“Eyes open, you’ve just been created.” A gentle voice rippled through the air. “It’s time to pick your color!”
His grey-blue eyes snapped open, his head inclining from its resting position as he took in the sight before him. A woman, wearing a pure white robe and a soft smile spread across young her face. Her eyes were a shade of clear blue and her golden curly hair cascaded down her shoulders. She made a quick gesture for him to follow her.
He stood from the wooden chair, one which he didn’t realize he was sitting on, and moved around the small alabaster table which he had been leaning on. “Color?” He asked, testing out his voice for the first time. “What color?”
The woman simply let out a chuckle, not turning to meet his gaze before answering, “That’s for you to choose.” Her cheery reply revealed nothing to him and as he trailed behind her, he found himself observing their surroundings.
Long white corridors with windows taking up the entire walls as the artificial light seeped through. The crystals that hung above their heads were clear and reflected the light across the hallway, creating an ethereal atmosphere. The white and pale-yellow checkered tiles lined the never-ending floor, and as he looked up, he noticed the doors to a room unknown to him. The double doors lined with gold, arching over him and far too large for anything more than show.
As the woman pushed open the oversized double doors and there stood a room and a man just as ethereal as the hallway had been. The man stood before him with vivid brown eyes, white hair, and wrinkles from old age as he stared down at him. Wearing the same white robes as the woman, only now
decorated with golden lace, and holding a staff with three rings chained to the circular top of the staff. He held flickers of wisdom in his eyes and gentleness in his smile.
“Welcome.” He began, his voice as powerful as an ocean storm but as calm and rhythmic as the changing of tides. “This is the beginning. The place where all beings begin. Our next question- our only question to you will determine your life and the path you are placed upon.”
“But- what am I? Who am I? What am I doing here? Why don’t I know anything other than the basics? Wha-” He asked before being stopped short by the man’s raised hand.
“You ask far too many questions that you will know the answer to later. Now, think hard about my next question.” He said blankly. “Which color do you wish for? Choose wisely.”
Just then the man waved his hand, panels upon panels of colors came to life, floating above and around him as they spun into place. Thousands of several colors covering multiple spectrums were shown to him, his eyes flickering left and right before he said, “What are they called?”
The man bellowed out in laughter and shook his head in amusement.
This angered him, he wanted to know genuinely. There were too many factors he didn’t understand, but as he raked over the thousands of options, he noticed a small number in the corner of each color. “What are those numbers for?”
“Now that I can answer. Those represent the number of people who have chosen that color.”
He began to become dizzy. The several different shades and combinations were confusing him and the reason behind why the colors determined his life
made no sense to him. Why? Why? Why? He kept asking himself. He didn’t understand and he desperately wanted to. It wasn’t until he saw a color without a single number on it. It was blank, apart from the gunmetal grey color it gave off. He wondered why it was blank, had no one chosen it? Had it been a glitch in the system? Was that supposed to be his color?
He decided that instead of asking questions, he would act. No point in asking questions that weren’t going to be answered right? He moved forward, raising his hand to the color and as it slowly descended downwards the man who answered very little questions began to physically panic.
“No! Not that one.” He said, sweat beginning to bead down his forehead.
“Why?” He asked once more, this time out of spite.
The man could hear the challenge in his voice and as the color floated closer to his hands. The man could say nothing to him, nothing that could not be questioned and led eventually back to his hands on to undesired color. So, with nowhere to go, the man stood there, mouth agape and as he stuttered out a hesitant reply, the gunmetal grey color brushed across his fingers.
The man withdrew himself and looked away, seeming to barely hold himself together as all the other colors dispersed and faded into nothingness, the only thing left being the single panel with his chosen color. The woman, upon seeing the absence of a number on the color flinched and began to push herself farther and farther from the center of the room. The color began to morph and shift in above his curious open hands, not being able to choose a form.
“May the Gods curse your selfish, unforgiving, bastard soul.” The man spat out as the color dispersed, shooting and bouncing across the white walls of the large room before merging once again with the choosers body.
The grey color liquifying and crawling all along his body, covering and seeping into his skin. Slowly glyphs and markings appeared all throughout his body, pulling itself to the surface and making itself known to the chooser and all those around him.
His body now covered in gunmetal grey colored glyphs of a language no on knew but himself and markings of patters long forgotten by all- he looked up to the man and glanced at the crying woman in the corner. His grey-blue eyes flickered back and forth before he looked back up at the man.
“Why?” He asked again.
“For you have managed to pull the balance between everything we have ever known with a simple question.”
“And you with an answer you could not provide quickly enough.” He said, turning from the man and walking towards the (now darkened) double doors. Pushing past them effortlessly as he marched onwards, to a path he was being guided to with the pull of his chosen color.
He reached the end of the hallway, from the room he had thought he had woken from, he realized that just beyond it was his path, his way to a world full of several different colors; just as diverse as the thousands he had to choose from. Just as he reached the beginning of his path, a song played for him.
He knew this song, from somewhere far beyond the reach of possible memory or imagination. One that played from the soul and was made real by the ethereal of the building he had just come from and the color he had chosen. Bells chimed in the distance, pulling together a mystical melody for him, almost saddened by his departure.
“Halt.” Something whispered.
“Halt…” He repeated.
And with that he moved forward, descending to a world that he would shape for as long as he wished.
If you turn on the news as background noise for when you’re vacuuming then you’d definitely know that the ruble has plummeted until it’s worth less than the in-game currency of some random MMO that nobody’s played since the early 2010s but you probably don’t know about something else that fell along with the Iron Curtain: the population of cockroaches in the former USSR. A lot of smart people have come up with hypotheses for why this happened, but honestly? They’re not that important. I’d much rather hear about the life of Igor Ivanovich.
Igor had a nice life in Soviet Russia. That was a place where a roach could work and it meant something. All he’d need to do was visit the garbage chute dutifully like an old woman prays in front of an icon and that was breakfast, lunch and dinner sorted. This was what Lenin dreamt of. This was what the Bolsheviks bled and died for. But then that revisionist Gorbachev came that goddamn bird-shit-on-his-head capitalist with his McDonald’s and his Pizza Hut ad. Both fast-food megacorps with red dominating their colour scheme. Wasn’t the red of the Motherland’s flag enough? That was the red of our heroes’ blood, damn it, and not the blood of those imperialised in the Global South. Bug sprays and fumes floated on dreams of prosperity and freedom, along with new ways of waste disposal. I mean, every bigshot country has to contribute a bit of plastic to the world’s oceans. Well, Igor wouldn’t have minded living in a shithole as long as they left the garbage chutes alone! With visions of his comrades piling up dead like their human male counterparts from war and vodka, Igor left for Germany. He heard West and East reunited last year, but he didn’t care— I mean, it’s kind of hard to when you’re missing out on the economic miracle like some East German and your wife’s just left you for a fucking kraut and your kids are shivering from starvation and you’re one missed meal away from eating them.
Last I heard of him, Igor was thinking of trying his luck at being a fighting roach. He could stomach it, sure enough— his countrymen practically fought the Nazis by themselves! And besides, there’s never a shortage of hoboes who bet on roaches (both because hoboes have nothing better to do than betting on roaches and also because capitalism ensures that there’ll never be a hobo shortage). See, that’s the sort of thing that has you looking up how long cockroaches can last without their heads and after that, you wonder if their resilience is a blessing or a curse, especially when Igor’s first fight is against one twice his size.
Sofia Tantono is a writer based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in INCUBATE, āraśi and Proyek Utopia, among others. She can be found on Instagram @sofias.writing.
The first day of class, he wore a suit, a black suit over a black button-down shirt and a purple tie. All the clothes hung from his frame as though he’d decided that morning to grab them out of his taller, broad-shouldered older brother’s closet.
“I thought I should dress up today so no one would mistake me for a student,” Mr. Briar said. Lara thought his face looked flushed, like he was overheated in the dark fabric, a stream of the hot September California sun shining from the window near the door of the classroom onto his white skin. The building didn’t have air conditioning.
Mr. Briar looked younger than all the other teachers, but not quite young enough to be mistaken for a high schooler.
“How old are you?” Mike, the skater boy who sat next to Lara asked.
“I’m 25,” he said. “This is my first year teaching solo so we are all freshmen in a way.” He looked at Lara and she thought he winked, but it might have been the sunlight making him squint. The golden light cut across his face and the chalkboard, where he’d written his name. He had soft features and shaggy blond hair, and Lara thought he could have passed for early 20s, but not a teenager.
After that first week, he stopped trying to distinguish himself from his students and instead dove into trying to be their friend.
An early storm arrived, clouds funneling over the mountains on the west side of the campus, and they could see the rain coming down in sheets as it approached. The campus was filled with open space in the center with a grassy quad that transformed into a mud pit after the first hour. Lara stood huddled under an umbrella outside class with the other students while they waited for Mr. Briar.
She saw him running up the pavement dressed in faded jeans, ratty sneakers and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt. She thought he was rushing to let them out of the rain. But instead he dove headfirst into a mud puddle outside the English 1A room, the wet turf serving as a nature-made slip and slide.
“That was cool, right?” He grinned as he reached into his soaked jeans pocket for his keys. His shirt and pants dripped on the dingy carpet as they settled in for the second period class. “Guess I should have waited until closer to the end of the day to do that.”
At the end of class he handed out their notebooks. On the first day of class he had told them they would spend the last 20 minutes of every class writing whatever they wanted to write.
“No prompt or parameters,” he said. “Just whatever is on your mind.”
Most of the students bought cheap one subject Mead notebooks in primary colors. Lara bought a notepad made from recycled paper with a plain tan cover she doodled on sometimes when she was organizing her thoughts.
“And here is yours, Ms. Eco-friendly,” Mr. Briar said, when he put it down on her desk. He had goosebumps on his arms from the wet clothes and the image on his T-shirt was concealed by still damp mud.
Lara wanted to be a writer. She wrote poetry and bits of short stories in her notebooks.
Mr. Briar wrote back with a critique or advice on revisions, but mostly with encouragement.
She opened her notebook to read Mr. Briar’s latest reply. Lara, you always surprise me with your ability to write so well and to make me feel the gamut of human emotions with the stories and poems you write. He wrote in red pen, the same color he used to grade tests, hisletters sharp and full of right angles. He filled half a page with his responses to her, or more. Lara glimpsed Mike’s notebook page and saw the teacher had only written a couple sentences to the boy. She imagined Mr. Briar at home at his kitchen table before work with the pile of notebooks, a cup of coffee next to him, pausing when he got to hers. Giving her extra words, extra time. Extra thought.
She liked English class, but she especially liked the free tutorial period. The students were supposed to use it to visit classrooms where they needed help or to work on homework. But Mr. Briar let her and her friends who weren’t even in his class come to his room to play poker or goof around.
Mr. Briar gave her a whole pack of the carbon copy tutorial passes, pre-signed.
“So you don’t have to ask me everyday for a new one,” he said.
She filled them out for herself, Jeannie and Gerald, two of her best friends. She didn’t break rules often but she and her friends were good students who did their homework at home. Tutorial was wasted time for them, so it seemed only a slight indiscretion.
Her friend Gerald taught them all to play 5-Card Draw, but Mr. Briar taught them to play Omaha and Texas Hold ’Em. When Lara won a hand, he patted her on the shoulder.
“Good job, Lar-Bear,” he said. “I should take you to a tournament with me in Vegas.”
He guffawed at his own joke and winked at her when he’d walked away to check on other students who were actually there for tutoring.
Some days Mr. Briar brought in a guitar and played songs while they wrote in their journals. He told the students the names of singers and bands she’d never heard of like Cat Stevens “Wild World” and “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas.
As the semester went on, he shared with Lara through her notebook that he was divorced and he had a daughter who was 6.
If anyone ever hurt her, I would kill them, he wrote.
Lara’s entries became more like letters to Mr. Briar. She wrote about the crush she had on a senior boy who would never notice her, how jealous she was of her best friend Jeannie who all the boys loved and how she thought no one would ever like her.
Just give it time, Lara. You are amazing, but high school boys might not notice it. I do.
Her friends were all into theater and talked her into helping with the stage crew for a senior play. She agreed because the boy she liked was in the play and she could watch him from backstage. Mr. Briar was there, too, as a faculty advisor.
“Which boy is the one you like?” he asked Lara. “I’ll put in a good word for you.”
A few weeks into rehearsals, Lara went backstage to get some props for the second act and she found Mr. Briar sitting on the floor in the dark.
“Are you okay?” she asked him.
He looked up at her and she could see even in the dim light that he had been crying. “My ex is moving out of state,” he said. “I’m never going to see my daughter again.” Lara sat down criss crossed on the black backstage floor with him. She heard the muffle of the actors taking a break in front of the curtain and a strip of light leaked in from a door in the back where some of the other stage crew members snuck out for fresh air.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll see her for summers and holidays, at least.” Mr. Briar started crying again, his shoulders heaving with sobs even as no sound came out, his face contorted with sorrow. He put his arm around her and pulled her closer so they were facing each other now. He buried his face into her shoulder and she wondered if she smelled like sweat or like the Teen Spirit deodorant she’d put on that morning. She could smell his cologne, something like Cool Water, and his warm breath smelled sweet. Lara let him hold her and cry for five minutes, then pulled away.
“I need to get the stage ready for Act 2. I’m sorry about your daughter.” At the end of rehearsal, Mr. Briar asked if she needed a ride home. “No, Gerald’s mom is picking us up so I’m good,” she said.
A few days later after rehearsal, Mr. Briar gave Lara a little stuffed horse dressed in a T-shirt with the school logo and name printed on it.
“As a thank you for being there for me the other day,” he said. “I really appreciate it. You are wise beyond your years.”
Lara took the horse home and put it on a shelf. It watched her when she did her homework and as she fell asleep at night. Mr. Briar’s attention had made her feel special all year, but now another feeling took over, a wariness that settled in her chest and never quite left.
As closing night approached, she and her friends looked forward to the cast and crew party. The Friday of the last show, they sat in tutorial playing poker.
“You should ask that guy you like to be your date at the party,” Mr. Briar said.
“Yeah, that’s a great idea,” Jeannie said. “You know he’ll be there so he can’t make up an excuse about not going.”
“Come on, stop joking around,” Lara said. “I don’t want him to know. It will be weird.” But Mr. Briar grabbed a notebook and started writing in his hard-angle letters.
Dear Evan, I have been in love with you all year. Please be my date for the cast and crew party tonight. Love, Lara
Lara tried to grab the letter away but Mr. Briar folded it up and tossed it to Jeannie.
“You can deliver it tonight,” he said.
Lara didn’t think Jeannie would really do it, but at the theater before the curtain opened her friend handed the slightly crumpled piece of binder paper to the boy.
“It’s from my friend Lara,” Jeannie said, but the boy just tossed it into a trash bin without opening it.
Lara was glad he didn’t read it, but a mix of rejection and betrayal simmered in her gut.
During English the next week, Lara wrote her shortest notebook entry yet.
It wasn’t your place or Jeannie’s to tell anyone how I felt about them. I hate you for doing that. It was just a crush…I didn’t want to date him and I knew he didn’t like me, but now I can’t even be around him. You ruined the rest of the year for me. I don’t even want to be in this class anymore, she wrote.
Lara had calmed down by the next time she had English midweek, but she didn’t want to see what Mr. Briar had written back.
Lara, I will never let you get away. I will track you down with Gerald and Jeannie, and spray you with whipped cream and put a cherry on top because you are the sweetest thing in my life right now. Don’t leave me, he wrote.
His writing was messier than usually as though it had been rushed or he was overly emotional when he responded. The words about whipped cream made Lara pause and the wary feeling deepened.
She started writing less in her notebook and Mr. Briar started writing more and more, as though she were his confidant for all the things that were going wrong in his life. Then on a Wednesday evening when she’d stayed home sick with a cold, the phone rang at home and she answered it from her bedroom with the door closed.
“Hello?” she said, thinking it would be Jeannie or Gerald, or someone else from class.
“Hey, Lara-Bear,” the voice said, the words coming out slow and thick.
“Who is this?” she asked.
“It’s Miles,” the voice answered. “Mr. Briar. But call me Miles. Why weren’t you in class today, Lara? I just want to check on you. Make sure you are okay.”
Mr. Briar’s voice sounded strained and his words stumbled out in a different cadence than usual.
She sat on the edge of her bed with the phone to her ear.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I just have a cold.”
“I hope you are back on Friday,” he said. “I wrote you a lovely note and I want you to read it.”
“Yeah, I should be back,” she said. “Have you been drinking, Mr. Briar? Are you okay?” “Yeah, I’m great. I’m great.”
“Okay, I need to go, there is someone on the call waiting,” Lara said, and hung up the phone.
She called Jeannie.
“Mr. Briar just called me at home,” she said.
“Why? Was he giving you the homework assignment from class since you were sick?” Jeannie asked.
“No, he said he was checking on me,” she said. “But I did kind of hang up on him quickly. Maybe he was just calling about homework. But he sounded weird, like he might have been drunk.”
“He’s cool, Lara,” Jeannie said. “I’m sure it was nothing.”
Lara went back to school the next day and it wasn’t one of the days she had English. She lingered at the end of French class with Mme. Boucher. She didn’t mean to say anything, but her mouth started moving on its own.
“If a teacher called a student drunk at their home, that would be bad, right?” Lara asked.
“Did a teacher call you at home?” Mme. Boucher asked her.
“Mr. Briar did,” she said. “He said because I was out sick and he was checking on me. It’s probably no big deal, right? I mean, I don’t know for sure he was drunk. He just sounded weird.”
Lara never saw Mr. Briar again. When she got to class on Friday a substitute teacher stood at the front of the class and the principal stood with her.
“Students, I want to introduce Ms. Callahan. She’ll be finishing out the year with you,” the principal said. “We only have a couple months to go and they’ll fly by with her.”
After the principal left, Ms. Callahan, who had gray hair and wrinkles around her eyes, handed back their notebooks.
“We don’t have time for these writing journals,” she said. “Looks like you guys are a bit behind the last three units we need to get through this year.”
Lara didn’t ask Mme. Boucher or anyone else what happened to Mr. Briar. Rumors circulated among the students.
“I heard he kissed a girl outside the gym late at night,” Mike whispered at the end of class to Lara.
Another kid said, “No, I heard he had sex with a senior from the volleyball team in his car.”
Someone else said he had been caught drinking on campus.
“He was always way too happy to be here,” Mike said. “Maybe he was just drunk all the time.”
Lara didn’t share her little bit of truth and she never knew if it was her question to Mme. Boucher that got him fired or if one of the rumors was true.
She took her notebook home, but she didn’t open it up to the back, to the last page where Mr. Briar had written the last note to her while she was out sick. She didn’t want to know what he had to say.
Lara put the notebook and the little stuffed horse in the trash, not the wastebasket in her room or the one under the sink in the kitchen. She carried them out to the dumpster in the corner of the parking lot of the apartment complex, where no one would ask her questions about it.
Melissa Anderson is a Latinx writer from California and a reader/editor with Roi Fainéant Press. @melissacuisine (Twitter) @theirishmonths (IG)
Tejaswinee Roychowdhury is a lawyer, writer, and poet from West Bengal, India. She also makes the occasional art and wishes she was a cat. Twitter: @TejaswineeRC Instagram: @tejaswineeroychowdhury
From Tenafly High School’s 2014-2015 issue of Omega Magazine
The first thing I recalled after waking up this morning was that we're building molecular models out of wooden balls in chemistry today. This means there's a likely chance I'll actually be helping my lab partner instead of standing around, wearing stupid looking goggles and acting completely useless. Good news, I guess.
The second thing I recalled was the boy in the red-and-blue hoodie in my Chinese class, twirling the pull-strings on his sweatshirt absent-mindedly. I was thinking about how they looked just like giant shoelaces when our teacher, Wang Lao Shi, announced that she was canceling our oral exam. That was very good news.
Now, I'm standing in an empty bathroom at school, scowling at myself in the smudged-up mirror. My face looks like it got run over by the back of a pickup truck– nothing unusual there. I have a bad case of bed-head, since I didn't bother to comb my hair. It's spiked up so much that I look like an anime character, or a brunette elf. I stick my hand under the leaky faucet to wet my fingertips, then run them through my hair, spiking it up even more. I shoot me-in-the-mirror a crazy grin, and she grins back from behind the glass. Time to go.
Ni hao, Lao Shi! I stroll into Chinese several minutes late, backpack hanging over my shoulder nonchalantly. I make eye contact with the boy in the hoodie, who's sitting next to the only empty chair in the class. Maybe he smiles a little, or maybe he just has a minor facial spasm while coincidentally looking in my direction. He's wearing the white hoodie with red sleeves today.
Thankfully, the teacher ignores me and does not say, "Lona, ni wei shen me chi dao?" which is the Chinese variation of, "Lona, why the heck are you late, you terrible student?" I slip past the front of the room, unscathed.
Once I'm in my seat, I pull my hood up and become invisible. This sweatshirt– my favorite– is a treasure I retrieved from the men's section of Hollister, where all the women's sweatshirts are flimsy and tight and don't come in maroon. Even though it's size small, the end of the zipper reaches almost halfway down my thigh.
Hood up, lurking in my cave in the back corner, I'm safe from danger. I'm like a wolf: completely unnoticed, undetected. I am ready to pounce if the situation demands it, but usually our Chinese class doesn't get that much action. Instead, I pull out my notebook and draw bubbles in the top corner of the page.
I glance to my left at the boy with the hoodie. He's taking notes– bowing his head up and down, from his notebook to the board, his eyes bright and eager. His eyes are two dark orbs: almost black, like two of those wooden carbon atoms our chemistry teacher showed us yesterday during the lab tutorial.
Hopefully my lab partner was paying attention during that. Right after our teacher said, "Listen, this is very important," my eyes glazed over and my brain went into sleep mode. Odds are he was. I'm sure he's going to castigate me for not listening again. Better break out my usual technique: just nod until he stops talking.
After what seems like three hours, the teacher stops talking too and class is over. I watch the boy with the hoodie pack up his stuff, slipping his pens into his pencil case with a precision that is completely unnecessary for putting pens into a bag. There's no one here to wait for him, so he has all the time in the world.
He picks up his notebook, and I study his hand. His fingers are so long and bony; I wonder if he plays the piano. I heard pianists are supposed to have long fingers so they can reach all the keys. I picture him playing a super complex piece, fingers flying, and throwing off his hoodie as the audience applauds wildly. The right side of my lip curls up.
I fling my backpack over my shoulder and walk out. Xie xie, Lao Shi! Zai jian!
Lunch is supposed to mean eating and talking with your friends. For me, it means not eating anything, doodling and staying silent as a bunch of giddy girls chatter around me. Today their subject is "the boy who Lona likes," which makes pulling my hood up and blending into the table a lot harder.
"So, Lona." The girl with red hair and pink eye shadow giggles like a chipmunk and smiles at me. "After this, you have chemistry. With Tyler," They're all smiling, staring at me. I am being stared down by an army of grinning makeup monsters.
I look back down at my notebook paper, which is covered in dizzying multicolored swirls, and pull out a blue pen. "Yep." The girl next to her with kinky brown hair goes "Oooh!"
"How fitting that you have chemistry class together," the redhead giggles.
I don't know why they think I like him. I have shown zero signs of liking him. If anything, I have shown negative five signs of liking him; he's even more irritating than my lab partner. But they needed someone to accuse me of liking, and Tyler was chosen by default; everyone likes him at one point, apparently. The girls at school used to call it “Tyler Disease” back in sixth grade– the most formidable virus known to mankind.
"You two would make a great couple!" the brunette coos. There is more giggling. I glance up at the table next to us; the boy with the hoodie has just sat down with his Asian clique. He pulls a pair of chopsticks out of his lunch bag. I grab a red pen and circle my wrist around on the paper. Just nod until the bell rings and they leave me alone.
"Oh, I have a great idea," the redhead exclaims. “Tomorrow is his big baseball game. We could all go together, and then once it’s over, you could ask him to the dance!”
I pull my hood over my face, smushing down my spiky hair, and don't respond. The table becomes even more animated and everyone starts talking at once. I just swirl, nod, grab another pen.
The boy with the hoodie is eating fried rice. He laughs, in a normal sort of way, not like a demon chipmunk covered in makeup. I will gladly disguise myself as a Chinese schoolgirl and sit with the Asian clique if it means getting away from this table.
"Don't worry, you don't have to. I know you're super shy. You should really lighten up! I mean, at least smile every once in a while. By the way, I love the way your shoes match your sweatshirt!"
I look down at my filthy Converse high-tops, which represent 50% of the shoes I own. This color coordination was completely unintentional. In Lona land, matching is a major fashion crime.
"Uhh, thanks," I mumble. The two girls in front of me bare their teeth again. My "friends."
I was right– my lab partner was paying attention. Likewise, I was right about him lecturing me for being the horrible student that I am.
"You never pay attention! I can't keep helping you with everything. You have to start listening if you want to pass this class." At least his voice isn't as annoying as his personality. It’s pretty smooth and sophisticated, with a sort of British-sounding accent. Apparently he just moved here from Australia. I wouldn’t have known.
He sighs. ”I'm wasting time. Let's start the lab. But make sure you focus from now on!" His voice doesn't match his outside appearance at all. His face resembles that monkey Pokemon with the bush on its head. If you gave it spiky hair and glasses, they could be twins. "Ok, first we have to make an oh-two. That's two oxygen atoms, double bonded." Nerd Monkey takes two springs from our plastic container.
I grab two red balls, one in each hand. Somehow I remember what color oxygen is. It's too bad we don't need to know that for the test, or anywhere else in life outside of chemistry labs. I hand the balls to Nerd Monkey, and he sticks the springs in, making an elliptical shape. A double-bonded oxygen. "Oh-two."
At the table next to us, Tyler the Virus is sticking two yellow balls together with a stick to make hydrogen. Apparently, this task requires a lot of yelling and cursing at his friends across the room.
Nerd Monkey glares in the direction I’m looking before sketching the molecule in his notebook. "Alright, good. Now, aluminum oxide. We need two aluminum atoms and three oxygen atoms." He pronounces the word like "alu-mini-um."
I get out two grey balls and say it a few times to myself: alu-mini-um, alu-mini-um, alu-mini-um. This molecule is way more complicated than the oxygen one, which a baboon could probably put together without trouble. The springs keep popping out, and Nerd Monkey is getting pissed. After a lot of adjusting, it stays together. "Alu-mini-um oxide." Nerd Monkey sketches it down.
A very loud string of profanities that could kill a nun is shouted from the table next to us. Nerd Monkey glares up again. The Virus sees him, grins, and cracks his knuckles one by one, in a chorus of snaps. I pull my hood over my head and start taking the molecule apart.
"Tong xue men! Students, class is over! Wo men xia ke le!" Another Chinese class is done. Another crappy winter day is halfway over. I am now half a day closer to the weekend.
The bell hasn't actually rung yet. Wang Lao Shi is giving us a minute or two to stare at the wall before we're allowed to leave.
The wall isn't very interesting today, so I glance over at the boy in the hoodie. Today, he's wearing the red one with the big black circle on the front. It looks like a big empty void of nothingness in the middle of his chest.
He's almost done putting away the small office store that he laid out on his desk. I've already slipped my pencil and notebook back into my bag. I was feeling ambitious enough to actually take notes today, but I ended up covering the page with graphite swirls instead. The boy in the hoodie twirls his big shoelace-pull-strings around with his long fingers and runs them through his hair– it's that naturally spiky, poofy kind that seems to defy gravity.
Then he glances at me. Or, at least I think he does. I lower my eyes to my tennis sneakers– the other 50% of my shoe wardrobe, which doesn't color coordinate with anything I own. When I glance back up, he's still looking at me.
"Hey. You're Lona, right?" he says. I don't think I've ever heard him talk before. His voice is just a few notches above a whisper.
I peer at him from under my hood, no longer invisible. "Yeah."
He pauses, studying me curiously. "Why do you always keep your hood up?"
I shrug. "It's a survival mechanism."
He pulls his red hood up, covering his anime-character hair. He half-smiles, nods. "I feel safer already.” I half-smile back. The bell rings. He starts out the door, and I follow behind. Zai jian, Wang Lao Shi!
The boy with the hoodie walks really fast, so I have to half-jog to catch up. I slide into step next to him, and he acknowledges me with his carbon-black eyes.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?" I say.
"Sure."
"Ni hui bu hui tan gang qin?" I just asked him if he plays the piano, in Chinese. For all everyone else in the hallway knows, I could have asked him to move to Guatemala with me.
The boy in the hoodie smiles and cocks an eyebrow. "Interesting question. Wo hui." He does. I am officially a hobby predicting wizard.
In a few more paces, we turn to a door on the right side of the hallway.
"Sorry– what was your name again?" I ask before he walks in.
"Kai. It's Chinese for 'victorious'."
A chemistry lesson from a few weeks ago– probably the only one I'll ever remember– flashes into my mind. "Electronegativity is an atom's tendency to attract electrons," the teacher said. These words somehow managed to stick in my head as I drew stars all over my notebook paper. "Fluorine and oxygen are the most electronegative atoms. The more electronegative an atom is, the harder it is to pull electrons away."
I should probably leave now, but my legs are being annoying and not listening to me. Instead, I just stand outside the door with nothing to say, frozen in place like an idiot. Kai, as in victorious. I like it.
"Ming tian jian, Lona!" he says. See you tomorrow. He slips through the door.
My legs finally start listening again, and I pull myself down the hallway.
The clock in our chemistry classroom was programmed to run twice as slowly as a normal clock. No one told me this, and no one else seems to notice it. But I'm sure of it; no normal clock can run this slowly.
Our teacher just left the room for a moment, so of course the whole class has erupted into complete chaos. A bunch of people have gotten out of their seats to talk with their friends. Nerd Monkey and I are the only silent ones. He's scrolling through pages of who-knows-what on his phone in the chair next to me. I notice he's wearing a grey sweatshirt, which is a bit odd because Nerd Monkey never, ever wears sweatshirts.
I glance behind me and see The Virus surrounded by his baseball friends, shouting and being an idiot as usual.
“So this kid was giving me a hard time today. He was pissed at me for picking on his brother or something." He cracks his knuckles.
"You mean the new kid?"
“Yeah. Why the hell would his own twin brother live so far away? He just showed up one day from across the world. Like, 'Surprise, I have a clone!'”
"I heard his parents divorced, and he was living with his mom. Then she died or something, so he had to move back."
Nerd Monkey’s face whitens. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and runs a bony hand through his hair.
"Wow, did his parents really hate each other so much that they had to live on different continents?" The Virus tilts his chair back so it's balancing on its back legs. "Sucks for him."
“Wait, Tyler, what happened? Like, today, with his twin,” one of the baseball jerks asks.
“Oh, yeah. Just a punch in the face and he shut up pretty quickly. Seriously, that kid deserved it. He's such a spaz.”
Nerd Monkey turns around. “Hey, Tyler!”
“Yeah, what do you want, Aussie?”
“Fuck you.”
All the baseball robots go “Ooooooh!”
“Whoa, watch your mouth there, kangaroo boy! You don’t want me to fuck up your face too, do you?”
I can practically see steam shooting out of my lab partner's ears. I’ve never seen him get this mad. Not even that time when I spilled hydrochloric acid during a lab in October. It looks like his head might explode, but he doesn’t say anything else. He just hunches down in his chair and pulls his hood over his eyes. For the first time ever, I actually feel sorry for Nerd Monkey.
Our chemistry teacher walks into the room, and everyone gets back in their seats like nothing happened.
As if spending lunch with them every day isn’t enough, the giggly girls clique comes to my locker every day after school too.
“OMG, did you hear what Tyler did?”
“Do you think he’s gonna get suspended?”
“I hope not!”
“Hey, Lona, what do you think of Tyler now?” the redhead nudges me.
This is an open ended question, not a yes or no one, but I just nod anyway. She turns back to the group, and they all chatter away as I drop my books into my backpack. Just a few more minutes and I'm free. At least until tomorrow morning.
I glance to the right, leaning back a bit to see past the sea of people on my side of the hallway. Then I see them pass my locker, just like they do every day after school. Two figures: one with a black eye, one with glasses. Twins. A pair of double bonded oxygen atoms. “Oh-two.” Or “alu-mini-um oxide:” red and grey. The boy with the hoodie– Kai– nods at me. He has his hood pulled over his spiky black hair, but not low enough to cover his bruise. I nod back. Nerd Monkey just stares straight ahead.
The giggly girls shift their focus.
“Oh, look, it’s the Chinese twins.”
“One of them is in my math class. The Australian one, I think.”
“If it weren’t for the accent and the glasses, I’d think they were the same person.”
“Yeah, I know! They’re, like, exactly the same!”
I close my locker. "You're all exactly the same," I mumble. Then I swing my backpack and stroll off.
“What is with her?”
“I don’t know. Lona's weird.”
My lip curls up. Weird is good.
Ni hao, Lao Shi! I stroll into Chinese, late as usual, and slip into my corner. Kai is wearing a red-and-black sweatshirt today, with a keyboard snaking down the zipper. I pull out my notebook and run my hands through my hair, making it stick up.
“Ni hao,” I say.
"Ni hao." He nods, doesn't smile.
I pull out a red pen and draw molecules on a clean sheet of notebook paper. The boy in the hoodie flips his hood up and acknowledges the board with one carbon-black eye.
Vivian Holland has been writing stories with chemistry metaphors since she was 15 years old and is thrilled to be a part of this experiment. Read more at vivianholland.com or @VivWritesStuff.
(from Latin spectare, gaze at, observe, frequentative of Latin specere, to look)
Turned inward, turned spectre,
(from Latin spectrum, image, apparition; from Latin specere, to look)
Prepared to swallow itself.
To do, undivided into spectre and spectator;to write, and not be a writer—
(…if I follow up this word with that the differential significance stands out I fit in with others who write I take the stage with all these words I positioned We take a bow I walk maternally into the spotlight I have lived this script already I pulled my strings My shadow danced on the wall to an audience of One the words props to My right to be—)
Thus dies the creator. On the other hand, consider this recipe for a doing:
“Here’s the to-do of sustenance: Start with the oil behind the stove, the noodles on the shelf, the water in the city’s potable water-supply system. See what the heat does to the water. The water to the noodles. Flip the gaze, spectator—watch it gloriously bubble, severely flail, the milk-balloon, the sauce-chromatography, the yolk-mineralizing, the tongue-linger— and kill the spectre. Serves 1 to many.”
To look in the soup-bowl and not see a mirror.
Akhila Pingali is a research scholar and translator based in Hyderabad, India. Her work appears (or is forthcoming) in SoFloPoJo, Brave Voices Mag, Five Minutes, and others. Twitter: @AkhilaPingali.
Have you ever felt the urge to eat words like the last piece of a rosogulla, afloat in its syrup, because you simply cannot take it all in with your eyes and nose? So you need a few more senses— those of taste and touch to do justice to its maker. In calligraphy, a word stands alone yet whole. I write lonely on a dark night. Words I could eat
The poets say if you dropped an anvil from the peak of Mount Olympos it would fall for nine days before it reached Tartarus. I’ve considered trying that but there’s not a straight line. Besides I don’t visit Olympos that often. When I do go I sit in the back. The other god pretend to argue about the affairs of mortals. It amuses them and I just think enjoy it while it lasts, suckers. I know I make the rest of the family uncomfortable. They said they were doing me a favor giving it to me as my domain, giving me all the wealth in the world, but we know they don’t want me around. Seeing me reminds them they’ll end up here eventually. Even my wife spends half the year away from me, and when she’s here she’s like a closed-up flower. I brought her here when I was young and naïve enough to think I could ever have happiness, or that I could at least share this place, that I could have company, someone to care about, someone who would care about me.
So I walk. Not that there’s anywhere here for me to go. Level terrain stretching to infinity, endless shadows, and a handful of amusing characters. There’s Sisyphus rolling his rock up a hill only to have it roll back down again. He could stop if he wanted to but I’m not going to tell him that. There’s Tantalus who served up his own son for dinner, now condemned to stand in water up to his chin with fruit hanging just above his head. His punishment is eternal thirst and eternal starvation, but he’s already dead. How bad could it be? Then there are the Stygian witches. What was it they did? Oh, right, they killed their husbands. That’s not always a crime, I think, although they did do it on their wedding night. They’re condemned to fill a barrel with water using sieves, and they could do it too if they’d work together, but I think they’ve given up. Nothing would change even if they succeeded. The dead are never really free until they’re forgotten; then they fade away. At the very edges of Tartarus shadows dance. Those are the Titans, what’s left of them, and if I walk far enough I see wisps, like breath on a cold morning, of things that came before them.
So I walk some more. I walk by Charon paddling his boat across the Styx. The dead who can pay with coins on their eyes or in their mouths get to cross right away. It’s the final reminder that you can’t take it with you. The ones who don’t get a proper burial have to wait. The rules say a hundred years but really it’s not until I say the word. Sometimes I forget and it’s more than that, sometimes I just issue a blanket pass and it’s sooner. Either way doesn’t matter. Everything comes to me in the end, and the end is all darkness.
So I go up. I guess it’s good to remind myself there’s a living world, for now. So I come out on a mossy green riverbank and I see leaves swaying in a gentle breeze and birds, and fish darting through the water. There are pale purple flowers at my feet. I find it all beautiful, then I snap out of it. I remember who I am.
There’s a road and I follow it to the city of Cumae. There’s a festival in the main square. Musicians are playing, there are dancers, jugglers tossing balls in the air, fire-breathers. There’s the rich smell of grilled lambs and bread, yogurt and mint, fruits, honey. It’s not nectar and ambrosia, but good enough for mortals, I guess.
A man next to a tent catches my attention.
“See something you’ve never seen before!” he bawls out at the crowd, and for a coin he lets people in one at a time. It’s a good pitch. I’m almost fooled by it myself, but I’ve seen everything. I slip him a drachm anyway.
It’s hot inside the tent and an opening lets in a sliver of sunlight. At first I think it’s a trick, that there’s nothing here, but then I see a square wooden pen filled with straw. A dark shape moves in it. I kneel down and look in and three squinting heads all lift up and yowl at me. Then the pup stands up, turns around, and falls over, unable to get upright. I reach down and stroke one of the heads and it tries to suckle my finger. Funny little thing, taken from its mam too soon. I pet its body which is soft and warm. Hera doesn’t like to admit she makes mistakes, but she does, and they never live long, but I’ve never seen one like this. One of the heads wobbles and yowls at me again.
Outside I pass the guy a heavy purse. Half again what he’d make if the entire city lined up at his door. Okay, he says, after pretending to think about it. I take the bundle with me, feeling it shift against my chest as I carry it.
On the riverbank it sniffs and craws and howls as it tries to pull itself upright. So small, so weak, in so much pain. But still trying. It opens one mouth and spits out a small bloody clot.
I turn away and try not to choke. So small, so soft, so warm, so vulnerable. I could throw it into the river. I could leave it. A wolf or an owl, even a fox might drag it away. I could let it starve, or just wait for it to stop. Once passed over this tiny, fragile thing will be big, and strong, and it will never be hungry again, but for now, as long as I wait, as long as it fights to stay alive, its pain goes on.
So it’s done. I put the knife away.
Tartarus is still unchanged. Sometimes I walk. Sometimes I sleep. But Cerberus is always with me.
Christopher Waldrop lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and a horde of wild Dalmatians.
in the blue-light glow of my lips, i’ll stamp my kisses onto read 11:11 pm & remember how a sliver of thinned moonlight caught your fingers better than i.
remember this— how pennsylvania plains unspooled prostrate like a promise, shadows hidden under the swells of my breasts, pansies blooming from your torn knees.
remember this— split cuticles & burnt letters, stars & negative space compressing 5’8 of blood oath and lie, your face lost to- night.
i’ll lick the twilight breeze and capture you on my tongue, what, not who, because selene knows how hair and myth curl whisper-soft in nyx’s bruised arms.
let me chase you through the infinities of in-between, take a shot every time you fly like a foal, alcohol or bullets shaping flesh— red and ribs every time.
how does the night covet?
will you find me in the belly of the dark?
April Yu is a teenage writer from New Jersey with an affinity for language, running, and human anatomy. Visit her on Instagram @aprilblossom and Twitter @aprilgoldflwrs.
Sitting tall in front of those short trees, we gaze at the opposite side of rush hour. The dome of our head blazes red one moment, green the next as memories of previous rush hours rise steaming from your skull. We fold ourselves into a striped suit with saggy threads, and we take pleasure in polishing our brown shoes whenever we can. Next to our wooden stool, our cart is stacked with lollipops, bags of potato chips, cigarettes. Pigeons clamor around the wheels. We speak to them. Just those pigeons are near, no people, but we don’t care. Those rush hour memories nudge a chuckle from within and we flash juicy bits of gossip at the birds, but they ignore us and peck the cement. We continue chuckling and swiping at our shoes. Eventually, a young man stops to deposit a few coins for a single cigarette. He is our very first customer. We had parked this cart on this corner just last night, but it was too late. We had missed the rush hour. Just last night, years ago. It’s so far to push our cart, but people on this side of town have always been nicer. Plus, this streetlight’s cycle had enticed, instead of the ordinary red-yellow-green in front of our house, way on the opposite side of town. This one’s red-green, red-green. It’s different. Smooth, yet chatty. The only one in town. It chides the shiny cars under sundown: pollution will laminate the sky in a few short years. In fact, the sunset is passing into pink right now. Salmons and corals ripple above the red-green bounce. Offended by their ignorance, we tell the pigeons to get lost, go take a bath. Go drown in the ocean above the streetlight. The birds take off in a huff, flinging themselves far into the evening. We look up, nod and laugh, congratulate the young man on being the first customer. We are smooth, yet chatty. He glances around. The cigarette seethes. He straightens his back, flicks his smoke, walks away. Our voice trails off and our eyes widen as flecks of ash ride through the wind and settle down, softly smudging our newly polished shoes.
Johan Alexander was born in Medellin, Colombia. A musician and community organizer, he lives in Portland, Maine. His writing can be found in LatineLit Journal and elsewhere. Twitter @Johaxander1
Unstamatic 