Fiction

Like a prodigal son returning home, I stood at the peak of a mountain I once lived on, looking out at a city I once knew better than the pipa and violin calluses on my hands. In Hong Kong, every building shone like a beacon in the night. It brought a different kind of peace than the nighttime quiet that Arkansas provided. During the two years I lived in the Natural State, I became familiar with the type of still where you could hear the night breathe. Never still, Hong Kong brought the sort of peacefulness that came with screaming, a sounding declaration of human existence. I am here, look at me, look at me, look at me. As my parents laughed somewhere behind me, I wondered if we looked out at the skyline and saw the same neon green tinted memories of streets and insect glow.

We had begun our hike up Lion Rock just as the sun barely grazed the crooked horizon line, painting the harbour skyline warm gold instead of searing white. Fireflies, their yellow-green tails twinkling like stars, had danced amidst the swaying wild grass and tree branches. My father and I used to catch them in little glass jars and bring them home to watch the glowing dots fly around the living room, all the lights switched off.

“Do you remember that time we saw a snake one night?” My father had asked as we inched our way up the road, the salt and pepper of his hair standing out though the leaf-speckled dusk. “You were so scared afterwards, I had to carry you home.”

“I was five, but okay,” I replied. “Many-banded kraits are venomous. I had every right to be terrified.”

My father looked wistful. “You’ve grown a lot since then.” He spoke with a heavy blend of sadness and pride. I understood. Everything seemed much smaller now, less giant than they had been when I was a child. An oasis within a metropolis, mountains remain immortal, but the people stepping foot in them do not.

We had arrived at the peak just as the sky turned a vibrant pink, the sun tinting the glass skyscrapers and grey estates orange and rose. Last time I stood here, I had just hiked it with my aunt seven years ago. Some part of me still longed for the recklessness of my childhood, the thrill I got from climbing the rocks just a little too close to the edge. Pictures of me standing on a boulder with my arms stretched wide as I yelled into the wind still floated around somewhere in the family group chats. We had started in the comfortable winter morning chill when the sun was just rising and took the long way up, arriving just before noon. I could still feel the weight of my then-long hair, brittle with cold and mountain wind, and how bright everything shined, sunlight making crystals out of windows and concrete.

Closing my eyes, I thought of my American friend Rose’s backyard in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas. Once, we had driven her back home after a day over at my house in the suburbs. The hour-long drive south took me down winding roads through places I called forests and she called woods. Listening to the soft lilt of her voice in an accent that had become familiar, I had placed my hands, dry and scarred from cold winters my body had never known before, against the car window and imagined rough tree bark breaking the skin apart.

If my hands were charcoal-stained instead of string-callused, I would have captured the view in watercolour. If Hong Kong was a mural, a shattered marble mosaic, Northwest Arkansas from the I-49 was a forgotten Andrew Wyeth, tucked away and awaiting display, gathering dust in a museum drawer.

 

That March evening, I had learned that Rose actually did live in a log-walled cabin in the middle of the woods. I also learned the feeling of speeding in a golf cart, the adults we left behind in the dust yelling at us to go slower.

Rose taught me to find constellations from her little hill top in West Fork, Arkansas. Start with the North Star, and you figure it out from there. She had laughed when my weak eyes, blinded by city lights, failed to do even that. But just before my mother called for me to get in the car, I picked out Cassiopeia, that little flattened W, hanging by the corner of the navy sky, tucked between two tall shadowed cedar peaks.

Although I kept my eyes on it the entire way home, I still lost it when I ran from the garage to the yard.

On Lion Rock, the sun was almost entirely gone. Only a few strands of pink and purple remained, streaking across a navy sky now illuminated by the lights of highways and buildings. The Remains of the Day, I thought. Ishiguro understood metamorphosis, that thin tightrope line between cultures, the way values and morals and everything changed with time and place. From up high, Kowloon—the district I grew up in, a home within home—didn’t look all that different, but I knew better.

The stationary shop I used to buy pastel blue mechanical pencils from shut down three months ago, replaced by a Chow Tai Fook selling diamond necklaces no one in the area could afford. The building across the street from where my cousin used to live caught on fire a year ago and turned the sky the colour of opium smoke, burying my childhood in its ashes and ruins.

I watched the lights in apartment building windows as they flickered on one by one, forming little stars on the ground. 8 p.m., and in some ways, the city just came alive. Just as the boulder I was leaning on had once brought me to the top of the world, my hometown that had once seemed so big I now understood as a pencil speck on an atlas. My love for it felt too big for my heart, and the streets of Kowloon seemed like too much for any one person to know. And yet.

I could tell you where to find the best noodles (Kam Ho Restaurant on Fuk Lo Tsun Road). I knew where to find good quality boba and fruit tea drinks for impossibly low prices (Hoi Saam Guo Yuen, Happy Fruit, on Yuk Wah Crescent). Po Kong Village Road Park allowed for moon-and-street-lit strolls and teenagers practicing kickflips, making it the best place for late night walks. A pro-protests and pro-democracy store, Dai Gai Siu Goon had the best desserts, my favourite being the coconut pudding with taro and grass jelly.

The window lights made constellations as the night grew deeper, imaginary but symbolic figures and patterns appearing in a night sky of human life. Rose had seemed to know every star and tree and pebble in her woodland backyard, and I now wondered if I could ever hope to know Hong Kong, or even Kowloon, just as well. The memory of yellow revolution banners flying in the wind of this very spot burning fresh in my mind, I thought of all the people who loved this city just as much as I did and fought the urge to fall to my knees.

Basking in the light of Kowloon blooming and coming to life under the warm blanket of darkness, my parents and I began our journey down. I only had a month left in Hong Kong, summer vacation only lasted so long. Moving down the path that a few months ago was lit up by a human chain of protesters, I swore an oath to every crystalline speck of light that made this city beautiful. I was a Hongkonger, and as long as I still breathed its fragrant harbour air, I would not waste a single day away from its streets.

 

Chiu-yi Rachel Ngai (she/her) is a high school student hailing from Hong Kong. Currently studying in Arkansas, she works closely with her school’s award-winning literary magazine, Footnotes. She also serves as Blog Director for SeaGlass Literary and writes for Intersections Magazine and Project Said. Her work has been published in Skipping Stones, Paper Crane Journal, and Unbroken Journal. She hopes you have a lovely day!

He pointed a finger, crooked from a life of construction work, at a distant building. The sidewalk before it was swollen and cracked like the black eye he’d once told me he got from a broken beer bottle at the Cotton-eyed Joe. Every visit I made, my grandfather told me the story.

“The buildin’ has a slight tilt now, not that anyone’ll notice.” He spat on the pavement through a gap in his teeth, rubbing it in with his shoe in a single mindless motion. “I don’t guess I know how long it’s been so don’t bother askin’ me,” he cackled. “There was a kid who used to clean those windows way up there. It was real routine for ‘em I imagine. He sure as heck’d move fast. Anyhow, there was a windy day in the city and I’d just sat down to get a bite to eat right over there at the sandwich shop.” He ran his hand from the top of the building down to the ground with a painter’s care and described to me some long cables that hung from the platform where the window washer stood.

“I was sittin’ there eating my… well, it must’ve been a meatball sub. Those things had good all through em’. They’d just about make your tongue slap your brains out.” He took a moment to lick a corner of his smile, but then fluttered his eyes ashamed at his digression.

“Anyhow, I saw those cables blowin’ in the wind underneath the platform. They’d gotten so low, a whole loop of it was sittin down by the curb. There was a real sharp young man sitin’ in the booth next to mine. I figured he’d show his concern.” My grandfather gestured with his head signaling for the young man to come over just as he had done on that day. “I said, “Hey, take a look at that cable sittin’ on the street like that. Say if somethin’ were to get a hold of that rope in all this wind…””

He said the boy was polite but paid it little thought and I wasn’t too sure anyone but my grandfather would be keen enough to notice, much less find it at all intriguing. “I betcha not two minutes later, a car came down the road and that blessed loop wrapped right around its mirror. I said, “Oh mercy!” The young man and I burst out the shop and ran towards the scene. That window washer’s platform had tilted and he was holdin’ on tight way up in the sky.”

“Did the car ever stop?” I’d made a routine of asking the question.

“He stopped within fifteen feet of takin’ that loop. He didn’t know anything had happened until someone on the sidewalk got his attention. There really weren’t too many people on the street that day, all at work I guess. When the driver hopped out’a the car, I hollered, “You gotta get that cable wrapped around that telephone pole and then loosen up on it slowly!” He was terrified from what I could see so he took no time to second guess my orders.”

“Why did he need the telephone pole if he was just going to loosen it all?”

“If he didn’t use the pole, the force of the platform would’ve overpowered him, slamming it back into place and risking shakin’ the window washer off the side. It all had to be done slowly. The car driver wrapped the cable two times around the pole and gradually gave it slack.

As he loosened the cable’s tension, the platform moved back into place and the weight of it made the flesh come right off his palms and the cable chip the paint off the pole, but it looks like they’ve repaired it since, not that anyone’ll notice. In fact, it looks like they might’ve replaced it entirely. When all was done, the window washer stood up and shortened the cord below ‘em to get away from the street and went back to scrubbing the windows.”

When my grandfather’s lips returned to their unmoving, limp appearance, he took me into the sandwich shop where he sat that day. He told me it would be the perfect place to eat lunch.

As we made our way to the counter, we looked around and were met with the interior of a shoe store.

“Is there anything I can help you find?” A man approached us from the register. “No, thank you, we’re just looking,” I replied.

The man seemed all too accustomed to the unprofitable phrase and he walked away dissatisfied.

My grandfather turned to look at the building across the street. Its glass was dirty, only subtly capable of reflections. And just below his line of vision was an aged memorial plaque I knew was engraved into the sidewalk. He too was somewhere resisting.

 

 

 

Sam Baker is an author of poetry, fiction, and essays from Louisville, Kentucky. He currently works for the Kenyon Review as an associate and as a teaching assistant for the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop. Baker’s reads have been published or are forthcoming in The Pinch Literary Journal, Polaris, The Blue Marble Review, and elsewhere. His work has also been recognized by The Missouri Review, Guesthouse Lit, Penn Review, Apparition Lit, Wrongdoing Magazine, Silk Road Poetry, Smartish Pace, Ruminate Magazine, Columbia University, Kenyon College, University of Massachusetts, Washington University in St. Louis, Sewanee: University of the South, Ohio Northern University, University of Louisville, Bellarmine University, Variant Literature, The Alliance For Young Artists and Writers, and The Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts.

There was a girl at my school who never spoke a word. She had turquoise hair, a septum piercing, and she wore a green hoodie like a shell. We all called her Turtle Girl.

I don’t know why I called her that and laughed with the other kids. You see, I was unpopular like Turtle Girl. The only difference was that I talked, and she didn’t.

One day, some bullies hit me at recess. I wasn’t much of a fighter, so I took it for fear of worse. The other kids watched from a distance, some trying to defend me but most doing nothing. Turtle Girl sat on her own, away from me, the bullies, and the other kids. She chewed her sandwich and looked bored, until suddenly, she wasn’t. She stood up, walked over to the biggest bully hitting me, and she left her shell just like that. She rolled up the sleeves of her green hoodie and hit the bully.

When the bullies retreated, Turtle Girl left the scene. She didn’t say a word, just walked away. While the other kids talked, I followed her, spewing thanks and wonder. Turtle Girl remained silent.

Eventually, frustrated by her silence, I asked her, “Why did you help me?”

Turtle Girl blinked at me. “You looked like a turtle going into its shell,” she said, rolling back down her green sleeves. “I thought I’d help you, because you don’t have a shell.”

And just like that, she returned to her shell and resumed her lunch.

I never called her Turtle Girl again.

 

Patricia Jane Donato is the aspiring author of short stories, novels, poems, and maybe even graphic novels. When she’s not writing, she’s reading, walking in the woods, drawing manga, or chatting with her friends. Patricia’s work also appears in The WEIGHT Journal and Cathartic Literary Magazine.

    It is a warm summer morning, the sun is bashfully peeking over the mountains, filling the mansion with a wonderful warm glow.  The halls are empty, and eddies of dust swirl around.  My golden frame glimmers in the morning sun, and I stretch my arms out as far as they can go.  I flutter my eyes daintily.  Another glorious day.

A loud jingling sound emanates from downstairs, then a loud creak.  Astonished, I peek out of my painting and glance down the stairs.  An elderly woman has entered the building.  Her face has melted with age, covered in liver spots.  Next to her is a middle-aged woman.  When they look my way, I quickly meld back into my painting, assuming the position I was born in.  The two women begin to search around the house, my house, rummaging through drawers and file cabinets.  I feel my blood pressure increasing with everything they move out of place.

Something seems off about the older woman.  Her eyes seem like cruel copies of my own eyes.  Her hair is a faded version of my own golden hair.  On her finger is the same ring that I wear!  I am outraged as I recognize this hag.  I hear the younger woman climb up the staircase, the younger woman fixated with an old piano.  She sits on the old stool and opens the lid.  When I am sure that she isn’t watching, I slither out of my frame.  When I touch the sleek wooden floor, my delicate foot makes no sound.  The woman begins to play, and I recognize this melody.  It was something she would play when she was younger; however, her skills are greatly diminished.  My eyes narrow as I approach her, standing silently behind her.  What a cruel imitation of my eternal beauty.  Suddenly, her head whips around, shouting in fear as she sees me.  I zoom back into my painting, quickly resuming my pose.

The younger woman rushes down the stairs, wrapping her arm around the elderly woman, who is as pale as a ghost.

“Are you alright!?” the woman asks, panicked.

“Y…yes… I thought I saw someone behind me…”  The elderly woman mutters, her eyes not moving from my painting.  “But it was nothing…”

“I think we should go,” the young woman says quietly.

The pair leave quickly, closing the door behind them.  Once more, I am alone.

 

William MacLeod, 15, has been writing poetry, short stories, and novels before kindergarten. This is his second published work, his first being a poem put in the newspaper of his small hometown in California.  When he’s not writing, he enjoys other creative hobbies like drawing and painting, or spending time with his cat: Gwyneth.

A tumbleweed blew by.

It was as dead as the rest of the small frontier town: dry, shriveled, a husk that was once a lively plant. The earth was cracked and dry, the sky a pale and unforgiving yellow. The hands of the clock tower pointed to high noon, and despite having ceased movement years ago, they still happened to be correct, just for this one passing minute.

Two figures stood on opposite ends of the main street, eyes shaded by wide hats with hands hovering over their belts. Off to the side, a pair of horses watched, bridles tied to the rotting post of the abandoned saloon. They had seen this showdown hundreds of times before, and would no doubt see it hundreds of times more.

Both outlaws sharply eyed a bird pecking at the ground. The scrawny thing wasn’t going to find any food in such a desolate land, but every day at noon, it returned nonetheless. Didn’t the simple thing know it was just wasting its time, tapping at the soil in a daily exercise in futility? The first outlaw squinted a little, teeth biting down on the straw in her mouth. The second curled his chapped lips. Having finally resigned its fruitless quest for seed, the bird between them spread its wings and fluttered off to wherever it came.

As soon as the bird’s tiny feet left the ground, two gunshots broke the silence of the dead town.

The wide hat of the first outlaw was blown off her head, her scalp only narrowly grazed by the bullet. The second outlaw’s hat, however, was the least of his worries. He staggered backwards, his head had been blown clean through. The chunks of skull and viscera never hit the ground, but evaporated into a thick black smog that hung in the air like a ghost. The first outlaw didn’t seem satisfied, sliding her revolver back into its holster on her waist as she sprinted to her horse, and pulled a long shotgun from beneath its saddle.

Running to the still standing man, she unceremoniously blew his head clean off, the blast knocking him to the ground. The wounds were exuding more thick, foul-smelling smoke, as though hell itself were reaching through his body and clawing its way into the real world. She blew a second hole through his chest, opening the coach gun’s breach and replacing two empty shells with a pair stuffed with silvered buckshot.

“In the name ov’ the Lord,” She loudly declared, firing her weapon indiscriminately into the body that still flinched and smoked with every shot, “deliver ‘is unholy spirit n’ta Hell, cast this devil n’ta the deepest pits a’ fire ‘n brimstone, t’whence it may never return!” 

She chanted for several minutes, invoking curses belonging to every religion and tongue, interspersing them with a double-aught chaser whenever she thought she saw the body move through the dark haze it produced. Once satisfied with these curses and banishments, she returned to her horse once more, retrieving a large jar of holy water and dumping much of it over the smoking husk. Then, she salted the body. Then, garlic. Then, drove a crudely silvered knife into where she imagined his heart would probably be. She used the buttstock of her shotgun to hammer in a few wooden stakes, just in case she guessed wrong. After lighting her lantern, she tossed it on the barely-recognizable mash of smoking remains, engulfing them in oily flame.

She watched the body for a long few minutes, hardly bothered by the suffocating plume that the wind blew into her face. The pillar of smoke hung high in the sky, thick black as tar and infesting the area with the rancid smell of death. Once she was satisfied, she returned to retrieve her hat, before retiring inside the abandoned saloon. Small book in hand, she began taking notes as to the exact procedure she’d undergone this time–her exact words, her exact actions, every last detail.

It wasn’t until the sun hung low that the woman heard the saloon doors creak open behind her.

“Sonnuv a bi–” Her curse began, cut short as a revolver’s bullet pierced the side of her head. Her entire body slumped to one side, hand reaching out to grab the bar top to prevent falling from her stool. A disgusting black smog poured from the wound in her head.

A man stepped behind the bar, sliding his revolver into its holster with a dejected frown on his face. His shirt was full of holes, beard singed and body a dark ashen color as though he’d lain in a campfire. There were uncountable faint scars on his chest and face, although the longer one stared, the harder they became to perceive.

He reached up on the alcohol shelf, fingering through dusty empty bottles before finally discovering one which still contained some diluted liquid. Pulling a pair of small glasses from beneath the splintered wooden bar, the dry man filled both as equally as possible, sliding one towards the hand of the woman still in the process of righting herself. In exchange, he flipped her notebook around, squinting at the poor handwriting.

“Garlic’s a no-go.” The woman commented, running her hands through her dry hair. The deathly fume pouring from her temple had faded, what was once a lethal wound replaced by nothing but a scar.

“Donno why you even tried, we ain’t vampires.” He commented, raising his dusty glass to his lips.

“I don’ know, I jus’ thought… I don’ know. We’re runnin’ out’v shit ta’ try.”

“You might be, I’ve got plenty more ideas.”

The woman scoffed, taking the second glass. The whiskey was ancient and spoiled, it barely tasted like anything, but it was ritual at this point. “Y’said that yest’rday. Y’hit my hat.”

“Still shot first. You’re getting slow.”

“Got’ya today, didn’t I?”

The man gave a brief chuckle and a small nod of acknowledgement, swirling the faded liquid around his small glass. Neither of them got much out of the near-empty bottle, but it wasn’t the whiskey they sat in this empty saloon for.

“I’m gonna’b awful lonely once I send’ya t’Hell, huh?” The woman mused, after a long minute of silence between them.

“Don’t count on it. Tomorrow’s the day I put you down for good.” 

It was the woman’s turn to scoff. They’d spent countless years locked in this halfhearted contest, she hardly let herself hope for such sweet release. Maybe one day one of them would discover the miracle necessary to break their unholy curse. Both were beaten, whipped, they’d outlived everything that mattered to them. They shared a hollowness, a dryness, a certain solidarity two outlaws cursed with immortality could only experience. His lips were chapped and split. Her hands were dry and rough. Their nails were chipped and eyes dull. They were tired, but they were each others’ only lifelines.

So, the two drank and spoke for a time longer. Once the moon was high, they mounted their horses and went their separate ways. The fire from the lantern oil was still smoldering on the dusty main street when the weary pair rode past. The moon set, the sun rose, and come midmorning, a pair of figures rode into the otherwise derelict settlement. They exchanged a few brief words, before taking their places.

A tumbleweed blew by.

 

 

Mag Callaghan is a student attempting to study English and Education in cruel and unforgiving rural Ohio. Their interests involve visual arts and flash fiction writing, as well as tabletop role-playing games, acquiring keychains, and describing themself in the third person.

 

I lit a cigarette on my way to the grocery store. There was something in the wind that made its light sputter, so I offered it mine, to breathe life in the transaction. I store every cigarette stub I ever birthed in a box. I feel bad simply throwing into the trash or onto the sidewalk what had once been alive. There are a handful of stubs at the bottom of my purse that have not yet been embalmed for their funeral rites. I simply haven’t gotten around to it.

I used to save the Boy’s stubs too. This would make him laugh as I stole them from his grasp, or caught them in my palms as they dropped, softly if I was catching a baby. He dropped one on the sidewalk once and I got on my hands and knees to save her from mutilation. He laughed.

The Boy laughed like the wind. Which means everything. I think that is why I loved him even as he swept me away.

I used to keep the graveyard under my bed, until He complained of the smell. It was like living at the bottom of the bonfire. So, I exhumed the corpses to my kitchen cabinet. It is unfortunate one will open a door expecting to find a plate only to be met with death. The Boy threw them out once as if it was a favor. After he left the next morning I pulled out the trash and got on my hands and knees to find every last body.

He dropped them on the sidewalk often. Mostly in the night where no matter how hard I tried I could not save their souls. I would cry in the bathroom at a funeral without a body. Then I would kiss him till I came back alive with tears to spare another day.

When the baby dropped between my legs, the doctor blamed the smoking. I laughed at him like the wind then brought what was left of living to flame. The smoke tasted cool against my skin.

I could never save a stub The Boy did not give me willingly. Which means everything. I think that’s why I loved him because some days he would come home with a palm of cigarette stubs, and caress my hair as I performed the funeral rites under his watch.

My graveyard is public property. For my corpses and his are all treated the same. Cleaned softly with a tissue paper and then returned to a cigarette case, as if they were never born at all. In that way, there are always ghosts, though I never know if I or he created them.

When the Boy was looking for a plate and found a shoebox filled with ashes in my graveyard, right next to a stack of cigarette boxes that could never be used and were in use, he lit a cigarette and left the house. I found the stub by the front door when I came home. I was careful not the step on it as I opened the front door, just slight enough to not let the cold in. I imagine by now, the wind must have carried the corpse away, that body, I did not kill but still did not venture to care for.

 

 

 

Norah Rami (she/her) is a pun connoisseur, professional cloud watcher, and writer from Houston. A member of Houston’s Youth Slam Poetry Team, Norah’s work has been published by Prospectus and Brown Girl Magazine as well as shared at local venues. She is a current senior at Clements High School.