Fiction

By Patience Williams

Silver stars twinkled in the black sky. No clouds blocked the view, and no streetlights hazed it over be-

cause the power just went out. The small girl with purple glasses was sequestered in her dark room, and wished

for a shooting star to fly across the twinkling sky. Something happened today that invaded her somehow, but she

couldn’t pinpoint why she felt that it made her sad and guilty. She heard her sister banging around in the kitchen

right as the loud, Latino music that had been pouring in from the loft above theirs suddenly stopped playing. A

siren sped past and the doorknob to her room jiggled a little, and then the door flew open. Her older sister Sa-

mantha stood there holding a mug steaming at the top, her legs lengthening out of little shorts and her stomach

exposed from a tight tank top. There was no air conditioning.

“Are you okay?” Samantha asked.

Someone laughed obnoxiously loud near the window. Gloria sighed, pushing her glasses up on the bridge of her

nose. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she answered.

“Okay. Do you want some tea?”

“Yeah.”

Her older sister sighed a little but, seeing that her younger sister was still watching her, smiled and

walked over. “Be careful, it’s hot.” She placed the mug down on her desk.

Samantha left and closed the door behind her. The power cut back on and the living room light illumi-

nated a dim yellow in the hallway. She turned into the kitchen and refilled the electric kettle and then went into

her room. He was sitting upright in bed, leaning against the wooden bedframe with the remote in his lap. Since

she arrived empty-handed, he made a small face but didn’t say anything because she saw his reaction. “I’m

making more,” she said. He leaned over to kiss her and hug her thigh.

“Are you hungry?” he asked her.

“No, are you?”

“No.”

He laughed. “No, I’m not! And what are we doing, huh? Are we watching tv? Talking?”

The kettle went off.

“I’ll be back,” she said. She poured two medium-sized mugs and dropped an earl grey tea bag into each.

In her bedroom, the small girl sipped her tea and contemplated the previous happenings of the day. She

was in class with her other classmates when she saw it—her teacher looked at her differently, and spoke to her

differently. She didn’t understand why and she was sure that she wasn’t supposed to notice this, and no one else

noticed it either. The thing that bothered her most was that this behavior wasn’t acknowledged, nor corrected—

the moment passed as though it never happened. And then she had smiled at something her teacher had said and

then her teacher said something to make her laugh and told the other kids how smart she was. The discomfort

lingered, and here she was, contemplating what it meant and why she couldn’t define this feeling that invaded

her, and that she couldn’t remove (it was sharp) nor forget about.

Gloria moved to the kitchen with her book because the kitchen light finally came on, and she didn’t want

to be alone much longer. Her sister came out and poured another steaming cup of tea.

“Can I pour milk into mine?” Gloria asked.

Samantha smiled. “Of course you can. You know that you can have as much milk as you want—you just

can’t have soda more than once a day.”

“I know. I just wanted to make sure I actually knew that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I’m tired but I’m too young to be.” As she exhaled, her sister’s boyfriend came into the

kitchen and drank from the tea Samantha just poured.

Gloria spoke again, with her eyes casted down and her glasses slipping slightly lower. “I don’t live in the

same world that they have us read about, or study, or dream for. I can feel the way they look at me—”

“Who?”

“Them. You know them—everyone who isn’t them is conscious of exactly them, of what they do. Sa-

“Yes!”

“But I don’t like how they look at me!” Gloria’s voice cracked some and her sister’s heart broke. “They

know so little of what they do and they have so many excuses for the things they don’t even know!”

Samantha and her boyfriend looked shyly at each other. Gloria was the smartest child they knew—even

smarter than most adults—and could not imagine how the inadequacy of everyone else might make her feel in-

ferior. He wrapped his arm around his girlfriend’s waist and rested his head on her shoulder, looking receptively

at the little girl.

“Keep talking, baby,” he said.

“Okay. It goes like this—

I have less than a split second to prove to someone that I’m not who they think I am or what they expect

me to be. And I can already tell by the moment they look at me that they have an expectation; I can read their

openness, but they can’t read mine. I take their judgments and assumptions of me they don’t realize they have—

or honestly don’t believe exists within them—and I talk to them about things that make them smile, that impress

them, that flatter them—and then, we leave each other and they feel good. This is because I’ve manipulated

their thoughts of me against themselves and I won the battle with their own perception.

“But why am I only 8 years old and could tell that my teacher sees me differently and that the world

wants me to prove my own humanity?”

Samantha was crying now, but she didn’t interject. Her boyfriend kissed her forehead and then gazed at

the little girl with moistened, light brown eyes. “God damn,” he whispered.

Gloria continued but she didn’t look at them. She entered her Dream State—funneling into a world in-

side of her that she could not explain—only loathe and remain quiet as it made her experience tiredness, heavi-

ness, and attention to everything around her that made her feel self-conscious and hollowly existent. “I feel

like I know something I’m not supposed to know,” she said in a low, crystallized tone. “Like it doesn’t actually

exist. I don’t know that it exists, but I feel it. They don’t look at me the same and from the moment they look at

me I have to prove that I’m human.”

“It’s starting to rain,” her boyfriend said quietly, disappearing from the kitchen and going back to the bedroom.

A window closed.

“I’m going to close the window in your bedroom,” Samantha said. Gloria nodded, but she could tell that

her older sister had gone someplace that she herself knew already.

Samantha’s own Dream State had grown to be a place of terror and solace, as well as a resting stop for pain.

This is where the emotions lay before she committed her unruliest actions or opened her mouth to say horrid

things against the people her sister was talking about. However, she was proud of how she carried the weight

and how it defined her. It gave her grace, a sense that she knew about different frequencies that other people did

not know existed. She also learned to combat her sadness with her culture, with the way she was taught how to

better herself and make herself happy. It was an amusement park of melancholy—she could choose which ride

would make her feel woozy with disgust or exhaustion, stare at the bright, hypnotic lights of her thoughts as

they channeled something new to her or something weary and dazed. A light shower released within her as she

went to close her sister’s window, muffling the thick sound of the silver rain falling heavy.

When she turned around, Gloria was standing in the doorway with her glasses crooked on her face as she

rubbed one of her eyes with the back of her hand. She knew from the way she stood that she had been crying.

“I know it hurts but you are going to learn about yourself and the ways of the world from how you feel,” her

older sister said. “There are many corrupt and hurtful things about this earth and the people on it, but as there

are many resources to harm ourselves, there are just as many to heal us.

“Use everything in your heart to guide you, to serve the goodness you wish came unconditionally and

without effort. You have to keep liking who you are because people are going to sense that. They already do,

and many are going to change how they act around you as you get older.”

The volume on the living room television increased enough for them to hear of a shooting from that

night, less than an hour ago. Her younger sister assumed that’s where the sirens were headed. The expression on

her face changed from upset to angry. “Okay, I’ll go to sleep now,” Gloria said abruptly. Her older sister nod-

ded and left the room, eager to crawl into her boyfriend’s arms and fall asleep. Her sadness had released her for

the night, and the small pouring that had lessened to a sparkling within her had yet to subside. The crystalized

do it with her sister, not while she was entering a deeper dimension of her State. She left the room and closed

the door behind her.

The little girl watched the rain pour on the outside of her windowpane and bleed down the front. She

could still see the moon, but it was blurry now. “Dear God,” she whispered in prayer, “Please pray for all the

black bodies that will flood tonight.”

Nonfiction