Joey Cifelli ’23
Arts Editor
October 17, 2021
Bang, bang, went the door. A fist pounded on the door from the outside, in the hallway. Roger listened from the chair in the living room. He was curious, but not curious enough to bother either way, to get up and investigate or stop himself from paying attention altogether. Roger sighed and allowed the indescribable exhaustion caused by his predicament to wash over him. It was cruel, he thought, that this problem could be thrust upon him. That his bodily sensors simply had no choice but to receive stimuli and transmit the resulting electric pulses to his brain, where they caused him no end of grief. “What is it,” Roger asked, facing the door across the room. But he must not have been loud enough. 6.2/10
October 18, 2021
The banging kept going at a steady rhythm, then all of a sudden stopped and began again a moment later with no structure at all. “What do you want from me,” Roger said. He turned his head back toward the television and exhaled into the soft chair. “What do you want.” The minutes passed and already Roger’s brain was busy at work stripping the door’s auditory waves of their meaninglessness and weaving them together in a nice pattern in his subconscious. Roger slowly grew drowsy. Television static droned from the set. He liked the way it unfocused his eyes and made him warm and fuzzy. Roger fell into deep sleep to the sound of bells ringing from the town chapel. 6.3/10
October 21, 2021
In his dream Roger walked along a beach made of marbles, and inside each marble, when he bent down and picked one up, was a memory of his childhood playing out like a movie. Benjamin was there. Roger found a marble displaying the first time he encountered schoolyard bullies. Little Roger plucked blades of grass inside the green glass. But then Benjamin was running away. Roger dropped the marble and it fell back onto the beach with a clink. Benjamin ran away from him with a bulging sack. Marbles kept spilling out of the opening and shattering when they hit the ground. “Hey!” Roger shouted. “Stop!” 6.4/10
October 23, 2021
Roger woke up to the last bang on the door. Footsteps thumped down the carpeted hallway. Roger swiveled out of his chair and leapt against the door, tore it open, and saw a shoe vanish down the stairwell at the end of the hall. Roger ran to the edge of the staircase but found there was no one there. He took a few steps down the stairs when something caught his eye. A white piece of paper glinting from the light through streaked entryway windows. The paper was thick, more like cardstock, and its edge fluttered up and down with the ambient movement of the air. Roger crossed the rest of the steps and picked it up, and uncrumpled it. It was a business card. The name of the card read, in deep ink: PLUCK. Roger fell to his knees and cried. The card meant nothing to him, which was the tragedy. He had hoped for a moment the universe cared. 6.5/10
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