Fiction

Forcing my eyes to stay open, I watch Mr. Conn’s face while I hold my stomach. I should have called in sick today. The artificial lights in the classroom blast the space with annoying brightness. Everything in here shines like a waxed apple, including the faces of the thirty-five students in thirty-five wobbly desks. We’re crammed close enough that I smell everyone’s deodorant after PE.

Why do I feel this way? I did nothing wrong. What happened to Jason is not my fault. Or is it? I didn’t even know him that well. We were on the same robotics team in middle school. We carpooled twice.

“Discover your self-worth,” Mr. Conn says. He’s wearing his usual blue polo shirt and gray sports pants. He’s giving his weekly lecture on mental health in “Advisory” class, which is weird since he doesn’t offer specific advice. He just monologues in strange metaphors. He’s a nice guy who’s great at teaching, but if I hear one more metaphor…

“Take care of your body,” he drones. His subway sandwich lies half-eaten on the desk.

The pickle smell of his turkey on wheat saturates my nose hairs.

Don’t think about nose hairs. Think about homework. I should be working on the three hours of homework he assigned today. God, it was much worse for Jason. What did he say to me the last time we talked? Why can’t I remember? Does depression make people forget things?

What am I wearing? I glance down. My typical black sweatpants and random free T-Shirt. This one says “2014 Mini Golf Champion.”

I peek at my friend Matthew. Unsurprisingly, he’s wearing the same red jacket he wore yesterday when we ditched to avoid three tests. He stares at the corner of the wall, his fingers fidgeting. No doubt, he’s mentally writing the Lord of the Flies essay that’s due tomorrow. He’s a procrastinator like me. It’s an underrated art form.

Behind me sits Aiden. My body blocks his entire shape from Mr. Conn. Aiden is likely dreaming about the French Revolution after the all-nighter he pulled studying for the History test. He owes me one in English class later, where I’ll bury my head in my arms and dream of fish.

“You are all young. Take this time to discover your acorns. What do you want to do in your life?”

Acorns?

One kid coughs and another sneezes.

But I wonder, what do I want to do with my life? When I was little, my older sister took me to Saratoga Creek. We hiked under the bridge at Wildwood park, and she pointed at the invasive trees and exclaimed, “Look! It’s an Ash tree!” She pointed at the butterflies: “It’s a Cabbage White!” When she spoke about the environment, she was like an auctioneer. Her words slurred together into one incomprehensible jumble. She loved the environment. One time, she picked up a guy’s empty Starbucks off the ground and speed-yelled, “Hey loser, you dropped your brain!”

But my sister has run off to study environmental science at Emory. She sends me pictures of taxidermy bugs and Chipotle burritos. Even though our parents are divorced, it doesn’t affect how we interact. If anything, we’re closer. After my mom became a travel nurse, I started spending nights in “my room” at my dad’s house surrounded by his Coca-Cola bottle collection. He always asks, “What are you gonna study in college?”

What will I study? What are my interests? My Rubik’s cube and those pressed quarters? I have one from the MET, the Smithsonian, and Pearl Harbor. My problem is that I lack motivation. My perfect day is being left alone in my room, my left cheek pressed into my memory foam pillow, my left arm underneath it, and my eyes closed. God, it’s heaven. Some days, I’m so lethargic from staying awake all night worrying about meteorites and tests.

Basically, I wish I were a cat.

The thing is, I wasn’t always like this. I used to be so curious as a kid. When I met new people, I’d tell them random facts: Owl’s don’t have eyeballs. Caterpillars dissolve into a liquid in the cocoon. Cockroaches can live up to one week without their heads. President George W. Bush vomited on Japan’s Prime Minister.

But what do I want out of life? I want a fancy pencil collection with Spoke model 6’s and IJ instrument model 9’s. I want to eat Margherita pizza every day. I want my sister to come home from college and tell me how much she missed me. I want to be an astronaut floating in space while watching the Earth spin. I want to determine the meaning of life—well as close as my sixteen-year-old brain can come to it. I want to know what went through Jason’s mind. Was it sudden or did he think about it? I want this hour to end.

“It’s like I always say: be like a cactus…” Mr. Conn continues, walking back and forth on his metaphorical stage, his forehead wrinkling with thought.

A cactus? Let’s be logical. We aren’t in the desert. Well, maybe, considering how school goes on and on forever and ever like the Sahara, or like an ultramarathon … Could I survive alone in the desert?

“You need to be able to survive in any circumstance…” Yeah, like being overworked, sleep-deprived, and bored!

“…and push through tough times, rebounding stronger than before. Be patient and bloom brightly when your time is here.”

Bloom brightly? Are we flowers now? I thought we were cacti, or was it acorns? How does he change metaphors so fast? He’s like Usain Bolt with figurative language. While he is talking about mental health, why isn’t he mentioning Jason? Doesn’t he know?

“Daniel!” Mr. Conn shouts, his fist clenching as if he had a spear in his hand and I were a fish.

 “Yes!” Oh god. What did I do?

 “Stop mumbling, face forward, and pay attention,” Mr. Conn growls. His nose hairs stick out as he crinkles his face. “Not just you! Everyone! Eyes up here and listen!”

Matthew loses his staring contest with the wall and blinks blindly at Mr. Conn. Aiden’s desk jerks behind me, and I imagine him rubbing away the fatigue from his eyes. Everyone knows Mr. Conn is going to single one of us out, and no one wants to hold the microphone.

Mr. Conn throws his hands in the air. “Why is it that nobody cares about these meetings? These are real problems people deal with.” Mr. Conn’s eyes slowly pan across the room. Is he expecting one of us to answer him?

Unfortunately, I have that terrible problem where my lips move without saying anything.

It’s a disorder. I looked it up once but forgot what it was called. Who has time for that? “Pardon? Did you want to say something, Daniel?” Mr. Conn snaps at me. “Go on, here, grab the mic.” He unclips the tiny rectangle off his collar and hands it to me.

The whole classroom stares at me like I’m suddenly a car crash on a freeway, the kind with a car upside-down, two detached wheels rolling down the highway.

I hold the tiny mic with one hand. “I was just thinking about Jason. Nobody mentioned him,” I say as my eyes roam for support. All the faces in the room look down at their desks.

“Jason?” Mr. Conn asks.

“Yeah, ever since I heard, I’ve been thinking about the culture of our school,” I continue. “And uh, sure, nobody here has an empty stomach or shoes with holes, but people are suffering. It’s like everyone is stranded on a boat in the ocean, and no one is coming to get them.” Oh god. I’m beginning to talk in metaphors too. Mr. Conn is rubbing off on me.

“Who’s Jason?” Mr. Conn inquires as he straightens his back, making himself taller. “He’s a student who passed away yesterday,” I reply.

“I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m sure the school did what they should have done, so let’s move on,” Mr. Conn answers.

I click my tongue.

Mr. Conn folds his arms and glares at me.

“I just think it’s ironic,” I say, holding the mic closer to my mouth, “how we are supposed to be talking about mental health in this class, so why aren’t we talking about Jason?” What did I care if I made Mr. Conn angry? What could he do to me? Give me more homework? Kick me out of class? Besides, wasn’t this a time to talk about our feelings?

“What are you talking about?” Aiden whispers and jabs at my back with his finger. “You should shut up. Jason is fine.”

“What?” I say.

Whispers travel around the room: “Who’s Jason?”

 Mr. Conn storms over to me and snatches the mic out of my hand. “That’s enough.”

For the rest of class, Mr. Conn continues as if I had never spoken. He drones on about cactuses being an excellent metaphor for mental health as they are resilient and can carry on in harsh conditions. I know he’s just doing his job, and most days, he’s pretty cool, but on a day like today, it’s not enough.

After the bell rings, Aiden follows me out into the hallway, where yellow-tiles point arrows towards the school office. We pass the math mural where the faces of famous dead mathematicians look down on us. Sounds of banging instruments come from the band room. In the hallway, everyone moves together as if drifting in a river.

“What the hell, dude? Where did you hear that Jason died?” Aiden asks.

“It’s everywhere. Have you not checked Instagram? I’m serious. Ask anybody.” We pass by a group of Jason’s friends. “See,” I say, pointing. “They look depressed.”

“No, it’s gotta be a prank,” Aiden smirks. “Look, I’ll message him right now.” Aiden pulls out his phone and texts Jason a simple “wya.”

“Dude, that’s so rude. You can’t say that to someone who literally just passed away. What is he going to do? Be like ‘I’m in heaven?’”

Aiden says, “I swear I saw him yesterday in the Safeway parking lot with his mom. He was holding a box of Oreos.”

“Parents are talking about it on WeChat.”

“No way, man. Unless he died, like, today morning, he’s perfectly fine.” Aiden is always like this. He never believes until he sees it with his own eyes.

“People do these kinds of things on the internet all the time,” he says. “Don’t take it seriously.”

We turn the corner and continue walking.

Heads bounce down the hall and locks spin on lockers. Backpacks float. I want to believe Aiden is right. I want to be that kid again whose biggest worry was if my sister would take me to the park. I want to believe in a future filled with pressed quarters, Rubik’s Cubes, Social Security, jobs, and picket fences.

We squeeze through the edge of the hallway and approach Jason’s locker. He won’t be there. I just know. The world is too cruel for happy endings. But maybe Aiden’s right. It’s just a rumor that got out of control. Rumors can happen. It happened to Taylor Swift.

Is that Jason’s red North Face jacket or is it just wishful thinking? The owner gets swallowed by waves of people. Shoes squeak and kids talk about chemistry tests. Is that Jason’s voice? Maybe if I imagine enough, if I just concentrate hard enough, I can bring him back to life. We are only ten steps away.

A future with Jason flashes in my mind. I’ll invite him out with my friends to the nearby food court for spicy miso ramen. I’ll tell him that everything can only get better. I’ll remind him about the time he shot the judge in the face with the robot’s foam ball and how we couldn’t have made it to the Worlds competition without him. I’ll ask him to tell me that joke again about fish that can break dance. I’ll remind him about the future, filled with college and jobs and Social Security.

As we walk through the hall, I mindlessly nod at Aiden’s small talk. The closer I get, the more the anxious feeling builds in my throat. My phone slips out of my hand and I bend over to pick it up. I know when I rise I will have my answer.

But why am I so afraid?

 

 

Bryan is a junior in high school who recently started creative writing as a hobby. He likes doing math, hiking with friends, and watching cute cat videos.

 

Quietly waiting for a fish to puncture its lip on a barbed hook is an excursion I only tolerate for the sake of tradition. Once a month, Papa and I travel to Crescent Lake, a freshwater lake in North Central, Florida—its name derived from the curvature of the swampland resembling a sliver of the moon. Toting a bucket brimming with minnows and two spinning reel poles, we trudge past palm trees and mangroves, our feet sinking into the loose grains of warm sand until we reach a familiar cedar dock protruding over water. I look away as Papa baits our hooks with calloused hands.

The chime of our plunging bobbers shatters the lake’s smooth surface, carving wrinkles into the water like a crinkled sheet. Our silhouettes become distorted in the reflective ripples, streaks of sunlight blending into billowing waves. Lucent fishing lines interlace with the dance of the lake, and Papa’s freckled face relaxes. Occasionally, I attempt to start a conversation with Papa, but after a few short remarks, my efforts end in silence.

The water’s motion makes it difficult to decipher whether my bobber is bouncing from the waves’ swells or if a fish is nibbling on my minnow, so I wait to pull my rod until the bobber falls with force and the line tightens. A second too late.

“Better hope he didn’t swallow it,” Papa says as I reel in. The fish often do, which prompts an intrusive surgery using rusty pliers. Papa seems to care more about saving his hook than the flailing fish, so when we toss the thrashing creature back into nature’s nest, it twitches on its left side, teetering in and out of the water. I recast and observe my bobber with extra caution, jerking my pole upwards in response to any slight movement. Papa chuckles as I pull my hook into the air every few minutes with no fish attached.

My eyes become tired from the meticulous staring, so I hunt for alligator heads instead, finding four yellow globes peering above the skin of the lake, their scales veiled beneath the quivering surface. I find eight more lustrous eyes as the sun begins its expedition toward the horizon, causing the ripples to glisten with a rosy glow. Mosquitos stick to the water, prompting the fish to bite more frequently. Papa hooks five largemouth bass, and I catch two. When the sun’s shimmers disappear, and our bobbers blend into darkened waves, we reel in. I casually fling my rod over my shoulder and leave with one last glance into the lake, which now resembles a foggy pool of ink.

***

Now, I trek to Crescent Lake alone. My neon bobber sinks into the water—the knell of a solemn bell. I close my eyes and breathe in its musty scent like incense, listening to the susurration of leaves and the crash of bubbling water striking sand. I begin to enjoy the whispers of the world around me. I search for life underneath the lake’s tempered glass surface, attempting to find transparency amid folding waves, but the mirrored exterior only portrays the wispy clouds above.

Abruptly, my bobber thrusts below the surface, and there is a powerful pull against my palm. Yanking my pole to the sky, I fight a fish writhing in water. Its body jolts downwards—a desperate plea for freedom. The line strains with tension like a tightrope connecting me to the enigmatic world below. With one final heave of my pole, a ten-pound bass ascends into the air. The image of its flight is captured in the glossy waves, its scales scintillating in sunlight.

My rod curls as I undo the hook from the bass’s lips and ease it onto a patch of grimy grass. Its soaking body melds to the emerald turf, swathed by lengthy blades. I watch it flip and spin, its rigid fins whipping against the ground, attempting to fly as it does in water. After a few moments, I grab the bass and hurl him back into the lake, grunting. With a vigorous splash, he is gone.

My hands clutch at rippling memories of Papa as I anticipate another catch.

 

 

 

Sarah Pouliot is a writer from Titusville, Florida. She has poems and essays published in The Sailfish Review and The Living Waters Review with forthcoming work in The Rectangle and Saw Palm. In addition to being a recipient of Sigma Tau Delta’s International Convention award for creative nonfiction, she has been invited to read at their 2023 Convention in Denver. Sarah is president of Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Sigma Tau Delta chapter and works as a managing editor for the campus journal. Majoring in English, she is interested in pursuing a career in editing and education.

 

I left the maths homework till last – it was my favourite subject until there were more letters than numbers in the questions, and all my hopes of passing went out the window. I know I’m not going to get it done. I bet the whirring fan in my room knows the answers, and if my mum wasn’t yelling at the telephone so loudly downstairs, I would be able to distinguish the whispers of solutions coming from the revolving blades.

I find myself asking why questions a lot. Why won’t the fan speak up? Why is mum always shouting? Why is mum always crying? Why is a constant which is determined by ex, the man who left her last month and split our family into little fractions. Why is an algebraic term I will never be able to wrap my head around, no matter how hard I try, or how much more homework I do. Ex is just another man my mum found using the trial-and-error method after my dad died.

Ex rearranged the equation of our family, and although I never really liked him, not like I loved dad, he was always there, always a number. Now he’s ex, and I have to watch as the things in my life turn from numbers to letters, knowing that I will never be able to solve the questions I need the answers to.

 

 

Peter Ormerod is a writer who dabbles in flash fiction and resides in London. He recently started writing creatively and hopes to continue coming up with interesting concepts for future stories.

Lily was a girl made of letters.

Her blood was ink, black and thick, and coursing through her veins along with the unkept promises bound to the pages he sent. Home soon. When she read those words, those promises, her heavy, dark blood crashed through her body in a swell of dangerous hope. Her veins burst, and her lungs bubbled with blood instead of oxygen. Her air was sucked deep inside of her, strangling her, squeezing and twisting her organs tight, too tight. When she opened her mouth to scream, to sob, a rush of sticky, rotten blood crawled up her throat like vomit and choked her before pooling in her mouth and spilling over, dripping from her lips and her teeth like the juice from summer fruits.

Her heartbeat was the flutter of envelopes dropped at her doorstep, and unless he was there, her heart was painfully still; she was not alive. The ghost of himself was printed on the envelope that drifted and fell through the air like a dying moth, before brushing against the door with a barely-audible rush of wind that she trained her ears to catch. With that quiet little whisper as the paper made connection with the wood and slumped down to the floor, was the faint drum of a weakened heart coming to life.

Her limbs were made of tape, glue, and the broken pencil tips that gathered between the two of them. No matter the distance, she found him holding her sturdy with the proof of his survival, with tape and glue to keep her broken limbs from snapping. She prayed he had enough tape and glue left over, to keep the both of them from crumbling to pieces.

Her skin was paper thin. Ready to tear at any moment, so her inky blood and her paper heart and her broken bones could spill out and leave her blissfully devoid and dry. She was built on the foundation of love letters that broke her dying heart, and deep, aching sadness that brought her to her knees and locked her hands together as she cried bloody tears, and prayed for him, for the other paper girls out there. She prayed until she ran out of words and was so tired that all she could do was rest her head on her knees, and feel herself fall apart. Feel her skin tear and feel herself drown in her blood until her heart beat so rarely that her chest ached with emptiness. Then she could hide inside the comfort of her memories.

Her memory was a blissful place to live, a place where lovely words replaced nerves and brain matter, a place where promises could be kept. A place where the past was no longer painful and lonely, but beautiful and bright. In Lily’s mind, her husband was not a dead man walking in the trenches, but in their home as they danced together. They swayed at a slow, peaceful pace, as if they had all the time in the world. Tangled in the mournful cry of the violin were the words she believed only in her mind. I’m okay. I’m alive. I’ll be home soon. Home soon. And the quivering vibrato held her response. I miss you. I love you. Come home to me.

Come home.

 

 

 

Julia Weisenberg is a high school student and an aspiring writer from the Philadelphia area. She writes historically set short stories, and hopes to write something as beautifully epic as Victor Hugo one day. She loves any and all topics in history, but especially loves European history, because it truly is the soap opera of history.

I met you the way teeth meet pavement. Summer after sophomore year, when I didn’t know anything about truth except that it scorched, I was working the register at the family shop and caught you at the door with your pockets full of lighters and candy. You told me you’d empty them if I met you by the dumpster out back, so I left my shift with a hand curled around my butterfly knife, half-ready to die. Instead, we shared a cigarette until the lampposts flickered on, the silence some sort of truce.

You cupped your hand around the tiny fire, let it fall onto the pile of garbage below us. It caught lazily. I watched your eyes follow the sway of the white flame. How it climbed like a vine up the side of the building, rolling, breathing. How there was no proof of it except the echo of the burning across your face.

***

It wasn’t always this way, you told me. You’d scraped your palms raw trying to scale the old family sycamore and when you knuckled through the medicine cabinet for your mom’s jar of aloe you found a lighter instead. It was small, peeling, and pulsed like a heart in your crying hand. How sweet: a tiny tragedy to call your own. Outside, it stormed harder than it ever had.

The first fires were small. A pile of sticks. A pair of boots. A dead sparrow. But the rain kept coming down and the only way you knew to deal with it was evaporation. Everything became either kindling or ash, your hands a trigger. When your daddy caught you curled up by a burning shed, he hosed you down with the cows behind the barn and sent you down here to stay with your aunt, keep out of trouble. God knows it didn’t work.

***

In the alley, you show me where the fire nicked the base of your throat. Did it hurt? My fingers running along the raised, gnarled skin. Probably. I don’t remember anything but the light. The cigarette sizzling out on your knee. A hiss, but I don’t know from whom. Brightest thing I’ve ever seen.

Once the trash fire wanes, I turn off the cameras and grab a bottle of liquor for the way. As the road stretches black and empty before us, I point out where I chased a snake into the gutter, where my bike got stolen the first time, where I stole it back the second. Suburban windows dark, curbs pregnant with shiny empty cars. I pretend not to hear clicking. We follow the sound of music to the biggest house in town, yard heaving with kids barely older than us, puking into manicured grass stained pink and yellow in the shitty disco lights. We hop the white fence and leave ashes in our wake.

***

I learn the rules of the game quickly: get as close to the flame as you can without getting burned. First, you teach me how to cut through a crowd like a blade, fish a wallet from a pocket through the disguise of slipping past. Bodies, clumsy, bleed into each other in the haze of youth, of throwing it all to shit. Funny how please and excuse me become currency in the exchange of deception. I thrill at invisibility, at weaving in and out of presence. You see me all the same.

We get bolder, go bigger. This house is massive, everything in it gilded. We take ornaments, tablecloths, earrings, knives, magazines, pills, purses, bottles, china. My bag grows heavy with what is not mine. Between raids, I name your hunger contagious. We have no use for any of this, obviously, but the thrill of marring the pristine is too great to ignore. Too many times, I hold my palm out for you to press something shiny into it. The last is a vial of old French cologne. Swiped it from the dad’s room. Some sort of tycoon. I slip it into my pocket and leave everything else on the silver kitchen island to be claimed once more in the morning.

The night swirls into itself. One moment we are taking and another we are giving. Your fingers are a permanent circle around my wrist and I am nothing but willing. Ready. Eager. My gaze reaching only as far as the stretch of skin between your shoulder blades.

Glass shatters against the white paneling of the house in the backyard, barely empty beer bottles heavy in our hands. Watch. You pull your arm back, wind up for a throw. I’m gonna get the bedroom window. I prepare for an arc but the bottle never leaves your grasp. Instead, it comes back down and splinters between your hand and thigh, and scarlet blood blooms across your skin. As I sit cross-legged pulling the shards from your palm, your laughter rises smoky through the dark.

***

The center of the flame is the hottest, you told me at one point, blue and biting as ice but the readiest to burn. Maybe that’s what drew you to the pool: the chlorine-blue surface, the eye of the flame you could finally touch. Maybe it was just about time you grazed the other side, for once growing to fill an empty space rather than molding your own. Kneeling at the edge, you turn to me, and you must have wiped your mouth at some point because your hands and grin gleam the same punched-out shade of crimson. When you move your lips, I don’t hear your words until you take my hand, guide it to the beginning of your scalp.

You’re staring at me, and staring, and staring, your eyes the whitest thing I’ve ever seen, and there’s still music seeping warbled through the marbled windows, the air heavy with it, and with something else, something sweet but putrid, thin but insistent, settling like film on my skin, my eardrums, my tongue, but I still can’t tell what it is, and this whole time you’re still staring so hard I think you see right through to the other side. My neck prickles with sweat. I close my fist in your sweat-slick hair.

***

It’s you. It’s the singed stench of chlorine rising like heat from the concrete. It’s the wet night pooling sticky in my elbow pits. It’s me, holding your head under the blurred surface. It’s the rubbery skin of your nape slipping silver like a fish beneath my fingers. The water still. Your eyes open.

***

When I let go, you rise like you’ve been woken, silently, but so quick and sudden your matches fall from your pocket. I cup my hand right below, before the water closes around them. You could have left them. The ends of your hair drip water into my lap. Your face is a puddle of gasoline shining chrome in the porchlight. I know. I’m sorry.

And I think that somewhere in there was an answer. But I’ve forgotten the question.

We left the same way we got here: in the dark. This time, the walk back is familiar. I shouldn’t look back, but when I do, I see the silhouette of your head turned down to face your hand, haloed in the wavering glow of flame.

***

Later, you’ll stand in the same pool, drained, and trace the gaps in the concrete with cracked fingers. The jets empty and open like mouths. How even an absence can hold the past like a wound.

***

When I come into the store the next morning, I find nothing but ash and police tape. In the place of the green and brown building is a pile of black, men murmuring around it. My father stands with his head in his hand, the other wrapped around across his stomach. When I approach him, he turns. Who would do this? Who? Who?

As I am handled into a police car, read my rights, I don’t look at my father outside the window, red and blue lights echoing on his watery face. Instead, I rest my gaze in my lap. Beneath my fingers and the fabric of my shorts lies the smooth glass of the cologne bottle. Warning: highly flammable. The car lurches forward and once I am sure we are far enough, I look up. I watch the wheat fields slip past me in rivers of beige, trying to be golden in the first breaths of morning, like running, like remembering wrong.

 

 

 

 

 

Thanisha Chowdhury is a Bangladeshi-American writer from Northern Virginia. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writings Awards and she is the EIC of Paper Crane Journal. When she is not writing, Thanisha enjoys playing the Sims 4 and crocheting frog hats.

 

 

He collapsed onto the wet mud beside the bank. He’d finally found water.

After the thrumming in his heart had relaxed, he trickled into his mouth what little water he could cup in his palm. His tongue opened like an amoebic creature with a porous maw, absorbing everything it could. The rest sizzled and evaporated like droplets falling on a hot concrete pavement in the afternoon sun. Nothing reached his throat in the first few tries He was satiated and about to go when he saw the floating heads coming towards him.

When they came closer, he realized that all of them looked the same.

They were septuplets. It was rumored that when they were born, their umbilical cords weren’t tied to their mother but to each other. But he didn’t know this. What he saw was seven females staring at him, wanting him.

One naiad got closer to him, tracing a hand over his nape and sliding it down his back. She was guided by his occasional moaning as she unraveled the sore, unloosened muscles and stiff joints. They were going to need it later, this bodily mapping. He thought so too.

In his mind, he was doing his own mapping. Or at least trying. For all his discerning taste in women, he couldn’t quite make up his mind as to who he liked better.  After staring at one for long, he thought he’d pinned down and memorized her specific mannerisms and features and where she stood. He named her accordingly and when he thought he could pick her out from everyone else, he moved on to another one and then another. After he came back to the woman in the first position, she didn’t feel like the same person. The minute details he’d memorized to remember her had transformed into something else. Her differentiating characteristics were so subtle that he believed he had only imagined them on her. After all, he knew she hadn’t physically moved. He started again and kept losing track. It felt like they weren’t distinct people housed in separate bodies but were constantly passing in and out of each other’s consciousness as if through doors.

“You must be hungry.” she said the words like they’d been plucked from a song meant to lull.

She brought a shroom to his mouth. He wasn’t hungry but he ate out of the naiad’s hand like a deer unfazed by its predator.

Before he knew it he was lowering himself into the water.

There were a few tadpoles eddying around at the bank. They swam about in a strange frenzy, never moving away from the edge or deviating from their short circles in which they swam. It seemed as though they were almost toppling over each other to stay the closest to the edge.

Like a corpse being pulled in by a warm current along its course, he moved toward the waterfall with the naiads encircling him.

The water steadily grew warmer. The shroom had rooted itself inside him by now. The warm water drained all the tension from his body and the shroom untied whatever remaining apprehensions he had. What was left was a hazy awareness of everything around him.

As they went deeper, he felt the mud and sediment skid from beneath his feet and he lost balance. Maybe he was just stepping on slippery dead tadpoles lying at the bottom.

They all looked at him and gave him a moment to register what was coming.

He thrashed, splashing water in every direction. He was drowning belly up, with his whole body horizontal on the water. His body lurched, twisted and rotated, dunking and spitting out water. But it wasn’t the uncoordinated desperation of a normal drowning person. It was as though each naiad held an invisible string tied to a different part of his body, like a puppeteer to a puppet. The deft movements of their seventy fingers orchestrated the flailing. After having done this many times before, the rhythms were ingrained in them. They knew the weak points, which string to pull to crack a bone or twist his abdomen. It was a spectacle, a show of their love and continued devotion to their sisterhood. The drowning of that male body proved to each other that they’d drowned their desire for it too. To achieve that, they had to be as violent as they could be.

Drowning the way he was, he couldn’t see the naiads, only the sun. As the water turned hotter underneath, pulling him in, he felt the sun grow bigger and swallow him.

He grew translucent and one could almost see through him, the sediment, rocks and dead tadpoles underneath. The naiads looked placid as they sucked his essence in from the small sun in their loins. They stood still, their bodies too steady for the fact that life was being poured into them. They only moved after he had turned completely into water.

“They never learn.” said the naiad who’d fed him the shroom. She then let out a contrived laugh, hoping the others would join in and their collective laughter would drown the desire pulsating in each one of them. No one responded.

They’d promised to each other long ago that nothing would ever mar their kinship, no person. They could find in each other everything they would ever need. Loving someone besides the other six would mean a dissolution of that closeness.

One by one they each went toward the waterfall and stood under it. The water that fell onto their heads was cool unlike the one he’d died in which was warmed by them.

All of them looked up at the sun suspended in a pond of azure, surrounded by the canopy, waiting for it to happen. Then it did, like always. The peaceful green at the corners of their eyes hushed, spreading inward like venom, before finally closing in on the sun and their sisterhood.

 

 

Tara is a freshman in college. She likes long walks, math, listening to ABBA and rewatching the same musicals over and over again. Her poetry and essays have been recognized by the Young Poets Network and Cambridge University.