Poetry

"Papaya Bowl" - Raen Kao (1st place)
"The Moth" - Mattie Sullivan (2nd place)
"December" - Naomi Ling (2nd place)
"Ars Poetica" - Aaliyah Anderson (Honorable Mention)
"Nanang" - Cathleen Balid (Honorable Mention)
"Doppelgänger" - Alamo Frank-Niyogi (Honorable Mention)
"A Letter of Thanks" - Connor Hoffman (Honorable Mention)
"Empty Heart Disease (空心病)" - Fiona Jin (Honorable Mention)
"The Small Things" - Maeve Kenney (Honorable Mention)
"Night-day" - Clara Neilson-Papish (Honorable Mention)
"A Self-Portrait Reconstructed with Grief" - Julia Ongking (Honorable Mention)
"Girl Stands Knee-Deep on the Seashore" - Heather Qin (Honorable Mention)
"Baby Bunny" - Bee Stevens (Honorable Mention)
"Cemetery Living" - Bee Stevens (Honorable Mention)
"The Night of the Rain" - Sherry Zhang (Honorable Mention)

Fiction

"Ezekiel’s Progress Journal: Day 1 at Week 60" - Alexis Washington (1st place)
"Memorialized in Embers" - Claire Rawlins (2nd place)
"A Poison Tree in Munich" - Chloe Alley (2nd place)
"Scarecrow" - Oliver Herron (Honorable Mention Fiction)

Raen Kao

1. yāt
Your mother is the sun and a cut papaya.

2. yih
Your father is the moon and a squeezed lime.

3. sāam
Their love to you is carefully placed in that ceramic bowl you made in second grade. It’s half
muddy, half neon—you vaguely remember dumping a few million rainbows of glaze, watching
the colors scream and sing as your messy brush reached for more and more and more.

You are that bowl.

4. sei
The weighted blanket sits on top of you, blank and heavy, mirroring your mind. The color is
what your father initially described as ‘unicorn vomit.’ Sitting there now, on the other side of the
table, staring at you, you imagine he’s probably wondering, Where did I go wrong?

Your mother’s on the other side of the table, also staring at you. You can’t read her; you were
always more like your father. Maybe she’s thinking the same thing, but you never learned
Cantonese—the words of sun-baked, viscous honey always too much for your cold, sharp
tongue.

You’re back in the house. When you shouldn’t be. And you do not cry.

5. ńgh
Your mother gets up before your sullen silence to walk to the kitchen, your father following her.
She opens the fridge door, and the sound echoes into your shame. Still, she pulls out your bowl
as he picks out a lime.

She sets the bowl down on the counter, peeling off the cling-wrap, droplets cascading into her
hand. He cuts the lime into slices, cupping them into the bowl.

They head back to you.

6. lohk
Your mother gives you the bowl of sweet sour orange green. Deoi m zyu, she whispers. Your
father grimaces, a smile through pain. Now looking them in the eyes, they both look like they’ve
been crying.

You know it’s your fault.

7. tsāt
They leave. Your mother goes into her office, your father goes to the living room.

Deoi m zyu, you echo-think to their bent backs.

I’m sorry.

8. baat
Hollowly, you shift under the mass of ‘unicorn puke,’ grabbing a pair of chopsticks from the
right end of the table. With your other hand, you squeeze a lime slice over the top.

The chopsticks pick up a chunk.

It’s sweet, dark, sour, bright. Salty, too, for some reason.

The chopsticks pick up another chunk.

I taste home.

Mattie Sullivan

She is the bringer of death, the ancestors’ messenger, marked with a skull,
the fate who spins the holy thread, Her sheers slice the spindle
the messenger of the gods, but not of their blessings; She is no Hermes

She brings no winged sandals with Her message, only fore and hind wings
laced to Her thorax, adorned with peach fuzz and implants of gold
our divine watcher, with pale eyespots orbited by ancestors

She changes Her color when the messenger requires: an ancestor calls
She must be a milky white, but caution in trust calls for an earthy shade
called to the divine, running towards light, an open flame of desire

She flutters forward, Her fern-like antenna on the edge of death and desire
must bring Her message, so the light is diminished: someone will die
certain of fate the second she enters, She must snip the spindle

She is the bringer of death, She engulfs every aspect, She is rebirth,
brings fate to your doorstep, dressed in faded ink and yellowing paper
brings death and life and every moment between: She is our Charon

She rows the gold-crested boat, through stalactites and ancient crystals
brings us home, and will soon pull us from our rest—She is the carrier
trains and stretches every tendon in Her wings, all to connect the circuit

She works with and within the cycle: from an egg, to larva, to encapsulation
inches closer with each incarnation; Saturn's rings will warp to greet Her
the bringer of death, the divine messenger, marked by our souls

Naomi Ling

This winter will eat you like every other,
the tarot woman cackles in my ear. This morning
milk hugs the rim of my mug with a tinge
of hesitancy. The landline hums a staticky tune.
Funny how we romanticize brevity—
the brisk toss of an Abercrombie scarf,
the question posed by a door ajar. Should I stay
or stay inside? Inside as in the second-floor bathroom two years past
where I caught breaths like fireflies gasping
in & out of existence. My lungs such a tired warrior.
My mother holding my braids as I hugged the rim
of a white, chipped abyss. When the church choir floated by on hallelujah
I conjured their faces: chapped & blistered
but ever so angelic, as if they were ascending the golden staircase
at any moment. I rushed over with Panasonic—
but they had yellowed like the edges of a photocard.
This morning I awoke to the same choir,
alighted upon the same dirty window, pushed the same past
into a small blue room between my gut & my heart.
How much room do I have to rewrite myself? And if not in this world,
perhaps a multiverse built by my ancestors’ bones?
Someday I’ll decorate this room with a vase,
eyelashes, & other necessities. The past stubborn & squirming,
but mine to love like a daughter.
Mother, kiss me before I’m wise enough to push away your want.
I am unripe & yet to unfurl.

Aaliyah Anderson

Will you love me like the crows
hanging between your septum piercing?
No, I didn’t think so, but I learn to still ask.
Oh, how articulation transforms as you fill your
ears with water. Suppose I’m the one who
eats paintings, unconsciously, re-flaming
citrus like a good smoothie—yes, pulsing allows us
happiness. Each walk does the opposite; more need
to stress my feet, deities crossing soundlessly, I bless you,
you kiss me.

Cathleen Balid

is a word that has always sat funny in your mouth. You say it with the back of your
tongue, your teeth stale and pristine, and you note the breath in its odd timedness, smooth and
circular like nanang’s rosary beads. Maybe that is why you say it like a prayer: eyes closed, lips
waxy. Breathing measured like your body.
Nanang is a word that means mother, but you have never seen it before. Somehow the
word only exists in the space between cost and silence, between nanang’s antiseptic eyes, as in,
yes, nanang, I saw the bills. As in, no, nanang, I don’t know what to do. You only knew nanang
through her thin, slippery body, the way her dreams slipped past her coffee-stained teeth and
paused
into farming sugar. Through the absent way she said your name, like a stain of coffee
knelt into a tablecloth, flattened by its bitterness. Over the years you watched nanang’s back
grow broken like webbed fruit rinds swallowed and discarded, and you palmed your spine faintly
and imagined your bloody bone developed from hers—a skeletal connection. But nanang
swallows affection as if it were bitter medicine, and you, embittered, swallow her name into the
striated depths of your voice.
Nanang is a word that you have not said since you left her, dying, in the house you were
born in. In time nanang would learn to clutch her words so they did not fracture, to amend them
into a reflection of her body, but you did not stay for time. You lost your youth to mending the
ripples across nanang’s lonely, absent face, smoothing a future serrated like the peel of durian,
and
when you left, you brushed the wetness from her cheek. It has been years since you have
seen nanang’s filmy lips, touched her wrinkled skin, but
nanang is a word that falls reflexive from your mouth

Alamo Frank-Niyogi

I saw my twin working as a waitress; it was an IHOP and I was seventeen and full enough with anger that it had started to become coherent rather than crazed. She asked for a picture and I dropped my plastic spoon, getting it all sticky on the syrup-stained linoleum. I had seen the antithesis of who I was, who I would be—she looked like me but wrong. Wearing my face like an ill-fitting costume—or maybe I was her mirror; maybe I was the wrong one. I was not yet religious but in that moment I felt like repenting, bargaining for my individuality. Begging to something up above for her to drop dead upon the floor. She begged again for a picture and I cried out: “No! I hate you! I do not want a sister!”

Connor Hoffman

To all of you,
The background characters of our reverie,
The fantasies who shield us from the unwanted thoughts
To all the siblings we never had, to all the children we won’t:
Thank you.

You keep us thoughtful and sane.
Thank you to those who don’t exist outside the light of speculation
Or wandering thoughts.
Or those fleeting things we call dreams
You affect our world in more ways than we can say.

To those whose wish upon a star or a well came true
To those with enchantment, wonder, and a touch of magic in their lives
Or to those who could have been but never were.
I am happy you get to live in a world where things are different.
Something more than the straight lines and rigid rules I live by.

Until we speak again,
I will see you in my dreams, and in tales told round the fire.
I will see you during endless school hours and in the shadows late at night
I’ll hear legends of your deeds in songs and stories and in whispers overheard at a cafe
And know that I will someday return.

And that when my eyes open, I will remember you.
Thank you for your service to the world.
Thank you, to those who don’t exist.

Fiona Jin

Lately my knives stay in the kitchen drawer because I have nothing to cut anymore. They said only clean, dying girls become saints, so I wash everything down the sink to pass the food-grade test, become so edible I grow flowers from the mouth. My roommate asks why my cutting board is a graveyard of biology textbooks & I reply with my hometown friends on the phone, voices brittling like prayer: please, eat something today, why do you kill yourself like this?—my God, how the valves of my heart are shredded into wilting pomegranate shells. How I’d rather lie than say it doesn’t really matter, does it—at least not to me? Confess that I stay alive by playing dead? Red, translucent seeds are rotting from beneath my fingertips & I still haven’t cleaned out the blender. I haven’t used a pair of scissors since 2017.

*空心病—romanized “kong xin bing”—is a term coined by Beijing University Professor Xu Kaiwen in 2016 to describe its 40.4% (according to Xu) of otherwise extraordinarily brilliant students who found life meaningless. An additional 30.4% said that they hated studying.

Maeve Kenney

Eggs,
Milk,
Bread—seedy bread—my once-best-friend’s favorite.
The cereal my mother likes,
Hand sanitizer that smells like Iowa in January.
It reminds me of rags of dirty snow
wrung out between the crocuses.
Bandaids.
Bobby pins and batteries . . . I’ll just go to Costco,
and feel small between the shelves.
Since I can’t buy August or Italy, I’ll get
Olives that taste like water, and
Lemon-flavored gelato.
I’ll look for honey to leave sticky
on the countertop, aniseed
and cinnamon for my morning tea.
Maple syrup for my dad to drizzle
From high above my head.
“I should stock up before the long weekend”
Someone I love once said.
Did I write milk already?
Eggs.
I might get sourdough instead

Clara Neilson-Papish

The sky fell that night
A million stars plummeted
Cosmic hail, burning our skin,
Making us giggle

Next came the planets
Bruising and confusing us
Jupiter left a purple mark
Tattooing my shoulder

As the sky transformed from night to day
The black dripped down from the heavens
The black dripped onto our clothing
Under our fingernails
Leaving only blue

Birds chirped, signaling the end
The hellish transition was complete
Sun, illuminating the scars of night
Peeked in and out of clouds

Julia Ongking

i wonder if his daughter’s ghost stirs at the presence
of her mother, her presence swelling at quiet dialogue

between parents from a lifetime before, to a husband’s
passing question, a wife’s arm around a tender

shoulder, as if they’ve been doing this for hundreds
of years. why haven’t you eaten your lunch yet?

he’s been teaching a class, he says, and i imagine his wife
facing the dozens of children, families who’d worked to save

his ailing daughter, reflecting on the remnants of wealth,
piercing jewelry clutching her shrinking baby.

i wonder if grief is the material we use to build our houses
to shield us from the sight of a yellowing face,

hollowed out by growing tumors in an infant’s liver,
only to be blown away by the early winds of a philippine

typhoon. i wonder about the nature of bodies, souls, scooped
out of fragile bodies, by the pain of being, or perhaps,

the pain of losing, as he turns towards expectant eyes,
students, who will fail, time and time again, to fathom

the ugly aftermath of a typhoon, unable to pick up the pieces
of a shell of a household, scattered all over the classroom floor.

Heather Qin

And watches the ocean desert by daggering into its
mouth. On TV a hula dancer, magical girl bending boards
into boats, at home a girl confessing that she has always been

afraid of flight. She was born in the year of the floods, when
volcanoes splintered empty into the clouds and lurched into
the ocean as steam. Again this year: ring of fire hurling up ash,

decorating the atmosphere with summer storms. Outside
the fishing port, she fists sand into something ugly: the stench
of bodies washed up on the shore, fruit flies flicked in rot. Capitalist

theory says all things are commodified for something private, so
she smears her knuckles across the oily beach, cheekbones
slicked with dead things, here is the princess you were

looking for, mystical and rare, the last of her people? Cage her
atop a tower with saltwater rusting its spine, and she will
sharpen her nails into harpoons before thrashing against

the windows, skin unzipping against the rocks. She has been
homeschooled in survival and learns the only way to be saved
is to turn animal, to un-daughter into something porcelain

and fragile marked: Do not touch. Handle with care. Currency
is only valuable when exported, so she molds herself
into a rabbit: white enough for anyone to look away. How long she has

survived in this place—beautiful only in its destruction, spine
herringboned with scars. A bird once filled
the entire ocean with stones in search of her drowned brother, so she dreams

her body capable of such strength.

Bee Stevens

Caught in his royal mouth
You were but a baby
With glass eyes and a quivering nose.
I held back the ferocious king for you
My widening eyes watched as you crawled
Desperately dragging what part of you was dead
By what part of you was still alive,
That rich hunger driving you
That wicked, wet pity following me
I remember how cold you looked, melting into the soaked ground
How quickly your tiny heart beat to expel
The fear-laden blood from your body.
Gingerly, I wrapped you in a blanket and in a box;
Don’t you remember my shaking knee
That you rested upon as we traveled?
Our thoughts could have been a raw concord
In that midnight car ride fueled by hope.
Tiny thing, so scared to die next to me. . .
Small creature, wretched and desirous of life. . .
As I handed you over, your eyes glossed over.
I never touched you with my own skin,
I never felt your dying hope,
So I suppose that is why I don’t understand it.
But I know it

Then I returned home, I stared down at my smug king,
Glory in death, he told me.
Please live, I told you.
Do it for the both of us.

Bee Stevens

How do I know when to keep living?
The grave plots in the cemetery by the house tell me.
Every few weeks or so,
Another shovel tears into the haunted soil,
Another rectangular stain on the earth is spilt,
And another minute ticks away.
Those ghosts have always infested my brain
Like maggots digging holes through memories and
Only pausing to die and decompose.
Those ghosts have always influenced me
Like the one who lingers after the funeral
Screaming, silently sobbing into the empty, dead air:
Always just over your shoulder, too close, too close.
And I never asked if they were demons or malicious,
For, by the writing on their very headstones,
(All their anger and sadness and perpetual misunderstanding)
They led the same human death we all will—
And we were all just normal people.
My legs can walk me to the cemetery and beyond,
But usually, I am comforted by the final quietness I find.
We watch the weeds twist and grow over the disturbed earth
And breathe in the scent,
And exhale the rot,
And then take a shaky step back.
The ghosts have always followed me home.
It’s only now that the bodies have started catching up.

Sherry Zhang

Heavy raindrops bang on straw roofs, defying commoners' wishes.
“Why must you be so?” the distant passengers ask, shaking their heads;
Yet the young man trudges, bound to glimpse beyond the virgin mountains.

Alexis Washington

Everything around you sounded quiet. You’d tuned out the noisiness of the classroom, the bickering, the gossiping, the random YouTube riddle videos, and whatever else was now lost to you. You wondered if you should have even been there. Dr. Kelly said you could’ve waited a few more months, but being home-schooled for half a year would have driven you insane. However, it appeared that being in school wasn’t beneficial for your sanity, either.

Locks of black hair obstructed your view, interrupting your thoughts.

“Guess who?”

“H-hey, Bea,” you said.

She moved her hair out of your face and lightly wrapped her arms around your neck, rocking side to side.

“How you doing, Zeke?”

You stayed silent for a few seconds, not for lack of an answer but a lack of words.

“Um, good. F-fine used, um, talk this.” Well, you were almost used to it, at least. Though you understood your limitations, sometimes you still tried to force more complicated sentences out of your mouth. However, no matter how hard you searched, you couldn’t find the words anywhere, and then you’d spend fifteen seconds on a three-second thought.

“Talking like what? This is how you normally sound.”

“Haha. Um, fu-fun-ny.” You rolled your eyes.

Besides your moms, Bea had been your chief supporter after your stroke. She tried to make things seem like nothing had changed, but that was almost impossible. Your conversations had gone from long and dumb to short and dumber. The only saving grace was that Bea had gotten pretty good at understanding you, even the few times you attempted complicated speech.

“I’m serious. What did you think you sounded like before? MLK?”

You gave her a light shove, and she laughed before taking her seat behind you.

“Okay, I get that wasn’t the best joke I could’ve made, but at least I got you to smile a little.”

You shook your head. “H-how you?”

“I’m good; bit sleepy, though.”

“Sleepy, t-too. R-recover, um, therapy, umm, work.”

“I get that. The work Mr. Thomas gives already takes me two hours to complete. Can’t imagine facing that and speech therapy after spending months recovering.”

“Thomas e-easy. You, ah-um, dumb.”

“Hey, history is hard for people who don’t care about history. Don’t judge me.”

“You j-joke.”

“Yeah, but I also got you a gift. So, I earned my jab.”

“Gift?”

Bea pulled out a small purple box decorated with glitter and a bow on top and pushed it toward you. She nodded for you to open it. You untied the bow and opened the box to find a silver ring with a red gem and a black necklace with a blue gem.

“Umm, jewel. Pr-pretty.”

“Yeah, my mom has been getting into that whole chakra thing, and Isabel made some jewelry out of some gems Mom gave her.”

“Mom, um, crazy.”

“Hey, I don’t make fun of your moms.”

“Mom, um, k-kick butt.” You punched the air next to her face.

“I know; I’ve been to your house many times. Ms. C still terrifies me.” She took the ring out of the box. “But inspiration from her, well, ‘kick butt’ attitude is kinda the reason why I chose this gem. The red gem is supposed to represent the Muladhara chakra, grounding me to earth and increasing my ability to manifest my goals of awesomeness.”

“Course ch-ch, um, pick.”

“I’ve got to become rich somehow.” She put the ring on and took out the necklace. “And the blue gem in your necklace represents the Vishudda chakra.”

“Me-means?”

She paused for a moment. “It is the chakra of creativity and good vibes. I thought you might need some of those.”

Bea handed the necklace to you. You held the gem in your hand and stared at it. Her pause and the fact she unironically said “good vibes” made you think she didn’t actually know what she was talking about. Nonetheless, you really did need good vibes. And you could just look up the meaning later if you wanted to.

“You be-lieve?”

“I don’t think I fully believe in this stuff, but if it is legit, then we are set.” She waved her hands like she was about to perform a spell. “With the power of this gem, I manifest that we’re going to survive the rest of this hellish school year and that we will get one million dollars by the end.”

You smiled and tied the necklace around your neck. It was a little tight, but it looked nice. The gem even matched your navy blue t-shirt.

“Thank, you.”

“No problem, buddy.”

You heard footsteps approaching the classroom door. Despite the bell ringing several minutes ago, they sounded calm. Mr. Thomas was here.

“Good morning, class. Sorry for being late. Traffic was not in my favor today.”

Traffic was rarely in his favor. He told you he had to drive through Volée Street and Groves Drive, which had a ridiculously high rate of car accidents. Mr. Thomas was almost always late if he showed up at all. You preferred when he didn’t show up because you used that time to talk to Bea and even tutor her when she needed it.

“But I won’t let my tardiness impede our pop quiz for today. Hopefully, you all have been reviewing at home.” He looked around the room with a devilish grin, knowing good and well that the majority of kids in the class were not ready for a pop quiz. You never understood why he was okay with sabotaging his students’ GPAs with those. “I’ll give you all ten minutes to look over your notes while I take attendance. Good luck.”

“Dang it,” said Bea. “I haven’t been studying at all. I don’t even think I got any notes to study. Can you go over the stuff with me?”

You narrowed your eyes.

“Right. Too much talking. Do you have any notes that I can use?”

You grabbed your phone and showed her the study sheet you found online. “Not, umm, tho-rough.”

Bea took your phone and scanned the notes. “Thanks. There’s no way I’m going to pass this, but at least I won’t get a zero.”

Though you didn’t doubt the possibility of Bea failing by her standard, aka getting a ‘C,’ you still did your best to encourage her. After all, you now owned the chakra of good vibes. It’d be a shame not to share them. “You g-good.”

Bea didn’t take her eyes off the notes, but she smiled.

The ten minutes he promised passed in seven, and Mr. Thomas instructed everyone to put their notes away. He silenced the class and passed out the quiz. Before he reached you, you turned around and gave Bea a thumbs up as last-minute encouragement. Bea returned the gesture, though with less enthusiasm and a grimace.

Mr. Thomas handed you the paper. After only a glance, you assumed that you were going to nail this. The quiz was only one page, and all the questions were multiple-choice or true and false. Easy peasy. You zoomed through all the questions and moved to turn in the quiz. However, you stopped when you heard someone flip over their page. It was cocky to assume it’d be over that fast.

You turned over the page, and there was one last question. “Explain the causes of the great depression in at least five sentences.” You felt bad for Bea, as the study guide didn’t go over that, but she knew she should’ve studied on her own. For you, the question was child’s play.

You attempted to write an answer. The great depression cause stock. Stock what? Stock, stock, stock crash. You wrote down crash, but your following words didn’t come out much easier. More kids were flipping over their pages. The sound made you itch. You scratched your upper arm and attempted to write again, but you could only think of one word at a time. When the first kid walked to the turn-in bin, you scratched even harder.

Bea tapped your shoulder. “Hey, are you okay?”

You stopped scratching and nodded.

Of course you were okay. At least you were able to write three sentences, even if their meanings were lost behind the grammatical errors and your near-illegible handwriting. You tried to fix it, and your thoughts went blank. You couldn’t stop there because you still had two more sentences to write. Or maybe more if Mr. Thomas expected elaboration on each cause.

Soon almost everyone had turned in their quizzes. The only person left was Bea, but her pencil wasn’t moving. She was waiting for you, and who could blame her when it was ten minutes till second block, and you would’ve usually been done at least thirty minutes ago. But you couldn’t turn it in. You said that the question would be child’s play, but you forgot how hard that could be.

“Ezekiel. Beatrix. You need to leave for second block in five minutes. Please turn in your quizzes.”

Bea stood up and put her hand on your shoulder. “Dude, seriously, are you okay?”

You leaned over your paper so she couldn’t see it. You could feel her eyes on the back of your head. They were probably filled with sympathy or slight worry, and you didn’t know why you were hiding your quiz from her, but you refused to relent.

“What is taking so long, you two? Hand in your quizzes so you can leave.”

“Uh, Ezekiel isn’t feeling well. Can I take him to the nurse?”

“Sure, just give me your quizzes before you go.”

Bea tried to take the paper from your desk, but you put your hand on top of it. “No.”

“C’mon, I know it was hard, but it’s going to be fine,” she whispered.

“Um, not hard. Ca-an’t g-give.” You remained at a standstill. The bell had rung and your classmates filed out the door, all while giving you strange looks. Mr. Thomas got up and walked over to your desk.

“Ezekiel, we don’t have time for this.” He ripped the page from your fingers and skimmed it. “What was all the fuss about, anyway? Your answers are correct.” He flipped over the quiz and took about thirty seconds to read your sentences, then he looked up and said nothing.

A minute went by, and though he still appeared flustered, he spoke up. “Listen, the other teachers and I have been fully briefed on your situation. I’m very sorry that you felt stressed by the quiz, but you should’ve guessed that this—” He waved the paper around. “This quiz isn’t even going to count for you. I just wanted to see how far along you were. You’ve been out for a while. It’s okay if you don’t know everything.”

You repeated the last sentence in your head. He thought you didn’t know. You had gotten all A+s in his class since freshman year, and he assumed you didn’t know. Maybe if he had really tried, he could’ve figured out what you wanted to say. But maybe he didn’t have time for that. Who would have time for that? Still, if he knew what you were going through, wasn’t it part of his responsibilities as a teacher to try at least a little? You’d never want to be a burden, but asking someone to put in the effort to understand you shouldn’t have been too much. Or was it? You still didn’t know. Either way, you knew what you knew, and it wasn’t fair.

You stood up, blankly looking at Mr. Thomas. “Um, l-look. I know.”

Mr. Thomas nodded and walked back to his desk. Clearly, he didn’t understand what you meant as he tossed your quizzes in the turn-in pile with the rest. You wanted to try again, and you would’ve had he not waved his hand, signaling you to leave. You stormed out of the classroom with your head hung low and Bea following close behind.

You walked into the bathroom, scanning the place to make sure you were alone. After rinsing a paper towel under the sink, you cooled your face down. You couldn’t believe you did that. You wasted Mr. Thomas’s time when it wasn’t even his fault you couldn’t answer the question. But if he knew your limitations, he shouldn’t have had the question on the quiz in the first place. You didn’t even know why you accepted his phony apology. Well, it wasn’t really an apology, more like blaming you for him not paying attention to the briefing. You regretted not reporting that man.

And what about Bea? She followed you all the way to the bathroom door, and with how distressed you looked, you wondered if she was still waiting for you. You knew she was worried sick, and stressing her out was the last thing you wanted to do on your first week back. You had to get back out there for her and yourself. Staying would not have made school easier. Especially if someone came in to use the bathroom.

You attempted to hype yourself up: You can do this. It’s not like there’s going to be another pop quiz. Only Mr. Thomas does those. And you’d know if you had another test today. All you gotta do is sit through a few more lectures. You got this. You got this.

Saying the words in your head wasn’t enough, though—you needed to hear them out loud. You looked at yourself in the mirror, studying your lips as you spoke. “You, got, uhh. Uhm.”

It seemed that even hyping yourself up was a chore.

You glanced down and saw the gem resting on your sternum. Now was the time to see what it was actually supposed to do. The good vibes just were not coming through. You picked up your phone and looked up chakras after a minute of remembering how to spell half the word. You clicked on the first link you saw and scrolled until you found your blue gem.

You read the passage: The fifth chakra is called the Vishudda chakra, also known as the Throat chakra because of its location on the V of the collarbone: the center of communication.

You froze for a moment. There was no way.

The possibility for change and healing is located here. When out of balance, you may feel weak, as you are unable to express your thoughts and feelings without great stress.

You couldn’t decide if you should laugh or cry, but it didn’t matter because you ended up doing both. Only a little bit, though.

Before this, you accepted that aphasia would be ingrained into your reality and practiced only to learn how to cope. At that point, you thought you could’ve been okay with that, and maybe you could’ve, but if there was any way to get better, you wanted it to work. You wanted things to go back to normal and didn’t care how much effort it would take. You wanted to tell Bea how dumb yet awesome she was and let her know everything you’d felt during the tiring ordeal without stuttering or forgetting anything.

You gripped the gem and pressed it to your Adam’s apple. “Please, w-w-work.”

After spending a few more minutes hoping and washing your face, you walked out. You were right about Bea waiting for you. Her face looked like yours did just moments ago.

Her words flew out as fast as a cheetah on coffee. “Oh my gosh, Zeke. I’m so sorry. I can guess what happened with the quiz. And I’m sorry for making it seem like I thought you didn’t know the answers. Of course, I know history is like your best subject. And I’m so sorry that you felt the need to run away and—”

“It o-kay.” Though knowing Bea cared was nice, she shouldn’t have felt the need to apologize for that day. You would never blame her for any of this. She was the main reason you’d made it this far, and you needed to communicate that. You pointed to your necklace. “Kn-know.”

She looked at you with wide eyes, and her speech slowed. “Oh, you looked up what it actually meant?”

You nodded.

“Look, I’m sorry I lied. I just thought you might think I was being insensitive or dumb for thinking it would help. I know there’s a chance you’ll have to deal with aphasia forever, and I’m totally okay with that. But when my mom told me what it meant, I had to at least try. You’re my best friend.”

“M-my too.” You paused for a moment. “I be-lieve, um, better. Umm, take t-time.” Your eyes watered. “It h-hard. Try, um, it s-so hard.” You tried your best to keep it in, but the tears didn’t care about your pride.

Bea put her hands on your shoulders. “I know. But you don’t have to worry because I’m going to be by your side for every step of your recovery, no matter how long that is. I know you can get through this.”

You smiled. She gave you the perfect setup for what you had to say. “Sa-say we.”

“What?”

“We.”

Bea shrugged. “We can get through this?”

You hugged her and yelled, “We can get through this!” It was a bit louder than you meant for it to be, and your yell echoed throughout the hallway. Your instincts told you to move before a teacher came, but Bea held on to you so tight. Even though you couldn’t see her face, you knew there was a big smile on it, and you made a note to try repeating things more often.

Claire Rawlins

Dust collected on the chairs and the shelves and the doors. It was swept to the floor and in the bin when company came. When the door slammed, the dust rose in the air and settled around again. There was no place to put it. Put it in the hall and it floats back in. Put it in the room next door and it seeps through the cracks. Put it in a locked box and your clothes and food and precious dirt will replace it. It was the hopeless, grim war everyone fought—if the dust can be beaten back a day longer, if we can pretend that it is gone, even though tomorrow it’ll be there, twice as thick—they never quite finished that thought. Everyone living in the Maze was waiting for something. Maybe it was death; they weren’t sure. All they knew was that before them there wasn’t so much dust, not so much they woke up choking on it, nor so much that a layer was caked on every face. If they unlocked the great metal doors at either end of the Maze they could put it out there. But then maybe there would be dust outside too, and it wouldn’t do any good. Anyway, the doors were shut and no one could open them.

They called it the Maze because that’s what it was. The middle of it was where the farms and the water pumps were. You could go down the big hallways and see the house-rooms. If you went too far down, the big hallways would turn narrow and dark, and there would be innumerable locked rooms. The map in the meeting room showed the doors, and some of the little halls, but it was too dark in the Maze for anyone to add to the map anymore. The batteries went out twelve years ago, and they all feared the darkness. The bright ceiling of the middle-room was the center of the known world, like a sun. When it went out every night, there was no difference between the sight of closed and open eyes. All of those who lived in the Maze eked out a narrow and tenuous existence in their crypt, sweeping away the dust and toiling in the dying dirt for their rough pittance, and feeling the pulse of the darkness in their hearts when it fell.

But Ellin found a battery.

The big hallways were always dim, just catching the light of the sun-ceiling in the middle-room. Ellin’s house-room was way near the back, almost in the little, forbidden hallways. She didn’t mind, but the dark made it hard to see the trash chute down there, almost invisible in the floor. She was running because she felt like it, even though her mother and father had told her not to, and she fell. It was just like they told her. She was running and running and her footfalls resounded against the walls. Bang-bang-bang-bang, and then it was silent when she stepped out onto air and fell down the chute. Someone came out, yelling something about it being nighttime and no time for infantile games.

They didn’t hear anything else, and shut their door again. Ellin choked on the dust at the bottom of the chute. Her heart, which had been so high as she’d felt the exhilarating cool air run by her face, hurtled to her feet. She cast about desperately, but the dust was thicker than water and it burned her eyes. Her flailing arms slammed against metal, then she jerked her right arm back—into a pocket of air. Her lungs screaming for that air, she pulled herself out of the dust.

For a minute she sat there sobbing, shaken and terrified that her play-world could so fast turn on its head. The echoes of her crying halted her, making her disgusted with herself. Crying was a waste of energy. She dried the snot from her nose and the tears from her eyes as best she could—Ellin had always been a precocious child. When the world righted itself she opened her eyes—and there was light!

The passage she was in turned to the left, and from there emanated a warm, pulsing glow. Ellin blinked, her eyes adjusting slowly. There was no light in the under-tunnels, no light anywhere except the middle-room, and furthermore it was night-time, so there wasn’t light in the middle-room either. But there was a light in the trash chute. On hands and knees, she crawled cautiously towards it. Rounding the corner, she gasped.

The light she had seen was radiating from a window behind a grate. Screwing her eyes up against the glare, she peered into a fingernail’s width of light. At first it was blinding. The cloudiness evaporated finally into the corners of her eyes, and Ellin gasped again. The chute opened into a second middle-room, impossibly more vast than the first, or than anything Ellin had ever seen. As the first middle-room, the ceiling of this room was bright with powerful, unexpendable electric lights. Trees grew in the space with dirt—distant cousins to the shriveled ones above—and there must have been hundreds of them.

“Forest,” Ellin whispered, the word unfamiliar in her mouth. It was a forest. Even from the beginning, before the dirt started running out in the middle-room and eating became a battle with the apathetic soil, the forests were gone. And now there was one in front of her, a shocking incarnation of the dingy schoolbook pictures.

She pushed against the grate gently, then more firmly, but it did not give. This did nothing to abate her excitement. The world of a child was scarcely finite; obstacles like this could be circumvented a hundred ways. There was someone upstairs with the key who could open the frame. She almost forgot that she was trapped in a dusty prison. Ellin fell asleep on the metal floor, utterly spent. She slept a dreamless sleep.

She woke, sore, to the abrupt click of light filtering through the dust into her passage. Her parents would be looking for her soon. She passed a few sundry minutes gazing through the grate again. It was still daytime, and she was now almost certain that there were cows and horses inside, eating the grasses and the wheat. She saw them moving around lazily, basking in the heat of the sun-ceiling. Ellin reaffirmed that she would be hailed as a hero, until by her reckoning it was three-ten past lightening and no frantic voices shouted her name above.

Impatient, Ellin sullied her heroic visions incrementally by shouting above.

“Hey! I’m down here!” No voice called back in answer. “Hey! There’s more dirt down here,” she yelled, loudly as she could.

Finally there was an answer. “Dirt?” asked a voice, muffled by the dust. “Are you in the tunnels?”

“Someone’s in the tun-nels!” shouted another voice, childishly, as if they were telling a bad deed.

There was a great deal of scuffling above, and Ellin caught the voice of her mother. “It’s you, isn’t it, Ellin,” she said tersely.

“Yes,” said Ellin guiltily, feeling heroism was not all it was cut out to be. “I only fell—but I found some dirt! There’s light down here, there’s cows and animals and—”

Ellin’s mother sighed, but everyone else in the crowd gathered around the little innocuous dust chute was silent.

“What sort of dirt?” someone asked playfully, as if humoring the girl’s fantasy.

“Oh, it’s the rich, loamy kind—like we found under the big meeting building when I was born—” Ellin started.

“What kind of cows?” someone else interjected, laughing.

“Well, they’re black and white and brown, and kinda fat, soft-like. They’re in the meadow eating daisies and laying in the sun with their calves.”

“Are there plants down there?”

“Why, there’s a whole forest of them, more kinds of green than are upstairs, and with apples on them, too. There’s fruit trees, mangoes and peaches and oranges and the sort, and no one there to pick them.”

“No one’s down there?”

“No one. It’s so deathly quiet, like Eden before Adam and Eve, like they tell us in school. I think it could be Eden, anyway. It’s like, there’s so many growing green things, and it smells so nice—like dirt used to smell, only better. There’s clovers in the fields. You could lie down on them and sleep, just like a bed. There’s vegetables in the fields, there’s chickens in the coops, and not anyone to keep you from them. The sprouts poke just above the earth. It’s a little wild, like it’s been growing alone for years, but there’s no weeds and there’s so many vegetables. I bet we could put up houses in no time. Remember how we used to weave before all the cotton died out? There’s cotton in there. There’s sheep. The trees are cool and shady, like you could picnic under them, and the meeting room is made of brick.

“The old middle-room is so dirty in comparison. It’s a new middle-room, and everyone could live there, it’s so big. There’s not a speck of dust anywhere.”

Silence from above.

“Well then, get her up!” a voice said, gruffly.

Ellin heard shouting and clambering about and at last a rope came down to her through the dust. “Hold on,” someone told her, and pulled her up.

She emerged from the dust, coughing.

All of the able-bodied and strong in the Maze gathered round with shovels, and put the dust of the dust chute in great big plastic bags. It filtered through the air, but for once, no one cared. Everyone was too exhilarated, full of energy and life at the thought of the second middle-room. School was called off, and all day the children who were too young to help watched them toil in the hole. Shouts rang out through the big hallways, resounding like Ellin’s running footfalls twenty-some hours before, when the passage was uncovered.

Then the drills were brought in since the passage, while big enough to accommodate Ellin, was far too small for the workers. They hammered on, even through the night, the light of the sparks revealing the dusty faces around the chute.

At last, when the grate was uncovered, a gasp of surprise and excitement rang up through the gathered crowd. Ellin was the heroine of the day. Carried on her father’s shoulders, she called, “Open it!”

The strongest of the workers hefted her pick, smiling uncertainly. She paused, glancing up at the crowd, waiting for their assurance.

“Open it!”

“Come on!”

With a great swing, the pick crashed into the grate. A hush rang through the room when it threw up sparks. The worker dislodged her pick. The crowd was silent, disbelieving.

Ellin wriggled down her father’s back hastily, jumping down into the hole. No one stopped her. She went up to the window-that-was-not-a-window which had been covered by the grate. She didn’t know what it was. It was broken now, though. The fields and forest and cows and sheep and vegetables were gone, and smooth black glass had replaced them. She stuck her hand in the hole that the pick had made. Jagged shards of glass cut long, jagged red lines, but her hand numbly groped and—a battery!

“I found a battery!” Ellin announced. No one looked at her. The crowd began to disperse. “We can look in the little hallways now!”

The grimy faces looked only at the floor. They moved slowly, but with resigned purpose. No one swept away the dust that night. They let it come. They let it sweep about the town, not ignorant, but uncaring. The dust was here. It would always be here, and there was no use hiding it.

The men and women of the Maze were no different to each other. They feared the darkness still and abhorred what the light revealed. But when they had drawn the spark of life out of their chest, it had been extinguished brutally.

They had not found what they had been waiting for. They had, instead, discovered that there was nothing at the end of their wait.

Chloe Alley

A loud crack vibrated through the air. The fresh smell of black powder faintly brushed his nose in the same instant of the bright red flash, illuminating the otherwise obscured interior. The pistol he held in his shaking hands clattered to the ground as the fairy glow of light snuffed from inside the boy’s eyes. What beautiful eyes he had. His curly black hair swayed with his tremors as he crumpled on the ground. His graceful form was now worth no more than a lamb led to slaughter: Wasted meat.

In the last of the great European wars, in 2052, one of the cities that was struck the hardest was Munich. The devastation wrought there was unparalleled to most other cities in the world (obviously excepting those that had been nuked in Russia). Countless young faces were painted orange with fire, red with blood, and gray with the soot of the buildings that collapsed on them. The city had become less of a city (entailing that people lived more than died there) and more of an occupation of soldiers. Grocery stores became barrakses; office buildings became hospitals, which then became morgues. On missions into enemy lines, soldiers transformed houses that had once been homes into cold camps, forts, and lookout points.

Many of the people that fought here would stay in these houses for a day or two only to advance to the next sector of the city after clearing out any and all combatants. Strategies of guerilla warfare were common in Munich, as the ancient stone cathedrals made sturdy cover for those who would expire anyone that dared venture into the vast, snow-dusted open courtyard streets, among fountains with pipes that now spat blood and meat, churning it with the water.

A newer camp in an older house had been established and occupied, overlooking the snowy streets of no-man’s-land. The unit was led by Captain Mikkel Fischer, overseeing his team of four. Three privates: Gerald Junge, Jacob Verald, and Sara Einengar, and a junior medic, Jones Weber.

As a unit they gunned down a small camp of American soldiers that had hid in the house, cleared any traps that had been placed, and established a vantage point on the second story. They set up camp on the now bloodstained hardwood after disposing of the American corpses.

The house was a narrow, two story, shotgun-style house that had to be centuries old. The rectangular wooden pillars that held the low ceilings were marked by deep grooves and large, frayed splinters. All the windows on the first floor were painted over with a thin black paint, and the pervasive fetor of old cigarettes was baked into the yellow walls that held dusty broken picture frames and peeling floral wallpaper.

The unit had settled inside the house, on the second story. They pulled out a space heater that had been kept in Private Verald’s bag, and rolled out thin bedrolls on creaking, splattered boards. The sun began to fall below the ruins of Munich, and Captain Fischer’s unit of four talked among themselves in hushed tones, chewing on tough morsels of jerky and hardtack.

“So what are you in here for, Einengar?” Gerald inquired. Gerald himself had been drafted. When the letter arrived he cried in his bedroom of his mother’s house for three days out of fear, but he simply told the group he joined with a friend in another unit.

“I enlisted,” Sara replied plainly. “Better than shoveling shit for a living.” She took a long gulp from an amber bottle of Jack Daniel’s that they had found on one of the Americans, then passed it to Gerald.

“What about you, Jones? You look like a draft kid.” Gerald smirked.

Jones Webber was very scrawny for someone stationed so far in the front lines. The faint orange glow from the space heater lit the peaks and valleys of his gaunt face. His wisps of jet black hair seemed to absorb all light that touched it. His unit often joked that he shouldn’t be scared of combat and gunfire because he looked as if he were dead already. . .

But he was scared. He tried to hide it, sometimes but it wasn't hard to see it in his deep black eyes.

“Yeah, I was drafted,” he said shortly with a blank stare, clutching a book of English poems translated into German. He had been very quiet tonight.

“Leave the kid alone,” said Captain Fischer, remembering how the junior medic shot an ambushing American in the raid on the house that day. He saved Fischer’s life, but Jones had never killed anyone before.

Jones looked down at the glowing heater, and when the Jack Daniel’s bottle reached him, he took a sip, winced, and passed it back. He did not say much else for the rest of the night, except to offer to take watch while they rested. He wouldn’t have been able to sleep, anyway.

The back of Jones’s head laid pressed against the glass pane, sitting in an old wood chair and looking into the black abyss of the house. Thin nylon sleeping bags served as minimal padding for his sleeping companions. His eyes tracked the ebb and flow of their chests in unconscious dreaming. The orange light from the heater in the center of the circle of bodies was the only source of illumination, excluding the cold blue shine from the sliver of a moon in the night sky that lit the interior through the window. The house itself ached like old bones: creaking and popping, withstanding the force of the German winter wind outside. It slammed itself against the old glass panes making them shift in their frames, and chilling Jones further.

He pushed his body away from the window, set down his book of poetry that he had folded back so many times that the spine had nearly snapped, and swiveled in his chair to look outside. The floor bent and groaned under the pressure of his legs as he turned, echoing through the otherwise eerie stillness of the house.

The sky had been a dull gray overcast for most of the season, contrasting the white, dusty powder blanketing the stone streets. Now, however, the dull, never-ending stratus was broken up into a stringy black veil of clouds that cast a haze over the thumbnail slice of moon.

He looked out at the ruins of the city. Usually glows from fire bombs could be seen from any point, accompanied by rolling booms that the untrained ear wouldn’t be able to discern from thunder. However, untrained ears were hard to come by here. But contrastingly, as Jones looked out on the city, he saw only the cracked and broken remains of St. Peter’s Cathedral, and a handful of smoldering smokestacks. Instead of bombs, he heard only the whistling exhales of the wind blowing tunnels through the streets.

He tried to find solace in the quiet of the night, but the silence did not comfort him. Looking out into the street, he felt the night as dead as the cadavers they had thrown from the second story window just hours before. The air felt like a tripwire . . . like if he moved too suddenly, he might set off a chain reaction—like atoms splitting apart. He hardly breathed.

The wind whipped up the snow on the courtyard, sending up small tornadoes of ice into the air. Through the foggy old glass and the snow-clouds twirling in the air, Jones picked up movement in a distant shadow. He thought to himself that it was only the dark. That his eyes were betraying him, uncomfortable with the lack of stimulation that the inky shadows in the dark alley provided. He didn't know what it was, only that it was not the dark.

It shifted between two buildings, a shape too dark to make out. It could have been an animal. But what animal that size would hide in the middle of a city like Munich? How was an animal that size hiding at all?

Jones grabbed the heater behind him that cast a glare on the dirtied glass and turned it to face away from him, to darken his surroundings and get a better look. The sudden absence of warmth somehow frightened away any comfort he had remaining. He returned to the chair to look out the window again.

He saw it more clearly now as it moved suddenly. A shifting mass of bent joints and thin, cylindrical limbs jutted themselves out from behind a small dilapidated stone house. Like a piece of the shadows itself were moving. It morphed and came apart, forming what looked to be a hunched back with arachnid-esque limbs that protruded from the body. Jones watched the creature flex rapidly, as if laughing, or smelling. A head was visible at the terminal of the inky silhouette, and Jones pretended that he didn’t see it smiling at him.

Jones suddenly felt each of his pores vomiting a cold sweat. He felt his palms becoming increasingly clammy, accompanied by panicked weakness. He drew the curtains in two quick motions and turned away from the window, looking into the dank innards of the house.

Jones drew in a deep breath in, held it, and then released it in a sort of strangled, shaky exhale. He held his head in his hands as to steady the speed at which his brain was spinning, but in his thoughts he rationalized what he saw in the alley, like any good, irreligious doctor should do. He called for no god to his aid, but to science. Of aid, however, he desperately wanted.

He concluded that the vision of the figure was a brief lapse of psychosis. The trauma from watching the young American boy seize on the ground after the bullet from Jones’s gun severed his spinal cord took so much of an emotional toll on him that he was temporarily (he hoped) going insane.

Jones lifted his head to stare into the corridor towards the stairs leading down to the first floor. The dilapidated hall seemed to swallow the orange light from the heater, not letting it gain more than four feet into the abyss. The pale white moonlight only shone enough through the thin lace drapes to cast a blue rectangle on the floor with Jones’s shadow at its center.

He slumped in the wooden chair and faced his unconscious friends, staring into the darkness and listening to the night.

He listened for a long time. To Jones it could have been days of the creaking in the house and the banshee screams of the wind outside. He listened closely. And in his close listening there was another faint sound that he heard, a sound like nails tapping on glass panes. Jones had been listening so closely that his eyes were both closed. He noticed this only once he felt compelled to open them: a feeling as if he were being watched, a compulsion to turn around. Jones opened his eyes slowly.

He did not notice it at first sight, but it did not take long to realize that the pale cast of light from the moon was now absent from the floor. His shadow now blended in with the shadow of something else obscuring the moon’s light, something behind him. To cover the entire window’s light, Jones concluded that it must have been either something very large, or something very close to him. He didn’t know which one frightened him more.

He continued to listen. The tapping was still present but also was a sort of rasping, a clicking breath. Jones swore he could feel the warm damp air permeating the glass and coating his skin. Jones listened, though he wished he could stop listening.

In the thick silence of the darkness, Jones heard quiet utterances . . . voices. He could not discern what they said, but he heard them.

Yes, you heard them Jones, so don’t fucking pretend.

He could not discern the whispers at first, but as they grew louder he suddenly knew what they said all too well. Glancing down at the heavily used poetry book by his side, Jones listened to it speak behind him:

“‘Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door. Only this and nothing more.’”

Jones shook his head furiously. “You’re not real,” he whispered, more to himself than to anything else, closing his eyes again and this time burying them in his hands. But it continued:

“In the morning glad I see; My foe outstretched beneath the tree.”

Jones could not release the creeping anxiety that perhaps the comfort of insanity that he was clinging to was not present. That what he heard was a real threat to him, not just a symptom of his already damaged psyche. Jones covered his ears with his hands but the sounds were not muffled. The voices grew louder and he pleaded that they stop harassing him, but they did not:

“I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow.”

As it spoke, his closed eyes and saw the American boy, beautiful as he was in the short glimpse of his living face that Jones saw. His bones and joints made violent rapping sounds on the ground as he convulsed. Thick crimson gore pooled around the center of his throat. His blood stained Jones’s lips.

The whispers grew into barks, and barks into wails. Jones felt himself begin to sob, remembering the beautiful boy, his death replaying in his mind over and over again.

“I know!” he shouted. “I didn’t want to. I had to. I had to. How can I make it right?”

The shrieks and howls suddenly halted. Hushed echoes still made themselves known, but they did not harass him further. They stayed quiet as if thinking, as if pondering his question.

“Join us,” the voices commanded. “Join him.”

Jones paused for a while, trying to steady his breathing before speaking again.

“I don’t want to,” Jones choked.

“None of us did. We didn’t have a choice, neither did he . . . You made sure of that.”

Jones paused. He now knew that the voices were not requesting him to join them. They were giving him time to say goodbye to what he knew. He knew that he shouldn’t have asked to make it right.

“Is it like falling asleep?” Jones asked.

“No.”

When dawn broke, Captain Fischer and his unit did not see Jones. Their breath was a thick fog when they called his name. His book was beside a chair that faced them, lying open.

As they came to stand on their cold, numb feet, the smell of pungent rot cut through the dry winter air. They searched the house from top to bottom but in the background of their thoughts, they knew what they needed to do to find Jones. They needed only follow their noses.

In the far bathroom, the unit met a Jones they did not recognize, lying bloated and engorged from the bath that he laid in. The transparent yellow plasma had risen to float above the thick blood cells at the bottom of the tub. Hanging off the edge of the white ceramic was Jones’ black hair. Dead eyes lulled inside his skull. A shredded, brown bullet hole in the center of his neck leaked into the tub.

Note: This work excerpts lines from Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” and William Blake’s “A Poison Tree.”

Oliver Herron

The light shone through the window, hot and dry, directly into the old man’s worn face. He opened his eyes and cursed at the sun while slowly getting up from his bed. His weary bones creaked and ached as he waddled to the kitchen and made himself a bowl of porridge.

He sat at the table with his bowl and started to eat, staring out the window at the wheat field he tended to every day. The wheat looked dry and tan with a haze of heat over it and the sky was a blinding baby blue, no cloud in sight. All that could be seen was wheat for miles in all directions. The only thing that broke this bland horizon was a scarecrow in the middle of the field. It was older than he was but he could still see the remnants of a crooked smile painted on its face. Its clothes and old straw hat were falling apart from years of standing outside in the elements. He stared at it every day and a hatred for it grew inside of him. It never scared off the crows, it only stood there smiling at him. Though he hated it, he could never tear it down. It had been there longer than he ever had been. This was its farm. He would never take it down from its post.

A crow flew in front of the window. He stood up to shout curses at the crow and the scarecrow, but his body failed him. He choked on a bite of porridge and started having a coughing fit that only stopped after he coughed up blood into his bowl.

After cleaning up his bowl he went out onto the porch and was about to start work on the field, but a crow flew down and stood in front of him. A moment later two more flew down, and then a few more. He hated them congregating on his porch. Every day he had to yell and scare the crows from his porch, which always made him cough up more blood. All of the cursing and yelling made his already scratchy throat sorer and sorer as the days went on.

He went out into the field and began his work. He set up the irrigation system, cleaned out all of the weeds, and flushed out any snakes and rodents that may have been trying to nest in the wheat. Each day he tested to see if it was ready to harvest, which it never was.

The scarecrow stood and stared while he did the work with its worn eyes. Crows perched on its outstretched arms with their beady eyes on him, their silky black feathers vibrant in the hot sun. They were the only things he had for any sort of company, but he wished he had none. He despised them with all his being. He almost tried to shout and scare them away, but all he ended up doing was coughing up a few more specks of blood into his handkerchief.

The hot sun that had been beating down on him all day was now almost under the horizon. More crows sat on his porch again, as if waiting for him to open the door and let them inside so they could eat his dinner and sleep in his home. He would never allow it.

As he walked up the stairs to his door, he yelled and swung his cane around, making the crows hop out of his way and glare at him. Some flew back towards their scarecrow friend. They stared at him as he threatened their lives, knowing that his threats were potentially empty. He waddled into the house and slammed the door behind him.

Once inside, he changed out of his work clothes and waddled to his bed. He laid down and stared out his window. From here he could still see the scarecrow in the distance, smiling away with crows perched on it. He cursed at it as he slowly fell asleep.

Days and days went by with this same repetition. He would get up, eat porridge, tend to his field, and sleep. All the while it was as if the wheat would never be ready to harvest, not that he would survive to ever see it harvested anyways. The only difference, however, was that there seemed to be more and more crows forming a cloud to pester him each day. The scarecrow was doing worse and worse at its job, letting them perch on his arms and head while they all stared down the old man. Finally one day, he’d had enough. He knew he shouldn’t, but he had to tear the scarecrow down.

After eating his porridge he grabbed his ax and marched through the crowd of crows swarming his porch and straight to the scarecrow, not caring as they squawked at him for almost stepping on them. He didn’t even take the time to shout curses at them like usual.

He gave it one last long look of hatred before he began to hack down the scarecrow. The wooden stake holding it up was much harder than it should have been. It felt like chopping at bone with his dull ax. The labor that it took made a trickle of blood come down from his nose, but he didn’t care to deal with it now. The job was almost complete.

It fell with a hard thud to the ground and he could swear he saw its smile start to falter. With each whack, moldy hay poured from its old, torn-up shirt. He cursed at the scarecrow and cursed at the crows which seemed to be getting louder behind him.

Finally he let his ax fall heavily and split its smiling head in half. The old man had a faint grin that was quickly wiped away when he turned and looked back at his house.

The crows were now swarming around the house, like a tornado funneling down from a storm cloud, squawking louder than before. Dark storm clouds were rolling in on the horizon and he could hear the thunder in the distance. He cursed at the crows screeching as he carefully made his way to his door, covering his face to protect himself from their flailing wings. With luck he finally made it inside to prepare for the storm.

In less than an hour, the rain was pouring hard outside. Every couple minutes a new leak formed in the roof and the old man would scramble around trying to fix them. Pots littered the floor trying to catch all the droplets of water, but the effort seemed futile. The leaks would never stop.

The crows on the porch struck their beaks against the wood as if knocking on the door to be let inside. The old man would never let that happen. A couple times he even tried to scare them off the porch but they just stared at him and tried to squeeze past to get inside. They pecked at his shoes and squawked at him, but he refused to let them in. Crows would never be allowed inside.

After a while of fruitlessly trying to stop the leaks, he decided to try to sleep and wait out the storm. As he laid in bed he could hear the crows squawking and hitting the door louder and louder. He would never let them in. Finally he was able to fall into a restless sleep, waking every couple minutes to the loud banging of the crows.

Suddenly he was awoken by a loud clap of thunder that shook his bed. He was going to roll over and go back to sleep, but a heavy weight on his chest stopped him. He opened his eyes to find a large crow sitting on his chest, its dark beady eyes staring down at him. A strike of lightning outside lit up the room just enough to see that all of the crows were surrounding his bed, silently staring at him. He slowly turned his head to see the scarecrow staring at him from the window.