By Makai Andrews   When she was in grade school the boys would make fun of her because her thumbs looked like toes. She painted them orange and dotted them with silver rhinestones to prove them wrong. No one would waste that much time on a foot.   Mother was having an affair with the pool boy when she was eleven. He was a young man from Arizona, moved here in hopes that he’d get in with some celebrity housewife who needed a pool cleaning and an actor for her next movie. He wasn’t having much luck, so far. Mother had the gardener drive in a big tree on one of those trucks that are too big to turn at normal street corners. She planted it next to the pool, where she was sure dozens of leaves would fall everyday. She shook a branch to make sure, dumping piles of leaves into the crisp water. Now the pool boy would have to come four times a week, not two. There’s just so many leaves in there, silly me for planting a tree right above it, she tells Father. Oh, but isn’t it just beautiful.   Father liked his whiskey. Liked his whiskey with ice. Liked whisky with ice that looked like little islands of glass were floating up from a pool of golden mud. Sometimes she thought if she stuck her finger in the liquid, it would harden around her finger and she’d have a gold-capped nail. She tried it once, but instead of a special finger she got broken glass in her arm and bruises from Father’s hard day at the office. She wiped up the golden mud after he was finished. Brother was born when she was thirteen. He had eyes like hers...

The Deep End by Annalise Lozier The sun bobbed in the sky like a peach in the water. We sunk below the surface and you were the apex of a triangle. With the light slicing past you, I was hidden in your faded glow, a planet in the dusk; and my fingernails, which my dad said made me look like a homeless goth looked to you like worn-down continents hidden in the binding of an atlas. Your face falls apart like tissue paper, dark purple and melting in the past. I can never really picture your nose and I can’t say how often I’ve mistaken your smile with the pointy chin of the man in the moon, but your silhouette still burns on my eyelids. You’ll be relieved to know I don’t love you, cross my heart and burn out my eyes. Your fingers pushed through my chest like it was so much dust, you tapped the metal hatch to ask if anyone was home, but there wasn’t-- it was only me and a few gray teeth. underbridge she had a face like sarcasm, her teachers said she scraped the paint off the walls when she skirted too close to the edge of the room under her shoulder blades she could pull back the muscle and untangle the tendons the tendons wrapped around her bones played with her joints like a rubik’s cube                               when she spoke she looked               towards the windows or at the wormy yarn knit its fingers into sweaters she laughed loudly to cover the cracking sounds her spine made she laughed with her teeth bared she had a face...

“The people you work with make it or break it,” enrollment advisor Justin Grogan says, and for him SFUAD surpasses his expectations. Grogan works with prospective and current students in the Creative Writing and Literature and Photography departments.