Issue 24

Everything that exists is you, so treat it well.

In essence, this is Andy Weir’s The Egg, a two-page philosophy on the nature of humanity and the purpose of life. Weir’s short story narrates the reincarnation of a forty-eight- year-old father who, after dying in a car crash, meets God in some sort of gray zone between life and death. God goes on to explain that the meaning of human life is for the man’s soul to mature, elaborating that the protagonist has lived many lives before and will continue to be reincarnated into every life that ever has existed until he is worthy of being a god as well. Earth, therefore, is an egg — a vessel in which the man’s soul can prepare for the immortality that awaits him.

Andy Weir wrote The Egg to invoke reflective thought and remind readers of their common humanity, but if we — just to make food for thought — isolate the religious aspect of the story and analyze it as if it were a legitimate belief system, we find that it is just like most other religions: it provides a rationale for why we exist, describes the afterlife, and demands obedience to a moral code, but ultimately places the thing we crave most — certainty — out of reach. By publishing his 2009 excerpt, Weir inadvertently demonstrates that religion can be created by writing answers to life’s existential questions and dangling the work beyond human grasp.

For humans, forming and following religion is a natural development. We live in a world where matter and energy cannot be erased, only transformed or transferred. To us, it is illogical that life should cease to exist. Religion gives us a comforting explanation: life is eternal, only ever changing in nature. Recognizing this continuity can sometimes make it seem like religion is orchestrated and that we gravitate towards it out of a desperation to prolong our finite existences. If we try to prove otherwise, we fail; proof always lies conveniently in another dimension.

Provability and truth are not necessarily the same thing, however. Even mathematics, which is based on amassing knowledge through provable theorems, has true statements that can never be proven (see Godel’s incompleteness theorems) and questions that can never be solved (see Turing’s undecidable problem). No matter how much we grow to comprehend our being, there will always be gaps in our understanding that are impossible to fill — things we can just never know.

Accepting that we cannot know certain things — the afterlife, the existence of God — provides a sense of calm security. Personally, though, I am unable to shirk the violent restlessness that screams to know and understand. Most people seem to ultimately find answers in religion, so is that where the truth is held? Well, to be honest, I don’t know. With religion, believing will always require we cross the gap of uncertainty with a leap of faith. Think hard about whether or not to jump, because what we choose defines the things we stand for and the people we become.

 

Aidan is a high school student and avid writer from Middletown, CT. In his free time, he enjoys reading, exercising, and browsing the web.

CW: Body horror, homophobia, internalized homophobia

 Dear Lilah, yesterday my tongue fell out of my mouth and into the bathroom sink. Slippery organ twisting red into the porcelain bowl. The smell of sea salt from the open window. Nǎinai warned me that something like this would happen. She told me Western ideals would darken my mind and scramble my brain until she couldn’t recognize her own granddaughter anymore. Gut my heritage like fish bones from flesh and strip me from my roots. As if ethnicity is something to be earned and maintained, a title gifted and taken away. Lilah, I wish you could have seen her expression when I told her about you. I was foreign.

When I was younger my Nǎinai loved me. She made me sticky white rice with guttered pork belly and washed my back with rough cloth. We were from mirror worlds, same blood different bodies, extension and predecessor. She sang songs about sparrows and springtime echoed from my mouth, I learned how to count and spell through my limbs, our bodies connected by something deeper.

One rainy day I clung to her leg and watched her chop scallions with a large vegetable knife as she told me a love story. There once was a cowherd named Niulang. He fell in love with the weaver girl, Zhinü, but their love was forbidden by the Jade Emperor. As punishment the emperor cast a sea of stars and galaxies between them, purple waves pulling the two lovers apart. But on the seventh day of the seventh month they would be reunited for one day. That night Nǎinai and I watched the sky from my bedroom window and we saw a shooting star, a crystal drop that fell from the same celestial sea. I wished for my own Niulang and Nǎinai promised me that I would find one.

But loving was a blade, Lilah. A curved vegetable knife with a peach wood handle. Loving smelled like salt and reeked of Nainai’s wrinkled breath. It carved me with its edge, eviscerated me into something else entirely, deemed me unworthy of something I never had to earn.

Lilah, I’ve never learned the Mandarin character for queer. Never saw its scratched letters on the cubed paper dished out by my Sunday school Chinese teachers. Never rang its syllables on my tongueless tongue. It did not appear next to the plates of pickled mustard roots and red paper lantern. But sometimes I saw flashes of it, a curve of a character, pinyin dangling above my hair, a black dot seeping into my skin. A friend of a friend of a friend who left the groom on her wedding day. A cousin of a cousin who refused to date. Clipped newspapers of young girls abandoned for the traitorous act of loving.

The day Nainai found out she threw me into the bathtub, steam fossilizing my hair as I drifted in the simmering water face down, liquid puckering my lips. Liar. Liar. Liar. Say it isn’t true. She scrubbed my back raw, peeling back a body of a body until I was nothing at all. I stared at the bottom of the tub with my eyes open, the ancestors of my ancestors cursing my existence. I wept salt because queerness has no roots, Lilah, no defining heredity for me to cling onto.

I dreamed about you last night as I wilted into half of myself. Monolids thinning and nails popping off like Coca-Cola bottle caps. Anatomy wrung inside out. In my dream we sat on a park bench and ate grape ice pops together, purple staining our teeth, saccharine flowing through our veins. But every time I looked at you, held your hand in mine, burned red from your sweet gaze, I became less than the entity I once was.

The truth was I loved you without loving you. I loved without knowing what love was.

Lilah, do you even remember me? We spent a sticky July afternoon drifting in a boat together. You wore a pink life vest and held your tan arm towards the sky, fingers clenched to your shiny iPod that sang songs about Watermelon Sugar and summer sweat. We talked about boys with citrus gel hair and washboard abdomens. You told me your letterman jacket crush behind your cupped hand and I told you my basketball jersey one. You watched as I got up and stood at the mast of our boat and shed yellow skin in the Long Island air, bare feet fracturing into spiderless spider webs as I stared into the sun.

Tongzhi. Tongzhi. Tongzhi. Say it with me, whisper it into my ear when I dream of ice pops and lying in the meadow with you, when I lose a body of a body. That’s the character, Lilah. I’ll never write it in their boxes, never show it to my vegetable knife Nainai. It’s my word. I’ll keep it here in the cave of my tongueless mouth, chew it with no teeth, run my lipless gums over the bleeding texture.

That day on the boat I had slipped, fell briefly into starry limbo before I lost myself in all this saltwater. Everything is foggy under the sea, muted. The fuzzy bottom of our boat. White flapping sails. Your face red from the sun. Zhinü, my weaver girl from the sky. You were more than Western ideals yet I paid the price anyway. You dropped the boat rudder and reached out to me, dipping your hand into the dark water, fingers tangling in mine as you pulled me up into the air, skinless, limbless, and whole.

 

Pinyin Footnotes:

Nǎinai- Paternal grandmother
Zhinü – Weaver Girl
Niulang. – Cowherd Boy
Tongzhi – Queer
Pinyin – The standard system of romanized spelling for transliterating Mandarin.

 

 

Jessica Wang is the founder of the youth literary magazine Ice Lolly Review. Her work has been nationally recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing, NCTE, and Susquehanna University. She is a Kenyon Young Writers’ alumna and her work is forthcoming in The Apprentice Writer. In her free time, she doodles and listens to Indie Rock. She hopes you don’t let Imposter Syndrome get to you!

The anxious chatter of the crowd fills the small, dimly lit space of my dorm room.  My laptop is open in front of me, the flickering image illuminating the fluffy corners of the blanket I’m clutching to my chest.

My heart pounds and my hands shake as I stare at the screen.

This is it.  At seventeen my brother is only ten points away from making one thousand points in his high school basketball career.  Players don’t usually make it to that milestone point, and if they do, they don’t even make that one-thousandth point until their senior year.  But here my brother was in his junior year, once again, defeating the odds and breaking records one shot at a time.

Being two hours away from home, I don’t get the latest basketball news from my brother every night.  When I talk to my mom on the phone, I get a summary of the latest, but it’s never the same as hearing my brother relay the details through excited or disappointed retellings.  When it comes to his own game, my brother has always been humble.  The one-thousandth point had been mentioned a few times, but I hadn’t realized how close he was until my mother texted me the night before: “Fyi, I saw on fb that the game will be live streamed tomorrow night.  He needs 23 points.”  My brother’s average was around twenty-five points a game.  This was it.

With each basket he makes, the crowd goes wild, causing the speakers of my laptop to screech with an electronic buzz.

Every dribble, pass, and basket feels like an eternity, the clock ticking down slower and slower with each second.  I frantically text my mother to make sure I’ve counted correctly.

Six points.

I keep my eyes on number thirty-five, the red and white uniform blurring in a clump of pixels.

I double and triple check my WiFi connection.

Four points.

The blanket I had been clutching to my chest falls away as I lean closer to the screen.  My legs have fallen asleep, protesting against the criss-cross position I had been sitting in for the past thirty minutes, but I don’t risk moving.

White and black uniforms run down the court, the camera failing to fluidly follow the players’ movements.

Two points.

Through the pixelations, I see he’s standing tall, moving freely with his teammates.  No sign of stress or anxiety.  His shot has been perfect the entire game.  Whenever he gets the ball, it soars through the air in a perfect arch, swishing into the basket.  My brother had the weight of the school and game on his shoulders, yet he held it with grace.  He runs down the court as if this is just another game, as if nothing extraordinary is about to happen.

My heart stops as my brother is intentionally fouled at 998 points.

He moves to the free-throw line, arms swaying casually at his sides, as the other players take their positions in the paint, forming a pattern of white, black, white, black on either side of the basket.

My brother wipes the soles of his red shoes with his palm as the referee dribbles the ball.

Each thud of leather against wood sparks the thought of a different shoe.

My brother is suddenly six-years-old wearing black, bulky hip-hop shoes hopping across the stage.  Another year goes by and his foot is slightly larger as he kicks a soccer ball with neon green cleats across the grass.  The next year rushes by with a thud.  He’s eight-years-old bringing up dust as he steps up to the plate with mud-stained baseball cleats.  The mud and dust wash away as his cleats become shiny, black dress shoes.  He’s nine-years-old balancing a double bass between his feet, delicately swinging the bow across the large instrument’s strings.

Over the years, he had tried on many shoes, but he had only ever asked for new basketball shoes.

A silent murmuring settles over the crowd, and suddenly I’m sitting in the bleachers.  “Come on, bud,” I whisper as gossip-like mutterings wisp around me.

He kicks the floor, getting his feet into position, and practices his form.

My heart races as I watch his chest rise and fall.  He’s calm and collected as his eyes move away from the basket and to the referee still dribbling the ball.  My brother nods and the ball bounces across the paint into his hands.

He licks his lips and dribbles the ball at his side, taking in the basket before him.

Suddenly, he’s three-years-old and his little hands are now dribbling the tiny rubber basketball on the carpet as he licks his lips in concentration.  He dips and dives in his dinosaur pajamas toward the blue and yellow Fisher-Price basketball hoop.  He dunks the ball, standing on his tiptoes, pretending to hold onto the rim.  “Beat that!” he says with a beaming smile and a gusto other three-year-olds could only wish for.

The small ball rolls across the carpet and hits my knees.  I pick up the ball, which fits perfectly in my palm, and say, “Bet I can!”  I toss the ball between my hands as I ponder my next trick shot.

I blink.

He bends his knees and lifts the ball up in the air.

A perfect arch.

One point.

I can imagine the bleachers vibrating under my feet as the crowd hollers, the electronic buzz of the crowd from my laptop’s speaker filling my ears.

My brother puts down his arms and shakes them out at his sides.  His teammates step over to give him high-fives of encouragement.

Because my brother was fouled intentionally, the referees move the other players to the half-court line, leaving him alone with the basket.

A hush settles over the crowd as the ball is tossed across the paint to him again, the echo surging through us all.

The ball bounces next to his red basketball shoes as he dribbles.

I hold my shaking hands to my pounding chest.  “You can do it, bud,” I whisper into the two-hour distance between us.

Everything goes quiet as my brother bends his knees and lifts the large, leather ball into the air.  The ball lands into the net with a swish.  He pumps the air victoriously with his fist.

Robbie Rusciano has made one thousand points.

A sob escapes my lips as I watch the crowd stand and cheer.  I scream and clap, disrupting the dark quiet of my dorm room.

Robbie jogs to his coaches and teammates, doing a different personalized handshake with each of them.

The pixels of the livestream and my tears blend together as a warmth spreads across my chest.

Robbie’s beaming smile reaches me from ninety miles away, and for a brief moment, he’s three-years-old again shooting a rubber ball through a plastic hoop in dinosaur pajamas.

 

 

Aly Rusciano is a twenty-two-year-old recent graduate of The University of Tennessee at Martin, where she majored in English while focusing in Creative Writing and minoring in Theatre. Aly can often be found reading outside or typing away at her computer. She has been writing ever since she could hold a pencil. Aly’s love of books and passion for writing continues to positively affect her life as she pursues a career in the publishing industry while simultaneously chasing her dream of being a published author.

 

 I am 18 years old, and I am sure of one thing: I never want to be a mother.

90% sure.

80% sure.

75% sure with a 10% surcharge fee for overthinking.

Maybe it’s silly to say something so concrete at eighteen years old. At seven years old, I accidentally ate part of a rubber band and thought I would die two months later. (Two months came and went, and I amended my death sentence to three months, and then four, and then five. For all I know, the rubber band is just waiting for me to let my guard down.)

At twelve years old, I thought “depraved” and “deprived” were synonyms. (I proudly said “I’m just depraved like that!” in front of several of my favorite teachers during the crowded rush between fifth and sixth period.)

At sixteen, I thought my biggest point of pride was being able to differentiate between Jacobins and Jacobites. (And I’ll still pretentiously lecture about both to anyone who will ask; you, dear reader, could be the inaugural requester.)

But I make do with what I have, and what I have is the experience of an eighteen-year-old who knows that children feature nowhere in her five—or her ten—or her forever plan.

I like children. I like them in an abstract they are our future”way, in a No Child Left Behind idealistic way. But raising them myself is a completely different discussion. Involving myself in a lifetime of whining and pooping and screaming doesn’t appeal to me. I’m eighteen—teetering on the slim picket fence between adolescence and adulthood—I remember my whining and pooping and screaming.

I look to my elders, the Millennials, for justifications. Climate change—imagine raising a kid in the era of fiery hurricanes and melting icebergs. Economic inequality—imagine raising a kid in an era where Jeff Bezos owns more wealth than he’ll ever use while college graduates get turned down for McDonald’s positions. Racial discrimination—imagine raising a kid in an era where if they look different, if they love different, they’ll be targeted. I don’t want to raise a child in these situations. I’ll live through them myself, and they’re experience enough without forcing someone else to share them with me.

But I don’t pretend that my desire to avoid motherhood is wholly rooted in a concern for the future. I’m selfish by nature—everyone says so—and so are my decisions. If I become a mother, I’ll be a Pygmalion. Of course, there’s philosophical debates that could be had about whether children’s minds are truly tabula rasa or if they’re born with predetermined traits. But children, in my own child experience, are deeply influenced by their parents and the situations they live in. Mothers and fathers take chisels to their pristine block of marble and chip away.

Sometimes parents have discerning eyes and gentle hands, and the sculpture wins awards. Sometimes parents chip too much, and the sculpture cracks on the inside and crumbles.

Sometimes parents chip just enough to avoid the crumbling but not the cracking.

I feel the smooth handle of the chisel in my hands every time I think about children, feel the coldness of the metal against the ridges of my soft palm. The last time I had a callus was six years ago, the last time I dangled from the monkey bars near my home. I am not built for holding tools, for hard labor, for sculpting, for motherhood.

At least when you seek a partner, when you swipe right on Tinder, or maybe when you give someone attractive at your local coffeeshop the ol’ up-down, you rest safe in the knowledge that you will meet someone fully formed. Someone whose qualities will little budge with your influence, and someone who will little budge your qualities. The two of you will complement each other.

But children come to you just-formed. And when you stroke your rough human finger—because even my bourgeois hands are too rough for those just-formed children—against their cheek, you will give them their first touch. Now your touch is theirs—your touch is their first definition of so many things.

Your touch is human.

 Your touch is skin.

 Your touch is mother.

 Or your touch could be disgust, could be bitterness, could be scorn, could be regret.

 Forgive me for dating myself, but there was a popular TikTok trend circulating a few months ago: “I love being your mom,” the women in the videos said, “but I miss her.” “Her” being the women before they were mothers, the women who dressed up and went to clubs, and saw their friends and thought of their children as abstract little twinkles in their eyes, not seven-pound babies in their arms in a sterile hospital bed lit by fluorescent lights demanding to see every little flaw.

I love my child enough never to have them.

 

Kathryn Lee is a freshman at Binghamton University. Her work has been previously published in Binsey Poplar Press, Paper Crane Journal, The Augment Review, and Halfway Down the Stairs. Along with writing fiction, she also runs her own book review blog, le livre en rose (lelivreenrose.weebly.com).

She wanted to buy the fridge freshmen year, just in case we ended up hating each other. She didn’t want us to have to bicker about who got to keep it. We laughed about that in the first dizzy April, then again in the fleeing November sleet – we laughed about it as we barreled toward one another at the airport, against each other’s lips, we were always laughing, we laughed at everything but most of all at her foolish attempt at safety before she knew me and realized we would share a fridge forever. We laughed about it during the months we spent apart, me getting high in the Netherlands and her working at Jersey Mikes, we laughed about it in the greedy mountain river, swimming naked and freezing and unashamed, and we laughed about it when she moved in with me, a shitty one bedroom apartment in Colorado, where she stayed for three days and kissed me blind and said she liked men, not women, and boarded a plane the next morning, and I was laughing as I carried her suitcase down the stairs, laughing as I crammed her clothes in a box, laughing as I stood barefoot in the dorm again and saw the same fridge pushed against the wall, kept there just in case.

 

Kelsey Day is a poet and novelist from southern Appalachia. Her work is urgent, timely, and relentlessly vulnerable, and has been published in literary journals such as Reservoir Road Literary Review, Storm Cellar Literary Magazine, Brave Voices Magazine, and Our Shared Memory Collective. She is a recipient of the University of Chicago’s Young Memory Fellowship and is an honors student at Emerson College. She works with women from across the globe with the International Women’s Writing Guild, is a staff writer for Two Story Melody, and serves as the Head Poetry Editor for the Emerson Review.