table of contents
from class of ‘22 graduates:
If I meet you on a spring day
by Alice Liang
They expand
by alice liang
To them whose wings are broken
by Alice liang
Coke Addict on the Subway
by Chris Maffucci-Fitanides
From current students:
collage
by soomin lee
illumination
by soomin lee
on something i miss
by grace pariser
slammin’ screen doors
by margaret hines
untitled
by eve shapiro
sleep
by ava rahman
my neighbor
by dava sitkoff
crickets
by grace pariser
untitled
by arjun krishnan
dialogue
by eliza lamster
train of thought
by ava rahman
the truth is all about you
by avery selk
The AutumnForest Blender
by kerem pauwels
A Case of the Licks
by tien phan
The Wanderer; or, the Tales of Stingy Jack
by Ella mckee
cover art by Margaret Hines (Through Time)
Note FRom the editor
From the Archives is a compilation edition of all submitted works from the 2021-2022 school year. Whether each piece went through the full editing process varies, and pieces are published here as they were left by their authors last year. This publication also includes works from now-graduated Commonwealth students, whose wonderful writing we still appreciate.
If I meet you on a spring day
by alice liang
If encounter implies I inadvertently walk towards you
On a windless spring day,
When you, pedaling your cruiser bike,
Happen to go the opposite way,
Slipping away declares a deliberate dislocation,
The exact angle that parallels glances,
For the breeze to roll through the woods beside you
But not to sweep across your face.
If congeniality suggests I inadvertently walk towards you
On a watery spring day,
As the rain dabs the same jocund rhythm
At the same time in the same place,
Schism announces an inaudible fall,
A slumbering king with a frivolous palm,
That overturns the weltering well to waterlog soggy fields
But misses the draining pond.
If reconciliation foretells I inadvertently walk towards you
On a cerulean spring day,
Since the air smells like the lawn freshly mowed,
Since the toad we spot does not run away but gazes back,
I could smoothly erase words like child’s play,
And tell you a sycamore could grow so high
As to forget its timeworn roots,
But an ephemeral orchid could not leave behind its base.
If I meet you on a spring day,
The weather does not matter, nor does our age,
For between the gray skyline and violet clouds
That flock of pigeons always drifts soundly.
Would I meet you on a spring day?
They expand
by alice liang
There is always more beyond the homeward buoy,
The jagged reef and bony keel of a small ancient disaster,
A looming longitude of unrest and failures of sympathy.
Safer to be on the land, to stay in the haven of misconceptions.
Distance is huge between two horizons,
Crimson flame trying to warm cobalt ice, an impossible gap,
An attempt so violent to the self,
That bleaches every tenderness.
The jarring hearts themselves amazed and confounded,
Could not understand how a one-way road could bifurcate
Into two dead ends.
They gaze and gaze longer, but no sails are set.
The mirage afar shivering in their vain hopes
Refuses to come alive.
Flood begins to attack the shore.
Stiff feet drenched and heavy like boulders,
Limbs untended swinging in the blaring wind,
Hair wet and adhesive to their cheeks and necks,
They decide, in the end, to forsake the solid ground.
One tentative inch is enough;
The rest expands in a blink.
When they dock the desolate isle,
False dreams burst on the pins of sharp discrepancy.
They cannot believe that they have never noticed
Even evergreen has shriveled grey;
Bluebirds fluttering crippled wings have fallen under haphazard hail;
The rich juice of mulberries
Have now been seared into the bitter rain of May.
No tears could compete with the flood
That has silently mounted into a deluge that inundates
All insidious delusions.
It would be the end of a misguided story
Of flimsy shards residing in a cracked, embellished casket.
To them whose wings are broken
by alice liang
They held onto the bongrace of clouds, cradled messages of their loved ones,
And went away undauntedly.
The field of despair had no wind;
Then rainstorm scoured everything, so the wind was no longer needed.
What we’ve hoped for a thousand of times
Now seems to be a lost object that we could no longer cry at.
The vast land was weaved together by mahogany blood vessels,
Water supplied to the heart through crevices.
That day an immense bird, wings broken, plummeted heavily into that heart.
Scarlet blood turned into splattering tears,
Every creature on earth was wailing with the crippled heart.
The huge bird was carrying her hatchlings,
They fell together now in the same place, though into pieces.
Our hands are clinging to faith, so we put our palms together devoutly,
Whom we love are buried in the wilderness, also in our bodies.
Heaven, where no suffering persists, is an ever-blossoming spring for all seasons.
The many ages we went through holding hands
Now spread seeds midair where nothing could be depended on.
Upon their germination, they are calling over and over: “appear before us again.”
Coke Addict on the Subway
by Chris Maffucci-Fitanides
Having crossed the buzzing gates today
I made designs to find some other way
To quench the thirst my dry throat could not bear
So clogged it was with dirty subway air
An iced coffee, a glass of water would
Without doubt treat my teeth and liver good
Aranciata rossa or agua con gas
Brought from Italy to Back Bay, so fast
But these my foolish windpipe must reject
And as it does, on every day, elect
For a blushing can, with fizzing amber filled
And it arrives, as my five quarters willed
Slides down the chute, where my coins are taken
Slightly warm, and more than slightly shaken
The crisp tab cracks beneath my eager thumb
And noting the arriving train, I run
Collage
by soomin lee
illumination
by soomin lee
Hunched over on the plastic mat in the living room,
You practice the ukulele after dinner,.
Your voice the accompaniment,
Mumbling that can barely be heard over the ceiling fan.
You flick the strings with lazy precision, the lamp’s glow
Illuminating your face, a spotlight,
Bright like your eyes fixed
on the screen of your phone
That displays the pattern of chords your fingers freely follow.
You hum and you strum and I listen as you create a world of quiet song—
Every note, every chorus, falls into place,
A patchwork of spotty beginnings and confident bridges.,
And while your spotlight remains on for your audience to see—
Now a dim lamp that illuminates your face,
Later a shining beam that
Illuminates art of your own creation—
No spotlight can illuminate the world of love I have for you.
On Something I Miss
by grace pariser
I want you to think of Radio-Flyer wagons,
String tied to plastic sleds,
Jostled against the tops of hills packed glassy with snow
Like shellacked gymnasium floors in September.
When we were happy, time moved slowly.
We had to drag it to keep pace.
We never talk about that.
Beauty is underrated.
People assume its overuse
And dare not risk appearing ordinary.
The glass shattered in my picture frame.
The vacuum’s neck engulfed the slices and splinters,
Of crystalline teeth
And then it was gone, like always.
The watercolor still hangs above my lightswitch.
It pains me, thinking how plundered it seems,
What it might lose next,
But it fits too squarely with the doorframe
To bury it.
I think of people marching up the mountain it displays,
Clad with thick jackets and the trill of boots
Lumbering on top of gnarled, smokebush shadows,
But it’s just a picture.
They’re only toy soldiers.
slammin’ screen doors
by margaret hines
Little feet, fairy skirts. Pirate hats and foam swords. Plastic crowns fit only for the swashbuckling princess of the royal kitchen. Dancing until you fall like pods from a maple tree, though certainly less graceful. But it’s all fine, and you get up again as soon as the screen door slams because it means your dad is home and you can rock out to Taylor Swift and the Mamma Mia soundtrack like you’re the next pop icon of the decade. Even if the CD player skips when you jump too hard. It’s all fine because dad is home and that means mom is coming soon after, and you love your aunt, but she’s not your parents, and in your opinion it’s time for her to go home. You’ll see her tomorrow anyway.
You can’t wait until your dad starts making pasta with tomato sauce that you don’t even like to eat, but it smells like home and that means everyone else is home too. You’re ready to show your dad the magic you came up with and hopefully the absolutely-edible mud pie waiting in the backyard. It’s spring, and you can tell by the way the scent of rain hangs over everything and the flowers are poking their pillowy pink heads out of the green leaves. The air feels different and it’s your favorite.
Your aunt and your dad are talking in the kitchen like they always do, passing your little brother between them as they tell stories of their days, smiling at the moments adults always find funny but you never quite understand. The patterned kitchen tiles are cooler than the rest of the house, and you’re grateful for it. The kitchen might be your favorite place. It leads to the yard, and has the door that slams loud enough to tell you who’s home and the heater you like to sit on in the winter and pretend it’s a fireplace. It has odd burgundy walls and fading white doors and a sink with a window facing your neighbors’. They have almost as many flowers in their yard as you do, but your yard is a fairyland of legos and lightsaber fights while theirs is only cut by hard asphalt.
You don’t know it yet, but these details stick in your mind like pine sap to your fingers.
Untitled
by eve shapiro
In an enormous old gymnasium with badly painted walls and shiny wood floors at a public school in a suburb of Philadelphia, there is a funeral of sorts taking place. Thirty people mill around and speak in hushed, anxious tones, as if waiting for an event each one believes is a surprise for the rest. Every person is clothed in neon yellow.
A teenage girl in a yellow skirt, black flats and a black top sits on a gray folding chair in a corner, her older brother in black slacks and a yellow top beside her. Together, they’re staring up at a collage of pictures of their cousin covering the entire wall. There are photos of him as a toddler at the top of a slide, as a middle schooler at a piano recital, as a college student on a beach with his arm around a pretty girl, as a grad student in a bookstore in Madrid.
One of the photos flutters down, the one from that long ago piano recital, and the girl slides off her chair onto the ground to pick it up. She has no way to reattach it, but she can’t leave it there. She slips it into her pocket instead. There’s a bitter taste in her throat and tension through all of the muscles in her body; she wants someone she can yell at. Instead she bites down on the inside of her lip and leans her head back against the wall.
The pretty girl from the beach photo, older now, is dressed in a yellow wrap dress with a carefully pinned braided bun atop her head. Once upon a time she was his girlfriend, and now she is walking to the doorway of the room to greet two newcomers to his funeral. She can’t remember who they are. “Thank you so much for coming!” she says, smiling at them. “I know he would have been so happy to see you here.”
“Oh, of course!” says one of the new arrivals. “It’s just a fantastic idea for a memorial, to have it be like a– a celebration of life, with all the yellow, instead of just depressing black. You know, I bet he’s looking down at us and enjoying all this right now.”
The girl with the braided bun doesn’t believe in heaven, or cliches. “I’d like to think so, too,” she says. She lets her smile fall a little and gestures at someone who isn’t there. “I seem to be being called over! There are refreshments against the back wall if you’d like them.” They walk away, and she walks towards the person who has gestured to her, the one who doesn’t really exist. Her back to the rest of the room, she places her fingers against her temple and sighs, questioning her inability to feel anything but tired. Perhaps she is a terrible person, but that isn’t a thought she has time or energy to dwell on, so she turns to try and find if there is anyone she hasn’t spoken to yet.
In the hallway outside the room stands a small boy in an ugly yellow suit. It looks terribly uncomfortable, and his mother thinks this might be why he is crying. She is leaning down so that she can look at him at eye level, her hand on his arm. “What’s going on?” she asks. “Do we need to go home and find you something else to wear?” The little boy shakes his head vigorously. “What is it, then?” says the mother.
The boy crosses his little arms across his chest, dislodging his mother’s hand, and says through tears, “I don’t understand why they’re all acting so normal. No one is even talking about him.”
His mother sighs. She doesn’t know what to tell him, so she just crouches down and gives him a hug. He uncrosses his arms and reaches them around her, leaning his head against her shoulder.
In the center of the room is a small group of friends, dressed in all manner of different yellow clothes. None of them are wearing any black at all. None of them are appreciating this memorial. “This is bullshit,” says a woman with short hair. “The whole point of this was to celebrate him, to tell stories and make fun of him and play his favorite songs on repeat at a completely intolerable volume. Not to have a normal fucking memorial where no one acknowledges him except to say ‘Oh, he would have loved this,’ as if anyone can know that.” She looks around at the room again and shakes her head. “Hey, at least everyone’s wearing yellow!”
The two men across from her in the cluster nod along with her words. Her girlfriend, standing beside her, squeezes her hand and then walks over to the cousins in the corner by the photo collage. “Can I grab a chair?” she says, and one of the cousins nods at her despite his obvious confusion. She drags the chair to the center of the room and steps up onto it.
“Hey, everyone!” she calls out to the room. “Can I have your attention, please?”
The room slowly quiets.
“I’d like to open up the floor if anyone has stories that they’d like to share about Daniel.” The room is full of people staring at her and no one has raised a hand, so she announces, “I’ll start.”
Near the doorway is a man wearing a yellow sweater, listening as one person after another steps up onto the rickety folding chair to tell stories about Daniel. Some are sweet, some are funny, some are mocking, some are tragic, some are nostalgic. The man listening barely knew Daniel beyond small talk in an office, and he wishes his response were sadness over this loss, at the fact that they’ll never again make awkward small talk and that they’ll never get to know each other beyond that, but it isn’t. Instead, he is filled with a sort of wistful ache, a wish to believe that this many people would stand on a rickety chair to tell stories about him. He can barely think of one person who knows him this well.
Standing by a wall in a black dress and a yellow cardigan is Daniel’s mother. There are tears on her cheek that she doesn’t bother to wipe away. She’s listening to his friends and his girlfriend tell stories about someone kind and funny and smart and thoughtful, and it sounds like him, but also someone confident and idiosyncratic in ways she’s never known him to be. She’s aware of how silly it seems, to be standing there at her son’s memorial, crying not because he’s gone but because she never knew that he liked heist movies, but it doesn’t matter. She can’t seem to stop.
When the memorial is over, and any evidence it left has been cleared away, and the people have all filed out, the pretty girl with the yellow wrap dress and the braided bun is still there, sitting in a little ball in the center of the empty room. She’s taken her hair out so that it falls in messy waves around her shoulders. Her head is on her knees and her hands are clasped around her ankles. She isn’t crying. Her breathing is careful and controlled, as if she’ll forget to inhale if she doesn’t think it through. She sits like this as long as she can. Eventually someone comes in to tell her that the building is closing, and she’s forced to smile at them and walk out into the cold.
Sleep
by ava rahman
Ambiguous as an ink-blot
Ballooning outwards, glove-like,
Extending forever, infinite,
Until the sun lifts its pale finger
And strikes the sill of day.
Darkness swallowing all forms,
Door, desk bed;
The splendor of thought,
Inflated, wrapped up in itself,
Clamoring against absorption,
Ensnared in a net of dreams,
Haphazardly collected and projected.
Curled up like a child,
Frog like, amphibian,
Mind watered down like a tincture.
Tidal waves of this fickle day,
Pulling neither here nor there
But everywhere, relent in this dreamworld,
This evening bath.
The world falls into its reflection,
Hours scroll out their minutes,
Waiting, still
Submerged,
beneath.
my neighbor
by dava sitkoff
My neighbor visits a dead man every Friday evening. At his grave, she sobs all over the defaced and vandalized stone and screams obscenities at the ground. Through tears, she tells him that he is arrogant, and cruel, and never did care about her in the way that he should have.
My neighbor came over for brunch last Friday morning. Wanting to relate to her, I recounted the only time I held a conversation with her dead and terrible man. He had been very rude to me in the aisles of a grocery store; haughty and contemptuous over something insignificant. After I finished my story, my neighbor’s hands shook against her teacup, and she set it down so vulgarly that the bottom clanked against the plate. She glared at me and insisted that he had been a very good man, and what a tragedy it was that only she knew of his kindness.
My neighbor returned to the grave that evening and went through her usual routine. After telling the man that he was arrogant, and cruel, and neglectful, she chastised him once more for leaving her no one to share her grief with.
Crickets
by grace pariser
The field was parted,
a massive head of hair
with a path wobbling on the scalp of it.
Spare stalks of hay snapped in my fingers,
crumbled softly in my palms,
and the dust was wiped on my knees.
The hum of crickets is numbing.
You never hear it until you want to,
and when you finally do
your hands and feet feel outsize,
swollen and buzzing.
I heard the crickets, then,
saw them, too,
as I looked at my feet
and realized they scattered with each step,
their gangling bodies fleeing from the shorn center
to the tall sides.
Tens of them, visible all at once,
leaping into the pale caramel stems.
I felt like a god,
and I hated it.
We couldn't help but listen,
all of us,
to the nauseating trill of motors
shaking their fists at the dark orange sun,
just as it was trying to fall asleep.
Untitled
by arjun krishnan
DISCRETIONARY WARNING: STORY CONTAINS PHYSICAL ABUSE
She hadn’t seen the world like most people her age had. In fact, she hadn’t seen the world at all. She had resided in her run down, enclosed space for as long as she could remember. It didn’t feel like an enclosed space to her, though, it was all she’d ever known for her 16 years of life. She had vague memories of a mother, a father, a brother… but she simply dismissed them as wild dreams, put into her mind by evil spirits to tempt her from seeking these fantasies. She knew what would happen if she did.
Her life goals were uncomplicated; things like mapping out a floor plan of her space, or doing the laundry in under five minutes. She thought simply, pondering about what the outside world and other people are like.
The only thing she had to go by was a necklace. It sparkled, with a little golden heart at the end of it, and it glimmered every time she put it under the light. She had that all her life, and she had always wondered where it came from, and what it was for.
Her bunker came with unexpected friends, little puny bugs. She grew to bear a few, but always found the spiders irksome, with their creepy eight eyes and hairy long legs. She would always scream in fear in terror when she saw one, no matter how many times she did.
For all her years she only knew one man.
Robert was an odd man, coming into the space everyday and taking advantage of her any way he could, whether that was hitting her, manipulating her, or doing the unthinkable. She had known him all her life but never knew a thing about him. He was gruff and angry, but to her he was like a god-like figure, as she knew no one else. Robert was the only one who could bring something new to her, a new pillow or book, a new toy when she was younger, and music discs of only classical songs when she was older.
She had many habits, like biting her nails, even though she had earned the gift of a nail clipper. She put on Mozart in the day, Handel in the afternoon, Beethoven in the evenings, and Mozart again to sleep; he was her favourite. She read simple books like “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” with great analysis and depth as if it were a full scale novel. She would always imagine the beach (as she had earned a poster of it) and what it would be like to splash in the waves and get tanned under the sun, eat ice cream, or just relax with friends…not that she knew what the concepts of friends meant; she had none. She only knew Robert, and Robert was anything but a friend. She would pause all of these habits when Robert came just in case they aggravated him, because if they did she knew what would come next.
She was a smart girl, curious beyond belief. With the only thing she had from the outside world being a necklace. She had examined the necklace for hours at a time, seeking something, anything, that would set her free from the shackles Robert had placed on her hands.
Until one day, she noticed something.
A tiny little crack was starting to form on her necklace, so small that most would not notice it. But she did; she knew the ins and outs of that necklace, the dimensions, every square millimeter by rote memory.
“Could this lead to something?” She asked herself, as she tried to exploit the crack and open the necklace, it was a big deal to her, but she was willing to break it just for a chance of getting out. Instinct got the best of her. As she tried harder and harder, she felt it get closer and closer, and then, in an instant, it snapped in half.
It dropped to the ground and split in half. She hurried to pick it up and examine it. But there was nothing, nothing inside, nothing outside, nothing new, nothing to save her from this hell hole.
As all hope came crashing down, she wept and wept. The one chance she had was gone, no hope was left, no fight was worth fighting, there was no way she was going to get out.
Dialogue
by eliza lamster
The first girl was pale from containing her emotions. Her eyes were wide and bloodshot and her lips, once perfectly pink, were now pursed so tightly that they blended into the whitish pallor of her drained skin.
Next to her sat the second girl. Their bent knees pointed at each other in a comfortable position, as if they had sat like this a thousand times. But the two girls sat apart, their postures magnetic in such a way that anyone could see they wanted to be closer at the same time as they were scared to be closer. Sometimes they would lean towards each other almost imperceptibly and, catching themselves, would straighten immediately. The two girls would each rearrange a lock of hair or twitch a couple of fingers to cover up the movement that had seemed so conspicuous to them but was so inconspicuous to anyone else. An ugly scar had marred their friendship, and yet they still ached for each other’s comfort.
The first and the second girl were quiet, hiding from each other and from themselves, but the third girl was not. She had pulled out her silver phone and was gesturing wildly with it. Her lips moved frantically as she swung her phone around in front of the other girls. Both of them looked at her; neither of them saw her.
The second girl was silent. She was always quiet, but now she was silent. She had a sulky posture, her limbs curled protectively around her body. Headphones fit snugly around her head, and tangled strands of dark hair gathered around them. When the first girl observed her closely, she saw the second girl bobbing inconspicuously to a nameless song. She did not acknowledge the third girl, who carried on talking.
The first girl nodded and mumbled along to the third girl’s conversation. Like a truck on a dirt road, she would be quiet for a while, then make some mumbling noise or jerk her head in this direction or that one and, making sure she had done her part in the conversation, would go back to her own thoughts. They were so loud in her own mind but so quiet to those around her, like the second girl’s music.
The third girl continued to gesture rapidly. She was showing off some news story, talking about how wrong it all was: all the coverage, all the stupid rumors, how it was just making things worse. But the first two girls didn’t care, or maybe they cared too much, or maybe they didn’t want to care. Whatever the reason, they both drowned out the third girl with their own kinds of music.
Every now and then, the third girl would move her arms too quickly or push her phone too close to the other girls’ faces, and they would flinch, jerking violently away. When this happened, the first girl’s eyes would go blank for a moment, empty of all their previous contemplation, and the second girl’s music would get louder, just barely, as if she needed more volume to drown out her thoughts. The third girl, after apologizing once or twice, would continue with her lonely conversation.
And so the three girls carried on like this. The first girl was thinking and the second girl was bobbing and the third girl was making her own kind of music, so out of harmony with the rhythms of the other girls.
Train of Thought
by ava rahman
Sitting on the train, I watched
The man with his hat crooked, a book broken on his knee,
The woman with her eyes listless on her screen,
And the boy who got up on his knees and looked out,
To the trees, the houses, the drifts of snow,
Myriads of impressions slipping past the window
As the train barreled forward into space,
Pulling itself by its bootstraps,
Self generating its existence,
Or maybe affirming our own:
We built the train.
But I did not build the train.
I could not march up to the front,
Push the driver out of the seat,
And pull it back from its own momentum.
I wouldn’t know which button to press.
I sat on the train and I watched passengers leave like ghosts.
The man, the woman, and the child stepping off,
Trudging through lungfuls of snow,
The boy tripping as if unused to his legs,
While the train fled the station and went on,
reaching the final stop where it was left desolate.
After that, did it continue on?
Was it willed into existence by our knowledge of it,
The tree falling in the woods and the Vale of Chamouni?
In my room, I wrote in the seat of my chair
And these words were boxcars built by others,
Sticking as condensation to the film of my mind,
Spinning webs into ephemeral space
That I neither saw nor was aware of.
Yet some hand moved and picked this one, this one, and that one,
And I settled for it, nodded, and though it was mine,
Writing something that created itself
With seemingly no movement at all.
Distance is huge between two horizons,
Crimson flame trying to warm cobalt ice, an impossible gap,
An attempt so violent to the self,
That bleaches every tenderness.
The jarring hearts themselves amazed and confounded,
Could not understand how a one-way road could bifurcate
Into two dead ends.
They gaze and gaze longer, but no sails are set.
The mirage afar shivering in their vain hopes
Refuses to come alive.
Flood begins to attack the shore.
Stiff feet drenched and heavy like boulders,
Limbs untended swinging in the blaring wind,
Hair wet and adhesive to their cheeks and necks,
They decide, in the end, to forsake the solid ground.
One tentative inch is enough;
The rest expands in a blink.
When they dock the desolate isle,
False dreams burst on the pins of sharp discrepancy.
They cannot believe that they have never noticed
Even evergreen has shriveled grey;
Bluebirds fluttering crippled wings have fallen under haphazard hail;
The rich juice of mulberries
Have now been seared into the bitter rain of May.
No tears could compete with the flood
That has silently mounted into a deluge that inundates
All insidious delusions.
It would be the end of a misguided story
Of flimsy shards residing in a cracked, embellished casket.
The Truth Is All About You
by avery selk
I
The Great Falls were larger in real life than in the paintings— louder, too. The crashing sound of water hitting glistening sandstone drowned out the chatter of elven passerby, and the chirps of wingèd beasts that soared overhead. Muted as they were by the thrash of the falls, the very sight of the eastern creatures blew him away. Although miles away from home, he was at roughly the same latitude as the desert town he grew up in. When he was young, he had dreamt of a prestigious city life— that was what everyone dreamed of in Logikē. Yet here he was, in a foreign place where everyone looked, quite literally, down on him. He had never been particularly tall but never had he passed so many people who would have to bend their necks so far just to look him in the eye. Few stopped to stare, but those who did wore expressions laced with confusion or contempt.
He didn’t mind the falls. The rushing water’s steady rhythm was comforting. It reminded him of the sound of the riversides that had soothed him as a child. He remembered zoning out as smaller mer-life swam by. If he closed his eyes he could picture his favorite ocean where he used to spend hours lying against the cool ground of the beaches, getting sand in his hair and on his feet. He never used to think about the consequences. His aunties had scolded him for his irresponsible behavior as they combed the sand out of his curls. An hour later when they’d given up undoing his hair and just cut off the remaining braids, he had gone to bed resentful. Not at his aunties, or the other kids who would surely make fun of him the morning after. He hated the rules he always seemed to be bumping into. Throughout his childhood he often found himself increasingly dissatisfied with his society. And, in that moment, he had despised being born scienike. No, it went beyond race or nationality. He hated being human. No one back home wanted a kid like him. A kid who was always bending the rules, asking questions that didn’t lead to a thesis. So here he was—in Technē, of all places—equally alone.
II
It was cold the day I met Ari. Unlike most tourists or travelers, he was dressed for the weather, though not for standing under the chilly spritz of the waterfall that sprayed him every so often like an ungulate going through a puddle too quickly. Despite his thick, wooly, elven-cut robes, the boy stood out amongst the crowd of statuesque villagers and students that were hanging out around the busy streets. Something about him drew me in, and even now I can’t quite describe it. Not for a lack of things to talk about, nay, I am constantly finding new things about him to be drawn to. That day my gaze was caught by him, by the red ribbons braided into his hair and the way he removed one glove to fidget with it. I tried to let my eyes pass over him, like any other face. But he wasn’t just any other face, so I bit my lip and approached him.
Ari was tall for a human, though not as tall as me, and I quickly saw that we were about the same age. He was holding a crumpled pamphlet in his gloved hand, and his eyes held the distant curiosity of someone whose thoughts were never stagnant. If he had been elven, I would have mistaken him for a peer. Not that my peers wore bright colours and naive nervous smiles or were people I wanted to talk to. I had paused three feet away from him when he looked up. At the sight of my academic robes, his eyes widened and he blurted out, “You are from the Technē Academy for Magical Arts!”
His accent was unfamiliar, a clear legato— probably scienike. He pronounced every syllable distinctly. His words had been a statement, an exclamation, but I answered as if it was a question.
“Yes, actually— I’ve been enrolled for five years.”
“Five?” he looked shocked., “That’s incredible, you must have been so young.”
“Since I was ten, yeah,” I frowned. “It was my paren— my father’s idea.”
“Oh, the never-ending cycle of guardians with such misplaced ideas and expectations.” He smoothed out the pamphlet, and I looked away from his eyes for the first time long enough to recognize it as an official TAMA handout. “It can’t be that bad, though, can it?” His voice got quiet as if he was afraid someone would reprimand his enthusiasm, “I mean you work with MP8 all the time!”
“MP– what?”
“You know,” Ari made a twirling motion with his hands. “Zap, buzz, vroom.”
I couldn’t help it—I cracked a smile. A genuine one.
“You mean magic?”
Ari shifted from foot to foot, looking down, “I am not, ah, supposed to use that word. Hasn’t gone well.”
I tilted my head, not sure what to say. Then, cautiously, placed my hand over his and pointed at the pamphlet with the other. “I know a place where they would let you say as many magic words as you would like.”
His head shot up, and there was an intensity in his gaze that wasn’t there before.
“Me? At an academy like—like that?” He looked like he was trying to laugh at the idea but couldn’t.
“No hope is truly impossible.” I recited, not used to hearing the words outside of my own head, “That’s the point of hope, to keep us going.”
He grinned at me, then down at the pamphlet. I miss that. I miss when it was just us. and I miss making him smile.
III
I saw him the other day, in the forest where I teach. No longer out in the open by waterfalls and mountainsides, but my eyes followed him all the same. Pandea, a half-elf on my mother’s side, was leading the oddest mixture of people I had ever seen, and trailing behind in the very back of this group was him. Ari. My Ari. Or the person who used to be mine, who I thought was mine, who I could have sworn was... He’s older, taller, and he’s cut his hair. He was walking shoulder to shoulder with a Hedoni girl, the two of them laughing indistinctly with each other. He looked happy.
I wonder what his life has been like, how he’s changed, how people have changed him. I wonder if he ever did learn magic— if he found someone to believe in him. To believe in his dreams. I like to think that he did.
The AutumnForest Blender
by Kerem pauwels
Warning: Violence
“What would you like to order today, sir?”
I stand behind the counter, smiling. The sir in question stands in front of me, readying his answer. I had immediately marked him as an outsider. Staring a whole 5 seconds at the polished orange menu board is just not something a resident does. He seemed about college age, wearing a tie dye with brown jorts and of course a hitchhiker’s backpack that dwarfed him in height. It was clear to me he hadn’t grown up here in AutumnForest –a town, no, a family of 500. There is only ever one food on the menu: our signature trail mix blend, as healthy for the body as it is for the mind. What’s really up to the customer is how they choose to take the trail mix blend. Every single resident of AutumnForest knows what their preferred order is, as we often make that choice in our infancy. If you’re a fan of milk, get it in a milkshake. If it’s a cold day, get it steeped as a tea. If it’s a hot day, get it frozen as a tablet. If you have a sweet tooth, cover it in sprinkles. If you’re feeling sick and out-of-breath, rub it on your skin as a cream. If you just find the taste unsavory, get it in a syringe. “Nobody shall be barred from the benefits of the trail mix blend!” - a restaurant policy, courtesy of Great-grandma.
“I think I’ll have the ‘Trail Mix Milkshake’ please.”
I shout to the kitchen behind me: “One ‘Trail Mix Milkshake’ for the gentleman on table four!”
“Oh, and hold the nuts. I have an allergy…”
“And no nuts!”
Our restaurant, lovingly named ‘the AutumnForest Blender’, has stayed in the family since its founding. My family’s story in AutumnForest began as Italian immigrants off the shores of Genova. They first arrived on the shores of South Carolina in Beaufort, after which they traveled inland until they reached the small town of AutumnForest. It had been left abandoned after 1864, when Union forces presumably burned it to the ground and caused its inhabitants to flee and never return. New residents from outside began rebuilding the ghosttown for themselves, including our family.. Since 1867, my family has been living in AutumnForest, and in 1869, we would become a major part of AutumnForest life. My great-great-great-grandmother Reginna would notice a problem in the town and provide a solution. Her blended trail mix, a secret family recipe passed down through the generations, helped the residents “sleep when their beds seemed to come alive” (in their own words). It was -- and still is – a sleep medicine, but further along the recipe evolved to combat overthinking, indecisiveness, confusion, sleeping limbs, overactive limbs, night terrors, hallucinations, nightmares, aggression and more. It’s truly a mark of our family’s ingenuity, and I’ve seen it unfold in front of my eyes. When the lumberjacks began seeing faces on the trees, our trail mix eased their worries. When the shepherds began hearing their sheep talk, our trail mix made their flocks silent. When the students felt a rumbling in their heart, our trail mix killed it All these –real events in AutumnForest’s history-- are thanks to our family’s innovation. Every tourist will ask us What is in the trail mix blend that makes it so great? An absurd question to anyone who’s grown up here. We know what’s in the trail mix. Everyone knows. We take almonds, chocolate, peppermint, cauliflower, raisins, cashews, peanuts and a family secret ingredient, then we blend it all together! Then they’ll predictably ask what the secret ingredient is and – well.
I walk downstairs when the clock hits 9 PM, closing time. For the next hour I gather the ingredients to make enough trail mix blend to last the day. We have the almonds, we have the chocolate, the milk, the cashews, the peppermint, the cauliflower, raisins, peanuts.Yes, all here and ready for tomorrow. All we need to do now is visit an old friend of the family.
John Ash, aged 120 years, sits on his wooden chair in his wooden kitchen, with his wooden utensils looking out the wooden window and contemplating his wooden life worriedly. He lives in our basement, but doesn’t know it. Every night, including this one, I creep down wooden stairs, open a wooden door and give him a wooden greeting. This is my job and it always has been. It’s another family tradition–the eldest manages John’s room, the middle plays John’s wife, and the youngest plays John’s nightmare. I, being the middle child, get dressed each night in this silly old outfit to entertain this silly old man we call John Ash.
“Oh, my dear Amy, you’re finally here! I had the most horrible dream last night, I was bound to my dinner chair and then a horrible creature came and stole my blood like that Greek Prometheus and the eagle--”
“Josh, that sounds absolutely horrid! Why would you be having dreams like that? I say, you must be sick with something. You shouldn’t go to work today, not before I make you a good hearty chicken soup.”
A relieved and loving smile replaces his worried expression. I see the same expression every time, and it never gets less disturbing knowing that he thinks he loves someone just entertaining the role of his dead spouse. Nevertheless, he never catches on. “That would be lovely, Amy, thank you.” He sighs. “Thank you very much.”
“You're always welcome, John. Now just sit on the dinner chair and relax while I get your soup ready!”
Ashe sits on the chair, I go behind him to be right outside of his field of vision. The kitchen here isn’t actually functional of course. Everything is made out of wood. The wood soothes him in a way that I still don’t understand, but the room’s design was certainly deliberate. I theorize the wood room does something to his memory, or maybe alters his consciousness, or perhaps it stops him from escaping…
Out of his vision, I activate the clasps of the chair. Metal chains - the only thing in the room that isn’t wooden - rise to strap his arms, legs, and torso to the chair. The youngest, my sister Gini, bursts through the door with her ‘extraction device’. The extraction device is a two-faced machine. The top half bears a sharp, spinning blade used to efficiently saw through John’s torso without directly damaging organs. The blood extracted is pushed into the bottom half, an upturned “scoop” that catches the falling liquid. The wide metallic mouth gobbles all of John’s essence, pushing it through narrow see-through plastic tubes directly to the device’s stomach – the “secret ingredient” containment barrel. I hear John’s muffled screams and curses grow louder. I always cover my ears during this part. I just can’t bear hearing John that way. Gini, however, often opts instead to leave her ears open to his suffering. If you ask me, sometimes I think she takes a bit too much enjoyment in all this. The blood of John Ash is used to make more trail mix, and gives it its more unconventional properties.
That is how our quaint little family makes the magic happen at our dearest ‘AutumnForest Blender’.
a case of the licks
by tien phan
It was a chilly, rainy, Halloween night, and Bernie had amassed a three pound pillowcase full of candy for the spooky holiday. Running wildly with his superhero suit chafing and squeaking, while his cape flowed through the rain and wind, he felt the wet droplets hit his forehead. Good thing this suit had a mask, only half his face was getting wet.
Bernie finally reached his destination! It was a huge Victorian house, decorated with spider webs all over. There were mummies and witches sprawled all over the lawn, and lanterns spreading their ghastly light. At the end of the pathway, there was a full bowl of candy; the paper taped on it said TAKE TWO.
What did Bernie do then? Pour all of this poor neighbor’s candy into his pillow case. To make sure he got all the candy out, he stuck his hand into the bowl.
“AAAAAHHH!” Bernie screamed. He felt something slimy on the bottom of the bowl. He peered into it to see what it was, and it was a tongue! Bernie ran back out to the street, pulling on his cape so that it wouldn’t get in the way. When he reached the sidewalk, he realized he forgot his pillow case! I can’t just leave my hard work at the house like that… I can’t give my candy away like that” he thought. He rushed back and grabbed it.
As he ran back to the street with his candy, he felt something slick again, and it wasn’t the rain. Was there a… tongue on his forehead? WHY IS IT LICKING ME? He thought
Of course, there wasn’t anything on him, he was just imagining things. When he slapped himself on the forehead, there was nothing but wet skin, and a quick look up confirmed nothing was there. How weird.
Bernie tried to lift the pillowcase over his head, and decided that this was a good enough weight of candy to go home with. The labors of Halloween were terminated! He took his time walking, dragging his pillow case behind him.
To pass the time, Bernie popped a lollipop out of his sack.. Bernie unwrapped the lollipop and immediately shoved it into his mouth. “Aaah, refreshing!” The night was long and hard, the hunger for candy had passed, it no longer masking the underlying thirst from the night’s labors. The candy was so good, the silky feeling of the pop rolling through his mouth. He pushed the lollipop back and forth from each side of his cheek for fun.
“Argh,” Bernie choked suddenly. He felt his tongue cramping, which completely stiffened his jaw. Then, something was worming through his mouth, prodding his cheeks and teeth. Moments later, a tongue plopped onto the street.
The Wanderer; or, the Tales of Stingy Jack
by ella mckee
Everyone has stories. I should know—I am one.
Here’s another:
There’s a story they tell by the sea, in a village too small to be named, not by the maps and not even by the people who lived there. There, there lived a lonely fisherman. Why he was lonely, I can’t say—I only saw this story, not the ones before. All I can say is that his soul was so full of sorrow the salt of his tears could have made a whole ‘nother ocean for him to fish in. They didn’t, though, so he just spent all his time fishing in the one that already existed. It didn’t bother him any, because he’d be along either way. Well, one day he came home after fishing, and brought a mighty fine lady with him. She was a strange thing, beautiful, but with big black eyes like a moonless night and shiny hair like she’d eaten naught but fish. She followed him like a newborn babe might—because she knew nothing else. Well, the fisherman wasn’t lonely anymore, because soon they had children—two, if I remember correctly, and I do—so it wasn’t one person in the house, but four. And then one day there were three, because the fisherman’s wife left in the night, leaving their children alone until he found them. Well, not really, because he was never the same again, so they were alone forevermore.
That was one story.
Here’s another:
There’s a story they tell in the sea, among people who don’t have villages, about a woman who was lost and found. What happened before she was lost, I can’t say—I only know this story, not that one. Well, she was brushing her hair on the beach, as seal-folk are wont to do, when a fisherman came and stole her seal-coat. Now, a seal-woman’s seal-coat is no article of clothing; it’s a part of her soul, and she must obey anyone who has it. So she did. She followed him back to his house—such a strange thing for her, feet that had only ever felt the sand, and only for such short times that, now walking on dirt and grass for what she knew would be a long time—and became his wife. She couldn’t do elsewise. Then she became a mother. She couldn’t do elsewise—although she managed to love her children a fair bit, I’d wager, as the seal-folk always do. That didn’t stop when she found her seal-cloak in the attic, locked in an iron box that burned her hands. It was just that she couldn’t disobey him, and they could. It was just that she couldn’t take them with her. So she didn’t. She put them to sleep and kissed their foreheads and hid away all the sharp things they could hurt themselves with and left. She returned to the ocean, where she found her seal-husband—I know little about him, for he is part of the stories I don’t know, but they loved each other—and they swam away. She returned, though, to give her land-children treasures of the sea they could sell to get money and move away. Seal-folk love their children, after all, even if they hate their fathers.
That’s one story.
Here’s another:
There’s a story townsfolk whisper amongst each other, when a child seems strange or loud or otherwise just plain wrong. Once, there was a couple, who, after trying for quite a while, finally had a baby. He was everything they could have wished for—not just a living child, but a perfect one, rosy-cheeked and giggling. Everything was as it should be, until one day it wasn’t, because the baby—now a toddler—didn’t act as they thought a toddler ought to do. He cried at loud noises and sharp smells like they cut into his flesh, and he could read the Bible—the only book his parents owned—but wouldn’t recite it out loud, because he didn’t like to talk. Well, his parents had heard other whispered stories, and they knew they weren’t his parents at all, and that he was a changeling. And, well, there was only one way to deal with changelings: put them into the fire and watch as the fairy that took your baby exchanges it for the real one, lickety-split, because they like to see you suffer, not their own. This changeling was a particularly cowardly one, because he left and brought back the baby—now a toddler—just before they tossed him into the fire, so fast you wouldn’t have been able to tell except for the fact that he acted normal now.
That’s one story.
Here’s another:
There’s a story a boy didn’t tell to anyone, a story I only figured out by watching him. Once, there was a boy. As he grew and grew into himself, he learned a lot of things. Words. How to speak. How to read. And that he was different. Strong scents, tastes, sounds, textures—they all made him feel like he was getting swallowed up in them. He didn’t like to talk to people—he liked to read, but also, for all his sharp senses, he could never figure out what the changes in their faces and voices meant. What he didn’t learn, at least not at first, was that this was considered very wrong. He didn’t learn it entirely until the day his parents almost put him into the fire, convinced that he wasn’t their son because he wasn’t what they wanted. So he lied. He let himself suffocate every moment of every day, and he pretended he wasn’t. He got very good at lying. One day, though, he found someone he could tell the truth to. They moved away together, and he didn’t have to lie any longer.
That’s one story.
Here’s mine:
Once there was a man named Jack. Nobody called him that, though—they called him Stingy Jack, because he hated to spend a single coin from his purse. That didn’t mean he lived a simple life, though. Quite to the contrary. Because Stingy Jack’s smile was as warm as his heart was cold, and he could pluck anyone’s heartstrings like a fiddle until they did whatever he wanted—a category that often involved buying him alcohol. Well, Stingy Jack became so well known for his wicked ways that even the Devil himself caught wind of it, and flew up from Hell to see what all the fuss was about. He found out rather quickly, when Stingy Jack convinced him to shapeshift into a coin so he could use it to buy a drink, then shapeshift back when the bartender wasn’t looking. But before he could shapeshift back, Stingy Jack pocketed the coin and pressed it against a crucifix, so the Devil was in pain and at his mercy. He made the Devil promise to leave him alone for ten more years—having already figured out that the Devil planned to kill him, whether because he coveted him or because he was jealous of his reputation, I can’t say—and so he did. Ten years goes by awful quickly, though, especially when you’re spending it on pleasures as Stingy Jack did, and so soon the Devil showed up again. But Stingy Jack’s silver tongue had only sharpened with time, and when he asked the Devil to climb up the apple tree and pluck him an apple, so he might feel like Eve in Eden before he died, he acquiesced. Of course, the apple tree had crucifixes branded all over, so the Devil couldn’t get down. Only when he promised to never claim Stingy Jack’s soul did Stingy Jack take his axe and chop it through the crucifixes, bringing down the tree and freeing the Devil. Stingy Jack lived for a good long while after that—I won’t tell you about his life, because it’s just more of the same sins, except done to humans—but eventually he died, as all people do, finding that Death was deaf to his pleas. It turned out that didn’t matter, though, because God had no interest in a sinner such as he entering the pearly gates, and the Devil couldn’t break his promise. So Stingy Jack couldn’t die. The Devil—I still don’t know why, he doesn’t strike me as a kind man, but perhaps Stingy Jack’s honeyed words from so many years ago had stuck to him—gave Stingy Jack an ember, and told him that, if put in a lantern, it would burn eternally, just as he was now made to live eternally. Well, Stingy Jack, being stingy, had never bothered to buy a lantern, but it was Samhain, so he simply picked up a carved turnip and put the ember inside. Ever since then, he’s been wandering, lantern in hand, not dead and not alive, and so unseen, as he walks the world, and watches the stories unfold.
That’s just one story, though.
There’s always another.