1Pegasus 2011

Managing Editor Courtney Carver

Poetry Editor Matt McCullough

Fiction Editor Courtney Carver

Advisers Jeff NewberrySandra GilesDiantha Ellis

PEGASUSSpring 2011 Volume XXXVIII

Art & Photography EditorMary Porter

StaffShikennya Bryant

Gretchen ElmAustin FlandersD’Ante JonesMicki MooreAlyssa Morris

Kassandra MorrisAlan Parks

Whitney ShepherdJessica Smith

Autry WhitfieldTamzy Whittle

Prose Judge Janice Daugharty

Poetry Judge Jay Snodgrass

Art Judge Donna Hatcher

Photography Judge Shirley Beckham

2 Pegasus 2011

Pegasus, Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College’s literary magazine, is published by ABAC students under the authority of and is funded by the Student Activities Budget. Contributions to the magazine include fiction, nonfiction, poetry, art-work, and photography. The publication features works by Georgia high school and college students; ABAC students, faculty, and alumni; and selected invited contributors. The opinions reflected are those of individual artists and writers and not the magazine. The mission of Pegasus is to encourage creative writ-ing and art by providing a forum for artists and writers to display their work.

We thank the Georgia high school students and ABAC students who submitted their works to magazine. We especially appreciate the efforts of instructors who encouraged their students to contribute. Also, we would like to extend a great thanks to the ABAC faculty and staff writers who so enthusiastically support the mission of Pegasus.This edition of Pegasus was printed by Boyd Brothers Printing in Panama City, Florida.

Submissions: The editors of Pegasus invite submissions of fiction, po-etry, nonfiction, artwork, and photography from Georgia high school stu-dents; undergraduates currently attending Georgia colleges and univ-eristies; and ABAC students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Please see our website for submission guidelines and more information concerning the magazine.

Pegasus Literary MagazineDepartment of Literature and LanguagesAbraham Baldwin Agricultural College

ABAC 20, 2802 Moore HighwayTifton, GA 31793

http://www.abac.edu/pegasus

Telephone: 229.391.4972Email: jnewberry@abac.edu

Cover Design by Heather Newberry

3Pegasus 2011

CONTENTS

Devin Gibbs,

Jason Patterson

Sam Lane

Sally Brannen Robin Case

Brenda Doss

Matt McCullough

Sarah Nelms

Andrea Sweeney

“Wearer of Broken Sneakers“Ficus Elastica”

“There Ain’t No Liberty Bond Posters in Hell”

“Don’t Make Fun of the Deaf”

“Sounding Out”

“1889”

“Girl Talk”

“Clap Your Hands to Keep Me Alive”“Dressed Like a Cheap Captain Hook”

“Bergen”

“Dreams”

526

10

15

16

17

23

2444

30

36

Poetry

Alicia B. Sloan

Brandi Arrington

Norina Samuels

K.M. Hill

Devin Gibbs

Matt McCullough

“Untitled”

“From Nowhere”

“Savagery of Human Nature”

“What If?”

“On the Graduation of a Fish”

“Something Like Living Occurs”

7

18

27

35

41

50

Prose

Anna Ristuccia

Jean Gay

Suburbia

Melody ModeratoWinter Shadows

Cover

1249

Photography & Art

4 Pegasus 2011

Emily Hershberger

Hannah May

Roy English

Andrea Sweeney

Erin Teixeria

Ariel Nix

Daniel Shippey

Morgan Woodard

Anna Shatuck

Rebekah McGee

Katie Kimbrell

Amanda Hershberger

Micki Moore

Quincee’ Mutuku

Carol Martin

Courtney Carver

Caterpillar

The World Through Their EyesForever and Always

Fallen

For the Love of a Girl

Modern Day PrincessThings Aren’t Always as They Seem

Who

Costa Rican Rain ForestThings Aren’t Always as They Seem

Off the Reef

Mr. Biggles

One Little Flower

Crab Shack

Tongue

Pink Lady

Go Away

Down the Road

The End of the Road

13

1443

21

22

3132

37

3940

46

47

48

61

68

69

70

71

79

Matt McCullough Who’s Southern Now?: An Interview with ABAC Writer-in-Residence, Janice Daugharty 62

Interview

Book Reviews 72

5Pegasus 2011

Devin GibbsWearer of Broken Sneakers

My Airwalk Converses are like soldiers.I wear them even when they are not on my feet.I wear them on my mind.

The seams are frayed. My shoes moan.They look withered, uncared for.

They smell of sweaty feet and daily wear.To the touch they are rigid, hard clay that never washes away,Like when you bury cloth and it’s stripped of all cloth-like qualities.

But still, it is cloth.

Dust rises with every step I take.I hear a CNN report, and I taste the saliva in my mouth Becoming thick with mucus and sorrow,The taste I always associate with tears.

These shoes are my favorite.Words written on them in 7th grade seemed childish, Then fitting,Now childish again.“I pledge allegiance…” and so it goes.

The men of hard times and harsh words: Motherfucker is a soldier’s favorite word after war.If these shoes could talk would they say fuck?They do have a tongue, but they have not been to war.

WhiskeyAlphaRomeo

6 Pegasus 2011

The bombs bursting in air reminding them of siblings running in and out of the house.Melodious giggles are the rat-tat-tat of a rifle,And then there is the BANG of the screen door.

Soldiers return home while away at war,Just not in the physical sense.Who am I to say they do not return physically?I am only the wearer of broken sneakers.I know nothing of war.Except that it is still war.

When they return home they will find some peace in old things,Like my broken sneakers.They will make do with what they don’t know they never had.Que sera sera.

My Airwalk Converses weep.The soles are blown.

7Pegasus 2011

Alicia B. Sloan

Unitled

It’ll be ten years this spring since my best friend Annie died. I can never remember the date it happened. I know I’ve heard it said a thousand times, and seen it on her headstone a hundred more, but the damn date always escapes me. I know it was a Saturday, because we didn’t have school or church that morning. The dirt road had just been scraped, so it felt smooth and cool under our bare feet. We liked to walk it after the sand was all scraped away because the exposed clay looked like melted crayons. All the reds and oranges bled into the whites and purples, and you could find just about any color if you walked long enough. The tractor hadn’t made its second pass to scrape the ditches yet. That was fun too, because sometimes they would uncover old glass bottles that had been buried long before we were born. It was mostly old soda and liquor bottles, but sometimes we’d find one of those really pretty royal blue ones. The dogs ran ahead of us sniffing back and forth between the ditches. I don’t remember what we were talking about or where we were going, if anywhere. I just remember that it was cool and shady still, and she was wearing the oversized white shirt she’d slept in. We didn’t usu-ally turn around when we heard cars coming. We automatically moved over into the ditch and walked single-file until they passed. The thing is, I don’t even remember hearing that truck coming up the road before it hit Annie. We must have been talking too intently or lost in our imaginations somewhere. She was just walking right next to me, and then she was gone. It was the strangest damn thing, to be walk-ing along with someone, close enough to touch, and with a streak of red and a gust of wind they’re gone. She made a loud thump when the truck hit her. It’s the same sound you hear when you hit a dog or a small deer. It’s just a loud, dull thump. She didn’t even scream. The tires went over her and the truck stopped for only a second before spinning out and leav-ing us in a cloud of orange dust. I was eight years old and full of faith in humanity; I thought they were going to get help.

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The sound of my feet slapping the clay was the only sound I heard when I ran down the road to her, dizzy with adrenaline. I think I expected her to get up and dust herself off until I saw how many places she was bro-ken. The back of her head was flat, and blood so dark it was almost bur-gundy was running like a faucet out of her mouth and nose. I screamed for help until my voice broke and I cried in great hysterical sobs. Panic is an ugly thing, and I was terrified. I could see bones sticking out of her knee and the different colors of the flesh that her skin was supposed to hide. Some of it was dark red like a raw steak, and some of it was pearly and pink, but none of it was supposed to show. These parts of her were all too private. Her shirt was gone too. It was just gone, like the truck snatched it clean off of her and took it like a gruesome trophy. I don’t know how long it was before I decided to try to take her home myself. Seconds felt like years and I knew I’d become insane if I stayed alone with her, so I had to do something. It was hard to get a hold of her because she was bleeding so much. It spread across the waxy clay in a scarlet halo around her blonde head for a few inches, before relent-ing to the gradient of the road and running toward the ditch. It tended to cling to her body and run down her torso too, kind of pooling under her. I tried holding her under her arms and dragging her back home. She was as big as I was and after a couple of tries I was slick all over with blood. It seeped up between my toes and turned sticky as soon as it started to dry. When I tried dragging her by her ankles I got a good bit farther. I made it to the next big pine tree, probably ten or twelve feet before I had to quit. I was exhausted but that wasn’t why I stopped. I had to stop be-cause every time I tugged on her legs I’d feel her bones grinding together all wrong. She felt like a bunch of heavy pieces all held together by tiny strings, and I thought if I kept pulling, one of the strings was going to snap and she was going to come apart. When I realized I couldn’t move her I settled on the road next to her and waited. I looked at her sprawled out there so pale and cold, and I regretted having tried to move her. I’d bent her back at a weird angle and one of her eyes got dirt on it. It was a silly thing for me to feel guilty about, but I was only eight years old. I didn’t know any better. So, I hugged my knees to my chest and wailed until a car came. I don’t think my mind’s ever been the same since then, I really don’t. The driver of the first car to come along was more hysterical than I was. She stopped the car in the middle of the road, and, apparently not

9Pegasus 2011

knowing what else to do, just ran around and screamed. She wouldn’t touch Annie or me because of all the blood. She stands out in my memory as a rather unimpressive adult. Luckily another car was close behind her, and before I knew it the scene was swarming with grown ups. One of them, a man with a big mus-tache, put a white sheet over Annie. I was grateful to him for that. She wouldn’t have wanted all of those people looking at her without her shirt, or seeing the things that were supposed to have stayed inside her body. That day was ten years ago. More than half my lifetime ago and I still think about Annie every day. Sometimes it’s like I’m living for her or she’s living through me. I eat things and drink things that I don’t even like sometimes because I think Annie might like to try it. I think about her a lot when I sneak off with my boyfriend Jason in his truck. I think about her then, when we’re hot and cramped and all tangled around one another, because I feel so alive then. I imagine it’s her blood rush-ing warm under my skin, and the instrument in my chest beating out a rhythm beneath her breasts. I want her to taste his salty lips and bruise her knee on the shifter. I know she’ll never feel those things. She’s in the cold dark beneath our feet, still and always a little girl. But just like she’s with me when I’m tasting pecan pie, or with my arms and legs wrapped tight around Jason, I’m with her in the cold dark ground. I feel that box close around me and the black solitude of six feet of earth over me. That’s the thing no one knows. It wasn’t only one little girl who died that day.

10 Pegasus 2011

Jason PattersonThere Ain’t No Liberty Bond

Posters in Hell

I.

Have you ever had to starve throughHeavenly war-time rationing?I think the angels are used to it.

Stars like bullet holes leak lightThrough cosmic black-out curtains(and we need them).

Less God’s spotlights, Searching for zeppelins in HeavenBlinds us.

II.

The shrieking cries of Hell’s dive bombersReverberate across solar windsAs they bank right and crater the moon.

On a clear night you can taste the staticSizzling down from the ethereal blitzAnd on a clear day, you can almost See Apollo manning the Olympian flak guns.

Yet, there is no blitz, no bombs threateningTo rip through the night sky.It’s all training days here.

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III.

The saints are manning the machine-gun nestsIn the Horse Head Nebula and rattle offSunbeams into black holes.

They carry around pocket-worn copies Of Hemingway to get aGlimpse at what war is like.

Yet, they hope the war Will be over by Christmas,But time has no use for calendars.

12 Pegasus 2011

Jean GayMelody Moderato

Oil on Canvass

13Pegasus 2011

Emily

Her

shbe

rger

Cat

erpi

llar

Dig

ital P

hoto

grap

hy

14 Pegasus 2011

Hannah MayThe World Through Their Eyes

Colored Pencil

15Pegasus 2011

Sam LaneDon’t Make Fun of the Deaf

A deaf

man once

told me,

with such

angry

hands—his

signals

loudly

gnashing—

I speak

in sound

asshole

listen

to me

16 Pegasus 2011

Sally Brannen

Sounding OutI lie in bed diggingback into myself, strainingthrough the noise of lifeto hear my mother’s voice.

I fear I have lost my sense of hearing.

As I still my breathing,listen to the hydraulics of my heart,the rheostat resisting light,the second hand in perpetual pivot,and the dust covering my bed,still, I cannot hear her.

I remember her lips Grasping words silently as she read the Bible to herself.I remember what she said,but I cannot hear it.

That last year she grew quiet--even her joy was a squinched-eyedpantomime of laugh.

We approached her quiet as fawns,as if our soundnesswould propel her into that reverent,final quiet to come.

I exhale and wait,and still, she is silent.

17Pegasus 2011

Robin Case1889

Made of complete ironMade to stand for only twenty years. Shestands 1,063 feet.

La dame de fer

Overlooking the City of Lights.Overlooking the people that never wanted her built.

One of most recognizable structures in the world.I stood on the second floor 6 7 4 steps

I stood looking over the City of Lights.One hundred and one years after she was supposed to be dismantled.

Surrounded by people who didn’t even know that I had dreamt of this moment since I was seven. I touched the iron as if it was glass.I leaned over the bars and took in every structure every statuethat surrounded me belowI took a deep breath and breathed in this moment.In this moment, I stood on La Tour Eiffel.

18 Pegasus 2011

Brandi Arrington

From Nowhere

He coasted over the Atlantic shoreline in an owl’s body, not his. He had no earthly body of his own; he was, in this sense, a creature void of form. As he allowed the owl’s wings to ride the thermals, he recalled his own bodiless dives into the ocean’s depths, falling weightless mile after mile toward black basins, searching for a place to hide from his fa-ther. But always during his descents into the darkness the strange crea-tures with the pretty glowing innards would distract him. Their liquid lights were transcendent gifts just for him, or at least he liked to imagine them as such. They made him feel, even if just for a moment, invited. The man-made neon nightlights of humans’ cities were incom-parable to the God-made electric organs of translucent squid or a puls-ing swarm of medusae. But it was the lesser delicate bodies of humans he envied, weighed down to earth by gravity, heavy organs, and pounds of flesh. He had once been a human, centuries ago, with blood-pump-ing vessels entangling bone. But he had no memory of his life. Presently, he skirted the Blue Ridge Mountains, flap-ping the owl’s wings with real zest as he made his way southward.

* * * Afterhoursofflying,heextendedthetiredwings,adjustingthemaccordinglytotheupdraft,toglideoverthisfamiliarstretchoflandinGeorgia,withitsinfantryofskinnypinesanddarnsoffarmland.Geor-gia.Hewantedtosaytheword,butthebeakofthisavianbodythathehadstolenonlyemittedasofthoot. Heglidedoverthecattlefarm.Whitecattleegretscircledbe-neathhim,justoverthecattlewhichwerelumberingacrossthepasturetowardafamiliarshape:thelargewomanwithskinrichanddarkliketilledearth.Sheworeafrayingstrawhatwithafadedbluesashwhichshehadtiedunderherchin.Shewaspushingaheavywheelbarrowcon-tainingasackofdrycornthroughthepasturegate. Asheflewoverher,thewomansetthewheelbarrowdownwithdeliberateness,agracefulease,thenkneadedherrightearwithherglovedfingers.Thewomanstraightenedherhatandonceagaingripped

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grippedthewheelbarrow’swornwoodenhandles.Shebegantosingassheploddedthroughthecows:

Stayinginthehotsunalldaylong, Ain’tnopreachermansingin’mysong, Sataninthefieldandmyfaithdonegone, Ain’tnopreachermansingin’mysong.

Hehadheardtheoldwomansingtohercattlebefore.Heflappedtheowl’swingsandmovedon.Herhouseservedasamilemark-er,aroadsigntohisdestination.Inhishurry,hehadnotnoticedthewoman’shusband,askinnymanhobblingtowardherfromthevegetablegardenontheothersideofthebarnwithhisheadcocked.

Chapter 1

“Therese!” the man called to the woman as he made his way toward the pasture fence. In front of him a blue-mottled hound chased an upset hen in circles. “Lightnin,” the man said to the dog, skirting around the skirmish, “let that chicken alone, now. Therese!” The woman sat the wheelbarrow down and turned toward him. “What?” she yelled from the pasture, her whole body jerking with the word as if it were a sneeze. She saw her husband, Shine, drag-ging his left boot through the dirt as he crossed the yard toward her, leaving a trail of dust in his wake. At the sight of her limping husband, Therese’s thick shoulders relaxed and she walked over to meet him at the fence. “What’re you singing?” Shine asked her, a bemused expression on the right side of his wrinkled face, the eye gleaming. The left side of his face hung, deflated. “Why?” Therese asked. “You remember a few years ago, that boy who helped us out in calving season? That feller who wasn’t quite right in the head and would eat those chinaberries off the tree? He always wore that worn-out leather and wool high school letterman jacket he’d picked up at a yard sale. He was so proud of it, especially after you unstitched that other kid’s name off it. Wore that jacket every day. Even on the days

20 Pegasus 2011

when it was all the rest of us could do to keep from drowning in our own sweat.” Therese nodded, breathing heavily. “I remember.” She removed a leather glove, using it to swat gnats. “His breath could wilt hay. He was a sweet boy, though. Good with the cows. It’s a shame.” “It was those chinaberries that made his breath stink,” Shine said. He slowly shook his head in wonderment. “Those stinking berries should’ve torn his stomach all up, but he just kept picking them and eat-ing them. It’s a wonder that by the end of the day he wasn’t standing on one side of this fence and shitting on the other.” Therese let Shine prattle while she eyed the early autumn sun dropping too fast from the sky. “What about him?” she finally asked with a tinge of impatience she could not quite check. But Shine had also been looking up at the sky while prattling, at what appeared to be a large owl flying over the pasture before disappear-ing beyond the pine woods. “That song you were singing just now,” he said in a subdued voice, distracted by the bird he had seen. “He used to always be singing that song. And remember how he used to always be talking to himself? He’d claim he wasn’t talking to himself if you called him on it. Said he was talking to a bunch of angels. I didn’t have the heart to tell him other-wise.” Shine kept his crooked face on the sky, toward the pine woods, searching for the owl. “I’d never seen that boy around before that calving season. He was like that what’s-his-name. That traveling bastard.” The eyelashes of Shine’s right eye beat like a black dove’s wings as his mind searched for the words. “You know who I’m talking about.” “No, honey,” Therese said tiredly. “They’re all traveling when they get to us.” “The Wandering Jew?” Shine asked the sky. He shook his head. “Naw, that don’t sound right, does it? It’s a shame because he was a good boy, good with the cows,” he said, echoing Therese’s sentiments. “I hope wherever he went after here he took that jacket with him and washed it. By the end of calving season it had got rather pungent and looked about like a cow had been using it for cud.” “He took it with him, remember?” Therese said. Since Shine’s stroke, his memory was spotty. “When we found him hanging from the barn’s rafter, he was wearing it.”

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Roy EnglishFallen

Digital Photography

22 Pegasus 2011

Andrea SweeneyTheLoveofaGirl

Digital Photography

23Pegasus 2011

Brenda DossGirl Talk

Used to think you hated me,Because I was smart, but still a girl.I tried, when I was younger, To be the son my brother was not.I pulled lightning-scarred branches across the yardUsed grown-up words Only to be scolded for repeating youPulling weeds in the azaleas

I remember you yelling scared because inside We could not hear you stuck on the roofWhere you had gone to fix the antenna, finally.I had never seen you so angry and loud

Memories of days spent exploringA mountaintop hotel while you conferencedThat was my summer vacation after the divorceWatching you dominate conversationsRaising your voice so no one could interrupt

I am not like my brotherWho does not talk to you anymore.Who is so much like you it hurts to see.

All I rememberIs being told not to block the TV[children should not be seen or heard]I sent a note once, askedIf you were proud of the womanI have become. So not my brother.Birthday cards since have gotten more showyMore wordy in preprinted text.Still every visit there is a backhand in your compliments.

24 Pegasus 2011

Matt McCulloughClapYourHandstoKeepMeAlive

ThenightMaxworehiswolfsuitandmademischiefofonekindandanother... —Maurice Sendak

My room grew a jungle, too. Green vines wrapping their legs around walls they had fallen in love with. Only, they were cut down by a man shaped like a telephone billwith an ATM card chainsaw.

Maybe they should’ve been more modest.

Yesterday: I took a job application from my walletand checked a box indicating that I did, in fact, have three eyes, a horn, and yellow fur. That I only had four toes on each foot and my eyes sometimes shoot lasers. Nobody seems to notice.

Today: a television loops a Toys-R-Us commercial while I sit in a chair shaped like Mickey Mouse. I’ve never noticed that giraffe’s wearing shoes. How adult of him, to wear shoes. Practical. That giraffe taught me how to grow up, I guess.

Still, growing up is sometimes toxic.

I’m standing chest high in credit card applications, eating paper, cutting it with a fork and a knife(I may be a monster, but I still have my manners, if anything).

25Pegasus 2011

I can breathe smoke, I think.

Breathe. Smoke. I am terrifying! (I am terrified.) Breath smoke,

or, just breathe at all at least.

26 Pegasus 2011

Devin GibbsFicus Elastica

Being a houseplant must be a wilting life.Always straining for the white rays of sun butOnly ever feeling warmth through armored glass.

To never feel the six legs of a nectar anxious bee,Bizz buzzing from bloom to bloom.The bee that is always grateful for what a flower offers, And always willing to share with butterflies and silver moths.

A house plant will never know the feeling Of rain falling from the sky.The splatters upon its leavesReflecting prisms of light When the sun leans around the clouds,And those waves wash over the new clean green.

Children bend and look closely at theFlowers of Queen Anne’s lace.Bugs of all creeds crawl there seeking refugeIn the tiny white flowers.

Ficus elastica has no flowers.It has no bugs.

What if this plant could hear?At best, the children’s happy squeals of delightFrom being chased by villain sprinklers, Would be muffled through opaque walls.

27Pegasus 2011

Norina Samuels

SavageryofHumanNature

The condition of human nature is just that “human.” It is a flawed natured that houses a man’s mind. Human nature is what compels and drives one to their actions, and what shapes them in mentality and heart. The condition of the heart and the condition of the mind are sepa-rate of themselves but tied to the human nature. The nature is the animal instinct, that primal drive and need. Human nature demands progress and superiority but requires structure. Left without constraints human nature pushes toward savagery, yet with too many constraints it leads to dissent and barbarism. Each in end of the spectrum is hell and brings out the savage nature as can be seen from the events that take place in Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano. In one all rules are null in void and in the other rules and regulations are so abundant one may drown at just the thought of it. Human nature demands progress. It is the human nature of people to try to better themselves. Greed and the need for superiority of others drive man to progress. Player Piano is the epitome of a controlled and structure society. Machines do everything from deciding the destiny of an individual to deciding the needs of a nation. The machines main-tain the structure and keep the people in their station of life. In a society where the constraints of a machine’s decision determine you, man loses the option of choice. Player Piano talks of a machine known as EPICAC XIV, it being “wholly free of reason-muddying emotions” (117). Emo-tions are what makes humans humans. They allow for choice where the machines do not. Man loses the option of choice. EPICAC XIV knows “how many everything America and her customers could have and how much they would cost. And it was EPICAC XIV who would decide for the coming years how many engineers and managers and research men and civil servants, and of what skills, would be needed in order to deliver the goods; and what I.Q. and aptitude levels would separate the useful men from the useless ones…”(Vonnegut 118). The machines have taken everything from humans: “first the muscle work, then the routine work, then, maybe, the real brainwork” (15). Human nature needs and de-mands progress but in this constraining society people are forced to settle for their lot in life and that is not a comforting thought. As one

28 Pegasus 2011

man in the novel put it, “Reeks and Wrecks… that’s all my kids will ever be, and guy’s got to have kicks or he doesn’t want to live—and the only kicks left for a dumb bastard like me are the bad ones”(167). To be told you are what the machine says you are and no more. Those constraints push human nature to dissent which is a straight path to barbarism and revolution. Too much structure grows into resentment. Humans are made to progress so Dr. Proteus, the main character in Player Piano, was right when thinking that “It was an appalling thought to be so well-integrated into the machinery of society and history to be able to move in only one plane, and along one line”(35-36). It is natural to find dissension when the “feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect” is taken away (175). Therefore, yes, too many constraints lead to dissent and barbarism because “the most fascinating game there is, [is] keeping things from staying the same” (332). In the novel, riots occur, setting off a mini- revolution and it takes but one man start one. The society portrayed in Player Piano results when human nature is given too many constraints. Dr. Proteus states the problem with too many constraints and too much structure when he says, “The business of humanity is to do a good job being human beings not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems” (315). On the other side of the coin left without constraints human nature pushes toward savagery without structure anarchy and chaos rule paving the way for barbarism. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is the epitome of the human nature at its most savage. Mark Twain once said one of most humorous things in the world was white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages. This black humor is evident throughout Conrad’s story as the most savage among the savages was Kurtz, a white man who went into the Congo. Once free of the con-straints of “normal” society Kurtz slowly slipped into his primal human nature as proven by Marlow when he stated, “I tried to break the spell--the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness--that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions. This alone, I was con-vinced, had driven him out to the edge of the forest, to the bush, towards the gleam of fires, the throb of drums, the drone of weird incantations; this alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations” (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Part 3). Humans drift toward savagery out of instinct, survival, and greed. The ivory trade of the Congo made upscale gentlemen turn to brutes like when Marlow was

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demanded to give up ivory for his life: “He declared he would shoot meunless I gave him the ivory and then cleared out of the country, because he could do so, and had a fancy for it, and there was nothing on earth to prevent him killing whom he jolly well pleased” (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Part 3). The entire story on the savage transformation that usual occurs. The doctor that checked Marlow before he left for the Con-go had insinuated that interior changes would happen. What happened to Kurtz in his world is the effect that happens with no constraints. Kurtz’s transition to a savage human nature is one that occurs to the majority and best summed up in the terms of Marlow when he says, “In some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him—all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascina-tion of the abomination—you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate” (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Part 1). Through Kurtz what happens to the human nature is seen clearly: it pushes towards barbarism. Both sides of this spectrum show the savagery of the human nature. Marlow covers both when he states, “And this also, has been one of the dark places of the earth” (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Part 1). Too much of either leads to the dark side of the human nature. So for the human nature to stay in balance there much be a happy medium. A compromise that results in structure and constraints but not to the ex-treme of Vonnegut’s Player Piano or savagery will prevail. There will always be a part of the human nature that is dark and savage, but that savage nature does not have to reign supreme. Compromise is the key as yin cannot exist without yang. Therefore the savage animalistic side of human nature cannot exist without the mindful reasoning of side of the human nature. Left without constraints human pushes towards savagery, but too many constraints also lead to the same savagery. A barbarism that is not realized until it’s too late. When the realization hits, all who are struck will weep for the loss of innocence and the darkness of men’s hearts just as Ralph of Lord of the Flies did.

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Sarah NelmsBergen

Conversations loomed highOn the breath of morning’s dewBeauty to be found withinUnexpected connections betweenTwo heart strong mindsRevealed

Cobblestone streets kissed with rainTin roofs echo their songConversation ricocheting off the balconyOnly to be interruptedFor a kiss anticipatingA silent world was taken

Many petal breathsReplaced with desireHis blue depths are not shallowIn my eyesDifferentSo different from before

Anticipation is prevalentIn twilight skiesOf tangled sheetsHands holding the glow Of our desire breaking its hold

Yes

Breaking its holdTo grasp to more We’ve waited for our timeSeasons have passed(Let this be our Spring)

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Erin Teixeria Modern Day Princess

??????

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Erin Teixeria Wonder Glass

??????

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K.M. Hill

WhatIf?

‘What if the freshwater pond that we swam in every day suddenly be-came full of ketchup instead of water? And what if the lily pads became pickles? And what if the fish turned into tasty french fries and we floated around on juicy hotdogs instead of old tractor tire inner tubes? Then we

could float forever, and gobble it all up!’

It was definitely lunchtime. Our grumbling bellies, although already dazzled with sweet blackberries that had stained our hands, were making our imaginations soar. My brother was seven. I was eight. Our favorite game was “what if.” We roamed our mamma and daddy’s fifty-acre pond and forest in the South Georgia springtime. Like new-born fawns, we were innocent and curious. Our blue eyes were alive with wonder. The sun set its mind to giving our half-American Indian and half-Irish bodies an irresistibly warm glow. This made us look even more native and maybe a bit untamed. We were indeed the children of Mother Nature. Among this make-believe magical world, we continued to dis-cover Mother Nature’s blessings and seasonal wardrobe changes. What if we made a new recipe for God? We could mix:

Half a River of Magic Potion: (Pond water)Ten Balls of Warm Lava: (red Geogia clay—to make it thick and stick to God’s ribs)Bunches of Stingers from Evil Fairies: (honey bees—they were evil because we were allergic to bees. The stingers gave the soup some kick! Note: careful not to let the fairies bite.)Unripened (red) Blackberries: (to give it some tang!)Some Magic Lion Spit: (because Vladimir, our beloved pet, a white Alaskan wolf, kept sobering up the blackberries!)Lots of Handfuls of Wildflower Petals: (so it would be pretty for God!)Mix all this stuff in a Lovely Sparkling Silver Cauldron (five-gallon bucket painted with clay and blackberries)

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This would be our “Heaven Soup.” God would love it! Of course, we would need some good meat too. What if we painted our bodies with the red Georgia clay and blackberries that stained? Nobody could see us in the woods and we could be great Indian hunters. When the victory of our kill with our bows and arrows (fishing line and green bamboo) arose, we would bring our lion (Vladimir) back to camp and have a magnificent feast! The days seemed timeless. They seemed to last an eternity. Mamma called us in for lunch, oranges and peanut-butter sandwiches. In the afternoon, my brother and I would sneak out to the cow pen and lick the blocks of salt. Vladimir followed us everywhere we went. He protected us from harm potentially inflicted by dangerous fire-breathing water snakes! As the sun began to set, we would run as fast as we could through the woods. We avoided the rays of setting sun that pierced through the forest canopy. Those rays were alien laser beams that would melt us completely if they touched our skin. As the very last laser beam vanished, mamma would call us back to the safety of her eye view. As early evening developed, we lay on our backs and watched airplanes leave trails across the still brilliantly dark blue sky. Those were actually rockets. What if we had surfboards and could skate on the white trails? No, better yet, we would fly like Superman and Wonder Woman.As the very first star would begin to peek through the young and lay-ered evening sky, mamma would call us in for dinner. Daddy had come home from work. He always had a way of making dinner and adventure. Sometime it was ‘urp’ burgers. Sometimes it was fresh sushi or even an occasional wild rattlesnake that he had so carefully cleaned. This exotic array of reality only fed our imaginations even more. What if the ‘urp’ burgers mad us burp forever and ever?! We finished our dinner while full nightfall came to be outside. We giggled at the thought of burping forever and then quietly slipped back outside for one more last chance adventure before bedtime. Lady Night cascaded her veil of twinkle songs and stars around our spinning planet. Chorus frogs and bullfrogs allowed their voices to arise slowly like a symphony warming up for a heroic grand finale until all at once they chimed in rhythms and swayed with the beating of our untainted hearts. The smells of fresh spring burns and freshly cut grass heavily perfumed the air. To us, it was as if the billions and trillions of

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stars in the sky were the spirits of our ancestors looking upon us to give ustheir utmost approval to be forever happy with life as it was at that very moment. We looked up at them and dared each other to spin and spin as fast as we could without falling down. The stars had magic stardust in them, didn’t you know? When we finally could spin no more, exhausted from our day’s adventures, we would tumble down and just lie there on our backs in nature’s palace. As our breathing slowed, we watched the twinkles and became absorbed in the chorus that hummed within our ears. We fell into an imaginative trance and our minds drifted without effort.We lay there breathing and contemplating quietly amongst ourselves. We were tired but happy. As our heavy eyes teased that they may close for the rest of the night, mamma’s voice would once again ring out and bring us back to the here and now. It was bedtime. We had to get in one more dream before mamma remembered that we had only bathed in the pond that day. “I’m going to sleep tonight and I’m going to dream that I’m a superhero cartoon!” My brother would happily exclaim back. I am older now. I have children of my own. My life has not exactly gone as well as planned. Somewhere along the line, I forgot how to play the game “what if.” That is to say, I forgot how to dream. Just today, however, I drove by a simple fresh-water pond. My four-year-old daughter squirmed to get a better out the window in the back seat. She then asked me, as she often does, ‘what’s that, mamma?’ “It’s a sand-crane hunting for fish,” I told her. Then, as I looked out across the pond, something caught my eye. It was the setting sun reflecting from ripples on the water. Suddenly, I remembered something… was it the water? What was it that my mind was trying so desperately to grasp? Oh yes, that is right. What if the reflecting light on each ripple of water were actually a dream? What if I caught those ripples of light in a jar and could keep those dreams forever? What if even just one of those dreams were a place like heaven? Was that what I had left behind when I left my childhood? What if I could get it back? What if…?

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Andrea SweeneyDreams

Float on LikeSlow EndlessClouds of NightmaresPouring and FillingMy mind WithDrops of Fear.Scaring and ShakingEvery bit of MeUntil I Awake…

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Ariel Nix Who

Ink Drawing/Coloring

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Daniel Shippey

Costa Rican Rain ForestD

igital Photography

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Daniel ShippeyThingsAren’tAlwaysasTheySeem

Digital Photography

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Morgan WoodardOff the Reef

??????

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Devin Gibbs

On the Graduation of a Fish

I have marveled at a fish’s demise. My first day of college, in rural South Georgia, I bought a betta fish, and I named him Pony. When I was younger I had a cow named Oink and a turtle named Ribbit. I enjoyed naming animals things that they could never accomplish. It only made sense to name my fish something it could never be. My Pony would never be an equine. My Pony would never have four muscular legs to use in running across green pastures. My Pony could never have a saddle strapped on its back, and unbeknownst to me, Pony would never survive my college experience. I bought a bowl from the pet store and then went to the Dollar Tree to get paint, marbles, and seashells. This was a big production, after all, moving out of my home and having a pet all my own. I painted “Pony” in blue at the bottom of the bowl and filled it with a mixture of tiny white seashells and clear marbles. In my mind, this fish deserved seashells. Now I realize that betta fish hail from Thailand where they live in rice patties. I could have made Pony much more at home if I had bought Uncle Ben’s Instant Rice. I awake on the third morning of my freshman experience and read the back label of the fish food. “Drop 4-8 pellets into the fish bowl daily, and watch as your fish becomes more colorful and vibrant.” Morning one as well as morning two, I did not feed my fish, so a triple dose of foul fish food seemed like the best option. I dropped 30 or so pellets into the fish bowl, waited to see him eat a few, but he didn’t. I stayed busy, so while I was not with Pony to know his day to day struggles I often imagine what they may have been. I make them up, you see. I often think Pony swam frantically in his bowl, when the heavy-set people above us decided to dance on day one. When the sun shined too brightly on day two, and glanced of off his thick glass bowl, I imagine he winced a little fishy wince. I may have once thought, “Ah the life of a fish,” but after all it is not an easy life. Nor is it an easy death. One morning I was awakened by a stench. I looked over to see Pony floating diagonally in his bowl. His water reminded me of eyes that have jaundice. An unhealthy yellow glow swarmed within Pony’s bowl. Encompassed in the fog was Pony himself looking quite peaceful,

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and blowing bubbles out of his mouth every four seconds. The bubbles were trapped in the gelatin like water and had created a fascinating pattern. My roommate walked in and said, “What are you doing?” Propped on my pillow, chin squished by my hands and my mouth cov-ered by my knuckles I replied, “Pony’s dying, come here and check this out.” My roommate crawled across the bed and looked over my shoulder at Pony’s bowl. “Ew, Dev! What the hell happened? It’s only Thursday!” The beauty of the pattern had obviously escaped her, and I was disappointed. “Ah, I don’t know I think he must have been a crap fish.” My roommate left for class, but I skipped. I lay on my bed in that same position for thirty more minutes before a thought occurred to me. Just as I had graduated high school and moved on to a bigger pond, Pony needed to graduate and move on to his new life. I grabbed my bible and Pony in his crusty bowl and headed for Lake Baldwin. I sat on the damp grass right at the edge of the pond and flipped my bible open. I looked for anything that said water and came across the word “sea”. So I read aloud Jonah 1:12-13.5, “And he said unto them, Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you: for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you. Nevertheless the men rowed hard to bring it to the land; but they could not: for the sea wrought, and was tempestuous against them. Wherefore they cried unto the Lord, and said, We beseech thee, O Lord, we beseech thee, let us not perish for this man…” I trailed off when I realized this may not have been the best parting speech for my fish. After all, this was his gradu-ation of sorts and Pony deserved a strong Go-Out-And-Be-Your-Best speech. The almost upside down Pony looked as frightened as a fish could when I ran my hand around and around in his yellow Jell-O bowl. Finally I grab his sliminess and pulled him from the only home he has known (except for the rice patties of Thailand, the baggie he was thrown into for transportation to America, the other container where he was put in order to be transferred to the pet store, the pet store container where I found him, and finally the baggie I put him into before bringing him home). Fighting madly the whole time, it seemed as if Pony did not expect the change. He was just getting comfortable with the way things were. I gently laid him in the murky pond water and waited. At first, Pony just wiggled to and fro, trying to keep himself upright. After

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a minute or so he gracefully swam out into the deeper part of the pond. I gathered my things and turned to walk back to my room feeling a sense of relief. My fish graduated into unsympathetic conditions, and made the transitions successfully. There may be hope for me yet. I had taken five hopeful steps toward my new college life when I heard a familiar whoosh. I turned around in time to see only ripples (very clearly not made by my one ounce fish) and I stood there, mouth agape, until long after the ripples and ceased.

Hannah MayForeverandAlwaysStipple Engraving

on Oil Pastel

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Matt McCulloughDressed Like a Cheap

Captain Hook

She told him goodbye and he tipped his hat, resting his fingers on its brim. He told her goodbyein a voice that one would usually follow with a fewinspired words of wisdom.

(One says things like: “This world ain’t big enough for the both of us,” or “Here’s lookin’ at you kid;” a witty swing and miss. He did not say this, though, and could only tell her that his belt felt a little too big, that he felt thinner.)

Her head sounded like shoesin a dryer, altered by the small electrical explosions that try their best, sometimes, to explain themselves to one another. They were violent, a color wheel, a frog with muscular dystrophy.

He seemed lost now, in a cup of alphabet soup: he had had a map (he was pretty certain he had), but he long ago replaced the names of towns, streets, and highways with the names of certain television shows.

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He was stuck somewhere between Jeopardy! and ILoveLucy, Between “I need your answer in the form of a question,” And “Lucy, you have some explaining to do.”

She found him again With his lips pressed against a reality show.

She wanted to be liked he wanted to be noticed.

Eventually, they both lost a sizable bet to a capital letter dressed in a bathrobe and slippers, a half eaten cigar growing from its bottom lip, and with a particularly aggressive comb-over.

They both had such terrible luck . . . such terrible, terrible luck.

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Mary PorterOur Looking GlassDigital Photography

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Ann

a Sh

attu

ckM

r. Bi

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sPe

ncil

Dra

win

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Rebekah McGeeOne Little Flower

Digitally-Colored/Pencil Drawing

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Jean GayWinter ShadowsOil on Canvass

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Matt McCullough

SomethingLikeLivingOccurs

PopQuiz!question:Whatisanalliterativenameforanequineheadonapoleusuallyusedasanoldchildren’stoy? Answer:AHobbyHorse

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I was, then, stuck (or, more rather, locked) in a car—for what I could only assume by the marks that I had started making in the leather on the back of the front seat like some inmate so bored with jail and so intent on finding something to occupy his time that he just starts to catalog his ‘time’ on the walls—for about six-ish hours with a guy I had come to know from work (he having the office next to mine at the Claremont and Danes Advertising Corporation, so it was less of a ‘come to know’ and more of a ‘forced to know’ type thing) that I had nick-named T Rex (his actual name being Tyrus F. LaCert, which, when he first introduced himself to me and I first heard the name [the LaCert part] it reminded me of Lacertus—which is Latin or Roman or something for ‘lizard’—which made me think of that song, the ‘walk the dinosaur’ one—I think first performed by the band Was (Not Was) and featured on their 1988 album What’s Up, Dog—anyway, there’s that, which made me think of the term ‘thunder lizard,’ which made me think of T Rex, which seemed far too good of an opportunity to pass up); and though I had been, like I said, locked (or trapped or whatever) in the car, it wouldn’t have been all that bad if I hadn’t already been so incredibly late for a Fo-cus Group meeting at C&D, and also if T Rex hadn’t been discussing—now ad nauseam—some news snippet he had read recently and was now trying to get across to me about some ice-skating bear or something. T Rex keeps asking me if I know what he’s ultimately talking about and it takes what seems like about an hour to explain to him that I, in all actuality of the fact, don’t know and/or have a clue as to what the fuck he’s talking about. He tells me that he can’t believe that and shakes his head (or what I think constitutes a head shaking; I’m a bit cut off,

51Pegasus 2011

visually speaking, from my position in the car’s back seat behind him) and tells me that, OK, that, so there’s this Russian bear trainer working for some circus in Moscow, and he gets bored being a quote, normal, unquote bear trainer T Rex guesses, and decides to try and teach the bear (Boo-Boo or whatever patronizingly cute sounding name you would want to give such a death machine) to ice-skate. To ice-skate, he reinforces. And so by now, of course, I know where this is going; or, at least, where it will end. I know how this has to end is what I’m trying to say. Anyway, T Rex says that it kills the guy, the bear does. And but what the interesting thing is, is that it didn’t maul him like one would assume normal bear behavior would dictate if someone tried to teach it to play ice-hockey or whatever; no that T Rex thought it was more like an accident or something, or at least that it felt like an accident. That he thought the bear actually loved Milosz (or whatever the trainer’s name was). He says that the bear was, actually, kind of like digging the ice-skating thing at first, but that he accidentally knocks Milosz (or what-ever) over and steps on him with the ice skates. Yeah, steps on him the bear does. And he kills him instantly, not even, really, at first realizing what he’s done; he just keeps sliding along the ice, paws out, trying to keep some sort of balance.

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PopQuiz!question:Theword‘phosphorous’referstosome-thingthatiswhat? Answer:Somethingthatisbearinglight.

i I just stare at T Rex’s mouth’s reflection in the rear view mirror (to which, if you’re interested, he had taped a small what looked like sideways eight to the right side of, it drawn, crudely, on a piece of paper torn out of something, I couldn’t tell). His mouth was a part of a body one would certainly not at-tribute to the ominous nickname (that, of course, being why it was so ironically funny, like nick-naming a huge body guard ‘little Mike’ or

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whatever, this, of course, is nothing new). Facially, T Rex looked as if he hadn’t aged since like say twelve or so. He was a plump, cherry-faced man who looked like this (that is plump and cherry-faced), until he wore a baseball cap (which I only fell witness to once, at a C&D company picnic) or he slicked his hair back like he was Michael Douglas in Wall Street, if he did this, then, he looked far too ridged, far too high defini-tion, like he was part onion. Well, but so if he didn’t wear a baseball cap or slick his hair back then he looked like a plump, cherry-faced twelve- year-old right down to his hair, which seemed to form, no matter the style or however much product or whatever T Rex would use, a bowl cut. I’ve known T Rex for a while now and I guess I owe him a lot (which is why I’m not really freaking out at this point I guess). Maybe it’s even, though, for example: We have a snack machine not so far from where our desks are at C&D, which tend to usually be stocked pretty full of Gobstoppers (which, I guess, T Rex loves). Anyway, so T Rex, one day, was chomping down Gobstoppers and not giving them the allotted amount of time to dissolve/be chewed before swallowing, and he started to choke, turning blue and trying his best to shoot the thing out of his mouth by finding his celiac plexus (also known as his solar plexus: what is, essentially, that upside-down ‘v’ in the middle of your chest) and pressing it (down and up) against the back of his chair, which, then, kept rolling away from him so much so that for about eight to ten seconds (before everyone could process the information and figure out something was wrong), T Rex seemed to be demonstrating how one could properly ride a chair’s back. Actually, he wisped back and forth across the office with such Baryshnikovian beauty that I’m surprised something kicked in w/r/t my quote unquote training in the Heimlich Maneuver (something I had learned in some toss away Health and Wellness class back in college) which ended up (not on purpose) shooting the Gobstopper into the eye of Dorothy Vee (who had to wear an eye patch afterward from then on, too which most of the office found it kind of hard to take anything she said at meetings seriously (due to her looking like a pirate), but I found her, after that, stunningly beautiful). After that Dorothy and I started dating; we were married in Vegas last year. Not an Elvis-marries-you-you-get-$100-in-free-chips marriage type deal, we had what she called a quote Elvis-is-strictly-not-invited marriage. She said she just found Las Vegas beautiful in its own little way.

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Maybe the absurdness of the story T Rex had been telling me thus far or my incessant attention on how, in his mouth’s reflection, it seemed like he would use all of his facial muscles (if that makes sense) when forming words such as ‘normal’ and ‘Moscow,’ that I hadn’t been what I thought fully prepared for the sharp eastward turn the car made and, thusly, hadn’t been prepared for the car to lift itself onto its side, like on two wheels. Out of some desperation/weird muscle memory á la something out of Robocop, I gripped what I had only known then (and, subsequently, only know now) as the Oh Shit! handle for support and to keep myself from ending up headfirst in the car’s front seat. T Rex didn’t seem all that affected, like he had planned it all along, like he was proud. He just continued talking (or really, now, just commentating): he says that anyway, a knifed bear foot with six-hundred or some odd pounds behind it makes pretty short work of a man, Motsy (Motsy being my name, of course, something T Rex would begin to use as an annoying rhetorical device to constantly, it seemed, make sure that I was paying him attention). He says that if I ask him, and that he could tell I was itching to ask him his opinion on the matter, that if I ask him the Russian guy’s first mistake was strapping ice skates to a god-damn bear in the first place. That you just don’t give animals like that enhancements, that it’s just not natural or whatever. I guess, though, he felt his point not hammered home enough, which he remedied by making complete sure I understood that you just don’t give a bear, a bear, a bear, a quote goddamn bear unquote, an extra pair of weapons on the thing’s feet, and that that’s all he was saying, that it was that simple, that you just don’t do that, and if this rule was not written down somewhere that someone ought to get on that right quick like and write it down in the Constitution or wherever one would write such a thing down.

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Pop Quiz! question: According to Amy Szalinski (portrayed by Amy O’Neil in ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’), to do this all one has to do is ‘put your lips together and blow.’ Answer: Whistle

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It was hot inside the car, nightmarishly hot, like something out of a temazcal—T Rex refused to turn on the A.C., something about breath-ing real, quote no shit air—and, in all the hours we had been driving (well, he driving, me [basically] kidnapped) I hadn’t gotten used to the heat, opposed, I guess, to what one would probably expect; I assume tak-ing a lesson from something like getting used to the water in a hot tub. W/r/t the heat, then, I had started to stick, somewhat uncomfort-ably, to the small, cold circle of sweat forming itself on my undershirt’s lower half, near the small of my back, the lumbar portion of the spine. Not so much so that it would come across, e.g. to someone who hadn’t experienced such car heat as I had, as disgustingly obvious and/or ob-noxious if I were to, say, ever get out of the stupid car and actually get to the Focus Group meeting—I’m sure they were waiting on me to start—(Jacob . . . something, from I.T. had one of these disgustingly obvious and/or obnoxious sweat shapes on the small of his back pretty much every day, so much so that the office would usually either try to interpret it, like some Rorschach test [this, to a lot of people, becoming one of the few highlights of his/her day and I swear that one day, and subsequently, every day thereafter, Jacob’s sweat shape looked, to me, like William Wallace], or constantly crack jokes about it [one of my favorites being this long dialogue between Jacob and his ass (which had a British accent for some reason) about how said ass was ‘incredibly parched’]); no, just a faint hint of a cold, wet feeling every now and then when the shirt would brush/stick against said lumbar portion of the spine. It actually felt good, considering the hell-like conditions of the car. Felt like what I guess a ghost or something like that would feel like if such a thing were to brush against the lumbar portion of the spine (which I’ve mentioned three times now).

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Pop Quiz! question: A frog’s heart has how many chambers? Answer: Three

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i

I guess I must have noticed the radio in the background before T Rex started shouting what I thought to be just random things at his steering wheel, but, I’ll say then, a slave to memory or experience or whatever, that I certainly noticed that it (that is the radio) had been on (and, I guess then, on the whole time) when I learned that T Rex was, actually, yelling answers to a radio quiz show’s questions called Pop Quiz! Pop Quiz! and hosted by a guy that referred to himself as Dr. Question. (The answer, then, being the word hemidemisemiquaver [see why it caught my atten-tion]; I had later learned that this word, hemidemisemiquaver, actually is another name for what would be considered a sixty-fourth note in musi-cal notation, playing 1/64 the duration of a whole note.) I had really, then, given up asking T Rex what we were doing—i.e. what was the point of driving in what I assumed a giant square in the desert—because he didn’t answer and, in fact, after I had asked about a thousand times, he started giving me a sort of fed up ‘anti-answer’ saying that we were driving, Motsy, and doing that weird facial-muscle-mouth-thing when he said ‘driving,’ that we were driving east, south, west, and north. Driving, driving, driving, driving. That we were on ice-skates, bears on ice-skates. The only good to come out of what T Rex was saying, then, was to drill in what I had already, pretty much, deduced on my own: i.e. that T was clearly (clearly) insane, that he had lost his mind, and that as soon as I got out of the car and to the Focus Group meeting—that was, for sure, waiting on me to start—and if he didn’t get arrested or something, facing fifteen-to-life for making me so incredibly late to the important-as-fuck Focus Group that was surely getting a bit irritated with waiting on me at this point, but still waiting nonetheless, that I was going to talk to my buddy Roger in personnel about T Rex’s quote unquote mental aptitude, possibly (no, not possibly, more like definitely) suggesting an extended stay at some clinic or whatever they send people to who drive around the desert with a kidnapped co-worker yelling quiz show answers at the top of his lungs and talking about ice-skating bears or equally ridiculous things for hours on end. T Rex says, out of the blue so to speak, at one point that we’re about halfway there.

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Pop Quiz! question: The name of which aquatic reptile rhymes with all of the following: a verb meaning ‘to move rapidly or noisily’, an archaic word for a woman’s gown, and a Mediterranean shrub with purple/black berries sacred to Aphrodite. Answer: A turtle

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Of all of T Rex’s faults, which, trust me, there were many (most of which I could personally attest to, having spent so much time in such close proximity to the guy), one actual attribute, or at least semi-positive, thing I could say about him was that he was a Mozart of the radio quiz show, especially, it seemed, Dr. Question’s Pop Quiz! Pop Quiz! I guess what I’m trying to say is that T Rex seemed to possess an unfathomably dense understanding/knowledge of trivia. For instance, then, like when Dr. Question would ask for the name of the author that had written Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus and followed that up with Children Are From Heaven, T Rex would yell, without missing a beat, that it was John Gray. And, in pretty much the same breath, when Dr. Question asked what the name of the equation eiπ + 1 = 0 was—what Dr. Question also called the most beauti-ful equation in mathematics—T Rex would, of course, then yell to Dr. Question that it was the Euler Equation. He also answered—without breaking a sweat—that the proper medical term for a gap in one’s front teeth was called a diastema. T Rex turned the wheel what was, more than likely, too sharp westward causing the poor car to fishtail a bit, the dirt taking control of it for a few seconds; he seemed pleased, again, with himself. I, on the other hand, clutched the Oh Shit! handle and pulled my briefcase up to my chest, I guess to protect me, or whatever, like a drawbridge; I was scared to death, to which T Rex says, I guess in a general not-specifical-ly-to-anyone-but-secretely-specfically-to-me sort of way that there were people back in the day (his term ‘back in the day’ dripping with so much stupidity and cliché that it made my advertising bones quiver) anyway, that there were people back in the day that said motion was impossible. He says that they were Greek, of course, so you know that these people

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weren’t quote unquote stupid, he guessed, that that’s what they taught him in school, One thing: if they were Greek, ergo, they were not dumb. His voice started to choke up I think, then, but I was fed up at this point and thought T Rex was patronizing me, which grates on my nerves more than anything I can really think of right now. I interrupted him, asking him; again, what the fuck we were doing driving around in the desert like this. He just said we were halfway and that yeah, halfway would be his estimate if he had to estimate, again his words choking him up a bit.

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Pop Quiz! question: What word now used pejoratively to mean ‘biased or misleading information to promote a cause or point of view’ comes from the name of the committee of Cardinals responsible for for-eign missions founded in 1652 by Pope Gregory XV? Answer: Propaganda

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But so T Rex says that a certain Greek guy was pretty seriously not a big fan of motion, even going so far as to say that it was impossible because of infinity or something et cetera et cetera. He says that the guy says that before you can get anywhere you must first get halfway there, and before you get halfway there you must get a quarter of the way there, and before you get a quarter you must get a fourth, and then an eighth, and then one-sixteenth, et cetera et cetera. T Rex says that this guy called it dichotomy, Motsy, and if I understood thus far, that it was, at the time, what the guy thought of as proof that motion was meaningless, an illu-sion, a bear on ice-skates: stupid and probably dangerous as hell, against something very, very primal. He says that it’s all infinity’s fault; that because we always think of infinity as some gigantic number but never really understand that it can be also an incredibly small number too. I thought I could see, then, in the rear view mirror next to the sideways eight, what looked like T Rex beginning to cry, to get a bit teary eyed. He continued in an almost confessional type way, admitting (I guess to me, or whoever was willing to listen it seemed) that he didn’t

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think we were moving at all, Motsy. That in order for motion or whatever to occur, an object must change the position in which it occupies; that is, for instance, in any one instance of time, for us to be moving we either are moving toward where we are or where we are not. W/r/t this, then, he says, we can’t be moving toward where we are not because this, he points to the car as he says this, because this is a single instant of time and is, he says, like a snapshot, frozen, still; like-wise, then, we can’t be moving toward where we are because, of course, we are already there et cetera et cetera. Therefore, he says, if we can’t move in a single instant of time, then we can’t move in any instant of time, making motion impossible, thusly forming the crux of T Rex’s now toxic belief: that the car he and I were in was, he believed, not actually moving, and that it was, in fact, impossible for us to actually be moving. Still, the main thing I noticed was how the car felt, vibrating un-der my feet, like what I guessed those chairs you always see old people sitting in at the mall or the airport or whatever feel like. T Rex turns the car south, it, moaning and clicking against the dirt, or, maybe that was him and not the car . . .

f

Pop Quiz! question: From the Greek word for ‘goat,’ what term denotes the small, pointed eminence of the external ear situated in front of the conch? Answer: The tragus.

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The car’s gauge was starting to inch a bit below the ‘Hey-You-Need-Gas’ line and the same ‘Hey-You-Need-Gas’ light was bright in its corner. T Rex was starting to skip/ignore certain questions on the radio’s game show, every now and then brushing against his face with his shirt’s sleeve. He was . . . crying, or, at least, starting to. My initial, knee-jerk reaction to this was to ask what he actually had to cry about? I’m the one one that should’ve been crying, see, but I was stoic, naive I guess as to what T Rex thought obviously wrong enough to cry about or whatever.

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g

Pop Quiz! question: Rhyming term used to indicate a response from animals to a potential threat. Answer: Fight or flight.

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And so, yeah, T Rex was crying, to which the car started to sputter, started to ebb and flow, on the onset of that familiar deadening feeling of running out of gas, acting more like a wave than a car. He kept turning his head toward me, looking at me, his eyes wet and full, scream-ing at me through desperate breaths of air he was gasping for that I didn’t understand, that I couldn’t, and apologizing to me for expecting me to understand. He said that if I did I would be crying too or, at least, under-stand why he was crying. I just pulled the briefcase tighter to my chest. The car stops fully and T Rex just stares forward at first, tears pulling themselves out of his ducts, he was crying, crying, not ashamed, not worried about how he would come across to me. Out of nowhere, then, he starts punching the steering wheel over and over, frustrated, becoming emotion, pulling out his hair, yelling, sobbing, shaking his head, point-ing fingers, punching, kicking, yelling at the radio for it to please, just to fucking please tell him he was wrong. He does all this and asks me how I can just sit there and look at him. How not moving doesn’t scare me to death, how what he has told me doesn’t scare me to death. How the bear killing what he loved wasn’t the most tragic thing I’d ever heard, why I hadn’t cried when he told me the story. How something killing quote unquote love in order to love wasn’t breathtakingly beautiful to me. He reaches into the glove box and pulls out a knife and starts thrusting it into the radio in front of him. I grab the Oh Shit! handle, again, out of reaction, I guess, and T Rex starts yelling, his decibels get-ting louder with every plunge he makes, stabbing the knife into the folds of the radio’s transmitter and screaming at the radio, asking it if he were wrong. Begging it to answer him, to please tell him, please, that he was

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just wrong and stupid, please just to tell him that. Out of breath, T Rex throws the knife at the now obliterated radio and unlocks the car, stepping out and falling to his knees onto the desert ground. I opened my door, then, and just looked at him, putting my hand on his shoulder and just looking at him. And the sun was hot on his head, I could feel it, and the city was far away, way out of his reach.

“Something Like Living Occurs”First Place, College Prose

Chosen by Janice Daugharty

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“Who’s Southern Now?”

AnInterviewwithABACWriter-in-Residence,

Janice DaughartyPulitzer-prize nominee and award-winning novelist Janice Daugharty became Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College’s first writer-in-residence in 2010. Her presence on campus has given ABAC students access not only to a well-known writer, but also a thought-ful and generous teacher. The author of seven novels (including the Pulitzer-nominated Earl in the Yellow Shirt) as well as numerous e-books, Janice recently chatted with Pegasus poetry editor Matt McCullough for the follow-ing interview, the first interview Pegasus has ever published.Matt McCullough: I’d like to start with a variant of a question that’s probably on some never-ending loop for you—and, thusly, I’m sure you’re tired of hearing—one that, in the long run, seems essential: One age old trope in a lot of Southern literature before, say, the 1960’s (and still in much contemporary southern writing) was this preoccupation and usage of ‘place.’ However, this idea has, obviously, been incorporated time and time again in many different forms of lit and adopted, it seems, most heavily by certain postmodern masters (e.g., Barth, DeLillo, and Pynchon). In fact, John Barth’s first novel The Floating Opera is held in fairly wide circles as an implicitly Southern novel. I guess, then, my question (or questions, really) would have to be this: Considering that, what do you think this says for present day Southern literature? That is, has the adoption of age-old Southern tropes by the rest of the country done what Allen Tate feared and killed Southern lit after circa. 1960? Too, then, what do you think constitutes Southern writing today, or Southern writing in general? Is it just, simply, whatever section of the U.S. the author happens to be from, or something more?

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Janice Daugharty: I’m going to speak to this for starters by talking about Southern lit as I know it, from my experience. If however I haven’t answered your question, pose it again. When I first began writing I was in love with Faulkner, Welty, O’Connor—still am. But what really inspired me was place, as in the South. I was familiar with these writers’ people, with their shade trees and grits, and I did do my share of “Grit Lit” before I began to see what I was doing and hate it. As I became more sure of my own voice, I had to drop the influences of these and other Southern writers and write of my own experience, regardless of like places and other such things. I think now it was about going inside, in-side myself, and forgetting similar surroundings. It took a long time to do this. At the time when I first got published Southern lit was very popular. Since then I’ve seen it toppled as king and more urban lit enthroned in its place. I too quit reading so much Southern fiction (I never quit reading Faulkner though; I still love him. He satisfies my cravings for ‘place,’ I guess you could say. But language was at the heart of what I read, and write). And really I still prefer rural to urban, or whatever you want to call it. I’m very content with writers like Annie Proulx (rural Wyoming) but I also like Ian McEwan and Donna Tart. So many writers, but that goes back to language. I do want to touch on something else about my experience with Southern fiction. My editor at Harper Collins for five years, five novels, was an executive editor who could buy what he wanted without having approval from an editorial board. So, he bought anything I would send him. He was in love with Southern anything and most of his authors were southern geographically as well as writers of Southern fiction. Larry Ashmed went way back to the days of Harper Roe—even able to recall Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which was edited (and actually, truly written) by one of Larry’s friends and associates. So, for me, during that five-year period, I was a “Southern Novelist” in every sense of the word. And that probably had everything to do with my not venturing out. I made good money and got lots of promotion from Harper because of Larry’s influence. But I was also there at the end when Larry “retired” from Harper because, I fully believe, Southern fiction was waning in popularity. In my first New York Times full-length book review, you can see the favor bestowed on my brand of writing, Southern fiction. Then in my last NYT full-length review and my last book with Harper, you can see how my brand of fiction is wearing down—almost a joke.

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Matt McCullough: I agree that Faulkner, of course, satisfies some sense of place per se, but—and this might be my extreme bias and complete admiration for Faulkner talking—I think his writing is on a whole dif-ferent level from his peers. His stuff is just so . . . I don’t know, inde-scribable. I love what O’Connor said about him: “The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great deal of difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same rack the Dixie Limited is roaring down.” Still, don’t you think the en vogue nature of Southern fiction is just like anything that’s on some “Hot or Not” list? After all, Southern lit did survive H.L. Mencken’s dismisal of the south as “The Sahara of the Bozart.” So, its survival could mean, really, that good Southern fiction is—at the end of the day—simply good fiction as well, and capable of pressing on against what is or is not the literary hot button that week.

Janice Daugharty: You are, of course, right about Faulkner, absolutely. And about the “Hot or Not” lists: When all is said and done, good writing is a category in and of itself. I do think a lot of serious readers think “Grit Lit” when they see the term Southern fiction.

Matt McCullough: I agree. I think it seems that nowadays the term “Southern fiction” is a bit loaded. People somewhat expect a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird or Gone With the Wind and when they get something like Larry Brown or Cormac McCarthy they don’t really know how to take it in. Still, the fact that people like you and those other authors actu-ally get published has to say something.

Let’s go back to something you said earlier, about writing your share of “Grit Lit.” When do you think there was, for you, that para-digm shift? I mean, your writing now is still distinctly southern, but I wouldn’t—in any way way—categorize it as any sort of “Grit Lit.”

Janice Daugharty: I did for a while write “Grit Lit”; and if you saw some of my archived early novels at Valdosta State University, you would call them “Grit Lit,” no doubt. I made that shift from writing Grit Lit several years ago—actually with Necessary Lies, my second pub-lished novel at Harper. I hate that book, Dark of the Moon too, for their preciousness—especially in dialogue with heavy dialect.

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How they “tawked.” I’m so glad you mentioned Cormac McCarthy, because even in his early Southern works he never stooped to writing quirky and cute. I must have been heavily influenced by him because it was about the time I began reading him that I really began to “see” (as in Conrad) how silly I was writing. What I read, what I admire, influences how I write, though I no longer try to write like those writers I admire. Go to my story, “The Hunt,” which I think you’ve already read and you will see how I use touches of dialect without overdoing it. My best at-tempt to break with my old habits and stick to my characters’ true speech is in my story “Going to Jackson.” There I feel totally in control without allowing in those ghosts of Southern literature.

Matt McCullough: I love McCarthy. I remember the first time I read Blood Meridian, it completely knocked me back, floored me. You’re right about “The Hunt,” of course. The vernacular in it is spot-on. However, I think “Going to Jackson” is a really, really good example of not simply copying what worked in the past (i.e. reprinting Harper Lee) or rejecting what past masters did (e.g. Faulkner, O’Connor, et cetera), but pressing on through them and addressing something particularly new while still paying homage to writers’ works before. The stuff with memory and language in that story is incredibly interesting, as well as this O’Connor-esque idea of grace or redemption through violence. Not necessarily for Jacobs, but for Velda. It’s one of my favorites you’ve written, maybe my favorite. That entire short story collection, Going to Jackson, is one of my favorite things you’ve written. Going back, though, dialect seems to be the staple in not only a lot of bad Southern fiction, but bad Southern movies as well (the ridiculous dialogue, how they ‘tawk’). Some even get it so bad that they become an absolute parody (like a lot of John Grisham novels or Sandra Bullock and Cameron Diaz’s accents in The Blind Side and The Box). Anyway, on most of your books (and in most reviews I’ve read) there is always a blurb from Joyce Carol Oates. How did this rela-tionship come about?

Janice Daugharty: First, I want to thank you again for your praise; you say what you mean and you mean what you say. And I have to tell you these are some of the most articulate, intelligent questions I’ve ever had in an interview.

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About Joyce Carol Oates: I call her my Fairy Godmother be-cause I was at a low point in my writing “apprenticeship” when she ac-cepted one of my stories for she and her husband’s Ontario Review. Then she accepted another and another; the first was in an issue with out of my favorite writers, John Updike, a friend of hers then. Then she asked me if I had a story collection. I wrote back, yes. It was a lie. But I did within a month or so, writing night and day because I knew this was “the” op-portunity for me. And it was. She honestly loves my stories, but not so much my novels. I still have contact with her on occasion and I’m very honored to be. She’s a fine person and a very fine writer. Her charity, it seems, is helping deserving writers. But never ever before they truly deserve her help.

Matt McCullough: So, I was doing a bit of research for this interview and came to the conclusion that a fair amount of “Southern” writers seem to have this strange sort of love/hate relationship with the process. I mean, this is obvious once I thought about it, but I know I certainly both love, with all of my heart’s heart, everything about writing in general: from conception to completion. But, still, at the same time the writing process—speaking, of course, for myself and what I have gathered from interviews with Larry Brown, Rick Bragg, McCarthy, and others—can, of course, sometimes just take everything out of me. I think Don DeLillo said something along the lines of writing being, for him, the prefect blend of complete bliss and torture. I like that. Still, back to what I started to ask you in the first place: Do you find this rings true in your own writing process?

Janice Daugharty: I love DeLillo too, plus another writer of Ameri-cano, Jonathan Franzen. The Corrections and Freedom are beautifully crafted, and he doesn’t worry about readers losing interest when he gets into extraneous, unentertaining stuff.

If not for the tug of every-day living being this door of “A Room of One’s Own,” I would remain in a blissful state while writing a short story or a novel. I just love living in the worlds I’m creating—too much, I’m afraid. I often look around me and wonder why petty living matters when people could be reading or writing—same bliss for me. I’ve never had what writers call “block” because I always have something to write

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that seems so important to me. I feel guilty, actually, when my family and friends are living normally and I’m stuck in my head with images and voices that they wouldn’t even understand. That’s when I really put the pen down and try to fit in—I never do. As I’ve gotten older, I’m trying to be less apart from what’s going on, but it never really works in my heart and mind. I hate having something I want to write and not being able to move inside where I love to live. That’s sick! Okay, so you are sick too. I can tell; I know all the signs. That’s why you are such a fabulous writer. I know you understand.

Matt McCullough: I’m actually extremely excited that you mentioned and have read Jonathan Franzen (not so much the case now, but I don’t think he gets enough well-deserved attention). I read The Corrections and his book of essays How to Be Alone a few years ago and they both blew me away, as did Freedom when I finished it recently. I think he’s in-credible. Subsequently, if you like Franzen, you should check out David Foster Wallace.

Too, in lieu of that, and to unfortunately bring the interview close to an end, I’ll ask you a completely cliché but otherwise fun question: What writers are you particularly interested in at the moment, and why exactly. Let’s say to name a top five, I’ll give you mine: Cynthia Ozick, David Markson, Dave Eggers, Roberto Bolano, and David Foster Wal-lace.

Janice Daugharty: Thanks, Matt. I’m going to really look at Wallace and your other favorites because we seem to share the same literary taste. I keep mentioning Annie Proulx, certainly one of my favorite short story writers. I change up from time to time. Faulkner will always be number one, with McCarthy running a close second. I like A.S. Bryatt also. I’m just now beginning to check out Japanese lit. Someone gave me a copy of Haruki Murakami’s latest short stories—not a favorite yet though. Ga-brielle Marquez is definitely a favorite. And from way way back, Carolyn Chute. I loved, and was much inspirited by, The Beans of Egypt Maine. I have so many favorite writers and the trust is I’ll read anybody who proves to me on the first page that they take language seriously. I had a wild love affair with Toni Morrison, but like McCarthy’s, her early sto-ries interested me more. Ah, and then Louise Erdrich—I love her work.

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Book Reviews

Terri Cheney, Manic: A Memoir. Morrow (Harper/Collins) 2008. 245 pgs.

Cheney sets out to record for us a “visceral experience” that mir-rors bipolar disease. A memoir of what it’s like to be bipolar. And while she does manage to avoid the whininess that tends to infect memoirs of a certain category (of bad childhoods, sicknesses, addictions), you’d expect more insight, reflection. The book is dramatically written, the first sentence being quite the hook: “I didn’t tell anyone that I was going to Santa Fe to kill myself.” Thus we readers are grabbed and whisked off on a series of herky-jerky adventures, some fun (in the manic phase) and some not (the depressive). And that aspect of the book could have been very effective, Cheney choosing to organize the memoir according to the randomness of her moods, her impulses and compulsions. Instead, her explanation of that choice makes it seem offhand: “It’s truer to the way I think. When I look back, I rarely remember events in terms of date or sequence.” Well, okay. Plenty of memoirs don’t use chronological sequencing. But some attempt to organize according to some principle might have generated more insight, meaning. An Amazon reviewer who is himself bipolar hits the nail on the head: “not as deep as a movie of the week.” What is absolutely missing is any attempt to understand the effects of her out-of-control behaviors on others, on family or friends or employers or neighbors or men. If what you want from memoir is simply entertainment, you’ll enjoy tales of her skipping out on obligations to fly kites during a thunderstorm, of her suicide attempts while her father is sick and dying. If you want understanding, reflection, genuine attempts to reach some meaning about bipolar disease, you’ll have to look else-where.

—Sandra Giles

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Andy Frazee, That the World Should Never Again be Destroyed by Flood. Chapbook. New American Press, 2011. 32 pgs.

The postmodernist distrust of language has developed in the past four decades into an outright linguistic atheism, an absolute rejection of any kind of meaning conveyed through language. A poet with postmod-ernist tendencies, Andy Frazee might be called a “linguistic agnostic.” In That the World Should Never Again be Destroyed by Flood, Frazee searches for meaning using the very language that he distrusts. Soundly lyrical on the one hand and formally daring on the other, That the World Should Never Again be Destroyed by Flood attempts to find catharsis for the grief he feels over his father’s death—to let “words pile high” though “they have yet to close the gap.” Primarily, That the World Should Never Again be Destroyed by Flood is concerned with the grieving for a lost father, who “died on the bedroom floor on Sunday morning, suddenly, without warning.” At the same time, however, the book is an elegy for elegies, a search for mean-ing in a world that seems washed-out and used up. Nonetheless, the speaker continues his quest, developing a theory he calls “irony beyond irony,” a way of writing that is “in reality . . . earnest and true to life.” Cleverness and wit won’t provide the epiphany he seeks, but the speaker never admits that “irony beyond irony” will, either. Winner of the New American Press’s Open Chapbook Competi-tion (chosen by poet Dan Beachy-Quick), That the World Should Never Again be Destroyed by Flood is a fully-realized chapbook consisting of two short poems (“A to B” and “Song”) followed by the lengthy title sequence. Formally, Frazee divides the page into two panes, the top and bottom commenting on each other and forming a unified whole. Craft-ing these panes, Frazee asks the reader to view the page as a screen onto which the poet (and the reader, by extension) projects his fears of a life cut short, despite God’s promise in Genesis to never again destroy the world by flood. Rain haunts the book, reminding us, the speaker says, of all that could go wrong. From poem to poem, the speaker sees and hears rain and tries to make sense of it, attempting to turn the rain into a symbol of rebirth or renewal: “Text toward an epiphany: Rain—rain, reborn, resurrection.” This particular poem riffs on random words that have no other connection except on the page—and that’s the point. The

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speaker must make the connection himself. He must, as T.S. Eliot writes in the final lines of “The Wasteland,” shore up fragments against his ruin. An achingly beautiful and haunting collection, That the World Should Never Again be Destroyed by Flood knows that no deux ex machina will drop from the ceiling to salve the speaker’s grief. Still, the speaker attempts to understand, a Sisyphean task because, as he admits, “The rain is what we make it. And I know I have it wrong.”

—Jeff Newberry

Roberto Bolaño, 2666. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009. 912 pgs.

Once, while discussing writing, Donald Barthelme said: “Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful.” Barthelme, unfortunately, didn’t live to see Chilean author Roberto Bo-laño release his novel 2666, but the writer couldn’t have summed up the massive (almost 900 page) novel better than he did with that sentence. Bolaño’s 2666, then, seems to exist along the same line that Wallace’s Infinite Jest, William T. Vollmann’s Rainbow Stories, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, Modest Mouse’s music, etc., exist: that place where something is at its most beautiful when it’s at its most jagged, demands the most from our attention, is able to take the most out of us (which the novel does, in spades). Divided into five sections (that were originally planned by Bo-laño to be released as five separate novels), 2666 starts breaking all kinds of literary rules at the start of its first section (“The Part About the Crit-ics”) by telling the reader about (not “showing” the reader) four literary critics from different European countries, all—in one way or another—interested in an obscure German author named Benno von Archimboldi. Eventually, the critics get wind that Archimboldi (who is reclusive to near Pynchon-like proportions) may be in northern Mexico, which leads three of them to the city of Santa Teresa. It is here that Bolaño leaves the critics (whom we never see again). The next section (“The Part About Amalfitano”), Bolaño in-troduces a riveting character study of Amalfitano, a Mexican professor living in Santa Teresa and on the brink of insanity. However, Bolaño

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doesn’t stay here long, moving us quickly to the next section (“The Part About Fate”) where Amalfitano is dropped altogether for an Ameri-can journalist named Oscar Fate sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match. Again, however, Bolaño doesn’t stay with this character long. It is, then, the novel’s fourth section (“The Part About the Crimes”) that is both its centralizing point and its most frustrating. Infact, this section may be 2666’s most talked about portion, for Bolaño goes on (for near 300 pages) with case file-like banality to discuss several murders that have taken place in Santa Teresa. This, however, may be the novel’s most interesting point, it becoming an attempt to take something like crime violence (saturated, it would seem, by crime shows, et al.) and return it to something revolting, something hated. Finally, the novel’s last section (“The Part About Archimboldi”) revisits Benno von Archimboldi from nearly 600 pages prior, and con-cludes the novel. With 2666, then, Bolaño has created a massive story that is told only through pieces seemingly overheard here and there and slapped together a la a more levelheaded Burroughs, which in turn reveals its genius. That through something that demands so much from the reader, so much acute attention, something triumphant is created and can exist. Does exist. Whole-heartedly.

—Matt McCullough

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ContributorsCourtney Carver is a sophomore at ABAC and is from Talking Rock, GA.

Robin Case is a student at Valdosta State University. She enjoys writing poems and is currently working on her first novel. Her current major is Special Education and she wants to continue her studies under Deaf Education.

Brenda Doss is a Rural Studies major, wife, and mother. She finds inspiration for her writing in strong emotion, memory, and her five (six?) senses. In her spare time, she works in ABAC’s Office of Academic Affairs.

Roy English is a Rural Studies major attending Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College. He resides in Irwin County. He divides his time between academics, friends, and family. He has an interest in all forms of art, especially photography.

Jean Gay was encouraged by others to pursue interior design and, at the age of 63, entered ABAC where she earned a certificate in Interior Design in 2004. Still wanting to explore other areas of creativity, she is currently enrolled in the art department at ABAC where her course work includes oil painting, drawing, ceramics, and three dimensional designs using wire, wood, plaster of Paris, and various metals.

Devin Gibbs was born in Anderson City, Georgia and is a sophomore at Abraham Bald-win Agricultural College, majoring in Writing and Communications. She enjoys writing poetry and non fiction short stories, never wears matching socks, and loves pickles.

Amanda Hershberger is a senior in high school. She is taking AP drawing and plans to pursue a career in art.

Emily Hershberger is a sophmore at Sequoyah High School. She is a member of the Digital Photgraphy Club and is one of the Yearbook Staff photographers. She plans on becoming a professional photographer.

K.M. Hill is an amateur writer who was born and raised in the deep south.

Kate Kimbrell is a sophomore at ABAC and is an Early Childhood major. She plans to attend Valdosta State University.

Sam Lane is currently a writer living in Valdosta, GA and working on his undergrad from Valdosta State University.

Hannah May is a senior in High School. She has taken art for years and is in AP Draw-ing. She plans to major in illustration.

Carol Martin is a senior at Piedmont College, majoring in English with a minor in creative writing.

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Matt McCullough is a literature student at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College and lives in a small interstate town in Georgia. His work has appeared in Haggard & Halloo and Killpoetry.

Micki Moore is a student at ABAC where she is majoring in Business Administration but has a passion for photography.

Quincee’ Mutuku is a sophomore who loves drawing.

Sarah Nelms is a junior English major at Piedmont College.

Ariel Nix is a senior at North Point Christian Academy who is planning on attending the University of West Georgia in the fall, where she will be entering into the art program.

Jason Patterson is currently a student at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. He writes both fiction and poetry that is indebted to southern and religious influences.

Mary Porter is a sophomore at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, and is an Animal Science major.

Anna Ristuccia is a senior who loves photography. She intends on becoming an engi-neer.

Norina Samuels has many interests and passions in life, writing being one of them.

Anna Shattuck is a sophomore in high school who loves drawing and wants to pursue a career in drawing one day.

Daniel Shippey has loved photography and art ever since he was a small child. After attending ABAC, he transferred to Valdosta State University to pursue a degree in Mass Media. In 2009 he opened his own photography studio in downtown Tifton, GA.

Alisha Burnette Sloan is a Nursing student at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College. A voracious reader, she enjoys multiple genres and idolizes authors ranging from Charlaine Harris and Jim Butcher, to Emily Bronte and Vladmir Nabokov.

Andrea Sweeney is currently an ABAC sophomore. She is an Animal Science major and enjoys drawing, taking pictures, and writing in her free time.

Erin Teixeira is a high school junior and has taken art classes for years.

Morgan Woodard has always had a passion for art, it is a way for Morgan to express her feelings and let her creative mind flow. She will persue art as a hobby while she attends cosmetology school to become a hair stylist.

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From the EditorCourtney Carver

2011 Managing Editor

Pegasus has a long tradition of excellence stemming from its first edition in 1973 to this issue in 2011. In our thirty-eight year history, both past and present Pegasus staff members have tried to bring honor growing liberal arts program at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College; and I believe we have succeeded in doing so. I am proud to be a part of the Pegasus legacy and to have been a part of it for two years. To take complete credit for this magazine would be extremely selfish of me because there is no way I could have created this masterpiece without an excellent staff and extremely awesome advisors. The Pegasus staff has worked tirelessly in everything they have done. Without a staff like I have had the Pegasus would not have been the masterpiece you see before you. Also, I have had an awesome team of editors. I honestly do not know what I would have done without Matt McCullough and Mary Porter. They have helped me stay on track, and without them, there is no way that this magazine would have been finished on time. The Pegasus advisors, Dr. Jeff Newberry, Dr. Sandra Giles, and Diantha Ellis have been incredible. They have supported both me and staff both academically and in life, and we are incredibly great-ful. Most importantly, however, I want to thank the contributors. With-out our awesome contributors from across the state, Pegasus would be nothing. Thank you from everyone at Pegasus and I hope you enjoy the ride hidden inside the pages of this magazine.

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Courtney CarverThe End of the RoadDigital Photography

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