By Josh Emrys Payong

“Hastily taking shelter from those tempestuous winds, I found myself in a building so eerily unfamiliar, so profoundly…gothic,” recounts Kayleigh Lunaglow ‘28, “strange rocks in glass cases…the twisting and turning of the layout so reminiscent of the forests of Brockden Brown’s winding frontier wilderness…I was completely out of my depth.”

Lunaglow’s recent publication through the Grinnell Press, A Saga of Stars and Substrates (endearingly abbreviated to SoSaS by the two people that manage its Fandom page), follows her coincidental journey into what we know as the Noyce Science Center. But to an English major like her, it was a land of complete mystery, chock-full of weird symbols and outlandish implications of future employment.

“It was just so alien to my aesthetic,” she complained, adjusting her glasses with fake plastic lenses and drinking oat milk lavender matcha (with two teaspoons of cinnamon, no less) out of a sepia brown mug that read “Actually, ‘Frankenstein’ refers to the doctor, not the monster” that she made sure we could see throughout the interview. Indeed, Lunaglow’s red scarves and plaid cardigans would stand out in the heat of early fall when SoSaS took place.

One of the only points of character development in Lunaglow’s SoSaS was in her romantic entanglement with a stranger she found three days into wandering around the Noyce basement: an Ancient Chinese Warfare major, John Confucius ‘89, who had found himself lost in the building decades ago in much the same way as Lunaglow herself. Here is an excerpt from their last poignant conversation:

He was the Miranda to my Ferdinand—lovers brought together by fate after a magical storm had swept me away to this world of sorcery. A world where strange juices that made you throw up were kept in glass bottles marked with big red symbols. A world where libraries tell of the meeting of “gametes” or the repulsion between “electrons” rather than the poignant tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. All I knew is that if I were to leave this place, it would be with him.

“A man whose hands have never bled from the reins of a chariot cannot hope to lure a tiger down the mountain,” said John, his own girthy fingers wrapped around a rusty decorative polearm, “much less deceive the heavens to cross the ocean.”

“So true, John.” He was as tightly wrapped in mystery as I was around his pinky. I loved the way the bronze lamellae clattered like calming windchimes upon his large, no doubt hairy chest. His language—as Virginia Woolf would say—was wine upon my lips, which I was constantly licking out of sheer desire.

Suddenly, the fire alarm blared with the desperation of a cornered army.

“Of the thirty-six divine stratagems, the best is to flee!”

And off he went.

Sometimes I wonder if he was even real. Maybe, in my drifting delirium, I constructed him. Not as a man, but as a metaphor with a pulse. I mistook a brief collision of atoms for divine design — and called it fate to avoid saying ‘accident.’ But his wisdom…his hunkiness…and his spear, his hard tool of iron that strikes the heavens and the hearts of people, rusty as it is, still…

This event was so memorable to Lunaglow that she dedicated a running Substack blog to John Confucius called My Love is an Empty Fortress: The Art of Parting.

“More like A Shit of Fart and Balls,” comments known literary critic Bobert Boyce ‘28 under one of Lunaglow’s blog posts. “And wasn’t John, like, fifty? Next thing you’re gonna tell me is that being in Noyce froze his age and made his dick twice as big. You English majors are fucking ridiculous.” As it turns out, that is exactly how Lunaglow described John in a recent post, titled His Stratagem Was My Body in the Bedchambers of War.

Pick up a copy of her book from the mailroom today! Or whenever you want, really. It sure as hell isn’t running out.