is issue showcases bold new work from both our returning artists and new members, pushing the boundaries of what Descent can be. is is our second issue that will launch in an exhibition space, and we’re so ecstatic to continue growing with you all. We’d like to extend our gratitude to our partners, KACE Tea, Kaya Press, Operation Chiin Chilla, and Kids of Immigrants, for their belief in and support of our mission.
ank you as well to Caleb Lin from Good ght, Patrick Liu from Liu’s Cafe, and Sean Wang, who have been so generous and enthusiastic towards our projects.
*WithphotographybySamaraChaplain
The Chapel For Hasty LoVers
Written By: Rui Zhang
Designed By: Isabella Murray
It’s 109 degrees in Las Vegas. It smells like gasoline and rust and sweat, esh and sour wine. And cheap cologne. Everything’s cheap here. Cheap cologne, cheap sex, cheap wins. Cheap lives. Sweating and fucking and crawling through the ground oors. Bring the whole family. Bachelor party. Spring break. Go to the strip club. Get married.Winlittleorlosebig.Gorge yourself on crab legs at the Caesars Palace bu et. e entirety of e Strip glitters with a thin coating of human sweat.
It’s 109 degrees in Las Vegas. Last night I watched a man snort a line o a woman’s collarbone. I took him to his hotel room and emptied hisbody.Cocainefeelslikecrawling into pristine white hotel room sheets.
It’s 109 degrees in Las Vegas. Heat is a taste in the mouth. It starts on the tongue and makes its way into the back of the throat, down the hatch and past the still heart, into the deep dark pit of the stomach, where it emanates a slow, pulsing warmth. And then fades back into nothing, a sensation that you only remember while it’s happening.
You give up more than you think for the ability to draw blood. I am given this—skin like a coating of ne china, hair like an oil spill, a Las Vegas body, a killer smile, a still heart. I am given this—the will to render esh from bones. e strength to turn lean, muscled bodies into pink paste. e means
to turn a man inside out and back again.
is is taken from me—my mouth can no longer do anything but destroy. No words wheeze up my throat, no sigh of pleasure nor plea for help, no thankyou’sor excuse me’s or FatherforgivemeIhave sinned’scan pass through the black holebetweenheartandmouth.Iam sentenced to live inside this foul carcass forever and to be nothing more than it. All I have to show for this life so far are these cold hands and sore gums.
It’s nally getting dark now. It’s still 106 outside, not that it really matters—I chose Vegas for a reason. At these temperatures I can almost feel the tips of my ngers. When they attempt to subtly sneak a fat ngered hand up my thigh, it’s easy to attribute a corpse’s chill to the groaning labor of the air conditioning. Itnevermatterstothem,thesilence. ey might not know it, but they like it better that way. It’s erotic, thelackofvoice—theygetto llthat unanswering space with whatever they want, to superimpose fantasy on reality like you’re entitled to do in Vegas. Sometimes they hit you when you don’t respond. Yank you around, grab your hair, I asked
you a fucking question bitch, but that’s all part of it too, that it turns them on even more when you just stand there and take it. ey want the facsimile of struggle, to crawl over you and try to crush the sound out of you, agony or pleasure but preferably both. is is Vegas, a er all—the place to fuck and drink and win, which all men love to do, to play Elvis.
I would repave the Strip a hundred thousand times over with men. I would crush and pulp their putrid bodies to rehydrate this desert. I would wash this place clean, reinvent the Red Sea. New Vegas. New New New New New New New Vegas a thousand times over until there was no more Vegas just New, and it would not be enough to satiate a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the itch that consumes from the tip of my tongue down to the deepest pit of my stomach.
It smells like shit on e Strip tonight. e pigs are sweating as they waddle through the streets,gorgingthemselveson anything and everything, getting fatter by the minute. e cocaine stillhasn’tentirelyle mybody.It’s hardtodetoxsubstancesfromblood that hardly moves. I need to re-up, needtowhetmypalateandswallow down something warm, chase the remaining jitters down out the tips of my toes.
ese days I am performing an
iterationofaniterationofaniterationofahumanbeingatbest.Iamaparodyofa desirable woman, trying to recall what that means, a complex series of inferences and calculations: to expose exactly this much surface area, to position legs and hips and chest at this angle, to remember the threshold for a smile’s wideness before it begins to conjure fear instead blind desire (give or take about 15% teeth). e cocaine still shivering through my system is making my muscles forget. I ican’t quite remember, right now, how to be anything but what I am, which is nothing good. Eyes too dark, smile too sickly, ankles twisting grotesquely in these six inch heels. Even the inebriated can smell something of wrongness about me. Some primal instinct stirring deep, if I want to keep my head I can’tlistentomy dicktonight.
Nogood.Can’t get the coke out until I kill and can’t kill until I get the coke out. I crawl my way down the Strip. Get a few catcallers, none that can follow through. at’s a part of the fantasy, too—it’s no good if you’re eager and down for it. It has to be coerced, coaxed, won fromyou.Apearlpriedfromtheshell.
My legs keep me going forward in perpetual motion, tendons crunching and refolding with everypoorlybalancedstep.Iwalkuntilthecrowdsclear and the buildings hunker down, the rest of the city cowering reluctantly beneath the glorious lth of the Strip. It smells di erent here, like stale cigarette butts and part-time food service jobs turned lifelong careers. e loneliness has a cold, bitter a ertaste. It turns my whole body heavy. If I cannot killtonight,IwillkeepwalkinguntilIreachthedesert,andIwillopenupacrack in the hard, dry soil to curl up in until the morning washes me clean.
For once, I see him before I smell him. e block is dark but for the garish sign blazing from a building that’s peeling hot pink.
“THE CHAPEL FOR HASTY LOVERS—GET MARRIED BY ELVIS!!!,” the exclamation points ickering erratically with hysterical urgency. A poorly rendered illustration of Elvis holding a pair of wedding bells over his crotch with a Viva Las Vegas grin. Inside the window, Elvis.
Sweating through his white polyester suit, face ruddy from the contents of a metal ask, le sideburn sliding o . His heart, beating fat and slow and irregular in his heaving chest, begging me to lay it to rest.
I approach. Tap the window with ve nails in deliberate procession. Try my knuckles instead when he can’t hear me over the sound of his own voice bellowing he ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog. Finally whirls around, stutters in his tracks, fringe on his pants whipping back and forth when he saunters up to the window. Pops it open.
Li s the aviator sunglasses to openly ogle long and predatory from neck to ankle and back up. Wets his lips. Good evening, good-lookin’.
Wiggle my ngers.
What’s a ne thing like you doing out and about alone at this hour?
Tilt my head, shi my weight. Reach a hand up to draw a ngernail down the line of his sleeve. Smile.
Watch him swallow, readjust his pants. Well, if the likes of you is asking…
Smile.
Ain’t much of a talker, huh?
Shrug. Smile. Tilt my head at the door, questioning.
Well, ne by me. Always thought girls were prettier keeping their mouths closed ‘cept when they need to be used. Licks his lips again, head spinning with his own innuendo. Honey, I’d love more than anything to let you in and get a real good glimpse at ya, but I’m on the clock. Bossman will have my head if I’m letting people in willy nilly, no matter how long their legs are.
He’s drunk, rambling, spit gathering at the corners of his mouth. Foul, putrid creature. It’s so close I can taste it, phantom heat in the mouth.
at the sweat gathering on his lip, the cakey foundation creasing around the nose, the tongue he can’t seem to keep in his mouth, and hate rises in me so visceral and consuming I almost vomit with the force of it. I need his head in hand by daybreak. So I nod, saunter away while throwing my gaze over my shoulder.
I stalk the barren street. e night breeze whistles down the road. e whole stretch of it seems to be sleeping, and I think for a moment it might be futile until a silhouette materializes against the grimy glow of a liquor store. She lights a cigarette with thin, precise ngers. I cannot help but follow the utter of those hands, mesmerized. She takes a moment to notice me approaching, but doesn’t look away once shedoes,darkeyesunder dark eyebrows under dark hair. e thrill of it makes me breathless-breathless, stealing air from already empty lungs.
How ‘bout this, hon? Can you grab some fella o the street and bring him in with you? We can kick ‘em out right a er, I just gotta get an image of the would-be newlyweds ontheentrycamera. enwecando anythingyouwant,huh?Betyou’ve never done it in a chapel before. He grins sleazy and grotesque.
is game is drawing on too long, but I cannot resist playing. I stare
Sidleup.Pressthelengthofmybody against hers, reach a questioning hand out for a cigarette. She nudges her hand against mine, and it’s corpse cold and porcelain smooth.
Go shock-still with surprise. Another.Another,another,another. She puts the cigarette between my lips and I taste the residual iron
from her mouth. Takes my hand between both of hers, both of us the same temperature. Rubs a thumb over my palm and holds it to her still heart. Whoareyou?Where haveyoubeen?Whatdoyouwant? I’vebeenwaitingforyou.
Take her hand and slide it down my stomach and back up to the heart. Hungry. Grab her ring nger and cinch it tight. Let’sgetmarried.
Back at the chapel, Elvis is waiting impatiently. Opens the door and steps out with it, wolf-whistling. Damn.Hadmethinkingforasecond youwentandclonedyourself,honey. Didn’t expect you to get down with kitty too. Maybe we extend her an invite, huh? I wouldn’t mind seeing the two of you get it on. Damn near a wet dream.
We step over the threshold. Close the door behind us. I follow him to the altar. She turns o the lights. Push him onto the altar, crawl over him and press his shoulder into the wood with a heavy hand. Feel him paw at my waist, at my thigh, and press harder, feeling bone and tendon groan under my palm. He’s saying something now, but it passes through my ears mu ed and incomprehensible— all senses attuned to the sound of her footsteps coming down the aisle, her presence settling down beside me. A shrieking note of panic, limbs thrashing helplessly, the dour note of adrenaline and piss rising through the air. Lean down and sink my teeth in, feel
the reverberations of pain echoing throughhisneck.Herhandstroking through the hair at the back of my head, tender, urging. Begreedier. Tear the column of his throat open. Reachforher. Youtoo.Hestruggles, shoulder ripping open. Elvis tastes like Las Vegas, like gasoline and rust and sweat, esh and sour wine, cheap cologne, cheap sex, cheap wins, cheap lives. We empty him. I consume him, and I look at her, and I hear wedding bells.
Photography by Risa Takemoto
Design by Yen Lynn Wee
Descent has a meal withSean Wang
Photography by Samara Chaplain Vidoegraphy by Jasmine Wan and Marissa Ding
As soon as we settled in our seats at Liu’s Cafe with lmmaker Sean Wang, we reached a quick collective understanding: We were going to eat family style.
Writing by Jinny Kim Design by Yen Lynn Wee
Sesame cold noodles, braised pork belly rice, spicy wontons, and Hong Kong style french toast graced our table. “Take some of the noodles, guys,” Wang said, gesturing to the small empty bowls he grabbed earlier. Of course, I obliged.
With his easygoing demeanor and rook piercing on one ear, Wang could pass as one of our class peers,simplygettinglunchwithusa eralecture. Wang, who most recently wrote and directed the Focus Features lm “Dìdi” (2024), graduated from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 2016. His Academy Award-nominated documentary short lm, “Nai Nai & Wài Pó” (2023), was screened at the university earlier this year.
Wang joked that the moderator of the screening didn’t realize he was the director, mistaking him for a student. “I was wearing, like, a Pixar sweater,” he laughed. “I literally looked younger than the students.”
Don’t let Wang’s down-to-earth and humble personalityfoolyou—hisresumespeaksforitself. “Dìdi” won the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award and Special Jury Prize for Best Ensemble Cast at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. “Nai Nai & Wài Pó” was nominated for an Oscar and awarded the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at SXSW 2023. Wang is also an alum of several Sundance fellowships.
Before all that, though, Wang worked for Google straightoutofcollegeasapartoftheircompetitive “Creative Lab Five” one-year program. On paper, Wang said, it was the perfect gig; he was living in New York and getting paid well to make videos. But in reality? Wang felt a sense of “failure” and unful llment over the lack of creative control and his impending burnout.
“Out of frustration, I made this short lm that was like the total opposite of what I think they would encourage you to make in lm school,” he explained. at short, titled “3,000 Miles,” captured Wang’s rst year in New York, chronicled by voicemails from his mother. He credited that short lm as one of the rst projects that opened up a door for him in the industry.
It was also around this time in New York that Wang began the process of writing “Dìdi,” partially inspired by the 1986 coming-ofage lm “Stand by Me,” which follows four boys who nd a dead body on a hike.
In the early stages of “Dìdi,” Wang wondered, “What if you took the ethos of ‘Stand by Me’ that treated boys and their emotions as stupid, loud, crass but also very emotional and tender, and apply it to me and my friends, set it in the Bay Area, and write really speci cally to kids who look like us? So that if it doesn’t take place in Fremont, it actually doesn’t make sense.”
“Dìdi,” heavily inspired by Wang’s experiences growing up in Fremont, California with a Taiwanese immigrant family, depicts the multicultural diversity of the area without being a lm solely about race or identity.
Wang explained that the diversity of his hometown and his friends was never something he questioned or secondguessed; it was just simply ingrained in his day-today life. “I learned about culture in a way that was so immediate. Like, I would go to my Korean friend’s house and his mom would cook us budaejjigae or ,” he said. “You start to learn these things because you’re around it.”
you start to learn these things because you're around it.
Wang brought up how he would send screenshots of old Facebook statuses or unlisted YouTube videos to his childhood friends during the production of “Dìdi” (much to his friends’ embarrassment). I laughed, remembering my own
unlisted, iMovie-edited skits I created with my older siblings back in 2011.
“You should re-list the videos!” Wang said.
I’m not sure about re-listing them on YouTube, but I did watch them recently for a good laugh. It’s a strange feeling to revisit old memories that are so well captured on camera.
Wang recalled a weekend he visited home in Fremont in the midst of editing “Dìdi.” He was driving around the streets and locations where the lm was shot, remembering both his childhood memories of hanging out with friends and the recent shoots they had there for “Dìdi.”
“Oh, this is now my de ning experience with this neighborhood, as opposed to what I was doing here when I was, like, 12,” he re ected.
roughout our meal in the bustling restaurant located in Koreatown, Wang frequently turned questions back to us. Did we all meet in Descent? What are we interested in doing a er graduation? What other types of people are we hoping to feature?
At one point, he asked to hold the camcorder we were lming on and turned it on us, zooming in on our faces. e interviewee became the interviewer — the lm subject returned to his comfortable role as the lmer.
A er I’ve nished packing the sludgy grave with wet mud, I walk back to him. Each step takes e ort, swamp roots and mire tugging at my ankles, my socks squishing in my boots.
“ ere,” I tell him. “It’s gone. Never happened.”
He brushes his thumb over chapped lips. “You won’t tell anyone?” His voice is tiny and vacant, like a pebble that’s been hollowed.
I shrug. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He laughs at this, a laugh that starts out too high-pitched and quickly turns into a sob. And then he’s gasping, his breaths coming fast and shallow. “I don’t know how it happened,” he whispers. “I—it was an accident, I didn’t mean to… it was just an accident—”
“I know,” I reassure him. I’m tired suddenly, the adrenaline draining out of me and making the shovel heavy in my hands. “It was an accident.”
A silence falls between us as we both gaze out into the murky water where the body lies. e swamp murmurs, reeds shivering in the hot summer breeze. A cicada croaks somewhere close. I bat at a mosquito that tries to skip up my arm and I start thinking about all of the hungry, eager critters here and how long it will take for them to start eating away at the corpse.
Without looking at me, he says, “You’re the only person I could tell about this.”
I close my eyes. “What does that mean?” I surprise myself with how biting it comes out.
“I mean when I—when the accident happened, and I was losing my mind, and I thought the world was over, I thought of you. You were the person I wanted to see. Not my parents, not any of my friends.” Now he does turn to look at me, his eyes catching the moonlight and spilling it into me. “It was you.”
He has this way of making me forget things. I forget that I’m frustrated with him and that he never calls, that he’s killed another human being, that he’s never told me he loves me. We stand pressed into one another, nameless swamp creatures, knowing only the dirt and each other.
He’s gone before breakfast. He doesn’t wake me up with a kiss or tell me that last night was amazing. He doesn’t leave a note or a text. e only evidence of him being here at all is the Tulane sweater he le at the foot of the bed, which I throw on over myself as I clean the apartment. He’s always hated this apartment, how low the roof is, how the mosquitoes always get in through the tattered window screen, how the air conditioning is busted and worst of all how there’s clutter everywhere. I usually clean it before he comes over, but I didn’t get the chance last night, and I wonder if maybe that’s why he didn’t stay.
When he calls, it’s a few days later, late at night. I lie in bed half-watching shitty Dateline reruns on cable while he talks to me on the phone. His tone is light, casual, like the night in the swamp never happened, and also like the years and years of our mangled history never happened either—like speaking on the phone is a normal, everyday occurrence, like we do not frequently go months without speaking. But this is nothing new.
He talks about mundane things, about laundry and chores and bank account statements. He talks to me while he scrubs dishes. “How do you get stains out of plastic plates?” he wants to know.
“Easy,” I tell him. “Don’t use plastic plates, you psychopath.” He laughs, but I’m only halfjoking. “We’re not in school anymore. You need to get real house stu .”
“Real house stu ,” he echoes, amused. “ at’s the writer in you.”
A mosquito lands on my knee. I try to slap it away, but it skips up onto my thigh. I ick it o . “Shut up.”
“Should I get a stand-mixer? And paisley curtains?”
“White-picket fence,” I o er.
“Wife and kids,” he replies, and laughs, and I laugh too—funny, funny, funny. Like he’s that kind of person, like he’s built for love. I laugh until my ribs start to ache. en the goddamn mosquito’s back and I’m getting eaten alive.
is was also an accident, he tells me. Two this time, lovers, wrapped around the hood of his Benz. An accident, an accident. He had too much to drink and he was going so fast and it was so dark and they were wandering, lovesick fools. ey died instantly, they didn’t su er. is, at least, is good, he tells me, his hope and desperation wound so tightly around each other that I can’t tell the di erence between them anymore. I put them in the same grave so that their bones will be together.
A er I’ve washed the blood and swamp stink o of myself as best I can, I lie next to him in bed. I turn on the TV and put on Dateline and he snaps, “Can we watch something else?”
I change the channel. We watch a few minutes of a crappy made-for-TV lm and then he’s crying. He cries the way we cry when we’re kids, the kind of shuddering, uncontrollable sobs that you can’t get a good breath around.
I don’t bother trying to tell him that it’s okay. I just pull him into me and let him lay his head on my lap as he weeps, and I listen to him grow quieter and quieter until he’s spent and just catches his breath.
Even his breaths are beautiful to me, these little reminders of life. Sometimes I worship him so much that I forget he’s human, that he doesn’t bleed silver or oat in his sleep. I used to pretend to fall asleep in bed with him so that I could just lie with my head against his ribcage, listening to the marvel of his heartbeat, the organs pumping blue blood through his miraculous, alive veins.
“I cleaned my apartment,” I tell him a er a long while.
“I noticed,” he says. He’s still gone in the morning.
“How’s the writing?”
“How’s the researching?”
“I asked you rst.”
He’s not trying to make me squirm, but the question prickles. I don’t write much these days. In college, when we were the closest we ever were to being a real couple—whatever that looks like—my creative output was at a freakish, outlier high. He assumed that was how it always was, that my brain was always on overdrive, inspiration owing out of me with no end. He doesn’t realize that he was half of my poetry.
But I can’t tell him this, of course I can’t tell him this. So instead I tell him about this one idea I have for a story. A man elopes with a woman against her family’s wishes. is pisses o their god, who punishes them by turning the woman into a sword. e man weeps over the blade every night, still loving her madly, longing to touch her, to hold her just once more. Eventually he loves her so much that he can’t bear to be kept from her any longer, and he buries her into his chest all the way up to her hilt so that they can never be separated.
He processes for a minute in silence, rubbing his lip with his thumb thoughtfully. “You have a very interesting mind,” he says at last.
“Oh my god.” I groan, rake my ngers over my face. “You hate it.”
“I don’t hate it,” he argues. “It’s good. It’s a good idea. It’s just… sad. Kinda fucked up.”
It never crossed my mind that it might be sad. I didn’t know it could be anything but devastatingly romantic.
“It’s a love story,” I tell him.
“Funny love story,” he says.
“You didn’t go to Columbia.”
“What?”
“We went to Tulane.” I tug at the sweater he’s wearing, navy instead of forest green. “Is this, like, wish ful llment? Your little way of getting out of Louisiana?”
He smiles but doesn’t laugh at this, and something in it halts my breeziness. “Is this yours?”
“It’s,” he starts, then stops.
“What?” I’m sitting up now. “Whose?” I feel like a schoolgirl, obsessive, idiotic, helplessly trying to hold onto something that’s not mine.
“I met somebody.” is could mean anything. You meet the grocer when you buy milk and eggs. You meet Jesus when you go to church. But the way his mouth says “somebody” creates a shape in my head: the shape of a girl with golden hair and curious eyes and so lips, the shape of a girl who smiles more than I do and asks all the right questions, the kind of girl who could be his
I don’t know if I say anything. I don’t think I do, but my face must say enough because he tells me, “She’s the one who initiated.”
I’m trying to gure out how this matters. “How long have you been seeing her?”
“Not long. A little over a month ago.”
“So you’ve been seeing her while you’ve been seeing me.”
“Well, you and I aren’t…” He trails o when he sees my face.
“What? Aren’t what?”
“You know—like that.”
I don’t know, actually. If I were brave I would ask him. If we’re friends or if we’re fucking or if we’re dating, or lovers, or accomplices, or strangers. Because I’m a coward the question I ask is: “Do you even love me?”
“Of course I do,” he says, and I can tell he means it. Somehow, this is worse. He loves me but not enough to kiss me in the street. He con des in me when he’s done something unforgivable but doesn’t ask about my day. He wants me to bury dead bodies but he does not want mine, alive.
He’s made a real mess. I didn’t realize this much blood could come out of one person, so much that it still hasn’t dried and glistens wet in the dark, pooling in the trunk. If a cluttered apartment gets under his nerves I can only imagine how he feels about the state of his car.
I’ve handled a few corpses now but I’m no expert in dead bodies. But even I know there’s no mistaking these wounds as anything but intentional. e cuts are deep and deliberate and purposeful, made by an unwavering hand.
“Accident again?” I ask. Not a good joke, but I can’t help myself.
He just shakes his head tersely, not in the mood for it. He looks sick, and I wonder what disgusts him the most between him, myself, and the bloody corpse. “I didn’t think I could do something like this,” he says quietly. “I don’t even know what the fuck I am.”
I want to tell him that he’s not a monster, that he must have not meant to do this. But when I try to conjure an image of him, a killer, I’m surprised at how easy and vivid it comes to me. e veins in his wrist tense as cords, knuckles bone-white around the knife. Blood inging back onto his teeth as he tears through esh and muscle, eyes wild with joy.
I suspected this for a while now, I think. at he kills them on purpose and loves me by accident. I know what he is; I always have. He’s just himself.
“You probably shouldn’t help me anymore,” he whispers. He doesn’t say the other part but I know it anyway. at I shouldn’t love him, either. ere are a million good reasons why I shouldn’t and only a few shitty reasons why I do. is brilliant, puzzling person who makes me laugh until I ache.
Funny love story.
“I’m going to get my shovel,” I say.
GHOSTTRAIN
Guo
On the rst night, Sydney saw the lights.
Hunched over the bedroom desk, glaring at equations through bleary eyes, the ashes of green caught viciously against his waning concentration. With a grimace, he shi ed the hand buried in his hair, rotating his arm to block the piercing glow. But the lights continued to blaze through the glass, on and on, like re ies frozen in thin ice.
Slamming his pencil against the table, he rose and stomped toward the front- aked window. One st was already in the curtains, ready to wrench the old fabric to the side, when he realized the glow wasn’t from some neighbor’s broken porch lights.
No, the lights were high in the sky, and they were growing larger.
writhing shape was lashing straight toward him. Withnotimeforfear,he’dbarelyclosedhiseyesand covered his face before the rush overwhelmed him.
e scorching maw and mechanical roar seared his senses green, as if his arms and eyelids weren’t even there. Dirt slammed and gravel clattered against the glass, the sound shrill against the stillness of the night.
Greenmeltedbackintoblack,andSydneyhesitantly uncovered his eyes. His pulse pounded in his ears, his mouth falling open in disbelief. e window was whole, the room was whole, and even his stupid homework was whole. Only the green lights had vanished from the picture.
He rubbed his eyes and his shoulders slumped. e
Writing by Ally
Design by Isabelle Lim
lack of sleep must’ve nally started catching up to him. Sighing, he shut the curtains and icked o the bedroom light.
ere was no glass to clean. He could nish his homework in the morning.
BenniewasalreadyhomewhenSydney returned in the a ernoon, sitting on the ground in front of the pile of shoes, unpacking his small cartoon-printbackpack.Sydney had just nished greeting him when their grandmother from the living room.
“He wasn’t feeling a erschool.” She glanced meaningfully at the calendar on the wall. No day was marked.
“I know.” Sydney felt a familiar stab of annoyance as he shrugged o his backpack. Of course he’d remembered what anniversary it was. He’d already sent the “Hope you’re doing well” text in the morning. Why did his grandmother always act like he couldn’t take care of things himself?
He tugged the binder out of his bag and retreated upstairs, busying himself with homework until his grandma called him to dinner. Uncharacteristically un-chatty, Bennie’s appetite was as horrible as ever, but for just one day, neither father nor grandmother pressed him to eat more.
It was a er their grandmother had le for her post-
mush catching between his teeth.
“I think Dad lost Mom’s car. Maybe we can nd it. e train can help bring it back.”
Sydney ground his teeth, swallowing his words down. Of course their father had “lost” her car. He’d sold it half a year a er he’d donated her clothes.
“Have you even seen a real train before?” he scolded instead. “Don’t even get me started on the ying.”
Bennie hu ed, insisting that the train was big,
Forever Bachelor
“Why the hell are you wearing a bowtie?” Nathan’s friend Chris scrunched his eyebrows as he looked him up and down, squinting to see better in the evening light.
“Isn’t this supposed to be formal?”
“It’s a bachelor party, man. Not prom.”
Nathan tugged on the bowtie around his neck, it felt like it was choking him all of a sudden, “Oh, should I take it o ?”
“Like, maybe. It’s too much.” Nathan noted the stark contrast between Chris’s half-unbuttoned short sleeve and his own dress shirt and bowie. As they walked up the dock, Nathan tugged the tie o as subtly as he could. “You should undo a few buttons on your shirt, too. Maybe roll up the sleeves?”
He did as instructed, laughing awkwardly before saying, “I’ve just never been to something like this.”
“For real?” Chris clapped him on the back and laughed, “It’s
gonna be fun as hell. My buddy is loaded—the yacht’s huge. Plus, open bar.”
“Oh cool.”
“You drink, right? You’re not Muslim or whatever?”
“Uh no, not religious. I drink sometimes.”
“Well, if you want something that’s not alcohol…” Chris pulled out a small baggy of powder from his pocket and grinned like a hyena, “I got you.”
Nathan’s smile was strained, since when did Chris do coke? “Ah, thanks,” he replied. Chris barked out a laugh. ey were at the boat now. It was huge.
“Try to lighten up, man,” Chris said, “your shoulders are all tense.”
“It’s just—am I allowed to be here? I don’t even know the guy.”
“ at’s what you’re worried about? My buddy told me to invite people, so you’re good. Go nd a hot chick somewhere to entertain you, maybe that’ll help the nerves,” Chris laughed. Nathan winced.
ey ascended the stairs into the boat, lled with chatter and
people milling about—guys in khaki pants and polo shirts, girls in scantily clad tops and small shorts. Looking down at what he was wearing, Nathan realized that Chris had been right about his out t. e button down and slacks he was wearing were out of place. He shaved for this, too, and his face felt naked and strange.
Usually Nathan wouldn’t ever attend something like this, but he was already struggling to make friends as things were now. Yeah, Chris was a bit of an ass at times, butasano ce-coworker-turnedkinda-friend who adopted him into the workplace friend circle, he was all that Nathan had. And admittedly, he was cool. And it had been years since Nathan had been associated with “cool” or been part of the in-group. It felt good to be invited to something, even if Nathan really just wanted to shrink into himself and leave.
Chris disappeared somewhere to nd the groom, and Nathan settled on a couch near the edge of the boat. A pretty waitress made her way over to him—her short brown hair swayed as she walked, and the shirt she was wearing was really tight—but Nathan tried really hard to keep his eyes on her face. She o ered
Writing by Sage Murthy Design by Michaela Chang
him what was on her tray.
“Gin and tonic?” She asked.
“Ah, sure. anks,” she was really pretty, Nathan could feel his face heating up. She handed him a glass and started to turn away before he stuttered out, “Wait, what’s your name?”
She turned back, “Adela.”
“Nice to meet you, Adela, I’m Nathan,” he said, sticking out his hand for her to shake, which was a miscalculation since she was still holding a tray full of drinks. She shi ed the tray to one hand carefully and shook his hand with the other. Nathan cringed inwardly, this was not going well.
With their hands still clasped together, Nathan blurted out, “How old are you?”
He immediately regretted it. He had just wanted to make sure he wasn’t talking to a minor, or something—not that he thought there would be minors at a party with strippers and alcohol—but now he de nitely looked like a creep.
“I’m nineteen,” she said, smiling awkwardly.
Nathan’s mouth dropped open, his ears were burning, “Nineteen? What are you doing here? Don’t you have like, school or something?”
“I work part-time for the yacht crew.”
“Oh, I see,” Nathan replied. God, this was awkward. “Sorry, I just assumed that everyone here was above twenty-one at least.”
“Don’t have to be twenty-one to need money.”
“Ah. Fair enough.”
“Well… how old are you?”
“I’m twenty-seven.”
“Damn,” Adela looked like she was holding back a laugh.
Nathan’slipspressed into a thin line, “Hey, I’m still young.”
“Young enough to be at a bachelor party, old enough to awkwardly ask my age within seconds of meeting me,” she was laughing now.
Nathan didn’t really know how to reply to that, his whole body felt hot. His shirt felt tight. Was he really irting with a nineteen year old? Was this even irting? He never talks to people like this. He reached for another drink from her tray and downed it.
“Yeah! Drink up, grandpa.”
He couldn’t even look at her, so he laughed awkwardly while averting his gaze. By the grace of God, someone called her over to get a drink, so she wandered away and le Nathan by himself again. Perfectly in his element— sitting at the edge of the crowd with the ability to people-watch. ere were a lot of people there, a lot, and they all seemed like the same type of person. Uppermiddle class dudes, with a blonde girlfriend who they probably le at home to irt with a stripper.
A few minutes later he heard
a crashing sound from the other side of the boat. No one in his eyeline seemed to react, so he went to check it out himself. When he rounded the corner, he found two guys—one shorter, holding a broken glass bottle, and one taller—seemingly facing o against one another.
Inarandomburstofcon dence, Nathan tried to pull the shorter one away from the other, “Hey man, put the bottle down.”
“Mind your own fucking business,” the short one turned around and held the broken bottle in Nathan’s face. Nathan immediately let go and put his hands up.
“I don’t want any trouble,” Nathan’s heart was beating fast.
“Fuck o before I cut you up too.”
Nathan’s face contorted in confusion. He looked around to see if anyone else was seeing this. No one was looking.
“Are you deaf?” e short one took a step closer, pressing the smooth side of the bottle against Nathan’s neck to get his attention. Nathan’s head snapped back to look at him.
“Uh, sorry?”
“Fuck. O .” He pushed the bottle into his neck harder.
“Your guy le , man,” Nathan pointed behind the short one to where the tall one was standing before. e short one cursed before glaring at Nathan and booking it down the deck.
Nathan stood there in disbelief. What the hell just happened? He started looking around and spotted Chris standing near the railing.
“Chris!” Nathan made his way over to him. When Chris turned around his nostrils were covered in white powder.
“Nathan! My man!” Chris hooked his arm around Nathan’s neck and gave him a noogie, “How’s it going? Are you having fun?”
“Uh, kinda? ere’s actually—”
“I’m so glad we’re working together, Nate. Can I call you that? It’s got a good ring to it.”
“I—”
“I’m glad we’re friends, man.
You’re a really cool guy,” Chris let go of Nathan’s neck and smiled at him lazily. Nathan’s heart swelled. For a second, he forgot the urgency he felt moments earlier.
“ anks, Chris,” he said, and he meant it.
“I mean it, even though I’m wasted, I promise. I wanna get to know you more, man,” Chris laughed, eyes widening with an idea. “Wanna do a line?”
“Uh, I’m good. anks though.”
“You sure? It’s awesome—will de nitelymakeyoulessnervous.”
Nathan thought about his horrible awkward conversation with Adela, the weird ght he witnessed moments earlier, the orgy (or setup to an orgy) that was taking place further down thedeck,andthepeoplethrowing up over the side of the boat, and considered it again. If you can’t x ‘em, join ‘em.
“You know what? Sure.”
“Attaboy!” Chris smiled and leaned down to scrape another line on the railing. “Just close one nostril with your nger and inhale through the tube,” he explained. Nathan nodded and took the makeshi dollar-bill tube from him.
He leaned down, lined up his nose to the tube, plugged one nostril, and felt his heart race. Nathan only made it down half of the line before he heard a girl shriek and his head jerked to attention. His eyes were bleary and his head was spinning.
“You good?” Chris asked.
“Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“ e girl screaming.”
“No?”
“We should check it out,” Nathan stood up straight, looking around for anything strange.
“Are you gonna nish that?” Chris pointed to the half- nished line.
“I don’t think so?”
“Okay cool,” Chris grabbed the tube from Nathan’s ngers, leaned down, and snorted the rest.
“Are we gonna go check it out?” Nathan asked again.
“Check what out?” Chris asked dumbly, blinking.
Nathan realized that Chris probably wouldn’t be of any help, anyway. “Nevermind, I’ll be right back.”
He wandered around the deck and into the cabin until his eyes locked on Adela, being felt up by somemanwhowasde nitelyway older than her. His hands were stuck down his pants, grabbing himself. She was writhing under him, trying to push him o her. Suddenly, either because of the coke or an abrupt change in his meek personality, Nathan rushed forward and yanked the man o of her.
“ e fuck is your problem?” e man snarled at Nathan.
“Don’t be a creep, asshole,” Nathan found himself biting back.
e man threw Nathan’s hand o of his shoulder and pushed past him, storming o to another
place on the boat. From her spot on the couch, Adela looked up at Nathan with relief.
“I thought you were old, but that guy was way older. And grosser.”
Nathan let out a shocked laugh before saying, “Geez. You okay?”
“Yeah, thanks,” she smiled, before her face morphed into horror and she screamed.
Nathan’s head whipped around to see a aming bottle sail through the window of the cabin. e glass shattered, raining down on everyone inside. e ery bottle landed on the wood oor, burning the ground and slowly spreading.
him, trampling on each other to escape. Next thing he knew, Adela was gone.
In the dark, Nathan spotted Chris leaning over the railing. As if in slow motion, he watched as another bottle ew into his head, pushing his already slouched body over the short edge and into the water. Adrenaline surged through Nathan’s body as he dashed over to the edge and saw Chris slip into the ocean.
“What the fuck?” Nathan was so fucking confused, but he couldn’t stay still for long because another bottle came sailing through the newly made hole in the glass window. Adela grabbed him and they ducked behind the couch. ere was screaming and running—people half naked bolting across broken glass. Utter chaos.
As soon as the bottles stopped, Nathan counted three so far, they booked it to the door. eir shoes crunched on glass mixed with miscellaneous alcohol strewn across the oor. It was hard to see anything because of how dark it was. People were still scrambling around the deck in panic, screaming and shouting. At least two more bottles went sailing through the air. He saw a few people jump into the ocean to escape the quickly growing re on the boat. People shoved past
It wasn’t until this moment that Nathan really registered that the boat was still moving. Slowly, sure, but moving nonetheless. Weren’t they supposed to drop theiranchorandstopsomewhere? Before he could think much more, he found himself diving into the water a er Chris.
Nathan was by no means sober, but the cold water woke him up from his inebriated trance for a moment. He kicked against the heavy water—trying to go deeper to grab Chris before he sank too far. Everything was dark. e only light coming
from the yacht above. His heart was pounding. He couldn’t see Chris. How long had he been underwater for? He could feel his lungs gradually tightening from lack of air. He kept swimming down further and further but he really couldn’t see anything. Desperation set in. Where the fuck was Chris? Could his body not oat even a little bit? Was he at the bottom already? Nathan was out of air, he kicked up to the surface and gasped for air at the top. His legs rapidly and desperately kicked to stay a oat.
e ship had moved closer to shore, lit up from the glowing ames. Helicopters ew above, the search lights shining on the water and stopping when they landed on him. ey spoke to Nathan through the speaker, but it all sounded like white noise.
Designn by Julia Mao
Photography by
Nicole Joseph & Jasmine Wan
Design by Grace Wu
Descent x Kids of Immigrants
Photography by Marissa Ding Design by Raina Paeper
Adrenaline is You
Written by SammieYen
Design by Stella Vu
(pianissimo)
IcanonlysayI’m agitated,it irks me thataknotispooling at the bottom of my
once-indelible stomach, spools and spools of tangled and complicated, of imagining bridging the arm’s length between us with a smile, with a musicality to a perfect howareyou but as music clings to the piano man’s hands, fearing to let go, I am afraid of orchestral de ance,ofsharpnotes.My mind ees the scene,andIamle to conductmyemotions—poor, youngthings—
with stupid, small hands that go in my lap, or in my pockets or adjusting my hair because all I want to do is reach out and feel your hand,
under mine, trace the veiny lovescape, feel the pulse of a chord progression moving up and down.
tapping, gliding, quickly and so ly. For now,
I’ll listen to whatever we’re watching, whatever contemporary Bach this is, as e symphony in front of us is incomparable
I’ll listen to whatever we’re watching, whatever contemporary Bach this is, as e symphony in front of us is incomparable
to what I feel / or know / or think about you, you and your smile sounds like a symphony I won’t stop playing, echoing (pianoforte) accelerando allegroallegretto
in my mind’s chamber halls. I wish I could say it, I wish the words
will just sp ill out out,
atteries in F major, the blush in your cheeks blooming across, a refrainless ballad, (did I strike a decadent chord?)
Sight reading is second nature but I can’t read you, not as easy as a fugue or an ode — a treble, I tremble (forte)
under the gaze of you. e bow of your mouth opens, and I’m dis harmony, disjointed, more scattered than an étude
the space between the notes is the music, the silence between the smiles and it’s music,music, fortissimo!
I can feel the weight of the conductor’s li ed hands, can feel the space between your ngertips and mine, can feel the notes hang, suspended and suspended in time
like peaches on an orchard tree. I can almost reach reach for your hand, grasp it like it’s the bow of my violin.
I see your hand resting, loyally on your lap I can,
outstretched, take it under mine, and all the music dreamily oating — violently clashing —
cautiously loving — in these halls, nothing can sway as this melody, your hand in mine.
“Let in Clear Light”
Photography by Marissa Ding
Design by Isabelle Lim
one more silly adventure
Written by Z Luo Design by Jenny Liu
Do you think the demons are out yet?
Did you let them go?
Just one cell. Don’t worry. I did the paperwork this time. How many forms?
Twelve?
Uh oh. How many did I miss?
Thirteen.
Why did you choose demons?
… I don’t know either.
I’m sorry. It’s not very good, is it?
I wouldn’t necessarily say that so much as… it doesn’t… feel like… you?
Well, the dialogue feels like us.
But the emphasis on numbers, on paperwork… When did any of that matter to you?
Sigh. I don’t know what I feel like anymore.
I just…
Anyway, could you help me with smashing these?
A shower of salt-glazed pottery shards scatter, indistinguishable from those trapped in glass.
Keep 婆婆’s urn company hm?
Behind you. 婆婆’s riding a horse. Wait, 婆婆, that horse doesn’t have enough legs!
Can we take 婆婆 with us? Please?
Ask 婆婆
Hi 婆婆! We’ll be taking these sculptures with us, but we can burn you this fruit!
The duct-tape and bedazzlement won’t a昀昀ect the 昀氀avor at all!
Trust me. Do you wanna come with us?
A herd of chipped sculptures, a banana-munching spirit, and two youths crash through the museum exit.
*shiver*
Here, take my jacket.
No. Your hands are violet.
–Drops of dew glimmer on pale, 昀氀ushing petals. Under the radiant glow, if not for your blueing 昀椀ngers, you could forget that mere moments ago, strands of frost wove in chains and crowns. Tempted, you’d stretched towards its warmth. Under gentle caresses, you fail to recall its bite–
Huh. *headshake*
Here. At least take a hat.
Alright.
You shove equally violet hands into the attached mittens. The bright orange beak bonks you on the head as you stand back to admire your work. The penguin’s cartoonishly large eyes droop in their corners as the hat falls to cover resigned eyes.
P昀昀t! You… you…
Descent Magazine
It’s your hat. What did you think it’d look like?
De昀椀nitely, ha, not that. I… you… *choke*
Hey, hey, breathe for me. Deep breath in. Two. Three.
Deep breath out. Two. Three.
–You’d been struck again, under the tree-wherethere-are-no-ghosts, breathless. This time, you’ll get it right. This time, the lightning will carve branches and brand ghostlessness to your core. This time, you still can’t breathe. You–you promised me. Your head is down. You can’t look. All you do is disappoint. You can still feel THEIR eyes, their hands, you’re disgusting, you’re a monster, you’re pathetic, you’re sorry. I’m sorry. I’msorryimsorryimsorryimsorry. You’re not sure who you’re saying it to anymore–
Gentle 昀椀ngers coax your clawing hands from your eyes.
Sorry about that.
Don’t be. You know I’m used to it. But you shouldn’t have to be.
I am anyway. There’s no question of have to. You’re bleeding again. Don’t just lick it clean! Your hands are 昀椀lthy.
I only touched your hands. My point exactly.
Oh! Did you see that star? Mm.
I wanted to make a wish but it winked out. Do you think that when––Frantic scribbling in the dark. Unintelligible murmurs, paper ripping, bang! A spark of light; a gushing crimson stream splashing the page. Cerulean rage, whose, engul昀椀ng, gone, gone, nothing left but to write, bringitback, bringitback,comebackbackback–(come back, come back)
Do you want a bite?
*CRUNCH* Slow down. Take another.
*crunch*
I wish you could come with me. Ai. Let’s go on another adventure! We’ve got to burn the time we’ve got left now don’t we?
Do you want to correct some tombstones? Raise some restful dead?
*choke*
Hey, hey *pound* no one’s competing
You…
I haven’t gone anywhere. Please. Come back.
I’m not going anywhere. Come back to me, please. –
Adrenaline
with you.
Oh, oh I know, we could liberate the État?
Don’t they still have your…
Oh.
Please? You still have all that red paint. My expensive scarlet paint??
Not that one. The cheap crimson one you bought to splatter?
Ah.
Alright. Let’s go on one more silly adventure.
Three dolls, a loose foot and 昀椀ve foam bars threaten to fall from your hands. Before the entire stack can topple, two 昀椀ngers pluck the rowdy foot and sweep away the bars. You half expect a rose to appear in that mischievous mouth as the troublemaking dolls are kicked and caught.
Sorry, staging the bank robbery took longer than expected.
Mm. You’re still just in time. Glass shatters. Two shadows stroll in, muting the alarms with a 昀氀ick.
This one?
Headshake. Striking your 昀椀nger against your canines, you point with the ignited end at the hypnotizing tapestry hiding more poorly packaged boxes. Blowing your 昀氀ame at that nauseating spiral, the cloth blazes, charring the walls around it.
There’s an entire stream’s worth of stones here!
Do you want any?
No. You wouldn’t have enough space to paint. No buts. You don’t like the styles it would need. Do you want to arrange the bars?
Sure. Upstairs?
Yeah. I wanna see what these so-called experts have to say.
Leave a splatter here! I think the description is perfect for it.
You 昀氀ick your wrist, sending a furious rain of droplets slashing across these exotic…
Always.
Do you want to do the honors?
Dipping small feet into the paint, you hand them over to excitedly twitching hands. Little, crimson footsteps trail across walls and cases in accusatory fractals.
Did you 昀椀nd your notebook yet? Yup! Can you hold on to it for me?
Didn’t you want to write in it?
I brought notecards. *昀氀ourish* I’ll make you a collage later.
Ok.
Under a sliver of moonlight, two 昀椀gures
invite co昀케ns and sarcophagi open. As ragged not-quitedead emerge, they toss generous amounts of spices to the breeze.
Woah! *cough* Wow, this is dusty.
Can we take this suona? I think I could summon a whole legion with it.
Anyway, I’m going to leave some echoes. Cover your ears.
Obnoxious blaring bounds o昀昀 to hide in corners and memories of cages.
Ooh, *scribbles*
Whoops, that woke up some old friends.
Hey, you’re new, welcome!
Can you sprinkle these peach pits under that atrocious marble bust?
Of course. Look at them grow! What a view for the guy. May the trees not remember the strangled.
Magni昀椀cent trees sprout, the strangled bust barely an imprint of dust as the air 昀氀oods sickly-sweet with the scent of ripening, rotting peaches.
*frantic scrawling*
You wanna paint an entrance for that one?
Plum 昀氀owers blossom in glorious rings around a meditating 昀椀gure. Swiftly, your maobi dances, sketching a spider lily that leeches the color from the blossoms. Amidst wilting petals, the 昀椀gure stretches languidly and walks out. Handing them a doll, you direct them towards the gardens.
Shall we deal with the curses?
Curses, curses, everybody line up! I’ll send you guys home!
A conglomeration of white gets stuck in the yawning expanse of the gate home, sending mummies and halfmaterialized forms 昀氀ying. The gate shutters. White sears into black.
Oh, its warm he–
The BODY collapses into frantic hands. –
You promised… You never got a chance to soar. Please come back, am I not worth living for?
The notecard-that-is-not-yet-your-gift 昀氀utters to the ground. Trembling 昀椀ngers lift it slowly.
‘I wish you saw your hands the way I do. Your hands in motion became my favorite the moment you 昀椀rst lifted the brush. There was no need for paint.’
With scales from 昀椀sh-that-do-not-remember-being昀椀sh, you grind ink from rehydrated squid and bits of minorly cursed bone. Studying the pathetic selection
of brushes, you sigh. You select a slender branch from a replanted redwood tree, fed by crystallized resentment, and crush arrows to serve as bristles. Dipping your makeshift brush into the obsidian ink, you exhale, inhale, exhale, stroke by stroke, etching the tree-wherethere-are-no-ghosts onto the BODY.
Your words are etched into my heart.
‘There was no need for paint.’ I… You would admire a painter who does not paint.
I’ve never been good with words but I… I will always read what you write. I always want to read what you write.
(What if I never write again?)
The BODY remains still.
‘Oh, to take these cruel hands of mine and press into 昀氀esh what I mean, to mangle creation into a clumsy form, where have you gone, my cardinal thread?’
It’s still tied around my pinky.
Smashing a case, you pull out the only intact guzheng, hoping the years have aged the wood well. It’s not in tune, but when have dirges ever needed to be? But, bloody, melancholy notes do not move thread. Fumbling, you dutifully attempt to capture the essence of joy. Steady, sanguine drips and your footsteps crushing paper weakly mimic festivity. As though moved through pity alone, your thread extends, and you tie a shaky knot to the BODY’s corresponding pinky.
I tied our strings back together. I don’t understand why you cut it in the 昀椀rst place. You’re not a burden. You’ve left your dreams in my colors, your words across my skin.
I fear the day I lose your voice. Won’t you come back and read with me again? (I fear I have already lost my voice.)
The BODY remains still.
‘The clouds tell me of rain and rain and sleet, yet they billow and pu昀昀 and break the very skies open for you.’ Cloudburst. You gather drapes of silk embroidered with crisp herons in 昀氀ight. With bits of thread gathered from stray spiders, you carefully stitch silken feathers into the BODY, heedless of messy stitches 昀椀nished into your 昀氀esh. There’s enough material left over to give you one bloodied wing.
You once told me you felt like a wingless bird.
That even if you couldn’t 昀氀y, you’d love
the feeling of wings on your back.
That you were scared of being a monster alone.
I made us wings. Will you come back to me?
The BODY twitches. Is it not enough?
You said you loved my hands; have them. I cannot paint without you. I’ll learn to use my mouth, my feet.
Grasping a fallen guandao, heedless of rust, you hack at your wrist.
The BODY jolts.
Don’t! Why are you always so careful with me yet careless with yourself? [smile]
I… it’s not your sacri昀椀ce… it’s about… harmony
The BODY crumples, pointing to the notebook. –
‘To my 秋叶, sometimes I wonder if I am a bird or a monster.’
Neither. You’re you.
‘Never around you. This one’s for you. May your 昀氀ight be more than a dream.’
A leaf adrift deserves to soar. Yes, but can you let go?
Where would you go then?
Where the spring wind pleases.
A leaf in 昀氀ight delights in spin.
I am getting dizzy.
And is that not delightful?
Delight is not my mother tongue. What language, then, breathes the leaves?
First, eradicate your implicit reliance on Google Maps. You can’t trust satellites. ey won’t tell you everything. “ ey” aren’t satellites. ey know but won’t tell everyone anything. It’s not because they can’t, but simply because they won’t. Perhaps to some degree they can’t. ey’re trying to survive too, so you can’t fully blame them. You don’t need to judge them. You just can’t trust them. e truth of the matter is that “ ey” can’t be out–
down into sewage-pipe-like subway stations, wet with ashing neon lights and jaundiced uorescence and the acrid scent of something obscure decomposing in every dimly lit corner. Whip your head around. Survey the scene. Look. Look there.
ere’s a military green trash bin with a black bag and a cloud of black ies and a half-empty can of half-eaten garbage near the gum-laden stairs where some aggravated 9-to-5 o ce employee spilled their co ee this morning. Although the liquid is still steaming white smoke, it no longer smells like roasted co ee beans. e subway has swallowed the savory scent in a nauseating stew of scents which smell like sewage-water. It looks like tar now, doesn’t it? Or maybe gasoline: black and viscous and virulently lethal. Not that it matters to you. Does it?
Didn’t you stop to stare as the spilt Starbucks Americano puddle seeped into the veins running between tiles littering the subway oor? Get back on your feet. Spilt co ee is too slow. You’ve got to move faster. More fervently. Furiously. Don’t falter, just
RUN RUN
and learn from bullet trains. ey’re the most reliable coaches.
ey’ll screech at you, screech past you, scream as your ngers fumble across the screen of your digital pocketbook trying to search for the location of that evening appointment you slipped into your back pocket last minute but forgot rst thing in the morning.Maybenowyoucanempathizewiththebusybodywho spilled their co ee at the foot of the subway stairs. You’ve both got to run; the train is leaving the station. Intercom static pricks your ears like paresthesia– a sign that you’ve been standing still and stagnant for much too long. e sound makes you cringe like you did the day when you accompanied your mother when she got acupuncture to treat her Bell’s Palsy. But that was di erent because she was paralyzed. Sterile white gloves punctured the le side of her face with a million tiny needles and she still didn’t inch. You did though. at was the day you decided not to pierce your ears when you turned 16 even though all your friends did. To rid yourself of the needles, you’ve got to
Second lesson of the day: subway trains teach the right way to punch pavement. Sear through granite tiles with the soles of your worn down checkerboard sneakers or the polished black leather shoes you borrowed from your father or your mother’s high heels which make you look like you’re 5 foot 3 instead of 5 feet tall. Puncture the pavement. As you
the wind will slip another secret into the back pockets of your frayed, fadedblue jeans that “ ey” refused to inform you of. Don’t worry because the subway knows. It’ll tell you a seemingly peculiar tale; just listen. In the pounding of your pulse and the screeching of the trains and the spreading co ee stains, they’ll whisper that you are the inauspicious twin of Usain Bolt, as if you lost a leg before the Beijing Olympics of 2008 so your training is futile, yet you still run. ey’ll reach their headlights into your subconscious and wrench out that memory when you saw your own face (which, in fact, was not your own face) ash: pixelated, across TV screens, across the nation, across the globe, across the shbowl eyes of your father whose limbs were sprawled on the moth-eaten carpet of your living room basement, breathing. Hard. His breaths are barely audible; he inhales nicotine smoke and exhales white tendrils of terror, reeking of le over war. Perhaps the indisputable truth of these memories is why you nd that you need to
RUN RUN RUN
a er the Olympian on-screen even though the absence of your le limb keeps reminding you that you’re a desperate cripple. at blurry, pixelated face cannot be your own; that is your distant twin brother, the one your other mother from another war lost to a military dra long ago. Perhaps bullets trained him to run as fast as he does. Perhaps you weren’t fast enough for the bullets and that’s why you lost your le leg. Maybe it was a good thing you merely lost a limb and not both of your legs and both of your arms and your torso and so, the totality of your body was not swallowed whole by millions upon trillions of TV screens. He has both of his limbs and both of his arms and his torso is built like Hercules, built to race like a demigod. Perhaps that was why God chose him for the dra and
not you. Were you spared for being a weakling? Spared for your broken le wing? Or should you be ashamed that the bullets stole your leg and not his? Would you rather have cameras capture you in commotion on the racetrack of the Beijing Olympics in the year 2008? Crowds of scoundrels will swallow you whole; gaping eyes will devour your image in pixels which conjure up a farcical you. But you know that this is not you. It is him. He doesn’t know you and you don’t know him, not personally, but perhaps it was because you were switched at birth, or because your mother woke up one day and decided she only ever had one child, and so she choose you as the sacri cial lamb although you insisted that you were no Issac and your father was no Abraham and God was not as benevolent in the East as he was in the West. Still, she stole you away. She sold you away in the night markets of Shanghai thinking the hand she had clutched in the dark was the trotter of some swine whose carcass had been half-butchered and bleeding before she decided to buy it. Maybe she was the one who bought you a er bartering for the price on your back. Maybe it was because you were half-butchered and bleeding, or because you had just lost your le limb, so she decided that you were worth keeping despite the impurities spouting from your mouth. And so she dragged you and your remaining foot in your still rundown Skechers into uorescent lights and LED signs and side stalls selling real, marinated hogs’ feet on skewers as raindrops ran rampant in their riveting, raucous, roaring black rage. And then you remembered that you stopped your sneakers, squealing like piglets before slaughter on the slippery street. Back then, you stood there and wondered why God was so angry. Perhaps he was hungry from the aroma of roasted hogs feet from the street vendor next doortoyourfamily’sshack.Perhapsthenicotine
scent of your fathers’ incense o ended your ancestors, who accompanied him at his dinner table. Perhaps it was your mother, still gripping your hand so that your ngers intertwined into a single st, begging for bandages from the apothecary’s shop and hysterically sobbing for the doctor to save her son whom she bought from the slave market just that night; perhaps it was her hypocrisy that had angered God. Or maybe it was you, spitting profanity and saliva in the face of the surgeon who butchered your leg. He called it amputation. You called it pain. at night, when he sawed o your limb, you tore empty air with your screams, rivaling the voice of subway trains screeching under your feet. In any case, he made it so that you couldn’t
RUN
now like before when you raced your twin Usain Bolt across the playground of your elementary school. His body blurs past like a phantom: desperate to reach the gates of Hades before they close upon him. Apparently, those gates are just like the doors of subway bullet trains, stopping only for a set time before closing to race against time once again. Your feet are still ghting against pavement. You’re still running down subway tunnels watching handheld screens blast a story your le wing was sacri ced for through static. e next bullet train screeches past your ears, reminding you that your stop is next a er your brother’s. is time, you are forced to
STOP
and stagnate. Your speed has been stymied by the door of the train which shut just before you stepped in. Even with three legs, two of which are arti cial, you are forced to stand out
time a er your brother ran away from home, he smokes. Cigarettes make his breath sour and his coughs scratchy like telephone static as you try to explain how you won’t make it on the sidewalk as your only means of getting back home slithers past, slicing through air as if it were like butter. If only that surgical saw was sharp enough to slice through your tissue and bone like the train splits empty dark in these tunnels. But it was not. It le you like the train, like the stars in your vision leaving you lost in your pain with nothing to gain but a reminder that you’re stillinShanghaiasacripple.Nowawareofthefactthatyoule yourle wingatthenightmarket like a le over thing which is what your mother calls your father, now since he is still breathing–hard. She says that le overs only bring home more le overs from faraway trains and secluded alleyways and children purchased from the night markets. Le overs sprawl on the oor of their houselikeyourfather’sforminthebombcellarlastspring,barelystirringyetalivestill.Noyetstill, but almost. Just not quite. He is just like you, not quite like your brother who was lost. In order to
back by your curfew tonight. You choke out a sorry into the phone and hang o . Your breath, all sticky from running and sewage and starting to falter, seems to salivate for something. You know what it is because you’re like your father. You are both not gods who get angry beca hungryforthescentofsmokedmeat.Yourhandseepsintothebackpocketofyourrippedjeansand slips out a cigarette, white and whimsical and wanting to forget the conversation you just shared withyourfathersecondsago.Itseemstoigniteonitsown,lustingforthelureofyourcrackedlipsas they crack apart and you hold the cigarette between your front teeth. When your lips let it go, you breatheoutputridwhitesilklikeyourfatherdoes,shootingcobwebsfromyourmouthinanattempt to capture the le overs you’ve lost. Lost years, lost months, lost days, lost minutes, lost seconds, all lost. He has lost time. You have lost time. You’ve lost against time. Why is there never enough
TIME
to stay in sobriety before you both slip back once again? Back to the night a surgeon had to amputate your le leg to save it from the bullets which bit it? Back to the night you saw the face of your idol submerged by static and heard the screams of your neighbors and your mother shoved you into the bomb cellar? Back to the morning when you awoke to nd only your father rocking back and forth, crouched in a corner like a child abandoned by his mother? Because he couldn’t stay sane a er the war, he dragged you down with him. Maybe one day you’ll nd your lost leg to run away again, but now, you
Photography by Robynn Shen
Design by Stella Vu
Design by Isabelle Lim
A Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. A construction worker withdarkbluejeans.Arightlegseveredatthehipcracked at the heel. A Canadian race car driver. An untethered yellow life ra .
It was a sad, accidental mix of children’s toys arranged perfectly against a black backdrop, washed up on the Cornish Sea in South England and picked from the wet, coarse sand by meticulous, calloused ngers. e Great Lego Spill scattered 5 million Lego pieces and other toys into the ocean a er a rogue wave capsized sixty-two cargo containers en route to New York. at was 1997.
I scroll through the @LegoLostAtSea Instagram page, these plastic shipwreck survivors staring back at me. How many never met the sticky hands of the children they were made to play with? eir expressions remained unchanged from their creation thirty years ago when molten plastic met metal molds. Wide, toothy smiles.
A smirk, perhaps. e bottoms of their feet, meant to snap into Lego sets like buttons, are instead bare, having waded hundreds of miles through the thickest, most
Googling self-immolation. at night, I lay in bed trying desperately to sleep. But every time I closed my eyes, all I saw was orange. I resolved to keep them open.
He was sitting perfectly still.
3.
I came home from school one day and told my parents I wanted them to start leaving presents for us under a Christmas tree and write on the tags that it was from a guy named Santa. My mom was washing vegetables in the kitchen. My dad was lighting incense at the altar, placing two fragrant sticks right by a portrait of the Buddha. Putting away the oor cushion he knelt on, I’m sure he said something along the lines of Christmas? We don’t do that in our family. Or at is something di erent that người Mỹ (American people) do. To which I explained that all my friends at school were hanging out without me at a place called church, which they go to because they celebrate Christmas — which is not just another sale at Old Navy — and practice something called Christianity, and until our family gets it together we will never be invited to this church place.
“We can do the presents part,” my dad said. “But I don’t want this Santa dude in my house.”
I was ve months away from my seventeenth birthday when, due to unforeseen, globally catastrophic circumstances, I found myself watching a Ken Burns docu-series on the Vietnam War at ve in the morning for my AP U.S. History class. It was a normal day in lockdown, and as such, I spent the day consuming as much media possible to distract from the apocalyptic chaos just outside. A er a month, everything became a
Sheets over my head, laptop inches from my young, spry retinas, I watched a slow march of images pass across the screen. Young American men covered in Vietnamese mud. John Kennedy, brow furrowed. e silhouette of a helicopter against the burgeoning dusk.
en, I saw a Buddhist monk light himself on re.
I stared at the esh made forever raw on his shaven head as ames engulfed his body, scorching his orange monastic robe. e air thickened in my throat.
A er that, my family started exchanging gi s simply for the fun of it. My little brother and I knew very well that all of this was pretend. We didn’t believe Santa was real or that God existed or that the Bible was anything but the inspiration for our favorite Veggie Tales movies. From the ripe age of seven, I understood that I could accept something I knew to be false if I desired the reality that the belief came with. at rst Christmas, Santa brought my brother and me the LEGO City: O -Road Fire Truck and Fire Boat, complete with little remen.
End
A erward, I slept for a few hours before it was time to log onto class at 8 AM, where I spent the lecture
there, and she yanked me out of the water. My tummy was swollen with all the water like this,” he said, pu ng out his already protruding stomach. “A er that, I never went in the water again. Even when my friends ask me, I never do it.” He sat still on the edge of my bed for a while as little yawns seeped out of my mouth. I could have sworn I saw the re ection of the wave, sharp and uncompromising, in his distant eyes. A three-year-old boy frozen in fear at the foot of my bed.
Neither of my parents can swim. None of my aunts and uncles can either, neither can my grandparents. “ at’s why we take a plane to America,” my dad said. 5.
ere were ways to turn the hours into seconds during our childhood summer a ernoons at Grandma’s house. e game was called Captain of the Ship. My brother and I would climb onto Grandma’s blue, woven hammock, and thus began the wrestle for survival against the sea. I’d grab onto the metal rungs of the frame, violently rocking us through turbulent waters. My brother in the front with a paper telescope, keeping watch on the pendulating horizon, me in the back shouting orders and commanding our ship. e sea sprayed us in the eyes as storm clouds rumbled just above us. e game would always end with our boat capsizing as we tumbled into pillows I set up on the oor, giggling as imaginary ocean water dragged our limbs to the bottom of the sea.
Aye, matey!We’re sinking!
Captain! Captain! I can’t swim Grandma used to watch us play this game. She’d stand in the doorway wringing her calloused, freckled hands. I remember staring up at her from my makeshi ocean, her tired, grey eyes, the way her milky gaze dri ed into the distance, just beyond us.
Over a decade later, I can name that look in her eyes. She was remembering the bottom of the ocean, a faraway
in 1975. Many drowned. Many died of dehydration or starvation. Several of the small shing boats packed with dozens of Vietnamese refugees capsized and never turned back over, forcing people to oat until they couldn’t any longer. In the past few years, I’ve started peeling back our people’s history because I realized that the existence of Vietnamese people in this country will always depend on whether our su ering was convincing enough — loud enough, revolting enough — to move the typical American. ere had to be a compelling enough case.
Between 1975 and 1992, images of the Vietnamese Boat People barraged mainstream news channels, germinating further Western sympathy for the refugee crisis in the Paci c. A mother struggling through ocean water trying to keep her baby’s body above the surface… sinewy bodies, bony legs tangled about, piled atop one another on the oor of a shing boat… ai soldiers with their bayonets pulling crying refugees out of the water onto rescue ships…
ese images were powerful. Powerful enough to stoke guilt and pity in the hearts of young Westerners and powerful enough to reform refugee policies in the same nation that would later go on to cage asylum seekers at the southern border. e American War in Vietnam was the rst nationally televised war, and Vietnamese people, in various states of su ering and loss over the two decades it lasted, found themselves directly in the spotlight.
Approximately 200,000 to 600,000 refugees died at sea attempting to leave Vietnam following the Fall of Saigon
e trope of Vietnamese su ering invites Western curiosity, a narrative that hasn’t changed since the day it was written. Napalm girl. e Buddhist selfimmolitionist. In fact, if you asked AI to conjure a photo of a prototypical Vietnamese person, it would likely involve a Vietnamese person who is either starving, crying, dead, naked, and/or in excruciating pain.
e Western gaze merely observes from the shore, documenting those who wash up a er ages at sea, shing them from the wet sand like beautifully fractured sea glass, like tragic otsam and jetsam, photographing their faces frozen in shock to display in textbooks their children will one day read or documentaries their grandchildren will one day watch.
But the moment we are depicted in the pages of history solely as a collective — a faceless group of victims denied individual status — that is when we lose our humanity.
7.
IN HONOR OF PHẠM THI LAN AND HER TWO DAUGHTERS LOST AT SEA.
8.
In the winter of 1997, my mother was deciding whether to go to grad school when a family friend, also a Vietnamese refugee, suggested she become a pharmacist. e woman was my grandmother’s age and had been a pharmacist in Vietnam before 1978 when she boarded a shing boat headed for ailand with her two daughters, ages three and ve.
e Western camera lens might show you the moment she slumped back on the shore, coughing, a er the shing boat carrying 27 people capsized, and she had to swim back. But here’s what you’d be missing:
It was pitch black outside, a cloudless night. She held her two girls, one in the crook of each arm, as the sky full of stars pendulated to the waves above them. ey had no luggage. ey were meant to stay on the boat for 14 days. In open water.
e water was freezing cold as the waves grew more violent. Suddenly, she was trapped under the capsized boatincompletedarkness,thrashinginthewater,calling out her daughters’ names, feeling around for their tiny hands, their heads of long, black hair, listening closely for their meek voices, gasps, anything.
ere were bodies panting, slumped over the belly of the boat, but there were even more bodies oating away, lifeless in the Paci c.
A fellow passenger found the girls, and the woman was so relieved to feel their heads against her chest, she kicked violently in the water to save them all. But they were cold. e water was cold. She kept kicking even a er the exhaustion numbed her legs.
If they had lived, the older daughter would have been my mother’s age. e woman still remembers the agonizing moment she let go of their cold hands to swim to the shore. A bludgeoning wave swallowed both her girls by the time she turned back for one last look. A mother’s gutteral scream lost in the water.
9.
I took swimming lessons when I was six years old. e instructor, Ms. Patty — a pale, stout woman who wore a large straw hat — threw handfuls of toy squids into the pool for me to dive and fetch. I’d return to the pool’s edge in record time with all the squids bunched in a single st. On days she was feeling especially con dent in my abilities, she’d throw a plastic squid all the way into the deep end, where I’d have to swim the length of the pool and then dive nine feet to get it. e rst time she did that, I made it halfway down the deep end before the air ran out in my lungs, and the pressure started compressing my ears. Turning back, I apped my arms, pushing water past me, reaching for the rippling sun. e panic settled in my throat like boiling water down my veins.
When I made it to the surface, my lungs wretched for air. I stayed oating for a while, the sun beating down on my skin, toy squid resting at the pool oor beneath me as I marinated in the scent of chlorine. A shadow intercepted the sunrays, shading my vision. It was my mom, grinning at me in the water.
“Have you learned how to get out of the pool yourself yet?” She asked. Eager, I raced to the wall and ung myself over the edge of the pool. Getting out of the pool was the rst thing I learned how to do that summer.
“ ere’s still one more toy down there,” I told her as she wrapped me in a towel warmed by the sun. I spent the rest of the day, and every swimming lesson a er that, thinking about the bottom of the deep end.
Writing by Alice Fan
Design by Grace Wu
Staring at the fog that packed the Hutong in front of her, Gening thought there are still a few hours le before the sun rises. She usually came back home around this hour, when the Hutong was yet to be lled by all sorts of trolleys selling tanghulu or hand-warming snowballing usury in winter.
Gening never planned to live within the second ring of Beijing. e rent became so expensive that people started moving to the h ring a decade ago that there was no reason to live near the Forbidden City. So she surrendered, surrendered to whatever was advancing and modern, and recoiled back to one of the slim and slender Hutongs.
ManymaythinkthatonlySiheyuanarele inthese labyrinth alleys and that they can cost someone a fortune to live here. But times have passed – all the chancellors or ministers who used to live here are long gone. Naturally, these courthouses became a ordable when people stopped dreaming of living like an emperor.
Gening moved into one of the 20 rooms inside a Siheyuan two years ago with her mother. Despite the sharing of bathrooms and kitchen and the lack of sunlight throughout the day, their life in the 120-square-foot room has been livable.
It was one of those ordinary nights when the man appeared at the café Gening worked at. His face seemed to be covered with a few nights of stubble, with a pair of weary eyes under the shade of a hood. He was wearing a black, thin coat, not one of those cashmere downs, but one that someone would buy on the side of the street out of pity for the merchant.
He walked in as if he’d been here a thousand times – picking the seat closest to the exit and scanning the barcode on the table. Within seconds, Gening received the order on the tablet – a hot chocolate. e night dwelled on – the two souls silently kept their privacy to each other.
An abrupt ringtone broke the silence. It was her mother again. Her tone on the other end nearing hysteria, begging Gening to go home. Examining her surroundings, there was only one man, the
man, still in the shop. Gening had no choice but to approach him.
“Excuse me, can you please take care of the shop for 15 minutes? I will be back very soon. You only need to stand here.”
e man looked up, with a pair of eyes even more hollow than her own that could swallow her in whole. A er a short moment of silence, the man spoke, “OK, 15 minutes.”
Sprinting back to the Siheyuan, Gening threw open the door and decided to shout at her mother no matter what. But again, she couldn’t do what she wished – the upper half of her mother’s body was almost touching the ground, and the lower half remained on the bed, trying to stop herself from falling completely onto the oor.
Suppressing her rage and tears, Gening walked up and li ed her mom back to the bed with all her strength.
“I’m sorry daughter, I thought I could reach the table,” said her mother with a feeble voice that was completely di erent from how she sounded over the phone.
Still holding her fury, Gening looked away from her mother and said, “I’ve to go. No one’s looking a er the shop.”
“Gening, please, just two more minutes,” the mother grabbed Gening’s arm as she stood up from the bed. “We don’t have much time le together. I could disappear from this world anytime.”
“I know. But does that change anything? Does the fact make our life any better?” Gening yelled as if she would never yell again.
Gening shook o the arm and stepped out of the door. As she was leaving, she felt a gaze from behind. She knew what that embodied – love that she was no longer capable of bearing.
It didn’t take long for Gening to return to the shop. e man kept his words – standing behind the counter, with the same pair of hollow eyes staring into the void.
As if noticing her approaching, the man le the counter before Gening entered the shop.
“ ank you,” Gening said.
“You’re welcome,” said the man as he returned to his seat.
e night dwelled on; the two souls kept their courtesy for each other. Gening kept preparing the drinks for the next day; the man stayed stationary on the chair.
It wasn’t until the closing time that they spoke again.
“Excuse me, the shop is closing soon. Do you need anything else?” Asked Gening from a table away.
e man was facing his back to Gening. It looked like he was resting his chin on his hand, body leaning slightly towards the wall.
Gening walked up only to notice that he had fallen asleep. With his eyes shut, he looked warmer under the orange light.
Not knowing what else to do, Gening had to tap on the man’s shoulder, “Sir, we’re closing now.”
Hearing Gening’s voice, the man winced and retreated closer to the wall. en gradually, he opened his eyes and took another moment to understand his surroundings.
When he looked up at Gening with the same pair of eyes, Gening suddenly thought, what do I like right now in his eyes? What can he see in my eyes? A weary soul? Or just another unnoticeable human being?
As if reading the thoughts trickling in her head, the
man rested his gaze a little longer on Gening’s face, and asked, “I hope everything was OK.”
“Everything was OK. ank you for asking,” Gening responded.
“ at’s good,” said the man as he was leaving.
“Why didn’t you ask earlier?”
e man turned around and looked at Gening with slight confusion.
“You looked like you didn’t want to be bothered,” the man said.
“You’re right. I wasn’t in a good state,” Gening looked away.
“It was my mom. She’s sick, that’s why I had to leave.”
“I see. I hope she’s OK now.”
“I’m not sure if she is. It’s very likely she will never be.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“ at must have been too much for a stranger.” Gening lowered her head and said.
“ at wasn’t too much. Everyone has another side to them,” said the man.
Gening li ed her head and looked at the man. Maybe it was the orange light hanging above his head – his eyes were no longer empty but lled with some faint light.
“What’s yours then?” Gening asked.
“Mine? Probably appearing at a random café every few nights,” the man even gave a little titter a er saying it.
“ at’s a good side, isn’t it?”
“Well, you could say so. ings are usually doublesided.”
“Even things that are doomed to go bad?”
“Yes. Hopefully.”
“Sounds like you’re not too sure yourself either.”
“I stopped being too certain about things a long time ago. It made my life easier,” said the man with a smile on his face. A true smile that made Gening want to believe him.
“How can I be uncertain when bad things have already happened?”
“You don’t think about it. You focus on the good things in front of you. Something like a hot chocolate.”
“You’re funny.”
“I try to be. Especially when others are sad.”
Gening giggled. “Maybe I should do that too.”
“ at’s up to you. It can be tiring sometimes, but it’s worth it.”
“I think I will. ere’s not much time le to do nothing,” Gening looked at the man and said.
“I wish you good luck,” said the man with another smile.
“I wish you good luck too,” said Gening with a similar smile.
Gening rolled down the roller shutter door and locked it. Again, she was on her way back home. at night the Hutong was covered in less fog with the orange streetlight pricking through the grey mist. She quickened her pace, faster and faster that she found herself running in these labyrinth alleys. Hopping over fallen branches and skipping
over puddles, she sensed something she hadn’t felt in years. It was something bittersweet, something in between hope and happiness. But all she knew was that she would open the door gently this time.
by Ashley Li
Design by Raina Paeper
Photography
OA C TIVE HYDROACT HYDROACTIVE HYDR O A C TIVE HYDROACTI HYDROACTIVE HYDR O A C TIVE HYDROACTI
Photogra DesignbyCic
Blue Waves that Melt Windows
Written by: Jasmine Kwok
Designed by: Hoonbin Yoo
A PARADE passes by A GIRL’S window–a moving video exhibition collecting all the trees she has driven by, the people she’s momentarily locked eyes with, and all the colorful trails she’s ever taken.
She drifts underneath a tunnel of trees–a blank canvas that readapts and transforms with the seasons. Autumn leaves entwine to become scarlet dragons that follow the whims of the wind. Kaleidoscopic fractals hang from branches like delicate pieces of jewelry, frozen in time. Some of the treetops dance like corals swaying to the melody of the sea.
Through the looking glass, a BOY walks with a BALLOON in hand. He quickly fades out of frame, but the girl catches a glimpse of the balloon lifting him o昀昀 the ground and carrying him towards the moon.
In the next scene, UNICORNS with iridescent manes frolic in green pastures.
ANGELFISH swivel in the sky. They’re visible for a split second before the visuals warp and change.
Road maps home make it easy to 昀椀ll in the gaps when images are erased as parade treks on. Enter FAIRIES with dresses made unicycles. A glowing blue WHALE twirls
EXT. SANTORINI, GREECE- DAY
The traveling parade has come to an inde昀椀nite pause. Now, attractions stand still The LANDSCAPE ahead pulsates and buzzes with tangible energy, and the music in the streets matches the rhythm of a rapid heartbeat. With the window melted away, the girl absorbs unimaginably luscious pigments. Her breath gets caught in the wind and courses through a maze of milky white and deep azure. Mediterranean blues slip through her 昀椀ngers, and pastel walls press against her skin. They feel slightly warm to the touch, grazed by the hands of all the travelers who came before.
Colors are blindingly vibrant when they can be grasped.
Cycladic BUILDINGS glisten like pearls, with rounded tops that inhale the shades of the sea. MANNEQUINS adorning 昀氀owing cerulean silks with dazzling gold trims are animated to life. They stretch out their arms to embrace a new wanderer.
Gray cobblestone paths playfully weave past CREPE STATIONS and SOUVENIR SHOPS. New characters emerge out of every corner. A SHOPKEEPER with a bushy gray mustache, a mint green polo shirt and open-toed sandals waves merrily.
SHOPKEEPER: Kalimera!
The girl does not answer. He’s looking right at her.
SHOPKEEPER: (louder this time) Kalimera! Hello!
Her head snaps up. Her gaze meets a pair of blinking eyes. When she smiles and gives a friendly wave, he waves back, much to her delight.
GIRL: Hi!
There’s something much more exhilarating about characters who speak back–people she can shake hands with, rather than the two dimensional ones who only existed within the scope of her window. People have paints that seep beyond the screen and 昀椀ll in parade 昀氀oats someplace far away.
EXT. SANTORINI, GREECE- NIGHT
In the shop, the girl 昀椀nds a TIE-DYE SKIRT tucked behind a stack of aquamarine dresses. It lightly brushes the ground and appears to be made for her. She walks through the streets with a bounce to her step. The cloth is airy and soft. Notice how the splotches of tangerine and teal appear animated as the skirt sways around her ankles. The colors run o昀昀 the fabric and splatter the people she passes. In these narrow alleyways, everyone’s hues mix and enliven each turn with new shades. This is a landscape that speaks back. Its dialogue opens blue doors that swing out towards the ocean and erase any gray tint muddying her vision. Her palms feel the cool velvet waters and warm jagged stones. The weather braids her hair and playfully tries to steal her cap.
EXT.-
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN
The girl no longer takes the passenger seat in a silent car, nor does she traverse a new country accompanied by symphonies of di昀昀erent tongues. Instead, she sits on a tender boat that whisks her away from the island and past a parade that emerges out of the water like an uncloaked city. Unicorns and dragons with scales made out of fall leaves are featured on the 昀氀oats. Interspersed are snow-white windmills of Mykonos and the wondrous cave houses of Santorini.
There’s nothing quite like a dinner with Aegean sea spray for a garnish. Waterfront restaurants provide a front row seat to a pink sunset–an interlude before the nighttime spectacle. Performing its most impressive magic trick, the island casts a wide net to reign in the constellations and sprinkle stardust throughout the town. Laughter echoes from illuminated taverns, and singular shadows waltz through the winding streets searching for another to dance with. The girl takes a moment to truly breathe. With each cold inhale, she tastes hints of freshly squeezed adrenaline–citrusy like the orange juice she spilled all over herself. Her mind stops racing and falls back in pace with the soft cadence of waves lapping against the shore.
The girl watches the 昀椀nale of 昀椀reworks from a distance. She sits comfortably on the tender boat with her knees pulled up to her chest and lets the world whip past her in a blur of indiscernible shades. She can brie昀氀y make out specks of every color before they coalesce and disappear into the boundless blue.
When the show ends, she applauds, despite being the only audience member. The tender drifts along. The water becomes still again–a new blank canvas for cosmic whales, pixies who dance on the surface, and holographic jelly昀椀sh that burst like bubbles.
Photography By Marissa Ding
Design By Molyka Duong
Stealing y ur Secrets
Writing by Sisi Li
Desgin by Raina Paeper
ordinary secrets, careless secrets, the rst secret that slipped from your mouth in late november, wrapped in autumn leaves and fading daylight. a trivial, short-lived thing, still I picked it up & kept it in my pocket. casual secrets, accidental secrets, idle secrets, secrets of the ve-minute walk tip-toed from your house to mine, behind the magnolia bushes, over the broken fence. the door was ajar but you knocked anyway. & every time a er. implied secrets, tentative secrets, o and secrets, secrets as jokes & secrets as probes, secrets I relaxed out of your grip with patience & a generous measure of sarcasm. between laughter, you called me trouble, called me dangerous — say it once, twice, again — I had never been dangerous to someone before. for you, I learned to fold it into myself, wore it like a ribbon in my hair. crisp secrets, chilled secrets, secrets you wrote into powder snow that vanished by morning. thawed secrets and awed secrets — could I tell the di erence? — lining the doors of february. the replace was warm but your sweater was closer. we were not liars but the curtains stayed closed. budding secrets, fragile secrets, secrets you cast into the sky, trembling like edglings in rst ight. spring coaxed secrets up through the pavement cracks, uttering around our ankles. I o ered you a dandelion but the breeze blew the wishes away before you could. I’d save you another, you made me promise, a secret laced around your pinky nger. mu ed secrets, rough secrets, secrets & stories & dreams you tossed up on the trampoline, the one resting and rusting in my backyard. once summer emerged from behind the trees, we wasted evenings draping our bodies across the mesh mat. we traced the stars under the hum of cicada-song, our limbs nearly corpse-like, nearly touching. warm secrets, tart secrets, secrets you drizzled in honey & scorching spice, leaving chemtrails under my tongue that I retraced in evaluation, in earnest. secrets you tucked behind my ear, secrets passed from lips to collarbones — the sound of my name, pressed into a question, a test — collision, others might call it,
but to us it was only tuesday. le in our wake, a trail of secrets we buried, secrets we justi ed, secrets we stripped into kindling. today, on the last day of july, while the clouds above us clench onto secrets, heavy & gray, we anticipate. we plot. we ignore the warnings. as soon as thunder breaks — rainfall, that de ant hymn — the timer starts. crammed on your imsy bike, we slice through the puddles, sending secrets spilling, spiraling, soaking in e ervescence. between splashes, your shoulders veer backwards into mine and I oblige, like lungs to air, like a secret to greedy ears. we make it to the lake dock a minute a er sundown. before the wheels even stop spinning, you’re tugging me towards the bridge & you’re lamenting something about missing the rainbow but I don’t hear it, can’t hear it beneath the cascading heartbeat in my ears. careening to a stop, as your hand falls from mine & the lake spreads open its arms, my world in its entirety tapers, sharpens. just you, me & the storm at the dock’s edge, bone-wet & wheezing & overwhelmingly alive. & you’re looking away, over the water, that turbulent mine eld, & you’re reaching across the eruptions & I’m watching you, I’ve been watching for a long time & there’s a bubble rising in my chest, painfully, pinpricks from rupturing, begging for release — hey, hey, listen. listen, I have to tell you something.
In Nature,
Photography by Avana Wang Design by Michaela Chang
