Non-Fiction

“You guys! The volleyball!” I shriek, racing towards the lake.

It’s too late. It rolls into the water with a disappointing silence, like a yo-yo slipping down its string. It drifts slowly but surely to the middle of the lake, where it then stops in the dead of night.

My friends crowd around me and debate possible options to reel it back. Someone suggests stealing the life preserver from the pool, but that doesn’t sound very responsible at all. Another tries to wade through the lake, but it is surprisingly deep. Someone else walks back home for a spool of twine. They try to knot a circle to lasso the volleyball, but we are hardly Westerners.

“When’s your birthday?” the culprit asks with a nervous smile.

“May,” I grumble.

“Okay, bet. Expect a new volleyball in May,” he says, flashing me a grin and a thumbs-up. I know his answer is genuine and this predicament isn’t entirely his fault, but I still glare in response.

It is 2020, and the pandemic isn’t slowing down anytime soon. Playing volleyball and badminton at our local park has been our only source of social interaction for the past month. This volleyball is the only one we have, and in our adolescent minds, holds infinite power for joy.

I wander to the other side of the lake and hope it will float in my direction. Plopping down in the grass, I take off my mask and gaze at the still water. The volleyball looks like a bead of color in the monochrome night, a dot of white in a black abyss. From where I sit, it almost resembles the reflection of the full moon, wafting along the water and surrounded by specks of twinkling stars. I half expect a fish to surface and spike the ball into the atmosphere, causing it to never be seen again. Maybe it’ll knock a star out of place. Maybe it’ll form a new constellation. Maybe the planets will align, beckon a new fortuitous age, and then someone will find a cure for us all. Maybe the tides will go wild with the appearance of this new moon. I shudder and rub my icy hands together, my imagination running wild with the current.

When it drifts to the other side of the lake, I touch the moon and frown. Its craters are all wrong, too shallow and straight. The texture is too soft. I am not holding greatness or infinite power in my hands. My hope dissolves into the water.

It is just a wet cold ball, stolen from the sky.

 

 

Raiya Shaw is an undergraduate student at the University of Central Florida majoring in English: Creative Writing and Sociology. She works as a writer for Her Campus magazine and has been recognized nationally by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and the NCTE.

Zhang was one of those hundreds of quiet, plodding men who kept Chinatown alive. He had come to America as an exchange student decades ago, dreaming of becoming a civil engineer back home, designing apartments for the developing Sichuan. When he consumed alcohol for the first time at a college party, he’d forgotten those goals forever. The drink consumed him right back—leaving him to pick up the pieces of his life for the first time when it was nearly half over. Yet he had in the end; he’d learned a few phrases like “here’s your bill” and “don’t cheat,” enough to bargain at the market. Broke and broken, unable to return to China, he created for himself a little slice of home where he was.

He ran a little restaurant tucked in a back alley. In truth, it was an exaggeration to call it a restaurant. It was really a stall, with its rickety bamboo doors that were kept open by a broken brick to prevent them from getting stuck; the faded red spring-festival paper, peeling off with the wind; the dusty bulbs casting a dampened lighting that felt almost atmospheric. Yet he never bothered to change things, as he knew these were the reasons his customers came to visit, even more than the authentic Sichuan dishes: noodles in hot chili oil, stinky tofu, chicken claws boiled in a sour-and-spicy soup. His customers were college students from the nearby University of San Francisco—young men and women with pock-marks over their faces, plastic foreign bills still in their pockets, their accents apparent despite all their efforts. They came because the splintering walls reminded them of their childhood homes, the dustiness of the lighting of the rusting oil lamps which lit their summer nights. They did not mind the dinginess; they had grown up amongst it, had grown to love it, to see it as home.

It was a sweltering summer afternoon when Zhang received his first new customers in ages; a young couple. It was immediately apparent that they were without the intimacy which came from a lengthy relationship. The man bore no resemblance to the majority of his other customers; he was tanned, and despite his Chinese appearance, he looked up quizzically when Zhang greeted him in Mandarin. He stepped in cautiously and tentatively, as though he was a traveler just arriving in a foreign land. The woman was rather tacky-looking, with a worn pink purse and a matching dress ripped at the seams; she hailed Zhang enthusiastically. They sat at the counter and each ordered a bowl of beef wontons. The woman took the pair of chopsticks in hand; the man asked for a spoon.

Even Zhang could tell he wasn’t impressed with her. The man watched her mouth insistently: her lips painted more brightly red than the American style; the way they curved upward too much, as though they were used to creating different sounds; the gap between her two front teeth which would have been corrected by an orthodontist, had she been born here. She slurped at the wontons with an intensity that betrayed her hunger for home, only stopping to cast around a nostalgic glance at the decor around them. When they were finished, she clung to the counter, examining it intently as though she could be taken back to her parents’ dinner table by her pure imagination. The man was anxious to leave, to be free of the smog, of the language others spoke and he could not decipher, of the strange foods they were consuming. He pulled on her arm until she let go of the table, letting herself be dragged out.

They came every Friday, always ordering the same dishes. Zhang took to preparing these bowls ahead of time, watching the same patterns play out. The woman would chatter about nothing in particular in her nasally accent. The man would sit, uncomfortably and silently, rocking back and forth, as though to will the groaning creaks of his chair to drown her out. The man was one of those who were not mean-natured, but he did have a selfishness, a natural need for reassurance which came from his youth. He did not mean to lead one on, but could not help his revelation which came from her—that he could be loved, admired. He may have found her quite disgusting, but kept her around because he enjoyed the reassurance that one might be dedicated to him, and the pleasant sensation of having a woman interested in him. He sat, determined to trade his comfort for the adoring words she spoke, determined to ignore the foreign-ness of the mouth which pronounced them and her differences which drove them apart. He tried to ignore the clattering of mahjong pieces, and wrinkled his nose when the young lady asked him to buy anything else, like spring rolls with oxtails.

One day in spring, the woman came alone and waited, sitting with the two steaming bowls of wontons in hand. She checked her phone once, twice, three times. She tapped her foot, then tapped her chopsticks against the noodle bowl. She sat and watched a group of elderly folks gossip for about an hour before she gave up and headed out. She had not eaten any of the food.

From then on, this became a pattern; she came each Friday to sit at the counter with her two bowls of wonton soup, which always remained untouched. Holding onto them for warmth, she listened to orders being taken and shouted to the kitchen, the cheers of old men as they bet on mahjong, and the whispers of grandmothers worrying about their children. She examined every detail of the restaurant; the crackled paint of the roof, causing steam to float through the top; the oil smeared on the countertop, running to the floor; and the ink tapestries hung haphazardly on the walls, their images softened by age. She was as silent as those women in those paintings, silent with want and waiting.

One afternoon in summer, nearly exactly a year after they had first come, Zhang made only one bowl of wontons. It sat steaming in the spot where the young woman usually  was. She came and sat in her usual spot. She hesitated, seeming to notice the absence of the second bowl; yet she was unwilling to acknowledge this difference. Eventually she reached out tentatively and cradled her hands around the single bowl, moving it with a swaying motion, as though she were rocking a baby. She stared straight ahead, straight at Zhang, in a way that seemed expectant—as though he were supposed to do something, as though he had made her a promise.

Suddenly, without knowing what he meant to do, Zhang reached over and seized one of her hands in both of his own. He gripped it tightly and said, “Us lao shang （老乡, those sharing a common home,) we have to watch out for each other, all right? This one is on the house, all right?”

The woman nods and looks down silently. She slurps down the wontons, letting her tears fall free to flavor the soup.

 

 

Tanya is a written and spoken word artist residing on the California coast. They write about their experiences in the cultural melting pot of San Francisco, and about their unique cross-cultural perspective as a Chinese American.

 

 

I wear the hood So I can let the world fade away and float back into my own head,

I wear it so I don’t have to listen to people’s voices. So, I can sit by myself and explore my own mind for thoughts that have never occurred before

I wear the hood to let myself fade away from the nasty looks that Earth gives me once in a while, especially when I miss-step in what I desire

I try my best every day,

even if on that day I did nothing but binge-watch movies and tv shows. Even if all I do is sleep I still try my hardest to be okay.

The world can be a cruel place where, if you’re not loud enough your words will fade away, you will fade away. And that may be so unfair but as much as I want to be seen, a part of me wishes to stay hidden.

I wear the hood so I’m unrecognizable to people I don’t know, people who I don’t want knowing who I am. I wear the hood as it protects me from the stabs of the people that betray.

But when I wear it, I’m also restrained from the warm embrace of the people who actually stay.

The hood is the wall I built around my broken heart. The hood is my mind as it locks my heart in a prison when all it needed was home.

So, I’m working on it, to remove the hood and to let the world see me for who I am, to not be bothered by what people say because the ones who matter just encourage.

I’m working on removing the hood slowly… but surely because I don’t want to be restricted from the pleasures I might encounter because of the people who couldn’t treat a given heart right.

It’s okay, I’m not poking blame on anyone because it’s not one… but more like a little from everyone. Unknowingly and unintentionally.

I do get that part, mistakes do Happen.

mistakes will always happen.

Let’s leave the past in the past and see what happens when you carry just the lessons taught a little more optimistically, let’s just see what happens,

and if we don’t like the ending, we can come all the way back and find a new path ahead.

The time we have, it feels like forever… So, we have all the time we need to mend, to run, to fall, to fly, and to fall all over again.

what we can accomplish by just being is unlimited.

Feeling everything is so beautiful in ways that can only be recognized only when we are there, present in the moment that cannot be cheated into. I had forgotten that.

The hood guises itself as protection when in truth it is just the thing that destroys us silently, slowly, from the inside.

I’m going to remove the hood now because I have a world to welcome into me and a lot of time to recover from everything I might feel.

“If death is the destination, why not risk it all?”

 

 

Deeksha is a teen writer, poet, and an aspiring author. She recently published her new poetry book: The Vacated Heart. If she’s not on her computer frantically writing dark fiction then she’s probably reading another good book. Some of her other hobbies include cycling, coding, and art. You can find her personal blog at: Wizardee.in

I know I can’t afford it right now but damnit, here in the quiet of Italy, under the infinite possibilities of my future paths, having grown paranoid and ever-ponderant of these paths after a renewed reading of the Borges—Oh how deeply I feel this liberating instability and desire to live from a car, an SUV (that beautiful, mythic beast whose secrets are known to all suburban mothers), or dare I say Max Tennyson’s Rus Bucket, which one day I could use to drive my many nieces and nephews around the world, speaking all the languages, eating all the food, playing all the games—Oh how magnificent that seems to me even now, still a teenager trying to decide where I’ll be living come two months’ time and yearning for home but yearning for life, for the world, for the stories I’ll tell my descendants when I no longer have the strength left to live them; how I yearn, how I yearn—so young! so old! so much time! not a minute! (time to get the shit together up and together before I grow up enough to realize it’ll never be together)—Oh how confusing it is to sense the world’s size from the tiny town of Mondovì, and how deep the desire to own bookshelves!

 

 

 

D’Antonio Ballesteros (@danteanantonio) is a musician, writer, and actor based in Brooklyn, NY. He writes plays and poetry, fiction and non-, and is spending quite a bit of time these days researching for a novel. He’s also exploring the worlds of microtonal and electronic music. You can find his work in Progenitor Art and Literary Journal, Blue Marble Review, and New Note Poetry, among others.

It is a late fall afternoon. The kind where one can feel winter’s shoulder butting in.

Disrupting the beautifully sunny scene with its crisp winds and tiny flurries of snow. I sit by the fireplace and the covered bowl of dough: simultaneously warming my feet and eagerly watching the dough rise, waiting for it to balloon up enough so that I can punch it down and see as it deflates back into the confinements of its glass bowl. But a watched pot never boils so I give up on the dough to busy myself elsewhere.

Beep! Beep! Beep! Fire! Fire! An automated voice warns us. I jumped up. But not because of the potential danger. No. I know that this alarm does not mark a tragedy but rather: a meal. As suddenly as the alarm did, it hit me. All the tell tale signs of an active kitchen. I stand at the top of the stairs where I have found all the scents carry to the best. The smell of warm dough and basil trace the air. The soft sound of distant voices and clattering utensils. The sight of all of it as I make my way down the stairs.

My dad bustles around the kitchen sporting a fleece and beaten down Birkenstocks from his college years with the corner of a tea towel stuck in the side of his pants acting as his only form of an apron. He sees me enter the room and smiles. Never mind that we drove home in silence earlier that day because I had a bad race. Or that he most likely had to listen to my oldest brother curse him out and storm off just an hour prior, and will probably again tomorrow. “Hey Annie-Belle,” his nickname for me that I still don’t quite understand. “Here, grab a towel and start pinching the crust.” I don’t need to respond. I searched the towel drawer for the most aesthetically pleasing one and tucked the corner of it into my pants, just as he did: letting it hang on my side down to my knee. We pinch the crust of the pizza dough which rests on a wooden pizza board propped up over the sink. With the newly formed wall we just made around the edges he swirls the olive oil onto the dough and allows me to spread it out. With a perfectly imperfect ratio of sauce and cheese and peppers and a much too large pinch of parsley: we declare it a masterpiece. A masterpiece which is ready for the oven. We start the next pizza. Tossing flour generously onto the bare counter to roll out the pizza dough just enough to allow us to throw it in the air a few times to finish the job.

An array of pizzas build up on the counters around the oven, waiting for all of them to be finished so the family can eat together, which is a rarity these days. But we are the chefs. We sneak a bite of the most cooled pizza, savoring the blend of flavors. “Mama Mia! That’s a

good-a-pizza!” He exclaims, quoting a line from a childhood book called Pizza Pat. It was one of our favorites.

The clock strikes 5 and He tells me to go fetch my siblings and tell them that dinner is ready. Never mind the fact that it was not. It never is ready when he says it will be. Soon a stampede rolls down the stairs, myself at the front of it: simply trying to keep my feet underneath me so I don’t get trampled. I pour soda into glasses for my sister and I. Perfecting the art of only making it look even, but I got more.

The food is perfect. Or is it the company that makes me think so? It does not matter to me. In these moments around the table we talk instead of argue. We share pizza instead of fighting over whose items belong to whom. All I can do is sit. Collecting the laughs and loud talking. My heart is full.

 

 

 

Anne Straka is a junior at Arrowhead Union High School. She is involved in cross country, track, and cross country skiing. In her free time Anne likes to visit coffee shops, hike, read, or hang out with friends and family.

Movement one: Alive
Pianissimo, Lento,
berceuse Breath, play-

I was born, in a family of mixed race, which takes a family history project to explain. They were always kind, always there, talked, and ate a great bunch. I never knew the strangeness of the world; I always had my family and I didn’t need anything else.

Then as I grew up, I discovered books, music, and the way the sunlight feels if you lie in its path. I shared this with my family but they never understood my love for any of it. They seemed to only think books give paper cuts, music is sad, and the sun’s rays give burns.

Movement two: Discovery
Accelerando, Slight Crescendo

Every day after school I would come home smiling, and my mom would ask, “Ok sweetie, what do you want to start with, piano or homework?”

I would immediately run to the piano and carefully pull out the bench and turn the light on. (sigh) I slowly put my hands on the keys and played. I could transpose any song, memorize it, and do it with my eyes closed. I practiced as much as there was to practice. At first, I thought it was to avoid homework, but then as the months passed I found that I had a passion for music. I couldn’t part with it. I would finger scales on my desk, and hum my music until my sister threw a pillow at my face at night.

Later my mom took me to the local library. I instantly loved the smell of all the books. I would spend hours there and always end up taking home too many to carry out to the car. I would escape from these stories for hours reading all of them only a few hours after I had just picked them up.

I was always captivated by sunlight. The sun was warming, and letting clouds explode off the world around me-it was the sanguine sign of a new day. I would sit on my back porch: hot, painted wooden panels. Letting the sun warm me till I felt heat seep to my toes.

Of these three things, I constructed my new world. The sun was always out even in the rain. Music played every day even if it were some simple background noise, just something to inspire at the moment of course. I married my own made-up guy{s} and created new friends from the stories I devoured. I would get lost, adrift in mirrors talking to myself for hours…

My sister barged into my room. “- Emma”

I jumped up startled

“What are you doing?”

I wonder how long she had been there. “Oh nothing, just talking to myself.”

I looked back into the mirror and could’ve sworn I saw my reflection wink back as I ran out to catch up with my sister.

Movement 3: Alone
Strepitoso, Fortissimo, sortsando

During the whole summer of sixth grade, I would read, play piano or sit in the sun and do nothing else. I was too scared to play with any of the other kids, even some of my closest friends at times.

I had been told by one of my best friends that they no longer wanted to be friends because I was too “Sassy” for them. I was never a talkative person after that. I just thought no one would want to be friends with me, or that when I talked it would make people dislike me. I would play with my sisters outside sometimes but when a neighborhood friend would come outside, asking if I could play, I would sneak back inside to my room, back to the world where all of my book character friends were, back to my piano.

“Hello there, Emma” Anne of Green Gables said with the sweetest smile. All of my favorite characters came around taking turns to greet me.

“Hello”, I smiled, rushing to grasp onto the only people that understood me.

Movement 4; Freedom
Con Passione, mezzo piano,

After feeling so alone for so long I almost gave up. I thought there was nothing meaningful in practicing the piano, lying in the sun, or books. Year after year passed when 8th grade came, and I met my best friends: Emma, Ellie, and Evy.

I met them at a youth group and they were always affectionate and brought the greatest out in me. They always talked about how convivial and maybe even sometimes astute I was. I never before realized I could be loved by people other than my large family or the world I created. We would talk about music, lay in the sun, laugh, and talk about the latest books that we‘d read. I could finally share my world with other people.

Finale: Love Maestoso,
Mezzo forte

After all of my years of friendship, even with fictional characters, I have never felt so loved. As my worlds were tearing apart, my friends were always there to keep me standing. They understood me almost more than I did myself But I will always give credit to the sun that gave me warmth, the music that gave me life, and the books that first gave me something to hold onto.

 

 

 

Emma is a hard-working student busy with marching band, piano practice, and of course, writing. She hopes to continue this pursuit of writing and to teach the next generations the power of words. This is her first published writing with Blue Marble Review and is excited to do more!