Damascus

“Jenny, stay in the truck. It’s naked.” Jenny got out of the truck.
Bill had one hand on his hip, and the other had unearthed his head from beneath his baseball cap. He scratched his head.
Jenny took a quick look then discreetly began calling into the labyrinthine corn fields for some sort of help.
“Where did he come from?” Bill said aloud, pacing around like there was engine trouble. “He isn’t dead, at least. Well, not dead. But I really don’t know what we can do.”
There was a baseball field nearby, and the lights created a thick carpeted bask across the fields, spilling onto the road so that when Bill finally made a decision, though it was only to turn off the car, the shaft of light wetted the limp figure on the ground with its glow.
“Let’s see if there’s someone there who can help us,” she said, unnerved.
Bill twiddled with his dead cell phone a bit more, and scornful of his lack of strength and unwillingness to part from any buoy in this new bizarre ocean, he tossed it onto the driver’s seat.
First, they had to decide what to do with the unconscious man. For safety’s sake, Bill decided Jenny would stay with the truck. He was reaching down to sling the anatomical specimen over his shoulder when Jenny shuddered and pleaded that if he had a concussion they shouldn’t move him. Bill gave up his jacket for proprieties sake, and went towards the light.
The field was deserted except for a gaggle of old men – professors at the university thirty miles away. They ate popcorn and laughed in their slacks and coat jackets like boys, and wholly lacked resonance with their location. The crickets and the breeze and the sky melted into the grim aspect of desperate, echoless, gossiping chalk.
In the darkness, they squinted against the lights, and its glaring reception in their glasses.
Bill slowed as he reached the congregation and pointed back towards the road with a guilty stride. One of the gentlemen addressed him as “son,” as in: “what can I do for you, son?”
Jenny was sitting in the passenger seat when the tribe arrived, she sat still, watching the naked being which had begun to stir, to rub his rusted palms gingerly, to inch his back up from the ground with groaning hesitancy.
The men laughed and slapped Bill on the back and said things like “you sure were telling the truth!”
Then the debate began. Do we take him to the hospital? One hand on the ground. Consider this might be a mental case. Head supported by neck, staring up at the windowless sky. Well, what’s our first priority here? Knees raised, shoulders slumped. I’ve got a nephew in Kansas who can give us some advice, works as a psychiatrist. Bill gave Jenny a hand out of the truck. Don’t forget, there’s no service in these doldrums. They lifted his elbows. Is our duty ethical, or medical?
Bill and Jenny and the man sat together on the side of the dusty road, under the hum of the artificial light, watching the professors talk into the night.

By Maria Lawson, '13

Wild: A Declaration of the Soul

Wild is tomorrow! We are all very excited for this gallery and concert event. On the menu: candy, cake, pbj, and juice boxes. Original tunes by Society members and plenty of original artwork exploring childhood and untamed soul. The event shirts just came in and they are of baller status. Buy one today!

Playing with Fire

Mary – a parishioner – carried a Zippo lighter in her pocketbook. She didn’t smoke, and in fact had a moral aversion to it, like the inhalation was a communion between man and the temporal world. Oxygen was thin and hardly satisfactory, but her own personal subjugation was to subsist on the sub-par.
In August, the Catholic congregation finalized their lease on a new building with a contemporary youth room, so the Protestants snatched up the old venue and pocketed the history. In September, the church sheathed its new congregation officially, and by October, the renovations were complete.
Mary helped with the denominational overhaul and in particular directed the removal of the stained glass that was “contrary to doctrine”.
The church converted; it denounced the virgin mother and they physically expelled her. The saints wept, then packed their carpet bags and left with her, trailing behind like a tail, inching back towards the heavenly father and His new youth room.
She stood inside while they removed the glass, shouting superfluous instructions, and watched the light change. The dust lifted and as the colors brightened, so the capacity for noise seemed to grow. The slab of Virgin Mother bobbed away on the shoulders of her pallbearers.
Mary drew out her lighter. It had the Virgin Mary on it. She flipped the lid, severing Mary’s head so the fire could sprout.
Prometheus strove to bring man the gift of the gods, and there it was, burning in her palm, a testament to the pattern of technological modernity. This lighter that Jonah had given her as a parting blow – to ease the sting of separation – and what he hoped would bring her to smoking or vandalism or some manifestation of daring rebellion instead of the cold, fishy pacification she clung to.
“Be in heaven when you belong to it and be human while you are human!” he said, bending his knees in rhythm with his exclamation mark. And she laughed and went on living, until she watched Mary slip from the fingers of the workmen and shatter into rainbows on the concrete.
While a few minutes earlier, she had been looking through the medium of art, through the painted air of the stained glass, she then saw into the undiluted light of day, and watched the fire of Mary burn in the palm of her hand.
The gap between sanctity and desecration shrunk, eating away at its wafer lining, until all that remained was perception. At the fork, which road? Because there stood Mary, and the pastor speaking to her with his thumbs in his belt loops, proclaiming success, and she couldn’t answer him.
Wind, breathing through the whole in the stained glass, snuffed the flame of the Zippo, and Mary looked at the pastor of her church, searching his face for something unexpected, and met a confused vacancy.
It all felt predestined.
She had the idea that Jonah was wrong about what he said, but she knew she hadn’t grasped any sort of truth yet. It was as though her limbs and organs had come unattached.
So she pulled together what bodily organization she could, and left the church through the hole in the stained glass.

By Maria Lawson, '13

Your kicks caught my eye

What I noticed first about Jenn were her Vans. I'm a fool for Chuck Taylors and Vans. I also loved the way she cuffed her jeans- since they were too long, she cut the sides and rolled it. Plus, she's absolutely rocking a Grove City College sweatshirt which is kinda tough to do because a lot of our apparel really isn't that big of a deal. Thanks Jenn, you're a sweetheart!

Hello Zooey

This is lovely Hannah on Sunday. I can picture adorable Zooey Deschanel wearing this skirt and ruffled shirt ensemble.

a chilly october

Thanks, Emily, for letting me take your photo! I love the red with the black and grey, and most importantly, it's comfortable and cozy for a chilly day.