Fall 2017 final digital.pdf Beauty Elizabeth Coffman-Mackey the noise of brassy bands and chatter, the scent of burnt popcorn and popsicle juice. I am sprawled on the sidewalk, an array of chalk before me and my tongue stuck out as I try to sketch out my masterpiece with sidewalk when I color and shade at the top, and getting indented by I have lost the competition once again. and she’s gone over each of the thirteen stripes so many times that the boring. It’s unoriginal. It wins. against the street. The lines are not clear, and the judges say when they think I am not in earshot that they do not know what it is. I had been practicing for the competition for months. This piece of the sidewalk, it’s the epitome of my art. What I colored was a map of my fantasy world. I tried to bring to life with pale pigment on the ground the world I played in inside my head. It was comprised of lush, rolling, green head it is gorgeous. On the sidewalk, it looks like scribbles even though I cry on the way home, my hands still covered in dust in every pastel shade Crayola could make. This is not a story about art. Beauty This is Indianapolis, Indiana, sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for my classmates to say what they thought of my story. It’s autumn of 2017, but it’s so hot and muggy outside that the air conditioner is blasting all through the classroom. There’s an institutional chill in the room, and says. around in a circle as they take turns vivisecting the story on the classroom It is too confusing, it’s too long, it’s not long enough, it’s showing and not telling and it’s telling and not showing and the paper is bloodless, pale as it gets carved up with markers and pens. “The real problem is that there’s no moment of reckoning,” the professor says. “This is a good story, but how does it come together? You’ve got to narrow your focus here.” I don’t want to take my story back home with me anymore. This is not a story about writing. This is Urbana, Illinois, wearing my best velvet dress and listening The symphony is otherworldly. Instruments weave together like the tapestry of the fates. When I close my eyes, I am not in the crowded concert hall with 2,000 of my closest strangers, struggling to stay awake under the dim lights. I am back inside my mind, running through the lush forests that refused to be committed to paper, or I am swimming through but I do not know these notes. The chords and the melodies do not sound “I wanna do that,” I think to myself when the music stops. “I want to make music like that. I want to make people feel like that.” My mother speaks before I say any words out loud. “You could do that, you know,” she said. “If you practiced your piano everyday like you’re supposed to, you could sound like that.” mind, folding and crashing and dancing like rivers. Music that sounds like water or adventure or love, I can hear, I could write it, I know I could. time on piano without crying in frustration. This is not a story about music. This is an old beige Toyota with the windows rolled down, kicking up dust as it blurs past forests and mountains down the old dirt road. drowning us, but just enough sound leaks out of the open windows that we can still breath in the musty summer air. makeup is perfect and unsmudged. Her hair blows around her face but never tangles up or gets in her mouth. Her waist is trim and her eyes are “You’re perfect,” I say, in more words, words that come out bitter and accusing. “I try harder than you,” she says in more words, words that sound like biting classroom insults, words like “lose weight” and “don’t be a slob.” I can’t tell her I am trying because if I’m trying and this is as good as it gets then that is so, so much worse. This is not a story about love. This story is me trying to say something and never having the words to, never having the guts or the balls or the brains to pull something to completion and not really trying to. It’s a story about letting all the stitches show in your clothing, having a life that isn’t seamless and art that’s riddled with mistakes. It’s about sending letters that aren’t thought through saying anything at all. broken pottery with melted gold. This is about beautiful damaged goods. This is a story about the mosaic I made when I was very young. It was made of pieces of broken glass pressed into wet grout, and it was supposed to be a sunset, but it didn’t look like anything but colored broken Beauty glass. No one knew what it was, no one knew what it meant. No one could deny that it was beautiful.