Non-Fiction

The cathedral was big, absurdly big. It towered over the cobblestone streets of Chartres’ medieval center, imposing its harsh Gothic symmetry on a place that otherwise seemed to exist in a state of perpetual pastel charm. I stared at it, biting into a baguette. The cathedral was impressive. But being a twelve-year-old atheist, I had chosen to stop at the bakery before starting my sightseeing, even if it meant sacrificing the opportunity to experience mass. I found the baguette and the gentle June sun a far more sacred form of communion. I finished my bread, then, holding my parents’ hands, entered the cathedral. I was curious to see a building with such a fascinating and ancient history, but I was ambivalent to the faith that drove the miracle of its construction.

The air was cooler inside the cathedral. It smelled like old stone. What struck me first was the singing: passionate tremulous notes that seemed as old as the walls off which they echoed. Despite my bakery detour, mass had found me. I looked up. The arches rose to pointed pinnacles with a solid grace. The cathedral was composed of curves accented and grounded with the geometry of angles. It was dark, yet in that darkness was so much color. With an almost ascetic sensibility, precious sunlight filtered through windows stained with stories, touching the gaudy marble of the partially refurbished walls.

Juxtaposition brought out my reluctant spiritual side. The cathedral was a place of contradictions. It was there I first saw a detailed depiction of the crucifixion: the grotesque, yet passionate image of self-sacrifice was bathed in the soft glow of candle light. I stared at it, horrified, while a glorious aria played. Beauty emerges from contrast: from a dark church illuminated sparingly with the warm incandescence of the faithful’s newly lit candles and the colorful light of ancient stories.

The grace of this place astounded me. A small melancholy ache rose in my chest, like I was missing or maybe longing for something. I could feel the careful geometry with which the architects had sought to please God. I could feel the many hands that had dedicated their lives to the cathedral’s construction in poignant faith. I realized that I didn’t have to be Catholic for this place to be holy. Its story made it sacred.

In that cathedral I found pieces of myself that didn’t fit, yet I felt whole. For a moment, I let myself become part of an established and complex rhythm. I let myself dance with history. I realized that this experience was incompatible with my atheism. In the years since, I have become an agnostic. I believe patterns are sacred: the ones we follow, the ones we seek to understand, and the ones we create. Notre Dame de Chartres was full of patterns of religion, architecture and art. These patterns created a throbbing amalgam of humanity and math, of logic and faith. As a writer and aspiring linguist, it is my dearest ambition to translate this amalgam into something I can understand.

One of the defining characteristics of humankind is our ability to create stories, our ability to believe in things we cannot necessarily see. Sometimes the things we are not able to fully understand can be the most beautiful. And the process with which we attempt to make sense of these mysteries can be even more exquisite than the enigmas themselves.

After leaving the cathedral, we returned to the bakery to buy another baguette. Meandering through Chartres, we took turns tearing off chunks of the long loaf. As we walked and ate, my mind lingered in the cathedral. Despite the early summer flowers, I could still smell the musty stone.

 

 

Zinnia Hansen is a seventeen-year-old essayist and poet from Port Townsend, Washington. She has a tendency towards abstraction, but a deep love of the idiosyncrasies that make us human. Her work has been published in several magazines. She was a participant in the 2020-2021 Hugo Young Writers Cohort. And she is the 2021-2022 Seattle Youth Poet Laureate.

The average length of a woman’s hand is 6.8 inches from wrist to fingertip. The length of mine is well under six—I have childish hands disconcertingly attached to an otherwise average person. In spite of this anomaly, and beneath the grueling mockery of those who claim to know at least a legion of fifth-graders with hands bigger than mine, my hands have served me just fine. To their credit, their mobility and appropriate proportions have allowed me to live a perfectly ordinary life.

But if I’m allowed to lament just a little, when taken together with the rest of my body, I look like I wasn’t quite assembled correctly. As if somewhere during my conception, the poor gene that would grow my two palms and ten fingers was struck by a malady so sudden and crippling that it became too disoriented to carry out its instructions properly. But whatever it is, my hands just stopped growing, and I’m stuck with them now.

I wonder if there was a precise moment when I became frustrated with this peculiarity. Maybe it was when my cheeks flushed red after the football toppled out of my hand for what seemed like the millionth time in middle-school PE. I squeezed my fingers extra tightly and stared at my target with ferocious ambition, but every time I hoped to see any semblance of that glorious spiraling arc, I only saw the football slip and fall to the ground a mere few feet away from me.

Or maybe it was when my piano teacher suggested a beautiful Andalusian melody to add to my repertoire one year, only to rescind it when we realized I had no hope of reaching the intervals it demanded. I still listen to it and wonder what it would sound like on my piano.

I soon recognized that my dwarfish appendages were proving to be a real shortcoming, and I naturally blamed them for the problems they caused. At a piano evaluation one year, I was required to demonstrate a technique that I hadn’t had to in previous years. That one was especially daunting because my fingers could barely reach the correct notes half of the time. I tried to do it just about every day, but I could never play it just right. Anyway, at that moment, sure, my heart was probably pounding and my palms inopportunely sweating, but what I remember most is staring at the keyboard and its row of black-and-white teeth flashing back at me in a wide, sinister grin.

Performed well, the notes should have been glimmering raindrops, dancing one by one in clean concision. They should have sprung a wistful tear to the eye, coaxed a warm nod of approval from the evaluator. Unfortunately, by now, one can hypothesize how the music did sound. Perhaps its only saving grace was that it could make the soundtrack of a Tom and Jerry chase (imagine Tom stamping across the keyboard in hot pursuit), with no shortage of discordant clangs and pummeled strings. Disgraced, I rushed through the rest of the music that I had prepared for eight painstaking months.

In any case, the results for that performance were subpar, which wasn’t necessarily a surprise. But seeing the marks with my own eyes made me wonder if I was just not cut out for the piano. Being incapable of perfection, I wondered if there was even a point in continuing.

Alas, all I have is small hands. So what? My goal is not to complain. Maybe I’ll never be the next Liszt, but do I even want to be?

As for middle-school PE, I’m pretty sure I had never aspired to become a professional football player in the first place. Surprising as it may seem to me in the eighth grade, the horrors of fumbled passes and missed tosses would not torment me deep into the future. Some things can just be moved on from.

To my surprise, I suspect that I’ve been able to cultivate my skills in other areas precisely because of these setbacks. In my music, I discovered that I can make the music uniquely my own in shaping the voice it takes on beneath my fingers, and this is a goal I can cultivate to fruition regardless of my hands. Indeed, more than the range of notes my favorite performers can hit, I realize that I admire their tone, touch, and phrasing. In the end, what is the harm in a truncated chord if the return is exceptional lyricism? So although it seems that pianistic virtuosity and expansive intervals can impress an audience (or earn a superb technical score), one’s ability to give the instrument life is what captivates it.

Through endless trials and tribulations, my miniature hands have proven to be limited in their means to conquer the instrument. But maybe my key to musicality is not to conquer but to befriend. My inability to subdue the piano has taught me to understand, to negotiate, and to amuse. Though I sit before the same beast every day in all of its enormity, I don’t remember seeing its teeth glimmer maliciously in quite some time. Rather, I’ve learned to love the instrument and my idiosyncratic relationship with it, a far cry from my exasperation at the universe’s injustices years ago at that evaluation.

Currently, I’m studying a piece affectionately nicknamed “Wrong Note.” My teacher affectionately calls it “inhumane.” Structured upon implausible jumps at a dancelike speed, it demands a precision and elegance that I probably have not yet attained, but I have faith that I can. As long as I avoid attributing my hardships to unalterable disadvantages such as the length of my fingers, I will have the perspective that encourages me to keep at it.

The piece derives its beauty from discordant notes. Leave it to a physics student to explain why, but notes that are too close to each other are less satisfying to the ear. When such incongruous notes are heard in a performance, one often assumes that the performer has accidentally struck a wrong note. However, through the melodies which delight the heart in the way that a toddler’s first steps or a baby goat’s teetering trot might, and through the rhythm’s endearing hesitance, the composer reminds us that there is beauty in dissonance and triumph in being almost.

I imagine that I will play many wrong notes, some of them on purpose, and some of them grievous mistakes. My fingers will stumble, hobble, and ache. I will experience frustration that’ll convince me once again that the world is about to end. Still, I am eager to hear these wrong notes—within them, unimaginable revelations await discovery.

 

 

 

Olivia is a student writer from California, and enjoys a multiplicity of other art forms as well.

Writing to you feels sketchy, like I am trying to paint a picture of a kind of formlessness I cannot grasp. Maybe I am not used to writing everything into something. Maybe it is the wave of guile breathing free around me – freedom is a whimsical thing. My palms are tracing patterns of untold stories and I want to tell you that the leaves in my compound dared flying too close to the sun and free fell abashed. I am marvelled by the burnt brownness of the yellow bushes, the lengthy intrusion of the masquerade trees – is there even such thing as privacy, when the clouds stare bleu into my nakedness as I peel lingerie from my skin? I woke up this morning like a log and my bones stretched like stone, water does not quench anything except the combustion of suppressed sentences submerged in my throat.

I want you to read this knowing that I paused punching my keyboard midway because of a notification on Instagram – it was CNA, wearing an artsy T-shirt that affirmed her ancestry & I wonder if we ever get the chance to be the original of ourselves, if reality is true or if the world is founded on a lie we chose to believe in – if there is an afterlife. Maybe the earth is a stage and all of us are just drama queens! Life and death are similar forms of undoing.

Now, I am trying to make my body elastic, this routine requires me to imagine a bicycle and paddle my legs in the air to the utter disemboguement of the fat walls in my belly,  that shit burns! I have taken to walking & I find that there are loud silences with every forwarding of my limbs. I like that the wind knows me and has the fortitude to shrink my afro into a bulb, but I want to ask you what else you achieved from walking between Dandora to Bangla besides your destination. I ask because I want to find home for my nothingness, I want it to swim in a room full of meaning.

You said I could write to you about the moon, about the currents in the ocean, I imagine one as a bowl of dim light and the other a liquid blanket over the earth, both of them swallow light, both of them conceal, both of them form stillness in the gut of the night.

I want to explore the complexity of memory, how contorted and distorted lived experiences can prove, how heavy it can flex on the brain. There are some I have carried for long days – like the memory of my uncle unfastening his belt at the mercy of a con woman, I passed like a shadow & was present like a storm when he told his wife he had gone to pray. I carry both the genesis and the revelation of this betrayal. Do you ever feel hunted by the memory of the madman you saw at Kilifi whenever his image flashes through your senses?

These days, I am unearthing myself, coming undone with loss as brittle as rose petals; I am looking at the complexities that have made me simple, gearing at the drowsiness in charge of my insomnia. Sometimes I am begging for rest & other times I am wanting to be riled up.  I want to coil into the arms of anything ready to give me a tooth of attention & lest I forget, my cabbage turned purple this evening.

 

Roseline Mgbodichinma is a Fiction Contributing Editor for Barren magazine, a Poetry Mentor & Alumna at SprinNG, and an NF2W scholar in poetry. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Native skin, Isele,  The African writer,  Hellebore, West Trestle Review, JFA human rights mag, Indianapolis Review, Artmosterrific, Kalahari review, Blue Marble Review & elsewhere. She blogs at www.mgbodichi.com

It has often been said that opposite forces are complementary. Be it through light and dark, loving relationships, the attraction of magnets, or even the ancient Chinese philosophical symbol Yin and Yang, seemingly antithetical parts create the concept of dualism. This is especially evident in literature, where the theme of “Good versus Evil” is ubiquitous, juxtaposing morally righteous characters with someone antithetical who is ethically flawed, usually after undergoing a turning point in their life. From the perspective of a reader, a story isn’t entertaining if merely one force dominates the entire time, whether good or evil. Instead, literature reflects the combination of these two platforms, through the complements of protagonists and antagonists, rising action and falling action, and the figure of speech of oxymoron. William Golding’s literary work, Lord of the Flies, is the epitome of the theme of “Good versus Evil”: Golding elucidates through Jack how a once innocent character is transformed into evil because of his surroundings. 

Golding’s Lord of the Flies reveals Jack’s transition from morally correct to incorrect (or good to evil), due to his environment. This selection illustrates the survival of a group of boys who are stranded on an island with no adult supervision. In chapter one of the book, Ralph, Jack, and Simon venture into the depths of the island to learn more about their location. As they are about to head back, they hear an animal squeaking – an innocent piglet. Having a large appetite, the boys try to capture and kill the animal. “He raised his arm in the air. There came a pause, a hiatus, the pig continued to scream and the creepers to jerk, and the blade continued to flash… Then the piglet tore loose… Jack’s face was white under the freckles,” (Golding 31). 

The only thing preventing Jack from slaughtering the pig is his attachment to civilization, but more importantly, the sliver of morality that he retains. Just as Jack is about to strike, he realizes that he is a civilized boy from England. Killing the pig would mean that he has lost his decency, turning him into a savage. Jack’s behavior here illustrates the nurturing aspect that humans possess and how it can contain our savage instincts. His actions reflect that humans are equipped with a capacity to understand morality, as well as the knowledge to distinguish between righteousness and grim actions. Jack and the other boys are all hungry, and Jack is in the perfect position to make the kill, but his nurturing disposition is what prevents him from following through. This supports the idea that, at first, Jack is able to differentiate between good (not killing the harmless piglet) and evil (slaughtering the pig). However, his ability to recognize these two parallels of justice diminishes as the novel progresses, resulting in the emergence of his wickedness. 

Jack’s evil persona is shown after he and Roger, another violent boy, brutally slaughter a pig, and Jack’s group of boys imitate this hunt while joining his eerie chant: “Then Maurice pretended to be the pig and ran squealing into the center, and the hunters, circling still, pretended to beat him. As they danced, they sang. ‘Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Bash her in,’” (Golding 75).  

Not only has Jack lost his innocence and transformed into a savage, but he has also influenced his peers to follow similarly, showing that the boys have lost all their decency and no longer retain their civilized manners. The primary reason for Jack’s change is most likely to prove to the other boys that he can kill the pig, as he was taunted for not killing the pig the first time. In addition, being in a stressful environment may have affected Jack and his nurturing instincts have now been clouded by his survival affinities, turning him into a savage. These savage inclinations have most likely grown due to his desire to be accepted by others, supporting that the physical and social environment play a role in one’s ethics.

Golding continues to develop Jack — the antagonist and opposing power of Ralph — into a brute to portray that humans, despite being born with a civilized instinct, may resort to violence solely because of their desire to survive. Jack and his band excitingly reveal their killing to the rest of the group: “We spread round. I crept, on hands and knees. The spears fell out because they hadn’t barbs on. The pig ran away and made an awful noise…It turned back and ran into the circle, bleeding” (Golding 105). 

Jack’s conspicuous transformation into viciousness shows his desire to survive which is accomplished by obtaining an unconventional food source – a pig. The fear of death impels the boys to find any food, no matter how disgusting it may seem, showing that the boys have lost all their decency and no longer retain their civility. Being in a stressful environment where one is forced to survive affects Jack, and his survival instincts prevail over his civilized impulses. He has turned into a savage that is willing to do anything – even brutally stab a pig – to escape starvation and essentially, death. Consequently, the basis of evil may sometimes be a motive to survive.

Jack and his band symbolize evil, whereas Ralph and his squad represent good. This separation is conspicuous because of the savagery and irrationality that distinguishes the two. Most evidently, the driving factor behind Jack’s transition into ignobility is that his life is on the line due to him being stranded on a wild island, with no aspects of civility present. After all, the boys now hunt for food, build their own shelter, and relieve themselves on a beach, instead of having access to the luxuries which are available at home. The perspective of the “Good vs. Evil” theme in this story is that by stripping away all remnants of society, Golding demonstrates through Jack’s group, how humans can quickly transform from innocent to savage (good to evil).

Golding’s Lord of the Flies illuminates how the lack of amenities can result in evil through Jack which supports the theme of “Good versus Evil.” Even in today’s society, humanity tends to forget that the world cannot exist without either “good” or “evil” people. Simply having just one or another is impossible since the spectrum of being morally righteous is subjective. The same can be compared to the concept of light and darkness. Without light, darkness cannot exist. Yet without darkness, light cannot exist. This situation exists solely because the two qualities are mediums of comparison and subjectivity, not definitive measures. Thus, “Good versus Evil” in a literary sense serves as a didactic for mankind to scrutinize not only their potential wrongdoings, but more importantly, how they can be ameliorated.

 

 

Tanay Subramanian is a senior at Dougherty Valley High School, where he competes in Varsity Extemporaneous Speaking, and Varsity Congressional Debate with a nationally-ranked team. He is an avid jazz saxophonist and teaches dozens of students across the nation as part of Tanay’s Music Foundation (tanaysmusicfoundation.org), donating the proceeds to charitable organizations. In his past time, he enjoys performing jazz at public events, in addition to conducting medical and social justice research. When he is not volunteering at John Muir Hospital or shadowing a cardiologist, he can be seen leading his Boy Scout troop as an Eagle Scout.

 

Works Cited
Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. Penguin Books, 2003.
 

 

 

 

The motel was dingy and run-down and highway-side, but I didn’t mind because my life was about to change, and such dramatic instances don’t require five-star hotels. This motel even, had no vacancies, along with all others in the area. On August 21, 2017, the city of Idaho Falls, Idaho, typically dredged in sleep and quilted between vast stitches of nothing, burst at the seams.

Around noon, the “Great American Eclipse” was to occur—America’s first total solar eclipse since 1979—and Idaho Falls was directly in the path of totality. My father had awaited this event since 1979, and I, ceaselessly captivated by space, accompanied him to Idaho.

That morning, I noticed how the motel was abnormally alive, jolted into sentience by a shock of intrigue, awakened from primordial slumber to watch the galaxy shift. When we entered its “backyard” (an equally dingy lot of dying grass), we found clusters of people setting up telescopes and cameras. The air buzzed with eager conversation as we wandered to the middle of the lot and put on our eclipse glasses—we could only look at the sun safely during totality.

Soon, the eclipse and the waiting began, moon eating away at sun, rock suffocating plasma. The sky slowly dimmed even though it was only around eleven a.m., and street lamps flickered on. I tried to place my own mortal insignificance in the scope of it all; struggled; failed.

“Where are you from?” a man asked us, wielding a complicated camera. We learned that he was from California. A woman nearby was from Australia. She wore a flowy beige dress.

The Californian smiled. “It’s amazing, people coming from all over the world for this.”

“Yeah,” I echoed, almost to myself, gazing at throngs of strangers staring up at the same sky, marveling at humanity’s instinctual yearning for the stars, “it’s amazing.”

Small talk dwindled as our hazy anticipation suspended reality. Watching the sun vanish, I understood why we once believed that solar eclipses heralded the end of the world. I felt it too.

And suddenly the street lamps brightened and the sky darkened to the deep color of wine and everyone held their breath, eyes fixed in rapture, and someone exclaimed, “It’s totality!” and I took off my glasses and I saw. The solar corona shone around the moon like a halo wrought with silver, and I remember thinking that the moon seemed so tangible; it wasn’t just a constant fixture in the sky but something real, something I could reach out to and touch.

Moon moved between sun and earth, the cosmos realigned, and this random world, this world of accident and chance, this world where we are small and everything is out of our control, created order out of disorder. It was entropy—the universe’s descent into chaos—in reverse.

I wasted it: 101 seconds of totality, and I spent most while taking poor-quality pictures.

Even as I took those pictures, I thought about the human desire to photograph, to preserve intangible things beyond memory. I took photographs to remember, because even a mere three years later my memory is fuzzy at the edges like a Polaroid vignette, but maybe I would  remember better if I didn’t spend so much time photographing. Memory: my personal paradox.

After totality ended, everyone stood in silence, transfixed. Meanwhile, slivers of sun crept out from behind the moon, disorder created from order, entropy-in-reverse-in-reverse.

Eventually people packed up cameras, shuffling, spellbound, speaking in low murmurs. Without fanfare, we, strangers of all nationalities, filtered together back into that motel. Extraordinary into ordinary, disorder into order. Again, entropy spun on its head. I felt like I was dreaming; I didn’t realize how, picture or no picture, there are some moments we can never quite shake.

 

 

Alyssa is a high school senior from New Jersey. Along with her passion for creative writing, she loves literature, psychology, and neuroscience. Alyssa has previously been published in The Writers Circle Journal, and she is a prose editor at the Body Without Organs literary journal.

In elementary school, I loved the seafood section, the teeming clams with their tracheal tubes peeking from two shells, Mercy and I poked at them with the scooping nets when the butchers weren’t looking to see if they would react to our prodding. We could stare for hours at the Darwinism acting itself out in gurgling fish tanks as lobsters with red tags clamping their forceps scrambled over each other in close quarters, the undulating fish beating rhythm as a dozen eyes glazed back at us. Once, my mother had to drag me away from a box of frogs just as I reached a questioning hand into their ribbitting colony. She bribed our silence and complacency with rice crackers, pineapple cakes, pretzel sticks, Yan Yan strawberry dips, xiao mantou. Nothing spoke peace more than blissful chewing. Guzzling down Yakult and chrysanthemum tea was how we nursed our lips from the ravage of saltiness. If our mouths were occupied with an assortment of snacks, there would be no room for fighting throughout the rest of the day. We were too focused on making sure the Pocky sticks would ration out for the car ride home, sucking the sweet, pretending we were smoking a long one. Mercy would always be the most patient and giving when Cether and I would beg to share her snacks after we carelessly gobbled ours down. We never saw anyone at Trader Joe’s but here, we managed to always run into another auntie from church, BSF, or PTA who would also be shopping the deal they heard from their friend about the niu rou sale. It made sense, though, where else did all the magic in our kitchens spring from? Even though I can’t read the labels, I know by sight the sauces and spices that are hot pot necessities, the way my mom rests her head against a watermelon to hear its well-grown echo reply back to her. This knowledge, so primal, the taste buds craving the salt and sugar is a heritage I can always name.

 

 

Jireh Deng (she/they) was born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley of Southern California. Her words appear with the Asian American Writer’s Workshop, podcast “VS”, Edsurge, Level Ground’s “Blooming in the Whirlwind”, and YouthSpeaks’s anthology “Between my Body and the Air”. She is a workshop participant in Get Lit Words Ignite 2020-21 Poetic Screenwriters Lab. Summer of 2021 she will be an editorial pages intern at the LA Times. Connect with her on Instagram and Twitter (@jireh_deng).