Grow a House

Part I

Before my sister started smoking cigarettes, she loved to visit the old, abandoned treehouse in our neighborhood. Often times, she took me along with her to the treehouse, which perched on its thick-leaved oak tree like an ailing raven. Sometimes, she did her homework in the treehouse, but most of the time she gazed out the window, staring longingly at the grassy hills in the distance.

During one of these viewings, a wind swept up, lifting the red and gold autumn leaves from a ground. My sister’s eyes fixed on something in the air, and she leaned over the windowsill with an outstretched arm.

When she leaned so far that it looked like she might fall, I called out to her, “Vivi!” However, she didn’t fall. Her hand closed around something. Backing away from them window, she stared at the object in her palm. I stepped behind her and peeked over her shoulder. It was a scarlet and pearl-colored feather, unlike any bird feather that I had seen. Wordlessly, Vivi slipped the feather into her pocket. She took my hand, and we walked back to our house. All the way home, she stayed silent, so I didn’t say anything.

Part II

Later, Vivi explained to me that the feather was a good luck charm. She carried it with her wherever she went, tucking it in her pocket or her backpack. It was around this time that she began to believe that everything could grow on trees. One time, she plucked the seeds from an orange and buried them in our front yard.

“What are you doing, Vivi?” I asked.

“Growing a house,” She nodded toward our cracked-wood home barely big enough to fit us.

I gave her a confused look.

She explained, “We’ll grow them until they’re big enough. Then we’ll live in them.”

“But oranges can’t grow that big.”

“They will if we take care of them.”

The orange tree grew and gave us juicy fruit every summer. Every year, Vivi picked the oranges, tucking her scarlet-and-pearl feather in the basket. However, each time, she was disappointed that the oranges weren’t big enough. Even when she was fourteen, she still clung to the idea of growing oranges into houses.

When she was fifteen, she came home with the basket of fruit and ate them expressionlessly.

“You’re not upset?” I asked.

“Why would I be upset?”

“The oranges still aren’t big enough.”

“For what?”

“The house.”

She stared at me for a second before saying, “Oh, that house. I was stupid. Don’t know why I ever believed it.”

Then she pulled a cigarette out of her pocket and lit it.

Part III

Neither my parents nor I could figure out what happened to Vivi. First, she snapped at Mom for asking her to clean the dishes. Then, she stormed out of the house and returned three days later. Finally, she smoked a cigarette in our backyard.

Mom and Dad tried to take the cigarettes away, but Vivi walked out of the house and threatened to disappear into the city streets. I told her that she wouldn’t, that she wasn’t that stupid, but the crazed looked in her eyes made me unsure.

Eventually, Vivi stopped attending school, and anyone who tried to convince her to go back to school would suffer her wrath. On the day Vivi would have graduated from high school, she drove us both in her dirt-crusted car to the grocery store, swaddling herself in a too-big gray jacket.

When we walked out, carrying bags of bananas, oranges, jerky, and bread, I said, “The car’s this way—”

“We’re going over there,” she said. I knew that she was going to take a smoke. Though Vivi was eighteen, she still looked sixteen, and she hated the “you’re too young” looks casted at her when she smoked.

We stopped in an alley and she lit her cigarette. I stood quietly, breathing in the smoke.

“So, there’s no climbing out of this rat hole,” she said.

“What?”

“Stupid I was, believing that I would be able to get out. I woke up long ago. There is no climbing out. Broke people are destined to have broke lives. Our fault is that we are born to moms and dads who barely make enough to feed us.”

“Vivi?”

She turned and looked at me.

“I don’t think that’s right,” I said.

She crouched down so that our faces were level, “I was once like you, so hopeful. Do you know what made me indulge in such lies?”

“No,” I answered quietly.

“Do you remember that feather I used to put in the orange basket? The one that I caught in the treehouse?”

I nodded.

“Well, it had the colors no bird had. I thought it must’ve been a gift from the heavens, or something watching over us. It was such a bright color that I was sure that it was a sign that we would make it out.”

Vivi paused, her breathing shaky. Then continued, “All those years, I carried it with me, slipping it into the orange basket. Then, one day, I dropped the basket into a puddle of water, and you know what happened?”

I shook my head.

“The color leeched right out of that thing. It was just a plain dove’s feather colored with dye, probably fallen off from someone’s old feather duster.”

She laughed humorlessly, “I should’ve figured it out long before. The oranges would never grow bigger than the ones at the store. What a fool of a child I was.”

With one hand, she reached into a grocery bag and threw an orange at the wall in front of her, juice splattering in her face, her laugh echoing down the alley. My heart pounded. I didn’t know what she would do next. My only thought was I didn’t want to find out. So, I ran and used some loose change to ride a bus home.

I’m still ashamed of how I acted.

Part IV

Soon after high school, I headed to college. Now, I am a journalist at a national newspaper.

After that day in the alley, I set out to prove Vivi wrong. It couldn’t be true that I was destined to have a broken life. I took jobs at restaurants to save up for college, applied for scholarships and studied for exams every free moment I had. There were times when I was screaming that I wouldn’t make it.

I’ve seen Vivi only once since I left her in the alley. Neither our parents nor I know where she lives. Somedays, I wonder if it would’ve been different if I hadn’t run from her. Maybe she would’ve felt more welcome. Maybe she wouldn’t.

The one time I saw Vivi was last week, when I was visiting our hometown. She came to our parents’ house for some food, dressed in patched up pants and shirt. We sat on the lawn, staring at the now-towering orange tree, while she smoked a cigarette.

After a long stretch of silence, I said, “Remember when you wanted to grow those oranges into houses?”

She held still for a moment, then nodded.

“Well, they still aren’t big enough,” I continued.

“I noticed.”

“But,” I said, gesturing at the tree’s tallest branches, “The tree’s big enough to make a treehouse.”

She didn’t respond for a few seconds. Then, she laughed. The sound bellowed through the neighborhood, filling it to its brim.

When she finally stopped laughing, she looked up and put her cigarette down, the tears in her eyes shimmering like a blood red sun.

Jieyan Wang is a high school junior in northern Idaho. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and published in Teen Ink. In her free time, she loves to play the piano and paint flowers.

The featured art piece is by Anthony Johnson, titled “Alone.”

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Adultolescence: A Money Grab for a Social Media-Crazed Generation

Gabbie Hanna, Adultolescence, $16.99, ISBN 978-5011-7832-0

Adultolescence by Gabbie Hanna is a playful and childish book of poetry, paired with Hanna’s own simple and beautiful artwork. It explores the mentality and struggles of the new adult generation, as well as the influence of social media on mental health and real life relationships.

The book depicts grueling subjects such as breakups, the struggle to find oneself, and even depression and suicide. However, despite the subjects, Adultolescence remains sarcastic and immature. The childishness of Hanna’s poetry has its charm, and follows the newly developed “Twitter-speak” form of poetry which derives its language and audience from the short, cynical style of the new social-media-crazed population. However, this style does not serve the subject matter in an effective way.

Some of the poems follow a rhyme scheme, yet are too short to fully carry it out. The poem HIDE (15) for example, follows an AA rhyme scheme, and explores the effects of hiding depression and other mental health issues. But this poem is too short to have an important or influential message of any kind. It seems that these subjects, which are common topics among teens and young adults today, are only there for the reader to relate to. In addition to falling short in the linguistic department, the shorter poems deal with heavier topics like mental health issues, even addressing death and the desire to die, or wanting someone else to die; yet the poems seem to trivialize these issues. For example, POUT examines these issues in an immature way, saying, “life sucks. be grateful, you woke up this morning. that’s the worst part.” (8-9) This type of language is often used by teenagers today; they joke about these feelings in conversation in order to mask them, using humor as a coping mechanism, which is not often a positive message for someone to be promoting. These short anecdotes are paralleled by longer poems and anecdotes which seem repetitive and dry, devoid of the sarcasm and wit that is present, albeit misused, in the shorter poems.

The art is interactive, often incorporating the poem into the drawing in one way or another. At times the art pairs well with the pieces, but ultimately does not help readers obtain a meaningful takeaway. Hanna is clearly artistically inclined, as her drawings are impressively detailed, while still sticking to a line art style. The realism of the drawings may take readers by surprise, as the people in them are easily recognisable, and often appear with Gabbie in her YouTube videos. All of these positive traits, however, do not make up for the writing, some of which is worked into the drawings in rather disappointing ways. One example of this is a poem titled “K,” which is an blank page, except for a text bubble with the letter “K” inside and a read receipt underneath.

Adultolescence follows a common thread, which seems to have stemmed from the Milk and Honey phenomenon, and follows the same pattern of good artwork paired with–at best–mediocre writing. Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur was one of the highest grossing poetry books of 2017, and was Number Two on Amazon’s Best Seller list. It is widely loved and cited as an aesthetically pleasing and relatable work by many teen readers. That being said, Milk and Honey shows a pop-culture side of poetry, rather than the traditional style which uses beautiful language, and images found in the work of poets like Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson. This new and vulgar style is now simply being accepted by readers without much thought, due to its easily interpreted, relatable content.

Adultolescence–along with Milk and Honey–represents a new idea of “money grab” poetry, which stems from social media influencers, and the new Internet-focused generation. These influencers write books in the anecdotal style of Twitter and other word-space-limited social media platforms, and then claim them to be artistic and poetic, when really it is a way for an already well known celebrity to make even more money. People like Gabbie Hanna, who could be considered second tier influencers, and have a smaller audience than other big-name YouTubers, often share their financial situation with their fans and may have a lower income than larger influencers. This somewhat justifies the “easy money” of writing and selling books, as it pulls in readers from a smaller fan base, and expands the writer’s brand.

However, this does not justify the claim of “art.” Adultolescence does not represent what poetry really is to most published poets. The claim of poetry and art should be reserved for beautiful, intelligent, and playful works, and should not be applied to collections of on-trend, relatable, and sarcastic content, which sells more copies than authentic art, due to the popularity of the writer rather than the quality of the work.

By Delany Burk

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Two Poems By Asha Marie

Dinner
is served on a picnic blanket
in the garden.
 
The wind comes
with some weary wobble,
caught in some savory sulk
and turns the air sour
and thick
             grandmother’s marmalade
sordidly unabashed
and I rush to take cover inside.
Sister sits through the slew
and pinches at honeysuckle
collected earlier.
She sips on its sweet slobber
and absentmindedly
swallows an ant.
 
She smiles
and I imagine
she feels the tickle
of its little ant feet
running along her taste buds,
toppling down her throat
trying to catch a grip
on her insides,
before boiling in the slop
of her stomach acid.
 
Sister is placid,
somewhat jaded,
              I suppose
through this tantrum
and eventually,
the wind gives in
and leaves
in a fit of pique.
 
In this moment,
I feel a knot of jealousy
jumbling in my belly.
             I long to sit as comfortably as her.
 
Blue
 
I rise with
the hum of car engines
outside my window
and wood creaking
beneath heavy footsteps
in the hall.
 
Did you know
the crickets
chirp and groan
in the morning
the way they do
when the sun sets
and streetlights flicker on
as fireflies flitter
tracing glowing
breadcrumb trails
through the grass?
 
A cricket’s symphony,
(a child’s missing music box)
plays through the night
breaks at midnight
and resumes with dawn
and morning dew.
 
I cup my breasts
with my hands
when I am cold,
in bed,
bent slightly at the hip,
cast like a cicada shell,
molded from clay–
 
This morning is cold.
 
I tuck my arms,
folded, into paper cranes
under my belly
& feel my nipples
cold, & hard
less like diamonds
less like glass.
 
Today,
when the car engines
turn over & hurry off
into the distance,
& the crickets
strike their final
hum, I do not
unfold myself–
not in the blue
of the morning,
not with sputtering
engines nor footsteps
groaning along
because today
I am cold,
saturated blue
and hollow inside.
 
Today, my nipples
cut along my palms,
diamonds cutting
against glass
& there is no
warming me.
 
Asha Marie is a senior at the Fine Arts Center, a competitive magnet arts high school in Greenville, South Carolina, where she studies Creative Writing and Digital Film. Her work has been published in the Chautauqua Literary Magazine and has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. She is the Social Media Editor for Crashtest Magazine (crashtestmag.com).
 
Visual art by Rudy Falagan
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Allison Benis White Interview

Allison Benis-White is a renowned poet from Southern California. She has published three books: Self-Portrait with Crayon (2009), Small Porcelain Head (2013), and Please Bury Me in This (2017). She is currently a poetry professor at the University of California, Riverside.  

 

Q: Have you always written poetry and if so, when did you start writing it?

 

A: I first started writing when I was sixteen, and it was traditional high school poetry: angst, and, you know, a lot of violence. Then, I had a boyfriend who had an ex-girlfriend who was a writer, and he introduced me to her, and she took me to my first poetry reading in Venice, California, in a place called Beyond Baroque. It was this huge reading for a literary journal, maybe thirty people read, and my life was transformed by hearing that reading. I mean, before that, I had written in some casual way an adolescent writes, but after that reading I was bewitched. I was enamored with poetry, and not so much with the vision of, “I’m going to devote my life to this genre,” but there were much sharper desires to make something on the page that lasted. So, when I started going to college, I began taking literature classes and studying poetry. Poetry’s always been my genre. I wrote one short story in a creative writing class, and it was okay. The experience of writing in fiction—in prose, really, was tedious for me. There wasn’t a lot of pleasure in it. Whereas writing poetry there always was and still is this great energy and excitement and urgency, and a sense of invention. Somehow, for me, writing in prose— traditional prose, because I do write prose poetry— always felt constricting. I don’t know why, exactly, and I don’t know if that will last, but so far I’m a single genre person.

 

Q: Do you have any advice for young writers?

 

A: The only advice that I think is useful is to read widely, to be patient, and to try and find your own conviction. Those are the three things that kept me in a space where the work feels alive. Advice is a tricky thing, because everybody’s particular. I guess it’s less advice and more of the things that I hold dear and that have kept me in motion.

 

Q: What’s your process when writing ekphrastic poems? Have you written other ekphrastic poems [ekphrastic poetry is poetry written in response to other works of art (i.e., paintings, films, other poems, etc.)] inspired by other art?

 

A: I got this opportunity to go to London by myself, and I was visiting all of the museums I wanted to visit and in one of the gift shops I found this postcard of Degas’ painting, “Combing the Hair.” It’s a young girl, maybe thirteen years old. She has long, red hair, and an au pair is combing her hair. She appears to be in pain–she has curled fists. The whole painting is in reds and oranges, and I was completely enamoured with it. So I bought it, and I brought it home and I set it on my desk a few weeks later. Then, just as a writing exercise I decided to respond to it. I was familiar with ekphrastic poetry, I certainly didn’t know that word, but I knew people wrote in response to paintings. It was a really sort of spontaneous writing exercise, and I found that when I wrote about that painting, I was able to write about my mom leaving when I was very young in a way that I had never been able to do before. I had tried to write about that experience before, but the poems would always end up feeling repetitive, hysterical, and unsatisfying, so I just shoved that topic aside. Somehow, writing in response to that painting facilitated this kind of speech for me. So I tried it again with another Degas painting, and it worked again; I was able to articulate in this really surprising way. I didn’t think this was going to be a book. I was just really happy to be making something that was surprising to me and where I could discover things, so I just kept writing in response to his paintings and it kept working. I was able to go deeper and deeper into stranger spaces and that continued on until I had a manuscript length amount of these poems.

 

Q: Why Degas for this collection specifically?

 

A: Why Degas? I didn’t really understand it, I just capitalized on it, and I didn’t study Degas while I was writing these poems. I was just viewing the painting as a common viewer of art. I didn’t want to be an academic that studied the nature of Degas. However, towards the end of this process I did do some research on him, casually, and I found that his mother had passed when he was very young. There were also rumors that he was impotent. Both of those things are interesting to me because he paints so many dancers, that’s his main gig. So, I thought maybe the loss of his mother and the desire and the inner way to talk about stillness… it’s something I’ve relied upon and it continues to be fruitful.

 

Q: Throughout Self-Portrait with Crayon, you make use of large motifs like abandonment, as well as many smaller motifs. Did these small motifs show up on their own or did you weave them into the pieces purposefully?

 

A: There was no conscious weaving of themes. The way I wrote the poems was sentence by sentence in this state of meditating on each painting. I tried to allow the language to direct the poem. I was conscious of the themes that were emerging, but I never said, for example, “Oh, I need to braid in this theme.” The themes were so prevalent that, regardless of intention, they were going to reveal themselves. But I tried to be led by the painting and the language versus by the theme or a biographical incident.

 

Q: When you were writing this collection, were you focused more on the music or the narrative?

 

A: The music. Almost 100%. I mean I also think the music, the language, was inspired by the meditation on the paintings. And I wrote them sentence by sentence, via the ear. The first line or sentence would dictate, sonically, ultimately, the second line. And when I say sonically, I don’t think that it’s entirely accurate to say that was the driving force, because of course there’s image, and of course there’s pattern, and the narrative, etc. But I think the thing is, especially with prose poetry, is that the ear has to be at work, because you don’t have the luxury of breaking the line, so to keep it buoyant, the ear really has to be awake. As for the narrative, there are very few truly narrative moments in the book, maybe five or six. The narrative and the music and the imagery and the connection between the speaker’s mind and Degas’ mind, that is what I think is driving the book.

 

Q: How did you know you were done with the collection, and what was it like going through the contest system?

 

A: I knew it was finished because I continued writing these pieces and I started feeling like I was repeating myself, that I wasn’t discovering anything new, or whatever I had discovered I had said better somewhere else. That happened three or four times in a row, and I started to think, “Hmm, I think this is winding down, I think I have expressed myself as completely as I possibly can using this tactic.” And another practical signifier was that once I hit about 48 pages, which is usually the minimum page requirement for the contest system, I was like, well, if I start repeating myself or losing steam at this point, it’s okay to stop, because I have an entire manuscript. In other words, I would’ve been very sad if at the twenty-fifth poem, it had stopped working— which I would’ve accepted, but I was fortunate to have written enough to be manuscript length.  

And the contest system, it’s huge now. There are many reputable presses that have blind submissions, so one would submit their manuscript via Submittable, usually with a fee of $15-25, so it’s a little expensive, and the idea is that there’s a group of screeners who whittle the manuscripts down to 20-25 manuscripts which get sent to a final judge, usually somebody of note, and if your manuscript is selected you usually get a small monetary prize– something like $1000, and a publication contract. This is a really common way that poets get published nowadays, because poetry’s not a commodity, you don’t have an agent, no publisher is going to make a bunch of money off of your poetry collection. It’s a way for unknown writers to get published, to provide some income for the press, and to create a space for newer writers. Very rarely are poets discovered, or have the luxury of having an agent going around trying to get editors to notice your work. I published through the contest system for my first book, and for my second book, and now the press that published my second book has agreed to publish my third book. So, ostensibly, I have a press now, which is the dream of any writer, to have a press that supports you and wants to publish you. I think my beginning is a very common beginning for modern poets.

 

Q: Do you find yourself editing as you go or writing and then revising?

 

A: I’ve done both. With Self Portrait, I actually edited as I went along; I wanted each line to have a sense of completion before the next line, and so on. It was a tedious process. I remember on a good writing day, I would write three good sentences in a row. And that was very taxing. And then the next day, I would go back to the same piece and write three or four more sentences. Very rarely would it tumble down the page, would I complete a poem in one sitting. It was usually many, many sittings, one sentence at a time. But then, more recently, I’ve periodically written more quickly, understood that all of the raw material was there, and then went back and edited acutely. So I’ve done both, but with Self Portrait with Crayon, it was very tedious sentence by sentence, word by word process, and I just couldn’t write them any other way. But with more recent work, I could sort of streamline.

 

Q: Have other poets inspired your writing, and do they differ from the poets that you read?

 

A: I think the poets I read are the poets that inspire me. The initial poets that inspired me were Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I found them when I was very young, as many young people do, and they still continue to inspire me, specifically Plath; her work continues to burn through me. Later, when I was in college, I found Louise Glück, specifically the book The Wild Iris, and that book also is the gold standard for me, still. And then there’s another book that is less well known, by this woman named Killarney Clary, called Who Whispered Near Me. It’s a book of prose poems; I think I discovered it in graduate school. That book changed me and gave me a vision for something I wanted to do. I think Plath, Glück, and Clary are the three writers that continue to inspire me and give me the ambition to write something with that kind of heartbeat.

 

Q: Can you tell us about your mother and how she inspired this book?

 

A: Sure. So, my mom left me and my father sometime between when I was a year/year and a half old. Of course, I was very young, so I don’t remember any of this. As I was growing up, we never talked about her. I didn’t know where she was. There was no reason given, I just knew that she was gone. I knew she wasn’t dead, I knew she was alive, although nobody talked about it. I just grew up with my father. Then, just before I turned eight, she called, and a few weeks later, she showed up, and I met her. That’s the language I use, because I didn’t remember her. After that, my dad ended up having a nervous breakdown and going to a mental hospital so I ended up living with my mother for a few years. So I did get to know her in that way, but after that I ended up moving back in with my father, and she’s always lived up north, in Northern California, so… We’re not close. We have a relationship. We talk on the phone periodically. I think the question is always why? Why did she leave, why did she come back, what’s going on? I still don’t have answers to those questions. I still don’t fully understand.

 

Q: Has [your mother] read Self Portrait with Crayon?

 

A: She has! She wrote me a letter and said something to the effect of: Her approach to reading the book and her experience of reading the book allowed her to be proud (of me) rather than be ashamed (of herself). So, that was interesting, and I appreciated that. I did call her, when I found out the book was going to be published, and told her, “FYI, this is the anchoring subject matter of this book,” and that it wasn’t disparaging her. I didn’t write the book to disparage her, but rather I was writing from this enormous silence and mystery that has characterized my life. But, I did want to give her the dignity to know. And, I mean, it’s poetry, it’s not like we’re going on Oprah discussing this. So yeah, there is that connection. She has read what I have made. But there’s an endless mystery to my mother, and me writing that collection didn’t resolve it.

 

Q: When you finished  Self Portrait With Crayon, what was it like to start a new collection?

 

A: I don’t remember exactly. I remember being relieved when it was done. And I remember organizing it, which was an extraordinary task for me because I didn’t write them in a sort of sequence, so I had to truly think about how the poems were going to unfold, which was very challenging, so I remember a feeling of relief. My friend had committed suicide about six months before I finished Self Portrait with Crayon, so I already had this other terrible grief in my life, and I knew, because that’s how I process being alive, I knew I wanted to put pen to page in some way, responding to my friend’s death. So I didn’t really grieve Self Portrait, because I had this other grief. I think it took about a year to really find a way to write about my friend’s death, and that’s what became my second book. So that’s my memory of letting go of Self Portrait: I felt a sense of relief, and then tried to find a way back in.

 

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Tilt

This summer Mummy, Daddy, Bunny and I are going to visit Grandmammy in her house by the sea. We don’t visit Grandmammy often. Mummy says it’s because she lives so far away.

When we visit Mummy lets me and Bunny play at the edge of the water near Grandmammy’s house. Bunny gets all fat and bloated and then Mummy has to put him out to dry. Mummy says best friends can’t be stuffed toys but I know she’s wrong because Bunny is mine. He always wants to play the games I think of and he never laughs at me like the boys in school.

The last time we visited Grandmammy I was only in kindergarten. Grandmammy told me she’d buy me a chocolate sprinkle cone if I tell Daddy that I want Grandmammy to live with us. Mummy was angry when she found out. I didn’t get ice cream and we came back three days early.

I like looking out of the window to see the big trees at the side of the road. There are only small trees where we live. Mummy points out pretty birds and a little monkey sitting on a rock. The monkey acts very funnily, jumping about and scratching itself. I yell out, “Mummy, it’s touching its bum!”

Mummy says the monkey is acting in this Shameful Way because it isn’t intelligent like me. I look away quickly from the monkey which doesn’t know not to show its Private Parts in front of others.

We finally reach Grandmammy’s house. When I enter Grandmammy smiles and says, “Who is this handsome young boy?” I laugh and run to the other room to sit on the bed and watch Scooby Doo while Daddy and Mummy talk to Grandmammy.

During dinner, Grandmammy puts rice on my plate and says, “Such a shame that he has to grow up an only child.”

Daddy says, “We’re a happy family of three.” I feed Bunny some of my rice.

“Those who cannot do better must be…” Then Daddy is yelling at Grandmammy and Grandmammy is yelling back. Mummy is

trying to get Daddy to sit back down. Bunny falls off his seat.

Daddy goes straight to bed without clearing his plate. I ask Mummy if Daddy wants to play I Spy but she says no, not right now. Grandmammy says she can play with me, but I say no, thank you and sit with Mummy and colour my notebook.

On the last day of our visit, I make sandcastles till Mummy says it’s time to pack. I run in, put my clothes in my blue sailor backpack, and try to run out but Mummy stops me. I have to wait there while she and Daddy carry our bags to the car.

I sit on Grandmammy’s blue sofa and swing my legs. Grandmammy keeps strange things on the side tables – little stones from a riverbank, a mood lamp, a prayer wheel from Tibet. Grandmammy doesn’t have any toys or comics.

Bunny and I are playing cross and noughts with my red jumbo crayon when Grandmammy comes into the room. She starts taking out jars and boxes and putting them noisily on the table. Mummy says it isn’t polite to make so much noise but I don’t say this to Grandmammy because I don’t want her to feel bad.

I know I have to listen to Grandmammy because she’s older than me. I stop and make more crosses.

“You’re acting like a cat in heat,” Grandmammy says in an odd voice. She’s looking at me strangely. I look down at my notebook paper. I wish Grandmammy would go back to moving the jars. I wish Mummy would come back into the room.

I try to focus on my notebook. But Bunny falls off the sofa and I’m trying to win the game and I’m used to shaking my leg when I sit.

Grandmammy is yelling at me now. “Stop it! Shaking your legs means you want sex. Is that what you want?”

I stop doing everything at once.

I feel like when Vicky from class hit me on the head and I couldn’t breathe or think, I just waited silently for Mummy to come get me. My eyes are burning. I nod like a puppet.

Grandmammy said the s-word.

The Dirty and Wrong Thing you shouldn’t say.

The Secret Thing grown-ups do in movies after they take off their clothes, even though you should never show anyone your Private Parts.

The Very Shameful Thing you cannot say.

The Chinese paintings on Grandmammy’s walls are tilting. It makes my head hurt. I want Mummy to come and take me away like she did after Vicky hit me. I want to go far away from Grandmammy who says these Terrible Things.

But my arms and legs aren’t working so I just sit there.

Mummy and Daddy come to take me to the car sometime. They say bye to Grandmammy. I say bye to the plant next to Grandmammy’s feet. Grandmammy says she hopes we visit again soon. I hope Daddy forgets the way to Grandmammy’s house.

The small pebbles in front of Grandmammy’s house are jumping. My Lightning McQueen sandals are tripping over them so Mummy takes my hand. My eyes are open too wide and I look at the dancing pebbles so Mummy doesn’t notice and make me repeat the Bad Thing Grandmammy said.

In the car I open the window and look out. Mummy asks me if I want to sing a song. She asks if I want to play I Spy. I pretend to sleep and she stops asking.

I feel like I’ve fallen in a very muddy and smelly puddle. I don’t touch Mummy’s hand when she gives me a sandwich so the dirt won’t get on her too. When we get out of the car to go home I see the sandwich fallen on the floor.

Only at night, when I’m pouring shower gel and water into my ears do I realise that I left Bunny behind.

Ashira Shirali is a high school student from Gurgaon, India. She loves books, music, good food and the colour blue. Her work has been published in Teen Ink and Moledro Magazine.

Visual Art by Paulina Otero

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