THE MERCURY 2001 ^H^^^^^HI^HBHHHKiJ The Mercury The Student Literary Magazine oj Gettysburg College 2000-2001 Editor-in-Chief Colleen Hubbard Fiction Editor Melynda McBeth Nonfiction Editor Erin Baggett Poetry Editor Allison Schroeder Art Editor Ashley Pisanick Staff Eric Danielson, Collette Green, Cara Hall, Mariesa Hinchey, Ruth Homberg, Patrick Jones, Anya Morrison, Lyndsey Rago, George Riley, Laura Root, Erika Stensvaag Faculty Advisors Oliver de la Paz Fred Leebron Kathryn Rhett The Mercury Literary Magazine is published once a year during the spring semester. Throughout the jail semester, staff members review anonymous works submitted by Gettysburg College students and determine as a group which pieces are to be published. This year judges awarded the best works in each category with the Mercury Prize. Prize winners are marked with an asterisk in the table of contents. ■^■^^^HHHHHH^^^HHHH^H^HH POETRY Here you are Ruth Sysak Scandinavia Hans Ramel i4 It's Nice Daniel Williams \6 Envision Melynda McBeth 25 Outside the Box Allison Schroeder 3i Remembering the Cactus Michael S. Fish 37 The First Time Ruth Sysak 38 The Marriage Ceremony* Sasha Silverman 46 Collapse Allison Schroeder 52 Secret Revenge Hans Ramel 58 Desire George Riley 60 FICTION This Place* Laura Root Farewell to Beethoven Michael S. Fish a Cy in the Morning Time Luke Ballman 16 Tojo Tommy Pearce 32 Fall Erin Baggett 40 you're the top Joshua J. Wyatt 54 NONFICTION Lists* Sarah Doherty n Crushing Kelly Kervick 20 National Panther Census Rustom Davar 41 The Mirror Joyce Sprague 61 ART Hands* Elizabeth X. Kligge Cover Girls at Play Brooke Hutt to Enchantment Michelle Meyn 15 Photo Booth Ashley Pisanick (9 The Doll Brooke Hutt 30 Our Neighbors Julie Gordon 36 Trees Elizabeth X. Kligge 39 Joga/myself Emily Simmons 45 Female Outline Leigh Sacks 53 Sketch #2 in Toulouse, France An Truong 57 The Secret Michelle Meyn 59 Distaff Any a Morrison 62 Here you are Rutb Sysak Cherry soda pop Fizzing in your mouth Stinging your cheeks, You held it too long Looked right through The lipped crystal glass Full of grenadine, Spouting its colors Onto the bleached tablecloth Into your head, Your forgotten teabags Left steeping in Hot water. This Place Lniira Roof This was how you looked to me: your hands were hanging at your sides like they were massive doughy lumps only barely attached to the spindly sticks that were your arms, which I thought was oddly appropriate because after all, you were in the bakery. What kind of bread would you buy? That was a hard question to answer. What kind of bread would you not buy? I knew that you would not buy the bread whose golden body was freckled by the onions and the olives. You wouldn't want your breath to still smell and taste like onions when you woke up tomorrow. And you wouldn't let yourself taste it before you got home because you would worry about the olives getting lodged in between the teeth that you were hiding in a tight-lipped visage of concentration. You would not buy bread with sunflower seeds for the same reason. Cinnamon swirls? No. To you, bread was not sweet. But you did belong in the bakery. You did not savor the indeterminate taste of Wonder Bread. You wanted bread that was not reminiscent of spongy Styrofoam. Your nose wanted to smell the dough: the yeast, the salt, the flour. Your nose wanted to smell the water, too. You looked to me like you were the person who wanted to smell water. Which I thought was weird. This was how you looked at me: your heart-shaped face swiveled toward my deconstructing glances. Your eyes grazed my nose my mouth my hair that I combed away from my face. You looked at the outline my hands were making in the pockets of my too-tight jean shorts. You looked at the blue Hip-flops and stared at the upper left-hand corner of my right foot where the big toe had almost worn a hole through the plastic. You looked and I felt like you knew how clammy my armpits must have been on the day in the bakery when I first saw you and your doughy hands and your spindly arms. This was how I noticed you: as you walked in the door your nose re- minded me of my dog. Your nose was flat, like you had pressed your finger on its tip and held it there. My dog's nose was not flat, but I thought of my dog anyway. Which leads me to believe that maybe it wasn't your nose that reminded me of him. You had square shoulders like you had hidden football pads somewhere in your worn green tee-shirt that advertised Sir Speedy's Dry Cleaners in cracked white letters. The apostrophe was peeling off. You walked stiffly to the back of the line. My dog had a stiff walk, maybe that's why I thought of him. I was second in the line of nine people. As we waited, I forgot about you and 1 eventually forgot about my dog. Instead I concentrated on the breads until 1 looked up at you staring. I looked at you again and yes, I know that I avoided eye contact. As my eyes avoided yours, my brain stuttered stopped jumped. I recall thinking about the cherry pies while I looked up at you and 1 recall weighing the drawbacks of buying day-old muffins. 1 thought about the sugar cookies on the brown tray under the glass case and if they would taste better with milk or with orange juice and 1 couldn't remember whether the bakery was made out of stone or brick or wood. It was impossible for me to ask you these questions. 1 wanted everyone else, especially you, to think that 1 was familiar with the bakery, to think that I was a regular there. When it was my turn, I had not decided on which bread I wanted to buy. 1 pointed to the metal basket directly in front of me. I did not want to talk because I was embarrassed that you would hear my voice. The cashier did not understand me and so I gestured again and waved my hand backward. Do you remember when my hand connected with the man's coffee cup? The black liquid splattered and 1 looked up from the mess to see you walking toward me with solid arms swinging from stiff shoulders. The bakery floated in the middle of the sea of cracked asphalt. The parking lot was separated from the four-lane highway by a narrow patch of grass cooked brown as a result of the harsh August sun. Despite rainy springs and summer Sundays, the grass could not rejuvenate itself. The highway intersected the suburban sprawl that was clustered around the factory. In 1978 (that's what the sign out front said), someone had decided that it would be a good idea to open a bakery along the highway. Since then, the bakery had welcomed other company: the roller-skating rink, the family dinette, the movie theatre, the lumberyard, the restaurant that sold tacos for under a dollar. Most of the neighbors were temporary—the skating rink that smelled like dirty socks and garlic had closed after the mothers heard rumors of gang fights on the glossy floors. The lumberyard went under after building patios became unfashionable. The dinette whose front windowpanes gushed water to remind patrons of tiny waterfalls was constantly under new management,- the ethnic dishes it advertised transposed from spaghetti and meat sauce to bratwurst and sauerkraut to lo mein and pork and back to spaghetti, but with meatballs this time. Even the taco dive was changeable: it started out as another place to buy soggy hamburgers, then it became home to fried chicken and pizza places. The bakery and the factory were the two constants. The bakery was actually a two-story house. The house had been built long before it was a bakery, long before there was a highway, long before there was a factory. Its wooden body was balanced atop a stone foundation. The house was probably built around 1920. The shingles were painted white every four years by the owner and the owner's sons. The shutters were painted red. The customers entered through the side door into a wall of dry heat, yells from the kitchen, and the acute smell of yeast and crusty loaves that cajoled the newcomer into returning. The smoking towers of the factory spindled upward into the heavy sky behind the bakery. Girls at Play Brooke Hutt 10 Lists Sarah Doherty My father makes lists. On napkins, index-card sized stationery from his office, on the backs of business cards, in his even, all-capitals handwriting. The date is always at the top. BANK. LAWN. HARDWARE STORE. POOL. His lists are sparse, terse reminders of what needs to be done. As a child, I used to curiously study his lists on Saturdays and Sundays (he keeps his work lists at the office). The cryptic notes were invitations to my imagination, what is he doing at the bank? What is he going to do the lawn now? Do they sell toys at the hardware store? These lists plague him until they are finished (if you look closely, you can see the list behind his wrinkled brow),- upon accomplishing a task, it is firmly crossed through with blue ink. He doesn't wait to return home to cross errands off the list, yet he does not waste the two seconds in the act of crossing off as a singular activity,- my dad is nothing if not a multi-tasker.