013. ARE THE KIDS ALRIGHT?
dreams that feel like remembering.
Welcome to ISSUE 013: ARE THE KIDS ALRIGHT? 🫁
“I need time away from the bed before I remember how to sleep”, writes Jayd Green of nightmares in “Sea Dreams.” Surviving one monster under the bed at a time, we sleep off years into bigger beds, greater worries, houses and apartments of our own that smell vastly different to our childhood homes, for better and for worse. Sooner than we realize, the landscapes of childhood relocate to a corner of our subconscious and, whether asleep or awake, begins our haunting of blurs, scents, and echoes. Nostalgia elicits a need for possession, and the park becomes our park, the sheep we drove past thousands of times become our sheep, the bus stop our bus stop. “my home, my Niagara Falls”, yearns Emenel Ohsea’s eye-catching character in “My Gemini Twin Mother,” before asking what all of us have at some point wondered: “what makes a full person?”. To this, Vasundhara Singh’s “The Pleasures of Being Stalked in a Small Town” might speculate it’s an aura.
This short story-filled issue of adds a new component to the nature vs. nurture debate, namely narrative. What are the stories that shape us, the tales we tell ourselves of the past, and the narratives we attempt to concretize on paper? The smells, textures, and tastes in this all-narrative issue might transport you. Let them. Try to taste the melting wax of the candle, the one on the birthday cake you envied. See if you can hear the wind in ’s “Good Lungs” as a young girl fights for her place in the world, while a mother considers her influence over her son in ’s “Between a Rock and a Soft Place to Land.”
And just maybe, through the stories told in this issue, you can learn to identify the type of body of water that best embodies your homesickness—is it a river where innocence drowns or a pond with memories that relentlessly float up?
Perhaps it’s September in the air, and the faint echo of back-to-school memories it brings with it. The feel of brand new pen and paper and the dizzying possibilities of new beginnings. In ’s “Portrait of a Little Heiress,” childlike wonder is a prized commodity, but the young Kathleen reminds us of questions we all asked at her age, like “Why [does] everybody want to be a kid so bad when this is how lipstick can make you feel?”
The house I grew up in is now a furniture store. I’m no actor but award-winning was my performance when I pretended to browse for a new couch in the room where I lost my first tooth. Gone was the menacing Julius Caesar-shaped shadow of my bedroom window, but so was the mint green I helped my father paint on the walls before my sister was born. My ownership of the place had decidedly been revoked, like a spell that ends in an instant. In its place, an overpowering smell of leather.
Enjoy this 13th issue of . For me, it prompted a visit to the river, my boldest lipstick tucked into my sock.
“Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three”. — “Eleven,” Sandra Cisneros
| co-editor
Sea Dreams by Jayd Green [Non-Fiction]
My Gemini Twin Mother by Emenel Ohsea [Fiction]
The Pleasures of Being Stalked in a Small Town by Vasundhara Singh [Fiction]
Portrait of the Little Heiress by Shannon Viola [Fiction]
Between a Rock and a Soft Place to Land by Nic Marna [Fiction]
Good Lungs by Mad Crawford [Fiction]
Sea Dreams by Jayd Green | Instagram
I miss the raucous screech of gulls. Many mornings, groggy from being woken up too early after a night out too late, I would be woken by their unapologetic screaming. A gull curling its head down under its own body, then throwing it back to carve open its hell-coloured beak: this is the feeling I have when waking from a nightmare.
I dream of the sea. I dream of the sand falling away from under me, as a wave rolls in and over me. In the real world, I cannot swim. My dream-self wants to claw my way back to the shore I am being pulled away from.
I tell myself I must be dreaming. I tell myself because I am dreaming I can make new rules–I can breathe underwater. The waves crest and envelope me, and I drink in the sea, become the kind of creature that could do this. I feel myself become heavier as my real body wakes, my eyes struggle to open. I reach out to try and take something from the dream with me, and I hold something, but wake before I can open my fist and see what it is.
I’ve learned a few dream tricks from long periods of nightmares and sleep paralysis episodes–the kind where you wake up with a dark, cold pit in your stomach that stays with you throughout the day. The dreams that feel more like remembering, a sickness or grief.
In my first experience of sleep paralysis, six figures stood around my bed menacingly, the horror of how they got into my home overshadowed by the knowing that I am about to be killed. To dream of something where my dream-self ‘wins’, overcomes the organic restrictions of my real body, almost makes me think I could swim–if I tried.
I grew up in a small coastal town called Lowestoft, off the coast of Suffolk in England. Facing the North Sea, stories about Lowestoft’s heritage of a thriving fishing town were passed from my grandmother to me on lazy Sunday afternoons. She would be putting milk in a dish for a local ginger cat called Buster, the sun pouring in from the open back door, recounting school summer holidays spent working on the beaches, gutting fish alongside Scottish girls who had travelled for the work. The town was prosperous then.
On June 15th 2023, an article about Lowestoft was published in The Guardian–primarily to promote The First Light Festival, but also to more widely disseminate what Lowestoft has to offer to visitors and the people of the town. It is good to see the town gaining positive traction–and I am sure that for the many people that have spent countless hours working and volunteering in the businesses, this recognition is essential.
I’m struck by the article though–for two main reasons. Firstly, the way Lowestoft’s landscape has and will continue to change as a direct result of the obviously cosmopolitan tourist angle. Second, the language of Lowestoft as a resurfacing movie star–praising ‘her good bones’--the feminisation of it, the erasure of how Lowestoft came to be in this position. Coastal towns, since fishing regulations and the availability of cheaper international travel, have struggled to find new economic foundations. If Lowestoft is to be positioned, again, as an affordable holiday attraction, then presenting the most cosmopolitan aspects of the town as keeping up with the rest of the world, and the ‘faded’ parts as cheap investment opportunities presents the town as a cyclical myth. There is danger in presenting the town’s niceties as inexhaustible, in the right season–places like Cornwall are swamped with tourists during the summer, and then the full-time residents are left out of work and destitute the rest of the year, unless they choose, like those Scottish women my grandmother told me about, to follow the work elsewhere.
The article also makes me feel, selfishly, unsettled. It points out the ways in which I don’t belong. Some of the sights-to-see and places to go that are mentioned, I recognise: they are longstanding pillars of Lowestoft’s community. They survived so much. I worry that if I do what the article suggests, take a day trip to Lowestoft, then I become another tourist, of my own hometown.
I’ve dreamt of ghostly beheaded women following me, floating china dolls that materialise gradually in my vision, little red aliens that whisper cruelly in my ear, witnessing sudden suicides, finding photos of naked and murdered children, dinosaurs and wolves tearing me to pieces, my teeth falling out and turning to gritty clots, being eaten alive, all of these reoccurring.
When I wake up in a sweat, I have to go through a kind of reset ritual before I try sleeping. After the dream, I lay still before sitting up and checking the time. Sometimes it is three in the morning, sometimes I have only been asleep for an hour. I get out of bed, have a drink of water, smoke out the back door. I need time away from the bed before I remember how to sleep. Maybe my relationship with my hometown is undergoing this same kind of reset: by not living in Lowestoft, I am remembering the call of the gull, the pull of the tide.
My Gemini Twin Mother by Emenel Ohsea | Instagram
When my mother died, I stole her birthday. This is my second year celebrating my new second birthday. The slice of birthday cake sits under the patio’s umbrella. The waiter is waiting for me to blow the flame out to take the picture. He holds the camera in front of his face and remains like that, obscuring himself to me. I watch the black candle wax drip onto the red velvet. A black candle? Did this waiter choose that?
I took a second birthday for myself as an award for all of the broken vases, bookshelves toppled, and torn clothing I’d suffered. I took my mother’s birthday as compensation for the Barbie doll heads she chewed up in front of me. She had salivated over the plastic, growling during her outbursts. Some of those Barbies had been bought apologies for a previous fit of rage. She was never the type who could restrain her anger. Injustices–against needed objects of spite, and it was never tenable for her to rage against God, her employers, or the men who cut her off in traffic on the way to work. Since it was just the two of us, her spite often landed on me.
I miss my mother, I really do. She cooked pancakes on her well days. Her food was never bland. She bought spices and used them well. She despised burnt cinnamon. She said it was a crime against nature. I always imitate the jargon of her sensitive palate when I’m out for dinner with foodie friends, such as “Diced garlic, not boiled, please.” “Pepper it with paprika.” To be honest, I’m a liar; it all tastes the same to me.
The flame of the candle flickers in a slight breeze. I am wearing a large black hat and white bustier top, a white and black checkered accordion dress to the ankles, one white boot, one black one, and heels with dagger-sharp tips. I am not smiling yet, so the photo hasn’t been taken.
The waiter is standing in an awkward position, like a mannequin on display. He is playing the role of an Enthusiastic Birthday Party Participant so well. Slightly effeminate, I note. His black hair gelled back behind the giant tablet blocking his face. He is posed at a slight angle. He is leaning into the act of taking the best shot. I have frozen him, however, because I am not smiling. The picture remains untaken. A bead of sweat drops from the edge of his ink-black swoop.
“Say cheese,” he says again.
I don’t say “cheese.” I look down at the candle and keep him paused there, with his ass theatrically poking out. I can tell he is becoming self-conscious. He keeps looking over his shoulder, as though desperate to call for help. Pedestrians walk by while he stands there, waiting for my smile to signal the right time to shoot me. He repeats himself and I ignore him.
I was born on May twenty-seventh. Mom was born on August thirteenth. In my early years, I often walked to school with a slouch. I would wake up and speak to the breath I exhaled in a wintery cloud of vapor on my way to school. “Why aren’t you good enough? There’s a, you, a Shannon that is bursting with potential. Math wiz. Polyglot. I can speak French, English, German, and Japanese. But nothing fulfills me like being a fashion icon on the streets of Niagara Falls.”
When I was sixteen, I used to wear sequin jackets and red rain boots and turn Clifton Hill into a runway. Later outfits became dresses of silk, face masks bedecked entirely with dangling costume crucifixes, and one day, a men’s suit but in the shape and colour of a red delicious apple. I dressed up every Friday, Saturday and Sunday during the peak of tourist season, May to September, while my mom was changing hotel sheets at the Radisson.
The streaming lines of tourists would ignore me until I became hard to ignore. Soon, they were evading the wax museums, the fast-food vendors, the arcades. Instead, they were lining up for a photo of me wearing something daring. They began to ignore Niagara Falls’ three waterfalls themselves; the American, the Horseshoe, and the wimpy bridal.
When the first videos of me captured by Korean tourists went viral, I became an internet sensation before I could even afford a cellphone. I didn’t make a dime off the subsequent videos that the tourists took. My runway exhibits were free performance art for the public that brought more foreign money into the hotels, the burger joints, the arcades, the casinos, the haunted houses and the wax museums that litter the banks of the Niagara River, Canadian side. It wasn’t until my mom got involved that we sharpened up into a business.
I was never interested in business. The money side of being a viral phenomenon confused me. It sounded like black-magic talk. I hated it. When I made and wore clothes, it was only for joy, pure joy. When people lose their money at the Casino, they often drive a little way up the Niagara River. They would park the car along River Road, step out, walk over the small stone ledge and plunge into the gorge. I saw many cars with open doors on the drive home from Mom’s work. She would pick me up after her shift ended while I was wearing an alligator skin leotard and we would see the empty vehicles together. Suicides don’t make the news much in Niagara Falls, even though they are prevalent. It scares away the tourists.
That’s all I knew of money before my mom became my manager. Except for on occasions when mom was healthy enough to work a bit of overtime, I had never seen money or had any of it. I thought people like me would be better off finding ways to live without it.
That was before I realized how many people lived much more comfortable lives than what mom and I were living back then. When momma landed me that first television interview, I got to know quickly that sleeping next to cockroaches and empty beer cans on a mattress on the floor wasn’t a healthy way of existing.
We started touring. Mom organized my own runway set. She gathered all of the clothes I stole from thrift stores and friends and turned into wearable art. She told me to present these pieces for a large fee around the country. I went to cities and towns from coast to coast I didn’t care about. I presented my polka dotted cone bras at the Calgary Stampede. I wore hemp jackets with a hemp-braid wig at Quebec City’s Carnival de Glace. I strutted a straightjacket with jutting needles covered in dollar store rhinestones at a ballroom runway in New York. I forgot the names of the people I met during that time. I always missed Niagara Falls. This shocked most interviewers, who quickly turned on me as some kind of country bumpkin in the press, but that Niagara water runs in my blood. Polluted though it may be, polluted it may have made me. I hated to be on the tour bus moving further away from my river and my runway.
One day, my mom suffered a heart attack during one of her outbursts. I found her lying in my dressing room trailer with scissors through the piece I had just finished working on and was set to walk in on the red carpet at the Toronto International Film Festival. It was a dress built out of hangers and underwire ripped from old bras with a deactivated automated external defibrillator patch visible under the dress. It was meant to be my statement of the recent overturning of Roe vs. Wade. Yet, with my mother’s dead heart weighing heavy in her body, it felt inappropriate to wear. My mother had stabbed one of the patches of the AED, which didn’t cause the heart attack; the AED was, of course, deactivated so as not to roast me. Just a coincidence that her attack occurred at the same time as she tore up that particular outfit.
This happened during my third and final tour. After she died, there was no one holding the whip, and this chariot crashed into oblivion. I had enough money left to move back to my home, my Niagara Falls. To this day, I walk up and down Clifton Hill, with hats I cover in costume feathers and boots with googly eyes. Sometimes my clothing is an expression of something that’s bothering me in the world, sometimes it’s just an escape from the world itself. I don’t have a market to capture, since there is always a crowd on Clifton Hill. Sometimes people pay me. I take their money to buy a hot dog dinner from one of the touristy food stalls to sustain me until the next day.
What had you been so mad about all the time, Mom? That’s the thing, it didn’t really matter. I was not her. Her way of being her meant working very hard to be. My way of being me was not her way of being me, and this schism always drove her to the point of violence. I think, deep down, she feared her old job. She always said it was more than what you think of when you think of a cleaning job.
“There are dimensions to that kind of work that goes beyond the grime of cleaning piss and puke off the walls.” she said, “One time, I walked into this room on the thirteenth floor of this one hotel I worked at before the Radisson, you were about three at the time,” she was smoking a cigarette on a newly-purchased recliner in the house we bought together after my first press tour, her feet up and her blouse open. She was nothing if not at home when she was with me. “I walked into this room. Total coke-party mess. You could tell from the holes in the walls, the sperm and shit smeared on the sheets, the broken furniture, emptied mini bar. The night before, I knew a man had checked in on this floor with a bunch of women who looked about half his age. He was quite old, so they were legal, but the receptionist who told me all of this after, Hannah, had her doubts about one or two.
“Anyways, I walk into the bathroom of the room they stayed at after they checked out the next morning, and there’s this perfect pool of blood. A red dot that was about half the width of the bathroom alone. The perfection of the circle strikes me whenever I remember it. It was like, computer generated.
“I called down to security,” she extinguished her smoke at this point. It was rare for my mom to talk for this long at a stretch. Even when she was getting me to go on tour and expose my art to the world, she’d done so in short imperative sentences. She coughed roughly and carried on, “I told them, ‘There’s this blood in the bathroom, a lot of it. What should I do?’ You know what they said?”
“No,” I admitted.
“‘Wear gloves.’” There was a pause in the conversation then. I stopped hanging my art on the mannequins my mother had purchased with our tour money. She demanded I display the pieces in the living room. Prop them up. Mom took pictures of the mannequins standing around me in a circle all and sold the shots to Vogue a week after this conversation.
“‘Wear gloves.’” She repeated. I could tell, from the way her eyes were glazing over, that she was not repeating for me to hear it, but for her to relive a bit of that cold response.
“What did that sentence mean to you then?” I asked her.
“It meant human life don’t mean jack-shit,” Mother’s voice was starting to crack. Her anger boiling up in her, she said, “It means to me that as long as we look good, all the rest can go to hell. Like dirtying a hotel room with drugs and criminality, so that someone lower on the totem pole has to clean it all up after. That’s why I appreciate your art so much, sweetie. Your costumes are a mask for the world to wear over its problems.”
I sat there for a moment with such vacuity in my heart. My mom had never given opinions on my art before. I had no idea she found it to be so trivial.
Two years after she died, I was getting fed up with sadness. My mother’s death had hit me later than one might expect. Delayed grief, grief-like thunder after lightning strikes. It happened while I was at the top of Clifton Hill. The tourists were milling about. Early August, the late season vacations before back-to-school, excursions from Toronto, Hamilton, Montreal, Buffalo, New York, Chicago, Dallas, London, Mexico City, Shibuya, Doha, Sao Paolo, Rio, Karachi, Lagos, New Delhi, Amritsar. Beyond their points of origin, I got to chat with these folks while they took my picture. I listened. Gave them space to tell their story to a walking meme. Just this morning I’d met a carpenter, a model, a retired teacher, a ballerina, and a CSIS agent (she probably shouldn’t have been so honest about that). But that’s not right either. They were more than occupations. They were in various, stratified spheres of employment, alone and together or in families. Mothers and sons, daughters, fathers, husbands, wives, granddaughters, grandsons, cousins, workers, mysteriously solo—
What makes a full person?
There was yellow sun reflecting off the hotel glass. The mist which spews up from the force of the powerful Horseshoe falls hitting the river basin below it had hung over the city like a veil that day. That waterfall alone sends 618,750 gallons of fresh water over the crestline every second. At the peak of Clifton Hill, I got a peak at the flat-chested American Falls, and the dainty Bridal Falls was a bit further to the right, out of sight.
I was dragging this dead twin beside me. An unfulfilled one. An unfilled one, I had actually thought at the time, and I loved the slip my mind had made. At the top of Clifton Hill, after a long day of parading a tomato-pin-cushion costume up and down Clifton Hill, I wondered, how to make that twin come alive.
I grew desperate. I thought no medicine would cure this pain. I talked to counsellors I could get access to through government programs. “Breathing exercises,” they suggested. I gave it a try. But two years of loneliness suddenly crept up on me, and I felt my shoulders hunching in a way they hadn’t since high school.
I decided to give it life myself. This dead twin I dragged around would be born again.
My mom’s birthday was August thirteenth.
A year after her death, on that day, I drew a pentagram in the center of the living room I’d inherited from Mom. The same room where she had told me about how the hotel supervisor at her old job told her to deal with a pool of blood by “wearing gloves.” I positioned the mannequins at the tip of each point on the star. They all wore a piece I had designed before she died. They had perfectly rolled back shoulders, ear lobes that sat superior to the deltoids, chests out, and angled arms dangled near their hips. I sat in the middle of all of these women without faces, in the center of the pentagram.
I ingested a five-gram dose of magic mushrooms, a hero dose, one where you can talk to God. I put three large pieces of the crushed peridot in my mouth. Stupid, I could have choked. The exercise was to hold the gems in my mouth without choking. It took extreme focus. I looked ahead of me while the psilocybin coursed through me.
After some time, my house plants I barely keep alive began to drip like green drops of paint on a canvas. The wall breathed in and out, and I learned to match its pace. The breathing exercises were finally paying off. I became grateful to the floor of my apartment for supporting me, and the thought reminded me of my mother. I began to weep the tears I couldn’t find for her passing in over two years.
Then, a stupid thought came to me. Look in the mirror.
Oh no. I knew better than to listen to that voice. But the ritual couldn’t be completed without reflection, I’d realized.
So, I stood up. I walked off the pentagram I had drawn beneath me, stepped over the Holy Mary candle and walked to the bathroom. Inside, I closed the door and turned the lights on. I opened my lips as though to smile. In the mirror, my teeth were now made of peridot gems. It was as if they had melded around my teeth, like a protective layer. My smile was green. Good. My mother’s birthstone was fused with me now.
Lastly, I unbuttoned my blouse. I opened it. In the space where my chest cavity should have been was the round curve of the Horseshoe Falls. The crest was at my collarbone. And the basin was in my belly. Between the two, my long stretch of torso was the plunging gallons of water. What I saw in that mirror affirmed me.
When I opened my mouth, the roar of the Niagara Falls rushed out. For once, my body felt like power.
Now that I have filled my twin with my mother, now that I know she lives in me like the polluted waters of the Niagara River, I can live my life how I want to. My posture corrected itself after the ritual. Each year since, I stand a little taller, a little more statuesque to all who see me. I celebrate my first birthday on May 27th, and I celebrate the life of my inner twin, the life I christened on August thirteenth. I’ve absorbed some of the money-making instincts of my mother. I’ve absorbed her ability to control her reality. Her drive to pull herself out of poverty is within me, but this time, I do capitalism on my terms.
“No pictures, please,” I say to the frozen waiter.
I blow out the candle and smile. The waiter gasps, as though he can breathe again, and begins stretching his limbs in all kinds of amusing ways. I hadn’t meant to petrify him, but I guess I did.
Now, this part always gets tricky to explain. Witchcraft is much more about how you take control of yourself than about controlling others. I cast spells on people by accident all the time. They get armoured by the way I can compose myself so completely, as of late. I hadn’t had this much control over how I was perceived since my mother also became my manager. Maybe it’s because both sides of myself are fully alive now that I can finally control when the shutter of a camera closes around me. These days, when tourists find their photos of me come out blurry, no one is surprised anymore. Articles have been written about it. I can’t be captured unless I want to be.
I refused the waiter’s invitation to say “cheese.” I expressed myself so still against the suggestion, it paralyzed him. My eyes fixed on the candle. The clothing helps. The hat frames my face, severely. Black and white look amazing on me. I am striking today.
He sets down the tablet on the table, looking exhausted and terrified. I had paralyzed him for the entire time it took for the candle to become a black pool over the cake. The flame was struggling to find real estate on a remaining spec of wick before I blew it out, so much time had passed. The waiter is shivering as he walks back into the restaurant like he has caught a cold out on this summery patio. He won’t be returning to my table, that’s for sure. Not even for the bill I won’t pay.
I blow out the candle and eat the cake. Wax and all.
The Pleasures of Being Stalked in a Small Town by Vasundhara Singh
The man who follows Ratna from her tuition master’s house on Chaya street to her bungalow every evening at half past seven is a father of two teenagers. Ratna, barely fourteen years old, is conscious of his presence but doesn’t turn back to look at him. She hears the sole of his shoes crunch the tiny pebbles as he takes small measured steps. He halts at least two hundred meters away from the metallic gates of her bungalow and leans against the fat old bark of a Banyan tree.
This is the only time Ratna turns to look at her stalker. From the faint light of a lone street lamp, she sees his hollow cheeks and bushy hair. He is always dressed in a black shirt, denim pants and flip flops. He sometimes bends down to scratch his ankles and sometimes, he waves to Ratna. She never waves back. She isn’t scared of him. In fact, she finds this little game to be the most amusing part of her daily drudgery because when she enters her eight-bedroom bungalow, she is asked by her mother or by her father’s younger sister to help in the kitchen. Her younger cousin brother plays football with their servants in the backyard as she peels the delicate red layer of an apple for her grandfather. At night, when she lays on her bed, tired from rolling rotis, she thinks of running away with her stalker. Perhaps, they will live on a mountain and pick berries for breakfast.
At school, Preeti, the most beautiful girl in their batch, brags about getting two offers for marriage during the weekend. The first offer is from a family who owns seven guest houses across the country and the other is from a Lieutenant in the Army. She may choose the latter because wives of Army officers carry an aura unmatched by ordinary civilians and they are entitled to their husband’s pension when he dies. When she returns home from school, Ratna stares at herself in the mirror. She doesn’t seem to carry an aura. Just as she lies down on her mattress, her mother calls her to the kitchen to prepare a raita with cucumbers. She asks her mother if she will receive a pension when papa dies. Her mother slaps her forearm and says that her papa will never die. Later on she finds out that only government employees are entitled to a pension and her father manages their family’s grocery shops in the town.
Her tuition teacher, Mr Wagle, who sniffs perpetually, teaches her Math. She isn’t weak at Math but her father wants her to become an accountant when she grows up. He says that it will be good for the business. She had entertained the idea but after hearing about Preeti’s marriage offers, she would prefer to be the wife of an Army officer. From the discussion in the class, she gathered that an Army wife should have long hair, a thin waist, good command over the English language and above all, an aura. In her school library, she searches in the dictionary for the meaning of ‘aura’ and notes down the following line: “a feeling or character that a person or place seems to have.” She decides that she must’ve an aura otherwise the man in the flip flops wouldn’t follow her home every evening.
As she is getting ready for her tuition class, she hears a thud from the adjoining room. She runs to the dining room where she finds her father’s sister lying on the floor with her hands covering her head. Her husband stands above her with a copper mug in his right hand. He says, “I will take you back if you promise not to disrespect my mother!” Her father’s sister doesn’t say or do anything. When the man leaves, she helps her sit on a chair and gently presses an ice pack over the swelling on her forehead.
On her way back to her house from the tuition, she doesn’t hear the sound of shoes crunching pebbles. She turns back to see an empty lane. In class, the following morning, she overhears Preeti telling another girl about the Lieutenant. He is tall and broad shouldered. He complimented her hair and nose. She is thinking of dropping out of school to become an Army wife. She has even decided the names of their children. The first son will be called ‘Arjun’ and the second son will be named ‘Ram.’ No, she says, she doesn’t want any daughters. They are too much work.
During the tuition class, Mr Wagle tells her to enroll in accountancy classes once she enters eleventh standard. He says, “You are smart. You should become a Chartered Accountant.” She nods insincerely. This evening, too, she doesn’t see her stalker. She wonders if he has found someone more beautiful to follow. She wonders if he thinks she is ugly. She doesn’t want to be smart. She wants to be beautiful like an Army wife.
During recess as the girls sit atop desks and eat from each others’ lunch boxes, Ratna discloses to them that she is being followed by an Army officer. When a few of the girls gasp, she explains that he is on a break from the Army but he always wears his uniform when he follows her home from her tuition master’s residence. From the corner of her eye, she sees Preeti whispering to another girl. Ratna continues her tale. They wave at each other and sometimes he hums a tune. She thinks that he might be in love with her but she wants to speak to her parents before dropping out of school to become an Army wife. Her classmates pat her on the back and congratulate her.
At home, she is greeted by the stern faces of her mother, her father and her father’s sister. They received a call from her principal Madam. Her mother pulls her by her braid and drags her to the floor. Then, she slaps her till Ratna’s screams turn into muffled cries. Her father asks her mother to stop beating her. He informs her that if she is not interested in studying, she can stay at home and help around the house. Then they ask her to go to her bedroom.
A few minutes later her father’s sister gently presses an ice pack over her arms and forehead. “Girls are so much work,” she says.
Portrait of the Little Heiress by Shannon Viola | Website | Substack
Jilly is a person Kathleen has learned to smell.
At the first whiff of powder and satsumas, Kathleen stops squishing her fingers into the blue clay on her desk and yips like a dog. Ms. Starkweather turns around and asks, “Kathleen, why are we acting like a dog and not working on our assignment?”
“My nanny is coming to get me.” Kathleen sheds her art smock. She walks up to the front of the room with all of the assurance of a lawyer having just won a case.
“Please go back to your spot,” Ms. Starkweather says.
Kathleen remains by the door. Ms. Starkweather stands up, prepared to guide her back to her seat, when Jilly appears. Jilly tells Ms. Starkweather that Kathleen has been granted an early dismissal, and Kathleen, hand caked with clay, takes hold of Jilly’s hand. On her way out of the classroom, Kathleen yips over her shoulder at her friends sticking their little tongues out in concentration as they discern how to make the shapes in their heads manifest in the turds of clay in front of them. At the beginning of class, Ms. Starkweather had told them that she was granting them the privilege of clay as a sign of how mature they were for kindergarteners.
“We’re going to Papa’s gallery,” Jilly says once they are in a taxi. Jilly wears pearly purple lipstick. In Kathleen’s mind, the smell of powder emanates from the pearly part, and the satsumas from the purple.
“I know,” Kathleen says.
“Clever girl, how did you know that?” Jilly takes out a packet of Wet Wipes from her purse and begins cleaning the clay from Kathleen’s left hand.
“We never go anywhere else.” With her right hand, Kathleen takes Jilly’s lipstick out of her open purse while she is distracted scrubbing her left hand. Kathleen tucks the lipstick into her palm.
Kathleen’s Papa has an art gallery. The walls are always being painted different colors, and no matter how many times she begs, Kathleen is not allowed to decide what color they will get painted next. On the days the walls get painted a new color, Kathleen gets early dismissal so she can go to the gallery. It’s always a party when the walls are painted a new color. Daddy is usually there by the time Kathleen is delivered. And then all three of them are together: Kathleen, Daddy, and Papa, just like Christmas.
Rubina, the lady who works with Papa all day, meets Kathleen at the door. Jilly isn’t allowed at the gallery during parties. She just drops Kathleen off and picks her up. It is only after Jilly leaves that Kathleen misses Papa the most, and she wants to see him now. She clamps the lipstick tighter in her fist.
“I can sound like a dog,” Kathleen tells Rubina, and then she yips.
“Oh my! Clever girl,” Rubina says. “I’ve got your paper and crayons all ready for you downstairs, maybe you can draw me a dog.”
Rubina leads her to the room where Kathleen always colors. In this room, there are paintings on the walls and a sculpture in the corner. Papa has told Kathleen to lay on her stomach and color on the floor until he comes in with a guest.
“Draw me a sweet little doggie,” Rubina says as the door closes behind her. “Papa will be in soon.”
Kathleen doesn’t want to draw a doggie. But she knows that if she doesn’t draw, Papa will have one of his swirlies. Sometimes, Papa yelled at Kathleen and made her feel as if she was without a doubt going to hell. Jilly called those moments “a swirly.” She explained it to Kathleen once while they were looking at a painting full of nothing but swirls that hung in Kathleen’s country house. “Look at that painting,” Jilly had said, “do you see a picture in that painting?”
Kathleen did not. She only saw scribbles. Jilly said that Papa’s head was full of those cloudy, endless swirls of paint, and yelling straightened them out until they made a pretty picture.
Papa comes in. He is with a woman with wide hair and a purse with a scarf tied to it. Papa pretends he is surprised to see Kathleen. Laughing, he tells the woman that she has snuck in here. Kathleen is so happy to see Papa laugh that she laughs too, as if she really did surprise him.
Papa says, “What are you drawing?”
“Q4 projections,” Kathleen says, just as she has been trained to.
When the woman laughs, it sounds like she has a frog stuck in her throat. Papa guides her around the room, telling her about the paintings and the sculpture, while Kathleen continues to color. She once asked Daddy why people always laughed when she said, “Q4 projections,” and what exactly it meant. Daddy said it would be hard to explain to her at five-years-old, and that she would understand when she was older.
“Well,” Papa says as he and the woman are heading out the door, “I will leave you to it.”
Kathleen grinds a green crayon into the paper as the door shuts. When she is sure she is alone, she tosses the green crayon at the sculpture, and it pings against the bronze. She takes Jilly’s lipstick from her fist and draws a doggie with it. She is not supposed to leave this room until Rubina comes and gets her. She walks around, gazing at the paintings with her hands behind her back like the woman with the wide hair. One painting looks squishy, like the clay Ms. Starkweather gave her. Kathleen picks at the paint with her fingernail so that chunks fall down onto the toe of her school shoe.
Rubina has forgotten her. Rubina forgets her in this room sometimes, if Papa has asked her to do something.
Kathleen opens the door. She tucks the lipstick into her sock, and as she walks around the gallery, she can feel it against her ankle bone. Rubina isn’t here to play a game with her, so she will have to play by herself.
She jumps into the doorway of the office where the lights are dimmed and there are five people sitting at a table.
Kathleen points at a girl with gold glasses. “You’re fired!”
“Oh, God,” the girl with gold glasses says. “What?”
Kathleen points at a boy chewing a pen. “You’re fired!”
“This game again,” he says, with somewhat of a frown, but then he turns it upside down and laughs, all without removing the pen from his mouth. Then, everyone at the table is laughing. While they laugh, Kathleen points at everyone in the room, shouting “You’re fired! You’re fired!” It’s all so funny that Kathleen’s laughter wrings her stomach and mangles the words “You’re fired!” until they’re mush, until she can’t breathe. She runs away, across the hall to the office that often has a biscuit to give her, and she fires everyone in there. Weeping from all of the fun, Kathleen runs upstairs and jumps from office to office pointing and shouting, “You’re fired! You’re fired! You’re fired!” She’s galloping down the hall to the last office when a hand grabs her arm.
“Kathleen, love.” It’s Rubina. “You’re going to sit with Minty for a while.”
Kathleen yips. She loves Minty.
Minty sits at the front desk, and she is pretty. She wears a big lacy scrunchie around her ballerina bun, chipped red nail polish, shoes that look like hooves, and a bellybutton ring. Minty never smiles unless she’s gotten a word correct on the crossword she does on her laptop, and only then will her lips tremble with a faint smile. She drinks water from an old Diet Coke bottle and eats a croissant every morning. Now and then, she presses her finger to the croissant bag to pick up a leftover flake, and then deposits that flake onto her tongue for a snack. There is a boy who also sits at the front desk with Minty, but nobody ever asks him to hang out with Kathleen.
Minty’s fingers stop typing on her laptop when she sees Rubina shepherding Kathleen to the desk. The boy stands up, taking his laptop to go somewhere else. Kathleen takes his seat. Rubina runs back into Papa’s office once she’s rid of Kathleen.
After a few moments, in which Minty eats two croissant flakes, Kathleen asks her, “Why are your fingers green?”
Minty glances down at her fingers, each one bedecked with a ring swamped in green skin. “The rings do that.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re cheap.”
“Why?”
“Because your dad doesn’t pay me enough.”
The girl with the gold glasses comes up to the front desk and asks Minty if someone in particular has come into the gallery today. “Here,” Minty hands Kathleen her phone, “go take pictures of the art.”
Kathleen takes Minty’s phone. It has a clear phone case with a small photo stuck inside the back. Kathleen walks away, but stays close enough so that she can hear what the girls are chatting about.
“Why does she need to take pictures?” The girl with gold glasses says. “I can send you the install shots if you need.”
“I just always ask her to do that so I can get some space,” Minty says.
They laugh.
“This will all be hers one day,” says the girl with the gold glasses.
“Lucky little bitch,” says Minty.
Kathleen turns the phone over in her hands and studies the photo in Minty’s phone case. In it, Minty is cheesing with a cigarette between her teeth. The girl with the gold glasses is sticking her head right against Minty’s, and there’s a boy drinking from a can next to them. Minty had called her a Lucky Little Bitch. Kathleen takes the lipstick out of her sock and colors over everyone’s face.
Papa always tells Kathleen that childhood is the best time of her life, and that’s why he wants her to meet all kinds of important people who would buy art. Because she reminds them of what it was like to be a child again.
You’re my most perfect work, he’ll say. They know they can never buy you, so they buy something else to make up for it.
“Kathleen,” Minty says. “Your dad is here.”
Kathleen turns to see Daddy, not Papa, grinning at her. She runs into his arms, and he picks her up, hugging her whole body so tightly she fears the lipstick will fall out of her sock.
“Carl, I don’t think you can park your Vespa there.” Minty nods out the window, where Daddy’s Vespa is parked in the middle of the street.
“I couldn’t find a parking spot close enough to the gallery, so I just had to park there,” Daddy says. Kathleen buries her head in his neck.
“What if it gets towed?” Minty says.
“Then I’ll buy a new one.” Daddy puts Kathleen down. “Let’s go, darling, Papa wants you to meet someone special.”
Kathleen looks back at Minty and the girl with gold glasses. They’re hunched over the crossword.
Daddy brings Kathleen back into the room where she was coloring. Papa and the woman are already sitting on the couch, talking over a tray of tea. Patting the seat next to him, Papa expresses delight at seeing her. Kathleen takes the seat she has taken many times before. Daddy leaves.
“I don’t think I’ve properly introduced you to my daughter, Kathleen Odette,” Papa says.
“No, but we met briefly, didn’t we, angel?” The woman says.
Kathleen nods, unspeaking. It’s time to be quiet now.
“Is she here to learn the business?” The woman chuckles. “Unpaid internships and all that?”
“No,” Papa plunks a sugar cube into his tea, “I pulled her out of school early for the opening so that she could come. It’s a special one, you know, Agatha’s first in Europe.”
“I’m aware, I’ve been following her work for quite a while.”
“Would a studio visit be of interest to you then? I know Agatha is keen to have a presence in Europe, and your collection, of course, is one any artist would be honored to be included in. From the responses we’ve had from other clients, it’s looking very likely that the show will sell out quickly, so I would hate for you to miss out on something.”
“But when I buy, of course, I’m not concerned with what others are buying.”
“And that’s what makes your collection so influential.”
“I buy with a childlike sense of wonder, and without that, there is no fun in collecting.” The woman smiles at Kathleen. “Do you like art?”
Kathleen nods.
The woman gestures to the paintings in the room. “Which is your favorite? I’ll buy whatever the angel likes the best. Children have this gorgeous innate appreciation for beauty.”
Papa puts his hand on Kathleen’s back. She looks up at him, and even though he is smiling, she can see the swirls in his head, the strain behind his eyes. He drums his fingers against her back, and suddenly, she needs to pee.
“Go on.” Papa removes his hand. “Which is your favorite?”
Kathleen can feel ice forming all over the room as she walks around, looking at each painting, her hands clasped together at her breast. Trying to quiet the urge to pee, she jostles up and down as she goes. Her mind wanders. First to that girl’s gold glasses, then to the green crayon pinging off of the sculpture, to Jilly’s pearly purple lips, and finally to the mound of blue clay on her desk in Ms. Starkweather’s classroom.
“That big one in the back is pretty, isn’t it, Kathleen?” Papa says, stirring his tea so that the spoon clanks against the cup.
Kathleen doesn’t go to the big painting in the back. She stands in front of the painting she was picking at earlier. It has just occurred to her that she might get in trouble for picking at it, so she blocks the pock she has made. She says, “This is my favorite.”
“Why is that, angel?” The woman says.
“Because it’s squishy. Like clay.”
The woman howls with laughter. “Clever girl!” She has to put her teacup down so that it doesn’t spill in the midst of her jubilation. “There absolutely is something sculptural about the artist’s use of paint, clever, clever girl!”
“I’m not a clever girl,” Kathleen says. “I’m a Lucky Little Bitch.”
Papa stands up as the woman gasps. The woman puts her purse on her lap, muttering and shaking her head, and Papa stomps over to Kathleen. He grabs her hand and takes her out of the room.
Rubina is waiting outside the door. “Well?” she says.
“She’s ruined a massive deal.” Papa lets go of Kathleen in such a way that makes her feel as if he’s tossed her at Rubina’s feet.
Rubina puts Kathleen in Papa’s office. “I’ve got your crayons in here. I will come check in on you.”
“When can I come out?”
“You can’t come out, love.”
Rubina shuts the door.
Kathleen sinks down into the fuzzy rug. Supine, she plays with her fingers. Makes them dance to the tune of people coming into the gallery, talking, hollering, kissing each other’s cheeks. She transposes the green that was on Minty’s fingers on her own, desires a lot of cheap rings.
Both Daddy and Papa have told her that their family has a lot of money. They could get her a lot of rings like Minty’s. Maybe they could give Minty some money to buy herself new rings, and Minty could give the old ones to Kathleen.
If now she couldn’t have the rings, she could at least have pearly purple. Without a mirror, Kathleen applies the lipstick to her lips. The three swipes Jilly usually uses don’t feel like enough. She draws more, and more. Until the sensation feels too good, as if she is becoming soft like Jilly, pretty like Minty, and helpful like Rubina, and the effect is that of armor against the screaming Papa will most definitely do later. Why did everybody want to be a kid so bad when this is how lipstick can make you feel?
Something within Kathleen is stirring, shaking off its dead fur. It’s premature, but not less strong for it. Kathleen no longer believes that childhood is the best time of her life. Maybe it was for that woman with the wide hair, but not for Kathleen. She was sure that when Ms. Starkweather told the class they could have clay because they were mature for kindergarteners, that she was looking right into Kathleen’s eyes. She can understand what “Q4 projections” means now, not when she’s older, and from the information she has received thus far, she deduces that it must mean making art. People laughed because it was preposterous that a kid could make art. She cannot wait to grow up and pierce her bellybutton and make sculptures from clay that no one will laugh at.
All around her the gallery bustles. Deals are struck, drinks are sloshed, pettiness runs rampant, someone blames the pock in the painting on an intern, and Kathleen falls asleep alone on the rug in her father’s office. Despite the noise, she is not disturbed.
The only time she surfaces from sleep is the brief moment in which she feels herself being lifted. The softness of the rug on her skin is replaced by a comforting cloud of powder and satsumas.
Between a Rock and a Soft Place to Land by Nic Marna | Substack | Instagram | TikTok
A mother watches her son prance in the yard. With his face held up to the sun and his hands stretched away from his body, the boy dances like a sheet in the breeze.
Her hands busy themselves with gardening (dig, plant, cover, repeat), but her eyes are glued to the boy. Seeing his joy take form makes her swell with pride.
After a few trips around the yard, he runs over to her panting. Setting aside her rough gloves, she pats her lap where he plops down. His hands climb the folds of her neck, find purchase in her smile lines, surf her forehead, and start the cycle back again. She watches him study her contours, memorizing her cartography.
A faint rattle sounds out around them, a rapid series of echoing thunks. With it, a thought comes out of him unfiltered: “What am I?” asks the boy.
The mother strokes his hair in a sweeping motion. She ponders the question, or rather, how to answer it. She pushes through the idea that every single moment could warp her child into a different shape. He is a boy, he is not wet clay, she reminds herself.
“Why are you asking?” She buys herself time.
His hands fall from her then, dropping to his chest. It rises and falls with his breath, the thump of a heartbeat almost visible in between. “Eric at school said I was gay.” A crease splits his otherwise smooth forehead in two.
She is careful not to react. In the garden in front of them, she imagines a road. The road is forked with many prongs, each prong leads down a different path, each path leads to a different version of him. She doesn’t know how to choose.
He is not wet clay. He is not wet clay. He is not—
“And Daddy said it too. He told Sue in a little voice so I wouldn’t hear, but I did.”
She remembered the last conversation she had with her ex-husband. She never imagined she’d be divorced, let alone have a strained relationship with her child’s father.
“I think we should take him out of ballet,” he had said over the phone.
“What, why? He loves it.” They’d been discussing budgets for the school year, but she paid for ballet. This wasn’t about money.
“It’s just not good for him.” He was folding laundry. She could tell because of the swooshing of fabric.
“Christopher,” he hated when she used his full name. “Can you stop speaking in riddles.”
The sound of cotton swiping the air stopped. “He’s already soft enough, Alice.” Her mouth fell open, and his statement lingered. She felt his words paint the walls a stale, cold grey.
She didn’t know how to respond. Was soft bad? The mother loved her soft child.
The way he was different from other children was something she was aware of. To say otherwise would be a lie. She assumed all parents had these inclinations when early signs started to bud. But he was also extremely good at math, he liked olives, he got freckles on his nose in the summer. To her, this part of their son did not stand out from the rest.
The father spoke again. “I love him, you know that. I just don’t want to see him get hurt.”
“Taking him out of ballet would hurt him,” the mother said.
She pictured the father splaying his hands out on the table, something he would do when he was being serious. “I think we should encourage something sturdier, something solid.”
“Chris, I—” The rope that tethered her to this man was slipping, she couldn’t find the stronghold of recognition anymore.
“If we’re not careful, he’ll turn into a mound of wet clay.” His new girlfriend was a potter.
“He is not wet clay,” she was whispering now, stopping herself from boiling over. She steadied her breath. “Chris, don’t do this. Don’t be that guy.”
Her son shifts in her lap, bringing her back to the garden. “What does it mean?” he asks.
She heaves him up and anchors him next to her. The rattle follows again, unmistakable this time. She recognizes the clattering of a pebble or five in his pocket. “What do you think it means bear?”
“Ummmm.” He thinks. He thinks hard. “It’s bad?” A question, but she doesn’t answer.
“It’s bad because other kids were laughing at me when Eric said it. And Mrs. Fournier told him to stop.”
In his deep saucer eyes, her reflection is beautiful. Through them, she sees herself shiny, blurring at the sides. Somehow, a shimmer has overtaken the dulling effects of gravity and time. Her son’s look is a pond’s surface and she is Narcissus clambering to become one with the image.
“Mama?” She’s pulled out of his gaze and back to him.
“What people are saying, it’s not bad—it’s actually the opposite.” His face goes wide, stretched out with eagerness. “Gay means happy. Gay means joyful, smiley. Gay means cheery and breezy…” She continues to list bright yellow words, most of which she knows he won’t recognize. She is trying to keep the creeping grey at bay.
The mother holds his face in her hands then. No need to feel her way around the contours, she knows them well. “They say it like that because they want to change the meaning. This thing that makes you special, they want to turn it against you.”
His face pulls in tight like he’s just bit into a lemon. She feels drawn to hold him and shield him and never let go of him, but knows she can’t. Her body chiseled him from nothing, but he is building himself now. All she can do is help him carry the tools.
“Hey, can you show me that dance again?” She nudges him. Excitement flattens his brow and tugs his lips into a smile.
He leaves the pocket pebbles behind and starts to prance again. The mother collects the soft white rocks from the still-warm spot of grass he was sitting in. She rolls them around like marbles in her hand. They are so small, yet so heavy.
Good Lungs by Mad Crawford | Substack | Instagram
This girl dressed in bright shiny gold. A bright shiny gold most would reserve for special occasions but that she wore everyday.
She had an important job, and it was to control all the winds in the world. She had a talent for it and dressed accordingly.
To get this job controlling the winds of the world, Seamstress—what her parents called her—was chosen out of everyone on this earth. Every year, local wind-blowing competitions were held and those who had the strongest lungs in their hometown graduated to the national competition, and then the worldwide.
When she was six years old, Seamstress’ parents noticed she had an incredible knack for blowing out her birthday candles and entered her into their nearest wind-blowing competition. Seamstress won, made it to nationals, and then the worldwide competition.
Just before the final round, Seamstress became anxious and begged her mother to forfeit. She was only six years old, after all—she could not be the Conductor of Winds. Her mother, who had grown up in a small town and only knew mild, inconsequential winds, took Seamstress by the shoulders and said, “But you are good, Seamstress, and good people do not always control the winds. We, not just your father and I, but all the world, need you to win so everything blows in the right direction.”
Her mother then handed her a pair of bright shiny gold track bottoms and a matching gold jacket and led her onstage. Seamstress, clutching the ends of her gold sleeves and looking out at the audience, expanded her lungs, and exhaled.
The crowd cheered and her parents wept and Seamstress was appointed the Conductor of the Winds of the World.
Soon, all came to Seamstress with requests to blow her winds here and there.
“My ships are still,” said the captain, “Please blow in this direction.” Seamstress acquiesced, feeling sorry for the passengers whose journey had been delayed.
“My windmills hardly rotate,” said the farmer, “Please blow in this direction.” She accepted the request, thinking about the thirsty locals who depended on that windmill’s water.
“It’s too hot,” said the residents of a small South American town, “We need a breeze to reprieve us. Please blow in this direction.” She sent winds their way, knowing she too would be gasping for cool air in their conditions.
“I’m proposing to the love of my life,” a humble little man said, “She loves a cool breeze. Please blow–lightly–in this direction.” Seamstress obliged.
After a year of this, the little girl grew tired. Control of the winds was a great power and the world a massive jurisdiction. But it was nonetheless time to defend her title, as every Conductor had done annually before her. The previous Conductor of the Winds of the World’s tenure lasted over sixty years and had only ended because of the weakness of his aged body. Seamstress would be embarrassed if she made it only one year. As the incumbent, she automatically bypassed the local and regional competitions and went straight to the finals, but this did not make her feel more confident. She walked on stage, dressed in her bright shiny gold, as she had this time last year but without her mother’s hand in hers. Even though she was seven now, she still clutched the ends of her sleeves, drew in the deepest breath she could, and exhaled.
Barely a yawn emitted from the girl. Her instrument—her lungs—had failed her.
The audience, who had been dazed, hair blown straight back, by the previous contestants, were unmoved. They stared at Seamstress, thinking she would try again, feeling in fact that the theater was a bit muggy without a real breeze.
Seamstress stared back and saw the lack of forgiveness in their strange faces. The bright shiny gold of her clothing felt hot under the stage lights, and worse, felt ridiculous in the wake of her failure. She saw the captain, the farmer, the residents of the small South American town, even the little man and his fiance, all snarling at her. She saw her mother and father, panic-stricken that someone else would be named Conductor of the Winds that night.
Unable to stand the weight of this, she lunged into the wings of the stage, her legs faltering. As one stagehand reported later, the only sound that cut through the eerie silence in the auditorium that day was that of the girls’ lungs, still gasping for air as he helped her to her feet.
Thank you for reading paloma, a monthly art and literature magazine. For information on submitting your work, please see the Submission Guide. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram, and you can catch up on past issues here.
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