Above Water is produced and published on the stolen lands of the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation.
Sovereignty was never ceded. We pay our respects to the Traditional Owners of this land and to all the lands on which our University operates: the homes of the Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung, Yorta Yorta and Dja Dja Wurrung peoples.
We acknowledge that the University of Melbourne is an inherently colonial institution, built not only on stolen land physically, but on the systematic exclusion of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous systems of knowledge. We recognise our complicity in such systems and strive to actively resist and unlearn colonial ideologies, both our own and the University’s.
Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
Salutations! Welcome to the 20th/revival edition of Above Water! For those who don’t know, Above Water is a yearly competition born from the collaboration between Media and Creative Arts, a friendly competition that births an anthology from the shortlisted participants, and given prizes by a judging panel, which is made up of a combination of emerging and established creatives passionate about uplifting the voices of creatives in the local creative community.
I won’t lie, despite how simple things may seem on the surface, this has been one of the most complex and exhausting works I have ever led alongside the Creative Arts Officers Riya and Tiyani, and our combined volunteer teams. To call this a labour of love, blood sweat and tears would be an understatement of the year—and truth be told, I almost gave up on the anthology multiple times in fact. However, at the end of the day, I and everyone involved wanted to showcase the written words of talented and spectacular students who contributed to this quirky little collaboration between Media and Creative Arts. This would not have been possible without their help, nor would it have been possible without the help of our socials team, illustrators, passionate keen bean volunteers, and UMSU staff who helped put this all together, and the accompanying launch for this zany anthology.
What’s the theme you may ask? While there is no singular unifying theme, a lot of the stories chosen evoked very personal perspectives on family, and the impact of love and lack of love, on connection and disconnection in the modern era. It is a collection of works dear to my heart, and a collection of works that gets to the roots of creative expression, and the connection between creative expression and the transformation of your own lived experiences into new art, into new meaning.
So enjoy this culmination of words and impressions, and may you feel born again after sifting through the pages of this microcosm of space and time.
Cover
Chiaki Chng
Design
Marcie Di Bartolomeo
Illustrators
Jess Nguyen
Editorial Team
Marcie Di Bartolomeo, Riya Gupta, Tianyi
Yu, Jaymie Nohejl Willis, Amandi Fernando
Judging Panel
Anna Ryan-Punch, Channon Goodwin, Khwaish Jadeja
Shortlisted Writers
Anthony Vezzu, Sophie Ryrie, Riley Fernandez Robert, Aaron Agostini, Ky Thorson, Elysha English, Richie Huang, Kaitlin
Weiser, Iryna Neschotna, Miranda Wilson, Ava Caputo, Bianca
Lockwood, Freya Haggren, Anushka Bidani, Sarah James
Writing Winners
Best Poetry - Elysha English - Ode to Joyline
Best Poetry - Runner Up - Freya Haggren - Needle to Death
Best Prose - Aaron Agostini - Chapter Four
Best Prose - Runner Up - Bianca Lockwood - Keeping Score
The UMSU Media and UMSU Creative Arts departments reserve the right to republish these works in any format. ISSN 1833-8879
love letter to “studies in film: the queer eye ENG-3501-1”
Anushka Bidani
i think everything will be okay if i can watch this film till the end. i’ll sit wide-eyed in my favourite chair & curl my nails into my palms until / this absence stops yearning. every tuesday, svasti & i will quote žižek & butler in our google classroom posts & laugh about how terrible everything is. how wonderful. to watch a film! to see our friends! in our zoom calls, horror will taste something bitter & achingly sweet because everything terrible / is followed by something beautiful. my favourite character dies quoting french & isn’t it a pity my lover will never strangle me to death? what other death exists? i sip my iced-tea & pretend like i know what i mean. Here’s a secret: every monday i quote professor on my twtr. Here’s another: i know exactly what i mean. only / i’ve never seen it. every wednesday, someone bleeds. It’s not you. we crack open our ribs & look! it’s a party / Intimacy & Desire & Porn & Jouissance stick like confetti to the back of my knees & i’m home! in the middle of a pandemic & what will my mum say when she sees the violet stains on the back of my skirt. i believe i can Theorise my way into my friends’ arms & my silly little sunsets. if only, nothing / everything was Real. every sky would be pink & every sky would be a poem & every sky would be in my mouth1 & what is a poem / if not my lover’s neck?
1 “A poem, Arthur, is when you are in love and have the sky in your mouth.”
— Jean-Pierre Simeón, This Is a Poem That Heals Fish
ode to joyline
Elysha English
content warning: death of a grandparent
lemon ice under tongue, little legs swung on the stairs of my grandmother’s garden.
a cherry tree at the bottom i only ever remember bearing fruit that final summer.
i’ve never been one for religion. i used to pretend to pray at school. but i would pray it would all turn out. even when i knew it wouldn’t. because she taught me how to waltz.
a cherry tree at the bottom i only ever remember bearing fruit that final summer.
just below the bed of pink and red roses, like the dress i wore to walk before the casket. it would all turn out. even when i knew it wouldn’t. because she taught me how to waltz.
in fairy dresses from the chest in the guest room. spinning around the green leather couch.
just below the bed of pink and red roses, like the dress i wore to walk before the casket.
she always believed in angels, like the abba song that always makes me cry, listening in fairy dresses from the chest in the guest room. spinning around the green leather couch and the binder of dvds to watch on holidays, my little sister and i fighting over which ones.
she always believed in angels, like the abba song that always makes me cry, listening to the first chords on my piano takes me right back to that old house, the warm blanket and the binder of dvds to watch on holidays, my little sister and i fighting over which ones. a treat on the counter, an abba cd in her little car on the drive back from dance practice.
to the first chords on the piano takes me right back to that old house, the warm blanket little images in my dreams. when i’ve nearly forgotten the way she curled her hair and a treat on the counter, an abba cd in her little car on the drive back from dance practice.
like she is still watching me and my little sister grow into women. but it is all gone now.
little images in my dreams. when i’ve nearly forgotten the way she curled her hair and i’ve never been one for religion. i used to pretend to pray at school. but i would pray like she is still watching me and my little sister grow into women. but it is all gone now.
lemon ice under tongue, little legs swung on the stairs of my grandmother’s garden
Stars will fall Ky Thorson
Theseat on the train is warm from someone else, the window still clouded with their breath.
The girl in the seat across speaks on the phone about a bisexual metronome while the guy behind me talks on the phone about his housemate’s affair. Soft lilt of excitement in both their voices. The replies on the other end unknowable. Small voices of far-off people I will never set eyes on.
She laughs. Stops when she sees me watching. The horn echoes quietly and the train shifts into gear, veins pulsing with electricity. Its brakes hiss and we roll forward into the dark, the wheels whispering a strange metallic language in matrimony with the tracks.
I shut my eyes and dream lucid dreams in the glaring white light. My dreams are strange in the silver liminality of the carriage, influenced by fluorescence. Static but moving. Proper sleep never takes pity on me on the train.
The phone in my pocket vibrates and I open my eyes. But it’s not her. A phantom text. The phone shivering in the cold. She has not replied in days. Unlike when we met. She promised to tell me a secret every night that May. Ensnared me with whispers about love. Said she thought of me on the train with my tangled headphones looking out the icy window. It’s June and she doesn’t think of me anymore.
The train passes over a bridge. I look out and see the shimmer of moonlight on the river. Glimpses of the city in the distance. Glass spires of light. A red star in the sky; a helicopter. While she sees only eyelids. Lies in sweet sleep while I sit on a train to nowhere.
The train pulls into South Yarra. The doors whine open and let in a flush of cold air. The girl across from me shivers and leans into the window and continues to talk quietly into her phone about how the deprivation of sex leads to banal anger, deep-seated resentment. She is talking about me. I know she is.
The doors close and the train starts again and I watch the guy behind me in the reflection of the window. He sits silently looking forward, no longer talking into his earphones. Maybe he’s fantasising about sleeping with the girl still on the phone. Her voice turning him on. He yawns. Wide with straight teeth. His yawn infects me and reveals my secret gaze. His eyes meet mine in the window and he gets up, opens the door between swinging carriages and disappears.
The girl gets off at the next stop. Her still-warm seat is taken by a middle-aged businessman in a suit, holding a pink box tied with a white ribbon. He places it on the seat opposite, and I smell it, a smell imbued with the heat of an oven. Fire and ash. Dough and yeast and dates and sugar. Scraped out of the oven and boxed up still steaming. The pink box a divine offering to a goddess. Pompeiian bread. Vesuvian smell. A smell preserved only in the museum of the mind. Date scones. A warm childhood.
The train curls into a tunnel and the lights flicker. The businessman checks his watch and the smell of the imagined scones, the broiling dates, fill my stomach. I haven’t eaten anything warm for days. Is the box and its contents an apology or routine? A warm gift for a wife, lover or mother? Or himself? Is he lonely? Either way, a liniment for love.
He crosses his legs and reveals those socks the corporate types wear in place of a personality. Green dotted with pineapples. Something a wife buys. But he has no wedding ring. Not all men wear wedding rings these days, or get married. Is he gay? They can get married too. He doesn’t look across at me, just stares out the window at the flashing lights of a level crossing. I look at the box again and wonder what the ornate gold writing on the side says.
The train pulls into a station and the businessman is woken from his midnight thoughts by the howl of the brakes. He checks his watch, loops the ribbon between his fingers and moves to the doors. The box dangles and twirls. I inhale the smell one last time, the doors open and he flees into the cold. By the time the doors close and the train flies past the platform, he is gone.
She asks me if I believe in aliens, every Sunday night. Maybe her window looks out to the stars. Says she does. That we can’t be all alone in the universe. She doesn’t ask me anything tonight. So I sit in the empty carriage and hope they will shunt me away. The train slows again and pulls into a station lit by orange lights. Nobody gets on and nobody gets off. I can’t remember when my stop is. The smell of the date scones has almost gone and there are no stars into the sky. Only the moon and helicopters and aliens.
Mannequin
Miranda Wilson
Sometimes I feel like a walking contradiction a traitor to my sex I know the words we are supposed to use I fear they will betray the truth as they slide so easily from my white throat I wear them like a pinstriped suit jacket I try to make fit but the cut is all wrong
I criticise the motherwife the idea of it the framework from which it was constructed but sometimes it calls to me like the soft lap of the ocean that I imagine would be warm and my mother’s tongue writhes in my ear it’s wet and pocked and fleshy red but when his arms so firmly thread through mine I recite my learned lines and they feel so natural on my teeth and all I want in that moment is to make my body an altar to his
but I know that I am quick to sacrifice to give myself away in service of something else it is embroidered into my DNA woven down through the maternal line the knowledge of myself so paper-thin and I so tired 11
Chapter Four
Aaron Agostini
content warning: mentions of blood
Thesecond I get on the train, I receive a text.
Are you able to donate blood?
I look up from my phone. I am surrounded by people. They rock as the train careens through the night. The yellow seats do not move. The lights do not move. The floor does not move. The people do. They are all so different. Some are seated. Some stand. They leave small gaps between them. An empty seat, an empty feet, a few of them, not a foot, but several, a couple inches thrown in too for good measure. Measure. Their ears are full of music. All of them. I wonder what they are listening to. What they see on their little screens. If they are playing games. What games they are. How long they have been playing this game. If there is an end in sight. Will they put the game down for a while and come back. Frustrated. Because it has not changed. But glad. Because it has not changed. Some things change so fast. Others never do. I would rather make mistakes, than nothing at all.
12
Are you able to donate blood?
I think about this message as a young woman rubs the back of her neck through an emerald cotton blouse spattered with flowers. I love flowers. I have not received flowers in almost two years.
Sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.
Are you able to donate blood?
My eyes are on the window now. I can see what is on the other side, briefly, before it rushes past. I can also see the window. I can see two things at the same time. This causes me no pain.
I used to go to Philadelphia, once a month, and buy ice cream, asian goods, hot oil, mustard green, pandan cakes, chocolate, little things, little things in bags, colorful bags, I would go to this one bakery, cash only, they did not believe in taxes, but they did believe in flavor, I would buy six, maybe seven, sometimes eight, never nine minutes later I would be down the street at reading terminal market watching a whisper of a woman wrap it in cellophane, her fingers moving like piano. Delicately. Intentionally. Practiced. Rehearsed. With love. She would smile at me. A man buying flowers during a month other than February. Things must have been going well. 88% of men receive their first flowers on their deathbed.
Are you able to donate blood?
I read a memoir recently. Education is not for white people, but it is especially for white people. I underlined this three times. I only read a book if I can write in it. Critical race theory is banned in 18 states. I was lucky to be born and raised on the internet. Freedom is a state of mind.
Are you able to donate blood?
A simple text. From a kind man. Door had a big tattoo on his forearm. Tattoos use needles. You get stabbed a million times. Ink is embedded between layers of your skin. You bleed. The needles have to be clean. What an amazing thing a clean needle can be. A tattoo is an open wound. A window has been opened. When god closes doors, I open my phone and read the message again. Are you able to donate blood?
I am back. Back in my head. I live in my head. The stuff around me is just vacation. I am back to highschool. Volunteer work. The gymnasium. Sweat. Floor cleaner. Body odor and cheap cologne. The scent of shame. Cheap shame. Shame is a luxury item.
But everyone pays. It is a hungry beat. It can eat anything. I can eat anything, anything I would like, it was the least they could do, I had always been so kind to volunteer for the blood drive. I sat at the front. The crest. The head of the table. Crestfallen. Sombre. Summer was just around the corner. The heat of the sun was tapping on the floor all around me. There is an adage that if you increase the water a degree at a time, you can boil a frog alive. This is false. Frogs will emerge if they begin to get too hot. They have thermal regulators. They will exit the water. The doors of the gymnasium all had locks.
I had never donated. Only volunteered. I had volunteered at every blood drive for four years. They asked me if I was afraid and I told them I was. This was true. But misleading. While working the blood drive, I was allowed to eat anything. Anything I liked. The cookies, the crackers, the juice, they were all intended to replenish those who donated. And to feed me. I felt embarrassed but happy to eat. 14
I am back on the train. Back in the city.
Back in my apartment.
Back in my room.
Back in my bed.
Back in my phone, again, reading this sane simple sentence. I peer into it like a well. I could fall right in. Who would find me? Would it be cold there? How long could I swim? Would I float? Dead men float. I would float. Would I start by floating? The glass on the surface of the screen covers the message yet I could still see it perfectly. I could see two things at once. This did not hurt me.
Yes, I reply. I can donate blood.
Though, donating blood is not especially for me. I choose not to mention this, instead, closing my eyes. I fall asleep.
The train keeps moving.
Needle the Death
Freya Haggren
I’ll send you a letter.
For you promised you would, I’ll seal it with my grot, taken from the pit.
Our sweat was similar, the smell the taste, what’s mine was once yours, cyclical and safe, before the odour suffocated our faith.
I lived long aside you, but your reproduction was dread. The salt on my tongue, taken from the pit, we may have different pupils, but identical chests.
I will say Happy Birthday, only ever on paper. Cursed with an age incessantly changing, while yours turned to sand, evaporating. The sand turned to paper, and I’ve sealed it all up. It’s on the shelf with the love and the dust. May the sand be sour, so I remember the tang, of my pit all ripped open, tongue torn by the pain. I’ve sewn you all up, with our sweat and our blood It might be too late but,
I’d like a commission.
Advice from my Mother
Miranda Wilson
In the car we sit like fish in a bowl distorted by the warped glass
you speak to me about your children like you have forgotten that I am one of them honesty pricks at my eyeballs and swells my throat
you tell me never to live under a man’s calloused thumb fingerprint of my father pressing down inky blotch on your forehead and so on mine a fainter mark between the brow like ash on Wednesday
I sit with stomach knot play an aperture a heavy vacuum the weight of your regret hangs from the base of my skull
Keeping Score
Bianca Lockwood
Mum and I went to visit dad the night that he had both his knees replaced. It was a wet, suburban evening after school in early July and streetlights bled reflections across the blue-black pavement. Dad was sitting up in bed watching Thursday night footy on the telly. His legs were tucked under a thin sheet and I could make out the bandages cradling each of his knees. A plastic tray of packaged food sat untouched beside him. Both of his calloused hands were entwined in his lap, and his wrists and forearms lay neatly alongside one another so that his shoulders seemed to cave inwards towards his chest. I bit my lip and stared at the linoleum floor as he spoke in a dull voice to mum. After a long silence, I took a gold coin which he had dug from his wallet and hurried through the lonely corridors to a vending machine on the floor below to buy him a can of lemonade. I keyed in the pin and clunked the $2 through the slot, failing in my haste to notice the dusty buttons and the splintered light inside which I now watched flicker in violent spasms. When everything remained still, I tried the buttons again, methodically at first, then frantically, slamming the keypad, shoving my small body at the metal and swearing at my tears.
I couldn’t go back, and walk in red faced and empty handed, having failed to do the one thing that was asked of me to help him, but I also couldn’t bear to stay here any longer while he sat upstairs waiting for me to return. I was scared that I would sink unnoticed into the deep, haunting silence of this empty corridor and forget him, but I was even more afraid of the guilt that crippled me with the realisation that it seemed easier this way; to leave the room and forget it.
Pain
An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage
And so I am told that pain is not real. At least not in the way we think it is. I am told that pain is the response to a trigger, that it will appear and fade accordingly. I am told that it exists in varying severity depending on the individual in which it presents, that it is born from a sensation that your brain detects before assessing its intensity accordingly, that its shape is configured entirely by the voice which speaks it, that this confession of existence is itself, an act of surrendering. I learn that pain is impossible to pinpoint, that it weaves in disguise, taunting and mystifying, between and within understandings, refusing definition.
This belief that it is something you can conjure up, an elusive ghost, a wisp of smoke that you might dispel with a breath, is imperative to survival. If you are to let it take shape in your body, you are to fail, and so you must deny its existence to preserve your own. I determine that you must have power over it in this way. I rejoice.
In a healthy person, the immune system functions as a defence mechanism against invasive bacteria to protect the body. In somebody with rheumatoid arthritis, this immune system instead attacks its own cells. The body mistakes itself for the enemy; like an animal in a mirror, scratching wildly at its own reflection. The defence mechanism is not strong, is not clever, but is blinded with rage, and is unable in its madness to identify the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. It begins its war with the lining surrounding the joints, attacking and swelling the synovium tissue. Signs of this battle generally appear in a symmetrical pattern; if the fingers in the right hand become swollen and stiff, those in the left will follow, although sometimes the presentation is palindromic, when patients describe aches which vanish and reappear spitefully to the same area. After the synovium is inflamed, the cartilage is attacked, stripping the victim of their mobility. It then decays the patient’s bones, splintering them like sticks of chalk, until they are entirely distorted and unrecognisable.
…
I learn that a series of specific sequential factors may cause rheumatoid arthritis to develop. The pathogenesis of the disease is the result of, to varying degrees, genetics, environment and autoimmunity; a complex, crossroads of conflicting factors which doctors call the ‘Bermuda triangle’. I learn that these factors operate like triggers, sending a hook down into your own construction and dredging something up to the surface which sparkles in the light. I learn that this might happen decades before symptoms ever appear …
Dad was raised in the shadow of a bitter mountain in Northwest Tassie. The dam would freeze over in winter and milk bottles were delivered to the doorstep. There was always a fireplace, a grandfather clock, cricket on the radio and cold meat sandwiches. A messy lawn; a rusted hills hoist.
Dad was born late and last, adrift from the union of his four sisters. When the girwould go out on weekends, he’d traipse alone down the gravel road and camp on the bank of the nearby river, throwing lines to a spatter of fish. He shot and buried his first dog in a paddock behind the house when she grew too old to move. At 16, he left school with the Friday afternoon bell and started pruning trees for a mate’s dad who played him Fleetwood Mac from a CD in his Torana. When he was barely 20, his old man died of cancer. Days before his last breath, grief began to stalk the house, as a coffin made of celery top pine sat in the tray of dad’s ute parked in the back shed.
And so I am told that pain is not real. At least not in the way we think it is. I am told that pain is the response to a trigger, that it will appear and fade accordingly. I am told that it exists in varying severity depending on the individual in which it presents, that it is born from a sensation that your brain detects before assessing its intensity accordingly, that its shape is configured entirely by the voice which speaks it, that this confession of existence is itself, an act of surrendering. I learn that pain is impossible to pinpoint, that it weaves in disguise, taunting and mystifying, between and within understandings, refusing definition.
I learn that pain travels to the brain through the peripheral nervous system, a system which interprets external information in your physical environment and connects you to the real world, a system in which the pathways of pain can be scored so deeply that they become the most familiar routes. I learn that the way your body moves through the world can be entirely defined by the anticipation of pain.
I learn that pain becomes an act of isolation. A patient can describe pain, circling over its intricacies in great length, explaining its composition, listing its mechanisms and movements, resisting its torment while all the time justifying its existence to bodies who cannot truly know it.
But I know pain to be real. I watched it brooding in the corner of the living room where dad would collapse after work, falling asleep while the telly mumbled steadily on. I felt it in the way we would all just carry on, eating dinner, washing dishes, while he sunk into the fake leather. I felt it in his footsteps down the hall, his stunted shuffle along the carpet. When I was old enough to notice, and not just fumble through, the vague feelings of dad’s grief, I watched him fight to avoid pain. To feel seemed to be to fail, and so instead, he drank and slept and stared out the black, icy windows of our house as more winters came and went, grasping madly for numbness, for absence, outside of his body.
A few weeks ago, I called dad after he had been released from a surgery back home. They had carved away at the metatarsophalangeal joints in each of his feet, which protrude just before the big toe, and which had been distorted in swollen revolts of stretched skin. The night that I called him, we chatted amicably. I was on my way to see a band play at the pub, and after I hung up, I sent him a song of theirs. Australian Dream. A minute later, his echo returned as a video of his bandaged feet peeking out from the end of a hospital blanket, tapping gleefully from side to side to the music.
There is a photo of my brother and I as kids perched on dad’s back in front of the fireplace in our first home. Dad is grinning madly. When I first see it, I’m confused at how well he seems to carry us both. Any image of him where pain appears distant is unfamiliar. I remember it always being there in the house with us. It’s not that there doesn’t exist for him a story severed from suffering, but that I could not form one with the only bruised and incoherent words I had been given. A different kind of man must’ve lived in that body once, but I will never witness this. I mourn alongside him for who he might have been, had he not been haunted by such an unrelenting preoccupation with survival.
Dandelions
Anthony Vezzu
The father stares at slack eyelids. It is summer, but the ventilator rasps all light. The bare skull of his daughter – buzzed and broken beneath his hands –looks like cardboard crumpled in the rain. This ending is a paperback mauled by flames of mouthless prayers. Knees thud, head slumps, chest heaves. He smells dandelions.
The boy’s calves brush past fuzzy dandelions. His mother speaks over crickets kissing summer: “These sweet weeds… grass made holy with fur crowns; pure prayers dropped down by angels. Breathe one out; wish.” Her sharp skull –sick, ricocheting sun – eclipses him, ending childhood. The boy seeks God in the lines of his hands.
Nights spent scouring fields with secret, working hands fill three-dozen shoeboxes with dandelions. The forecast heralds wind. The boy feels the ending now, opens the boxes in their yard, sees summer in his mother’s smile. The air turns white as her skull: cremation-cured, blessed by the blaze, but not by prayers.
Faced with another skull he cannot mend, mere prayers bring only ending’s ashy taste, yet still his hands meet. Dandelions break apart in the summer.
My brother and his father
Kaitlin Weiser
We sit together, silent, at the dining table. At some point, my parents must have replaced it with a new one, because I could’ve sworn I remembered cat scratches on the legs and an old wine stain that had once seeped deep into the grain of the wood. They must have done it in the past few months because I’ve been away for university, but I’m back now. I expected there to be more conversation, more questions and concerns about my life in the big city. But there isn’t.
We sit together in silence. My brother has his headphones on and he is watching something on YouTube while he eats. It should be a normal sight, a comforting one. He always donned his headphones for a meal, too overstimulated by the sound of chewing, and even though he wasn’t listening he was still here. But now there seems to be a point in his silence, a discomfort. Not because he hates the chewing. No, now it feels as though he wears the headphones and trains his eyes on the flickering LED screen because he isn’t sure what to say. Because there isn’t anything he can say. The act feels completely different and yet nothing has changed at all.
It is unfamiliar in all the ways that it is the same.
The clock strikes 7:45pm and my father is not home yet. He’s taken another shift on the neighbour’s farm, my mother explains, and I can’t help but wonder when that happened. It was always a rule of his that we sit together and eat as a family. The ritual was always largely the same: we’d sit down, say grace because my grandparents always did that—and I suppose one day we must all follow our father’s footsteps—and then we’d share lively conversations about our days. My father was always good at telling stories about his mates from work, about the drive back to our house each night, or the beautiful sunrises and sunsets only people in his profession got to witness. Even as the years went by, as I graduated from primary school and went through the throes of my teenage years, that never changed.
And yet there his meal sits, cooling by the stove, the microwave ready and waiting for his arrival. When the silence gets to be too much, when I can no longer handle the ticking of the clock or the raspy hum of the fridge, I excuse myself and get up from the chair. I walk past the empty cat bed on the way to the bathroom and at least that hasn’t changed. At least the cat sticks to her strange routines; making the flattened couch cushions her home for the night, only returning to her bed when the dog is let inside and scares her out of her usual territory. And when I step on a particularly creaky board, I can’t help but smile, because I remember the nights I used to spend trying to avoid it on my way back into the house after a night out, desperately trying to avoid the inevitable waking of my parents and always, always, failing. And at least the layout of the house is the same as it always was, the placement of the bathroom door exactly fourteen paces from the edge of the dining table, the glow of the off-centre ceiling light that familiar shade of yellow, the cracked bathroom window still just above head height.
When I was a kid, my parents used to always joke about how I wasn’t part of the family. It was harmless, just a bit of fun, really. It was simply because I never looked quite like either my father or mother. My brother is a spitting image of our old man, with the same gap between his two front teeth and the same shade of stormy blue eyes and the almost perfect imitation of the way the left side of our father’s mouth curves up higher than the right when he smiles. It’s been a running joke my whole life. The ‘adopted’ daughter, a stranger in my own home. Of course, it was never true. They were never pointing out a hidden reality only I couldn’t see.
But now, when I reach for my toothbrush and find the space it used to be empty—replaced with the shaving cream and razor my brother has started using—when I feel that slight drop in my stomach like an awkwardly missed step, I can’t help but wonder. At least not then, but now, with my room full of packed boxes and my only clothes spilling out of my suitcase and my toothbrush gone, gone from where it used to be right next to my brother’s.
And as I find its new place, hidden under the sink so it won’t get in the way, I hear the faint sound of the front door opening, and then the voice of my brother greeting his father and laughing when he makes some tired joke about the weather and the drive home.
I can’t help but wonder if it was me crippling the conversation.
Morning Routine
Ava Caputo
Thealarm had been ringing for quite some time. I thought it might stop on its own, though I couldn’t recall when that last happened.
I was already awake. I didn’t move. It wasn’t time yet, I told myself. The clock said it was. But I didn’t feel ready, and surely that counted for something.
I stared at the ceiling while it screamed beside me. Arthur had already gone. Or perhaps he hadn’t. It didn’t matter.
The curtains were slightly open, though I thought I’d closed them last night. Wintry light slashed across the ceiling like a sword, in a perfectly horizontal line.
I turned onto my side to reach the alarm. The movement was effortful, like trudging through quicksand with limbs that no longer belonged to me. What a hell.
Once the screaming stopped, my head began to clear, like after a hard exam. A certain silence bloomed behind the eyes. I sat up slowly, sluggish and devoid of will.
I’d dreamed something awful but couldn’t remember what. Just a lingering dread, like the smell of something burnt that won’t fade. After washing my face, I wrapped my peach fleece blanket around myself like a cocoon.
All I needed this morning was toast and a large coffee. I dropped two pieces of bread into the toaster. They looked limp and stuck. Headaches had been relentless lately, and this morning’s was macabre. A dull pulse behind my eye, like a door being knocked on from the inside.
Then the smell hit me. Burnt toast.
Strange. Only a minute had passed. I pulled the lever, and the toaster kicked like a misfire, burnt and rigid. The other was jammed inside.
I scraped off the worst of the black with a serrated knife. It wasn’t ruined. I ate it quickly. It tasted like sandpaper with a touch of flavour.
The milkman’s clinking bottles outside made my mouth water for coffee.
I reached for the crate like it was a lifeline, hoping warmth could undo the cold setting into me.
The cold pierced like sewing pins stabbing my skin. The breeze blew them upward, wriggling beneath the surface.
No one can say I’m a woman swallowed by the blues. I’m red in all its forms. I’m the red room from Jane Eyre, a scarlet letter, a blood moon.
Bending my legs to pick up the crate was like correcting a dislocated shoulder. The cold frosted over me like it does petals in winter. Killing them. Am I living?
Is my chest rising? Will I feel a pulse if I press my neck? Is my blood still warming me, or has a gangrenous blue begun to bloom?
Light hurts. I flinch. But am I conscious now? I may be dead.
Not in the dramatic sense, just a slow unthreading, like a sweater caught on a nail.
This stillness could be punishment. A private hell. A body cooling without knowing it.
I may as well declare myself dead.
Not yet. There’s still the ritual. The steam. The bitterness. My coffee.
Then I’ll decide.
I craved something hot on this icy morning. So, I percolated the coffee. I stood by the window, waiting impatiently. When I poured it into the navy daisy mug, I felt her behind me.
Not a ghost. Not a presence. Just that knowing. A breath. A vibration under the skin.
I turned. The mug clinked too hard, and coffee spilled onto my hand. I didn’t flinch.
She sat at the table. Calm. Polished. Wearing the blue cardigan I used to wear to interviews. The one I threw over the chair weeks ago, maybe longer.
She’s me.
Too clean. Like a photo that hasn’t yellowed. No shadows in her eyes yet.
She stirred three spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee. I used to do that, before the dentist warned me.
“You’ve changed the curtains,” she said.
“They’re the same.”
“No. They were yellow. Now they’re grey.”
“They were always grey.”
“Maybe to you.”
She sipped and winced. “You always made it too strong,” she said. Her voice sounded right. Not mine now. No gravel, no sharpness. Clean. Unweathered.
She had a peculiar scent about her. Like warm leather and smoky tobacco. Arthur’s scent.
Her lipstick was perfect. I haven’t worn any in months. I threw out the compact when the mirror cracked. I didn’t want to look at myself in fragments anymore.
I sat across from her. My chair creaked beneath me.
“I didn’t expect you to come back,” I said.
She shrugged. “I didn’t expect you to still be here.”
“What do you mean?”
“In this kitchen. Still cutting crusts off toast like we’re ten. Still blaming the weather for everything.”
She traced the table’s edge. Her nails were manicured. Mine were bitten.
“You told everyone we’d move to New York,” she said. “You had a list of apartments in a green notebook.”
“I lost that.”
“You left it on the bus.”
“That wasn’t my fault.”
She laughed. Too loud.
“I was going to be a journalist,” she said. “Change things. Make people listen.”
“You didn’t even finish the internship.”
She looked at me. Not angry. Just sad.
“You forgot why we started,” she said.
The pause between us stretched like old elastic.
“I’m tired,” I said. “Things didn’t go the way I thought.”
“Because you stopped trying.”
“No,” I whispered. “Because I started bleeding. Because I got scared of trains. Because I saw my mother’s face instead of mine in the mirror.”
She tilted her head. “You always were dramatic.”
She wore the shoes I had on the day Arthur called for the last time. The ones that gave me blisters. I threw those out too. But there they were.
She stood and walked to the sink. Looked out the window.
“Remember when we named the trees?” she asked. She turned. Eyes bright. Not teary. Awake. 30
“That big one was Mr. Lowell. The bent one, Miss Margot.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Four years.”
“I don’t count anymore.”
“You’re disappearing,” she said.
“I’m still here.”
“Barely. You don’t laugh. You write letters you don’t send. You hide razors I can’t find. You sleep all day and stare at nothing all night. This house is eating you.”
I closed my eyes. Light flickered behind them like candlelight. When I opened them, she was fading. The blue cardigan was losing its color.
“You’re going to forget me,” she said. “One day, I won’t even be a shadow in the mirror.”
“I don’t want to forget. I just can’t go back.”
“You don’t have to. Just remember I existed.”
And I do. I remember the calluses from typing too much. The notebook of essay ideas. Crying after reading Anne Sexton. Dancing in the kitchen when no one was looking. And then she’s gone. Not like smoke. Just gone.
The coffee still steamed. My hand was wet. Only one cup sat on the table. At 6:30 a.m., I figured the least I could do was start the chores.
Arthur’s paper sat slumped over the counter, left after his morning cigarette.
The headline glared at me.
WOMAN FOUND DEAD OUTSIDE APARTMENT COMPLEX. POLICE SUSPECT SUICIDE.
Evelyn Müller her name was. German heritage, probably. I believe I had heard of that name before. Or maybe I dreamt of it. I read it twice. Then again. I felt nothing.
31
That’s when I turned to the family photos, untouched and coated in dust like ashtrays.
I drifted back into the living room. Morning light fell across the credenza, catching on a pile of unopened letters. My hands moved through them mechanically, like muscle memory. A curtain catalogue. A typed envelope from Arthur’s department. Then a postcard. That made me pause.
A photo of the sea. A woman on a cliffside, her back to the camera. No stamp. No postmark. Just our address in blue ink. I turned it over.
I keep thinking about last weekend. Thank you for making me feel alive again. Yours - M.
Arthur never said anything about New York. He said he had a faculty dinner. I’d been in bed most of the weekend. I flipped it over again. Stared hard at the woman. The way the wind lifted her skirt. The curve of her neck.
The Ballad of Judas Iscariot
Riley Fernandez Robert
Father. Your Honour, May I explain:
First, I will call The Lamb of God
To the stand.
It was there where You first saw me, Across the River Jordan, With the water weeping and dashing against our feet, Between clumps of olives and azalea, Wide open meadows.
Flocks of sheep just shorn, Coming up from the washing, Baked like Passover bread in the sunshine, The Roman officials are there now. The sights, their swords, the screams.
Follow me.
Shelter of Your wings, Sanctuary of Your sacred tent, Where You made me happier Than all the people I have renounced, Measured a thousand-fold, And Your light’s newly risen crescent, Attesting the hour of eventide
I’ll be the flowers of the field.
To them I was Judas, From heaven to earth I am the son of perdition But to You, In Your arms, I was always Jude.
I wish I could switch places with You. The world has cried out Against us both But it will always worship You.
How could I make amends with our friends? Where can I flee from Your presence? What does not connect You to me?
Are you fit for service in the kingdom of God?
In every cloud, in every tree, in every lambBy day, I am surrounded by Your image. Even this bundle of rope recalls You.
Petals uproot,
The grass wilts, the flowers fall Torn from their cradle, Guilty of dust and faux kisses, Gasping under Your cross of Calvary.
It is finished. My washed feet dry, My mouth splits into cracked lips, Our olives wither without end and Crush against my palate.
As the air wafts and the night whimpers, My intestines churn at the imagined taste of Your bread, Your blood. I know the metallic taste.
When I toss these 30 silver coins at Your temple, Choirs of Angels will sing in 12/8 time
I love You
But it's hard
To believe.
‘Was he God?’
Jury, I have always known.
The Buried Siren
Sophie Ryrie
And I walk into the depths of the sea, allowing water to swirl around my neck, to grab my hair and hold it in its delicate hands, to allow my body to forget.
And I am foaming at the mouth as my spirit pours out of me, reaching for the one divine place in the world. An ethereal entrapment, a cage of gilded pearls, I can collapse into and never wake up.
There is very little left for me I weep as my tail curls inwards.
Illustrated by Jess Nguyen
A universe that never forgets
Richie Huang
Some time ago, an uninvited silence crept between Adaline’s words, penetrating into the distance that we forget exists between two letters. At first, Adaline noticed it too.
The silence wrapped around each spoken syllable, before it learned how to hold onto the shape of memories. Memories are slippery things, so with understanding, all is forgiven. SUN
As a child, Adaline would always watch the sunset with her father. Both of them sitting on the porch as the day downed into the crosshatched valley in front of them. She grew up in the Okanagan where apples hung from every orchard eastward of the setting sun. On some days, the colour of the dusk sky was to be found on the apple skin in their hands.
When she was seven, Adaline set a seed in the humus of her front yard. It was a seed saved from the core of a sweet evening snack which contained something much bigger than what its size would imply.
Yesterday, urged by some force of instinct, she planted herself on a clementine rocking chair and involved herself in the sunset without an intent or urge for words she could no longer remember.
In the cabinet, a vase has stood for decades. Adaline’s two children, both named by her, have both forgotten when and why it appeared.
A ceramic river spread through that vase when Anny ran through the corridor and knocked it over. Two halves emerged from one whole, but the fissure didn’t cut all the way through.
The fractured vase, repositioned, stood as caution, warning the next generation of youngsters to carefully navigate Grandma’s home.
An apple tree continues to grow outside Grandma’s patio.
Sixty years ago, Adaline met Mike. It was a story that Adaline would tell with an enchanting passion despite how fate seemed to operate so boringly in it. Many other families should owe their union to that cheap café where first dates were had, but Adaline told the story as if she and Mike were the only ones to find love on table fourteen.
This memory must have been a funny shape, or perhaps something in Adaline protected it fiercely, because the silence had trouble taking it away.
But in the end, the library of Alexandria burned, and in its ruin, all the stories were gone too.
Anny remembers her mother well. She took her children to visit Grandma every summer when the earliest of the local crop would begin to ripen. Adaline was no miserly cook, and the temptation of apple crumble would always set in on the last right-hand turn.
These days, it’s not smell or sight that inspires her appetite for home cooked desert, it’s longing and nostalgia.
There is a certain kind of sorrow in remembering someone who is still here. Adaline’s comforting maternal presence was no more than a mirage for what it used to contain.
For some reason Anny still calls Adaline, mother.
Sometimes, Adaline still manages to reclaim a word or two. It is usually, pa or mammy, spoken with the light of infant eyes. It’s almost as if, in the terror of this unholy invasion of her soul, Adaline had retreated to the safest place she knew, the endless summer days of childhood.
In Adaline’s words, spoken on her fiftieth wedding anniversary, she said life was nothing more but an accumulation of memories. She had shared so many of them with Mike, and for that, her life was one well lived. That night, they dined at home with their children and grandchildren while the sunset filtered through the east-facing window. The maplewood table was just the right size for the six of them and the roast lamb.
There was a humbleness to how Adaline chose to live that day, adding more memories to her account of the world, untainted by pretension, stress or overwhelming expectation.
If life was nothing more than accumulation of memories, Adaline died the day when Mike became a stranger.
Anny swore that her mother used cardamon in her apple crumble. The taste of the Indian spice was unmistakable in every bite. But, no matter how hard Anny tried, there was always a chasm between her version of desert and Adaline’s rendition of the family classic.
The first assumption is that there must be something missing, but we rarely ask ourselves if there is something extra. The truth is, Adaline never used cardamon. It was always cinnamon and nutmeg.
When Adaline died, she left behind her ghost scattered among family photos that no longer had stories to go with them. The daguerreotype of a young Adaline posing next to a Venetian bridge lost its life when its captive memory was pulled into the event horizon of a black hole. No one will ever know what circumstances that led Adaline to that immortal moment.
Adaline’s grandson, a quantum physicist at the University of Alberta, finds comfort in knowing that even in the abyss of a black hole, information cannot be destroyed. The library of Alexandria may have turned into ash, but the wisdom of its scrolls is still contained on particles of smoke and half burnt pages. The precise arrangement of these books was inscribed into the very way that fire burned.
The ripples of Adaline’s existence continue to propagate across the fabric of space and time. He believes that life is the difference we make in this world because of the sole fact that we existed.
And so, Adaline lives on because the universe never forgets.
The apple tree blossoms again as the Okanagan valley falls back into the sun’s good graces. These pink florets unfurl with a refined elegance, reminding us where origami came from. Planted by the house with a bluebird roof and white planked walls, this tree tells us that inside it, a kind family lives.
To an apple, all experience of this earth, remembered or forgotten, is life.
Royalty drips shimmers
Sadanapalus
Sarah James
waves
Golden tendrils curl
M e l t i n g metallic into a sea of honey
Scalding silk and biting velvet
Red droplets soak invisible into the plush
And we drown in molten luxury.
Beasts cry their terror
Chaos rich and thick lush with pain
The charring veil devours consumes And we sink inside.
These sunlit promenades once drenched with opulence now blacken from ashes and armour
while the hearth overflows and sand mollifies into glass
Nineveh crumbles.
As our King commands within the pyre
We dissolve.
So pure is our angel so silent, so unmoved
Figure adorned with stars flames flickering opalescent off the lustre.
Flesh fermenting ripe for the taking
Do we entertain His fantasy?
Diamonds capture our life emeralds cushion our death
and we are s a t u r a t e d in gilded decay
This torment is His treasure.
Like always, our voices d i f f u s e into the abyss.
Our saviour perhaps mortal after all?
Dropping His matches watching His kingdom burn
Watching us burn shrivel blister and bleed.
To the Moon and Back
Iryna Neschotna
Thousands of miles away from the ground –The space never felt more secure. One deceiving feeling gives life to another, To the moon and back is my cure.
The Space never says sorry for being too much, For the stars and for galaxies merging. Every fall, every shift, every burst –All that keeps it at the verge of collapsing.
Balancing between having it all or nothing, Somehow the world finds a place for us too. And if I were to be just a falling star, Then I would still shine for you.
