By Hannah Smart
My twin brother and I always believed that if we could read each other’s minds, we could take away each other’s pain—place our fingers on our temples and transmit our grievances in the form of telepathic electrical signals. We figured that our embryo must have divided later than typical identical twin embryos after our singular mind had already developed. We had a collective consciousness.
When we were kids, our parents dressed us in cutesy matching clothes, as if to say, “Oh, you can’t tell them apart? Well, I bet you really can’t tell them apart now.” Sometimes, our parents couldn’t even tell us apart. They requested that we be placed in all the same elementary school classes so that our teachers could be burdened with not being able to tell us apart either.
We got all the same test scores, baffling our teachers. We placed second and third in the 1993 All-Illinois Second Grade Spelling Bee (I second and he third, to his eternal dismay). He didn’t cry when he lost. Neither of us ever cried much at all—it had been taught by our parents that to cry was to show weakness.
We did the Old Testament readings together at Mass once a month, identical golden W’s emblazoned on our red polo shirts (to add to the confusion, our names uncoincidentally started with the same letter). In sixth grade, we dabbled in piano lessons, voice lessons, and trumpet lessons before eventually landing on the viola.
People always asked us why we didn’t simply take up the violin. I think I just felt that the viola had a gruffness to its tone that the violin lacked. When you play an emotional piece on a violin, it just sounds like whining, but on the viola, it’s more of a heartfelt, plaintive wail. So that’s what I’d tell people when they asked, but my brother would claim the reason he played viola was because it was ‘a violin for men.’
I guess the natural place to start is this time a few years back when my son Walter was about seven. His mom Pam (who I’ve never been married to) and her lawyer husband were getting ready to leave for the weekend on a romantic getaway in the Caribbean or something, so I was tasked with looking after Walt.
My son has always operated on a unique wavelength. He didn’t start talking until he was about five or six. He’s not dumb—I maintain this much—but different somehow. He’s dialed to his own frequency. Pam is ashamed of it, I think. She won’t admit it, but it’s probably the reason she still, to this day, has never taken him to a child psychologist.
I don’t mind it—that he’s like this—I’ve just never known what to do with him on the rare occasions I spend one-on-one time with him. I always suggest that we play Guitar Hero or go for a bike ride or something, but he likes to keep to himself.
On this particular day, when I arrived at his mother’s house—which smelled of burnt casserole, presumably from the previous night—my son sat at the kitchen table, assembling a Lego set. He looked up at me but didn’t say anything. He was wearing a pair of those thick over-ear headphones.
“He’s gonna blast out his eardrums with those,” I told Pam. “They’ve done studies and found that tons of young people are getting hearing loss from listening to loud music.”
“Hello to you as well, William.” She spoke hurriedly and disinterestedly as she shuffled around in her high heels, placing stray items into her purse—lipstick, a travel pack of Kleenex, a miniature bottle of Bath and Body Works scented hand sanitizer. She wore a frilly, low-cut shirt and had some kind of curled perm thing going on with her hair. Her husband Melv’s comparatively casual T-shirt had a tuxedo design printed on it, which he must have thought was a real hoot.
Pam kissed Walter on the forehead. “Be good for Daddy, okay?” Walt nodded distantly but didn’t make eye contact. I’m not sure whether he even heard her over the music.
“Leftover casserole in the fridge,” she told me. “Just heat it up for two minutes or so.”
“Thanks,” I muttered, though I wasn’t keen on the idea of eating whatever I currently smelled wafting around the house.
I took a seat opposite my son and fixed my gaze on the Lego piece he was fiddling with. It was oddly shaped—kind of cylindrical with no dots on top. They didn’t make Lego pieces this advanced when I was a child, I don’t think. As Walter placed a long, single-row strip down, I heard the vacuum whoosh of the front door closing, and we were alone.
“Whatcha building?” I asked, picking the Lego box up off the table. “LEGO Star Wars TIE Fighter,” I read aloud.
He moved one of the headphone cups slightly off his ear and nodded in bored agreement. Several more minutes of silence passed, punctuated only by the satisfying clicks of Legos being stacked.
“How about some McDonald’s for dinner?” I suggested, more to myself than to him.
He shrugged.
“You like milkshakes, Walt? Eh? It’ll just be our secret.”
He stopped stacking and began sifting through the pile of Legos on the table.
I squinted at the instruction manual and then at the heap. “The piece you’re looking for is in here, I think,” I said, picking up a tiny, unopened plastic bag.
He didn’t say thank you but ripped it open forcefully, located his piece, and plopped it atop the designated dot.
“Why are you alone?” he asked after a few more conversationless minutes. I often found that if I didn’t talk for a while, Walt would fill the emptiness with something—usually something I didn’t really want to hear. “What do you mean?” But I knew exactly what he meant.
“Alone,” he repeated dully.
“By yourself. Why?”
“I’m not by myself—I’m with you.”
“That’s not what I mean. Mom has Melv. Why don’t you have anyone?”
“How do you know I don’t have anyone? Maybe I have a wife back at home you’ve never met.”
He paused and considered for a second, affixing a silver plate to the side of the contraption he was building—some sort of cockpit, by the looks of it. Then, he shook his head. “Nah.”
I didn’t tell him why I was alone, but there was a reason—is a reason. It’s just a long one and not a particularly easy one. But I begin my story there, in that moment with my son, because everything that led up to it and everything that’s happened since centers around the answer to that seemingly innocent question.
Transcript from call with subject #0938, operator #54, date: 02/16/05 at 8:47 p.m.
Operator: So what has you feeling this way?
Subject: I’m on my seventh therapist.
[pause]
Operator: Why so many?
Subject: Well, I go to one for a while, and we do the whole process, and after a few sessions it becomes clear that I’m
not going to get better. We’re just [pause] running around in circles, you know?
Operator: What is it about the therapists you’ve seen that makes you feel they’ve been unhelpful?
Subject: It’s nothing about them; it’s all about me. I don’t want them to feel bad about the fact that I can’t get better. I don’t want to burden them.
Operator: Well, that’s their job, you kn—
Subject: I know. I’m not saying any of this is sane. I’m calling a fucking suicide hotline for God’s sake. [pause] But there always comes a point when I feel bad for them and start lying. Make them feel real good about all the progress I’m making. And once I’ve convinced them I no longer want to off myself or whatever, they cut me loose, and I move onto the next one, hoping that this one will convince me not to kill myself for real. [pause] And now I’m doing the same to you, I guess. But I’m being totally transparent about it, so maybe that counts for something.
Operator: It does, I think. But what do I know? It’s my first week on this job.
Subject: Lucky me.
I wasn’t alone, once upon a time. My entire childhood was marked by a persistent and annoying sense of not-alone-ness, even when I would have rather been. In my rare moments of relative solitude, people would always ask me where my brother was.
Or I’d find myself surprisingly and satisfactorily by myself, sitting on the toilet or jerking off or doing some other private activity that need not be broadcast to the collective consciousness, and he’d seem to spawn out of nowhere and appear at my side. “How’s that shit coming along, Will?” “Did you know that when the Beatles used to jerk off together, John Lennon liked to yell the name ‘Winston Churchill’ to kill the other guys’ boners? Would be a shame if I did that right now, huh?” (To that particular remark, I believe I replied that my boner had been killed the second he walked into the room.) But I couldn’t blame him—I did it too. Not the yelling-Winston-Churchill-to- kill-his-boner thing, but I was certainly known to show up at inopportune times.
My brother and I held the first and second orchestra chairs all throughout high school. Whether he or I wore the crown varied by semester. We kept a tally of our respective semesters of orchestral rule in the hopes that it would reveal the truly superior player, but by graduation, we were tied, four-to-four.
We both went to Carleton College, this snooty liberal arts place in rural Minnesota. We were roommates and would remain so for all four years. We debated joining the orchestra there but ultimately decided against it, taking for granted during our period of consideration that it would be a mutual decision. Our paths didn’t begin to diverge until around Christmas of our sophomore year when we both, undecided up until that point, chose majors. I chose theater. I knew, even then, that I wanted to be a playwright. He said that theater was “queer shit” and opted for economics.
And then later, I took a part-time job at the local suicide hotline—ironic given the current circumstances, I know, but the gig had surprisingly few experiential requirements—and to be honest, it depressed me a whole lot. The more nights I spent listening to all the reasons people didn’t want to live, the more I began to wonder whether some of them had a point.
Transcript from call with subject #2409, operator #54, date: 05/09/05 at 5:10 p.m.
Subject: I’m an architect. Used to doodle bridges in the margins of my high school notebooks.
Operator: Well, that’s something, right? If you’re gone, how will the bridges get built?
Subject: Someone else would do it, and better than me, probably.
Operator: What if they don’t? What if your fill-in builds a bridge that collapses within a year?
Subject: Are you suggesting that by killing myself I’d be committing involuntary manslaughter?
Operator: Who knows? You’ll never know.
[pause]
Subject: They make me put up anti-suicide fences on the bridges. Hilarious, isn’t it?
Operator: Not really.
Subject: I’ve often thought about how I could easily build a weakness into one of them, so that if I ever need to jump
off, I know where to go.
Operator: And have you?
Subject: What are you gonna do, report me?
Operator: No. Just making conversation.
[pause]
Subject: No. But if it really comes down to it, there’s a small, unfenced section on the I-90 overpass, right where the bridge meets the east side.
Operator: I’m not the one who wants to kill myself here.
Subject: Well, you asked.
When the hotline job’s emotional toll became apparent, my brother began working some of my shifts. We looked identical and had the same vocal timbre, so nobody could tell the difference.
“Anything to take your pain,” he said, harkening back to the mindreading, emotion-transferring days of our youth, for he could likely tell that I was being absolutely put through the wringer every night, listening to all those perfectly justifiable rationales for wanting to die.
But after a few months of the two of us rotating shifts, I sensed that it was starting to mentally tax him too. He began drinking more. He’d go out on Sunday nights and sleep through his Monday morning classes. I offered to go back to working the hotline full time, but he insisted that it wasn’t affecting him in any real way.
“You haven’t left our room all week,” I remember telling him at least once. “You smell like beer, and it’s eleven in the morning.”
He patted me roughly on the shoulder. “Just trying to maximize my college experience.”
I recall a particular occasion during our junior year when I was up late writing a play. The script-in-progress would get shoved in the closet to collect dust the following year, but I later revived it, and it’s coincidentally the project I’m currently wrapping up. It’s about a preteen viola prodigy growing up in Cold War Germany. He plays next to the Berlin Wall from the western side each day, and Easterners gather to hear his songs. Though the prodigy is the star of the show, the whole thing is narrated from the perspective of a much older, East German admirer many years later, so there’s a kind of implied quotation mark around the entire play.
Anyway, while I was working on my script that night, my brother burst gracelessly into our room and declared, “I have had sex with a woman.”
“And you didn’t have the sense to spend the night?” I remember replying.
He scoffed. “You’re just jealous.”
“Not really.”
“Wanna know what it was like? I’ll broadcast it to the collective consciousness.”
“Sure.” I was less than enthusiastic, however, because by that point, I was ninety percent sure I was gay, but I knew, even then, that this was a part of myself I intended to take to my grave. There was no way I’d be able to live it out in any meaningful sense—not with my brother breathing down my neck for the rest of my life, and I down his. If one of us was going to live a lie in order to have our perfect little nuclear families who visit each other every month and exchange gifts and attend Mass together on Easter and Christmas, it would have to be me.
“Well, she took me to her room, and we were kissing pretty sloppily, and I reached into her shirt and began copping a feel, and I—”
“I thought you were going to broadcast it to the collective consciousness.”
“That’s what I was doing.”
“No. You were telling me. There’s nothing telepathic about that.”
He sighed tiredly. “You don’t really think we can read each other’s minds, do you?”
I didn’t—I had abandoned that childish notion years ago. “Let’s find out. Broadcast it.”
He furrowed his eyebrows and placed his fingers on his temples. “You getting it?”
“Yeah,” I lied stiffly, but what I was really getting was radio silence. Peace and quiet.
Transcript from call with subject #5562, operator #54, date: 9/13/06 at 4:43 p.m.
Subject: My parents love my sister more than me.
Operator: What gives you that impression?
Subject: They told me.
[pause]
Operator: Did they give a reason?
Subject: When I was in sixth grade, I huffed spray paint behind the church.
Operator: What does that have to do with your sister?
Subject: She didn’t huff spray paint. Probably still hasn’t to this day. [pause] They also think I’m a whore. [pause]
Operator: Look, there are always going to be people out there who accept you for who you are. No point fixating on the ones who don’t.
Subject: Cheesy.
Operator: Huh?
Subject: Seriously, did you just read that off a script or something?
“Does it make me a fag if I find the sentimentality of this whole ordeal a real downer?” he asked me one night, fiddling with a zipper on his sweater.
We lay in our beds, opposite each other but not making eye contact. “My man, the only thing that makes you a fag is if you want to fuck men. Do you want to fuck men?” He hesitated for a second, and I wondered whether he was about to make what for him would’ve been a grand admission. “No.”
“Well, there you go.”
“But it’s such bullshit, the stuff they say to me on that damn phone line. They’re always making excuses. You don’t need a reason to commit suicide.” He shifted his position in a manner that was somehow aggressive. “I mean—do they really expect me to believe they’re gonna kill themselves because they got C’s on their midterms?”
“Maybe they’re just trying to rationalize it.”
“Well, no reason will ever be good enough.”
I sat up. “Something you wanna talk about, buddy? Broadcast to the collective consciousness?”
He didn’t bother touching his head. “Okay. It’s broadcast.”
I didn’t read his mind, but I sensed that he was sad in some intangible way that didn’t even make sense to him. And I sensed that this frustrated him—that he feared he couldn’t be truly, authentically upset without calling his manhood into question.
And I should have said something sincere and profound at that moment. There was some objectively correct thing I could have told him to pull him out of the rut he was in—there had to be, right? I mean, our whole job—the one that had steadily drained us of all passion and desire—hinged on that assumption.
And maybe there was. But what I ended up saying wasn’t it. “Want me to punch you in the face? Would you feel like less of a pussy for being sad then?”
My brother killed himself on April 3, 2007. He didn’t leave a note—probably felt, as he often did, that there was nothing to say.
I found him hanging from a rafter in our closet when I returned from my 4 p.m. directing class. I wrenched the belt apart at the clasp, my hands shaking, and he dropped to the ground with the dull thud of a much heavier man. All our dry-cleaned clothes—our nice shirts and ties and sharply ironed dress pants and blazers—were stacked neatly on the floor next to his bed to make room. I thought about the way he must have methodically taken each item off the rack, folded it, and set it down, and
how with every one he’d removed, he’d probably asked himself whether he really, truly wanted to go through with it.
I thought about how his answer, every time, must have been “yes.”
Then, I held his body and cried. I cried for all the times he’d refused to.
Transcript from call with subject #4995, operator #54, date: 04/24/07 at 10:13 p.m.
Subject: I’ve become terrified of war. And I’ve sort of gotten it in my head, like—if we’re all going to die anyway, why not just get it over with?
Operator: A brilliant question.
Subject: Well? Aren’t you going to tell me that life is worth living, even in its transient, ever-temporary state, or something like that?
Operator: Sure. Let me just find the entry about life’s transience in my little script here.
Subject: Or that war isn’t inevitable, and it’s just a dark period in human history we’re in, and we’re all gonna get better in the next few years?
Operator: One thing at a time. Consulting the “inevitability of war” section next.
Subject: Why are you acting like this? Aren’t you supposed to talk me out of killing myself?
Operator: I’m supposed to, but I don’t need to. You’ve already talked yourself out of it.
Subject: Huh?
Operator: If you were gonna kill yourself, you’d have just fucking done it, okay? You’d have dropped subtle, impenetrable hints for weeks and then done it. Quietly. You wouldn’t have called a suicide hotline and told the operator exactly what to say to change your mind. So do whatever you want. I don’t care.
I stayed at the hotline a few weeks longer than I probably should have. I was unceremoniously dismissed after a particularly rough call during which it seemed as if I’d encouraged someone to off herself. I hadn’t—I’d simply seen through the superficiality of it all, by then. I knew I was ultimately powerless to influence anyone’s decision.
The weekend after my brother died, before I was fired, I went to a college party. I never went to college parties—that was always his thing—but I felt I owed it to him for all the parties he’d invited me to that I’d declined to attend.
While I stood awkwardly in some sophomore’s cramped dorm room, shoved up against a bunk bed and getting steadily and progressively more hammered, I tried to think like a heterosexual. I wondered what type of woman the straight version of me would sleep with. It felt like a kind of unnatural calculus going on in my head. This one had big tits but no ass, that one had a big butt and voluptuous hips but a sort of square, mannish jawline. You get the picture. Anyway, I found this one girl drinking in the corner, alone, and determined that the ratios of her various features’ sizes deemed her reasonably attractive, and I approached her, I think—though it’s a blur to me now and was a blur to me already by the next morning—and asked her whether she wanted to fuck. I used that exact word—fuck—though I was slurring my words pretty profoundly, so it probably lost some of its abrasiveness.
She chuckled. “What kind of a proposition is this?”
“I want to have sex with a woman,” I announced, using the same intonation my brother had used a year prior but speaking much more loudly than he had, to be heard over the bass-heavy dance music. I realized I’d never really even asked him about that encounter. I’d let him broadcast his feelings to the collective consciousness neither of us believed in anymore, and they had sat there, untouched, in the void. Now, they were virtually inaccessible, but I figured I would do my best.
“Has that line worked on anyone before?”
“Never tried it.”
“I can tell.”
“Well? Want to?”
She scanned me up and down and then shrugged.
“Why not?”
I was almost surprised by how easy it had been, but I was too drunk to be taken aback in any real sense.
I made a point to “cop a feel” as we shoved through the doorway of her sophomore dorm, the stench of must and mold and stale cigarette smoke clogging the air, our lips locked in numb, sexless hunger.
I imagined she was a man, to get it up, and we fucked mechanically while I stared at a poster of Kurt Cobain on her wall.
The day before graduation, she cornered me outside the arts building—the woman with no name—and introduced herself as Pam, and she told me she was pregnant, and that she was keeping it, and that based on the precise date of our encounter and where she was at now in the pregnancy, I was the only conceivable father.
I asked whether I could get a DNA test, and she said that I could, but that there was no doubt in her mind.
There wasn’t any in mine either.
She wanted to raise the kid in Minnesota. She’d been born here and grown up here, and she wanted her child to grow up here too.
“Are you going to be a part of the baby’s life?” she asked, almost sheepishly, as if it were a point of embarrassment for her to care about such trivial matters as whether her child would have a father.
“I’m twenty-two years old.” I’d set my sights on New York City—Broadway, the big time, somewhere I could have a chance at living the life I wanted to live free of scrutiny and derision—and now, it all seemed to be slipping through my fingers before it had even fully materialized. “I don’t even know how to look after myself.”
Walter and I did go to McDonald’s that night in 2015, when he asked me why I was alone. On the drive home, between gasping sips of chocolate milkshake, he said he wanted to play viola. He said his mother had told him I used to play viola, way back when. He said that’s why he wanted to do it—because I had. That he wanted to be like me.
I swung by my house on the way back to Pam’s and grabbed the horribly out-of-tune instrument that had sat dust-covered and unused in my bedroom closet for years. I showed him how to bow the strings and where to place his fingers. He had an incredible ear for pitch. When he played a wrong note, he adjusted it. The bow squeaked, as beginners’ bows tend to do, but his musicianship was obvious. I briefly considered casting him in my play, but I figured that Walter feared crowds. He—like me, now— was a solitary creature. Maybe that’s all either of us was ever meant to be.
But he revels in his isolation. Despite his challenges, he’ll be fine. I’m a different story. I don’t bask in the peace of solitude. I’m a lonely person stuck in the life of someone else—someone I never was but who everyone expected me to be. It’s only fair that I should go out the same way he did.
So now that I’m on the other side of it—now that you’re the one listening to this long and convoluted line of reasoning for why I want to kill myself and your job is to convince me not to—I know exactly what you’re going to say. I know you have this whole list of premade responses, and I know you’ll give me one of them—probably one I’ve given others, word-for-word—and hope for the best. And I know you won’t really believe it—what you’re saying—because you’ve already heard thirteen different suicide rationales this afternoon alone, and you’re fed up and tired, and you probably go home each night and eye all the belts in your closet, pondering which would be the sturdiest one to hang yourself with, and you’ve probably started your car in the garage and sat there in enclosed darkness for a few moments, just thinking, I could do it, and so I know you’re going to feed me some line you yourself don’t even buy, and if you don’t buy it, I sure as hell won’t. We’re in the same fucking boat.
So please, tell me something I’ve never heard before. Give me a revelation. Show me the light.
The one nice thing about suicide is that you get to choose the precise time and means by which you’ll die. It’s been four months since I called the hotline, and I’ve set my death date for August 14, 2019. That’s a week
from today.
The reason I’ve put it off so long is because my play—the one I’ve been developing on and off for years—is debuting at the Minneapolis Playhouse tonight, and my son Walter is playing the lead role.
Pam and I (Melv “had to work late” and “couldn’t make it”) are sitting in the sixth row in the center of the theater where the acoustics are best, watching people trickle in. Set pieces squeak as they’re dragged on by stage crew members dressed in all black—faceless, invisible figurants.
“You sure he’ll be alright up there?” Pam asks. I nod.
Walt may be a bit of a loner, but he likes being the center of attention. I know now that it’s not crowds he fears—it’s navigating the inscrutable expectations of social existence. Onstage, he has his work cut out for him. He knows exactly what everyone will do and say, and he’s been told, via a script he’s rehearsed hundreds of times, how to respond. There’s no mystery.
And he is a fantastic violist, just like the character he plays. He already has music colleges breathing down his neck with scholarship offerings, and this fall, he’ll be visiting the local high school twice a week to rehearse solo concerto parts with the chamber orchestra.
The curtain rises, and the audience claps sparsely. A single spotlight focuses on Walter standing solemnly in front of a Berlin Wall set piece.
And then, he begins playing. He plays the first phrase of Rebecca Clarke’s viola sonata.
“Have you seen this before?” Pam whispers.
I shake my head. I wrote the script and attended the first few rehearsals to provide some general direction, but then, I moved on to other playhouses with other casts and directors and acting philosophies.
As I watch him up there, I’m struck by how much he looks like my brother and me, when we were kids. He has the same auburn hair, the same pointed nose.
And his viola plaintively wails.
“Walter’s good, isn’t he?” Pam says.
“Walter… our son?” I ask. It’s a strange question, but my thoughts are currently focused on a different Walter—this Walter’s namesake. The Walter who would probably get a real kick out of his nephew following in our footsteps, mowing down the trodden road of viola excellence more thoroughly and prolifically than we ever could have. The Walter who would most likely nudge me right now and ask, in that guarded way he had, “How much of an asshole does it make me if I’m jealous of an eleven-year-old?” And for a second, my brother and my son—all three of us, in fact—are one and the same.
I assumed, erroneously, that the collective consciousness had died with Walter, but now it’s all flowing out from the void with every note my son plays. All the things we wished we would have said to each other before we knew it was too late.
I see the woman he slept with—a beautiful, petite redhead. I see him ruefully lingering in her doorway, contemplating asking whether he can spend the night, and then biting his tongue because being rejected at such a vulnerable point in his life would be the biggest ego blow imaginable. I see myself telling him that I’m gay and him replying, “You know all this anti-gay stuff is just a front, right?”
I see him inviting me to a party. “I can pick up girls, and you can pick up men, and then the two of us can broadcast it all to the collective consciousness tomorrow.” I see myself agreeing to accompany him, just once.
I see him admitting that listening to all these people tell him why life isn’t worth living makes him feel sad—truly and pathetically sob-into-his-pillow-and-wipe-snot-all-over-his-sweater-sleeve sad—and that life doesn’t seem worth living to him either, but you don’t see him calling up some overworked undergrad to whine about it.
I see him saying that he knows whining about it now wouldn’t make him gay, but it would make him a real fucking hypocrite, and that’s much, much worse. I see myself telling him we’re all hypocrites, at the end of the day.
I see myself assuring him that at least one of the three of us is going to be okay, and when he asks, “Three of us?” I see myself replying, “You’ll see.”
“Yes,” I tell Pam as our son’s song soars into the stratosphere like the cry of a wounded god begging for mortality so he can finally feel something human. “Walter is good.” I state it like a mantra—like it’s the one last solid, sure thing I can hold onto in an empty sea of darkness and uncertainty. “Walter is good.”
“Collectively Conscious” by Hannah Smart and the artwork titled Circle of Life by Aileen Sandoval appeared in Issue 44 of Berkeley Fiction Review.
Hannah Smart‘s short stories have been published in West Branch, The Harvard Advocate, Puerto del Sol, The Rupture, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Cleaver, among others. Moreover, her essays have appeared in The Boston Globe, Potomac Review, and The Sunlight Press. Her long story “Educated Circle Promised Revelations” was shortlisted in The Masters Review 2024 Chapbook Open. Her debut novel Plume (Bayou Wolf Press) is forthcoming in early 2025.
Aileen Sandoval works at Monterey Peninsula College as a Human Resources Specialist and is involved in initiatives to hire diverse, equitable, and inclusive faculty to better serve the educational experiences of underrepresented groups. Following the completion of her undergraduate studies at California State University Monterey Bay, she has dedicated her time in refining her painting skills so that she can one day teach entry-level drawing classes at the community college level. Although she was born in Los Angeles, California, she currently lives in Monterey, California with her partner.
Berkeley Fiction Review 
Leave a comment