About a month ago, someone told me he looked at the sky seven times every day. He said it calmed him down and smoothed out anxieties. It wasn’t a spiritual thing. He called it “a way to spend time with myself.”

Since then, I’ve tried to look at the sky more often. While standing in my new living room, walking through humid Florida, or driving past shuttered stores and take-out restaurants, I’ll suddenly notice colors and pause for a moment. I don’t count to thirty or take ten deep breaths or anything like that. I don’t even pause, really. I keep following the car ahead of me as I glance upward through the windshield. It’s more about my background attention. A net of powerlines and traffic lights and road signs tie me in place like lashings on a ship, but beyond them, beyond the apartments and office buildings that line San Marco Boulevard, I can see open sky. The other week, it was solid blue, as bright as baptism. In the midst of that expanse, I saw a single whisp of cloud. Then I found a parking spot, sanitized my hands, and put on a mask. I returned to ceilings of lights, HVAC systems, and to-do lists.

Around the time television sets became a staple of every American household, “serious writing” cut playwriting and its progeny out of the will. English curriculums at the university level ceded playwriting courses to the theater department. The emerging disciplines of film and television studies were claimed by the communications department without opposition, leaving aspiring auteurs to form alliances not with their bookish peers, but with the more pragmatic students aiming for careers in public relations, marketing, and human resources.

I remember climbing onto our parents’ roof Christmas Eve Day to smoke a cigar and watch the trees. We could do that again, after the pandemic. Not to re-create a moment—just knowing we could. The being able to. We’ll see each other again for Christmas, I’m sure.

The day I left, I could have sat in your back yard for an hour with beer and the spring wind and your roommates. We could have talked about other long drives, ones we’ve done together, like our twelve-hour sprint back from Mt. Shasta just in time for Mother’s Day, reeking of mountain sweat and damp wool. I could have said goodbye.

Five bangs on our screen door startle me from my magazine.

“Police! Open up!”

John glares across the living room, shakes his head, and returns to his book. I stay on the other couch. My finger marks my place halfway through the article. Another bout of knocking begins, and it doesn’t stop. The screen door’s metallic clatter matches our saggy couches and dirty yellow walls. My housemate sighs, rises, and opens the front door, and Kenny’s not-quite-there laugh explodes through the screen.

“Tha’ was a good one, wasn’ it? I got you, babe!” He claps and snorts. “How’re you doin’, man? I know them classes ain’t fun. You doin’ okay?”

“Yeah, I’m doing okay.” John’s lack of enthusiasm rivals Kenny’s abundance.

“That’s good, babe, that’s good.” I can’t see Kenny from the couch, but I hear the screen door screech open. “School’s really somethin’. I shoulda gone to more school, you know? Man, I mixed up in all sorts of bad—but not anymore. No way! I turned my life around. Got Jesus, you know? Now this is all for Him. Just me tryin’ to be good for the Good Lord.”

“That’s good to hear, Kenny.”

“Brothers in Christ, babe! Us two, we is just brothers, man. Brothers. Hey, you got any of those cans or bottles lyin’ around?”

I didn’t mind Donald Trump so much three and a half years ago, on that day my friend’s dad went to the hospital with a strep infection in his heart, while over in Seattle, my friend and I sat in front of the television and watched the map turn red. My friend’s dad was already hooked up to a monitor when he had the heart attack.

Michigan went for Trump. Wisconsin, Trump. Pennsylvania, Trump.

We didn’t know if my friend’s dad would survive the night, so we watched the news and refreshed 538, The New York Times, and Politico, and that evening, because my friend’s dad might have been about to die, the election made me feel better about things.

In this collection of essays, forty-four Calvin University graduates under thirty years old share the most interesting and intimate parts of their twenty-first-century lives. Co-editing, book design, and typesetting by Josh deLacy.

After a few pregnancy scares earlier in life, I got a handle on birth control. I don’t have much skin in the abortion game these days.

I still care about it, of course. It’s living and dying, or at least living. I’m not sure where life begins. The science surpasses my long-forgotten high school classes and my single, lab-less BIO 123, and that’s what so much of this comes down to, isn’t it? Are we killing people?

When I need to see a book without reading it, I’ll spin the page upside down so the letters look like cuneiform and the ideas fall out. I’ll spread pens, highlighters, and half a ream of upside-down manuscript across a table and flip through it without reading a single word. Each page gives the reader a window into the story, but I’m not reading—I’m cleaning, and it’s easier to fix those windows without the author dancing in front of them. I brush off rivers and word stacks, buff out awkward hyphens, and wipe away excess word spacing. I clean smudges, more or less, to help the reader see the story without distraction.

Spent shotgun shells lie in the dirt like Oil Age arrowheads. The top halves have sun-bleached to pink, while the bottoms have stayed as red as the shells in my own gun. Their plastic casing hasn’t cracked yet; the brass has just begun to rust. I shake out the dirt, drop them into my pocket, and perk up. Someone shot at a bird here.

Assembled entirely from two weeks of subject lines found in the spam folder of info@stlukesrenton.org.

You can be her loving demon, able to satisfy all her dirty wishes for hours.
Want to thump her wild?
Get ready and poke your lady until sun rises!
You can show your girl who’s the best driller on Earth!

Do you know how to turn a girl on?

Thunder in your bed, solidity in your bone-ons!
Better stiffness – better satisfaction!
Set your libido level to maximum!