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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The Symbolism behind Driving into an Underpass on the Garden State Parkway

One time, while driving home from a Tuesday grocery trip at the Little India produce market, you wiped the last fragment of boiled spaghetti away from your lips with a Chipotle napkin and said that only things that bluntly resemble the form of humans can have symbolism. Take the trees, you said, and see how their branches jut out like frozen twizzlers from the lean figure-eight waist — it all looks distinctly like the silhouette of a human body. This is why there are so many poems littered with metaphors about trees. And look ahead at the chipped brick underpass, you said, there is no symbolism in this thing, no blunt resemblance to humankind, just a loaf of carved brick designed to spare our Chevy truck from the humming Jersey rain for a few seconds. Pay no heed to the underpass, pay heed to the trees, you said. 

Now I don’t understand what this Garden State underpass has done to you to be named the most un-symbolic thing on the planet, but, then again, I don’t get a lot of things. For example, how did we two people, one a believer and the other an atheist, find ourselves together in the midst of a wedding. We announced our commitment to each other somewhere in the local mango fields, property of a fruit farmer who was not invited to our ceremony. I did not fancy stealing another man’s oxygen and trespassing like this, but you said that it did no harm, and so we exchanged rings on another man’s property unbeknownst to that man. 

The mangoes of the tree we stood under decorated the tufts of leaves like hairpins and your soft fingers did not hesitate to plunder a fruit from this tree for your lips to bite into, water syrup forming rivers through the lace of your gentle fingers like poetry. I was stunned when you did this. The fruit, mango, was nothing more than a complicated collection of particles to you, but I saw clearly that it was a child of the tree and the property of a man we both didn’t know. In the taxi your brother paid for, I pressed you for a reason as to why plundering the forbidden fruit was the arch for sharing my life with you and you said that it was just a mango, that it didn’t matter, that we shouldn’t fight on our wedding day. 

But our first night together, we fought anyway, this time with pieces of hips and elbows for the first right to the bathroom sink and, in the end, we had to share, like children. In between toothbrushes and shaving cream, with mouth foaming with listerine, dental floss, and toothpaste, I turned to you and said that I would love to be a liquefied mango, or any fruit for that matter, because it would be nice to be able to just disappear down the sink drain sometimes. Except, the part about being a liquefied mango is important because it would be quite horrid to flow down the drain like regular bathroom water. And you spat out a puddle of Colgate toothpaste into the sink and told me that you didn’t understand how mangos could possibly matter. I must have looked crazed to you, defending an eaten mango and then announcing that I want to be a liquified mango. But I didn’t want to tire you with my theory about the universe so what I said, instead, is that I guess what I mean is that I want an overripe mango for breakfast. 

Then dawned the days when you used to bike to Chinatown every morning, through dim sum palaces and dumpling dens, to buy a pound of fresh mangos for me, wearing nothing but husky trousers and that oversized gray Santa Cruz hoodie you once left on the couch and missed a flight to retrieve. And even though you never bothered to fix that brake lever, even New York City traffic didn’t keep you from your bike. Thinking of you one day as you had gone, I came to the conclusion that your Santa Cruz hoodie and your bike spend more time together than your lungs do with air. I wondered what a love letter from your Santa Cruz hoodie to your bicycle would sound like, maybe something like this: 

 

     Dear Bob the bicycle, 

I fell in love with the perfect curves of your tires that carry your full lust. I can fit into any space you allow me to. I wish for our dust to dance together like charcoal at the end of each day, when you’ve tired yourself and return from the dirt and grime of the winding streets.

Love, 

Your Santa Cruz hoodie 

 

I thought the love letter was quite clever, but when I gave it to you, you said that I have this unsettling tendency to pay attention to things that don’t matter, like bicycles, sweatshirts, and pigeons. Stealing a mango from a plastic grocery bag, you said that the rooster windbreaker with a missing “W” and the Chinese minimalists shopping for vegan tofu in China Town don’t matter in the grand scheme of life and the universe. So the next morning, I really tried to not think of the symbolism behind your tongue pushing water through the tube of your throat after 59 push-ups in the foyer, or the meaning behind a person who cuts an apple pie with the knife tilted up at 90, instead of a flat 180 degrees angle, or the symbolism behind the strange way in which you eat spaghetti and meatballs because you, My Lord, are the only living being who can get drunk off of dipping spaghetti, like nachos, into a tomato sauce with eggplant and zucchini. Now the truth of the matter is that I tried to pay no heed to the underlying symbolism of things for about two days, before rolling over and accepting defeat and the fact that cheesecake somehow represents the birth of a child. (A cheesecake is heavy and burdensome on the stomach, buttery, satisfying like the feeling one has after birthing a newborn, but touch the crust, and it crumbles to reveal a world of sin.) 

But you never got how these things could possibly matter because you never cared about the mango from the tree that did not belong to you, or the rooster windbreaker with the missing “W,” or the Chinese minimalists. You don’t remember the three people who always stood leaning on the tar hill cascading around the price pole for diesel in that gas station that bordered our flat. You don’t remember what the moon looked like, crescent or full, that night we built a cardboard airplane out of the cereal boxes in our pantry. That night, I told you that the reason our marriage collapsed was because of the mango and you laughed and asked again how mangos could possibly matter. The truth is that if you had cared about the mango, then the walls of the world would have leaned closer to you, given pieces of itself to you, and held you like honey with the gentlest of arms and lips. 

But the world and its things obviously never mattered to My Lord, you, who never hesitated to plunder and pluck the forbidden fruit and drink the soul of the mango leaves that were summoned to protect you and I, the paired pigeons, from the rest of the world. The people vomited sins and you spat back in the name of the holy Scripture. I am bitter. I wish that the fruit farmer had awoken our marriage night and thrown us both, like Adam and his beloved Eve, with the complementary threats and curses, to the cumbersome paved streets for drinking his property’s air. 

Now if we’re going back to the underpass, My Lord, there is lots of symbolism behind that Garden State underpass. The underpass broke the slaps of the rain as we drove underneath and somewhere in between, I grew up. That underpass is a symbol for our marriage, above all things. We drove Ferraris and Mercedes through each other as if we were somehow able to still stand even with an arching hole simmered through our pooling belly buttons. As we ate the fruits and beets, the things of this world fell from our throats through our bellies and out, though the difference is that I tasted it and you shoved it down your throat. You are like the underpass. You don’t stop to think about the cars and trunks that pass through you. You stand and assert your strength and courage by pushing something as gentle as rain away. The truth is that no one will care when that Garden State Parkway underpass is torn down one day and built into a better, stronger underpass, and the underpass knows that and maybe that’s why it’s so bitter. The underpass breathes, My Lord, just like the mangos breathe. The world beyond our bubble breathes, full inhales and exhales, drunk on the taste of air. It carries lessons and meaning and that’s why something as prosperous as mangos matter to the overarching scheme of the universe. 

 

Zoha Arif is a 16-year-old high school student studying computer science and programming at the Academy for Information Technology. She currently lives in New Jersey and enjoys spilling her strangest ideas into her works of fiction in her free time. She is also an editor for her school newspaper, Polyphony Lit, and E&GJ Press.

Visual arts by Ordy Chen

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Sunday Dinner

The family comes bubble wrapped, prepped to eat over synthetic discourse.
Prayer first. The future’s passed around; patrons pile on the collection
plate. The oven is hot and the timer cheats. Women leap at the beep,
unrehearsed in their assembled domestic burst. Another spring chicken:
underdone meat, dry like chalk. She’ll learn. The men are robust with
compensating promises, raises and grease simmering at the table, lingering
green outside the confession booth. They lurch. A bubble pops and the
curtain drops. Chairs adjust, scrape back singed skin. Faith and heat
converge.

Fiora Elbers-Tibbits
A senior creative writing major at Walnut Hill School for the Arts.

Art by Florence Liu

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