Physics 120 Exam Semester 1 2024 Question 7:

Emma Philips

 

A girl gets into a car at 7:00 am, closes the door and turns the key. You may model the interior of the car as an isolated system, a world of its own where the ramifications of closing the door early in the morning have not yet taken effect. She sets the radio to play Bruce Springsteen, but that is unimportant. To an outside observer, puffing in the middle of the rural road as he chases after her because he would do anything (within three significant figures) to make her stay, anything to spool time backwards and pull her into his arms, she appears as a receding particle, brake lights red shifting as she speeds away. She is crying because the fairytale is in the rearview mirror, because she wants the whole world, not just the first three significant figures and she cannot have it out here in the silent country, the claustrophobic open spaces speckled with dairy cows. She cannot have it with him. The girl wants to read and burn and know things beyond barbed wire fences and the engagement ring left next to the double bed. Travelling at 27ms, the future is fast approaching and she faces it alone.

If no exterior forces are acting on the girl, at what time does she return, if ever?

Show all your working and give your answer in the si unit for time.

About Emma Philips

The 7,000 league boots

Anna Thorby

 

It was nearly too late by the time I got the boots; I was already past six decades of life. You see, the ancestors had not envisaged things like forced adoption wrenching people from their destiny – and their boots. But now I wore them.

I started at Rēkohu. There I unfurled my hook and snared the 180th meridian. I pulled until I felt the line catch. One last time I stared eastwards, watching the vast ocean of heaving waves and towering clouds. And I knew it was right. I placed the rope over my shoulder and turned to the west. A few steps and I was on the shores of Aotearoa, the Meridian reeling in behind me.

Maybe I had been naive – I’d thought that only things like clocks and alarms would be affected. Or maybe I was too old, I had forgotten about how much was governed by those timelines scrawled on human-made maps of this world. For, as I walked, my rope pulled all time with it: factory lines clogged, cell doors opened, airport flight boards spun, bank safes unlocked, deep-sea mining rigs stopped and Facebook, Instagram, TikTok – the whole lot failed to send alerts.

But I kept on pulling. I towed the Meridian in one complete circumference of this world until I was back at Rēkohu. Then I sat and looked at the pile of debris behind me and beamed. It had worked – all timelines were demolished.

Now for the borders. 

About Anna Thorby

Medusa

Kat Ziesler

 

We eat inside. Even on days when the summer breeze is warm and the sun tiptoes across the water, we eat our dinner inside. I sit on the sturdy chair, Gran on the pretty, frail one. I can’t be trusted to sit still. We eat fish. 

After we’ve eaten, Gran washes our dishes with languid hands. Then she stacks them onto the rack, for me to dry. Some days she lets the water become a cold soup of particles that stick to the rims of glasses. The dirtiest cups, I slip back into the sink. It makes her eyes go dark, and the waves of her long hair quiver, but she stays silent. If I feel brave, I ask her to change the water. Sometimes she will, sometimes I have to wipe the brown streaks off with the dishcloth. When the last plate is on the rack, she leaves the room. The TV comes on, and to the blare of a game show I stare at the foam crackling in the sink, a sprinkle of cooked fish and crumbs dotting its membrane. 

Years later I eat my dinner on the damp sand of a beach at low tide. I slide one toe along the slick residue of retreated waves, dirty speckles on a lace trim of foam, and think of Gran. I see her long hair in the strands of kelp smashing against the rocks. I meet her dark eyes in the mirror at vile hours of the night.

About Kat Ziesler

If a little lie is white

Sylvia Santiago

 

What colour is a big lie? Red, I think. Glaring like a stoplight. Pooling, on the bedroom floor.

The coroner said he was in bed, tucked up with blankets. It was peaceful. 

The flatmate said he was facedown on the lino, a hand stretched towards the door. I only 

wanted to bum a smoke. 

Someone (the landlord?) left a note taped to the wall: I’m sorry for your loss. 

A blanket hides the stains on the floor. So many ways to conceal our grief. The ghosts of cigarette smoke. A rack of empty clothes. A stranger’s room. 

He was facedown on the floor. It was peaceful. I’m sorry.

Later, when people ask if I miss my father, I know what colour my lie will be.

About Sylvia Santiago

This place used to be bigger

Finn Williams

 

You jump the fence and make your way inside the old school grounds. When you were five the sight of the junior block turned your stomach into a hornet’s nest as you made your way to class, reminding yourself that if the teacher yelled, they weren’t yelling at you. Today as you approach, you’re uneasy once again but only because this place built for people is completely deserted.

When you were seven, the roof over the walkway between the junior and senior blocks felt a mile above you, but today you have to stoop down so you don’t hit your head as you walk. Across from you are the rainbow benches where you and your friends traded Pokémon cards for the month before they were banned because people kept nicking them.

Rounding the senior block, you come across what was known as ‘The Big Fort’ but now it looks more like the modest fort. The levels between platforms that you had to clamber up at nine can now be walked up without much effort. At the top you look out over the back of the football fields and swimming pools, it’s overcast so Ruapehu is hidden away. Taking a ride down the fort’s slide, you still find it dangerously fast.  

A cold wind chases you as you walk out. Miniature ghosts of a simpler time watch on as you leave. Looking over your shoulder as you hop back over the fence you leave the past behind.

About Finn Williams

 

Musings of a reluctant bridesmaid while visiting a friend

Sara Crane

 

Beside the French doors that lead to a secluded patio, Marian has a wall of photographs. Most of them are strangers to me now.

I wonder if there are familiar patterns that guide the photo choices people make, leading us to imagine who they are, or want to be.

My brother displays vintage cars, men in uniform, the odd exotic holiday. A sister has pictures of dogs, mostly beagles, mainly hers. A few sports teams and her daughter with an unidentified trophy. My mother has a careful array of studio portraits of all her children at varying ages. None of us are smiling. Wedding photos are promptly removed after divorce. Granny used to stuff recent snapshots under the thick glass that covered her kidney-shaped dressing table with the floral skirt. Over time they turned sepia.

I look at Marian’s craftfully framed collection again. Shocked, I recognise a much younger self. This person is wearing a bouffy pink bridesmaid’s dress. She is leaping to avoid catching the bridal bouquet which the bride is determined to throw to her. I remember how it crashed and fell apart. And everyone laughed.

Having never married, I never have to embrace photographs of myself.

Out in the small garden I painstakingly deadhead Marian’s roses. I remember, all those years ago, picking the flowers for her bouquet from Granny’s garden. Roses and long sprigs of aromatic myrtle. She looked radiant on her wedding day, a picture of joy. And I miss her steadfast friendship.

About Sara Crane

 

Whenua

Eartha Davis

 

Without a lover to dream upon, my mother sleeps against the Earth. She pretends Earth is a human chest. The grasses are star-studded whiskers, she says. The tūī are hearts, lungs, organs thudding under the body’s blanket.

At night, my mother and Earth breathe together. Their lips flower, wetting the air. They are swollen with heartsong, gratefulness, the dearness of being. Seconds fall like snow. 

When morning comes, my mother greets the dawn. She is a fragile, gentle beauty. Her eyes are soft with seeing. She is frightened by the weight of loneliness, its sudden, hope-soaked hatching. She asks the sky for salve. 

One morning, my mother does not return. There is a woman-shaped dent under the pines, where her spirit once lay. I call out to her, throat unspooling its threads, watching light bandage the mountainsides. Sun is my witness. I imagine our sorrows kissing, wedding their hot strings. I imagine Sun and I foraging small, feathered victories from birdsong. 

Dusk. I press my face against the Earth’s chest and listen. Gentle wingtaps. A music of migration. Soil glazed with the dampness of being. 

And there you are: Mother. There you are, dancing beyond the pines. 

We build gullies from the homing of our palms, rivers from the homing of our cheeks, until the birds follow us, until hope dangles from the roots of our hair, like two swaying torches at sea.

About Eartha Davis

Dead men

Carrie Burley

 

“It’s riddled, not worth keeping.” He pushed at it with the toe of his boot, I stepped in between. He was right though, it was riddled. We’d forgotten it and the rot had set in. Stopped at five to midnight. No more the rigid shift of its hands, the pause before the half-hour pitch and the echoey peel of the hour. What was the use of a stopped clock?

Dad with the scar creasing his top lip, telling me of the dog bite that made it. The doctor placing a litter of puppies in his lap while they stitched him up so he wouldn’t be scared of dogs ever after. The clock the background beat.

Grandad won it in a fishing competition, a hobby he took up when he came home from the trenches. Can’t imagine losing yourself in that pastime. All those empty spaces. Watching the float as it sat or bobbed.

Nan on her knees polishing the case each Saturday with her balled-up apron. The heady clinical aroma of the beeswax creating a honey conker glow as the blur of her face appeared. Her forehead furrowed, the look she always had when she spoke of Grandad. Gone. Fell down the stairs when the light bulb blew. Not a fitting end for a war hero.

My finger circling the silky smoothness as I followed the swirls of the knots, smudging her handywork. She, feigning cross, raising her fist to my nose – “Smell that,” she’d say, “Dead men.”

About Carrie Burley

God’s got a good backstroke

Nicholas Viglietti

 

Booze brained, and foggier mornings. Life starts each day, when you open your eyes. Sleep is good … freedom … from all this trying … all this beat down you get, whenever your alarm goes off – that’s the first thing that wrecks us – then you stagger out of whatever bed you make. Some are comfy, and others peel themselves off the street … we get to rushing and that familiar feeling of defeat.

I prepared for the day. She’s already gone, and still mad, and oddly that’s OK, because I’ve learned in the love game, emotions are better than resolute disinterest. I got hope, then. The sun shined, and I thought, fuck companies, I’m sure those assholes would fill my slot as fast as I dropped.

“Hello,” the secretary said.

“Hey,” I grumbled, “it’s Nico, ain’t feeling well, not coming in today.”

She started to ask details, and I hung up because people don’t want real explanations, they want their suspicions validated. I’m over caring … I went to the river, a hot sun beat down, and I swam with God.

About 
Nicholas Viglietti

This time

Leanne Comer

 

No one remembered the last time they’d seen her. Was it before the fireworks display? Or after? No one could say for sure.

There was similar confusion about exactly what she’d been wearing. Blue jeans with a pink t-shirt, said her friend Anna. White sneakers. No, it was a purple t-shirt, insisted her mother. And black jeans, not blue. They both agreed on the sneakers.

Yes, she’d been drinking. Who hadn’t? It was New Year’s Eve, for God’s sake! No, she wasn’t drunk, said Anna. Well, maybe a bit drunk.

Constable Cooper sighed.

There’d been a large crowd gathered around the lake to watch the fireworks at midnight. Not just locals. There were some out-of-towners in the crowd as well. Everyone agreed that it was the best display in years – twenty minutes of colour and noise, culminating in a cascade of white stars plummeting from the velvet sky into the lake.

Cooper wasn’t convinced that anything sinister had happened. He knew the girl, and her family. She’d run away before, he reminded her mother. More than once. Chances were that she’d turn up in a few days, safe and sound.

But that was before old Elsie Wagner took her beagle, Max, for a walk around the lake on Sunday morning. Before Max bolted into the pine trees, barking madly. Before Elsie stumbled after him into the forest.

Before everyone knew that Lina wasn’t coming home this time.

About 
Leanne Comer

Seaside holiday

Keith Nunes

 

The first day of Olivia’s seaside holiday and it’s a deathly quiet, warm afternoon. The clouds seem affixed to the sky, seagulls glued to the seawall. She’s a gratefully single woman alone for the first time in a long time.

Anything could happen, she thinks with relish.

She wonders why the tourist town is so subdued. She catches a glimpse of people up a road.

The town square?

Olivia heads off and hears cheering, then jeering, then several gunshots, crowds of people pour down the street. She panics, pushes through a gate into a garden surrounded with roses in bloom. She lays under them, listens to the crowd flow by like gushing water from a burst dam.

The garden fence is bent and partly crushed by falling, screaming people. She rolls into the foetal position. A woman’s voice calls out, “Come inside, you’ll be safe in here.”

Olivia sees the woman beckoning from the open front door. She doesn’t

hesitate. “Thank you,” she says to the middle-aged woman as she enters. “What a relief.”

The door is closed behind her. The house-owner is brushing soil off Olivia’s yellow dress in the entrance hall. The woman’s hair smells like tomato soup. Olivia can hear men whispering through the door to her right. She hears shuffling shoes on a wooden floor. A TV is switched on, the volume abruptly turned up. Olivia shivers, her back arches involuntarily.

When the towering clock behind her chimes, all hell breaks loose.

About Keith Nunes

Killing time in Aberystwyth

Emily Macdonald

 

The seagull flies over the square from the corner of Great Darkgate Street. He swoops toward the Millennium Clock Tower, claiming the top perch from the pigeons. He opens his beak and screams his ‘arc-arc-arc’ cry, then folds his wings and rests.

The clock’s mechanism moves beneath him, ticking long past the time when the train arrived at the station and Mary failed to meet it.

The gull turns on the clocktower, tilts his head to one side as if he’s listening into the despairing wind, listening for the sad sounds of the waves and for Mary’s last gasps beneath them.  

Most people below him have their eyes to the ground. They don’t check the time on the clock tower, instead they use the smart phones in their hands. They don’t look up. They don’t look around.

The gull will wait for a head to tilt back, a pair of eyes to glance upwards, to see him perched there, and then he’ll stretch open his angel’s wide wings and sail free into the salt summer air. Over the town, the quiet boats snug in the harbour, over the trundling holidaymakers retreating like the tide from the beach, over the bay, over the sun-dazzled sea.

About Emily Macdonald

Fling

Erika Spadavecchia

 

There are no bills on the kitchen countertop. There are no aprons, no washcloths, no calendars, no posters. It came like this. The few bills pinned to a medium bulletin board aren’t past due. They hang under a live, laugh, love sign and next to wedding pictures where the bride’s black curls look wrapped in meat-wrap film, hair sprayed still. Last time there were flowers by the window, their heads bent to the sun. They must have died. The wooden bench by the dining table is from a private showroom in Milan. There is an exact copy at IKEA. Right next to it, the glass doors open to reveal the husband’s topiary artistry. The table is Vincent Van Duysen, or that’s what he said when he bent me over after sitting down to consume three-minute eggs. The brown leather couch clings to your skin when you’re on your stomach.

About Erika Spadavecchia

The vapors

J W Goll

 

Today there is a skywriter doing loop de loops against a bright blue canvas. Jesus is Lord, then Repent and be Saved drift and blur as they float westward. A lady at the Steak and Shake looks up and says, “Amen”. Later, another plane writes, NO, chasing the earlier affirmations toward the horizon. The dialogue between these theologians is not compelling, but what religious argument ever is?

The ephemeral medium is the message, the receding words remind me my time is passing. They signal dying eras, crumbled civilizations, extinctions. The evaporating letters warn that nothing will last, everything falls apart. There they go, no longer readable, heading toward the horizon’s half-dipped sun. Finally, they disappear behind the “Don’t Wait! Get Yours Now!” billboard on Water Street. 

The bottom line is blocked so who knows what they are selling, but the sign is solid and shows no sign of flight. It barks a sentiment that will surely outlast any spiritual longing or desire for salvation floating through the sky or drifting through our heads. That’s what the prophets and the holy books always miss. Faith is fine, hope has its purposes. But what we want is here and we need it before we’re scattered dust, before it’s too late. No god understands our cravings for the imperfect prize, for wretched excess, tawdry love, battered crowns, obscene dreams … holy grails all. So don’t wait for a savior, get yours now.

About J W Goll 

Apteryx mantelli, wingless creature, hatching and dispatching

Susan Barker

 

Ambient light filters through the thin-shelled eggs to the growing chicks. It’s perpetual dusk in the brood room. She likes this twilight atmosphere.

Her own chick gives her a solid kick as she sucks her stomach in to raise incubator lid number one. She lifts the huge egg, placing a small flashlight beam against the shell. In the egg she sees movement. This one’s a karate kicker, the air sac’s increased too – so nearly ready. She uses both hands to return it.

Only after egg twelve has been rotated, revolved, temperature checked, does she sit, wincing at her painful bruises.

In the wild the male kiwi does her job, keeps the egg warm, patiently adjusting it.

Danny had been like that with her at first.

Put your feet up, babe – I can’t believe I made a baby.

We, she’d corrected.

Eggs thrive here at the hatchery, away from predators’ teeth and claws.

Danny didn’t grow claws, he grew churlish. As she tired, filled out, partied less, Danny brooded.

The kid’s an excuse. Days off work. Days off everything … you ignore me.

Just verbals at first, then a shove, slaps, last week a punch.

She checks Karate Kid in #1, its shell is cracking. She draws her stool close, settling in, chin on hands, enthralled. The hatch could take all night. Even longer. She has the time – now.

Danny’s overseas appointment had finally come through.

More money, he’d shrugged, but should I go?

You deserve it, Dan. You go for it!

About Susan Barker

The trestle

Arthur Shattuck O’Keefe

 

There was a trestle at the eastern edge of town, part of a stretch of the Delaware & Hudson Railway. It crossed above the Batten Kill, a tributary of the Hudson. The trestle served as the focal point for some of the stupid things I did as a kid, which I suppose peaked the summer I turned 13. I won’t use my youth as a defense. I was old enough to know better. We all were. 

Sometimes late at night, I and my elder brother Marv and our neighbor Ron would climb up to the trestle and drop water balloons onto cars as they passed under. We aimed for the windshields, occasionally hitting one. There were no crashes, luckily. When you’re that age, you just assume no one’s going to get hurt or killed. Or at least I did.  

On occasion, during the day, we’d stand along the tracks and shout obscenities at the caboose men on the freight trains as they passed by. This was long before everyone could instantly record each other’s actions and show them to the world, and it felt exhilarating to insult adults with impunity. Most were poker-faced, but one day one of them looked distraught.  

We stopped doing it after that. His face is the only one I remember. 

About Arthur Shattuck O’Keefe

Spoiler alert

Alex Reece Abbott

 

Sleek, dark Ben was a relaxed curlicue, a lazy cat reading on their bed.

Lying bastard, thought Kate. She’d been stewing all evening. She sniffed. Knowing how much he hated to be lectured, she took a new tack. “By the way, your book’s out of date.”

Ben grinned. “Yeaaah-nah, don’t think so. I’ve been reading Aladdin and the Arabian Nights since I was a kid.”

“Your version has had any adult content stripped out.” She plonked herself down. “And they added in all that racist, sexist, orientalist stuff that middle-class Victorians loved.”

He laughed. “I know it’s old, but…it’s a classic. I just like how the stories…how there’s

no –”

“And the correct title is One Thousand and One Nights.” She leaned over, tapped

the cover. “The result of fragments of versions left behind. Adaptations and translations. Censored, embroidered, misremembered by editors, compilers and translators down

the centuries. Always changing shape, losing something each time.”

He cleared his throat. “Aren’t all texts a compromise? I just thought I’d re-read…”

“Written for merchants – not children,” Kate added, to eliminate any doubt. “To pass on real and practical knowledge. It’s filled with moral dilemmas.”

“Right,” he said, frowning. He crossed his arms, cradled the book.

“Anyway, there’s a new, better version, the first English translation by a woman. And Shahrazad the story-teller is the real hero. Not Aladdin.”

His face closed. Then: a half-snore, sleep.

She could smile at his betrayal, knowing her words had landed, knowing that she’d spoiled his favourite book.

About Alex Reece Abbott

Childhood rhymes

Jane O’Sullivan

 

Sticks and stones may build my bones, hear me, clanking creature, all rattle and moan, holding it all close, pressing the shards so the skin can grow over, into, through, and you call me a monster, a beast, but you were the one who threw it all, the plates and cans and ashtrays, one after the other, so sure I would duck and run, delight you with my fear, and I did – how could I not, small weak thing, too terrified to stop loving – but you were not prepared for how I would scavenge, how I would build this whole carapace of bruised strength and rickety hope, and grow and grow, and it’s only now, as you hear me coming down the hospital hall, pulling open the curtain around your bed, that you feel my shadow and wonder just what it is you’ve done.

About Jane O’Sullivan

Turtle days

John Brantingham

 

I avoid roads on Sundays when the Amish ride to each other’s homes. I worry about them, in this world mad for speed. But I’ve forgotten what day it is, and there’s a pond down the road, and it’s the turtle time of year. 

I’m thinking about how water formed in space before gas clouds collapsed to make the earth and sun, how the water in the pond is as ancient as that when I hear the horse hooves. I look over to see an Amish man. 

He lifts a hand to wave. 

I say, “Good morning.” 

I mean it.

About John Brantingham

I always thought he was a small man

Volha Kastsiuk

 

“Listen to me!” his shoulders widened.

I was stunned by the missiles flying out of his mouth. I tried to hear the words but the invasion was so deafening that I just heard an echo. “… me! me! me!”

After the first attack, there was a flash of stillness in the air.

“Listen to me!” whizzed the first bullet. The second, the third, the two hundred eighteenth … They were flying through my helpless bulletproof vest and reaching internal organs. My belief in good people was hurt first. The bullet chipped a centimetre of its right corner. Then trust got shot close to the middle. Gender equality started to bleed. One of the bullets got stuck there. I wasn’t sure if my racial equality was shot as well. I felt pain in the rib cage, but it might’ve been just a ricochet.

“Listen to me!”

I applied pressure to stop my blood words coming out. I looked at my voice lying in the mud next to my feet and suddenly I heard.

I heard the wails of the women under their husbands’ fists.

I heard tears of the brown girls dropping on the desks.

I heard the swish of a silk sari running away from the playground.

I heard the kick in the leg of the boy with the almond-shaped eyes.

I heard jokes and laughs from the men after she left.

I heard the quietness of people around me.

I was listening. 

About Volha Kastsiuk

Binary

Joe Kapitan

 

Survival is binary: left or right, Gardner or Frye. One must die so two may live. Delayed at the start, waiting for horses that never arrived, we missed our window; now we’re trapped in the shelter near the pass, snowed in for weeks without food, our only water from the snow we melt, cannibalizing bits of the cabin hourly to feed an impotent fire. Gardner is stronger but not as intelligent; Frye’s prone to convulsing, the devil’s dance, but I trust him more in the mountains. Gardner has a wife but no child, opposite of Frye’s situation. I could strangle Frye if it came to that, but I’d have to take Gardner by surprise, from behind, something heavy to the head when he’s asleep. If it went down that way, would Frye scream out, interfere? Or would he see inevitability in my raised fist? Gardner clears his throat. One must die, he croaks. So two may live, adds Frye. Gardner produces a tattered deck of cards from his pocket, passes them to Frye who cuts and shuffles. They each draw a card, face down. Odd color loses, Frye says. Binary outcome, red or black. They stare, wolf-eyes aglow in the shadow of the dying fire. What do they see? I’m not as strong as Gardner, not as smart as Frye, with no one at home to mourn me if I don’t return. Pass the deck, I say. You come over here and draw, says Gardner, hands hidden from view.

About Joe Kapitan

Man’s best friend

Jon Gluckman

 

My dog tells time, so for her birthday, I gave her a watch. Not a Rolex – you don’t give a dog a Rolex – I’m not stupid. I gave her a ladies’ Timex set with rhinestone highlights in delicate teardrop bezels. Sometimes, she’d lie on the rug and watch time run out. Tragically, dogs have little of that – which keeps us honest.

People rarely take to me. At birth, my face got forceped, so my eyes don’t line up.  This scares normal people. Kids especially. They scream and run behind their mothers, who shrink back themselves. I want people to like me. 

So, I mail-order a bright red helper dog vest. Now, we enter stores, restaurants, and theaters. She breaks the ice. We meet people. I’ll say, “She’s my emotional support dog,” if anyone asks. No one ever does. Once, though, in the theater, we approach a snot-faced usher. 

“Helper dog, eh? What’s it help with? Wackin’ the weasel, you freak?” 

The urge to slam his head into the ticket box overwhelms me. Instead, Bella (that’s her name; she’s a pearl white retriever/Great Pyrenees mix, slender like a coyote, with hips that won’t quit) cooly glanced at her watch, tells the usher, “We don’t want to be late,” and that he should shut his goddamn mouth, rip our fucking tickets, and let us pass so we won’t miss the fifteen trailers before the feature starts. 

I guess I forgot to tell you, she can talk, too. You just had to listen.

About Jon Gluckman

The last time

Clare Travaglia

 

They say you never know when it will be the last time you do something. The last time your dusky-haired child lets you kiss them goodbye at the school gate, crinkling their freckle-flecked nose with that slight ghost of a smile. The last time they reach out to hold your hand, curling their small, cool one inside the cocoon of your warm one. The last time they ask you to play a game of Operation, their favourite, limbs sprawled on the lounge room floor, drenched in strands of pale sunlight beaming through full-length windows. The last time you know exactly where you are, and why you’re there. When you don’t know the last time is coming, it’s hard to hold onto. And now, when memories slip from your mind like the faintest whisper, there and then gone before you can grasp them, you have only fragments. Timeless, placeless. The first times, the last times, the somewhere-in-betweens. Images float by, vignettes of a life. Your life. You are left with only a fleeting sensation of joy, a tug of nostalgia, a glint of sorrow. An understanding that once, this all made sense. Once, you had all this.

About Clare Travaglia

Almost 88 days

Pam Avoledo

 

We’ve been here for 87 days, almost 88 now, if you count the hour we spent in the station saying goodbye, we’ll be back, it won’t be long with too tight hugs and pecks on cheeks. From the window, the colors evaporate with the rain as we go higher. Soon it’ll be a lasting dusk with a sliver of stars, you say. Soon, it’ll be only us, you say.

Static again over the intercom. Static with made-up words. Static without any answers of when, where, how and why. Static we’ve given up on after a week. It was a game then, of theories and riddles. We’re the pieces, don’t you see, you say. We move to the wrong spot and it ends, it all ends. And I see our home, a redwood box with toy trees and my sister’s car in the driveway. She’s checking on the house while we’re gone. And I say we’re not really far and your seat is empty, your glass of water still on the tray.

About Pam Avoledo

Dreamdrift

Tracie Lark

 

A cloud can weigh up to one hundred grey elephants. They stampede across the sky, bellowing flourishes into places where humans believe silence escapes to. There are a million humans right now, projecting their worries onto animal-shaped clouds, hoping they will evaporate with the scorching sun. If only they could realise that nothing disappears. Things change shape with time, yes, but vanishing is an illusion.

There’s one human who keeps annoying me with his staring. He’s one of the tiny ones with big brown eyes and raggedy hair, and freckles where the sun has kissed him too many times. Ginger’s best friend is Socks, a white, tail-wagging mammal with black paws. Sometimes Ginger’s mother growls at him for walking past things. Yesterday it was a bundle of clothes, today it is an empty cup. Yet, the mother often walks past things. Ginger’s hand-carved wooden boat. His ocean sketches. The little song he sings quietly on his guitar.

Ginger’s father lives on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, tending to the caged animals inside. He too often stares at me with his stormy face. If only he knew about Ginger, perhaps he could tame those wild animals.

In the clouds, Ginger sees elephants and lions and birds and whales. A wooden boat rocking on the ocean. A stormy face. Socks rests his head on his paws. He doesn’t mind what he chases, a stick, a ball, a rabbit. So long as he’s chasing something. Some phantasmagoric dream.

About Tracie Lark

Halos & stingers

Barlow Crassmont

 

Pedro ran like hell as his mad pursuer screamed, “Scorpion! Scorpion!”

Their chase kicked up dust on the gravely road. Out of breath and covered in perspiration from head to foot, Pedro slowed and surrendered, facing his pursuer.

“I’m not a Scorpion,” Pedro cried. “Why do you keep saying that?”

The pursuer made him turn, and with a flick of his knife, knocked down the scorpion that hung on the back of Pedro’s shirt. Pedro watched apprehensively as the pursuer squashed the deadly insect with his foot.

“Thank you,” Pedro said. “Which gang are you with?”

“Angels,” the other replied.

About Barlow Crassmont

Talking electricity

Michael Harlow

 

Name’s Tennessee. When it’s not Kentucky. Where I was born a second time. And that’s more than a miracle. A Journeyman, I was born into Electricity. As a boy tall as any cornstalk, I knew how to catch the Electric stuff, coil it in and collar it. It’s catastrophes I follow in my gypsy van. Our home on the road. My Pitt Bull for company, he’s my best friend. Never lonesome when Pooch is on board. Let me tell you he is also cer-tif-i-cated. Tennesse Pit Bulls is the best kind. Pooch was also born in Kentucky. A second time with me. He can lick the paint off the side of any house. He’s a talker.

‘Flood’s is best,’ I say and he says the same. What a nose for news, buddy. We get to work together in those big factory places that have taken a Big Hit. And the Bigger the Hit the more wire we get to pull, the more Electricity we can bring back from that dead place it goes to.

Motors? Fixing motors that have gone to the cemetery for dead ends. And those giant red, white and blue transformers the prideful ones, or speciality. That’s right, isn’t it, Pooch buddy? He can raise his leg when it’s called for.

Well, it’s all never pretty, when those disasters hits anywhere. And one moonshine day when I find me a wife, a travelling one who love Electricity gone to the dogs – no offence, Pooch honey. When I find One of those, and we have a kid, he’s already got his name. Little Tennessee. That’s it, buddy.

About Michael Harlow

Bits

Amy Marques

 

She never lied about big things; it was the bits of irrelevant harmless details that she’d twist out of shape and toss over her shoulder at me. Her trail of forlorn facts, flummery ornate with sharp edges and inconsistencies, tripped me when I tried to walk with her. When I tried to follow. Some days, the ants got at them and carried away the sugared coat of levity that enveloped the bigger bits, the ones shaped like bricks. 

And I stopped trying to follow. I picked up the largest bit, felt its weight, the coldness of it chilling in my palm. The bits didn’t fit her story, but they fit each other. I stacked them like the bits of a raspberry. Sideling the bits to each other. Connecting them. Painstakingly. Slow. 

They were a marvel. A puzzle. A wall that stretched and stretched between us like the old stone walls that separated fields, separated lands, nations, enemies. 

I planted tulips.  

On hot days, I’d lean against the cool wall and sometimes faintly hear her on the other side, still throwing bits in my direction. But now she is harmless.

About Amy Marques

The grownup plan

Arvilla Fee

 

I know I should be upfront about going out tonight – just tell Mom that Trish and I have plans to eat at Jake’s pub then go see a live band in Metro Park. But honestly, I don’t want the friction. Mom’s a bit old-fashioned – wouldn’t approve of Jake’s and wouldn’t approve of those long-haired hippies flopping around. So, I say I’m going to bed early. Inexcusable, I know!

And yet, here I am, plumping my pillows, putting them under the covers so if Mom decides to pop her head in my room, she’ll think I’m in bed. I slide my window open and step over the sill. Trish is waiting for me by the back gate and she shakes her head. She tells me I’m 26 years old for gosh sakes, and I should be able to tell my mom I’m going out. I tell her I know but I can’t handle a lecture.

Hours peel away in a thumping blur. Trish drops me off at 3 a.m. The house is dark, and I sneak back through my window. As soon as my feet hit the floor, I gasp. Mom is standing in my room, hands on hips, pink curlers in her hair – her mouth a straight, disapproving line like one of those cartoon drawings. She asks why I’m sneaking out at age 26 and says no grownup does that. I tell her no grownup wears pink curlers anymore.

Years peel away. I’m 16 again.

About Arvilla Fee

When you heard she died

Amanda Ellard

 

There’s a wall, of course there’s a wall. All of the stories about the end of the world you used to read when your grandmother fell asleep on her library window seat and you could romp around unsupervised between her bookshelves, yanking the most angry-looking spines from their homes – they all had scared adults behind a wall.

The Wall by John Lanchester sits on your bedroom bookshelf. You catch the eyes of its blue wave cover and think: how outlandish, all that walling off of the sea. Then you curl up in bed like a seahorse and dream of waves stopping mid-peak. Where does the energy go?

Inside the wall of course. Your world is ending now, but you don’t wish for this wall that’s locked you in with the deluge. You float inside the memory of your grandmother’s porous bookshelves and how they let in little streaks of light from the window, moderating their intake. There were no surprises from them, no overwhelming everything-all-at-once. And, if this apocalypse could, you’d like it to wash over you gently like a fog, or in increments like waves kissing your toes.

About Amanda Ellard

The notes that mattered

Jeff Friedman

 

He thought the notes mattered. He played them on his sax in the right sequence over and over. But the notes didn’t really bring him forgiveness, redemption or even a hint of satisfaction. He still remembered what he remembered. He still regretted what he regretted, and now he regretted the notes, because they didn’t bring him closer to his father or his wife or his son; they didn’t make up for his bursts of anger or what was broken around him. He would say to himself, “No more, I can play other notes or at least other sequences of notes.” But he couldn’t play other notes, only the ones he kept hearing like a distant ringing. His reed cracked. His lips bled. He set down his saxophone and waited for silence, but the notes kept playing; only now he could hear words also, words coming from so deep within his mind he didn’t know how to say them.

About Jeff Friedman

Frontiers

S J Mannion

 

Sometimes I forget what things mean, even things like traffic lights.

I forget that red means stop. Everybody knows that.

I forget things I know to be true, things like which lid fits what and why.

I mean things that are so obvious.

Like, you just can’t get a pickle lid on a jam jar.

It just won’t go.  

I forget things like … everything.

Even words stop meaning anything.

I get lost, deciphering what is being said.

Then I think I see something there, hear something here, something behind, 

or maybe beside, or inside.

Something I’m looking for.  That thing. I don’t know.

Sometimes, I just give up the search for signifiers, make of my mind a river  

or more a small rushing stream, let thoughts and things pass by, trust only touch.

The mind is so small really compared to the world.

Nobody knows why or how, or what, all of this is.

Sometimes, you’ve just got to look that in the face, hold it between your hands

and say    Okay,   Okay,    Okay.

About S J Mannion