Fiction

Once there was a fisherman who lived in a run-down apartment near the shore. He spent his time fishing and selling his catches, though they were always small. One day, as he was fishing, he caught a strange fish, the likes of which he had never seen. It was small and golden in the sunlight.

“Oh, please let me go,” said the fish. “I am not a fish, but a transformed prince, and I must go back into the sea.”

“I don’t know what I’d do with a talking fish anyway,” said the man, and released the fish.

That night, he recounted the strange experience to his daughter.

“Well,” she said, “if it really was a magical prince, surely it could have granted you a wish. You should have asked for somewhere better to live.”

***

Feeling guilty that he’d not thought of that himself, he went down to the docks early the next morning.

“Oh fish!” he called. “My family is suffering, and I believe you owe me a favor.”

The fish swam up next to the pier, bobbing in the tide. “What is your request?”

“I would like a nicer place to live, somewhere clean and not broken.”

“Consider it done.”

Sure enough, when he returned that evening, his daughter was sitting in the living room of a small house. There was a garden in the front, full of lettuce and carrots and beans. Inside, they each had their own bedroom, and not a single faucet leaked.

“Thank you,” said his daughter. “I am glad to see the fish was not lying.”

“As am I.”

“Perhaps, though, the fish can do another thing.”

“No,” he said. “This is plenty for us. We shouldn’t be greedy.”

“But wouldn’t you like a second floor? And a dog? I know you’ve always wanted one.”

***

The man couldn’t deny that. The next morning, as he set out his crab traps, the fish came to surface again.

“Is the house to your satisfaction?” it asked.

“It’s a very lovely house. But, you see, we’ve always wanted a dog, and I’m afraid it’s still too small to have one. If we had a second floor, we could have a dog.”

“Consider it done.”

When the man got home, he was greeted by a large black dog, wagging and begging for pets. His daughter laughed and hugged the dog.

“Do you think, Dad, that the fish has more tricks up his sleeve?”

“Even if it does, we shouldn’t ask for more.”

“If he can make a dog appear, though, he must be able to make me a boy.”

“I will not ask the fish for anything more.”

***

The man saw the fish again, but did not ask anything of it, and only threw it a scrap of his bait. When he returned home, everything was just the same as it’d been before. His daughter was sitting on the sofa with the dog, a book propped open in her lap.

“Dad, you didn’t ask the fish.”

“I told you, we’re not going to bother the fish anymore.”

“If I can’t ask the fish, then I can at least ask you. “ She closed the book. “Please, I just want to be a boy.”

“But you are not,” said the man, and he went and cooked them dinner.

As the weeks went on, she asked more and more. Every time he returned home, she stared at him in disappointment. Every time she asked, he refused. He remembered sitting in a doctor’s office and being told, it’s a girl! and he simply did not see how that could not be true.

***

The fish continued to pop up around the docks, seemingly nodding at the man. It didn’t speak to him again, or if it did, he didn’t hear over the crashing of the waves. One night, long after the other fishermen had gone, he stayed, hauling up shrimp traps and throwing back the occasional rockfish.

Once again, the golden fish appeared.

“Old man,” he called, “do you have any other requests of me? I am forever in your debt, and surely by now, you’ve found some flaw in the house and dog.”

“No,” the man said. “I do not.”

“Not you? Or your child? Not even a bone for the dog?”

“No, thank you.”

“Very well.”

It was nearly midnight when he made his way home, under a cloudy and starless sky. In the dark, he did not recognize the building. He’d gotten so used to the house that seeing once again the broken-down apartment did not register.

His key still worked though, and the apartment was exactly how he remembered it. The kitchen was small and one of the burners didn’t work. The bathroom sink always leaked, and the pull-out couch where he slept was creaky as ever.

The only difference was his daughter’s room. She was not there, and neither was the dog. The bed was made, only her baby blanket missing. A stack of books sat in the corner.

The man raced back to the docks.

“What did you do to my house?” he demanded of the sea.

“What house?” the fish answered. “The house your son wished for? The house in which you refused him his life? The house that I gave, not to you, but your son? It is still his house. But it was never yours.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Your son spoke to me. He told me of the wishes he’d asked for. I gave you a chance, tonight, to be honest. To care for him. And you did not. If you cannot make one selfless wish, you do not receive any wish. It is your son’s choice whether or not he finds you. I’ve made sure you won’t be able to find him.”

***

True to the fish’s word, the man never saw his daughter again. It was as if she had disappeared, or, more accurately, never even existed. Across the bay, there was a small, two-story house. Inside it lived a young man, a daughter who was once someone else’s son, and the dog.

Many years later, when visiting an old friend, the fisherman thought he saw his daughter. He recognized the dog on the leash, but not the man holding it, laughing with a friend. He wondered, then, if the fish was right. If it really was true that he had a son. Or, maybe, he just missed the dog.

 

 

 

Khalila Soubeih (they/he) is a creative writing student at Western Washington University. He writes about queer magic, often set in their home of the Pacific Northwest. In their free time, they can be found exploring tide pools and on Instagram as @starful.khalila.

My mother was dead, and I had been driving in a cold dark night for what seemed like eternity.

The sign for a motel glowed neon in the dark as I drove into town. I pulled into the parking lot as the sky shrugged on the navy-blue night like a threadbare jacket. The motel parking lot was dark and deserted—it could have been abandoned, but for the lemon-yellow light glowing in one of the windows.

I parked, crossing the lot and stepping into the lobby. The door banged shut behind me. Standing on the threshold, I took off my earmuffs—it was a frigid night, and my car’s heating had broken two months ago.

The motel wasn’t a welcoming place. The carpet was faded and frayed, and the overhead lights were broken. This forced the clerk to resort to a sun-yellow desk lamp. Even she had something of the dead and discarded about her. Blue circles were smudged under her eyes and her thin hair was pulled into a fraying ponytail; I guessed she was fifty. I could see her skull beneath her skin, drawn in indigo shadows. A cigarette dangled from her lips.

I asked for a room. She stretched out a hand to hand me the key to Room 4 and asked, “What brings you to town?”

I fumbled the key as she handed it to me, and dropped it. I crouched  to retrieve it and rose to answer, “Funeral.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. My husband died two months ago.” Those bruises under her eyes must have come from the kind of sleepless nights I was familiar with. She frowned and sighed and said as if to herself, “Sometimes I wonder how people keep living.”

“My mother thought it was God.”

“I don’t know about that. My husband is dead.” The clerk stubbed out her cigarette. “Good luck, anyway.”

I followed her directions to a slightly derelict room. Turning the key in the lock, I dropped my suitcase on the floor. I did not bother to turn on the light before I fell into bed.

I checked out that morning with a different clerk. I left. I went to my mother’s funeral, and I never saw the bruised-eyed clerk again. But sometimes I still dream about that old motel. And occasionally when I wake up I will remember how the motel sign glowed in the dark like a lighthouse, and how it was I and a stranger in an unremembered town had at our core the same deep corrupting fear: that there was no point, that they had died for no reason. I still don’t know the answer to her question, but there is a strange comfort in knowing I am not the only one asking it.

 

Mary Russell is an avid writer (and reader) of fiction, mostly fantasy but occasionally realistic. She was published as a winner of the 2021 “It’s All Write” regional contest at aadl.org. When she isn’t writing or being a high schooler, she enjoys reading, painting, and playing the violin.

(after Ocean Vuong, Daniel Liu, and Patricia Lockwood)

,I tilt my head back against the sound. There’s a line I read in a poem that I often repeat to myself now: the most beautiful part of your body is where it is heading. I hold it like water, as if once I squeeze too hard, it will break. Back in rural Texas, behind a front porch in the middle of the Bible Belt, is a house; its rickety foundation with watered-down wood soft enough to bend, its daffodils perched by the windowsill withering in the sun’s stubborn cradle, curling into their bodies like rollie pollies; it is only early February, the month when the weather has an attitude that won’t go away, temper scaring away birdsong. I try to live largely, try to live like a wildly brilliant animal, yet so much for my efforts, because here we all are, stuck on an enormous flatland between two bodies of saltwater, trying out each day of the new year before deciding which one to die on. You are no better than me. I am no better than Claire from across the street. I entered this world with my sadness, I’ll take it with me when I leave. On our living days, we are realtors in our own homes, showing our bodies around space and time before picking some punctum to wallow in; I’ll never admit any of my flaws to my doctor, when he asks how much sleep do you average per night?, I tell him eight hours, which is excluding the time when I sit by my bedside, knees dangling from the edge, blue seeping into my joints, running lines from Ocean Vuong’s book over and over again in my mouth so my tongue can sandpaper the words into perfection and spit them out in syllables again when I need it. I’ll let you guess how long that takes. In Texas, I imagine nothing is happy. They call you fat or gawky or pretty and roll it up like a joint stuffed with insult, well, I figured I’d light it with burning eyes and smoke it, then leave at the first crack of eighteen. The future is parading itself in front of me, a red carpet, and now I am in my twenties, washing after a party I can barely remember just to feel clean. I scrubbed and scrubbed just to see how hollow I was inside, opening flesh to inspect my bones of sadness and calcium, reminding myself of my mother’s words, we are what we eat, thinking that I must have drank too much milk when I was younger. It is the first time I feel close to death, seen enough of a sliver of him to feel afraid; mother says anything can cause death if you are not careful; cover your drinks, cover your eyes, girls, live on to try out every day of the year before choosing your death date. The air here is so thin and sharp and keeps you in exquisite pain. There are flowers by the windowsill (old habits die hard) that open their red throats like tiger lilies ready to speak. Beneath the queer retreat of silken sound, the distant cacophony of doors slamming, liquor hangs in the air and my roommate has written up another list of boys she’d like to kiss, her downpour smile sharp, legs curled up against her body like an apologetica. She asked me why I was looking so blue, I told her I had written out an elegy for her. She doesn’t know what this is about (but finds it funny), and I don’t either: I can say confusion is the best quality we have, so hold on to it when you wake by the darker side of the pool shivering in the summer ode of petrichor and pondering the first time you realized you were alive, your knees giving out beneath your butterfly form when you walk because you don’t watch where you’re heading, tripping into the chlorine water before you’ve decided on a date to die, and all you hear is a murky vodka-soaked cry above from some nearby partygoer on land, you are still too young to try death on like a drug, body in the shape of a child falling off a first bike with rusting handlebars, so you pop your head above the water, the taste of hair plastered in your mouth. Remember all the kissing, all the young death flashing through your head like it’s your last day alive and the animators are frantically filling up the screentime of your life. I’ve taken you forward to where I ended up, let me take you back, back to biting off pieces of laughter like mint chewing gum, back to when we took the form of bodies that were none the wiser. I’m putting it all away: homecoming, the snuffing of a last cigarette, mourning. I think so greatly, so far ahead, beyond the starlings above, high and fevered, that nothing matters, not even the fact that I still don’t belong here—the rest is a dream.

 

 

Michelle Li has been recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing, The Waltham Forest Poetry Contest, published or forthcoming in Blue Marble, Masque and Spectacle, and Lumina Journal among others. She is an alumnus of the 92Y Young Writer’s Workshop and will be attending the Kenyon Review Workshop; you can find her on the board of the Incandescent Review, Pen and Quill magazine, and the Malu Zine. She’ll read practically anything, the more absurd and emotional the work, the better, and plays both violin and piano. She has an unhealthy obsession with Rachmaninoff, morally grey characters, and Sylvia Plath.

 

 

 

It is in my nature to absorb identities. Since I was thirteen, I have played many different roles; hoarding and collecting them like my brother’s stamp collection. It started with my mother. Stately and elegant wherever she went, I felt like a caterpillar trudging behind a Rajah Brooke’s birdwing. I adopted her walk, first, then her mannerisms. As I grew older, I looked to my sister, who was some ten years older, and copied her, until I stole my next identity.

The first ipseity I outwardly stole was in the eighth grade. On the first day of class, I was seated next to Kimberly. There were two other Kimberly’s at my school, but neither were as renowned as the du jour Kimberly, and so they faded into a listless obscurity for the rest of their middle-and-high-school careers. My Kimberly possessed the three traits guaranteed for high school success in America:

1. She was athletic,
2. She had perfect grades, and—
3. She was white

Kimberly was a trifecta, a beautiful statue erected in the image of suburbia, and I wanted to be just like her. I wanted her body, toned from track and cheer; I wanted her straight A’s, her ability to speak up in class and say what she meant without ums and ahs; I wanted her fair skin, her blonde hair, her white teeth, her blue eyes. I even wanted to be white, though I never told Mother or my sister this.

During introductions that first day, she asked me what my name was.

I did not share with her my home name, Ehuang, which means ‘beautiful.’ “Evelyn,” I said.

“Are you Evelyn Smith? You might be in my homeroom!”

“Oh,” I deflated, realizing I was not who she wanted. “No. I’m Evelyn Guo.”

“Oh,” she echoed. We said nothing more, and I felt the silence between us in my bones.

As the days went on, I found myself wanting to be reeled into her circle. While we followed our teacher’s demonstration of quiet country scenes on 4 by 4 canvasses, I would ask her questions, prodding her to speak to me, as if we were friends, not merely two people forced to sit next to one another in a class we would forget in ten year’s time.

“Math is so hard,” I would say, dabbing my brush into our shared paint tray, “what math class are you in?”

“Advanced,” she’d answer, with a roll of her eyes. “I hate it. I’m so bad at it!” I paid attention to the way she held her brush and mimicked it.

“I bet you aren’t. You’re super smart.”
She smiled, and I returned it.

As days turned into months, I fell into deep study—the subject being Kimberly. I learned to speak valley girl and nearly fried my hair every morning straightening it. I begged Mother for new clothes. She said no, said I had perfectly fine clothes already.

Said my sister never asked for new clothes—so why am I unhappy?

When Kimberly told me she shoplifted a tube of mascara, I shoved t-shirts from the mall down my sweaters. When Kimberly told me she’d started a new diet, I asked her what she ate, and at dinner subbed out bowls of rice for lettuce.

On the last day of eighth grade, I walked into art class a near identical copy of Kimberly, a hand-painted reproduction of the real thing. Kimberly complemented my outfit, and as we parted ways, she gave me her home phone number.

She never returned my call—and yet, for the rest of summer, I remained a Kimberly clone.

The next identity I stole was in junior year. I was watching T.V when a singer appeared on screen. Her name was Hannah Montana.

My traditional mother did not appreciate the gaudily dressed, white American singers on television; she called them whores, but in her own way. I watched Hannah in secret, focusing on her footwork, the way she held the mic.

At that time, we were the same age, and I saw in Hannah what I wanted to be next. She was a pop star, a global entity which loomed in the hearts and minds of everyone under the age of twenty.

She wore what she wanted: wide studded leather belts over glittery tops, thick heeled black boots. Sometimes, a frilly tiered skirt, or a long sleeveless tank. Mother did not allow me to bare any skin below the collar bone, so I cut off the arms of my favorite shirts in secret, wearing them underneath hoodies so she wouldn’t know.

I began waking up earlier to get ready for school, hiding what I would wear under baggy jeans and the thick sweaters bought from Macy’s, which I despised. I’d ask to be dropped off at the side entrance, and from there would run to the nearest bathroom to transform.

I took sharpie to my eyes for liner, and used a jar of Vaseline from Mother’s medicine cabinet and beetroot powder from the pantry to make lip-gloss. In the bathroom stall, I slipped out of my jeans and pulled my hoodie over my head, stuffing them both into my bag. I couldn’t change the color of my inky black hair, but I could style it, and often pinned it back with bobby pins.

For a time, this plan worked wonders; in choir, I would sing out, overpowering the other sopranos in the room, and during lunch I would tell fabricated stories of my fascinating home life. I no longer went by Evelyn; my new name was Eva. It was a nice name; short, more modern sounding than Evelyn, easier to pronounce than Ehuang, and most importantly, white.

I told everyone my uncle was an important businessman in China; to my white classmates, this was exotic, but still distant enough from myself that they could treat me as an equal. I then told them that both my parents and myself were born in Quebec and therefore Canadian; that I had been to China and performed there; that I had a boyfriend in Canada, who was also a musician.

“What’s his name, Eva?” Someone once asked. It might have been one of the other Kimberly’s, but I can’t recall anymore.

“Jason,” I said, thinking that sounded believable. “His last name is French, though.”

“Really? What is it?”

I panicked. “Blanc,” I said, accenting the c. “He’s from Quebec, too.”

“Jason Blanc,” remarked the girl-who-might’ve-been-Kimberly, “that’s such a cute name. Do you have a picture?”

I told her I didn’t.

“It’s long distance,” I’d said, “I met him on vacation, when my family went back a few years ago.”

“It’s amazing you two are still together.” “Yes,” I’d replied distantly, “it is.”

Since then, I have taken up many personas; once I was an artist, after I watched my friend Brian sketching out a still life; then I was a bookish girl with blue light glasses, discussing novels I’d never read to impress those around me in college. At one point, I was advertising myself as a DJ, going clubbing despite hating the sound of the bass thumping under my heels.

I have become everyone and anyone, modeling myself after acquaintances, friends, colleagues, people I see on television, voices heard on the radio. But I have never been able to escape my mother, my elegant, stately mother, who wears our culture with pride, or my sister, the model immigrants’ daughter.

When I look in the mirror, I see many faces, fractured, none whole. I see many lives lived, but none of them my own. Who am I looking at on any given day? Who is the woman standing before me, who wears these clothes, this haircut, this makeup?

I will never escape myself. If I could, I have tried. I do not want to be Evelyn, no, never Evelyn.

I do not want to be Eva—she died long ago.

Once, long ago, there was Ehuang, little girl, beautiful, who wore her culture with pride, too. I crushed her long ago, in favor of who Evelyn could become.

But if I could be anyone in this given moment, I would choose to be her.

 

 

Claudia Parker Joel is a young writer from Ohio. She has received honors from the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, and is currently working on her debut novel.

It was July, warm, a few days too late for a Virginia Woolf novel, but we could still feel its residue on us like stardust. Red, white, and blue flags, red faces of uncles in tight blue polo shirts that strained to hide their barreled bellies, white wine poured too fast into elegant glasses while we should have been somewhere else, blasting music and emptying red Solo cups. Root beer floats on the shadowy grass, feeling like a kid at a party even though we both know deep down in our stomachs, unspoken yet going without saying, that our childhood is just out of reach, the feeling of what once was still lingering on our fingertips like the opposite of phantom pain. White fireworks lighting up the dark lake, white beneath our eyelids when we blinked. Sweatshirts invisible shapes somewhere by our side, relishing the first chill of the night as it cuts through one of the hottest days of the year. Small shiver, laughing at our goosebumps, saying I’m not cold but meaning I don’t want anything to change. Intertwined hands flashing red/white/blue//gone under the noise of fireworks displays. Counting breaths, counting seconds until our idle conversation lapses into muggy silence. One/two/three//gone. One of us saying, this might be the last time we’re at a lake without mosquitos. Music and half-drunk chatter drifting down the hill from the white gabled house, absent of origin by the time it reaches our ears, like a conversation entering our dream from a distant, waking room. Grass tickling our bare feet and arms, thumb over thumb, lightest of squeezes silently returned. Breezeless hair limp on the grass, still damp from afternoon sweat. Morning/noon/night//gone. The final crescendo of fireworks, whizzing noise and color, your face in and out of shadow. Belly warm with root beer and contentment, no shame in waistband unbuttoned. Everything vanished now in darkness, anchored only in sound and touch. Crickets. Quiet breaths. Our own voices and blurry, distant ones. In fifteen or twenty minutes, a call from the house that we will ignore, until the last warmth of the day melts away like a dropped popsicle on asphalt. Crumpled napkins sticky with fudge and melted ice-cream, empty cups spilled out on the lawn, shoes in hand and jackets draped over arms, following you up the hill with a stomach full and a heart bursting. But not yet; linger one more moment on the grass, laughter out of sync with our conversation, everything we feel but need not say stretched between us thick as taffy. The first star of the evening has long vanished into a vast plain of constellations, yet still we wish for the night not to chill, the lights not to shut off in the nearby house, room by room, the fireworks to always be only an instant in the past, their afterimage still brightening the night from black to dark blue. Seventeen/eighteen/nineteen//gone. Not vanished, only a moment too far behind.

 

 

Jessy Wallach is a rising senior at Maybeck High School in Berkeley, California. In addition to writing, she enjoys drawing, reading, and spending time outdoors.

Ember Leanne was an unusual name and that name went with an unusual girl. But she wasn’t unusual in the bad sense, she was just well, unusual. In fact, Ember wasn’t bad at all. Ember was a very pretty girl with a very big heart.

I’m Jack Hill and unlike Ember I was a pretty average kid. But how I met Ember is probably the weirdest way anyone has ever met.

While walking home after work one day I sat down at a bench next to a streetlight. I was drawing in my sketch pad when someone whispered, “You’re really good.”

I jumped and whirled around but no one was there. Then I heard the voice again, “Look up.”

I swerved my head upward and sure enough a girl was sitting on top of the street lamp. A few strands of loose hair escaped from her braid and were moving with the wind.

She was smiling at my confusion and bewilderment.

“What–? What are you doing up there?!” I spluttered.

Casual as ever she replied, “Reading.”

“Who are you?” I asked her, astonished.

“Ember. Ember Leanne. And who might you be?”

“Jack Hill.”

Then she went right back to her book. I sat there flabbergasted for a moment and then I made up my mind.

“Would you want to come down and talk to me?”

She came down and set her book on the ground. Then she reached under the bench and pulled out a pair of roller skates.

This girl was full of surprises. I watched her for a minute as she put on her skates. Then gathering my courage I asked, “Do you read up there often?”

She laughed. “Yes, but sometimes I just sit in a tree.”

“You know you are the most peculiar girl I have ever met.”

“Then you haven’t met too many girls. Here in Chicago, I’m not the only peculiar girl.”

I laughed. “I guess so.”

“Why do you read in such odd places?” I asked her.

She smiled with her glittering white teeth. “What’s the fun in reading in normal places? How can you escape into a book when you’re lying in bed?” She looked at her watch. “Oh! Whoops. I really ought to be going now. It was nice meeting you though!”

Then she stood up and began skating away. “Wait!” I called.

She skidded to an easy stop. “What?”

“Where are you going?”

“Follow me and you can find out if you’re that curious, Jack.”

She promptly began skating again this time at a slower rate so I could keep up. We’d only been slipping through the streets for five minutes when she stopped in front of an old building. Puzzled, I looked up at the sign posted above the door. It read, “Holy Covenant United Methodist Church.”

“What are we doing here?” I asked her as she rushed for the door.

Barely pausing, she waved for me to follow. I rushed after her. Inside were fifty or so homeless or struggling people, all getting food from tables where staffed by several volunteers.

Ember ran over and she too began serving the food. Cautiously I weaved through the people to her side.

“You volunteer here?”

“Yep.”

“Why?” I asked her, surprised.

“Jack, you have lots to learn. But to start, what’s so bad about helping people?”

“Nothing but—”

She cuts me off. “Exactly. Nothing.”

“Yes but—”

“What’s the difference between me and these people?” She asks accusingly.

At my silence she snapped, pleased with herself, “There is no difference. You know, I needed help once too and no one was there for me. I want to make sure I’m there for anyone who needs it. ANYONE.” She says emphasizing her last word.

Surrendering, I helped her finish passing out the salads.

***

Later that night I walked home left with the day’s crazy events swirling through my mind. After our conversation we’d gone back to talking normally but she’d left me thinking. I mean she had a point.

In the morning I woke up and got ready for the day. I went to work and then I went to the soup kitchen. There skating up to the doors was Ember. She turned as she heard my footsteps approaching.

Then she smiled, “I was hoping you’d come back.”

“Well I did. But before we start I have a few questions.”

She shrugged her shoulders, “Okay.”

“One, how old are you?”

“Seventeen, you?”

“Twenty two.” I answered.

“My second question is, do you have a car or do you just use your skates for fun?”

She laughed. “I don’t have a car but yes I use these for fun too.”

Then she skated through the door.

Laughing to myself I raced after her. We worked for an hour before she said we could leave. Once we were outside she said,

“I want to show you something,” and then she grabbed my hand as she spotted a cab and waved it down. To the driver she said, “Forest Glen Woods please.”

The cab driver nodded and sped through the streets. When we arrived, Ember pulled me out of the cab.

Then she ran through the trees with me chasing her laughing. She stopped all of a sudden and said, “Welcome to my home.”

She laughed as she whispered, “Look up.”

There above me in the trees was a treehouse. Ember raced over to the tree and then climbed up the rope and into the treehouse.

I slowly shimmied my way up the rope to her and pulled myself into the structure. I gazed around in amazement. It was fairly large and from the ceiling dangled Christmas lights.

There was a mattress in the corner, a box serving as a table, a sleeping bag, blankets, and pillows. There was a small stack of clothes in the corner.

Ember told me all about how her dad owned the wood and when he died he left it to her.

On our way back, Ember smiled and said, “Look up.”

I did as she asked, and saw the most beautiful sunset ever.

I looked at Ember’s radiant face. “You’re always telling me that.”

She looked at me, confused. “Telling you what?”

“To look up.”

“Well, a rare amount of people ever do. People always miss the beautiful things in life because they’re always looking down. For example, there is my favorite bird.”

A blue jay was sitting high in a tree looking down at us. Ember, as always, was right. People always miss the beautiful things in life because they never look up.

The months that came after were wonderful. Before I knew it, it had been a full year since the day I’d met Ember.

In those months it had soon become routine for her to eat dinner with us and after eating we would play games together. In no time Ember was a part of the family.

Looking back, there are lots of things I would change, but none of them had to do with Ember.

Then on December 15th the event that would change my life happened.

It was a normal day and everything seemed fine. As always, we ate at my parents’ house and then I told her goodnight and she left. I was getting ready for bed when the phone rang.

I ran downstairs and picked it up. About halfway through the call I started shaking.

Once I’d hung up the phone I broke. The cry that emitted from my mouth was one of pure agony.

My mom had come to my side had asked me what happened.
I said, “Ember. She’s gone. Her cab got into a wreck. All three of them were killed instantly.”

My mom held me for hours as I cried. The sadness I felt in her absence was the most horrible feeling I have ever felt.

Over the next few days I sat with my grief. I barely got out of bed. I just sat there with my dark thoughts.

The day of the funeral it took everything I had to get ready.

I don’t remember much of the funeral, but the thing I do remember is that when I had said my goodbye’s I had heard a chirp. I looked up and there sitting in the tree was a blue jay.

After the funeral my parents took me to the Chicago Parks Foundation. Every day I walk to the church and every day I stop at our bench. Every day I sit there and gently brush the plaque on it. The plaque that reads,

Ember Leanne

December 16th 2005 – March 26th 2023

“Look Up”

Like her name Ember Leanne was a very unusual girl. But she was not unusual in a bad way. In fact Ember Leanne was the nicest, bravest, and most extraordinary girl I will ever meet. Ember Leanne will never be forgotten by those she loves and certainly not by me.

 

 

 

Malloree Mullins absolutely loves writing books. She also enjoys reading, playing basketball, and track, and  hopes you enjoy reading her story as much as she enjoyed writing it.