Shorts

The Zipper

By Benjamin Armstrong

The day smelt of warm pig dung when we walked towards the Zipper. The ride was old and felt as if it would crumble and kill all on board. We got into the cage, me blushing from this girl. Her ride bracelet, borrowed from a friend, fell from her tan wrist. My beating heart leaped from my crotch to throat.

There was silence.

The man looked at the bracelet then handed it back to her. We went into the sky and kissed.

Ben is a high school student who doesn’t do much other than write stories and play hockey.

My Name is Scout

By Scout Benson

My name has always been different. Someone’s dog is named Scout or their uncle is Scott. When I was younger kids would ask why I had a boy’s name, and adults have always been ecstatic to talk about To Kill a Mockingbird– a book so powerful it gave my name meaning I didn’t understand. So powerful, it often took me from Scout Benson- daughter of Doug and Heather, curious, confident, and bold- to Scout Finch- daughter of Atticus, curious, confident, and bold.

It was life changing to always be associated with this other child, who I was told I fit perfectly.

I bore the weight of this little girl on my own little girl’s shoulders. Her story changed the world. Would mine? My name is heavy. It means things to people. Things like innocence, or pain. My name reminds people of history. Battles fought and won, battles still being fought. Wrongs yet to be righted. A little girl in a world she didn’t understand. Much like I was. Much like I still am. My name is Scout Benson. I love my name. It gives me power. It is not a boy’s name, or your uncle Scott’s name, or a dog’s name. It is my name. A name I share with a little girl in a big story that touched millions. I want to be curious and confident and bold like her. My life is not a story, it is my life. But I too hope to touch millions someday.

Scout graduated from Springville High School in Utah in May of 2021. She enjoys expressing herself through writing about the world around her. Outdoors are one of her many passions, and her writing attempts to convey feelings and emotions that she finds and feels in her life.

I-270

By Grace Gent

it’s 8:17 on a Sunday night in May.
the sky is bright enough
blue enough
that if the moon wasn’t shining pale above us you’d think it was
mid-afternoon.
when i turn my head
pink swaths of cloud wrap around the horizon,
cradling the last rays of sun as they
sink
into the ground.
the endless rolling green of the foothills of appalachia stretch out beyond the dashboard.
my feet are tucked beneath me,
a book cushioned in my lap,
its pages soft from years of love.
my father sits behind the wheel of the jeep he cherishes so much,
singing softly to the songs he raised me on.
a guitar hums through the speakers,
strums of americana fill the car,
vibrating through the dust-laden seats.
my father turns 51 in three months.
in four, i’ll sit on the morning damp football field of my high school with the rest of my senior class.
the cicadas won’t be singing anymore,
their song passed onto the crickets and the morning doves.
in eight months, i’ll have sent out my transcripts
to the schools i hope to spend the next four years of my life at.
in 12 months, i’ll know which school that’ll be.
when my father turns 52,
i’ll be packing my bags,
leaving the blue grey room i grew up in
for the dust bunnies.

but for now, my father is 50. we ride through the mountains that the country forgets, and i watch their secrets pass by in the twilight. tonight, my father is whistling in tune with jason isbell and i am turning the pages of a novel. and though memory is a fickle thing that i am sure exists only to confuse me, i hope that if i return to these forests, these hills, these winding roads, i remember them beautiful, held close by the moon, the future stretching into the valleys below.

Grace Gent is a high school student from Northern Virginia. When she isn’t writing she can be found forcing her dad to take her on road trips and trying very hard to learn the guitar.

Under the Same Roof

By Eliana Goldenholz

Under the same roof is where I have been,
Surrounded constantly by my very own kin,
Pacing the same hall,
Staring at the same wall,
Watering the same single plant,
Hearing inside of me a chant,
“Go out!”
“Go out!”
“Without a doubt!”
“Let go of your anger, worries, and stress,
Just be free from your same old confining address!”
But I can not ignore reason and sense,
The ones to blame for my being tense.
They protest:
“This situation must be assessed!
Do not go out and have all your fun,
For we all must remember your safety is number one!
First check the data, tests, and results,
and learn the effects they have on kids and adults.”
This dispute goes on and on…
I expect it to continue until Covid is gone.

[By now, most people have gone back to their past routines, with minor changes. This is not the case for my family. We are still staying ‘under the same roof’ for much of the time. As I watch others have fun and go about their lives, as if there is no longer a terrible disease in our midst, I wish that I could go about that way too. But I cannot, and my family’s warnings echo in my head. I hope that other teens that are in a similar position read this poem and know that they are not alone.]

Eliana Goldenholz is a thirteen year old living in Brookline, MA. She loves to read both fiction and non-fiction books, as well as learn about a wide range of subjects including math, physics, computer coding, and English literature.

Kinship Corolla

By Camila Cal

Bryan’s foot floors the gas. We’re sailing through the desolate two a.m. Turnpike, his Corolla packed to the brim with friendship and feeling. The five of us know we’re going too fast, that the 90 miles per hour lightning freedom could be extinguished with a simple pothole. I say “slow down” but really, I mean “don’t let this ever end.”

It’s Valentine’s Day.

I was falling asleep on a twin size mattress in Natalie and Nicole’s dorm room, the space where I spent the majority of my freshman year. I lay at the foot of Natalie’s bed; we were crumpled together from the weight of the day. Alexa, my roommate, hunched over at a desk, typing her way through assignments. Nicole played music from her bed across the room. We were all close enough that if we stretched out our arms, we could probably interlock fingers. A pinky promise was always only a reach away.

My phone rings. It’s Bryan, another part of our dorm family. He’s breathless, his voice muffled by the connection or his despair. I’m half-awake but I make out words that sound like “boyfriend” and “cheater” and “break up.” I sit straight up when I hear “Gainesville, RIGHT NOW.”

I don’t remember what my first thought was, probably something along the lines of it’s MIDNIGHT, Gainesville is two hours away, and oh God I have class tomorrow. But those thoughts weren’t important, because one rose above the rest, tore its way from brain to throat to mouth to phone:

“You’re not doing this alone.”

That’s how we end up strapped into Bryan’s college Corolla’s crumb-filled seats leading us to the demise of a two-year relationship. Co-pilots navigating our friend through heartbreak.

I’m sitting in the front seat diligently skipping any song that mentions love or happiness or commitment or feelings or boyfriends that cheat using dating apps, which is to say that mostly we listened to our own voices offering advice and promises that things will get better. I watch the speedometer needle move higher and higher and I want to say what we’re all thinking:

This probably isn’t worth dying for.

Just six months ago, we were all strangers to each other. Random roommates at the mercy of a university’s algorithm. But now I know that Alexa throws up when she eats too much at Chili’s, and I know that Natalie can’t go outside without socks on, and I know that Nicole has always wanted to dye her hair red, and I know that right now Bryan needs us.

I look around at the broken, beautiful group of people hurling through the highway with me and I choose not to say anything at all because the windows are rolled down, the wind slaps our cheeks, and the laughter at how ridiculous this all is bruises our ribcages. And in this brief, gloriously electrifying coming-of-age moment, I think, maybe, just maybe– this is worth dying for.

We wait outside a Gainesville apartment for a while, feeling the energy of the night in our chests. To pass the time, we tell jokes, yawn, kick through the empty water bottles at our feet. And then Bryan comes back, silently crawls into the backseat of the car; his body collapsing into the safety of friendship. It’s quiet for a second, and then he begins sobbing into my friends’ laps. There’s nothing left for us here. Natalie takes the wheel, Alexa rubs his back in careful circles, Nicole runs her fingers through his hair. This time, I do say the thing we’re all thinking: “Let’s go home.”

Camila Cal (she/her) was born in Montevideo, Uruguay and lives in the U.S. She attends the University of Central Florida where she studies creative writing and journalism. Her experience as an immigrant and first-generation student inspires her to write creative nonfiction that others may relate to. Her work has been published in UCF’s literary magazine The Cypress Dome, and Ghost Heart Literary Journal’s Chambers issue. Find her on Instagram at @camivcal and at Twitter at @camivcal!

Our Hometown

By Christian Ash

In our hometown there were places––Real places: like the Taco Bell Burger King McDonald’s trifecta, where if we went late enough we could sometimes see the employees lighting up and smoking underage under parking lot streetlights; and the beat-up other Walgreens, where a big can of Arnold Palmer and a family size bag of those pretzels bites with the peanut butter inside only cost two seventy-nine in exact change; and the church/daycare parking lot where we used to play four-square and had our own ass handed to us again and again by merciless middle school boys who found puberty early and used it to cherry bomb that motherfucker so hard we didn’t have a cold chance in hell; and that secret bike trail that wasn’t really secret and is now an apartment complex haunted by the souls of Baja Blast-drinking sixteen-year-old jackasses pulling wheelies on their ghostly 12-speeds; and the old basketball court that stood next to the high school until orcish men wielding hard-hats and jackhammers came and tore it up to build a brick building with no windows and no doors, that black asphalt and triple-rimmed hoop now long, long gone—the faded white three-point arc and games of twenty-one existing only in memory like the taste of a root beer float; and let’s not forget the football bleachers so stereotypical I don’t need to remind you they had a specified section solely for the hopeless souls of pep band kids with braces and baritones, ADHD and saxophone reeds, converse kicks and splintery drumsticks, lonely oboes and sheet music with penciled-in quotes from Seneca, etc., etc.––those bleachers underneath which the virginities of many were (supposedly) lost, along with something else we didn’t even know we had but now we miss it like those Scooby-Doo fruit snacks that turned out to be too good for reality; and of course that hill behind the Honeywell smokestack, where once on an October midnight before the end of the world we licked cheap McDonald’s ice cream cones in the backseat of a beater, and for the first time saw our lives as bildungsromans building up to this exact moment, saw the honey-colored spirit egress not just with the smoke of Marlboros or blunts or bonfires, but with each new and frosting exhalation.

And now when we find ourselves back in our hometown, it’s just a town that used to be home.

Christian Ash was born and raised in suburban Minnesota, and currently attends Gustavus Adolphus College. In 2020, his fiction and poetry received awards as part of the Lawrence Owen Prizes in Creative Writing. Additionally, his work has been published in Kaleidzine Magazine and Firethorne Literary and Graphic Magazine.