A Second Chance
Wilson stared out through the large, expansive window. Having a window was a privilege, but the view from the 34th floor was depressing. Most of the other buildings were old, dating back to the days when they were meant to shelter people from snow and cold. Now the year-round tropical heat and humidity made mold grow over the city and concrete crumble like wet sand. A gray sea mist was coming in, making the buildings look even sadder. Only the new State buildings, all crystal and steel, stood out in the grayness.
As head of recruitment, Wilson had an office all to himself. On the wall adjacent to the window were framed posters featuring the slogan, “A Second Chance.” Sitting at his desk, Wilson reflected on his success. The Ministry of Life’s space program was about to launch yet another colony ship, the Falcon, on the long journey to GY129. The spaceship would lift off in three days, and Wilson just needed one more recruit to fill the ship with 5,000 qualified colonists.
There was a respectful tap on the door, then a pause before it opened and James Wong entered. Fresh out of National Training, the unremarkable-looking young Junior wore the standard black overalls with the insignia of the State.
“James,” Wilson said. “Come in. I presume you know why you’re here.”
“Yes, sir,” was James’s reply. “At least I think I do. I’ve been told I have a chance of being on the Falcon.”
“A great professional opportunity,” Wilson reminded him. “Are you aware that this is quite an honor for a Junior?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” James replied eagerly.
Wilson gave James his usual talk, finishing up with the Falcon’s mission and how lucky James was to be assigned to the colony ship. He was pleased by how humbly and attentively James listened. He was a perfect Junior, Wilson thought. If he stayed on Earth, he would probably rise to become a high-level official in the Ministry. But he was going to the colonies instead, which was a sign of devotion to the State. Still, he would probably do just as well in the colonies and become a high official there.
“Congratulations,” Wilson said as he logged into System and changed James’s status from Junior to Senior. Then he pulled out a set of dark burgundy Senior overalls, wrapped in plastic. They were identical to the Juniors’ uniforms except for the color. He handed it to James and shook the young man’s hand, surprised at himself for feeling a little bit envious. “Now,” Wilson said. “Let’s get you to the spaceport.” That was where James would receive his final training before boarding the Falcon and departing for the colonies.
They were whisked down in a Ministry lifter, one of the few existing in New Ocean City, then took the elevated hyper loop reserved for ministry officials. The hyper loop was a local, stopping at every station. As they passed Central Supermarket, James gasped at its size. “Back home in New Waterline, the State sent food out to us directly,” James explained. “There was no way for us to get any more than the ration.”
New Waterline, Wilson knew, was a much smaller coastal city. Actually, he mentally corrected himself, it had been a coastal city in the province of Pennsylvania until the waters of the Atlantic finally washed over it ten years ago. He did not tell James that most of the shelves in the Central Supermarket were empty. It was probably just a temporary shortage, Wilson reminded himself optimistically… though less land above water meant less food for rations and almost no luxuries. The State’s official position was that rising sea levels were not an issue that people needed to worry about, but the Ministry’s generous funding of the colonization program suggested otherwise. At least half of what had been State land was now covered by water.
“We used to own a two-bedroom house on the beach,” James reminisced. “It was me and two older brothers and our aunt. My parents left when I was only two. They were chosen to go to the colonies, back when they still had conscriptions.” Wilson nodded. When the first colony ships were being launched, fear of the unknown made voluntary recruitment next to impossible. But as the oceans covered more land and life became harsher, more people signed up voluntarily. Wilson had even turned a few away, though they would undoubtedly make it onto the next ship.
James looked hopeful. “That’s one of the reasons why I signed up. To reunite with my brother, up in the stars. He went to the colonies last year. My other brother died in the New Waterline flood, so I have no one else.”
The sadness on James’s face was quickly replaced with excitement as they approached the Spaceport. They passed through security and into the soaring entrance hall, several stories high with magnificent chandeliers dangling down. It was intended to make prospective colonists feel awed, and it worked.
Another lifter ferried them up to the 22nd floor, the Department of Colonial Training. There, Wilson greeted Leo, the training director, and handed James over to him. “Good luck,” he told James. He nodded to Leo and left.
Just as he was about to get back on the lifter, Wilson heard the sound of laughter echoing sharply in the gleaming hallway. It came from a nearby conference room. The door was slightly ajar, and now Wilson could hear pieces of the conversation taking place inside. He recognized one of the voices: it was Ross, head of Colonization. Thinking he should say hello, Wilson started for the door but then stopped, not wanting to interrupt a meeting in progress. Then he heard Ross speak:
“People are desperate enough to believe anything, I guess. Even if we detected a habitable planet in another system, we don’t even have the technology or resources to go any farther than Mars.” Ross sighed. “Sometimes I feel bad for those people, with their dreams of a Second Chance.”
“Maybe they do get a Second Chance,” the other voice said. “I mean, if there’s an afterlife.” There was more laughter. Wilson almost gasped, but he caught himself. He needed to hear more.
“Besides,” continued the other voice, “it’s not like either of us could do anything about it. Step out of line and the Controllers will find you and throw you into one of the maximum-security prisons. Or worse.”
“I know,” Ross said. “Plus, we’re reducing the population, and that means more resources for the lucky ones who survive.”
“Like us,” said the other voice.
“Like us,” agreed Ross.
Wilson felt his blood turn into ice. He could not believe the State was behind this. All that he had been told, and all he had told others was a lie. How much blood did he have on his hands? How many people had he, as Head of Recruitment, sent off to the “Colonies” that didn’t even exist? No wonder the launch site was so heavily guarded. They weren’t sending anybody into space. They were just murdering people. Now he understood why the State didn’t address the issue of rising sea levels. It was because they didn’t need to. Instead, they chose to reduce the population to allow the decreasing amount of resources to be shared among fewer people.
Then he thought of James. James, who thought he was going to reunite with his brother in the stars. At that moment, Wilson knew he had to get James out of there. He charged back towards the Department of Colonial Training and snatched James right out of the room before Leo’s eyes.
“Just trust me. It’s for your own good,” Wilson said as they entered the lifter. Wilson told James all that he had heard. James almost fainted. Wilson thought they had made it out, but when the doors opened on the first floor, they were met by a squadron of Controllers, armed with laser guns and tasers. Wilson swallowed. “The lifter,” he whispered. “It must be monitored by security.” He felt a second of terror before everything went black.
When Wilson woke up, he was in a small barred cell, alone. James was nowhere to be found. His body ached all over and his mind was frantically trying not to think of what would happen next. Would they torture him before killing him? He knew what the State did to people accused of treason, and he did not see how he could talk his way out of the charge.
When the door opened a bit, he scrambled up, hoping to get some information, at least about James. But it was just a hand sliding in a tray with food and water. For two days, Wilson saw nobody, just that hand sliding in the tray.
On the third day, the door finally opened and two silent guards came in. From their gray uniforms with the State’s insignia, Wilson knew immediately that they were Controllers. They would not speak to him, but just handcuffed him and dragged out of the building and into a prison transport elevated hyper loop with neither windows nor a clear destination.
When the transport finally stopped, he was pulled out again. When his silent guards turned him around, Wilson immediately knew what his fate was.
He had only ever seen pictures of the top-secret launch site, but he knew he was looking at the Falcon; the ship that he now knew would never take off. It looked just like all the ships in the posters. “They must paint a new name on it every time,” he thought. “For the publicity pictures.”
The Falcon was waiting for him, its last passenger. This was his Second Chance.
Frank Yang is a high school student in New York City whose passions range from reading and writing to science and technology.
The Music Box
Tick.
Painted eyes flutter open. She’s standing upright, balancing on the tips of her toes, one arm raised over her head and the other extended. Her left arm is caked with something—dirt? Dust?
Where is she?
Tick. Tick.
A box. Round and wooden, dim and empty, save for the dust and the two lonesome shafts of moonlight that pry through the gap under the wooden lid. She hears the murmuring of voices from somewhere above her.
Tick.
That sound. She knows that sound. But what-
Tick.
The scarce light skitters across the crack in her watch face.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
But no, the watch is broken; the hands have long ago ceased their spinning dance.
The silver light alights on the bridge of her nose. She tries to bring her arms down to her sides, but—she can’t. Why can’t she?
Tick.
She can’t feel her limbs, she realizes. Something tells her that she should be horrified, but her mind feels clouded, wooden; all she can think to do is laugh.
I can’t do that, either. I can’t feel my face.
A final tick, then a resounding groan, and, slowly, the air around her swells with the steady breath of a simple tune, tinged with dust and infused with moonlight. It weaves in and out of her consciousness, ancient and strangely familiar, a long-lost remnant of a forgotten lifetime. Each lonesome note seems to tempt the darkness, lingering only to pass on the melody before fading into oblivion. Swirling dips, twisting breaths, all infused with a life of their own.
And somehow, all of this — the tune, the moonlight, the musty smell – seems achingly familiar. She struggles to place it, but she can’t; parts of her memory feel blurred, others entirely unreachable. Another groan, and she can feel the platform beneath her tremble, then begin to turn. Ever so gently, it spins her around and around in time to the swirling tune, her partner in eternal dance.
And then it begins to rise. Does the music have wings? Or do I? As it carries her higher and higher, she finds herself wondering. The voices whisper above her, growing louder as she ascends, but she can’t quite make out their words. And yet, she feels as if she’s heard them before…
The lid creaks as it slides to the side, into the wall of the box, and moonlight filters through, shimmering against her skin. The music seems to carry her up, higher and higher, enveloping her in its protective embrace, and through the opening, she can see two blurred, spinning faces peering down at her.
But it’s she that spins, not them, and as she rises through the top of the box, the moonlight traces the sloping curve of her body, casting a soft halo of light on the wood around her. She seems to glow, angelic, yet somehow reminiscent of a demon rising from hell.
The voices. She can hear them more clearly now, a woman and a man, but she can’t see their faces. She’s turned away from them, towards an open window, her small frame drowning in the moonlight.
“My god, is that made of wood, too?”
The lid clicks into place beneath her, and still, still she turns.
“Yes, can you believe the craftsmanship? The hands are so-”
She can almost see them now; still blurry, but she can make out wisps of silvery hair and the edge of a puzzled frown. This, too, feels vaguely familiar…
“That’s funny; I don’t remember there being a watch.”
A watch. Her watch, and the woman, and…the music box. The music box.
A buried memory swells to the front of her mind, a rolling wave of thought, and she has no choice but to let it swallow her.
Her eighth birthday, and a beam of sunlight slips through the window, landing on two unwrapped presents on the carpet, both from her grandmother. The first is a watch, ticking gently, the sunlight dancing with its golden hands and tracing shimmering patterns across its white letter band. The second, a music box.
She puts the watch on first, pausing for a moment to admire it before the box steals her attention. She picks it up. It’s cool and smooth against her palm, and the musty smell of old wood weaves through the air. Round and covered in a thin layer of dust, the wood underneath polished to perfection.
She turns the key in the bottom of the box.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
And then, suddenly, the music begins to play. She gasps and stares down at the box, transfixed, as something within it seems to shift, as the lid slides away. She catches a glimpse of the wooden interior, but a platform begins to rise up from the center, blocking her sight. She frowns; no spinning dancer stands on the platform.
And suddenly, it’s as if the music speaks to her soul, and she reaches out to touch the wood. She closes her eyes and has the distinct feeling that the room is growing larger, that she, herself, is spinning. Tries to open them, but she can’t, she can’t…it’s as if her body is made of wood—she moves nothing, feels nothing.
Then, darkness.
And she’s back to reality; the music has stopped now, and she finds herself descending back into the box.
“I hate to part with it; it used to belong to my granddaughter, you know. She went missing four years ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, ma’am.”
And, slowly, as she spirals out of the reach of the moonlight, she feels her mind hardening, gently solidifying in wood.
Her painted eyes flutter closed.
Tick.
Prisha Mehta is a student at Millburn High School in New Jersey, and she is very passionate about her writing. She aspires to be a successful author one day, and has won many writing awards, including a Scholastic National Gold Medal. Her work has been published in “Spaceports and Spidersilk” and is forthcoming in “Riggwelter” and “Body Without Organs”. When she isn’t writing, she can often be found scrolling through psychology articles, sketching in her notebook, or of course, reading. You can find out more about her at prishamehta.com
Crossroad
“…Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them.” –William Shakespeare
The time finally came for me to confront the inevitable decision. It was at dawn on a chilly September day in my hometown of Nanjing in China, and I, a seventh grader, was on my way home after school. Suddenly, I heard a loud cry from the other side of the crossroad. I looked over and saw a multitude of people gathering in a circle, the center of which revealed the cause of the commotion.
I rushed over, and, through the tiny gaps between the bystanders, I saw an old man lying on the ground. His pain was evidenced by his distorted face and continuous moaning. He grasped his kneecap with both hands. Drops of blood leaked through his fingertips and trailed down his thin, dark leg.
A string of impatient car horns grabbed my attention. At the intersection, the serpentine traffic wound its way around the commotion, tires hissing over the wet road. Some drivers banged their fists on their steering wheels, other drivers opened their windows lighting up a cigarette while cursing at the traffic officers. On the sidewalk, a group of office-workers went out for their lunch break. Smartly dressed people’s faces winced and crinkled in disgust as soon as they saw the old man and slunk away from his presence. One thing remained consistent—no one was lending a helping hand.
This scene reminded me of the news that had swept across China in June of that year. A white construction van had hit a six-year-old child named Yue Yue in a market district of Foshan. The driver slowed down after the accident, apparently aware of what had happened, but then speedily fled the scene. What happened next was even more disturbing. For several minutes Yue Yue lay on the ground, still moving, as more than a dozen people passed by. Some glanced while others drove straight by, avoiding the girl, not offering any help. At one point a mother walking with her child saw the accident, covered her daughter’s eyes, and hastened their steps. This demonstrated lack of compassion kindled a debate in China about the proper response of passers-by to accidents.
I knew the proper response. My parents had always taught me to be compassionate, and my teachers had encouraged me to help those in need. What lay in front of me then was a perfect opportunity for me to demonstrate my successful upbringing and content myself with an act of high morality. But my self-fascination and smugness quickly dissipated when I overheard the conversation of two young men standing in front of me.
“What happened?” the guy on the left asked.
“Seems like someone hit him,” his friend answered.
“What do we do?”
“Just wait. Maybe the guy who hit him will feel bad and come back to help him.”
“Why aren’t we helping?”
“Because that old guy might be faking. I mean, who knows? You might even be mistaken for the one who hit him. It’s complicated!”
It’s complicated. I repeated the words to myself in my mind, feeling disturbed. I knew exactly what he was referring to. In July of that year, a month after the Yue Yue’s death, a twenty-one-year-old young man in Guang Zhou helped an old woman who was lying on the street. The woman, however, falsely charged him for hitting her, and threatened to sue him. The young man, feeling desperate and overwhelmed by the commotion the old woman caused, paid her 2000 yuan (300 USD).
This incident reflected a horrible epidemic in China. People capitalized on other’s sympathy or vulnerability and extort money out of the responsible people. If I am naïve enough to help the old man, I thought, I might be blamed for a crime that I did not commit. Like what was described in the news, the old man might grab my hand and not let me go until I gave him money. As I realized that my peaceful existence was at stake, the moral question became a dilemma of whether I should trust a complete stranger.
A lot of voices seemed to be whispering inside of my head, making me feel dizzy. As I struggled to make a decision during the twenty minutes, the sun faded, along with the possibility of my offer to help. I looked at my watch. It was eight, and the thought of dinner at home beckoned me. Thinking about my grandma’s specialty, Hunan Pork, I turned towards the direction of home.
There was just one problem: the red traffic light across the pedestrian’s sidewalk. The monitor ticked 30, 29, 28… Each tick seemed to challenge my choice. So I decided to give the old man one last look.
Instead of seeing his posture and expression, I noticed his over-sized and stained white shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. This was a typical outfit for the elders in the nursing home down the block. These elders spent their afternoons on the streets, either doing Tai Qi or playing chess around a vegetable stall. They conducted these activities alone, however, as their children were too busy to look after them. Abandoned and isolated by the rest of the youthful and magnificent city, these elders were like the dropping sun, plummeting violently and alone towards the dark abyss. They had already burnt all their light and life for the generation that would wake up and see tomorrow’s sun. As a part of that generation, I suddenly felt ashamed. I asked myself, what would I have hoped for in his position?
I turned back again towards the old man. This time, I was determined to act.
Oscar Liu is a Chinese student who came to America to study in seventh grade. He knew very little about how to write an English essay when he arrived, but his passion for writing encouraged him to keep writing. Oscar loves his home country, but it has some issues. One of them is the lack of compassion. With this personal story, he hopes to shed some light on the social issues in China. He hopes to make his country a better place.
Ladies, Gentlemen, Etc, Please Take Partners
1.
Ladies, Gentlemen, Et Cetera, Please Take Partners for a
WALTZ |
The view from above could either be a stirred pond of drifting flower petals or a box of ticking clockwork. Social waltz sits on the edge between organic and mechanical. Try to feel free, but still united with a partner. Respond to a partner while still fitting with the rest of the room. It feels beautiful to find that balance.
I like social waltz best when it’s about balance,
but the dance has a built-in power gap.
Take another look down, and notice that some of the flower petals or cogs are moving more than others. The ones who move more are the follows, or in traditional terms, the “ladies,” and their partners are the leads, the “gentlemen.” Lots of people don’t pick a role based on gender – I prefer to lead because leads spin less, and I get dizzy easily – and more experienced dancers, myself included, often learn both parts. But it’s nonetheless relevant that the traditionally male part directs every move and is considered the more difficult part, to the point where sometimes a class will be taught by a lead, using a silent junior teacher as a prop to demonstrate moves.
Social waltz has the ghost of the patriarchy inside it.
Unless society is perfectly egalitarian, where everyone both decides what to do and carries out these commands, there will be power disparities.
And when there are power disparities, those with power will be tempted to forget the perspective of those without it.
One evening, I was following a waltz and instead of resting his free hand on top of mine, my lead was squeezing so tightly that I couldn’t pull away.
If we’d been on a collision course with another couple, I would’ve had to put all my trust in this man I’d met two minutes ago when I’d asked him to
dance.
We’ll have a short break between sets. Get a drink, have a snack, keep your energy up.
We’ve got a long night ahead of us.
2.
Ladies, Gentlemen, Et Cetera, Please Take Partners for a
CROSS-STEP WALTZ |
Recognize and accept that we’re living with a power imbalance.
Come up with ways to make the voices of those with less power heard.
I’ve talked to people who teach beginner waltz who have successfully co-taught classes in lead/follow pairs, each having an equal voice so that each role’s concerns are addressed. One pair even tried to teach all their students to lead and follow at the same time, so they’ll be more flexible and sensitive to their partners’ positions. It’s tough to teach two roles at once, and rather confusing to the students. But maybe with a bit more attention paid to class structure, it could be managed. Or maybe there’s a better way to teach lead/follow empathy.
I would want a classful of beginners who I can test ideas on. Maybe some of them will go on to become as interested in the problem as I am, and test ideas on their own students. Maybe one of us will figure it out, and maybe we’ll be able to make the same principles work in politics, school, the office, or whatever part of society we land in.
3.
Ladies, Gentlemen, Et Cetera, Please Take Partners for a
Char B. Pavlov is a bigender Northern California native in their first year at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest. When not dancing, they can be found acting in Shakespeare plays, arguing about Star Trek, or reading books about medical malpractice. They are intending a biology major with a history minor
[worth]
[paintbrush]
I started with watercolors instead of washable markers and crayons. I subsequently loathed markers and crayons when I was finally introduced to them. Colors were usually limited to only ten distinctive options. Maybe eleven if they included a pink. Boring, I whined as a bratty four-year-old. Watercolor entices the expansion of your given palette, the blocks of ink close enough to guarantee a delightful accident. I spent hours playing alchemist, my imagination staining innumerable paper towels from cleaning off brushes. Whatever I imagined, I gave myself the responsibility to birth it, training myself in the playful temptation of creation. Of course, this was the brief period of time before dreams were only okay as long as you didn’t believe in them too much. A year later, at age five, I learned the world was confusingly unfair after a class friend and her family were killed by a drunk driver without warning; a hardened heart isn’t healthy at an early age but I recognized dreams often die, too. That never made me settle for just ten colors, though (or maybe eleven).
[mechanical pencil]
In fifth grade, every day right after recess, I was pulled out of class with five others. We were part of a tentative study of “smart kids,” reaped from gifted assessments we took in fourth grade. I was a “twice exceptional” – highly gifted and talented with a mental disorder, an interesting asset for researchers. Uncomfortable, I despised both admirations and belittlement from adults who decided to merit me with a blue medical report and a congratulations letter. As guinea pigs, we tested experimental enrichments, scratching out solutions to algebraic problems on lime graph paper. Fitful clicking ricocheted around the room, our lead repeatedly snapping as if the mechanical pencils we received were syringes desperately pumping fragile steroids into our fledgling potentials. If the medicine ever worked, I don’t know; they took the data and left. I’m still a cerebral wild card, a clumsy renaissance man, an Icarus that flies too close to the ocean than the sun, a scarred and self-taught wielder of the double-edged sword. Regardless of how I turned out, I don’t let two pieces of paper tell me who I am.
[highlighter]
In middle school, I never understood “getting the main idea” from a reading assignment. I lived my junior high career as a heretic, never highlighting that priceless one-sentence summary we were indoctrinated to ceaselessly sniff out using an alphabetized list of context clues. Okay, admittedly, part of it was out of spite (bless my 8th-grade teacher’s heart). But to this day, whenever I highlight something, I’m chasing after bizarre-looking butterflies and white rabbits – what I do and don’t understand; there’s no difference. Sporadic stripes of neon serve as a map of my curiosity; the summary is a footnote that I’ll put at the bottom of my works cited page and probably neglect to put in my essay altogether. I inherited the mantle of the intellectual gadfly, the pride of Socrates: pestering dead poets and playwrights for their techniques and personal lives, stalking the posse of sci-fi and fantasy authors on universe building, ransacking essayists for their social commentaries, exploring the proclamations and pamphlets of history’s greats and terribles. Forget about the summary; it’s still a hobby of mine to drag the devil out of the details.
[ballpoint pen]
I never liked pens. You can’t erase ink, and my handwriting is an ugly hybrid between print and cursive, the lines bleeding too closely together making my e’s look like c’s and my g’s like gaunt commas. Because of the erratic pace of my hand, my letters often smear too. But I use pens to scribble out dumb ideas and write more absurd ones underneath them. I always attempt to be organized when writing with a pen. That never happens, of course: smeared ink and half-hearted doodles infest the margins and any white space between them. My idle ambition slumbers until I pick up a pen – ink has permanency and confidence graphite lacks, elements required to smelt lofty dreams into actual goals: the consequence of use could be the forming cartilage of a masterpiece or another reminder to celebrate my human failure. Whatever the result, I disown my notes and maroon them cabinets, lulling their unappeased spirits back to sleep, empty-handed without deserved credit. They come back, however, whenever I dash out my signature on a dotted line, claiming something captive in my name, ultimately having the last laugh.
[calligraphy brush]
Chinese calligraphy, like all things in the Sinosphere, could not be simple. It could’ve been just a writing style. But it also had to be an art; a discipline; a cultivation of character. In other words, bitterly difficult. Despite its reputation, the technique and form aren’t usually what drives beginners away – it is the ubiquitous demand for patience. Children fail superbly, me being no exception. It takes time to know the right amount of pressure to apply on a hook stroke while resisting the urge to flick your wrist. The brush is traditionally considered as an extension of the calligrapher’s body, coinciding with his or her virtuosity. If you can’t subdue your impatience, you forfeit your concision and clarity. I’ve pulled at my hair more often than not just from writing my own name while growing up. Even worse, my younger sister was extolled by a master calligrapher, doing wonders on my then prepubescent ego. Eventually, matured with humility, I learned mastering anything requires investment in myself first; and even more difficult, to be patient with myself afterward.
[no. 2 pencil]
You must use a No. 2 pencil or you will not be scored.
Caleb Pan is a stressed out teenager who enjoys hash browns and maintaining his 4.0 GPA. He’s an avid reader, writer, coder, and martial artist in his free time.