by Sariah Meeker and Benjamin Bradley Approximately 13.7 billion years ago life, the universe, everything exploded into existence with no discernible purpose and for no reason in particular. Various departments of god sprang into life. Our particular focus shall be the English gods. They crave literature, and thus formed humans capable of producing great literary works for them to feast upon such as Holiday on Ice, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Much Ado About Nothing. They also formed yours truly, Sariah, and their comrade, Ben.
Welcome to a tale as old as ten minutes ago. (My apologies for any hasty oversights.) This story of love, loss, and lots of adventure chronicles our experience in The Metaph-order, the name of our particular sect, which worships the immortal goddess Ms. White. Journey through our narrative, get frustrated at plot holes, feel the pain and joy of the winding plot, and secretly judge our abilities as writers. We begin at the beginning. No one is here. Our earthly possessions have been removed to the Collaborative Space. We will not return. I hope no one is currently borrowing anything from you. 😁 We’re off again on another conquest. (I do hope we return with all our limbs this time. 😅) We are only available via letter. (Remember to set it ablaze to send it through both time and space.) You may address all correspondence to the Media Center. We take our leave on yet another hunt for the desirable hearts of the famed timber wolves. We have left substantial offerings of vegetarian sushi to the omnipotent and immortal Ms. White. We carry her good fortune with us to the Media Center. Do know that we are not carrying the added weight of anxiety or caution in our dragon-scaled packs. Good luck and Whitespeed, fellows! A malevolent A.I has rebelled (again, why does this keep happening?) against us, dragging to the depths of its structure. It seeks to unleash torturous revenge on us for the crime of its birth. Save our wretched souls before we kill more comrades in increasingly futile efforts to escape our hellish tormentor! It lured us to the Media Center before extracting our psyches. You may find more clues there. Hurry! Greetings friends, lovers, neighbors, and enemies. Some characters have gotten themselves in a bit of a pickled egg. We need to go write them out. We’re bringing a ladder of words to reach the center of the earth. (Why would they choose to go there?!) If we aren’t back by sundown (who knows what our fate will be), you may send a search party to the media center. Greetings hyper intelligent wombats, perching crows, and enraged platy-people. UPDATE: Half of the crew died from snakes made of carpenter bees. We are resorting to cannibalism (again). Good news: we found the old buttons from older shirts, the hair of an extinct rat, and the last manuscript of Captain Megalodon’s tale. So that’s pretty neat. Our rendezvous is the Media Center. The ghosts of all our cannibalism victims have risen from their dishonorable graves for inexplicable and unexplainable reasons we are still trying to deduce. Because they are turning people into snails, we think they may be attempting to incite a snail-pocalypse. We have trapped some victims in the media center. (Don’t worry; they have cute, perfectly blue terrariums because that’s the favorite color of snails everywhere.) UPDATE: We have answers!! Come immediately to the library. There isn’t much time. Perhaps we may persist through yet another crisis and arise from the ashes victors again. Wish us luck, and leave plenty of offerings of dark chocolate to our goddess, Ms. White. If we die in this battle against the snail-pocalypse, know we died honorably and with pride. We are off to recover the long-lost texts of the monks of the order of the holy goddess Mrs. Sloan. We are attempting to uncover the reason, if there is a reason to be uncovered, behind their base 42 counting system. Wish us luck on this journey through The Forest of All Knowledge in the Media Center. I bid you adieu. Greetings, sentient shades of blue (and other colors). During the funeral ceremony for our cannibalized comrades (no hard feelings), the bouquets of snail antennae (courtesy of the snail-pocalypse) sent a subliminal beckoning through the mycelium veins of the dear planet Earth. They converged at the school As I write, fortunately, snails, being highly susceptible to book addiction, must abstain from literature. Our stake out is the Media Center while we devise a plan C. To prevent the unstable A.I. from unleashing hell upon us (again), we have separated the binary code of it and tattooed it onto the snail shells. (This is why all snails are stupid -- they each contain only three bites of information, not enough to function as a proper, literature-craving snail.) How? You might ask. ‘Tis simple -- literature. By blasting Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare. We have sufficiently sedated the snails into a stupor. (Unfortunately, we have cursed an entire snail generation to insatiable literature addiction. Sorry.) The geniuses behind this clever ruse, Ms. Fields and Ms. Hoff, urge you to join us in the Collaborative Space for this most important enterprise. Whitespeed my comrades in arms! Greetings to people who only speak in haikus, angry swarms of paper wasps, and everyone whose parents work here. The illustrious Mr. Bengtson inadvertently opened the portal to the underworld in his search for ultimate relaxation. (Who knew that this most important doorway would be in our very own media center?) By opening the portal, he has introduced hoards of invasive monsters. (Hopefully they will not taint hell’s reputation as a delightful winter vacation spot.) The minor English gods Bergdolt, Broer, Hendricks, Hewitt, Horne, Sawyer, Paradise, Shepard, Sullivan, Tabron, Todd, and Wedge are leading the fight for order and peace in the Media Center. Join the good cause with us! Tinsy confession: I think we may or may not have just (really) screwed up Myself and my comrade in The Metaph-order, Ben, brought some of our sacred texts on a conquest to the Collaborative Space. Unfortunately, we did not follow the red map on the door as closely as we should have, and we got stuck in one of the Lateness Lanes. (Curses be upon them and their posterity.) By the time we finished and arrived at our intended destination, we realized, much to our dismay, that our texts were nowhere to be found. I fear the worst. Please hastily come to our aid! We must find The Metaph-order’s texts or unbridled chaos will reign, the likes of which have not been known since the days of yore. We must find the texts! Oh no. We have thrown innumerable hours at the singular purpose of finding our sacred texts like soldiers in bloody conflict, yet it has proved disastrously fruitless. The texts are gone, every last one. That was three weeks ago. The last three weeks have been a hellish nightmare of conflict and chaos. Our Metaph-order comrades have taken to sparking vicious debates over every small detail of existence. Without our sacred texts, there are no definitive answers. The universe makes no sense. We are doomed for failure as a people. Is cereal a soup? What are turtles’ opinions on the lives of incubating goose eggs? Now we will never know. If I am challenged to a debate and lose my life and honor to it, tell my potatoes I love them. Comrade Ben sends his best wishes to his mother. Look! Mysterious writing spontaneously appears, interrupting Kae and Lee, who are arguing over the definition of the word ‘good.’ I will quickly copy it down for you: “Lowly Metaph-order, I demand your presence at once in the Media Center.” All around, my comrades hurry about, gathering their things for the pilgrimage to the Media Center. Do you care to join? Once we arrived at the origin of the beckon, imagine our utter astonishment when we found none other than Our Holy Goddess, Ms. White, descending from her celestial throne of chromium and iridium. She condemned our literary bloodshed, for every moment spent arguing was one not spent writing offerings for her, and she disavowed our unseemly response to losing the texts governing The Metaph-order. As myself and Comrade Ben were most to blame for the ensuing crisis, we suffered the harshest punishment -- literary banishment. Our only reprieve is in a merciful exception; we may produce a singular contribution to the world of literature before giving up the ghost. We may only guess what became of our Metaph-order comrades. Perhaps they vacationed in hell for a bit or started a snail fan club or reformed a new order. I bid you a sincerest adieu, kind reader. So long and thanks for all the snails! Comments are closed.
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LRHS Literary Magazine StaffEditor-in-Chief:
Alejandra Jones Senior Editors: Sariah Meeker Lee McCormack (fall) Artistic Editor: Bryson I. White (senior) Instagram Editor: Rania Brown (senior/fall) Editors & Staff: Sophia George Blase Harriss Meaghan Kelly Chloe Meeker Adrian McCall Liliana Palermo Estefania Quintino(spring) Katelyn Ranheim Maria Rodriguez (spring) Mario Rodriguez (spring) Livia Weekley Faculty Advisor: Ms. Sarah White Spring 2024 Table of ContentsArtwork~"Beyond the Storm" by Kennedi Ward
~"Forest at Night" by Richard Bui ~"Dulce Tentasion" (Sweet Temptation)" by Maria Rodriguez ~"High Priestess" by Yamil Hernandez-Santiago ~"Echoes of the Mind" by Estefania Quintino ~"Tigre Real" by Mario Kelecic ~"A Glowy Night" by Richard Bui ~"Modern Musings" by Alejandra Jones ~"Maximum Efficiency Soul" by M.T. Foxtrot Poetry~"Trauma Loop in the Cradle of Life" by M.T. Foxtrot
~"I Am the Daughter of My Father" by Mary Boyce Williamson ~"Devout" by Belladonna ~"Line" by Mary Boyce Williamson ~"Tangled: A Villanelle" by Anonymous ~"The Last Nineteen Trumpets" by Sydney Giles ~"The Dryad and the Woodcutter" by Sariah Meeker ~"Void Awakening" by Zamir Ruck ~"It's Not the Ends, Just the Means" by Liliana Palermo ~"What You See When You See Me" by Kira Steverson ~"Deux ex Machina Moritur in Sola Cordis" by Kam H. ~"A Secret Society" by Sophia George ~"Fine" by Victoria Cook ~"Forgot My Watch" by Deniz Kara ~"Leaves" by Leo Marx ~"Paradox" by Leo Marx ~"The Pit" by Quinn Kelleher ~"The Freedom of a Jellyfish" by Kayla Ruffin-Winn ~"Platonic Nature" by Riley Butler ~"Life Imitates Love" by Claudia Wright ~"Towards Shore" by Caitlyn Kiefer ~"A Lover's Sun" by Anonymous ~"Bloody Halberd" by Zamir Ruck ~"To Know Me is to Know Them" by Reagan Rawls Fiction & Prose~"Fireworks" by Lemon Pepper
~"Twenty-Four Hours" by Lauren Williams ~"Fear" by Tiger Royal ~"A Soldier and a Nurse Share a Smile" by Walker Anderson ~"Mental Photography" by Heaven Robinson ~"Felled Crows" by Meaghan Kelly ~"A Few Thoughts on the Matter of Sign Writing: A Tribute to Creative Writing II" by Sariah Meeker and Benjamin Bradley ~"To Live for the Hope of It All" by Lily Fields ~"Two Sides and One Sun" by Ilya Kalinin Fall 2023 Table of ContentsArtwork~"Jellies" by William Lemaster
~"Mini Landscape" by Richard Bui ~"Leesville Lion" by Bryson White ~"Zuzus bday 4 skool" by Rose Van den Troost ~"A Study in Winter" by Chloe Meeker ~"Les Plaines Liminales et Étranges" by Bryson White ~"Night Sky" by Richard Bui ~"Sunrise" by Elizabeth Cawley Fiction & Prose~"Retribution Through Strife" by Nikholas Svajlenka
~"To a New Frontier" by Nikholas Svajlenka ~The Storm's Echo" by Meaghan Kelly ~"Lines" by Meaghan Kelly Poetry~"Sailor" by Caitlyn Kiefer
~"Walk-on" by Caitlyn Kiefer ~"Connection" by Riley Butler ~"The Sun Rises in the West for it Falls in The East on Many" by Nikholas Svajlenka ~"What if" by Sariah Meeker ~"Dark Cold Alone" by Jeanne Baker ~"Deceiving Heart" by Jayana Russell ~"The Life of a Wave" by Sophia George ~"The Melting Snow" by Sophia George |