THE PULP

THE PULP is a student-published compilation of creative work-- writing and art can be submitted to [email protected] via google drive

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Open Prompt #1

prompt-- Write / draw / paint / photograph a situation three times. The first as an idealist, the second as a realist, and the third as a surrealist If you would like to share, submit your work to [email protected] xoxo

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They Told You to Speak So You Screamed

I want to put these tangled legs to use I want to push this past farther and farther behind me with each step I want to smash our lips into a Big Bang Baby let’s make galaxies with our tongues I want to create a river cutting through my room Salty tears and betta fish fighting each other because the world told them they must The earth is shaking my dear No it’s just in your head The earth is moving my dear Yes but you are not Stuck in the same damn seat never daring to challenge the flesh that made us See worlds see love see life in the forests in the oceans but not in your city, not in your home I found a bird crushed by a passerby And I cried I damn near sobbed in bright daylight But only darkness gets to learn my secrets Only she gets to see the insides of my soul. Crying and laughing and screaming and sobbing We are crazy, we are a storm, we are the hurricane that destroyed your childhood home.

ARIEL M

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We Find Poetry in Everything 

Wine stained lips and fingertips 

Broken bones

Tear tracks on muddy cheeks 

Leaves that shatter like cracked glass

Your audible heart beat under the chill of the stars

Words spewed in hatred 

Cracked lips and cracked sidewalks 

A crowd so large and united it becomes a single entity 

Scribbled notes revealing heartbreak 

Lipstick on collars 

My lips pressed onto yours with a passion 

so strong it overwhelms us both 

Protesters deafening the officers shouts

Your fingertips grazed hers and you didn’t pull back

Eyes mimicking the ocean so blue and so deep I fear drowning in them

Shouts so loud the neighbors complain

Photographs in which we are laughing

Sun drenched rooms 

Shadows

Dancing by yourself because your soul won’t sit still

The smell of him on every piece of clothing you own

Writing until your heart bleeds clear

A new leaf

Rotting bodies 

Cemeteries and forests teeming with rebirth

ARIEL M

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Chinese-American // Graphite // Janet C

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Novel Excerpt 

Sirens screamed out in the night as an officer bent down over a body. The detective was an old grizzled man who had seen too much in his lifetime, far too much. He looked down at the limp body of a boy on the street. The carton of milk and bag of apples he had in his reusable shopping bag, or at least what was left of it after the car had run over it all, sat in a splatter pattern a foot away. 

He sighed, wondering why the car did not stop. He could still see the shock in the wide blue eyes of the  kid and the little-bit-too-long hair that made him look like he was forever a child. He looked at the boy’s mangled, bloody corpse.

He knew that kid. The kid had graduated that past June from the local high school. He was a math-athlete or whatever they were called. He was the kid who stopped to help the father of a friend install his blue tooth. He was the kid who helped set up internet modems for old people and taught them how to use cell phones. The man raised his hand to the little bit of plastic in his ear. 

He had a family to call. He wondered how in the world he was going to tell the family that their son was dead, after walking over to the local supermarket to pick up a few necessities. He was dead.

“Hey, Joe.” The man spoke into his cellular phone. The man swallowed, looking back at the body. “James is dead.”

§

A ghost hovered higher, above the flashing lights and the sirens, above the houses and the noise and the crying neighbors whose faces he could name, but never remembered meeting.

“Hello?” He called out. “Hello?” He asked the night sky for an answer receiving only the darkness of the void in reply. The speckled stars told him nothing of what he wanted to know. He ran his fingers through his dark hair wondering what he could ask next.

“Hey, anyone out there?” He called out.

He paused for a moment waiting for a reply. “Hey, I thought someone was supposed to, you know, help me out here.” 

He knew the legends. The Europeans had the Grim Reaper; the Japanese had the Shinigami; the Greeks had Hades and his compatriot in the Roman Empire; Egyptians built holes in their pyramids for the dead to ascend to the heavens. Death waited for everyone no matter where they went.

He stilled his ascent. There really should be someone. There had to be. He looked around again, only surrounded by the bright expanse of light above and the shimmering glow of the city below. He could not hear the sirens, or the tears. He could feel the radio waves though, but they made him feel even more pained as they passed right through him with little or no interference. 

He spun slowly in a full circle looking over the dark sky that surrounded him.

“Anyone?”

§

Detective Derek Stone looked away from the body of the girl. He tried to look away from her mop of red hair, curled by iron, and school tee-shirt. He tried not to think about the broken bones she must have sustained or her horror at knowing that she was falling and going to die.

The ME stood up backing away from the body to let them carry her away, but Derek could sense the pain the man felt. The man had a daughter the same age right across the water at UC Berkeley. 

The blood stain remained on the floor and they looked at it for a moment, the grim reminder that someone died there. They should be used to it, but nothing ever got anyone used to the fact that there was once a life there and the next moment there was not. 

The medical examiner sighed, “Good luck.”

Derek popped his Bluetooth into his ear. He needed some real food. His stomach wasn’t up for it, not after what he just saw, but some food would do really well for him right now. He had a long day ahead of him. As the Bluetooth activated he heard a cheery, late-adolescent male voice in his ear. 

The voice chirped brightly, “Good morning, Palo Alto. It’s shaping up to be a beautiful day….”

Derek pulled the Bluetooth out of his ear. He must have somehow picked up the school’s radio station. He rubbed his ear, trying to stop the slight echoes he heard after the loud noise. 

Detective Carlos Teadlane, his partner, walked back from where he was interviewing the woman, Professor Hartwood, who discovered the body. He locked his phone and, placing it in his pocket, asked, “What’s up?”

“Bluetooth’s picking up a radio station for some reason.” He wasn’t a tech genius of any sort, but he knew that wasn’t supposed to happen. He could still vaguely hear the voice out of the speaker saying something about how the traffic wasn’t particularly congested that day and how every must be so excited for the new expo coming to town next month.

Carlos looked over the ear piece, placing it closer to his own year to listen. Derek knew he heard the voice, because suddenly his face changed and a look of confusion over took him. He passed it back eyeing it warily. As the more tech savvy of the two, and that wasn’t saying much, he knew that that was not supposed to happen. “Huh, you better have that thing looked at.”

Derek pocketed the possessed device and started on the way to the quad where he might be able to find some food.

“Breakfast?” he asked. 

Carlos shook his head. He waved his hand in the opposite direction. “I think I’m going back to the office.” 

Derek shook his head. Carlos gave him a long suffering look, the kind that said, “I know you don’t play well with anyone outside of the department. I’ll go make nice then, since you seem so bad at it.”

Derek saluted, calling out the retreating figure. “Yeah, see you.”

He turned around and almost walked straight into a teenaged, or maybe college-aged, kid with the biggest blue eyes he had ever seen. The kid looked him up and down, assessing. When he was done, he said, “That wasn’t all that polite.”

Derek glanced around in confusion. He was still in the yellow tape line area. Why hadn’t someone removed this kid? He pasted on his best I’m-an-officer-now-you-listen-to-me-son face and said, “Whoa. Hey, sorry, officers only…”

Then the voice hit him. It was the voice over the Bluetooth.

The kid smirked, extending a hand. “Hi, are you Detective Derek Stone?” 

He nodded and tried to take the hand. His hand went straight through it. That anomaly didn’t seem to faze the kid who looked down and shrugged before continuing, “My name is James. I’m your ethereal associate.”

He took a step back. “Holy…” He looked around. A few people, passerby stopped to watch him, like he was a mad man, but no one else seemed to notice. 

The thing in front of him held out a small dark blue, leather bound book, licking his fingers and flipping pages. He muttered to himself, or to Derek, the detective couldn’t tell, “Hm… there is nothing in the guide book about this. I get the feeling you aren’t supposed to see me.”

Rubbing his hands through his dark blond hair, Derek tried closing his eyes and opening them again. The thing was still there. He really needed a coffee and as soon as humanly, or inhumanly, possible.

§

What would have been a few minutes later was actually fifteen minutes later as Derek hadn’t paid attention to the thing telling him to take a right instead of a left. But now, he sat at one of the student restaurants digging into a breakfast platter as sleepy undergrads filled the hall. He was voraciously hungry, stuffing bacon into his mouth. 

Derek asked the thing that wasn’t so much sitting as floating on the seat, “You’re telling me I have a ghost?”

The thing raised an eyebrow. He sounded offended. “Ghost? Wow... A little offensive. I have wings.”

And to prove it, a ghostly outline of feathered appendages appeared behind him. They were large and transparent, bending light around them like a fishbowl. 

“Wait...” He knew what he was seeing as some holy light appeared around the kid’s head. Derek tried to remember back to Sunday school and, other than the fact that back when his mum was alive and he was in elementary school, he went to Sunday school every week, he didn’t remember jack.

The kid leaned back in his chair at the booth, making the angelic things vanish until he looked like a regular student, one that blended into the crowd of people behind him. “I’m an angel, baby.”

Derek tried to reconcile what he saw with what he knew. Right now his brain was drawing a huge garbled mess of letters, numbers, and kinky things a red blooded man could do to a bottom with wings. 

He brushed that aside and asked, “Angel? But, you said ghost?”

The angel nodded and spoke in a way that was inapropriately nonchalant for the subject, “I died. Yeah, it wasn’t all that cool, just a car thing. Anyway, I ended up drifting around for a while and then a letter came down from Heaven and, since I was already hanging around and doing my own thing, they figured I could try for an angel position.” The angel twitched a little; there was something he wasn’t saying.

“Try?” Derek prompted. This was a dead kid. He wasn’t sure how long this kid had been dead, but it sounded he died in a hit and run. Going by the name of “James” wasn’t going to help much, especially when the kid claimed, and proved, that he was an angel of the “holy lord our father may his name never be used in vain amen”.

“Yeah, there was a thing with flight tests and a few forms.” He said “a few forms” with a distaste that said there were many forms, and “flight tests” like they should be banned. Derek was interested in the fact that all of this existed in the first place because, holy smokes, this was a lot to take in for an atheist.

Derek raised an eyebrow. He meant it metaphorically when he told someone to go to hell because life was already bad enough, forget the punishment of an afterlife. He hopefully asked, “Is there a hell?”

The angel shrugged and looked over the rest of the crowd there didn’t seem to be anything to attract his interest. Nothing must have captured his interest because he started playing with the pepper shaker, trying to set it off balance as far as he could without it tipping. “Not really, that’s just a story they tell little kids. There’s really just a huge recycling bin.”

Derek choked on his drink. 

“No... you’re saying...”

The angel didn’t look up from the wadded napkin in his hands. When had he traded in the shaker?

“Yep, you are 100% recycled soul. Congratulations.”

Derek tried to ignore the fact that a woman was casting him very odd looks and thought that somewhere sarcasm was the normal setting for all people or someone just liked writing angels as snarky undergraduates with wings in which case he had a few complaints to file to the Man, or Woman. 

“That’s just...” 

The angel shrugged. “Hey, at least they aren’t screwing around in your love life. Heaven isn’t a matchmaking service. They’d be deputizing meddling twats left and right if they were.”

Meanwhile, Derek noted, looking around, that he should probably put the bluetooth back in so it didn’t sound like he was some sort of psychopath with a badge because God knows there are enough of those out there. He placed it in his ear ignoring the odd look he got from the angel and the accompanying shrug when his feathered friend figured it out. 

Derek slurped his coffee. His angel, that was still uncomfortable to say, was an angel with opinions. 

Really loud opinions. He rubbed his chin, feeling some stubble he missed that morning. “At least there’s that...?”

The angel shrugged again. “Don’t ever die. It’s like getting born all over again. Noise, lights, things tugging at you. It’s a headache. Let me tell you, those grim reaper guys, real nice fellas. They tell you where to go when you’re dead. You’ll be real happy that they do.” 

He wiped the bitter smile off with an ease that disturbed Derek. Kids, even if they were dead, shouldn’t know how to smile like that. They should wait until they were jaded, or in their late forties and it was too late to start over, to start making faces like that. 

“Took a few days to learn how to move things. I started pushing little things around, like leaves. Then moved on to the heavier stuff.”

Derek perked up upon hearing that. He finished the pancake he stuffed into his mouth a few seconds earlier and asked, “Heavier stuff?”

“Cars. Houses. Cats.” Derek nodded in agreement. It made a lot of sense. Cars weighed something like a ton and don’t even get him started on houses, he’d fished enough people out of collapsing buildings. Cats were… 

“What?”

The angel looked at him and said in a voice that seriously sounded like he wasn’t high no matter what the words were, “Those little fur balls have heavy souls man, you have no idea.” 

That made as much sense as an alpaca dancing to Japanese disco pop in Cancun. Wait, didn’t that happen last week? Derek tried not to think about overpaid young starlets doing stupid things because in that direction was madness. Instead, he asked, “So what do you do?”

The angel poked the crumpled up the napkin that had somehow transformed into a fighter plane, a box, a clown, and a dog over the period of their conversation and his reverie. “I’m just here to make sure you don’t die before your time.”

“Oh.”

The angel nodded like that was what every man who got a guardian angel thought. And for the record, it probably was if any of them got angels turning up around dead bodies of college students. “Yeah, so be careful and try not to screw yourself over.”

Derek tried not to take that as the insult it probably was because he was the adult in the room, not the crazy kid that sat in front of him.  “Alright,” he said.

The angel looked around at the mostly cleared tables. Even if your life and beliefs get turned upside down over the course of breakfast with a supernatural being, you still don’t get a day off. A few stragglers hung around because a small part of you still claims that you should get the day off for rest and recuperation after the shock of your existence. Funny how insurance doesn’t cover that. 

The angel-ghost, because somewhere between the “cats have heavy souls” talk and the “I have a halo and wings like a BAMF” talk he lost that bit about his new undead friend, added, “As a ghost. I broke into the library anyway. You can’t blame me for getting bored after hours.”

“Huh...” Maybe he could. Well, once he got the office to believe in his sanity, he could.

The angel eyed him, looking him up and down before extending a hand and saying, “My criminal past aside. I’m your guardian angel. Pleased to meet you.”

This time, when Derek reached out to take the hand, he felt a firm handshake. It would have been consoling if it weren’t for the fact he heard a woman hyperventilating in the background from seeing a kid pop out of nowhere to shake some grown man’s hand.

He was so screwed.

§ ALICIA A 

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My Grandparents

Going to my grandparents house Down south was always something I looked forward to I would sit in the back seat Of our blue van Hands on my lap Bobbing up and down with my little Legs as my motor Then I’d say what every kid says on A car trip Parents you’ve heard it “Are we there yet? are we there yet? Are we...” We would leave in the morning as Early as my parents could drag us out Of our warm beds and into the usually Cold car My brother bringing along a book Me my big mouth and something To color and we’d be off to their house Down south When we got there it would no longer Be light out My brother would slink inside the One story house as my father would Carry my limp body through the small Black gates My granny would always be awake Keeping my grandpa up with her They would watch the television In the corner of the room I’d like to think they couldn’t Pay much attention to it though Their minds were racing in time With mine “are they here yet? Are they here yet? Are they...” I would wake up to the smell of bacon My eyes would fly open I would shoot off the bed in the small Guest room I rarely remembered Entering, it was a race to the food My granny is from Canada And my grandpa is from Michigan They met in San Francisco Where my grandpa was stationed In the US army I would always look forward to All of their stories My grandpa, being a writer Would tell us bedtime stories Coming up with intricate and Always a bit ridiculous Stories of the invention of mayonnaise For a portion of my life I will not disclose, I believed That mayonnaise was invented by two Men, mayo and naise My granny, however was always the One in motion, while my grandpa Gave us rides on the boat My grandma had us eight year olds Speeding down the streets near their House on the golf cart This wasn’t safe But we loved it anyway Since then they have moved From their house by the lake To a motor home, traveling Together As I grew up I looked forward to seeing The two of them together Because one without the other just Wasn’t the same People say that love requires balance Love requires patience Being a teenager I can’t claim to know Everything about love But being the grandson of two people Who have loved each other through Fifty years of troubles, crises, miracles Joys, laughs, and tears I do not have to know any more about It than what I have already learned from them

BEN F

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Groggy // Graphite // Koe I 

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Danielle

Danielle spent a few years of her life traveling, characteristically getting herself into all sorts of trouble. 

She once found herself wandering around a sleepy midwest town that she now denies knowing the name of and adamently claims does not exist. 

Danielle happened across a bookstore, labelled Bookstore. The windows, covered in newspaper, indicated the closure of a once bustling store, after the flow of customers trickled and halted. No one cares to support their local bookstore anymore. Printed books are nearly extinct, don’t you know. Burn your books. Everyone is grouchy. 

The parasite of adventure sunk its teeth into Danielle’s brain and her hand inched toward the knob. Danielle turned her head and checked the deserted street. “Watchfulness,” Danielle says at least three times a day, “is always the best policy. That’s what I learned traveling. I traveled. I’m a traveler. I swear.” 

Danielle looked back at the door and noticed a yellow post-it note stuck to its newspapered window, with the words, “Open the door, Danielle, or you’re a loser,” written in black ink. She grumbled a bit about how she prefers pink post-it notes. Some people have very little consideration for her feelings.

Shrugging and puffing out her chest, Danielle pulled open the door. Well, first she pushed the door but it wouldn’t open that way, unfortunately. People have very little consideration for her poor nerves.

Danielle stood in the doorway, allowing her eyes to adjust to the dark room. Her eyesight is slowly deteriorating and in her vanity, she refuses to wear her glasses. 

She turned her attention to the single table in what she assumed to be the single center of the room. A single spotlight hit the table and made visible a single book to her weak and fragile eyes—fragile because they do not react well to dust, needles, or other debris.

To Danielle’s surprise, on the single table sat a single copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. She had heard from several people, almost the entire world in fact, that the Harry Potter series was not something to be missed. 

Because she had in her pocket exactly $6.99, which happened to be the exact price next to the barcode on the book’s back cover, she decided to buy it. She left the cash in the middle of the single table and left the bookstore.  

Down the street, Danielle sat down with her book and a cup of tea that a faceless passerby handed her. “It’s mint,” said the stranger, “with four level teaspoons of sugar, just how you like it.” Danielle nodded and felt flattered. 

She opened the book and a beam of light shot out of the book as a Hallelujah chorus filled the air around her. 

Suddenly, a knife fell from the book, its tip landing in Danielle’s freckled thigh in the very important artery that no one at this desk knows the name of. The steaming tea crashed to the asphalt and Danielle fell asleep. 

ISABEL S

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Tree // Photograph // Montana S

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Taxes

I don’t think I want to have sex with you. 

I don’t think I want to kiss you. 

I don’t think I want to wake up next to you in the morning.

I want to file taxes with you.

If that isn’t love, 

I don’t know what is.

ALICIA A

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We Are the Open Ocean 

I am the open ocean I am filled to the brim with excitement I am uncovered depths And hidden species.

We are the dried up glue in kindergarten classrooms Forgotten art projects because we are forced to grow up younger and younger.

You are the science teacher’s smile As she watches her class light up with understanding Their eyes bright with accomplishment.

You are determination and pride personified and you will pound on the student’s desks until they shout the answer you knew they had stored in their growing brain.

They are clichés of teenage adolescence Walking down their suburban sidewalks like runways Because no other person listens like the cracks in the sidewalk do.

And when they cry their tears are fueled by us telling them every single thing they do has been done before, has been said before, has been thought before.

The science teacher tells us that our water is older than the dinosaurs themselves, recycled since the beginning of time, so those tears aren’t even our own, just borrowed liquid for the survival of the organism.

But we are the open ocean. We are sunflowers stretching tall, beaming because in our existence is pure happiness. We are watercolor paintings with worn brushes and brilliant ideas.

We are the ocean. We are vast. We are strong. We shape continents. We hold up ships. And we hold the beginning of life itself.

ARIEL M

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Colin // Acrylic // Caroline L

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Untitled // Alicia A

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Independence // Photograph // Matt P