Twisting Topeka (20 page)

“
Umm, umm. You sure do got
ideas, now,” Amos murmured.

Josh slung his arm over the
caretaker’s shoulders while they ambled back towards the building.
“I do. I’m going to make darn sure
psychiatry
won’t ever be the
same!”

Tunnels

Leah Sewell

I was done. I told my husband I didn’t
love him anymore. I sent that spear screaming straight through the
kitchen ceiling into his heart. Our marriage splashed the tiles,
making a mess I was too weary to clean. I took off my apron and
left out the back door, wobbling like a marionette down tricky
stairs.

I went into the garden, what was left
of the garden from last fall. The merciless birds ate the berries.
I’d tied old discs to stakes to ward them off. It was a fruitless
chore. In spring’s wane light, the discs turned and strobed gold
and blue. I held one up like a mirror but my face gave no
indication. If there had been a mountain anywhere in sight, I
would’ve climbed it then and there. I would’ve climbed it to the
top and looked around, wiser for the view. Seeing the bigger
picture.

But this was caraway Kansas in a
small, kept neighborhood with rain still hugging the curbs from
last night’s storm, leaves traveling the street’s moat to the
sewers. Deep inside the sewers, foxes made dens on old brick
ledges, waiting for the watery tumult to subside. The only thing
left up in the sky was a smear and a waft of ozone.

Down at the end of the block was the
empty Topeka State Hospital, its patina peaks and turrets rising
over the sleepy neighborhood like a child’s dream of the old world,
of a castle, of a world inside of doors with intricate carpets and
relationships. I walked to it, my legs mobilized as if pulled by
string.

I knew better than a child. This thing
was a psychologist’s fantasy taken shape in handsome blonde brick
and sheen of stone, but inside was a horror of porcelain, pain, and
bodies still in shock, wandering these decades after death. How
romantic. My husband and I - before he was a husband and I his wife
- crept in one night, drunk on love, and embraced on the floor of
the broken ballroom. The dust was thick with lives. It furrowed
into our pores, sifted on tongues that we slid in each other’s
mouths, high on this, reckless on this.

I found it utterly unfamiliar; a total
stranger. The building squatted among the oaks, smug and stupid.
Its finery an insult to its history. A liar, a boaster, a pretty
facade concealing a black, black soul.

I stood in front of its face, studying
and struggling to decipher what I ever saw in those shattered
panes, peeling balustrade, stains, cracks, and sediment. Its porch
arms flew open, asking for a crushing embrace.  

They say it was a wrecking ball that
did the final blow. No. It was me. I shook the cobwebs off my heart
and the sluggish beat went back to its original fervor. I was a
wreck of anger. I poured all the hurt and stones into a vortex,
casting off that heavy debris. They say that people came from all
points once the waves of dust announced its fall. It was me.
Strings pulled my limbs. Wind pulled my fists into hammers made of
air and magnets. That’s how the asylum fell.

It was inside me all along, the
tornado he once tried to quell. Here and there across the city
floats down a tile. A shard. The past in a bit of brick. And a
layer of dust the foxes notice, pricking their snouts at the
scent.

When I went missing, no one thought to
look in the tunnels, the only remaining corridors of the buildings
now gone. They raked the river and searched the skinny patches of
wood behind the mini malls and fast food joints. They rustled the
homeless from their pockets beneath the viaduct. They fingered my
husband but found nothing incriminating. He was capable of harm but
not culpable for this. Not in the eyes of the police.

I saw the lid to the tunnel cocked
off, leaving a hole for my body to slip through and a hold for
lowering myself into it. No one saw me go down or heard me call
hoarsely for help when I lost my way under the flat plane where the
asylum used to be. Someone must have slid the lid back over the
opening.

I saw only black but knew the former
inmates roamed here too like restless Minotaur, huffing breath
against my neck as they passed on some mission. It wasn’t until I
died eons later, slumped invisible against the flaking concrete
wall, that I finally found my way free.

The websites call me the Wailing
Woman. They think I was mad and died at the asylum. I was mad, that
much is true. In some ways, I still am. The former inmates regard
me with distrust and keep their distance. But I didn’t die at the
asylum. Most of me died at the house down the street. The last of
me, in a tunnel underground.

Love and
Friendship

Lissa Staley

Login successful 4/14/2026 Discussion
Board Population=2

ENGLISH LIT 499-SELF-GUIDED DISCUSSION
BOARD

TOPIC: EMMA BY JANE AUSTEN, BRITISH
LITERATURE

ThomasG: I did not find this story of
youthful hubris and the perils of misconstrued romance to be my
particular cup of tea.

KateM: DUDE. If you copy and paste
from Wikipedia, use quotation marks and a citation.

KateM: Also referring to
tea doesn’t make your answer more British.

KateM: How am I supposed to receive
the benefits of a quality public secondary education online if my
peer group is completely lacking?

KateM: Are you even going to
reply?

ThomasG: Pardon me. The book is an
archaic 211 years old. The concerns and difficulties of genteel
women in 1815 Britain are no longer relevant in Kansas in
2026.

ThomasG: And in case you
haven’t figured it out, the anti-plagiarism software only checks
whole sentences, not phrases.

KateM: Again with the Wikipedia. Did
you even read this book?

KateM: Seriously. Did you?

KateM: Did you casually swipe through
the pages on the ebook for the completion credit while actually
watching a vid?

ThomasG: I read it. Duh. Although it
was weeks ago and no one has ever posted in this discussion board
before.

ThomasG: And the Kate
Beckinsale film isn’t bad.

ThomasG: These English credits fulfill
my graduation requirements with less hassle than any course with a
virtual lab or—heaven forbid—groupwork.

ThomasG: The reading and quizzes are
no trouble, but requiring 20 posts on a discussion board that no
human will ever read is already trying my patience.

ThomasG: Are you still
there?

KateM: I’m human. YOU are
trying MY patience.

KateM: You quote from
Wikipedia and you don’t like people.

KateM: And yet here we are discussing
British literature in our limited free time.

KateM: It’s quite
odd.

ThomasG: “I am going to
take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” Was Jane
Austen describing you here? Or would even Austen deign to find you
likeable?

KateM:
Quoting the author isn’t proof of anything resembling
comprehension. And personal attack is unnecessary.

KateM: I’m sure Jane
Austen would find me to be a delight.

ThomasG: Austen liked
EMMA. She’s baseless and tasteless.

ThomasG: Okay, pop quiz time. Which of
these characteristics best describes you:

a.handsome b. clever c. rich d.
spoiled e. headstrong f. self-satisfied

ThomasG: Just seethe
silently if your answer is “all of the above.”

KateM: …

KateM: That wasn’t silent
seething. I was just speechless. Didn’t you learn anything from
this book?

ThomasG: This book is irrelevant in
our modern world. It tells me that career-wise a man can be a
lawyer, doctor, businessman, or vicar.

ThomasG: We both know that
our illustrious online public school isn’t the path to any of those
professions, not any more.

KateM: At least a private
tutor isn’t such an anachronism in 2026. Plenty of rich kids have
them.

ThomasG: What idiot put this book on
the assigned reading list?

ThomasG: This book firmly
reminds us that we are in the working classes, the people who are
almost invisible in Austen’s world.

KateM: Some “idiot” with
enough money and influence to buy a cozy seat in an air conditioned
office instead of spending the day on hands and knees in the dirt,
turning a field of pumpkins.

ThomasG: Our lives don’t
matter in the narrative, except in how we support the privileged
elite.

ThomasG: So why do you or I even need
to complete secondary education to take our place among the
laboring class?

KateM: Rant much? I can barely keep
up.

KateM: And you know even the entry
level jobs require a diploma now.

ThomasG: Honest discussion
isn’t ranting. And the truth about the dismantled public education
system hurts.

ThomasG: The diploma isn’t
an accomplishment or a rite of passage, it’s just one more way to
oppress and control us.

KateM: Harsh!

ThomasG: What community service did
you do during daylight today?

KateM: Point taken. At
least the screen on my school issued tablet looks great in the
dark, since that’s the only time I log in.

ThomasG: Are you avoiding the
question? Or are you too rich and spoiled to have a service
assignment?

KateM: Ouch! I didn’t
realize we had moved into true confession time.

KateM: And, no, I pay for public
school technology fees with my community service hours just like
everyone else.

ThomasG: And did you improve yourself
and become a better person?

KateM: Only by listening to 5 hours of
podcasts while I harvested mixed greens and lettuce.

ThomasG: Good thing you’re
young, since that sounds backbreaking.

KateM: What about you?

ThomasG: I pollinated apples by hand,
2 hours on foot and 3 hours off a bucket truck.

KateM: Ha! You’re quite
the sex machine. And such stamina!

ThomasG: I prefer
“fertilization specialist”.

ThomasG: And not to redirect you away
from flirting with me too much, but back to the book we are
supposedly discussing here. What about relationships?

ThomasG: The romantic take-away of
Emma is that your true love is most likely twice your age and
already your brother-in-law.

ThomasG: How was anyone
supposed to meet anyone else in Austen’s novels if they didn’t
already know them?

KateM: Much like my life, where the
only people my age that I see are down the agriculture row from me,
or across the aisle of the transport bus.

KateM: And conversation is
discouraged, always. How is anyone supposed to meet anyone else in
Topeka if they don’t already know them?

ThomasG: You can meet people at
dances. Austen is all about first impressions at country
assemblies, you know.

KateM: That’s Pride and
Prejudice, not Emma. How many Austen books have you
read?

ThomasG: All of them. You can check
the discussion boards.

ThomasG: I believe that you and I are
the only students in public online school in Kansas to read a book
by Jane Austen in the last 5 years.

KateM: What makes us so
special?

ThomasG: With hundreds of public
domain books to choose from, students choose shorter books and more
modern language. They take the easy way out.

KateM: I like that we’re
both eschewing easy with Austen.

ThomasG: Nice. The readability score
of this conversation just skyrocketed. A few more astonishing word
choices and we could earn bonus points.

KateM: Demonstrating a proficient
vocabulary is the least of my personal concerns.

ThomasG: So, what character deficiency
are you trying to remedy by choosing Emma? Do you look like her AND
act like her?

KateM: I call phishing on
that question. If you’re going to compare me to Emma, then let me
ask a personal question.

KateM: Are you actually 37 years old
like George Knightly?

ThomasG: As poorly-monitored as this
educational discussion board is, I assume they still screen for
that.

ThomasG: They may not
appear to hold us responsible for what we type here, but I’m
betting they don’t want to be held responsible for what we type
here either.

ThomasG: The great
migration to self-directed online-only education is all about the
plausible deniability of everyone involved. Emma isn’t the only
intentionally clueless one.

KateM: This is the best
literature discussion I’ve ever had.

KateM: I can’t believe I’m
going to type this, but I wish we could meet in person.