Fiction

“I had dinner in Queen Elizabeth’s palace this summer!”

Oohs and aahs rang across the classroom. All eyes were now on the new girl, no longer an inconspicuous figure in the back row shrouded in a hooded lavender raincoat. Daisy stood up from her seat and scanned her prey for the first time. She spotted the deer, wide-eyed, and she sensed suspicion amidst the serpents. The birds grew thrilled and chatty, and the bugs were fazed enough by the news to inch their antlers just a little closer. With a subtle raise of the eyebrows, she lured her game yet closer, and with a flash of her smile, the jungle was under her reign.

The charades continued that afternoon. On the playground, upon her announcement of her distant relation with Taylor Swift, Daisy had gathered an entourage. The girls chased her in clusters like puppies in a litter.

Her band was charmed. She told them about the time she sat third row in the 2016 Olympics. She boasted about the street in New York City that was named after her. She described what summer had looked like in Belgium when she lived there for three months. Each new fairytale drew a new curious face, and by the end of the week, Daisy was forced to implement a recess schedule to meet the desperate requests of her awestruck peers, who yearned to stroke the fur of her newly imported Swedish wool coat.

But after Lucy Hall spotted the Old Navy tag on the inside of the woolly coat on Daisy’s backpack hook, the whispers traveled in ripples. As Daisy passed them by at recess, the students hollered, calling her a phony, a wannabe, a laughing stock.

The girls began to observe Daisy from a distance. They watched her jump out of her seat at the tap of a pencil on a desk and bury her head in her hands when the dismissal bell rang. They heard her mutter to the tiles on the floor as if she could see right through them. They saw her claw and bite at air like it had slipped right out of her.

The girls conjectured. They said her eyes were hollow like lightbulbs, that the blaze inside hardly flickered. But Daisy could see it all. She saw monsters in the trees and shadows in her childhood swing set. She heard voices in her head, voices which told her that her ticket to the school fair was a ticket to Belgium. She couldn’t make out the words on her clothing tags; she could only see fuzzy hazes of unfamiliar script and of a life forgotten. She was no longer Daisy – she was one with the voices.

The voices told her to forget about pills and problems and to kick and scream and pace. They showed her the underworld and took her to Europe overnight. They left her unfazed. They left her renewed. So, she let them consume her.

And she mumbled the truths in her sleep.

 

 

Ishita Shah is an aspiring writer from Texas. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Polyphony Lit, and Positively Positive. In her spare time, she can often be found baking with her family of four or listening to Christmas music (all year round).

10:41am, 28^th of January. Smith walked through the threshold and set foot onto the air bridge. The door to the bright, gleaming rocket lay not ten strides away from him. He looked down through the bridge’s metal grates. They were red. Through them he could see all the way down to the icy ground, several hundred feet below. It was cold. He could hear the rocket creak and groan and had to assure himself it was alright, the rocket always expanded and contracted when it was cold. It was alright.

He walked briskly across the bridge. He didn’t look down through the red grating again when he crossed it. He didn’t like looking down. It reminded him of being high above the ground, dropping thunder on the forest in Vietnam. He was glad that the windows in the rocket only pointed upward.

As he crouched to fit through the hatch, he paused in the threshold. Reaching to his chest, he removed a small pin. It was firm in his hand. On one side was emblazoned the word ‘NASA’ in blue. On the other side, that morning his wife had scratched the agency’s motto. “Per Aspera ad Astra”– through hardships to the stars.

He brought the pin up to his lips, kissed it, then leaned out and let it slip from his hand through a gap in the bridge’s red grating. It fell, fell, fell through the cold air for what seemed like an eternity. He thought he saw it land near the base of the boosters, but he couldn’t be certain. It was too high up to make out such a small object clearly. It was too high up to hear it land either. The rocket was creaking too loud anyway. He stepped back into the rocket and looked out. He sighed. He paused, then pulled the hatch shut.

 The ignition flared; its flames enveloped the pin. It melted into the ground. The Challenger rocket lifted itself into the sky.

 

Freddie Coffey is a rising senior at the Collegiate School in Manhattan. While now firmly a New Yorker, Freddie was born in the UK, and attended Eton College on an Oppidan scholarship until he emigrated at the start of his sophomore year. A long time poet and writer, Freddie founded and directs The Decameron Project (decameronproject.org), a non-profit organization that connects thousands of students, teachers, and passionate authors worldwide through the power of storytelling during the pandemic. Freddie is a contributor to and editor-in-chief of his school’s literary journal, Prufrock.

I emerged from my room around seven in the evening to grab a snack and chat with my parents after a long day of school and video games. As I opened my door the national emergency alert signal stopped my blood cold in my veins. Three endless, atonal sirens later and the announcer was prophesying the end of the world.

“This is an emergency broadcast,” echoed that robotic male voice that I and the rest of the population have been conditioned to fear since birth, “Nuclear missiles have been detected and are currently inbound. Shelter in place, under furniture in the innermost room of your house.”

He kept going, but my ears were ringing too loudly for the harbinger’s cries to reach me. I stumbled out into the hallway, collapsing against the wall to keep myself upright. It felt as though my heart was beating so fast that it had begun beating slowly. The corners of my vision grew fuzzy, blurring out the family photos hanging up on the wall, and the soft blue glow of the living room television at the end of the hall.

Thoughts of my parents snapped to the forefront of mind, and I stumbled on weak knees towards them. My mother reclined on the living room sofa, listening to the emergency broadcast in her bathrobe with a can of peanuts in one hand and her decrepit old poodle curled up in her other arm.

Dad was sitting back in his brown leather chair, his eyes only half open. I couldn’t be sure if he was hearing the whole announcement, on account of his bad hearing. I stared at them from the hallway, my hands gripping to anything solid.

This was it, then.

This was how we died. Me, having just spent the last couple hours wrapped in blissful ignorance as I played first person shooters with my friends. My parents here with me, to the very end. Likely, my sister would call any moment, and then we could all die, the four of us, together.

I breathed deeply, and with each breath I started to accept my fate. If we were lucky, it would be quick. I simply had to be strong for Mom, now. I put on my brave face, tossing my long blonde tresses over my shoulder, and in the manliest tone I could muster, asked, “How much time do we have?”

Mom turned back to me, that sweet smile of hers decorating her beautifully round face. I made an effort to memorize every sparkle in her olive-green eyes. It took all my willpower to let her answer my question, before I broke down and curled up sobbing in her arms, as I had done in my younger days. Telling her and Dad both that I loved them so much, even though we never said it very much.

Casually as could be, Mom popped a handful of peanuts in her mouth, chewed, and once she was done chewing said, in answer to my question, “Oh, well, the movie has only been on for about thirty minutes now. Why, did you want to watch something else?”

As quickly as fear had rushed over me, it drained out of me all at once. Leaving a sick, but blessedly numb, sort of relief in its wake. I curled up beside my Mom, smiling weakly into her neck, breathing in her familiar smell like oxygen. “No, no, leave it on. I like scary stories.”

 

Divinity Sykes is a senior at UNC Chapel Hill who is pursuing a degree in Spanish Interpretation. Writing is her life long passion and she is blessed with a loving family, and wants to thank them now for all the support they give. Especially Cedric, the inspiration for this story.

Mother has always been excruciatingly devoted to God and my imperfections, in that order. Saturday nights I stumble back home seventeen minutes-thirty minutes-an hour past curfew, and there she’ll be standing, statuesque in our kitchen, worry lines flooded by the fluorescent light, arms crossed under her chest. She rakes her eyes over the half-hidden bruise on my collarbone, the rumpled chaos of my skirt, the soft smudging of my bubblegum-pink lipstick, but says nothing.

In my hand, my phone is still open to a video I just took: untitled boy’s lips on my cheek, lips on my lips, hand possessive on my left thigh. I tilt the moving screen away from my mother’s dissection.

***

Mother had once been a good girl, in the suffocating Stepford wife sense. Her skirts probably never dared to ride up past the dimples of her knees. When I picture it, her mouth is always stretched into an almost grotesque eager-to-please smile and her hair is always neatly brushed into mahogany quietude. A girl with respect for authority in abundance.

Mother had once been young & unaware that a man would burden her with not only a lifetime of guilt and a yearning to inflict purple-blue-banana-yellow bruises on the pale expanses of her thighs, but also a child: a shrill baby girl loudly resistant to being controlled.

Philomena, she reluctantly named me, a woman once martyred, newly forgotten.

***

My mother, now, is relentlessly pious: knees bruised in homage to the ground, face strained with conviction as tendrils of moonlight filter through our window. Baptism by nature’s incandescent rays. She’d surely crucify herself on the browning grass of our front lawn under the heavy dominion of both God and a late summer afternoon sun if only for capital-s Salvation.

My faith is irreverent, unhallowed, in comparison. I worship the simple act of being known: soft gaze on soft skin on soft sheets, a passing nod, an acknowledging half-smile. Loving scrutiny, no matter how brief. Unadorned appreciation in the neat squares of my Instagram page: made-up, painted-on face, body contorted. Red lips drawn up like a puppet’s, back curled like a dancer. Immortality in the bleached-white glare of my phone, lust from the fingertips of strangers. I keep my real name far away like a taboo, replace it instead with something weightless.

She who stares coyly from my screen reminds me of the characters my classmates and I used to conjure up in the fifth grade, one-dimensional and grossly perfect. I use her to search for my own absolution: Fingers soft and assured around my wrists, hot breaths on my neck, eyes dark in my gaze. Releasing me from my mother’s relentless expectations, forgiving my existence.

***

I am sixteen and my mother dreams of life before me and as me. Instead of her usual examination, she looks through my body, through taut youthful skin, through bright hopeful eyes, like I am a vessel to her. Her own dreams inflate me, set me afloat, and I fight to keep above the water.

Philomena, she reprimands, voice harsh and insistent. The way she says my name is always the same, tinged with a little bit of violence, dressed up in grievance. The list of complaints is long: put down your phone. Straighten your skirt. Cross your legs. Have faith for once. Pay attention when I’m speaking to you.

It’s a sharp contrast to the way boys whisper my name: a little bit unsteady, a little bit like a prayer when my mouth is on theirs. Sometimes I feel like I’m sucking their soul away, filling my own vacancies with their generous affection. Their words vary yet are always really the same: you’re so hot. I love you. Let’s go see a movie sometime. Here is my heart, let me have yours.

***

In seventh grade I learned about how some families used to drown newborn babies for the sin of being born female. Blue limbs thrashing in the cold. Hands closed around a tiny neck, a snap. Wails bubbling up from a scalding coffin. Wasting away into a husk.

I’ve never stopped thinking about how easily that could’ve been me or you. A different kind of immortality, and not the kind I yearned for: instead, the permanence of death without remembrance. If a girl dies alone in the woods and no one is there to see it, did she actually ever exist? We pay the shared price for our original sin, an eternal punishment. Eve plucks an apple from the tree: disobedience.

***

Mother looks at me like I am not enough, but I look away. My gaze slips unharmed from hers when the world sits in the palm of my hand, when a boy, hard/soft, blond/brunet, whispers like poetry/like commands, sings prayers to me as I do to him. Meaningless nothings, reverent in their delivery. His pulsing heart warm in my hands as mine is in his.

For I know the real truth to immortality: even as I leave my sanitized portraits floating untethered to reality, it is in memoriam that I plan to live forever. Philomena branded on countless tongues; bronze hair diffused in collective memory.

 

Isabel Su is a junior at the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. She is an editor for her school’s literary magazine, and her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Short Vine Journal, Hypernova Lit, and Cathartic Youth Lit.

I learned how to play the organ two days before your funeral. It was the most last-minute of arrangements: Dad wanted me to play something at the service but apparently there was only an organ available. It made no sense. Nothing made sense anymore. What happened?

It was thirty minutes until my six-p.m. flight to Burlington. I vomited my lunch in the airport bathroom and then swallowed a whole Ativan to calm my nerves. There were two green boxes of laxatives in my carry-on. You never wanted me on medication; you said it would cloud my greatness. What greatness, I always wanted to ask, but never did. In hindsight I wished I had; it was always a desire of mine to get inside your head, to pick at your brains with my piano fingers, to figure out what it was exactly that kept you so meticulous and wired and always so impersonal. But I had robbed myself of the opportunity. I would never know.

You signed me up for piano lessons when I was five years old. Eighteen years later I stopped returning your calls. You left voicemail after voicemail—asking how was I doing? and where had I gone? and why didn’t I tell you I was going to Europe? You discovered I was in Paris from my cousin, who showed you a picture of me: standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, wrapped in two coats and a gingham scarf, holding a postcard from the Louvre. Mona Lisa smiling at the camera like she knew something you didn’t.  You saw that I was dead-eyed, and clearly flirting with the possibility of never returning home. I remember the picture well because I had zoomed in on every detail, searching for signs of weakness—and I had done this for days, even, after Julie sent it to me. When I was very young, you taught me the art of self-surveillance.

I liked Paris, but also felt that the whole concept of the trip was lost on me somehow; first I wished you had been there with me, and then I grew unbelievably happy with the idea that you were unable to spoil it. The problem was that I was thinking of you either way.

The organ at the service was a five-octave chamber organ. I played the piece I’d learned two days prior, with the sheet music in front of me because I couldn’t remember what to do with the pedals.

No one clapped. That was strange for me, in spite of the fact that I knew it wouldn’t have been right if they had. I always guessed that I was, inherently, a performer—or rather, the thing that you raised me to be.

The reception was a groaning affair, but you would’ve loved the attention. Would’ve eaten it up like that. You know what I mean. There were sandwiches on the table and a cocktail maker, alongside everybody you ever knew. My cousins sat neatly in a row on the red sofa, dabbing gently at their eyes with tissues crushed into needlepoints, and in front of them were Dad’s parents, who couldn’t believe you were dead. “So sudden,” they said over and over again. “So sudden.” Eventually my old piano teacher came to me to ask when I had learned to play the organ.

“Just last month,” I said. “I wanted to explore.” It felt good to lie. She gripped my arm, tight as death, and waited for me to burst into tears—like I was some unstable widow, drowning my sorrows in red wine, and not your daughter.

I drank four plastic cupfuls of Diet Coke and thought about you, flipping through old memories like worn, delicate photographs: how you would sit me down at the piano bench when I was little and look over my shoulder as I played; how you threw a lampshade at my head; how you apologized afterward, and asked about my day; how there had been a school project when I was in the second grade where I had to pick a hero, a person in real life that I looked up to—and you screamed at me because I hadn’t thought to pick you, the immigrant, the self-sacrifice. I regarded the memories with an indifferent, albeit gentle touch, careful as not to provoke them. After all, you were already dead. In other words, you had managed to escape the last of my vitriol. What could I do now? What would change anything? You had a heart attack during your morning commute to work. Your car went, screeching, into the intersection. They say you died on impact, but that’s just what they say.

After several hours, the reception had shrunk considerably; the only ones left were the cousins and the in-laws, and in my pocket a shiny bottle of Ativan. I swallowed one in the guest bathroom—your candles were still there, lined-up by the sink, vanilla and sea salt, and I wondered, strangely, if Dad would ever replace them—and then I returned to the main room, hands in my pockets, eyes absentmindedly wandering across the picture frames hung on the wall. Family portrait: me, smiling like a girl; you, about to sneeze.

Meanwhile, Dad was entertaining the last of our guests with the tired story of how you two had met: on a ferry boat. Then he found me.

“Come and play something for us, Lou,” Dad said.

“I’m fine.”

“Marylou.” His smile said please.

“OK.” I slowly made my way toward the piano. Cracking my knuckles, I sat down at the bench, placed my fingers on the keys, and tapped out an unenthusiastic Chopin etude. Then your voice in my head, as if your ghost were there to inform the audience: They call this one the “Wrong Note.” Isn’t it perfectly imperfect? I heard my father sigh behind me and wondered what I had done wrong. Not just to him, but in general.

It could have been that I hated you. Or, it could have been that I missed you like a little kid misses summer vacation—that naïve longing that felt brand new, and heavier, with each passing year. Either way, I took two Dulcolax and an Ativan and, straight after the reception, went to sleep in my old bedroom, still decorated with polaroids and Martha Argerich; and I dreamt of the train ride from New York to Vermont. It should have been winter, I thought, but everything was green and shining. Fresh and easy. I looked out the window and saw trees of many colors.

When I woke up the next morning, I felt the effects of the laxatives. I shuffled into the bathroom, sat down on the toilet, and stared at my toenails. For a moment I thought I might talk to you—out loud, like they do in movies when someone is feeling particularly sad, or lost, or alone—but decided against it. I didn’t feel any of those things. For a long time, sitting there, I didn’t feel a thing at all.

It was nearly January when I returned to Manhattan. Everything was just as I had left it. What you’d like about New York City is that you don’t need a car. I walked to my favorite bakery on Seventy-eighth Street and ordered my cakes: Black Forest gâteau, tiramisu, strawberries and cream. I bought a slice of each and carried them back to my apartment on the Upper West Side. You don’t know where, and I can’t show you. That’s it.

 

 

 

Ida Mobini is a junior in high school living in the flat suburbs of San Diego, California. They have been writing since they could pick up a crayon. Currently, they work on their school newspaper and literary magazine.

The biggest ironies about funerals were the fucking hats, honestly. The floppy-brimmed one dangling in front of me had this massive agglutination of black netting and feathers on top that reminded me vaguely of roadkill. While the minister with worm-on-a-string eyebrows went on about “death begets life” and “blessed are the living,” the birds who sacrificed their plumage and lives to make that hat were probably throwing a riot in bird heaven.

I wondered what Jay would think of all these huffy men choking on their ascots or the minister whose mouth gaped like a fish every time he said ‘Thessalonians.’ I imagined him in his clean-pressed suit and polished shoes, fighting to keep a straight face. He happened to be really good at that—“years of practice with the Exeter profs,” he said—but I could tell when he was laughing inside. His jaw would set and his chin would jut out, as if the laugh were a bullfrog in his throat which he was trying to contain. I glanced inside the casket to look at his white face. Not even a twitch.

The last time I saw Jay, he was packing for a charity mission to Mozambique.

“You know, just because you’re an Ivy graduate,” I said, taking a drag of my cigarette, “you don’t have to fill the shoes of some old white philanthropist just yet.”

He didn’t reply. Jay had this brilliant way of talking through his silences. A quirk of his mouth, a pause, and you’d understand exactly what he meant. This one felt like a tether, drinking up your words and gently tugging on you for more. I took the cue.

“It’s like, sure mom and grandma and, heck, this entire town thinks you’re America’s biggest darling since Shirley fucking Temple, but—” he raised his eyebrows at that, and I went on hurriedly. “—but the point is, are you trying to make yourself into a walking stereotype with this ‘helping orphans in Africa?’”

He put down the shirt he was folding and looked at me. “That’s the point, Reed. Everyone makes this about me, but it’s not. It’s about the orphans.”

“So, the Catholic prep school valedictorian has been soul-searching.”

“Maybe I’m a hippie after all.”

“Tell that to your monogram,” I said, jabbing my cigarette where his initials lay embroidered on his shirt collar, and I took satisfaction in the scraggly ash circle it left behind.

Jay’s following silence was rare and resigned and final. We hugged good-bye and he set out half a world away to feed the starving of children of Africa while I discovered the wonders of rolled marijuana. Two weeks later, we got a call that he had been killed by four of the teenagers for whom he had just built a school.

“It’s truly tragic, but not uncommon,” the doctor had said. “A lot of the kids here have a lot of, ah, resent, for the white people who come here and interfere with their lives.”

“He had a whole life in front of him,” my dad kept saying in disbelief, while my mom shuddered silently. She graciously took a handkerchief from the doctor and blew her nose twice, crying louder. I just shook my head in amazement. If I could by chance make it into heaven, I’d have to give the bastard a dollar for being right again.

 

Another month later and my mom was still crying next to me, at the funeral paid for by Jay’s remaining mission funds. The minister had finished his speech and people were walking around, making an ocean of those godforsaken hats. I made my way to the side exit and almost got away with lighting a cigarette, before my dad clamped his hand on my shoulder.

“Seriously, Reed? You’re at Jay’s goddamn funeral. The trash can’s by the other exit.”

I rolled my eyes and walked across the room. When I got to the casket, I stopped. There were dozens of roses wreathing Jay’s body. Nearby was a lady I didn’t recognize handing them out, and she gave me one when I walked up.

“Oh, you must be Reed. I’m so, so sorry for your loss. If there’s anything I can do… ”

I turned the rose. It was black. “I didn’t know black roses existed,” I said stupidly.

“Oh, yes, beautiful, aren’t they? They’re very rare, only grow on the Euphrates, but all of us were so touched by your brother’s story that we thought he deserved them.”

“His story?”
“Yes, the one about the thugs in that town—oh, when I heard it, I just—”

“Beira,” I said dully.

“What?”

“The town’s name was Beira. In Mozambique.”

She frowned at me like I was an afterthought. “Yes, anyways, he was so kind, your brother. Aren’t those kids horrible—well, all of them are, those not raised by our Lord. Anyways, we were all so moved and set up a fund to import them from Euphrates. And, oh… ”

For the first time, I looked at her face. She was smiling thoughtfully behind about seven layers of black mesh, as if she actually found the whole ordeal beautiful. “Yeah,” I said flatly, looking straight at her. “They sound really horrible.”

She sniffed sympathetically and patted my back. “Anyways, honey, I’ll be headed back to my seat. Your dad’s eulogy should be starting soon. But you take your time with him, alright?”

She drifted back, still with that affectionate smile plastered across her face. Her hat was one of the tiny stiff ones, but no less horrendous than the carnage of feathers I had been staring at for the past two hours. I wondered what reason she had to hide behind all that mesh, as if she were too modest to show her face, while there was a literal corpse, sprawling mesh-less and visibly face-up in front of her.

“What a fucking spectacle,” I said, turning to Jay. With exaggerated care, I tucked my rose underneath his elbow. “But you saw all this coming, didn’t you?”

I wanted to say more, but my dad was mounting the stage, and my shoulder was still sore from where he grabbed it. Instead, I turned to head back to my seat, where my mom was still crying. Her eyes hardened when I approached, though, so quickly that I had to wonder if she was only crying for show.

“Your dad said you were smoking just now.”

I shrugged helplessly. “I wasn’t. Well, I was going to, but then he stopped me.”

“God, Reed,” she said after a hard moment, “What is wrong with you today?”

I never got to answer. In that moment, the lady two seats down began screaming. My dad doubled over coughing onstage. I smelled smoke.

“Everyone out! Fire!” a man shouted from the back.

I didn’t need a second signal. I jumped up and ran, pushing past wizened professors and hunched old ladies to the exit. A couple yards away, smoke was pouring in great black gusts. The mahogany casket—Jay had always despised mahogany—had finally found a less mundane purpose and fueled the flaming mass that was now engulfing the front stage. While I watched the stack of ungiven Euphrates roses wither and catch fire, I breathed in the summer air, almost giddy with excitement. It was over. Even the old men were hobbling safely out of the building now, everyone well and intact except for Jay’s body. That would have already disintegrated to ash, and the fire department would never find the cigarette stub tucked under its elbow.

What was that for? Jay would’ve asked.

For you, bastard, I would say. For the kids in Beira.

Then he would give me a sad smile and watch in resignation as a woman desperately fanned her hat at the flames, only for it to ignite a moment later. God, funerals were hilarious.

 

 

 

Samantha Liu is a fifteen-year-old aspiring writer in New Jersey with a penchant for all things Voltaire. She thinks optimistic nihilism is underrated.