Sophomore Mary Kate Sherwood is currently taking Professor Tammy Greenwood-Stewart’s Intermediate Fiction 103 class. Here is an excerpt from her her story “Price Check.”

“Shut up,” grunted Cathy, trying to push herself up onto the checkout counter. She kicked a carton of cigarettes out from under the register, stepped onto its flimsy cardboard, and clambered onto the red Formica surface, scraping her shins as she hoisted herself up. Rocky, startled, started laughing, allowing Cathy to snatch the cool, wet plastic of the soda bottle from his fingers.

“Got it!” she crowed victoriously. She unscrewed the cap, closed her eyes, and took a long pull of chemical-tasting bubbles, savoring the coldness against her dry throat.

“Cathy!” boomed a voice in the darkness. She choked on the soda and wrenched her eyes open to see Jeremiah standing feet away, staring up at her as she knelt on the counter.

Rocky backed away quickly, folding his hands innocently behind his back. Cathy fumbled with the soda bottle, coughing and trying to dismount from her perch.

“Jeremiah, I—” she said, and dropped the bottle. The slick plastic slid swiftly from her hands and exploded in a syrupy, carbonated mess at Jeremiah’s loafered feet.

Rocky yelped and took another generous step back. Jeremiah jumped back too, then glared up at Cathy, his chapped lips pursed in disgust. For a moment, he seemed speechless.

“This,” he said finally, “is unbelievable.” He picked up the gurgling soda bottle with his fingertips and slammed it down on the counter, next to Cathy’s knee. “First,” he said, “first, I see you ringing yourself up for store merchandise, which you know is against Drug-Mart rules, Cath. Then I turn around and you’re climbing on the counter like it’s a jungle gym! What are customers gonna think, Cathy? And now you go pouring soda all over the place—it’s gonna take forever to clean this up! And I just got these shoes!”

Cathy, bewildered, looked down at Jeremiah’s loafers. The right one did indeed still have a Payless size sticker on the side. She said, “I—I’m sorry, Jeremiah. The soda—it’s really hot in—”

“I don’t care how hot it is, Cathy!” bellowed Jeremiah. “You kids, all of you spoiled brat kids that come in here day after day—you and you and the stock guys and even Connie—all of you, you all walk in here and never once do you take this job seriously—”

“I don’t work here,” Rocky pointed out. Jeremiah threw his hands into the air.

“I am the general manager of this store,” he growled. “I’m here all day, every day, and you know what I do when I get home? I play in my band.”

He paused, smirking at Rocky and Cathy, clearly waiting for the impressiveness of this statement to sink in. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “My band. ‘Price Check.’” He looked at both of them, clearly hoping the name would ring a bell. Getting no reaction, he continued, “So not only do I have to open and close and run this godforsaken store, I gotta balance it with my band. My music. And every time one of you little punks reads a magazine on the job, or steals a bag of gummy worms, or spills soda, it just makes things harder for me. You kids got a lot to learn about being successful, both of you. Well, here’s your first lesson.”

He turned to Cathy. “You’re fired, Cathy. Go on, get out of here.”

Cathy felt suddenly cold; there was a stunned buzzing in her head, like an air-conditioner with a blown fuse. She knelt there mutely for a minute, and then Rocky leapt forward violently.

“Hey, you listen,” he barked at Jeremiah. “You listen to me for a second. Don’t you push her around like that! You can’t just fire her! She’s the best damn person you got at this place. You know why she’s working at your store all day, every day? Not because she loves freaking drug stores so much, and definitely not because of you, jackhole.”

The sheer volume of Rocky’s voice sparked something inside Cathy, igniting an energy that pulsed forcefully through her veins; she heard herself shout, “Yeah!” in answer to his words. Both men turned to look at her. Her face burned, but she felt her mind clouding over in a haze of heat and anger. She leapt to her feet atop the counter. Rocky and Jeremiah titled their heads back to look at her as she towered above them. She could see the whole store, its pristine aisles stretched out neatly before her like the grid of a city; tiny, scattered customers looked up at her in shock.

“I work eight hours a day at this pointless job so I can make some money,” she said. She could see only Jeremiah’s puckered, wrinkled face, could hear only Rocky’s impassioned voice. “So I can buy myself a car and get away from you, and this town, and this damn store!”

“Hell, yeah!” said Rocky, nodding. “She does everything you ask her to. I’ve seen it, I come in here all the time. You’re always yelling at her, man. And how do you thank her?”

“You fire me!” answered Cathy, shouting down into Jeremiah’s wide glassy eyes. “Well, guess what, Jeremiah? You can’t fire me. I quit.”

She pulled off her nametag and spiked it down at Jeremiah’s feet, loving the dramatic bounce it achieved as it hit the gray carpet, watching it splash down and stick in the soda.

Rocky grinned up at her and reached out his wide, tanned hand. Cathy felt her smile light up as well; she slapped her palm against Rocky’s and leapt down next to him.

“Oh, and Jeremiah?” she said, straightening up. “‘Price Check’ is really the stupidest band name ever.”

“See ya, man,” said Rocky, tugging gently on Cathy’s sweaty fingers. She turned away from Jeremiah, keeping her hand firmly in Rocky’s as they marched towards the exit. The doors flew open respectfully before them as they approached, and together, they crossed triumphantly onto the sprawling blacktop, the infinite freedom of the Drug-Mart parking lot.

From Mary Tabor’s Intermediate Fiction 103 class comes this modular story from junior Sarah Krouse.

She had knitted a baby blanket for a child that was not her own. In the bottom right corner of her meticulously crafted yarn tapestry was an “L.” She could be a part of this. She bought her 1100 square-foot apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, so that the kids would have room to play, to read, and to sleep in rooms connected to her own. Their own.

He had befriended her goldfish when they returned to her NYU suite after stories, laughs and tequila passed between them in a club too smoky, too trendy to warrant a second visit. The air had smelled like stale autumn as her heels slipped on newspapers mâchéed to the pavement by a phantom Manhattan rain that had managed to dampen the sidewalks without catching their attention. The rain returned as they traced lazy paths along each other’s stomachs and faces in the shelter of her loft bed. No sex, a connection of a different sort.

She thought she might burn the blanket, but why all that wasted work when there were perfectly good, cold babies in the world who could be wrapped in it. She supposed the margin would be narrowed by the L, but still, there had to be a hearty population of Lauras, Larrys, and Lailacs in need of a good blanket. She ran her fingers over the even stitches, the yellow yarn and depressed squares where knits gave way to pearls. Could this gift be given to anyone other than its intended recipient?

It was she who was the caretaker, the older sister with answers. She made the decisions, gave the final approval of the outfit that her mirror image, two years her younger, had selected for the homecoming dance. Rachael was the taxi when Meg first met vodka in her friend’s basement and ended the night apologizing profusely to the holly bush into which she had vomited her shots, pride, and that night’s make out session. Rachael knew what she wanted from the world while Meg maintained that she had no need for a plan.

She had slept with it, hoping to leave in its small knots a trace of herself. She would not be the one this baby truly cried for, needed, and looked to for solace. She had knitted on the train on her way to keep him company as he worked the red-eye shift, only to return home at three, nap until seven and begin her own nine-to-five work day. She swore if she wove herself into his life wherever she fit, she could become part of the fibers, part of the stitches that barely held it together.

The first time he threw the phone across the room, she insisted it had more to do with the stress of a dead mother, an abusive father, an ex-girlfriend, and a first child that was planned as part of a relationship that he had been too young to tend to, than it did with his anger toward her. He didn’t mean it and his wrongly placed anger would not be a problem in their future.
He loved pulled goat over rice and beans and she loved to see him love. They would sit in the overstuffed chairs on the 14th floor of an academic building that was part of a world that belonged to her, while they looked down on the city he was a small part of. He offered stories of Jamaica, lazy, smoke-filled days of reggae and juices too sweet for her tongue, while she shared stories of the Atlantic Ocean, Connecticut, and the family that was perplexed and frustrated by her decision to date a man so different from herself.

Running her fingers over the neat yellow stitches she told herself the same lie that nine months ago had seemed a deep, infallible truth as he ran his own fingers along her breasts and thighs. She had been away. Abroad. Not there. It was fine that he had slept with another.

Around her junior year in college she felt within herself a need. A need that went unsatisfied by lovers who groped desperately instead of feeling and boyfriends who wanted to date instead of apartment hunt. Her life to this point had been about caring for Meg, proof-reading her papers, driving her to work, making excuses for the laundry, dishes, for the reality that Meg ignored. But Meg was away; it had only been a matter of time. She was hiking the mountains of the world, kissing boys with souls darker than their compelling complexions, throwing herself from bridges and airplanes relying on mere ropes and threads to propel her back to safety.
Rachael needed someone, someone to need her in return. It was more than a want; it became a yearning, an obsession. Her body ached to hold another, her mind made room for the routine that would have been carried out by this imaginary child. She woke up in the middle of the night to check on it, bought books to one day read to it. She incorporated that child into her being. Winston was the one she wanted this with.

Jaden’s affection for his father was compelling and overwhelming. Donning matching Brooklyn Industry sweatshirts, the two formed a Freak-the-Mighty tower, Jaden’s braided head bobbing with Winston’s stride. She looked at this and saw what she had made room for in her 1100 square-foot Sunset Park apartment. She held him when Jaden’s mother was granted full custody.
But this new child was not Jaden. It did not come from a relationship that had ended, it did not come from a woman who knew that Winston spent nights in Brooklyn, and it did not come from Rachael. The first nine months his lie held true, but as the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth brought with them the cold truth and the answer to an equation that put infidelity on her watch, she had nothing to do but knit. The Hester Prynne of Sunset Park, she was not ashamed of the “L” corner that draped further over her legs as her blanket grew, marking her the victim of loss, loneliness. She could make room for this child.
Meg was infuriated, ranting to her sister halfway around the world, she was exasperated. “Jesus Christ, hasn’t he ever heard of a condom? Wrap before you tap. Why is this okay with you?” She did not know why it was okay, nor did she know why she unlocked the door for him to return each night after he stormed out leaving behind him a trail of swears and purple smoke.

She wrapped the yellow squares around Beulah; her Gund bear’s arms didn’t reach for her, didn’t wail for her breast milk. She could not keep the blanket.

Winston called begging her to come down from her office skyscraper because he had a surprise. Laila gurgled quietly from a backseat chair into which her daddy had buckled her. Rachael turned on her heels marched through the rotating doors and vomited in the lobby.
Two other women had sweated and pushed out children that were his. Two other women had carried for nine months something that he had given them. Despite her attempts to botch her birth control and ignore condoms, she had not been able to hold him. She had never really been able to have a part of him.
The two months of solitude she had asked him for made her strong. Meg had taken her dancing, they took the train home to apple pick, they allowed their mother to make them 4 o’clock tea and stroke the legs of her most marvelous creations the way she had as their five and seven-year-old bodies drifted to sleep years before.
Now it was morning in her 1100 square-foot Sunset Park apartment that has room for kids that are not her own. She is alone. Dust dances in the rays of sunlight that seep through the slats of her Venetian blinds. The lines of light create a cell in which she lies, knees to chest, clutching close to her heart the knotted truth.

The poem below is from senior Sam Chiron, who is a Political Science major. Sam is taking Jane Shore’s Advanced Poetry (117W) class, and this poem is the result of a fugue assignment.

Spinnning for Jessica

the teacher is a spinning smile is too skinny spinning yelling “keep spinning”
i am spinning, the teacher is spinning, the thin people are legs spinning.

spinning legs molded to spinning hips at the spinning joint are spinning, the teacher
is a spinning smile is too skinny spinning yelling “keep spinning keep climbing ”
i am spinning, the teacher is spinning, the thin people are legs spinning.

bodies spinning sweating and steaming
keep their legs spinning, the teacher
is a spinning smile is too skinny spinning yelling “keep spinning keep climbing keep spinning”
i am spinning, the teacher is spinning, the thin people are legs spinning.

thin people are legs spinning, impassioned spinning legs
thaw into groans spinning into a searing boil
a person stops spinning, the teacher
is a spinning smile is too skinny spinning yelling “hurry the fuck up keep spinning”
i am spinning, the teacher is spinning, the thin people are legs spinning.

For the rest of the semester, we will be featuring select students’ creative writing that they are producing in our workshop classes. The work you will read will range from poetry, fiction, nonfiction and plays. Please check back frequently as we hope to showcase a different student’s writing twice weekly.
For our first feature, I am proud to introduce Jenny McKean Moore Writer in Washington professor Ryan Van Cleave’s student Cristina Sciarra. Cristina is a senior majoring in English and Creative Writing.

Jacqueline

Many a woman has a past; but I am told she
has at least a dozen, and that they all fit.
- Oscar Wilde

At sixteen, Jack scrubs coke into her gums
with the narrow blade of an index finger,
her body splayed across the dented wood
of our bedroom floor; when she rests
her head in my lap I can smell the musky oil
she nightly kneads into her dreadlocks.

Staring up at her Jim Morrison poster
with something like reverence
he, too, is posed as if he were a martyr—
arms wide and ribs vivid. She too
will die before twenty eight, she promises.

She still makes empty promises,
but allows me only doses now,
then blames it on the distance.
I know about the cigarettes—
those she stopped bothering to hide.
I’ve seen pictures of her pierced nipples
too. I know about the bruises on her lower back
the size of apples, gifts from a boy
she just couldn’t shake.

What I get now are spare parts; only enough
to piece together the rough outline of a story.
Like chinks of light spit from a strobe
or the swinging caress of a lighthouse beam—
part of the landscape always obscured,
the kaleidoscopic picture always changing—as if
by trying to catch her in your sight, the act itself,
is enough to damn yourself completely.