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"Afremov Rendition" by Lauren Sink

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Philosophy Graduate Student

An Ouroboros tail in mouth I sit in class and stare at your push-broom mustache, contemplating the profound question: would it be morally acceptable for me to shave the thick bristles off your face? Of course, I’d probably displace a complete civilization of Platos and Aristotles behind the theoretical curtain that shades your upper lip, constructing speech with logical slips, premises you unleash in lecture, frowning at conjectures from students who overlook the facts. If A is justified in believing B and B entails C, then I am justified in believing that your glass mug is not full of tea when you mention consensual sex between man and dolphin, ask us to debate the ethics with a sound and valid argument. When Socrates swan dives into the herbal hot tub you’re sipping, I think maybe the world as I see it is a lie, the universe nothing more than dirt trapped inside the feather-duster under your nose or a paradoxical snake’s essence spinning infinite like a barber shop pole.

--Karen Bourne

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Martha Meets John

I know she wore a sun dress: the hem hovering over the tops of her long plump thighs, the white skirt stark against her golden. She was sixteen. 

I know he wore only jeans: wild-eyed, ready for everything, every bit of it. He was twice her age. 

She was already looking to drown herself in the sweep of someone— the humidity collecting in pools behind the back of his neck behind the soft backs of her knees. 

She does not yet know how violence can be served at room temperature like a late supper. 

He does not know how to stop; only how to take what she has to give and she wants to give and give until everything is filled with the anesthetic light of winter morning; quiet and empty. 

If I could’ve taken my mother’s child hand in my child hand then led her away.

--Blanche Brown

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Mirror

Looking is an itch in the back of the eyeball,

stretching the lower eyelid, lifting the upper eyelid, clawing at the filmy ball to reach the sore, to reach the itch. I cannot soothe it

I twitch and move, bend, manipulate, this body, this face. Lift the hair. Move the hips. All wrong. I bleach my teeth and delicately paint and erase the same surface. 

My fingers reach into my skull, looking for the back of the eye, With long vengeance nails, blind scratching. If I could reach into the reflective surface, pull the ugly out of me.

Pulling the string of ugly out of me. Unveiling the ugly out of me. If I could only reach the back of the eye, I would claw the little balls raw.

-- Polina Bastrakova

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Ghost of the Digital Age by Savannah Gerlach

In any given room I predict which of my friends and which of my strangers will die first. I note which ones will marry each other, rob banks, and which ones will reappear in my plot-lines thirty years later. When I stare at myself in the mirror, trying to identify my own end, a nictitating membrane lowers itself over my eyes and stops me. When I heard that you died ten days after graduation I looked for you online. I went to the usual places: profiles, search bars and the Herald Sun. The obituaries didn’t know you had a birth or death date, only that you were “joyful and beloved.” It didn’t know you tunneled into your computer screen after school, just that you had “big plans.” A month later I forgot your last name and a year later I went digging again, curious for fossils, but the pages were gone.

Every now and again, when I roam the web at 3 a.m., curved over my desk, my protein bars and thermos flask, the aluminum stars hanging shapes in my window, craning and reforming into constellations millennia before we notice the patterns, I mistake you for a chat room ghost. Your screen name stands in silence on the screen. You join conversations to listen, then you wander off into the terabytes, the Amazon wish-lists and the Minecraft planets, the pixelated wastelands.

I’d like to tell your family that memory, these days, is an infinite physical space never fully erased but preserved in the deep files, running through the bloodstream of databases of rocket launchers and racing stocks. ERROR 404 just means you’re somewhere else. 

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Binge

Wednesday night sessions inside my dad’s shop where blue collar beer bellies escape frozen tray dinners, work calls or wives with old man gossip and southern slurring   behind three garage doors and our back deck. I am home on summer break watching ten Netflix episodes pajama-clad with a tall glass full of chocolate milk when I am called   to play sober taxi for Barry. He stumbles through headlights, fumbles with the door, falls into the passenger seat and Dad steps up to my window laughing at the squinty-eyed man who drops his purple bag of half-full Crown Royal to the floor as he wrestles with the seat belt. Drive careful and I do. My dying air freshener will not cover the smell of vomit. Barry asks about college, says my ex-wife is a whore, daughter wants nothing to do with me.   He’s glad that classes are going well. I watch him survive the key gauntlet, bending to lift the mat, slow-motion momentum planting his face against the screen door – all spotlighted by high beams. But the lights are off inside the empty house and his Crown sits forgotten in the floorboard. I find it when I park at home, overhead bulb absorbing shadows around the purple drawstring I now remember packed full of marbles in the toy chest.

--Karen Bourne

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"The Silent Council" by Linnea Lieth

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Separation

Sliced until the tip is sharp, the bamboo stalks prick through the supine victim’s skin 

like a patient stitch, still sprouting. Cradled in the low belly of a boat the intended’s lips crust with milk and honey, the only sound the hum and buzz of insects picking at 

soft bowels and softer flesh. When the drop hits, the pain is a relief. The art is in the moment before, the water’s slow squeeze like a fist

hovering above the stalagmite of brow. Your goodbye is a flimsy reed, a toy canoe, a child’s sigh, an insult to the artists I survived before.

- Lauren Bullock

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Interview with Gail Z. Martin, author of Ice Forged

Aisha Anwar: Who encouraged you to read?

Gail Z. Martin: My mom was a kindergarten and first grade teacher, and she read to me from the time I came home from the hospital as a newborn!  She read to me until I had many of the stories memorized.  As I grew up, requests to buy books or go to the library were never turned down (I can’t say the same for other items I wanted to purchase!).  Both of my parents and my grandmother, who lived with us, were readers, and I always saw books in their hands.  Many of my friends growing up were also readers.  One friend and I had to climb a tree to get away from the neighborhood bully, but we took our books up with us and were pretty happy up in the branches.  Another friend used to come over and we’d each find a comfy chair and a good book and read in companionable silence!

 AA: What are your childhood favorites?

GZM: When I was little, it was the Dr. Seuss books and the Winnie the Pooh original books by A.A. Milne.  The original Winnie the Pooh stories were well written and not just the super-simplified little books they are today.  A.A. Milne wrote paragraphs that could go on for half a page!  When I got older, I loved Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden, the Meg stories and any of the “girl detective” books.  We didn’t have “YA” books back then, so I read anything with a ghost or a vampire in it, including Dracula, Macbeth and Edger Allen Poe.  I also read books of ghost stories, and anything I could find about King Arthur.

AA: What or what drove you to become a writer?

GZM: There were stories that I wanted to read that I couldn’t find in the bookstore, so I decided to write them myself!  I started out writing what today you’d call “fan fiction”—stories based on the characters from TV shows and movies, creating new adventures within the framework of someone else’s world.  My friends enjoyed reading them and wanted me to write more, which taught me that I could entertain people.  Eventually, I started writing my own worlds and characters and just kept on going!

AA: What's the title of your newest book? Where can readers find it?

GZM:  The newest book is the first in a brand new series.  Ice Forged is Book One in the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga.  It’s available in bookstores internationally, on Amazon, and on Kindle, Kobo and Nook—and soon, it will be available as an audio book, too!  The second book, Reign of Ash, will be in stores in April, 2014. AA:  How do your ideas take form? What do you find inspirational?

GZM:  Ideas come from everywhere.  I might watch a TV show on The History Channel or on The Discovery Channel or somewhere like that and see something about an old object, a long-ago war, a biography, etc., and I get thinking, “What if…”  The same thing happens if I am reading something historical, or visiting a historic site.  All kinds of little things create ideas, and I build off those ideas for bigger things.  I find historic sites and learning about history, myth and legend to be very inspirational! AA: Are you working on anything new?

GZM:  I just signed a contract with Orbit Books for two more books in the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga series, so I’m working on the next book, War of Shadows, for 2015.  And every month, I bring out a new short story on Kindle, Kobo and Nook in two other series, my Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures series and my Deadly Curiosities series.   I’ve got some ideas I’m also working on for an urban fantasy book and some steam punk stories, so we’ll see what happens! AA: What do you enjoy most about writing?

GZM:  I enjoy sharing the characters and stories in my imagination with other people and having those creations come to life for readers.  That is so much fun! AA:  What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

GZM:  Never give up.  I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was 14, but my first book wasn’t published until I was 45!  Sometimes, life gets in the way for a while.  It’s a business with a lot of rejection, but if you believe in your stories, you’ve got to keep trying until you break through. AA: Your daughter's coming to UNC in the fall. Does this mean you'll be in the area for any projects or book signings?

GZM:  I hope so!

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"Study of a Cardboard Object #2" by Anthony Hamilton

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Physical Laws

My mother packed lunches for my father every morning, her tears sliding down the knife into the bag.

If a red delicious married Granny Smith for her shine, would their children grow to manifest gravity, or would the fruit 

just come out with mixed feelings? When Newton was under that tree thinking about gravity, I doubt he paused to check the ground for bruises. Things fall all the time, the earth’s skin is tougher

than it is round. And when he made his discovery, he was surely astounded. Humans exaggerate when they’re scared, so if I said you and I were chest to chest does that mean 

we were an arm’s length apart I am slicing red— the color of unfulfilled hunger in sleepless eyes. I bet it felt euphoric in its tree, unaware that good things always come down.

by Candace Howze

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Fender Bender by Katie Jansen

Our plans are not like a couple’s. As we lie naked under your comforter and talk about the future, the questions raised are not where we will move after I graduate or when we will get a dog. I always thought I was okay with this. It has always been clear: the future is unclear for both of us. I thought I could live here, in the now. With you.

I assumed I would be fine, bidding you adieu when the time came. But as you send off law school applications one by one, I picture you scattered in any corner of the southeast while I am God-knows-where. I wonder if you will still text me just because, regardless of where we’re both living. It’s healthy to have our own ambitions, I realize that. But I also realize that maybe I’m kidding myself; maybe I want to support your goals along with my own.

Things that scare us are more approachable in the dark, so we always wait to talk about the future until after sex. There is never much to talk about, not in the way of a joined future, anyway. Afterward, we always move on to something philosophical to lighten the mood. This time it is life and death.

Then we get up and put our clothes back on and drive to Wendy’s. It’s the only thing open all 24 hours of the day. As we sit in the drive-thru and wait for the loudspeaker to crackle to life, there is a fender bender behind us. We watch in the rearview mirror, discreet and nosy.

“Should I get out?” you wonder.

“No,” I say. “You’re not even involved.”

“But aren’t we, like, implicated? As witnesses?”

I want to remind you you’re not a lawyer yet, that you don’t have to take on every potential case you see. I want to tell you to stay here and tell me that story again about the guy you waited on that pitched a fit about his buttered vegetables, or listen to me complain about my thesis. “They probably just have to swap insurance information,” I say. The sentence sounds dry, boring, logical.

We get our food and you drive to a parking lot across the street to eat. Across the way there is a coffee shop with one string of lights on its front porch.

“Best view in this small town,” you joke, and as I look over at your profile half-illuminated in the light, I think maybe you are right.

As I am sorting through fries and chicken sandwiches and handing you half the spoils, you won’t stop talking about the fender bender. “I mean, it’s crazy,” you say. “What was he thinking? Did he not see him there?”

“He was probably drunk,” I say. I am tired of hypotheticals for tonight.

“I’m glad it wasn’t us,” you say. “I feel like I dodged a bullet.” You’re only joking, of course, but when you look at me something about it is true. We are not dying, or getting jobs or going off to school, just yet. We are here, basking in the glow of Christmas lights, and we have a little time left to spend together. 

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"Self-Portrait of Father with Dying Mother" by Gray Swartzel

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"Jumper" by Emma Biggerstaff

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Submit to the Cellar Door!

Attention Poets, Authors, and Artists!

Cellar Door, Carolina’s undergraduate literary magazine, is now accepting submissions of art, poetry, & fiction for publication in its Spring 2014 issue. We urge you to submit any work you consider worthy of publication. The submission deadline is FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7th at midnight.

If you are unfamiliar with Cellar Door, you can always find a *free* copy of our latest issue in both the Undergraduate and Davis Libraries, as well as in Bull’s Head Bookshop.

Click read more for submission instructions

INSTRUCTIONS FOR SUBMISSION:

You may submit a maximum of 3 poems, 3 works of fiction, and 5 works of visual art.

All work must be submitted digitally.

POETRY/FICTION: Poetry and fiction must be submitted in the form of MS Word documents. Your name must not appear anywhere in the body of the document. The document must be named in the following format: YourLastName_TitleOfWork.doc(x) 

ART: Visual art must be in jpeg format. Color images will be accepted along with grayscale.THE LONGEST DIMENSION MUST BE AT LEAST 1200 PIXELS. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT.

The file must be named in the following format:

YourLastName_TitleOfWork.jpg

EMAIL POETRY TO: cellardoorpoetry@gmail.com  

EMAIL FICTION TO: cellardoorfiction@gmail.com

EMAIL ARTWORK TO: cellardoorart@gmail.com

  The body of the email should contain your name, email address, & titles of the submitted works. In addition, you must include your class, your major(s) and minor, and your hometown.

PLEASE: Don’t forget to attach your work!

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Coping

by Amanda Baldiga

He sat down on the couch. The skin beneath his eyes was dark, nearly purple. He wore socks that had been navy but were so dusty and thin they looked gray. It was dark and the TV flickered, garish candlelight. The walls of the room were bare except for a few unadorned nails. His hand landed on an open packet of nuts on the cushion beside him. He ate the remaining ones individually, examining each sphere and crunching down deliberately with his jaw.

“What’s wrong?” It was 4 am. She was in the living room, huddled under an afghan. Only her head and her hand, clutching the remote, were visible. He leaned against the doorframe.

“Nothing. I can’t sleep again. Go back to bed.”

He glanced at the television. “Is this what you watch every night? Infomercials?” Images of women wearing sweatbands and beaming men in aprons flashed by.

“Yeah. Silly, aren’t they?”

“They’re ridiculous. I can’t stand them.”

“Really?” She shifted under the afghan.  “I like them.”

“How can you like them? They aren’t likable.” He thought about sitting down next to her but didn’t move.

“I don’t know. They’re always so cheerful.” She turned back towards the figure of a pockmarked woman talking to an earnest Cindy Crawford. “Go back to sleep.”

He held his finger down on the Channel + button. Images raced each other, studio audiences and boxed sets of “I Love Lucy” and attractive families making pancakes while they roasted turkeys in a single sleek machine. The sound of the TV was barely audible. His eyes focused and unfocused as his finger pushed down.  

“I can’t do this anymore. I can’t.” She jerked the locket around her neck back and forth on its chain. Her skin bulged as she pulled it tight.

“You can’t do what anymore?”

“Be here, with you. You barely leave the house. You should talk to someone- it’s selfish, do you know that? What you’re doing is selfish,” she said. He watched her, hoping the taut chain burned her neck.

“Selfish? How am I selfish?  You’re not making any sense, stop yelling.” He kept his voice even and loud.

“I’m not making sense? What do you mean I’m not making sense? Don’t you dare tell me what to do, I’ll yell if I want to.” She dropped the chain.

He got up from the couch. “This is idiotic. I’m going to bed.”

“I can’t do this anymore, I feel like I’m suffocating.” Her hands spread.

“Jesus Christ, calm down. You’re being ridiculous,” he said, watching her sway.

“It’s you, you’re suffocating me. I need to breathe, I need to get out -“

“Shut up.” She looked at him, matched his gaze, until he felt self-conscious and walked into the kitchen.

He paused on Channel 131. A woman with lustrous blonde curls cocked her head and smiled at him. He turned up the volume as she said “Call the toll-free number on your screen within the next ten minutes to order. Trust me. It’ll change your life.” A number flashed on the screen.  He picked up his cell phone and wallet from the coffee table.  

“Come to bed,” he said, leaning over her.

“No.”

“Then talk to me. Look at me. This is ridiculous.” He looked at her profile. She stared straight ahead. He waited but she didn’t budge. He went to their room and made the bed, cut his nails, sat on the trunk under the window and read a program from a play they saw two years ago. He leaned against the doorframe and looked into the living room. The TV was flickering and tears were falling thick into her lap. Everything was silent.

            Within two weeks, the second bedroom was full. Juicers, two exercise machines, hair curlers, several types of moisturizer, an inflatable clown, a deck awning, four closet organizers, a grill. He unwrapped each package as it came and arranged the items into towers forming a rough circle. He left the packaging materials in the center of the room. After everything he ordered had been delivered and was in place, he sat cross-legged in the middle pile. The crunching of styrofoam and popping of bubble wrap echoed as he shifted position. He built low walls made of cardboard and used tape, concentrating. In an hour, he was surrounded by a barrier that came up to his chin. He looked around him and pulled his knees to his chest.

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Three Words

  by Katie Jansen

Come out with me tonight, Alex’s text reads. We’re celebrating the end of an era.

So I do, even though we are a couple of lightweights who feel nicely buzzed after only two beers, even though we both find the bar scene laughable. I do it because that’s the way things are with Alex: once he gets an idea in his head, you go along with it.

It is so like him to call the past however many years of our lives “an era” – to Alex, everything is more grandiose and important than it appears at first glance. Everything is an opportunity, an adventure.

            He has that sparkle in his eye when I push open the grimy door to the bar he’s chosen. The look is mischief combined with visions of grandeur. “David, my kind sir,” he greets me. He’s acting even more jovial than usual, completely ignoring the fact that come tomorrow he’ll be halfway across the country for basic training, and if he survives that he’ll be shipped off to who the hell knows what third-world country, and if he survives that he might come back to visit. But it won’t be the same.

“Three words,” Alex says, nodding to a girl standing at the bar.

            It is a game we play, or rather, that Alex plays and I participate in: three words to describe the object in question. No explanations allowed. The girl is dressed in tiny ripped shorts, and she is leaning against the bar on her elbows while surveying the room with a cold stare.

            “Duck-faced,” I decide. “Condescending…and tragic.”

            Alex furrows his brow, pretends to be confused. “Oh. I was gonna say my next girl.”

            We sit for a while and discuss anything that is not the impending flight than Alex will board in the morning. We have been friends since fifth grade, which sounds like a cliché or an exaggeration, but in our case, it’s true. The only hiccup we’ve had is when we entered middle school and I was trying so desperately hard to be cool. After Mike Peterson left me in the dirt (quite literally), Alex picked me up, dusted me off, and showed me what being cool really meant. It wasn’t about being a football star, but instead about charisma, about finding adventure, about being someone who was exciting. Someone like Alex.

            Alex always has crazy shenanigans, and I’m always along for the ride. Sometimes he calls them “entrepreneurial endeavors,” like the time in seventh grade we sold Air Heads out of our lockers until the cafeteria shut us down for being in competition with them. Other times they’re just plain off the wall, like the time in tenth grade when he bought two tuxedos at Goodwill and planned out an entire photo shoot. The shoot was going to involve performing bizarre activities while wearing the tuxes. Slip ‘n’ slide in tuxes, grocery shopping in tuxes. That plan came to an unfortunate end when we decided to begin with playing paintball in tuxes. Although we went to different colleges, we stayed close, driving the half hour to see each other at least once a month, discovering drinking, dancing, girls.

            But now we are both 24, that precarious age where you’ve been a college graduate for a couple years and if you haven’t yet found something permanent to do with your life, you’re approaching the brink of major failure. For a while there, we were both back at the restaurant we worked at in high school, but while I was busy studying for the LSAT, Alex went and signed up for the Army.

            It’s not like in the old days, when going off in the Army was not only a civic duty but also glorious, romantic, and sentimentalized, something you did with all your buddies. Now it’s a choice – a choice where buddies leave behind buddies, where sons (and daughters) leave behind mothers. I mean, I know someone has to do it, but I never thought it would be someone I know. Or let me rephrase and say I never thought it would be Alex.

            Maybe it’s what he wants, but I’m worried it’s one of his whims. I study his face, searching for the cloud cast over it, the silent signal that something isn’t right. But no, it’s glowing, his face is pink and smiling and a faint sheen of sweat is gathering on his temples from the beer.

            He leans in conspiratorially. “Three words to describe this place.” It’s one of those nameless joints, one we haven’t been to before.

            I look around and above me, pretending to think. “Dismal. Bleak. Depressing.” I immediately hate myself for being a cynic, for not being the life of the party and giving Alex a last night to remember, but he just shrugs. He’s used to this from me.

            “Bleak, eh? Been reading Dickens lately, old chap?” He smiles, shoves away from the table and goes to get us another round of beers even though we both know we don’t need any more.

            On the walk home, I want to talk about life but the words stick in my throat as though I’m eating an unmanageable caramel apple, one of those monstrosities you can buy at the fair. Alex was the one who got me to go on all the rides when we went in sixth grade, and he didn’t even make fun of me for being afraid. My place is on the way to his, and we halt awkwardly in front of my complex, hands shoved in pockets, toes scuffing the cement.

            Alex squints in the yellow glow of a nearby streetlight, waves his hands in front of his face dramatically as though he’s being blinded. I look up into the light, see the silhouette of a moth fall dizzily from the sky.

            “I’ll talk! I’ll talk!” Alex jokes. “All right, Mr. Lawyer – I’m cutting your sentimental soliloquy short. No pulling the heartstrings of juries today.”

I want to remind him I’m not due to take the LSAT for another month, but then he says, “Three words.”

There is no prompt attached to this assignment; it is completely open-ended. And three words is just not enough. I can’t say I love you because there is not enough room to explain, you know, platonically. Like the brother I never had. Women can say I love you and that’s just assumed, but with men there can never be enough clarifications. I can’t tell him I’m worried about how dull and mundane my life will surely become without him. I can’t ask, Is this right? and effectively question every decision he’s made in the past year. But this is the way Alex wants it, so I embrace him – more of a clap on the back – and say, “Take care, bro.”

Alex gives me one last salute and turns away. I should turn the opposite direction, head into my apartment, but instead I watch him. Is it just my imagination, or does his posture slump as he puts his hands back into his pockets? I watch him until he becomes just a ghostly figure in the distance, nothing more than the silhouetted moth. Three words ring over and over in my head: an era ends.