September 2023

The Tick Tock Man

By Liza McGilpin

The ticking grew louder and he was struck with a familiar longing for disbelief. The knowledge was his chaotic lover and he shied away from her bruising touch. His body was a mosaic of her kisses, scars, each larger than life.

He wondered how it would happen this time. Fire, skin sliding off his coworker’s protruding frame like rib meat does a bone? Sleep, the consumption of an eternal dream? The way it happened was the only thing left to chance. His mind was at the mercy of this indecisive Nature.

His coworker had begun to tick six days ago in the conference room. They had been the only two inside, both plagued with morbid punctuality. She had been writing something, black hair falling in her eyes. The room was silent, save for the sound of the pencil violating her notepaper.

The man’s head started to ache. A sour bile penetrated his taste. And then it began, quiet as first, as it always was. The clock. The tick tick that made him crave death, crave the blessed ending to the noise.

He called in sick the next three days, the separation dulling the chimes, though the sound never truly stopped.

But it was Monday now. He was back in the office and the ticking began to swell. Death was near. He could always sense it.

With the coworker it was an unbearable tragedy. She was pregnant, the ticking twice as loud. The man felt terrible for her husband. He had met the soft-spoken man at the baby shower, and he had seemed like a decent fellow. The two had been so happy that day, and in the last six months, despite the pain, the aches, there had always been a smile on his coworker’s face.

She would die before morning.

He had first discovered his talent in third grade. Before then, he thought everybody heard the clock. Whenever he complained about the ticking to his mother, she would shrug it off, chalking it up to childhood imagination.

The ticks were fluctuating storms, thundering and lulling. He had never assigned them any meaning until the day of his classmate’s death.

They had been schoolmates, circumstantial friends that never saw each other outside the elementary walls. Usually they played together at lunch, in the sandbox, or by the woods. However, in those last days, the boy hadn’t liked playing with his classmate. The ticking had begun to hurt; it was so loud that he had cried for his mother, fearful that he was going deaf.

Four days after the ticking began, his classmate died in the cafeteria. He had choked on a slice of pizza, and that had been that.

The ticking had gone quiet.

As he grew, the boy learned to manage the ticks. He avoided clocks, as they became synonymous with precognition. A young man now, he followed a strict set of rules that gave his life the illusion of normalcy. Avoid crowds at all costs. Don’t tell anyone that they are going to die. Don’t treat them any differently. Feign surprise when your pregnant co-worker falls off a ladder and splits her head in two. Don’t tell anybody about your gift. Don’t get attached to people. And under no circumstances may you ever fall in love. Love is nothing more than the quantification of chaos.

He broke that last rule on the day he met the woman.

Time skipped after the death of his coworker, the days feeling empty like a slice of Swiss cheese. Their department had been given a week off. The man now wandered in the rain, staring up at the morose sky. His hair began to dampen with the water, and he grew worried that his face would soon follow. He stopped in front of a crowded coffee shop, chilled to his bones and shivering like a mad man. He opened the door tentatively, wincing as the ticking began to puncture his bruised mind. Voices swelled, pregnant with jubilant laughter and contented life.

As he closed the door behind him, his overcoat was caught and the man stumbled to the floor. He heard laughter, and looked up from the coffee-stained carpet.

There was a woman there, on her way out of the shop. Her hair had been in long red braids then, when she still had hair to style. Her eyes were gray and full of mischief, and the man couldn’t help but smile, despite the rugburn that scarred his palms.

She helped him up, extending a long hand, thin and pale as a crescent moon. There was a book under her arm, one he had read many times over.

“That’s a good book,” he said, regaining his footing. He pulled his coat out from the door, dismayed by the slight snag in the black fabric.

“It’s rather boring so far,” the woman said, her voice like cream. “I’m partial to something with a little more action.”

“You should try his other book then. The pacing is better.”

“The one about the spy?”

“Which other would it be?”

She laughed again and that had been the start. They exchanged numbers and names, promising to do a book swap in the following week. And miraculously, they did.

The first book she gave him had been terrible, the second wonderful. Sometimes they would meet up at the coffee shop, other times the park. She would always drink coffee, he a chai.

He resisted it at first, the feeling in his chest like buzzing bugs zipping about. The butterflies bursting through his heart. The warm, fuzzy feelings like the fur of a caterpillar. But the worm of love ate into his skull and there was nothing he could do. He hated himself for it, for breaking the rule. But he loved her more.

The ticking had become quieter as he spent more time with the woman, and for this, with a regard for their mutual attraction, their interactions began to increase exponentially. After their sixth meeting he asked her on a proper date, and she said yes. Three months later, they moved in together.

They had seven good months before things started to go wrong. Seven months of watching films, going on bike rides through the town. Seven months of literature and laughter. Seven months of dancing in the rain. Seven months of intimate whispers. Seven months of happiness. Seven months going on eternity.

Then the ticking began.

It started slow, quiet. He first thought it was another coworker, the sound so faint it could have been wind. But as the days passed, and later months, he knew what the ticking foreshadowed. It was louder at home, as it had been when his mother passed. A different tale with the same ending.

Then she began to cough.

The cancer had been slow. It took her as a sloth grabs a leaf.

He wanted to be with her when it finally happened. He tried to walk through the hospital doors. But in that place, the place of death, the collective noise had been louder than bombs.

A week later he was alone in their bedroom. The walls had grown barren, stained only by the torn-off tape of her photos and pictures. As he sat on their bed the ticking started again, this time louder than anything he had ever heard before. His teeth ached in their sockets and his marrow seemed to bubble. Tears sprung to his eyes with reflex, and he groaned and screamed into their useless sheets.

The pounding never stopped. The ticking never ceased, it never had. His bones felt like they were twisting, gnarled branches of a dying tree. Somehow he stood up, stumbled to the bathroom.

On the top shelf of the cabinet there was a bottle of pills. He had long since forgotten what they did, what they cured. It no longer mattered. He took the jar and unscrewed the child’s cap, placed there for the child they never had.

And finally, the ticking stopped.

Liza is a sixteen-year-old student from California who loves reading horror novels and writing existential stories in her spare time. The Tick Tock Man follows a tortured man and his struggles with a unique ability, the burden of hearing how close someone is to death.

The Thief

By Rehan Sheikh

I remember this incident very vividly. We were living in Delhi near Humayun’s Tomb in a small wayside cottage. Usman had just come to work at our house as a replacement for our old servant, who had been incapacitated by tuberculosis to run errands. Owing to his expertise in household chores, he soon became indispensable to us. He would sleep at night in our compound, where a rug had been allotted to him.

It was September and the equinoctial winds had set in. Father had to leave for Simla, and Mother had to go to Calcutta to grandmother’s house. I was left alone with Usman. All was well until night. The summer gale howled and shrieked, raging through the city like an untamed beast which had escaped from its cage. The window beside me trembled and thunderstorms crashed in the pitch-black sky.

I could not sleep. The strange noises of the violent storm scared me out of my wits. I kept looking outside the window to assure myself that no one was there, far and near. But I could not stand it any longer, and opened the window from which one could see the compound. I called out to Usman, and asked him to sleep with me for the night. He agreed immediately.

Usman came upstairs and laid his rug on the floor. He quietly slept on it. After a long moment of silence, he said in a comforting tone, “Babusahib, go to sleep. I am here. Do not worry- The rain will die down soon.”

But nothing could stop the wind. Neither could I fall asleep, nor did the wind give any hint of relent. Usman was still fast asleep, or so I thought. I was still uneasy in bed, waiting for Father to knock at the door anytime soon. I kept my eyes closed, trying to get some sleep, but in vain. It was around 3.30 am. Usman suddenly woke up with a shudder, and raised himself to my bed. He glanced at me, checking whether I was deep asleep or not. I did not move.

Then I saw Usman suddenly standing up. I still lay as a dead man. He walked upto the study, pulled the bedroom drawer, very quietly, and started rummaging through the papers. They were mostly Father’s official papers, which he had kept securely in that drawer. I suddenly felt that they were not any more ‘secure’. Usman kept scouring through these papers.

I started getting worried. What was he in search of? Was he trying to steal something of value? I had never, in the past, seen Usman in such a state of desperation. Suddenly, he took his hands out from the heap of papers and I saw a golden ring glinting in his hands. I instantly recognised that it was the watch which my my aunt had sent for me from America. On having found the ring, he leapt with joy and whispered something to himself. He glanced at me once again to ensure that I was not disturbed. I still lay quietly on the bed.

Usman moved around the room to check if any other item of value was there. His eyes fell upon the small, golden case which was placed on my study table. He took it in his hands and examined it with curious eyes. It was my treasured silver pen that I had received as a gift from my father.

Usman put his previous possession into a plastic packet, which he acquired from the dustbin by my table. Before putting his next success into the packet, he once again looked at it. The case itself glimmered brightly in the dim light of the dawn. What a fool I was to have kept that case there!

The clock struck six. The sun had now begun to stage itself in the sky. As soon as Usman put the case in his packet and tried to leave the room, the azaan rang out. Having lived beside a mosque since my boyhood days, I had long accustomed myself to this morning prayer’s call by the muezzin. Suddenly, the packet dropped from Usman’s hands. It seemed as if he was in a trance; he stood still without any movement.

The raw sunlight of the morning entered through the lattice filigree and melted on him like butter as the azaan rang out. Tears rolled down from his eyes. He fell to the floor, indifferent to the world around him. I moaned, but Usman stood, absolutely still like a stone image cut of granite. Only the tears ran down his cheeks. With cupped hands, he cried out “Ya Allah!”

Usman had been about to commit the sin of stealing, but the morning prayer stopped him dead in his tracks. He came to his senses and immediately repented. I don’t think he ever stole anything again in his life.

Azaan- a prayer practice by Muslims.

Babusahib- a form of addressing young children from rich families.

Rehan Sheikh writes short stories, memoirs and articles. His work, The Roaring Himalayas won him the Elan Middle School Writing Contest 2020. Since then his works have appeared in various leading magazines and newspapers. His work has also been recognised by HarperCollins India.

Infinite Power

By Raiya Shaw

“You guys! The volleyball!” I shriek, racing towards the lake.

It’s too late. It rolls into the water with a disappointing silence, like a yo-yo slipping down its string. It drifts slowly but surely to the middle of the lake, where it then stops in the dead of night.

My friends crowd around me and debate possible options to reel it back. Someone suggests stealing the life preserver from the pool, but that doesn’t sound very responsible at all. Another tries to wade through the lake, but it is surprisingly deep. Someone else walks back home for a spool of twine. They try to knot a circle to lasso the volleyball, but we are hardly Westerners.

“When’s your birthday?” the culprit asks with a nervous smile.

“May,” I grumble.

“Okay, bet. Expect a new volleyball in May,” he says, flashing me a grin and a thumbs-up. I know his answer is genuine and this predicament isn’t entirely his fault, but I still glare in response.

It is 2020, and the pandemic isn’t slowing down anytime soon. Playing volleyball and badminton at our local park has been our only source of social interaction for the past month. This volleyball is the only one we have, and in our adolescent minds, holds infinite power for joy.

I wander to the other side of the lake and hope it will float in my direction. Plopping down in the grass, I take off my mask and gaze at the still water. The volleyball looks like a bead of color in the monochrome night, a dot of white in a black abyss. From where I sit, it almost resembles the reflection of the full moon, wafting along the water and surrounded by specks of twinkling stars. I half expect a fish to surface and spike the ball into the atmosphere, causing it to never be seen again. Maybe it’ll knock a star out of place. Maybe it’ll form a new constellation. Maybe the planets will align, beckon a new fortuitous age, and then someone will find a cure for us all. Maybe the tides will go wild with the appearance of this new moon. I shudder and rub my icy hands together, my imagination running wild with the current.

When it drifts to the other side of the lake, I touch the moon and frown. Its craters are all wrong, too shallow and straight. The texture is too soft. I am not holding greatness or infinite power in my hands. My hope dissolves into the water.

It is just a wet cold ball, stolen from the sky.

Raiya Shaw is an undergraduate student at the University of Central Florida majoring in English: Creative Writing and Sociology. She works as a writer for Her Campus magazine and has been recognized nationally by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and the NCTE.

Wontons

By Tanya Sun

Zhang was one of those hundreds of quiet, plodding men who kept Chinatown alive. He had come to America as an exchange student decades ago, dreaming of becoming a civil engineer back home, designing apartments for the developing Sichuan. When he consumed alcohol for the first time at a college party, he’d forgotten those goals forever. The drink consumed him right back—leaving him to pick up the pieces of his life for the first time when it was nearly half over. Yet he had in the end; he’d learned a few phrases like “here’s your bill” and “don’t cheat,” enough to bargain at the market. Broke and broken, unable to return to China, he created for himself a little slice of home where he was.

He ran a little restaurant tucked in a back alley. In truth, it was an exaggeration to call it a restaurant. It was really a stall, with its rickety bamboo doors that were kept open by a broken brick to prevent them from getting stuck; the faded red spring-festival paper, peeling off with the wind; the dusty bulbs casting a dampened lighting that felt almost atmospheric. Yet he never bothered to change things, as he knew these were the reasons his customers came to visit, even more than the authentic Sichuan dishes: noodles in hot chili oil, stinky tofu, chicken claws boiled in a sour-and-spicy soup. His customers were college students from the nearby University of San Francisco—young men and women with pock-marks over their faces, plastic foreign bills still in their pockets, their accents apparent despite all their efforts. They came because the splintering walls reminded them of their childhood homes, the dustiness of the lighting of the rusting oil lamps which lit their summer nights. They did not mind the dinginess; they had grown up amongst it, had grown to love it, to see it as home.

It was a sweltering summer afternoon when Zhang received his first new customers in ages; a young couple. It was immediately apparent that they were without the intimacy which came from a lengthy relationship. The man bore no resemblance to the majority of his other customers; he was tanned, and despite his Chinese appearance, he looked up quizzically when Zhang greeted him in Mandarin. He stepped in cautiously and tentatively, as though he was a traveler just arriving in a foreign land. The woman was rather tacky-looking, with a worn pink purse and a matching dress ripped at the seams; she hailed Zhang enthusiastically. They sat at the counter and each ordered a bowl of beef wontons. The woman took the pair of chopsticks in hand; the man asked for a spoon.

Even Zhang could tell he wasn’t impressed with her. The man watched her mouth insistently: her lips painted more brightly red than the American style; the way they curved upward too much, as though they were used to creating different sounds; the gap between her two front teeth which would have been corrected by an orthodontist, had she been born here. She slurped at the wontons with an intensity that betrayed her hunger for home, only stopping to cast around a nostalgic glance at the decor around them. When they were finished, she clung to the counter, examining it intently as though she could be taken back to her parents’ dinner table by her pure imagination. The man was anxious to leave, to be free of the smog, of the language others spoke and he could not decipher, of the strange foods they were consuming. He pulled on her arm until she let go of the table, letting herself be dragged out.

They came every Friday, always ordering the same dishes. Zhang took to preparing these bowls ahead of time, watching the same patterns play out. The woman would chatter about nothing in particular in her nasally accent. The man would sit, uncomfortably and silently, rocking back and forth, as though to will the groaning creaks of his chair to drown her out. The man was one of those who were not mean-natured, but he did have a selfishness, a natural need for reassurance which came from his youth. He did not mean to lead one on, but could not help his revelation which came from her—that he could be loved, admired. He may have found her quite disgusting, but kept her around because he enjoyed the reassurance that one might be dedicated to him, and the pleasant sensation of having a woman interested in him. He sat, determined to trade his comfort for the adoring words she spoke, determined to ignore the foreign-ness of the mouth which pronounced them and her differences which drove them apart. He tried to ignore the clattering of mahjong pieces, and wrinkled his nose when the young lady asked him to buy anything else, like spring rolls with oxtails.

One day in spring, the woman came alone and waited, sitting with the two steaming bowls of wontons in hand. She checked her phone once, twice, three times. She tapped her foot, then tapped her chopsticks against the noodle bowl. She sat and watched a group of elderly folks gossip for about an hour before she gave up and headed out. She had not eaten any of the food.

From then on, this became a pattern; she came each Friday to sit at the counter with her two bowls of wonton soup, which always remained untouched. Holding onto them for warmth, she listened to orders being taken and shouted to the kitchen, the cheers of old men as they bet on mahjong, and the whispers of grandmothers worrying about their children. She examined every detail of the restaurant; the crackled paint of the roof, causing steam to float through the top; the oil smeared on the countertop, running to the floor; and the ink tapestries hung haphazardly on the walls, their images softened by age. She was as silent as those women in those paintings, silent with want and waiting.

One afternoon in summer, nearly exactly a year after they had first come, Zhang made only one bowl of wontons. It sat steaming in the spot where the young woman usually was. She came and sat in her usual spot. She hesitated, seeming to notice the absence of the second bowl; yet she was unwilling to acknowledge this difference. Eventually she reached out tentatively and cradled her hands around the single bowl, moving it with a swaying motion, as though she were rocking a baby. She stared straight ahead, straight at Zhang, in a way that seemed expectant—as though he were supposed to do something, as though he had made her a promise.

Suddenly, without knowing what he meant to do, Zhang reached over and seized one of her hands in both of his own. He gripped it tightly and said, “Us lao shang （老乡, those sharing a common home,) we have to watch out for each other, all right? This one is on the house, all right?”

The woman nods and looks down silently. She slurps down the wontons, letting her tears fall free to flavor the soup.

Tanya is a written and spoken word artist residing on the California coast. They write about their experiences in the cultural melting pot of San Francisco, and about their unique cross-cultural perspective as a Chinese American.

Saltwater Taffy

By Christian Paulisich

From the pier, we watch two gulls wander
overhead, the day oddly warm.

The sun has waxed the city
into speechlessness. Suspicious

of the island across the Bay,
you ask if prisoners really swam from there.

The reason, we’ll learn, is obvious:
the best bars are in the city.

We sit and stare for a while, and you,
not nervous for once, take my hand.

We walk around the aquarium
where you pay just to watch me

giggle at the otters curled
like pieces of saltwater taffy.

We eat steak, drink Malbec, and at night,
at the bar, we become as we are meant:

two gulls, wandering, from the pier.

Christian Paulisich received his B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University and is a Master’s candidate at Towson University. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, but is originally from the Bay Area, California. In 2023, he received the Julie Sophia Paegle Memorial Poetry Prize from The Concrete Desert Review. His work has been published or is forthcoming from Blue Marble Review, New York Quarterly, Pangyrus, Rust + Moth, The Ocotillo Review, I-70 Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Invisible City, and others. He is a poetry reader for The Hopkins Review.

The Hood and Removing it

By Deeksha Aralelimath

I wear the hood So I can let the world fade away and float back into my own head,

I wear it so I don’t have to listen to people’s voices. So, I can sit by myself and explore my own mind for thoughts that have never occurred before

I wear the hood to let myself fade away from the nasty looks that Earth gives me once in a while, especially when I miss-step in what I desire

I try my best every day,

even if on that day I did nothing but binge-watch movies and tv shows. Even if all I do is sleep I still try my hardest to be okay.

The world can be a cruel place where, if you’re not loud enough your words will fade away, you will fade away. And that may be so unfair but as much as I want to be seen, a part of me wishes to stay hidden.

I wear the hood so I’m unrecognizable to people I don’t know, people who I don’t want knowing who I am. I wear the hood as it protects me from the stabs of the people that betray.

But when I wear it, I’m also restrained from the warm embrace of the people who actually stay.

The hood is the wall I built around my broken heart. The hood is my mind as it locks my heart in a prison when all it needed was home.

So, I’m working on it, to remove the hood and to let the world see me for who I am, to not be bothered by what people say because the ones who matter just encourage.

I’m working on removing the hood slowly… but surely because I don’t want to be restricted from the pleasures I might encounter because of the people who couldn’t treat a given heart right.

It’s okay, I’m not poking blame on anyone because it’s not one… but more like a little from everyone. Unknowingly and unintentionally.

I do get that part, mistakes do Happen.

mistakes will always happen.

Let’s leave the past in the past and see what happens when you carry just the lessons taught a little more optimistically, let’s just see what happens,

and if we don’t like the ending, we can come all the way back and find a new path ahead.

The time we have, it feels like forever… So, we have all the time we need to mend, to run, to fall, to fly, and to fall all over again.

what we can accomplish by just being is unlimited.

Feeling everything is so beautiful in ways that can only be recognized only when we are there, present in the moment that cannot be cheated into. I had forgotten that.

The hood guises itself as protection when in truth it is just the thing that destroys us silently, slowly, from the inside.

I’m going to remove the hood now because I have a world to welcome into me and a lot of time to recover from everything I might feel.

“If death is the destination, why not risk it all?”

Deeksha is a teen writer, poet, and an aspiring author. She recently published her new poetry book: The Vacated Heart. If she’s not on her computer frantically writing dark fiction then she’s probably reading another good book. Some of her other hobbies include cycling, coding, and art. You can find her personal blog at: Wizardee.in