Mosaic by Amber Morena

Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders

2016

Contents

Instructor’s Note | Adeena Reitberger The Woods | Georgia Moore

Shrinky Dinks | Georgia Moore Wings | Emily Weaver

Black Cloud | Emily Weaver

Country of Hyenas | Shara Henderson

How You and I Remember the 1900s | Shara Henderson The Supernatural Truth | Tia O’Laughlin

Trust Is Shown, Not Told | Tia O’Laughlin The Summer of Ice | Allegra Green

Lions In A Small Town | Isabella Baladez The Big Oak Tree | Isabella Baladez Weighted | Cindy Ly Fireﬂies | Cindy Ly

18 19

Neveah | Lorenya Moñoz

Black Sheeped Family | Lorenya Moñoz Never Knew | Jaqui Ruiz

Ninth Grade | Jaqui Ruiz

Brotherhood | Brenda Avila

Disappearing by the Hundreds | Brenda Avila

Instructor’s Note

few blocks north of the rumbling of Highway 290, at the end Prather Lane, the Ann Richards School stood quietly in the weekend sunshine except for the scribbling of ten ambitious writers in a second-floor classroom. These young women, gathered for The Austin Review’s Fiction Workshop, came to write stories, to push the boundaries of their imaginations, and to expand their artistic communities. Together, we talked about our love for literature, and then we read stories and were inspired by them. We focused on three fabulist works by contemporary writers—stories that demonstrated expertise in invention, creativity, and empathy. In one of these stories, almost all the children in a neighborhood turn into birds. In another, a woman remembers a childhood friend who had a secret: her heart flipped out and beat on top of her chest. And in another, a woman considers the different perspectives on what she felt was a magical winter years ago, only to realize the way memory can soften or change. We discussed how the writers utilized techniques such as metaphor, transition, symbol, and repetition, and then we used these stories as jumping off points to tell our own. In this collection you’ll find characters who shrink into tiny humans, who turn into lions and cheetahs, who grow wings on their backs or have doors in their eyes, and others who are mysteriously cured of all their illnesses or who disappear from their worlds completely. These are stories about memory, civil rights, friendship, family, loneliness, love, and so much more. The students at the Ann Richards School demonstrate tremendous honesty, insight, empathy, and passion in their writing. With their wit, unwavering hope, and good hearts, these students have inspired me to imagine a kinder more just world. If you let them, they will do the same for you. Adeena Reitberger, workshop instructor 1

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The Woods | Georgia Moore I remember the cold afternoon running down the hill, up and down over the steep gravel leading to the woods. Flying over stones and granites, maybe diamonds, who can know? We didn’t. I would go and you would pull, you would go and would pull, laughing and running before we hit the murky tree line, throwing buckets and balloons at boys on bikes and skateboards. We let out war cries, and who were they? The woods were the boundary where stray cats with sticky, plush fur would emerge at night, where packs of dogs would howl, and the dead echoes of country and rock would linger from the backyards across the creek. The woods were soaked through with coyotes, and once in a while a hawk would circle overhead, urging cats to return inside. A black tom chased a field mouse straight over our fence once. I remember walking to the well, a kind of ancient shrine before us, green leafy water and crumbling stone like Mayan ruins of central suburbia. You remember it differently. You think of the park, the slide, the weird plastic tarantula neither of us would touch, the swing that didn’t swing but bounced like a dumb frog. The branches where I hoisted you up by your shoulders, your shoes, and how you cried when you couldn’t come down. You remember the jump rope and the yellow yield sign, another boundary. You feared the woods. This, then, for drama: You still won’t go down the slide. The gravel is now a set of steps, and bikers sigh and dogs still howl before dawn. When I can’t sleep, I stare at the stars behind the eyes. The field mouse hideaway is covered in concrete, a pool that reflects orange, purple, and blue. The woods’ sticks and branches with spindly squirrels leaping have stayed the same. The pond is fuller now. I wish I had someone to meet there. They might have stripped the nails (rusty, a hazard) and wood (rotting, a hazard) off of the tree house tree, but I think the well is still there. This is a story told the way you say stories should be told. Two girls grew up near some woods and never went out, only when they did, and it was filled with war and laughter and blood and concrete. Even now, the trees poking out of sight of the big window remind

Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders, 2016

me that the sky was once big and blue and that my bike helmet once ﬁt. We will always say we should do it more, but then I close the door and you turn the key. We diverged, no longer what the woods made us.

Shrinky Dinks | Georgia Moore On the street where everyone shrunk, we were not as surprised as you might imagine. Many would say it was meant to be, especially Mr. McMillan three doors down. “How can you live on Dinkler Street and not expect to shrink?” Mr. McMillan would say. He worked at the paper and was especially proud of his headline for the story: “The Shrinky Dinks: Anomalies of Dinkler Street.” As if living on a street called Dinkler wasn’t bad enough. Walking up to the bus stop, we all glared at the street sign so it would become branded with our anger and change to something normal, like Oak or Elm. Some of us, bolder, would spit at the base of the sign whenever we passed, a ritual that was kept long after the incidents. It was August, and Marla Lopez was three inches tall. Some thought she was a myth, that the great June Lopez didn’t really have a twin, but there she was in her mother’s palm in the hot air. June told us while we were sipping Cokes in the park that her mom made Marla live in a doll house and that she ate breadcrumbs. Then Sam Pitcher the pitcher shrunk, too. His mother thought he ran away but found him nearly smothered in his pillow. “Names always mean something,” Mr. McMillan told my father after Sam pitched the winning ball at the neighborhood little league game. My best friend Kate was madly in love with Sam Pitcher the pitcher. She told me that she had snuck into his house and had him in a jar with holes but that she couldn’t show me. The paper got involved when both Mrs. Blake and Mrs. Wilson accidentally killed their husbands with vacuum cleaners. The widows left Dinkler Street, never to return. Or maybe they shrunk, too. We were never sure. People were more careful after that. No one wore shoes. Our

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feet became cracked and black from the hot asphalt. Everyone saved breadcrumbs in a jar for the kids who got small and bought eyedroppers at the drugstore so they wouldn’t die of thirst. It was a tricky business. By the time school stared, only Kate and I were left from our street. We solemnly spit at the street sign that had cursed our miniature peers as we walked to the bus. We ate lunch in silence. Nothing’s interesting when you live on a street where carpet lines the curb so mothers don’t lose their kids. Then my father got ﬁred, and my mother stopped speaking to him. His temper had lost him a job once again. “They deserved it,” he insisted. “This time those crooks really deserved it.” The next day he was gone, but I found him asleep in a bowl of cold oatmeal in our sink. So no one washed dishes anymore, in case of a drowning. My feet had begun to smell since nobody showered either. The next day, I spit on the street sign curb alone. I ate lunch alone. I drank coke at the park alone. There was no way of knowing who was the same and who wasn’t. Nobody went outside to prevent ticks and ants from getting in. Ticks and ants could eat you whole, our mothers told us. I wondered why I wasn’t small yet. I was glad about it, but once my mother shrank it was a lonely life. Teachers asked if I was all right, nose curling from the smell I tried to cover with perfume and deodorant. I always said I was ﬁne. And when counselors and my principal called home, neither of my parents could reach the phone. The ringing killed their ears so they told me to disconnect it. I quit then going to school. Some nights, I still sit on the fading asphalt of Dinkler Street and watch what stars I can see from behind the curtain of light pollution. I think about the moon, bright and lonely and one huge blob in the middle of a billion tiny stars. It makes me feel hopeless and hopeful. A lonely moon feeling. I hate the name Dinkler, I say to myself. I hate it now and I will hate it for as long as I live.