Written by the Chivomengro staff

Art by Jordan Coolbeth

JULIA COTE

“Sneaking”

I snuck out only once as a teenager, to climb through a girl’s window, who I realized on my walk to her house I didn’t even remotely like. In a previous year’s fearful obsession, I decided to put my dresser against the window of my first-floor bedroom, protecting me from one or another evil that would want to break in. Vagrants couldn’t easily sneak in, but neither could I sneak out. Without that convenient exit, I walked out the front door and silently thanked my stepdad’s sleep apnea for drowning out my footsteps. In my memory, I crept through our adjoining neighborhoods in the shadows, avoiding the streetlights as if they were beams shining from police helicopters. Thunder cracked, and the wind coming off the shore was fierce. About two-thirds of the way there—marked by the underpass of the bridge connecting our island to the mainland—I decided to lie. I told her that there was a police car stationed under the bridge, the only passage to her street, and then I repeated that lie to my friends when they asked how the planned meetup went. Before now, no one but the streetlights had known the truth.

GRETA SCHEFF

“A Branch or a Table”

I’m sitting on a wall made of stone, smoking a cigarette after getting home from my grandmother’s funeral. My black dress is dirty and tear-stained, while the moon is peaking through some bunch of branches. I wonder how long those vines have been wrapping themselves around the electric wires, strung across the road like a bridge. How many bugs have crawled along it—like those men who walk on tightropes—to reach the next streetlight, which sits parallel to a tree, a tree that has been there forever, I’m sure. The one where a family of blue jays has resided for generations. I can see which branch they decided to hang the frames that hold pictures of all the ones they’ve lost—in loving memory.

Three years after she died, my cousin got married. At the reception, there was a table for the dearly deceased. Pictures and candles of all the ones we’ve lost; we really are no different from the blue jays.

Near the end of the evening, I sat outside to smoke a cigarette. My black dress was dirty and tear-stained, and the moon was bright and full. What is the point of it all, if we don’t remember the ones that came before?

JORDAN COOLBETH

“The Streetlit Story”

Digital Drawing

PARKER ROGERS

Untitled

While sweat drips off my body from the overcrowded dance floor, and the lights and mist make reality bend in a way my youth never knew, I step out onto the street from the club to catch some air. The cool breeze licks at the sweat on my skin while my hands move in ways that could never be described as elegant, demure, or graceful. The lighter falls from my fingers onto the street once it’s left my pocket. My body weight leans too far forward while I bend over to fetch it, tumbling to the dirty sidewalk. I stand, laughing to myself while I swat at the dust on my pants and shirt. A few steps away stands a streetlight, and as I lean on the brick wall not far from it, I watch as it becomes the biggest star in the sky. 

Smoke drifts all around me while I stare up at this big star, the one man placed on this Earth, the one man pumps with fuel. With a deep exhale, I realize that I’m here. That I’m twenty-two. That it’s all happening right now. I’m no longer ten years old wondering what the future will hold, dreaming in languages of masculinity that I don’t quite understand yet. With scruff on my face, and smoke in my lungs, I’ve become exactly what I always wanted to be. Bourbon Street rages on beside me, but my heartbeat has slowed, and the music sounds dull in my ears. A drag queen walks by; in a different state, I would have told her she looks incredible, but tonight is for the internal. 

These moments of revelation don’t always come on mountain tops or with the waves crashing on your feet. Sometimes they do, but sometimes they come to you beneath street lights in places that are hotter than you’re used to. On the corners of bars, with dirt from the sidewalk still clinging to your clothes, under streetlights you didn’t know could be so beautiful. What you don’t account for as a child is that life won’t be a movie. You just think about how amazing it will be, forgetting that a movie is incomplete without conflict. So there will be the good times, but there will also be the boring ones, and tedious ones, and the ones that are so wretched you begin to believe in God. So wretched that someone must have sent this to you. All the emotions will happen, and unfortunately their frequency will be fairly balanced, but the time goes on anyway. I am no longer a child, my parents are no longer young adults, but this is okay. And it’s okay that it’s all balanced, because the moment comes when you’re on the street talking with strangers for who the exchanging of names was never necessary, and you’ll realize the bad parts were worth sticking around for just as much as the good ones. 

HUNTER RAMOS

“Threshold”

I had had my license for less than a year when I drove my entire life across the country. Some of my friends have been driving since they were fourteen. But I zig-zagged my way through life, and did not sit behind the wheel until my mid-twenties. So, when June was rolling into July, and the next step of my life was nearly fifteen hundred miles away, I was ill-prepared for the journey.

Yet, we needed to go somewhere. Yana, my wife, and I finished our associate degrees at Pensacola State College. We decided to earn our bachelor’s degrees at Champlain College, hoping that their promise of preparing students for the workforce was more than just a sales tactic. So we packed the cars full of nearly everything we owned, which admittedly was not much. We also packed Cinnamon, a German Shorthaired Pointer with separation anxiety and a sharp entitlement to any lap. I drove our Red Hyundai Sonata, and my little brother drove a Chrysler Pacifica, a rental, of course; none of us would ever be caught on the title of a minivan.

The first day of travel, from Pensacola, Florida, to some chain hotel in southern Virginia, was exhausting. I had never driven anywhere close to twelve hours straight before. I had a gnarly headache, my astigmatism was conspiring with headlights to blind me, and I wanted nothing more than to pass out and wake up two days later. But that was not to be. Less than six hours after drifting to sleep, we were crawling out of bed to get back on the road.

If the first day was my trial by fire, the second day was my trial by nuclear reactor meltdown. Just over thirteen hours of driving, on less than six hours of sleep. The headache came back quickly. A semi-truck tried to shut the door on us. A psychopath, hitting a road rage bender, put us in his crosshairs. Cinnamon was too overstimulated to use the bathroom. Exhaustion came in waves, occasionally being driven back by a second, and later, a third wind.

It was well after sunset when we hit Vermont from New York, probably around the twelve-hour milestone of the day. There was a transition in that moment. Elements of the American road experience that I did not know were erasable fell away. There were no street lights, no reflectors on the road, no billboards trying to sell me on overpriced used cars, or insurance I couldn’t afford, or celebrity attorneys with catchy slogans. And, just as oddly, the highway was nearly dead. For the first time in our trip, it felt like we were alone on the road.

Maybe it was exhaustion, maybe it was the headache, maybe it was the stress of the move, but sailing on the pitch black, starlit highways of Vermont was like entering a dreamworld.

In life, we sometimes make decisions that will affect the trajectory of our existence. Moving across the country was one of those moments. We had passed the threshold. Entering those roads near midnight in the absence of streetlight felt like an omen. Was it an invitation or a rebuke? Was it a warning or permission? In all likelihood, it was a tired driver with a tension headache looking for any sign to believe he was in the right place.

I am on that new trajectory now, and over a year later, it certainly feels like I am where I am meant to be.