Issue One: April 1 (Now Available!)
Issue Two: June 1
Chapped
I notice you’ve been walking faster lately. Taking less time to stop at traffic lights, looking in office windows for your reflection—a quick glance and then gone. I notice your hands. I see their faint tremble upon being dragged from your coat pockets and into the air. I see it chip away at them like ice picks against an unscaled mountainside. You don’t appreciate them, not like I do; you won’t comprehend the ache I feel in seeing you careless, without your gloves in winter, without your coat pulled close and securely fastened.
They crack and break like sheets of ice under the spontaneous pressure of skating blades. They are slow, reluctant, to expose the raw inside. But they are bleeding now, when they meet the air.
Did you notice?
You have priorities. You are a grown man in a hurry and, much as I might try, I cannot fault you for your cufflinks or your shiny, wing-tipped shoes. I am proud to see you have succeeded. Your long black wool coat suits you. You are certified now not to notice things like hands or street signs or the pedestrians you’re outrunning to the crosswalk. The busy ones grimace at your velocity; their eyes twitch, narrowed—You have done wrong in our sight—before they realize who you are. By the time your feet touch pavement they have forgiven you for your vaporous statement of purpose, your well-crafted raison d'être that evaporates into the taxicab exhaust, hovering in a smog of Excuse me’s and Pardon’s, so rigorously nurtured, to explain why you had to cross so immediately. They forgive you too for the way you shield yourself from the shiny grey mud you kicked up on their pinstripes.
Bundle up, darling.
I saw you with that cup of coffee. I saw a steaming droplet escape and burrow into those thin, red crevices. I sprung forward when you flinched, did you notice? I gripped the table with ghostly knuckles and pried my mind from your rough, pink hands.
When you have time, you may want to think about how the laughter of children scares you. You have noticed it but have replaced the fear with glances at your wristwatch. They are fearsome, diminutive ice skaters bundled close in parkas, fiery pink and purple against bright red dawns. Their laughter is loud and unnatural and ill-timed. It turns so quickly to sobbing, to screaming tantrums of It’s, Not, Fair, to choked unintelligible words hushed by a grey-green pea-coated mother, who kneels on the ice over fresh-skinned knees, cooing, bobbing her head—You, dodging traffic, do you feel me kneeling over you? Did you see the fresh red drop well up and settle on your hand?
Tracy Bowling is a sophomore English major currently attending Butler University. Her interests include reading, quilting, classical languages, and driving while recording ideas for stories in her notebook. Tracy enjoys listening to music, particularly movie soundtracks, and spends much of her free time writing her own compositions. She is very involved with her school's literary magazine, Manuscripts, and the Indy Writers Group RRRR. This exposure to the work of her peers has propelled her hopes of becoming a professional author someday. She wishes to thank God, her family, and such meritable literary influences as William Goldman, T.S. Eliot, Robert Heinlein, and Norse mythology for being her constant sources of inspiration and her models for how to tell a good story.