By: Sofia Gillen
The rickety bridge stretches out endlessly before me. I grab onto the green railing and step on. The wooden boards shift underneath me as I slowly walk along the bridge. My heart pounds. I feel like I could drop into the water below at any moment. Suddenly, the bridge starts shaking wildly. My uncle had gotten on after me and started shaking it on purpose. My legs tremble and my stomach drops. I grip the railing, annoyed. As if this isn’t scary enough already. After a few more wobbly steps, I finally step onto solid ground. Safe. I did it. I successfully crossed the world’s smallest suspension bridge.
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By: Cora Davis
Finally, we are old enough It feels like we’ve been waiting forever Reality finally sets in. Eventually we knew it would happen. Indeed, we are now seventeen and eighteen Seriously, as kids it was just a number. Like everything, what we originally thought, was… All a dream it was just to be eighteen. Now only seventeen, forever longing to be kids December rolls around, the last is old enough Lingering feelings of us children - we want forever. I am the only one who feels this way? No. You are, all of us, forever, never old enough. By Sofia Gillen
I hear a rustle, far above me, and pause my wandering. There’s a flash of quick movement. I spot the tiny bird. It lands, then it flits from branch to branch with a flick of its fine feathered tail. Despite the cold winter air, the small bird, a chickadee, opens its tiny black beak and sings. Bold, perched in the arms of the maple tree. I peer up at the little bird in the big tree. The world is quiet, though I hear the chickadee’s call, “chick-a-dee-dee”, a familiar song. The world is still, here, until, suddenly, the bird soars away. Now, I feel peace on a cold winter day. A strange stick figure,
with a large head. Like a bobblehead. A terrible drawing, given to me by a little kid. She’s in middle school now. I still know her. A scribbled in caterpillar, given to me by a little kid. I still have it, years later. She’s in fifth grade. I still see her, but she doesn’t remember me from when she was that young. A brown bear. I can barely picture the picture she gave me the last time I saw her. I lost that drawing. She used to run to hug me, every time she saw me. She won’t remember me now. By Ramona Boyd
my distant cousin, whom we've just met, is an encyclopedia of obscure family information. open between the three of us (she, my mom, and myself) is a photo album filled with images she is quite familiar with but neither my mom nor myself has seen before. she is pointing her finger at each and every one and has at least a five minute story to go with it. before she has finished her last sentence i can see the wheels turning in her eyes as she prepares to tell the next story. we are eating almost identical biscuits and drinking fall beverages. we are completely absorbed in what she has to say. i have always been terrible at facial recognition, but my eyes are drawn to the boyd features in the book immediately. something about the nose in relation to the eyebrows. the softness of our faces. there is something both confident and listless in our posture. the early boyd women gave the camera eyes blunt but quietly unnerved, make no effort to pose, they stand straight forward with their hands by their sides- like they are in front of the camera and that's enough. my mind wanders and i think about how i look eerily alike to my grandfather in my ID photo and how it's hilariously one of the only photos i love of myself. there is a picture of my great aunt katherine, a nurse, reaching up to touch a statue of mother mary. a side by side comparison of a distinct-looking family portrait on vera's uncles living room stairs versus its recreation twenty years later. there are pictures of my great aunts sitting on the beach, barely posing, and i feel old envy creaking in me. they seem to love the camera. my soul is grabbing at something beyond that, though, that has been lost in the dark. faces soft and smiling like hearts, making no effort to cover themselves… this is what makes me realize what i am going to realize. i think, that's what it is! oh my god, this is what it's about. portrait photography is about documentation. THIS IS WHAT IT'S ABOUT. The revelation shakes me with light. how could i have gotten so lost, and forgotten what it was really about? it's not about cruelly sucking my stomach in, or jutting my chin forward…. it's not about the calculated movements, this is what it's about! it's about seeing your soul in the way you smile. how did you feel when you were there? what were you thinking about? i should be able to tell when i see you on film. i keep repeating to myself, the sun warming my clothes and the leather covers, this is what it's about. it becomes more true to me each time i say it to myself. the most beautiful part is how it's so within reach. no need for envy. (no need for envy EVER, really, but that's beside the point.) my great grand-nieces will see me in my class photo and immediately pick me out of the crowd for my nose, for my posture, for the roundness of my face when i smile… they will eat biscuits and cast their shadows over that album under the sun. they will laugh and marvel over how little has changed. vera, completely unaware of the revelation i am having, lifts up the page and carefully turns it, fast elocution unwavering. i am looking at five images. in each one, a different member of the family is leaning out of the drivers seat of a car, beaming. "...they had just gotten a new car, so naturally everyone had to get a picture in it!" "well of course," my mom says. i want to tell her what i have realized immediately, that the future looks at you with only wonder. (At rise, MIEP leaves the office building and faces front looking beyond the audience. She is talking to herself.)
MIEP GIES I am not a hero. “I, myself, I’m just a common person. I simply had no choice.” The Franks needed my help. And I did not want to live “a life filled with regret.” Hour after hour, day after day, I fetch food, flowers, library books, cigarettes. “It is terribly difficult to get them[those cigarettes]” But I will still buy pack after pack. I know what would happen to me if those in hiding were discovered. But you can’t say I am suffering. Not when I can go to parties, breathe the clean fresh air, see that my friends are safe. Sleep at night without worrying that the slightest sound could give me away. I save up every sugar ration for a cake, a cake with “Peace in 1943” on it, or “Peace in 1944”, “Well[because] it has to come sometime, you know.” Someday. Someday soon. If enough people are willing to help, to put themselves in danger... “People should never think that you have to be a very special person to help those who need you.” So don’t call me a hero. Works Cited Goodrich, Frances. Hackett, Albert. The Diary of Anne Frank. Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1955 The elevator door opens.
There is a lady in the bland, grey, colorless box. Her blonde hair is in a messy bun, with little pieces falling out, like spray coming off of a waterfall. She wears a fancy black dress with matching high heels. She smiles at me. Maybe a teacher, a lawyer, a spy? And me and my sister will be squished in this tiny prison with her. Just as I’m about to follow my sister into the elevator, the doors start to close. I jump inside, just in time. I can’t breathe, and my heart is on a swing. We should have taken the stairs. I grab the railing. It is cold and hurts my hands, but I hold it anyway. The lady looks at me like I sprouted tentacles. The button for level five glows yellow like a flashlight. Five levels we have to pass, just for physical therapy. Did you know there’s an emergency button on all elevators? But if the power went out, it wouldn’t work. Whoosh, the elevator goes down. Beep, what was that? An alarm, a broken wire? Is the elevator going to drop, are we stuck? No, we’ve just passed a floor. After a thousand years, the elevator stops. The doors open, slow as slugs, gates to freedom. But then I realize, this is level three. Two levels below our destination. Soft, mushy, disgusting shortening.
A block of it, like hard-to-cut cream cheese. It sits on my kitchen table, and glares up at me, dares me to touch it. It must go in to the pumpkin pie that I am making for Mother’s Day. Slice, slice, slice, it sticks to my silver butter knife. As I separate little pieces, my hands slide off the block like waves sliding off rocks. A million little pieces in a bowl, like pebbles in the sand. Now my hands feel slimy as a jellyfish. Mash, mash, mash, it clumps on my pastry blender. Scrape, scrape, scrape, I pull it all off. Smush, smush, smush, over and over and over again. The dough for a pumpkin pie is sitting in a bowl, finished, but my hands are still dirty with sticky, slimy, slippery shortening. By Ramona Boyd
There is an onion in her right hand, a knife in her left. Shuttered blinds, warm rain, summer twilight casting softened shadows on roots already diced, sprawled across the cutting board. Gnarled farmland innards. She is old origami alive, by some miracle of love. Her daughter and granddaughter and great-granddaughter, her primary school friends, and high school friends, and nursing school friends and friends she met at the grocery store yesterday wonder how she accomplishes it each day. How you spelled their names, icicle points in their penmanship, prints their shoes make on the sand, the way they held a camera, whether or not they take a receipt, which tense is instinctive, past or present, when she talks about them? These are her reminders of them, bookmarks in a lengthy novel. Moving pictures with no time or place folded into paper skin and rough white hair. She might describe the pictures to you in hopes that you’ll remember. The onion looks like a planet, she’s decided. She twirls it round in her right hand. She’s alone in that room, but she’s not cooking entirely alone. You will each take turns leaning yourselves on the doorframe to watch. She smiles, turns slowly and carefully, and looks just past you. You have to resist the urge to gently pry the knife from her hands, as they’re more than capable of slicing a taproot on their own. You’re beginning to learn this. Her sons and her grandsons and her great-grandsons don’t join you in observing, rather lean forward slightly in their seats while the girls are gone. The world is an onion in her right hand. There is a knife in her left. Earth is an onion. Swirling in cosmic soup. She considers this analogy. You think it’s sad, you talk amongst yourselves, the way her hand tremors to carry a pot to the stove, the way she looks at a point just behind you when you talk, trying in vain to place a picture in her head. But the world is an onion misted lavender, layers and layers peeled back. Her hands are more than capable of slicing a taproot on their own. |
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