Paranoia
Eleanor Peters '20
Lonely street
This morning’s rain in grungy pools
Reflecting light in cement grooves
Flickering, eerie just after sundown
Darkened storefronts watching
With glassy, lidded eyes,
Peering into the silence, shattered
By the even steadiness of heels
Clicking on cracked pavement
A car door slams, somewhere, startling
One sharp inhale, widened eyes scanning
Distant laughter, floating, evaporating
Pause.
A second set of footsteps echoes
You are not alone
Mirror image:
Measured strides,
Clenched hands,
Beating hearts,
Tightened lungs,
Racing minds
Searching, creating
Illusions in every flash of light
The climactic event:
They pass, without a glance,
Disappear into the gloom
Each leaving the other to wonder
Were they even there at all?
Artwork by Danielle Hong '22
Photograph by Sharon Zhou '19
Slammed Doors
Olivia Zoga '21
I wished I could know her.
There I stood, dressed up like a fairy queen, like I was finally realizing a childhood dream, and my mind was lost in the sea of people streaming past me. This girl, dressed in red, high-heeled boots and a black skirt and a red shirt streaked with sweat stains in the July heat, didn’t even notice me.
When she smacked her foot to the floor, a loud slap cried back, like the tiling couldn’t handle the abuse of harsh footsteps on the ground. Or maybe it was the echo of slammed doors of fate. Surely, this girl had gotten a proposition once or twice?
Surely, in other rooms, on wood floors, on carpets, or even dewy grass, knees have kissed the surface that worshipped her touch, caving in slightly where she stood. Surely the question was asked, and this girl in her flaming heels, blazing, quite literally, her own lonely path, had the courage to decline as I could never. I gasped at her perfume.
She smelled like flowers. Gentle meadows, quiet with the hum of bees breezing past your ear. I almost fell over wafting her perfume. She smelled nothing like the sweat sunken into the fabric of my dress.
“Excuse me,” I rushed out, letting the words guide my sentence. She stalled, calling my attention to her blackened brown eyes, pulling themselves off her track straightforward, lingering on my face. I fought a blush. “Do I look okay?”
It was all I could ask.
I saw her take me in, the dress, the veil, the flowers, the sweat. She probably noticed the hair, profoundly engaged in its own, anti-gravity state. She smiled, trying to mind my nerves, pushing warm energy out into the world when it had no business being there. My heart broke.
I tried to put it all in my face, in my eyes, somewhere beneath the kind exterior. She didn’t realize.
“You look great,” she offered, standing for a minute more. I wanted to explain that I looked miserable, like I’d rather be anywhere else in the world. I wanted to explain that she looked how I wanted to. But I couldn’t drop that into this moment. No.
“Thank you.”
As she walked away, I was sure I’d never see her again. Not as me, awkward in my white dress.
Painting by Ashley Chung '19
The Light in Darkness
Stephanie Zhang '21
At 2 in the morning, I heard the victory bell ring
Must have represented some sort of win.
The bell chimed exactly 3 times.
Curious, I stealthily climbed out of bed,
Put on my slippers and slipped out the window.
As I neared the patch of grass and brick path leading under the bell,
The ground, in its usual resting state, looked disturbed.
The rope, which was usually held by the hands of victors from their recent battles on fields,
Was now tied in the shape of a noose,
With a single raggedy doll swaying in the loop,
Dancing slowly with the chilly air.
As I looked closer at the coarse threading of each string of the rope,
A sticky, crimson liquid had seeped through the ends and was making its way to the doll's face.
And there, not more than 5 steps from the border of concrete and grass,
Lay a single silk glove, fluttering gently in the loneliness of the moonlight, forgotten, or left in haste.
And behind me, the shadow on the brick wall slyly picked up the glove, smiled and stood still.
And as it stared at me for two seconds more, the creeping light reflecting off its smile grew, blinding me.
Bernice
Isabelle Halsey '20
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My mother and I settled into our favorite spot: twin plastic seats with matching polka-dot covers at the back of the bus. My mother pulled back the waffled sleeve of her shirt to check the time, while I pulled out my phone to check the weather and the bus map. 11:24 a.m., 93% chance of snow, five stops from 66th street. The bus jolted to a stop, and a few more passengers, smelling of sweat and frost, climbed aboard. Four more stops. An elderly woman, patting her cantaloupe-colored pixie cut and leopard-print earmuffs into place, settled into the seat in front of us. She turned, the soft leather of her winter coat swishing against the gold chain of her purse, and smiled, revealing coffee-stained incisors, peeling orange lipstick, and deep wrinkles that cross-hatched her face like graph paper. My mother looked up from her book, smiled back, and began to make small talk with the stranger about the weather. Three more stops. The old woman introduced herself as Bernice, age 87, and babbled on about the faults of transportation systems, her lousy husband whom she had left twenty years prior, and her good-for-nothing son who lived down in the South and didn’t have to deal with crappy New York City weather like she did. My physician mother listened patiently, sporadically creasing her brow and tsk-tsking in disapproval. Bernice, relieved to have found an audience, began to flush and gesticulate her knobbed, veiny hands animatedly. I watched. Two more stops. Bernice hiccuped and paused to apply Chanel no.5 with a travel-size rollerball. She wheeled around to face us once again, and a rancid smell of orange citrus filled my nostrils. Eyes bleary, she took in my mother’s Taiwanese features: almond-shaped eyes with irises the color of aged amber, a long face splattered with freckles, shiny black hair interrupted by only a few strands of gray.
“I have this great joke about wontons.” She giggled, jostling my mother lightheartedly. She paused. As her unfocused bead-like eyes took in my mixed features, pearls of sweat began to string themselves down my armpits, back, and neck. Only one more stop. Confused, Bernice frowned and leaned into her seat. “But, out of curiosity,” she resumed, tripping over vowels, “Do you know the young lady sitting next to you?”
The Familiar Shadows
Ashley Chung '19
When I was young, a friend lived next door. From the first day I knew him, his smile brightened up the whole world around me like a clean, crisp winter sunlight. I talked to him a lot about many things, like how time slipped by like sand and how a cute café entered our town. In my town, there stood many old buildings and ancient houses with history, and we used to venture out in daylight, constantly discovering new old streets — he was from America, which allowed me to introduce him to Japan’s dazzling culture. He had flown over to study science in Japan, for he had proved himself worthy of a full scholarship to a prestigious foreign exchange program.
He was the kind of person with whom you’d want to spend an entire night talking about random things, whom you’d wish would stay beside you when you were curious and lonely. We did just that. He would come over with market-bought bentos (or sometimes sushi, if he felt fancy); we’d eat together discussing our Physics assignment, go out on my balcony to gaze at stars suspended in the vast, clean, infinite void. He would comment on the marvelous nocturnal scenery, saying: “It’s so fascinating to think that the only thing between that moon and me are some tiny gas molecules and nothing else. There’s only a certain distance between us before I could land my feet on another celestial entity.” Yes, I know — he was kind of a nerd and a weirdo.
Being the weirdo that he was, he once mistook my house for his home and crashed there after his paid lab work. He rang the front doorbell about a thousand times before I snapped out of my sweet dream and opened the door for him. He wasn’t really sane then, but not completely insane either — he would just belt out complaints about his challenges in life, about how much he missed his friends back home. Whenever he said that, I would get this ache in my heart that I couldn’t fully describe, though I was reassured by his physical presence beside me.
But it finally happened. One morning, I got a text from my friend that he had decided to fly back to his home. I glanced at my screen, walked around my room, thought for a bit, and guessed that he missed his home so terribly that he had to go back.
I spent that year’s winter almost alone, without my friend’s comforting presence. My emotions were deeply injured by his sudden disappearance. I couldn’t believe that he sent a single text and left — was he that desperate? Did he not feel at home at all? On top of that, my office job and the particularly dreary weather had taken a toll on my time and energy levels, so I just stayed trapped in my room reading and shutting out the noises with thick curtains drawn 24/7. I would sometimes have bursts of memories pop into my brain; I couldn’t really control them. But I somehow did cope. And when spring came, I decided to take a trip — a vacation — to his home. Over email, he said yes.
When I got off the plane in Boston, I saw my friend holding a picket on which my name was written. Because of the unfamiliar situation in America, my eyes were spinning quite badly, but I soon composed myself and walked straight toward my friend, whom I had longed for so much.
“Hey.” I smiled nervously, matching eyes with him.
“Long time no see!” Saying so, he smiled so widely that my heart was relieved of all stress. He was indeed the friend I knew from Japan.
But there were some things that made me uneasy. We grabbed lunch from a nearby Boston restaurant and drove to his home, where he introduced me to a girl friend that he had known since he was three years old; I cracked a little smile, but internally I was rattled. A splash of reality overwhelmed me like a cold cup of water at midnight, like getting out of a warm, toasty bed to greet the cold winter air — ah, yes, he had spent a long time in America before he knew me in Japan. He had old, nostalgic relationships that he treasures, perhaps more so than our relationship…that thought brought me an unreasonable amount of sadness.
Later that night, I lay in a borrowed bed and thought to myself — why do I feel foreign, like an outsider? Did I barge into his world so rudely? What did he think of me now that he had gone back to his old home?
Did I. . . really know him?
His unadulterated laugh around his American friends and his comfortable gesture toward the waiter at the Boston restaurant made me look at him in a new light, for I sensed a certain distance between us now. I felt as if I should have let go of him earlier; I felt as if he were a stranger. Thinking so, I gradually fell into a murky dream where everything, including my five senses, was blurred together, and I swam in that inexplicable dream until I lost myself in familiar shadows and unrecognizable faces.