Willa Marie

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by Willa Marie

She sat on the edge of the star covered sky. She dangled her legs over the side. I watched her as she pulled her feet towards het her knees to her chest. Then I watched as she rose to her feet and jumped. She didnt fall. You cant fall in a place with no down or up. She shot like a hummingbird, straight towards the frayed cutoff. She passed where the black velvet of the universe's backdrop ended, past where the white stitches of its edges lay bumpy against infinity. I watched her as she did this, and silently wished her well on her journey. She had left what we know behind. She had said goodbye to the glued-on stars with the swinging of her dangling legs. She had wished farewell to the papier-mAch6 planets with the wistful, bittersweet crinkle between her eyebrows. I wish I could know what she saw as she left. What she's seeing now. If she knows now what's in between the stitchings of the universe. I cant remember anymore. Those days were much too long ago. I stretch out on the sand of salt and sugar, granular but soft. I gaze at the craft glitter that adorns the inky velvet of space. I wait for midnight, and then, for sunrise. I love seeing the paper sky that rises to cover up our glimpse of that glimmering, stygian fabric. I love seeing the pastels and watercolors splash across its surface. Waiting for cotton ball clouds to fill our colored pencil sky. I dont miss it. Although, I do miss her. She was nice, always had jokes to share and laughs for the ones I'd tell. I've done my fair share of traveling. I've seen my fair share of stitches, of all the different fabrics. Anyways, I like it here. This universe is beautiful. Itt soft and adamantine, confined and infinite, mystical and scientific. It's all real and none of it is. Perfect for someone like me.

Pfu,I%

by Maya Guerriero

I cant squit enough to block out the sun without closing my eyes. It is like the sun has channeled all the light straight into my eyes. They slowly stop hurting as much. I can see the blue of the sky. A blue I dont know how to describe. It's a powerful blue. Not a baby boys room blue, and not a night sky or blueberry blue. But that perfect blue in the middle. It almost looks transparent. Yet it is a sturdy wall stopping me from seeing the stars hiding behind it.

Clouds are scattered across the sky like the wisps of torn-apart cotton balls. In some places, the color of the sky mixes with the clouds like it would when mixing paint. I wonder what I look like from their perspective, the perspective of the clouds. Or maybe the perspective of the stars. Does this mountainous lake I stand next to matter? To the stars, this world is just a little blue dot.

Once I hung up a picture of the Earth taken from Pluto. I had to stand no less than a foot away from the picture to even see Earth. I laid on my bed looking at that, and I often found myself asking, "Why does my life even matter?" To the sky, I'm nothing but an ant in an anthill. To the stars, I'm nothing but a fleck of dust in a bag of marbles. I took that picture down.

A river the size of a microscopic creek flows beside me. With one hop I clear it. What do the rocks at the bottom see? Is their vision warped by the clear liquid moving above? Does the world twist and turn to them? Do my eyes look enlarged like my friends' eyes do when I see them through a water bottle? Eyes big like a bug. Or is seeing through water normal for the rocks,like the way I see through air? And when I reach my hand into the liquid ice and bring one out into the air, is the rock's vision distorted? I throw the rock, and it flies on wings of gravity through the ait through the water, to the bottom of the lake. The lake, the reason we here in the first place.

If only I could jump in that lake. To cool off this winter jacket of sunlight. But the wind says it is still 40 degrees outside. Sweating boatloads and feeling like a lobster boiling with your coat on. And feeling the wind go directly through your single layer of clothes and chill your skin like air made of ice when you take it off. Brown stalks stick out from the ground. They look like stick bugs. Actually, I guess stick bugs look like them. Their leaves separate from the stalk like the number of paths I can take in one life. They are creamy, tan, brown. But I imagine flowers for days on them. I can see the flowers without seeing them. Like a filter my friends use on their phones. They are mango yellow with brown centers like coconuts, blue to match the sky with sun yellow in the middle, and deep violet purple. There are butterflies and dragonflies too. They extend over the whole field to the right. All the way up to the summit. And down the opposite mountainside, too. Obviously, the flowers do not grow over the lake, but the dragonflies hover over it. They chase after each other like my cats loudly playing tag downstairs when we are trying to fall asleep. The dragonflies are quiet though. I wish that painting that I made with my mind could come to life and we could walk through it, my family and I. But I guess there is no way for anyone else to really

see what I see. I see both the brown stalks and the field of flowers at the same time. Like seeing through VR glasses. The screen on the phone shows you one thing, but you imagine the real world with your memory.

I stop to sit on a boulder. It is grey. Not a simple flat grey, but a grey with texture. There are black specks. There are also clear, shiny, miniature, stone specks in it. Like our countertops, but on a smaller scale. When I lift up my hand from the boulder, it is red from the pressure of my weight. There are little white indents in the red texture on my hand.

I heard somewhere that when a pattern like that is left behind it means you had a good nap. Whenever I wake up to find a pattern on my skin I feel like I just crawled out of a bowl of syrup. You only know you were sleeping when you have woken up. when you are sleeping you don't know you exist. I could bet that is what dying is like. Does this boulder I'm sitting on know that it exists? You can't call it dead because it was never livin$,