Fiction

 

For the third time in my eight-hour shift, the needle pricks the scabbed and clotted skin outlining my fingernails. Grimacing slightly, I lift my fingers from the soft cotton blouse and watch the crimson liquid pool over my cuticles. Bringing my hands to my cream white apron, I add to the decorations of scarlet scattered around the cloth. I have to be careful. Mr. Blanck and Mr. Harris don’t like it when blood gets on the shirtwaists. I don’t want to explain to my family why we won’t be eating this week. Usually, the bosses don’t spend their time in the lower levels; the salty stenches of blood and sweat tend to turn people away. Sponging the sweat off my forehead with my wrist, I try to stay focused on the task at hand.

Still, my mind continues to wander. It doesn’t help that people are hollering, enjoying their Saturday afternoons eight floors below. I can imagine myself wearing one of these shirtwaists and strolling through the streets. My sister is always going on and on about getting one of those lavish hats to balance on the top of her head, feathers and flowers spilling from it. Shaking the fantasy from my head, I glance over at the big clock hoisted above the door. Only twenty minutes left and no mistakes now. That’s what Mr. Blanck is always telling us. As the uniformed men brought in the new electric machines, he told us specifically, wagging his finger in our faces, “Three thousand stitches a minute. No mistakes.”

I count to six thousand before I glance at the clock again. Only a minute and a half has gone by. My pride tugs at the corner of my lips as I realize that I have beaten the average already. Feeling my mind start to wander yet again, I shift in my seat. The bosses make us pay for our own electricity, so I need to keep focused. There can be no wasting it. No matter how bad the working conditions are, everyone who quits always comes back within the next week, like a boomerang. With the current economy, we need to take any job we can get.

The sweat trickles down past my ear, overflowing like a crashing waterfall, as I try to focus on my stitches. However, my sewing machine neighbor constantly shifting in her seat is distracting me. She’s just a child of ten years old. I can tell that she needs to use the bathroom but with the foremen watching, there are no bathroom breaks. Their silent rubber heels always catch people and send them back to their stations, pursed lips hidden beneath their groomed moustaches.

I count to 15,096 when the smell of smoke wafts into my nostrils. My mind tries to play it off as exhaustion-induced hallucination. However, when I glance back over to my neighbor, I see her own nose scrunched up at the odor. Everyone is so attached to their work and the money it brings in that they don’t even bother to look for the source. The foreman is too busy scolding a young German girl about her needles that he doesn’t even look up. Seeing as I am ahead on my stitches, I risk a glance behind me. A wisp of smoke is exiting from the tips of a rag bin. Before my eyes, I watch that same wisp turn to red and yellow as the flames leap upward.

“Fire!” I shout, the word ripping from my throat before I even realize that the noise is coming from me. The other English-speaking girls’ heads whip upwards, leaping from their machines.

“Fuoco!” An older Italian woman nearby shouts. Soon, every translation of the word is springing up along the eighth floor. By now, the flames are leaping across the room, licking at our ankles.

With the recent union protests in our building, Mr. Harris took it upon himself to lock all of the exits except for the Greene Street stairway. There, he would force us to undergo bag checks to make sure we weren’t stealing extra thread or needles in our purses. Only he has the keys to the other exits that he carries on a large brass ring.

As we press closer to the other side of the room, I watch as the foreman tries to use the hose to dampen the fire. However, the valve is rusted shut from lack of use. The doorway to the Greene Street stairway isn’t even visible anymore. The smoke completely covers it, blanketing over our only escape from top to bottom. Wicker baskets are scattered around the room in chaos. The fire just continues to eat them up, its hunger still not satisfied.

Blindly, I look around for my little sister, trying to catch a glimpse of her red braids somewhere in the crowd. I’m still calling out her name frantically when a small hand grips ahold of my dress. Quickly, I turn around to see my Ann staring back at me. Her cheeks are red; tears flowing freely down the sides of her face. The bottoms of her dress are singed, like she barely made it out before the flames took hold of what they thought they were entitled to. Her breath escapes her lips raggedly as her smaller hand tangles with mine. I give it a short squeeze and we push toward the elevator shaft. Already, girls are piling in, trying to cram as many bodies as they can into one car.

“No more!” A girl barks at the rest of us, closing the gate quickly behind her. The last thing I see of her is the soot draped beneath her cheekbones as the shaft descends downward.

“We didn’t get on that one.” Ann murmurs, her bottom lip quivering.

“Next one, Annie, next one,” I whisper back, tugging on her hand. I can tell she’s terrified, her tears dropping onto the floor next to her feet. “Remember our plans? We are going to become rich and wear fancy evening gowns—”

“Can I get a fancy hat?” she asks me, suddenly.

“The fanciest,” I assure her.

“A purple hat?” she asks again, her voice trembling.

“The brightest, biggest purple hat we can find.” I nod to her. The next car never arrives. People start to become frantic, pushing forward and trying to see what the holdup is. The people up in front are whispering to the back that the elevator has crashed and there will be no more. Screams flood my ears as people jump down the shaft to escape the fire that is drifting even closer to our bodies that are shivering even though we aren’t at all cold.

“Come on.” Ann tugs on my hand and urges me closer to the shaft.

“We aren’t jumping, Annie,” I tell her, urgency etched in my voice.

“Everyone else is doing it.”

“We’ll die on impact,” I try to convince her, but she is having none of it. Instead, she pushes to the front of the group. I get caught in the back, angry girls in scorched dresses covering up her trail. I try to yank a girl backwards to get back to my sister and she kicks me straight in the knees. Hobbling for a few seconds, I at last get to the front of the group. Ann is standing at the very edge of the shaft. I try to pull her back, but I only get the back of her necklace that we made together when we were children. Beads fly down with her as I clench my eyes closed, as if that will block out her scream. For a second, I can’t breathe. My sister is gone and I don’t wait to hear the crash landing. I took this job to keep my family alive and I failed. Without her, it just seems all over. With my knees aching, I limp to the back of the crowd.

My vision is foggy from my own tears, but I run back toward the fire escape. Girls are standing around the window, watching the fire trucks pull in outside. They are screaming, their words overlapping so it sounds like a foreign tongue I’ve never heard before. I watch as the ladders fall short and the flames grow taller. Taking a deep breath, I think of my other family members. With our mother sick, they still need me to help provide a somewhat steady source of income. With their survival on my mind, I push my way to the front.

My first steps on the fire escape are wobbly. I don’t feel completely safe on the thing, but then again, I don’t feel at all safe in the building either. Other girls are screaming at me for running past them, but in the moment, I don’t care. Beneath my feet, I can feel the rumble of the girls in front of me, scrambling down. Quickening my pace, I throw my shoes off, figuring I can do this quicker barefoot. The metal is hot beneath my skin, which gives me an incentive to run faster. I’m just at the second floor when the fire escape releases a fatal creak. Clenching my teeth together, I run faster before the metal caves out from beneath me. Clattering to the ground, I’m lucky that I’m at a short enough distance that the net the firefighters have set up catches my fall. Others are not so fortunate.

As I’m rolled off of the net, I try not to pay attention to the falling figures or the disheveled tangles of hair. But I can’t do anything to block the screams.

A week later, I am called back to collect my paycheck from that terrible day. My heart is still in pieces, the remnants of my sister’s necklace coiled around my wrist. They place both of our paychecks in my hands. As soon as I get the money, I turn back around and walk toward a store that Ann and I only dreamed of entering. And I buy a hat. Not just any hat. The fanciest purple hat that they have.

Marriya Schwarz is a junior at the College of William & Mary, with roots in the Northern Virginia region. She was a recipient of two gold keys and one silver medal in the 2016 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and the third-place winner of the College of William & Mary’s Howard Scammon Drama Prize in 2018. Her writing has been featured in Writopia Lab’s From Your Friendly Neighborhood Feminist and Women’s eNews: Teen Voices. In her free time, she is a historic tour guide, a tap dance teacher, and a web series producer.

The I’s stuck up out of the letter like broken bones.

I miss you. I like it here. I want you to come.

The hand that hit my face wrote this.

Flesh incarnadined.

I shan’t forget the wounds.

 

 

Temima is an avid reader, writer, poet, and artist who enjoys the moments right after sunset when it’s not quite night. She can be found anywhere within the vicinity of a book.

I skid down Main Street, cursing Bill’s name. He promised to put the snow tires on yesterday, but I suppose I shouldn’t have expected him to develop a sudden sense of responsibility overnight. The kids shout and kick in the backseat, fractioning my attention into sharp and shiny thoughts, utterly disconnected. Up ahead a red light glows like a beacon. I need to work on my sleep schedule, I feel like my brain’s imploding on itself. Ok, go through the motions, drive the kids to school, go home to start dinner and do the laundry, just like any other day. I break for the red light and my heart thunks as the engine grinds. “Please, please, please.” My toes curl as I press down on the brake. Skid, skid, skid: the grinding sound from the engine combines with the kids’ shouts. I close my eyes as the red light passes overhead.

…

I scowl at the falling snowflakes. My eyes dart between the road and the clock. 8:59, 9:00, 9:01, each minute that ticks by increases my anxiety. I can’t be late again. She won’t like it, and I can’t take her anger twice in the same week. I accelerate into the snowstorm. I thank God for each green light. I flip off the slow truck drivers. Brake lights ahead, despite another green light. What the hell? I check the clock, 9:05. I pass the car in front of me and race forward, only then noticing the blue minivan drifting into the middle of the intersection from the side. I start to brake, but I know it’s too late. Too late, too late: instinctually, I glance at the clock: 9:07.

…

I grip the steering wheel, transfixed by the view. Two cars, only a couple meters in front of me, a blue minivan and a silver car. It plays out like a movie, the faster car speeding into the minivan, sending it spinning around and around with a splay of car parts flinging off, until coming to a crooked halt. The car careens into a ditch, tilting and landing on its side. Just looking, I can imagine that any moment now the cops show up to arrest the bad guys crawling out of the cars, ending an epic car chase. My sister made me watch an action movie with that exact ending just yesterday, for my sixteenth birthday. The illusion of fantasy shatters in the still silence after the collision. My breathe comes faster, “oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh.” That could have been me. If I’d been going a little faster…The thought of it makes me want to flee, get out of the car and never enter a vehicle again. I turn, expecting my parents to somehow appear in the passenger side, to comfort me and help me get home. They aren’t there. I’m all alone, all alone, all alone. No bad guys are getting out of the wrecked cars, nobody’s getting out. Right, right, I need to call 911, breathe in and breathe out, then I dial the numbers.

…

I sigh as the ambulance pulls into the hospital, snowy days are always hectic. I scratch on the clean blue scrubs that were getting tighter with each passing month. They pull a stretcher out and I grit my teeth: juveniles. I’m reminded that I have to call Riley and make sure he knows it’s my turn watch his kids this weekend. I direct the paramedics to room 8b, simultaneously jotting down the notes and observations they call out. Boy, nine years old, head injury, unconscious. Girl, six years old, broken arm, severe cuts, conscious and talking. Next comes the driver, wide-eyed and pale, but walking, trailing the kids down the hallway. Victor comes in last, closing the doors behind him, I raise an eyebrow, “Is that everyone?” He winces, nods, and I sigh again. Victor is one of the new paramedics, unaccustomed to failure, unlike some of us. I wave him through the hallway, then turn to stare at the thick snow coming down, finishing the notes to send on to the doctors.

 

Audrey Rabick is a junior at Comstock Public High School; writing has been her passion for many years now and has helped her through the ups and downs of high school life. This is the first time she’s flung herself into the abyss that is publishing. She lives a charmingly boring life in Kalamazoo, MI.

Nothing means flat kisses or abandoned shoe stores wrapping old memories around their legs like faded scarves. Nothing means the absence of words, an empty cola bottle, a lack of soul. A black hole is better than nothing. Emptiness is better than nothing.

 

The cold cola bottle clutched in my arms sweats fat droplets while the sidewalk paints my feet red. I contemplate the idea of flatness beneath the artificial blue sky. I heard the Earth was flat from the reedy boy in the desk in front of me. He argued with our physics teacher about trajectory and speed, screaming, “Yes but it’s Aristotle…” I wasn’t paying attention. I only noticed when his desk remained empty, when he became a stone fingernail in the yard.

Maybe the Earth is flat. The sky is flat, listless, to me. I wield my cola bottle and tear wisps from the sky, stuffing the blue cotton candy against my hot, dry gums. The sky tastes like water. The sky tastes like nothing. The sidewalk is so hot it fries my feet into bacon. I would say an egg, but that’s a cliché, and clichés are husks. I am more original than the reedy boy in the Flat Earth Society. He vomited words others had digested, and then excreted, for thousands of years. I guess it killed him. Aristotle would shake his head, because if you say something long enough then it dies. People start thinking you’re cracked as a metaphorical egg.

I am so cracked that my soul has evaporated through the breaks in my skin and formed a puddle of yolk on the sidewalk. That is why I feel useless. I am the abandoned shoe store distorted through my cola bottle, old memories threading my legs together until I cannot run. I take a swig of soda, feeling my yolk fry around my feet. I watch my name around the cola glass obscure the floating green buildings: MARK. So ordinary it is printed on a cola bottle. Maybe that is why I feel like I am splintered, because if you make something ordinary, it perishes. I am nice and ordinary.

I am a flat kiss, a missing shoe, a vacant hotel. My soul is a well-done omelet, no spices, my name so common it graces thousands of labels. A cracked-up loony, that’s what I am, the ones you find dropped like pennies on street corners. I’ll die alone in an alley; become a stone fingernail in a yard with trillions of hands. Maybe I’ll join the reedy boy in Flat Heaven. We’ll discuss Aristotle.

Do the laws of nature permit a yolk to be un-fried? The sidewalk is cold beneath my feet. The cola bottle, half empty, has stopped sweating in the sun. I take my last chug and look at the dusty buildings wavering through the green glass until they break into streaks of dirt. At least those Flat Earth guys have a purpose. I am drained like a bottle. I will flit around this dusty, abandoned town; grow old on cold cola and stray bits of cloud. It’s not terrible to have an absence of purpose. When you die, your shell floats away, turns into sand. Your soul becomes

 

.

Sylvia is a writer from Ohio. She is working on improving her writing and struggles with keeping her cat off the keyboard.

(The inspiration came from bicycling through the neighborhoods around my street. It’s not a great area, and all I could think about is that all these people grew up in my town, got funneled through school, and basically then returned back and died, unnoticed, and that this cycle was repeated hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. It was a little chilling. Based on these reflections, I decided to write a protagonist, Mark, that becomes a little crazed by the monotony but, at the same time, notices how easily one is caught in a cycle of “ordinary-ness.”)

 

Rachel picked out two gnarled ginseng roots and absentmindedly stuffed them into a plastic bag. The doctor’s matter-of-fact voice came to mind as she pushed her shopping cart to the cashier: As long as she gets plenty of rest and takes her medicine every day with a healthy meal, she’ll recover just fine.

As the cashier handed her her groceries, Rachel took out her phone and called the house to check on her mother, only to hear an automated voice telling her to leave a message. Rachel dialed again, and then a third time. She tried calling her mother’s cell phone before texting her, “Are you doing okay?” She waited. There was no response.

The heavy rain stung her face as she rushed out of the grocery store with plastic bags dangling from each arm. A chill wind whipped through her coat and battered her hair, seeming to pull her towards her car. Hurry, the trees rustled brashly, writhing as she drove away from the parking lot.

As soon as she parked her car outside the house, Rachel leapt out and rushed to the door, fumbling for the house key. She entered, greeted by the humming of the heater. It was dark, save for the red light emanating from a salt crystal lamp.

“Mom?” Rachel called out as she set down the groceries on a table and tore off her dripping coat. She raced up the stairs to her mother’s room.

Illuminated only by the bluish glow of the TV was a blanketed lump on the bed. As Rachel turned on a lamp, she heard a snore. She sighed with relief – her mother had just been asleep.

“Hmm?” Her mother stirred, opening her eyes slightly. “Back already?”

“I thought something had happened to you because you didn’t answer my calls.”

“You called?”

“Both the house phone and your cell phone.”

“Really?” Her mother grunted as she sat up, picking up her cell phone on top of a nearby desk and looking at it.

“You must have had the ringer turned off again.” Rachel noted. “Still, I can’t believe you didn’t hear the house phone.”

“You know sometimes I’m a deep sleeper.” Her mother chuckled, followed by a row of coughs.

Rachel sat next to her mother and put a hand on her shoulder. Her mother reeked of mint from the pain relief patches that she’d been wearing for the past week.

“I’m fine, I’m fine.” Her mother insisted.

Rachel noticed a mug that had been sitting on the desk, holding dregs of coffee that had long gone cold.

“I’ll take this downstairs for you.” Rachel sighed – it was too late to mention the online article she had read advising people with pneumonia to avoid caffeine.

“So what did you get at the market?”

“Some ginseng – I was thinking of making your ginseng chicken soup for dinner.” Rachel replied.

“That’s good. I’ll be downstairs in a few minutes.” Her mother smiled, taking the TV remote and changing the channel to the news.

Rachel went downstairs and brought over the grocery bags to the kitchen, turning the lights on and setting the bags on the counter.  Putting a pot of water on the stove to boil, she opened a cupboard above the counter and took out a box of herbs. The jujubes are for sweetness, the goji berries are good for the eyes, and the angelica root is good for blood circulation, her mother once said. Rachel put the box down next to the cutting board and began to chop a ginseng root into thin disks. She blanched a small chicken to clean it, and then left it to cook more thoroughly in the pot on the stove. She went to one of the larger cupboards at the other end of the kitchen and opened a bag of rice, using a small plastic scoop to pour some into a bowl before rinsing it at the sink.

She grew more unnerved by the empty spaces of silence between the boiling of the water, the chopping of the ginseng, and the rattling of the rice as it swirled in the water at the bottom of the bowl. It was somehow different not hearing her mother run around the kitchen like she did when Rachel herself got sick.

~

“Come on, Rachel.” Her mother would say when she was a child. “You’ve only got a cold. The doctor said everything will be just fine.”

Six-year-old Rachel clung to her mother’s hand.

The edges of her sleeves were wet.

“Are you crying?” Her mother asked her then. “You know I’ll take care of you. Don’t you trust me?”

~

 

She couldn’t stand the thought of the silent spaces between each sound in the kitchen becoming permanent.

There was a loud hacking cough followed by a clatter that made Rachel jump. She had dropped the bowl of rice into the sink.

“Is everything going okay?” Her mother cleared her throat as she walked into the kitchen.

“Er, yeah.” Rachel quickly said, still looking at the bottom of the sink.

“Yeah?” Her mother repeated, walking over to the sink to see what she was doing. Her eyes widened at the mess. “Did you spill all of that rice?”

Rachel looked away from her.

Her mother glanced at her face. “Are you crying?”

Rachel said nothing, wiping her face on her sleeve.

“Rachel. I told you I’ll be fine. Trust me. I’m not that old yet.”

The smell of herbs used to always follow her mother. The relief patches covered it all up, but the herby aroma of the soup seemed to bring it back.

“I know, mom.” Rachel mumbled.

“Come on now. How about you go get some more rice? I think the soup’s almost done.”

Rachel rinsed more rice and placed it into a rice cooker, waiting for steam to float out from the top. Rachel stirred the soup to make sure the chicken was cooked through and tasted it with a spoon. She scooped some rice into a bowl and then poured the soup over it, letting the rice soak up the fragrant broth. Then she cut out a chunk of the chicken, slicing it into thin pieces and layering them on top of the rice. Holding the bowl with a napkin beneath it, Rachel brought it over to the kitchen table where her mother was sitting.

“Careful, it’s hot.” Rachel said as she placed the bowl in front of her mother. She watched as her mother took a spoonful, gently blowing on it to cool it down before eating it.

“Very good.” Her mother nodded, taking another bite.

When she had finished, Rachel took the empty bowl to the sink to wash it. Her mother went to a drawer and pulled out a bottle of pills – the medicine she was supposed to take before going to bed.

Rachel saw herself as a child again, clinging to her mother as she stood in the kitchen stirring a bubbling pot of ginseng chicken soup.

 

 

Penelope Yagake is an undergraduate English Creative Writing major at California State University Long Beach. She has been a member of the narrative and gameplay design team for the CSULB Video Game Development Association. Her work has appeared in Page and Spine, Fifty Word Stories, and Poppy Road Review.