Issue 22

There’s a woman standing at the other end of the subway platform.

There’s nothing abnormal about her appearance: backpack slung over one shoulder, hoodie emblazoned with the name of some college, jeans ripped at the knees, scuffed sneakers tapping a rhythm against the yellow tiles, presumably on beat to the music she’s listening to on her phone. The epitome of a college student. I would know, considering my own ensemble of clothes.

None of that is what grabs my attention, however; what does are the numbers floating above her.

A timer, I realize after they count down to two minutes. As the woman turns her head to cough into her hand, the numbers follow the movement, as if they are attached to the top of her head.

I look around to see if anyone else sees this, get an unspoken second opinion or reaction. There’s no one else around, however; it’s late, and this isn’t a popular stop to begin with, being located at the outskirts of the city and all.

Staring at the changing numbers, I wonder if this is something of the norm. New pieces of technology seem to pop up on the daily, and it’s impossible to keep track of every single one. Still, if such a thing was possible, something akin to a holographic display, Emily would have talked my ear off about it already. I consider taking a picture and showing it to her later when I get home, but don’t. Knowing her, it’ll be met with some snide remark – “Oh, this girl caught your eye, did she?” – followed by a lot of passive-aggressiveness for the next few days. After the week I had, that’s the last thing I want to deal with.

Anyways, back to the floating numbers.

For the briefest moment, I even entertain the idea of a supernatural explanation, before banishing the thought. I haven’t believed in anything supernatural all my life, and am not going to start now.

Of course, there are countless other questions besides the how.

Is the woman even aware of the numbers? If not, am I the only one seeing this? Why only this woman, and not the countless people I met throughout today? What makes her special?

Is it somehow contagious? Will I wake up tomorrow morning and see a timer above my head in the mirror?

But most important of all: what is the timer counting down towards? What happens when it hits zero?

My initial thought is that it could be the waiting time until her train arrives. This is promptly disproven when her timer hits one minute, and there’s a ten second delay before the waiting time on the nearby train sign follows. So, not that then.

It could just be something mundane she set as a reminder for herself, like ‘buy milk’ or ‘feed the cat’. Something that doesn’t matter to anyone besides herself, especially not a stranger waiting for the same train. But then why showcase it for everyone to see, which brings me back to the question of whether she’s aware of the numbers being shown.

Then, it hits me, the most obvious, cliché answer that I somehow didn’t think about; it could be the time of death.

Now that I look again, the woman has this sort of resigned look on her face, tired but determined. She pockets her phone just as the light from the incoming train can be seen, growing brighter and larger as it approaches the station.

“Train approaching,” says the station-wide announcement from above. “Please stand back from the edge.”

The woman takes one step forward towards the edge of the platform instead, and it’s all the incentive I need to break into a run. The first passenger car enters the station, closing in on where the woman is standing, and I’m still too far away to reach her.

“Stop!” I shout, but my voice is drowned out by the screeching of train wheels against the rails, and all I can do is watch helplessly as the woman brings a hand up to her mouth, timer reaching zero and-

She sneezes, inaudible but unmistakable in motion.

The timer disappears.

 

 

Hwankyu Song was born in Korea but raised in a multitude of countries, the most recent one being the US. He’s currently attending Carnegie Mellon University, where he is majoring in Math and minoring in Creative Writing. His stories are usually lengthy, but he also writes flash fiction on occasion.

It was a Thursday night and outside was the coziest thunderstorm. Perched where the great woods met a cliff overlooking an ocean was an old house, taller than it was wide. Sitting inside this house, a woman, in her favorite wingback chair, enjoying the comfy storm. Unlike most in her current situation, she wasn’t reading, or listening to music, or doing anything particularly entertaining. She was simply sitting, staring at her crackling fire and thinking. Of what she was thinking we may never know, but one could almost be certain she was thinking. The house was dark–it always was this time of night–but the storm had cut what little electricity the old house had. But she had lit a candle, and that was all she needed. The thunder boomed.

She was staring; you couldn’t verify if she was thinking, but one look would confirm that she was very much staring. At one point it seemed that she was staring so hard she forgot exactly what she was staring at, for in the blink of an eye she realized that she was not in her chair by the fire, but in the hallway upstairs. Looking at a wall. She wondered how she had found herself in this predicament–she didn’t remember moving at all, and even if she had, why had she gone here? As she turned her head, she heard a child’s laugh coming from the bedroom door. Strange, her daughter had grown up and moved out long ago. She went back to her chair.

As she sat in her chair she heard crackling, the crackling of a radio tuned to a channel with no signal. A voice cleared the crackles, and the old sound of a 1920s vocalist flooded the room. The woman by now was most likely deep in thought, perhaps she was thinking of how strange it is that a radio with no source of power that has not worked for 6 years would suddenly turn on. But it was a lovely tune, so she stayed put. Or perhaps, she was thinking about a child’s laugh coming from an empty room. Or maybe not.

She was sitting, staring, and listening–listening to the rain and the song. She closed her eyes and listened, listened until she heard a new sound: water.  She opened her eyes to find she was no longer in her chair–she was sitting on the edge of her bed. She sat staring, not at a fire, but rather out of an ocean-view window. Yet the water she was hearing was not the ocean, it was the sound of the sink in her bathroom, the sink with the spout that never turned on. She was glad that it was finally working. She walked back downstairs.

When she sat back in her chair she could see the fire, and through a window she could see the ocean. Through that same window, she could also see the light falling of snow. It’s on cold winter nights that one loves to sit by the fire and think; although for the woman it was getting increasingly hard to think, with the radio and the fire, not to mention the buzzing and flickering of the table lamp’s bulb. She considered turning off the lamp but decided she needed the light. As the musical stylings of 20s swing faded into 40s jazz, she decided that she needed something to drink. She walked across the room and grabbed a mug out of the cupboard. The particular mug she grabbed was found at the very back of the cupboard and read “World’s Best Dad” on the front; it was the only one clean. She rinsed out the dust and made some hot chocolate. She sat back down and relaxed into the music. During one song a noise piqued her ears. It was the sound of a bell, the kind you would put on a house cat. It sounded identical to the one she had put on her old pet. After a rather loud meow, she felt her cat walk across her feet and settle on the chair beside her. Anyone else in this moment might have been perplexed: why, after 24 years of being missing, had her cat finally come back? I suppose she was just happy her cat had returned.

She sat listening to the radio, the ocean waves, and Edith the cat purring softly in her sleep. After finishing her drink, she returned to her staring, the light of the fire consuming her attention. As she stared, she felt a gust of wind brush her cheek. She was standing at the edge of the cliff and looking at the water. This was not unusual, although she usually enjoyed being here when the weather was nice. Tonight was very foggy with a slight breeze–not ideal conditions if you are looking to view anything. Light wasn’t an issue, not even in the dead of night; the moon shines so brightly here it could pass for a second sun. But due to the fog, the only thing she could see was the gleam of a lighthouse on a distant shore. Until the ray from the lighthouse went out. Now tell me why, in the middle of the night, when the earth was nothing but fog, did a lighthouse go out? Conceivably, the only notion she held at the moment was that she now had to go back inside.

She turned and started to wander towards her house. About halfway there, an intense beam of light engulfed her sight. The beam came from the woods and stayed on her for a second or an hour, or what could have been any amount of time, then disappeared. She lightly shook her head in an attempt to clear the floaters from her eyes and walked to the front door. As she was walking, she hoped that whoever was holding that flashlight escaped the foggy woods and got home safely. But she wasn’t too worried, after all, Edith made it back. When she had settled back into her chair, she listened to Edith’s bell slowly make its way down the stairs and into her lap.

She got lost in thought for a little while, but when she returned, she determined that not too much time had passed; it certainly wasn’t morning, and the hailstorm was still going as strong as it was in the late evening. Her cat had moved back to her separate chair and fallen asleep. At some point, the radio had stopped playing tunes and reduced itself back to crackling, and the old lamp bulb had finally given out. The one thing that grasped her consciousness most urgently was the fire, which had gone out. The house was nothing but a pit of darkness, light coming only from the moon. She was paralyzed with fear, her mind consumed with the sound of hail striking the walls, a broken radio crackling, and a dead cat purring. And then she heard it: a pounding. This wasn’t hail, this was the front door. And as she slowly turned around to face the door, it happened. She finally stopped thinking.

 

 

 

Avery Sauber is an eighth-grade student at Centennial Middle School in Minnesota. When she’s not doing schoolwork, she can often be found playing lacrosse, taking naps, or updating her personal book index -complete with title, page number, and publication date. She hopes to continue with her writing pursuits in the future.

Red velvet curtains; ornate, centuries-old windows; snobbish-yellow light washing the walls with nineteenth-century aristocracy; an ottoman and an intricate, plum-colored cushion; empty crystal vases; Persian carpet choked with antique dust … one couldn’t care less about the setting, glorified and mundane.

The subject sitting atop the ottoman, however, is far more compelling. She looks ahead with wide black eyes, this woman so similar to yet so incongruous with her backdrop. Her rings glisten gold and platinum, matching the colors of the thick frame surrounding her. Her hair is tightly pinned behind, not a single strand out of place. The camera is positioned toward her, with all intent of capturing more than just her beauty. Not just her lightly blushed rosewood cheeks smoothed over with layers of makeup, the luxurious folds of her brightly patterned dress, but also the creases of her hand, the tense grip in her jaw.

What has she been through to voyage all these leagues? Expulsion or persecution from her land, lack of support, a temporary sojourn in the first world…the possibilities flip through like stills. She is asked to turn a little more toward the westward window, where dwindling rays of sunlight fall upon her, illuminating irises like muddy rivers, beating violently against the boulders that constrict them. A glistening film coats those tumultuous eyes.

Weep, but don’t let those tears fall, woman—you cannot choose who sees them. Let them sit atop your lashes like morning dew.

She does not react to the first blinding flash. Her mouth is pinched into a small rosebud, her hands clasped tightly on her lap. Her skirt, intertwined with gold and red and violet, is frozen, unruffled by movement. Underneath the heavy volume of her dress, the outline of her legs becomes more apparent. She is thin, bony, constructed of scaffolding. The skin on her face hangs against her cheekbones, creating hollows her paint cannot hide.

Tremble, woman, but don’t rattle your seat.

Finally, an aperture: in between takes she exhales, mouth open. Within the gateway, cumulonimbus clouds pulsate dense grays and lash out lightning bolts. Gnarled, ancient trees with young lime-green foliage reach for the ceiling, bending before they can shatter it. She conceives universes she is too frail to hold. She yearns to release the wealth she carries inside, but the image she maintains is unrelenting.

Bleed, woman, but do it gracefully; don’t fall apart, or we cannot piece you back together again.

She shifts, pouring her life’s discomfort into the tilt of her foot she has been taught to maintain for years. Her joints creak in their limited span of movement. Her lips purse, stopping the whistle of air that fluted through her sighs. The gleam in her eyes disappears and she becomes the portrait the camera is supposed to create.

Where is the vibrancy of your youth, where you questioned the walls built before you? Where is the vigor that propelled you to climb them? Was it age that weakened your hands, that made you slip and tumble to a kneel? Who makes you crumble under the weight of his pronoun? Restricting your realm to the claustrophobic box of your mind, all the while taunting you with soft brushstrokes of foundation, creams, silk or cotton dresses and vibrant geometric patterns.  Stuffing you in this room…what are your origins whose primitive lies bind and gag you?

Woman, where is your essence? The colors inside you are locked within that golden chest surrounding you, key long lost. Look at you now, still-life fixture. Have you traveled this far to be an ornament clasped onto tradition?

But stay still. This is hardly the time to speak.

 

 

Nithya Ramcharan is a high school senior from New Orleans, Louisiana. She loves writing in her free time, along with drawing, playing the piano, and walking her dogs. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and the Apprentice Writer.

It begins like this:

You are thirteen. Four girls sit around you at the lunch table. Their lips shimmer with layers of gloss, the air around them is thick with the smell of vanilla perfume. They talk about boys and you think about how their lips shine.

There’s a game they play called boy crazy. They tell you that if they tickle your leg and you laugh it means you’re boy crazy. One of them runs her fingers over the top of your thigh, laughing, and you feel the hot burn of blood rushing to your face. You laugh but you don’t think it means what they think it means. You don’t know what to think.

There’s one girl. Her hair is curly and her eyes are brown- she says they’re brown like mud but you think they’re brown like chocolate- and she looks at you. Asks you which boy you like. The answer is clear, it’s there, it’s burning holes in the pit of your stomach. No one, you want to tell her, I don’t like any boys. Something inside you says she won’t like that. They won’t like that.

So, you say your first lie- your first lie that really matters. And the game begins.

There’s a boy on the football team. He’s tall and blond and he’s not quite handsome yet, but he will be. Everyone can tell he will be. The girls all know it; they talk and talk and talk about him and you know that if he’s the one you pick, they won’t think anything is wrong with you.

When she asks you who you like, it’s his name that you give her.

You’re fifteen and summer’s changed everyone, changed everything. The brown eyed girl’s got legs that stretch for days and days and days. Everyone stares at her. They can’t help it. She tells you about how she wants that football player, the almost handsome one, to look at her.

She asks you if you think they’d be good together and you tell her yes. You tell her they’d be great together.

It’s another lie, but she can’t know that.

You watch as it happens, as she bats her lashes and he takes her to the movies, to dinner with his parents, to nights out in his car. You see them kissing against her locker and you feel something rise in you. You feel like you’re going to be sick, but you push it down. Deep, deep down. You tell yourself it’s nothing.

You still haven’t had your first kiss by the time you turn sixteen. The other girls tease you. They smack their glossy lips and they tell you how pretty you are, how smart you are, how you could have any boy in the school if you only tried. They don’t understand, but you’re starting to. You’re really starting to.

Boys ask and ask and ask you out and you always say no. You’re not ready. You’re the kind of person that dates in college, not high school. You have homework, you’re too busy, you don’t need the hassle of it all.

You’re the worst kind of liar because you lie to yourself.

The brown-eyed girl wants you to be happy the way she’s happy. She talks to her football player boyfriend and gets you the number of one of his friends, the quiet, dark haired one who’s always looking at you. Please, she says, please please go. You’re perfect for each other.

You’ve gotten close to her since middle school. She seems so excited, she wants you to go so bad, you don’t want to disappoint her.

So you say yes.

You’re starting to figure out that you don’t know how to say no to her.

There’s a movie showing at the theater near your house. When you go to see it, he leaves his hand open on the armrest. For the first half of the movie, you watch his hand lay there waiting for you. But for the second half, you reach out and you hold it.

It’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s fine, you tell yourself. It’s fine it’s fine it’s fine.

Afterwards, he parks his truck in the middle school parking lot. The town stretches out in front you, shining. Burning. It’s practically on fire. He’s looking at you and you don’t want to look back at him, but it’s what you’re supposed to do. His eyes are so very green.

There are no butterflies when he kisses you. No magic. No fireworks. But it isn’t bad. It’s not horrible. It’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s nothing. There are lips against lips and nothing more.

Later, she sits on your bed, wet nail polish shining on her fingernails, and she asks you how it went. You think about telling the truth, but it catches in your throat. Great, you tell her. It was great.

He tells you he loves you three months later and you tell him that you love him too. It’s not a lie, you tell yourself, because you do love him. You love the way he laughs at all your jokes, the way he reads every book you recommend to him, the way he always wants to stay up late talking to you. You can’t help but love him.

But at some point, you have to admit to yourself that it’s not the same. Maybe you love him, but he’s in love with you. He’s seventeen and he’s fallen in love for the very first time and you’ve broken his heart before he’s even realized it.

She calls you crying at three in the morning. You put on your jacket, you go to her house, you knock on her window like you’ve done a thousand times before. She pulls you into her bed and you hold her until she tells you what’s wrong.

It’s the football player. Because of course, it’s always the football player. He’s decided he just can’t love her anymore. You try and try and try to wrap your mind around something like that, but you can’t. It doesn’t make sense, not loving her.

You get her to stop crying. You get her to start laughing. You’re good at that. You’ve always been good at knowing just the right things to get her to smile. She holds your hand while she falls asleep and you think, just for a moment, of how nice it feels.

He cries when you break up with him and even though you thought you wouldn’t, you cry too. You cry because you wanted it to work so, so badly. Because you’ve been lying to him and to yourself and to everyone else and for what? You couldn’t make it work. You couldn’t make it feel right.

She crawls through your window. She holds your hand. She tells you about all those fish in the sea. The two of you are going to go off to college and find someone right. The right boy.

You don’t know what to say. Or maybe you do and you just don’t know how to say it.

You’re eighteen when you have to face the truth. College is so close you can touch it and you’re running out of time.

She hasn’t dated anyone since the football player. Instead, she spends all her time with you. She reads all the books you recommend to her. You take her to the movies, throwing popcorn at the screen. She stays up late every night talking to you.

You think of the way your name sounds in her mouth.

You’re alone with her in her car the night before you leave for college. You’ve been talking and talking and talking about everything and nothing and you’re so tired of not telling her the truth. She looks at you and you look at her. You say her name.

There must be something about the way you say it, because her face changes. Her eyes soften, her lips part just the smallest bit. She says your name too.

This is the moment.

You can feel it in the air, in the silence that stretches out for miles in between the two of you. It is hot and heavy and endless and for the first time you think maybe.

Maybe you can tell the truth.

Maybe, just maybe, she’ll love you the way you love her.

You’re drowning in her brown eyes and you have a choice to make. You’ve been playing this game for a long time and you don’t know if it’s a game that you can win. You just want to make her smile. You just want to hold her hand and have her hold yours back. But to do it, you have to make a choice.

The only way to win the game is to end it.

So you do.

 

 

Sophie Sheumaker is a twenty-year-old aspiring writer from Colorado. She’s currently a Writing, Literature, and Publishing major at Emerson College. When she’s not writing, she’s helping edit papers and working for Emerson’s resident publishing club.