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Long Form

I can't afford the good hotels

2/15/2023

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by Ron Riekki


because those cost a thousand dollars
and I’m not even talking about the great
hotels, because those are a billion dollars
an hour. I have to find the hotels where,
swear to God, there have been holes in
the wall so wide that I once passed my
car keys through it, to my cousin, who
forgot something inside. And then
there was the hotel, in Toronto, no less,
where a cop came to my door, knocked,
and told me that I didn’t want to stay
there. I’d already checked in. He said
he saw my license plate, that (yup) I’m
American, and said that I might want
to go to another hotel. I asked what
happened and he said, I’m not allowed
to say
, and I imagined dead bodies piled
up on the other side of the walls, and
imagined that there were ticking bombs
in the swimming pool that was empty,
seen from my window, a perfect view
of the absence of water, and then I said,
Thank you, which made no sense, and
closed the door, and lied in bed, as
there was nowhere for me to go, this
feeling that if the building was about
to catch fire, then I deserved it, that
my dumb poverty was something I
somehow worked for, that it was my
fault to join the military, go in, get my
head drowned in explosive nothingness,
lose sleep over not having enough sleep,
get sick on sickness, its libraries that had
more porn than poetry (and that is not
an exaggeration), the beer vending
machines at the end of our barracks
hallway, how it was impossible to get
orange juice or real milk, but I could
get drunk twenty-four-seven, and then
the war where one bunkmate turned
bulimic, his way of coping, and then
another roommate got caught reading
out loud passages from his New
Testament
while masturbating, got
sent for a psych eval and came back
stamped Good To Return To Work,
and then the suicides, how one night
I looked up and saw that the moon
had a rope tied around its glowing
neck, and there was a madness, pure
madness, when most of us weren’t
even front lines, because there is
no front in war anymore, just this
sort of chaos, where this child, and
we were all children, had just re-
turned from a bombing, and we
were at the mess hall, and some-
one asked him, How’d it go? and
he stopped eating, and said, How’d
it go? How’d it go! and he said,
This is how and took his plate,
lifted it over his head, filled with
food, and slammed it down, so
that potatoes parachuted from
the ceiling and peas crashed
into napkin holders and milk
pressed into our faces and he
gazed at us with the skin of
the dead and he ate every single
sleeping child in the world and
you could see there was a free-
way in his lungs and he tied his
chair back into a knot and walked
out of the room, taking the air
with him, and we sat there, in
hunger, and our childhoods were
on display, and war makes you
insane and insanity makes you
war, and war is the Deep End
and my PTSD counselor told me,
Just so you know, there’s no cure
for PTS
D and then my other
PTSD counselor, when I told her
that, said, Don’t listen to a word
he said
and I tried to erase my past,
but I can’t, tried, for years, to just
punch myself in the side of my
skull to try to reset my memory,
tried to chalkboard-fingernail
everything out of my brain, but
it’s so stuck in there, the Marine
that put his M16 in his mouth,
tasted the air-cooled, gas-operated
carbon steel, the theft of child-
hood, the honor of nothing and
everything, the fever of history,
the way that Thank you for your
service
makes me draw my knees
into my chest, how the barracks
always scared me, especially
after the deaths, and, now, tonight,
for the first time, I went into my
phone, and started deleting all
the names of the dead, just
scrolling through, finding their
name (or their nickname), how
there was this opposite feel
when it was put into the phone,
how it was this new friendship,
and then, now, tonight, clicking
on their name, hitting Edit, then
Delete Contact and it was, at one
time, a contact, so much touching
in the military, how every single
bunkmate had their own distinctive
smell, a rot that was solely theirs,
and, now, it is a deletion, to take
out, cut out, strike out, and I’m
left with this empty apartment,
this cheap apartment, how I
always have to search and search
and search and search and search
and search to find some shit-
hole I can afford, some off-
kilter crypt where I never even
buy furniture, because I know
it would be stolen, keep all
the window shades open to
show how there’s nothing inside,
just my trembling body,
​and no one wants to have that.

Ron Riekki is a poet/writer/editor from Michigan and has been published by several publications such as Juked, The Threepenny Review, Wigleaf, Akashic Books, Beloit Poetry Journal, Spillway, Rattle, and many more. ​His books include U.P. (Ghost Road Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press). Right now, he’s listening to Mireille Mathieu’s “Addio.” 
Back to: Issue Eight
Next: Spencer Silverthorne
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Flight Risk

2/15/2023

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by Katie Tian


like all the other honey-lipped girls here, you hold this secret between the slits of your teeth: soft & pink & overripe with the night’s stickiness & the pork drippings from yesterday’s dinner. someone in the next room singsongs a children’s lullaby & it grates through the cloth of your milk-blue gown, paper-thin as a breath. the moon is silver & gaping & won’t stop leaking cold light against your bare skin. you bite down hard until the stale nectar on your breath turns to metal & blood.
 
tonight you dream of swallowing the moon. of smearing milk powder & peach juice across your warm mouth. of leaving through the window with a cherry-red wicker-basket & a dead gps, of running & running & running until the earth sputters out.
 
all the other sicknesses make you ugly, you know, they make you washed-out & cotton-stuffed. this one turns you soft & pink & fuckable. maybe that’s why you’re not trying. maybe that’s why you’ve rewritten your biography as an arithmetic sequence: small into smaller into gone.
 
the doctors wear all-white that make them look heavy with ghosts. the nurses teach you card games, sometimes. most of the time they watch you with their fisheyes searing constellations into your back.
 
the other girls share secrets with you. this is how to be pretty, & how to be liked. this is how to empty yourself gracefully, & how to die. this is how to be already halfway there.
 
you find it funny: how you only recognize the shape of your body when your limbs are blurred by bathwater. last time, you nearly drowned trying to flush sunflower seeds & milk taffy from the hollows of your esophagus. you lift yourself out, imagining this: 24-hour escape, cliff-bathing in colder streams, unsuturing your skin & wearing your ribcage like a necklace. the bathroom-tile walls press themselves closer with every breath.
 
your mother asks if there’s a boy. maybe it’s her fault, she says. maybe she spoonfed you so many fairytales that you grew up thinking you could be juliet. every girl wants to be wanted, she says.
 
maybe it was that boy you met last july under a red-bodied moon & two scoops of cotton-candy ice cream. the one who took you to the shore & kissed you in rhythm to the gentle lull of the waves, who gave you a whole world in the palm of your hand; until you realized one night, with his nectar tongue against your razor teeth, that you could never love him the way he loved you, because you were too many sharp edges & potholes that you tried to fill with his outline. he’s in arkansas now with a job selling vintage CDs, & you haven’t talked, & you’re still trying to fill the holes with pieces of everyone else.
 
so you answer, it’s complicated. because bloodshot eyes and cracked enamel don’t make a girl wanted. because this is the only way you know how to hold your body close. this is the only way to have a destination, because you don’t want to be that girl riding the back of a tow truck in circles around a barren field. this is how to know there’s a ground level: to know that if you fall, you won’t keep falling forever.
 
everyone else has written letters home by now, but you’ve forgotten how to spell. because your brain is all fucked up now, & because there’s not enough breath between the syllables of i miss you & i’m gonna be okay, okay to ask for forgiveness, & then to ask if your mother still sings along to your favorite song on the stereo. you want to fold yourself into the flap of a red-lettered envelope & mail yourself home, or into the space between your mother’s arms. but you’re not a poet, & you don’t know how to walk away from the warmest place you’ve been given.
 
there is no ending to this elegy. all the honey-lipped girls are dead, you know, & none of this is beautiful. which is to say: there are pieces of you everywhere now, but never enough to make a whole. which is to say: maybe you’ve lost the game, but maybe there was no way of winning to begin with. which is to say: even at the bottom of the well, you’re still dreaming of bluer skies.

Katie Tian is a sixteen-year-old Chinese-American writer from New York. Her work is published in Frontier Poetry, Polyphony Lit, Rising Phoenix Review, and Kissing Dynamite, among others. She has been recognized by Hollins University, Smith College, the Adelphi Quill Awards, and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. Apart from writing, she enjoys collecting stuffed animals and consuming obscene amounts of peanut butter straight from the jar. 
Back to: Issue Eight 
Next: Ron Riekki 
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The Speaker is Listening to "Opus 93" after an occasion of not seeing anyone for miles

2/9/2023

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by Spencer Silverthorne


Opus 23 - Dustin O'Halloran
Dustin O’Halloran is an American pianist and composer with five acclaimed solo albums under his own name. He released his first EP Sundoor with renowned classical musical label Deutsche Grammophon in 2019, and followed that up with his solo album Silfur in 2021. He’s also a member of the band A Winged Victory for the Sullen with Adam Wiltzie, and they released their album The Undivided Five with Ninja Tune in 2019 and self-released their latest album Invisible Cities in 2021. ​

0:01

Brown roof, blue roof,
Blue, blue, blue, brown
​
0:11
LOVER 1
What’s been whipped after years of neglect.
​0:25
​
Everyone minds
the difference
between the tenuous
and tender.

1:26

Everyone forgets
to mind the surge.

1:34
​LOVER 1
You had to catastrophize the measure of time.

LOVER 2
Friend, your candidacy is no longer under consideration.

LOVER 1
O Friend, your cadence tracked in mud from a stomp in the woods.
​1:52
​
Everyone flubs
their own farewell
to become a stranger.
LOVER 2
So, watch for the water moccasin.

LOVER 1
Everyone wants a problem if it means new tennis shoes.
​2:16
​
Pity these foals
trembling
in the midst
of these strangers’
passing wonder.
LOVER 2
Never be someone’s passing wonder.
​2:48
​
Vector, here and there,
with some fingers to the sky.
​
2:52
LOVER 1
...with hopes that the blame’s set for your natural comeuppance.

Spencer Silverthorne (he/him) is a poet and PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He's also the Poetry Editor at Rougarou: A Journal of Arts and Literature. His work has been published in Black Warrior Review, Dream Pop Journal, Gigantic Sequins, Sundog Lit, and Westchester Review, among others. Currently he is working on a full-length collection of poetry called Deep in the Pitch of Elsewhere.
Back to: Issue Eight
Next: Patty Paine
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10 Years later, breaking up while listening to leslie Cheung

9/26/2022

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By Jacqueline Xiong

Prose Runner Up of the Inaugural Surging Tide Summer Contest
​Selected by Angie Sijun Lou
十年後,邊聽著張國榮邊分手
​After Enshia Li
當愛已成往事
唱:張國榮

往事不要再提
人生已多風雨
縱然記憶抹不去
愛與恨都還在心裡
真的要斷了過去
讓明天好好繼續
你就不要再苦苦追問我的消息
愛情它是個難題
讓人目眩神迷
忘了痛或許可以
忘了你卻太不容易
你不曾真的離去

Bygone Love trans. Jacqueline Xiong
Singer: Leslie Cheung

Don’t bring up the past for me
Our lives have been stormy at sea
Though I can’t erase your memory
My heart’s love and hate remain to be
If we are to let the past break slowly
And continue tomorrow carefree
Please stop asking for me
Love is a difficult query
Which turns people hazy and dizzy
Maybe I can forget the agony
But forgetting you is not easy
​You’re never truly leaving

***
April Fools’, 2013. A decade after the abandonment of all artistic expression. You are deposited into a world of disquietude, confusion, and dissonance, waiting for Enya to come home. Let’s break up, you practice, but that doesn’t sound right. Instead you try 我們分手吧. It sounds better, but only in a slow, linguistic way. In Mandarin, there is none of the absolute dissolution characterized by breaking up--there is only 分手吧, a reluctant parting of hands, a goodbye.

On the thin slice of TV, rioting cymbals and paiban scurry across the stage of Farewell My Concubine. You and Enya watched this film too many times to count, the first few times with your respective families when it first came out in 1993, then the two of you together on this couch after your parents tsked and said it was too homosexual, too tragic. But even though you had to sit through the entire 171 minutes on a couch too sweaty for the summer heat, Enya liked it too much for you to turn it off. Enya has always been more transfixed by the ineffable tragedy of the film—a main character who was forced to become a Peking opera actor, a protagonist who breathed in tandem with the 旦 he portrayed on stage, a boy who blurred the lines between stage and reality until he gave up his life to find the answer.

He had a choice, you used to tell Enya during the ending theme song. She would’ve stopped crying by then. The boy could’ve disentangled himself from the story. The Hegemon-King Bids His Lady Farewell was only a play, nothing more. If he could’ve detached himself from the play, it would’ve saved him.

She only shook her head. 不瘋魔不成活. If you don’t go insane, you don’t survive.

What?

Do you see? He was mourning. He had to become someone else, someone within another story, so his grief wasn’t his own.


That’s silly, you said. Then nothing was his own—his love, his hate.

She shrugged. So maybe he had nothing, to begin with.

Now, you watch the boy’s last act as someone else. A sword flashes across the stage and leaves behind bloody blossoms on Lady Yu’s neck as she convinces herself to die for a man who doesn’t love her back. In every rendition of this play, the year is 202 BC, and Lady Yu dies for the Hegemon King. The vibrant curtains close and so does the boy’s role, but this is an opera within a movie, and so the tragedy continues. The boy is not Lady Yu but Cheng Dieyi, but he still cuts his throat for a man who doesn't love him back, on the stage he loves the most; and as the film ends, you know that ten years later Cheng Dieyi’s actor will also die, and that ten years after that, a part of you will also die.

Enya is right: it’s one life within another, one death within another, like these wooden Matryoshka dolls nestled so tightly into each other you’d think they’re one whole. Cheng Dieyi died alongside Lady Yu. Ten years later on April first, Cheng’s actor threw himself off the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel because some part of him had died alongside Cheng. Ten years after that, in the AC-less basement of a shabby apartment in Kowloon, you mourn Leslie Cheung and think of breaking up with your girlfriend.

The TV screen fades to black. You rewind the movie once more, waiting for Enya to come home.
你始終在我心裡
我對你仍有愛意
我對自己無能為力
因為我仍有夢
依然將你放在我心中
You live in my heart for eternity
​I still have love for you, baby
​I have no power against me
​Because I am still dreaming--
​In my heart, still loving

***
Enya is an artist, a sentimentalist, and an idealist. You think it started when her Ba chased her out of the house after finding a stash of nude figure studies in her room, all sorts of bodies and shapes that an already cheap history major shouldn’t be dabbling in. Enya said that her Ba yelled something about drawing shameful men and she yelled right back, I draw women too.

Since then, you and Enya live in the basement of an apartment on the cusp edge of Hong Kong. None of your families know— it’s a secret like the film you watch over and over again, even if you’re tired of it. Enya is an art major now and she spends days in figure studies that she sells for HK$20. You’re still staying up until 1 AM to transfer your handwritten novel manuscript to a rundown Mac that always reacts too slowly. You two are in love. Most days, that’s all that matter.
​
But some days, on the old cracked phone you got from your Ma, you still get a call here, a text message there. 什麼時候回家啊,寶貝?When are you coming home, sweetie? You have a home already, but some days you’re still depressed and turn it into art to pay rent. You think that’s what Enya does too, because artists always do something with their wounds until it’s no longer theirs. You think that’s a freedom artists have that no one else does.

You think that’s why Enya likes the movie so much—you think that’s why you hate it so much.

                                                                                                        ***
Cheng Dieyi mourns so much that you don’t notice. The only way he shows grief is through screaming—when his mother chops off his misshaped finger, when he shatters glass against the wall like sound alone can displace an opium addiction, when he shapes the cavity of his mouth for Lady Yu to reside in the hollow of his throat. He’s so silent and loud about pain that every shrill, excruciating sound he makes can be interpreted as a song; and maybe his grief does come in a song not sung by himself, but by Lady Yu.

At twenty-two, Enya does not mourn. She says it’s too public of a display, and that mourning is something stitched together of constituent sadness and rage, and that if you remake it, it goes away. She heaves old heavy canvas onto the couch and rolls new acrylic over the paintings that her Ba slashed with a kitchen knife. She says to you one night, Sometimes I think storymaking is insanity.

You remember: 不瘋魔不成活. So it’s survival?

She is quiet for a heartbeat. Could be.

What’s the difference, you say. Then, because the radio is still buzzing on some old Leslie Cheung song: I think you’re getting a little too crazy about that film.

Do you think it’s tragic too? She asks. You shrug.

We’re storymaking all the time. Nothing too tragic about us.

But he’s so tragic,
 she says. We can do whatever. But he only has one other person to be. It’s one person or nobody.

You make yourself emotional, you tell her. She looks at you absently, like you’re just another character study of hers, like you’re someone in a painting or a black-and-white movie or even a memory.

He only has one other person to be, she insists. Lady Yu has to love the Hegemon King, so he has to love Duan Xiaolou, who plays the king. Isn’t it tragic that he only has one other person to love? And the sad part is because Duan Xiaolou doesn’t have to be someone else, he doesn’t love him back.

Annoyed, you say, Can you stop talking about that film?

She closes her eyes for a moment and opens them again. You’re right. Slowly, she reaches to the bedside table and turns the radio low, until it’s only a teeny buzzing through the papery walls. We should go to sleep.
總是容易被往事打動
總是為了你心痛
別留戀歲月中
我無意的柔情萬種
不要問我是否再相逢
不要管我是否言不由衷
為何你不懂
只要有愛就有痛
The past and I are always touching
​For you, I am always hurting
​Don’t linger over years of our passing
​Or my tenderness before our parting
​Don’t ask me if we’ll be meeting
​Don’t ask whether I’m honest or lying
​Why are you not understanding
​That if we’re loving, we’re hurting

***
You don’t like Cheng Dieyi, but you like Leslie Cheung. On the radio, you pretend not to listen to his old songs, but you listen to them late at night more times than not. Unlike Cheng, Cheung is a real person— used to be, anyway, before he became a splatter of greasy blood and flesh at the bottom of a Hong Kong hotel.

Enya has always been too consumed with storymaking that she’s a little like Cheng Dieyi: loving you because you’re the only other person for her to love outside of her unspoken grief. Every time she rewinds Farewell My Concubine, she loves you more. Holds you closer like she’s afraid you’ll disintegrate into shadow. Sit side by side with you on the couch until your bodies are touching, flushed in the gooey, pooling summer shelter. It’s almost like a possession—storymaking until you’re only a story, until your feelings are no longer your own but a product of your ideal creation.

It’s almost like the way your Ma asks you, every other day after you told her you won’t be going home: 你真的喜歡她嗎?Do you really like her? 這種關係不會長久的。This kind of relationship won’t last. 兩個女生有什麼好交往的?What kind of relationships can two girls have? Questions you can’t answer, because for others, between you two, love is not a feeling but a fancy.

You’re here, you want to tell Enya. But you’ve never quite had that way of hers— remaking reality until it bends to her will. You can never reconstruct a new world aside from what you have. Your first time watching Leslie Cheung on stage, you were sitting with your Ma and Ba on the tattered couch in your old Beijing home, crunching on kuaci and sesame candy. While your mother tsked and your father left for another plate of kuaci, you watched as Leslie Cheung become Cheng Dieyi and Lady Yu, fitting into one shell after another so effortlessly, it was like he was unraveling layers of himself to the world. He did have something of his own, you thought. The process of becoming someone else but keeping your own grief.
​
Your grief isn’t like Enya’s— it does not change. But grief always stays. You won’t want it to leave. Somedays you’ll be so full of unexpressed love, you’re as light as a bird; some days you’ll flail and choke when it has no place to go but to writhe and crash inside of you. And when it shatters, the little pieces of grief don’t go away, either; they trickle into that empty hollow in your heart where your love is until they blow up into one enormously injured, bleeding thing. From that point on, with these shards wedged forever in your chest, you’ll be prepared to injure.

It’s like a contagion, these shards. You stick a hand into your solar plexus and twist, the way you would remove the pit from a ripe avocado until the fragment vomits itself with a sighed pop. It glitters in your hand like a stone someone plunged deep into the sea. And because it will no longer be yours after the breakup, this enraged grief, you set it aside to where Enya usually perches on the couch, knowing that when she opens the door and sits down, it will become part of her as well.
​有一天你會知道
人生沒有我並不會不同
人生已經太匆匆
我好害怕總是淚眼朦朧
忘了我就沒有痛
將往事留在風中
為何你不懂
只要有愛就有痛
​有一天你會知道
人生沒有我並不會不同
人生已經太匆匆
我好害怕總是淚眼朦朧
忘了我就沒有痛
將往事留在風中
One day you will know
​Life without me won’t be altering
​Life is already running, running
​I’m so scared of always crying
​There’s no pain in forgetting
​In the wind, no pain in leaving
​Why are you not understanding
That if we’re loving, we’re hurting

​​One day you will know
​Life without me won’t be altering
​Life is already running, running
​I’m so scared of always crying
There’s no pain in forgetting
​In the wind, no pain in leaving
***

Jacqueline Xiong is a Chinese-American writer from Houston. Her fiction has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and can be found in Waxwing Journal, Sine Theta Magazine, and elsewhere. She enjoys composing music, putting together Spotify playlists, and tweeting chaotically at @jacquelanx.
Back to: Issue Seven
Next: Kaiser Louis
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MUSCLE MEMORY

9/26/2022

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By Ai Li Feng

content warning for blades, bulimia, self-harm
In the mouth of every memory, my mother. Light glinting along her jaw like teeth. She is halving heads of Chinese cabbage, fists of cilantro. I can't cut vegetables because she keeps the knives out of reach, afraid I will become accustomed to violence. I am limited to peeling potatoes and carrots. Scrapes and small scratches. When I nick my knuckles, I don't find the cut until I notice the well of blood. The reversal of hurt. My mother says I'm lucky, to lose something so easily. To have a wound with no memory of it. She ghosts against the scar silvering her wrist, veins thinning into tree trunks. She knows anger the way an ax knows wood. The back of her hand flat as a blade. We flinch when the clock strikes twelve, and she shelves the cutting board behind the sink, sheathes all the knives. She clears away a space for me at the counter before softening each grain of rice in warm water, placing her hands in the pot. Instead, rust between each joint. When we sit together, our shadows merge like metal fevering beneath the same forge. Still, the temperature rises and a degree of separation remains between us.

My mother is always hovering, holding herself back. When she was pregnant, she was told to expect a miscarriage. She would confront her reflection in the glass, dragging her nails against her face, gasping open. She thought she was unrecognizable. Instead, she looked like her mother with more of her hurt. When she went to the hospital, she clenched her fists until the veins came to the surface of her skin for air. A birthmark blooming beneath her ribs in memoriam. The only thing that you are capable of carrying is grief, her mother said, and she believed her. How my body was buried in her body and she was so grave, so cold and unmoving as the nurse delivered me like news of a relative's death. The nurse told her to hold her child and all she could see were her hands, rivering in red. Then I screamed and she started to sob, said take her away, I keep hurting her. We were each other's only family. There was no one to tell when I was born.

My mother doesn't speak of the hospital but still, I mistake the stretch marks clawing my waist with the white tissue on her stomach from the pregnancy. Beneath my fingernails, the cuticles scaled with rust. In the department stores, I start searching for larger, looser clothing, which means more stitches, longer scars seaming the fabric. The salesclerk comments that we don't look like we're related, our faces too different, wounds too foreign, and my mother feels relief in a flood. I flush. Sometimes, I measure my body against my mother's body and I am larger than her anger. I outgrow her grief, submerge in smaller memories in which I slot into her shadow like a child, heartbeat still inseparable from her own.

In the bathroom, I imagine a gap between my thighs, wide enough to show gums, and skin my teeth. When I double over, each hurt is reflected into two. The pads of my fingers softening with spit as I try to ingest the prints and regurgitate a different, changed body. Instead, I climb into the belly of the bathtub and replicate birth, come up to the surface of my grief for air. I keep emptying my lungs as if screaming but nothing leaves my throat so I hold the backs of my knees, pull the patellas closer to my heart in a fetal position. I can name every limb in this body but not possess it like a ghost returning home. On the other side of the door, my mother is standing against the wood, pressing her palms against it as she tries to detect the quiet pulse of my gasping. Her hands are heavy and mine are heaving. We are separated only by a few syllables.

When I sit at the table that evening, my mother offers me a bowl that she had filled with her memories of me, mouth sticky with sweet rice, soft fruit. Instead, I trace the pattern of blue rabbits and bluer moons. I think about Chang'e and the loneliness of hunger as my mother mirages a second stomach, swallows the leftovers from her own attempt at loving. She knows how to eat for two but she still gets sick. I hold back her hair as she empties. My fingers soft on her shoulders, small circles on her spine. She bends her body into a fetal position and I pull her toward my own. I feel so full of fossilized griefs so I dig my fingernails deep and excavate my ribcage, clear enough space to carry this wound without speaking of it.

My mother starts eating by herself in the evening, solitary and shadowless. When the light begins to thin, I cradle my head against her collarbones as she stands still and wooden, sheathing her hands against my sharp bones, my serrated back. How the body opens to both tenderness and the touch of a blade, leaving a threshold where we can linger before we close our mouths like doors. There will always be a distance between us. I am not my mother. It is easier for her to love an echo of her body than her body.

​Ai Li Feng is a young writer with work in Waxwing. She reads for the Farside Review. 
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UNDULATIONS IN THE RENAISSANCE

9/26/2022

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By Ariana Duckett

With lyrics incorporated from "Dayglow" by Fuzzybrain
I.
Pretty please
Where do I begin?

Oh, I don't understand it either
And I don't think I can
Fuzzybrain call it what you want

I've felt so distant lately as if I were not


I live in a small liberal arts college campus and it is autumn. My classes are not too difficult, nor do they engage me. I’m not sure where I go after my classes end, just that I find myself surrounded by redwoods that pierce the sky, threatening to conquer it. I am far away from home and the days end sooner and the nights are more intimidating, menacing. It takes extra effort to get out of bed while it is dark, and I think of my friends back home. Burnt orange sweaters and red cheeks and white rooftops. Whose memories are these?

II.
There's rain outside, steady winter
My heart feels like such a mixture
Shapeless, I stare at her picture

I don't know her, but I miss her
Why, oh why such things?


The nights are quieter and friendships are more intimate, concrete. I wonder how everyone else is doing, and I daydream much more. I think about Christmas, and the end, and the special places that I share with special people. When it comes to old friendships, I am a flower girl: the silky memories of my old flings and frivolous choices scatter in my shadow, hidden from the new crowd around me. Back then, it was easier to make me smile; I seemed to hold a fragment of everyone around me in my soul. There was the girl I fell in love with, the boy who fell in love with me, and the boy I dated, all of which have nearly forgotten me. I see their pictures and I see the scattered petals, the remains of a garden I no longer visit, that has been flooded by my ‘else’: the myriad of distractions I find caked around my new environment. An alien horizon I can’t navigate, and a cleansing rainfall I can’t make stay. I used to miss my friends; now I miss my classes. But don’t I love them?

I wonder who I’ve locked gazes with in the past 24 hours, if they will also become integrated parts of my soul. The colors grow warmer while the nights grow colder. We decline to do many things now; reading outside, swimming, talking too loudly. We were so busy making all our mistakes during the summer that there is nothing left to do now other than talk about the spring, which we are pretty sure is coming someday. We debate convoluted topics and long for home.

There is too much rain to nurture the gardens; now it just kills everything, slowly, almost beautifully.

III.
Write it down absent of the pen
The sun has been set for hours and she's rising again
Scattered mind, I call it a friend

I wish I thought a bit less and spoke up instead
In my head


Long drives, shivering, snow. You ask me how I’m doing, and I smile and say I’m fine, and my cheeks stay dry. I think you’re flirting with me. I think you’ll use my honesty against me. Gentle music, quiet questions. We have no childhoods anymore. Let’s hug tight, until the snow covers our arms and we become snow angels. Let’s discuss old habits and new myths. The sun is not up yet, and we have time to dissect the stars and sprinkle them on our birthday cakes. The night laps up yesterday’s worries, and everything is rhapsodic, unending. This is why I keep a tissue in my pocket - not to touch against my tears, but to annotate my romances, with the snow and the sun and the silhouettes. The silhouettes alter: everyone looks different in the variant light of truth, and it will trick you if you don’t pay close enough attention. The hero of the night might turn into the morning’s mourning villain. You will feel the sorrow I have felt, and you will need it to get through the renaissance.
​

IV.
There's rain inside my skeleton frame
​A hurricane within my rib cage

I never left but I never stayed

I'm cleaning out the fuzz in my brain
Time and time again


Coffee fixes nothing except smiles on our faces, but we already knew that. Slow dance. String lights. Soft romance, no louder than the falling leaves. I never did anything right, so I hope you’ll forgive me. Shake your head. Try again.

She’s in love with you.

What do you remember from your time with her? Surely her smile, surely not her side-eye. I wish I remembered her better, but we could not call ourselves a duo of the night until the end, when everything grew crucial and immediate, and we could decline each other’s presence no more.
​

I talk about my past-love, and you talk about your new-love, and it empties us of our souls. Milky fairy light, like what we tried to string on our ceiling. Homework unfinished. They would be ours if we were not ourselves. But we can be each other to each other for each other, unabridged children from colorful homes in different oases.

V.
I never left but I never stayed
I'm cleaning out the fuzz in my brain
Time and time again

Oh, it's time and time again

Waffles and smiles and dissatisfying answers. One AM, before anyone can understand what’s going on, but after the protection of our regular lives has gone home. You tell me something, and I struggle to hear what you’re saying, because the air is thick and you hesitate to be honest.

They finally got together, you inform me. Two hummingbirds conquering the night in their shimmery-teal armor, and have survived into the morning, and have accepted each other’s truths. You always see them together, humming the same songs. Can we share earbuds? So that you can listen to my thoughts. Piece through my rubble. Find a child cowering in a half-destroyed closet. A closet in a garden in a thunderstorm in the nighttime. It’s happening again, and childhood is seeping back into the cracks of our redwood-protected campus-kingdom. You’ve learned nothing at all.

VI.
I’ve learned nothing at all.


Ariana Duckett is a British-born writer and editor studying creative writing in Southern California. She has been published in Lunch Ticket, Rainbow Poems, and Manuscription Magazine, was a poetry editor for Wingless Dreamer Publisher and is a current staff writer for Fulminare Review. Her other interests include astronomy, listening to music and ice skating.
Back to: Issue Seven
Next: Daniel Liu
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火

9/26/2022

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By Daniel Liu

Prose Winner of the Inaugural Surging Tide Summer Contest
​Selected by Angie Sijun Lou

It was the summer that dead things came back to life. When his mother’s bridal gown surrendered to the smoke in Jing’s backyard, he wound up the film camera beneath his thumb and shot me in front of the fire. White lace folded in the heat. Midnight grasshoppers sang in the undergrowth. He took another picture, this time of the scalloped sweetheart neckline alone crumpling into the breeze. Jing promised me that what he was doing wasn’t wrong, that what remained of his mother’s charmeuse satin in the thick air was about creation, not vengeance, that if he could make new art from this burning garment then it was worth it, and I believed him because he had a toothy grin that unwrapped itself over neat rows of lawn, because I was a boy with too few friends, because I was seventeen.

When his mother was seventeen, she had bought the dress in a thrift store in Sunset Park. She told me this once over a pitcher of sweet tea with ginger, that it had been a soft ochre before it was dry-cleaned and renewed and worn on her wedding day. Her voice was shrill and unbearable, the kind that wilted peonies and scared away dogs, unlike her son’s, which was careful and earthly.

Jing smiled brightly at the pyre. The reason he set fire to her wedding dress was not that he hated his mother but instead, he told me, because he was determined to make art. On the stark white walls of his bedroom upstairs, there were dozens of sets of photographs, each having an image entrapping an object and another image with its smoldering remains.

Sometimes they were his own, a childhood train, a novel he had never read. Three of the sets were objects of mine, a deflated soccer ball, a pair of white socks, a copy of a magazine. Since I always ended up witnessing the fiery ritual anyway and didn’t have much besides the object itself to lose, I thought it might as well have been something of mine that he burned, something that I had a memory of. But memory didn’t work in this way. Memory created its own hurts and contours, its own body. I imagined Jing’s mother knew this, always threatening to break his 35mm SLR camera. I imagined she was afraid of what it could capture: her fingers around a green bottle, the purple marks I had seen before on Jing.

On the trimmed grass, he stretched his long arms and turned his head toward me. His dimples were in full display, despite how the only light remaining was from inside the house, now that the gasoline-stained liturgy had gone out. His hands fell to his sides. The heavy heads of the flowers in his mother’s garden beds arched back into the soil it stemmed from. Everything was heavier when it was alive.

I followed him as he took a seat on the patio floor right next to the garden table and chair. From his pocket, he pulled out the lighter he had used on the wedding dress and also a pack of Marlboros that we had stolen from the gas station by a Buddhist temple his mother frequented. I didn’t smoke, only he did, but I took one anyway, because I was seventeen, and lit the white tip. He looked at me disparagingly. Sorry, I said. That I grabbed one. That I can’t do more to help you.

He didn’t move. Instead, he pointed out gently that I had lit the wrong end. I gave the lighter back to him and tossed the failed attempt to the ground and crushed it under my shoe. The shadows we made looked bruised, hazy by the bamboo shades that separated what was outside and the warm house, too amorphous to be ours.

He closed his fist around the pocket lighter, strangled the plastic. He brought his knees up to his chin. There was a mole there, and I had joked before that his mole was like a navigational star, and that if he followed it, maybe it would take him to his real mother. He had kept a stone face then and I didn’t really understand the gravity of what I said, only speaking what had crossed my mind. I had never seen him cry, but I imagined on that night that he did, even going as far as to think about his mother crying too on the other side of his always-locked bedroom door, two wails an inch apart and still full of distance. The day after, when he picked me up in his gray sedan, I told him the part where I felt guilty and where I was sorry, and he smiled it off and gripped the steering wheel tighter, the faux leather already coming off.

Now on the cold stone floor, where he sat in front of me, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and held it loosely, and I placed my hand on his torso where there was a tattoo of an animal, or an idea, or a man. He didn’t care for permanent things, he had told me this before. He had expected things to fall apart. But there, on the flagstone paving, he admitted to this one attempt at perseverance, something he made that no one could ever take away from him, something that would always stay and could not stop loving him, could not throw plates at him, could not die in an accident, could not become a cut-out space on a family portrait, could not change, could not break, could not leave him, even if this permanent thing was on his own skin.

He climbed over me and kissed my forehead. It was the end of June, and I didn’t know a name for myself then, only a brief mindless word the world had associated with me, but now, with him renaming me, releasing me, I could answer him calling out to me. He stepped back and let his hand hover over the shutter release of his camera. This time, as he shot me, there was no fire involved, only a bright flash.
***
That spring, I didn’t cry and spent the morning talking to his mother. I let her yell at me and scream and kneel and weep and do all the things you do when there’s nobody to blame for all the stifling smoke burying your desires in a sweetened mess of ash. When he was cremated, his mother gave me his photos. How the soft reds blended into the landscape, the grainy details making out the figures of all the things we owned, or thought we owned, or had cared for. How all his pictures ended in a soft pile of embers.

And maybe he was right. That making something needed the past to burn up and fade into nothing and he understood this in his art, that all memory was just the aftermath, the great quivering silhouette of a wave crashing into the shore, the briefest division of time that we could have spent on this earth.

But the fire remembered too, didn’t it? Tracing all the things it destroyed, or created. My lips in the picture hung like a body, spelled out empty, or vessel, or all the things I couldn’t keep dead.

Daniel Liu is an American writer. The author of COMRADE (fifth wheel press 2022), his work appears in The Adroit Journal and Diode. He has received awards from the Pulitzer Center, YoungArts, the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, Columbia College Chicago, Bennington College, the Adroit Prizes for Poetry and Prose, and others. You can find his work at daniel-liu.carrd.co
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have you eaten rice yet?

6/8/2022

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by Christoph Grosse

A strong, young man cannot develop on white rice and soy sauce alone. In response to my picky eating as a child, my mother once hid a bit of cod in congee she made for lunch, sneaking some nutritional value into my diet. At least the way I liked it, congee was still technically white rice with soy sauce. The fish blended with the broken rice porridge, and I finished my bowl of jūk none the wiser, my aunt Lily and my mother exchanging a conniving look as I did. I asked them if they were hiding something. Upon learning that I had just eaten fish (which was supposedly "good for me") I gagged in a fit of melodramatic trauma. 

On paper, we’ve no familial relation, but the intense friendship between Auntie Lily and my parents could be blood. One could consider her my godmother were we a non-secular family. Her family hails from Fuzhou, my mother’s from Guangdong; Lily grew up south of both provinces in Hong Kong. In the mid-20th century, both families immigrated to Manhattan's Chinatown, settling down between the shadows of the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. She found a fast friend in my mother, Lucy, a woman who shared her conviction, empathy, and stalwart work ethic. They remain close, all these decades later.

Auntie Lily is astute, unconquerable, and assertive. Her dark eyes are always fixed upon you in conversation, formulating a poignant and well-forged response to what you have to say. She’s the first to tell me when she doesn’t think we’d have a good time at a restaurant that I’ve found on social media, and even quicker to steer us in the right direction. “I’ve had better,” she’ll say. “There’s a place down Grand Street that I prefer. Don’t forget cash.” We’ll transition from trendy Malaysian fusion to nyonya’s rich, red Laksa in a heartbeat. I almost always forget cash. She almost always picks up the bill. 

It’s a big, scary, edible world out there, and I grew up in a central position of a cultural compass rose. East and West coalesced in my family kitchen, two distinct cuisines attempting to find common ground in the mind of a mixed kid. Food is canon in both Chinese and German culture - the former sees folk greeting each other with “have you eaten rice yet?” (“Ni chī fan le ma?” 你吃飯了吗?) - and my home dinner table hosted a confluence of both. Despite these tastes of Canton and Bavaria available to me, I consumed primarily white rice with soy sauce. If I was feeling adventurous, I’d sprinkle on some Maggi Fondor, a German all-purpose seasoning salt of dehydrated herbs, onion, garlic powder, and, most importantly, MSG. A potent sodium-laden umami mix of both my cultures - the staple cereal grain of the Chinese, with industrialized German inflection. An infelicitous Frankenstein’s monster of a meal, with none of his brawn.

Humble white rice is an accompaniment to many a dinner table but rarely serves as a meal in and of itself. As a child, this felt like a table I wasn’t Chinese nor German enough to sit at so I grazed from the sidelines. The most surface-level Cantonese foods made up my plate at my mother’s dinner table - rice, pastries, and sweet-sticky charsiu pork. My father’s - Käsespätzle, schnitzel, Wurst, and Bratkartoffeln spiked with caraway seeds (which he used in most everything he’d cook). These Bavarian dinners were closer to the American fast food I saw my friends eating. They were easier for my mind to swallow than the dishes my mother’s sisters would prepare for our family gatherings, like pearlescent, sweet tapioca soup (sai mai lo, 西米露), or sticky rice folded in lotus-leaf (laap may lo mai fan, 臘味糯米飯) like so many presents I left unwrapped on the table.

I benched myself on the sidelines of Chinese cuisine. Meals were cause for dissonance; choosing to eat only one thing helped to quell these feelings of push and pull. In a study published in the National Library of Medicine, researchers found that "biracial individuals are able to switch between their two racial identities, suggesting that they are more sensitive to social context than their monoracial peers." Those of mixed descent may recognize the image of a bifurcated home dinner table. Laura Wolfgang, lead product manager at Food52, discussed the dichotomous diet of Filipino and American food in her childhood home:

“I have been torn between the Filipino side and the white side of my family for as long as I remember. I never really identified with either side. I don’t really look like either of my parents. I don’t look like any of their family. I feel like I’ve lived a life without a real identity that I can trace back through my lineage.”

Now, during our regular catch-ups over breakfast (usually close to her home in Two Bridges), she imparts lucid advice and lived wisdom, oftentimes extending further than our dim sum table, and out to our friends and family. These rendezvous are a study in phenomenology, as we dig deep into the motivations and struggles of those closest to us, to better understand our own experiences. 

Lily has known my family a great deal longer than I have. She holds a boon of rich historical context with a raw and uncut view of this family she has chosen. Her observations are objective and fair, expanding my understanding of my loved ones. Over lunch, we’ll explore the experiences of my sister, Caitlin, in her decision to pursue a teaching degree, or of my mother, whose conscientiousness and penchant for altruism drive her forever-full social work schedule.
We round out our understanding of our loved ones while slurping hot broth out of our soup dumplings (xiaolongbao, 小笼包) at our favorite Shanghainese spot. There’s always white rice at the table, but only as an accompaniment to more substantial dishes. 

We almost always walk to get something sweet after our meal. Usually, that’s a pastry from a Chinese bakery of her recommendation. I defer to Lily, knowing my position relative to her. She is a sage and pillar of her community, and I am a pursuant disciple. Despite my best efforts, I haven’t yet been able to pay her for any of the flaky, semi-sweet egg custard tarts (daan taat, 蛋挞, a favorite of mine) she’s treated me to. Lily bolsters my nascent knowledge of Chinese culture during these encounters. Whether it’s the food, the topic of conversation, or the streets we walk down as we digest, I am wholly privy to the cultural identity we share. As she points out various details about Chinatown and its inhabitants, I absorb and internalize them with gratitude. 

I wasn’t always this receptive. As a child, I resented my Chinese culture. The “small penis” and “dog-eating” jokes started as soon as a group of fellow high school students saw mom drop me off one morning, her jet black hair and almond eyes invoking wanton ostracism. Rather than defend my mother, I shirked my heritage. I longed to tap into my cultural heritage but felt it inaccessible and at odds with the social hierarchy I found myself in.

The dissonance of my childhood diet was a symptom of my “third culture kid” status - a term I discovered recently and was quick to append to myself. The term refers to individuals who are raised in a culture other than their parents or their country of nationality. In general, they are exposed to a wider variety of cultural influences than those who grow up in monocultural settings. My childhood was peppered with monthly trips to Manhattan's Chinatown, my mother's childhood home, and Bavaria, my father's, maintaining a cultural connection for my sister and me (and, in many ways, for my mother and father as well). I never got to meet my maternal grandparents. My parents decided that we would be better off communicating with our living Opa and Oma in Germany. My sister and I spent our Saturdays attending German school as our cousins learned Cantonese or Mandarin. 

UNT Department of Psychology researchers examined the relationship between a child's cross-cultural experience and their adult identity. They found that developing "a sense of belonging, commitment, and attachment to a culture" can be difficult for third culture kids (TCKs). These factors play a strong role in one’s self-esteem and identity, as strong identification with a group helps to maintain one’s sense of belonging. 

When I moved to New York City after college graduation, Lily showed me which hawker off Canal Street sold the best quality oranges. She let me in on where I could find fresh soy milk if I woke up early enough to get in line before the aunties selling were fresh out. My appreciation for my heritage blossomed, as did a wave of self-directed anger and guilt. There’s an impossible gnawing hunger that stems from stifling one’s true identity. As I learned more about my family history, I lamented the time I’d spent starving myself of my ancestral heritage.

The pendulum swung and I sped toward a culture I’d spent my childhood years hiding from, with food as my exploratory vehicle. I scoured the streets of Chinatown, looking for the best beef chow fun (gon chow ngau ho, 乾炒牛河) a mainstay dish always present during my family gatherings featuring wide noodles, tender vegetables, and meat piled high, coated in soy oyster-spiked sauce and kissed with wok hei. I spent my Saturdays eating my way down Mott Street with Auntie Lily. I bought myself as many egg tarts as I could stomach. I still felt like something was missing.  

One of the challenges of being a TCK is developing a rooted sense of belonging, adeptness, and commitment to their culture. I felt wistful when I was unable to join my aunties as they poked fun at my uncles in Cantonese. I found difficulty navigating the menu at Cantonese restaurants I once visited with family, only this time solo and out of my depth. I felt that without almond eyes and jet-black hair like Lily, like my mother, I could never be Chinese enough. I began to ink my body with Chinese iconography. Symbols collected so that I may tout my heritage on my skin and on my sleeve; compensatory in nature, but self-affirming in the way they allow me to be perceived. My mom thinks they are silly - I’d wager Auntie Lily does too.

After so many lunches with Lily, and walks with my mother around her childhood home, I came to realize that neither ink nor jewelry could prove my cultural heritage. I had always been presented with the abundance of two cultures, neither of which ever felt easy to wholly commit to. I’ve leaned into this abundance, finding comfort in an ever-expanding biracial identity and diet. Now, alongside my white rice are mounds of boiled fragrant tripe, salty-sweet gelatinous chicken feet, fish balls bobbing in broth, and soups of winter melon.
​

I wish I could take my younger self to Chinatown now, and show him all that I’ve learned about us. I’d bring him to lunch with Lily. I’d buy him an egg tart, and point out those details about his mother’s childhood home that I’ve learned from her. He might start to feel proud of our mixed identity as Auntie Lily takes him by the hand as we walk down Henry Street. We would show him how good the cheung fun is at Sun Hing Lung, because somebody’s got to let that kid know there’s more to eat out here than white rice with soy sauce.

From the author: I don’t support the current Chinese state, their systematic oppression of free speech, state surveillance, the genocide of Uyghur peoples, the shunning of Taiwan, and many other injustices. But I, as well as many of my family members, have tried to untangle our pride in our ancestral heritage from politics.

Christoph Grosse is a writer-by-night and advertiser-by-day based in Brooklyn, NY. He is passionate about sustainability, hospitality, and generally cultivating a more hospitable world. His written work explores the intersection of food, climate justice, and his Cantonese-German heritage. 
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THE MIDDAY RAIN

6/8/2022

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by Lucas Rucchin

Forte’s was a place where the rain liked to hide, which was a strange characteristic because the restaurant featured all the standard constituents of a building, including, though not limited to, walls with good posture, a set of double doors with rousing glass patterns, and a roof on which dozed an apartment complex that had no problems with rain. Somewhere the rain hummed, taunting them at every candlelit table. 
        Monday to Saturday, three to eight, Jones and Laurier would step onto the black makeshift stage at Forte’s without catching an eye. Jones would ready himself at the forefront, breathe in, out, let smoke trail and stream from the brass kissing his mouth; Laurier, placing himself at the bench with a back as straight as the keys before him, would dive into the silent orchards of his mind and sit there while his hands did the work. Their sounds warmed the air. They were invisible like the rain. 
        “Crowds this quiet back where you’re from?” Jones would mutter between his glazing impromptus. Laurier would not respond. He could speak English, but he was always sleeping as he played. It was only backstage that Laurier tended his partner’s thoughts: “Only if the food was good.” 
        So Jones set his blame on the chef, even if he was sweet as they come, his desserts sweeter. During his breaks, the chef would listen to their songs if the nearest table was unoccupied. “Lovely work, gentlemen. You keep my waiters so well-behaved. Like a lullaby.” He would laugh a hearty laugh while holding a few coins in his open hand. 
        The money was meant to be offered to them both, but Jones would scoop the donations all into his pocket at the end of his next phrase. “You’re so kind, West. Keep it up in the kitchen.” And then the brass was back on his lips and the smoke was purling. 
        On one rainy day, midday, like every day, the chef arrived not by himself but with another, a suited man, pacing to the black platform together to the rhythm of Jones’s brass bawls. 
        “That’s him?” the suited man spoke in the chef’s ear. The chef nodded. Laurier paid him no interest, but Jones recognized recognition and all its forms. The man beckoned at him to continue. Then this was someone of value, someone who enjoyed tasting his music, chewing and living, feeling it tingle his throat. The man began a light clap as they finished. 
        At the end of his work day—eight o’clock, the time when street-lamps had long replaced the sun—Jones found the man lingering by his car. He was holding an umbrella and he did not look real. The sidewalks and the buildings and the roaming headlights on the street were mirages in the evening rain, but this man was etched so clearly in his eyes, acrylic on watercolour. Laurier had caught a wandering cab and vanished in the grey. He was after Jones and Jones only. 
        The man spoke in a trombone’s croaky tones. “Forte’s. It’s nice. They know what they’re doing. Great clams. Met the owner a few years back. He has a nice wine cellar.” 
    Jones blinked. He could feel every droplet that merged with the fabric of his clothes. Somewhere on the street, a curbside current was strangling an empty soda can. 
        “How do you like it here? Not the food, I mean.” His fingers played around the handle of his umbrella. “You know.” 
        Jones knew. “It’s all right. The pianist’s fun to have around.” 
        “Is that all?” 
        “There’s some freedom. People spend more time looking at their spoons than our gig. Forte rarely visits and the chef will hear whatever. So the set-list’s in our hands.” 
        The man’s chin lifted. Maybe the rain had tampered with Jones’s eyes: he could not see the man’s face as it was hoisted into the streetlight. “You’re a nobody in there.” 
        “Excuse me?” 
        “You saw me. West and I were the only ones watching. You don’t belong in a place like this, sitting in the background. You’re out of your element. You want more.” To lighten the package, he tacked on: “Don’t you?” 
        Jones felt as if this man was reaching around in his inmost thoughts. He did not respond. He let the rain speak for him. 
        “I’m offering you something. The Wayne Floor needs a new lead. Twelve to six, Monday to Saturday. Better hours, better pay. More eyes.” The suited man gave Jones no time to think. “If you want to think more than spoons, you know where.” 
        Jones knew. He knew all throughout the drive home and the hours he spent awake, staring at the ceiling of his dusty, often creaky, studio apartment. He knew that acceptance would mean leaving the black platform in the corner of Forte’s where no one seemed to look, for good. He made himself breakfast in the morning.  
        Jones found Laurier already at the piano bench as he entered Forte’s the following afternoon, like every afternoon. In the absence of customers, Laurier’s solitary chords and licks would ring warmful through the carpeted aisles. But this morning, he only sat, eyes locked on the charts. Jones could hear the whispers of the candles.
        The makeshift stage leaned slightly as Jones stepped onto it, settled down his case. “Bloom Times?” A quick test of the valves, the shuffling of crinkled sheet music, then the rubbing of brass as the mouthpiece was inserted into the leadpipe. “It’s a day for Bloom Times. We’ll figure it out from there.” 
        Laurier would normally begin drawing out the chords of the specified song. He did not this morning. His hands had fallen slack onto the keys; his dress pants seemed a deeper grey today, fusing with the cushions of the piano bench. 
        Jones stood. “Hey. I know each day feels no different than the rest. But I need a pianist.” 
        Then the pianist looked at him, no longer in that sleepy dream-state that he harnessed on the bench. He was crying. That was not good. At least it was the quiet kind, the kind that spared the shaking hands and mouth but caused the eyes to flood still. 
        “That’s wonderful,” Laurier said. “That’s really wonderful.” His English was perfect, tinted slightly by those parisian silks, a sublime snake song. Then Laurier was grinning and crying, two phenomenons that Jones could’ve never imagined on the pianist’s face. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Thank you for the reminder. This job needs me, doesn’t it? It does.” 
        Jones resisted toying with the third valve slide of his instrument; that would ruin the mood. He was no therapist, but he’d comforted a few troubled unwanted auditionees in his time, to moderate effect. “Are you all right, man?” 
        “Ah, it’s nothing.” Laurier fished out a tissue from his pocket. He was slowly coiling back to normal: straight back like piano keys, sleepy eyes that could see through smoke. “It’s nothing. My wife’s not well, you see. I’m not needed at the hospital, apparently—nope, they’ll take care of her just fine, as they say. They don’t need me to be there!” A quick and reviving breath. “But hey. I’m needed here. That’s good, isn’t it? Keeps my mind off of it. Our playing—it helps both them and I, you know?” 
        Jones knew, as well as his apartment, which seemed extra dusty that evening. 

*****

He held several lengthy conferences with himself during his morning commute to Forte’s. “He’s another man. He has his own goals, responsibilities. His life isn’t ours. Our life isn’t his. He has a wife, and we don’t. But that’s a personal choice. We don’t need someone else in our life. No—that would interfere with our goals. He has different goals, which is why he chose to pursue a relationship. We could get one if we wanted, of course. But we don’t want to. His wife—” Jones’s pointer and middle and ring finger tapped across his steering-wheel, patterning a chromatic scale to a double C. “He has a wife, and that comes with its own problems. Sickness, for example. Cancer, if we want to get dramatic. But that passes. It all passes. The Wayne Floor will pass. We don’t want that. We want to reach our goals. We’ve been at Forte’s for far too long. It’s time to move on.” And then he was back here, this concrete decision. And then he was conferring with himself again, strucken by his own words. “Another man.  .  .” 
        Forte’s was back to normal this morning. An euphony of passionate diatonics roamed the aisles. 
        “Good morning,” said the pianist. He’d never said good morning. “Little Sunflower. What do you think?” He’d never suggested songs. Such was Jones’s obligation. 
        “All well. You’re lively today.” 
        “Yes. She’s feeling much better. A miracle, really. The doctor has no words to describe it. A miracle.” Laurier was terrifyingly awake. “Come, let’s begin early. I find it easier to hear my playing when nobody is here. We’ll play well today. I know so.” 
        Jones felt his lungs smothered beneath his feet. “There’s something you need to know.” 
        “Something I need to know?” 
        “Today will be my last day at Forte’s. I’m moving on to play someplace new. The Wayne Floor.”
        Whispering, gossiping candles.

*****

When the suited man had said “more eyes”, Jones had not anticipated the well-dressed smudges gathered beyond the curtain, seated in the golden candlelight unblinking, hands placed on the circular, white-clothed table around which they gathered, all turned towards the stage like mannequins. The Wayne Floor took root in the expensive west of the city, and with expense trailed expectation. So did this audience expect, silently, in the straightness of their backs, in the smoothness of their clothes. 
        Sounding on the stage were some shifting Argentinian tangos. The guitarist and the flutist played well, and they pleased the expectations. Jones’s ensemble would play next, and they were all hoping that they could accomplish what those on stage were accomplishing now. They were fine, but they were not Laurier. They could play, but they could not slip into the fragile sub-space between wakefulness and slumber where magnificent ideas paraded and could only be incarnated by the most inflamed of minds, like Laurier on the bench at Forte’s. 
        Clapping; so the guitarist and the flutist bowed and fled and Jones’s ensemble took their place. All the eyes turned, and all the turning eyes were felt by Jones, on his neck and on his hands, in ice-cold tingles. Then the saxophonist sent out ripping silk, the drummer sifted his kit to texture the air with soft sand, and the walls became very near.
        Jones readied himself at the forefront, breathed in, breathed out. But before smoke could start streaming from the brass kissing his mouth, he looked into the audience, and saw Laurier seated in the closest table, watching. Jones stumbled. A falling haze hurried his heart. Jones looked away, pushed his gaze into the depths of the audience, readied his instrument again. But Laurier resided there as well, watching. So Jones’s eyes hid behind the backs of his ensemble, but there he saw Laurier’s upright pose, his slim-fit attire, at every seat in the limelight. 
        Four bars passed, six, eight. The trombonist leapt into form to fill the missing melody. 
    
*****

For one, please. The doorkeeper was partially thinking of the man’s words, where to place him between the many four-partied and two-partied tables, as well as his familiarity. The latter thought dissolved a moment later. How many single, moderately dressed men with blurry eyes had she seen through all those months here? She reached beneath the guest-list, retrieved a single dinner menu, and led the customer through the aisles. 
        The doorkeeper beckoned towards an unused booth, fit between two other groups of four. The customer paused, looked elsewhere, then asked if he could be placed in the table nearest the piano. The doorkeeper nodded. As they moved, the pianist’s modest playing arrived in their ears, fully defined when they reached the table. The pianist said, This one is dedicated to the health of my wife, to no one in particular. Though the doorkeeper had not led customers into this corner for some time, she felt that something was missing. 
        The doorkeeper asked if regular water was fine, or if a sparkling beverage would be more to his liking. The customer did not respond. Instead, his attention was directed towards the pianist, who was nearing the end of his performance. The doorkeeper asked the same question again. She was met with the same. How many moderately dressed, jumpy, talkless men had she seen? Not many. 
        The pianist finished his piece. A loud clapping resounded about the aisles, the work of a single pair of hands. That customer was on his feet, applauding with a full crowd’s bravado, and the doorkeeper felt her hands come together, apart, together again in rhythm, and the rest of the restaurant yielded to this impulse as well, from those seated on the high-stools of the bar to the parties housed within the booths to the couples warmed by the candlelight near the windows. 
        The pianist’s head turned towards the talkless customer. It stayed in this position for a long minute. There was something in the pianist’s eyes, but the doorkeeper could not discern it from her distance. The clapping was like rain. How many moderately dressed men had come in here and made the pianist smile? The doorkeeper really didn’t know anybody at all.

​

Lucas Rucchin is a grade ten student at West Point Grey Academy situated in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is an aspiring writer who enjoys prose grounded in reality and the human condition. Surging Tide Magazine is his first medium of publication. 
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QUIET TREES

6/8/2022

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by Lucas Rucchin

The painter has remained in this grove for six-hundred, thirty-seven days. He had journeyed here for inspiration, new colours to spur the muse, but was met with yet another crowd to please. If he can receive praise from the critics, surely he can cull the same from lowly trees? 

​The painter drinks praise like heady wine, chews it for years, as do the cattle of the Tiber plains chew on grass: the eyes around his works at the Museo Campano, the rows of waiting legs seeking his hand at the Galleria degli Uffizi—he swims in such things. This grove, however, with all its quiet greenery, has never spared his pieces a word. 

Every morning, the young artist sweeps the forest mire off his clothes, studies the foliage, the twining flora, the sturdy stalks of trees, and addresses them with the sun in his eye: “I promise,”—his left hand has already grasped and fondled the round-tipped brush, and his right, a pencil—“today, I will entertain you all.” 
So he perches the brush on his canvas and his dreams assume control of his limbs; the muse, now, graces him with a reverie, and handles his hands from strings in the clouds. The sun has nearly finished its arc across the sky when the painting is complete. This piece surpasses the one created yesterday. It is rotated for all to see. 

His voice echoes at dusk:  “Regard, trees. Another masterwork by Signore Demonte, who is so honoured to be in your patient presence. Likewise, you have the privilege of being in mine, for tirelessly over the breadth of two years have I worked to perfect my craft to your liking! I ask that you now fulfill this privilege, humbly so, by serving your duties as my watching audience.” 

The trees are quiet. Where are the enticed eyes, the polite claps, the arms folded in captivation? His pencil nearly breaks in his grip. “Well? Are you looking? Aren’t you pleased?” His gaze probes the motionless audience. Hours pass as he stands in anticipation, and anticipation turns the tone of his voice to thunder. “My mind has been emptied, my ideas exhausted to satisfy, and you daren’t speak at all? Have you really nothing for me, again?” 

The sky is dimming and the painter’s legs are begging for slumber. “Tomorrow! Tomorrow, you infernal trees--you will be forced to break your silence! I can see it already. . . my new piece. . . you won’t. . . you’ll have to see it. . . and—”
​

Demonte is being cradled by sleep. His work is tossed into an ever-swelling pile by the foot of one quiet tree. In his dreams, the trees have eyes, the flowers dance to his strokes, and he floats on the wind. The painter has remained in this grove for six-hundred, thirty-eight days.

Lucas Rucchin is a grade ten student at West Point Grey Academy situated in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is an aspiring writer who enjoys prose grounded in reality and the human condition. Surging Tide Magazine is his first medium of publication. 
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