Please Tell Me Who Mary Can Save by Talia Gritzmacher
I am twelve years old. My body is made from knob knee driftwood and bat wing arching elbows. Elbows condemned to beat against the corner of the refrigerator. I am female, and to me, that means nothing. People are only masses of legs and flesh and skin. My life is one bathroom. One living room with a sink and a stove in the corner. One couch to sleep and to cry on. One baby brother who is young enough to wear his diaper but old enough to sass. Old enough to run. He is made of marshmallow pudge and couch cushions. He is tinted with baby blue belly button lint and baby powder crusted crumbles. My body was created to keep him. Keep him safe.
I know the bald man is walking down the outside hallway, though I cannot hear his footsteps. My toes that shiver and itch and dig into the stiff fibers of the carpet cannot feel his vibrations, but they know that he is shaking the ground. His bald head brightens as it reflects the white of every fluorescent bulb in the apartment building’s dingy hallway. That one bulb- the one that sometimes works but mostly shutters and flickers and dies- that bulb, spilling darkness across his head, is somehow worse.
When the itching in my toes becomes unbearable, I know he is near. I carry baby brother in my arms, though he is old enough to run on his own. I tell baby to keep quiet and I stick him in the bathroom. In the corner. Near the door. I turn on the shower. Hot, very hot, hot. Very hot. I tell the baby not to touch, but to stay in the corner closing his eyes and his ears. Don’t touch the water, even if it spills onto the floor. I close the door on baby brother’s tears. I bless the water that stifles his sniffles. Bless the waterfalls running and running and hitting the shiny white floor of the bath.
I close the bathroom door just in time. Bald man does not knock, and I hear the clicking, clicking, click as he unlocks each lock after lock. Clicking is momentarily replaced with frustration as he struggles with the last sticking lock. He is still frustrated, and still he enters. Bald man smiles. White teeth. Flat teeth. Shining teeth that know where baby brother is hiding. Shining teeth that click like locks. He closes the door behind him without looking. The door swings, but does not make a sound when it closes.
I sit on the couch and he sits too. He smells like strength. His cologne teases my nostrils in tendrils that mix with the steam seeping from under the bathroom door. In the darkness of the room his head no longer shines. He is only darkness and quiet and cologne. He offers his neck to me. I refuse to take it. But of course, his large hands take hold of my wrists. And of course, he brings my wrists to his neck. Once he is sure that my hands will remain on his throat, he releases his hold, letting his own drop and fold lightly in his lap, like a clothespin resting atop a pile of molded cloth.
My own small hands, smooth creek pebbles and gray swarms of sweating fishes, attempt to wrap around his thick neck. I apply pressure. I can feel the vibrations of laughter building in his throat. I squeeze and squeeze. I think of my baby brother’s hidden waterfall cry. I squeeze with all my might, and the laughter of him rises.
“Come on, you’re stronger than that.” He tells me as he closes his hands around mine.
He chokes himself, my hands crumpling into shadow under pinching clothespins, and it hurts badly, but I must not scream out. I must not anger the man. I must not scare my brother. I must welcome these changes in my one-bedroom life. I close my eyes in the dark and imagine the bruises that are forming on my fish pebble hands. Little sweating pebbles that are barely noticeable in his neck’s ocean. He does not let up, only laughs harder. And his neck. It is fine. And my hands. They are leaking.
Water leaks through the crack under the door. At any moment the bald man will notice. As suddenly as rain, I realize that the smoke alarm will not detect the steam rising. I don’t have to look to know that my baby brother is drowned. I give up and let the dream fall under water. I know that it is time to wake, but I am unable to let the dream leave me. My eyelashes itch, falling heavy like wet sand caught in the cracks of skin or in between the fabric of beach towel summers.
I am 22 years old. And I am alive. I scrape my knuckles on the world around me. Blood pebbles prove the earth real. I cling to concrete, to tree bark, and to the grass blade fingers that grab at my pinkie toes. These little abuses teach me sanity. To forget the memories that itch, to forget the boulders of dreams and the light blue skies that kill them.
Comfort is here, In between the abuses of the day and the shining waters of night. I don’t need to breathe here, but I could if I wanted. I can swim the perfect backstroke, my lungs filling with cricket legs, singing the light breeze. Here, I am shadow on hammock string. I know I’ll need to wake eventually, and I’ll mourn the losses, and I’ll eat my vegetables. For now, freedom is muddy dirt between toes. Hard gray slabs of concrete on my heels. Scraped knuckles, bitten lips and rubber bands. The souls of my feet whimper for softness. One day I will allow myself to stand on tufts of cotton. But for now, maybe I can find love through cauliflower cheeses.
Ode to Naps by Jenna Seachman
If we are what we repeatedly do, then I most definitely am a nap.
Let me elaborate: I am a long, luxurious nap, taken under several layers of blankets, with a diffuser peacefully dispersing its contents in one corner, and perhaps the peaceful hum of a neighbor’s lawnmower outside. The kind of nap where you wake up restored and ready to conquer the world, like you may or may not have manifested superpowers… and also with several pillow lines on your face (the mark of a truly great nap, in my opinion).
And if I am a nap, then that also makes me a rare commodity — especially during the school year. Winter and summer breaks are when I thrive. Because during the school year, nobody has time for one of those double-down, hardcore naps — you know, the kind where you do a miniature interior decorating session beforehand. Where you walk around the house thieving blankets from every corner, then stockpile your pillows, shut the curtains, and spend ten minutes ransacking your drawers until you find your sleep mask. Then you arrange everything — oh, and don’t forget the diffuser — in its proper place, and bam. A nap-oasis.
When I’m in the middle of the school semester, and I have three assignments due, a speech to give, and a powerpoint to make, the nap oasis is a distant mirage, despite the fact that this is the number-one time I’d love to be mercifully unconscious. No — just like my actual life, school breaks (and weekends) are the only time when naps can be enjoyed in their entirety.
Really, the similarities between me and naps are endless. Except when it comes to power napes — aka those thirty-minute pops where you jump into bed and then trampoline out of it thirty minutes later. At least, a trampoline is what it would take to get me out of bed after only thirty minutes of napping. Or maybe an ejection seat, because that wouldn’t require any bouncing. I’m not even sure what ‘power’ a power nap is supposed to give you. Disappointment? In my opinion, a power nap would just intensify the longing for my pillow-covered queen-size. I’d probably go stare out a rain-streaked window like the heroine in a rom-com, waiting for my lost love to appear on the horizon.
I wrote this essay to make you laugh — but also to remind you to take stock of your priorities. Glance at the pile of books on your desk, the long list of assignments that need to get done. Ask yourself: when’s the last time I took a break? If the answer is ‘when I passed out at 4 in the morning after chugging two redbulls so I could finish my paper in time’, or something along those lines, I highly suggest that you add a new bullet point to your to-do list. Call it what you will. “Rest.” “Time for peace.” “Maintaining sanity.” “Jenna Seachman.” No matter what it is, though, it’ll mean the same thing — a really well-deserved nap.
The Music Box by Jordan Spennato
The first time I saw it, it commanded the space on my father’s mahogany dresser, next to childhood pictures and his nail clippers. A porcelain white-faced clown, playing the accordion on a round stage. Captivating, in that way older objects haunt and warmly entice, concomitantly. At the clown’s feet sat a small monkey with arms joyously raised, as if dancing.
A broken music-box.
But you see, it wasn’t completely broken; it still sang its melody—the King and I—but the side right next to the crank bore a hole, framed by heavy cracks. Funny enough, it was the gap there, the absence of what was—the nod to the piece’s mortality— not the intricate lace lining the clown’s neck nor the soft ceramic glazes that echoed the soothing tune, that defined the figure for me.
Don’t touch it, can’t you use it’s fragile? Don’t breathe, can’t you see it could break at any minute, what with that nasty crack creeping insidiously toward the monkey?
But what resilience.
The tune still played. The monkey still turned, miraculously evading the crack, the ever-present danger, still emanating joy.
I see it now, sitting on a yellowed shelf in my old bedroom, next to dusty sea glass and faded rabbit feet luck-charms. How strange—a memory reawakened, familiar smells, the transportation to a place previous? And how interesting—how surprising— the accompanying pang of guilt.
A memory forgotten, a piece of beloved childhood discarded, buried under growing pains, braces, and college applications.
But the monkey still plays.
B=blue by Erika Imhoff
There’s an old Alanis Morissette song that wisely explains life has a funny way of helping you out—but it also says it has a funny way of sneaking up on you. Never in a million years would I have guessed that the best and worst moments of my teenage life would involve M&M candies. Those stupid, cheap excuse-for-chocolates everyone in high school munches on when you don’t know any better until you actually grow up and taste real honest-to-goodness chocolate. But the moment I spotted him in a hallway of pimply, nervous freshmen waiting for our locker assignments, I knew I had to at least go up to him and say hi. And while most people might assume a fifteen-year-old girl would not have the nerve to approach a good-looking guy from the “other” middle school wearing Oakley sunglasses and a baseball cap, I knew a long time ago I wasn’t a typical fifteen-year-old girl. I had nothing except an empty backpack, a package of M&M’s, and confidence, so I used a little sweetness to land me a sweetheart.
Jake and I were inseparable for the next two years. Puppy love is what my mom called it. He was the star of the wrestling team and I, the nerdy volleyball jock. With a pair of lovely hazel eyes, funny sense of humor, and a smile that charmed everyone, Jake had so many good qualities that endeared him to many of our friends and teachers—that is, except for book smarts. I knew deep down he could date any of the better-looking girls who actually bothered with wearing makeup and the latest fashions and who were more on his intellectual level, but I didn’t care. He made me laugh and feel special. Though I had more of a natural look, I had ambition and a strong work ethic that I was confident would help me gain a full ride out of good ole’ Odessa, Texas. My sights were set on Baylor University with a plan to study nursing. Let’s just say Jake didn’t really have a plan other than try to get us alone at any given moment.
I talked with him about the future and truly believed that we could go to college together and one day get married, plans that only hopeless teenagers in love can make at age 17. In reality, he never had the drive nor the smarts to want what I wanted for both of us. He needed to pass the SAT and get a good enough score to even get into Baylor, and as a solid C- student, we knew deep down without saying anything that it was a long shot. So, after an idle study session one morning wracking my brain of what to do, I came up with a plan that would ensure his passing at the very least and talked to him about it.
Jake and I agreed that we’d both sign up to take the test on a Saturday morning and have him sit down two rows away from me but where he could clearly see my right hand and the side of my desk. Back in the late 90’s, our high school was lenient on allowing a bottle of water and a small snack when we took the SAT. I remember this because I had already taken the test beforehand and was slightly irritated when the unbathed football player next to me kept stuffing his face with candy that morning. I explained to anyone who asked about my taking it again that I strived for a higher score when in reality, I scored high enough for Baylor the first time around. I thought nothing of asking my folks for another $23 to take it again. Love doesn’t have a price, right?
The morning of the SAT came and just before entering the gymnasium with my M&Ms and #2 pencils in sweaty hands, I quietly discussed the details with Jake one last time. Red = A, Blue = B, Yellow = C, and Green = D. I made sure to remove the orange and brown M&Ms so as to avoid confusion on Jake’s part because I knew he might be nervous and get confused. I’d rotate one every five seconds. Anyone who may have noticed us intently whispering to one another right before the test probably assumed we were making plans for later that night. I never gave anyone else who was there that morning any mind. My plan, this calculated, ridiculous risk, was meant for Baylor, for us.
All in all, everything went off without a hitch. I deftly switched out colors painstakingly slow after 5 seconds to make sure he kept up. Back in ’96 there were 45 multiple-choice questions and 13 free response questions on the SAT, and as long as he got the majority correct on the multiple-choice, I knew he could still struggle on the free response but still pass. After the exam was over, we gathered our pencils, walked out with relief on our faces, and quickly left in his mom’s minivan. I don’t remember where we went to afterwards, but to this day I’ll never forget the image of throwing away that damned M&M wrapper in the trash with its ugly brown color telling me “they’ll melt in your mouth, not in your hand.”
Four unimportant weeks rolled by closing in on the end of the school year. I remember getting my results in the mail one afternoon and smiling; I improved my score by almost 80 points. I called Jake to see if he’d gotten his score in the mail, but when I called his house (in an age where cell phones were a good three years away from everyone owning one), his mom said he was out with cousins. I told her my good news and that I was confident he’d pass, too. Thinking nothing of it, I figured he and I would discuss it the next day at school.
Looking back at that fateful Monday, I should have known something was amiss. Jake wasn’t at our usual meeting spot before school started where we often shared breakfast. I went to his locker, saw he wasn’t there and decided to wait for him at his first period class. I didn’t care if I’d be late to first period French, which I was, and settled into my chair with an uneasy feeling after realizing he hadn’t shown up. Was he sick? Why didn’t he meet me? Where was he? Thirty minutes into class a phone call startled everyone, and I was told by my French teacher to meet my counselor at her office right away. A million red flags should have gone up in my brain, but because I didn’t associate Jake with Mrs. Pederson and our transgression happened a month ago, there was nothing there to give me pause.
I reached the counselor’s hallway in record time and only when I spotted Jake sitting in the waiting area with his back to me and his head hanging down, did my heart stop. He never made eye contact with me when I stared at him as I walked passed nor did I get a chance to say a single thing to him as one of the assistant principals (!) quickly called me in to sit. With my heart beating a million miles a minute and my mouth feeling dry like the Sahara, I was asked to explain what had transpired during the SAT. Oh my God. How do they know? What did Jake tell them? Has he even talked to them yet? Do I tell the truth? Do I lie to save him and say he had nothing to do with it? Regardless of this plan, I still considered myself to be an honest person. So I told the complete truth through misty eyes, and when I was done, no one spoke. Complete silence that is unnerving to any teenager talked to by an adult in authority. And then Mrs. Pederson, the one counselor who always supported me and believed in me and was my biggest cheerleader aside from my parents, laid the truth at my feet with pity in her eyes. Apparently, Jake summoned up the “courage” and confided in his counselor, Mr. Davis, about the whole plan I concocted shortly after we took the SAT. Turns out he intentionally bombed it to avoid passing at all; to avoid any chance at a school he never wanted to attend; to avoid any future he never wanted together with me beyond our junior year. And by taking me down in such spectacular fashion, this was his way of breaking up for good without saying anything to me at all.
Only with hindsight do you realize the obvious cues that were missed. How Jake shut down when I brought up the future. How he often let go of my hand when I’d bring up Baylor. His silence when I brought up the plan for him to pass the SAT. His body language and eyes cast downward that still linger even after I asked him what’s wrong. Things your mind doesn’t want to accept in this “puppy love.”
By the time Mrs. Pederson finished speaking, I was utterly stunned. Even though I was an honor student who was ranked 3rd overall in a class of roughly 500 juniors, the administration could not let this transgression go unchecked and rightfully so. As a result, I received a three-day suspension that I mercifully overcame my senior year to stay 3rd overall, whereas Jake only received a one-day suspension for being so “courageous and forthright.” Our relationship was obviously over after that, and I felt broken for a good eight months until my heart was willing to try again with someone new, only this time I spoke nothing of futures together or made plans past a few days. Later did I find out from a close friend of his that Jake wanted to stick around Odessa, attend community college, and try to wrestle at a Division II or III school afterwards. He just never had the nerve or the heart to tell me the truth when I was so busy planning our so-called lives together.
After graduation, I learned Jake never went to college after all and worked odds-and-end jobs until he got hired to work for some railroad company. I, on the other hand, eventually went to a university (not Baylor) where I met my future husband and later become a registered nurse. Indeed, it was finally refreshing to meet someone who had the same plans I had in my heart and who supported my dreams. My husband showed me what it was like to have faith in love again. We have three kids now, and every so often when we’re at the checkout lane at a grocery store and when the kids want candy, I’ll let them to pick anything they want—even the M&Ms.
The Metal Mermaid by Kyra Dusk
The Strand
Galveston Island, TX, USA
September 8th, 1900
9:00 AM
It was a storm unlike any other.
Carys couldn’t sit in the parlor with her sisters and listen to the radio while alarms wailed up and down the Strand. She climbed the creaking stairs to her workshop in the attic. Its window offered a seagull’s view of Galveston Island.
The streets outside remained free of seawater, although oleander blossoms swirled in rain puddles. No seawater meant her father’s bilge pumps were working. He’d designed them by combining steam technology with lightning-charged power crystals.
If they survived the storm, he would sell this design to local shipwrights. If they failed, his brilliance would join Carys’s mother in the Gulf of Mexico’s muddy depths.
Carys took after her father. She busied her hands by tinkering with her metal mermaid suit, yet she found herself at the window time and again. Its porthole shape reminded her of the fishing vessel that carried her away from the dolphins ten years ago.
Don’t swim too far or too deep, her father had said before she splashed into the waves. She hadn’t listened, and the undercurrent stole her. Then the dolphins came.
She recalled the heat as sunlight poured from the sky and bounced off the water. The blue horizons leading to any life imaginable. The waxy texture of the dolphin’s skin, their songs, and how they skimmed across the water faster than a steamboat. Among the dolphins, she wasn’t Dallas Wright’s youngest daughter, a girl in men’s trousers, or a lonely child without her mother. She was Carys, Daughter of Dolphins.
She’d cried when the fishing vessel pulled her out of the gulf. Nobody had understood her tears—or the dreams she’d returned with.
Still, Carys was her father’s daughter. While he’d tinkered with metal lungs to honor his dead wife, Carys had designed equipment for returning to the dolphin’s reef. She’d perfected the goggles, the tail with its propulsion system, and the forearm fins set with a timepiece and navigation equipment. All that remained were the gills.
They were based on her father’s design, but they had one major flaw. To access the wearer’s lungs, they would irreparably damage their esophagus and vocal chords. With the metal gills, Carys could swim with the dolphins but never sing with them.
Laboring over their design gave her a distraction from the storm—until one trip to the window revealed it wasn’t just flower petals spinning through the rainy streets. Entire oleander trees now careened like drunken wagons down the Strand.
Cary lifted a brass spyglass to check the jetties. The west jetty looked fine, but her father’s bilge pump on the east jetty had broken free. The tide surged past it, lifting wagons, market stalls, and even docks with ease. Galveston Island was a sailor thrown overboard, flailing for rescue before it drowned.
—
Carys covered herself with grease. She slid on her mermaid suit, latched on her forearm fins, and pulled on her goggles. Then she picked up the brass gills.
Her skin tingled with anticipation as she clipped them around her neck. The pain was sharp and sudden. She tried to cry out. Only a rasping sound emerged. Blood trickled down her throat, thicker than engine grease. She fumbled for a glass vial with a medicinal tonic inside. It itched as it wove her tissue back together.
She dared a breath. Air wheezed through the brass contraption, requiring greater effort from her lungs. But it worked.
Carys couldn’t step into the tail until she reached water, so she slung it over one arm. Then she crept down the back stairwell, avoiding her sisters and their children. If she had to say goodbye, she might never make it out the door. However, she couldn’t escape her father. She found him salvaging projects from his flooded workshop.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
Carys touched her throat, unable to explain. She gestured the shape of a book with her hands. Then she pointed upstairs. Maybe if he read her notes, he would understand her choices.
Maybe not. Maybe she would go down in history as a suicide or a basket case. It didn’t matter as long as this worked.
Carys snatched her father’s tool box and shuffled into the storm. Everything that mattered—his safety, her dreams, and the future of Galveston Island—hinged on the night ahead.
—
A city’s worth of flotsam choked the bay. Fish hooks caught in her hair. Wooden planks—unrecognizable as parts of houses, boats, or piers—crashed against her. Brass was a soft metal, not meant for armor. Blood churned around her, rotating like the clouds above. The world was dark clouds and bright lightning, every edge polished to crystal clarity. For the first time since the dolphins, Carys felt alive.
Don’t swim too far or too deep, her father had said.
She hadn’t listened when the undercurrent stole her away, and she didn’t listen now. When she finished the repairs, she released the jetty and pushed herself back into the water. She flicked her tail. A burst of bubbles sent her jetting downward. She angled herself out of the bay—diving, not sinking—until the island disappeared behind her.
The bottom of the sea was a dreamy place, as dark and cold as the coral reef had been warm and bright. She swam until ice seemed to settle in her bones and her skin swelled against her equipment. She needed to return to the warmer, surface waters, but she preferred this world to the one above.
Surrounded by darkness, her ears echoed with the song from her childhood: beautiful clicks and whistles. Then a waxy nose stuck itself under her armpit and nudged her upward, out of the freezing, crushing deep. As impossible as the first time they rescued her, the dolphins had returned. This time, she was ready for them.