Issue 25

How Coin Tosses Prove God Exists: A Lab Report

By Connie Cai

ABSTRACT
In this report, we aim to prove the existence of God.
PROCEDURE
You loved coin tosses. To you, coin tosses always felt like fate flipping down onto the table, or destiny dropping with a musical plink. Every game, every argument, every yes or no question was settled with a coin toss. Let a coin decide, you would always say, pale hand grasping shiny silver; warm skin against slick, cool, thoughtless metal. Quarters worked the best, but you liked the look of pennies twirling through the air, like coppery fire spiraling down. A sign from heaven if the toss went your way, from hell if it didn’t.

DATA
You learned about heaven and hell (the Christian versions, at least) late into your life. Born-again Christian is what they called you at Mt. Olive’s church, the little white building on the corner of Holiday and Whitney you started visiting Sundays at 9:30 A.M. There, you learned that heaven was glamorous, beautiful like the stained glass windows, harmonious like the cascading hallelujahs of the church choir, and you gladly knelt at the feet of the wooden pews, breathing in the dust of the red hymnal books. You learned to fear hell, to grasp tightly instead on to faith, fate, and blind belief; religion gripped your bones and made your heart pound and your blood rush with singular purpose. It was a faith that even when tested, made you believe in destiny, in some kind of peaceful closure and of course, in sweet, sweet, salvation.

But before you were a born-again Christian, you were a physicist by trade, a child prodigy who scored near perfect on the national college entrance exams for physics. In college, you learned about Lagrangian numbers and the laws of kinematics––the simple classical mechanics that governed the physics of coin tosses. You knew, better than most, that there was nothing unpredictable about coin tosses, no way that heaven or higher powers would or could or should intervene. You knew the moment the coin left your hand, physics had already mapped its journey––a coin, destined to land on heads because of a cross breeze the moment you flicked it off your thumb, or on tails because of the extra weight of copper in its grooves. In physics, there was no such thing as fate, no such thing as faith or signs from heaven, only the raw data of the laboratory.

ANALYSIS
But even though the data was clearly laid out in the yellowed pages of your textbooks, you were never satisfied with the loops of logic that seemed so contrived compared to the effortless beauty of the world. And though you knew how Lagrangian numbers worked (Taylor series, and don’t forget the error term!) to calculate the effects of a cross breeze on coin tosses, you always asked yourself, who blew the cross breeze? and for that, there was no answer in the textbook.

In a quantum theory class you took your senior year of college, you thought you found the answer. In quantum theory, there is always a small chance of atom entanglement, where atoms will disobey the laws of classical mechanics, and thus, your coin toss would be unpredictable. The questions that I strived to solve but never could, the quantum theorists answered with the God of the Unknown, a being who was in control of everything that wasn’t explained or couldn’t be controlled by the laws in a physics textbook.

Years later, you ran into the God of the Unknown where you least expected Him––far from the sterile white walls and linoleum floors of laboratories and libraries, but in between the embossed black covers of the Bible you got from Mt. Olive’s annual Easter service. This time, though, as you sat in the wooden pews, you didn’t call him God of the Unknown; you called Him your Lord and Savior.

CONCLUSION
You’ve proven God because you’ve chosen to believe and trust in Him. Coin tosses are your metaphor, the very closest thing you have to representing Him. Both God and coin tosses decide your fate, both are a delicate balance between the unknown and known, both can follow physics or defy it (after all, didn’t God himself create the laws of physics in order to create light on the first day and the Earth on the second?).

Like it says on the coin––in God we trust, indeed.

Connie Cai graduated from Harvard College in May with a degree in Biochemistry, and a minor in Education. She’s currently a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan, where she teaches English and writes personal essays and fiction in her spare time.

Suburbia Burns Bright

By Samantha Haviland

My friends and I live
in old houses. Old houses with peeling rooftops

and in the summer, we sit on them
after dark. Sunburns shrivel and fall away in the wind. We pass

around a travel-sized bottle
of aloe vera. Our feet kicking up black bits of asphalt

—sometimes whole shingles slide down
into the side yard, into the garden, the driveway,

the back patio. We used to stargaze, but the sky
is so polluted now. My friends and I live in old houses

and none of the doors lock. The paint
is chipped. Stairs creak, voices drift through hollow walls

and warmth is not what it used to be—
we were sitting on the roof when the house on Halstead

burned. Like a bruised peach or a funeral.
It was raining but the fire didn’t care. When it rains we sit

in our basements. Some of them are refurbished
but we don’t like those. They’re too mundane. Beige rugs

and our fathers’ ellipticals in the corner. We like
basements with pipes unveiled, with shaking machines

and a garage that smells like pennies and soil
and sawdust. We like old houses with ancient backyards

with well pumps and birdbaths. Yellow tulips. We burn
old furniture in an old fire pit, watch aluminum handles melt

into the grass. The house on Halstead had crown
molding and a knocker shaped like a lion that melted and left

a puddle on the owners’ welcome rug. Home
SWEET Home. Old houses. Old gimmicks. Dry humor

makes dry kindling, and the wood burns
like my skin. Like my friends’ skin. Red, angry, in the dark

ash flies away with the breeze. We all smelled
the smoke, my friends and I. And we remembered that old houses

burn quickly. That wood cracks and flames spread
and that the hallways are much too narrow for our brackish bodies.

Samantha Haviland is a high school senior at Interlochen Arts Academy. Their work has been published in the Interlochen Review and recognized nationally by Scholastic.

in the margins

By Aamina Mughal

i am trying to hold you and i delicately.

you — woven like a spider’s web in between
my ribs, crisscrossed and haunting.
you knit together the space of my
diaphragm, so my heart never outgrows
the thread-bare chapel it lives in.

i — i test the word “gentle” in my mouth,
gentle, gentle, gentle. how it feels, how it tastes.
i ponder it. my body, still cradling the glass drops
that fell when the sky shattered. i still remember
your hand brushing mine. when the mind was
suddenly no longer cruel to the body.

i hold us with care, a deliberateness i didn’t have before,
this time my gloves are laced with impartiality.

i still hold us with reverie, this time like an
archeologist. i hold us up to the light.

Aamina Mughal is a young writer from Seattle where she serves on the Museum of Pop Culture’s Youth Advisory Board. She writes for TeenTix, and her work can be found on the TeenTix blog and on the Encore Spotlight. Her writing tends to pertain to identity, the intangible, and things like race and sexuality. In particular, how those intangible ideas interact with the tangible parts of identity like geography and family. When she’s not writing she can be found listening to new wave, listening to Taylor Swift, or binge-reading queer novels.

Smoke Breaks

By Emma Lagno

I need a smoke, I say,
in my pajama pants,
gray zombie flesh exposed
by a hole in the inner thigh.
With bone-crackling fingers
I slip on my fleece-lined winter boots,
let untied laces writhe against my movement,
host-less horsehair worms eager to bore through exoskeleton,
for knot-tying and mind control. My body passes
through the front door, like vapor, like smog,
I fold my knees over a front-stoop step.
The wind bites blood back into my cheeks. I check my pulse,
a muted shiver under onionskin. I reach for a lighter and a pack
but when my hand hits the silk of an empty pocket,
I remember,
with a flickering bedsheet shock,
that I’ve never smoked a cigarette,
never, not once in my life.
A red light turns green and with a rush of traffic
I decide to press on anyway,
cigarette-less.
I hold the gap between my first and middle finger,
press the negative space to lava-rock lips,
long drag.
Black soot burns down my throat, drips
into my lungs like candle wax, they bloat three sizes with heat.
I blow my clouds at passersby,
but they are busy blowing their own, dodging the acid rain.
The nicotine burrows into the pink-meat folds of my brain,
sends a rosy glow through my body like a pulsing cartoon heart.
I flash back and forth between
monster and human-again.
I sit and smoke until the sky breaks open and bleeds,
until my last neighbor tumbles over,
the last car sinks into the concrete,
the last building crumbles into ash,
rejoins the dead night mist.
I grind the remains
of my ghost-cigarette into the sidewalk
with a twisted ballerina toe
before turning inside,
half-satisfied,
half-human,
only half-pretending.

Emma Lagno is a writer from upstate New York. She currently studies the literature and religions of the ancient Mediterranean at Harvard Divinity School.

Dear Brother

By Mila Cuda

(who braved the brunt
for the both of us)
(who, stilted or stunted,
is still alive at twenty-five)
(who came out cord-caught
& kicking, miracle boy,
who came out singing Sinatra,
came out singing
Came Out Swinging,
who came out
tender as a bruise,
who bruises so easily,
like seriously, my tender-blooded
Von Willebrand brother,
King of the Block-
buster summer)
(who, in second grade, was shamed
for having nails painted flame—
who instead of going home,
& bathing in acetone,
inspired boys to do the same,
to steal their mother’s polish
& paint, a protest in each shade
of pink, gold, green, blue)
(you, who protected me
from the torment of elementary,
who found me sobbing by the swing sets
& said, half-threat,
you’d hit the heels of
my bully with the sharp edge
of your Razor scooter, you,
who taught me tough skin,
never tormented again,
you, who still holds my hiccups with
the softest snarl, you)
(big brother, who cries beside me
at the Tigers Jaw concert, whole
decade later, whose life
was saved by songs
shouted in the shower,
shouted shrouded
in sweat, shouted silent
in the tourmaline night,
big brother, who gave me lyrics
like heirlooms for when the hurt hums
like heartbeats, like blue prints
of an architectured ocean
you tread & survived
—so do it,
I dare you,
I triple dog dare
you, swim up straight
& admit that you’re special.

Mila Cuda is the former Youth Poet Laureate of the West Coast. Her work has been featured on Button Poetry, Teen Vogue, Rookie, and PBS. She is the lead poetry editor of the feature film Summertime (dir. Carlos Lopez Estrada), which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Mila is a caffeine-sensitive lesbian from Los Angeles with a sheer enthusiasm for spiders.

Dreams About Death

By Shane McDonnell

I still saw Cormac for a while after he died. Always as I slept. The dream always followed the same basic timeline. It was the last time I ever spoke to him. In the dream, as it was in real-life, I am unaware that in a week or two he would fall from his bicycle on the Luas line between Harcourt Street and Charlemont and his warm, kind heart would be stopped forever.

I met him outside Theatre L in University College Dublin’s Arts Block. I was on my way to a lecture and saw him furiously typing emails – presumably about some sort of rally or protest to take place soon. I stopped and I spoke to him at length – those who know me will know how much I talk; those who know Cormac will know how much he talked too. There is no surprise whatsoever that I ended up fifteen minutes late for that lecture. It was a Critical Theory module, something I suspect Cormac would have found intensely interesting.

When I emerged, he was still there. Still bashing away at the keyboard. I spoke to him again. He was about to leave for the City Centre, to Leinster House. He had recently been elected Chair of Labour Youth. I got the slight feeling I was keeping him from his work so we agreed to go for a pint soon. Then I left.

It is odd to think that not long after that, Cormac would no longer be around. It is equally strange at this point to imagine that Covid-19 was never a factor in his life. He never experienced the mask-wearing, the lockdowns, the itching for a pint. The ongoing pandemic has become such a by-and-by of everyday life that it is hard to imagine that there are people who never had to consider such things. I often wonder what he would have made of it all.

I had that dream on a few occasions. Sleep has always been a tricky enough negotiation for me. Up until that point, I experienced intermittent bouts of insomnia. This happened every few months – maybe three or four times a year. The insomnia was replaced by this dream.

For a while I considered the idea that this was not a dream at all and that it was time-travel instead. The consistency of the timeline within the dream – as well as the fact that, during the dream, I did not know what was about to happen – puzzled me. It made some amount of sense that this was entirely real, and that I was reliving this event by time-travelling back to it, in a Groundhog Day sort of fashion. Ultimately, whether or not it was time-travel is irrelevant – once I was up, life goes on as usual, and Cormac has not returned. I checked several times. I admit now that nothing will ever be different simply because of a dream I had.

About a month after Cormac died, I went to Berlin for the weekend with some friends. The ins and outs of that trip are fuzzy and unclear (and to be honest I’d like to keep it that way). When I got home, a bout of insomnia followed, but this time, the occasions where I did sleep were marked by night terrors. Night terrors are no fun whatsoever. This lasted for about ten days. I was a ghost haunting UCD’s campus during that time. At some point, however, amidst the night terrors and insomnia, I had another dream about Cormac. This one was different. On this occasion, we were still outside Theatre L, but nobody else was around. It also looked slightly paled, as if a graphic designer had toned everything down. Another big difference was that everything seemed slowed down. Not quite in slow-motion, like in a film, but slightly off the pace of real-life. That’s how I know it was a dream and not time-travel.

This time, I knew what was going to happen – that Cormac was not long for this world. I don’t think he knew. I don’t know why I didn’t try to warn him. Maybe it’s because I knew it was a dream.

We talked for a long time. About unimportant stuff, in the grand scheme of things – but don’t they always turn out to be the conversations you remember most?

After a while, I knew it was time to go. I knew what was going to happen to him, but there was no long-winded ‘goodbye’ or any of that. There was a brief “see you later”, and I gave him a hug, and I left. I have not seen him since.

My insomnia has not returned since those couple of weeks. Maybe, in dealing with my dream about Cormac, something else was put to bed, too.

We have spent the last year or so living with various levels of Covid-19 restrictions. Cormac did not live long enough to see any of this happen. As I mentioned, it is strange to think that a person I went to school with has gone before the most seismic event in living memory. Cormac died in December 2019 and I have tried to write about it many times since, but always failed. I wonder what he would have made of the year that has happened since.

Patrick Freyne wrote that the death of a schoolfriend caused, for him, a realisation that you can die in a stupid, meaningless way. Until I read those words I did not know that I had the same realisation. When I was a teenager I used to cross the road without looking and weave in and out of passing cars as I did so. I don’t know when I stopped doing this, or whether it has anything to do with this epiphany. I do know I haven’t done it since then. This may also just be a factor of me growing up – though the people closest to me would tell you that is yet to happen.

Recently I dreamt about death for the first time in a long time. In this instance, it was me who was dying. I was brought into a room by a doctor and told that I had about a month left. There was nothing in the way of diagnosis or explanation, besides the fact that I was, indeed, dying. This information, ultimately, changed very little. I still went to work. I still walked every day. I still did everything I usually do except I was very sad whilst doing it.

In this dream, I received a call from my optometrist to tell me that I was due another eye test. For some reason, I went along with it. Though I was going to be dead in a few weeks, I scheduled an appointment for a week after I was supposed to already be dead. This reminded me of life more broadly. Nietschze might argue that art is a howl against death. I would argue that everyday life itself is a quiet rebuttal of death. We are all going to die. What is everyday life – listening to the radio, kissing a partner, petting a dog – if not a modest decision to cold-shoulder our date with eternity?

I woke up before I reached the end of this dream – that is, before I died. I think that’s the point. I like to think I have a gentle awareness that someday I am going to die, but that I am not anxious or death-stricken.

Richard Dawkins, the unwavering atheist, wrote that “we are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.” Dawkins was not anxious nor was he death-stricken or racing towards life’s finish-line with vigour. What he meant was that the potential number of people who could have been here instead – instead of you, instead of me – means that the fact we get to experience death itself means we have experienced life. That certainly makes us the lucky ones.

I’m sure there are more dreams to come about death. I have not dreamt about Cormac in a year, but I can still imagine his face, still hear his voice. One day, that will fade. For now, at least, he is as alive as anybody else inside my head.

Shane McDonnell is a student from Dublin. He is studying English with Creative Writing at University College Dublin. His work has appeared in Sonder Magazine, Silver Apples Magazine, The Wells Street Journal, The New Word Order, ‘Brevity is the Soul: Wit from Lockdown Ireland’ and Caveat Lector.