Issue Seventeen

The Prodigy

By Sarah Stager

Whenever I say that I’ve been playing cello for twelve years, it feels like a lie. That’s well over half of my life that my fingers have been attached to this extra wooden appendage, that I have been breathing in the oaky smell of varnish and rosin, that I have been making noises; sometimes beautiful, gut-wrenching, soul-searing music, sometimes just an ugly, disappointing blip of unnatural sound.

Beauty has always been my specialty. I can never seem to play those loud, jumpy sections with as much accuracy as others, always hesitant to truly commit my body to the chaos, but sacrificing my body for beauty – I have never had trouble doing that. Long, languid, aching notes, filled with the swelling of the heart, exploring tenderly its cracks and hollows, its little broken bits. Cello is often sad, yes – mournful and wistful, reaching out and scooping up a bit of the past with gentle hands – but no one can argue that it is not beautiful.

I love this instrument. But it wasn’t always like that. I first picked up the cello because it was different, and because at the time, I was obsessed with being different. Little third grade Sarah was not like other girls with their teensy violins, scraping out meek squeaks and squawks – no, no, she lugged around cello, and adults said things like: “How can you play that? It’s twice your size!” This was an exaggeration of course, but it still made little Sarah puff up her chest with pride.

It wasn’t love at first sight that made me pick up the cello. In fact, when I first interacted with it – I wouldn’t be so generous as to call it playing – it felt unbelievably awkward. I was in second grade. I was small, and the cello was large. The strings instructor positioned me behind the cello, and I sat with my legs tucked behind its back since they weren’t quite long enough to reach around as they should. The bow was heavy and awkward, and my natural inclination was to clench it in my small fist. This, of course, was very wrong, but in the moment, no one really cared.

Naturally, when I managed to make a noise, it was not a very good one – a shaky, crunchy low groan on the C string. No one cringed, but at the same time no one threw their hands up in the air and declared, “she’s a natural!” In fact, my parents soon began to attempt to convince me that the cello was too big for me – why not pick up the viola? This argument only convinced me further that the cello was for me. I wanted to be the small girl that played the cello, an instrument usually thought of as only for boys, at least in my elementary school. I wanted to be defiant. I wanted to be different.

Well, I got what I wanted. I was one of two kids who played cello at my elementary school, and the other was a boy. We had lessons with the cello teacher Mr. Diehl in a room that was essentially a closet. It was not exactly how I’d dreamed it would be. We didn’t make a sound the first lesson – all we learned was how to care for our instruments, to lay them on their sides but never their backs, to always loosen our bows when we were finished, how to apply rosin, how to clean the strings, an endless barrage of lessons that did not include the one thing I wanted to learn. I wanted to play, with all the force of a petulant and overeager child.

But even when we did begin to play, plucking our way through short passages, placing our fingers on tape markers that showed us exactly where the notes were, I wasn’t satisfied. I was just making noises, not music. I was not a prodigy. I wasn’t even that good. One day, after a lesson went particularly badly for me, Mr. Diehl, who did not know how to be kind to children, told me that if I didn’t start practicing, he and the boy would leave me in the dust.

Even practicing, which had a certain glamour at first – I was playing the cello! – soon lost its luster with repetition. I became bored with rehearsing the same passage over and over. When would I get to use my bow? When would it sound beautiful? Why, why was I not as good at this as I expected to be?

After the first two months, I was ready to give up. It was hard, practicing was boring, it hurt my tiny fingers, which were completely free of the callouses that would later protect me from the hard, metallic strings, and had to stretch to reach the most of the notes. I would’ve stopped practicing altogether, had it not been for my strict parents. Every day, my mother would ask if I had practiced. Sometimes I would lie, but she would always know. Most of the time, I would sullenly, reluctantly, retrieve my cello from its case and practice through my passages, just once, studiously ignoring my fumbled fingerings, my scratchy bowings.

Eventually, this became habit – fifteen minutes every single day, no matter whether my parents coerced me or not. Fifteen, and then thirty, and eventually a whole hour, and I cared about my mistakes; I still made so many mistakes, but it was the caring that really mattered.

I am grateful that my first time playing cello was not my last time playing cello – not even close. I am grateful that I had supportive parents who provided an instrument, and also cracked the whip so that I would actually learn to play it. I am grateful that I am not a prodigy. Playing the cello is a physical, mental, and emotional struggle, constant and unceasing – even Yo-Yo Ma struggles. But it’s also a struggle that is fiercely rewarding, in the burning of muscles, in the quick movement of fingers, in the patient revision of noise into music. It wasn’t like that the first time, and even as I funneled endless hours into practice, I never knew that I would come to love it. But now I know – love is never effortless.

Sarah is a turtleneck enthusiast, tea drinker, and cat lover currently studying English Writing and History at the University of Pittsburgh. She is also a copyeditor and writer for The Pitt News.

Paper Lanterns

By Lilian Wiegand

Hundreds of glowing paper lanterns, richly colored and adorned with handmade stars and animals, bejeweled the darkening evening. They bobbed on the ends of carrying-wands touted by children wandering down the streets in parade-like processions. I held my lantern, a crescent moon with a smiling face, and walked among winter-jacket bundled crowds, experiencing for the first time St. Martin, the lantern festival. This German holiday celebrates the venerated Holy Roman Empire soldier who cut his cloak in half to share with a beggar during a snowstorm. Through his selfless deed, he saved the impoverished man from freezing.

I had spent two weeks learning traditional songs honoring the Saint so that I could sing from door to door and receive candy in return on this special November night.

For my eight-year-old self, this was the most wonderful and exciting holiday I had ever experienced. I traveled through the grand streets of Neuss singing my songs proudly and admiring the handcrafted sphere and prism-shaped lanterns that shone like planets. In that moment, I was proud to partake in such a beautiful celebration. For me, a celebration of being German. But that same year, someone tried to make me feel ashamed of it.

“You’re a Nazi,” the boy in my third-grade class accusingly spat at me as he pointed in a WWII book at a photograph of a devastated city. There were emaciated prisoners in the picture, being led by German soldiers. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as he said this. He was strangely enraptured by the war and spoke with bitter hatred woven into his words when addressing me. For several weeks I had been hearing these spiteful comments.

I let his invective roll off my back– it didn’t hurt me. But I was confused about why he would accost me; I had never imagined being associated with Nazism and the horrible events of WWII. How could I be assumed a Nazi when all of my grandparents, the most kind-hearted people I knew, had suffered so immensely?

My grandfather often told me stories about his experiences through the war. His family was ripped apart after losing their business and savings, and he and his siblings separated. He had to work as a young boy to help his family, yet he witnessed his mother crying when she had nothing to feed them but the starch-based adhesive scraped from wallpaper. He ran to escape bombings, and his promising education was cut short when his teacher starved to death.

He lost his childhood to the war.

I would listen with a heavy heart to his stories but smile at the end, when he expressed how grateful he was that I didn’t have to live through such times. I became imbued with a great sense of gratitude as well because, thanks to his stories, I deeply understood how fortunate I was. To have a childhood in peacetime, replete with opportunities and choices, was not something to take lightly. From knowing what my grandfather went through, I began to live with a more profound appreciation for what I had.

And so I looked at the lanterns and felt utterly blessed. I admired the colors, the lights, and cherished the beautiful voices dancing in the air. I love the many aspects of my German culture that I am able to enjoy, from celebrating Oktoberfest to watching soccer. Of course, I also share a deep repentance with each German in remembrance of the Holocaust and the role that the German people played in it. But with this shouldered sense of guilt, there comes modesty, the spirit of betterment, and a character of learned industriousness that I believe I inherited, too.

Each aspect of my German culture glimmers brightly in my vision, reminding me of who I am. The undeniable incandescence stays with me, and my path is lit. I am forever appreciative of this.

Lilian Wiegand is a twelfth-grader living in New Jersey. Originally she is from Germany and has spent time living in England as well. She is planning on studying neuroscience in college and going to medical school afterward. She loves writing and reading and hopes to one day write a novel. Other passions of hers include playing/instructing tennis and running cross country and track.

Five Years Warmer

By Kendall Bistretzan

I am fifteen and I take the city bus to school. I am the only one of my friends who lives on the West End of town, so my mornings are lonely, and I am accustomed to that. In fact, I embrace it, opting to take the earlier bus to avoid the 8:30 crowd. Morning after morning I stand in the blistering Saskatchewan cold, hands clasped firmly to my purple thermos, the taste of French vanilla cappuccino staining my tongue. My ear buds, the ones they give you for free when you buy an iPod, are only held in place by my toque. I listen to old OneRepublic songs ripped from YouTube. The quality is terrible. The bus schedule, the coffee, the sound, all of it. But I have never known anything else, so I am at ease.

The sky is a different colour at this time of day. In fact, I’m not convinced it’s a real colour at all but rather a majesty that can only be witnessed by the exhausted hopeful bunch who venture out of their homes at seven in the morning. It’s almost the Crayola pencil crayon that tries to pass for dark purple, but there is a rich royalty as though God Herself plucked the purest blue from a sea untouched by man and smeared it across the barren sky. The sun has yet to rise but the trees are nothing but shadows, so dark that they have been erased from the universe. Only the shell of where they once stood remains. More peculiar is the lack of wind. Wind, always raging in Saskatchewan, has yet to wake up from her slumber. It is just me, the sky, and the sharp chill that never rests.

The bus comes and I am warmer now.

I get to school around eight. Most kids hang out in Sion hall before class, but most kids don’t have the best locker location in the school along with their friends. Second floor, north corner, across from a staircase and a window. From this window, I can see the sunrise. There is no sunrise in Sion Hall.

Derrick will get to school before I do. He lives in South Hill, but also opts to take the early bus. He sits with his back to the adjacent wall; gangly legs sprawled out, drawing notice to his slightly-too-short jeans. His shaggy hair often covers his downcast gaze. Before, my presence would draw that gaze up. We would talk, and joke, and kill time until drama. It’s not like that anymore, and I think perhaps it’s not the sky or the chill that make mornings so cold, but him.

We sit in silence and I try to ignore the way my heart aches. I look at him and he looks at his phone. I divert my gaze to the window, where the sun paints her picture. I lose myself in the blue that fades to lilac that fades to rose that fades to fire. In times of stress my friends and I joke about throwing ourselves from the window, but I would never do that to the sky, and perhaps that’s the only thing that keeps me on the ground.

I am twenty and everything is both different and the same. Alberta air is forgiving enough that my hands can be ungloved as I clutch my to-go cup. The coffee is black. I made it with my Keurig – the first thing I bought when I moved out. The sun doesn’t rise in my neighbourhood and I don’t know how this can be, but every morning at the bus stop I watch the sun turn on like the rising of a dimmer switch. There isn’t light, and then there is. I miss the land of living skies, but there is no point in dwelling on what is different. I have adopted a new favourite view; the city lights at night. They are a manmade wonder, but they’ll do.

I am twenty and I am everything that tenth grade Kendall hoped I would become, except that I am a multitude, and good cannot exist without bad. I am a journalism student, a published writer, I am entering adulthood with a solid group of friends, and I have a part-time barista job that I happen to love. But I am weary. The people I love worry about me. And while it has been half a decade since my first heartbreak I have only recently uncovered the burden of breaking another, and it is so much easier to be sad than to make sad.

I try not to dwell on my shortcomings when I’m doing all I can to make good. I fill my head with music to battle it out with the worry. Everlong, but not the acoustic version. Motown, to remember better times (maybe I’ll tap my foot a bit). Not Imagine Dragons, at least not yet. Arkells; I share this love with new friends. These songs belong to me, and if I’m cold waiting for the bus, I don’t notice.

The ride leading up to my transfer is short and offers my favourite part of the day. The only people on the bus are the driver and I— the exhausted hopeful bunch who venture out of their homes at seven in the morning. We sit in silence. The bus lurches around the corner of Windermere road and there it is:

The sun rises over downtown Calgary. She actually rises. I say hello to my old friends: the blue that fades to lilac that fades to rose that fades to fire, but where there were once blacked-out trees is the skyline of a city that is bigger than my dreams, and in that darkness, there are lights.

Everything is both different and the same. I take the bus to school, and finally, I am warm.

Kendall Bistretzan is from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and resides in Calgary, Alberta, where she studies Journalism at Mount Royal University. She has previous publications with Windscript, Polar Expressions, Local Drop Magazine and Rebelle Society, and also writes for the Calgary Journal. You can find her on Instagram @kendallbistwrites.

Up in Smoke

By Hailey Bartlett

Ms. Hillberry liked things difficult. She would ask her butler of twenty-five years to steep her tea with not one, but three bags each cup. If you were to ask her why, she would explain that her taste buds were far more advanced than common folk who only drink from one bag. She also required that her sugar cubes be expertly sliced in oddly precise measurements to which she never checked, no matter how many times she threatened it. The butler knew the cubes must be placed on the side of her plate, never to be put it by any hands other than her own.

Next to her tea was a handcrafted sandwich, cut in the shape of a heart with crusts on the side and cut into fours. Every ingredient had to be visible, the cream cheese, cucumber, pepper, and alfalfa sprouts that would get stuck between her yellowing teeth. Her teeth were just as yellow as the satin curtains in each window, specifically drawn at a ninety two degree angle, which again, was never checked. The walls soon followed suit with a yellowing color, causing Ms. Hillberry to demand the walls be covered in elaborate oil painting of every single member of the rich family holding a cigarette between their pale fingers. Her butler, however, was not a painter, but he learned for the sake of the “royal atmosphere” Ms. Hillberry and her ancestors worked so hard to create by smoking indoors.

Not only did he dislike painting, but he disliked the stench of cigarettes and the effect on the older woman’s lungs. The butler would tell her that one day, she would lose hold of her lit cigarette, leading lace tablecloth, imported from Bordeaux, France, to catch fire, which would make its way to the circular rug from Istanbul, and finally connect with the drapes to ignite the entire royal atmosphere in flames.

She replied the same way every time he cautioned her: “You know what they’ll say once that happens? The butler did it.”

Hailey Bartlett is a seventeen-year-old writer from Freedom, Pennsylvania. She still can’t swim or tie her shoes very well, but she CAN make people laugh.

Crucifying Fish, Waiting for Death

By Zoha Arif

Nana hasn’t seen an ocean or lake for decades, since she left the business of fish bladder trafficking, since her husband, a middle man for the fish mafia, was thrown overboard into a ring of hammerheads on a wet night. Perhaps that’s why she’s so easily excited by thunderstorms. When I visited her a few years ago, she sat for two hours watching a passing storm. At the time, Nana lived in a one bedroom apartment facing the inner courtyard of her brick high-rise complex, a matted grassland dotted with weed, mosquitos, mice, and thickets of vines, crawling up the brick walls like arms jabbed and poked by needles. When I tilted my head far enough, I could see the opening above the courtyard through the window, where black clouds billowed from the west, their brassy countenances fattening the air and dulling everything. We sat in silence that evening, Nana with green tea, me with my bitten finger-beds, rain slapping the window a thousand times over, both of us watching the courtyard bleed with water and the vine fade away in a blur of mist. Nana soaked in the brilliance and brute violence of the storm, intrigued and fascinated, whilst I didn’t see anything different with this thunderstorm than the last.

When mama plows us to Nana’s house, there are eruptions of periodic yelling and questions of do we really have to go? God, it’s so boring there, there’s nothing to do. And always, with clinging fingers to the front door, we drive to her house in silence. For a couch, Nana has a tower of three mattresses. There are always cockroaches on these mattresses because Nana eats here, so we have learned over the years to glance over the tower before pressing ourselves together onto the thing. The Pakistani flag, just a patch of dark green and the vertex of a crescent moon, melts out from in between the bottom two mattresses like cheese in a burger.

Nana has had the same pack of 12 assorted colored pencils for decades, each one accentuated with bite marks in the places the pencil was held in between her teeth for concentration when she’s meticulously drawing sharks on the corners of napkins. Her drawings seem childish to me now (the sharks looking more like a portly circular whale), but when I was more naive, I thought otherwise. Her sharks were once blue and white, with full bodies and sharp, canine teeth, eyes, bulbous hair, and always a toothy smile. But on the back of a Chipotle napkin once, Nana drew a shark with a trace of red around the mouth, like lipstick, and said “something like Kool-aid, that’s what it ate.” From there, the innocent blue and white sharks vanished, and to replace them were purple sharks with mozzarella sticks and tarantella-shaped rings and glittered sharks with disco balls for eyes and chicken tenders for a fin.

Nana cannot understand English, yet the only channel she can tolerate is CNN, as if there is comfort in letting the foreign voice of a newscaster plump her apartment. She throws a fit coupled with a period of verbal shunning if we ever do so much as request a change of channel. So we sit quietly, quaintly on the tower of mattresses. One time, Nana asked about the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton debate broadcast on CNN, but my pashto vocabulary on political jargon was not stellar and so my explanations did not suffice her questions. But still she kept pressing me, more questions that I could not answer, and so before my patience wronged me, I fled to the bathroom with the intent of staying there until Nana’s faze passed. Standing in front of the mirror, in a dull, yellow light, a part of me thought that I won’t miss this when Nana is gone. But I quickly buried the thought because what sickened grandchild wishes for their grandmother’s death. When I emerged from the bathroom, CNN still hummed against the walls, as always, but Nana was resting by the window, one cheek pressed against the glass like a pancake. On a napkin in her lap, there was a shark with a party hat, a cake balanced on its head, green teardrops springing from its gills. I sat on the tower of mattresses and looked at the wedding ring in the fishnet underneath the row of army medals by the door.

One summer Nana stayed over for Ramadan. She’s had joint pain for years around the perimeter of her knee but never believed in doctors so its been left untreated. She slept on an air mattress in the entry hall of our house because she couldn’t trek up the stairs to the guest room and refused to be carried. She spent her days with the front door open, watching the cars and cradling her 12 colored pencils. A friend once came over and asked, what’s with your grandmother and sharks? and I stared at her wide-eyed.

During Ramadan, we took Nana to Target. She was awed by most everything in the store, pointing to this and that and commanding me to push her wheelchair over so she can touch this and that. She spent an hour staring at the selection of biking helmets and I sat on a tricycle, utterly bored. As we passed the stationary aisle, I plucked a pack of fresh colored pencils for Nana, remembering her finger-sized and dilapidated set, bitten from decades of shark drawings. But Nana hissed and slapped them way when she saw them, asked how I could commit such an abomination of an act, and verbally shunned me for a couple of hours, her usual way of voicing her distaste. Later that day, as we sat at a McDonald’s, Nana licked her fingers of the remaining crumbs of a chicken McNugget, her bony hands and ivory limbs reaching across the table for more, brown eyes wide and excited, almost like a child. That night Nana drew a shark modeling a bicycle helmet and hid it underneath her pillow.

After each visit, the joy perspiring from our bodies from the feeling of driving away from Nana’s house, on the road to our normal lives, our outside lives, is a fire on its own. As Nana’s brick-high-rise complex shrinks into a facet of the far-off scenery, looking back at the thing, infested with mice and cock-roaches and riddled with constant power-outages, I wonder if Nana wants more from life than this.

Later on, in my teenage years, Nana became outwardly devout to God. Visits compromised of shark drawings and long epilogues on the Prophet Mohammad, Jesus, Moses (peace be upon them), and Allah, the all-knowing, the most-gracious, the merciful. Imams and Islamic Scholars replaced CNN. Nana cannot understand Arabic, but she still lets the voice of the Arabic quran, the holy scripture, plump her apartment. Strangely, Nana lightened during this time, and carried herself as if she had a sweet secret, as if God had given her a glimpse of the seven heavens.

The night before my cousin’s sixteenth birthday, in the early morning hours, Nana rolled to the freezer and threw the ice-cream cake out the window, explaining the next morning that birthdays are not to be celebrated in this way, this Western way. Praise God on your birthday, she said, for letting you live this long and recognize that you are one day closer to the Day of Judgement, the promised meeting with your lord, and death. I refused to say what the others said, that Nana is crazed, because she was 84, and not much longer.

Nana died on a Tuesday in March. At her funeral, we played hide-and-seek. The ceremony itself was hushed and startlingly short, and afterwards we stood in the parking lot of the cemetery, talking and running and enjoying a great deal of hilarity. Nana who stole napkins to draw sharks, drained everyone with constant warnings about God, lived in a place we all pitched in to pay for but were all too happy to leave, why did she bite the bait but not stay hooked? The fishing is good, better for us, when Nana is on the other side of the lake, because that way the bass and salmon will have nothing to fear and come near, fill our pooling bellies, something Nana wouldn’t do.

When Mama and I went to her apartment to empty it for the landlord, I found three cereal boxes full of napkins littered with shark drawings. The last shark left by Nana was the strangest one I’d ever seen; it had a round stump for a tail, massive, bulging eyes, humanoid legs, and arms jetting from the gills and fins. In a cookie tin-can, I found the remains of Nana’s 12 assorted colored pencils. Mama looked at them once and said that they’ve got no worth, utter trash, but I shuffled a few into my backpack anyway. That night, I tried not to think of the army medals, the piggy bank filled with ashes, the twenty thousand pakistani rupees left in a safe underneath the kitchen sink, the binoculars and fishing net and fishing rod thrown on top of the fridge, Nana sleeping on an air mattress by the front door with her shoulders shaking and sagging like teardrops, her hollow stare at the bleating rain, the strange joy she found in chicken nuggets and thunderstorms, her cracked countenance, this knowing that there will be no more fits during the drive to Nana’s house, the certainty that this is what we internally, quietly wanted.

Zoha Arif will graduate from the Academy for Information Technology in the spring of 2021. She lives in Union, New Jersey and melts away her free time appreciating peanut butter, eating books, breathing computer science, chasing squirrels, and spilling her strangest ideas into her works of fiction and creative nonfiction. Her work has previously been published or is forthcoming in Polyphony Lit and the Showbear Family Circus.

Songbird

By Isabelle Kang

She was his sweet child, fair and spring-like and blowing in the wind. A vat of English cream; a sugared wine; thick honey in one’s tea. At night, before he slept, he saw her golden face quirked in that everlasting smile, the expression always still, the wind mussing the strands of her hair. It seemed to him like a picture, or perhaps an infinite scene in a movie, in which she remained forever-young.

They met at church. Her family only came a few times every year, mostly on Easter or Christmas, occasionally on the rare Sunday, if the children accepted it, and the mother felt particularly devout. He had been there on one of those rare Sunday mornings, sitting in the pew, mopping his brow – humid, July – listening to the sermons. Then the choir was introduced, and there, bathed in the morning light, stood the newest member of the congregation, a short and delicate girl of twelve-or-so, dressed in her robe, licking her lips until they were moist. Her voice came to him tender and unripened, tart upon the mouth like a fresh wine. Her very face allowed the hymns to pass through her like a shuddering wave of pleasure. It was then that he knew she ought to be his child, a little one to nurse and advise and walk among the church with, whispering secrets and sworn to the other through unbloodied ties.

After the sermon he had introduced himself and complimented the girl’s singing. He’d asked for her name.

“Winnifred,” her mother said, “but she prefers Winnie.”

From then on he held her name close to his heart. He found himself shivering at the very sound of it, shivering all the more if he said it aloud. One morning, walking to church, he saw her like a ghost skipping beside him, hair gold and fine, radiating strong smells of shampoo warmed by the sun. She stayed beside him throughout the service, and he imagined she was fidgeting with something beside him, head locked into concentration, her nose bunched into a gentle scowl.

In the evening, as he made dinner, she would dance across the floor, sweeping her skinny legs to fast-paced music, and at night she would ask him, “Tie my shoes, won’t you?” and run off into the yard, laughing devilishly. Sometimes when he was driving, he would look into the rear mirror and imagine her sitting there, imagine how her body would glisten with excitement, how, in the heat of the summer, he would watch sweat weep down her face. He would buy her candy from the gas station near his work; he would pick her up in his arms; her laugh would fill the empty house.

One Saturday he saw her walking home from school, hair like fine strands of gold in the afternoon light. It settled upon her shoulders in waves. He decided he was going to talk to her. He’d built up the nerve. He had his words lined up in front of him.

“You’re Winnifred,” he said, pulling up beside her. “Am I right?”

“It’s Winnie.” With delight, he watched her pick at the hem of her dress, knobby knees poking out under her skin.

“Sure,” he said. “I like your dress.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you walking home from school?”

“Yeah.”

He paused to look at her. “Need a ride home?”

“Okay.”

He opened the car door. She sat down beside him. “Thanks,” she said.

“Sure. Mind if I make a quick stop before your house?”

“Where?”

“I need something. It won’t take long.”

“Okay.”

He drove off.

They reached his house not long after. He looked over at her. She was sitting with her knees pressed against the door so hard they were turning pink.

“It’s too hot in here for you to stay,” he said. “You should come inside.”

He opened the door and reluctantly she slid out. “What do you have to get?”

But he didn’t answer. He unlocked the door and showed her inside. “Stay right here,” he said, “I have something to show you.”

She stayed still, standing evenly between her two legs, hips rigid and arms holding onto one another. He ran to the top floor of the house. At the top of the landing there was a room painted pink, mostly empty save for a couple of magazines and a stack of women’s clothes. There was a box, too, a white cardboard box with a red ribbon.

She was still standing there when he got down, legs and feet sewn tightly together. “Is this what you had to get?” She stared at the box, eyes drawn to the bright red ribbon.

“It’s for you.” He gave it to her, but she didn’t open it.

“Thanks,” she said, “but I really have to get going now. I can just walk home the rest of the way.”

“Wait,” he stepped towards her. “I want you to tell me what you think of it.”

She looked down at the box. Her hands couldn’t hold it steady. “Okay.” She set it down and loosened the ribbon. Inside, there was a white silky dress, spaghetti-strapped and trimmed in a cheap lace; the fabric pooled into all corners of the box.

“Do you like it?”

She picked it up. It dripped from her arms. “Thank you very much. I love it.” But her face was cold as stone.

“You have to tell me the truth,” he said, reaching forwards for her arm, “you have to.”

“Stop it!” she said, backing away as the fabric rolled with her. She trembled; a sweat was brewing on her forehead.

“I need to know,” he said, “just tell me what you think of it.” But she kept walking away from him. He was scaring her. So he stayed still as he watched her fiddle with the door, then as she opened it,— and fled outside.

The dress remained on the floor. She’d dropped it. Weeping, he placed it back into the box and carried it upstairs, put it next to the other clothes in the pink room. He cried – for the emptiness of the room, for the beauty of the light coming in through the window, for a beauty he had no one to share with.

For how long, he wondered, could he live in a house so cold? He watched the dress as it simmered beneath the sunlight. He put the top of the box back on. How long, he wondered. How long before he peeled away?

Isabelle Kang is a seventeen-year-old Korean-American writer. She attends Denver School of the Arts for Creative Writing, and has been published in the school’s literary magazine, Calliope, for four consecutive years. She enjoys incorporating her writing into other interests, such as music, painting, and psychology.