Published at the VIrginia Commonwealth University Student Media Center, Richmond, Virginia. Copyright 2025. Printed locally at Carter Printing Co. Titles are set in Komu New C. Body text is set in Interstate.
noun
1. something different, abnormal, peculiar, or not easily classified : something anomalous
“Tell the rabble my name is Cabell“
-James Branch Cabell to his editor, to help people learn how to pronounce his name. Cabell used the word derogatively but we are taking it back. These pages will showcase the writing and illustrations of our rabble, the ordinary students of VCU.
Acknowledgement
There is something extraordinary about rabble this time around. This has definitely been a year of transition; new staff members but the same outpouring of endless creativity. Even though things are a little bit different now, it feels like we have the energy and confidence to make this rabble special. We wanted something fresh and bold, and we hope that our chapbook this year can signify our commitment to quality.
Thank you especially to Virginia Commonwealth University and the City of Richmond for providing us with a wonderful community of artists and writers alike. Thank you to Jessica Clary and Mark Jeffries at the Student Media Center for all your guidance thus far. Thank you to our new staff members; Ashley, Mack, and Esther, I truly appreciate all that you do to make this publication come to fruition. And of course, to our new editors, illustrators, and students who so graciously submitted their work to us, thank you. We wouldn’t be here without you.
Melody Vang -Editor-in-Chief
Masthead Editor-in-Chief
Melody Vang
Art Director
Ashley Gabales
Secretary
Mack Blair
Social Media Manager
Esther Schneider
Cover Artist
Melody Vang
Designers
Quinn Lysek
Ashley Gabales
Editors
Melody Vang
Esther Schneider
Mack Blair
Andromeda Balane
Mollie Donovan
Julian Piccone
Emma Pizzillo
Elina Perera
Illustrators
Emma Huysman
Luce Barahona-Gonzalez
Andromeda Balane
Julianna Gutierrez
Ashley Gabales
Maddie Bui
Eliza Young
ANT LIKE AN ANGEL, TOOTH LIKE A GRAVE
Mollie Donovan, illustration by Emma Huysman EXTRATERRESTRIAL
Julianna Gutierrez, illustration by Luce Barahona-Gonzalez. HOW TO RESCUE GOLDFISH
elina, illustration by Andromeda Balane IN4MATION SUPERHIGHWAY
Elyott Saxe, illustration by Ashley Gabales LYCANTHROPIC SPECTRUM DISORDER
Elyott Saxe, illustration by Julianna Gutierrez MIRROR IMAGE
Esther Schneider, illustration by Ashley Gabales STARGIRL
Andromeda Balane, illustration by Maddie Bui THE DOLL AT THE DINNER TABLE
Cassidy Larson, illustration by Eliza Young STRAGGLERS
elina, illustration by Ashley Gabales
Mollie Donovan
I can still feel the bite of the ant hanging off my tongue. Its pinchers buried in the wet, bumpy expanse of my tongue. My tastebuds nothing but clumps of dirt. Maybe it thought that my tongue was a worm. The great devouring kind, leaving nothing left in its path. It would explain the seemingly neverending gaping cavern just beyond it.
Perhaps it saw my mouth, not unlike a cave. It’s dark and damp, home to stalagmites reaching up to align with its stalactite counterpart. The moans, groans, and whooping rushing out in gusts so strong it would shake the walls and would scare any brave vermin and unwanted bacteria.
Perhaps it was drawn to the sweet stench of rot. From one tooth, less a stalactite, more a headstone. Maybe it felt kinship with the tooth too small to survive. Turned in the wrong direction, its purpose is lost. My tooth, like the ant, ended up in the wrong place, no enamel or super ant strength left.
Perhaps it wanted to feed, to drink. It was surely trapped in pools of goo. Saliva, acid for the soon-tobe dead. Maybe it saw the dripping of the necrotic insides of my tooth. A pustule full of white-hot death must be better than drowning.
The ant, not unlike the tooth, craved a release. Neither would go quietly. My tooth went first. One final day-long stabbing, fading into a dull ache. The ant decides that the tentacle-mussel-devouring worm would be a good enough statement. With its final cry for life, it would in turn inflict its death, its pain upon me. The ant’s body was removed, but its anger lingered. For months, I could feel its body, its own mouth fighting mine. Now all that is left are two holes, not quite microscopic.
I would like to think that they found kinship. The ghost of a root is holding my tooth down. Small drills the size of an ant will drill. Bite it. Open the sweetness of decay once more to the air. Cement will fill it. A cover will be placed. The tooth looks bigger now. It’s the proper color, and for those who would look into my cavernous expanse, they would see a healthy ecosystem. But I know that that tooth is nothing more than a rock now. A mausoleum.
Julianna Gutierrez
There used to be a time when I thought I was human
As I’ve grown up I’ve realized that is far from the truth
I was never the perfect child
And I can barely function now as an adult
Dread feeds the black hole in my chest
Weighing me down
I used to hear stories of spacemen and the stars
Dreaming that I could be like them one day
Slowly that dream has faded
Replaced by a certain truth
I was always the alien
Earth’s gravity eventually will crush me
Maybe one day I will find the right planet
Before the weight
Finally tears me apart
For now I will keep looking towards the sky
Waiting to see
The spaceship meant for me
by Luce Barahona-Gonzalez
1. Take notice. Feel the cold, unforgiving material, face pressed against the glass tank. You are eight years old at the doctor’s office, watching the unearthly movement of the ruby-red creatures. Your fingers reach, make contact, and push further, imagining the glass molding beneath your touch, imagining it shifting to allow you entrance. If you close your eyes, the chill against your hands feels like water. You sway with the sensation, picturing waves carrying you to somewhere unlike this place.
2. Take the chance. When you are ten, you visit the state fair and see the hundred glittering goldfish in the wide-open white porcelain prize tank. You spend twenty-five dollars on winning them over and over. Your sister and your brother lurk behind you, restless. They stand with funnel cake and a turkey leg, respectively. You wrinkle your nose at the smell of salt and oil hanging thick and heavy in the air and, a little bit, at your siblings’ lack of patience for a decision with this much gravity.
3. Take your pick. Stand with the prize bowl, golden as daylight. Taste the iron where you’ve been biting your lip as you face the agonizing choice. Block out the rides’ creaking, the riders’ yelps, and the sound of your mother calling your name until it all fades to a drone underneath the humming fluorescents. Then make up your mind. Bend your shoulders slightly. Take the bowl in your left hand and the net in your right. Pinch the handle between your thumb and index finger. Feel the bite of the cold metal and move your hands steadily, reverently.
4. Take your time. From this close, you could reach into the tank. You imagine how it would feel. The only sound would be the slide of your hand into the water. Ripples would extend from the point of entry- the only interruption in the hyaline surface. Your movement would slow, fingers smooth against each other, unburdened in the water. Scales would brush like velvet against the side of your hand, fast enough to miss if you weren’t so devoted to this moment. Nothing is more real than bubbling mouths and beady eyes. Nothing is more beautiful than light playing over thousands of scales, painting them luminous as stained glass windows.
5. Take the plunge. Return to the present, to the act, the choice. The fish skate the surface from below, looking like they’re breaking the sheet of water, but only coming close. You dip the net into the water and hear the splash over all else, even the whirring of the water filter and the din of the fairground. Select the five most golden ones, Olympic rings of your making. Recall laurel wreaths from the books of myth you read in fourth-grade English and imagine a crown far more precious.
6. Take them home. Fill five bags with water. Feel the heft in your hands, make your sister and brother hold one each. You keep the three you saw first. Clenched in your small fists, the bags droop and shake as you walk, weight shifting with each step. Holding the fish up to your face, you look into its tiny eyes, into the infinity of their blackness. Could you be made of the same material? Could you
7. Take up their space?
ELYOTT SAXe
You have to see this video youre gonna laugh
ahsjkdshfgkjsgjldkgjk
Do you ever think about how if we were born like 20 years earlier we never would have met each other
I’m so ancient compared to you! You’re just a baby! :)
I need to meet you IRL I swear ^_^
i kno i feel so lucky 2 grow up in this era
I’m ending it all tonight. I can’t fucking live on this earth anymore. I have all the pills next to me and I’m about to take them.
oh my god
i feel like if i was older id have been so lonely cus no1 around me is like
When I was your age, we still had landline phones in my house. Oh, how the time flies…
I drew us togetherrrr plz dont Hang on my parents are calling me
i think my parents dont believe ur real
idk how do you explain it
I guess I’m kind of like your replacement mom.
no1 around me is weird the way i am u know
i swear u will find something tmrw 2 be happy abt
I totally get what you mean like thank god there is a box in my house full of other little freaks
No one in my life gives a shit about me. Literally not one person on this planet will miss me.
I was… doing something I probably shouldn’t discuss with you, haha. Not until you’re older.
;)
i cant imagine how it would be going thru middle school without u
I can’t imagine how it would be going through life without you.
I can’t possibly ruin your innocence. no no no i will
STOP IM CRYINGHGKJ i will miss u
LMAOOOOOO what can i say 2 make u feel better
:3 Awww omg plz
Ily ilu i luv u <3
Elyott Saxe
She doesn’t really get why people are screaming. She isn’t freaking out or anything. Alright, she was for a second, but, you know, it was only a second, and it’s not like she was attacking anybody. She’s calm now. But everyone is still screaming, pushed up against the wall, staring. It doesn’t make sense to her. And it’s too loud.
What happened was: She’d already been having a bad day, and then there was an algebra test, and the clock was ticking and the girl next to her tick was clicking her pen tick and the click fan in the corner tick click of the classroom was whirring tick and the whir click tick wood of someone click else’s tick pencil was scratching whir on their whir click paper and scratch whir the tag in the tick whir scratch back of her shirt scratch was tick rubbing against her skin whir click and then someone scratch click whir tick moved their chair and it made a loud sound and she was just gone.
There’s a gap of a few seconds in her memory. On one end she was seated and biting her tongue. On the other end she was clamping her teeth around her desk, rearing back until it was lifted above her head. The wood gave a little between her jaws. She slammed the legs back down onto the tile, and when she let go, there was an arc of dents where her teeth had been. No one got hurt, but she feels bad about the desk.
Illustration by
Julianna Gutierrez
It is way, way too loud.
She remembers that her psychologist said the most effective way to prevent sensory overload and meltdowns is to avoid the stimuli. He’d encouraged her to stand up for herself, to tell people that no one can force her to stay in a distressing environment. She walks over to the door and shoulders against it to swing it open. Just down the hallway is a pair of double doors that lead outside, so she’ll push through those. The silence and the cool, fresh air will help her.
Before she can leave, someone, heaving, cries out, “Please, don’t hurt us. Please.”
She turns back to look at him. She cocks her head and barks.
Everyone startles. They twitch and gasp.
She whines. She has done something wrong, but doesn’t know what. This is not a new feeling.
Once she is out in the wide, empty bus lot, she rolls over onto her back. The asphalt is pleasantly warm. With her paws awkwardly half-extended, floating midair, she barks, and she barks, and she barks.
Esther schneider
My doppleganger climbed out of my mirror
And I folded her straight into my arms
Pressed my nose into her soft curls
She had a gap between her front lower teeth
Mascara smudged across her undereyes
And only one dimple
I had never seen someone so beautiful
We sat on the floor of my room
Candlelight flickering across our perfectly identical faces
I admired her without shame
Struck by her steadfast kindness
Remembering how on Valentine’s Day
She passed out little cardboard-and-sticker notes
The kind you’d buy back in grade school
To every room on her dorm floor
So nobody would feel unloved
When we locked eyes, I couldn’t hold it back
The wave of praises
That flowed from my mouth
The way she responded
Was sweeter than her breath across my skin
She guided my head to lay across her lap
And sat sentry through the night
Bright and bold above me
As the dawn crept slowly through my window
She left cucumber scented kisses on my hands
And melted back into the rippled surface
Now my mirror waits patiently
Like a cat blinking slow and smug
Content with the knowledge that I’ll return
Time and time again
Like a tide to the shore
When steam curls hazy tendrils through the morning air
I press my skin flush to the fogged surface
And if I catch a glimpse of that fleeting figure
I whisper a message meant only for her ears
Andromeda Balane
Can a child, touched by the stars; know to stay grounded?
Can a girl, intimate with the abyss; ever learn that she is enough? Can a being, handed the power of destruction; comprehend that this is not her destiny?
Star girl, oh, my star girl. Do not force yourself to adhere, to mimic the humans around you.
For you and them are not the same; cradled by light, loved by the sun. In due time, you will learn to come to peace.
Then you shall see the love this galaxy holds for you. How the light has held you in its embrace.
Cassidy Larson
My childhood friends ask for a dead girl when they call my family home. Relatives ask how she’s doing and if she’s come back from death row. She’s been dead for years and I took her place but she still lurks beneath my placid gaze. Each year I am forced to rouse her from her grave, to disturb her peace, and relearn her tortured ways. Her limbs are stiff and I am weak, but for my family I awaken her, the haunted antique.
By the time it happened, I had dreamt of the end of the world three times. Was three times enough to consider something a recurring dream? I certainly thought so, and I had considered dreams recurring even with less frequency and less similarities, like the one where I lost all my teeth, or showed up to class naked, or was killed by giant spiders. This dream, by contrast to that one, was the same each time.
In the dream, I’m sitting in a one-day-only support group for agnostics at the end of the world, always listening to a lecture about philosophy, which is always about Dirac’s position on the explanation for belief in God. I know, always, in the way that one knows in dreams, that the world is ending. The group ends, I stand up to leave, and the dream abruptly changes scenes.
After the lecture, I find myself walking through a dense forest. It’s twilight, nearing eight, and I feel the weight of late summer air around me. The last few fireflies of the season dance through the clearing like they know somehow that it’s their last chance for a show, stragglers late to the news that everyone else had already heard. They dodge the weight of the heat, flying up while I sink down.
Walking towards the clearing in which I watch the world end, I trip over a root and fall to the forest floor. A girl reaches her hand out to help me up and doesn’t let go for the rest of the way. This girl is Madeline, whom I will meet in my senior year of high school.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that your lab partner is the most beautiful woman you will ever know- I believe Illustration by Ashley Gabales
we ended up covering this in my end-of-the-world philosophy lecture. I don’t remember what drew me to Maddie: her relentless extroversion, perhaps, or her honey-brown eyes, or her quick smile. It most certainly was not her titration skills. All told, she was a horrible lab partner. Her chemistry skills matched mine, which is to say that neither of us was skilled at all.
Maddie and I would spend most of that year together. After chemistry, we’d take my car out to lunch and stop in the lot for the little park in the neighborhood around the school. She’d sit sideways in my passenger seat, reading a dubiously truthful article from her phone screen.
I would listen every time and, inevitably, we’d both be wrong together. Maddie seemed like someone I had always known. I found excuses to see her every day.
Maddie decided not to come to the support group with me, but Troy did. Unlike Maddie, I actually had known Troy forever, but they both held very different spaces in my life. Troy was my first real friend, back in second grade, when the boys said that I couldn’t play Pokémon cards with them because of the whole “being a girl” thing. Troy didn’t care about Pokémon, and eventually, I didn’t either. We spent second grade pretending that the tree at the edge of the playground was a sleeping dragon instead.
Troy always found the other option, the tiny decision that would split multiverses, if I believed in that sort of thing. He told me about the support group, but didn’t listen to the lecture. He taught me how to tread water, but not how to swim.
The first time I had the dream was in Troy’s bedroom, the summer before I met Maddie. I had passed out on his loveseat, experiencing the absolute worst high I would ever have, so, initially, I attributed the dream to the weed. When I woke up, Troy
was standing over me. He said that I’d been screaming.
The night before, we had swum in the lake in the back of Troy’s parents’ house. Troy lived at the edge of town, where the city descended into the suburb, which descended into thicker and thicker patches of forest and field. Troy’s house was next door to Adrian’s, and Adrian’s was where we would all gather to watch the world end. We stood right where the lake bottom turned from coarse gravel to slimy silt. This was the nastiest part of an otherwise clear lake, the only imperfect element of the evening. Troy floated on his back a few feet away while I treaded water, trying to keep my feet from hitting the ground.
I would have hundreds of other evenings in this lake, or smoking on Troy’s backyard trampoline, or passing a bottle of wine between ourselves and Maddie when she joined our little group one summer later. When thinking of Troy, though, I always came back to that night. In the moment between seeing the world end and understanding that it was ending, there were a thousand nights, one for every world that might have been. Four summers before the end of the world, though, there was only this night in Troy’s lake.
The third time I have the dream is the day after our first and final support group meeting. I fall asleep to a news broadcast about the freak solar event that will kill us all tomorrow. By this third dreamt rendition, I have nearly memorized Steve’s lecture on Dirac and fear and God. I try to leave the lecture early, but the dream stops me at the door and turns me around. I try to really listen this time. I mouth along where I know the words. It helps that, yesterday, I heard it for the first time in real life.
In real life, Dirac argued that, in a modern world with modern medicine and modern amenities, there was no reason to
believe in a God who would allow for suffering and hate. He wrote that there was a place for a God in primitive times, where humans were soft, starving, scared animals, alone and trembling in the dark. He wrote that any God worshipped now was a product of a collective imagination and desperation for control. Steve agreed.
When I first had the dream, I didn’t know Steve, I didn’t know Dirac, and I didn’t know Maddie, so, in my dream, Steve is wrong about what Dirac has to say about God. Steve says (and I’m inclined to agree) that we’re still those soft, starving, scared animals. If, when faced with the end of the world, we are encouraged to care for and love one another, Steve says that there should be no shame in seeking an explanation or a brief comfort. It’s not enough to make me believe in God again, but that’s not what my dreamt Steve is asking of us.
I think I always expected the end of the world to be dramatic and explosive, but it’s looking like it’ll be quiet. I’m sitting on a hill with an ancient barn tucked away near a patch of trees, both coated with kudzu vines. The cicadas have ceased their buzzing. The sky is clear, sun dipped away into gentle, dark blues. Troy is sitting on my right. Maddie is sitting on my left. She leans into me, and the sky floods with light.
Starlight encircles thee
To warm you gently
The wind against your hair
Water lapping at your feet
You lean down to listen to what it has to tell you “There is no end or beginning. There is only you.”
Those words continue to echo
