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.