December 2020

I emerged from my room around seven in the evening to grab a snack and chat with my parents after a long day of school and video games. As I opened my door the national emergency alert signal stopped my blood cold in my veins. Three endless, atonal sirens later and the announcer was prophesying the end of the world.

“This is an emergency broadcast,” echoed that robotic male voice that I and the rest of the population have been conditioned to fear since birth, “Nuclear missiles have been detected and are currently inbound. Shelter in place, under furniture in the innermost room of your house.”

He kept going, but my ears were ringing too loudly for the harbinger’s cries to reach me. I stumbled out into the hallway, collapsing against the wall to keep myself upright. It felt as though my heart was beating so fast that it had begun beating slowly. The corners of my vision grew fuzzy, blurring out the family photos hanging up on the wall, and the soft blue glow of the living room television at the end of the hall.

Thoughts of my parents snapped to the forefront of mind, and I stumbled on weak knees towards them. My mother reclined on the living room sofa, listening to the emergency broadcast in her bathrobe with a can of peanuts in one hand and her decrepit old poodle curled up in her other arm.

Dad was sitting back in his brown leather chair, his eyes only half open. I couldn’t be sure if he was hearing the whole announcement, on account of his bad hearing. I stared at them from the hallway, my hands gripping to anything solid.

This was it, then.

This was how we died. Me, having just spent the last couple hours wrapped in blissful ignorance as I played first person shooters with my friends. My parents here with me, to the very end. Likely, my sister would call any moment, and then we could all die, the four of us, together.

I breathed deeply, and with each breath I started to accept my fate. If we were lucky, it would be quick. I simply had to be strong for Mom, now. I put on my brave face, tossing my long blonde tresses over my shoulder, and in the manliest tone I could muster, asked, “How much time do we have?”

Mom turned back to me, that sweet smile of hers decorating her beautifully round face. I made an effort to memorize every sparkle in her olive-green eyes. It took all my willpower to let her answer my question, before I broke down and curled up sobbing in her arms, as I had done in my younger days. Telling her and Dad both that I loved them so much, even though we never said it very much.

Casually as could be, Mom popped a handful of peanuts in her mouth, chewed, and once she was done chewing said, in answer to my question, “Oh, well, the movie has only been on for about thirty minutes now. Why, did you want to watch something else?”

As quickly as fear had rushed over me, it drained out of me all at once. Leaving a sick, but blessedly numb, sort of relief in its wake. I curled up beside my Mom, smiling weakly into her neck, breathing in her familiar smell like oxygen. “No, no, leave it on. I like scary stories.”

 

Divinity Sykes is a senior at UNC Chapel Hill who is pursuing a degree in Spanish Interpretation. Writing is her life long passion and she is blessed with a loving family, and wants to thank them now for all the support they give. Especially Cedric, the inspiration for this story.

“I had dinner in Queen Elizabeth’s palace this summer!”

Oohs and aahs rang across the classroom. All eyes were now on the new girl, no longer an inconspicuous figure in the back row shrouded in a hooded lavender raincoat. Daisy stood up from her seat and scanned her prey for the first time. She spotted the deer, wide-eyed, and she sensed suspicion amidst the serpents. The birds grew thrilled and chatty, and the bugs were fazed enough by the news to inch their antlers just a little closer. With a subtle raise of the eyebrows, she lured her game yet closer, and with a flash of her smile, the jungle was under her reign.

The charades continued that afternoon. On the playground, upon her announcement of her distant relation with Taylor Swift, Daisy had gathered an entourage. The girls chased her in clusters like puppies in a litter.

Her band was charmed. She told them about the time she sat third row in the 2016 Olympics. She boasted about the street in New York City that was named after her. She described what summer had looked like in Belgium when she lived there for three months. Each new fairytale drew a new curious face, and by the end of the week, Daisy was forced to implement a recess schedule to meet the desperate requests of her awestruck peers, who yearned to stroke the fur of her newly imported Swedish wool coat.

But after Lucy Hall spotted the Old Navy tag on the inside of the woolly coat on Daisy’s backpack hook, the whispers traveled in ripples. As Daisy passed them by at recess, the students hollered, calling her a phony, a wannabe, a laughing stock.

The girls began to observe Daisy from a distance. They watched her jump out of her seat at the tap of a pencil on a desk and bury her head in her hands when the dismissal bell rang. They heard her mutter to the tiles on the floor as if she could see right through them. They saw her claw and bite at air like it had slipped right out of her.

The girls conjectured. They said her eyes were hollow like lightbulbs, that the blaze inside hardly flickered. But Daisy could see it all. She saw monsters in the trees and shadows in her childhood swing set. She heard voices in her head, voices which told her that her ticket to the school fair was a ticket to Belgium. She couldn’t make out the words on her clothing tags; she could only see fuzzy hazes of unfamiliar script and of a life forgotten. She was no longer Daisy – she was one with the voices.

The voices told her to forget about pills and problems and to kick and scream and pace. They showed her the underworld and took her to Europe overnight. They left her unfazed. They left her renewed. So, she let them consume her.

And she mumbled the truths in her sleep.

 

 

Ishita Shah is an aspiring writer from Texas. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Polyphony Lit, and Positively Positive. In her spare time, she can often be found baking with her family of four or listening to Christmas music (all year round).

10:41am, 28^th of January. Smith walked through the threshold and set foot onto the air bridge. The door to the bright, gleaming rocket lay not ten strides away from him. He looked down through the bridge’s metal grates. They were red. Through them he could see all the way down to the icy ground, several hundred feet below. It was cold. He could hear the rocket creak and groan and had to assure himself it was alright, the rocket always expanded and contracted when it was cold. It was alright.

He walked briskly across the bridge. He didn’t look down through the red grating again when he crossed it. He didn’t like looking down. It reminded him of being high above the ground, dropping thunder on the forest in Vietnam. He was glad that the windows in the rocket only pointed upward.

As he crouched to fit through the hatch, he paused in the threshold. Reaching to his chest, he removed a small pin. It was firm in his hand. On one side was emblazoned the word ‘NASA’ in blue. On the other side, that morning his wife had scratched the agency’s motto. “Per Aspera ad Astra”– through hardships to the stars.

He brought the pin up to his lips, kissed it, then leaned out and let it slip from his hand through a gap in the bridge’s red grating. It fell, fell, fell through the cold air for what seemed like an eternity. He thought he saw it land near the base of the boosters, but he couldn’t be certain. It was too high up to make out such a small object clearly. It was too high up to hear it land either. The rocket was creaking too loud anyway. He stepped back into the rocket and looked out. He sighed. He paused, then pulled the hatch shut.

 The ignition flared; its flames enveloped the pin. It melted into the ground. The Challenger rocket lifted itself into the sky.

 

Freddie Coffey is a rising senior at the Collegiate School in Manhattan. While now firmly a New Yorker, Freddie was born in the UK, and attended Eton College on an Oppidan scholarship until he emigrated at the start of his sophomore year. A long time poet and writer, Freddie founded and directs The Decameron Project (decameronproject.org), a non-profit organization that connects thousands of students, teachers, and passionate authors worldwide through the power of storytelling during the pandemic. Freddie is a contributor to and editor-in-chief of his school’s literary journal, Prufrock.

Mother has always been excruciatingly devoted to God and my imperfections, in that order. Saturday nights I stumble back home seventeen minutes-thirty minutes-an hour past curfew, and there she’ll be standing, statuesque in our kitchen, worry lines flooded by the fluorescent light, arms crossed under her chest. She rakes her eyes over the half-hidden bruise on my collarbone, the rumpled chaos of my skirt, the soft smudging of my bubblegum-pink lipstick, but says nothing.

In my hand, my phone is still open to a video I just took: untitled boy’s lips on my cheek, lips on my lips, hand possessive on my left thigh. I tilt the moving screen away from my mother’s dissection.

***

Mother had once been a good girl, in the suffocating Stepford wife sense. Her skirts probably never dared to ride up past the dimples of her knees. When I picture it, her mouth is always stretched into an almost grotesque eager-to-please smile and her hair is always neatly brushed into mahogany quietude. A girl with respect for authority in abundance.

Mother had once been young & unaware that a man would burden her with not only a lifetime of guilt and a yearning to inflict purple-blue-banana-yellow bruises on the pale expanses of her thighs, but also a child: a shrill baby girl loudly resistant to being controlled.

Philomena, she reluctantly named me, a woman once martyred, newly forgotten.

***

My mother, now, is relentlessly pious: knees bruised in homage to the ground, face strained with conviction as tendrils of moonlight filter through our window. Baptism by nature’s incandescent rays. She’d surely crucify herself on the browning grass of our front lawn under the heavy dominion of both God and a late summer afternoon sun if only for capital-s Salvation.

My faith is irreverent, unhallowed, in comparison. I worship the simple act of being known: soft gaze on soft skin on soft sheets, a passing nod, an acknowledging half-smile. Loving scrutiny, no matter how brief. Unadorned appreciation in the neat squares of my Instagram page: made-up, painted-on face, body contorted. Red lips drawn up like a puppet’s, back curled like a dancer. Immortality in the bleached-white glare of my phone, lust from the fingertips of strangers. I keep my real name far away like a taboo, replace it instead with something weightless.

She who stares coyly from my screen reminds me of the characters my classmates and I used to conjure up in the fifth grade, one-dimensional and grossly perfect. I use her to search for my own absolution: Fingers soft and assured around my wrists, hot breaths on my neck, eyes dark in my gaze. Releasing me from my mother’s relentless expectations, forgiving my existence.

***

I am sixteen and my mother dreams of life before me and as me. Instead of her usual examination, she looks through my body, through taut youthful skin, through bright hopeful eyes, like I am a vessel to her. Her own dreams inflate me, set me afloat, and I fight to keep above the water.

Philomena, she reprimands, voice harsh and insistent. The way she says my name is always the same, tinged with a little bit of violence, dressed up in grievance. The list of complaints is long: put down your phone. Straighten your skirt. Cross your legs. Have faith for once. Pay attention when I’m speaking to you.

It’s a sharp contrast to the way boys whisper my name: a little bit unsteady, a little bit like a prayer when my mouth is on theirs. Sometimes I feel like I’m sucking their soul away, filling my own vacancies with their generous affection. Their words vary yet are always really the same: you’re so hot. I love you. Let’s go see a movie sometime. Here is my heart, let me have yours.

***

In seventh grade I learned about how some families used to drown newborn babies for the sin of being born female. Blue limbs thrashing in the cold. Hands closed around a tiny neck, a snap. Wails bubbling up from a scalding coffin. Wasting away into a husk.

I’ve never stopped thinking about how easily that could’ve been me or you. A different kind of immortality, and not the kind I yearned for: instead, the permanence of death without remembrance. If a girl dies alone in the woods and no one is there to see it, did she actually ever exist? We pay the shared price for our original sin, an eternal punishment. Eve plucks an apple from the tree: disobedience.

***

Mother looks at me like I am not enough, but I look away. My gaze slips unharmed from hers when the world sits in the palm of my hand, when a boy, hard/soft, blond/brunet, whispers like poetry/like commands, sings prayers to me as I do to him. Meaningless nothings, reverent in their delivery. His pulsing heart warm in my hands as mine is in his.

For I know the real truth to immortality: even as I leave my sanitized portraits floating untethered to reality, it is in memoriam that I plan to live forever. Philomena branded on countless tongues; bronze hair diffused in collective memory.

 

Isabel Su is a junior at the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. She is an editor for her school’s literary magazine, and her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Short Vine Journal, Hypernova Lit, and Cathartic Youth Lit.

I learned how to play the organ two days before your funeral. It was the most last-minute of arrangements: Dad wanted me to play something at the service but apparently there was only an organ available. It made no sense. Nothing made sense anymore. What happened?

It was thirty minutes until my six-p.m. flight to Burlington. I vomited my lunch in the airport bathroom and then swallowed a whole Ativan to calm my nerves. There were two green boxes of laxatives in my carry-on. You never wanted me on medication; you said it would cloud my greatness. What greatness, I always wanted to ask, but never did. In hindsight I wished I had; it was always a desire of mine to get inside your head, to pick at your brains with my piano fingers, to figure out what it was exactly that kept you so meticulous and wired and always so impersonal. But I had robbed myself of the opportunity. I would never know.

You signed me up for piano lessons when I was five years old. Eighteen years later I stopped returning your calls. You left voicemail after voicemail—asking how was I doing? and where had I gone? and why didn’t I tell you I was going to Europe? You discovered I was in Paris from my cousin, who showed you a picture of me: standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, wrapped in two coats and a gingham scarf, holding a postcard from the Louvre. Mona Lisa smiling at the camera like she knew something you didn’t.  You saw that I was dead-eyed, and clearly flirting with the possibility of never returning home. I remember the picture well because I had zoomed in on every detail, searching for signs of weakness—and I had done this for days, even, after Julie sent it to me. When I was very young, you taught me the art of self-surveillance.

I liked Paris, but also felt that the whole concept of the trip was lost on me somehow; first I wished you had been there with me, and then I grew unbelievably happy with the idea that you were unable to spoil it. The problem was that I was thinking of you either way.

The organ at the service was a five-octave chamber organ. I played the piece I’d learned two days prior, with the sheet music in front of me because I couldn’t remember what to do with the pedals.

No one clapped. That was strange for me, in spite of the fact that I knew it wouldn’t have been right if they had. I always guessed that I was, inherently, a performer—or rather, the thing that you raised me to be.

The reception was a groaning affair, but you would’ve loved the attention. Would’ve eaten it up like that. You know what I mean. There were sandwiches on the table and a cocktail maker, alongside everybody you ever knew. My cousins sat neatly in a row on the red sofa, dabbing gently at their eyes with tissues crushed into needlepoints, and in front of them were Dad’s parents, who couldn’t believe you were dead. “So sudden,” they said over and over again. “So sudden.” Eventually my old piano teacher came to me to ask when I had learned to play the organ.

“Just last month,” I said. “I wanted to explore.” It felt good to lie. She gripped my arm, tight as death, and waited for me to burst into tears—like I was some unstable widow, drowning my sorrows in red wine, and not your daughter.

I drank four plastic cupfuls of Diet Coke and thought about you, flipping through old memories like worn, delicate photographs: how you would sit me down at the piano bench when I was little and look over my shoulder as I played; how you threw a lampshade at my head; how you apologized afterward, and asked about my day; how there had been a school project when I was in the second grade where I had to pick a hero, a person in real life that I looked up to—and you screamed at me because I hadn’t thought to pick you, the immigrant, the self-sacrifice. I regarded the memories with an indifferent, albeit gentle touch, careful as not to provoke them. After all, you were already dead. In other words, you had managed to escape the last of my vitriol. What could I do now? What would change anything? You had a heart attack during your morning commute to work. Your car went, screeching, into the intersection. They say you died on impact, but that’s just what they say.

After several hours, the reception had shrunk considerably; the only ones left were the cousins and the in-laws, and in my pocket a shiny bottle of Ativan. I swallowed one in the guest bathroom—your candles were still there, lined-up by the sink, vanilla and sea salt, and I wondered, strangely, if Dad would ever replace them—and then I returned to the main room, hands in my pockets, eyes absentmindedly wandering across the picture frames hung on the wall. Family portrait: me, smiling like a girl; you, about to sneeze.

Meanwhile, Dad was entertaining the last of our guests with the tired story of how you two had met: on a ferry boat. Then he found me.

“Come and play something for us, Lou,” Dad said.

“I’m fine.”

“Marylou.” His smile said please.

“OK.” I slowly made my way toward the piano. Cracking my knuckles, I sat down at the bench, placed my fingers on the keys, and tapped out an unenthusiastic Chopin etude. Then your voice in my head, as if your ghost were there to inform the audience: They call this one the “Wrong Note.” Isn’t it perfectly imperfect? I heard my father sigh behind me and wondered what I had done wrong. Not just to him, but in general.

It could have been that I hated you. Or, it could have been that I missed you like a little kid misses summer vacation—that naïve longing that felt brand new, and heavier, with each passing year. Either way, I took two Dulcolax and an Ativan and, straight after the reception, went to sleep in my old bedroom, still decorated with polaroids and Martha Argerich; and I dreamt of the train ride from New York to Vermont. It should have been winter, I thought, but everything was green and shining. Fresh and easy. I looked out the window and saw trees of many colors.

When I woke up the next morning, I felt the effects of the laxatives. I shuffled into the bathroom, sat down on the toilet, and stared at my toenails. For a moment I thought I might talk to you—out loud, like they do in movies when someone is feeling particularly sad, or lost, or alone—but decided against it. I didn’t feel any of those things. For a long time, sitting there, I didn’t feel a thing at all.

It was nearly January when I returned to Manhattan. Everything was just as I had left it. What you’d like about New York City is that you don’t need a car. I walked to my favorite bakery on Seventy-eighth Street and ordered my cakes: Black Forest gâteau, tiramisu, strawberries and cream. I bought a slice of each and carried them back to my apartment on the Upper West Side. You don’t know where, and I can’t show you. That’s it.

 

 

 

Ida Mobini is a junior in high school living in the flat suburbs of San Diego, California. They have been writing since they could pick up a crayon. Currently, they work on their school newspaper and literary magazine.