Reconstruction
  Naomi Neal '09

Untitled
  Gia Harris '08

The Good Fight
  Maxfield Peterson '10

Reconstruction
     by Naomi Neal '09

     "We're human beings and we have to have secrets," my father finally said after my sister asked if her friend could sleep over on a Saturday night. It was a Saturday night, so we were in the car. There was talk radio playing the way Dad liked it, turned way down low, the car buzzing with murmurs of conversations. The hum of the radio matched the hum of the minivan, and I could have closed my eyes and been anywhere. But I was here.
     Mom twisted around in the passenger's seat and touched Val's knee. "She can come over on a Friday night, okay, sweetie?"
     On Saturday nights, we drove to our old neighborhood. It was easy to find the place we used to live because its silhouette was half as big as all the other shapes on the street. Only the garage still stood, and the property was cyclone-fenced-off, brown tarps tacked to the wire for secrecy.
     We parked the van in the garage that we still owned and camped out in the backyard, most of which had, before the fire, been covered by the house. The tent was roomy and the sleeping bags were warm, but I never had any fun. To this day, I hate camping.
     We were supposed to tell stories about the house, about what we remembered about it. While we were supposed to be talking, Mom took notes on a yellow pad. I looked at it once:
     Stairs going up to kitchen: eleven, landing, ten more.
     Kitchen flooring: linoleum pattern = ?  (Go to Home Depot and check it out.)
     Nobody had said any of this. Maybe Mom wasn't paying attention.
     They were determined to rebuild it exactly as it had been. It's all they talked about. After they got off work and came back to the apartment we lived in now, they called contractors and carpenters and construction bosses. Val and I would eat peanut butter sandwiches and sign each other's permission slips, and all the while, I would think that something was off, somehow. Something wasn't right. But what was it? It was always in the back of my mind, but I was ten and I didn't worry about it....
 

The Good Fight
  Maxfield Peterson '10

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     This morning there was spit in my bathroom sink.  It was flamingo pink and frothy, identical to my own toothpaste, but it wasn't mine.  No one was awake yet -- not Jessie, not Elliot.  The pink spit in my sink could not have been theirs.  But I wasn't worried, five years living with someone you grow used to lots of things not being yours.  The garden's weeds, the seedy hair in the shower drain, blinking phone messages, the leftovers forgotten on the table.  After a while, other people's residue doesn't seem so bad and you forget to attribute it to anyone.  I looked at the toothpaste and the cap was still on; it should have occurred to me then that it wasn't Elliot's.  Elliot always leaves things half-done, waiting, because I'll be there soon to finish the job.
      I ran the water and the froth, assaulted, disappeared down the drain.  The house was quiet this morning.  Chase was napping by the front door and the cricket trapped in our basement had hushed after a hectic night of crying.  None of this worried me: the silence, the spit, the capped toothpaste, until I looked into the bathroom mirror, my hair wrapped in a terrycloth bouffant not quite concealing a figure who quickly ducked out of sight.  Who's there? I whispered, my throat hardening.  Who's there?!  I grabbed my toothbrush in a clenched fist.  It didn't occur to me how strange it would be for an intruder to be using my toothpaste, especially since my toothbrush was dry and had not been borrowed.  It didn't occur to me that the alarm system was turned on, that Chase was not barking, that I couldn't hear any footsteps.  I considered calling for Elliot, but he had work in a few hours and I didn't want to wake him.  He gets little enough sleep as it is.  Besides he's so harsh in the mornings.
     Hello?  A man three inches shorter than me walked back into the bathroom, his hands up like stop signs, surrendering.  Hello.  Scared, frozen in the door frame, he spoke quickly...
 

Untitled
  Gia Harris '08

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     Isolated in a shimmering motorboat, water washing the hull like an upset stomach, we sat and waited.  We traded stories and bullshit in maroon-spaded playing cards and rocked the boat for fun until it scared the fish away.
     This is what Evan and I did while we were fishing.  I never caught anything and had given up on it long ago; I just wanted to return home talking about a good day fishing.
     We pulled hats over our faces trying to doze off and dream what real men dream.  We wrapped golden glistening strings around our big toes, waiting for applause from Huck Finn.  The sky curved over the dam at the lake's end.
     I forgot the knot, that rigid little beast I used last summer when I hooked my thumb and sucked up the blood.  Shifting around the wooden chipped benches we handed poles and casted out willfully, squinting for the ripples on the vanishing point.
     I remember it was the beginning of the end when the mosquitoes lacquered their lips with toxin and hummed over the water for no reason, because they had done it the night before.
     I made up my own knot and tossed it overboard, piercing the worm's saliva skin and sending it into the deep green blue abyss.  I clicked the reel, the line ending its frenetic shaking; the worm, I imagined, was now floating off the murky bottom.  I didn't want to cast out; I didn't want to chop the air in front of my face for bugs until eight o'clock when we had to return the boat.  I just wanted to talk about the good fight with my dad's friends over pan-fried trout and Coronas.
     So I plopped the worm down into water hell and wiped my face with sunblock just because it was cold and the vessel was starting to smell less sweet than it had when the day begun.
     The last cast of the hope-devoid fisher boy sunk to the bottom, and for whatever reason, the pole began to jiggle.....