Zinnia Hansen

It didn’t feel like a vacation.

The entire week we’d been in Cabo, I tried to pretend—swimming in the hotel pool and lounging in the jacuzzi at night. I drank non-alcoholic Piña Coladas all day. At the all-inclusive hotel restaurant, I stuffed myself with squid, fish tacos, clam chowder, and macarons. I spent long mornings in bed and told myself that sleep is the only time machine in the world, though one-directional and oblivious to the past.

“We need to make the most of what we’ve got left,” my mother had said a month ago. She was pointing at the resorts on her computer: Cancun, Puerto Vallarta, Cabo San Lucas, Costa Rica. “It’ll come out of my retirement, but it’s worth it.”

“Why don’t we just stay home?” I recommended. “The doctor is here.”

Ultimately, they had settled on Cabo because Grandpa wanted to “stand at the edge of the world.”

It was almost five o’clock, and the Arch of Cabo San Lucas looked like a dragon bending over to drink from the sea. During the day, the sun perched right above our heads, blasting us with equatorial heat. But now, the wind blew just enough. We reached the beach’s edge, and I removed my sandals, taking small steps over the broken shells.

Standing at the tip of the Baja Peninsula, I admired how the water reflected the flame-like clouds. The colors reminded me of when Grandpa and I went bird watching at Shoreline Park. There, the long-billed curlews dug into the sand, and the belted kingfishers sat in the trees. Grandpa had pointed out the geese. “You know Canada geese don’t actually migrate to Canada? They were named after John Canada.”

“Who’s John Canada?”

“The guy who discovered that these geese were different from other geese.”

“So they don’t go to Canada?”

“Nope, they go somewhere south, I think.”

“To die?”

“Maybe some of them.”

“I wonder what happens to them after they die.”
“I guess their spirit finds a new body.”

 

The violent waves collapsed on boulders as if they wanted to break the rocks and suck me in. I inched around for a steady place to stand. In the tide pools, starfish lounged, sea slugs crawled, and sea anemone swayed their little fingers. I picked a smaller boulder where a thin tide ran over my feet.

On the beach, Grandpa set up a tripod for his camera. “I’m capturing the sunset time-lapse to condense into two minutes.” He loved time-lapses, often saying how they let us truly witness time passing because people never notice on their own.

“Like a flipbook?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

One morning, several years ago, he took me to Golden Gate Park. As he pointed his camera at the fog rolling over the Golden Gate Bridge, he said, “It comes and goes, and then it’s gone. One second the fog floats over the city, and the next, it engulfs it. It’s unpredictable.”

“You can’t see the bridge,” I complained.

“Yes, but you know the bridge is there. You’ve seen it a hundred times without the fog, so you can imagine it.”

Grandpa was like that. He would bring me places and tell me things, and half the time, I wasn’t listening. I went along because he had a way of making me feel important. He had an interesting past that he liked to talk about. He’d say, “Your grandpa ran a chemical factory. He was the guy everyone looked up to.” When I was younger, he was so cool, but as I got older, I didn’t always understand why he was constantly teaching me things. It sometimes felt like being in Mr. Kinsley’s history class.

On the beach, the sun was still over the arch, and my mom and I waded into the water. We rolled up our shorts to keep them dry, but the waves splashed our clothes.

Grandpa positioned us to stand knee-deep while he maneuvered from rock to rock around us, clicking the shutter button on his phone. With his expertise, his photos looked as if we stood in front of a green screen. He’d already captured so many pictures of our trip as if he’d planned to have so much time to look at them. He even brought a camera when we went ziplining. A small one that dangled from his wrist.

We’d gone the day before in the outskirts of San José del Cabo. He couldn’t be talked out of it. As we climbed higher up the stairs to the platform, I started to sway, and every time I looked down, nausea took hold of me. Grandpa marched ahead. I watched as one of the guides connected him to the trolley.

“Remember to brake when you see the other platform,” the man said. “Don’t worry. My partner will catch you on the other side. Just make sure you don’t stop in the middle.”

I stood there, under the shade of the platform watching Grandpa. It was frightening to see him dangle on that line, his feet pointed forward as he grasped the handlebar. When he picked up speed, he grew smaller until he blended into the dry hills like a bird in flight.

At times like these, I thought about Jesus. I had recently been learning about him in Sunday School. My parents always believed in God, but only after Grandpa’s illness had they started going to church again. Maybe Christianity was right. Or Grandpa was right and we’d all be reincarnated. I guess we’ll know when we know.

Then it was my turn. The guide hooked me onto the trolley, repeated the same dialogue, and sent me soaring.

The wind blew and I started to twist. I kept anticipating the platform, but the line stretched longer. Instinctively, I applied pressure to the rope. I scrambled to turn the other way, but I only braked more. I thought for sure I’d get stuck in the middle. If I did, who would save me? But then, the other platform came into view, and I saw my Grandpa waiting, snapping pictures of me. His mouth was slightly open, his hair was gray and long, and his camera hid his crow’s feet.

The sun dropped behind the arch, peeking out from the hole. Darkness descended on the stone structure. As I admired the glow of the day’s end, Grandpa snapped a silhouette of me, the sound of his camera’s click crisp over the rushing waves. “Silhouettes are a type of disguise,” he once said. “You never know what the person has on their face: joy, fear, or loneliness—the blacked-out face hides them all.”

When we walked back to the red rental car, Grandpa strode in front while my mother and I trailed behind him. The distance between us grew with every step he took. I yelled, “Grandpa, wait! There’s no rush!”

But he didn’t hear me. The wind had caught my voice and lifted it away.

 

Justin Gu is a junior at Palo Alto High School. He has been writing for three years, and he finds his inspiration from family experiences. He was recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing for various pieces.

Loud music filled the room. Tom’s stick-like legs bounced to the rhythms of Patti Smith, Richard Hell, and the Ramones. Like fingers on a keyboard, they hit every note via convulsive inward twitches. Though unable to move, he had danced his homebound days away in his mind, and flared up the walls between himself and his neighbours.

His paralysis subsided upon the sound of silence. Tom straightened and strained each of his legs, as if they were made of crumbling wood. He stood up and floated out the door in a dreamlike state.

As he went outside the trees swayed to his rhythm, encouraging him to take one fresh footprint after another. He hasn’t walked in years, and every step felt exotic and transgressive. He felt himself doubling like a tom-tom drum at the climax of an upward-hill solo. His legs withered under the strain of sensory excess, so he reached for his fellow strollers for support.

The first figure he spotted was a teenage girl. She walked carefully, pliéing her way forward like a ballerina. Her long legs, winding and ashamed, didn’t seem to fit the rest of the body or the malevolent expression on her face. She had headphones on; Tom imagined ballet poses smashing an electric guitar seamlessly, its crumbs falling over the girl’s dark hair. He tried to mimic her walk, but it was too fast, too used up.

He heard the tap-tapping of the rain as he followed another silhouette across the street. She had a brisk walk and a concentrated style, like a first-rate dance teacher, relinquishing talent for authority. What would happen if she found a partner good enough for her? He wondered. Would she spread her wings and fly above the crowd to the rhythm of a ballroom’s starlight chandelier? He tried to keep up with her, but the bustling sound of her footsteps put him in need of a crutch to lean on. He dropped her trail and fell on a bench.

Tom used to slurp on movement like it was mother’s milk. He inhaled every rhythm and key change, and moved his body accordingly: he pogoing to punk, gesticulating to hip hop, swaying to jazz—and skinning his partners alive at slow-dancing.

There was one art he had never been able to grasp, and that was walking itself. The way people moved forward, never looking back or up or down – except for those more socially anxious, that is – the path leading them exactly where they needed to go. As natural as he was on the dance floor, he grew hopeless on the street.

Until the paralysis struck him.

He’d been kissed by a siren at the most elemental dance of all. The curves of his partner’s flesh suffocated his bones and blew substance out of them. Unlike birds, he did not learn to fly. He took to bed instead, watching the birds flocking and mocking him outside the window.

He would never love anymore. He could not dare to invite even a possibility of the tiniest tinge of attraction. He had loved once, and the woman broke his legs. They could have remained broken, he didn’t care about that anymore, but he would never let anyone break his heart ever again.

*

Pumped up by the air in his lungs, Tom situated himself firmly on the bench and watched people walk by. The street began to overflow with couples: tangoing their way out of fights, cha-cha-ing into each other’s business, or waltzing into a shared space of their own. One heart might have been a lonely hunter, but two constructed the most elaborate frameworks and patterns imaginable.

Tired of looking outside himself, Tom joined the fingers of his two hands together and took them on circling walks up the air’s stairs. He mixed and matched grungy rhythms and twirled until his cheeks turned flamenco red.

When he looked at the world around him, he noticed a woman leaning on the wall on the other side of the street. When she spotted his eyes set on her, she waved at him. He waved back.

Without walking over, the woman began to move her hips. She must have been about Tom’s age, with short red hair and a sickly pale complexion. He couldn’t see the features of her face from afar, but he saw a smile sifting through her body. He stood up and walked up to the edge of the pavement. He couldn’t feel his legs anymore. He began to mimic her, and sway his hips left to right. Without thinking twice, he raised his hand, as if pressing it on an imaginary wall; then he locked the air in an embrace with his other hand. The woman, in turn, reflected him.

Tom remembered the waltz lessons his parents had forced him to take in elementary school. Right foot forward, left foot to the left, right foot follows; left foot backwards, right to the right, left follows; and so it goes. The woman moved correspondingly. Each passerby stared and every other car honked, but no one stopped them. Everyone kept a safe distance, as if the pair was surrounded by an electric field of their own.

Tom felt a teardrop on his cheek. When he looked up, he noticed a bruise-coloured cloud staring at him and sending him cold droplets, one by one, like a cold shoulder. When he looked back down, the woman was gone. The trees turned motionless. People did, too. Their pace was slow and their movements mechanical, blurry, anonymous.

Tom felt the pronounced stickiness of his legs crawling back into the bones. He barely made it back home. As he did, he heard the trees’ whispers, their promise branches broken like the wind and swallowed by the rain.

He couldn’t tell if the drop on his cheek was a tear, or a bit of sky falling upon him.

 

 

 

 

Alex has been experimenting with various forms of writing for the past few years. She’s a Culture Editor and Writer for Roar News, her work has also appeared in publications such as HuffPost UK, Bad Pony Mag, Breath & Shadow, and Litbreak Magazine. She’s a creator of the YouTube channel, Alex Blank, where she explores the illusions and inconsistencies of the human psyche.

I will build us a home in Alaska.

Inside you’ll be able to paint flowers anywhere with thick oil colours, the same ones you sketch on your notebook when you cannot focus. They’ll be bright and brilliant and their petals will be strewn across the banisters and countertops, gauzy bodies overlapping like shingles. You can throw them like splatter paint over the walls and carve wispy leaves on window sills. The flowers will be visible and brazenly displayed and not hidden in the corner of your paper.

The outside will be a gentle white. As frozen crystals dive sluggishly from clouds to earth and the land is whipped cream, it will be impossible to see a difference between us and the snow and the expanse of forest beyond. Because we’ll be the same: pristine, radiant.

I rest my head against the frigid window beside my desk and admire the sunlight flow through the glass barrier, onto my paper, making my pen marks shimmer. Lifting one hand into the sunbeams, I watch dust motes swirl around my fingertips. I imagine the specks collecting into ribbons that flutter and sail in the air, wrapping themselves around my hands and forearms. With my eyes closed I can see the vast skylight I’ll build in our home. We can wake up to daylight’s butter yellow glow, it will pour inside like a waterfall of light, and we’ll be swimming in sun.

After I have been distracted too long, the teacher walks to the window and tugs a string, dropping the blinds with a whir and a crash.

The tiles covering the floor will be a dark, deep blue, the colour of a 2 AM sky. None of the furniture will match. The curtains will be made of thick canvas so we can paint them on rainy days. Your green retro bike will sit on the front porch. And anything else you could possibly want, I’ll get it for you.

In the spring I’ll put a chair beneath the trees -aluminum so the rain cannot eat at its metallic frame. Vines will slowly wrap their spindly tendril-hands around its legs; climbing and slithering between the gaps in the seat. Nature will curl through the chair like it’s a trellis and then I’ll sit. And I’ll become part of a mixture of metal, plant, and boy. Not the way a teenager is hidden in a crowded high school hallway, but the way rain joins the sea. Ferns like shaggy dog tails will sway at the base of trees whose trunks are knotted and gnarled with fortitude, blotchy shadows shivering on the ground. I’ll close my eyes, listening to birds whistle. I’ll flex my bare toes against the damp earth and feel roots gradually sprout from my feet, twisting down in the dirt. I’ll connect to the forest and feel it breathe. Synchronize myself with its pulse. Be part of something bigger.

We’ll have a record player in the living room, sitting on an ancient black suitcase. With the needle placed down, I’ll close my eyes and let myself sway to the music. It’ll soothe me, a river of notes over my burning body. We’ll play everything we crave; from Bach to the Rolling Stones. Tom Petty to Britney Spears. Holding you close to me, we’ll dance on the navy floor; spinning with our arms above our heads, stamping our feet, rocking softly side to side with our foreheads pressed together.

 

I put in my headphones and play my music now, dissolving and floating away with the song, rising upwards in a cloud. The feeling is ethereal and effortless. Absolutely uncontainable.

 

Then it ends. I desublimate. I slam back into my body with an abrupt jolt similar to the impact of an airplane landing on a runway.

If the music ends at our house, the silence will not sound like emptiness.

I have an inkling that soon, the walls of my hectic mind won’t be able to ignore the erosion from nonstop waves of exhausting thoughts that crash against them. I’ll collapse dramatically on the stained carpet floor of my bedroom, fracturing and bursting apart, flooding water in the licorice-coloured night. I will be a candle melting to wax across a table, a tree cracking in the wind, being undone, being demolished. But not in our Alaskan house, the farthest slice of America from here, where the wild hums. If the tears start to spill from my eyes, you will wipe them away tenderly with your thumb. You will whisper my name (you will know my name). You will look at me, recognize me, and I will be held together.

The porch will be screened in with a fine mesh. I can lay blankets on it and fall asleep listening to the commotion of the night.

 

 

Naomi Marko is a high school student in Vancouver, BC. Her writing has been recognized in the Alice Munro Short Story Competition and is forthcoming in Aerie International. When not writing, she can be found reading, playing soccer, or hiking with friends.