Grotonian Draft

the grotonian

SPRING 2023

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

— Franz Kafka

Writing is an intimate endeavor to wield a pen, fuse ink with paper and reveal one's most unspoken obsessions, and offer this intimacy to public eye is not for the faint of heart. We are all so consumed by a fear of whispered words and prying glances that we forget our true audience: ourselves. At a school that demands efficiency and a rigidity of expression, creative writing allows us to breathe life into our most earnest desires and invent something that is uniquely our won. On a blank page, our scribbles unite to create a complex portrait of the colorful musings of our minds. So obsess over the smallest details, every single word.

Sixth Form Amy Ma

David Wang

Sophia Bay

Fifth Form Alisa Gulyansky

Isabella Gardiner

Michael Lu

Cover Photo by Dilzafer Singh

Amanda Chang

Fiona Reenan

Jasmine Powell

Christina Chen

Jessica Lee

Julie Xie

Maya Luthi

Amanda Chang

To the Men Wandering the Streets of Paris with Roses

Alisa Gulyanksy

Fiona Reenan

I was Never One to Watch the Movement of the Night

Michael Lu

Amos Lawrence

Olivia Ding

Alisa Gulyansky

And He Was Kit Knuppel

POETRY

MIANUS RIVER BRIDGE

Amanda Chang

According to my orchestra conductor, on a particularly foggy night in June 1983, a section of the Mianus

River Bridge collapsed into the watery depths. Despite the urgent warnings of a goodhearted man from Georgia—who

had noticed this catastrophe unfolding and, having parked his car, entered the fray—disgruntled drivers honked

their horns before plummeting to their deaths one after the other until hundreds were submerged

in currents. Resounding crashes, amidst the ripples of hysteria and the sirens of paramedics, were

silenced. He was exaggerating the extent, perhaps unknowingly, of the damage—his mind murky from decades of tragedy-bound headlines and disquieting phone calls in the early hours. Yet I believe that

there was a semblance of truth hidden between the folds of sorrow: how far we have fallen to let Death take the wheel long before we ever learned to steer.

TO THE MEN WANDERING THE STREETS OF PARIS WITH ROSES

Fiona Reenan

who are you looking for? rambling around like adam & eve after the garden in the sunshine, in the rain, shoving flowers in my face reminding me that i was a lover, once.

the three fates spin tales outside a coffeeshop you can cry now, sweetheart and when the saltwater settles in my irises they will read them like tea leaves. let’s see what you were before the wreckage before the sugar hardened, and the cows came home, well, i was sitting across from the ocean side-eyeing some saltwater taffy reading the age of innocence, your typical teenage dream.

a minute ago, it melted in my mouth. coated with ambition, warm like blood, and full of promises like roses that reek of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume. before my love affair with pessimism, i liked to look for god in sunsets, and would’ve bought flowers from roaming men in the city of love. but delusion, that tricky old bastard, took me out to a candlelit dinner and crashed the car into a tree on the way back to my place.

so over half-cold cappuccinos, the fates mutter something the death of romanticism. but i never could see clearly in candlelight. so beg all you want, i won’t apologize for the wreckage. or the roses. or the saltwater. just watch the sunset fall into the earth, like lost teeth sinking into taffy.

I burned my copy of edith wharton and took like three trips to the dentist. so if you want to learn a lesson, just look at the night sky.

those are not stars, they are planes my darling, everyone is running away high on the hope that love lies on the other side of border control. that’s right, just like the floral night-stalkers, drunk on old ideas, we are all chasing someone. once again I ask: who are you looking for?

IN THE NAME OF GOD

Jasmine Powell

In the name of God, We place our hands together, Bow our heads, And close our eyes.

He has lifted our sorrows, And duty calls us to the pews, So that in our finest robes, We praise his name.

In the name of God, We sip the wine, We eat the bread, And leave the cups on the floor.

The help will mouth His name As they pick them up, And smile as we stand to leave, Even if we do not.

In the name of God

We shut the church doors at eight And the stragglers outside Cannot disrupt worship

and when the doors open We stampede out Leftover hymns on our lips And gracious goodbyes

In the name of God father grieves his losses in the night donning the white tented hood that mother sewed–in His name

and uncle writes the words that takes the books off the classroom shelves until faith is lost

In the name of God my grandfather cracked a whip and their work turned to his coin that turned to His

But in the name of God, We never speak of these. We bow our heads And close our eyes. Hostage to the night.

Untitled Clara Quinlan

GOSSAMER

Chritina Chen

We are all mini-molecules

Momentary loops of gossamer1 In the beginning is a beginning And in the end there is an end. The halo around the world Is always there and always disappearing.2 I have seen the sinews of life

The tendons, the veins, the arteries, Drawing paths so seemingly indelible, In truth, merely ephemeral; When I hear a wren sing, positively drenched In enthusiasm, What could I be

If not the witness of a prayer?3

There is a natural order to this world

And its purpose is yours to find –Find reason at the scalpel’s edge, An answer in each half-lit slide, A slice of reality for us to pick apart, To play God.

The bright dawn of morning chases away Night’s specter

Whose clutch is a vice grip of Wintry blankets tangled at feverish feet; And the cool face of the water’s edge Pooled in my palm, Begging for a kiss4 –What is balance, but this?

In this world, you are either a planter Or a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.5

1 From A River Runs Through It by Norman Mclean.

2 From A River Runs Through It by Norman Mclean.

3 Mary Oliver, “I Happened to be Standing.”

4 Langston Hughes, “Suicide’s Note.”

5 William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying.

PHOTOGRAPH PICKING

Jessica Lee

She plants all her memories in that photograph. When pine trees surrounded her and her porcelain skin couldn’t hide her blushing cheeks the clean, glowing eyes that showed no signs of age or childbirth classic, rouge Chanel 821 blossoms on her lips her hair undulates rhythm. The sun silently sips away her youth as her skirt of sunflowers sways in the wind shoulders stretched out like someone who loves herself. Mom, I pinched all your life from you Mom,

I see the stifling stiff denim that does not let a breath seep out Mom,

I feel your pulse when I massage your shoulders and see the veins your body popped and broken and given up to sustain my life is only complete with you. My awkward fingers bring you back to the shiny piles of us. Do you see yourself in me?

Pupa II: Calliphoridae Mei Matsui

Last Princess Alicia Guo

A POEM FOR MAMA

Julie Xie

I tell her that I can write, and I can read. But she doesn’t believe me. I tell her that I can cook, and I can clean. But she doesn’t believe me. And maybe my report cards say otherwise. And maybe my dumplings taste otherwise. But Mama I have grown so much since then. Remember that day I drove the two of us through pouring rain and freight trains. Mama you can trust me. If you can trust that the buds will bloom in the Spring, and the birds will sing songs when morning calls, and Daddy will come home on that plane, then you can trust me too.

Pupa I: Underdeveloped Mei Matsui

Temple Street Tangent Larry Li

SHADE

Maya Luthi

I like the color orange leaves in New England fall, bonfire embers, ripe loquats, a spotlight's metal coil as it pops and flashes off. It's the color of boiled-down light concentrated, syrupy, intense it's the vivacious color of when days begin and end...

I'm excited by endings and beginnings (at least I really want to be) excited to leave, to look back, then look forward and to see every pretty, perfect thing, and each colorful mistake and the new and glowing future paths to blaze and plans to make

But right now I long for 3:15 or 10am or noon

To be sitting in the shade of a tall, old oak in June and not to be distracted by a spectacle of light the fleetingness of purple wisps or sparkling flecks of golden night

I'd like to sit in the shade of something larger than I distracted by a calc test, a rowing race, a guy, not thinking too much un-reminded still of time.

I WAS NEVER ONE TO WATCH THE MOVEMENT OF THE NIGHT STARS IN THE SUMMER

Amanda Chang

because really, i could only identify the boxy frame of Ophiuchus as he wrestled with a snake between his legs and that’s only because i had to research him for a Latin project, you see, and that’s only if i squint and pretend that i can actually see the glimmers through the haze and i thought it was funny how people wished on stars as if they would respond, but then i met you, who shined brighter than the heavens. but the stars were never tangible to outstretched hands desperately waiting for the shallow moonbeam to flow into weathered palms and oh, but what i would give to sip from your fountain of wit as Juan Ponce de León wanted seeking everlasting youth but the thing is, i would have received so, so much more than he ever would and i know this to be true because i have found Eros’ arrows nestled in my raspy lungs and foggy mind, pooling tingling flames through translucent veins and i am bleeding red for you but not red like the poems written to glorify naked lovers to the heavens or the quiet flames flickering above a candlelight dinner but red like the exquisite pen that you let me borrow once and thankfully you reminded me to return because i don't think i could've handled owing you another thing and red like the crumpled wrapper of strawberry Pocky that i always shared with you during math in the back of the classroom as you collected your crops on Township because you already knew everything known to mankind, so god, i couldn’t help but love your mind, especially when your tongue articulated with such subtle nonchalance during history that your thoughts became merged with mine and my thoughts became immersed with you and i wished i had told you before we left for the last time that June when our eyes were blurred with memories and our hearts throbbing with words that we let lie in our throats too long but i couldn’t. so i watched you leave with your flowers and white dress and tear-streaked cheeks and i couldn't help but wish that i wished on another star because i had wished on you

The Trunk Mei Matsui

SPRINGTIME, OR THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD

Alisa Gulyansky

So you are spring, and you yearn to grow, to change, to plant your roots and stretch toward a world far-removed from your home just to see what it may hold. Eventually, you learn what this will mean for you: some day, you will yearn to know (or worse, to love) a creature that exists beyond your warm enclave — to rebel, if nothing else.

And so you do. She is a beast of October, rife with desperation and ever-eager to self-destruct. Something in her lifelessness calls to you, her comfort with darkness scorn for your life of eternal climbing. Instead, she sinks, prepared to plunge head-first into the depths of black December. She is far from the home you know.

You reach out. Touch. What is love, if not rebellion? A plunge into the unknown. You swear to her you’ll show her the climb, carry her on her shoulders as was once done for you, take her to the apex of your mountainous journey of seasons and show her a light in what you see as her mind of darkness.

She resists. You scoop her off her feet and sling her across your back and carry with you the weight of a thousand earths before you reach the top of your home. The horizon is all yours, and so is she. She is screaming, crying, pleading to return home. Naive, you think. She will grow soon. How could she be unhappy in this state?

It was springtime. Or at least, the weight of the world had vanished. The air was humid, saccharine. Your lungs were full of sweetness.

EULOGY

Fiona Reenan

They buried her in lilies. I hung my head and turned around. Careful not to disturb the bones beneath my feet, Making love to each other underground. Walking towards the black car, I pondered The passion it must take to be a ghost, Writhing around amongst the dirt, Searching for a long lost soul. She won’t be alone underneath the lilies.

I can’t tell if it comforts me to know, That somewhere down there, another someone Will fill the space between her bones. Now in the rearview reflection of a grassy hill, I swear I saw a glimmer of her ghost. My heart jumped against my skin, Begging her to know

Were you ever truly of this world, my darling? Were you ever really mine to hold?

Does your skin remember my touch?

Now that your blood has run cold?

Do you know that I love you, here, in this funeral car? And that I’ve loved you longer still?

I spent forty years believing you belonged to me, Now I know you never did.

But they can’t take you away from me, darling. With their shovels and flowers, their messages left on the phone. Some part of me will forever stay on that hill, Searching for you amongst the lilies, the dirt, and the bones.

Cellophane Dreams Mei Matsui '23

PROSE

FISHING FOR THE PAST

Michael Lu

It was the beginning of May in Gui Lin. The wind was no longer biting and harsh, and instead blew kindly. The willows on the edge of the lake drooped carelessly into the water, allowing its gentle flow to caress their newly-budded fronds. On their branches, sparrows and magpies tittered and bickered amongst themselves.

It was still dark, but Guo was already on the lake, whistling. He wore a loose cotton vest and a bamboo hat large enough to cover his face from a fiery noon sun. On each of his shoulders perched a small cormorant. Together, they floated on a bamboo raft in the clear cool water.

Guo loved his birds more than anything he owned, more than anyone he knew. They were loyal and well-trained; indeed, Guo had picked them out of the brood from which they were hatched and had trained them himself for years. The cormorants were short and stocky, which was ideal for chasing fish underwater, and were covered with dark scruffy feathers that quivered in the wind. Their long, bobbing necks swiveled inquisitively as they scanned the water for fish, but they did not move from their station on Guo’s shoulders- nor would they, without a signal from their master. Perhaps inexplicably, the birds’ legs were not tethered to the raft with a rope; the cormorants were free to go wherever they pleased. They stayed with the master because they wished to do so, and because he was all they knew.

The fisherman and his two cormorants sat patiently as they drifted towards the center of the lake. On the prow of his raft, Guo had perched a bronze lantern which lit the way. The lantern was filled with dark, bubbling oil, and it shone sputteringly, just bright enough to illuminate the water a few feet ahead of them. Starkly lit by the flame, a moth rattled against the metal base of the lantern, hurling itself repeatedly into the hot oil even as the fire singed its mottled wings.

sputteringly, just bright enough to illuminate the water a few feet ahead of them. Starkly lit by the flame, a moth rattled against the metal base of the lantern, hurling itself repeatedly into the hot oil even as the fire singed its mottled wings.

Guo drank from a gourd and began to croon an old folk song quietly to his beloved birds. He had learned it from his father, who had first taught Guo the craft of cormorant fishing. Briefly, the aged fisherman cast his mind back to his childhood, which always remembered fondly- even the occasional scoldings and beatings. Now, Guo’s only regret was not passing this art down to his own son, Guo Wei, who had moved to the city for a higher education. They had parted on bad terms, and Guo hadn’t seen his son for over two years.

Alone, Guo drifted with his birds. He was still singing.

By this time the sun had risen just far enough to illuminate the typical morning haze that swaddled the lake; a faint halo glowed behind the vista of mountains that stood around it. Guo suddenly gave a sharp click with his tongue. Cackling in anticipation, the cormorants immediately dove, like arrows, into the water.

The fisherman watched the agile shadows of his birds as they raced in the clear water, eagerly chasing the schools of carp swirling about the raft. Although the surface of the lake remained calm and undisturbed, a furious game of cat-and-mouse was being played out underneath it. Guo could only make out the faintest of figures as his cormorants darted in and out of view. Occasionally, a fish jumped up from the water, sometimes right over the raft, in a futile attempt to escape its pursuer. Then an uneasy calm settled upon the surface of the lake.

And suddenly, the cormorants emerged triumphantly from the water, their beaks clamped around thrashing fish. Guo deftly took hold of their necks with his fists and shook the fish they had caught into a basket woven with thatch. The cormorants did not resist, and after their beaks were emptied, they stood on the raft, preening themselves meekly.

In accordance with the ancient traditions of cormorant fishing, Guo had tied the necks of his cormorants with a piece of hemp string to keep them from swallowing the fish they caught. He had, of course, also clipped the cormorants’ wings when they were young, so that they had never learned to fly. Better safe than dead, Guo would always say to his son when asked why he did this. This way, the birds never get eaten by big bad eagles.

Hours passed, and Guo and his birds caught two baskets worth of fish. After every seven forays into the water, Guo rewarded his cormorants with the smallest fish of the catch: the only rewards small enough to fit through the restricted gullets of his birds. After they gobbled their payments greedily, the cormorants squawked pleasantly and rubbed their dripping heads against the shins of their master.

The sun was high in the sky when Guo whistled to his birds, and they clambered clumsily back to their berths on his shoulders. He tended to avoid the noisy afternoons because the fishing was slower; by this time, the lake was teeming with life: swallows and sparrows swooped over treetops, aged turtles sunbathed lazily on floating logs, children ran, squealing, on the lakeside.

But Guo left the lake mostly because he couldn’t bear the sight of other cormorant fishermen. He watched with a sad smile as they loaded their cushioned motorboats with tourists and photographers, welcoming their passengers with toothy smiles. This is not real cormorant fishing, he thought to himself, looking on with a mixture of pity and disgust. These impostors did not even train their own birds- no, they waited for fishermen like him to train fledgling cormorants, and then bought them for exorbitant prices. But what a great shame it was, that they could never experience the thrills of cormorant fishing, and the precious bond between a man and his cormorants that words could never express.

Still a distance from the shore, Guo made out two figures standing on the beach where he stored his raft. It was rare for him to have visitors- mostly photographers and travel bloggers hoping for a glimpse into his quiet life. As he pulled his raft onshore, with his cormorants by his side, the two at the beach hurried to meet him.

As soon as Guo saw him, he broke into a smile.

‘Wei Wei! It’s been so long!’

‘Hi dad, it’s good to see you.’ Guo Wei spoke softly. He was wearing a suit. A smartly dressed girl trailed behind him, holding a large binder with papers stacked inside. Guo Wei’s girlfriend? No, there was still some distance between them. His business partner then, or an assistant. So Guo Wei has an assistant! He’s doing well, then. And there’s his car in the back there… A Buick! Not bad!

‘Why don’t you both come inside for some tea? My house is just around the corner.’

‘Actually dad, I came here on business. Can we talk here?’ Guo Wei exclaimed breathlessly.

‘Alright, son, what is it?’ The three of them stood still, facing each other on the beach. Only the waves lapped at the shore, and Guo’s cormorants pecked absent-mindedly at the sand.

‘When I went to college,’ Guo Wei began fervently, anxious to get the words out of his mouth, ‘I pursued animal law as my major. I learnt about all the horrific ways people treat animals like slaves: elephants, mules, even cats and dogs. And then I thought back to my childhood, and what you showed me, how you strangle your cormorants, and cut their wings in half!

I’ve seen it, dad, don’t deny it now. How could you do it? It’s evil! And so cruel!’ The words spewed out of Guo Wei’s mouth as if they were bitter bile that he needed to expel desperately. He did not give Guo a chance to answer. ‘I work for an animal rights company now, dad. It pays well, and I’m happy in the city. We’re willing to give you a chance to make amends for what you’ve done; we’ll buy the cormorants off of you, give them a home in our wildlife sanctuary. And we’ll offer you a fair price. You won’t have to work again, dad.’

Guo’s head swirled. He could hardly respond. ‘Wei Wei, please.’ He finally stammered. ‘I’m not hurting my birds, they are free! They can go wherever they want! If they felt mistreated, they would simply leave! Can’t you see this? Look, I’ll show you.’ Guo clicked his tongue, and the cormorants shuffled up to him docilely. He stroked their feathered necks gently, gratefully.

Guo Wei shook his head. ‘I can’t accept that, dad. It’s not enough. Many of these abused animals are subjected to so much degradation that they don’t even realize it. Let Ling Ling give you the facts- but I’m not sure if you even want them. The data we’ve gathered just in China… it’s so disturbing, dad. If only you saw what I’ve seen, then you’d understand.’

Oh, how the young burned with righteous indignation.

‘Well, look at those fishermen still on the lake, why don’t you go after all of them as well? Aren’t they also abusing their cormorants?’

‘No, because they don’t cripple them at birth, dad! Their cormorants don’t have clipped wings and strangled necks. Yes, the fishermen tie their legs to the boat, but at least they are free!’

Guo was at a loss. Did these so-called fishermen really not clip their birds’ wings? How brutish, and how clumsy of them it was to tie their cormorants to a stake! Like slaves! And to call that freedom? To chain their birds down, to deny them the ability to go where they pleased?

Guo shook his head sadly. ‘I won’t let you take my cormorants. They’re precious to me. After all, why haven’t they run away, like you have, to the city?’ Guo chuckled at his own joke.

‘The reason why they don’t run away is because they don’t know that’s a possibility! They don’t even know that they can fly! You’re a monster, dad! You’ve taken away everything they have!’

A stunned silence. Then Guo Wei pushed past his father and took hold of the cormorants. ‘Come on’ he whispered urgently as he herded them to his car, ‘We’re taking you two somewhere safe now.’ His assistant followed him closely, without a word.

At the car, Guo Wei turned around and faced the fisherman. ‘Dad, don’t worry. They’re safe with me. I’ll send you a check; you can even move into the city if you want.’

Guo didn’t answer. His son nodded gravely, and entered the car.

Guo stared as the shiny silver Buick drove away. He was paralyzed. In the tinted rearview mirror of the car, he caught faint glimpses of his cormorants buckled up safely in the back seat. They flapped their misshapen, crippled half-wings desperately, squawking and crowing.

They are trying to fly back to me, but they cannot. Guo thought to himself. Two hot salty tears trickled down his wrinkled leather face. They need me. And I them.

Empty Paths Larry Li

THE SOUTHWEST CORRIDOR

Amos Lawrence

“Peace out.” Shit. Brutal choice for the last couple words I’ll probably ever end up saying to her. The red tile maze of the Harvard Square station swallows me whole; I pass the train map where she kissed me goodbye for the first time. As I slipped between the plexiglass panes of the terminal I looked down at my Charliecard, a slip of plastic embellished with a smiling man in a silver suit. There’s a song about him that my mom used to sing to me, and its tune rings between my rings. Yet I can’t quite place the words, pieces of a memory too far gone. Later I found a trace of her white eyeliner on my eyelash, a blade of grass on a freshly mown endline. I slept dreamlessly that night. My train comes; I swear I always get an old, beat-up car on the way home—the orange and white turned a uniform brown. “8TEEN” by Khalid starts to play, the halfway point in his debut album, American Teen. This is the only album I’ve ever listened to “properly,” like some kid in the sixties with his favorite record: intro to outro, and every song transition. It's not even that good, just the only album I could listen to in 7th grade because it was clean. Except “8TEEN.”

The split was going well, we talked honestly and gave each other little smiles. Enough to show compassion but not enough to show happiness. Then we frowned, but the satisfactory kind of frown. The kind of frown that doesn’t sting like a cut, but aches like a bruise—the kind of bruise that was worth the adventure that caused it. We sat on the Cambridge esplanade, on a bench a touch big but also much too small. After we finished talking we sat there, wordless— witnesses of a fruitless sky. It was my idea to end it, believe it or not. It's been weighing on me for a while now, an unwelcome bat in the attic of my head. She’s great, special even; yet I’ve found the need to remind myself of that fact more and more—like I’d somehow forgotten.

Ruggles. The doors here transfigure my mother into Professor Ruth McNeil, clad in leather jackets and boots and chunky plastic necklaces that rattle like a box of legos. Whenever she wears her work perfume I get bitter; I think I read an article online that smell and emotions are connected in the brain somewhere. Here she speaks slower, smiles less. Her friends have jet-black bobs, not long brown hair. I don't like the way her mouth draws to a purse, the way her eyes turn downward. Every once and a while I'll ask her about coming to visit. I always framed such suggestions as playful, as opposed to the pleas for authenticity they are. I’ve always teased her about never figuring out how to stop going to school; She’s never laughed.

Her family jarred me the first time I met them. They acted like friends, talking, cracking jokes. Her dad shook my hand with a knowing smile and whispered to me, “I’ll get her brother out of here as fast as I can,” behind the back of his hand. Still smiling he let loose a hearty chuckle and clapped me on the back. And he was cool too; he had been a combat photographer during the period of violence following the dissolution of Apartheid in South Africa. His work was so important that he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991, a far cry from my dad’s career of drabness. Her mother gave me a seven-second hug with several back pats and a warm squeeze at the end.Her brother was neat too, he showed me the Motorola kx500 he was working on and his way over the top PC. But I didn’t feel secure, didn’t feel relief in this escape from 16 years of staleness—I felt alien. This wasn’t what I was used to, what I could deal with. I was used to cordial family dinners, business meetings minus the suits and salary.

An elderly woman with a cart—the silver kind that splits open—boards the train at Stony Brook. More often than I’d like to admit I rashly assume people like her are homeless, a misconception of unambiguous origin. My dad taught me to stereotype.

“It's faster than asking and works good enough,” he would always say, eyes aloof. Her flats are grungy, her hands sit clasped in the lap of her tattered black coat. But despite the bumps and scuffs on her clothing, her posture is impeccable; she sits just as my grandmother taught me to. They look alike, the lady and my grandmother. Same shoulder length silver hair, same pockmarked hands. She even has on one of those faux fur headband/crown things that my and every other grandmother seems to wear. On cue, My airpod falls out of my left ear and bounces across the bruised tile, directly on course for the old woman. She picks it up and tosses it back across the car with a warm smile. This catches my attention. With my grandmother, smiles were earned. You got them for perfect grades or an excellent game. Dropping an airpod was bothersome and created a mess, and therefore would have resulted in a cinched brow and a not-so-soft sigh. But not from this lady. Her smile is easy, but not cheap. She gets off at Roxbury crossing. I hope she has grandkids.

My first girlfriend felt like a drug addiction. Long periods of rot and decay punctuated by moments of bliss. Worry and overthinking would gnaw at my head and shoulders until her hands would soothe them. I felt like I never truly had a full grasp of her, like I only ever held shards of her attention. When she didn’t smile at me right my day would derail. Self-doubt and anxiety ran rampant through me, seizing me by the ribs arbitrarily. Not her. She’s always

been easy: to meet, to like, to break up with. She did everything right. Her eyes lit up every time she saw me, she made me tea in the soft glow of her kitchen light, she made me bracelets from tie-dyed twine. It was simple. Not simple in the unintelligent sense, but simple in the way a soft serve ice-cream-cone is. But, eventually, I got sick of the sweetness. The cone only tastes good so many days in a row before its banality begins to disintegrate the warm blanket of sugar, it only really tastes good because of all the days where it isn’t eaten.

State Street. This is where my dad gets off for his job, but—unlike with my mom—I never really had a problem with that. He’s a simple person, and definitely in the unintelligent sense. Monotony conducts his life, from his twenty-three identical 18/34 Brooks Brothers blue button downs to the manicured way he folds his Financial Times. He goes to the same Au Bon Pain every morning and buys the same 45 cent refill—black, of course, no cream or sugar—in the same cup he got seven Christmases ago. The inside is so stained you have to tip it over in order to see if it's full, but he says spending the 8 dollars to buy a new one would be “superfluous”—his word, not mine. One time he did the math to show me how much money he had saved on coffee since he got the cup. It was the happiest I’d seen him in a couple months. He allotts 45 minutes for dinner each night, our “family time” where we run through what seems to be the same predetermined script every night.

“How was school?” he says, peering across the table through his wire rimmed glasses.

“Good” we say in unison, eyes placed squarely on the 2 ⅓ Trader Joes meatballs and cup of basmati rice placed in front of all three of us. Some nights we got desert, but we always had to split it.

Sometimes I don't even know why she even liked me in the first place. I took her affection for granted, I know that, but I just didn't know how to handle it. Every time I would pull back a little—just for space, to reset—she’d lean in to fill the gap. All of her all the time started to get to me, and I began to drift away. It's frustrating, to try and force yourself to like someone you can feel slipping from the corners of your mind. That’s selfish though, I know that, it's a lot more frustrating to force someone to like you.

As I rumbled through Downtown Crossing I caught a glimpse of my favorite person in the city: The train platform convenience store guy. He has a heavy South Asian accent and he only has five oil-slicked teeth left, and for some reason he always has on the same black leather jacket. His store can’t be bigger than a shipping container—he sells everything through a window, you can’t even go inside— but he makes use of every last inch. He has the classics, every conceivable chip flavor and form of nicotine, but he has his own trademarks: loose candies hand bundled in Saran wrap and his famous oatmeal creme pies. I lied actually, the only classic he doesn’t sell is the Little Debbies version, because he can sell his for more. Honestly though, I don't have a whole lot of valid evidence for his status as my favorite Bostonian—I haven't had a conversation with him spanning more than a couple seconds. He’s just happy. Unshakably, resolutely happy. No matter the hour or the weather, he’d stand there—never sit—and work

unabashed. While waiting on the platform I’d always watch people go up and buy things from him, the corners of their mouths seemingly buoyed by their purchase. But whenever I went up to buy my peach Snapple and mild Slim Jim I never quite knew what to say.

When I was talking myself into breaking up with her I kept telling myself that she just isn’t right for me. This is wrong. She is exactly what I need, just not what I am capable of handling. The truth is, whenever she smiled at me I couldn’t help but look away.

The train rolls into Green Street, my stop. All the stops in the Southwest Corridor look the same: rough-hewn concrete and the ghost of I-95, but each one feels different. I know this one, I know it well. I know the dirt path through some poor guy's backyard that leads to my house, the absurdly unsafe water park across the street, even the pile of ill-used needles behind the broken ticket machine. The doors groan open, a choir of ailing hydraulics. I step on to the grim bricks of the platform and watch as an inbound train pulls into the opposite platform. I get on—not for her, or the stops along the way, or even for the convenience store guy—but because there isn’t a place for me at either end of the line.

The Golden Lining Paopao Zhang

Jack Wang

The Hunt Paopao Zhang

INFIDELITY WITH THE UNIVERSE

Liv Ding

Believe me when I say that I died on the day of my mother’s wedding (I had not been invited) and when I woke up, I was sprawled on the floor of my childhood bedroom, mere feet from my bed.

I got to my feet. I ached all over, as if I had just run a marathon while getting bludgeoned by a blunt club. A lavender bruise rested heavily on my chest like a necklace. When I pressed on it, a soft ache shot through my heart.

The house was quiet and laden with expectancy, as if unsure whether the inhabitants of it would come back. I had experienced the feeling once before. I crossed over to my bedroom door. I wanted to leave my bedroom and pass through the foyer into the living room and build Rome out of couch cushions and pillows like I used to do with Dad. I would stack the pillows in pillar-like formations and he would sit in an armchair, heels resting on the ottoman, his eyes flipping up from his book every so often. I told him that once Rome was finished, he could be a senator because he was so well-read. He grunted.

A week later, he was gone and Rome fell to ruin.

For years afterward, I dreamed up ways to bring my father back down our stubby driveway, such as winning the lottery or a Nobel Prize––but none of those things ever happened. On one rainy day, it struck me to fake my death by slipping dramatically on the pavement and hiding ten ketchup packets beneath my shirt, which would break as I hit the ground. My father would surely tear away from the side of his new wife and rush to the hospital to hear my sucking last breath, would he not? And so I slipped, yet no one paid attention to the shuddering wet mass that was me lying on the driveway. They were all too preoccupied indoors with their lives, their families, their sorrow.

After that, I stopped trying. I let each raindrop drum into my skin that my father was never coming home. Why would he return for a sad, limp daughter such as me? And yet, I had only felt loneliness after he went away. Before that, my father was the sun and I glowed in his warmth––and he had left nonetheless, for a wife and a new family that was undoubtedly shinier and better. A hand crushed my heart into fine powder. Life beat onwards.

I had little idea that the second time I slipped, my death would succeed. An opportunity arose. The meanings of my life fused together with silver string, like constellations. I knew, at once, that all my life’s rainy, roiling grievances would, after my death, be assuaged. I was in my childhood bedroom, the hallowed hollow of my old naivete, and I was dead. Surely this meant that I would see a ghost of my father before I passed on to the next stage of death; the world could not be so cruel and make so little sense as to do otherwise.

I wanted answers. I wanted confessions. I wrenched my bedroom door open.

A gust of wind knocked the door off its hinges and suddenly I was stranded at sea. The door floated over pristine blue waves, and I stood on top of it like an experienced surfer.

Getting nearer every second was a white house on stilts, shaded by tall, curving palm trees. It was a beautiful house, engulfed by the beige beach and the bluer-than-ocean sky. I could see kids playing on the shore, and adults sitting in lounge chairs underneath a wide umbrella.

CRACK! The sky clotted with clouds in an instant. The sea turned steely, and rain lashed down on my skin. An enormous wave flung my door vertically––I fell onto my knees and gripped the edges of the door, wondering if dead people could drown, and deciding, after staring into the cold, gray waves, that they very well could.

On the beach, I heard the kids squeal and go: “Rome is falling!” (Simultaneously, I watched a tall lump of sand darken wetly and cascade into nothingness.) I heard the adults say: “Come on, kids, let’s go inside.” I saw the woman take the youngest child by the hand. I saw the man grab the boy by the collar of his soaked shirt. The boy yelled. “Et tu, patre?” By the time they were inside, the waves had pushed me up on the shore.

I dragged my sopping, salty body across the beach and settled beneath the family’s wide beach umbrella. I’ll just wait here until the rain subsides. Underneath it, the sand was white and dry and adhered to my skin until I looked like a sugared pastry.

I sat there. Occasionally, the wind would make the screen door clatter. Blowing sand whispered across the planks of their porch. Eventually, I realized it would never stop raining, so I crawled out from under the umbrella and found the whole family staring at me through their window, father and mother and son and daughter and a skinny white cat, as if they were posing for a photo and my face was the black eye of the camera.

My chest leavened. The man in this family tableau was Dad. My dad. Not the father of the kids who had their red cheeks pressed to the window. If I squinted hard, I could block out the children’s young, wide gazes and focus only on my father’s grooved face; so familiar, so forgotten.

“Dad!”

My father narrowed his eyes. “Who are you? Get off my property!” My bruise throbbed, and a piece of my heart crumbled off like plaster.

“Don’t you remember me? I’m your daughter.”

“Darling, who is that?” The darling sounded as if a piece of the woman’s tongue had been pulled off along with the word. I longed to fold up the beach umbrella and throw it through the window like a javelin, but instead, I cut my father with words.

“Is that your wife? Is that the woman you had an affair with?”

“Affair?” The woman puckered up her lips. She looked like Botticelli’s Venus; copper tendrils of hair framed her face and her lashless eyes. The depths of her eyes were extraordinary. It was as if she stared straight through you into the center of the Earth.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

Her eyes became molten cores. “Why do you want to know?”

So that my anger can take form and become a person. So that it can grab you by the shoulders and shake you and say, “You are the sole reason for my suffering!”

My voice echoed across the beach. I felt my open mouth and shut it. Had I really said all that? It was as if the confession had been prised out of the center of my chest. How did this woman unlock the well-hidden house of my depravity?

No one had the key, especially not my father; he would not choose to come home if his daughter jutted her chin out toward him in high dudgeon. Was her plan to expose my scorching flaws in order to repulse him to me? Fear contracted the muscles of my cheeks as I saw the disapproval etched into his face.

There’s something about that woman. Something about her night-sky eyes. Was this why my father eventually moved away? Was it because she had pulled every secret of his from his larynx until eventually he felt he had an obligation to her?

It’s not Dad’s fault he had an affair. He was forced to cheat. Otherwise, why would he leave us? We were perfect, weren’t we? Before he left. There was a stunned silence after these sentences flew from between my teeth, writhing in the air like a spirit that had been exorcized from my ribs.

Then, I felt pain seize my face. When the metallic blurriness subsided, my mother was raining from her eyes. Her eyes were the brown of wet sand and softly lashed. I saw in them a stolen hairpin sliding into a lock, opening her consciousness to unpleasant truths––that her daughter had never really been on her side.

I left her house, having been purged from it with my mother’s thick tears. It didn't matter, I thought, as my eyes lingered for a last time on the living room, pillows neatly arranged in the grooves of the armchairs. Rome had fallen long ago, and I had only been living in its carcass.

A week later, I slipped down the stairs and died.

No one mourned my death. Not my father. Not my mother. Not the ghosts that I thought roamed the empty streets of Rome. Not even the universe had tensed as one of its life forms gave way; I had been on the wrong side all along. I glanced up once again at the windows of the beach house. The family was gone. My father and the universe and their two children and the white cat.

Gone.

Orphaned, I walked over to the wet, misshapen sand pile where a Pantheon once stood. The waves lapped noisily against the shore. I saw my fractured bedroom door half-buried in the sand, rocking with each ebb and flow of the waves. I remembered how it had ridden over the glassy blue crests

HER LIFE WAS ART

Alisa Gulyansky

June Lancaster embodies tragically the downfall of the overworked y2k child star. Of course, with the exception that she never was a child star -- or a star at all, for that matter -- and never resurfaced in tabloids after her unwieldy nosedive-from-grace. She merely synergized that energy: the aura of the once-famous lunatic, relevant not of her volition but by the highly invisible and inexplicable threads of Nostalgia and Time.

As with most child stars, June began her descent into the endless chasm of existential dread around the time of her fifteenth birthday. The story goes that she fell into some sort of emotional abyss after her parents died in a car wreck and she was sent to live with her estranged uncle. Though, come to think of it, I’ve also heard the version that nothing actually happened to her family, and she just took the depression upon herself.

It hardly matters. She became depressed -- not cripplingly so, but enough to forget how her own emotions used to feel for some time. So when she finally got treated years later, she’s said to have experienced this total awakening: some sort of cerebrally, sexually, emotionally electric catharsis.

At this time June lived with four roommates so she could afford rent in the city. She worked for some low-level photography business uptown, and everyone who met her had a perfectly consonant image of June in their minds: precocious in thought, eccentric, but dutifully so, and positively insufferable.

Taking her emotions upon herself in greater doses than she had ever borne, everything was suddenly beautiful: the color of the sunset and the color of cement, her roommates’ snores, the aroma of fresh laundry on a Sunday morning -- none of it could go undocumented.

Her spiritual awakening landed her on the corner of 53rd and Crook where she bought a video recorder that looked as if it had survived several car crashes.

“Today is Saturday, the 27th of April,” she says in her first video entry. She wears a red beret and stands in her kitchen while her roommates make stir fry. “This is Arya,” she smiles, staring at the woman stirring a pot of some brown sauce. Arya looks over with a smirk.

“Hi, June’s Camera,” she teases.

“Hi, June’s Camera,” her three other roommates echo somewhere in the background of the tape.

The scene was perfectly nostalgic. It was the kind of thing you see in a wistful compilation someone makes of their youth, garnished with vintage filters and strategically outdated music. June knew this. She felt, filming it, as though she were watching it vicariously through herself twenty years into the future, reminiscing on her early years as she would become an exemplar of wasted potential and dying youth.

She watched back the recording of the scene in the kitchen when she was in her bedroom and began to cry. It was beautiful.

And so, June was happy. Not because she lived with four other twenty-something year olds, or that she had a steady job, or because she loved them or the job or the city, but because it all amounted to some glorious abstraction of Art; her life was art and she was happy.

June continued to film her roommates cooking. She would rejoice especially when her roommates would spontaneously break into dance in the kitchen like they do in any heartwarmingly cliché film about your twenties. And when cooking would erupt into shouting in the corridor, June would sneak into the kitchen and poise the camera in such a clandestine manner that she would capture the very fervor of her roommates’ altercation. She reveled at how innately human her roommates were in just their everyday interactions. They cried, laughed, argued, danced, loved, and hated -- so gloriously did they represent the human condition, June thought.

So June locked herself in her bedroom every night, piecing these incongruous scenes into some bombastic ballade of the fire that is youth. Lingering upon the threshold between exemplifying the monotonous nature of her existence and enforcing the cliché that there would be beauty in everything, her film was beautifully confused.

June entered Portrait of Some Youth into a local short film festival and won second prize. She was featured in a minor article in the paper and a couple local agents conveyed their congratulations, though June heeded none of it. She was an artist now.

In several months’ time, June fell madly in love with a woman named Rosemary who visited her office twice weekly to pick up headshots for her modeling business. June found it poetic that her name was June and the woman’s name was Rosemary, and rosemary flowers in June. By some cosmic twist of fate, Rosemary was sent to June to become her own.

The following week, June inserted a piece of paper between prints asking Rosemary to coffee, hiding her camera atop the equipment shelf and documenting the entire interaction. To her surprise, the next day when June went to pick up her mid-afternoon coffee, she found Rosemary waiting for her.

“I asked around,” Rosemary said grinning.

And so June and Rosemary talked all afternoon. They discussed the Renaissance, poetry, film, the nature of love -- the kind of seemingly banal subjects any half-witted intellectual would use to try and impress someone they’re interested in. June hardly cared for the words coming out of Rosemary’s mouth, just that they sounded poetic and horribly beautiful.

June asked Rosemary if she could record their conversation with her camcorder. Rosemary, a poet struggling to get her work published in even the most overlooked of journals, immediately agreed. She thought this could be her ticket to unlocking some true art behind life, so human as it was, that she had been so removed from in her time as a poet.

June would help her understand.

A tape I’d found from a few weeks after this time takes place in what seems to be Rosemary’s childhood bedroom. It begins in the middle of a scene that had started before June remembered to turn the camera on. It is edited in such a way that makes it seem unnaturally authentic.

Rosemary’s expression is that of mild discomfort though she continues her monologue from before the camera was recording about all the memories she had made in that old room. June places the camera on a shelf and tells her to ignore it. She then proceeds to call Rosemary beautiful. Rosemary feigns a smile.

June says she’s sorry if the camera makes Rosemary uncomfortable and Rosemary says it doesn’t. June pretends to turn it off but doesn’t. She and Rosemary embrace. Rosemary shows June her diary from when she was sixteen, chock-full of half-baked poetry so powerfully reminiscent of the naivety of the adolescent mind.

June tells her her mind is perfect and Rosemary brushes it off. June looks Rosemary in the eye and tells her she really means it.

Watching this for the first time, I was expecting something to happen. Expecting them to kiss or reveal their love for each other or at least just hold each other’s hand in some kind of mutual understanding of their love. But all that happens is that Rosemary laughs and says, “You’re a great friend, June. You really are.”

June turns her back to Rosemary to show the camera her artfully wistful expression and hide it from Rosemary. June sniffles and Rosemary asks if she’s okay. June responds that her mother is dying. They embrace.

Butterfly Mine Mei Matsui

III.

Rosemary’s Room won the 12th annual Fischer Prize for Best Short Film in the state. June was invited to celebrate at nearly every gay club in the city, and gave a speech at a local art museum. Yet, despite the minimal press and local acclaim, June figured she could hide this from Rosemary for long enough that the buzz surrounding the prize would eventually subside. Some things, June resolved, Rosemary hardly needed to know.

That weekend, in efforts to distract Rosemary from the omnipresent reminders of her awkward success, June invited Rosemary to go clubbing with her.

Of course, this, too, had been calculated on June’s behalf. The entire weekend, June made sure not to have a single sip of alcohol – that way, she would be able to nurse a drunken Rosemary back to health when she could hardly stand or see the faces in front of her.

Her prediction came true. On Sunday night, June dragged a half-conscious Rosemary from the bar to her Prius. Rosemary vomited profusely in her arms and told her she had magnificent brown eyes. On the car ride back to Rosemary’s place, June stroked her hair from behind the wheel and told her everything would be okay when Rosemary began to cry.

Glancing at the intoxicated mess of Rosemary sprawled across the passenger seat, June swelled with such intense adoration for Rosemary she could hardly breathe.

Rosemary, this glorious jewel of a woman, was in every way, hers.

June recorded the drunken car ride home with a camera she’d set up in the backseat of her car and edited the footage at Rosemary’s apartment until dawn. The product was positively enthralling: all captured in ten minutes’ time, it managed to piece together seemingly meaningless clips from parking lots and nightclubs, subway passengers, and homeless alcoholics into an indulgent, eternal treatise of love in the 21st century.

When Rosemary heard the news that June was submitting her film to international festivals, she dialed June’s number and screamed into the receiver before June could even answer the phone. She told June that she had no right to submit footage of her in her most vulnerable moments and without her consent, to be exploited and neglected and treated as hardly human. When June told her that she filmed her precisely because she was so human, Rosemary told her she was the phoniest person she’d ever met and promptly hung up.

June took Rosemary’s exit horrifically, all things considered.

Of course, as June sat staring at her ceiling for hours each night, the last person she could think of to blame was herself.

At first, it was Rosemary’s fault.

Rosemary’s fault for failing to understand what art was, who June was, why art couldn’t be exploitative if it managed to so elegantly spin life’s dramas into something outspoken and remarkable. June’s films were the most endearing thing she could have possibly dedicated her love towards, and now Rosemary would never be able to understand that love is nothing without art.

But as her contempt for Rosemary dwindled through the weeks she spent mulling over Rosemary’s shortcomings, June slowly began to realize that she had nobody left to shift her blame towards. The longer she locked herself in her room, the more dust that collected on the box encasing her camcorder, June was left increasingly with no choice but to open her merciless door to Guilt.

June could hardly face the idea that she had destroyed her own relationship just by combining the two things she loved most: Rosemary, and art. To fail to convey the meaning of her entire being to a woman she prized more than any trophy or medallion was to fail as a human being – and even more, as an artist.

June needed to make Rosemary understand her. She would have to find a way to compensate –overcompensate – for the betrayal Rosemary had endured. She would have to prove to her that art could be more than an exploit or absent-minded centerpiece. And Rosemary would have to be moved, swayed beyond her own will, shown that June’s art sought to unearth beauty and meaning, rather than to desecrate it.

That had been all she wanted to do for Rosemary. To show everyone how beautiful Rosemary was and how inextricable her beauty was to the very fabric of the universe. To show her that she was art. That her life was art.

Through days of blank contemplation and bitter respite, she realized what she’d have to do.

June would have to return to the only artistic device she had evaded for so long in her artistic pursuits – something artists seldom dare to explore. Rosemary would be left with no choice but to absorb June’s inventions, viscerally, and digest without willing to. If emotion alone failed to show Rosemary the meaning in her art, June was left with no other option but to appeal to Rosemary’s most primal human senses: the carnal, the visceral -- the disgusting. Art would be something that is not cherry-picked. Art would be Rosemary, and art would be death.

As soon as June realized what her art would have to become, she was struck with an energy she had never before endured. It was as if her quest for this meaning were a race, some sort of diabolical 100 meter dash to prove to everybody that her years of intellectual mania had truly been worthwhile. That one day, she would wake up and become the Buddha reincarnated, enlightened in the ways of life and overflowing with such expansive knowledge and art.

June stopped sleeping. She was determined to film everything, camera following her at each waking moment: to the bathroom, in her bedroom, roommates sleeping, drunken men screaming at one another in the street, strip clubs and overdoses, hospital beds and car crashes -- gone were the days when she would cherry-pick the meaning of art. During the day, June invited an array of houseguests -- acquaintances from her office, bars, the subway, the street -- to interview them. She would film their every move, visceral reaction, murmur under their breath -- and when they finally stormed out from the sheer discomfort of her interrogation, she would delight in the surplus of emotions she was able to so authentically capture.

She took it upon herself to invade the very sanctity of human dignity, all for the sake of research and for the sake of art.

When she did sleep, she slept in the late afternoons when her mind grew heavy and her sanity was too distant to touch. Her dreams seldom strayed from reality. They were like her own films, mesmerizingly idiotic and complex beyond all knowledge. Sometimes she would awake from her restlessness and exclaim, “Oh, the beauty of it all!”, scribble something onto a piece of paper, and fall back to sleep.

But June was unsatisfied. No matter what she collected, nothing seemed to be meaningful enough, to possess enough poetic power to really sway anybody. She would need something more. Something jarring and horribly graphic that could make children cry and adults fall to their knees.

And one day the meaninglessness of it all seemed to wash over June all at once, pounding its fists at her until she would be left no choice but to act. To go out into the world and find some semblance of meaning to complete her cinematic trash-pile.

All of a sudden, June ran out of her room, slamming the door behind her, and ran outside her apartment for the first time in weeks. The ground was glazed over with rain and wind billowing faster than she could move. She wore few clothes to cover her body; her eyes were bloodshot from not having slept in days; and her hands were shriveled to a near pulp from the times she would wring them against her desk in frustration. But when she emerged, she found nothing nearly good enough to satisfy the great existential quest for meaning she had undertaken.

So as soon as she felt a droplet of rain fall upon her face, June let out a devastating sob, crumbling to the ground and shrieking just loudly enough to tune out the faint murmur of some red-speckled blur slithering toward her.

But it seemed to call to her, hissing ceaselessly and tantalizing June until finally, she sprung back up, eyelids pinned to her forehead and hands shaking behind her camera. Before her glistening eyes crept a snake the length of her torso making its way toward a small rodent -- perhaps a bystanding mouse -- cautiously preparing its attack. June grinned.

This was exactly what she needed for her film -- a harrowing tragedy of the food chain and its victors; the old-age parable of life and loss -- the human experience in its most simple form. Of course, if she could understand the crux of animal nature, June would subsequently understand the underpinnings of what made humans so human: their visceral, animal existences. Here lay the meaning of art – here lay the remaining piece to her puzzle for Rosemary to understand her art, wholly, viscerally.

June grabbed a plank of wood that lay several feet away from her accompanying some nearby renovation project and swung it around her shoulder. She edged quietly towards the prospect of artistic infamy.

The snake was now hovering above the mouse, still uncertain as to how to consume its prey.

“Eat him!” she shouted fearfully, wielding the wood above her head like a whip. She tapped the screen of her camera vigorously as if it would cause images of the snake eating the mouse to materialize on-screen.

But the snake did not move, seeming even to back away from the mouse as if June’s encouragement spoiled his appetite.

“Eat him, I said!”

The snake slithered away from the mouse and toward June.

If the food chain didn’t work as it was supposed to, June thought, she would have to force it to. Her hand swiftly approached the head of the snake and in one fell swoop, she beat it with the wilted pulp of wood.

The snake coiled back, its tongue barely grazing the glass of June’s camera.

“EAT!”

She mustered as she struggled to heave the wooden plank behind her.

“HIM!”

She launched the wood at the snake, gazing starry-eyed as it skidded backward.

After several seconds, the snake regained strength and began to accelerate once more into the direction of June and the mouse. She clutched her camera at her side, heart pounding lifelessly against her chest: she would be a legend -- a god, even.

And gods never die; never wither; never cower in fear like the stupid mouse that lay motionless on the asphalt –

But the snake came nowhere near June and her silly camera – and somehow, neither would the mouse. They simply lay where they were, plastered to the ground by some invisible force not even June could manage to defeat.

The three of them stood, motionless, daring to stay on that street corner for a lifetime. But soon, the clouds began to swallow what remained of the sun and the pair slowly crept away, leaving June with nothing in her hands but a morsel of some dream ill-spent.

featuring

Amanda Chang

Fiona Reenan

Jasmine Powell

Jessica Lee

Julie Xie

Christina Chen

Amanda Chang

Alisa Gulyansky

Maya Luthi

Michael Lu

Amos Lawrence

Olivia Ding

Dilzafer Singh

Kit Knuppel

Larry Li

Clara Quinlan

Mei Matsui

Amy Ma

Jiwoo Han

Alicia Guo

Paopao Zhang

Jessie Shapiro

Marlene Ma