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Blue Marble Review

Literary Journal for Young Writers

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September 2019

All That Jazz/Midnight Blur

By Francesca Grazioli

These two pictures were taken in a restaurant in New York during Mardi Gras.  A jazz band came in–and I’m a huge jazz fan–so I couldn’t help but take pictures.  While I was trying to find a better view of the musicians, I found myself looking at the girl in the other picture– and there was something about her that was almost magical.  I really like Midnight Blur because it represents the exhausted buzz of being up late, and reality becomes fuzzy, and anything could happen.

All That Jazz
Midnight Blur

Francesca has bouncy red hair, a cat named Raspberry, and never matches her socks. She likes to notice things that other people don’t see. Sometimes she cannot control it, like noticing someone across the room biting their nails and not being able to stop, or hearing the slight clicking sound of their teeth for an hour. Other times, she picks up worms from the pavement after it rains so they don’t get stepped on. And yet other times, she finds wonderful and beautiful things to capture in photography.

School’s Out

By Maeve Florence-Smith

School’s Out

—My brother and I walked to the playground at his elementary school, and they were tearing down the building.  We didn’t even know that they were going to do it so soon!  We ended up watching the destruction of the building, and I took some pictures.  It was exciting to watch the school get torn down but it was also sad.  I think that they should have taken down the art first because a lot of little kids watched from the playground as the school building went down.

It was at Cornerstone Elementary School in Wooster, OH.  We live a couple blocks away, and the dust settled onto our lawn.  The building had to come down because there aren’t as many kids in town anymore, and also the town has less money now.—

 

 

Maeve Florence-Smith attends Wooster High School in Wooster, OH, where she is a reporter and editor for the school newspaper.  She has won Scholastic Arts & Writing Awards and an NAACP essay contest and placed third in the It’s All Write, Ann Arbor Writing Contest. She volunteers at the local nature center and tries to spread awareness about the environment and foster a love of reading and writing at Alice Noble, the nonprofit summer camp at which she works.  She is currently working on a horror novel about bees and climate change.

Untitled

By Devika Sharma

I have always been entranced by the interactions between human beings and the different forms of intimacy they can share. I strived to capture these interactions using mainly pen and collaging, while incorporating items that can tarnish the authenticity of a relationship, such as money. Kissing, in my eyes, is one of the simplest yet most effective ways to show affection for a loved one, and I hoped to depict different couples kissing one another. Using hatching with a fine tipped pen, I capture realness while also putting a twist to the reference picture, either thematically or with a varied background.

Untitled
Untitled

 Devika Sharma is a seventeen-year-old artist from Singapore. She loves drawing portraits and has always had a fascination for drawing people. She can’t paint at all and primarily draws inspiration from artists like Egon Schiele.

Speed

By Benjamin Samuels

The room didn’t have any side windows, only an overhead that let in a little bit of light and a lot of noise from the screaming kindergarteners on the roof. Zen music was being played a little aggressively to tune them out.

It was the last period of Friday, Tefila, Jewish prayer, except through the lens of meditation. It wasn’t a very important class to my school’s administration, and any Friday event that needed to be squeezed into the schedule inevitably came at the expense of meditation Tefila, which in turn came at the expense of real Tefila, where we would actually pray, like our Jewish school advertised. I had written about this in the student newspaper I started, which had survived a prolonged battle with the school for two years. Every two weeks, on Thursday, my small staff and I printed dozens of twenty-page copies, and on Friday we gave our hard work out to the whole school. I had thirty copies in my backpack.

I’d been late to Tefila, and when I ran in the door, I could tell I’d upset the atmosphere. I shrank back a little, abashed, but looked over to see a friend David laughing, and so I smirked and tossed my backpack into a corner. Now, I was slouched in one of the hard chairs like my friend. I had my Miami Beach hat pulled tight above my eyes, my coat zipped, and my glasses pushed up on my nose to focus. I joined him in his little bubble of showy cynicism about the opening five-minute silence. I looked around for something to do, recalling that I’d survived the last few “meditation Tefilas” by reading my book and doing homework. It came as a crushing realization that I’d left both of those activities in my locker. I couldn’t actually meditate; it hurt my back, and it made me feel moronic. I thought of passing the time by making jokes with David across the room, or indulging the expectant eyes of the a few middle schoolers in the room who’d heard I was funny. The last few times I’d done this on and off. This time felt different, though, or, probably more accurate, I felt different. I shifted from the chair onto one of the folded blankets on the rug.

That day hadn’t been great, just in general, which had started with my latest math test. The lesson had moved really fast, and the practice packets we’d been assigned confused me. I got most of the questions wrong on the packets, which I got handed back for corrections, got the same questions wrong, and got back for corrections again without being told how to do the problems. Shockingly, I got a seventy-nine. I hated our teacher, and I hated the class. I knew none of the skills we were using I would use again, as a humanities student, and additionally, the class was unbearable. Singapore Math, the curriculum we used, went so fast, and didn’t ensure that the students really knew the material, instead using a continuous bombardment of new work to let stress hammer in the material. Most of our classes were like that. I can’t totally blame them, though. I wrote my newspaper articles like that.

I wanted to ace my retest, on which I could get up to a ninety, so I got all the practice packets I could from my teacher, and woke up early the day of the retest to do all of them. I studied the study sheet, which didn’t have a sizable portion of the material and I suspect had been copied from a different website. I got a seventy-nine on the retest as well. Above the grade, my teacher had scribbled a sardonic note. When I told her how hard I had studied, and that I had in fact really tried to get a better grade, she gave me a taut, pointed smile, and admonished me for managing to get a failing grade even after studying. In general, I thought as Laura’s rotating fan wafted air across my face, I was getting dumber. You always think that, I countered in my head. Calm down. Just think about philosophy, or something.

Instrumental music floated around the room, punctuated every once in a while by a percussive stomp from the kindergarteners. One of the fifth graders was playing with the fake candles. Otherwise, the room was still.

Laura loved meditating. Her posture was perfect as she activated only a few fingers that deftly swiped her little pestle against the copper bowl. “Okay,” said Laura, as the vibrations rose up to each person in the room. The meditating people slowly opened their eyes and smiled, while the ones who were picking at the carpet lazily lifted their heads. I felt a little stifled in my coat, so I quietly unzipped it and let it fall off my shoulders. “Let’s go around the room and share some things that we’re feeling today. Remember after you finish, you say Dibarti, which means ‘I said,’ and then everyone responds, Shamati, — ‘I heard.’

I heard… who doesn’t want to be heard?

She turned to her left. “You can start.”

There were four boys in the meditation Tefila, compared to easily three times that number of girls, and a woman led the whole thing. The energy in the room was, now that we had come out of the individual meditation, decidedly effeminate. (Dibarti, said the girl. Shamati.) It was a little annoying, because that meant that any social part of the class operated by a totally alien set of rules, which discouraged the boys from sharing. The other times, I either hadn’t shared or made a joke out of it. I wasn’t some sort of teenage girl who desperately needed everyone to hear her bland thoughts (Dibarti. Shamati.) about how weekends and breaks were fun, just to engage in a dangerous social theater. I looked over at David, who seemed bored to the point of self-reflection, and to Laura, whose face was a serene mask. The girl sharing giggled, and finished her thought. Laura smiled at her expectantly. The girl looked confused and then embarrassed, and then she giggled again. “Oh yeah. Dibarti.

Shamati.

Laura looked towards me. I hadn’t figured out what my joke was going to be yet. I was going to mumble, “pass,” but for some reason instead I softly recounted a summary of my sadness about the Math test. I left out the part where my teacher had somehow made it a mark of shame that I’d studied since 5:00 in the morning, or where she walked away before I could respond. I just said that getting the same seventy-nine had made me feel depressed about myself and my intelligence, and that I felt angry and sad. I did. Dibarti. Shamati.

When everyone was done, Laura brought out a little packet and started to talk about a teaching she’d found. “In the day,” she said, “You’re supposed to do all of the commandments and pray with your community. In the night, though, you’re supposed to study, and build your faith.” A few people gave their ideas on why this was before Laura referred to the scholar whose work she’d brought in. “In the day, you spread kindness and joy, like the sun coming up and spreading it’s rays across the land. It illuminates everything and touches everyone. In the night, when there is no sun, you must look to yourself, and spread yourself and your happiness inward, and sustain yourself until the dawn.”

Somewhere in the middle of her teaching I removed my hat. It was too hot, and besides, it blocked my vision of the top of the room. Now, as we went into the ten-minute meditation, I took off my glasses, and wiped the sweat off of my nose. My periphery swung open without the limits of my glasses frame, and the fan’s air drifted on my eyes, and the magnified center I was used to faded away. The whole room went equally out of focus, and became a swirling haze, but at the same time it became clearer.

I wondered if any teachers would come to harass me when I went to hand out the newspaper. It didn’t matter, I thought. Just be in the moment. Just be with yourself. Don’t try to pursue anything. Don’t try to be anything right now. You’ll read when you get home, after you hand out copies of the newspaper and before you start on your Math homework. Don’t think about philosophy if you don’t want to, or do, if you want to, no, not your goal, not your projection of yourself, you, your present self, who doesn’t have to train right now, who has these invaluable minutes to himself, with his eyes open or closed, alternating, leaning against the bookshelf and not meditating, not like they are, not like you should, but meditating, yes, meditating perhaps more than they are and perhaps more than you should.

But here I am, aimless, alone, in empty and mutable space, and happier than I’ve been for a long time. The clock reports five minutes until dismissal, until I give out the copies of the newspaper and then rush home for homework and rush to sleep until I can rush up to hurry through the sunlight. Laura starts chanting the first line of the Shema, six words, saying each of the words like they are heavy throated “Om” chants, but keeps her eyes closed and everyone else does the same. Shemaaa. The room vibrates powerfully. Yisraael. The reverberations are in me, whoever that is, and they follow me as I clamp on my hat, the visor reminding me where the successful people keep their gaze. Adonaaii. I slide on my coat, which blocks judging eyes and always puts on a professional front. I paused to look out at the class with their eyes closed before viscerally breaking myself from the spell they were still under. Eloheiiinuu.

Silently, I put on my glasses and strode out the door before they finished the prayer, dashing down the hallway to greet the regulars and give them copies before they rushed off too.

 

Benjamin Samuels enjoys history and using the past as a lens and divining stick for the future. He is also a vehement opponent of the encroaching advancements of big tech. He lives in an undisclosed location.

My Fault

By Jared Pacheco

Cold. My nimble feet crusaded around the worn-down cement stairs that could cut my flesh in an instant. I trekked past the overgrown ant hill on the cracked flooring. Finally, I was greeted by the dewed cushion of grass that welcomed me so. My mind was a cloud as I twirled in what seemed like an eternity, and I ecstatically blinked back into my seven-thousand three-hundred-five square foot world.

All I’d known was a decomposing wooden fence, three-feet taller than my three-foot self, and the world. The world was a backyard, but it was more than my family gave it credit for. It was about the size of two houses and their yards combined. It was my playground, my house, my circus, my city, my solace. The neglected trees served as my landmarks. Between the two pecans was my basketball court, with my Crayola chalk strewn and a rusty hoop snagged from a construction site as the basketball hoop. The basketballs I had were half deflated, but still bounced even with my languid throws. The young oak was a skyscraper in the ocean. At the base, I would pour loads of water to make a beach, where my dog Oreo would play. The fig tree was the fountain of my city, a crumbling birdbath atop a pole sitting at the heart of the tree as branches curled around it. A large fishing net was draped over the trees and tied down to the fence all around the yard. It was a closed environment of sorts. The honeysuckles that curved along the fence didn’t mind that and would instead find their way along the cracks to get through to me. My small hands picked about ten at a time, and I’d run to the stairs. My dirty nails would pinch the bottom tip of the bloom, pulling the stem out along with the sugar-filled drop. They were the food of my life and were one of the few kind things in this world of profound solitude.

Then there was the shed house. It was far removed from the house and sat at the very edge of our property. Compared to the salmon pink our house was painted, it was a chilly blue, and holes from my sister’s archery practice scarred the surface. Looking back at it now, I always hated that shed house, but oddly enough I was always inside it. It was packed to the brim with boxes:old clothes, old toys, seasonal decorations, books, and just about whatever my mother deemed outdated and useless.

The shed house was my treasure trove. I would trade with the worn-down stuffed animals in there. Monday through Thursday was normal. Friday I would have rotating items that would be at a higher value. Saturday was the best day to trade! Trading was the worst on Sundays because I had to go to church in the morning. I would sometimes take naps in there too. I would pitch the tent we had inside and spend the hardest nights inside it. When my mom would come yelling, or my sisters berated me, or my brother locked me in the bathroom with the lights off so I would stop bothering him while he played video games. All this subjugation led me to believe the outside world merciless and it was “my fault”. I didn’t know what that meant until the day I saw a white jeep pull up in the driveway.

A bald man who wore a cowboy hat and aviators. His belt was that of a dead snake, a cobra from what I read in picture books. He wore a Harley Davidson leather jacket and reeked of cologne. His pointy cowboy boots didn’t make him seem friendlier either. This was my father, and after years, he’d returned. Unsurprisingly, my mother wasn’t all too happy with him, because that night they got into a huge argument, leading me and my sister to seek shelter in the bathroom until it was over. When we came out my mother rolled her eyes.

“Se va quedar afuera en el cobertizo.”

Though my father was a kind man, his living habits weren’t. He moved his luggage into the shed, and quickly it began to fill the already dusty air with the scent of unwashed t-shirts and alcohol. After he stayed there, I was no longer allowed to play in the shed house. My toys, my friends, my economy were all locked inside as my father slept his summer days away. The times he did come out it was either for food or to go out, and he’d look bedraggled. It was then that I made my quick entrance into my old  treasure trove. I found it filled to the brim with junk. A TV was haphazardly placed atop the box of Christmas ornaments, and his bed was shoved to the corner, where a wall of boxes loomed over it. One day it would fall, and he’ll leave were the words I told myself. One day everything would go back to normal.

On a good day, he’d take me and my haughty sister to a flea market we called La Tierrosa due to how sandy, and gravelly it was. It was a little portion of Mexico, and my dad seemed to love it there. From vendor to vendor, there was so much to see, so much to discover, and from the corner of my eye, I could feel the weight of the world looming over. In these moments, I wanted to understand him, I wanted to know why he left, and why he resented me so. I could see it in his eyes as he stared back to mine. Untouched, innocence in my hazel eyes contrasting to the scathed hardwood tint of  his unwavering stare. That stare was laced with malice, something I wanted to ignore for a long time, but at that moment it hit me. I’d read it in a book somewhere, and the scariest words popped into my head: My fault.

My fault. I’d scribble it down everywhere in the cement of my basketball court. In pink, in blue. In green. My fault. I know those words meant something bad, but I knew I hadn’t done such a thing! So why was it my fault? Was I the driving force to his departure? What did I do?

Clutching my spotted rabbit, I sat under the fig tree. It was putridly tangy, and the wasps that never stung me shifted past in the lukewarm air of an August day after the rain. Delicate fingers reaching out for something, anything, to help me. A red wasp fluttered down to my index finger, its feet sticky as it trailed down my arm, and at that moment I felt a pang in my heart.

It made sense. He’d left not long after my birth— on and off from what I was told. When I was two, he disappeared. For a child to blame himself for  such things, invokes fear in me now. No one ever told me those mean things said to me were lies. If anything, their actions supported my theory. My mother never told me of my infancy, and yet she’d boast about my siblings. What was I?

I dreaded opening my eyes. The safety of my isolated world had been attacked by the real one, and the realization of my life left its permanent scar in my mind. Was there any truth to it? My guilt, and my effort to make everyone around me happy,— and I was the root of my issues.

The wasp was getting closer now, slowly inching towards my cheeks. I could feel my body heat growing ever higher, and the wasp’s wings vibrate as it readied itself.

A heartbeat and a buzz.

A second between the two.

I swung my rabbit plush towards my shoulder, and the dying shell of the wasp pathetically dropped to the grass. It struggled in its final moments, asking for help where no one would respond. They were all hungry, and eager, for the fig tree was ripe with fruit, no unnecessary nuisance was about to stop them.

Sundays were bad but praying was supposed to combat that. My sweaty palms met, shaking from the adrenaline of facing a small wasp. Its foot twitched, and I saw myself in its final moments.

A pest.

 

Jared Pacheco is an aspiring writer from Texas. He’s deeply interested in fantastical artwork and literature. On his free days, he likes to garden and bake with his cat by his side.

Frances Forgets

By Rachel Zhu

Frances is afraid of the rain. She is afraid that the water will soak through the bricks of the buildings, which will soften like pound cake in milk and collapse. And so when it begins to drizzle Frances takes the bus (the bus is safe, because it is waterproof) into Central Park (the park is also safe, because there are no buildings) and she waits by the reservoir with a red umbrella until the storm passes. Sometimes it is a long storm, or there are multiple thunderstorms, and on those days she brings a beach chair and a blue blanket so she will not get arthritis by standing in the cold and the wet for too long. Sometimes when it rains for days she has no choice but to go home, and lie in bed, and feel afraid.

When home Frances takes the little white bus tickets (the ones that look like receipts, for the cross-town buses), folds them in half the long way, and slips them into a jar she has on the ground by the mirror across from the door. She says she will send them all to the mayor to show how environmentally harmful he is being. After this Frances reopens her red umbrella which she closed in the lobby, and sets it out to dry on the terrace, where there is a black cat figurine. Frances knows it is bad luck and has been the source of many troubles in late years, but is afraid to throw it away in case it was a gift from her daughter. She does not remember. The beach chair is left propped against the cat, as kind of a curtain to obscure Frances’s fear. But in reality she is not afraid of very many things; only the rain, black cats, and the feeling that one day she will forget her daughter. She knows she is very forgetful already; this is because every month she finds a new dried plant on her windowsill that she has forgotten to water. Sometimes she lets things stay on the stove too long and they burn, but she is not as afraid of fire as she is of rain because the bricks in the building are not flammable. Besides, her kitchen walls and floors are of granite, which ought not to burn either.

But fire is not what Frances thinks of most of the time after she steps back into the apartment from the terrace. Most of the time, she thinks about if her daughter is going to visit, and then she thinks about her grandson. Then sometimes Frances goes to take the garbage to the compactor room and sees the man who lives across the hall, except she has forgotten about him. He has lived there two years now, and she has welcomed him with brownies almost thirty-four times. He has helped her pull the Monet print off the wall and then put it up again almost ten times, because she keeps forgetting and wondering why the Monet is not on the wall, or why it is still on the wall.

She is not so terribly lost, though. She still reads the newspaper and does the crosswords in the bathtub and hangs her rose-printed sheets out on the balcony so that at night they smell like Park Avenue sunshine. Sometimes when she is bored she sits on the couch and pulls the comforter up to her chin and thinks about nothing, but thinks that she is thinking about everything. Sometimes she thinks about the man who owns the pickle shop two blocks away who talks to her when she pays for her sweet marinated red peppers, and then she thinks about the doorman who has the night shift downstairs, and sometimes she only sits and stares at the little mark on the wall from twenty-some years ago where there used to be a nail. Frances is sad when she does this, but barely realizes it, and instead considers it a routine time to ponder the world.

Maybe Frances is also sad when she goes to sleep, because she pulls her blanket up to her chin and stares up at the ceiling. Occasionally she stares long enough to remember what it was like staring up at other ceilings. She remembers pink walls (hers at six years of age), gray walls (his at twenty-seven), yellow walls (theirs at thirty-one). She wonders what color he painted his walls after he moved out and moved in with someone else. Usually while staring at those walls she remembers the feeling of smiling. She does not really smile because the lift of her lips takes too much energy, and besides, there is no one to smile to except for the ceiling light. If Frances looks at it for a long enough time it begins to look like a face.

She is not afraid of death, really, only afraid that when she goes to heaven she will not know anyone there. She is not sure of what she will do if no one speaks to her. What if it is crowded, and there is no place to sleep, no beds for her to lie in and no walls for her to stare up at? She has said this to the drunken man on the street corner whom she lets sleep in the living room (this is safe because she knows him and does not forget him like she does the man who lives across the hall. The drunk man, his name is Joseph and he is an actor). He repays her for her kindness by knitting her scarves and sweaters.

There are few events in Frances’s life, unless one counts the flowering of one of her succulents every few years. Otherwise there are events such as when she takes the piggy banks, stuffed with change, to the bank down the street, or when the young woman above drops cigarette butts onto Frances’s terrace (they often land in the aloe plant). Every couple of years her daughter and grandson visit from California, and Frances invites them to dinner and they eat roast pork and beans and tomato gazpacho in silence, because there is nothing to say. Frances’s daughter asks how she is doing, and Frances says she is doing well, how about you? And then the daughter says she is doing well, too, and William has just started his first year of elementary school, and William looks outside at the black cat figurine that is sitting on the terrace because he has nothing to say either. There are minutes of silence, and then Frances asks how Emily’s husband is, and Emily says he is busy and could not come, but did say hello. Frances says hello back, and then they sit and wait for William to finish so they can sit some more.

William is bored and he looks at the cat and then he looks at the Monet and he looks at the old television in the living room and then he looks at the plaid jacket that is hanging on the tall, ornate coat rack. If there is nothing else to look at William will look at the shoes under the bench and the jar under the mirror and maybe into the mirror, but never at his grandmother because he has nothing to say to her. Sometimes Emily hugs her mother and pretends to ask her to come to California, but both she and Frances know no husband wants his mother-in-law in the house, and so Frances says that she is too old to leave New York, and Emily insists that she is young, so, so young. William looks at the carpet and holds his mother’s hand.

Sometimes when it rains and one of Frances’s succulents is flowering she brings it into the park with her. The people on the bus wonder why she is holding a small painted blue pot with a miniature cactus and a long trail of white flowers coming out the middle, but Frances says nothing. If it is night and she falls asleep on her beach chair the small blue pot tumbles out of her hands and into the mud, where she finds it when a nice man wakes her up. Then she gathers all the dirt that was spilled from the pot and slips it back in on the sides, and then looks sadly at each little white blossom, as if to apologize. And when she goes back she is shivering and the doorman with the night shift tells her, again, that the rain will not soak into the bricks of the building and make them soften, and she smiles and says she knows. Then he asks her why she goes out if she knows, and she replies that she knows but does not really know—that she knows in her mind but her heart, where the fear lives, has not quite gotten the message yet. It may have been lost on the way.

Maybe in a few months or a few years Frances will forget her daughter. So that when there is knocking at the door Frances will open it to an unfamiliar face; she does not know anyone this young, she is sure, apart from the mailman and the new man across the hall. Maybe her grandson will be there, too, and she will wonder if they have gotten lost, or perhaps come to the wrong floor. She will ask who they are looking for, and then her daughter will know. But maybe that will come slowly; she will forget many things before she forgets them. She will forget to take the garbage to the compactor room, to bake brownies for the neighbor who just moved in, to pay for her peppers at the pickle shop, to think about life and heaven and smiling when she sits on the couch or the bed and stares at the white around her. Maybe Frances will forget to be afraid of the rain.

 

Rachel Zhu lives in New York and is a current junior at Horace Mann School. She is the cofounder and Editor in Chief of Horace Mann’s creative prose magazine, LitMag. Outside of school, Zhu writes creative short prose and poetry, and is also an artist and ceramicist. She draws influence from her Chinese background and culture as well as classical European and American works of literature. Through her work, she hopes to inspire other Asian Americans to express their stories and experiences through the world of humanities and art.

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