ROMAN HOLIDAY

By Sarah Feng

Here, girls don’t die.

Instead, they rise swiftly to burning cities, where swooning swans sail into moats filled with floating trout bellies and glistening oil. These girls dance with steps that hardly step, waltzing slowly, their cherry seersucker blouses rippling on the clotheslines.

Wanting to touch their best friends. Wanting to touch. That desire rashed with black bees, remembrances of the station splashed with ice in the winter. Curtains.

Then a white net closes over the sky, and static emerges from every speck of space, pouring out in feather-white sludge. Pain sears through the cup of my kneecap and swarms over the nuts of my spine.

When my eyes jerk open, sweat dried in tendrils down my neck, my fingers twitching in the shape of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” on the table, I see the crooked painting on the opposite wall. It’s an old knockoff of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, the cheap swirls of chalk reduced to powdery black detritus by time. Then I glance around: I’m spread-eagled on a sagging green couch, my palms flat on a table cluttered with overturned books and transparent bags of potato chips. My takeout order nods at me, askew on the springs of its metal box.

After turning off my alarm, I peel open my wristport, slide back the flinty mesh, and dig out the empty battery with the edges of my nails. The valve that connects it to my bloodstream sparks, a flish-flash of energy popping in a ribbon of noise. When I hold the battery up to the light, the last drops of limestone-silver liquid swish in the glass capsule. I tuck it away in my jacket pocket.

Clair de Lune. I haven’t played that in a long time. Years ago, it was ingrained in my muscles like nothing else, an instinct second only to sleep.

Sometimes, when I go under to the Vitruvius, my physical body starts doing things that I don’t expect. Last week I found myself sitting at the little electronic piano with my hands splayed over the gummy keys, clammed to the sharps and flats. Unmoving. I woke up like that, a fever shivering through me into the silent beast of the instrument. *

On the morning train, Father’s glasses are smashed into his face, and for days, he is unfeeling of pain he cannot see. One week, then two–– he limps through the menageries of passing streets, holding searchlights to parse movement from sound.

This the girls think of, seeing dolphins leap in ironed cages. Curtains.

The static shudders through the scene in torrents of seagull-corpse white. I open my eyes, stare at Starry Night, watch the yolk-bright moons palpitate under the canvas’s see-through tarp. This time, my hands are quiet. I sit up. Wipe my mouth.

The day that Father smashed his glasses in the train station, Mother and I watched him enter the doorway with one long, puckered cut splitting his proud, high forehead. He set his briefcase down and poured himself a tall glass of exquisitely malted milk. Then he drank. Bower scurried around his ankles in possessive circles, beady black eyes viciously daring Mother and me to approach. While I distracted our dog with halfhearted chew-toy throws in the backyard, Mother gauzed Father’s forehead and took his shirt to the dry-cleaner’s. Later, at the dinner table, he told us he couldn’t feel the cut. It was bandaged, but we could see splotches of red on the white cotton. There were orchids standing in the center of the table, drooped over at the stem, like wrists, corseted in skinny glass vases, and long thick rolls of fabric everywhere we stepped: the Persian rug on the floor, the Italian leather sofa Mother ordered last year. Apples lay bruised and heavy on a glass plate.

The next day, June and I found a pane of dead flowers behind her house. Hidden underneath the shock of chemical-yellow daffodils that bathed her backyard, we discovered a flat bed of scrunched orange buds, like a heat-fried reef of clementine peels. They were rotting. I remembered the coin of red on Father’s skin and backed away slowly, June scrambling to follow.

I haven’t thought of Father since––

I don’t know. I hold my left wrist with my fingers until it stops trembling and throw down half of a Xanax. Outside, a bomb lands––not a bomb, but a mountain beginning to collapse in the distance. *

As I’m driving to work, I pass by a cathedral, its grey, wrinkled spires darkening to the hollow black of a gargoyle’s throat. Milky faces float to the windows, throwing back the desert’s light from behind ironlocked doors and triple-barred eyeholes. I catch a peek through the open door. Inside is a feast grander than I have ever seen, piled high with rich platters of gravy and turkey, with parents dressed in lace and resined jewelry, their silvery laughs floating high above the heat and the babble of children’s bells.

The sounds hit me in wispy white breaths, vibrating above the shimmering waves of humidity that coat the melting asphalt. Then I realize: this is the cathedral that I went to every Sunday morning as a child, proud and safe in my blue crinoline dress, the one time of the week I would never see June Liu. But I would always think of her, buried in the pews and the mothy smell of old books, kicking my shoes away as the pastor spoke, wanting to scream into the empty buttressed ceilings of the eyeless church. They must be having a service right now, offering the children wicker baskets of round pears and honeycombed sprigs of grapes, clean as a rope of milk spilled into a metal bowl.

I stop at a red light and glance back. The shadows have shifted.

I have never seen that cathedral before. It must be the Vitruvius: it’s penetrating my conscious, sending ripples of obsession down the hallways of my mind.

At lunchtime, the curtains are drawn, and my coworkers appear under weak, watery stage-lights, separating wedges of glistening avian hearts on the chopping board. Not bird’s organs, but margarine, though just as satiny and clean. As if preparing for a family dinner, my coworkers lance through the butter, bread, tomatoes, and lettuce with bony, clicking knives.

While the paralegals study their whiteboards, scribbling on the diagram of the latest product we are defending, the new interns stare through the full-length windows at the scenery of the parched crater outside, where Lake Proserpine once was. Our new shipment of RespiraQuil inserts arrived from corporate last week, and the interns are still struggling with the thorny sensation of the calcified net in their throats, coughing lightly every few minutes, and still marveling at the purling stripes of air conditioning that hover in fluted blue bands against the shivering heat.

Lucy, our secretary, hands me a crinkled paper bag, colored mossy by the light and labeled with a hasty POPPY. This is my daily Care Pack, and inside I find a plastic bottle of water, two half-melted Snickers, and a single page of the New York Times, with a Post-it note reading, Team bonding! Find the

ART CLASS KATHERINE CHUI

person with the other half of your story.

When Lucy turns to boil tea, her black ponytail falls in a twist. The sheathed column of her spine flares and falls until it dips under her blouse.

When I look up, the curtains pulse red as the back of a gelatinous eye. I heave to the bathroom, vomit a coppery pelt into the toilet. At the sink, I thrust my hands under the stream and scrape at the cracked, marbled rash, some parasite seersuckering my skin in scarlet stripes.

When I return, dizzied from the raw rush of water, someone taps me on the shoulder and asks what I’m doing. I look down. My fingers are playing “Clair de Lune.”

*

“Break in five,” calls our boss. We rustle to our seats from our loitering by the coffee bar and plug in our Vitruvius nodes, one coin-shaped patch tucked into either side of our mouths. Staring at my nickel-colored nodes in my palm, I discard them back in their plastic box and drop them into my backpack.

I watch everyone go under. My coworkers first re-charge the manmade vein which runs through our bodies, gently nudging AA-packs into their wristports until they hear soft click-pops of the batteries settling into sockets. Sandra from accounting, who is diabetic, slips a star-shaped blue pill into the bottom of her gums before she begins. As my coworkers slump back in their chairs, their expressions slowly relax into summering, static bliss, but some chemical oscillation shocks their faces into brief quivers every minute, like a Roman statue awakening out of its slumber for just a fleeting, profound moment. They’ll see different scenes in their mindrooms––the area of the brain that the Vitruvius projects its moving film on, extracting actors and scenes from our amygdalas––but their faces will hum and shudder in synchronization.

Then I fumble my Vitruvius out of my bag and plug myself in, leaning back in my chair.

Vision crystallizes. Dark lobes rise, breaking the smooth seal of water. As if punctured by bullets, they self-chisel in jerky, sagging motions to match the shapes of buildings, growing dense and crowberry-black like trees. A drawbridge forms. Turrets rise.

The girls are dancing slowly through the streets in petticoated pairs, their pale foreheads lopped with shiny coils of hair. Taxis purr through the cobbled streets, ferrying them to the gate of a zoo. Curtains.

In the whaled chamber of the gabled house, Father’s searchlight pierces the room. June and the girl drop their cigarettes and stiffen under the gaseous, pulverized dust. Father’s feet scuffle along the floor with a regular two-four beat, knocking into a blouse, the color of mouths––June’s. He brings the leather-bound edition of the New Testament and splays it with a bullet-crippled hand. He pushes in the baby grand piano, an ivory-toothed animal gurgling low, melancholy notes from the crevasse of its muscled backside. June, with her large, foreigner’s eyes and spidery Oriental limbs, sits forward like a pupil in a classroom. Poised for recital, she plays Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” Curtains.

June and the girl flee down the stairs. Amongst the other girls at the zoo, they pass through corridors of taxidermy, where stuffed bats, black rams, and monkeys are lined up in plastic jungles. Finally, the caged dolphins leap in synchronized formations, diving through the manmade, ammonia sea.

What are animals, if not perfect Vitruvian figures to fill the wingspan of a dream?

Someone says this. The heads of all the girls turn. Their eyes meet mine.

Curtains.

Mercury-grey debris rolls over my vision in a heavy fog, and I wake, a high-pitched throb needling through my right ear.

Those gazes––the actors are not supposed to do that, to look at the audience, to connect obverse-reverse, to whet their bodies into coiled predators. Wide-eyed steeples. Before, they were only distanced soldiers, parading across my mind, just blurs of time and color, always have been, since the first time I went under, but this time I felt the seconds trudge forward, heard the images beat thickly on heavy wings, sensed the forceful tick-tick of a prairie rodent alert in the dark, glowing under iridescent leaves.

I spit the nodes out into my hand, steam curling off in ash-grey filaments. They twinkle innocently, like a pair of closed lids.

The seat next to mine is empty. When I find the window where my cubicle-mate is crouched and see the throng of people gathered at the foot of our building, a chalky thunder rattles through the floor and deepens into a throaty groan. The crater of Lake Proserpine––desiccated and sunken, bullfinch-red, nearly a hundred meters in diameter––is caving into the ground. Most of my coworkers, who returned from their break to type at their computers, gather around us the ledge. Surreally, we witness the earth separate into wobbling slabs, two pieces in the center sliding into the cavernous darkness with a sigh of dust. We shed our binders and printouts to rush down the elevator, pouring out from the building’s entrance, watching the little houses that line the crater’s outer edge topple in slow-motion, like plastic Monopoly figurines being swept to the ground by a bitter toddler.

The crowd of people surrounds us, clutching teddy-bears and overflowing suitcases.

“What’s happening?” whispers Lucy, the secretary, still groggy like the rest of us. She covers her mouth daintily while she spits her Vitruvius nodes into her other hand, wiping them gingerly with a silk kerchief.

Music Room Katherine Chui

“The Proserpinian Valley is sinking,” one woman spits, shouldering to the front to face us, wrapped in a ratty blanket, her forearms marred by pinpricks. “There’s a sinkhole underneath. Our scientists have known for weeks, but you don’t even know about your own backyard. Those were our homes. Did you know that?”

At our blank expressions, she curls her lip. “No sympathy for us or the city. We’ve been asking for donations for the conservation effort for months. Now look what you’ve done. Look at the Cerberean Mountains. Look at the orangewood forest.”

I back away, heading towards the office. Our building looks stable enough, and already I’m wracked with the nervy, chlorate-cold desire to return to my Vitruvius and sink deeper into its malfunctioning seams.

“Leave, if you want,” the woman yells. I stop. It’s directed at me. “Go back to your fancy ventilation machines. Go back to your dreamy mind-props. Some of us can’t pay for that. We live like dogs out here.”

When I turn, I become acutely aware of a sensation like a wool balloon being punctured. The crimson carcasses of burnt trees sway crisply in the horizon, charred wood flaking off like bits of fat from a fish. The mountain ranges are disfigured with third-degree burns, a reactive, sparking rubble oozing over the remnants of the beheaded summit.

“See,” the woman says, with a grim, set jaw. I must appear horrified at the sight, because she’s talking to me. I struggle to avert my eyes from her arms, spattered with citrus-colored Rorschach smudges. Suntear, a disease I’m vaccinated for in Corporate Headquarters across town each week. “So obsessed with your little lives, you can’t even look up at everything burning to the ground.”

The Cerberean Mountains and the orangewood forest twinkle in mirages of disintegrating antiquity. I did see them. I did.

“Do us a favor,” she continues. “Glance up from your screens once in a while. Might be hard to imagine, but there are people who can’t afford to leave Earth. We’re trying to preserve this planet for as long as we can, just until we die.”

Leaving Earth. That’s where Father and Mother have gone. Their tickets said Plato. I don’t know if they’ve arrived.

The last time I saw them, we spoke from across rooms, June’s Debussy limping around our toes in pooled, chemical residue. I left that night, our house of glass unspooling into a summer’s blood.“Making the Vitruvius right as the climate starts to kill, marketing it as some ‘medicine for the mind,’” a man hollers, stepping up next to the woman to gesticulate with a nicked cane. Under his baggy shirt hides a young boy in holed overalls, nose blistered with a hive of pumpkin’s-skin. “All you did was speed up the deaths of people whose bodies were dying in the heat.” american voices nominee • national silver medal • regional gold key • scholastic art and writing awards

There is nothing we can say to this. Someone protests we’re only the legal representation, we don’t make the hardware, it’s not our––and he’s cut off.

He cuts himself off, seeing the crowd begin to converge on us. I shrink backwards. Their teeth opening, they step forward. Their eyes fix on me as if I am a person. They fix me into being. I want to back away from the rot, from the bruise that blooms behind the white cloth.

I wish I could say these were actors. I wish I could say Curtains.

GRANDMA’S LEGS FINALLY AT REST

By Eva Liu

Sprinting, her legs moved rapidly in a bloody rhythm

She did not dare to stop among the corpses

Since all she could hear were clashes

Of bullets against innocent bones

Running away from her dark childhood

From responsibilities of being the oldest sibling

Incapable of catching up to her younger brother

Who ran into roaring water, drowning helplessly

A mile away, she stared at her skinny legs

That refused to cooperate

With her arms swinging, mind racing, heart burning

Jogging behind me on the pebble path with her fists clenched

Her stick-like legs moved as fast as she could

I suddenly stopped at a cotton candy stand, looked back at her

Begging her to give me money, my hands clasped in prayer

She smiled, but I saw her legs shaking with exhaustion

Walking next to me, her back hunched

Her withered legs screaming at stairs and hills

My legs have shrunk, she said, apologizing

Because we were late for the movie

Now, though

This time it is my turn to smile

This time it is my turn to wait

This time her legs are finally at rest