Non-Fiction

The wind breathes cold on my face. Green-tinted transparent waves leach away the tideline, taking everything except the pitch-black strands and broken shells forming a jagged ink-line of unwanted debris across crusty salt sand. There is a chill in the air, stealing uninvited through my jacket and whispering across my hair. Tumbled rocks lean into the beach, forming mounds of solid granite, immovable stone faces turned to the sky. Above me a world is falling away, sinking down in fire below the visible realm. The deepest hollow imaginable cups it as it dies, a hollow swathed in dusky blue and murmuring indigo. Streaks of burning color shoot warm pink fingers across it all, clutching on, afraid to let go, but all in vain; their grasp slips, falters, fades. Then, like a heartbeat gone cold, little frigid points of sharpened silver thrust through woven fabric to dance, luring me higher.

A pale, deadly glow lightens the horizon. Rising like an invincible destroyer, the great pitted face of Chang’e arises, glowing, cutting the soft sky with pitiless lances. The night’s full beauty descends upon us, and we stand struck dumb. There is nothing to say; all the words are gone, flown away to heaven, and we cannot call them back just yet. Soon we will be ourselves again, talking, defiling nature’s purity with our relentless worldliness. By then the spell will have dissipated and left us with nothing more than the echo I write from: memory. But right now the world turns day into night and the metamorphosis merits utter silence. It is the only fitting tribute.

Turning, we walk away. The idea of leaving feels strangely alien to my star-numbed mind; there is no other existence than that of a mute spectator party to the greatest costume changes unknown to mankind. Yet I walk. Shoes dig into the sand, eradicate thousands of burrowed homes. Nobody notices. When we reach the road, tarmac welcomes us. Not many humans pass this way nowadays, only the little earth-dwellers we hunt to extinction. Yet we walk. The road holds no ghosts of inherited wrongs, not for us. For the hands that felled the noble brethren of the trees now watching us, maybe. For the feet that stood here and declared it worthy for destruction, without a doubt. But we know nothing of this, nothing of the senseless cruelty except for what we are told. Who is to blame? The question follows us, eyes pleading, longing to be answered. And still we walk.

 

Hannah Ling is a Malaysian homeschooler with a penchant for pointless debates and interesting accents. She enjoys theatre, photography, writing, daydreaming, and the minutes just before a thunderstorm.

The watercolor sky of each seemingly endless June day bled into the next. The sun turned the other girls red and left their skin bruised and tender. They slathered on aloe vera and emptied cans of spray-on sunscreen, but flakes of flesh still ended up on the front porch and in the bathroom sink. I did the same; smeared on layers of protection against the angry sun, anxiously waiting for my skin to get burned too. I felt the suffocating weight of warm air on my face and a stream of water droplets rushed from the roots of my hair to the back of my neck, but the pain did not come. Instead, I glittered in the sunlight and could see my pale skin darken into the sweet honey of summer. The sunscreen I had used to guard myself dripped away until my body shifted into shadow.

Two girls posed for a picture on the front steps of the bunk. I drifted into a corner and pretended to reorganize the pairs of sneakers lined up by the door. My head swiveled around periodically, waited for a half-second to be invited into the exclusive photoshoot, then went back to occupying myself with more arbitrary tasks. The girls held clenched, closed mouth smiles. They stuck their elbows out and threw their shoulders back. Their arms were wrapped around each other, but one girl’s fingers barely grazed the other’s back. They stood perfectly still while drops of sweat collected into shallow puddles on the ground. After a single click of the shutter, their shoulders slumped back down. They started to fake laugh for a second pose and soon their forced giggles grew into uncontrollable laughter. Another click. One girl rushed around to the back of the camera to see what she looked like.

She let out a high pitched cry for help. Her voice was burdened by the agony of summer heat and the insecurities she tried so hard to suppress. She hated the way that her eyes narrowed into dark slits whenever her smile was genuine. She complained to her friend that it made her look Asian. She said Asian like she was spitting out rotten food. The disgust in her voice sent an earthquake through my spine. Could she see me? Did it matter? I stood speechless on the porch. Her words took refuge inside of my mind. My tan skin blended into the wooden walls and I hoped that if I closed my eyes she wouldn’t be there when I opened them. I stopped adjusting the shoes and kicking the dirt into piles. I walked into the corner of wet towels and bathing suits and tried to take up as little space as possible. Thick teardrops rolled down my cheeks but I couldn’t lift my hand high enough to wipe them away.

The sun dried my tears and left thin lines of salt on my face. I positioned my head towards the shade so my eyes wouldn’t squint. Every muscle moved with calculated caution. I stared at my arms. Now they looked like they had been muddied and no matter how hard I scrubbed, the layers of contaminated skin refused to fall off. I ran my fingers across my eyelids and failed to find the same deep-set eye creases and long lashes that the other girls had. I silently cursed the sun for making me different. They were beautiful in a way that I could never be. Yes, they burned. But they burned together.

As the day faded into night I sat on the front porch and watched streams of girls walk by and gossip and giggle. One girl’s face blurred into another whenever I took a second to blink. They didn’t need to look at their arms or trace their eyelashes. They could see themselves by watching each other. There was a security in their sameness but they paid no attention to it. Some girls sat down next to me to see the stars, and I half smiled at them. Their eyes were pointed in every direction but somehow avoided contact with mine. I retreated into the darkness. In the midst of our closeness, I was still inevitably alone. The sun rose the next morning and my fingers trembled because they were scared to touch the light.

 

Arden Yum is a junior at Trinity School in New York City. Her favorite subjects are Latin, English, and Math. She enjoys photography, teaching, and oatmeal. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing awards.

At age thirteen, I lived on the fifth floor of Ya Qing Court, a grey apartment building with many windows that overlooked the street. There, we called the smog over the city the yellow dragon because it made the sky perpetually yellow, and people often wore masks outside. A few Yang trees sat across the Beijing street in a courtyard. On the ground floors of apartment buildings were shops where vendors from the country sold candied fruit called tanghulu and guokui pork pancake. Multi-colored awnings always flapped in the wind, and old men sat in their rickshaws waiting to carry passengers to their destinations. Down the street, my school was a complex of sterile white buildings that resembled a jail. Whenever I left the streets and entered the gates of No. 241 middle school, I felt as if I were leaving freedom and entering a courthouse where a strict jury would judge me.

In that school, our teachers were our guides, judges, prosecutors, and executioners. They wielded immense power. One winter, I made Ms. Liu’s face turn red when I privately corrected her use of future tense in English. She sent me outside without a coat, and I stood there for twelve hours shivering in the snow. Often children stood with me who were also sent outside to stand in the snow. Sometimes I could see a hundred children, standing in a line outside, shivering, contemplating their mistakes.

In school, I knew a girl named Nancy. She was the kind of girl who would not eat her hot pot and dumplings outside like the other women while the men ate inside, as was common in Chinese culture. She insisted on eating at the table with the men. She loved hip-hop dancing and ping-pong. While the rest of us left our hair black, Nancy died her hair golden. Her legs were pale and long. Nancy always smelled like laundry detergent, as if her clothes were cleaner than ours. Unlike most of us, she was an Opera God: kind and good and gave everyone luck. Each day, she would encourage her friends: Keep working hard! Have a good day! We lived in a bamboo-steamer-like environment, where every kind word was a cure for death.

Naturally, she didn’t belong in this place. Nancy was like the tiger locked in the zoo. While the rest of us understood our cages, Nancy seemed to quietly pace crazily. We all should have noticed when she began to change.

One day, she stopped smiling. When the teacher called on her, she stood up and said nothing. I thought she was having her period, but then I was too worried about my own problems to help.

On a Wednesday when we arrived at the school, news that Nancy was missing spread quickly on campus. That day, the rain and clouds converged to form a grey dragon in the sky. The whole day, teachers didn’t seem to notice her absence. Even our counselor ate her sandwich in her office and watched television operas. But we students secretly thought Nancy had run away to another city, like Holden in Catcher in the Rye, and would be back. But Nancy’s tall, lean figure remained noticeably absent.

Two days later, I read about her in the city newspaper. They didn’t mention Nancy’s name to protect her identity, but we all knew.

Rumors spread that Nancy was staying in a shabby motel. I knew the place. From traffic and pollution, the outside wall of the motel long ago turned from white to dirty yellow and was covered with patches of small ads. From her boyfriend, I found out that Nancy was smoking marijuana, playing games on her phone, and eating the 3-for-$1 mysterious-meat pancakes sold on the street.

While riding the bus one day to the library, I passed the motel and saw Nancy wearing our school’s uniform, but it was oil stained. Her pants looked wet as if she’d washed them but didn’t have a dryer. Without shoes on, she was standing at the door of her motel room. She gazed straight ahead, and her normally happy eyes looked as if they held a secret. Her long hair looked like that of a homeless woman. For weeks, she stayed there in that terrible motel, skipping school, smoking marijuana, and setting a bad example for all of us. She was my hero. When our teachers weren’t around, some of us said quietly to each other, “I want to be Nancy, even for one day. One hour. So I can stop studying for just a little while.” When we said those words, our faces looked like those of mischievous, scared children. Secretly, we spoke about the joy of playing soccer on a field under the pleasant sunshine or riding the Cinderella’s Secret Palace at Disneyland in Shanghai.

But our words changed when teachers’ pets interjected: “Nancy was such a bad girl. Ms. Lee cannot get the extra prize this month for being a good teacher. We will never be like Nancy!” But secretly, we were all Nancy. We all felt that hidden desire to throw away our futures to go lie in some dingy motel, where life was devoid of pressure, where mysterious meat pancakes were better than egg tarts from Crazy Bakery and unending school. To us, that terrible, frightening life was better than the one we lived every day.

The situation changed when the principal cornered Nancy’s boyfriend and threatened to beat him if he didn’t tell her where Nancy was hiding out. Pretty soon, the police were dragging Nancy into the principal’s office. I remember watching the armed officers escort her across the blacktop to the office. Like a criminal, she looked at her feet the whole time. Her face looked sick, weak, dirty, and wild. I could see a tear in her shirt and her pants, as if she’d run through trees to escape judgment, as if she had been willing to risk harm rather than return.

Later I heard that the principal beat Nancy with her bare hands, screaming, “You’ve hurt our reputation! Now the education government is punishing us by taking money from our school!” When Nancy arrived home, her dad beat her so angrily that he injured her leg. Beatings were normal in China. Parents and teachers beat their children as a way of teaching them life experience. Later that week, at her apartment, Nancy stood on the ledge of the window, but her parents stopped her. She tried to grab a knife, but her parents took her to the hospital, where she lived in a small, dark, windowless room for seven days, like an animal in a cage.

I never saw Nancy again and she never returned to school, but we still talk about her. She lives on in my mind, and I’m sure she lives on in the minds of other students who want freedom. Sometimes when I study biology for 20 hours straight and I feel evil in my brain, I throw my book across the room. I turn on my music, and for ten minutes I become Nancy. I become her.

 

 

 

As a senior at Amador Valley High School, Yuwei is a creative writer, student journalist, and  page editor of the Amador Valley journalism class. She is actively involved in school and enjoys being part of the community. Yuwei is a professional Chinese Zither player, —a 21-string traditional Chinese Instrument almost 2000 years old— which she has done since the age of four and  passed Level 10 at 11 years old. She enjoys doing competitions and won first place in the National Chinese Zither Competition from 2009 to 2016. She also writes her own zither pieces included: Summer; That year, that river; Childhood; Homeland grassland, Homeland river, etc. As a member of High School Music Collaborative and the leader of PLAY Chinese Ensemble, Yuwei enjoys using music to share the joy and happiness to other people in the community. Although  English is her second language and she just came to America three years ago, she has already won the Scholastic Writing Contest, Bay Area Book Festival Writing Competition, and the Tri-Valley High School Writing Competition as the only double winner.She always tries her best to make the school and the Pleasanton Unified School District better as a leader in LINK, an active member in Pleasanton SIAC and a student representative in LCAC and DCLC. In her free time, she enjoys listening to music, reading books and cycling.

 

 

 

Remember when Aiona and I thought you were dying? The big kids kept breaking up, so they tattooed your body with the names of their lost loves. Viscous sap seeped from your freshest scars, and we stored grass and mud in a first-aid kit in case you needed surgery. We named you Bo because it was etched into the most exposed and vulnerable part of your roots.

A few years later, Aiona and I drifted apart – she liked singing, but I liked reading. Liking turned to loving when I discovered Harry Potter during lunch break on a warm Monday, slouched against your trunk. I can still smell the mildewy scent of your soil-clad twigs, mingled with the cool fragrance of magnolia flowers in elusive wafts of summer freshness. I shopped with Harry and Hagrid for school supplies on Diagon Alley, peaking through the store façade of Flourish & Blotts, where leather-brown tomes like giant chocolates were stacked to the ceiling in rickety spirals. Under the invisibility cloak, I snuck into the Restricted Section of Hogwarts Library to unravel the purpose of the Philosopher’s Stone. When the school bell shook me back into the muggle world, I picked up one of your fallen twigs before running off to my afternoon class. I had a magical wand now – English Oak, 10’’, unicorn hair, unyielding flexibility, I imagined – and was expecting my Hogwarts acceptance. Although I never received that Hogwarts Express train ticket, I returned every day to read and dream in your protective shade – my Platform 9 ¾ to the universe of magic.

After I had finished the entire series in my native Dutch, I learnt that Hogwarts’ headmaster Perkamentus, meaning parchment, was named Dumbledore, meaning bumblebee, in the original English. I was angry with the translators – a humming old wizard with twinkling eyes and a jolly laugh should not be called a shriveled piece of goatskin! English works needed to be read in English, and as my vocabulary expanded, I gained access to a wealth of English literature, diaries and memoirs, and popular science.

Over the years, I forged bonds with the downtrodden and forgotten characters I read about not because I understood them, but because I was stunned by the profound humanity in their isolation, their resilience, and their complicity in their tragic downfall. There was 13-year-old Theodore Decker, who drifted through cities full of nastiness and apathy in search of a home, weighed down by his nagging guilt for an unspeakable theft. There was 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove, who descended into a madness that delivered her from the endless sneers of more beautiful and more eloquent people, and from her burning desire for the bluest eyes. But there was also 36-year-old Humbert Humbert, a vile man with a ruinous, excuseless, but sickeningly passionate heart that coaxed him into child rape, barely possible to like yet uncomfortably hard to judge. If you were an orphan, a lunatic, or a deviant, these characters asked me in unison, would you do better?

In moments like these, I could neither invent an answer nor turn the page. So, I would take a nap under your awning of leaves until your shadow blackened the sunlit insides of my drowsy eyelids. I would roll over to the left and roll over to the right, but you turned and turned as time passed by, chasing me around like a tireless clock-hand, blocking the light and absorbing the warmth from my furry mattress of matted grass.

Sit up and keep reading, you commanded. But this time, a different author, a different subject, and a different genre. So, I read the works of activists who had suffered much but complained little and of scientists who had discovered much but shared everything. Malala Yousafzai, for example, lost the left side of her face during a Taliban shooting in her school bus, while Nelson Mandela sacrificed 27 years of his freedom to a 56-square-feet cell on Robben Island. Their narratives were authentic, generous, and filled with hope, and they showed me that we choose the interpretation of our past that lays out the blueprint for our future.

Carl Sagan, Michio Kaku, and Stephen Hawking took me on an exciting journey through black holes, parallel universes, space clouds, and, finally, back to the pale blue dot that is planet Earth – our mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam – as captured by the imaging system of Voyager 1. Their tales of pink skies, cannibalistic pulsars, and planets made out of solid diamond filled me with wondrous questions. Some inspired a quick web search. Others introduced the very next chapter.

Despite astronomers’ warnings against anything-centrism, many of my fascinations and obsessions had less to do with deep space and more to do with human history. From the 2 million animal species on planet Earth, how did we end up at the top of the food chain? Why did we give up the carefree romanticism of hunting and gathering for a sedentary life in destitute villages? These questions had their answers hidden in the fields of biology, psychology, and anthropology, and I looked for them in the writings of Richard Dawkins and Noah Harari.

For 10 years, Bo, you have shielded me from sunshine and drizzle so that I could live inside the pages of my newest conquests from the school library. Thank you for allowing me to meet Harry, experience joys and sorrows with Malala and Mandela, explore space-time, reflect on the heritage of our tribal ancestors, and be an inveterate reader. I wish you lots of sunlight, water, and nutrients in 2019!

 

Green kisses,
Yingtong

 

Yingtong Guo is an emerging writer and undergraduate student
pursuing a double major in biology and PPE (philosophy, politics, and
economics) at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been
published in Deerfield Magazine and Pacific Ties Magazine. She lives
in Leuven, Belgium.

This creaky, old porch is the same one that I have spent almost every afternoon on for the last fifteen years. The screen gapes open in some places, the brilliantly teal paint is chipped. My best friend’s parents are too busy with their carousel of jobs and their habits and their special needs son to pay attention to home repairs. Or her, most of the time, which is why when the sun starts descending into the horizon line we go next door to my grandparents’ house for a home-cooked meal. She calls them Nana and Pa the same way I do, and they call her squirt or honey or little shit the same way they do me. They always slide bowls of dessert in front of us when we say we’re stuffed because they know we’re never too full for sweets. We’re both lanky and tall and freckled and mean, our bones always ache at this time of day from playing rigorously outside and we are starving. Nana tells us to wash the dishes or she’ll get a switch and being teenagers does nothing to dampen the impending fear that motivates us to the big, full sink.

After supper, we trek back over to her second-story porch to smoke Marlboros and wait on the neighborhood boys to come slinking around the corner of the house. We laugh and sprawl out on comfortable recliners her dad plucked from yard sales or the side of the road. The breeze picks up and we both do a little shiver. I stare at her and I love her so much that it doesn’t surprise me anymore how much alike we have grown up to look. Exhaling smoke, I gaze over the rotted banister and at the green, stinking pool. I stretch, and her voice interrupts my daydream of the wildlife beneath that murky surface out there.

“Where you’d get that scar on your hip? It looks like a burn, a perfect circle and I don’t remember it.”

This is the first time I have ever tried to summon my father back from the grave. I want his soul to take place of mine for a moment, just long enough to lie convincingly. If he could do anything well in the whole world, it was to modify the world into whatever he made up. But I am not him and so all I can come up with is, “It’s nothing, it’s from early childhood.”

I yank my shirt back down without moving my eyes from the bug-ridden pool in the yard. But she notices that I don’t even look at where she’s pointing and she knows me better than my own mother does. Her silence is an aggressive accusation. Her words prove my theory correct, “Stop lying to me, I’ve been around since you were two, I’d know. What the hell is that?” It makes me want to smack her the way she does me when I tell her somebody could drive a semi between the gap in those teeth of hers, but I won’t argue with her because she’s right and we both know that I’m hiding something. Part of me wants to tell her that I understand just as much as she does. My ignorance to the truth of my own story, in more ways than the chapter that she’s trying to read right now, pushes me to anger that cannot be silenced, “Dammit, look I really don’t know and I stopped caring. It’s just bullshit. You really want to see?”

Some wicked, misplaced giggle escapes my throat like a bubble blown in my stomach that floated out. It was gravity – nothing is actually funny. I sit the cigarette in between my lips and pull my shirt up to expose myself. I’ve got a constellation of perfect-circle scar burns across my ribs. She winces and turns away, mouth quivering, as if she hasn’t seen them 200 million times before but never known to look or ever noticed how much foundation I go through. I paint my face pretty and my torso plain with that liquid magic so that nobody asks me who or where or why.

She looks like she might pass out because we’ve been with each other forever and my memories are more worm than thought when they crawl through her brain. She’s not strong. She’s barely able to use her legs properly as she totters to the side of the porch and violently vomits into the weeds below it. Her mind conjures up what it must have felt like as all those cigarettes were extinguished on the thick cover of my rattling bones. I tell her it’s funny she’s noticing in fall, when it’s too late, because he only ever grows hungry when it’s sweltering out. I won’t tell her his name. After she empties her stomach of every bit of its contents, she wipes her mouth and closes her eyes. “I can’t see how you can still smoke.”

****

My mother comes into the bathroom to get the hair dryer while I am drying off from a bath. She says, “What is that on your hip?” I smirk, “You should know.” My voice is hardly above a whisper but she gets the point, she looks at me with eyes that are my own. Her lips curl in on themselves and she steals a continuous look that travel across my ribs, down to the top of my thigh. She shivers. “You know this is the only thing that has ever made me feel as murderous as my mother. Can I hug you over your towel?” She can sense my apology but I only say, “It’s been years. It’s not like you haven’t seen them before.” She leaves because she knows that touches are electric blue flames lapping my skin up, messy and grotesque, like a parched dog finding a puddle in the heat.

****
There is this boy I meet after the trauma that swept me into isolation. At seventeen, I am hostile and blunt and very into my education and liquor. He tiptoes into my world out of nowhere and immediately annoys me because he can barely speak my language. Yet, he clings like a gnat. He’s asking too many questions in his broken, deformed English that he knows I won’t answer and telling me jokes that I do not understand. He shows up at sunset on my mother’s doorstep searching for me on the first day I ever crack a grin at him. Somehow, my family falls more in love with him that evening on the deck than I ever will think about being and for that reason alone, he is allowed into my life. He cooks dinner with my soft-spirited mother and wraps Christmas presents with my spiny-hearted Nana. He never complains when I want to sleep through the day, he just sits beside me as I dream. I wake up to cut fruit and cigarettes beside my bed, and his fingers slowly moving across the surface of my skin.

When he sees the scars it’s because we are camping and before that, I hadn’t been in the woods with a boy for six years, but there is safety in his foreignness and his coming departure. When he saw my bare hip, his mouth formed a perfect O and he sadly stares. You could make beautiful out of ugly memory. Tattoo over. My sister did. I like that he doesn’t call them scars, he doesn’t mention that they are perfect circles and he doesn’t ask who did them. But he does scratch furiously at his own rib cage as he slips from the zipper door and I know he is burning up, though he doesn’t know why. A moment passes and he pokes his head back in, says he’s feeling sick, he’ll go for a walk and be back.

Wildflowers are clutched in his fist when he returns. He looks at me softer than any creature like me should be looked at and whispers that I should get these flowers drawn on my ribs to represent the beauty of uncertainty.

I still don’t know if he said what he was trying to, but I like to think he did.

 

 

Sydney Craig is a double major who really just wants to explore the world. She adores spontaneous road trips, antique hunting, photography that makes you feel something, and laughter of all calibers.

 

To say the least, my grandfather is old fashioned. Constant monologues about New York City in the forties, changes in technology, and how amazing the economy is has left me well versed in the mind of an eighty-five-year-old man. But the most striking of his stale views are those of women.

“Most women her age have hit the wall,” he was explaining one day. “Hit the wall” meant, in paraphrased words, that a woman had “peaked” and lost the sex appeal that gave her value. “But Audrey,” he continued, “is far from it.”

Audrey is his partner. Amicable, devout, at times frivolous. She kept my grandfather company after his wife passed. But in no way was this heavily lipsticked woman comparable to my grandmother.

The range of possibilities in my life have been created by my grandmother. Inspiration overflows from the white stock paper of her resumé. Successful business owner, seasoned globetrotter, cultured trendsetter, loving sister, mother, and grandmother. Rather than acquiescing in an early marriage, she secured a college degree. Once her business was thriving, she resolved to buy an exquisite New York apartment a block from Lincoln Center. With cash. Trips to the jewelry store grew in frequency until she became best friends with the owner. Precious metals and gemstones flooded her drawers. Ruth was utterly powerful.

She never followed the trail of tradition. In a jungle of misogyny, she slashed a path through thick, cunning vines. Ruth shared little with my mother’s mother: her style was extravagant rather than plain and she displayed only grace and class. And I’ve seen her cook only once.

I was small, probably four or five years old. Pigtails bounced next to my shoulders as I sat at the table. The tall, expansive surface enveloped my body and nearly covered my head. Gawking, as I did during every visit, I studied the stark whites of the kitchen, the simple oak cabinets, and the industrial refrigerator that I could have fit in six times over. A miniature Kermit the Frog found a seat upon the cubed steel clock that hung from the ceiling. Between pictures of my cousins and I stuck on by magnets, late afternoon light glinted off metallic gray.

The memory itself is faint but imprinted in my mind. Screeching, the microwave begged for my grandmother to collect her food, but she sauntered over with leisure. The usual smell of her house, a confusing mix of mothballs and incense, meshed with the odor of burnt plastic.

“I’m hungry!” I complained. It would only be a few minutes longer, she replied, proceeding to cook the dish despite the microwave’s plea.

After ten more minutes, a black heap steamed on my plate. Long, bony fingers delivered me a fork. My grandmother stood back and crossed her arms, proud, while I contemplated what I was supposed to do with that fork and a burnt brick of frozen food.

I thought of my other grandmother: full, soft around the edges. Her visits were always accompanied by cookies and presents and hugs.

“What should I make for dinner?” Beth would ask.

But my father’s mother was different, eclectic almost. The scorched meal had been microwaveable Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese. And Ruth had forgone the simple instructions, white type against red cardboard, attempting to unleash her own culinary approach.

When I hadn’t sampled the dish for two minutes, she shot me an insisting look. “Just try it.”

The dark crust resisted my fork at first, then slid right in. Beneath the charred layer was a golden cheesy river, steam rising from its stream. To my young eyes, it appeared edible.

I ate the mac and cheese. It was ambrosia.

I’ve never seen my grandmother cook besides that. And I’m not sure if you can call over-microwaving mac and cheese a method of cooking. But she wasn’t bad at it. She just chose to focus on other tasks.

—
When I discovered she had cancer, I cried for two weeks.

Ten years old. Mostly innocent. I wasn’t completely sure what that word meant. Cancer sounded like a black mold, steadily creeping toward her soul. It sounded like a parasite, arresting, petrifying.

“Her doctors are great,” my dad repeated before each time we saw her. But I couldn’t connect how the doctors were helping, as she grew sicker. After awhile, those recurrent words rung empty.

We started visiting more often. The smell I remembered from an earlier childhood, incense and mothballs, warred with medicinal agony. Tragic orange prescription bottles littered cold granite countertops. Any natural light left—there often wasn’t any; the sky was always gray—filtered through, casting long, orange shadows.

Visits were sandwiched by hugs. “Hi Grandma,” I recited as I embraced her. She had always been tall, lean, thin, but, soon, her ribs jutted against translucent tissue-paper skin. “How are you feeling?” I would ask, but I could never remember her answers. Everything was rehearsed.

The woman I was seeing was no one I knew. She was a shadow of the pill bottles, weak and watery at times, but mostly absent.

There was a last good day. The whole family was there, crammed inside her expansive city apartment. Windows sheltered the party from unfriendly autumn air while welcoming sunlight that emerged for the first time in a week and a half. All the pill bottles were hidden in the cabinets.

We ordered food from the Chinese restaurant down the block. Ruth was an auctioneer, delegating chicken lo mein and crisped halves of egg rolls to distant cousins. A tub of duck sauce splashed on the counter as she unloaded flimsy plastic bags from the sturdier paper bags. She organized a conveyor belt of a meal, designating the beginning, middle, and end of the line, commanding which side of the family to go first, micromanaging which plates were used with which food, —and keeping the pork set aside to maintain something close to kosher for Uncle Earl.

The apartment swarmed with energy. Nostrils flaring, my brother challenged my cousin to see who could eat the most hot peppers without crying. Teenage cousins stood bored in the corner, texting on pearled slide phones as I begged them to braid my wild hair.

Ruth rescued me from wandering window to window, munching on a vegetable dumpling. “Come with me,” she urged. “I have something to show you.”

I followed her confident steps past the closed doors of her bedroom. A lamp blinked on and revealed costume jewelry carpeting a bureau, imposter gems flashing across the room. Something that looked like an emerald reflected in her eyes.

I wasn’t sure what to do. There was a fortune of jewelry mere inches from my fingers. Tense, uncertain, I watched idly as Ruth began to hold up technicolor necklaces, earrings, and brooches

against my eyes. She unfolded my hand, which had frozen into a nervous fist, and began laying pieces in my palm. Her touch was cold yet assertive.

“This one.” She seemed to be chatting to herself, murmuring aside although I was in the room as well. A lapis lazuli charm, encrusted with gold leaf and hanging from a shimmering chain, collapsed into a small mountain. I studied the wondrous pendant while Ruth continued perusing.

“Hmm, and this one.” On a cream-colored pin, black ink drew a scrimshaw ship traversing the ocean. From the water, a whale’s tail waved a solemn hello. The brooch rocked in my palm, ship on rough sea.

Ruth spoke again. “These are perfect.” She dropped a pair of glinting garnet earrings onto my new collection. My birthstone. Beautiful, encased in a gilded frame.

Then, she folded my hand back into a fist, her touch still cold yet assertive, and left the room.

Sophie Lipset is a high school senior with a passion for creative writing. She began writing seriously at sixteen and attended the New England Young Writers’ Conference at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. She focuses on creative non-fiction.