the repetition becomes exhausting.

I grew up wanting a perfect TV friendship. One where the two besties would see each other every day; and have each other's backs amidst the rumors, boy troubles, and growing pains; one where I could confidently call someone my “best friend” without awkward hesitation that I was stepping on someone else's toes. But as I've gotten older, I wonder if that wish was realistic. I called Brittany Dunham, a girl I had known for years, my best friend one time. I unintentionally did it in front of Kailee, a girl who has known Brittany since she was a toddler, but who would also call her fat and dumb behind her back. When my sentiment of our relationship slipped, Brittany stared at me with her giant blue eyes and froze, looked at Kailee’s glaring face, and said I

was “one of her best friends.”
Since the early two-thousand-tens, musician/actress Selena Gomez and country-turned-pop icon Taylor Swift have been best friends. They are often seen by the paparazzi on outings from lunches or shopping sprees, they attend one another’s events and concerts, and they almost always sit together at award shows, whispering gossip back and forth to one another. At surface level, they are what I wanted growing up, a supportive, loving sister who had my back, despite the rumors of being a poor performer and needing autotune to sound good. But as I have gotten older, I've learned that a 100% supportive friend may not be realistic, and I find it strange that they have never made a song together. Maybe a “friend” isn't someone you share everything with, whatever the reason as to why they haven't made music together, it seems like these two stars don't mix business with personal.

I read a book back in elementary school titled Friendship According to Humphrey by Bett G. Birney. The books follow a school pet hamster named Humphrey who, through wacky adventures, learns what being a “friend” means. This often involved using kind words, not discussing someone unfairly behind their back, including them in conversation and plans, and respecting them in every general sense. I wanted to have friends like Humphrey did and wanted to be a good friend.

Ashlynn, one of the names in the Snapchat contacts, told me I wasn't being a good friend a few weeks before finals. She couldn't understand why I, a full-time student working six hours a day, did not want to come to her apartment after every shift and watch a movie with the rest of our

friends. She didn't understand why I didn't want to be around my friends after a shift and why I wanted to go home to rest and do homework. “You can do your homework here,” she argued, while her baby boy screamed for more milk, and her boyfriend screamed at his video games. I wanted to be around my “friends”, I loved them, but can someone be a “friend” if they don't see each other at least once a week? Does friendship expire after not seeing one another for a specific amount of time? I wanted to prioritize a full night's rest over my friends. Did that make me a bad friend? Ashlynn seemed to think so. I ended up apologizing and said I would be there next time. I wonder how many times a week Selena and Taylor see one another.

Scrolling through the names on my phone and analyzing them, I can’t help but feel frustrated by what I was seeing before me. The Oxford Dictionary adds in their definition of a “friend” that it includes mutual affection exclusive of romantic or sexual feelings. I frown at the name of the boy who got me to sleep with him while I mourned the disintegration of my first serious relationship, claiming I could trust him with my thoughts and my body, only later to tell other friends that I came onto him. I shift my focus to another boy, one who more times than I can count tried to hit on me while drunk, and finally to the boy who would jump at the opportunity to sleep with me if my boyfriend and I broke up. If you asked him, he would claim he is my boyfriend’s friend like he is mine.

Shaking off my disappointment for the men I know, I move to the women. I stare at the name of a girl whom I have not seen more than twice since she got into a relationship almost a year ago, the friend whom I have helped move thrice who talks about me behind my back, and finally,

the girl who she talks about me to, who I had helped recover from drugs and held while she cried when her boyfriend cheated on her.

If there is a definition of a guy-friend I would say it is something like “A boy you initially view as a brother, who you trust like a brother, that is until they reveal they want to sleep with you, leading to you feeling uncomfortable wearing a swimsuit in front of them.” If I could define girl-friends it would refer to “Either the best mutual platonic sisterhood you could have, or the most isolating experience that creates insecurity, resentment and cattiness. Does not have to be mutual.”

My experience with “friends” has been a heartbreaking one filled with whiplash, but I doubt I have been a perfect friend in return. I have said the wrong things, and have been selfish and too opinionated, but I can rest easy knowing I have always tried to be at least an honest, loyal, and true friend, like Humphrey.

Swiping up and down my Snapchat contacts screen in frustration, it hits me. My definition of what constitutes a “friend” has changed since childhood, and I haven’t noticed until now. Unlike in the past, I don't have the desire to invite any of these people simply because they’re people I have attached myself to. I am tired of feeling the weight of expectations I am putting on myself and others while receiving minimal effort and maximum judgment from “friends” in return. My efforts are unappreciated, my intentions misunderstood, and while I have been allowing people all of my life to put their shoes on my neck, and accepting that this is the weight of a title like “friend,” I am denying myself other possible friendships in the name of loyalty. Or maybe it has been comfortable to stay in relationships that I don’t quite fit in.

I have known most of my friends for more than four years, some as long as six, which is enough time to have fights and disagreements with one another, but at the end of the day, we all are drawn back to the group by a bonfire kickback or a birthday, much like the one I have been mulling over. A lot of different factors could be what drew us back to one another like magnets even after nasty fights, but the most common theory among our group was that we viewed one another as “family.” I believed for a while that people you've known for a few years could hold a candle to blood relations, but my friends never paid for my tuition, never held my hand while I underwent medical procedures, they didn't even stop being friends with my ex after he cheated on me. My family did. What kept us together was familiarity, comfortability, and perhaps a trauma bond or two so that we would have people to go camping with, travel with, and celebrate birthday parties with.

It had taken me twenty-two years to learn how to be all right in becoming unattached to those who have not applied equal pressure, and for the first time in my life, feel comfortable celebrating myself with those whose intentions I do not need to question. Feeling a sense of assurance, I swipe my finger up, on the Snapchat app, erase it from my homepage, and with it, the half-baked group chat disappeared.

I decide, in the end, not to plan a big birthday party. Instead, at twenty-two, I conclude that I have to give up on needing to be celebrated, by people who are arguably not true “friends.” Instead, I will plan a small dinner for myself with my family and boyfriend and let the “friends” who give halfhearted questions about whether I am doing anything for my birthday, a gesture of meeting them at a local bar later that night, a place they would be either way, birthday or not.

Esabeau (Esa) Harrington is a senior creative writing student at Rocky Mountain College in Billings Montana. Her work often involves the relationships in her life and also includes themes surrounding mental and physical health.

‘It's Funny What People Will Say & Do to Relate to One Another’, ‘The Separation’, & ‘A Sky of Bombs’.

Photographer - Tobi Brun

It's Funny What People Will Say & Do to Relate to One Another

Her purple-hued legs, as long as my fingers
& the tubes that ran throughout her body
were as thick as her pine-needle arms.

When you explain to people
your baby is in the NICU, they never know what to say.
Prattle about a baby they once knew
who survived or read about
in a Facebook post. They preach phrases like normal,
you’d never know, even graduated early, or
only had a hole in their heart to make you feel relieved.
Jostle, how lucky you are & how thankful
you should feel. Your baby will be fine, & these moments
will pass when you can’t hold her, feed her, bathe her,
touch her petal-thick skin that you once grew.

Curious people ask if her eyesight
will be okay & I wonder if oxygen
lines will snake through her nose forever.
Or pry if she will always be so tiny - can she catch up?
All I can think of is that because she was born
so young, she hadn’t learned the reflex of suckling
& swallowing. No matter how many breastfeeding articles I read,
it would never matter as a toothpick-sized orange
feeding tube winds through her nose for nearly 45 days.

It’s funny what people will say &
do to relate to one another.

When in the dark of night, while everyone rests
& IVs streak both of your arms, you cry
with no sound, so nurses or your husband don’t hear
because you should be thankful you survived.
She survived.
But your body feels empty
& your arms pine to hold her
foot-long body next to yours in rough
patterned hospital sheets.

Instead, in the quiet beeps of hospital rooms
you grieve the dreams you had
for your pregnancy, birth, & the beginning

days of her life.
Grief’s like heavy weights
tied to your feet as you learn to walk again,
shuffle one foot after another
to the NICU in the morning light.

The Separation

Before they pulled her wet-slicked being
from my numbed body, they prepped us
we may not hear her cry.

Minutes before, her heart rate dived
to a faint tap & her 3lb body
had stopped moving.

No matter if I had changed position,
sipped chilled water, or however deep
they dug the ultrasound wand into me;

her life-filled body had become lifeless.

As my body rocked back &
forth like a swing in the wind, they carved
through 7 layers of my body.

I shivered from the coldness of metal tools
slicing thick tissue & the nurse to my right
gabbled everything they were doing, reasons why, & I couldn’t hear a thing.

Only thoughts of how
my 7-month-old baby that had grown a part of me
may not scream, cry, feel, or be alive.

My husband rested his hand on my hairnet
& soon we heard little bleats, a wet lamb
dropped in a pasture left to survive.

In a moment, we became two entities
left to laugh, wail, & feel the world’s aches
separate.

a sky of bombs

i can’t help but think
how things would be different if she
came under sky-cascade of bombs
on the gaza strip,
explosions like the uncurling of broken bones
snap in the sky. images of starved babies,
four in one hospital crib
in darkness without electricity & running water.
their misshapen heads, ribs raised
through bodies like the flat
& sharp keys of a piano.

women, like Walaa, their bodies
inside out to give birth on the bitter,
cracked earth between refugee tents with only
her uncle’s wavering flashlight &
vibrations of bombs ricochet. no medical care
& a baby’s limp purple body between her legs
waiting to be starved.

Whitnee Coy has an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Kentucky University's Bluegrass Writers Studio, and has taught creative writing throughout the past 13 years at various programs and colleges/universities including at Oglala Lakota College, a tribal college on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. She have two chapbooks of poetry published "Kintsukuroi" (Finishing Line Press) and "Cicurate" (SD State Poetry Society) and has been published in various literary journals such as "Pasque Petals", "Poem Memoir Story PMS", "Jelly Bucket", and "Havik: The Las Positas College Journal of Arts and Literature".

‘Convivium’, ‘Hylas’, & ‘Antinous’.

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Convivium

Hearing the golden youth play the lyre
I - blushing, joyful - turned to see you
then here with me
but now...

Hylas

You slipped into wretched waters
Led to a bloodied fate by nymphs
deadly, leaving me lonesome,
o forever tender.
By moonlight I, widower, mourn my love
hearing unwillingly those murmurs and sighs
rising from the hellish black depths
very soul aching.

Antinous

The garden flourished with bright birdsong and fragrant herbs
together we laughed and played here.
But the brilliant hour fled
now you sleep, eternally
silenced by the river.

Lee Lanzillotta is a writer originally from Virginia. He is currently based in Rome, where he studies Classics. His writing has been featured in Melissa, Vox Latina, the Gay and Lesbian Review, and Remus. You can find him on Instagram @leelanzillotta.