DigitalCommons@C.O.D.

The Prairie Light Review 
Volume 43 Number 1 Article 34 
Fall 12-1-2020 
Death Table of Contents 
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Recommended Citation 
(2020) "Death Table of Contents," The Prairie Light Review: Vol. 43 : No. 1 , Article 34. 
Available at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr/vol43/iss1/34 
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3 DEATH
UNTITLED (NIGHTSCAPE) • 30
T-REX BONES • 31
UNTITLED (KLINE) • 31
THE FINAL DRINK • 32
BUNNY RABBIT • 34
SKINNED • 35
DANCE YOU SINNERS! • 38
VIRAL GIRL • 39
HAMLET • 40
HOG-TIED • 41
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et al.: Death Table of Contents
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English

Death Table of Contents

Wiegand, Joel

The Prairie Light Review 
Volume 43 Number 1 Article 35 
Fall 12-1-2020 
Untitled (Nightscape) 
Joel Wiegand 
College of DuPage 
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Recommended Citation 
Wiegand, Joel (2020) "Untitled (Nightscape)," The Prairie Light Review: Vol. 43 : No. 1 , Article 35. 
Available at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr/vol43/iss1/35 
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more information, please contact orenick@cod.edu. 
Untitled (Nightscape)                                                       Joel Wiegand
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Untitled (Nightscape)

Freitas, Sylvia Morna

The Prairie Light Review 
Volume 43 Number 1 Article 52 
Fall 12-1-2020 
The Cat Lady 
Sylvia Morna Freitas 
College of DuPage 
Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr 
Recommended Citation 
Freitas, Sylvia Morna (2020) "The Cat Lady," The Prairie Light Review: Vol. 43 : No. 1 , Article 52. 
Available at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr/vol43/iss1/52 
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more information, please contact orenick@cod.edu. 
The Cat Lady                                                  Sylvia Morna Freitas
 The weathered woman sat in front of her glass window. 
A chestnut cat brushed against her leg, letting out a whine for 
attention from the floor. A white Persian sat snuggly in her lap, the 
fluff ball purring contently in its partial sleep. 
 The woman looked across the street where a brother and 
sister played in the snow. Snow. One of the many physical reminders 
that helped her remember that she was here not there. The snow-
colored cat in her lap suddenly shifted awake. It stood up unsteadily 
on the woman’s arthritic legs before jumping to      the floor. 
 She’d previously been using the sleeping cat as an excuse 
to stay seated, but now she decided it was about time to stop 
procrastinating. 
 Ms. Young knew she could often sit for hours dissecting 
every moment of her time in that place. That place. Somewhere she 
chose to go voluntarily when hundreds, maybe thousands, chose 
exile over impressment. She probably should’ve taken the hint, but 
she’d been young. 
 No. Not young. Too many faults were laid at the feet of youth. 
There were plenty of other young people who knew better than to 
head into a war-zone on some misguided sense of duty. What she’d 
been was sheltered. She’d craved experience--any experience. 
Thought it would be thrilling. At that age, new always fascinated 
her. Just as the jungle had at first, the concrete and organic ones 
alike, but both had taken advantage of her optimism. They’d left her 
the way she was now. 
 It was the biggest mistake of her life. Any good she managed 
to do, any experience or insight she gained, it wasn’t worth it. Maybe 
that made her self-centered or cowardly, possibly even callous, but it 
was the truth. The few she managed to save probably wouldn’t have 
minded slipping away, not after knowing the sort of lives they’d
lead anyways. 
 The elderly woman stood slowly and painfully, the ever-
present ache in her joints increasing. The cold air of northwestern 
Oregon was bad for her chronic arthritis, but she refused to move 
anywhere that was green, warm or humid. She refused to move 
anywhere that resembled that dreaded place. 
 Ms. Young often looked back at her first days in the foreign 
land and laughed. When she’d first arrived, the place had seemed 
nearly fantastical. She’d never seen flora and fauna like that before. 
It was beautiful in her eyes. Naive, unencumbered eyes. Eyes that 
hadn’t thought to consider all the shadows the leaves cast, the vines 
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that wrapped and hung, the dense trees that brought visibility 
to zero. 
 Going in, she knew the jungle held some of the best mimics 
and camouflagers in the world. Snakes the pattern and texture of 
wood, spiders the color of dirt. What she hadn’t realized was that 
this skill could be adapted by its people. There were times you 
couldn’t tell a person from a tree. 
 And so many times she found herself wishing it was just a 
damned tree.
 Her period of wonder ended about the time the first boot fell 
on a pressure plate. Awe turned to horror then, and it never 
turned back. 
 The woman rubbed her head and sighed, grabbing for her 
cane as she headed for the kitchen. The wood of her empty house 
creaked beneath her feet, soft slippers shuffling across it. Ms. 
Young had wanted a family— once. But something fundamental in 
her shifted after she went to that place. Her heart and mind became 
untethered, solitary things. 
 She could never explain it to someone who hadn’t seen 
battle or death. How the senseless cruelty of it had settled its claws 
in her chest and slowly shredded her heart to pieces. In its place, 
a throbbing, twisted rent had made itself at home. Healed wrong. 
Now stiffened and wrenching where once smooth, unobstructed 
muscle reigned. 
 The pain of it was unutterable, and she wouldn’t dare share 
it. Because it was hers. Private, personal. Loved. Something she 
would take out late at night and turn over in her hands so she could 
relish in its weight and its misery before putting it away again. No 
one would take it from her, for better or worse. Nothing and no one 
would take from her ever again. 
 Ms. Young opened up the cabinet next to the pantry, rooting 
around for the aspirin bottle. Her tremoring fingers landed on the 
bottle and dragged it out. Its light weight immediately told her it 
was empty. She threw it away dejectedly, watching as it missed the 
trashcan and frightened one of her tabbies. An empty aspirin bottle 
meant it was time for her dreaded trip to the town mercantile. 
 Dansville, Oregon wasn’t a small or isolated town, but it 
had that feeling to it. Everyone knew everyone and was, therefore, 
a little too up in each other’s business. It was a problem she hadn’t 
considered when she’d first come up here. But much like the 
jungles, the top layer of the tight-knit community disguised a much 
darker truth. A story of ignorance and intolerance spelled out into 
its foundation. 
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 Seemingly to her, this was the birth certificate of every 
society, and usually, its epitaph, too. She’d yet to see one that had 
grown beyond it. By the very nature of the word community, she 
wasn’t sure it was possible. 
 The woman slowly bundled up for the chilly weather, 
carefully slipping on the many layers. She grabbed her keys and 
shooed her two calicos away from the door before opening it. 
 People in town called her the resident ‘cat lady.’ She fit the 
bill. A crazy, old spinster who couldn’t hold a pill bottle without it 
sounding like a maraca. The sort of person you switched sides of 
the street for just so you didn’t feel obligated to wave hello. 
 Ms. Young hadn’t intended to step into this character. It 
was just that she found cats calming and easy companions. She 
held nothing against dogs. But for someone who left the house as 
little as she did, it wouldn’t be fair. And there was also the fact that 
dogs barked, and snarled, and attacked, and mauled, and killed 
and…What had she been doing?
 Ah, right. Getting in the car. 
 The woman carefully navigated her way down the front 
stairs of her small porch. The ice beneath her boots cracked as she 
stepped onto her driveway. Much to the chagrin of her doctors, 
Ms. Young refused to move into an elderly home, even if it meant 
risking catastrophic injury every time she left her house. 
 One doctor, in an attempt to be helpful, had suggested she 
sign up for a local program for vets. They collected trash, salted 
and shoveled driveways, even delivered food. Ms. Young had 
considered it. 
 But when she went to the local VFW to enroll, the attendant 
had immediately begun asking for her husband’s information, 
and when she’d explained she didn’t have one, she received the 
most heartfelt of condolences and was told that the lady at the 
other desk handled widows. 
 Apparently, women of her age weren’t veterans. She’d 
missed the memo informing her of the cutoff. Her mistake. 
 She left that place with a familiar bitterness on her tongue 
and vowed never to return. It brought back too many thoughts 
and feelings from that time. The isolation. The undercurrent of 
otherness threaded through every word, sentence, and order 
she received. 
 She remembered one trip, in particular, accompanying a 
unit of young men to her next post. They’d been forced to spend 
one night on the road in transit, sleeping rough. They built a fox 
hole but wouldn’t let her share it with them. She was forced to 
sleep just outside, on soggy earth. While she slept, the mud rose 
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up around her, the jungle trying to take more of her, make her one 
of its own. Encased seemingly in the cold, clammy hand of Death 
himself, she’d woken up screaming.
 It was absurd. She was aware. She’d been scolded harshly 
by a private once she worked herself free and calmed down.  
 Fool woman. 
 But everything had seemed alive over there. Even the mud.
 Nowadays, Ms. Young never went out in the rain for fear 
that stepping on a soggy lawn would give her a heart attack. When 
she came here, to the blissful quiet of a frozen winter town, she’d 
thought perhaps some peace could be found.
But she should’ve known. The war was still going. For her it would 
never end. 
 She settled into her old Volkswagen, the worn-down stick 
shift from a time before automatics. She pulled languidly out 
of the driveway, smoothing her gloved hands over the leather 
steering wheel. The heat blew cold air on her exposed wrists and 
she shivered, aching muscles coiling even tighter in on themselves. 
 A horn honked behind her, and she realized the stoplight 
in front of her had long ago turned green. She peeled forward, the 
snow-frosted shop windows scrolling past at the edge of her vision. 
She pulled into the first spot she saw and parked, too weary to go 
any further, and aware it was quite a ways from where she intended 
to be. 
Around the City                                                                  Megha Jain 4
The Prairie Light Review, Vol. 43, No. 1 [2020], Art. 52
https://dc.cod.edu/plr/vol43/iss1/52


The Cat Lady

Szekely, Olivia

The Prairie Light Review 
Volume 43 Number 1 Article 58 
Fall 12-1-2020 
MoonShine 
Olivia Szekely 
College of DuPage 
Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr 
Recommended Citation 
Szekely, Olivia (2020) "MoonShine," The Prairie Light Review: Vol. 43 : No. 1 , Article 58. 
Available at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr/vol43/iss1/58 
This Artwork is brought to you for free and open access by the College Publications at DigitalCommons@COD. It 
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more information, please contact orenick@cod.edu. 
MoonShine                                                                          Olivia Szekely
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MoonShine

Rubio, Amy

The Wisest Mirror of Them All

Awards

Cosillo, Morgan

So You Want to Be a Dietitian?

Imrisek, Loradana

Physician Assistants: Dedicated to Assisting Healthcare Needs

Zillius, Bea

The Prairie Light Review 
Volume 42 Number 2 Article 54 
Spring 5-1-2020 
Van Gogh’s Bedroom Remastered 
Bea Zillius 
College of DuPage 
Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr 
Recommended Citation 
Zillius, Bea (2020) "Van Gogh’s Bedroom Remastered," The Prairie Light Review: Vol. 42 : No. 2 , Article 54. 
Available at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr/vol42/iss2/54 
This Artwork is brought to you for free and open access by the College Publications at DigitalCommons@COD. It 
has been accepted for inclusion in The Prairie Light Review by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@COD. For 
more information, please contact orenick@cod.edu. 
Dance Violin                                                         Syreeta Williams
You dance in the light
Above my breasts you rest your head to lay
The lines and angles sing along ... a dance tossed forth you sway
Your melodies bend a lasting song that never ever ends
An echo of sound all to a fault that soar above the wind
Van Gogh’s Bedroom Remastered         Bea Zillius
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Van Gogh’s Bedroom Remastered

Voegtle, Olivia

The Prairie Light Review 
Volume 42 Number 2 Article 59 
Spring 5-1-2020 
Tragic Routine 
Olivia Voegtle 
College of DuPage 
Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr 
Recommended Citation 
Voegtle, Olivia (2020) "Tragic Routine," The Prairie Light Review: Vol. 42 : No. 2 , Article 59. 
Available at: https://dc.cod.edu/plr/vol42/iss2/59 
This Selection is brought to you for free and open access by the College Publications at DigitalCommons@COD. It 
has been accepted for inclusion in The Prairie Light Review by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@COD. For 
more information, please contact orenick@cod.edu. 
Tragic Routine                                             Olivia Voegtle
  Step one: Spot the drops of blood mixed with urine in the toilet 
and/or feel the blood soaking through your jeans and try not to 
panic as you clean yourself up and blink back tears
  Step two: Stop panicking because spotting is normal and panicking 
makes everything worse. 
  Step three: Lie down and, above all, resist the urge to call Michael. 
He’s usually at work and it might be a false alarm. He shouldn’t be 
bothered. He should never be bothered. 
  Step four: Drink the bitter tea Michael’s mom prescribed the first 
time you miscarried and pray to a God you don’t believe in that 
maybe this time it really is no big deal and that doing everything 
right will finally pay off and your baby won’t disappear from your 
body and with it, all hope of being happy. 
It was 7:13 PM. And Alissa was eating dinner. 
The steak was higher quality than she usually bought, and she had 
broken out candles to set the mood. She had even wrestled into that 
tight black dress Michael had bought for her a couple of years past 
even though it was itchy and too tight across the butt. 
Michael had noticed none of this. 
He was instead sitting numbly across from his wife running over 
the last moments of the workday when Sabrina had come into his 
office for an after-hours “meeting.” The notes from said meeting 
were the streaks of Sabrina’s foundation on his collar, the wisps of 
her perfume in his hair and the tiny abrasion on his left ear where 
her manicured nails had scratched him. 
Alissa had noticed none of these things though and was just about 
to open her mouth to announce that, “Yes, baby, it’s true-we’re 
pregnant,” when she found herself back at Step One. 
Michael did not immediately notice his wife’s sorrow.  
He did not even notice her absence from the table. It took a whole 
four minutes for the sobbing from the bathroom to break into his 
fantasies of tight pencil skirts and financial reports reeking of 
Chanel No. 5. 
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When he did notice, however, he stood immediately. Marital 
instinct demanded action. 
He was prepared to go to the cramped bathroom and kneel beside 
his wife, and whisper all of the same nothings that he had whispered 
before on the nights when she realized her womb now held nothing 
and that she was nothing and that their love was nothing because it 
was incapable of leading to a child.
And although he knew he smelled of Sabrina’s perfume and that 
there were likely smudges of makeup on his face, he was still going 
to comfort his wife. It was 7:27 PM. 
Michael did love her. He loved her despite the meaningless sex with 
his secretary and the purposeful sex with his wife that never left her 
happy until it led to those two pink lines on a plastic stick, and even 
then didn’t really make her happy because those pink lines would 
give way to streaks of red down her thighs, and streaks of tears 
down her cheeks. 
Michael stood and crossed the kitchen, then stopped. 
He waited until the sobbing had quieted so he could think a 
little clearer. 
Michael pushed his chair into the table and blew out the candles. 
He put his light autumn coat back on, making sure that his keys and 
wallet were still in the right-hand pocket. Then, he wrote a quick 
note on the daisy stationery that Alissa always left on the counter by 
the sink, flicked off the porch light, and drove away. 
It was 8:16 AM. And Alissa had not yet eaten breakfast. 
She had instead spent the last two and a half hours digging 
contentedly in the depths of her garden. Her eyes were overwhelmed 
by the colors of the begonias and lilacs and tulips, her nose was 
content in their perfume, and her body found itself too at home 
among the willow trees and supple green leaves to complain of 
thirst or hunger. 
Last night, when Alissa was shielding herself from the knowledge 
that her husband really wasn’t coming back this time, the lolling-
tongued irises had chosen to open themselves to this cruel and 
beautiful world. Now, as she knelt humbly among them, the bruised 
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blossoms reached over the bounds of their plot to caress her supple 
brown skin. Alissa rocked on the balls of her feet and rose, the 
warm sunlight stroking her tear-stained cheeks. Her back and neck 
ached, but the physical pain was a welcome distraction from the 
throbbing heart in her chest. 
She would have to go back inside eventually and when she did she 
would see her wedding pictures mocking her from yellow walls, 
and her bed unslept in, and the closed door to the nursery with the 
barren crib and the blankets her mother had knitted still asleep 
in wooden drawers. And the rest of the house would be similarly 
empty, similarly full of things cast aside… like her. “No point 
anymore,” she murmured as she stepped over the sagging threshold 
that led into the kitchen. “Just no point at all.”
And she was right about this. Because Alissa wanted just 
one thing. 
The one thing that she had thought was hers. The one thing she 
had thought was guaranteed by the little gold ring on her hand. 
But Alissa had learned that nothing in life is guaranteed and that 
instead of being at home, with her, her husband was in the city. 
Spending money that she wanted to put toward fertility treatments, 
running his body down on hard liquor and cigarettes, and burying 
his sorrows in the pale skin of women who were not his wife and 
could do all the things his wife could not. Foremost of which, was 
make him happy. 
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