Aishani Thakur

The bell above the door chimed as the girl stepped inside. Water dripped off her coat and pooled on the coir mat, the word “welcome” illegible under a thick layer of dust and grime. The air was thick with the scent of mildew and something sweet, like vanilla and nostalgia. Shelves lined the walls, cluttered with delicate glass jars, each containing a swirling, glowing mist. Some jars were small, while others were large enough to hold memories of an entire lifetime.

“Can I help you find something?” asked the old man behind the counter.

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “I saw the sign outside. Is this where you can buy memories?”

The wrinkles on his forehead deepened from fine lines into grooves. “Not buy,” he sighed, gently correcting her. “You can only borrow them.”

“Borrow?” The girl furrowed her brow, confused.

“Memories don’t belong to you in the same way things do,” the man explained, reaching below the counter to retrieve a small jar filled with a soft silver light. “They are slippery and fragile – always changing, forever fading. Here, you get to experience them as they once were. But like all things borrowed, you must return them.”

The girl stared at the jar, its silver contents glittered like a meteor storm. She felt her chest tighten with longing, an overwhelming force drawing her toward it, the desire to relive her long-forgotten memories.

She hesitated. “Can I borrow a memory?”

“Of course,” the man replied, nodding. “What would you like to remember?” he gestured around the store.

There were so many old memories she wanted to relive – her grandmother’s baking when she visited the countryside, her mother’s warm hugs and soft voice, her father’s callous yet gentle hands as they held hers, the sound of laughter building pillow forts that felt like they would last forever. One memory came to the surface, as if it had been waiting all along.

“One of the summer picnics by the lake,” she said softly. “The cool water, the sunlight on my skin, the sickly sweet popsicles – I want to feel it all again.

“Good choice,” the man said as his steady hands uncorked the jar, releasing the wisps of light that danced in the air. He handed it to her, and as her fingers wrapped around the cool glass, his clouded obsidian eyes empty of human emotion bore into her innocent brown ones for the first time. “Take it,” the old man murmured, the warmth in his voice replaced by a haunting chill. “But remember, once it is over, you may not be the same person who borrowed it.”

The girl nodded and closed her eyes. As the memory flooded her senses, she felt herself transported.

She felt the warmth of the sun on her skin first, before inhaling the fresh, earthy scent of the dirt and trees. Her mother squealed as her father splashed water at her. The girl sat on the shore, a bucket hat perched on her head, her hands sticky from a melted orange popsicle. It felt too real. She could almost taste the slight saltiness in the air, and hear the soft hum of critters in the afternoon heat.

But a moment later, the edges of the memory began to fray. Her mother’s voice became muffled, and her father’s face blurred. The sunlight began to flicker like a dying light bulb as her vision contorted into grey. The more she tried to hold onto it, the faster it slipped through her fingers, dissolving into the silver light that surrounded her thinly like smoke.

When she opened her eyes again, the shop was dim. The old man was gone, the jar she had held now ash dusted on her palms. The bell above the door chimed once more, with its signature distant tinkling, and she found herself outside.

The store had vanished. The street was quiet, empty. Her memory was gone.

 

 

 

Chloe Lim is a medical student and writer. When she’s not studying, she loves reading, baking, and dabbling in various hobbies.

“Did you close the windows near the laundry?” Umma¹ asks.

My contemplations wash away when I realize a fatal error in my jangma² preparation: I forgot to close the outer layer of the intricate Korean windows. When I enter the living room to lock the larger windows, the floor is already a gushing river. Rainwater soaks the fresh laundry I had just hung up on the dryer, submerges my favorite cotton slippers, and drowns my cacti. I hurl myself against the wind and wrap my arms around my clothes, tucking them safely underneath towels. When the window finally clicks into the latch, I dread turning around. Umma tells me to act with nunchi – read the room.

I look at the mess I have created. The rain has birthed giant puddles on the cherry wood floor that no longer boasts its gleaming brown polish, and the water reflects a decade’s worth of chipped paint. Through the puddles, I spot a reflection of myself, revealing my distorted face in the murky water. In hindsight, because I dismissed Halmoni’s³ rules for her cherished floor and furniture, I know I’m the decade-long culprit of the excessive wear-and-tear, so I dig my nails into the heels of my palms as I remember every time that I had recklessly played tag or furiously swept on Halmoni’s most prized possession. I rush to the kitchen before every memory cascades onto the ground and pools together in a muddy puddle of guilt and regret, infinitely expanding like the universe laughing back at me.

I grab a frail, ripped rag and desperately pat my mess. My mom calls me pathetic, and I grit my teeth in acceptance. I watch as the rainwater seeps between the cracks in the hardwood floor inside a room that I refuse to claim as mine. Maybe Halmoni treasured the floor because Korean floors are so intricate, designed to be kept cool during the summer and warmer during the winter. She used to lay the yo, or the mattress, on the ground and tuck me in my blanket woven with vibrant florals and embroidered with techniques passed down in my lineage for centuries– until my birth. In the heavens, my ancestors probably wallow in grief that their family traditions, so intricate and glittering and worth being shared and celebrated with the world, have been butchered by their clumsy, callow teenage descendant: a true case of involuntary manslaughter. My soggy fingertips sting from the holes I’ve punctured in my skin instead of the fabric. I wonder if Halmoni will ever forgive me for neglecting her embroidery and polished floor, and for yearning to leave this house to escape from the perennial evidence of my petty crimes. I plug in Halmoni’s old hair dryer to the nearest outlet and let the warm air blow at the ground until some of the puddle evaporates. Although the water on my hands dries, my stubborn guilt will never evaporate.

The floor is not completely dry yet and looks like a mosaic of old, yellowed rags, but I move on to my slippers. Drying them with Halmoni’s hair dryer, I regret that I peered outside, drumming my fingers to the chirping tunes of the cicada flocks on the birch instead of listening to her. My mother’s family never had a dialect, and yet the Korean language still traveled in monotone fleets, swimming between the pitches and inflections of the English tones that I understood, perpetually stuck in the vacant space between the Anglican treble and bass clef notes. After five years of piano lessons, I felt like I had an unfortunate, peculiar abnormality of two left hands and music note dyslexia, and I couldn’t bear to decipher the furious annotations on my music sheets or the connotations behind the Korean language. How could I understand or play the same tune if I couldn’t tell which fingers should press the keys?

“Don’t wear these outside the house, okay?” Halmoni said when she first handed me the soft slippers eight summers ago. The same week, I carelessly wore them outside to a bingsoo store with her and Haraboji.⁴ I grabbed my grandparents’ hands and obliviously ate the frozen dessert, unaware of why my grandmother suggested going outside when I asked about her absence every Wednesday. I dug through flakes of ice, ravaging the decadent rice cakes and red bean paste, in search of everything but the truth. The raindrops drip off the slippers and onto the ground, creating another puddle. Is this actually working?

I walk into the dimly lit bathroom, holding my cacti, and pour out water into the sink. The leaves droop and fall off the sickly and almost dead stem, and soggy spines bend against my fingers. Although I don’t bleed, I would rather be pierced by adamant thorns instead of sad pricks. Cacti evolved spines as a survival mechanism to prevent water loss in arid deserts at the expense of losing their ability to withstand floods. Cacti are supposed to be low maintenance, to be taken care of with ease, and yet, I had ravaged a succulent pot of this thriving living organism. However, Halmoni’s favorite small fuchsia-shade flowers on the tips of the branches are still alive and in full bloom. My spine curls over the sink, watching the flowers sag, sitting in giant puddles of futility in the vase. When the plant dies, the flowers will wilt as well.

Eight jangmas ago, no one was inside Halmoni’s house when the sun filled the room with its radiant morning light and gushed into my vision. I secretly listened to Umma’s call with Haraboji when she returned home hours later. As tears rolled down my cheeks, I sat in silence until they became choking sobs. My fingers locked into each other and around my mouth like a tight clasp until I choked back words that never existed. The rain should have poured in buckets from the heavens, the air should have suffocated and crushed with overbearing humidity, the atmosphere should have erupted from the storms it was holding, and the sun should have refused to shine. Yet, the sun beamed in the blue sky and I heard laughter from the neighborhood playground; it was just another beautiful day for everyone outside Halmoni’s house.

As I walk back into the room, sunlight pours through the windows, drying the rag-covered floors and slippers while I drown in grief. Eight summers have passed, but I am still alone in the shadows of my grandmother. The sunlight has not reached me yet.

Translations
1.Umma – mom
Jangma – monsoon
Halmoni – grandma
Haraboji – grandpa

 

Jiyoo Choi is a high school junior from Seoul, Korea. She aspires to encapsulate her relationship with grief, sense of identity, and experience moving ten times throughout her life into literature. Jiyoo has been recognized by the Scholastic Writing Awards and the Creative Communications Poetry Contest. In her free time, she writes for her blog (i’m)mutable, creates digital art, and listens to Steve Lacy.

The raging desert current blew through the Colliers’ geodesic tent’s fragile silicon film layer, ripping a gash of light into its dusky interiors. Sand and ash blasted through the hole in the tent panel and fell, soundless, like catkins, onto Lichong’s blanket. He sighed. It was no use pretending to be drowsy. He pulled himself out of the tattered cot and peered down at the light beside his feet, listening to the wind’s bellowing outside and the myriads of snores and mumbles of his workgroup beside him, deep in their slumbers.

Why can’t he sleep? It was the fourth time of the week that he’d woken up, tussling and turning from a dream he never seemed to recall. He stood, briskly wrapped himself in his old cherry-red puffer, fitted his head into a filter, and left the warm confines of his shelter.

The bone-chilling desert air found his exposed neck first, and for a second, he couldn’t tell if it was freezing cold or searing hot, but common sense told him it was the prior, and experience made him pull the rubber flap of the filter down his nape. He inspected the gash in the tent, at the broken threads around it from the two times where he had tried to sew it back together. If only his needlework was as proficient as mother’s, he would’ve made a strong enough stitch. But then again, his family practiced embroidery, not patchwork. He trotted out into the open bled, halfheartedly rubbing the rigid letters on his puffer’s left pocket. It spelled his name, “立春,” the first day of spring, a gift from mother on the parting day.

The twin moons of Hermes II were especially bright that night, and as Lichong strode to the top of the great dune overlooking their mining colony, he couldn’t help but wonder what his family was doing. His baby sister Guanxi would be…two, no, three by now. Soon, she’ll be old enough to swing on the tire swing father had fashioned for him when he was her age. His nephew, barely seven, would be wading through the shallow waters of the lotus pond by the county magistrate’s Siheyuan, catching tadpoles to feed the hens. Mother would be by the loom, and father would be…well, he’d be where he always was: atop the outcrop overlooking the entire village, peacefully watching over all of them. Lichong smiled, wondering if he still watched over him even now, twenty-five trillion miles away in the Alpha Centauri star system. That smile vanished as fast as the sand blowing across the dunes when the beeping of the activity monitor on his wrist pulled him back into reality. He switched it off, sighed, and craned his head to the sky again. The two moons had conjoined, the one closer to Hermes II blocking the second behind it. Yet the night remained just as bright, the sands bathed in the thin, silvery veil that seemed to have crept silently atop it.

“Ma, can you hear me?” he whispered despite the rising feeling of foolishness in his chest. Of course, she couldn’t hear him. Hell, with a single message from Earth requiring six whole months to reach Hermes II, he didn’t even know if she was still alive. If any of his family was, in fact, still alive. That was one of those thoughts he kept at the very back of his mind, always trying to forget but to no avail, like the nail poking out of the floorboards of the gymnasium where the lion dancers practiced. Unlike the dancers, he’d never managed to make peace with it.

“Oh, ma. Can you hear me?” he repeated, mouthing a silent prayer. He was an atheist, and he still is, but some time after his arrival on Hermes II, he realized that the only way to remain sane on this isolated piece of rock is to indulge in faith—blind faith. There was nothing much else he could do, anyway.

He sat down atop the dune and ran a hand through the fine sand. He scooped up a palmful and watched as the wind slowly blew more sand into the hole he made until it was filled. Then he opened his fingers and observed the same winds that had filled the hole carry the sand away—to fill other holes. He reached down, scooped up another fistful, and, nearly instinctively, threw it to his right. The gesture felt familiar. Ah, of course. A flash of pain coursed through his chest. He used to pull this prank all the time on mother. She hated it, getting the grit on her clothes, but allowed him to indulge in the stupid fun anyway. Then his nephew started doing it to him, and he had finally gotten a taste of his own medicine one day when he stormed home, a bucketful of grainy sand in his trousers with the little guy howling with laughter behind him. He had no doubt that if that little beach by the pond still existed, his baby sister would come to throw sand, too. It was almost like a ritualistic tradition in that sense. But now, sitting below the frigid moon with all the sand in the world under him, he had no one to throw it towards.

And even if he had someone—a friend he made in the colony, for instance—it wouldn’t be the same. He’s here, and they’re there. Trillions of miles away, on a planet in a solar system whose star he couldn’t even spot out of the thousands in this night sky.

He shivered, his open palm clenching into a fist, then into his puffer’s pocket, where his needle and thread resided. Lichong knew that sometime in the future, this moment would replay itself. And he would allow it to continue.

 

Zanchao Hao is an aspiring writer and high school student at United World College, Maastricht, He is the editor of the PVLSE teen magazine under Inkswell.