Issue 23

Cicadas don’t scream like they used to.

Evan clings to this thought as he walks, numb with rot, down to the bone. He’s nothing but the
texture of the rope slipping against clumsy fingers, the burning against his palm. The cicadas
are quiet, even as the sun swells in the sky, a concentrated fist of wobbling heat. Evan hears
himself breathing. Hears Ruby breathing, short, quick, desperate breaths, like she’s drowning,
even as she continues to walk. She stumbles. Evan doesn’t catch her – his arms are full, after
all.

Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Don’t look down.

Something soft rubs against Evan’s calves, and for a moment he pretends that it’s nothing but
lamplight-eyes Mew slinking around his legs, or the tendrils of his newest fern tipped sideways,
spilling soil. The cicadas are so very quiet. Why are they so quiet?

When Evan reaches the tree, it rings like a victory, and that thought curdles in his gut like sour
milk. His chest heaves for air. His teeth clatter against each other like marimbas. Ruby’s
stomach growls, and the sound feels almost sacrilegious. There’s something patently wrong
about the human nature of the bodies they inhabit – Evan’s never felt less like a real boy. It’s
easier if they’re two mindlessly shuffling dolls with painted lips and glass eyes. It’s so much easier.

There is an open bottle of wine on the kitchen table.

There is an open bottle of wine on the kitchen table, and it is cherry red and steaming violet,
crushed grapes fermenting, carmine and rose, and Evan clings to it like a lifeline. He closes his
eyes and imagines it in the scrunched-up, bled-dry corner of his mind. The individual dust
motes, suspended in the air, like snippets of dry skin cut out of a ghost. Filtered spindles of light.
The heady, heavy scent of berries. Evan turns it over and over in his brain, a rotating wheel, and
the sour smell of it, creeping under his nails and nostrils, is almost real. Almost.

In his addled state, his head spirited away, Evan trips.

He hits the grass softly, like a whisper, mud nuzzling up against the incline of his cheek. Rosie
does not.

Ruby shrieks as Rosie falls, an entirely involuntary sound, and Evan winces at the way it leaves
his ears echoing with thinly-spread pain. Her body thuds awkwardly against the earth, and
something cracks – ribs, maybe, or the already-fragile line of her collar. Evan scrambles to his
feet, leaves and undergrowth flaking under him as he moves. There’s no mistaking the motion of
the action, of the way Ruby stops herself from sobbing, cuts herself off in the deep part of her
throat, desperate and ragged, down to the root. Smooth, black hair spreads out across the
undergrowth like spilled ink, a dark patch, and Evan is not thinking about the open bottle of wine
at his house or the dark, plum-colored half-moons beneath his eyes, like someone had taken a
scraper to his bare cheeks. There is only the body. There is only ever the body.

Somehow, Evan stands up.

They will bury this body even if it kills them.

 

 

 

Lyra Kois is a junior at Yorktown High School, in Arlington, Virginia. She enjoys writing, music, and art, and is deeply passionate about social issues. She mainly works with Signature Theater, especially SigWorks in the schools. She hopes to one day own a dog.

Baba ushered us to the yard and ordered us both to keep quiet. You giggled as the chickens fussed around you, but I handed you a tangerine from my pocket and held a finger to my lips. You began peeling the fruit, tossing orange scraps among the dirty straw. In the right light, they could have passed for blood.

The men walked through the door, and Mama kicked your shoes behind the curtains. Whatever story she gave didn’t seem to satisfy them. They started toward the backdoor, silver guns flashing beneath their coats.

Baba raised a fist, but the shorter one backhanded him. He collapsed against the kitchen table, bloody rosettes staining the wood beneath his head. In the right light, they could have passed for orange peels. Mama screamed.

When they came for us, I could hardly breathe. I fought them tooth and claw—you must believe me, I did. But they had the weapons and the strength and all I had were pebble-stuck orange peels. They knocked your tangerine to the dirt when they grabbed you, and that was the moment you realized it was not a game.

“Jiejie!” you cried. “Jiejie! Jiejie!”

But our family cannot afford the fine. The men take you away to a new family far from our little town and do not tell us where.

Some days I imagine you’re in the north, among the snow-capped peaks we saw in Baba’s dog-eared atlas. Other days I think you end up south, walking the streets of Shanghai and Nanjing with tanghulu shells melting on your tongue.

But all I know is the empty place at the table, half-finished drawings scrawled across the walls, and the basket we leave behind when we harvest tangerines in the winter.

Come home, meimei. We miss you so much.

 

 

Mira Jiang is a high school senior from from Coppell, Texas. Her work has been published by or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online, Paper Lanterns, Hobart, and the Rising Phoenix Review, and recognized in contests from the Poetry Matters Project and the Geek Partnership Society.

They presented Mom with a barrage of bottles, swollen like milk jugs, corked with burnt cardboard. The nurse wore a paper hat, creased inward, with a clipboard in one hand and a clementine in the other. She had an hour, they told her, to scan the reports, bring the bottles to her eyes, sing to the babies dormant behind glass. She left the hospital half an hour after she entered, bottle baby in her elbow crook, receipt in her skirt’s back pocket.

The pricing system is rote, yet somehow still speculative. Babies are awarded a value based on their longevity, their looks, their predicted personality, anything that appears on the atomic-level scanner. Blonde babies are the most expensive. Blue eyes add a two-thousand-dollar surplus. Gene patterns that indicate obedience shoot the price upwards, while any neurodiversity causes it to plummet to nearly zero. The cost used to be fixed, but supply and demand tossed the bottle baby economy into economic entropy. We’re not too wealthy, so our new baby – who we’ve decided to call Lucas – is small, angry, and Chinese.

The nurse handed Mom a pamphlet, which she taped crookedly to the refrigerator door. In his early days, Lucas is treated much like a hunk of raw poultry. He soaks in warm water for several weeks, as his limbs unfurl, his face takes shape, his umbilical cord floats away like bread in tomato soup. We season the water with nutrient packs, bought in bulk from the nearby supermarket. A lightbulb hangs over his tub; casting light over his scrunched fingers for twelve hours per day.

Mom pulls Lucas from the bath at 7:00 a.m. on September 16, which I suppose is now his birthday. The moment his head emerges from the water, he begins to wail. Not a gentle coo, not a miracle cry, a full-out, five alarm, pineapple cake, donkey-on-the-mountain type wail. It shakes the shutters off our windows, turns our pecans into pie, grabs Dad by the collar and dumps him in the backyard. Mom tries everything, rocking and bouncing and steamed milk, but he just won’t shut up. I create a small barricade in my room, made of pillows and stuffed penguins, but Lucas’ cries drive right through it.

Five o’clock the next morning and he’s still going. Lucas has not gotten louder, but he’s definitely shriller, frillier than the night before. Mom and Dad have turned a muddy yellow from the stress. Their fingernails bend away from the noise and the hairs on their head have begun to commit suicide. All three of us have crusts contouring our cheekbones, black smudges beneath our eyes. My oatmeal tastes like tears.

Mom’s on the phone when I get back from school, caressing the receiver with her lips. Across the house, Lucas continues to wail, screeching as if silence would cause the world to stop spinning on its axis. Several moments later Mom taps the handset back into the dial pad. She tells me we need to take Lucas to the hospital. Dad tucks Lucas’ old bottle into a cloth bag, along with a turkey sandwich and a stack of manila folders, before ushering us into the car. Lucas continues to cry.

The doctors say no refunds. Lucas can be returned, but his valuation has dropped significantly. They apologize, say that these malfunctions don’t usually happen, but jab at the waivers Mom signed when she protests. Dad and Mom and the doctors disappear into the room next door, shouting over Lucas, who they’ve left with me. I take him in my arms, lifting his chin beside mine.

Soon Mom and Dad finish their conversation with the doctors. They disappear for a while, then reemerge in the hallway, a handheld cradle hanging below their hips. There’s a baby inside. They wink at it, cover their eyes, bobble their tongues, shower its head with caterpillar fingers. I try to make eye contact with them through the door’s glass pane, but they keep their heads fixated on the exit as they walk away. The baby’s name is Luther.

My name is Theresa.

The doctors come back into the room. They stuff a purple rag into Lucas’ mouth, and he stops crying at last.

 

 

Matt Hsu is a junior at San Francisco University High School in San Francisco, California. He works as a poetry/prose editor at Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine and The Formula. Currently he’s working on a new adult novel about a lonely assassin. In his spare time, he enjoys playing tennis and eating dark chocolate.

Twenty-one. I am twenty-one. The thought repeats itself in my head as I hurriedly stumble and skate up the uneven, stoned land, up to the cliff. My Nike sneakers slide surely against the ground yet I can barely remember stepping forward. I feel like I am holding my breath, although I am breathing normally, my chest moving up and down in the normal rhythm.

Energy builds up inside my muscles and bones knocking in my lungs like gas particles in a jar. I Imagine Brownian motion, small fast particles violently colliding with large slow ones at random. I want to leave a mark in the world, I tell myself, yet at twenty-one I barely know my place. I hate to admit it, but I am confused.

I arrive suddenly, as if I stepped on some brakes. Before sunrise, at exactly four o’clock, I stand erectly at the edge of the steep cliff. My favorite place. I am ready to meet the sun. Tenuously, I study the plain below me. In the darkness, my straining eyes can barely detect neat rows and columns of the slanted wooden shades. Between the shacks are narrow strips of worn out dust roads. Dust roads with indent-like roads in my neighborhood.

For five minutes the air is motionless while the coldness teases the skin exposed by my vest and shorts. All my thoughts disappear, as the sun peeps at the landscape a small upper part oozing upward.  No movement can be detected in the squatter camp below as the sun slowly lights it up pierce by pierce like a fire burning down a string. This, I realize, marks the beginning of another day. The sun rises in exactly the same way yet it’s different.

I thought I would find you here.

I don’t turn to the sweet voice. My mother approaches until she stands beside me. Her eyes study the side of my face, searching, studying and listening. She is the headmistress of a prestigious Catholic girls’ school. The first Headmistress who is not a nun or sister. Mom has found her place with her girls. Ladies, she calls them. I envy her.

Finally, she softly speaks, Happy Birthday, dear.

My mouth twitches. I have no words just as I have nothing to show for being twenty-one, a graduate and employed. The years are merely passing by. It angers me so I remain silent gazing at the sun in no rush to replace the darkness. My skin responds to its warming up. Sounds, although muffled, of people scurrying out of ragged blanket or card boxes reach my ears.

I want to find my place mom. The way you did.

I don’t turn to her as I confess this. Mom keeps her door open for any stray or troubled girls. They flock to her like a moth to flame, attracted by strict and quiet wisdom. When she strides through the quadrangle, greetings and requests follow her steady and quick progress.

The shadow of darkness slowly retreats backwards as the glorious golden sun patiently spreads its rays. At one-point half of the squatter camp is gold and the other black. People smile and greet each other while a delicious egg is shared among all. Small miracles exist here, although mother calls these people unfortunate.

I heavily sigh, tempted to hold my breath and never take another. Sometimes I wish I was a girl, so I could fully lean on her firm at the same time liberating guidance too. Do not misunderstand. As her only biological child, she’s the best mom ever. Absently, I kick a stone hearing it drop down the cliff.

Raymond, said in a you listen to me voice, I am sure you’ll find your own place. I’ll allow you to go as far as need to find it. And even if you venture to the sun, I’m there. My mother’s mother didn’t grant her the same luxury so my mother knows what it’s like to be trapped, when you know your place is out there. Grandmother is not even Catholic yet mother loves being Catholic. But that’s not what’s bothering you, is it?

No. I force a smile. My mother doesn’t assume the problems she faced are the same ones I will face. I am leaving childhood mom. It’s safety, to enter the unknown.

A warm smile lights her pretty face matched by a charcoal peplum dress. Blinking slowly, she tells me, You overthink, Raymond.  Remember we part to meet and meet to part. The sun rises to set and sets to rise. In between all the lessons, wisdom and experiences from childhood will be there as a shield or sword. They bought you here. Lightly, she places a hand on my shoulder. Her familiar touch is comforting. You will find your place. And if you are worried fortune will be cruel, remember she has also been favorable. You got me.

Laughter bubbles out of my chest. I have her. She’ll make an egg a meal. A drop of water enough.  I step forward into her arms which hold me tight. I feel safe. Sure, of myself.

I am scared. I breathe the words into her ear. I must forge my own path. At the same time, I must follow other paths already set. Fears gripped my heart so it beat weakly. It’s similar to the feeling I got when I lost my bus fare and only realized it in the bus. If you place it into an equation, childhood plus adolescent equals everything.

You should be, she confirms, otherwise you in the wrong direction. Fear is your compass. Now stop brooding and let’s celebrate. I am also getting older, you know.

And wiser.

 

 

Chido Munangwa is a Zimbabwean poet and Indie author currently studying Radiography at the University of Zimbabwe. Her paranormal romance series, The Color of Trouble, can be found on Smashwords under the pen name Cora Sacha.