Lila Analfi

Mr. Kebler moved in during the hottest summer of our lives, when the flies got stuck in the space between the drapes and the window and died there. It was the summer when Charlie and I ran the AC full blast at one end of the apartment and fanned it with our hands to carry the cool. We could afford to keep the AC running because Charlie worked nights at the pharmacy and because I worked as a part-time vampire hunter, part-time rabbit exterminator.

Standing in our doorway, Mr. Kebler said that he was moving into the apartment to our left, and that he worked as a retail agent for homes up in Michigan. I asked whether it snowed up in Michigan. He said it did.

Then Charlie took me by the arm. “This is my wife, May.”

I shook Mr. Kebler’s hand and said, “Charlie’s wife, May.”

Mr. Kebler looked me up and down. “Anyone ever told you you’re built like an astronaut?”

“No.”

“They don’t tell you this in school. But there’s a certain proportion that they look for in astronauts, and you fit the mold down to the centimeter.”

“Is it cold in outer space?” I asked.

“Sure it is. It’s very cold.”

“Then I think I’d like to be an astronaut.”

Charlie asked, “Do you have a wife, Mr. Kebler?”

Mr. Kebler said he did not have a wife. He returned to his apartment to unpack, leaving a bouquet of honey-scented flowers on our welcome mat. A droplet of water still trembled in the vial.

When the petals started to fall, I fought to preserve each purple scrap. Yet inevitably they would end up squished on the windowsill with the bugs, sun-sucked dry. Charlie caught me crying and laughed, as if amazed water still fell from eyes or from the sky or from anyplace, really. “Stop crying and go hunt a vampire,” he said. “That’s your job, isn’t it?”

I had picked up vampire hunting after Mama sent me a postcard of my little brother holding a gun, his hair long and ragged, though she never mentioned what he planned to shoot.

I hunted three vampires prior to night Mr. Kebler returned.

“Hello, May,” he said, stepping through the doorway and taking a seat at the table. Beneath his coated right arm, he clutched a helmet. It was white and plastic, smooth to the touch, with a logo reading NASA on the side. “It’s what astronauts wear.” He handed it over and said, “Try it on.”

It was cool and dark beneath the helmet.

From his bag, Mr. Kebler produced a bottle of wine. I brought over cups, and he poured two glasses like a waiter in the movies.

“Welcome to the Future Astronauts of America,” he said.

America meant a country and Future meant girls huddled in linoleum bathrooms without their mothers, crossing their thin fingers.

“It’s a club,” he explained, when I took off the helmet to stare. “For people like us.”

“For people who would make good astronauts?”

“That’s right.”

Mia had wanted a car. Belinda had wanted to marry a hot vampire. I had wanted to be a judge on TV, slamming down that wooden hammer. Guilty. Innocent. Guilty. Mama would’ve called it playing God, but Mama was dead.

Charlie came home late the next morning, knuckles scraped raw, asking why I had left glasses out on the table.

“I was celebrating,” I said.

“Celebrating what?”

I shrugged. “Life.”

“You don’t need two glasses to celebrate life.”

“I do.”

Guilty.

I lied again when I begged Charlie to buy a fan to fight the heat climbing up my torso like water up a flower’s stem, parching me from the inside out. I told Charlie I was afraid to die, but the Future Astronauts of America did not fear death. Mr. Kebler talked about men who exploded into a million bits as soon as their rocket lifted from the ground, or men who went off-course and drifted through the endless blackness until they starved. But I was afraid that the helmet I had hidden in the closet would slowly melt away – drip, drip, dripping into nothing but a sizzling puzzle.

“Which planet is coldest?” I asked Mr. Kebler one night, licking cookie crumbs off the edge of my lip.

“Whichever is farthest from the sun, probably. Probably Neptune.”

I tasted the syllables on my tongue. “I’d like to go to Neptune.”

And then Mr. Kebler kissed me, his lips touching my helmet where my mouth should be.

The next morning, Charlie returned from work and flipped off the fan and piled our belongings into the suitcase in the corner. When he came upon the helmet in the closet, he said, “I thought you were a werewolf ballerina.”

Charlie had many wrong thoughts – that I loved him, for one.

“Not anymore,” I said. “Now I’m an astronaut.”

“Where we’re moving, I think you’d rather be a werewolf ballerina. More space to dance.”

“Where are we moving to?” I asked.

“Not far.”

“Will it be colder there?”

“It isn’t far.”

 

 

Lila Anafi is a part-time freelance writer and editor. Her writing has received regional recognition in the Scholastic Writing Awards, and she is set to be published in the Ginosko Literary Journal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

With your grades? And your skin color? Not a chance. Go to an info session or two and humor your parents with the whimsical idea that you might proudly don a Crimson gown at your college graduation, and then accept the reality that the best crimson you’ll wear will be in Tuscaloosa (roll tide!).

College admissions are scary, especially for you, anxious and self-loathing teenager. I’m here to help make it a little less scary. It’ll save us both the headache if you can understand that it doesn’t matter where you go, so it’ll be best to choose the place that you can afford in a climate that you can tolerate (it gets frosty in New England).

When other aspirational eighteen-year-olds come to me, soliciting guidance, I have them answer these three questions:

1. Are you poor?
2. Are you particularly talented in anything? Do people other than your mother recognize your talent?
3. Do you want to go to college? Why?

That last one is particularly puzzling to people, and it’s my favorite of them all. Something you will soon realize is that not everyone has to attend college, and that not everyone should attend college, and that you, the most generic of students, might be one of those ‘shoulds.’ You remember those D.A.R.E. sessions in middle school? The ones where the cops herd everyone into a classroom to give a 45-minute lecture on the evils of drug use and how to combat peer pressure? Too many kids go to college because it’s the next step in a path prescribed to them by their parents, their teachers, their friends, society and whatnot. It’s hard, I know, but try and see if you can ‘just say no’ to college if it’s not right for you.

If you are persistent on attending college, then I will help you figure out which schools you can apply to. If the answer to the first question is ‘yes, you are poor,’ then limit yourself to in-state public options or the most elite of private schools—they’ll pay for everything and then some. Disclaimer for these schools is that it becomes incredibly apparent that you are significantly poorer than other students, and I mean significantly. You might go camping during Spring Break while they’re spearfishing in the Maldives. You might take the bus to your local Walmart once a month and pass by Cory from Chem 133 driving an Alfa Romeo. It is very easy to identify the wealthy students in the winter based on their brand of parka (watch out for Canada Goose). Try to develop your code-switching abilities, master the prep-school dialect, and you may find yourself rubbing shoulders with the sons of CEOs and the daughters of heart surgeons. If code-switching isn’t to your liking, you’ll find company with the other financial aid kids during vacation periods who also can’t afford to fly home more than once a semester (hope you like dining hall food).

Next, determine if there’s anything special about you. Are you good at anything? You don’t have to be a world-class hockey player or the next chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, but are you solidly above-average at any activity, and can you prove it? It doesn’t matter if you won an award from your school’s Rubik’s Cube club for ‘Most Improved’ or you were invited to teach fourth graders about the woes of nitrates in the water supply—is there some external recognition of your competence? This is your marketability as a candidate: sell it! If you aren’t talented at anything (likely), tell them about an interest of yours. It doesn’t matter how inconsequential that interest has been on your life, or how niche the interest is. In fact, the nicher the interest, the more it sets you apart. Convince the admissions office that you will be that one kid that is really into Chinese yo-yos, or that you will start the Kyrgyzstani Culinary Club.

 

Once you figure out your marketing strategy, it is time to prepare for rejection, and you will be rejected quite profusely. After the first few rejections, you rationalize and reason, you just weren’t the right fit or it was a longshot anyway (no one even wants to go to Princeton). After several roll in, then you start to question yourself. Did you forget to include your transcript? Did your teachers write incorrigible recommendations? Are you just stupid? Your mom will comfort you, reassure you that you’ll get in to a few. What does she know. Back in her day, if you were literate and mildly law-abiding you could go to Stanford on a full-ride. Now you have to testify in front of the FTC about antitrust policy just to get into Georgetown. Your safeties get back to you, but it’s little consolation to settle for UT Dallas when your classmates announce their admission to Rice. You go to school, kids already wearing their future college sweatshirts. Use every impulse of self-control to stop yourself from setting these people on fire along with their sweatshirts. Your college counselor counsels you, tells you that you were a sure thing to get into Georgia Tech, that it’s always a toss-up. Thank them for their sympathy, Ms. Salinas is trying her hardest, and you wander the halls like a lost ghoul, the misery and self-loathing burning in the back of your head like a bonfire. You will remember this feeling.

You need to burn off steam. Text your group chat of best guy friends, the ones that you forget about all of your obligations with and blow off steam chucking melons off of cliffs after midnight, but they don’t respond quick enough for you. Ask your parents if they want you to pick up dinner so you have an excuse to drive the Mazda. As you open the garage and watch the amber hue of streetlights trickle onto the concrete slabs below your feet, you see the neighbors across the street have put up a congratulatory poster for their child—MIT. Good for her. You’re in too much of a rush to queue music from your phone so settle for the radio. You haven’t heard this station since you rode the bus in sixth grade. As you begin to cruise down the highway, fixate on your very proximate and uncertain future. You can’t remember the last time you were happy, but then you think that’s too dramatic. And it is. But then wonder why this has affected you so deeply? Question why you are so emotionally invested in these decisions. Blame your classmates, your teachers, your school, your generation. Then remember your parents, the immigrants that worked night shifts to pay for your SAT tutoring, the ones that never went to college. Remember your mother, the one who told everyone how you were going to be the first person in your family to go to college, how you were going to make everyone so proud when you inevitably got into Harvard. Twitch at the thought.

Eventually arrive at your spot, the overlook on the west side of town where you sneaked smooches before curfew with the captain of the swimming team, where you learned that there is such a thing as too much tongue. Sit along the brick guardrails and survey the sumptuous suburbs that have encroached on your home. It is here where you meditate, but not really, because you are nowhere near calm enough to consider it meditation. Fume, pout, stew. And amidst the beauty of city lights, bury your head into your knees. A salty drop floats off your chin and floats down the cliff, drifting into the airy foliage of oak leaves beneath. Your solitude is disturbed by a vibration in your pocket—an email notification. It’s a decision letter. Immediately unlock your phone and click the link to your admissions portal. The reception is bad so get in the car and drive down the mountain. When it finally loads, pull over on the side of the road.

 

I am writing to inform you that the Committee on Admissions and Financial Aid cannot at the time make a final decision on your application for a place in next year’s entering class. However, because of your outstanding achievements and promise, the Committee has voted to place your name on a waiting list of men and women for whom we hope places may become available.

           

Re-read the message six times. Stop halfway through the seventh when you get a text from your mom. Waitlisted! It’s not perfect but it’s a start. Good things are coming your way <3. You weren’t sure how to feel, but after reading the text, a grin creeps in. Remember that, in the end, it doesn’t matter where you go, and that you’ll pave your own path. Remember that college doesn’t create successful people—you determine your worth. Remember that the to-go order your mom placed is ready, and put the Mazda into Drive.

 

 

 

 

True Pham studied creative writing and Political Economy at Williams College. He is the recipient of the Benjamin B. Wainwright Award for Best Fiction (2021). He is an avid soccer player, film lover, and he will be working in Vietnam next year as a Fulbright Fellow.

I remember this incident very vividly. We were living in Delhi near Humayun’s Tomb in a small wayside cottage. Usman had just come to work at our house as a replacement for our old servant, who had been incapacitated by tuberculosis to run errands. Owing to his expertise in household chores, he soon became indispensable to us. He would sleep at night in our compound, where a rug had been allotted to him.

It was September and the equinoctial winds had set in. Father had to leave for Simla, and Mother had to go to Calcutta to grandmother’s house. I was left alone with Usman. All was well until night. The summer gale howled and shrieked, raging through the city like an untamed beast which had escaped from its cage. The window beside me trembled and thunderstorms crashed in the pitch-black sky.

I could not sleep. The strange noises of the violent storm scared me out of my wits. I kept looking outside the window to assure myself that no one was there, far and near. But I could not stand it any longer, and opened the window from which one could see the compound. I called out to Usman, and asked him to sleep with me for the night. He agreed immediately.

Usman came upstairs and laid his rug on the floor. He quietly slept on it. After a long moment of silence, he said in a comforting tone, “Babusahib, go to sleep. I am here. Do not worry- The rain will die down soon.”

But nothing could stop the wind. Neither could I fall asleep, nor did the wind give any hint of relent. Usman was still fast asleep, or so I thought. I was still uneasy in bed, waiting for Father to knock at the door anytime soon. I kept my eyes closed, trying to get some sleep, but in vain. It was around 3.30 am. Usman suddenly woke up with a shudder, and raised himself to my bed. He glanced at me, checking whether I was deep asleep or not. I did not move.

Then I saw Usman suddenly standing up. I still lay as a dead man. He walked upto the study, pulled the bedroom drawer, very quietly, and started rummaging through the papers. They were mostly Father’s official papers, which he had kept securely in that drawer. I suddenly felt that they were not any more ‘secure’. Usman kept scouring through these papers.

I started getting worried. What was he in search of? Was he trying to steal something of value? I had never, in the past, seen Usman in such a state of desperation. Suddenly, he took his hands out from the heap of papers and I saw a golden ring glinting in his hands. I instantly recognised that it was the watch which my my aunt had sent for me from America. On having found the ring, he leapt with joy and whispered something to himself. He glanced at me once again to ensure that I was not disturbed. I still lay quietly on the bed.

Usman moved around the room to check if any other item of value was there. His eyes fell upon the small, golden case which was placed on my study table. He took it in his hands and examined it with curious eyes. It was my treasured silver pen that I had received as a gift from my father.

Usman put his previous possession into a plastic packet, which he acquired from the dustbin by my table. Before putting his next success into the packet, he once again looked at it. The case itself glimmered brightly in the dim light of the dawn. What a fool I was to have kept that case there!

The clock struck six. The sun had now begun to stage itself in the sky. As soon as Usman put the case in his packet and tried to leave the room, the azaan rang out. Having lived beside a mosque since my boyhood days, I had long accustomed myself to this morning prayer’s call by the muezzin. Suddenly, the packet dropped from Usman’s hands. It seemed as if he was in a trance; he stood still without any movement.

The raw sunlight of the morning entered through the lattice filigree and melted on him like butter as the azaan rang out. Tears rolled down from his eyes. He fell to the floor, indifferent to the world around him. I moaned, but Usman stood, absolutely still like a stone image cut of granite. Only the tears ran down his cheeks. With cupped hands, he cried out “Ya Allah!”

Usman had been about to commit the sin of stealing, but the morning prayer stopped him dead in his tracks. He came to his senses and immediately repented. I don’t think he ever stole anything again in his life.

 

Azaan- a prayer practice by Muslims.

Babusahib- a form of addressing young children from rich families.

 

Rehan Sheikh writes short stories, memoirs and articles. His work, The Roaring Himalayas won him the Elan Middle School Writing Contest 2020. Since then his works have appeared in various leading magazines and newspapers. His work has also been recognised by HarperCollins India.

The ticking grew louder and he was struck with a familiar longing for disbelief. The knowledge was his chaotic lover and he shied away from her bruising touch. His body was a mosaic of her kisses, scars, each larger than life.

He wondered how it would happen this time. Fire, skin sliding off his coworker’s protruding frame like rib meat does a bone? Sleep, the consumption of an eternal dream? The way it happened was the only thing left to chance. His mind was at the mercy of this indecisive Nature.

His coworker had begun to tick six days ago in the conference room. They had been the only two inside, both plagued with morbid punctuality. She had been writing something, black hair falling in her eyes. The room was silent, save for the sound of the pencil violating her notepaper.

The man’s head started to ache. A sour bile penetrated his taste. And then it began, quiet as first, as it always was. The clock. The tick tick that made him crave death, crave the blessed ending to the noise.

He called in sick the next three days, the separation dulling the chimes, though the sound never truly stopped.

But it was Monday now. He was back in the office and the ticking began to swell. Death was near. He could always sense it.

With the coworker it was an unbearable tragedy. She was pregnant, the ticking twice as loud. The man felt terrible for her husband. He had met the soft-spoken man at the baby shower, and he had seemed like a decent fellow. The two had been so happy that day, and in the last six months, despite the pain, the aches, there had always been a smile on his coworker’s face.

She would die before morning.

He had first discovered his talent in third grade. Before then, he thought everybody heard the clock. Whenever he complained about the ticking to his mother, she would shrug it off, chalking it up to childhood imagination.

The ticks were fluctuating storms, thundering and lulling. He had never assigned them any meaning until the day of his classmate’s death.

They had been schoolmates, circumstantial friends that never saw each other outside the elementary walls. Usually they played together at lunch, in the sandbox, or by the woods. However, in those last days, the boy hadn’t liked playing with his classmate. The ticking had begun to hurt; it was so loud that he had cried for his mother, fearful that he was going deaf.

Four days after the ticking began, his classmate died in the cafeteria. He had choked on a slice of pizza, and that had been that.

The ticking had gone quiet.

As he grew, the boy learned to manage the ticks. He avoided clocks, as they became synonymous with precognition. A young man now, he followed a strict set of rules that gave his life the illusion of normalcy. Avoid crowds at all costs. Don’t tell anyone that they are going to die. Don’t treat them any differently. Feign surprise when your pregnant co-worker falls off a ladder and splits her head in two. Don’t tell anybody about your gift. Don’t get attached to people. And under no circumstances may you ever fall in love. Love is nothing more than the quantification of chaos.

He broke that last rule on the day he met the woman.

Time skipped after the death of his coworker, the days feeling empty like a slice of Swiss cheese. Their department had been given a week off. The man now wandered in the rain, staring up at the morose sky. His hair began to dampen with the water, and he grew worried that his face would soon follow. He stopped in front of a crowded coffee shop, chilled to his bones and shivering like a mad man. He opened the door tentatively, wincing as the ticking began to puncture his bruised mind. Voices swelled, pregnant with jubilant laughter and contented life.

As he closed the door behind him, his overcoat was caught and the man stumbled to the floor. He heard laughter, and looked up from the coffee-stained carpet.

There was a woman there, on her way out of the shop. Her hair had been in long red braids then, when she still had hair to style. Her eyes were gray and full of mischief, and the man couldn’t help but smile, despite the rugburn that scarred his palms.

She helped him up, extending a long hand, thin and pale as a crescent moon. There was a book under her arm, one he had read many times over.

“That’s a good book,” he said, regaining his footing. He pulled his coat out from the door, dismayed by the slight snag in the black fabric.

“It’s rather boring so far,” the woman said, her voice like cream. “I’m partial to something with a little more action.”

“You should try his other book then. The pacing is better.”

“The one about the spy?”

“Which other would it be?”

She laughed again and that had been the start. They exchanged numbers and names, promising to do a book swap in the following week. And miraculously, they did.

The first book she gave him had been terrible, the second wonderful. Sometimes they would meet up at the coffee shop, other times the park. She would always drink coffee, he a chai.

He resisted it at first, the feeling in his chest like buzzing bugs zipping about. The butterflies bursting through his heart. The warm, fuzzy feelings like the fur of a caterpillar. But the worm of love ate into his skull and there was nothing he could do. He hated himself for it, for breaking the rule. But he loved her more.

The ticking had become quieter as he spent more time with the woman, and for this, with a regard for their mutual attraction, their interactions began to increase exponentially. After their sixth meeting he asked her on a proper date, and she said yes. Three months later, they moved in together.

They had seven good months before things started to go wrong. Seven months of watching films, going on bike rides through the town. Seven months of literature and laughter. Seven months of dancing in the rain. Seven months of intimate whispers. Seven months of happiness. Seven months going on eternity.

Then the ticking began.

It started slow, quiet. He first thought it was another coworker, the sound so faint it could have been wind. But as the days passed, and later months, he knew what the ticking foreshadowed. It was louder at home, as it had been when his mother passed. A different tale with the same ending.

Then she began to cough.

The cancer had been slow. It took her as a sloth grabs a leaf.

He wanted to be with her when it finally happened. He tried to walk through the hospital doors. But in that place, the place of death, the collective noise had been louder than bombs.

A week later he was alone in their bedroom. The walls had grown barren, stained only by the torn-off tape of her photos and pictures. As he sat on their bed the ticking started again, this time louder than anything he had ever heard before. His teeth ached in their sockets and his marrow seemed to bubble. Tears sprung to his eyes with reflex, and he groaned and screamed into their useless sheets.

The pounding never stopped. The ticking never ceased, it never had. His bones felt like they were twisting, gnarled branches of a dying tree. Somehow he stood up, stumbled to the bathroom.

On the top shelf of the cabinet there was a bottle of pills. He had long since forgotten what they did, what they cured. It no longer mattered. He took the jar and unscrewed the child’s cap, placed there for the child they never had.

And finally, the ticking stopped.

 

 

Liza is a sixteen-year-old student from California who loves reading horror novels and writing existential stories in her spare time. The Tick Tock Man follows a tortured man and his struggles with a unique ability, the burden of hearing how close someone is to death.