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Blue Marble Review

Literary Journal for Young Writers

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Issue 1

Friday, Shere Khan’s Melody

By Nikita Bastin

 

 

 

When the beast of Seeonee jungle wakes, he is

convinced that his day will be as musical as the ripples

of Wainganga River by the wood. But by afternoon, he

hears only skeletons of cotton trees clatter to the

ground, and the cold whistle of the water and its winds disturb

him. So he lays supine on the silvery-white rocks, his lips

as lifeless as the rotten banana leaves, his eyes as dull as the backs

of the inky beetles. He watches the glassy reflection of the sun and

remembers the canary yellow fire that chased him on Monday.

The day started well: he pounced on the spiny legs of an elk,

feasted on its meat, red as a cocoa pod, dragged his long nails

through the wildflowers, and listened to the Bandar monkeys

trembling at his voice. But then Mowgli reduced the king of

the jungle to a loud, loud scream that was lost in translation.

Today, he is the haunted. The jungle is blind with music,

it drowns, stumbles through the finite air. Shere Khan listens

in a stupor, the ghosts of the thrums are too much with him.

How does Baloo live in harmony with the vultures, the water

buffalo, the golden jackals? Does he ever want to tear through

the eucalyptus and stalk the deer, fat and pink and sweet in places?

It would be only natural. Shere Khan wants someone to bring him

the angelfish gliding through the river, he will not hunt today.

Sometimes, the splashes of the smallest hearts flying away pierce

the stitches of his careful grin. He thinks maybe he’ll yank out

the ferns and their ferine light from his arch, the golden face

adorning the curve once again commanding the heady vines.

Maybe Kaa will emerge with his wide, too wide green eyes.

He sees a figure with a pale mouth far off in the fog,

hears its stunted breaths, hushed and tuneless.

But no voice, no warmth, no thrum, no song will stir him.

He can do without the fear, the jungle can do without a king, worn

in his own pain and the pain of those around him.

He rises for six short seconds and moves to lay beside the black rocks.

Now, he will not be disturbed.

 

 

 

Nikita Bastin is a junior at Saint Francis High School who enjoys editing for her school’s newspaper and literary magazine, blogging, and tutoring in her community. She is a recipient of a Silver Key in the Scholastic Writing Awards. You can find her at nikitabastin.com.

 

 

 

Timber

By Emily Dorffer

 

 

The wooden corpse of the ancient oak
lay sprawled across the sunlight dappled clearing.
Its exposed roots clung to clods of soil that crumbled away
as armies of termites marched through the rotting wood.

After decades spent sheltering squirrels and cradling bird nests
with its leaf-laden boughs spread wide in welcome
the tree’s barren fingers stretched parallel to the ground
to console the flowers surrounding its grave.

The tree could no longer feel the worms beneath it
as they tunneled through the dirt
nor could it groan as colonies of termites
bored through its flesh, devouring all in their wake.

The oak’s trunk served as a coffin
for the decomposing layers of cellulose
within its suit of bark; its inner rings
married its rotting cadaver to the earth.

The oak’s acorn born offspring continued to thrive
as they dug deeper into the compost on the forest floor,
unaware of the banquet’s newest addition
of their fallen father, now fertilizer.

 

Emily Dorffer is a current sophomore at Johns Hopkins University. She has previously had a short story published in Breath & Shadow.

 

At the Cedar Lee Theater

By Annie Ertle

 

 

 

How important and how conscious and how good we feel
When we crowd into the small independent theater and we settle next
To groups of diverse strangers in head scarves with NPR tote bags
And we watch the documentary that details
The horror of Women That Are Not Us.

We gasp and we cluck at the appropriate moments.
We “thank God that doesn’t happen here”
And we wonder what we can do to help
In between fistfuls of popcorn that leave our hands greasy,
Our tongues thirsting for the Diet Coke they paraded around in the ads.

We fantasize about fundraisers and we hash tag the tweets and for
The next twenty-four hours we lie in bed staring at the ceiling,
Prophesizing about what would have happened if that had been us,
Not them, and we feel guilty until the weight of our down comforters
Hug us to sleep and we are calm and we are safe and we are okay.

Then the details of our lives overtake us and oh god the grocery
List is so long and the laundry piles up and the assignments are
Coming due and the house is a mess and when did life get so hard?

I remember there are two types of people in this world, and I’m lucky
Because I get to be the spectator and not the subject,
The person who pays the $10.50 admission, a temporary redemption.

The women documented in the movie stood up to the Taliban
And I was too afraid to ask the people sitting beside me in the neat row
If they could just scoot so I could slip by and get a head start
On living this normal life that I, for whatever reason, have won.

The advertising posters begin to peel and are torn down until
Next week, when new movies are released and new injustices recounted.

 

Annie Ertle is a junior at John Carroll University. She is studying Communications and English.

 

Letters

By Stephen Duncanson

 

Everyone at the bakery was afraid of cancer. Even Hovan, who despite his bachelor’s degree, insisted cancer was a pharmaceutical company construct. Brendan had cancer already, and breathed in deep floury lungfuls knowing it couldn’t get worse. He even laughed at the letters; he looked happiest whenever a new one came. Ten years or so ago, he had gone into surgery, and come out half a lung lighter. None of the doctors could make heads or tails of the tumor they had ripped out, and so began the journey of Brendan’s lung. Sent from lab to lab, we would get letters, from all the different labs, always the same thing: results inconclusive, forwarding your bio sample to such and such research station or university. I think Brendan started a stamp collection. I think he was a little jealous too, of the lung fragment. It got to travel across the country; he had to work 108 hours a week, all the while still breathing death.

It was the flour, or the powdered sugar, or the asbestos that had once insulated and now scared the bakery workers. We tried not to think about it. We turned the radio on and let mindless songs wash over us. We talked about the past or the present, never the future. We told each other and ourselves that we were fine. The letters kept coming in.

Brendan’s father died, cancer. It was he who had opened the bakery sixty years ago, and after sixty years, it had killed him. I was working when we got the call. I was washing dishes, Brendan was putting chocolate frosting on an eight-inch marble, and the phone rang. It took a minute for me to realize something was wrong. The radio was on, the sink was sloshing. I turned to see the eight-inch marble cake fly across the room and crash into the oven. I was speechless, motionless. Brendan ripped the radio’s cable from its socket, it flat-lined. He left.

I was washing chocolate frosting off the oven when the mail came in. More medical mail, the tumor had reached California, I wondered how long he had left. In the silent bakery, I wondered how long I had too.

 

 

Stephen Duncanson is sixteen and enjoys mountain biking, metafiction, essays, drinking black coffee and listening to audiobooks. Stephen lives in Stratford CT, a post-industrial and brownfield-laden suburb in southern Connecticut.

 

 

Why I Write

By Emily Stack

 

I switched schools going into the sixth grade, and I was so quiet that my homeroom teacher used to ask me at the end of every day, in front of everyone, if I had talked to anyone. She used to yell at me for reading in class, even though she taught English, and she thought she was funny even though the jokes she told were three years too young for us. She wore cardigans that were too small, and her smile was thin and unpleasant. Her intrusion into my life was unwelcome, and every time she asked me this question, I would answer yes, even when it wasn’t the case.

My quietness wasn’t lonely. I had things that kept me busy and friends back home. I liked my silence and my ability to blend in unnoticed, and I had no desire to leave my place on the outskirts of attention. Yet my teacher’s comments created an unnecessary self-consciousness that made me hotly tear up whenever someone asked me a question that I didn’t know the answer to.

So in order to avoid these questions and the subsequent embarrassment, and despite my teacher’s complaints and concerns, I read. I took out dozens of books from the library, and I would sit in the back of the class. Knees together, toes pointed to keep my lap flat, back hunched to see the print, I would melt away into the story of the day. I don’t remember what kinds of books I read in sixth grade. All I remember is that I read them with a kind of desperation. I wanted to envelop myself in the pages. I would steal glances at paragraphs whenever the teacher lectured, and when we were given worksheets to complete, I scribbled through them and carried on with my book.

I wasn’t a writer. I was a reader. I went through hundreds of books with all kinds of storylines and characters and thematic concerns, and most days, I didn’t talk to anyone. I explored sunken ships and fell in love and walked along deserted highways with people I met at bus stops. I had my first job at a boutique store, whispered with my best friends, and acted strong when confronted with the things that scared me. Like dark places and tight corners and people I didn’t know if I could trust. I witnessed more things than most, and I did it all without having a single conversation.

As I read through the library, the stories got more similar. The character’s voices blurred together and I started rechecking out books, forgetting that I already knew their endings. I got plots confused and scenery mixed up, and it began to feel more like a chore and less like an escape. I read and read and read, and then I got tired of reading.

It was no longer enough for me. I felt claustrophobic, surrounded by the pages that I had buried myself in. I felt bored. I felt boring. I wanted to be like the characters I read about, with their cool, strong voices, and I wanted to be able to talk without crying or stuttering or searching for words that were strewn around the inaccessible parts of my head.

So I started to pretend that my voice was purposeful, like some author had edited out the ramblings and hesitations. I would pretend that I wasn’t shy. I would pretend that I had something to say and that that something was imperative to all the plots of all the characters around me. Like the dialogues I had read with fervor, I began to speak concisely and deliberately. And with the voices of thousands of characters and authors alongside me, I put my books down and sacrificed my reading time in order to be present in my own story.

~

I didn’t start writing until college, until it became clear that my story was going to once again be filled with silence. My quietness was swallowing me up as I made this big change, moving states and schools, even though I had worked so hard throughout middle and high school to get rid of my nagging shyness.

It returned as I was confronted with unfamiliarity.

I entered my dorm, and was overwhelmed when girls started asking me questions. I knew the answers, but I couldn’t seem to grasp them as they swam around my head. I didn’t cry, but as I was pushed into groups of people, I couldn’t contribute. When I would finally think of something to say, I would hesitate with my thought for just one second too long, and the moment would pass. My comment would become delayed and out-of-place, so I never made it.

It didn’t take me too long to figure out that I only talk when I’m accustomed to the situations that I am in. I seem to only find my voice when I know the voices around me and when I’m able to assess how my speech fits in.

So at college, I fell into silence.

I couldn’t turn to books, because this time, I was aware of my tendency to be content with reading and not participating. I knew that if I let myself curl up in corners and hunch over in chairs, I would fall into book after book, never once emerging to talk to anyone. And I knew that if I did that, I would get bored of the books and myself, quicker than it had happened the last time.

So I turned to writing. I started off with journal entries that transcribed my day and my feelings. I took a brief detour with poems before I realized that my scattered voice was not going to be lyrical. Next, I wrote detailed descriptions of the new situations that I was in. At this point, writing became my way of assessing my surroundings and putting myself into stories before I had to assert myself by talking. I was able to organize my thoughts and strengthen my voice by myself, with as many stutterings along the way as necessary.

I recorded my voice and searched through it until I found the parts I liked. I practiced my speech and kept hold of the character that I had created for myself from the sixth grade onwards.

And on paper, my distinct personality began to come through. Unlike reading in the sixth grade, writing was a way to participate in my own story without overwhelming myself with the loudness of it all. My comments are never delayed. There’s no pressure to be memorable. I can take my time becoming comfortable in new situations, and I can explore my own train of thought without the stare of people who I don’t yet understand. I can put my story down on paper before I have to act it out.

 

 

Emily is a sophomore at the University of Michigan, where she is studying Economics, Mathematics, and Writing. Originally from Boston, she roots for all New England teams and hopes to work in the sport business industry.

 

 

More Than a Wave

By Jenna Kurtzweil

 

Blue is the color of music.
The cool feel of ivory keys and the nimbleness of practiced fingers as they dance across guitar strings.
The perfect fluidity of a drummer who feels rather than hears the light, tinny whisper of wood on metal and whose limbs exist independently in harmony, moving separately as one.
Blue is the color of
a jazz musician
who sways to and fro like waves in a lazy ocean or
stubborn boughs of tall trees that playful gusts of wind persuade to dance.
Blue is the color of
contentment;
sitting inside on a rainy day and hearing the irregular beating of water on the roof coupled with muffled
slaps of feet on wet pavement far below.
Blue is the color of parting words and forgotten covenants-
the color of makeup that cascades down the faces of the broken.
Blue is the color that fills up empty spaces
and conceives the purest form of mystery.
Blue is depth,possibility, relief.
When the clock strikes midnight, the world becomes a deep blue, and everything is completely still.
Blue is the Witching Hour
laced with power
when fantasy becomes commonplace and the world is left to the imagination of the dreamers, who alter
it on the whims of their fancy and orchestrate it to the symphonies of the mind’s eye.
Blue is the color of the ones who exist where they shouldn’t and live in the brief moments between
today and tomorrow.

Along with her responsibilities as a student, Jenna is always looking for new opportunities to experience life through travel, literature, music, and all forms of storytelling.

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