Kazden Bracket
Fieldwork
Henry Woodland
The Experiment
Jscob Elordi Poem
Olive Parker
Bones and the Angel
T.C. Hell
A flat massive thing already
Jane Dabate
Cup Drove Daisy
Reid Williams
Made on Honor, Sold on Merit
Sunset Limited
Rachel Dastgir
The Rabbit
By the time I was ten, I was allowed to walk home from school by myself, but I never did because it was more fun with Tove. It took us twenty minutes, and we stopped at nearly every store along the way, breaking the heat into bearable intervals. There was the supermarket, the clothes place, and the hardware store. There was the other grocery store, the place that sold carpets, and the laundromat. There was even an ice-cream parlour, with a life-size plastic cow standing outside. She was held in place with a thick bicycle lock cruelly tethered to her back trotter. She must have been chained up because she was hollow, and very easy to steal if you really wanted to, but we didn’t. We just wanted to have a look.
We never took the bus because I was saving up for a rabbit, the one I’d seen through the pet store window. The pet store was the final place we would stop at, right on the corner, and it had a large glass front that looked onto rows and rows of animals, all neatly held in their hutches, cages, and crates for passersby to assess at their ease and leisure. My rabbit was cream-coloured and small, with a perfectly-sized and rounded tail that moved in tight circles as she
slept. I was going to pay for her with fares squirrelled away from the kitchen table. My mother left out $2 every day for the bus ticket, and never once imagined that it would be used for an alternative purpose. I only needed $40 – a number I’d plucked from the pink plastic sign at the counter – and by spring of that year, I was nearly there. But when I first told Tove about the $40 rabbit, she didn’t believe me.
“That’s not true,” she said. “Rabbits are really expensive.”
I insisted that it was true, and that I’d have that rabbit within the next few months. I looked at Tove with a set smile, and she said nothing in response, so sure I was wrong. Then she pulled the homework answers from her bag.
“Take it,” she said. “I did it earlier.”
Later that day, in front of the whole class, I spelled the word J-O-Y-F-U-L. I had practised it in front of the mirror at lunchtime, as I always did, making faces until the word looked at home in my mouth. Tove watched me from her desk, her small white forearms placed one on top of the other in a neat line on the dark wood. She blinked slowly, her mouth bunching up and smoothing as she listened to me string word after word together. She clapped very carefully when I finished. Afterwards, it was time for silent reading, but we always avoided the task by taking turns at the back of the room with the large pencil sharpener nailed to the wall. Standing beside the sharpener, cranking the circular handle and pushing pencil after pencil inside, we would turn back and catch each other’s eye, sly smiles on our faces. Just being next to that wall was enough to make us start laughing. I don’t remember now what pranks or conspiracies we whipped up in those lessons, only the enormity and precision of our efforts to hold ourselves back from laughing, and the occasional defeat of tears that would drip into our open books and make the cheap pages pucker and bleed. Those were the good lessons. The bad ones were math. In math, like in reading, I was constantly craning around to get Tove’s attention, but unlike in reading, she was always absorbed by the task at hand. Tove understood things about numbers that I didn’t, and I can still feel the ache in my chest as I realised that I had nothing to say about the equations in front of me. They operated according
to principles that other people were tapped into, but which I had no grasp of. I would scrabble through the hour, coming up with answers via esoteric methods before she would just slip me the answers. I remember once copying down the sums convincingly enough that my teacher gave me a badge of a cartoon dog’s face, slobber on his cheeks. Tove didn’t say anything. I kept it close to my heart all day, before leaving it on the kitchen table for my parents to
discover.
“Oh, sweetheart,” said my mother when she saw it. “Well done.”
She was English and often bemused by the tokens of affirmation I brought home. My father thought it was great, and didn’t I know how proud they were? I did know. Of course I did.
“You know what?” said my father, “You know what?”
“What?” said my mother, her head resting on her fist.
“We need to celebrate. I think we should go to dinner. That’s what we deserve.”
“With the car?”
“Sure, with the car.”
My mother thought for a moment. She liked the car. She liked the car very much, and hated the city that wouldn’t let her use it. More than this, she hated having moved to a country that was all for car owners, and yet landing in the only city that thwarted them. “Alright,” she said, filled now with a sense of resolve and adventure. “Alright, I like that idea. Sweetie,” she said, turning to me, “do you like that idea?” I did.
I liked the idea of the dinner so much that the next day, I took the pedestrian and forgettable events of the evening and made them into something a little more exciting.
“It was like a movie,” I told Tove.
“Okay.”
“There was a big palm tree. And he cooked it all in front of you, chopped up all the stuff and then fried it and made it into shapes. And words. He spelled ‘I HEART U’ with shrimp. And there was a tank with blue beads at the bottom where the fish slept at night. Or something like that.”
Tove nodded.
“And we ate a sea worm.”
“Uh-huh.”
She shrugged, and I realised with a pang that she didn’t care, so I left her to skip rope, and went back to the classroom where there was air conditioning and milk. My teacher was sitting at her desk, looking at worksheets and drawings. I walked up and told her the story of my dinner with all the requisite trimmings of my imagination. But just as I was really getting into it, filling up my lungs and preparing to speak, I looked over to my right, and saw Tove standing there in the hallway. She was wearing navy blue
coveralls. Her white face and blond hair were gleaming against the red brick wall. She stood with her weight on her left leg, her hand resting on her hip, and she was smiling, but only a bit. “Then what?” asked my teacher. But I had stopped talking, so she turned to see where I was looking. She smiled when she saw Tove. “Hi, Tove,” she said. “Do you want to come in? Alison went to dinner last night. Did you know that?”
“Yeah,” said Tove. “I knew that.” The teacher smiled at us both. As Tove stared, I could feel myself getting warmer. I backed slowly away from the desk, and went into the hall, coming right up close to her. She smiled, wider now, and I could see all the gaps in her mouth where the teeth hadn’t come through yet, and it was just hillocks of gum. Horrified, I turned away and made for the yard, speeding up as I heard her click-clacking down the hall behind me. Outside, she took my arm.
“Hey,” she said, “listen.”
Her face was incredibly near mine now. She gripped me harder, and she looked like she was going to say something. I braced myself, but then her face cleared, possessed by some thought, and she didn’t say anything at all. Taking her lead, I didn’t either. When she finally let me go, I loped off towards the shade and we didn’t speak the rest of the day. At three-thirty, I saw her at the bus stop that we normally
passed on our way home, and I waited while she waited, expecting her to change her mind and come back to me, but she never did. I didn’t care. I had enough money by then, and I was going to spend it.
I took the route with a great sense of purpose. When I got to the pet store, I began by doing a full tour of the treasures on offer. I ran my eyes along the rows and identified my rabbit, tucked up and ready for the taking. When I got to the counter, I laid my savings on the linoleum, and looked up at the cashier. “It’s $40,” I said. “For the rabbit.”
“The what?” He wore a grey polo shirt with stains in the shape of craggy stones beneath his arms. He was probably eighteen, but to me, he seemed very old.
“The rabbit. It’s $40 for the rabbit.”
“The rabbit?” he replied.
“Yes,” I said, pointing to the pink price tag pinned next to his head. He turned and looked.
“Oh,” he said, “that. Yeah, I guess that’s true.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “But, you know, I can’t just sell you a rabbit. You’re, like, ten. You’d have to come in with your mom, or something.”
“But it was going to be a surprise.” He looked blank. “For her birthday,” I added quickly.
“Okay,” he said. “Well, I’m sorry, but I really can’t sell you the rabbit.”
“But I have $40.”
“I know, but you’d also have to pay for things like insurance and shots, so it would be more than that. Maybe it would be best if you spoke to your mom. And then come back. Maybe the rabbit will still be here.” As my face began to fall, he said, “You know, with kids, it’s hard because we don’t want to give them pets and then they aren’t cared for or maybe something goes wrong.”
It had never occurred to me that I would be anything other than a reputable pet parent.
“I’m not necessarily saying that would be you,” he said. “But it’s just about being responsible, you know?”
I didn’t know. I didn’t know at all, but there were people lining up behind me, so I nodded and took my cue to leave. The boy smiled at me again, but it was a smile that left me empty.
My walk back home was short, but I took it slowly. I was remembering the first day of our pickleball unit with Coach D. We kept getting distracted by the rackets, testing how loud we could get them to make a satisfying thwack as they pelted balls into wayward corners. He was increasingly frustrated by our poor sportsmanship, which we didn’t mind. But we were all sobered once we heard a large crack and turned to see Tove staggering backwards clutching her eye. The ball that had hit her rolled across the floor slowly. “I’m fine,” she kept saying as we crowded around her. “I’m fine. I’m fine!” She was told to go to the nurse’s office, but not without a chaperone.
“Alright,” said Couch D, “who’s it going to be?” He scanned the room before electing me from the group. I wriggled my way to the front, masking my pleasure at having been selected with a show of dutiful seriousness as I broke out of the throng and joined Tove at the door. I asked her again if she was really okay; she insisted that she was fine. But when we got to the nurse’s office, she took my hand in hers and gripped it fiercely. I really thought both my hand and her eye would bruise, but neither did. That was a few months ago, although it felt longer. Now, turning right onto my street, the weather was warmer and school was almost out. When I got home from the pet store, I went to the kitchen and put a chair to the wall so that I could clamber up and reach the phone. I punched in the numbers and the line rang twice before clicking.
“Hello?”
“Hi, please can I speak to Tove?”
There was a thud and shuffle of feet before Tove took the phone. “Hi,” she said.
“I just got back from the pet store.” On the other side of the line, I heard a tiny intake of breath. Tove sighed, loud enough to cause the line to crackle.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. When I saw it up close, I realised it wasn’t that good. So, I’m going to wait for a better one. Maybe spotted.”
She breathed in, and I heard her nodding to herself. “Oh, yeah. I like the spotted kind. The ones that look like cats.”
“Yeah, those ones.”
We spoke a bit more about the kind of rabbits we really wanted, the ones that our store never had, before saying quick goodbyes and hanging up. When I got to school the following day, everything was as it always had been, and we took our normal route home with no mention of the brief detour. The store never got a spotted rabbit, and it was to be several years before I would eventually acquire a pet of my own. Tove got a gecko when we were twelve, and she fed it live crickets that would escape into her bedroom and trill at night when I was sleeping over. The sound still makes my palms itch.Sedrick Chisom
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Colton Karpman (Founding Editor)
Editor’s Note
Dilara Koz (Art Director)
Em Bauer (Illustrator)
Isaac Zamet (Poetry Editor)
William McGuire (Prose Editor)