TABLE OF CONTENTS
Mariella Satow
Richard Yin
Dominic Borg
Hanmin Lee
Chloe Walsh
Anastasia Sotriopoulos
Ford Melillo
Lizbeth Luevano
Lara Morello
Chase Klavon
Alexandra Huynh
Divya Mehrish
Stanley Rozenblit
“Anchor Home”
“The East Red Reservoir”
“When Pompeii Lived” “Ajar”
“The Big Win”
“Dialectical Growth, or What It’s Called When a Tree Grows in an Odd Direction Because of an Obstruction”
“To and From the Asiatic Cheetah”
“Mechanics of Remembrance”
“Roots” “Equinox”
“Karaoke (Vietnamese Version)”
“Retaggio” “Gravity of Petals”
Mariella Satow
Anchor Home
Maclin Bocock and Albert Guerard Undergraduate Fiction Prize Third Place
“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know” -
Diane Arbus
Some things never change. There was no one to meet her as she got off the bus in front of the American Hotel. Wandering along Main Street, Faith spotted an old friend and was soon inside sitting at the diner counter taking in the smell: fake leather, greasy French fries, milkshakes. With a nod to the waitress, she ordered her favourite silver-dollar- chocolate-chip-pancakes and a glass of warm milk. She hadn’t eaten there or them for – what? a year? - that was the last summer she spent with him - but as they were put down in front of her and as she felt the sweet steam hit her face, she knew she was home. She drained the milk from the heavy glass with the same red and white striped paper straw and ate the pile of pancakes from the same chipped plates. No one ever believed she would eat them all but if she’d eaten the plateful when she was six it couldn’t defeat her now. An old photograph flickered into her head – pigtails, freckles, an empty, scraped clean plate and a slow smile on her face. He had been so proud of her - “I knew you could do it” - and she remembered the warmth of that even now. The stomachache afterwards had been worth it.
The diner door clicked shut but she didn’t turn around. Pancakes had always been serious business. It had been a long day. Early that morning she had taken a train from home, Otis, Massachusetts (4 s’s and two t’s), where she and her mother and her dog, Amber lived. She had arrived at New York City at Grand Central Station, ridden uptown on the local no. 6 train to 86th and Lex and then taken the Jitney out east to Sag Harbor. Or as her Gatsby-loving father would say, ‘just off the road to East Egg’. He had once told her, when she told him that she missed him, that she should retrace the journey in her mind, and she would feel closer. How many times had she played this journey out in her head over the past few years? Too many to count. The slap of a record as the jukebox fired up interrupted her thoughts and that slow smile returned to her face.
"Let me tell you about a girl I know, she’s my baby and she lives next door, every morning ‘fore the sun comes up, she brings me coffee in my favorite cup, that’s why I know, yes I know, Hallelujah I just love her so.”
Ray Charles and her Dad were in the house. She spun around on her stool, and almost felt the warmth of him as he wrapped his arms around her in a hug and then
Mariella Satow
stopped. An old man was shuffling back to a booth where his wife was waiting with an amused and tender smile on her face. This was their song, not hers.
Memories fade. They are malleable, shaped by what other people tell us and photographs. Memory becomes blurred like an out of focus photograph. A photograph is just a snapshot of what is happening at a particular time, it gives no back story. Gone are the days when homes had a box of photographs or fading albums that children would thumb through and ask their parents who was in the pictures. With digital photographs every minute can be recorded, but they are private - kept on phones and computers and altered, shared, filtered, and rewritten. The lines between reality and memory are smudged and it’s hard to know if someone was even there. Family memories are like quicksand; firm footing lost over the years as stories are retold.
Seven summers for seven years. That’s the catchphrase that all the camp brochures used to entice my friends. I didn’t need camp though. I had my Dad, Matt Gleeson, and each summer I left Massachusetts and journeyed to Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York. Dad was a college professor in San Diego and in his long summer vacations would return to his hometown and set up home with me. The long summer days were filled with swimming, visits to the diner and the beach, and his stories. We kept ourselves to ourselves and no one interrupted us. Sometimes it felt like people avoided us, but Matt said that the locals had never forgiven him for moving away and changed the subject.
Sag Harbor was an early colonial settlement, and prior to that home to a tribe of Native Americans. It played a part in the American Revolution and was one of the first battles in which the Americans defeated the British after they had taken control of Manhattan and Long Island. It is most noted however for its nineteenth century history when it became one of the three great whaling ports of the United States and exported whale oil which fueled the lamps for much of the western world. In the first half of the nineteenth century sixty-three whaling ships had called Sag Harbor their home port. The busy port housed a population of ten thousand, five times as many as today. Enough of the history though, the ‘sailors and whalers’ had left a charming village full of white shingled ship captains' houses with white picket fences, neatly trimmed boxwood hedging, blue and pink hydrangeas spilling out ofevery garden gate and star-spangled banners hanging from doorways.
Mariella Satow
Generations of families returned here every summer to sail, surf, swim, play tennis, have cook outs on the beach, dig for clams, chase moon bugs and watch the sunsets. I had spent all my summers here for as long as I could remember. The one time a year I could reconnect with Dad. This was one journey I had never thought of taking. I thought this summer was going to be the same. Our last together before I left for college and one filled with laughter and adventure, not a funeral service for him. “It’s your Dad, Faith.” No one needed to say anything more.
As I walked along Main Street to our house on Howard Street, I thought of the eulogy I was to deliver next week. On the train on the way here the page in my notebook had remained blank, my pen hovering over it. As his only relation it was up to me to do Dad justice and describe the man I knew. I felt every day since I had heard the news that the memories that were once clear were evaporating into the fog. A piece was missing. Just as sea captains had spun tales to entertain their crews on long voyages my Dad and his stories had long entertained me. As I struggled to describe him, I wondered if it was possible I never really knew who he was. I only saw Matt once a year and he was a magical and carefree pied piper. Now, as I grasped at the interwoven truths and myths, I felt an uneasiness.
I turned in to Howard Street and my heavy heart leapt for a moment. Any anxious thoughts I had vanished. The shingled house with white trim welcomed me as if it was expecting me. I saw the unmistakable sea green front door and knew I was home. As I opened the door it squeaked in greeting. The wide pumpkin pine floorboards, salvaged and reused from the floors of old whaling ships, were the color of golden honey and glowed in the soft afternoon light. This home was part ship, part house - very fitting for it’s captain. It was as if nothing had happened; his half-drunk coffee was waiting to be finished, the last chapter of a novel on the counter to be read. His usual armchair looked like someone had just got up to fetch something. A tattered photograph of the two of us marked two summers ago and his place in his book. I looked at him. His hair and stubble had greyed, his crow’s feet, or as he liked to call them, ‘smile lines’ had deepened, and his face was weathered after many hours in the sun and out at sea. I lay in his blue hammock and swayed in the breeze listening to the chirp of crickets and chatter of squirrels until sundown.
Later, as I walked in to the village for dinner I passed the Whaling Museum. Some of the best stories had started here. As we walked around the museum Dad said it was like coming home. When I was seven, he told me he was a captain of one of the most famous whaling ships - The Endeavour - and that was why he had to leave me for months at a time. He would describe exciting voyages where he and his crew
Mariella Satow
would chase down whales. With gory details he would tell of harpooning the whale, attaching ropes to the ship and the whale trying to escape pulling The Endeavour behind it. This was most exciting part of the story when he described the chase - the Nantucket Sleighride they called it - when the whale’s blubber was pierced by the harpoon and it swam off at sixty miles an hour with the boat and it’s crew still attached and flying across the waves behind it. The ride would finish when the whale eventually tired and died and was ready for the crew to cut it up and boil it down to oil. He described the small ship’s mate - only the size of a little me he saidgoing in to the whale’s mouth and cutting it up from inside. He said that the most prized possession for a whaler was the ambergris, found in the digestive system of the sperm whale. It was used to\ produce perfume but, more importantly for our stories, was said to attract mermaids. Mermaids featured a lot in the stories and for many years I thought I had descended from merfolk, rather than humans. Matt would tell of months and years spent at sea and of his triumphant returns to the port. Our house, like many in the village, had a ‘widow’s walk’ on the roof, a platform with a view of the sea. Matt described the hours that womenfolk would spend up there, pacing and scanning the skyline and anxiously waiting for his return from long voyages. I would go up to the roof and pace and pace and imagine myself as a forlorn maiden waiting for her true love to appear on the horizon. When he was not chasing whales, he would be a scrimshander, making scrimshaw out of the teeth of sperm whales and the tusks of walruses they also caught on the way. He described catching turtles as they swam by and how they would be made in to mouth-watering soup for his captain’s table. I never questioned how my father was a nineteenth century whaler in the twenty-first century, the stories were too good to miss.
Sag Harbor was full of storytellers: amateurs and professionals. The village had long attracted a community of artists, writers and dreamers. Dad had always loved a good story and Moby-Dick was one of his favorites. “Call me Ishmael!” he would yell as he jumped down the last few steps of the staircase and bounded in to the kitchen for breakfast. One of our summer traditions was to go to the Moby-Dick marathon in Canio’s Books. The bookstore had been there for years and once a year it would host a twenty-four-hour reading of the classic book: with readers taking turns to read out tales of Captain Ahab’s obsessivem and revengeful search for Moby Dick, the whale who had once bitten off half his leg. It reminded me of Captain Hook and the crocodile and was thrilling. Some readers came in costume; one guy even brought harpoons, rope and flensing knives. One year, I must have been about nine I think, we walked home along the silent village streets in the early hours of the morning when the reading finished, and he asked if I could keep a secret. Rolling up his trouser leg he showed me a long, wide scar under his knee cap and with his eyes
Mariella Satow
shining bright said, “I was one who got away!” The scar was really from his knee surgery, but he never let that get in the way of a good yarn.
As I got older he gave up the whaling and the stories and worked in a college in San Diego teaching immigrants English. The Mexican border was only fifteen miles away and many of the students had just entered America. Matt felt that he could be useful and helped families who had followed their American Dreams. Unlike Sag Harbor where immigrants were welcomed and could do well; San Diego was more like the Wild West and laws were strongly enforced. Listening to reports of raids on houses where parents were taken away from their children in the middle of the night made me edge a little closer to him on the porch swing. ICE agents with firearms would enter his classrooms and ask students for their papers and remove the ones who were there illegally. “Easy as shooting fish in a barrel,” they would say to my Dad as they dragged petrified students away. It made Matt ashamed to be an American. This was the reality of his life, but I liked to believe his other ‘jobs’.
As I lay in bed that night, and the subsequent nights leading up to the funeral that week, the old house creaked, and wind whistled through the storm windows. I would close my eyes and imagine that the house was on the ocean and the creaks were the ship’s boom moving in the wind, the waves lapping. Matt: always at the helm.
The night before the funeral I dreamt he and I were out paddle boarding. I was behind him and we silently paddled around the familiar coves and inlets around Clam Island. The water was still, and no one disturbed us. It had always been our favorite thing to do together. Matt taking the lead and me following as he wove tales around everything we saw: the ocean, the bay and the wildlife. Our favorite bird to spot was osprey. He never spoke about Mom and she never spoke about him, but I remember just once he brought up her name. We had silently paddled up to an osprey nest and he turned to me and whispered that osprey mated for life. He said that he and my mom were like osprey and they needed to live at least a kilometer away from each other. He always had an animal analogy to entertain or explain confusing things to the younger me. A chipmunk family chasing each other and scampering up and down trees, like parents chasing their children to brush their teeth and get in to bed. We watched as a stately blue heron soared in the sky above us and as it nested in trees, like a grandmother settling herself in a pew at church. We would paddle through overgrown trees and feel soft and sticky spider webs on our skin as we passed. As I shrank back I remembered a story he had once told me of his time in Indonesia when he was a young teacher in a rural school. He woke on his first night to find an enormous spider with many eyes looking at him as it sat in the hollow of his chest. As he lay
Mariella Satow
there and they exchanged looks he knew he had a decision to make and that giving in to fear would only mean that he would not survive in this place. He had carefully lifted the spider, put it outside and went back to sleep. Sometimes you have no choice he had said. The night of my dream we paddled without talking and without stopping and the next morning I woke as tired as I was when I had fallen asleep. There was no choice for me today either.
I slowly got dressed in a linen black dress and the amber necklace he had bought for my birthday and after breakfast had walked along Main Street and Division Street to the Old Whaler’s Church, an imposing white wooden building built in Egyptian Revival style. A sign for a Pancake Social stood planted on the lawn outside. It was a sign. Matt would have loved that. I climbed the wooden steps of the church with trembling legs. I saw the pastor rise to greet me and he walked me down the red-carpeted aisle. The church was full but not with faces I knew. I thought for a moment that there had been a mistake, perhaps early birds for the Pancake Social, but as I glanced over there was something in their looks that told me that they were in the right place. They turned away from me, as if they were ashamed, but I assumed they were embarrassed of my grief. This had been the same feeling I had had in the village this past week. It seemed as though familiar faces had suddenly crossed the street or dashed in to stores to elude me. I felt dizzy and my hands were clammy and cold. I have no memory of the eulogy I gave. A tear as salty as the ocean slid down my face as I sat down.
People filed out of the church orderly, quietly talking and walked slowly to the room at the back of the church where the wake was to be held. As well as giving the eulogy I had chosen the music. I had sat in Matt’s old leather armchair as I played his old records on his record player and chose his favourites: more Ray Charles, Bob Marley and The Beatles. Ray Charles was Matt’s favourite artist. I remember dancing until dusk with him on the porch and never tiring of his soulful voice. He had always loved Bob Marley too. It always felt like the summer had started when we played ‘Jammin’ on the Jeep’s stereo as we tore along the country lanes to the big wave beach in Southampton and ran to the water. ‘Let it Be’ by The Beatles was the only ballad he played and I cried as I mouthed the words, ‘And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree, There will be an answer, let it be’. As I mingled with the strangers, they were polite but cold. No stories about my father or kind gestures and I had the distinct feeling they were whispering, even arguing, behind my back. I strained to piece together snippets of their conversation, “never should have got away with that,”, “poor girl, she has no idea,”, and “it’s best he’s gone!” Incredulous, I tried to catch my breath but before I could interrupt them, a siren pierced through the quiet chatter. Looking towards to the front of the church I saw several police cars
Mariella Satow
with their sirens blaring and lights flashing blood red and blue parked outside. I watched, as if in slow motion, as they walked up the steps and I found myself walking towards them. One of the strangers pointed me out to them. They began to approach me and, as we met in the middle of the room, I felt hot and light-headed. A short and twig-like officer said, “We need you to come down to the station right away ma’am. It’s about your father. He was Matt Gleeson, correct?” I mumbled a quiet “yes”, and was led out by the officer’s partner, a man built like a tree, his huge hand on my shoulder. He was leading me out of my own father’s wake. I leaned back on to the dark brown leather seats in the back of the cop car and wondered what type of questions would be waiting for me when I reached the Sag Harbor Police Station and whether I would have any of the answers.
THEEASTRED RESERVOIR
Simon Lee | Unsplash
Richard Yin
The East Red Reservoir
Maclin Bocock and Albert Guerard Undergraduate Fiction Prize Second Place
It was a wash. Shi-An let out a scoff. They went bankrupt last year, he said from beside her. Thousands of jobs evaporated overnight.
As their train chugged past the river, Liu was reminded of the frothing Coke from her college student union soda machine. She would down liter after liter during her all-nighters. The black river water called to mind images of dying whales, burning plains, smoke spewed out into the atmosphere—an upsetting PBS docuseries of which she wanted no part.
My friend used to work in these mines, Shi-An continued. He’s at KFC now, last I heard. To Liu, Shi-An was not unattractive, though his nearsightedness necessitated glasses so thick that he looked odd; there was no kind way to put it.
How much longer? Xinye asked.
The gentle shudder of their carriage over each dent in the tracks had welded her eyes shut; Liu watched as the older woman studied the green lamp shades which dotted the compartment walls, painting the whole cabin a soft olive hue.
What a disgusting smell, Xinye muttered, her nose wrinkling.
Run off from the plant, offered Shi-An.
They were slated to arrive at Hailun Central Station just before eight—plenty of time to have dinner before retiring for the night. Liu angsted over not yet having booked their accommodation. Just last week, she had accepted an invitation over instant message relayed by a distant relative. The occasion was a funeral in her homeland, a place she had not visited since her own grandfather’s death three years ago.
Initially, she suspected the message to be one of those scams, but the name of the deceased she recognized, one she hadn’t thought of in years—an old friend of her father’s who would visit when she was young. Mao Ning-An, or as she had called him, Uncle Mao. A debt long past due. She purchased her ticket that evening and drove to the airport the following morning. For the past month, she’d been homebound after driving her car into a streetlamp. She blamed the lithium she’d been prescribed, and though unscathed, afterwards she found she was unable to step out of her apartment without experiencing the overwhelming sensation of falling.
You’re grieving, her therapist, Mrs. Kegan, as she liked to be called, had claimed over the suffocating smoke of the incense she insisted on lighting. For her grandparents, her father, her lost childhood.
Oh, but I had a great childhood, Liu prickled. She was lucky. Her father had
Richard Yin
hung himself, and her mother had abandoned her shortly after, but she had scarcely known them. Why mourn strangers? Afterwards, while with her grandparents, the world had taken on a certain clarity: peace born from necessity.
Wake me when we’re there. Xinye closed her eyes again, fanning herself gently with a magazine. She bemoaned the summer heat: it made her itch.
I don’t want to scratch my back like those baboons at the city zoo, she had said. Mao Ning-An, her husband, had keeled over last Thursday from a heart attack. Xinye told Liu that he had been on his lunch break; thankfully, the equipment in his hands had been off. Their carpentry shop had hired over a dozen new contractors within the past year, all from rural parts, so many were there that Xinye struggled to keep track of their names. She had handwritten invitations to each of her guests: family, friends, neighbors, employees, and finally Liu, whose name and address she was surprised to find on the page
Ning-An had left in their safety deposit box. The girl who arrived Tuesday evening, soaked from the rain, in no way resembled the small, doll-like pet strapped into the backseat of Dezeng’s car when he had first come to visit her husband all those years ago. According to Xinye, Shi-An had been only six then.
Do you remember me? He had asked Liu.
No, I didn’t think we had ever met.
I think I saw you, through my window, when your father visited.
Xinye explained that the two men had been sent down together as boys during the Cultural Revolution.
You scared me when you arrived, she’d told Liu. Your hair, and your arms, green highlights and dark tattoos. But you are very well behaved, she admitted. Liu had towed to the wake boxes of packaged fruits, pastries, cakes, flowers dyed unnaturally blue, and bundles of fake paper money. Xinye had been overly distraught, she would be the first to admit, and so it was her son who had taken the American girl out for dinner after the guests had all left.
Over cold noodles, Mao Shi-An explained his father’s request to be scattered at the East Red Reservoir in the countryside up north. Shi-An had already bought himself a train ticket; his mother needed to man the storefront.
Liu had picked at her bowl, unable to stomach anything after the long flight. The attendant repeatedly offered her stale biscoff cookies, which made her sick, but she was too anxious to refuse, the crumpled plastic wrappers piling up in her seatback pocket. What if I came with? Liu had proposed.
Xinye, upon getting wind of their plan, promptly called the trainline to purchase her seat.
I cannot let you two young folk journey unaccompanied into the countryside. You’re both unmarried. It’s improper.
Her son bloomed red, and Liu laughed politely, unsure if her grasp of Mandarin
Richard Yin had deteriorated so significantly. Xinye had phoned her husband’s favorite employee and told him he was in charge for the week.
I would kill for a beer, Shi-An wailed. Their compartment was warm, the AC either broken or nonexistent.
What do you drink? Liu asked.
Domestic. It’s cheaper, but I love American. My favorite is Pabst Blue Ribbon. He mimed opening a can and throwing back. You’re a swimmer, right?
Liu shrank. I used to be.
I remember watching you on TV, so fast!
Thank you. She tried to follow-up. Distracted, she pointed out the window. Above the rice paddies, the sun appeared as a red orb sagging into the muddy horizon. Do you ever think of being alone? She asked. Her fingers drummed against the glass. Xinye, by now, was fast asleep.
All the time, Shi-An smiled.
But I live at home, so Dad—Mom is always there.
Do you want to move out?
When I get a job.
Liu pressed her lips into a thin line. She had already asked too much. I got laid off last year. It’s not embarrassing, I promise. The edges of his mouth contorted upwards.
What about you, do you have roommates? No? A boyfriend?
Liu smiled. Not for me. Her fingers wrapped tight around each other.
We’re getting too old now. Shi-an’s eyebrows arched. Too old to be single. We’ll survive, she insisted.
They were silent, observing as the sun disappeared beneath the horizon.
You haven’t seen my father in years, right? Shi-An asked. Liu nodded. So, why come all this way?
He kept his eyes fixed intently on her face. She never met Shi-An properly when they were kids, but she had asked to, repeatedly. Ning-An had told Liu about him, a boy who dreamed of becoming a construction worker. She had found it endlessly amusing, the idea of a little Ning-An building houses from toy wooden bricks.
I needed a vacation, she said. Her hand angled toward her right thigh, which she gingerly massaged. Liu thought better of telling him that she had not been to work for weeks. Or about the ignored emails from her boss. Or the collection of bills that had accumulated at her doorstep. She shuttered the window shade with a snap, the turn of her head decisive.
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That April, the sky opened and wouldn’t shut. As Hailun flooded, I thought of my father and a song he learned from my grandpa, who had been forced to move North when the Yangtze overflowed. The melody was slow, winding, and in a dialect I was unaccustomed to, but I remember the chorus:
The river takes all and leaves nothing behind
Nothing, nothing, nothing but the wreckage of the departed
I liked Mary immensely, though I pitied her. She was the first person who spoke to me since leaving Beijing; she boarded from Grand Station with a single bag and knocked loudly on our compartment door as if she were our guest. At home, she left behind three younger sisters with her wheelchair bound father. Though prone to bouts of tears, she reminded me of my favorite aunt thanks to her thin face and acerbic humor. With Mary came Lenin, or rather, that is the ridiculous title he gave himself, for only Mary knew his actual name. They had been sent down from Harbin, which they said was a relief, for the city could best be described as odoriferous, and had become only more odiferous with time. In fact, according to the pair, recently it seemed like the odor was the only remarkable thing about Harbin.
I had begun reading to distract myself while cooped up at home. School had been cancelled. I wasn’t allowed to go outside. My parents had stopped speaking, and I wasn’t sure if I was meant to do anything about it. Things were bad at the University. Many of their colleagues had been beaten, pulled out into the streets naked and bleeding, before being strung up on poles. Ma had purchased sniffing bottles from a bearded gentleman she had insisted was an old family friend, some offshoot of traditional healer. The bottles put her to sleep for hours each day. At night, she walked around the house barefoot, gazing mutely at the newly emptied walls in a stupor.
Of course, we were among the fortunate. One of my friends’ parents had simply vanished overnight. When he too disappeared, a week later, I’d assumed he’d gone south to stay with family. Their apartment sat empty, downstairs across the hall from ours, their pantry still full. I remember the scent of decomposing pork and eggs that had wafted through the foyer.
When the officers finally knocked on our door, I was prepared. I had known that if it weren’t my parents, it would soon be me. My father wept as I prepared my bag, my assigned officer waiting at our door. Ma was nowhere to be found.
The train stopped four times as we traveled north. I dozed off as hundreds of boys and girls boarded, my commanding officer keeping a watchful eye on his flock. When the time came, and we were led off the train, I followed Mary and Lenin. We were brought to a large grain storage facility where we received our assignment: the rice harvest. Two other boys were assigned to our field. The first, Peniel, caught a cold after staying out in the rain, his condition worsening precipitously until he was taken away within the week. The second, a tall boy named Ning-An, had come from
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the outskirts of Harbin. He spoke with a twang that I teased him endlessly for, though he took this in stride. We would meet for long walks after sunset, as Mary and Lenin were often tired. I found myself enjoying my respite from the city. Amazingly, I was the only member of our party whom the mosquitoes shunned. I hypothesized that it was because I was from Beijing, but Ning-An asserted that, in reality, I was too stuck up for the mosquitoes, and they could taste the bourgeois in my blood. He is a bit of a prick, but I like him very much.
2014
The forecast was clear, so the trio decided to venture into the forest. Shi-An first led them into the fields where his father had been put to work, then down the path laid out in Ning-an’s journal. While they spoke to the farmers, they were lapped by a gaggle of college-aged kids who seemed befuddled by their own map. The trail had become a hiking hotspot, though the route stopped at the base of the foothills, a river piercing the highlands, carving out a path that Shi-An claimed would bring them up to the reservoir.
As the sky grew dark, Xinye asked to turn back, the clouds blocking the summer warmth.
It’s going to rain. We shouldn’t be here.
They were halfway to the river by then. Shi-An joked that his mother was too old to make the journey with them. Her pleas went ignored, and they hiked until sunset, when they finally reached the river. After a pot of instant noodles, which only seemed to amplify their hunger, they set up camp for the night. Shi-An extinguished his light. See, no rain, he muttered. Liu closed her eyes. After the trio had overtaken them, the college kids trailed close behind. Now their voices echoed down the stream, the clamor of a party.
After much tossing and turning, Liu asked if she could tell a story. Neither mother nor son objected, and so she began.
When I was a child, my father told me a story about a lake from his dreams. Round, blue… She paused, trying to recount Dezeng’s words.
Round, blue, clear. When he dove to the bottom, he found a large painted turtle who could speak our language. The turtle wove a tale of a beautiful woman on the other side of the shore. She was from a poor family, and as the youngest daughter, the water was always cold when it was her turn to bathe. Instead, she came to the lake each morning to clean herself.
Over time, the water turned her hair a brilliant silver. Every morning, a young man from the village down the hill came up to fish on the shore. He tried, in vain, to walk around the lake. For weeks now, he had been trying to speak to this beautiful
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girl, but each time, he found himself back where he started. The woman was unreachable. When he shouted across the water at her, she told him that he needed to swim across the lake to demonstrate his devotion. Only then could he see her up close. The fisherman dove into the water and swam blindly across until he reached the opposite shore. When he pulled himself out, he saw that the woman had transformed into a silver-winged egret. Before she flew away, they shared a parting glance.
For many years after the man returned to the lake, but never again did he see the woman. His parents brought him a girl from his town, and they wed and had many children. He grew old and grey, and eventually his memory of her faded into the recesses of his mind. Each summer, however, he returned to the lake to fish.
After many decades, when his children were grown, he was on the lake when he glanced up from his reel and saw an egret flying overhead, its silver wings glinting in the moonlight. The egret landed on the other shore, and the fisherman understood then what he needed to do. He cast aside his fishing rod and leaped headfirst into the water. When he splashed out on the other side, he saw that his arms had become light, feathered wings, his feet strong, sharp talons, his neck stretching long and thin until it was that of a bird. And the two egrets flew away from the lake, never to return.
When Liu finished, Xinye and Shi-An were silent. She raised herself from her sleeping bag and slowly pulled open the tent zipper, careful to make as little noise as possible. Outside, she shimmied out of her pants and from her jacket pocket, produced a bandage roll. Her tailbone sank into the damp earth as she sat and stripped her leg of the dirty gauze, tracing with her middle finger the scars which ran across her upper thigh before rewrapping them with fresh tape. She watched the river, half asleep
Soon, her exhaustion sublimated into restlessness. She walked, following the river until she came upon a circle of tents, the murmur of the water rushing by masking her footsteps as she approached. A flap lay open, the tent faintly lit from within. She could hear the faint sound of snoring. In front, she saw a set of footprints which led to the waterfront and, not thinking, she followed. By the shore, a boy and girl lay with each other, their clothes beside them. Panicked, Liu fell into a crouch, not wanting to be spotted. The sounds of their voices bled into each other, variations of pleasure and pain. As Liu watched the boy heave and ho atop the girl, his face sweaty, his expression knit in such intense concentration, Liu wondered if he was ill. Once, when she was fourteen, the summer had been unusually rainy. She had been sitting by the pool, waiting for her grandparents to pick her up. A girl emerged from the locker room, Daiyu. She was from the year above, her hair still wet, her bag in her hands.
What are you doing? Daiyu asked. Liu had just transferred to the training
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center, a government-run gym built to churn out world champions.
I’m waiting for my grandpa.
Oh. She moved towards Liu, who sat straighter. Daiyu had thin lips and short hair she wore in two small buns. Everyone on the team called her Ne-Zha as a joke, a title she accepted reluctantly. Liu always felt bad.
Where’s your mother? She asked.
She’s waiting outside, probably smoking or something. She doesn’t notice when I’m missing.
Liu nodded, unsure of what to say. There had been a momentary lull in the deluge, but now the clouds above looked ready to burst.
You were fast today, Liu said.
Daiyu laughed. You’re two lanes ahead of me, and you’re not even in high school. Coach says you have actual talent. That you have an actual chance.
Do you think it’ll rain? Liu asked, trying to change the subject.
No. Daiyu’s face straightened. But we’re already wet, does it matter?
She took a seat next to Liu on the bench.
I’m sorry if this is bad to ask, but is it true that you’re an orphan? Liu winced. Not exactly. My dad is dead, and my mom left me, so I live with my grandparents. Daiyu appeared genuinely sorry then, and Liu tried her best to reassure the girl. It’s not awful, my grandparents are good to me. They let me stay out at night and go to parties.
Do you party?
Liu smiled. No, I don’t.
Daiyu studied her, and with a clap of thunder, the sky broke, water pouring down through the open roof.
Still, Daiyu inched closer. What about a boyfriend? She asked. Liu shook her head. Is it lonely without your parents? Liu rose, and feeling bold, took Daiyu’s hand, pulling her up.
When I’m alone, I go for a swim. Late at night, you can crawl over the fence at the pool near my grandparents’ apartment and sneak in. No one’s watching. I do that when I feel alone. They crossed the pool deck, observing the rain strike the water. There was a game my dad and I used to play, Liu volunteered. She pulled off her jacket and stripped down to her underwear. We would dive in to see who could make the biggest splash.
When Daiyu laughed, Liu felt hot; if she could, she would make Daiyu laugh again and again.
I never won, but he did his best to make me believe I could. They both leapt into the pool, their clothing a big heap on the deck. As Liu sank, she wished that she could live there, sleeping on the steps of the pool, going to school during the day. Each droplet became a circle above, drawn and redrawn, expanding
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in perpetuity. When they surfaced, Daiyu pulled her in.
You’re very quiet.
Liu nodded.
She grasped onto Liu, holding her face for a kiss.
On the rivershore, the girl appeared to be undergoing some sort of transcendent upheaval, so immense was her ecstasy, so loud were her cries. Liu groped about in the darkness, fondling her breasts, which had firmed in the nightly chill. As she sensed the wet between her legs, she shuddered before pulling herself up into a crawl. She ran the rest of the way back to their tent and promptly closed the zippered flap behind her before lying down and shutting her eyes for good, as if doing so would erase what had transpired.
1976
After four months, I received a letter from my mother. Ba was in the hospital; his nose had been fractured during a struggle session. I wanted to return, but sneaking onto the train without papers was suicide. I couldn’t retrieve my ID from the army barracks; it would be easier to break into East Berlin. Besides, I had no money. Running away seemed pointless; I knew I could not conquer the wilderness. I was still a city boy.
I took to calling Ning-An Isaiah, and he called me Hezekiah. Though poorly read, he took to the stories I fed him. I enjoyed having a student because he surprised me. When we discussed Kant, he asked what duty was without emotion? Only now do I realize that I had fallen in love with my own reflection. In my luggage, I smuggled a copy of the Bible. We took turns reading to each other by moonlight. Isaiah kept a meticulous journal, which I liked to read when he wasn’t looking. In it, he picked out names for our friends, the livestock, even the farmers. He named Meng Meng Mary because of her motherly demeanor. The boar became Deborah for the smug look of judgment on her face. The farmers mostly kept to themselves. Ning-An questioned where their solidarity was for the working class, and I laughed before remembering that my parents were employed by China’s oldest University. Education was a form of wealth in and of itself, and I realized then how very impoverished Ning-An had been.
We had the week off to mourn the passing of the Chairman, so Ning-An persuaded me to go with him into the forest, up the foothills. There was a lake that he had heard mention of by the village kids one night—a reservoir built by the Kuomintang before the war. I can’t swim, I told him.
I’ll teach you, he pressed. Isaiah wanted to explore, and I needed to accompany him because, as he said, I was his Hezekiah. The journey took us a day and a half, and we followed the river until it was dark, when we slept laid out on the rocks, the
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September heat frying us up like crispy ground pork. When we finally arrived, pushing up from the hilltop past the trees, we found a pearl of water, vast as the eye could see, perfectly round. Ning-An came up to the lake, and when I neared the shore, he promptly pushed me in before leaping in after me. That night, we read the story of John
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
He scoffed. How could you not love the things in the world?
Because God is greater than all the world combined.
How many things have we yet to do? Places to see? People to meet? He stared up at the cloudless sky. I watched his brow furrow.
I would like to live in the United States.
What?
I can’t stay here.
What the hell does that mean?
A more reasonable answer: the communist party does not love god.
He laughed. You and god. You talk about him like he’s your woman.
Do you have a girlfriend? I asked.
Yes.
You never mention her.
Her name is Xinye. Our parents are childhood friends. Is that it?
He shrugged. We sat, watching the reservoir.
You’re going to school, aren’t you? He began, pushing aside the worn bible. What do you mean?
When they restart the Gaokao, you’ll be the first one to take it, I can tell. They’ll send you off to Tsinghua, and you’ll be some kind of famous scientist or writer. It’s not that simple. Professors are being hanged every day.
Good riddance. I was never one for school. He tossed a pebble into the water and observed the ripples spreading across the surface.
I don’t think that’s true, I mumbled. Do you think we’ll ever leave? He asked. Hailun?
He nodded.
Of course.
How can you be so certain?
Because god would not let us stay here forever. This could be hell?
I don’t think so.
I tapped his taut shoulder; he was leaning over on the floor of our tent, so close
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that I could almost taste the tobacco on his breath. I had badgered him to stop. He argued that it was one of the few things that made life worth living. Resentment boiled in me for the way he carried himself, as if nothing could ever hurt him. And when he focused on me, I saw myself reflected in his eyes. I can recall, distinctly, the slant of lantern light across his face, his nose, his lips, his eyes. When he moved forward, there was nothing I could do but savor the taste of nicotine on his tongue, for it became mine, on the beach of the reservoir, where he made me believe, for just a few moments, that my life was not a total loss.
2014
When Shi-an exited the tent, he found Liu and his mother boiling eggs and rice porridge. He flipped through Ning-An’s journal, pulling with his teeth on a bag of pickled mustard greens until Xinye plucked the pack from him and tore it open with her hands. Liu nodded along as Shi-An announced their course for the day, and after packing, they set out. She read aloud from the guide she had purchased at the train station, Xinye listening quietly, glancing occasionally at her son, who had taken to lagging behind. He shouted directions every few minutes, working through the journal still, looking at just the last second to avoid tripping over a log or running into a branch.
They summited just as the crickets began to sing. Xinye heaved a sigh of relief, and Shi-An continued to the shore, dropping his bag and slipping off his shoes to wade into the water. Liu pulled her bag from her back and rubbed her hands across her temples, scanning the horizon.
What now? She asked.
Do we want to do this here, Ma? Shi-An shouted from the water.
Xinye stood motionless, gazing out at the reservoir.
Ma? He trudged out of the shallows and approached, moving to take her hand in his.
She raised her right arm, stopping him.
Shi-An tried again, but she repeated the motion. Liu watched Shi-An, his eyes wide like a child’s, this giant little boy. He stood beside his mother, awkwardly, unsure of what to do. When he tried again, Xinye did not move, crumpling as he took her in his arms to hold her as she cried. Liu looked away.
They decided to hold off on scattering Ning-An’s ashes until the following morning. Liu sat outside their tent, contemplating the rise and fall of the waves. ShiAn lay inside, sipping from a silver flask he had produced from his backpack, still reading. Xinye soon joined Liu. How are you feeling, Auntie? Liu asked, taking Xinye’s left hand.
Xinye laughed. Better. My son is trying his best, so I have to try my best for him.
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She motioned for Liu to move closer.
You know, I also grew up without a mother. She died when I was still a baby. Tuberculosis.
Liu studied the moon, which had swelled in the heat, threatening to envelop the sky.
I’m sorry, she said, turning towards Xinye.
Nothing to be sorry about, dear.
A lone turtle popped its head out of the water, ripples radiating from where it emerged.
If I can ask, how did your father die?
He hung himself.
I never knew.
Your husband never talked about him?
He was light on the details. She glanced away, seeming uneasy with the subject. Liu wondered if she had ever really known Dezeng, her father. He was really quite inconsiderate. He’d been arrested in California before she or her mother could ever visit. Corporate espionage, they had claimed. Liu thought even an idiot would have known it was a fabrication. But it had been an impossible fight. She suspected the shame had worked its way down his brain, through his spinal column, into his soul. His roommate discovered him, a week after he’d been dismissed, hanging by his tie from the ceiling fan. Liu had visited the now outdated apartment complex once, her first semester of college, years later. She had driven up along I-280 from her University and stood outside the structure, examining its limestone and brick exterior. Her father had lived on the second floor, her grandmother had said. The windows were covered with neat blue curtains, a small brown stuffed bear peeking out from the windowsill.
My father spoke of Ning-An a lot. She said quietly.
You weren’t too young?
Liu shook her head. I remember bits and pieces. Ba called Ning-An the hardestworking man he ever knew. Like an ox. When they were in the field together, he did the work of three men.
Xinye’s mouth strained to smile.
I know the story you told me. Ning-An told me the same one of the silver-haired woman, only I was the egret on the other side of the lake, and we’d fly away together, he and I, at the end.
It must be old, maybe Manchu.
Of course. I’d never heard of it before him.
The tent flap opened, and Shi-An stepped out onto the sand.
Come, join us, Liu called out.
Ignoring them, he walked down the beach past them wearing nothing but his
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underwear. His feet touched the water, trudging forward until his legs were fully submerged. What are you doing? It’s late for a swim.
His head sank beneath the surface. The two women sat frozen. Then Liu snapped into motion, dashing forward, not caring to strip. The cold washed over her, her arms pumping furiously. Beneath the water, she reached out, grabbing Shi-An by the armpits, dragging him up with great pulls until they fell onto the shore.
Are you crazy? Xinye was beside them. Liu pressed her ear against his chest, locking her hands together to pump over his breastbone. Every few moments, she stopped to open his mouth and blow.
Oh my god, oh my god, Xinye repeated, pacing.
When her son sputtered, his eyes fluttering, Xinye let out a cry, grasping onto his torso and embracing him.
Finally, I got the American girl to kiss me. All I had to do was drown.
Xinye tried to slap him. He only coughed up more water.
What is wrong with you?
He started to laugh, his voice bouncing across the water as if the whole lake too was in on the joke.
1995
When I went to see Ning-An for the first time nearly two decades later, I brought with me Liu. Her mother was busy at church; I had stopped going all together, though Liu often accompanied Fulin on Sundays. She had been spending time away from home, usually visiting her parents uptown. We no longer slept in the same bed.
Ning-An had sent me a letter, postmarked from Harbin, and I had driven the four hours from Changchun. I saw his wife through their apartment window. She was short, but had a stern look about her. High cheekbones and a strong brow. We had the same taste in women.
Brother, Ning-An cried as he stepped out of the doorway where he had been waiting. I embraced him, and he laughed, grabbing me by the back of my head. Hezekiah, it's been an eternity.
We drove to the nearby strip mall where Liu ordered from a noodle stall. I told him about university, my work, about Fulin, not mentioning how she had stormed off last week to stay with her parents. He told me of his wife, his son who was only a few years older than Liu. His sister in law had been injured at the factory, and her husband was jobless, a drunkard, so Ning-An had begun supporting their family with his earnings. The carpentry shop was still small; they had opened it with a loan from Xinye’s father. When he spoke of her, I saw in his eyes an affection I had forgotten could exist. Liu drew his attention. I always wanted a daughter, he repeated, ruffling
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her hair as she chewed. She didn’t like it when people touched her hair, but the food was enough to distract her, and I said nothing. Afterwards, I drove him home. He promised to call.
It was a few months before we spoke again, this time over the phone. I was drunk; I had just been offered a job at Bayer in Berkeley. Eventually, I could apply to bring my family. Ning-An congratulated me, genuinely happy, his warmth suffocating.
Come visit me, he insisted. We can go up to Hailun to visit the reservoir one last time before you leave.
I drove out the next weekend. Liu stayed with Fulin's parents. When I told my wife about the job, she gifted me one of her rare smiles and said this would be a fresh start for our family. When I arrived at Hailun, I realized that Ning-An hadn’t brought fishing poles. We hiked up the foothills, across the forest, until we came to our childhood hangout. The lake was just as I remembered: the water clear and still as a dream.
It may rain, he remarked, glancing up at the sky. I replied Does it matter? We slept in the same tent that night, side by side. He asked if this was what I really wanted, and I said yes.
There’s a miracle here, Dezeng, he tried to explain. China is growing more and more developed every day. I sought to reason that it wasn’t that simple. That I had tried, and failed, to be happy too many nights; that I had fallen into the arms of other men time and time again, only to crawl from their beds in the morning with such shame that I felt as though there was no return. There is no future for us here, no future for my daughter, no future for me. But my words caught in my throat.
The following morning, we woke to the rain. We stayed put in the tent, eating cold fish from the can. Soon, Ning-An grew restless and moody, so I attempted to entertain him. I recounted a story he had told me when we were still young. There was a woman, silver-haired, who lived by a lake, I began. When I finished, he pulled out a bottle of rice wine from his sack. We must celebrate, he proclaimed. I seemed to have cheered him up some, though I assumed he was just happy that I had correctly remembered his story. We passed the bottle back and forth until it was empty, and the thunder outside had subsided to a distant whimper. I unzipped our tent and stepped out onto the mud to take stock. The shoreline had advanced to only a few meters from our tent, the ground now slick and goopy.
We should move, I remarked, only to be tackled from behind. Tumbling across the shore, Ning-An and I grappled until it was clear that I would lose. No fair! I exclaimed.
Life’s not fair! He cried gleefully. I wriggled, but he refused to let me go. Stop it! I yelped, laughing when he began to tickle. I understood my age then,
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for when we had wrestled as kids, I had at least had a fighting chance. By now, gone was any litheness of my youth, and his size, having remained, proved insurmountable,
When his lips found mine, I conceded. The mud caked our pants, arms, and torsos, the earth hardening. I didn’t mind, for at least I’d have something to keep me from leaving. We lay there in the muck, sinking into the music of the cicadas surrounding us, waiting for a miracle.
2014
Shi-An had left camp, taking with him his sleeping bag. The clouds above looked pissed. We should follow him, Xinye argued, but Liu maintained that they were better off staying put so he could come back. He had not left Ning-An’s journal, and neither knew the way back to Hailun.
Liu watched Xinye change into her swimsuit, her skin leathery. She could see where the white had begun to sprout from the crown of Xinye’s head. She waded into the water, where she lay on the surface of the lake, gazing up at the sky.
Join me! Xinye shouted, but Liu shook her head.
I thought you were a famous swimmer?
Liu sat on the shore of the reservoir and waved at Xinye.
I’m injured. She shouted back.
Suit yourself.
Afterwards, they walked along the shore, calling out Shi-An’s name. Soon, the clouds overhead and overwhelmed, erupted. They made a dash for the forest, where, from under the canopy, they watched the lake dance in its exchange with the heavens.
He can’t have gotten that far, Liu said to Xinye.
He can’t swim, Xinye murmured, and it dawned on Liu that there was the very real chance that the lake would soon engulf the trees. As they hid in the tent, waiting for the downpour to stop, Xinye told Liu stories from Shi-An’s childhood.
He was a loud child, chubby. Always wanted ice cream. He wouldn’t stop crying.
Aren’t all children like that?
No, some children. But not all. You are well-behaved. Maybe I was a loud baby.
Did your parents not tell you?
They didn’t talk much.
She picked at the ground with a stick, the sand peeking through the tarp they had pinned halfheartedly into the ground.
Liu volunteered a memory to pass the time. After her father’s funeral, Ning-An
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accompanied her and her grandparents home. They were busy managing guests, and it was implied she would miss swim practice. She trained at the neighborhood club, which at the time was well known thanks to its coach, a former national champion.
Seated in their living room on their hand-me-down sofa, Ning-An had insisted she needed to go about things, not as if nothing had happened, but as if things would continue to happen after. He drove her to the pool, and watched from the benches with the other parents for the one and a half hour session. When they all left to shower, Ning-An pulled the coach aside.
Liu understood that her membership would soon be unaffordable—her father had left behind nothing but the bill for his funeral, his body flown across the Pacific at an extravagant cost. But at the time, money was the paper she traded for milk popsicles from Old Lady Gao. The lessons would continue even after she moved to the national pool, all the way until she was recruited. Her grandparents had never mentioned the arrangement to her. Ning-An had spoken to them, she knew, separately at night when she was supposed to be in bed. The sum must have lain in the ballpark of hundreds of thousands of yuan.
My husband paid for your swim lessons? Xinye asked.
Did you not know?
No, I don’t know where he could have gotten the money.
They were silent when Shi-An opened the tent zipper.
Where on earth have you been? Xinye stood, nearly hitting her head against the slanted ceiling.
I needed to walk.
Walk where!? We were worried about you!
He dropped his things onto the ground, the clank of the empty flask ringing against the ground.
Are you drunk? Xinye asked. He passed her the journal.
Have you read this? He asked.
She opened it, her eyes glazing over.
No…I found it in the safe. You took it.
So you never knew, then? About Dad and Dezeng?
Her father? She gestured.
Liu slipped past Dezeng, leaving the tent to stand on the lakeshore. The wind buffeted her in great gusts, the water rippling. She recalled asking her grandparents, after the funeral, if Ning-An would be her father now. They had chuckled, telling her that he had his own family: a wife and son back in Harbin. Liu had asked why they couldn’t join them.
When he had driven her home from practice, the look in his eyes was not of adoration but sorrow. As a child, Liu felt the need to reassure him—to tell him it would all be okay. He laughed, peering into the rearview mirror, trying on a smile.
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When he told Liu his folktale, she claimed she was the silver-haired woman in the story. A female egret. Her father used to call her an egress. He had been learning English before leaving and took liberties with his words, unaware that egress already had another meaning
She endeavored to inherit this small thing from him. To make her own words, her own realities, her own rules. Maybe, if she tried hard enough, she could make herself a happier person, even grow wings and fly away.
Where would you want to go? Ning-An had asked, leaning across the steering wheel. They were stopped at a light. What about your grandparents, what about the Olympics? I watched you in that pool. The clock never lies.
On the beach, she took one step into the water. The surface was a flurry of pinpricks, droplets from the sky absorbed into one great mass. Can I join? She wonders aloud. Community seems alien to her. After her injury, she had been benched for a year. In lieu of parties, she took to walking down 280 at night, limping when the pain flared. If she grew bored, she would chew another edible. Her teammates had stopped making eye contact with her at the pool. There were few cars, and if it was late enough, she could walk for miles without encountering another soul. It was this way that Liu learned to separate her body from her mind, the voices in her head collapsing into a single distant drone.
Her doctor had laughed when she had asked if there was any chance of recovery. After graduating, she began to cut herself at night, selecting a spot on her leg that was easily concealable beneath the pantyhose she wore to the office. She incised small lines, later deep gashes that healed slowly, filling with yellow pus, which made her gag.
They had been standing on the pool deck at night when she told Daiyu about getting the call from Stanford.
Can we run away together? she had proposed.
Daiyu’s face was inscrutable. Don’t you want to go to school? To America? Her gaze fixed onto a building in the distance, the cross of a church faintly illuminated by streetlight. Don’t you understand what you have?
When Liu walked into her apartment afterwards, her grandparents had asked her what was wrong, coming to her side, taking her by the arms, guiding her to her chair. They were old by then, all skin and bones. When she looked at her Lao Ye, she saw a desiccated prune.
At the center of the table was a plate of wood ear mushrooms, and Liu’s Lao Lao insisted she eat, as if the food would force down her emotions. She choked on her second bite, refusing to cry as she struggled for air. Her grandfather struck her twice to free the lodged particle. The following week, she boarded her flight for visiting weekend.
By the time Dezeng and Xinye realized Liu was missing, they had both run dry
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of emotion, their throats hoarse, their cheeks wet.
Did you see where she went? Shi-An croaked at his mother. She shook her head, her eyes on the lake. Above, the sun cuts through the clouds, each tuft a lampshade, the light falling onto the turbulent water, which has transformed from a motley grey into something clear and translucent.
They abandoned the tent, trudging up the shore towards the trees. The wind picked the structure apart like so many toothpicks, and Xinye tripped, nearly toppling over. If they were careful and didn’t slip on the rocks going down, they could rejoin the trail before nightfall.
If Liu thinks back, it was her father who taught her to swim, as Ning-An had taught him. The reservoir came into focus as she took it in as a whole for the first time. If only, she thought, she could pick it up and take it home. Would something so large and deep absorb her disappointments? Maybe underwater, she could find everything and everyone she had lost. She dove then, not caring to glance back, for she imagined that if she swam down far enough, she could surface and find, on the other shore, the woman she had been dreaming of. We can’t leave her here! Xinye cried over a clap of thunder.
In her arms, she clutched her husband's ashes, boxed in their wooden case, caked with sand. The sky morphed, as if unsatisfied with their conclusion, growing darker by the second. The two were cast, momentarily, in shadow, a figure soaring across the water before alighting on the opposite shore.
In the past, Shi-An’s father would tell him of a shapeshifting egret, a story so saccharine that he had filed it away as an old wives’ tale. To him, nothing so beautiful could be granted so easily. Goodness in life was not received, but taken. The bird stepped gingerly across the beach, flailing, nearly colliding with the ground, so uncertain it appeared of its own two feet. The creature stood startlingly white against the muddy shoreline, strangely oblivious to the storm raging about it. If he squinted, Shi-An could just make out the silvery tips of its wings. He watched the water shimmer, as if possessed by a spirit, the sky bawling, the reservoir already full.
WHEN POMPEIILIVED
DOMINICBORG
Carlos Torres | Unsplash
For Livvy.
When
Pompeii Lived Maclin Bocock and Albert Guerard Undergraduate Fiction Prize
First Place
MEET THE LIVING DEAD AT THE FIELD MUSEUM
Is it a George Romero film come to life? Do the dead really walk among us? Not quite, but the truth isn’t too far off. This Saturday, almost 2000 years after the destruction of Pompeii, visitors at the Field Museum in downtown Chicago will find themselves face-to-face with the actual victims of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, who in 79 A.D. found themselves buried underneath tons of volcanic ash. That is, until the early 1860s, when Pompeii excavation director Giuseppe Fiorelli devised a way to inject new “life” into the victims. Fiorelli and his team would pour liquid plaster into the hollows left by those who died and decomposed inside the ash, almost like pouring liquid foam into a mold. Once the plaster dried, the team would carefully scrape away the surrounding ash, and in so doing produce a set of human-shaped body casts that captured the victims’ final moments in heartbreaking detail. Until recently, these casts resided at the Pompeii Archaeological Site near Naples, Italy. Now, for the first time, eighteen of the original Fiorelli casts will be on display at the Chicago Field Museum alongside several artworks and artifacts found in the city’s ruins. The museum will also introduce an exciting new attraction to accompany the exhibit. The attraction, entitled “Pompeii Lives!,” will utilize state-of-the-art visual, auditory, and even olfactory technology to create a gripping simulation of Pompeii’s final hours.
The exhibit opens on Saturday, October 14, at 5:00 PM. Tickets for the exhibit can be found online, with participation in “Pompeii Lives!” included in the price of admission.
I have learned since beginning this work that the above article, which was originally published on the Chicago Field Museum’s website and which I meant to use as a form of grimly ironic scene-setting, has since been taken down. I don't know exactly when this occurred, as I first copied it into this document some time ago. Regardless, navigating to the article’s old web address now yields a page that reads 404: NOT FOUND in large, coarse script. It may very well be that the 250-word blurb above is the only remaining record of the Field Museum’s online advertising for the exhibit. That’s probably not particularly interesting to you, but I believe there is a power in keeping these records, in the act of preservation. If you are reading this close to the time of writing, you have no doubt heard about Pompeii and its demise ad nauseam over the past few weeks/months/years. If, however, you are reading this in the more distant future, your way of conceptualizing these past few weeks may be vastly different from my own. In fact, I
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know it will. For you, these moments will be condensed, flattened, a passage in a textbook, remembered, perhaps, as the beginning of some broader development or as an explicable anomaly — I don’t know. History will make what it will of these strange and uncertain times, but I have a story of my own to tell, a story that, to me, is more than just some historical record — it is everything. I begin with an individual about whom I know almost nothing, but whose memory nonetheless haunts most of my waking (and sleeping) hours. Her true name is a mystery, a mote of truth washed away by time. I call her the Crawling Woman.
She was first discovered sometime in February of 1861. At the time, Fiorelli and his team were busy scraping away the meters of pumice and hardened ash that covered much of what was once Pompeii. Somebody probably broke into a hollow section in the ash on accident, and then, once Fiorelli had examined the hollow and confirmed that a body was inside, poured liquid gesso — a mixture of plaster of Paris and glue — into the hollow. Once the plaster was dried and the remaining ash (carefully) removed, the team would be in possession of a full-body cast of the victim at the exact moment of their death. They called these casts calchi, which is how I will refer to them, noting as I do that the word does, in fact, literally translate to “cast.”
This particular calco was found in the “Garden of the Fugitives,” a vineyard located near the city’s southeastern end. The Crawling Woman was one of eleven victims who were buried there, all of whom survived the initial explosion, which occurred in the early afternoon on August 24, 79 A.D. and immediately buried the city in about two meters of pumice. Many surviving Pompeiians fled, but some did not, perhaps because they could not abandon their livelihoods or because they simply had nowhere else to go. Those who remained fled to higher ground, places like the Garden and the “Villa of the Mysteries” to the northwest. By nightfall, the sky had gone completely black with volcanic ash. Pliny the Younger compared it to the darkness “of a room when it is shut up, and all the lights put out.” I can picture it now, the city still as death underneath a dirty, starless sky, colored only by the sinister red glow of the magma that filled the volcano’s new mouth.
Early the next morning, a cloud of gas and sediment known as a “pyroclastic flow” began to spew from the volcano. It was over 1000 °F in temperature and rushed toward the city at speeds surpassing 100 kilometers/hour. The people in the Garden may have not even seen it coming before it was over, before the hot ash was filling their lungs, burying them as it roasted them alive. It was these victims that were later reborn as calchi, many of which retain visible facial expressions that are often vivid and highly evocative, particularly in the case of the Crawling Woman.
In all of my research, I have only been able to find two historical records that describe her in any detail. One is from a piece about the calchi published in National Geographic by Italian archaeologist Amedeo Maiuri, who is primarily concerned with making fanciful (and largely unfounded) assumptions about who each calco was in
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life.
The other document I found is from the journals of Giuseppe Fiorelli himself, who, in my opinion, was much more attuned to the tragic and terrible power of this woman. The expression on her face alone contains multitudes, if you are willing to look closely. Forgive me for quoting at length, but Fiorelli’s words are better than any I could come up with on my own:
Today, we finally sent the victims found in the Garden to the Museum. I am glad to see this work finally done, as their excavation has been a long and often excruciating process. In total, eleven bodies were found there and eleven calchi made.
I find certain individuals among the calchi to be quite affecting. Two of them appear to be children, one of whom appears no more than one or two years old and who lies face down with his limbs splayed; the other appears to be about ten, and is sitting up against the garden wall with his knees drawn up and his face buried between them. But it is one of the grown calchi that lingers in my thoughts most. The detail on this individual is among the best we have captured so far — one can see the very folds and furrows of her garments, the length and flow of which suggest those of a woman. She is lying on her stomach and looks to be attempting to crawl forward, one of her arms propped underneath her and the other reaching forward, away from her, toward what we do not know. But it is the look on her face that haunts me, the way her eyes and mouth contort with such agony and despair. I feel that I discover something new in her face every time I look upon her. I cannot help but speculate upon who she was in life, and who or what she may have been reaching toward in her final moments.
Even now, as she journeys to the Museum with the others, I find that I cannot exorcise the image of her from my mind, the strange and awful look on her face as she succumbed to the ash. I confess that I have had strange dreams concerning her, in which her plaster body becomes animated, as if by magic. I see her in the Garden in the shadow of the volcano, crawling, struggling inside the cloud of black ash, her arm outstretched toward something that always lies just outside her reach.
Following her (re)creation, she spent her days on display at the Naples National History Museum alongside the other calchi. Then, in the 1970s, the Italian government returned bodies to the archaeological site itself, where they remained until the construction of the Field Museum exhibit, when eighteen of them, including her, were shipped by boat to the United States.
Fiorelli’s words recall the ones that came to mind when I myself first laid eyes on her. It was the night the exhibit opened. Yes, that night. I was there on an assignment, doing a review of the exhibit for the Tribune. It wasn’t the sort of thing I would have normally covered, but my wife, Olivia, insisted that I ask Ralph Warner, my editor, if I could do a piece on the exhibit for the Arts & Life section, less because
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of any career advantages I might gain by doing so and more because Livvy — that’s what I call my wife — had a personal fascination with the calchi that she said began with a Roman history class she took in college. She’d always dreamed of us going to Italy and seeing them, although my journalist’s salary combined with her teacher’s salary made for a rather feeble traveling budget. Now, looking back, I can’t help but wonder if there was money that could have been found somewhere, plans that could have been made.
I digress. The exhibit was on the Field Museum’s second floor, and looked to have been specially constructed for the calchi. The room itself was large and oblong, with the exit sitting in the middle of one of the shorter walls. The two longer walls were decorated to resemble the exteriors of an ancient Roman forum. Stalls, replete with columns and buttresses, ran in parallel along the length of the room, displaying artifacts and their associated plaques like merchandise. Taking up the entire wall opposite the entrance was an enormous screen, extending the room’s physical façades along a digital street toward a digital horizon. Towering above it all, its flanks carpeted with vegetation, was Vesuvius, its peak unbroken and serene underneath the cloudless sky.
And then, of course, there were the calchi, in all of their crude, uncanny glory. They lay individually on two-foot-tall black marble pedestals that were spread around on the floor, with plaques describing where each victim was found and what (if anything) was known about them. There were no barriers around the pedestals, no ropes or Plexiglass to keep somebody from climbing in. Or out.
Livvy and I idled around, tracing invisible Family Circus scribbles as we meandered among the pedestals, me crawling notes on a legal pad while she held my arm and effused about the calchi, most of which resembled crude clay figures, vaguely human-shaped but lacking in finer detail. They were also smaller than we were, around 5 feet to 5 feet, six inches tall by my estimation — no doubt the product of the much harsher realities of ancient Roman life. One calco was in the shape of a dog, and was, predictably, a fan favorite, due to both its novelty and its poignantly familiar pose — the dog, at time of death, was on its back with its legs splayed, reminiscent of a modern pet dog pleading for affection. For my part, there was one particular calco that I found myself returning to again and again, and that was, of course, the Crawling Woman. Her pose, the unreadable expression on her face — she just felt so much more alive than the others. I must have led Livvy back to that same pedestal three or four times, at which point she flicked my ear and asked me if I had a crush on her or something. I laughed it off and asked her how she knew it was a ‘her
“I mean, obviously I don’t know for sure,” she said. “I just… know, somehow.”
“Fascinating.”
“I’m serious! Look at the clothes she’s wearing. It looks like some kind of dress.”
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“I guess it does.”
“And,” she continued, fixing her glasses in the self-conscious way she always did when her inner know-it-all came out, “She’s clearly reaching for something. That, plus the look on her face… I think the only thing that could make a woman make that face and reach out like that, even while she’s being burned alive, would be her child.”
I bumped her with my shoulder, saying, “What, you don’t think a woman could love her husband that much?”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, stop it, you. Of course she can — it’s just a different kind of love. I think she looks desperate, but also… resilient, I guess, even in the throes of death. It’s fierce, the kind of love only a mother can have.” I’m sure I rolled my eyes at that, though it pains me to admit it now. But that was my Livvy, who could easily wax poetic for hours on end about the Romans, whom she loved so much that she made her living teaching their language to teenagers. She was quite popular among her students, particularly the boys, who I am sure were more than fond of their beautiful and ebullient Latin teacher.
I could tell Livvy was moved by the image she’d conjured up of this woman, as she always was on the subject of parenthood, even though she knew that those allusions made me uncomfortable. I was personally content with our humble life together, but we were both in our early thirties already, and in time, big decisions would have to be made. I had all of the usual worries about how our salaries would support us if we chose to add to our little family, but I think I felt, deep down, that we would find a way, just like we always had. At the very least, we always had a future together to look forward to. At the very least, we had tomorrow.
I know I need to finish telling you the story of that night, or, rather, one of the many stories that intersected there, most of which will forever remain untold, each petrified in its own solid white body. And yet, as the moment arrives, I find that the words aren’t coming easily, even though reciting stories is what I do for a living. Or, rather, did.
Perhaps I am thinking too much like a journalist, whose task it is to filter, to take in an overabundance of information and make sense of it. Perhaps I need to start thinking like an historian, who deals not with too much information, but too little, who must piece the world together, rather than sift it apart. I must grow comfortable with not knowing, not understanding. Both the journalist and the historian must contend with the same basic truth, which is that our lives are far too big for mere words to capture. We do our best — we collect our sources, we write our articles, our dissertations — but these works, they can never contain us, our thoughts, feelings, hopes, anxieties, triumphs, losses. They can’t contain me, they can’t contain the Crawling Woman, and they certainly can’t contain my Livvy. But I will try, inadequate though my efforts may be. I will try.
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“Attention, everyone — our thrilling new attraction, Pompeii Lives!, will begin in five minutes, so get comfortable and hold onto your loved ones, because tonight, Pompeii falls!”
Admittedly, my memories from that night are less than precise, but I clearly remember the moment the simulation began. Exactly five minutes after the announcement, the overhead lights turned off, leaving us in a semi-darkness broken only by the light of the giant screen. Low, percussive music began to play, music that sounded like a fast-beating heart, like fleeing footsteps, like the whirling of embers over a burning city.
Livvy and I stood to the right, facing the screen. I was learning against one of the fake columns, my arm around her while she rested her head on my shoulder. Suddenly, a booming voice thundered from hidden speakers, and told us a little bit about the day of the eruption, how Vesuvius is part of the Campanian Arc, which is a series of volcanoes that runs across the Italian peninsula; how the earthquake that had leveled much of the city in 62 A.D. was most likely a product of the same fault line that had produced Vesuvius; how the people of Pompeii had no way of knowing that Vesuvius was no mere mountain, as they had always thought, but instead a longdormant volcano that was fit to burst from the massive deposit of magma that had accumulated inside of it over the course of several millennia. The voice over ended, and then the rumbling began, barely audible at first but then growing so loud that it felt as if the room itself really was shaking. Livvy squeezed my hand. I kissed her warm auburn hair and held her tighter just as the on-screen Vesuvius exploded, making a terrible noise as loud and thunderous as cannonfire, as if the whole mountain had been filled with dynamite. An enormous column of red-orange magma screamed from the new mouth it had torn in the mountain’s apex, launching a shower of flaming rocks that rained down on the on-screen buildings and set them aflame.
Then came the smells. The museum mentioned on its site that the exhibition would include ‘olfactory technology,’ and so it did, the acrid smell of ash and burning wood filling the air as the music reached a percussive crescendo, underscored by a cacophony of indecipherable screams and cries. On-screen, a tremendous cloud of ash, black and opaque as rock, spewed from the volcano, blocking out the sky and darkening the exhibition room even further, so that only the dim orange light from the on-screen fires remained. Then the music faded to a low thrum, leaving us to sit there and rest, the city silent save for the sound of the crackling flames. Livvy squeezed my hand again. I squeezed it back. There was a long, hushed moment, like a held breath. Then, somewhere in front of us, we heard the first crack. It was loud, like a branch snapping, and didn’t sound like it came from the speakers. Livvy and I both looked that way, thinking that
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somebody had dropped something. But they hadn’t. What we had heard was the sound of a plaster body moving its head for the first time.
It was the Crawling Woman. She was the first. We saw her outstretched arm, outlined by the orange light from the screen, rotate at the shoulder with another crack. Then the arm bent and shifted, with a sound like stones sliding against one another, until it was at her side, palm facing down. More cracks sounded as she engaged her legs and other arm in an effort to push herself up before falling back down with a thump. I saw more people turn around at the noise, and watched their expressions freeze as they saw what we were already seeing. Nobody said a word. We all just watched her, utterly transfixed. Another voice over began above us, but we barely noticed. Next to me, I heard Livvy whisper, “My God.”
Then, we heard another large crack, behind us this time. Then another. The cracks echoed around us like fireworks as more and more calchi began to move. Somebody in front of us shrieked, and it was like a floodgate opened. A swell of people began to move quickly toward the exit, toward us. I grabbed Livvy’s hand and started to pull her in that same direction, but I felt her pull the opposite way. She didn’t move. “Livvy!” I cried. “What are you doing? The casts, they’re — we need to go, Livvy, right now.”
“This is incredible,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me. “They’re… they’re alive.” I pulled on her wrist, harder this time, and she responded in kind. “Wait!” she said. “I want to see.”
“See what?”
“The casts, Mark! Don’t you want to see what they do?”
“For God’s sake, Livvy, no!”
All around us, people were running. Most of the calchi had managed to stagger to their knees and were attempting to stand up fully, although most of those that tried to stand ended up falling to the museum floor, their limbs and torsos breaking apart as people tripped and fell over their heavy plaster bodies.
I was still tugging on Livvy’s hand, begging her to come with me, when something small and white slammed into her from the side. Livvy fell backwards, still gripping my hand, pulling me with her as she fell. I saw her eyes, wide with shock, her mouth open in an ‘O’ of surprise. We were falling toward one of the black pedestals. I saw one of its sharp corners rising up to meet us, and all I could think was, her head, her poor head, she’s going to hit her head. I heard a terrible sound, like the breaking of an eggshell, as I landed on my side and felt all of the air leave my lungs. Then something hit me in the head — I think it was one of the other guests, kicking me by accident as they fled. For about thirty seconds, maybe longer, the world was soft, fluid. I had impressions of sights and sounds and colors, but that was all. When I came to, all I heard was the music, each percussive beat making my head throb. I looked to the side, and that was when I saw Livvy.
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She was lying on her side, facing me, her eyes just inches from mine. One of her arms still hung across my body. Her eyes were open, but there was no light in them, no life. Her glasses lay on the floor next to her head. One of the lenses had fallen out. It lay in the spreading pool of dark blood that I realized, with dawning horror, was Livvy’s. I felt something drop inside of me as I scrambled to my knees and knelt over her. I saw the dark red stain matting the back of her hair, the blood dripping from the corner of the pedestal where her head had struck it. I could have screamed, but I didn’t. I didn’t even cry. I watched my world fall apart in that museum, and all I could do was stare, stare at her beautiful eyes, as if my will alone could bring the light back into them.
I saw a shadow fall over Livvy’s face. I looked, and there was the Crawling Woman, standing over me. She still had that awful look on her face, filled with despair and pain and bewilderment and a million other things, and for a moment, I understood. I understood how somebody could feel that, for I could feel those same feelings, snaking their way through my insides like black tendrils.
I don’t know how long we spent looking at each other, silent. It was as if we were communicating in some way that went beyond speech, beyond motion. Then, there was a flash, a loud bang, and her right arm exploded, her hand and forearm vanishing in a flash of white dust. I looked behind her and saw a security guard brandishing his sidearm at her with two violently shaking hands. She barely had time to turn her head before part of it was blown off, exposing the ancient brown skull underneath. The guard shot at her again and again, destroying a section of her with every blast. Finally, he hit her shin, severing her foot from her body, and she fell. When she hit the floor, she shattered completely, her body breaking apart into a mess of white plaster chunks and dark brown bones. The security guard ran to me, asking me if I was all right, telling me that an ambulance was on its way. I didn’t respond. I just knelt there, barely sensible, staring at Livvy's body, my Livvy’s body. I felt cold and numb. I no longer felt like a person. I was only an artifact, taken forever from a world that could never again be, just like everything else in that wretched place.
I don’t remember much from the following weeks. I know that they happened, but I can’t recall where, exactly, I spent my days, or how I passed the time. I remember having dreams, lots of them, vivid and unsettling, and while any direct memories of those dreams have since faded like old wounds, I apparently had the foresight to record their contents on my legal pad, the same one that contained my unused notes about the exhibit. It would appear that I had the same few dreams repeatedly, with minor variations. Here are a couple of the most representative (and coherent) examples, with no corrections made for grammar, spelling, or punctuation:
10/19
Dominic Borg
— I am in the city again, but the skies are clear this time. Livvy is all there with me, not speaking. We are on vacation, the city is empty, no people, no tourists and the buildings look like new. She grabs my wrist, takes me into one of the buildings, the stairs are long and winding and impossible and the torches are still lit. We arrive in a hallway, take the door on the left. A bedroom, bed with [indecipherable] on it. Chair in the corner. Strange wooden objects on floor — toys??
— Then Livvy dissapears and the crawling woman is there but shes standing up and then the room begins to shake and i look out the window and an avalanche is coming toward us and when the black is spewing through the windows everything disappears
— Woke up sweating through my nightshirt, head pounding, took aspirin, did not sleep rest of night, fourth time in a row
10/24
— I am on a beach, but i know this one, the cliffs, it’s the beach on Lake MI where i proposed to L. She and i are walking along the shore, she spots an island off in the distance. island is [indecipherable]
— she says she wants to go, and i ask how will we get there, and she says why don’t we walk? and I do not question this
— then i turn and L. is gone and then C. W. is there and she is silent, just looking at me as the sky turns black
— snippets after that. strange images. vignettes. erotic — dreamt of making love to a woman who is not Livvy in a strange dark room. this bothers me immensely — dreamt that we were back in the museum alone and L. was upset with me and i kept asking her why and she wouldnt tell me, woke up screaming, but was also in a state of physical arousal. could not bear to remain in bed alone and lay on couch for rest of night
Looking back, I noticed that at around this point, I no longer bothered to note when I could not sleep, likely because there was hardly a single night when I could sleep. This was the last entry I made, dated November 2:
— i am in a garden, vineyards rolling away
— sky is black
— surrounded by people, they resemble people i saw at exhibit
— someone screams far away, i see the wall of smoke pass through the garden, people collapse and scream and writhe around
— i see a woman collapse, reaching out just like CW, but she looks like L — last victim is a boy, sits against the rock wall with his knees tucked up, crying. then nothing
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As all of this was going on, the world outside was in utter chaos. The first news articles, including those from my beloved Tribune, were vague in their descriptions of the night’s events. I was not involved — I spent the night of October 14 at the hospital, where I waited while the doctors tried in vain to save Livvy. She was declared dead at 7:09 P.M. I spent that night sleeping fitfully in my car in the hospital parking lot, unable to bear going home and spending the night alone in our queen bed. During that time, I received half a dozen calls from Ralph Warner (my editor) that all went unanswered. Just after midnight, Sarah Parr, one of our sports writers, called me. I answered, and she asked me where I was, and I told her. She asked why I was there, and I told her that, too. She gasped, said, “Oh my God, Mark,” and asked me if I needed anything. I told her no, which was true. I only ever needed one thing, and she was gone now. Sarah began to cry, and asked me if she could tell Ralph. I said that was fine, and she hung up. Not long after that, Ralph called and left a message, apologizing for bothering me and telling me how heartbroken he was and that I should take whatever time I needed, don’t worry about coming in. I didn’t call him back. All I wanted was to sleep, to disappear, although as it turned out, there was no relief in that, either.
When the first article about the exhibit appeared in the next day’s Tribune, this was the headline:
VIOLENCE AT NEW POMPEII EXHIBIT: ONE DEAD, SEVERAL INJURED
The article goes on to quote then-chief of Chicago P.D. Brian O’Shaughnessy, who claimed that the police were “looking into potential suspects” and that there was reason to believe that the “large-scale theft of priceless artifacts” had occurred. Obviously, my colleagues were trying to be cautious and avoid making outrageous claims amid what was no doubt a frenzied and highly confused situation. That was a mistake. As it turned out, even amid the chaos, some of the museumgoers managed to get cell phone videos of the calchi. These videos were shaky and unfocused, often yielding only brief glimpses of white, humanoid shapes before ending or showing only the floor as those taking the videos fled. Anyone could see that something had happened, something that was going unacknowledged by both the museum and the press, who maintained that claims about ‘living statues’ were baseless, absurd, and in poor taste.
In all fairness, there was no way to verify directly that the calchi had ever been alive, since almost all of them were destroyed either by gunfire or by accident before they could find their way out of the building. That is, except for the dog, which, as far as I can tell, was never found and may very well occupy the back alleys of Chicago to this day. Regardless, the only pieces of evidence corroborating the ‘living dead’
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theory were a handful of crude cell phone videos and the chunks of plaster and bone littering the museum floor. As a result, the media continued to speak of that night in sensational generalities, mentioning “violence” and a “stampede” but little about what might have instigated the violence. By Sunday afternoon, the cell phone videos had gone completely viral. You may remember this part — you couldn’t go on social media without being inundated with a feed full of the same few screenshots and video clips showing the calchi standing up. I personally received several texts and calls (to which I never responded) from various friends and acquaintances, asking me if I knew what had happened, and what people were saying about it at the Tribune. For the first time since the city was rediscovered in 1748, the world was awash in Pompeii fever.
Online pundits, unable to resist an opportunity to perform, began sharing the videos with their followers, accompanied by pithy lines about how “The people deserve answers” and “If the Field Museum wants to be rid of these rumors, all it has to do is release the footage.” That last one was referring, of course, to the museum’s official security camera footage from that night. Across platforms, the tag #releasethefootage grew meteorically, and the mainstream press conscious of the criticism it received over its initial coverage and more than willing to redirect the public’s ire away from themselves, began to join in on the outrage. For a time, the museum was defensive and refused to release the footage, which only created further outcry.
I will mention, though it pains me to do so, that I was part of the initial backlash toward the press when they refused to acknowledge the rumors about the calchi. At the time, I still had my Tribune email address, which I used to harass Ralph Warner with increasingly fire-and-brimstone language, urging him to just be honest about that night. I won’t share the emails here, both for brevity’s sake and due to my own embarrassment at their contents, but you can probably imagine what they were like based on the last message that I received from Ralph before my Tribune email address was officially disconnected:
Subject: Re: The Tribune is Failing the People
Mark,
I know these last few days have been extremely difficult for you, and you have our utmost sympathy. However, the tone of your recent emails has been unacceptable. Not only should you not be contacting us while you are on leave, but given the tone and general incoherence of your messages, I am extremely concerned about your mental health. I suggest that you spend less time online and seek professional help. If you persist in contacting me or any other member of the Tribune in this manner, we will be forced to take firmer action. We value the work you have
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done here, and we very much hope that this will not be necessary. Ralph
Finally, exactly one week after the exhibit first opened, the museum caved and released the footage to the Tribune with no additional comments. I watched every second, right up until the moment the paramedics carried Livvy out the door with me in tow. It was a precious agony to see Livvy alive again, if only for a short time. I watched the Crawling Woman stumble from her pedestal and fall onto her hands and knees. I saw her get to her feet, look around her, and stumble forward, moving from pedestal to pedestal as the crowd eddied around her, her movements growing more fluid and at the same time more frantic as she did so. I can’t imagine that the calchi had particularly acute senses, which may explain how she ended up slamming into me as I tried to pull Livvy toward the exit. I shut my eyes and sobbed when her head hit the marble, something I’d blissfully missed the first time.
I watched the Crawling Woman trace the same path over and over again. By that point, I’d already had several dreams involving her, found her occupying my thoughts almost as much as Livvy did. The memory of her haunted me, the look she gave me as I huddled over Livvy’s body, suffering over the work she had wrought. I wanted to understand, to know this entity, this thing that had taken my Livvy away from me. I thought of the dreams, those fragments of thought and memory that my restless mind was convinced meant something, something significant. I thought especially of that last dream, the one in the garden. That little boy, sitting with his knees drawn up as the woman reached for him. Something occurred to me. I opened a new tab and searched for pictures of the calchi, filtering the results to only show those published before October 14. It took some scrolling, but I found what I was looking for. It was laying on a patch of gravel inside of a glass display case, which appeared to be at the Pompeii site itself. The calco in question was a small, thin form made of hard, white plaster, and sitting with its knees drawn up, its face hidden.
Just like the boy in the dream.
I stared at the picture for a long, long time, thinking about what to do with this knowledge. Was it enough to simply know that he was out there? Could I bear to possess that knowledge, to continue with my life as before, having done nothing with it? Honestly, my only response to that last question was, What life?
So I opened up one more tab and went to the website of the O’Hare International Airport. I bought a ticket through Southwest Airlines, and when I was done, I ran a hand through my hair and blinked at the confirmation screen in front of me. It said that I was scheduled to take off that Saturday from ORD to NAP — ORD as in Chicago, and NAP as in Naples International Airport, in Italy. This might seem wildly irrational to you, an ill-conceived whim from a grieving, sleepless mind. It probably was, at least in part. But to this day, I can’t help but wonder if there was
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something larger, more powerful at work, as if my choice was compelled by forces existing outside of myself. And so that Saturday, I drove myself to O’Hare and began a twenty-two hour flight to Naples, Italy.
The sky was clear and pale as I left the Pompeii Archaeological Site’s tourist center. The place was bustling, a steady stream of tourists walking up and down the Via dell’Abbondanza, the city’s stone-paved femoral artery. The site was closed for a couple of weeks following October 14 as the Italian government decided what to do with the calchi. However, there was no indication that the specimens at Pompeii were mobile, or ever had been. By all accounts, the events at the Field Museum were a freak incident, an anomaly that would nonetheless forever upend how many of us understood the world. The scientific community was reeling. Religiosity was reportedly on the rise, as was drug use. Nonetheless, the Italian government decided to keep the remaining calchi where they were, no doubt in anticipation of the massive increase in tourism to the site following its reopening.
As I walked westward along the Via dell’Abbondanza, I pulled out the map of the site I’d gotten at the front kiosk. The spot I was looking for was at the city’s southern end and was labeled on the map with a red letter “A.” It was only a few blocks away from the Amphitheatre, which I could see towering above the buildings ahead of me and to my right. As I walked, I looked at the empty one- and two-story buildings that lined either side of the street, their stone walls and rough-cut rectangular windows forming the crumbling, bleached skeleton of that lifeless place. I crossed the deep blue shadows they cast on the cobblestones, stopping to inspect the odd piece of Latin written on an exterior wall. To my left, watching me through the midday haze, was Vesuvius, its peak collapsed in on itself, a somber, permanent relic of that terrible day 2,000 years ago.
As I turned to my right, down a southeast-bound stretch of road that the map said was called the Via di Nocera, I thought that maybe I would take time to visit the public baths, the Temple of Venus, the Amphitheater. But I had somewhere else I needed to go first. I would like to tell you that I was somehow doing it to honor the Crawling Woman, but I know, deep down, that I was really doing it for myself, to see the source of all of the misery I felt, to convince myself that there was some kind of logic to it all, that it wasn’t just some horrible, meaningless accident. Finally, I reached the end of the Via di Nocera. The path terminated in a tall archway, which the map said was called the Nocera Gate. To the left of the path was a large, flat area covered in short, patchy grass — the Garden of the Fugitives, where she and the others had first been found all those years ago. I walked across the grass toward the opposite end, where a group of people stood clustered around a large display case. I walked up alongside them, and saw the white plaster bodies that lay behind the glass on a bed of gravel. There were only a few of them left now, the rest probably in pieces in a landfill thousands of miles away.
Dominic Borg
I found him right away. He was sitting against the wall directly in front of me. His knees were drawn up, his arms clasped around them, his face hidden. I didn’t know what I expected would happen when I saw him, but whatever it was, it didn’t. I just stared at him. This child. This boy, no more than ten, who may have been playing ball one day, or going to school, or following his mother through the market, when all of a sudden the earth began to shake and the sky turned black and fire rained down from the heavens. And when the end came, when the people around him were writhing on the ground, choking and burning to death inside the black cloud, all he could do was draw his knees up and wait for it to be over. It was a feeling I knew all too well.
I became lost in my thoughts, in picturing that final moment in the garden, his mother reaching feebly towards him as she died. I thought of that love, that special love Livvy had been talking about. I thought of what was taken away from us, the chance to have that love, to create it, together. My fists clenched at the unfairness of it, the cruelty. My eyes began to sting with tears. My breaths began to hitch. An older woman standing next to me heard me and asked if I was all right. I couldn’t speak, so I just shut my eyes and nodded. Her gaze lingered on me for a moment before she said, “I couldn’t believe it when I first heard about that museum. But I come here, and I look at these things, and it’s so sad, what happened here. It must have felt like the world was ending. I sometimes wonder if all they wanted was another chance to live.”
She stopped talking and looked back at the display. I thought about what she’d said. Another chance to live. Is that what all of this was about? They’d heard the sound of the eruption, found themselves immersed in that moment once again, and so they’d woken back up, in defiance of the volcano, of the black cloud that had swallowed them up, taken their lives away.
I don’t actually know if that’s what happened, whether those things really did come back to life in a kind of rejection of the injustices of that day. But I’d like to think so.
I turned away from the display, walked back to the path and followed it north until I was back to the Via dell’Abbondanza. Then I stood there, at the place where the roads crossed, wiping my eyes and looking up at Vesuvius, cursing it silently on behalf of the Crawling Woman, her son, and all of the others whose lives it had cut short. I felt them all there, with me, glaring at the mountain while it just sat there, collapsed, spent. Defeated.
For a moment, I felt as if you were there with me too, Livvy. I want you to know that I finally made the trip, just like you’d always wanted. Far too late, I know. But I found something there, something vital in a city that was once considered lost, erased from history in the blink of an eye. You were right after all, about the Crawling Woman. The thing she had defied death, defied history for — it was love. And I’m
Dominic Borg
sure that within the city, hidden beneath its splintered columns and eroded pathways, there are more such loves, loves so deep and so vital that they could wake the dead.
I now wonder if this was the Crawling Woman’s gift, though she may never have intended it as such. She died swallowed up in that black cloud and then emerged, centuries later, in defiance of it. I have seen that black cloud too, Livvy. I have felt its noxious fumes fill my lungs, blister my insides. But I have also seen the beautiful sky, the deep, sparkling waters stretching away from the city’s shores. I have seen what was lost and then found, what was thought to be dead join the living once more, if only for a brief, ecstatic moment. What I mean to say, my love, is that even now, some two thousand years later, Pompeii lives. And so do I.
AJAR HANMINLEE
CREATIVENONFICTIONPRIZE
ThirdPlace
Cassidy James Blaede | Unsplash
Ajar
Creative Nonfiction Prize Third Place
1.
The summer after I graduated high school, my friend Kazuo asked me if I could babysit his little brother for a week. Everyone in his family had been unusually busy with work or errands, and his mother wanted a face she had seen a couple times before. All I had to do was some basic meal prep, make sure no one broke a bone, and there would be no diapers: the kid had finished his potty training last month. For the most part, Kazuo said, I could just stay in the living room and mind my business.
That first afternoon I visited their home, Mrs. Tanaka greeted me at the front door. And I saw Yukio for the first time, standing on his mother’s toes in between her legs. He was a chubby kid, pudgy arms and legs, but something about his presence was commanding: he held a large, red toy truck in his right hand, proportional to Godzilla holding a life-sized truck. His other hand, meanwhile, was shoved halfway into his mouth. Standing like this, he just glared at me.
“Oh! Sorry about that,” said Mrs. Tanaka. “We were just arranging our shoes, weren’t we Yukio?”
I cleared my throat. “Hi, Yukio. Do you know who I am?”
He glanced up at his mother. Then he swiveled his head back to me, taking his hand out of his mouth.
“Dam Dam?”
“No—Yukio, that’s not what we practiced,” said Mrs. Tanaka. “Han - Min, remember? Say Han - Min.”
“Dam Dam,” he said again, still staring at me. This became the name he called me.
Yukio was three years old when I met him, a few months away from starting preschool. His mother had wanted to wait before school started to buy new clothes, so almost all his shirts ran a size or two small—you’d have to remember to pull his shirt down every so often to cover his belly button, his bare tummy jiggling around as he toddled around the house. Their home was massive, complete with lofty ceilings, winding hallways that led to unexpected doorways, a floor-to-ceiling window in the living room that overlooked downtown Singapore—but a lot of the furniture had layers of silver duct tape covering its sharp edges and corners. Throughout that first afternoon, I’d learn why. Yukio’s mind seemed to operate on random commands that an adult couldn’t control: I’m going to run, jump, somersault, climb that window, eat this remote, crawl beneath that desk, play with this comb, scream.
Later that afternoon, after his mother had left, he went over to his toy basket and tried to gather as many trucks as his body could hold. He fumbled several before
Hanmin Lee
settling on securing one truck in each hand, one under each arm, and one between his legs. Then, he waddled right past me and into the hallway, visiting each of his family members’ rooms. I heard him explain in halting Japanese and English what he had named each truck and how many years-and-months old he had been when he got it.
At one point, I heard a door shut in the middle of his explanation. Yukio scampered out of the hallway, his face crumpling as he let out a piercing scream. Kazuo’s head poked out of his door as though he was asking if anyone was going to take care of that. I panicked—hadn’t this been the exact sort of situation I was hired to prevent?
I found him in the utility room a few minutes later. He was squatted down in the corner in between two gray pipes, his face buried in his knees. “Yukio…?” I was just some larger person he had met for the first time a few hours ago, what if I’d make things worse?
“Hanmin! It’s Hanmin, remember? From the door? When you were putting away your shoes?”
Then, in one swift motion, he jumped up in the air into the shape of a starfish. “Dam Dam!”
Later that day, while I was walking through the hallway with a mug, something snatched it out of my hands. I saw Yukio zigzagging down the hallway with the mug in hand, his arms stuck out to the sides like an airplane. “Whoosh! Whoosh! Weeoooooor!” he exclaimed.
He reached up on his tippy-toes at the water dispenser, positioning the mug right be neath the tap. Then, with both hands, he pulled down on the lever as forcefully as he could, as if doing so would quicken the discharge. Once the mug began to overflow, he lifted it toward me with both hands, not bothering to turn off the running tap. He stared up at me until I was finished. From that moment on he followed me wherever I went.
2.
Last summer, I was working at an internship in Gangnam, a district in the south of Seoul. My father worked in Chungmuro, Seoul’s north, and our apartment was southeast of Gangnam—so every now and then he’d pick me up if we both got off work at the right times. Although in practice, there was no difference between getting driven by him and taking the bus. There was an express shuttle from near my company to our apartment, and it wasn’t like my father and I spoke in the car. I’d get in, and we’d exchange a few questions—“Did you have to wait long?” “No. How was work?” “Good.”—before driving for an hour in silence. On some days there would be the rain, torrents drumming so heavily against the steel car hood that we
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couldn’t talk anyways. On other days, my father would fiddle with the radio, turning to a top hits station that was playing some song he didn’t know the name of. And we’d just sit there, side by side in the all-black cab in, listening to “Espresso” by Sabrina Carpenter with deadpan expressions on our faces
We were supposed to be spending more time together. I had finished my military service in May, so I was staying at home in Korea for an extra couple months before returning to Stanford in the fall. I’d tell all my friends the same thing when they asked about my summer: “I’m spending time with family, which is really valuable.” But in reality, on most days I’d come home from work and go straight down to our apartment gym—by the time I got back my father would’ve already gone to his bedroom and fallen asleep. The next morning, I’d be woken up by the sound of him locking the front door on his way out. In this way we’d go days living in the same home without talking.
Some nights, when my mother was out meeting friends, my father and I went out for Korean barbecue. Hanwoo beef, he’d insist, because it was the most expensive kind. Neither of us would admit it, but barbecue restaurants helped because of how noisy they were: sizzling meat, customers calling across the room to get a waiter’s attention, the distant murmur of a TV playing talk shows. It filled the silence between us. I often wondered how we looked to everyone else in there, people laughing and clinking beers while we sat mute at our table, chewing and swallowing with no relish. My father would grill the first portion of meat, and before it finished searing I’d order the second portion—we’d keep going until the table was covered with smudged, empty plates, the tabletop grill switched off for the first time in half an hour. I wouldn’t even remember what I had eaten.
“The brisket,” he said after one meal, sitting across from me as he read through the receipt. “We didn’t have the brisket today. We’ll order that next time.”
“Okay,” I muttered, barely meeting his gaze. When we did talk, it was often about the future: restaurants to visit next time, errands to run later in the week, flights to book for later in the year. Anything that kept us from facing the present.
We left the restaurant and walked to the car, me a few feet behind him, before driving back home.
3.
Some days, when Yukio was particularly energetic, he and I would go down to the playground on the first floor of his apartment. This would be in the early afternoon, when other children a year older than him were coming home from preschool and playing on the swings with one another. But Yukio didn’t seem to take interest in them. While I made small talk to the other parents there, he’d sneak off beyond the swings to where the flowers grew, where he’d climb onto a bench and
Hanmin Lee
study the colored flora surrounding him.
Once, when I realized he was missing, I rushed over—“What is it? What is it?”— to find him fixated on a stray cat, squatted down at arm’s distance from the creature, its eyes gazing back at him with dilated pupils. But when I arrived, the cat scurried away into a bush. The wonder in Yukio’s eyes drained, and he returned to the bench.
“Wait, it’s okay! We just have to…” Before I could finish my sentence, I noticed Yukio had directed his complete focus to my mouth, as if whatever I said next held the secret to re-summoning the cat.
I closed my eyes. Shit. I cleared my throat, and, with a deep breath, stammered the best high-pitched “meow” I could. It sounded more like a strange yawn than anything close to a feline sound.
He giggled. “Again! Again!” I did my yawn again, to which he started laughing uncontrollably. The cat never came back—instead we played like this for the rest of the afternoon, sit ting on that bench hip-to-hip.
4.
After work one day, my father had texted me to meet him at Gangnam station, but I’d ended up going to the wrong exit. After fifteen minutes of crossing sidewalks and circling streets, I finally found him by an intersection, the stoplight still green. I yanked the door open and threw myself into the seat. He slammed on the accelerator.
“Why the hell would you go to Exit 5?” he snapped, cars behind us honking relentlessly.
“We always meet at Exit 5,” I said, still catching my breath. “Since when did we meet at 12?”
“I told you Exit 12 on Sunday. We’re picking up your medical records today, were you even listening?”
“How am I supposed to remember that if you just say ‘Gangnam?’”
He sighed. “Do you realize how late we’re gonna be now? They’ll send us to the back of the queue if we don’t go by seven, then traffic’s gonna get worse and we’ll be lucky to get home by—”
“Alright!”
The cabin fell silent, the engine’s whir the only sound filling the space.
“Are you still hot? I can turn the A/C down,” he said.
I didn’t reply.
5.
One afternoon, while Yukio and I were building Legos on the living room
Hanmin Lee
carpet, I caught a glimpse into one of the rooms at the far end of the hallway. There was a slight crack in the door, and I saw someone I hadn’t seen before: a man with slicked, jet black hair, wearing a white dress shirt buttoned to the top. The only radiance in the room was the desktop computer in front of him, glaring across the right side of his face. I could hear the faint clicks of his keyboard echoing down the hall.
Then, his eyes flicked toward me—for the briefest moment, our gazes met. Had he known I was watching him? I drew in a breath, about to gesture something to him, but before I could do anything he had snapped his gaze back to the screen. I couldn’t tell if he had meant to look at Yukio or me.
I wondered if I should go over and say hello. It was respectful in Korean culture, at least, to acknowledge hosts and greet everyone you met. Then again, it had already been a couple days since I started visiting their home. Mrs. Tanaka briefly mentioned on the first day that Yukio’s father was around, that he was working on an important project for this upcoming quarter—but I wouldn’t have known about him otherwise. I never saw him leave his room. I realized he must have eaten his lunches in there without me noticing, perhaps instant food products he could prepare at his desk while working.
Yukio tugged on my arm, letting out a soft whine. “Oh! Sorry about that,” I said, picking the pieces back up. A few minutes later I looked over at the room again, but the door was completely shut.
Shortly after, while we played with the Legos, I asked Yukio if he ever played with his dad. As soon as the question left my mouth, his fingers paused for the briefest moment—then he resumed without saying a word, twiddling the small bricks as though nothing had happened.
As the week went on, Yukio would start asking when Dam Dam was coming back to Singapore after this summer. Someday, I’d tell him, but I had never actually considered when. It would probably have to be after college, at least four years later —long enough for Yukio to re-experience the entirety of the life he knew now.
I imagined him starting preschool a few months after I left: walking to school in his new fitted clothes, being surrounded by a circle of peers for the first time in his life. By the next year, he would have made friends—names he’d mention at home when sharing stories about his day. Would he ever talk about our garden visits? How much taller would he have grown, would he still play with his toy trucks? If I saw him again, would he still call me Dam Dam?
6.
In elementary school, during my winter break visits to Korea, I’d watch my
Hanmin Lee
father play basket ball at Korea University, his alma mater. Fifteen to twenty people showed up every week, most of the others college students or recent graduates: fiveon-five full court, ten-minute games, winner stays on. Sometimes, the same team would play four or five games in a row, towards the end of which you’d see players slacking off and perhaps hoping for a loss. My father, however, was the opposite. Five-year-old me gaped from the sidelines as he bolted up and down the court, the vigor in his steps only intensifying as each game passed.
On one play, my father played possum on defense, letting the younger player waltz past him with the ball. Just when the opponent found himself with an open lane ahead, my father swung his arm around the opponent’s body and slapped the ball loose from behind. A paced and effortless swing, as if he could tell where the ball was with his eyes closed—a move he had perfected over decades of playing in that very gym.
His team gained possession, and everyone scrambled down the court. While the ball ricocheted around the court like a pinball machine, my father beelined towards the corner, rooting each foot behind the three-point line and squaring them towards the hoop. He stood there silently, shoulders loose and palms open, focused utterly on the ball; he was certain it would find him one way or another.
When it did, defenders shouted, “Jihun! Someone get Jihun!” My father hoisted the ball above his forehead and flicked it upwards, snapping into a rapid flutter as it sailed into the basket.
The entire gym erupted. Teammates roared as if they were witnessing a rockstar, opponents grumbled to one another about who was supposed to be guarding him. But my father didn’t react to any of that. Instead, he turned around and looked straight at me.
“Did you see that? Did you see that?”
I shrieked, flailing my stubby arms in the air as I mimicked his jump shot. He ran over and tugged at my hoodie with a chuckle, before jogging back to the other side of the court.
7.
Last Chuseok, my family and relatives gathered at my maternal grandmother’s house for dinner. I was the youngest there by a few decades, so for most of the night I had been sitting back while my relatives chattered through different topics: workplace gossip, real estate prices, vacation plans. At one point, the conversation shifted to parenting styles. They went around guessing everyone’s type: my uncle was the fun parent who took the kids to arcades, for example, while my grandmother used to be the one to check report cards and set curfews.
Eventually, they turned to my father. He was the strict type, according to an
Hanmin Lee
aunt: the “tough love parent.” Other relatives nodded along, noting how sparingly he had spoken through out the meal. For most of the night he had been sitting rigidly upright at his seat, taking modest bites out of his food and chewing everything with his mouth clenched shut.
Then, I heard a scoff. “Tough love?” my grandmother said, sitting at the far end of the table. “Are you kidding?” My father’s head swiveled towards her, his eyes widening—but before he could say anything, she continued:
“One night, a few months after Hanmin was born, I heard this voice coming from there,” she said, looking over at the bathroom door. “Everyone else was asleep. I was going to the kitchen for a glass of water, and I suddenly heard Jihun’s voice,”— she switched to a cooing tone—“‘Oh, how are you so adorable! Who’s my baby boy, oh yes you are!’”
My relatives burst out laughing with her. “Didn’t think anyone was around, did you?” she said, my father’s cheeks flushed to a bright pink.
“Okay, I never—”
“I heard smooching sounds too! Gosh, the money I’d pay to see his face when I knocked on the door. You were like, ‘Oh, shit—sorry, I’ll be out soon.’ I was rolling on the floor. Can you guys imagine that? Getting caught talking to a mirror by your mother-in-law?
“Tough love?” she continued, leaning into my father’s shoulder as a warm smile spread across her face. “Please, this guy is the biggest idiot I know.”
Everyone’s eyes drifted to me, and all I could do was grin nervously. My father looked over too from across the table, offering an awkward smile amidst the guffaws. For that brief moment, though, we smiled together.
8.
I typed “Tanaka” into the search bar. I had lost contact with almost everyone from that summer: the following fall I moved to Korea for a gap year, proceeded by three years of college and military service. I had tried not to think about Yukio too much during that time, which became easy amidst all the moving around. But a few days ago I had come across a post from Kazuo in my feed, and it brought him to mind.
I hit search. A list of profiles sprawled out, those with mutual friends at the top, and then I saw him: Yukio, looking back at me in Mrs. Tanaka’s profile photo. He stood next to his mother in a family portrait, uploaded on New Year’s Day earlier this year.
I wasn’t sure what I had expected. But the first thing I noticed was his hair: a flowing middle part, far from the scruffy cut he had back when I babysat him. Mrs. Tanaka had once told me she’d cut Yukio’s hair herself whenever it grew past the
Hanmin Lee
middle of his forehead, he’d get whiny whenever the hairs started poking his eyes; here, however, the ends of his hair draped just below his eyebrows. He stood poised next to his mother in a white shirt that fit snugly, the edges resting just at his wrists and falling neatly below his waist.
Much of the baby fat on his face was gone too, revealing an angular jawline that completely reshaped his features. He smiled, though not in the same impish way as before: his lips were only curved slightly with just his front few teeth peeking through, as though he was holding it for the photo.
I scrolled down. Photos from a trip to Austria, Yukio standing in front of a castle with a peace sign; a family picture at a wedding, him in a navy suit, looking away at something outside the frame. In one photo where Yukio rode Kazuo’s shoulders, Kazuo’s back was hunched over until you could only see the top half of his face. His body wasn’t much bigger than Yukio’s now.
I was about to close the app. But then, I came across another photo: a close-up shot of Yukio, his chin smudged with cake icing. His eyes were crinkled as though he had been half-embarrassed to be photographed. The caption read: Yukio turns 7 today. He speaks English, Japanese, German, and Mandarin. Such a sweet boy.
I leaned in closer to the screen, rereading the caption. Four languages? Speaking skills had been Mrs. Tanaka’s biggest worry about Yukio before he started preschool; after he kept mispronouncing my name, she had asked me to read as many English books to him as I could, but most of the time he’d doze off before we could finish reading the first few pages. Even I had gotten worried by how often he fumbled simple words.
A chuckle escaped me as I thought about it: Yukio the polyglot. Then I found myself wondering, what were his language classes like? Did his personality change between the languages? How did he say his name in each one?
9.
On the drive home after the last day of my internship, a few days before I left for Stanford, my father and I found ourselves stuck in rush hour traffic. Our car had barely inched forward in fifteen minutes. Off to the sides, beyond the concrete barricades, I noticed a basketball court beneath a nearby bridge. I turned to my father and asked if he wanted to go down and take some shots.
He looked at me with a scrunched face. “What?”
“There’s a court down there,” I said. “Do you wanna shoot around for a bit?”
“You want to play basketball right now?”
“Yeah, why not? Just while the traffic clears up. I think there’s a spare ball in the trunk.”
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It was the first genuine question I had asked him in the car all summer, excluding things like what the time was or where we were going. He took his phone out from his pocket, presumably estimating how much longer the drive would take.
“Just while the traffic clears up,” he said.
He pulled off the road and drove down. I hadn’t noticed from afar, but as we got closer, I realized the court looked like no one had played on it for years: its concrete surface was speck led with sun-bleached markings, just a few wisps of netting clinging to each hoop. I also hadn’t considered what we were wearing—tight-fitting office wear, leather Oxfords—clothes we had kept pristine all summer for our business meetings. We made it to the court nonetheless. As we stepped onto the court, I suggested he take some shots first while I rebounded for him. He walked over to the key. When he began shooting, however, I noticed that something looked different: his knees were bent more, thrusting his body more forwards than upwards. It was something novices or children typically did to make up for a lack of power. The ball spun sluggishly off his fingertips, closer to a pushing motion than the sharp flicker I had watched as a child. Most of his shots still went in, but the ones that didn’t all missed in the same way: falling a couple inches short of the rim.
It was the first time in years I found myself on a basketball court with him. The last time had been high school, when we’d still play once or twice a year together— back then I hadn’t noticed anything different about his playing from when I was little. He had run, jumped, and shuffled his feet with the same tenacity as a decade ago, the most passionate player on the court.
The arc of his shots gradually flattened, and he started to miss more than he was making. “Let me catch a breath,” he said, stooped forward with his hands on his knees. “You shoot now.”
I stepped into place at the top of the key. Bouncing the ball a couple times, it already felt heavy against my palms; I hadn’t played in months. The first shot clanged off the left side of the rim. “Try again,” he said. The next attempt rattled in and out. Another missed the rim completely.
“Maybe you need some momentum,” he said. “Get a running start and step into the shot. I’ll pass it to you when you’re near the key.”
I jogged over to the midcourt line, and as I ran down the court my father whipped me the ball. Swish. “Nice. This time from the corner.”
I made a few more. “There you go!”
I took shot after shot, starting to find my rhythm—soon enough I was sprinting down the court, sinking six, seven, eight shots in a row. My dress shoes scuffed against the concrete with every pivot, the stitching in my pants pulling and tearing, but I could only see the ball soar ing into the net over and over. “We’ve got Steph Curry here!” my father shouted, his eyes track ing each shot as it glided through the air, his face lighting up when the ball splashed into the net. He chased after every
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rebound tirelessly, as though he had found some new source of energy he couldn’t reach when he was shooting.
Then, just before I rose up for another shot, I caught sight of the freeway behind the hoop—the traffic had cleared up. I froze.
“What’s wrong?” he said, before looking over too. “Oh.”
We stood awkwardly in our places, both of our chests still heaving as we watched the last few cars crawling along the freeway. “I guess we can go now,” he finally said, and he turned around and started walking back to the car.
10.
One night, while my father worked late, I had been having dinner with just my mother. She told me stories about her and my father from when they were younger: the fried chicken shop they went to on their first date, his favorite red jeans that she had despised, how he’d follow her to watch musicals he knew nothing about.
“He wanted to get a place in Apgujeong, you know,” she said. “Eat at five-star restaurants every week, shop for foreign brands at the new mall, travel to every continent. Just the two of us, for the rest of our lives.
“He said he was no good with children,” she continued, shaking her head with a smirk. “Thought he couldn’t be a father.”
11.
We were back on the road. I sat in the passenger seat while my father drove us again, the passing breeze drifting in through the rolled-down windows. It was nearing dusk now; the sunset glistened down around us, the entire pavement bathed in its glowing amber. Neither of us was saying anything.
In that moment, I didn’t know why, but something prompted me to look over at him. The light from outside shimmered on his face, and I could see everything: the gray hair roots be neath his black-dyed hair, the deep-carved wrinkles running down from the corner of his eye. The unbuttoned cuffs of his shirt swaying in the gentle evening breeze, his sleeves rolled up haphazardly. He didn’t seem to notice me looking over. He just gazed ahead at the empty freeway, taking slow, unhurried breaths. I had never looked at him so closely before.
THEBIGWIN CHLOEWALSH
CREATIVENONFICTIONPRIZE
FirstPlace
Sérgio Alves Santos | Unsplash
The Big Win
Creative Nonfiction Prize
First Place
The day after the 2024 presidential election I became involved in a workplace sexual harassment case. This wasn’t my first harassment experience and was hardly the most inspiring. But it was my first reported violation as an employee, which felt like a marker of being a woman in my twenties.
The Wednesday evening began like every other with the same regulars sitting in the same bar seats. But there was a lot to celebrate with what they called the “big win” (surprisingly, this is Northern California). Tabs were twice as high and voices were overly rowdy. By the time my eyes caught Tony and his cane making their way towards me, I knew it wasn’t going to be good. His words slurred their way through an unwanted confessional of (1) how badly he wanted to take my hair down from that damned ponytail I was forced to wear and (2) how much he loved staring at me for hours on end because I was just so fucking hot. This would have been a lay-up for anyone left-leaning had the election not been lost the night prior—a realized caricature of misogynistic men (preferably the white and old ones) in Trump’s reclaimed America. I gave him a weak smile and a thank you.
Tony rejoined his wife at the bar and I ranted to an assistant manager with a can-youbelieve-how-disgusting-he-is-esque eye roll. Kevin’s reaction, however, was entirely unfamiliar—a definitive, no questions-asked declaration that Tony should be banned from here out. At the moment, it felt like a colossal overreaction. I tried to tell him there was no need to escalate it to upper management, because sure, it was gross, but it’s not like he touched me. Kevin just shook his head and repeated two things: (1) “That behavior is not okay” and (2) “We do not support sexual harassment, Chloe.” I agreed with the first part.
The truth was that men crossed the line with female staff members all the time. This was a known fact, and it wasn’t always a bad one. Us girls were the ones with invitations to Ralph’s estate in Iowa (supposedly lovely in the summer) and countless $20s in our pockets from Max, hand-slipped with a “you’re so beautiful I could just kidnap you” (this one sounds creepy, but his walker, thick Polish accent, and caretaker Cindy made it somewhat endearing). Restaurant rules—requiring girls to wear dainty necklaces, tight low-cut tops equally eye-catching as classy, and matte red lipstick—only reinforced a time-honored traditionalism. The way I’d seen it, the men were sleazy; but they were old and usually non-threatening and we catered to them nonetheless. It was the implicit price for access to the best tip pool in a 30 mile radius. But Kevin’s conviction that this was harassment gave me something new: A
Chloe Walsh
reconsideration that something should, and would, change.
I called my dad the following morning to get his opinion on the matter. Any certainty I felt about the incident’s wrongness was short lived. His solution-oriented response missed its mark, a well-intended albeit dated if you aren’t going to say anything back in the moment, how can you expect men like that to change? Equally unheard was my Gen-Z reminder that it isn’t my job to teach men not to say repulsive things. The conversation carried on like this, different genders from different generations suffering the same disconnect. But at its peak, my dad surprised me with an unexpected one:
“Are you telling me if Brad Pitt came up to you and said those things, that you’d have still called that harassment?”
It was a gut punch. The question was too reductive, too outlandish, and too dated to possibly prepare for. Tony was not Brad Pitt. He was a 70 year old racist whose deafness enabled him to pull you so close to his face that you were spat on every other word. Also, Brad Pitt wasn’t even Brad Pitt anymore. Long were the days of underground fight clubs and robbing casinos. He was, and is, a 61 year-old doubledivorcée whose own children have dropped his last name. (Harsh and a potential sign of misdirected anger, but nonetheless the truth.)
I felt certain there had to be something objectively wrong about Tony’s behavior, an overtness—one that had nothing to do with my obvious lack of attraction—that classified this as sexual harassment. The problem was that I couldn’t think of anything absolute. The 50 year age gap, proximal wife, and unprofessionalism were certainly frowned upon, but not technically illegal. I didn’t tell Tony he was making me uncomfortable and it’s not like this explicit vulgarity was a repeated interaction. Unambiguous was the fact that I didn’t want Tony saying these things to me in the first place. But what if it had been someone else delivering those lines, someone that I liked? Was this really the deciding factor in whether his advances left me feeling violated or flattered?
I got a text from a co-worker on my way to work letting me know upper management decided a proposed Tony ban was unnecessary. It was almost a relief. Then the second text delivered:
they’re still going to talk to you. but just to hear the story directly from you and if you don’t feel any type of way it will all be water under the bridge.
Chloe Walsh
Explicitly made was the very ambiguity haunting me: The implied if I express strong feelings of offense by Tony’s behavior, then management will do something about it. The amount of power my feelings had in the matter seemed distorted. After all, feelings were subjective. When it comes to harassment, is that how we decide what we consider to be objectively right and wrong?
In an effort to stay committed to the truth, I recounted the series of events the same way I told Kevin the night before; although this time, after I finished talking, the general manager asked me if I had anything else to share (implicit translation: Wait, that’s it?) as if he missed the punchline of my joke. I shook my head with a blank, tired stare. The nonchalance I initially expected now felt deflating. At the end, he reminded me that he wanted my opinion to feel valued and that I should always tell him if something was making me uncomfortable.
I ended up quitting the following week. Not to take a stand or to invoke change, but because I needed a break. I was exhausted.
A widely circulated statistic in a 2018 New York Times article revealed 81 percent of women have experienced sexual harassment or assault during their lifetime. It is a horrifying number, one I remember reposting on social media with a #MeToo, urging others to look around at their friends and do the math. Revisiting this study years later, I learned (after realizing I didn’t know what exactly harassment referred to) the two most frequently selected forms of such offenses were:
1. Someone whistling, honking, making kissy noises, “Pssst” sounds, or leering/staring aggressively at you. (65%)
2. Someone saying things like, “Hey Baby,” “Mmmm Sexy,” “Yo Shorty,” “Mami/Mamacita,” “Give me a smile,” or similar comments in a way that is disrespectful and/or unwanted and/or made you feel unsafe. (59%)
Many moments come to mind when I’m asked to think of these instances. Like the time I was followed for blocks by a guy on a motorbike yelling out for me to stop, just to tell me that he liked my sunglasses and wanted to know if he could get my phone number. Or the night a man whispered in my ear that the charades impression I did gave him an erection (a piece of information that nobody needs to know, ever). And so on. Are there more chivalrous ways to tell someone you’re attracted to them? Of course. But none of these felt like moments I would’ve classified as harassment unless a survey told me to. Which is precisely what happened with Tony: An interaction that, while not particularly enjoyable, I wouldn’t have registered as
Chloe Walsh
anything more than gross and soon-to-be-forgotten had a survey (or Kevin) not told me otherwise.
Clearly, what Tony said was gross regardless of what label we used. But the incident only seemed to qualify as harassment if I excluded the nuances. Like the fact that on a better day, with better election results, I likely would’ve laughed the incident off and felt particularly grateful for my youth. And that I had wanted to quit for weeks and partially used Tony’s creepiness as a cherry-on-top excuse to leave protest-free. Or that if it were someone else, I would’ve still thought it was a kind of perverted thing to say, but in a bold, domineering way that I could find attractive. And even though I didn’t appreciate being told that this encounter was insignificant, I also felt resistant to the takes of college friends who had stronger-than-mine opinions on the blatant wrongness of the matter (nevermind that it was my story in the first place; disagreeing with them felt unnecessarily contrarian when their interpretation was probably the safer conclusion).
Perhaps this makes me a bad victim, or at the very least an uneducated one. I didn’t know what to make of this version. But it felt more truthful than the first.
A high school history teacher of mine got fired for inappropriate conduct at the end of my freshman year. A different way of phrasing this is I was groomed by my freshman year history teacher, although this isn’t a sentence I say often.
Talking about his behavior has never been difficult. It was weird and inappropriate and, frankly, it never felt like my problem. He sent me dozens of emails throughout the year as if they were texts, with articles and quips and general thoughts that reminded him of me. He would hold my make-up quizzes in the bleachers of the indoor pool and then ask me to stay an extra hour with him, telling me about his exgirlfriends and teasing me for my height. He would snatch my phone out of my hand to scroll through my camera roll. He told me (in a manner I presumed to be a bit suggestive) that he heard I was a troublemaker and believed it. He illegally messaged me mid-investigation to ask how my summer was going.
But grooming feels like an oversimplification. It is a crutch I can use to eliminate any variables I don’t want analyzed, like my contributing role as a precocious, selfassured, chronically-in-pigtails fourteen year old with a head-over-heels crush on my AP Human Geography teacher.
If I mention this story, which is rare, it’s with close friends in passing as a not-
Chloe Walsh
actually-funny but let’s-laugh-anyways joke. (Don’t you guys remember when the teacher you had a crush on in high school got fired for having a crush on you, too? That one happened to everyone, right?) It should come as no surprise that it’s easier to do this than confess the details of my own behavior, which mortifies me to such a degree that my body curls up into a ball. Some of it is usual teenage girl stuff: Dressing up for him every day; getting red-faced when he’d talk to me and giddy when he’d email; inadvertently memorizing his wife’s Facebook profile by checking it as often as I did for new photos of the two of them (a hard one to write down, but admittedly, internet stalking your crush’s love interest is hardly outgrown with teenagehood).
The other half of it feels less excusable. This wasn’t a teacher who gained my trust under false impressions—he had a reputation for being that history teacher, the one who took a special liking to the girls and made his favorites a little too known. I understood that things were wrong. And still, when I sat with him in the pool bleachers and confessed that my dad had recently lost his job, it wasn’t because he asked or I needed advice, but because it seemed like the kind of vulnerability a teacher who was into his student would want to hear and I desperately wanted that to be the case. When he snatched my phone out of my hands, I took it as an opportunity to get handsy with him as I play-fought to get it back. When I heard that a younger girl had reported him for inappropriate conduct, I felt torn between the jealousy from not being the only one and the heartbreak that I would likely never see him again. And when the investigation began and I was asked to sit down with Child Protective Services, a less than warm and friendly looking pair, I spent the whole meeting hoping to hear any confirmation that, yes, he liked me too. I know to be grateful that he never touched me, and I am. But this makes it all the more confusing to remember the days where I wished he would.
Sometimes when I try to make sense of my behavior I find it useful to villainize myself. To see myself as the obsessed mastermind who was conniving and in control and knew what she was doing (think Misery, Fatal Attraction, anything Gillian Flynn). Sure, I played the victim when friends asked about his behavior and teachers checked in on me and my parents got the call over dinner that Child Protective Services would be speaking to me. But all the while it had been me provoking this wrongness. Like Kevin Spacey at the end of The Usual Suspects, I was a victim faking her limp all along.
I recognize this may be—spoken as a true psychology major—a way to regain control of my shame, amplifying my role until I turn into a caricature. But even when I lean into the trope, my behavior isn’t misconstrued. I did all those things; it’s just that
Chloe Walsh
nobody would ever villainize me for it.
Let me be clear: I in no way feel as though the crush on my end lessened the wrongness on his end. Rumor has it, this behavior was a pattern of his at other schools as well. What I struggle to sit with is remembering I knew in the moment what was happening was wrong and I still wanted it anyways. When I share this with people, I’m reminded with assurance that I was too young and none of it was my fault. And the first half of this feels true: These are feelings I had when I was 14. I’m not sure, though, that I believe any wrongness on my end was a product of being groomed or manipulated. I remember thinking a lot of ridiculous things when I was 14: Ripped high waisted skinny jeans were flattering, my generation was going to stop climate change, and all of my problems would be fixed if my boobs were one cup size larger.
But they were my original thoughts. To take those parts of me and blame it on him isn’t truthful. Worse, it makes me feel as though I need to forget certain parts of myself in order to still be in the right. Like that four years later when I was a freshman at college, it was me who reached out to him to see if he remembered me. And after stopping after a few cordial messages, it was me who had to block him six months later asking why he never heard from me again. I can’t think of any justification as to why he would engage when I reached out. He knows I’m well aware of the allegations against him and has a lot more to lose now as a father of two children. But it was my decision to reach out.
I have found within myself a consistent desire to self-flagellate. Not because I believe everything is all my fault, but because there is no room for complexity or nuance of any sorts. Surely, it can both be true that he was in the wrong and also that I made poor choices. I don’t need to be an angel or to be absolved of all blame; I just want to be more or less right.
I had a similar incident bookend my high school experience as a senior, although this time, I felt positive that what was happening was wrong. Steve coached the novices on my club rowing team. He was a former lawyer who left his practice to follow his dream of becoming a rowing coach. On the team, Steve was known for awkward conversations, minimal eye contact, and a general lack of emotional expression. I knew him as a quiet man who, while only speaking occasionally, knew how to make his words matter. Although I had only had him during my freshman year, he remained the coach I most looked up to.
Chloe Walsh
After a bad varsity practice, I could always ask Steve to pick me up from the dock so I could watch the novices row. Sometimes I would take the silence as an opportunity to nap at the base. Other times I would tell him about my current hopes and dreams, and he would listen for a bit before responding with lines I documented in my journal the second I returned home (example: “It goes by fast, Chloe. My advice is to not be afraid to go against the grain” or “I have no regrets at 47. I hope that when you get there, we can sit down and talk about it all. I have no doubt you’ll feel the same”).
The dynamic stayed this way for years. And then I turned 18.
Things began to evolve, like when you’re swimming in the ocean and don’t realize the current has moved you far away from your towel. At first the dynamic felt more mature, as if the mentor and mentee caps were traded in for friends. We spoke like equals. When I ranted to him about my head coach, he ranted to me about his boss. I would complain that he wasn’t making the right decisions for the boat, and Steve would complain that my coach was paying himself too much. Even in the moment I knew this was an unusual thing to tell an athlete. But I also knew that other people on the team didn’t have this information. It was exciting. I felt special, and more importantly, I felt like I could handle it.
Weekly conversations became back and forth texting for hours on end. It was almost always rowing related. But one night during a two hour text marathon the conversation escalated. He told me he was in the process of secretly interviewing for another job. Which is why, he clarified, he was texting me alone from a hotel room in Nashville. This naturally led to him telling me I looked just like an actress he saw on TV. I made a comment about how movies were always better than real life, which prompted him to ask if I had tried mushrooms before or if I drank alcohol often. I didn’t exactly know where the conversation was going, but I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like the destination.
Maybe he was attracted to me and thinking about me in sexual scenarios. This is, at least, where my mind went at the moment. But maybe he thought since I was 18 these were conversations adults could have. Maybe he saw us as friends. Maybe he didn’t understand that I was reading into the subtleties differently than he intended. All of these things could be true or none of them; I do not know because I’ll never ask him. Besides, it didn’t matter. Somewhere in that one conversation, I felt a line had been crossed. What text pushed it over and where the switch was made was entirely up to me.
I managed to ignore Steve for a week before he texted asking me if I was mad at him.
Chloe Walsh
Mad didn’t begin to cover it. I couldn’t believe that a mentor I looked up to would so stupidly ruin a relationship that was ink written in my journal. I felt violated and bitter. But I also knew this trespass of his gave me a lot of power. Text screenshots that blurred boundaries and insulted his boss gave me ammo. I knew that if I wanted to get him fired, I could. It wasn’t something I felt the need to exercise—but it did allow me to call all the shots.
In a brazen spell of herculean courage, I pulled him aside in-person and confronted him with a recorder in my pocket (because all coxswains carry recorders and I wanted the conversation on tape in case I needed it for legal purposes). The conversation took less than three minutes. His only two spoken sentences were the bookends of the conversation, which began with a joking “Am I in trouble?” and ended with an “Okay” so meek the recorder barely picked it up. I filled up the middle portion with no-nonsense lines, reminding him in a slightly shaking voice that if he needed to complain about his paycheck, he could do so to his boss or his wife. I was a high schooler, and it was not okay for him to see me as anything other than that. He didn’t speak to me for the rest of the season. Two weeks after I graduated, he moved to Boston in a strangely timed, abrupt exit, before quietly moving back six months later to assume his same role.
I haven’t been able to listen to the recording in years. I remember feeling proud of it in the moment, as if it was proof of something heroic. But now when I hear those lines, it sounds excruciatingly uncomfortable and a bit sad. There is no pride in losing a mentor because you had a hunch that they were fantasizing about you. The certainty I once believed in is not how I likely would’ve handled it today.
To this day, I do believe a line was crossed. But there’s a part of me that has always felt a twinge of guilt towards this socially awkward, quiet man who I had known for years. Perhaps I was a bit harsh, or maybe I jumped the gun, unfairly projecting feelings from other situations onto him. He never touched me so I’ll never know. Does admitting I feel complicit prove I can’t see clearly through my own trauma? That I’m a victim of others’ actions with a skewed perspective on the matter? Maybe this is true; I can’t be sure. Admittedly, it is difficult to decipher between which feelings are mine and which were superimposed by others’ opinions. But isn’t this disconnect in subjectivity problematic? Who gets to say what the truth is when it comes to my experiences?
I spent the summer after my freshman year of college at home in Chicago, working at an artesian pizza restaurant, tanning at the lake with old friends, and meeting
Chloe Walsh
once a week with my first therapist. For three months until the lack of out-of-state licensure prohibited more sessions, Kim and I met every Tuesday morning on her modern-chic couch with lit incense and talked about my past. I spent most of our time complaining about the same teenage boy who had still yet to fall in love with me. But Kim asked about other things as well, like my relationship with my parents and fears of being replaced and the collection of weird teachers and coaches I had— all the things you tell your therapist so they better understand who you are.
In one of our final sessions, Kim suggested I try EMDR. She explained it was a PTSD treatment that would stimulate my eyes to help uncover repressed memories, specifically foundational moments that have been deemed too traumatic to consciously remember. She told me it could help explain why I feel the way I feel. With my eyes following the circle back-and-forth, I took Kim back to the second grade to search for an unknowingly repressed memory, a time when I was a gymnast training three hours per day, six days a week. I described the layout of the gym, the smell of chalk on wet grips, how one of the high beams was scratchy like sandpaper and the other was slippery like sweat, how I was easily the weakest but by far the most flexible.
Kim asked me if I remembered anything strange happening, any coaches or secrets or basements in the gym that felt dreadful. Any incident that could’ve been the root of my problems. The dread was easy to find, but only that which accompanied hours of conditioning and being so afraid to throw my back-handspring on the high beam that I locked myself in the bathroom for 45 minutes to hide. There was no big reveal, no explanation. I asked her if there was still a chance something happened to me in childhood that I was unable to remember, something that would explain why I was attracted to the things I couldn’t have, why I liked feeling special, and why I desired things that weren’t always good for me. She assured me it was possible.
For a second there, I really hoped I would find something. Not because being a victim of childhood trauma sounded glamorous, but because I liked the idea of finding some missing puzzle piece that could explain who I was. Maybe these things didn’t happen because I liked playing games and indulging in fantasies and willingly going back to people who treated me poorly and making the same mistakes twice. Maybe it was because of something else that had happened to me, something I didn’t even have to remember in order to be true. How wonderfully convenient would that have been.
DIALECTICAL GROWTH ANASTASIASOTIROPOULOS
ThirdPlace
Vuk Burgic | Unsplash
Anastasia Sotiropoulos
Dialectical Growth, or What It’s Called When a Tree Grows in an Odd Direction Because of an Obstruction
Planet Earth Arts Creative Writing Prize
Third Place
On my 11th birthday, my mom sobbed, and I was angry. Outside, a massive oak was about to be cut down. But why did she care? We never even sat under it.
Our house was built in 1977 as a one-story U-shape of wood-paneled walls and popcorn ceilings. The horseshoe hugs a courtyard consisting of a scorched bonsai, foliage of the forgettable variety, and in 2012, a massive oak. The oak reclined directly at the U’s bowl, with arms stretching over the entirety of our roof and over to the other side, its meaty fingers dangling over front windows. Only now do I realize how precisely perpendicular its limbs ran to the center of our hallway and living room—our most communal spaces, those of most traction. Depending on your persuasion, the tree was either:
trying to protect us all. or
2. trying to murder us all.
The arborist said it had to be at least a hundred years old. Our house was obviously built around it. Also, it had to go. One wrong summer storm and the whole thing could come collapsing down on us. I began to wonder what would happen to its roots when it was sawed away—how far under my bed did they reach? The alleyway, road, neighbors? My dad told me something about a tree’s roots forming underground networks with trees nearby, how Everything’s Connected. I began to wonder if our oak was tethered to the one next door, and were they all friends with the trees a block down?
This was all an attempt at sympathy, but I could not stop breathing envy. It was my birthday! but I was sharing it with the funeral of a tree. There was even a procession: the arborist and his men in tan vests, my parents behind them, my gardenergrandmother sullen, my father translating for my grandfather. I sat inside the air conditioned kitchen, watching out from behind the glass. Once the men had left, my mom’s lips stiffened. I didn’t see her cry often, so although not performative, this felt weird.
We were not a family that went outside. I was once caught being taught how to climb a tree by the neighbor girl, and it did not go over well. Besides my history with breaking arms, I wasn’t supposed to be outside in the first place; Dallas summers those years were thick with hysteria over mosquito-borne West Nile. And when the
Anastasia Sotiropoulos
air wasn’t filled with constantly televised death counts, there was a humidity so oppressive it excused, even encouraged, Wii Tennis and DS Nintendogs. The rest of the year, my dad’s CD shelves of pirated black-and-white movies kept me inside. An L-shaped couch for a U-shaped house. The tree was just part of the scenery.
I do have some memories in our backyard, but almost all are on July thirds, my birthday. Our church, only a mile away, celebrated its patriotism a day early, and it always leaked into our sky. Before double-digits, I’d get on my dad’s shoulders. The oak sat behind us.
When they cut it down, my dad told me to let her cry. I’ve always thought my mom cries in her native tongue, and the Greekness of her tears make me think of the Whorfian hypothesis, which argues that our perception of reality depends on our cognition, which depends on the language we use. Think Russian’s obligatory distinction between lighter blues (“goluboy”) and darker blues (“siniy”). In studies, a greater specificity in language translates to a greater ability to, on a visual processing level, discriminate between shades of blue. German speakers with the masculine Schlüssel find keys jagged, metal, useful; Spanish with the feminine llave see them little, lovely, tiny golden intricate things. Is a tree the German feminine Brücke, an elegant, fragile, slender bridge; or a masculine puente, sturdy, dangerous, and big? In Latin, all the trees are feminine, even the ones that don’t look it: quercus, oak, feminine. One theory offers that it’s because the Romans believed nymphs lived in the trees, plush young women with fertile hips and a sweetness even to men. And while Greek’s trees are neuter, the ancient Greeks had dryads, too: protectors, frolickers, not immortal but very long-living. My mom cried like her old girlfriends were dead.
But our tree seemed like a man. Maybe it was the thick fingers or inability to understand personal space, or maybe it was simply that I saw it as less of a companion and more of a protector on its better days. All I knew is that he had wronged us, whether intentional or not. It took them twelve hours to bring him down.
It’s been a decade without him, and I’ve left the south for Northern California. I’ve lived in four houses since, all squares and rectangles with neat trees staked a polite distance from roofs. Now, I live in a dorm. It’s morning and I look down from the third-story window at the mini jacarandas propped on either side of the walkway. Their elbows are poised and calculated, neither cradling nor choking our front door. In early September, their hair was violet; now they’re bald. They feel like distant grandmas.
Anastasia Sotiropoulos
I haven’t had coffee, so my thoughts are sporadic, sending me back to those fireworks early on the third, how I could see them from our backyard, how I felt so special, as if they were just for me. I think about how my mom cried that the tree wouldn’t see them that year, and how dramatic I thought she was. I call my dad and ask if our old tree was an oak. He says yes, but doesn’t ask why I’m asking, just says it’s the reason our house is the shape it is. I don’t ask him what happened to the roots underneath, or if he believes in nymphs, and we wish each other a good day.
TOANDFROM THEASIATIC CHEETAH
FORDMELILLO
PLANETEARTHARTS CREATIVEWRITINGPRIZE
SecondPlace
Isaac Burke | Unsplash
“To and From the Asiatic Cheetah”
Planet Earth Arts Creative Writing Prize Second Place
When I woke I did not recognize myself the sun was already descending over the cliffs and the sand hid its dark parts stiffened by blood beneath the wind
I lifted my head to search for bodies but there was only the one beside me fatigued and glassy-eyed the two of us so slim that together head-on we were nearly invisible
When I woke it was from a dream in which I held a picture to everyone I saw pleading “have you seen her” and it was myself I showed
That last image of me is colorless myself the cliffs the stiff sand taken at night our night the last I saw
MECHANICS OF REMEMBRANCE
LIZBETHLUEVANO
Chad Madden | Unsplash
Lizbeth Luevano
Mechanics of Remembrance
Planet Earth Arts Creative Writing Prize First Place
The sun no longer wakes him like it once used to. In his youth, he remembers a stiff bed next to his window where the sun rays used to dance across hazy eyes at daybreak. Now, thousands of miles away from his home, Isidro misses that pocket of warmth on his face when the beginnings of a new day were etched in orange and amber, made pleasant by the promise of a day of comfort.
Although Isidro would spend most of his mornings idle, for most of his youth he worked.— he and his siblings had already been put to work when they were as young as 10, though there were few similarities between the work he did then and the work he did now, where workers rise to race against the sun and they go home with their labor etched in their bones.
Back in México, the sun would illuminate against stormy clouds and embrace his family’s crops, nurturing and ensuring they would have enough yield to sustain them. Now, he feels this Western sun calls out the ugly. Sitting down in his bed, the sun gives light to disfigurement, to a back so stiff now he asks his wife to stand on it to try to break through muscle that will no longer give. The sun’s beams give glow to fingernails bordered by earth, where a few on his left hand hang on, and illuminate the scars on his arms that preserve the shape of the thicket and thorns of the crops he’s had to push through.
Still, there are things that the sun cannot see. The sun cannot touch the poison that consumes him, that has spread across his body from the first moment he entered the country. Like the other braceros, he was sprayed with DDT, his body “disinfected” to ensure that before he began his harvest, he understood his place within these new ecosystems: outsider, foreigner, invasive.
Now, the windows in his mobile home are shaded by aluminum foil so that a rising sun and its intense heat can only pierce through silhouettes. Just like the rest of the house, the natural light doesn’t permeate, but rather lives on the edge of abandonment.
Isidro puts on his work shirt and covers his neck with a bandana. He rises from his bed and the floors creak on his way out.
In his bathroom he drenches his face in water. For months now, the neighborhood had been flooded with warnings and advisories, recommending to residents that they avoid drinking the water. High levels of arsenic had been tested in their drinking water supply, though Isidro and his neighbors had already known for years that their water wasn't safe. But the house is diseased just like Isidro, so he doesn’t avoid it.
Despite his dressing routine, Isidro doesn’t have much opportunity these days to feel either the sun’s wrath or its comfort. As a bracero, he is only wanted during the
Lizbeth Luevano
harvest season, and a work injury a year ago left him without the ability to cross state lines and move with the harvest. An immigrant without the ability to migrate, he now mostly stays in his house, where each passing day fades his memory of the sun’s touch, of his childhood, and of his village back home.
Their fabricated sun ghosted above the high rise. People flashed in and out of Socorro’s vision. Crouched by the iron wall where a crooked panel gave her sight, she made out families whose clean skin Socorro could discern from a hundred feet away.
Parents watched under the shade of giant oaks as their children ran in and out of water sprinklers. Droplets settled on smile lines, on textured skin for brief moments, before succumbing to the new world’s gravity and hovering over the satinlike grass. Their loud laughs and screeches echoed across the valley, where a barrier separated their world from Socorro’s. Humans made of flesh and bones, Socorro thought to herself.
One of the kids caught a ball midair and Socorro flexed her own hand, an awkward assortment of wires and steel. Whereas their hands were nimble, hers were stiff and clumsy— smooth, but unnatural.
A wire at the base of her neck short circuited and she flinched. Each time Socorro would disconnect herself from the Company’s mainframe, she felt as if her body didn’t know how to function. Sometimes the short circuits were mere inconveniences, but other times they caused her to black out.
Today, however, the short circuits were just another reminder of the differences that separated her and the other Desechos from the outsiders.
Centuries ago, her family, too, had once been flesh and bones, but now workers like Socorro were melded like machines.
Usually, the Company would regulate their allotted time spent outside, but Socorro had learned how to bypass their coding. Time was running out and she knew the Company would soon start looking for her, so Socorro turned around to head back. She glanced one last time at the families whose humanity reminded her of a world she would never be a part of, and reattached the loose panel back onto the wall.
Back in her house, her heart began racing. She had heard the rumors of course, but had never bared witness to the human outsiders with her own eyes. She had been going out to the borderlands ever since she had figured out how she could remove herself from the system, with the expectation that she might find some answers to the questions she had, but all the loose panel had given her was more questions and a headache.
They were so close, she thought. Do they ever think about what’s on the other side
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of the border?
She and her family had passed by the border wall once when she was younger, and she could remember how her eyes never strayed from its imposing figure. Today though, families played in front of it without giving it a single glance, and their casual indifference made Socorro wonder what kind of knowledge they knew or if they were even aware of the machines that toiled just a few throwing stones away.
She had been taught by the Company that no one understood when their mechanization occurred, though Socorro had learned through whispers from her great aunt that they all became machines the moment the Company blacked out the sun. Still, others said the transition occurred by the grace of the gods, to ensure that their skin would be thick enough to endure the new world they would make.
In this new world, Socorro and her family live under the Company’s anthropogenic atmosphere, made complete with a duplicate sun, whose cycles are one of the only relics left of the old world. Socorro knew this, too, only after having spent years talking to her neighbors, who still could remember what the old world was once like, despite the Company’s attempts to have them otherwise forget.
Socorro paced back and forth in her room. It wouldn’t be long until the Company went through its system and figured out she was absent from the working station she was supposed to report to. Earlier today, she had been able to remove herself from the system and disrupt their tracking by disconnecting a chip from her body. She looked down at that chip now, at the thing that marked her a part of the Company’s property.
She could keep working like Company wanted her to— that would be the easiest path— but she was unnerved by the lack of transparency she had uncovered so far. She’d been gathering her aunt’s whispers for years, and now she knew that the old world looked a lot like what was on the other side of the border. Looking out into the fields and the wall that scarred the horizon, she was determined to figure out why.
She closed her fist and crushed the chip in between panels of steel.
Isidro first met his wife, Nayeli, during his first year as a bracero. He was in Iowa for the summer, traveling back and forth between blueberries and beans. He had grown accustomed to eating with the other braceros in the outskirts of town, but he knew one of the kitchen helpers in a diner on the town’s main plaza, and so every few days he would visit and treat himself to the diner’s coffee and pastries.
It was in one of those visits he first saw her, with her hair pulled back into a ponytail of messy curls and an uneven tan that marked someone who worked outside in the sun. Both Isidro and Nayeli don’t remember who first initiated their
Lizbeth Luevano
conversation, but they would always remember in the beginning how the heavy weariness among them that had followed them from the fields quickly soon dissipated into warm tenderness. “Isidro, de donde es tu familia?”1 Nayeli eventually asked over her iced tea. “De México, pero del pueblo de Hidalgo,”2Isidro responded. “¡No me digas, yo también!”3 Her smile grew wider and they looked at one another with a growing sense of familiarity. Each time he would travel through the states, Isidro couldn’t help but notice how everything reminded him of his home, the way Iowa’s rolling hills panned out like those on his cousin’s farm, the way the cicada swarmed and buzzed in a similar symphony, and the way the other braceros would come together to dance to blaring rancheros like in the carne asadas back home. And here Nayeli was, someone else from his pueblo who he could share his remembrance with.
They talked for hours, and discovered their family homes were only forty-five minutes apart. They knew the same festivals, the same traditions, and plates, and could even recall the same drunkard that would sit under the Ojos de Dios and sing to anyone who would pass by him.
Isidro would later thank his god for Nayeli, for the light that had followed him from his hometown. “Esto es el milagro del pueblo,''4Isidro would declare afterwards to anyone who would listen, “Todos estas millas de distancia, pero el pueblo encuentra una manera de reunirnos.”5
Despite a difficult work schedule and demanding job, while their labor pulled them in different directions, Isidro and Nayeli married under a guayaba tree in the States a year later.
Energy surged through wires and Socorro awoke with a start.
She got up from the alley she had been laying in. After having left her house, she had wandered the streets trying to figure out how to get to her aunt’s house, when one of her wires had short circuited again and caused her blacked out. She looked out into the darkness, at the empty void that ate up any light. While the Company had installed their own sun, they had stopped short of what would have been a moon. Now when the sun went down, there was no other light or star to illuminate her neighborhood.
The Company was out looking for her, so she couldn’t risk going back to her house. Now with her gone, there was no one else left to occupy its walls and she was left to wander the valley alone out in the open.
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Five weeks ago, Socorro’s family was assigned to a different neighborhood, and Socorro hadn’t seen them since. She was lucky in that sense at least, Socorro considered. She knew that if her mom realized what she was up to she never would have let her leave. After all, to the other Desechos, breaking off from the Company was considered a fate worse than death.
She thought of the old child’s tale that warned her of the supposed health ramifications leaving had on bodies that were not used to operating on their own. The shorts circuits and blackouts were considered the first stages of mechanical failure without the Company’s chip, but eventually her body would forget how to transmit energy from her heart, and the machine in her body would power itself off until only her consciousness remained active. The Company had told them the Desechos that they would remain like that for eternity— their soul alive, but their bodies in a state of irreversible disrepair.
Socorro wondered how much truth there was to that story— it wouldn’t be the first time that the Company had pushed a false narrative.
She looked around to make sure no one could see her and made again to her great aunt’s house. Navigating the neighborhood without any light was difficult, especially since she could only barely remember where her great aunt lived.
After they had been separated, her great aunt was transferred back to her previous home, where Socorro was headed to now.
Sunlight broke through over the fields by the time Socorro finally arrived. Her aunt lived in a mobile home just like she did, and its inferior structure was also in a similar state of collapse.
Standing in front of her house, Socorro paused.
She knocked quietly and waited for her aunt to open the door.
Five years passed after Isidro and Nayeli met. Now in California, they had grown their family and welcomed a child together.
Nayeli first gave birth to a stillborn boy from all the stress at work, so she named her next child Guadalupe, after the mother of God to ensure her second baby would survive. She could see her grandma’s eyes in her daughter, and everytime Nayeli held her, she felt her heart overfill with pride.
For six years they lived in contentment with one another, the two of them and Isidro in their small mobile home.
Later after Isidro’s work injury, Nayeli stayed by his side during the off-season and continued working as a housecleaner instead.
Her days were long, and made all the more exhausting by an employer who would frequently withhold her wages. He was demanding and abusive, and though
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this wasn’t the first time Nayeli had had her labor exploited, she felt her life was no longer her own.
She thought of her baby back home, and of the women in her family whose eyes had been witness to too much mistreatment. The next day when she went to pick up her paycheck and saw that her wages had once again been deducted, she lashed out at her employer and demanded proper compensation.
Her whole body shook and she could feel her heart drumming in her chest.
“No puedes seguir robando mi dinero. Mi familia lo necesita.”6
He of course ignored her, and threatened to call the authorities if she didn’t quietly remove herself from his office, but she insisted.
Nayeli knew the risks, had heard the stories, and had felt the same anxiety over and over in constant waves, and though she wasn’t prepared to leave Isidro’s side, she remained in that office until they took her away.
“Socorro?” Her great aunt pushed open the door. Through the mesh Socorro could see her surprise. “What are you doing here?”
“I need your help,” Socorro replied, and suddenly the weight of what she had seen and done hit her. Her shoulders caved inwards and she looked down at the floor. “Do you want to come- “ Her aunt’s sentence was cut short as Socorro rushed forward to hug her.
“Oh, mija, what happened?” She let Socorro’s head rest on her shoulder and led her inside.
Her great aunt left her sitting down on the couch. Socorro sighed and looked over at the photographs that adorned her aunt’s wall.
Socorro didn’t know much about her family’s history. There were few records left of what her family was once like before they were Desechos, though her aunt had a couple of photographs of their human ancestors. She was one of the only Desechos who still did.
Her great aunt came back and placed a cup of boiled water in front of her. “Here, this will help settle your nerves.” She sat down next to Socorro.
Socorro was used to listening to her aunt’s stories, but this time the roles were reversed, as Socorro recounted what she had seen at the border and her great aunt listened with quiet intensity.
“Why were you out in the borderlands?” Her great aunt questioned.
“After they took you away, they stationed me in the fields closest to the wall. When they took Mom away too, I had to figure out why. Do you remember the stories
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you used to tell me, about the old world? I was able to see it with my own eyes. It’s not a thing of the past like you had said. It’s right here next to us on the other side of the border.”
Her aunt stood up and walked over to her wall of photographs.
Socorro continued, “Tia, do you have any idea of how beautiful they look? They’re not machines like us— they’re not attached to any system. They actually know what it’s like to be free.”
Her aunt turned around to face her. “What we look like doesn’t matter, because our skin has protected us so far. Before we were Desechos, we looked just like the outsiders, and our humanity is just the same now as it was once then. The outsiders are no better than us.”
“You carry all these stories. Did you know about the outsiders on the other side of the border?”
“I’ve lived long enough to know to question everything they tell us. I’ve had my suspicions for a long time now.”
Her great aunt walked over and handed her a picture. The image was grainy, but Socorro could make out a figure underneath a sombrero and dense layers of clothing.
“It’s about time you understand how this all began. Your ancestor, who used to live in your house, went by the name Isidro. He was the first Desecho.”
The next season rolled around in time for the tomatoes.
Isidro couldn’t stand to think of his daughter growing up without her mom, in a house that might kill her, so he sent her off to Mexico to reunite with Nayeli in the hopes that one day they would return.
Afterall, if there was one thing that Isidro knew, it was that remembrance had a way of pulling people to one another. “El milagro del pueblo,” he used to say. Though he didn’t spend much time now thinking about miracles.
Without his family, Isidro grew bitter. Eleven years working as a bracero, laboring over crops for hours on end, and all he had to show for it was a broken body living in a broken home. The harvest season was ending, and Isidro had no energy left to keep working. With no one by his side, he felt his soul wasting away.
One day, on a brisk morning when the clouds hung over the crops like spirits, the other braceros saw Isidro walk off the fields and never saw him again.
“What happened to him?” Socorro asked.
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“
No one knows exactly. But he wasn’t the only one it happened to. Years afterwards, the other braceros in the fields would undergo the same process of mechanization. The agri-industrialists at the time saw their new bodies as both a threat and opportunity, so they closed off our neighborhoods and isolated us from the rest of the world. Later, we were wired into their system to make us dependent on them.”
Socorro’s head began spinning. Of all the stories her aunt had told her, none had ever been as world-shifting.
Her whole life, she had felt herself suffocated in the fields, not knowing why she was never satisfied with the daily routine of the harvest. Day in and day out, she would rise to meet a horizon that was carved with the silhouettes of hunched-over workers. Knowing now that she had been confined to a system that was intentionally designed to strip her of her autonomy, Socorro felt her anger renewed.
“There’s something else you should know, Socorro. In Isidro’s lifetime, while the Company extended their authority over the braceros, he figured out a way to disconnect himself from the system.”
“Do you know how he did it?” Socorro abruptly asked.
“No, and be careful. Others have tried before, but no one else has ever been successful. I know how you might feel right now, but going against the Company has too many risks.”
Socorro’s chest felt heavy. She had experienced the short circuits and blackouts, but she had just assumed that complete mechanical failure was another fabricated myth from the Company. She felt fine, but now she began to feel her impending doom.
Nevertheless, she couldn’t let her aunt know about the destroyed chip.
“You mentioned Isidro was separated from his wife and daughter. Did he ever get to see them again?”
“Not like how you and I see each other. But a part of him had always stayed with his daughter and wife, just like a part of him still stays with us. Isidro used to say that that was the milagro del pueblo.”
“What do you mean?”
“It means that we all come from magic and a part of us will always remember where we come from. No matter where we are, we will always remember our pueblo in Mexico, our ancestors who came before us, and what it’s like to be human.”
She held Socorro’s hand and Socorro tried to push down her nerves.
Her aunt continued, “This present isn’t the only future our family will ever know. I have hope that one day our circumstances will change.”
Her great aunt smiled at her, and Socorro tried to reciprocate her warmth. Socorro wanted to stay in that moment forever, and keep looking at the smooth robotic face that had always felt everything but cold, but she felt a clock ticking i
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nside of her. She thanked her aunt and told her that she had to be on her way. At the front door, her great aunt gave Socorro a hug and held her for a long time. “Be safe, mija, remember.”
In Isidro’s solitude, no neighbors disturbed him, so there was no one to bear witness to the miracle that unfolded.
In his mobile home at the end of a loud street, while his neighbors danced to bandas and cumbias, Isidro underwent a type of metamorphosis. Maybe a scientist could answer what happens to a body compounded by poisons, when DDT, arsenic, and pesticides meet in a body that’s been made alien and othered.
There are few records left that remember how it all began, but that night, Isidro entered into a new world of possibilities.
Socorro made her way back to her mobile home.
The stories she had been raised with had threatened complete mechanical failure within 48 hours of removing the chip, and Socorro calculated that if the rumors were true, she only had a few moments left before her body stopped operating.
There was an official notice posted outside her door, letting her know that the Company had passed through her house looking for her.
She stepped inside, and recalled what her great aunt had told her years ago. Her house, like the sun’s cycles, was one of the few remnants of the past, left over from what had once been the old world. Her aunt had said that the house had been passed down for generations, which had always explained its deficient foundation, but now Socorro wondered what else its history could reveal.
She went out into the backyard where a giant guayaba tree covered the small strip of land. She knew from working in the fields that guayaba trees only lived to bear fruit for up to 25 years, but somehow her family’s tree had survived for at least a century.
Remember, her aunt had told her. And suddenly Socorro knew what she had to do.
In his final days, a storm casts a long shadow against the valley. In a town where there is no remedy or cure, where justice is fended off by untold histories, a
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pocket of light shines through. Follow the sun, Isidro remembers, and heads off to the side of his mobile home, where by the eroding faucet, a sapling tree grew.
ROOTS LARAMORELLO
CLARENCEURMY/ IRENEHARDYPOETRYPRIZE
ThirdPlace
Quang Nguyen Vinh| Unsplash
Lara Morello
“Roots”
Clarence Urmy/Irene Hardy Poetry Prize Third Place
My mother’s right arm remembers the uneven rhythm of the sickle. The sluggish outward sweep, then the violent inward bite into the base of the wheat stalks, the pauses between each stroke growing longer and longer as the sickle slipped from loose fingers, almost carving into the soil. Bloated bubbling skin threatened to burst like a scream about to release. I observe her hands now. Her smooth palms glide across a wooden rolling pin, soft yellow dough yielding quietly to her touch.
My mother’s back remembers the weight of the sun. The way it ground its heels through thin cotton fabric into the individual ridges of her spine, pressing until her knees hit the ground and she bowed, a chopped stem left abandoned to wilt. How different it was from the way the sun’s rays gently folded against the wooden floor panels at dinnertime, kneeling by her family for a meal of sodden corn. She describes this scene to me as she tosses scallions onto the damp flour, kneads her knuckles into the mixture.
My mother’s sweat remembers the path to the earth. It ran in graceful rivulets up the cheeks of her lowered head,
Lara Morello
sometimes catching in her hairline, sometimes falling the three feet to the earth, nourishing the cracked commune land like shy drops of rain.
My mother’s ears remember the sound of her breathing mixed with bullets in 1989, the staccato of her steps as she ran from Tiananmen Square, the swelling of silence and blood as she crouched in the alleyway with her coworkers, praying that the next set of steps she heard belonged to her two missing friends. The oil she now pours sizzles loudly on the pan.
My mother’s tongue remembers the foreign taste of English at age 25. The way she awkwardly molded her mouth to mimic the flat sounds of the talk show host, her tongue folding around half-baked vowels that stumbled out from her lips with crooked limbs and dissonant tones. The way her new name, Lisa, Still tastes like the whiteness of salt, like the stale $200 in her pocket as she stepped off the plane, like the decision to teach her children only English, like the sweetness of society’s half-acceptance. I used to blame her for not sharing her tongue with me.
My mother’s voice is strong as she remembers. She tells me her history and I inhale it between my teeth, wrap it around my spine. It makes me stand taller. I press my hands against hers,
Morello imprint our palms in the dough, and promise to remember her stories.
Lara
EQUINOX CHASEKLAVON
CLARENCEURMY/ IRENEHARDYPOETRYPRIZE
SecondPlace
Julian Hochgesang | Unsplash
Chase Klavon
“Equinox”
Clarence Urmy/Irene Hardy Poetry Prize Second Place
Morning rises alongside us, wanting to be desired, so we sit barefoot in the grass, let the wetness be. Fingers dig into soil. Nails blackening, water lapping, the dawn. I am afraid of losing whichever moment this is.
We do not speak. Silence fills the gaps between my teeth until the splash of a catfish cuts the air cold. Suddenly, we are fat with thought. Mosquitos feed from my swollen ankles and I let them. It is August when she tells me that she is afraid to die.
Night arrives too soon, wanting too to be desired, so we fold our bodies into an envelope addressed to God. I carve Hail Marys into her skin until it hardens. Time continues without asking. In another world we sit again in wet grass, anywhere but here.
It is September when I watch my mother cry for the first time. We stall out in the parking lot of a convenience store, let the radio drone on. Neither of us listen. We don’t know who we are. Still, the light from a street lamp above shines just for us.
KARAOKE ALEXANDRAHUYNH
Thong Tran | Unsplash
Alexandra Huynh
“Karaoke (Vietnamese Version)”
Clarence Urmy/Irene Hardy Poetry Prize First Place
And when the meal ends, the singing begins:
Aunties lay saran wrap over aluminum trays of papaya salad and fried chicken as the uncles approach the TV set like a car they’re gathered here to fix.
They tune the speakers with an engineer’s precision and call out, Who’s first? like hawkers in Hội An, microphones dangled into the crowd.
And, as always, your eldest cousin concedes. He croons a folk song about homegoing as the instrumental’s lone zither whines with grief, the guitar plucking in a major key before descending back to minority.
It sounds almost like a Bond song, you think. In the movies where someone wins or dies. Always a villain backing him toward a corner until the last end, when, our hero comes swinging from the smoke, dressed to the nines. The parents lean on the backs of couches in approval; they know this one.
When it’s your turn, you enlist the help of your brother. Together, you pull up a video titled, Numa Numa (Vietnamese version video) and attempt to pronounce the lyrics marching neon green across the screen.
Your voices soaked with the vibrato of suppressed laughter. Look at that flashing car and the singer’s hair gelled in spikes; he moves as if soaked by the swagger
Alexandra Huynh
of his own song – a Vietnamese adaptation of a Moldovan pop internet hit.
You absorb his affect, feel magnetic. And no matter how misshapen the words sound, everyone joins in: your brothers, and sister, and cousins shouting the chorus. The microphones now defunct, as they should be. And you finally understand why your parents put you in singing lessons, and why they insisted on installing music-syncing LED’s in the living room in the middle of September, and why the couches remain arranged in an open square with Heineken for the uncles and slices of soft bread for the kids.
You get it, you get it.
RETAGGIO
DIVYAMEHRISH
MARYSTEINBECKDEKKER AWARDINFICTION
Nathan Dumlao| Unsplash
Retaggio
Mary Steinbeck Dekker Award in Fiction
Panting heavily, a polar bear shifts her weight onto her hind legs. She is emaciated. She waits as a stream of bubbles circles the slice of ice upon which she balances. And then it happens—the bubbles dissolve. The bear stifles her breathing lest she draw attention to herself. She is so close. Slowly, like Botticelli’s Venus birthed from sea foam, the seal emerges from the depths, head erect. The bear grinds her teeth. This is her one chance. With her last energy, she lunges forward and swipes at the blubbery animal, gripping it with her claws. She locks her jaws around the seal’s neck and drags it away from the ice’s edge, one leg wrapped around her catch. For a moment, she lies down on the ice, body pressed down on the seal luxuriously. Before feasting, she must catch her breath. She closes her eyes, letting the slippery wet of the seal’s body seep into her brittle hair. The seal is fighting against her—thrashing, writhing. But it, too, is weak. The weak can recognize their own kind.
When the polar bear feels strong enough to lift her torso up again, the seal has suffocated. And so, she begins to eat, tearing through the blubber. She paws and chews ravenously, stuffing her body with as much as she can handle, and then more. She is eating for two.
~
“Hush. And listen.”
As if the body is tender, my mother’s stories rouse me in the belly of dawn. Her voice, the sound of red sand blistering chapped feet. We crave water, the triumph of cold over burn, the whetting of thirst. I lie in a sleep that is too warm and womb-like for dreaming. Body curdling like bad milk, I encase my hips in a chrysalis. Her stories come to me before my throat is ready to gulp, like unripe wine, like early menstruation.
~
It is 1970. Summer in Prato, Italy. The textile factories are in full swing, churning out yards of patterned cloth like butter. At dusk, my mother’s mother leaves the factory, her feet swollen from standing all day, her stomach rumbling. She turns left after leaving the back door, taking the long route to avoid the swarm of Socialists
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engulfing pedestrians in pamphlets. She must make another inconvenient turn before reaching the city center to avoid the town hall meeting that all the locals know is being chaired by Communist. The heat and humidity, she decides, make for fertile ground for political sciocchezze. She misses Sicily: her birthplace, the birthplace of her children. She misses not just her family, but also the predictable routine of farm life. Life was harder in the South—food scarcer, pockets emptier, the labor more physical, the Mafia stronger—but the radius of life was smaller, tighter, closer. Now her circle has expanded, and with it, the need for more. Only the day before did she finally realize that she no longer works to live—she lives to work. But she consoles herself with the reminder that she works for her children, for the daughter and son who will have more on their plates than she ever could dream of wanting. Her purpose is to make her children grow, to ripen them. Ever since she lost her first babies during the stillbirth two years before her daughter was born—she crosses herself now, as her stomach drops—she has made her purpose to keep her children alive.
She reaches the market a quarter of an hour before it closes for the night. She quickly gathers her necessities: flour, sugar, eggs, meat. She counts her coins for the fourth time that day. Yes, she does have enough money this week to buy an extra portion of steak for herself. As she arranges the items on the counter to pay, she notices a well-dressed little boy holding his mother’s hand at the next counter over, sipping a carton of juice. The saleswoman follows her gaze. “Ah yes, we finally have those cartons of fruit juice in stock. They are excellent for young kids. Lots of vitamins to make them grow big and strong.” The woman meets the saleswoman’s keen gaze. “We keep them right over there.” The woman glides left, following the angle of the pointed finger. She lifts one of the rectangular cartons, turning it over. She sees text. Some description of benefits, she assumes. She never learned how to read. Her father made her leave school in second grade so that she could help look after her newborn sister and take care of the farm.
The woman decides to buy two cartons, one for each of her children. But when the saleswoman adds the prices of all the items together, the woman gasps quietly. With a knowing look at the lady, she slips back to the butcher station, parcel of meat in hand. She returns it to the butcher, asking him to remove a piece and retie the string. The man gives the woman a hard look and sighs as if he’s been asked to perform this task many times before. But the woman doesn’t feel ashamed. In fact, she feels a kind of pride bubbling in her chest. The woman might not be eating tonight, but her children will feast. ~ Amidst the streaked light of snowfall, one can make out the gyrating rumps of two
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creatures—one quadruple the size of the other. The mother nudges her infant’s nose, licking snowflakes off his rumpled forehead. The flowers of frost are cold in her mouth, colder than usual. When she had been with child, the mother believed that the scope of winter would shrink when another life entered hers; when there was another with whom to share the endless nights. But winter just expanded, lengthened, deepened. Now, there is a constant need to find food, more and more as her son grows. And she sleeps less and less fitfully as the cub gains energy and learns how to play with snow, sink into the powdery surface and slide across ice. He begins leaving her side spontaneously, silently, stealthily sneaking off. She knows wolves roam these parts, that her little son is no match for them. She knows, only too well, that her baby might be gambling his life away without even realizing. And so, she begins to feed him her portions of fish and seal meat, trying to make his body grow as fast as it can so that if he ever needs to, he can be a match for ravenous wolves and adult polar bears alike. Perhaps her presence is intimidating enough to a wolf, but the mother knows that she is no match for a hungry polar bear bachelor. Not confident that she can protect her son from all potential attackers, she commits to equipping him with the tools necessary to fend for himself. At night, the boy cuddles against her breast, sucking hard on her teats. But her body no longer produces milk. In fact, she stopped producing milk long ago, even when she was still living with her son in the little den she had built to bear the infant. Her baby, however, is ruthless. Nourishment from the sea is not enough
He wants his mother to give herself to him, too. But there is only so much she can give away. He is hurting her now, biting her nipples, breathing desperately. She moans, trying to pull her sleepy body up from the ice. He doesn’t let go. She growls, baring her teeth. The boy’s eyes are closed, his mouth clinging tightly to his mother’s chest, legs tucked between hers. She claws at him, first at his hips, and then at his chest. He lets out a cry, the sound tainting the starless sky like a flash of lightning. Instinctively, he curls into himself, shuddering. When he finally unravels his body, the mother sees a dark line zipped across the soft pink of his hairless stomach. She has cut her cub. With a slight shiver, she puts her right claw into her mouth, tasting the steel of his blood, once a gift from her own body.
“Sometimes in the body, there is quiet.”
My mother’s voice is soft, like abalone, too soft.
I remember the taste of her rage, the biting sting of blood inside my cheek, steel. There was a time I tried to paint the violence to therapists, hands and words violating a body I quickly learned to unpossess. But
Divya Mehrish
memory became an unnecessary burden, a sour aftertaste. The muscularity of forgetfulness put its palms on my lips. And pressed.
It is 1961. Autumn in Caltanissetta, Sicily. The crumbling stone outhouse is nearly a thousand meters from the main farmhouse, set behind the pigsty. Amidst the sounds of oinking and splattering of diseased dung, my teenage grandmother wails between the tight walls. Her chest heaves, neck straining as she tries to lift her head. She is too tired, and her scalp collapses heavily onto the earthen floor. The midwife, whose arrival was nearly two hours too late, tells the girl she must not exert herself. “Non alzarti, Signorina.” The old woman realizes her mistake only after, as she tries to soak up the pooling blood with a dirty rag. The young girl is, in fact, married—even if only just. She is a Signora. Even if her husband is in Catania, looking for work. Even if the girl eloped with her husband because her father refused to give his blessing to a man who had no land to his name. Even if the girl is living in the outhouse-turned-shed of her great aunt, she is still a Signora because she has a gold band on her left ring finger and because her husband has already entered her body and has evidently made himself at home in there. When the girl gives birth, she doesn’t have a baby. She has two. The old woman doesn’t tell her this. Instead, she commands the girl to keep her eyes shut. Between screeches and howls, the girl clenches her teeth and nods painfully, a rivulet of sweat infested with tears dribbling down her dirty chin. The midwife takes the bloodied rag and, with practiced hands, tightly rolls the two silent infant forms into the cloth. She tries not to look too closely, but she can make out that one of the forms is female and the other male. The babies are four months too early. They may be breathing—just barely—for the time being, yet they are too weak to survive for more than a few days at most. The woman knows this, or at least she tells herself she does. And so, she carries the dripping parcel of premature twins out to the pigsty and tosses it into the trough. Then she goes to the well and rinses her hands of any sin. She stoically crosses herself. Then she returns to the girl. She is sorry for the child, lying weak and anemic on the earth. The child who is now childless. She lifts the girl gently and lays her in a patch of clean straw strewn across the earthen floor. With clean rags, the midwife cleanses the girl’s body of any evidence of birth. After some minutes, her wailing dissolves into the occasional gulp. She understands, from the delicacy with which the rough woman is tending to her, that something has gone wrong. But she still whispers, almost incoherently, “Dov'è il mio bambino?” The midwife cracks her knuckles for a few moments, playing with the question. How many times, she wonders, have women asked that question? How many times did the
Divya Mehrish
Virgin Mother herself wonder where is my child? And then the midwife knows how to answer. “Loro…eh…lui è con Dio.” They…he is with God. The old woman inhales sharply, clucking at herself for slipping. She clenches her eyelids shut, trying to ground herself. She doesn’t see how the girl’s body shudders.
As the midwife leaves the haggard girl, now resting in her cot in a clean nightdress, she tucks her rosary between her breasts like the secret she is keeping. Before slipping out through the doorless exit, the old woman wonders if she is really protecting the young lady from any additional hurt by hiding the fact that she lost two babies instead of just one. A loss is a loss. She considers correcting the story, but the young woman is sleeping, and so she takes her leave, wordlessly. When the air feels calm and slow and uninterrupted by the anziana’s breathing, the girl blinks her swollen eyes open, uncried tears still caught between her thick eyelashes. She curls into herself, her middle still soft and warm and full. She feels so empty, so alone. She wishes now that she had asked the midwife to let her hold them, to press them against her chest, even if they were already dead or about to die. She doesn’t even know what they smelled like, if they shared her husband’s soft chin and rolling forehead, if they had inherited her delicate fingers. She has no memory to roll around in her mouth, to keep her satiated when she is hungry for motherhood. All she has is the knowing that she birthed two babies, and she lost both—she had a double shot at life, at giving life, and still she failed. All she has is the fractured memory of her body convulsing, twice, into two splattered, bloody, excruciatingly silent lives.
And she has the taste of her own body between her lips. Her body had shuddered a third time, about a quarter of an hour after she birthed her twins. The midwife had taken the placenta, boiled it in the main house, and brought the steaming flesh back to the girl on a little plate. She hand-fed the girl her own insides, against her will, forcing the organ her body had expelled back inside her. The only reason the young woman chewed the tough meat and swallowed it was because the old woman promised that these nutrients would grant her the ability to birth a healthy child the next time. The only reason she listened is because of her faith in “the next time.” La prossima volta. But still, she wonders how consuming the very organ that failed to provide her infants with sufficient nutrients to make them strong enough to live is any sort of promise for future motherhood. She wishes, for a moment, that her mother was with her now, to hold her and pray into her neck with gentle kisses. But the woman disowned her once she married her husband at sixteen years of age, even though she returned to the door of her childhood home the next day, just with a ring on her finger and her insides deflowered. She sobs into the straw, both motherless and childless.
Divya Mehrish
Virgin Mother herself wonder where is my child? And then the midwife knows how to answer. “Loro…eh…lui è con Dio.” They…he is with God. The old woman inhales sharply, clucking at herself for slipping. She clenches her eyelids shut, trying to ground herself. She doesn’t see how the girl’s body shudders.
As the midwife leaves the haggard girl, now resting in her cot in a clean nightdress, she tucks her rosary between her breasts like the secret she is keeping. Before slipping out through the doorless exit, the old woman wonders if she is really protecting the young lady from any additional hurt by hiding the fact that she lost two babies instead of just one. A loss is a loss. She considers correcting the story, but the young woman is sleeping, and so she takes her leave, wordlessly. When the air feels calm and slow and uninterrupted by the anziana’s breathing, the girl blinks her swollen eyes open, uncried tears still caught between her thick eyelashes. She curls into herself, her middle still soft and warm and full. She feels so empty, so alone. She wishes now that she had asked the midwife to let her hold them, to press them against her chest, even if they were already dead or about to die. She doesn’t even know what they smelled like, if they shared her husband’s soft chin and rolling forehead, if they had inherited her delicate fingers. She has no memory to roll around in her mouth, to keep her satiated when she is hungry for motherhood. All she has is the knowing that she birthed two babies, and she lost both—she had a double shot at life, at giving life, and still she failed. All she has is the fractured memory of her body convulsing, twice, into two splattered, bloody, excruciatingly silent lives.
And she has the taste of her own body between her lips. Her body had shuddered a third time, about a quarter of an hour after she birthed her twins. The midwife had taken the placenta, boiled it in the main house, and brought the steaming flesh back to the girl on a little plate. She hand-fed the girl her own insides, against her will, forcing the organ her body had expelled back inside her. The only reason the young woman chewed the tough meat and swallowed it was because the old woman promised that these nutrients would grant her the ability to birth a healthy child the next time. The only reason she listened is because of her faith in “the next time.” La prossima volta. But still, she wonders how consuming the very organ that failed to provide her infants with sufficient nutrients to make them strong enough to live is any sort of promise for future motherhood. She wishes, for a moment, that her mother was with her now, to hold her and pray into her neck with gentle kisses. But the woman disowned her once she married her husband at sixteen years of age, even though she returned to the door of her childhood home the next day, just with a ring on her finger and her insides deflowered. She sobs into the straw, both motherless and childless.
Divya Mehrish
In her sleep, the polar bear’s nose twitches maniacally. She is inhaling the scent of her cub, memorizing his presence. Mother and son sleep braided together—limbs twisted and insulated. He has doubled in size now, and so has his appetite. Now, as the season of blizzards approaches, the mother worries about how she will continue to seek out enough to eat. She knows she is not alone in her hunt, that there are other mothers and other bachelors looking to feed themselves and their children. In the morning, the cub slithers out from beneath his mother’s heavy paw and waddles out into the sunshine. He is enthralled by the light, by the texture of ice against the raw pads of his paws, against his soft lips. He burrows, creating a little nest of snow where he can make himself at home, away from his mother. The sun is drooping, flailing its rays against the horizon when the polar bear forces herself upright. She is ravenous to the point where her stomach has numbed itself. It is time to scavenge, to feed her son. She stretches out her limbs, her nose tingling as she inhales the air in search of the musky flavors of his fur. Pausing, midstretch, she turns behind her, then ahead, then to each of her sides. Chuffing wildly, she rears her head. Where is her son?
~ “How will you begin again?”
The morning I woke with fear of the art your mothering had mastered, I realized there is only one genesis. “Let there be light,” God said, and light appeared. There is no undoing, no redoing. God was pleased; the light remained lit. My beginning cannot be begun, again. I am a consequence of love, decontextualized. A diapason, the dismemberment of daughterhood. I am the inhaling of the aftermath, yours. I am about to implode.
~
Every morning, my mother’s mother lays out two plates of light brown bread, each coated heavily in sugar. Beside each plate she plants a carton of fruit juice. As she waits for her children to sit at the table, she ties the apron strings tighter around her waist. She pats down her sides, her fingers drumming alongside her rib cage.
Divya Mehrish
She has lost a good deal of weight. Her lips pucker into a small, pleased smile. As if in response, her stomach growls angrily. She sips only at the black coffee she brewed earlier that morning. That is all she will allow herself today.
“Non lo voglio, mamma,” her daughter whines as soon as she approaches the table. “I don’t want the juice.” Every morning, her daughter complains, and, every morning, her mother reaches for her husband’s belt hanging from the hook by the main door. She has never belted her children—it’s her husband’s duty—but now that he is away in Germany, working for Volkswagen, she must be responsible for punishing her children into obedience. Mustn't she?
Her son begins to eat, hungrily, desperately. He eats with his hands, tearing chunks of bread off the crust, sucking on the pillowy flesh, and dipping the moist pieces into the mini pools of sugar on his plate. Between slurps of fruit juice, he requests another slice, and then another. Each time, his mother dusts an extra layer of sugar onto the crusty bread, trying to satiate her son. And then he asks for water, for more juice, anything to conquer his unquenchable thirst. My son is growing, the woman tells herself. It’s my duty to nourish him.
Her daughter is still sitting at the table in silence, her ankles tucked around each other as she stares angrily at the table, the plastic straw still attached to the back of the fruit juice carton. She is refusing her mother’s food, her mother’s demands, her mother’s love. The woman locks her gaze with her daughter’s. Eyeing the untouched slice of sugared bread, she warns her child with a reproachful glare in her eyes. And then her daughter does the unthinkable—she lifts the ceramic plate of her breakfast and shatters it to the ground. “Non lo voglio.” Her daughter’s hoarse voice slithers out of her body like the tarry fumes through the smokestacks at the factory. And then, her voice caged within barred teeth, “Ti odio!” I hate you.
Without flinching, her mother wraps the belt around her wrist, the buckles at the other end, as she approaches my mother. She teaches her daughter a mother’s love, responsibility, duty. These lessons cannot be unlearned. ~
The polar bear’s cub has been gone for a full moon cycle. The mother no longer sleeps, no longer scavenges. She has no one to feed but herself, and no need to feed herself if her body has become useless—she has no child to warm, to nestle, to mother. She spends her days shrugging off the falling snow, her weak shoulders drooping and rising painfully as she searches for the silhouette of her cub, the toolarge ears set against his tiny head, the too-short, waddling limbs. He is too young to live without her, without her milk, without her protection.
And then it strikes her. Instinctively, primally, she burrows her nose into the ground and begins following the scent. There is something meaty in the air, a
Divya Mehrish
richness exuded. She salivates, her eyes growing wide and wild. Her eyes narrow, beady and red. Her body suddenly full of energy, she bounds into the wind, the patterns of her paws disrupting the sleek overcoat of a snowed-in winter. In the distance, an off-white lump, stained by dirty water and blood, gyrates. Something is rolling on the ground. No, it’s running towards her. Huffing now, the polar bear growls. She is out of breath, overwhelmed by the deepening pit of her stomach. For a moment, she pauses on a shard of ice, lifting herself off the ground to stand on her rear legs. Her ears twitch in the wind as makes out the sound of moaning. Something is hurt.
~
“Where did you come from?”
I am of your hands, from your hands, in your hands. We have the same hands, pianist’s fingers, ballerina’s knuckles. The shape of my body is the shape of yours. I came from you—me, the consequence of silence, my origin story itself a consequence of silence. I came from the source whence you sprung.
~
My grandmother sits in the waiting room of the hospital in Pisa. Her husband’s second cousin is a doctor here, and he has access to the insulin therapy her little boy needs. She had sat with him as the doctors hooked him up to an IV, her satchel full of homemade food, a loaf of fresh bread, juice cartons. He is hungry. He needs to eat. He needs to drink. When the nurses left the room, the mother quickly pulled out a carton of juice, stuck the sharp end of the straw through the foil on the top, and shoved the straw between her son’s waiting lips. He slurped down the juice within seconds, sobbing, begging for another.
“Signora, no!” The nurse quickly snatched away the just-emptied carton and quickly herded the mother out of the room, slamming the door of her son’s room shut. The nurse pushed her into a seat in the waiting room, told her to stay put. Boiling with fury, steaming with concern, she now shivers in the airconditioned space, wishing her husband were with her. He has had to stay home with their daughter, to make sure she eats, to make sure she does not empty her stomach into the toilet after each meal. They can no longer leave her alone at home, even though their daughter is now only a few years younger than her mother was when she birthed her.
The woman slumps over in the chair, her face in her hands. Through her satchel, the loaf of bread pokes at her bony side. Salivating, the woman feels her fingers reaching for the bread. The nurses won’t let her son have any of her food, anything she tries to feed him, and so she is free to eat it. Isn’t she? Her fingers tremble as they grasp the thick crust. But she is so close— almost the whole day without eating. A deep murmur emerges from her stomach, followed by a hiccup sound, as her body wars with her mind. But then the nurse rushes in—her son. He has fallen into a coma. The woman drops everything: satchel, bread, her hunger.
With a roar, the polar bear swipes blindly at the creature before her, the falling snow blurring her vision. The steely scent of blood is still fresh on the creature’s hair, on its skin. It, too, is weak. The weak can recognize their own kind. The bear’s tongue lolls out as she fights, consumed by a raging hunger.
As gusts of wind heave through her body, chilling her to the bone, she paws at the ground, at her neck, at her eyes, at the creature before her that has stopped fighting. With a deep sigh, she throws herself onto its rumpled body, breathing heavily. When the polar bear feels strong enough to lift her torso up again, the creature has suffocated. The snow has died down. She slithers off its body and examines her catch. It is a small polar bear, a male, perhaps a year old. The blubber will be rich, fresh, young
And so, she begins to eat, tearing through the blubber, her actions hallucinatory. She paws and chews ravenously, stuffing her body with as much as she can handle, and then more. Attempting to fill an unconquerable hunger, an unconquerable loss, she nearly forgets she has lost her son.
When she wakes up from a trance-like sleep, her ribs sore and her stomach aching from having stretched itself out so far, she unfurls her tight limbs. There is life in her body, again. Warmth seeps through her bones as her heart pumps blood through her organs. Her left claw knocks against something soft. She turns around— it is the head of last night’s meal. There is something familiar about the too-large ears that makes her tremble. With a shiver, she grinds her jaw, the taste of her own body’s gift between her lips. She is childless.
~
“And what would you say if you could?”
Mama, I cleft you.
My childhood was a concerto in D Minor,
Divya Mehrish
like yours.
I am still learning how to pulp my loneliness, how to sip at amnesia like ambrosia. how do I forgive you: our inheritance— il nostro retaggio— shared, maybe, but devoid of purity, a sentence abandoned— “Please.”
—in midair. I would tell you I am your home, I am my own home, that I would hibernate in the space between our legs as if I were at home in my origin story. If you could.
GRAVITYOF PETALS
STANLEYROZENBLIT
WILEYBIRKHOFERPRIZE
Carine Becker | Unsplash
Stanley Rozenblit
“Gravity of Petals”
Wiley Birkhofer Prize in Poetry
The night unfurls like parchment in a librarian’s dream, turning blank edges into latitude and vine. I walk the furrow where the orchard once believed in spring—now only spine of root and rind.
A wind lifts skins from last year’s fruit, holds them to moonlight like unanswered letters, each rind a brittle syllable of goodbye, still fragrant, still refusing to rot completely.
My brother says decay is honest work; my mother, that mourning is a chore we never finish. I pocket two seeds, twin red planets, and feel their quiet gravity through denim.
In the distance, freight trains translate summer’s surplus into cities of need; the clatter sounds like someone feeding coins into the mouth of an electric well.
I think of you— your laugh stitched from river glass, how you left before the frost harvest, your boots filled with maps I never learned to read.
Was the world too small, or merely the sentences we were given? In the margins you drew constellations; now they drop their pins across my skull each dusk, a braille of static stars.
I dig a small gravity for the seeds— two finger‑widths, the space between question and answer, cover them with thawing light.
Stanley Rozenblit
Tomorrow, something tender will try again, pressing its green rehearsal into air. I will kneel and call it by your secret name, the one that tastes of windfall and staying.
And if it grows—a single bloom, no orchard— let it be enough: a compass trembling on its own stem, learning the trick of standing upright.