I’ll Find You With Golden Buns by Isabella Wu

I am born into the world screaming, my breaths stuttering against the blankets that swaddle me. The air around me stenches of subdued hope, warm fingertips weigh down my eyelids and there is the soft feeling of lips against my blushing cheeks.

“有一天她会让我们感到自豪,” whispers a voice. She will make us proud one day. My grandpa’s words are slow and deliberate.

I am born into the world with hope on my shoulders, an anchor of love on my chest.

At five years old, I taste brilliance for the first time. I’m standing, my tiny legs wobbling, on top of the dark oak chairs and watching with unmasked glee as my grandpa kneads the dough carefully, his old and cracked palms expertly maneuvering them into perfectly round circles caked in flour. The sunlight pouring through the windows makes every grain twinkle like freshly fallen snow.

“What are you making?” I ask.

“Baozi,” is my grandpa’s quiet reply. Steamed meat buns. His eyes are focused, his hands gentle yet purposeful as he presses expert fingers against the dough.

“爷爷,” I whisper, my voice tight with awe, “Can you teach me?” My grandpa laughs, pausing for a moment to dust his hands on his apron. The apron itself resembles an American flag in some way – blue stars, pale red, and white stripes. I remember that I didn’t like it — that it didn’t fit him and the gentle curve of his smile, and the blue was an ugly contrast to his baby blue irises.

“Come here,” he instructs. With strong fingers, he gently wraps my small hands around the rolling pin and teaches me how to roll the dough. The dough sticks, devastatingly, to the rolling pin each time I attempt to slide it across the board. A pout forms on my lips — even then, I didn’t like the feeling of failure. But he didn’t quite mind, and I found that I didn’t either. He’d just laugh, shake his head, and extract the rolling pin from my hands.

“Here, like this.” And he shows me, step by step, how to get them into perfect circles and how to scoop in the filling, savory pork filling with chives and other vegetables. The baozi began to really take shape then, circular dough wrapped around small balls of filling into a plump onion shape. It smells of hearty oils and the sharp tang of cooked scallions.

“This is where the magic happens,” he whispers. The baozi are placed into baskets, stacked one on top of the other in a never-ending toppling tower of golden meat.

Twenty minutes later, there’s a fluffy and hefty bun in each hand, and I giggle with glee as I watch the steam curl from the tops of the puckered lips of the buns. They shine, brilliantly, like gold to me. The bun itself has always been my favorite part — the beautiful off-white color, the spring of the dough, and the chewy gummy feeling as I pull at it with my teeth. The filling is warm and it sits comfortably in my stomach, steeping with warmth and love.

My grandpa holds a bun in his palms, offering it to me with a fond smile. “What do you think?” he asks in broken English.

“I’m happy I can eat all this yummy Chinese food,” I say, honest in the way five-year-olds are.

My grandpa laughs, a loud ringing sound. “I’ll bring you to China with me one day soon, and you can get a taste of the real deal.” I want to tell him that this is the real deal, that being here, eating his buns so filled with love, is all I’ll ever need.

But I go to sleep that night dreaming of sparkling aqua seas and a country filled with people that look like me. I dream of a place that smells like home.

At six I venture across the seas for the first time, staring in wonder at the towering colorful arches that welcome me with blazing smiles. My grandpa holds my hand as we twist through the marketplaces, the words falling from his lips light like they have wings. He tells me stories of his youth in his low rumbling voice, pointing out small flashes of memories from his childhood.

He takes me to a baozi house, his eyes alight with glee as stacks of golden buns are placed before us, washing our faces with curling steam. “This is what authentic baozi tastes like,” he gushes around a mouthful of glistening meat. I smile at him, swallowing my own bite. The flavor of it lingers on my tongue, rich and sweet.

I want to tell him that his buns are even sweeter, that these buns are delicious but they’re lacking something. Something like love.

I can’t help but think as we pass through the bustling streets, watching him so alive, filled with youth and his eyes blazing with the type of belonging you only feel when you return home, your true home, for a long time. I can’t help but think that he’s so much happier here, where his words flow freely from his lips, unobstructed by the constraints of the English language. I realize then, that he has no real reason to struggle daily, testing unfamiliar vowels against his tongue. No real reason, except to be able to talk to me in both Chinese and English.

We return to the Americas and it feels like I’m supposed to have found something, but I only feel more lost, losing my grasp on strings that won’t untangle themselves.

At seven I learn to blend in, learn to swallow my tongue, and let my words fall silently against the soaking earth.

As we crowd together on the playground, a girl turns towards me, her mouth opening and it’s clear she has a question as her eyes drag over my features. “Why are your eyes so small?” she asks finally, and everyone around us grows silent. She stares at me, expectant and a little impatient. There’s a null rushing noise in my ears as I curl into myself. I stare back, at her hands, pale as milk, soft and pretty. I look down at my own, tainted yellow. My voice dies in my throat and I’m speechless.

A teacher yells something, and the buzz of the playground slowly resumes like nothing had happened. The girl turns away from me, boredom flashing in her eyes and a scowl on her lips. I stay paralyzed where I stand, still staring at my hands.

For the first time, I am ashamed. For the first time, I am overcome with a bitter longing to be someone else. Someone with golden hair and stars in their eyes, someone who fits in. The children loop their arms around mine and my feet drag against the blacktop, carving a threaded line on the loosely packed clay soils. It makes more of a mark than I ever will.

At eight, my mother asks me when my skin had become so dark.“No daughter of mine should have this tan,” she says, poking at my arm. “You need to be more conscious of yourself and how you present yourself.”

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. My words are lost, falling against deafened ears. I stare at my hands again, at my nails bitten down to their beds, and wonder when I had become so flawed.

And so – I become so very conscious, my eyes lingering on smooth expanses of pale pale skin, of bright doe eyes and golden hair. Like this, the cycle starts. Like this, I feel myself distancing myself from my culture, throwing away bits of myself until I can barely recognize the girl that stares back at me in mirrors and shiny reflective surfaces. I begin to lose myself in this game of imitation, of pretending until I can almost believe that I’ve become what I crave to be.

I lose sight of the sun, and I lose myself in this game of make-believe.

At nine, my grandpa asks me when I had lost my happiness. “You don’t speak to me anymore. Your eyes are sad, always. Why?” He asks the question in his slow, broken English, staring at me with a face so filled with expectations and hope. Bitter annoyance claws up my throat and I turn away. Part of me wants to scream, to tell him to just speak Chinese, to stop torturing himself to speak English just for me.

The other part of me freezes when I realize that even if he did, I wouldn’t be able to understand his words now. The Chinese language, the one that had graced my tongue so easily before…it escapes from me now like trickling water through the cracks of my hands. The realization hits like ice water to a stinging wound, and I say nothing and try not to break as the sound of his slow footsteps eventually fades.

That night, my grandpa makes me baozi. I turn him down and tell him that the filling has staled in my mouth after years of the same taste, and close my eyes so that I don’t have to see the crestfallen expression on his face.

I tell myself that I’m unlovable.

At ten, it leaves me – finally, and fully. The language that used to taste like saccharine tangerines and warm soaking honey on my tongue burns like acid on my lips now, foreign and laced with unfamiliarity. It rings loud and ugly in my ears, and I tell myself that this isn’t what it’s supposed to sound like. This isn’t the beauty of the language that burns me now from within. So I close my lips and vow to never speak it again.

The language dies fully then, hidden in the depths of a treasure chest that I had long since lost the key of.

At eleven, I feel like I’ve failed my identity, lost every bit of what had made me human, had made me unique. I float helplessly, without an anchor to tie me down, without anyone to tell me who I am or who I should become, or who I was. This is the story of someone who lets go too easily, I realize.

I want to learn to love again, want to learn how to piece myself together again and hug myself tight so that I am whole.

I want to try again, but a hissing voice inside of me tells me that it is far too late, that I’ve abandoned myself for too long, let myself lose too much – I listen to the voice, and I sink like this.

At thirteen, I leave. Leave home, abandon all that I have ever known, and cross the threshold to the grand halls of a new home – boarding school.

Maybe this is my chance, I think as the acceptance letter wrinkles in my hands. The “Congratulations” is printed in bold at the top and it feels like hope, it feels like finality and a new beginning all at once. I tell myself that this is my chance to find myself, I allow myself to lose my grounding in reality for a moment and dream in the stars again.

So I leave, expectations crushing on my chest and my breath caught in my throat and for the first time, I see so many people that look like me, gorgeous people with long black hair and glowing olive skin, smiling and laughing with their families as they bid them goodbye.

It is here that my eyes open to the beautiful diversity of human life – people from every corner of the globe, all together here within the same buildings, eating the same food, sharing their own pieces of themselves with each other, and keeping bits of others with them too.

I meet people that come from across the seas, from the country that I hadn’t stepped foot in since I was six years old. Their voices are filled with joy as they speak in their mother tongue, their words so beautiful that it aches, that the chest that I had locked so deeply inside of me fills again with longing and threatens to burst open.

They ask me if I know any Chinese, tell me that they’d love to have someone to speak with, stare at me with hope and familiarity that I don’t deserve. I shake my head no, and they never ask again.

It’s easier, too, to lose contact with my family. To pretend that I haven’t seen their calls, to tell them that I’m busy and stressed, and—eventually though, everyone finds themselves drawn back to their roots, to the place that is home. I give in, weak and lonely and aching for familiarity.

“You’ve never tried to call us,” my mother hisses. It’s the first time in three months that I’ve tried reaching out.

“I’m coming home soon,” I say simply. The exhaustion envelops me like a sprawling weight and I let it seep into my words, let my voice waver for a moment before I’m silent. I stare at the stroked paintings behind my mother’s pixelated features, at the swans and pastel bridges and fading mountains that are so often captured in Chinese paintings. Longing fills my chest, coats my lungs, and twists bitterly in my gut and I turn away. I’d lost the right to feel like this, to want like this, long ago when I had let my own language die in my throat three years ago.

“Your grandpa misses you,” my mother says after a moment. I look up, staring at her through the screen. The overwhelming guilt washes over me like crashing salt waves and I duck my head, unable to maintain eye contact.

“Is he well?” I ask finally. And there, in that moment, something gives in my mother’s eyes – a small flicker of sadness, and fear overtakes me until I feel like a string about to snap.

“He’s-he’s starting to forget things.”

That night, I stare at the ceiling with her words ramming against my skull over and over again.

“Come home soon, before he forgets you entirely.”

At thirteen, I learn what it’s like to be afraid of your own family. Of being afraid of those you love, of the terror that fills me when I step foot on ground that is unfamiliar and too familiar all at once. To be afraid of your own roots, to press your hands against your abdomen and clutch blindly at the chest that’s still there after so many years, its lid begging to be freed and filled with scraping cobwebs and the burning taste of shame.

I see him when I step off the boat. I see the way his features alight when he catches sight of me, the wrinkles on his cheeks drawing tight into a small smile. For a moment we stand there, the flurry of winter’s first snow gently swirling around our figures. For a moment I am paralyzed by a potent fear of rejection, of being unloved. We stare at each other, so many unspoken words between us but suddenly I’m rendered speechless, my mouth open but only silence coming out.

“You’re back,” he says finally. “How are you?” My heart aches at the familiar voice, filled with endearment. I glance up at him, at his oh so familiar blue irises, the kindness and patience that has always lived there — and the English sounds so wrong now from his lips, not when I’ve seen the joy of the man with feathered words flying from his lips, surrounded by choruses of vendors and the smell of chili oil hitting black coals. The cold seeps through the warm padding of my winter coat but in this moment—

At this moment, everything is clear. The chest opens on its own, blushing and beautiful and I feel…whole again.

I reach forwards and embrace him. ”爷爷,” I whisper. “我想吃包子.” I want to eat baozi.

 

Isabella Wu is a junior at Choate Rosemary Hall who loves to read novels, write short stories and poems, create art, and play music. In her writing, she aims to authentically convey her experiences and connect with readers through themes such as identity, love, regret, joy and more. Her work has been recognized by several National Gold Medals and the American Voices Award by Scholastic Art and Writing.

Visual art by Sofia Montelibano 

 

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Lion Heads by Sydney Heintz

A Study of Birth, 1996, opaque and translucent watercolor

There she was, clutching a pair of buttocks that is, her painting of buttocks, and giggling with the fervor of one having deliberately defied some code of acceptable behavior. In that kiosk aching with smoke, the ad appeared to me in a kind of divine light, sudden and piercing. Yet it was not her girlish laugh or the choice of subject which piqued my interest. It was the incredible perfection of the buttocks themselves. At the first widening of the hips, a pattern of violet bougainvillea broke up the skin in a daring, spring fashion, while an anonymous back sunk into a void of dark sun. In fact, the painting was the furthest thing from crude: it epitomized the Platonic gene which, as I would discover, permeated through all her work. She had achieved in rendering buttocks noble. It was at that moment, in the fastapproaching night, that my elevenyearold self decided to start painting lessons.

The Doors, 1996, latex paint on wall

The studio was uncomfortably close to the tracks. Pulling up in the car that first day, all I could register was the metallic ring of a train being roped towards some violent place in the direction of Lausanne. As it departed, I myself began to drift towards a bleached structure, clinging all the while to my mother’s open palm, and more than a little white. Overhead and unnoticed by me at the time, there was a sign (Le P’tit Pinceau) pinned to the concrete like a forgotten doll. This was the place.

Sketch 1 of 4, 2052, blue pencil

In 1903, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.” I have trouble with this. After all, even art, our most desperate attempt at penetrating reality, is inevitably eroded, morphed, and mistranslated. Our souls become misshapen; our eyes witness the appearance of the ugly trace of time, la maladie ultime. Only to the artist himself can the work appear transcendent. And although their truth may continue to live inside it, it will be invisible to all others.

Red Scale, 1996, acrylic on canvas

The teacher introduced herself as Mirabelle. I learned her surname only later, from her paintings, signed M. Desrosiers. And truly, the person was as vivid as the name: she was short and red, as if her small body would not always be able to contain its share of blood, and one day she would burst, fountainlike and magnificent, onto one of her canvases. I had just met the creator of The Buttocks, a living descendant of Circe’s. It was the beginning of my hopeful conversion to the art world.

I was quickly disillusioned when the sorceress laughed at my idea of a painting (an owl swooping onto an invisible subject) and led me to a carboard box brimming with prints of popular internet searches. Above this first floor muddied by the latest tornado of paint there was a second consisting entirely of a narrow, indoor balcony. The effect was one of a staggering upwards motion, as if I was about to be launched from a rogue circus canon. It was on this second floor that all the students’ chef d’oeuvres were hung to dry. Mirabelle’s works, however, were constrained to the first floor, and could therefore be observed up close. Whether this was intentional, or the canvases had simply been too large to move upstairs, I didn’t know.

Judgment Day, 1996, graphite

It was in this open, wooden universe that I would undergo The Test. After I had carefully selected my modèle, a macaw on a black background (already in this absence of a surrounding world do I detect the beginnings of Mirabelle’s influence), I was handed an oversized apron and shown to the table with the other kids. Then, nothing. My mentor swept away as fast as she had come, her petite figure disappearing into a mass of students like a small apparition. I was alone with an unprimed canvas.

To an elevenyearold, this laissezfaire method is nightmarish. In the years to come I would observe the same phenomenon occur with every new student, watching the moment of dreadful realization pierce their expressions, needlelike and deadly. And thus would begin the Darwinian experiment: which of the pinkfaced protégés would survive in this world of pungent smells and infinite cabinets? Which would gather the courage to take their first steps?

Sketch 2 of 4, 2052, blue pencil

Every artist must come to accept the fact of their own unoriginality. It is the first, perhaps most essential step of the creative process: to accept the fact that every idea, every thought, every image that passes through their head has most likely gone through someone else’s at a certain place and point in time. Only once this burden of originality has been lifted can the artist begin to find their art. Only then will they create their millionth of treasure, and it will elate them beyond anything else in the world.

Lion Heads, 1996, oil on canvas

It was at break that I bore witness to the most extraordinary ritual. At 6 o’clock sharp, all the students began to drift toward an easel at the back of the studio. On it was a painting of two, enormous, disembodied lion heads. It was one of Mirabelle’s and was regarded, I believe, as something close to holy. Around this time too, shafts of light pulled through the shades and illuminated the portrait in dancing, uneven patches, as if through the stainedglass windows of a church. The whole event ended within minutes, as we then bounced in a similar fashion around the room, gorging ourselves on various displays of technical mastery. By the end of break I was feeling joyfully light and took a few more cookies for the journey back to my seat.

Untitled, 19962005, polymer paint on wood

Mirabelle’s work consisted almost entirely of animals. In fact, she specialized in horses. At any one time, dozens of them could be found exhaling their oily smoke into the room. Their sheer realism was astonishing. Yet never would I see her actively work on the beasts. They acquired instead a life of their own, as if mothered by Mirabelle and then left to finish themselves. Quickly my idea of successful art was defined by exactly this: immaculate precision and softness of demeanor. I had yet to realize, of course, that I was being immersed in a uniquely conservative strain of art, a type of art which worked only in an anachronistic fashion, cutoff from modernist influences. Remembering that first day, bent over the box of prints, I had only a landscape or animal to choose from. True, later, the odd modest abstract would appear from time to time, yet it was perhaps in these vaulted flashes that the conservatism revealed itself the most: a flash of light in blazing azure, the swirl of metallic color…

Sketch 3 of 4, 2052, blue pencil

Instead of “art for art’s sake”, I believe the current attitude to be better reflected in the phrase “art for beauty’s sake”. This first struck me while reading the literary magazine of a university in a Jersey town over a summer holiday. The writing was chocked gold, mirroring, it seemed, a garden slathered in sun. It struck me then that plot was a thing of the past. We had returned to the birth of man, a sticky Edenred creation of God. And to call it realism! But perhaps they were right. Perhaps the world has simply become too ugly to write about faithfully.

A Study of Death, 19962005, ink on A4 cream paper

It was the act of painting itself which enveloped me in a state of ecstatic monotony. My mouth slackened; conversation became impossible. I could think of nothing but the canvas in front of me. In fact, all I could do with any kind of success was listen. So, during those long hours of creation, it became common practice for Mirabelle to tell us about her childhood, casting us, it seemed, into a trance of imagist being. The story came in fragments, in a kind of Proustian association that would suddenly come to life and whip us all into the browning living room of a household in 60s Quebec. Her father I imagined as faceless, her brothers fragile. Often the stories were riddled with tragedy, or a violent desire to escape. As the years wore on, I became increasingly intimate with the details of this artist’s troubled past. What struck me most, however, was the incredible disparity between her narrative and her art. Her landscapes were serene, her animals sleek and powerful. Not a storm cloud was to be seen in any of her works. And slowly I understood: it was her way of finding peace.

Sketch 4 of 4, 2052, blue pencil

Years later, I was at an interview when asked about art. The question caught me offguard, in the way that questions catch you offguard when youve overprepared something else. I was asked, more specifically, how the written word differed, or not, from a visual medium of expression. Can a threedimensional, multifaceted world be expressed in black characters on a page? Can a thought, the pinnacle of an idea be fully formed on a canvas? I still do not know the answer to this question, or whether I will ever be able to answer it. After all, how can one describe art, the most unsayable of things?

 

Sydney Heintz is a senior attending high school in Switzerland and is trilingual with English, French, and German. She is an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and has been published in the Write the World Review. When she is not writing, she can mostly be found learning orchestral parts (too late) and reading her self-curated literary canon, which she hopes she will finish before beginning studies in English Literature at the University of Cambridge next fall.

Visual Art by Sylvie Mizrahi
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Never Stop Moving by Maddie Thompson

If a whale shark stops swimming, it dies. Because of their lack of buccal muscles, the creatures rely on obligate ram ventilation, which means that oxygen enters their bodies through their mouths, which then filters to their gills. To get this oxygen in their mouths they have to keep them open, which requires constant movement to keep a consistent supply of new air in their bodies. The more they move, the longer they survive. 

 

I’ve been moving since I can remember. A hurricane baby is what they call kids like me. Instead of being born where I was supposed to, a storm named Katrina came in and pushed me out of what was going to be home. So, while my mother had a C-Section in Yakima, Washington, her heart was left in New Orleans, in a condo under ten feet of hurricane surge. Spray painted X on the door, where no bodies were found and a crib had floated to the den.

In the aftermath of the storm, my family did not move back to New Orleans right away. Instead, my mother and her two-week-old child migrated. Apparently I was silent until we landed, but when we arrived in Oklahoma City I greeted the world with fists raised and screams in my throat. We met up with my father in college housing left for evacuees.

I said my first words in that housing. My first giggle erupted from the back of my throat while sitting courtside at an NBA game. I took my first steps on my first birthday, running toward my Dad in the waddling way all babies first walk. According to my mom, I never crawled. I decided to walk one day, and the new form of movement made itself known from then on.

A year later we moved back home, our real home. New Orleans wasn’t much different.  I had been there once before, baptized in a funeral home because it was the only place available, but that was a business trip more than anything else. The same people habited the French Quarter, the same candied pralines and beignets were in supply and the same foul jokes were made. I spent my first Mardi Gras collapsed in a stroller, an empty beer clutched to my chest like a teddy bear. Dog whistle was what they called me later. Mouth always open, always screaming these high pitched warbles that made dogs turn their heads and old women in grocery stores grimace.

 

The average Whale Shark travels 5,000 miles a year, from Australia to South Africa to the coast of Mexico. They move mainly to replenish their food sources. If they swam around in circles, new food would never have the chance to emerge, so to make up for the 10,000 gallons of water they consume daily, whale sharks make the trek across the shallow end of the Atlantic every year. 

 

I was two when we moved again. Instead of 5,000 miles, I only went 713 to Charlotte, North Carolina. First an apartment, then a condo. I went to preschool and read for the first time. 

At three years old we moved into a house. I got kicked out of preschool, learned the tooth fairy wasn’t real and organized a protest against nap time. I bit and kicked and yelled and cried and suddenly dog whistle was not just a funny nickname but a cruel joke. Sound like a dog, act like one, I guess. “Constantly moving” is how a teacher described me. “Too much to handle,” said another.

I stayed in the house and waited for kindergarten to start. When that tried my patience, I went outside and threw some sticks at some trees, but no matter how much I moved I still felt stuck. It was suffocating, and the air leaked from my lungs the longer I was idle. Kindergarten arrived soon enough.

It was the third day of school when I landed in the principal’s office. In an unfortunate miscommunication on game rules, I tried to stab one of my playmates with a stick. He screamed, and I was quickly shoved into the principal’s office to await my punishment. I bounced my leg and bit my fingernails down into tiny stubs of cartilage. When I ended up being brought in and lectured in the principal’s office, my hands tapped on the desk while it was explained to me that I can’t go around hitting other kids when things don’t go my way. Principal Gizzaro’s hands remained still and clasped the whole meeting. I felt bad for her, her stillness. I told her that, but she didn’t understand what I meant. “Just apologize, Madeleine,” she finally said, sighing, which was the biggest expense of energy I’d seen from her yet. 

Two weeks later, I made the journey to the principal’s office again, a trans-school hike, spanning from the vibrant yellow of the kindergarten and first grade wing to the dull gray concrete walls of the administration office. This time, my mom sat in the room with me while the principal explained the multitude of ways I never stop moving. I didn’t particularly pay attention to the conversation. I just nodded my head when the adults’ eyes made their way to me, but neither seemed to notice my lack of attention. During the meeting I decided to try and hold my breath for as long as I could, pretending I was swimming underwater, schools of fish trailing beside me. This only stopped when my vision started to spin from lack of oxygen, and for a brief second, it was like I could feel waves crash above me. I took a breath.

In first grade I discovered that when my mouth moves, I feel like my brain moves too. I would yell about the weather and shark facts and Harry Potter and my mom’s cookies. Recess was no longer a physical battlefield to me, but a verbal one, where I was armed with a barrage of fun facts and stories to use. This development eventually proved to be a problem when my teacher had to continually tell me to stop talking. When I finally got the message, I began to hum instead. When she said to stop that, I tapped my fingers on the desk until I was sent into the hallway. I wanted to tell her that I couldn’t help it. Without movement, I suffocate on my own air, feel waves crash above my head.

 

Whale sharks are slow creatures. Despite their great travels, they only move up to 3 miles per hour. If you were to put the average speed of a great white shark (5 mph) up against the whale shark, the great white would have more than doubled the distance of the whale shark in an hour. Because they’re slow, whale sharks, when maturing, fall victim to other, faster fish, like the blue shark, known for its haste and ability to stay still and camouflaged for long periods of time. They prove to be some of the greatest dangers young whale sharks face in their life.

 

I’m told from second andto third grade were quiet years. The phrases “aA pleasure to have in class” and “kKeeps to herself” made frequent appearances on my report cards. My teachers were happier with this development, as were my parents, so instead of my tapping and humming and talking like before, I quietly bounced my leg up and down, not drawing attention, just attempting to float through the rest of my schooling. I discovered that the sound of a pen against paper was similar to the click of a keyboard, and when my hand moved, writing out stories in sprawling handwriting, air came a bit easier to my lungs. With this, my camoflauge seceded and my movement resumed.

 Writing happened to be the only thing that kept me moving, and that came to a skidding halt the first day of fourth grade when my teacher did not find my constant scrawling to be productive. She decided that my stories were deterring me from my schoolwork and confiscated pencils until I needed them for math homework. Stripped from my newest resource and desperate to be moving once again, I began tapping my piano homework onto the glue-stained desk in front of me. Melodies of Mozart and Beethoven playing across social studies classes and quiet time. My teacher, once again, did not find this as amusing as I did, and would glare at me from across the room or yell my name at me until I stopped. For the first time, my grades were not just a row of A’s and 100’s, and there was no clap on the back for the extra effort put in to fix it. There was no movement. I was suffocating once again, sitting like prey to be taken advantage of. Weak and defenseless to the other fast moving animals in my environment as waves crested above.

 

When threatened, whale sharks have one defense to fall back on, their three thousand one-inch teeth. Typically reserved for eating small shrimp and plankton, the teeth are not useful in violent situations, but there has been evidence of whale sharks attempting to use their teeth when threatened. 

 

In the fourth grade I bit a girl named Sophie. She was tall and scary and loomed over me. She had nails sharpened like claws and always managed to escape the eyes of teachers when she used them. A master of camouflage. It was on the playground where I attacked her. She pushed me off the swings and, cornered by her against the black iron fence. I couldn’t breathe. Sobbing and shaking, every bit of oxygen seemed to escape the air around me before I could take any of it in. I desperately gasped for breath as she laughed at me, my back stuck against the fence and feet firmly planted on the ground. She reached out her hand toward me. I bit her. 

 

Whale sharks are remarkably peaceful creatures. They travel in diverse groups of fish, develop relationships and only eat what wanders into their mouths. Despite not traveling in groups with each other, they find community within other species and benefit from one another. It takes a very specific creature to travel with whale sharks though. They have to be willing to put up with traveling five thousand miles in three years, dealing with the whale sharks size and power as it maneuvers through the sea, but most of all, they have to be able to move alongside the gentle giant. 

 

I still have trouble breathing sometimes. My chest gets tight and my head begins to float as I feel stuck underneath the break of a wave, trapped between thick white bubbles fuzzing up the water. I tap imaginary piano notes onto my thigh when nervous, bounce my leg and run my hands through my hair. When I’m not doing that, I’m talking. To myself, to my friends, to the air, whoever will listen. And when I can’t do either, I begin to asphyxiate. As long as my heart is beating and my brain is running, you can count on me to be in motion. That motion is not always consistent. Some days I move like an Olympic athlete, on others I keep a nice slow pace. The difference in speed depends on my company. In a room full of unfamiliar faces, I ricochet off the walls, hands tapping endlessly as I look to find something to replenish my air. But when my mom holds me as we watch TV, or I go on a walk with some friends, taking in the crisp autumn breeze, I move slower than ever.

 

Whale sharks can slow themselves down to half a mile an hour and still survive just fine. Oxygen flows into their gills and filters itself at a healthy rate, and they are well. The main occasion they do this however, is around their community. When their companions are with them, swimming right alongside, they slow down, moving at a comfortable pace for everyone. Marine biologists have reported this as a sign of love in whale sharks, moving at a speed which best suits the ones around them, a compromise. The company could move on and survive without the whale shark, and the whale shark can do well without them, but they make the choice to stay together, working at the same speed.

 

I know I’m in love with someone when I slow down around them, and they slow down for me. I know I love someone when my hands shake and they understand and hold them anyway, and when my brain moves quicker than a bullet, they try to follow it. My love is a live, breathing thing. Composed of the constant ups and downs of a chest, containing the lungs, the heart, ever moving. Love for me is not absence of motion, it’s who I am.

 

Maddie Thompson is a 17 year old writer currently attending the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities for creative writing. She enjoys writing comedy pieces, poetry, and personal essays, many of which are about media she enjoys like comic books and rock music. Her favorite things to do are play guitar and watch movies, specifically heist movies.

Visual Art by Carina Wang

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A Nobody by Gia George

I was eleven years old on my first ballet lesson. I can still remember pressing my nose to the cool glass of the car window, waiting for the imposing white structure of the academy to glide into view. My mother was prattling on at the wheel, telling me about how she used to just love ballet, how it would make me graceful, how someday I’d become a celebrated dancer and perform on majestic stages in glamourous cities before spellbound crowds. I’d stopped listening for a long time, but she didn’t seem to mind. I just leaned my head against the window and let her lilting, fervent tones carry me away. At my young age, I couldn’t put my finger on what it was that rankled me about my mother’s chatter. It wasn’t that I was nervous, really, or reluctant to go. It was only until many years passed that I realised. It was that everything my mother had said, the way she’d said it, reeked of self-regard. Selfishness. She didn’t want me to go to ballet because it would be a fun extracurricular, or because she wanted me to learn a skill. She wanted to vicariously experience it all for herself.

The thing was, I’d never been a child who did or was anything. While other children screeched and tore around the house, I pottered about alone in the garden, seemingly at one with the silence, apparently completely content. While the girls in my class joined ice-skating or gymnastics teams, or learnt to sew from their grandmother, or played wild games of Tag in the playground, I stayed as silent and meek as ever. The only times I opened my mouth was if I ever needed anything, and I rarely ever did.

It unnerved my mother. She had grown up sprightly and healthy and completely happy, and it worried her to see the seeming lack of spirit in me. The lack of anything in me. I was an average student at best, prone to fits of daydreams. I had friends at school (who were really only loose acquaintances) but only because I was content to do anything they asked of me. Worst of all, I was terrible at every single hobby she tried to push me into- first it was the piano, then horse-riding, piano again, then acting, of all things, (that was an indubitable fiasco). After each attempt failed, after hundreds of pounds spent for months on another activity I showed no signs of interest or improvement in, my mother’s face would pinch like a clenched fist whenever she looked at me. She would almost snap on the rare occasions I asked her anything. Sensing danger, I would withdraw even further into my little world.

Now, sometimes I find it hard to fault my mother. She expected mothering a daughter to be tying ponytails, and trying dresses, the euphoria of childish hugs, and the responsibility of wiping away precocious tears. What she got shocked her, I think. It certainly removed the rose-coloured glasses from her eyes. She wanted to look at my youthful face, and see a promising child, a child who’d go on to make her proud. A future architect, teacher, leader, lawyer, mother. Instead, what she got was a child she could understand no more than if I’d been on the moon. And when you feel such a deep, all- consuming dissatisfaction with your child, they will know, inevitably. Subconsciously, I think I always feared my mother’s disapproval. And so I withdrew.

I understand that she felt that I was inadequate, mediocre, and my mediocrity made her inadequate. As a mother, as a thirty-seven-year-old whose achievements were now over and irrelevant. In fact, I sometimes think that she’d rather I were stupid, or arrogant, or a plainly unpleasant spoiled brat. Anything other than the way I just existed. At least she’d have something to show. Now her child was who people saw when they saw her. I was a representative of her, an ambassador, without even realising it. And I clearly wasn’t meeting the mark. That was what led to the ballet. My mother still had some lingering hope left for me, and so she rambled on at the wheel. 

Although I was vaguely aware of my mother’s frustrations, the full situation was far too nuanced for my mind to grasp until years later. My annoyance didn’t last long, and there was no resentment in my heart as we walked to the academy after parking the car. And my memories of that first ballet lesson are certainly not unpleasant. I remember a tall, angular woman with impeccably smooth skin and a very pink, lipsticked mouth meeting us at the door. She wore a black leotard with dance tights and greeted my mother with a bony hand and me with a cool smile. I felt very small under her gaze, unconsciously straightening my posture. Her eyes pierced like needles as she looked at me from that great height, as though she was sizing me up, assessing my value. She introduced herself as Madame Martin, leading dance instructor at the academy. With the natural instinct of a child, I knew from a glance that this wasn’t a woman to be messed with.

Madame Martin led me through a narrow corridor, and then opened a door and prodded me to enter. The intense white light dazzled my eyes as I stepped in. Blinking rapidly, the room swam into my vision, and I was stunned by the display that I saw. 

Tall, willowy, swans of girls in fluffy tutus were swooping across the wide practice floor, pirouetting, spinning, leaping. It made me dizzy to watch. Their feet flew with easy elegance, their hands floated with a gentle grace, all in perfect harmony with each other. If they were tiring, you would never have been able to guess it by their radiant smiles and starry eyes. With each step, their tightly laced ballet shoes pounded the floor in perfect unison, creating a perfect beat of their own over the fluting violin piece. Those that were not dancing were stretching their slender legs over their heads in front of the long mirror. I could see the supple muscle rippling like water under the skin. The whole room was a lively flutter of femininity, all soft skin and sweet smells and hairspray. Through my transfixed eyes, everything shone with a pure glow that seemed natural and right. Like dewdrops shining in morning sunlight.

Looking back on this memory, preserved perfectly and dreamily in the front of my mind, I think I had had an epiphany of some sort. For the first time in my eleven years of life, I wanted to be someone. With all the strength in my little heart and from the marrow of my bones. And for the first time, at eleven years old, I realised just how small, how insignificant, how utterly unsatisfactory I was.

I felt like my heart would stop beating when I thought about learning in front of them. I’d stumble about like a fool. Would they all glare at me, at this odd, small child who dared join their ranks? Would they laugh, looking down from the lofty heights of superiority? 

The feeling didn’t last long. After letting me watch for a minute or so, Madame Martin pulled me out of the room. She must have read the expression on my face and guessed at my thoughts. In a surprisingly gentle tone, she explained that I would be in the beginner’s class, that those girls were training to be professionals. “If you work hard and practise,” she told me gravely, “you might make it too.”

And I did. My whole life now revolved around the dance. Even throughout the week, ballet was constantly at the back of my mind- at school, I would absently dance the steps in my head, try to recall the technique. Madame Martin’s words echoed in my mind. “If I work hard…”

Every morning and every night, I would do my stretches in my room, feeling fierce satisfaction as I steadily got more flexible. Whenever Monday drew nearer, it would become almost obsessive. I threw myself into all the classes with a passion. With every mistake, every slip-up, my legs would turn to water, my throat constricting. I’d flash a guilty look at Madame Martin, searching her eyes for disappointment. But all the errors did was make me more determined. I shone amidst the other girls- and I knew it. Before long, I could dance any piece flawlessly without any hesitation. I moved up two grades in what seemed like no time at all. Sometimes, I’d look up and see a fleeting glimmer of pride in Madame Martin’s usually cold eyes. Inwardly, a shiver of glee would run up my spine.

My zeal was not for the girls at school, or Madame Martin, or even my mother (who was, of course, delighted beyond words). It was for me. I could never go back to being who I was. I was on a journey now, a journey that I was determined would end in the room with those beautiful dancing girls I’d seen my very first lesson. A journey from Nobody to Somebody. I was certain of one thing- I would never let myself be Nobody again.

Gia George is a 14 year old writer from Chelmsford, England. She’s been writing ever since she can remember. If you’re reading this, she’s probably at school, doing homework, writing, or reading.

Artwork by Anastasia James

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Scenery by Blanka Pillár

I forgive him for the little lies. The little fibs that slip away and the broken promises that go unkept. He always tells the same lies, and sometimes I believe him, because the story paints itself like a vivid oil portrait; first the figures are painted, then the background, then the corners, edges, contours, and finally it becomes as if it were a real scene on the canvas of life, but only the immensity of human imagination has made believable what could never be real. It tells me what I most desire, and so I reach for it with all my heart, stretching out the arms of my soul to preserve all that its lips say, and to hold it within me for eternity. I love him with all my heart, but when my reality is keen-eyed, it sometimes smells like the scratch of jagged-edged infidelities in the dawning dawn or the wistful night. The cold realisation slips into bed beside me, or touches me as I walk.

Today we take it into our heads to walk around the riverbank. We get caught in the cool January breeze and he starts coughing. I take off my thin pink cotton scarf and wrap it around his neck with careful movements. He gives me a weak half smile and walks on. My chest gets hot, even though my whole body is shivering from the winter’s minus temperatures. Sometimes we stop. We look at the broken-legged seagulls on the slippery waterfront stones, the sloppy sidewalk ahead, the footprints of giddy pedestrians. As we spy one of the old buildings covered in melted snow, he rubs his hand. His fingertips are almost purple, so I tug off my black fabric gloves and slip them on his frosty palms. He thanks me quietly. His silent words creep into my consciousness like angelically soft notes, wrapping my trembling body in a gentle embrace.

Barely perceptible, the milky-white sky opens and it begins to drizzle, but we are unperturbed. We sit down on a stinging bench and stare silently at the glistening toes of our wet boots as they tread the snowy ground before us. Somewhere in the distance, expensive hand-painted china plates clink, light pages of newspapers crinkle in the city breeze, the iron bells of a dilapidated church jingle, a delicious golden-skinned duck roast in a warm oven is being prepared. I feel him move beside me, and I put my head down. He sways back and forth with folded arms, while tiny particles of dripping snow fall on his knitted flame-red angora sweater. I slip my thin arms out of my expensive loden-lined coat and place them on his back. He looks me in the eye. At the sight of his delicately delineated perfect face, my tongue curls and confesses. It humbly confesses the truth it has admitted so many times before, and hopes. It hopes that for once its love’s answer will not be a lie. But once again he replies, I love you too. I-love-you. He utters each elaborate detail of the gracious lie in a wordy way. The first syllable is trust, the second is passion, and the third is loyalty. He feels none of these, yet he testifies to them. He savours the shape of the voice. First bitter, then sour, then finally swallowed. After all, it’s only one word. But for me, it’s so much more: I put myself in his hands.

Maybe that’s not how it all happened. I’ve been sick for a while now; my lungs are weak from the January freeze. Every time I close my eyes, I try to remember our last story. Embellish it, add to it, rearrange it, change it. Maybe one day I’ll grind it to perfection and that word won’t ring so false. Or the memory will turn yellow, like old letterhead, and no longer matter. Or maybe ‘‘I love you’’ will become just another fluffy word to be whispered in the harsh winter, bored, picked up by the wind, carried far away, across the world, to where it means nothing. Far from the eager, greedy arms of my soul.

Blanka Pillár is a young, emerging writer from Budapest, Hungary. She has a never-ending love for creating and an ever-lasting passion for learning. She has won several national competitions and is also a columnist for her high school’s prestigious newspaper. 

Artwork by Devika Aggarwal

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Beneath His Kaleidoscope Eyes

The rattle of an aging radio agonizing over war and the address of his childhood home are faded structural realities. He grew up in isolation with an erased memory after contracting encephalitis, and he also grew up embraced by a loving family. He had nothing or he had everything. It depends on which way you want to tell it.

From his pipe, wispy gray strands of smoke swayed like living ghosts. Sunshine shimmered through his dusty window shades onto strewn book stacks and his silver threaded hair. Now with the wind exhaling, drifting the smell of fish from the bay into the walls of my grandpa’s apartment, he sat alone once again—this time in the vortex of the COVID-19 crisis.

When time slowed to a tormenting crawl, he turned on CNN. The news led him through the possibility of death and despair, a borderless sphere where loneliness reigns and hope is an ancient entity. With the click of the off button, he entered into a state of pure illusion, a state of numbness, like the numbness that follows an injury, before pain starts to make its way through. Everything seemed less real under the waves of oblivion, and that’s what he needed. I knew he longed for fiction.

Like the planets in celestial orbit, he was distant and lying beyond reach. Growing up in an era where silencing pain was status quo, Poppy maintained an emotional shield against vulnerability. To bridge the generational gaps between us, I searched the apartment for remnants of his former life. I found a 1960s Diana Camera wedged between tattered baseball cards and faded news clippings.

This unassuming blue and black piece of plastic was embedded with supernatural sorcery. With its transcendent powers, Diana dismantled Poppy’s manufactured illusion and revealed the true emotions beneath his facade. I photographed the lines of solitude etched in his forehead, the deep ravines of shadows that shrouded his existence. Through the lens of this vintage telescope, he communicated his untold stories and sorrows from youth: bursts of uncontrolled electrical activity between brain cells and his body bound to the wheelchair he called home. Emotional transparency, once an elusive concept, became a source of healing.

In my garage, aka the makeshift darkroom, I began to develop this picture while listening to Stevie Wonder’s “Love’s In Need of Love” melting on the record player’s rusting needle. In tune with his melody, it occurred to me that this fragmentary image allows me to peer into the larger questions of the moment, into a country mourning the loss of human connection. The pandemic has been an exercise in subtraction. Poppy has experienced the voids left by neighbors who have succumbed to COVID-19 and the absence of friends and family. And then there are the intimate things that are gone: the handshakes, pats, and the strokes that warm daily interactions.

As the photograph dried and the gradients of grey took form, I analyzed Poppy. In his chair surrounded by tchotchkes, he stared at the pictures of his former dog and my Grandma in the 80s with cheekbones adorned in bubble gum pink rouge at the roller skating rink. When days meld into one and the pipe’s vapors envelope his being, he entered into a permanent haze of oblivion to escape living in a constant flashback. His current existence cloistered in his apartment is reminiscent of his childhood when his fever rose and was forced to stay in isolation to recover. The black and white film replicated his portal to the past. Somewhere at the intersection of peace and longing, his concealed pain thawed within the picture.

I picked up Poppy the day I finished processing the film, and we went to the deli on Cross Bay Boulevard. I had not seen him for a long time and his sullen face slowly waned. It was early in the morning and for a fleeting moment the chaos of the pandemic blurred into stillness. We ate our bagels and lox together by the bay, the salty threads of air whispered and the ebb and flow of waves hummed. In between coffee sips, we talked about our shared feelings of loneliness and yearning for normalcy. I finally knew what was beneath his kaleidoscope eyes, once a confusing mosaic of opaque colors. Now, a translucent vision of an old man trying to nourish his relationship with his granddaughter and cope with childhood trauma.

When Gabrielle Beck is not writing or photographing, she can be found repurposing vintage denim. She is a finalist for New York Times “Coming of Age in 2020: A Special Multimedia Contest for Teenagers,” and recognized by the National Council of Teacher’s of English.

Art by Sarah Little

 

 

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Something About Living

The veteran lives in his daughter’s house. He draws his curtains and lies on his bed. Its frame creaks, and it rots, and its mattress depresses with his weight, and a war torn land crosses his mind again. He thinks of barrenness, as he lies in his bed. But in spite of the sounds that come and stay, he lies and finds comfort in his bed’s depression.

He glances at his nightstand. A lamp, unlit, rests atop. A sepia woman sits next to it, captured in a photograph, darkened by light’s shadow—insignificant to the forgetful veteran. She had fled him, he had fled her. Besides the war he forgets most things.

He reaches for the nightstand in hopes of remembrance. He aims for the sepia woman, but he shakes and shakes more. The hand, a steamship, transports to the nightstand. But the hand, the feminine fingertips, the importance, the ship, she diverts her path—her hull trembles. She succumbs to a brighter light, guiding her into deeper, bluer obscurity. Steam puffs and flies in a different direction. She changes her course, the ocean’s breezes. The hand finds itself atop the handle of an antique drawer. She forgets again the photograph for which she had once lived. But reasons to live are only memories to the ship, drunken by the ocean. 

The hand clenches the nightstand’s hinge, and she pulls toward her person. The drawer glides ajar to reveal tall bottles, hard liquor, poison to the curtains, drawn evermore. The veteran thinks of war and screaming memories. The steam’s puffing and flying ceases, the dark room falls silent, and the drawer empties along with the old man’s mind, drunken.

Adjacent to the veteran’s room, a boy sits in a caned chair facing a mirror he stole from his mother’s vanity. His window grants passage to a mid-afternoon light, readying itself for the profound tone it saves for evening and night. He had grown up wishing for a lake by his house, one to reflect the colors of a setting sun, perhaps to echo birds’ songs. 

The old man’s sorrows reach his grandson. The boy hears an opening of a drawer and a clinking of tall bottles, making way for more clinking and more bottles and emptiness. However, he does not dwell on the tall bottles, but the thin walls, and he wishes quiet, blissful little things for his grandfather. He hopes these things would happen within their lifetimes, but maybe ideals belong to a world with a lakeview through his window. Maybe bliss belongs to a world of birds’ melodies. 

Deliberately the boy studies himself in the mirror. He hopes to the mirror often, mostly for materials, objects to display and then to discard. But today he hopes for clarity. He sees an unbrushed hair and combes it to his scalp. The mirror reflects a beauty, one exclusive to novelty and soft changes in light. 

First the walls hear clinking of full bottles, then empty ones. They hear an old man sigh dimly upon a glance of a photograph; he obliges another drink. And the boy who sees himself in the looking glass sighs, too, as he hopes and prepares for changes and a setting sun. Maybe a setting sun could bring him acceptance. The walls mute the family’s stilling echoes. 

As his mother warms gravy in the kitchen, the doorbell rings, and the boy descends to where the wallpaper peels in the foyer. The doorway’s opening reveals a boy his age, who smiles at the sight of him. The boy leads his visitor to an area outside the screened-in-porch. He closes the door shut before arriving there, however, and he smiles back at his guest. The door sends an echo throughout the house, which travels to a room with drawn curtains. 

The veteran had been sleeping, his fingertips embracing tall bottles. He had heard a door meet its threshold and, somewhere in the scape, a latch accept its lock. He wakes and moves to the windows and furls their drapes. The daylight instills in him a feeling so warm that he chooses to furl the rest of the blinds and do away with them completely for the evening. He looks outside from his bedroom’s vantage, escaping his dark room through the pane. He searches for the person who closed the door, who made him furl his drapes. 

The veteran sees his instiller of light, his grandson, standing before his daughter’s house’s façade. He presses delicate hands to the window and sees another boy smiling slowly at his grandson. It seems as though the guest offers something to the boy, something blurred, as the old man’s eyeglasses render useless from the nightstand. The boy’s hand approaches the guest’s in reach of the blur. Gently it transfers between the two silhouettes, and after, the guest’s eyes shimmer for a moment, which passes so quickly that if the old man upstairs had blinked or drunk or died, he would have missed the shimmer.

He is unsure of what overcame his grandson in response to this shimmer. His countenance directs away from his window. However, he believes his grandson reciprocated the guest’s sentiment, as their hands still linger where the blur’s transfer had taken place. Then the guest holds tighter to his grandson’s hand for one unapologetic second. 

He leaves the front door and the screened-in porch and the boy, who smiles slowly, stunned.

The veteran realizes the possibility of there having been no object, no blur, and their hands only touched because of the moment’s clarity. They were only but silhouettes, after all. He notices his fingertips embracing nothing but the window.

The sun descends loftily. The veteran no longer thinks of war and screaming things, but of his grandson, who held a boy’s hand and found acceptance under the shadow of a setting sun. 

An unfamiliar sobriety shields the old man’s face. He looks at the sepia woman atop his nightstand, and he sentinels himself before her. The window, blurry yet tender, had reminded him to protect her, their memory. In truth, he may have seen her in color for one fraction of a moment. 

He turns on the lamp next to her. He lets it shine onto her frame, giving her light like his grandson had for him. He becomes her sun like he had become his. He remembers forgotten things and descends to his daughter, who warms gravy in the kitchen. He brings his glasses with him. 

—Adelaide, he says at the bottom of the stairs. He sees clearly. He pauses. He repeats himself and apologizes. He mumbles subtleties to his daughter. His eyes tear slightly, blueing lightly. My darling, he says quietly. He whispers to her more.

His daughter leans over the stove but releases her wooden spoon after hearing his mournful cadence repaired. She lets go. She holds his face and serves him dinner. 

The boy, however, forgoes his mother’s gravy while he protects his guest’s path and watches it stretch into disappearance outside. Our lifetimes will meet again, he thinks. But in the meantime, I’ll stay with your memory. The walls might forever hold the smell of that night’s gravy. 

His path disappears, so the boy comes inside. The sun has set. He sees his mother holding onto, collapsing her entirety onto a delicate man who misses evening meals. His shoulders, scarred from the land where they fought and the bottles they emptied, feel embraced, beloved, felt. 

The veteran sees his grandson enter the kitchen. He lets his eyeglasses glide the bridge of his nose. The boy seems delighted and his mother complete, but the old man shows no emotion and says not a word. He only breathes a labial hum one expels when they can finally grasp something with an intense understanding.

His grandson had shifted something inside him. Unclear whether he feels heavier or more light, he knows nothing left him, but something old thawed. A war inside the veteran had broken; a window, opened. His grandson had alighted him from the nightstand, from the sepia woman, from the depression in his mattress. 

The old man considers thanking his grandson for daylight and for remembrance. He had shown him a setting sun, something about life, and something about living. 

Meanwhile, the boy thinks again of his guest. The setting sun had brought him what he wanted. He imagines a songbird’s call echoing off a lake. He feels the same tingling he had earlier, yielded by that affectionate hand on his.

Adelaide lets down her hair and pulls out a chair after hanging her apron by the stovetop. She sees her father already sitting, already sniffing warm gravy, already dropping warm, blue tears onto his placemat with every glance he steals from her son.

At the table, the veteran sees his grandson thinking of another boy’s shimmering eyes. So with his own, the grandfather weeps volumes of prideful acceptance.

Benjamin Herdeg is a high school student who just started creative writing over the summer, during the pandemic. He “uses writing as a vent into which he pours lots of emotion and unfinished thoughts.”

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To Linger

When I called my mother from the settling dark of the cold November night, she was unprepared for the news. She rushed down forty floors of cold apartment steel with the tiny shovel and gloves in her hands, ran across the cold dead rubber of the playground floor in her purple rain boots. All I could do was point with shaking eyes and strained fingers at the cold box in the kudzu. I remember my cold fingers all but digging through my shirt, watching my mother trudge over the undergrowth like she had done every night for over a year, bending over to push apart the bushes like she had done every autumn night. The dead leaves crunched under her feet.

 

I remember being sent to wash my hands- wash the scent of deteriorating mammal from my pores. I remember looking into my own eyes and telling myself over and over, this was bound to happen, this was bound to happen. When I returned, my mother was holding a small, stiff bundle wrapped in a red blanket. And as she lowered the cold form into the hoary ground, the tears finally burst from my eyes- I crumpled in front of the small hole, unable to form words but begging his name over and over in the small prison of my clenched hands.

 

His name was Mang-gae. I named him on a malingering summer evening, crisp and clean as the first bite of an apple. I named him for a wrinkled, ugly traditional rice-cake- didn’t the orange kitten look a lot like a rice-cake, rounded and scrunched up? I named him for longevity-the ugliest names will go the longest. I named him first. Out of the litter of five, he was the first to venture out into the open air, buttery and clean and yet infused with the limber grip of summer. He hissed at me as he ate snacks from my hand- then came back for more. I recall that one evening he swiped at me and left a bloody gash on my left palm, but was forgiven with the slightest brush of his whiskers against my mosquito-bitten calf the next day. I loved him as one would love a younger brother- complaining yet with a ferocity impossible to hide.

 

When he was named, it was as if he sprung up from a bed of identical kittens as a fully grown tiger- his face popped out at me like a flashlight from the box his family lived in. I learned his features. The pink nose, the high forehead, the delicate stripes on the back of his head. I learned his habits- the quirk of the tail when he was pleased, the negligent hiss when he pretended to turn his back on me. My father would watch him jump in and out of the same cardboard box for hours on end, almost purring with him when he settled down. I squatted in front of his closed eyes, wishing every day to speak to him.

 

Sometimes these days, I wonder what a year meant in the life of a fun-sized ginger cat. Was it an expanse of time he didn’t dare to encompass with a single flick of his paw? Or did the year he spent with us fly past like his baby-faced meow? I suppose I never will know. But if Mang-gae asked me the same question, asked me my bulksome human opinion on our shared year in broken yowls and hisses, I would tell him it meant more than any bond I had ever shared, whispering sweet nothings to him as if he had never left. Every summer night I spent with him seemed rosy with the remnants of the evening sun, but now I know that light was never the verdant vermilion of a summer day but his blooming warmth leaning against my hand. To look into the eyes of a creature unable to speak and enjoy its company was unbelievably precious, precious beyond conversational frippery and dated gestures. He changed my world solely with his acknowledgment of its existence.

 

To be able to look at a feather and think of someone who won’t be able to remark on it- to look at a torn sleeve and automatically see the night it ripped play out in front of your eyes. To trace an old scar on your finger, so faint you can barely see it, and forgive the claw that ripped it a thousand times over. To wonder if the small furry mind thinks the same. To wonder out loud to a bare grave, wonder if the hours I spent with you meant the same to you and know the answer before the tears hit the earth. To indulge in the vivacity of a living being during its short tenure on earth. To see it flown, escaped from its shallow prison of clay. I pushed my feet against the ground and begged the name that now meant nothing but a wrinkled, cheap rice-cake. Why had I ever named you for longevity? The dirt kept settling over the red blanket, over and over and over.

 

When my mother prompted me to say a few words for you, I could not. How could I ever let fly in a few words a bond that had never been expressed in words? Sobbing, I stammered out a generic prayer. I wish for you to be happy, I wish you all the things I could never give you, I wish for you to live in a haven with all the small things that make you happy- pureed cat snacks, inexpensive neon toys, cardboard boxes rimmed with cheap yellow tape and God knows what else. Certain things can only be said in words, clumsy and awkward. Some nights I have wanted to call after you, wherever you live now in the clouds. Most nights I did not know what to call, and now I think I may understand. You were many things- none of them spoken, many of them simply felt. And when I leave as you took flight, I should like to linger as you did- not as a broken call malingering in the kudzu, but as the fading light of a summer day, inexpressible in words yet blooming in syllables of faint touch.

 

Min Lee is a sophomore at St Georges School in Rhode Island. She enjoys reading fiction and creative nonfictions. Her interest in the field of neuroscience will lead her to pursue the study in college.
Visual Art by: Rita Yiting Ruan
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declutter.

200%.

It’s a steaming mid-July day. The moving company is supposed to arrive in a few hours, but we still haven’t packed all our belongings. The morning flies past as my sister and I scurry through the jumble while our parents work their way through every corner of the house. I cover the vintage dishes in bubble wrap while my twin tapes the boxes with please-don’t-throw signs. The moving truck arrives, and we skip lunch. I watch the frustration rise as the huffs of my parents and the puffs of the movers’ ring across the tiny house. Tension mounts as the clock ticks closer and closer to 6 pm, the time when the house needs to be entirely cleared and when we need to be out of the house. It’s 5 pm, and all the big furniture has moved to the new house. I circle around empty rooms I once labeled as my bedroom. It’s a strange feeling because the space is much more open but the air still feels tight. I am soothing my cat in the master bedroom when I hear my mom cry out from the backyard. I soon realize that we have less than twenty minutes left to clear the entire backyard, the shed, and the garage, which never came into our minds to clean before. We grab as much as we can and drag them into the house. We build a Pisa tower with cans of paint, rolls of paper half-gnawed by rats, and branches once transformed into magic wands in sixth grade. While we stuff them into the remaining plastic bags, I feel adrenaline rush through my veins as I give quick glances at my watch. It’s 5:55, and the front door swings open. It’s the new owners of the house. They’re early, and they look mad that we aren’t out of the house yet. By 5:58, one of them, a man, throws a tantrum, yelling in a language I do not recognize, while kicking our boxes almost out the door. At 6:00, we are out of the house, but the boxes of junk are still sitting on the driveway. I feel I am in the center of attention as the man and my mom continue to shout, each in their world of defense. But all I feel is the shame upon the tower of junk we drag out of the house in front of the entire neighborhood. It is at that moment that I feel the rich flavor of humiliation.

 

For my whole life, I have lived in absolute disarray, in ways both physical and psychological. However long I live in a particular house, it is only a matter of a few weeks when cleaning becomes the mission of Hercules scrubbing the Augean stables. Laundry stretches across beds, plastic bags cover kitchen floors, uneaten food occupies the fridge, and impossibility settles upon the carpeted closets to be vacuumed inside. I am Atlas crushed by the weight of possessions. It’s not that I am entirely underprivileged, but luck always finds a way to slip by me, mockingly brushing past my life. Family matters get worse and worse until arguments become a weekend ritual. While financial problems and conflicts build-up, self-confidence plummets. No matter how many times I make wishes while blowing candle after candle on birthdays, nothing changes. Life has become a continuous cycle of clutter. Time chases me down, while clicking submit buttons at 11:59pm’s, rushing back and forth to meetings and pointless destinations, to-do lists are now a Sisyphean struggle. I am a maximalist.

 

180%.

Quarantine is helping me change that. I catch onto the Gen Z trend of reorganizing bedrooms to fight off boredom. At the same time, my mom introduces me to the world of “minimalism,” and with it comes a series of nagging to clean my room. And so it begins. A journey towards emptiness. 

I embark on a 1000 item challenge. First, the decade-old desk hutches, then the roll of flyers picked up from volunteering, booklets from university fairs, artworks from kindergarten, and dried-out pens leave the house one after another. Shelves and drawers are emptied until I can finally clear the dust off them. For weeks, I move from room to room, peeking into every furniture, poking at every binder, bag, and box, wondering what I can get rid of. It is in these moments that I feel a surge of triumph rushing through. I partake in a game of no wins, competing against my maximal self. Instead of searching for gold coins and treasure chests, I search for trash. As I progress further, I no longer spend time looking for things and where I’ve left them. Frantic runs to the lost-and-found during after-school hours, and passing of missing water bottle sketches are reduced to a minimum. By getting rid of things, I find more value in everything I possess.

 

170%.

A warning pops up, ‘Are you sure you want to remove them?’

“Yes.”

Remove. Remove. Remove. 

Satisfaction bubbles up as my fingers work their way through the phone, removing every

app I haven’t used in the past month. I’m getting better at this thing, this endeavor of

emptying.

Unsubscribe. Unsubscribe. Unsubscribe.

I feel less chaos in my inbox. I set a time limit for notifications.

Delete. Delete. De-

My fingers pause mid-air. I zoom into the picture, and I see my mom laughing, from three years ago. A rare picture of her. I find myself smiling until my mouth becomes a counterpart of my mom’s. I decide to keep the valuable ones.

 

140%.

I am determined to dive deeper into minimalism. I wish to leave behind as little waste as possible. However, it’s not an easy choice for a maximalist, and I realize that it must be a task of joined forces, involving the entire family. While I give up my unconditional obsession with cute stationeries, mom makes wipes out of old cloth. Dad makes trivets out of leftover wood while my sister ceases to order food. Checkouts at groceries become a polite series of no thank-you’s to plastic bags. When we decide to abandon the use of shampoo, I begin to wonder if minimalism has brought me a lifestyle backward in time. I feel like I’m fighting the currents of modern society. But it feels good. Good to be doing good for the earth.

 

110%.

I watch my possessions, leaving me one by one. Some move on for the better. Unused craft supplies, almost-new clothes, and childhood books are donated. My heart drums the loudest when they get sent to people in need, to people who have recently settled into the country. In the face of the current pandemic, I see a pattern of selfishness among people, stocking up their unnecessary needs, driven by public psychology. And I want to advise them, declutter.

 

100%.

I sit in front of the windows of the master bedroom, watching the late afternoon sunlight flooding in. Instead of squeezing in through furniture and possessions, light fills the entirety of the room, where my cat bathes. It’s my favorite time, the romantic period of the day, and a newly acquired luxury. I realize that home has become a space containing meaning. Time runs at a slower pace these days. In truth, I am nowhere close to the end, nowhere close to being a minimalist. But more than ever, I find myself living the moment. I tend to see the big picture more often. I no longer try to pursue perfection but, instead, find satisfaction within my weaknesses unique to myself.

 

There is beauty in being decluttered, beauty in emptiness, beauty in finding the internal beauty. Most importantly, I feel so light. It’s still the same old life, even plainer than ever, but I see it in a new light. I now wish to live a life where I fill the emptiness with “me.”

 

Grace Hur is currently a junior attending Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary School. She loves to voice herself through many mediums, her favorite being Instagram. She calls herself a passionate writer and a student leader but in truth, she’s just a typical teenage girl with a terrible sense of direction.

Art by Saki

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Piano Player Fingers

My mother said that Janet had piano player fingers: each segment arcing into the next, flexing in unison because that is how the human body is supposed to work. But the first thing I remember about Janet’s fingers is how she stuck them too close to my face and I, a teething toddler, promptly chomped down on them. A baby’s gums does nothing but coat everything in the slime of innocence, but she hollered for Mom anyway.

Janet gave up piano when she hit seventh grade because basketball was all the rage. Mom dragged me to all her games where my feet dangled as I saw on the bleachers. And when the people stepping over us to find seats stepped on my white sneakers, she would console me with those lemon drops she always kept in her purse when I knew that Janet liked basketball—she’d come home at seven from after-school practices, sweaty and beaming and starving—but I wondered if she started dribbling because she was sick of etudes and sonatinas, or if it was because she liked the way the ball arced into the hoop, a motion as natural as the way her fingers used to dance over the ivories.

The summer before Janet’s freshman year, we moved and sold the piano. My mom cried when she sold the piano; Janet cried when she said goodbye to her friends. And I sat, squashed in the backseat between Janet and her basketball shoes, glad that we were moving. I was sick of spending Saturday afternoons at the court with her.  In reality, I had nothing better to do. Janet had been going to sleepovers since she was five, while I had made a grand total of five friends in the twelve years that I had been alive. Some tangled organ inside of me sang that if we were moving, it meant that Janet wouldn’t have any friends either and so maybe, just maybe, she’d be my friend.

Seventh grade premonitions don’t come true. I learned that the day Janet strutted into high school and made it onto the varsity cheerleading squad freshman year. She dyed the ends of her hair platinum blonde and swiped mascara over her eyelashes as soon as Mom left the house in the mornings, sliding me the piece of toast with the most peanut butter as a peace offering. Or a bribe.

The high school didn’t play basketball or soccer or volleyball—they played lacrosse and waved pom poms at football games. Janet shot right up there on the social ladder, skipping rungs and accepting hands that boosted her up. Mom made me go with her to Janet’s first cheerleading performance. A couple of my new friends had sisters on the squad as well, so I sat with them, starry-eyed over the football players and watching as the cheerleaders flipped and danced and contorted themselves in perfect coordination: a red and white being of undulating limbs and high ponytails, high off of the attention fixated upon them.

That was the first and last time Mom saw Janet execute a perfect backflip: arcing through the stuffy gym air and landing, shoes squeaking against the varnished wood, without a wobble. Over sweet and sour chicken that night, she told Janet that she had found out that a retired concert pianist lived two blocks away and that he was willing to give lessons and let her practice on his piano.

“Such a waste of your lovely fingers—they’re so talented! And all those flips and tricks—what if you injure your fingers?”

I smirked. All of Janet’s friends were on the cheerleading squad, and if Mom made her quit, she wouldn’t even have time to kiss that football player she liked goodbye. The ladder would be wrenched out from right under her, and she’d hurtle down back into the masses and would no longer be perfect Janet.

 I saw Janet’s nails dig into her palms under the table. She went to bed early that night, but our new house had thin walls, and I could hear the whisper of the pom poms as they cut through the air, over and over again.

 But the next week, she came home from school, having traded her pom poms for a deck of cards.

“They’re vintage,” she told Mom when she huffed in disapproval at her eldest shuffling yellowing cards over the table,“like all those plates you like so much.”

I found out from my friend Bethany, whose brother was dating one of Janet’s cheerleader friends, that Janet was now playing poker at lunch and making a killing. When I came home from school, I’d find cards dancing as she made them vanish with a flick of her fingers and reappear in her other hand.

 Perfect arcs, still, and I envied her ability to make things flow just right. The diamonds soared through the air and landed in her other hand in a rapid burst of plastic-coated paper slapping each other, as if pulled by some invisible string. I wished that I could do that.

 She offered to teach me how to shuffle one Friday afternoon before her weekly piano lesson, but I was going to the movies with Andrew. He had shyly asked me out on Wednesday, during those last few precious moments of lunch. I left her offer untouched and instead asked can you lend me lip gloss.

 She put down her cards, the queen of hearts on top, looking at me solemnly, and led me upstairs where she rummaged through the back of her closet and gave me four different tubes of lip gloss to choose from. She covered their labels and named them for me: “tastes like raspberries, will get you into trouble at school, makes you look kissable and the one mom doesn’t mind.” I grabbed “makes you look kissable” but nothing happened in the dark cinema except for a lot of crying scenes. That was my last date with Andrew.

 Mom still thought that Janet was set on the trajectory towards Carnegie Hall.

 When she asked me for a favor, I couldn’t say no. I wanted to be the magnanimous sibling who helped their crying sister. The one who would climb into my window at three in the morning, mascara running and a deck of cards, creased and stained, sticking out of the pocket of her ripped jeans. I wanted that moral superiority to dangle over her stupid French-braided head. She asked me for money, and I handed it to her wordlessly. All one hundred and twenty dollars of my babysitting money for the family next door who always wanted me to come over and be such a good influence on little Izzy. Janet’s hand stayed outstretched, as if she expected more, but the moment that I opened my mouth to tell her that the wad of tens and twenties was it, she yanked me into a hug.

 She smelled like cigarette smoke and the girls’ locker room and cheap deodorant, so I held my breath until she let go of me and whispered in my ear. 

“You’re the best sister. Thank you so much, I swear I’ll pay you back. Please don’t tell Mom, thank you so much, good luck with your algebra test tomorrow.” 

She said that like a prayer. The mantra followed her to the window.

 Downstairs the next morning, I was greeted by my mother and a police officer who tipped his hat at me politely but I did not see him—I only saw my mother’s red-rimmed eyes and raspberry nose and the papers in front of her. I did not see Janet anywhere near.

 “Did you know anything about this?” Mom’s voice was switchblade soft, and I wasn’t fooled by her splotchy face anymore.

  She jabbed a blood-red finger onto the top document, and I leaned in and saw a mugshot with my sister’s eyes wide and not entirely focused and looking so young—nothing like the piano player, three-point shooter, card trickster that dwelled in the pictures on the mantelpiece. 

 “She asked us to contact you, miss, but as part of our policy we don’t contact minors. We called your mother when we picked her and some other teens up for illegal gambling. Turns out she was running quite a prolific business and was getting involved with some local gangs.” 

 Something heavy and sticky began bubbling up in my stomach, and for a second, I thought it might be the “makes you look kissable” lip gloss, but I knew it wasn’t that when I turned to my mother and said “piano player fingers, huh.”

Yong-Yu is a Taiwanese teenager who has lived in Malaysia for all her life. Her current favorite self-descriptive adjective is “culturally-confused.” She had been previously published in The Heritage Review and the bitter fruit review. In her spare time, she can be found binging Doctor Who, playing the flute, or lazing around the house.

Art by: Tao Tiva

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