Issue 23

I will build us a home in Alaska.

Inside you’ll be able to paint flowers anywhere with thick oil colours, the same ones you sketch on your notebook when you cannot focus. They’ll be bright and brilliant and their petals will be strewn across the banisters and countertops, gauzy bodies overlapping like shingles. You can throw them like splatter paint over the walls and carve wispy leaves on window sills. The flowers will be visible and brazenly displayed and not hidden in the corner of your paper.

The outside will be a gentle white. As frozen crystals dive sluggishly from clouds to earth and the land is whipped cream, it will be impossible to see a difference between us and the snow and the expanse of forest beyond. Because we’ll be the same: pristine, radiant.

I rest my head against the frigid window beside my desk and admire the sunlight flow through the glass barrier, onto my paper, making my pen marks shimmer. Lifting one hand into the sunbeams, I watch dust motes swirl around my fingertips. I imagine the specks collecting into ribbons that flutter and sail in the air, wrapping themselves around my hands and forearms. With my eyes closed I can see the vast skylight I’ll build in our home. We can wake up to daylight’s butter yellow glow, it will pour inside like a waterfall of light, and we’ll be swimming in sun.

After I have been distracted too long, the teacher walks to the window and tugs a string, dropping the blinds with a whir and a crash.

The tiles covering the floor will be a dark, deep blue, the colour of a 2 AM sky. None of the furniture will match. The curtains will be made of thick canvas so we can paint them on rainy days. Your green retro bike will sit on the front porch. And anything else you could possibly want, I’ll get it for you.

In the spring I’ll put a chair beneath the trees -aluminum so the rain cannot eat at its metallic frame. Vines will slowly wrap their spindly tendril-hands around its legs; climbing and slithering between the gaps in the seat. Nature will curl through the chair like it’s a trellis and then I’ll sit. And I’ll become part of a mixture of metal, plant, and boy. Not the way a teenager is hidden in a crowded high school hallway, but the way rain joins the sea. Ferns like shaggy dog tails will sway at the base of trees whose trunks are knotted and gnarled with fortitude, blotchy shadows shivering on the ground. I’ll close my eyes, listening to birds whistle. I’ll flex my bare toes against the damp earth and feel roots gradually sprout from my feet, twisting down in the dirt. I’ll connect to the forest and feel it breathe. Synchronize myself with its pulse. Be part of something bigger.

We’ll have a record player in the living room, sitting on an ancient black suitcase. With the needle placed down, I’ll close my eyes and let myself sway to the music. It’ll soothe me, a river of notes over my burning body. We’ll play everything we crave; from Bach to the Rolling Stones. Tom Petty to Britney Spears. Holding you close to me, we’ll dance on the navy floor; spinning with our arms above our heads, stamping our feet, rocking softly side to side with our foreheads pressed together.

 

I put in my headphones and play my music now, dissolving and floating away with the song, rising upwards in a cloud. The feeling is ethereal and effortless. Absolutely uncontainable.

 

Then it ends. I desublimate. I slam back into my body with an abrupt jolt similar to the impact of an airplane landing on a runway.

If the music ends at our house, the silence will not sound like emptiness.

I have an inkling that soon, the walls of my hectic mind won’t be able to ignore the erosion from nonstop waves of exhausting thoughts that crash against them. I’ll collapse dramatically on the stained carpet floor of my bedroom, fracturing and bursting apart, flooding water in the licorice-coloured night. I will be a candle melting to wax across a table, a tree cracking in the wind, being undone, being demolished. But not in our Alaskan house, the farthest slice of America from here, where the wild hums. If the tears start to spill from my eyes, you will wipe them away tenderly with your thumb. You will whisper my name (you will know my name). You will look at me, recognize me, and I will be held together.

The porch will be screened in with a fine mesh. I can lay blankets on it and fall asleep listening to the commotion of the night.

 

 

Naomi Marko is a high school student in Vancouver, BC. Her writing has been recognized in the Alice Munro Short Story Competition and is forthcoming in Aerie International. When not writing, she can be found reading, playing soccer, or hiking with friends.

Loud music filled the room. Tom’s stick-like legs bounced to the rhythms of Patti Smith, Richard Hell, and the Ramones. Like fingers on a keyboard, they hit every note via convulsive inward twitches. Though unable to move, he had danced his homebound days away in his mind, and flared up the walls between himself and his neighbours.

His paralysis subsided upon the sound of silence. Tom straightened and strained each of his legs, as if they were made of crumbling wood. He stood up and floated out the door in a dreamlike state.

As he went outside the trees swayed to his rhythm, encouraging him to take one fresh footprint after another. He hasn’t walked in years, and every step felt exotic and transgressive. He felt himself doubling like a tom-tom drum at the climax of an upward-hill solo. His legs withered under the strain of sensory excess, so he reached for his fellow strollers for support.

The first figure he spotted was a teenage girl. She walked carefully, pliéing her way forward like a ballerina. Her long legs, winding and ashamed, didn’t seem to fit the rest of the body or the malevolent expression on her face. She had headphones on; Tom imagined ballet poses smashing an electric guitar seamlessly, its crumbs falling over the girl’s dark hair. He tried to mimic her walk, but it was too fast, too used up.

He heard the tap-tapping of the rain as he followed another silhouette across the street. She had a brisk walk and a concentrated style, like a first-rate dance teacher, relinquishing talent for authority. What would happen if she found a partner good enough for her? He wondered. Would she spread her wings and fly above the crowd to the rhythm of a ballroom’s starlight chandelier? He tried to keep up with her, but the bustling sound of her footsteps put him in need of a crutch to lean on. He dropped her trail and fell on a bench.

Tom used to slurp on movement like it was mother’s milk. He inhaled every rhythm and key change, and moved his body accordingly: he pogoing to punk, gesticulating to hip hop, swaying to jazz—and skinning his partners alive at slow-dancing.

There was one art he had never been able to grasp, and that was walking itself. The way people moved forward, never looking back or up or down – except for those more socially anxious, that is – the path leading them exactly where they needed to go. As natural as he was on the dance floor, he grew hopeless on the street.

Until the paralysis struck him.

He’d been kissed by a siren at the most elemental dance of all. The curves of his partner’s flesh suffocated his bones and blew substance out of them. Unlike birds, he did not learn to fly. He took to bed instead, watching the birds flocking and mocking him outside the window.

He would never love anymore. He could not dare to invite even a possibility of the tiniest tinge of attraction. He had loved once, and the woman broke his legs. They could have remained broken, he didn’t care about that anymore, but he would never let anyone break his heart ever again.

*

Pumped up by the air in his lungs, Tom situated himself firmly on the bench and watched people walk by. The street began to overflow with couples: tangoing their way out of fights, cha-cha-ing into each other’s business, or waltzing into a shared space of their own. One heart might have been a lonely hunter, but two constructed the most elaborate frameworks and patterns imaginable.

Tired of looking outside himself, Tom joined the fingers of his two hands together and took them on circling walks up the air’s stairs. He mixed and matched grungy rhythms and twirled until his cheeks turned flamenco red.

When he looked at the world around him, he noticed a woman leaning on the wall on the other side of the street. When she spotted his eyes set on her, she waved at him. He waved back.

Without walking over, the woman began to move her hips. She must have been about Tom’s age, with short red hair and a sickly pale complexion. He couldn’t see the features of her face from afar, but he saw a smile sifting through her body. He stood up and walked up to the edge of the pavement. He couldn’t feel his legs anymore. He began to mimic her, and sway his hips left to right. Without thinking twice, he raised his hand, as if pressing it on an imaginary wall; then he locked the air in an embrace with his other hand. The woman, in turn, reflected him.

Tom remembered the waltz lessons his parents had forced him to take in elementary school. Right foot forward, left foot to the left, right foot follows; left foot backwards, right to the right, left follows; and so it goes. The woman moved correspondingly. Each passerby stared and every other car honked, but no one stopped them. Everyone kept a safe distance, as if the pair was surrounded by an electric field of their own.

Tom felt a teardrop on his cheek. When he looked up, he noticed a bruise-coloured cloud staring at him and sending him cold droplets, one by one, like a cold shoulder. When he looked back down, the woman was gone. The trees turned motionless. People did, too. Their pace was slow and their movements mechanical, blurry, anonymous.

Tom felt the pronounced stickiness of his legs crawling back into the bones. He barely made it back home. As he did, he heard the trees’ whispers, their promise branches broken like the wind and swallowed by the rain.

He couldn’t tell if the drop on his cheek was a tear, or a bit of sky falling upon him.

 

 

 

 

Alex has been experimenting with various forms of writing for the past few years. She’s a Culture Editor and Writer for Roar News, her work has also appeared in publications such as HuffPost UK, Bad Pony Mag, Breath & Shadow, and Litbreak Magazine. She’s a creator of the YouTube channel, Alex Blank, where she explores the illusions and inconsistencies of the human psyche.

Eliza tucked paint-stained hands behind her back and took a step closer to me. Her faded summer camp T-shirt was knotted at the waist, daylily-gold skirt brushing the tops of her sandals. Standing in the blunt fluorescent of the airport terminal, her contour was more defined, shadows seeping through her neck. Graduation had weighted her to the ground like I thought nothing ever could.

We used to draw all over our geometry notes, faces and flowers and flowy dresses. They all ran into each other in the margins, collarbones intertwining with hibiscus stems, tangles of tie-dye arteries twisting through wide-rule lines to the sun. Once we realized how to put summer onto paper, we could never focus on math again.

We were always afraid of the dark. On those wide-eyed August days, we would spend the whole afternoon sprawled in tall field grass, tracing clouds with our fingertips. We stretched our arms to the sky and let hazy pinks and yellows fog our vision. But when the sky flooded periwinkle, and mosquitoes swarmed around our heads, we would run all the way to her house, set candles on the windowsills, switch on all the lamps and flashlights we owned, sit cross-legged on the floor, and wait for dawn.

And that was how it was. Every summer, from when we first learned how to stretch our arms wide like the sky, to the moment we realized we could never win against the world.

The day after graduation, she didn’t paint flowers on her jeans or run cursive paths through the open field overlooking the lake. She sat in my backyard and scuffed patches of dirt with her big toe and picked at an orange peel. And made small talk. And then a mosquito landed on her arm and she said she had to pack and she drove herself home.

That night, I fell asleep with the sunset.

She went to college in California. “Where winter doesn’t exist,” she said, burying her nose in my neck as she hugged me goodbye. She pressed a small, square canvas into my palm — a painting of a sunflower, flush against the bluest sky.

Her hazel eyes burned gold with tears as I looked up. She said, “I’m going to miss you so much.”

Half an hour till her midnight flight. Five and a half hours more, and she’d be landing to an L.A sunrise. I said, “Me too.”

I left for Chicago the next day. Full scholarship.

I can’t remember exactly when we stopped talking. We FaceTimed every day at first, and then one afternoon she had too much to do, and so it became every other day. And then once a week. And then just texting. And then silence.

I let it hurt.

Chicago doesn’t see the sun, but I wouldn’t know the difference. I have watery suns awaiting me at all hours of the day now, nestled in sagging ceilings that are either off-white or dirty. Sometimes, during lectures, I stare up at them just to feel the spots in my eyes again, but it’s not the same.

We still follow each other’s Instagrams; her posts always show up at the top of my feed. The algorithm is taking a while to catch up. She’s smiling her genuine smile in every picture, made only truer by crystalline California light, not the heavy Jersey heat we tolerated out of necessity. I wonder if her new friends — glimmering, molten, like her, like I could never be — take her to the ocean at sunrise on the warmest days of the year. I hope they do.

Once, the summer we were eight or nine, we were lying on a beach towel in her backyard, benevolently competing to name all the birdcalls we heard. As I said, “Indigo bunting,” Eliza asked, “Do you think the sun and the sky and the clouds can see us like we see them?”

Intellectually, I knew the answer. But I said, “I think they can see you.”

Her brow furrowed as she contemplated. “Why not you?”

“‘Cause I’m just me, and you’re a lot more than just you,” I said, and this, I know, is true.

I was born lonely, and then I spent twelve summers with Eliza, and now all I do is look for her.

 

Lili Namazi is a fourteen-year-old rising junior with a passion for all things literary and musical. When they are not writing, composing, or playing an instrument, you will probably find them drinking iced coffee, listening to music, and daydreaming. They plan to continue their artistic pursuits in college and as their career.