Yale Daily News Magazine | Wallace Prize 2022

WALLACE PRIZE 2022 DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE

Vol. CXLIV Issue 5

WALLACE PRIZE 2022 Magazine Editors in Chief Claire Lee Marie Sanford Managing Editors Abigail Sylvor Greenberg Oliver Guinan Galia Newberger Associate Editors Isa Dominguez Sarah Feng Zack Hauptman Samhitha Josyula Margot Lee Dante Motley Ana Padilla Castellanos Idone Rhodes Magazine Design Editors Jose Estrada Rachel Folmar Naz Onder Stephanie Shao Isaac Yu Photography Editors Zoe Berg Yasmine Halmane Karen Lin Regina Sung Vaibhav Sharma Illustration Editors Cecilia Lee Sophie Henry Copy Editors Josie Jahng Hailey O’Connor Chris Lee Yingying Zhao Caroline Parker Editor in Chief & President Rose Horowitch Publisher Christian Martinez Cover Illustration by Sophie Henry

The Yale Daily News Magazine is proud to announce the winners of the 2022 Wallace Prize. The Wallace Prize recognizes previously unpublished works of fiction and nonfiction by undergraduates of Yale University. The submissions were anonymously judged by two separate panels of experts in nonfiction and fiction, who also decided the number of prizes and rankings of the winners in each genre.

The editors of the Yale Daily News Magazine would like to thank the students who submitted their work, the judges who volunteered their time and expertise to evaluate the submissions and the production and design team for laying out this special edition issue.

Nonfiction Carcass Balancing

First Prize: Elliot Lewis ’23, page 4

Unearthed

Second Prize: Ana Padilla Castellanos ’24, page 10

Tor Olsson’s Reputation Precedes Him Third Prize: Audrey Kolker ’25, page 13

Watery Vignettes of Where We’ve Been, of Where We’re Headed Honorable Mention: John Nguyen ’24, page 16

Yamaha, Jr.

Honorable Mention: Eric Krebs ’22, page 19

Fiction Cherry

First Prize: Isabelle Qian ’24, page 23

The Rubber Band Test

Runner-up: John Nguyen ’24, page 27

The Whistle of a Pressure Cooker Runner-up: Arinjay Singhai ’22, page 31

4 16

10

23

27

13

19

31

Carcass Balancing ELLIOT LEWIS

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FIRST PRIZE, NONFICTION

T

he walk-in freezer is stuffed with carcasses.

The air is fragrant with oxidation and decay.

Sunlight glints across the weathered orange skin of the lambs as they rest on green metal shelves.

The pigs, a little further into the freezer, are pink and bloody, with yawning gashes running down their midsections. And in the way back are the cow chunks — once a single cow, now sawed into eight pieces — flecked with cakey white fat, exhaling blood that trickles over their suet and onto the floor. Zach Pierce leans against a shelf, beholding the thousands of pounds of carcass before him. Within a week’s time, all of it will become meat.

We walk back to the front of Provisions on State, a shop on State Street in New Haven, Connecticut, where Zach works as head butcher. As a whole animal butcher, Zach gets two pigs, a lamb, a cow and 60 chickens delivered to him each week. The carcasses come de-skinned, de-organed and de-genitaled. The cows also come decapitated. Much of Zach’s work, then, is deboning.

The two of us stand before a massive hunk of beef on his butcher block, a large wooden table 9-feet wide and 3 ½ -feet deep. Positioning his knife against a bone, Zach scrapes away at the sinew, occasionally sticking his knife into the fissure and wobbling it up and down until the meat begins to loosen.

Provisions on State smells like the sea, an odor eerily more fishy than it is meaty. The setup is sleek, with slate walls, stainless steel counters, and a pink neon sign in the back depicting a pig partitioned into its various sections: bacon, spare ribs, picnic ham, Boston butt. Front and center is the meat case, packed with the most tantalizing cuts that Zach’s livestock could offer: ribeyes, tenderloins, chops, back fat. Beside the meat case, slabs of salmon bask on a vat of ice — perhaps the source of the smell. Farther left are wooden shelves showcasing a selection of artisanal groceries ranging from hemp pasta to preserved lemon paste.

Zach’s beefy biceps bulge as he slices. His hands are heavy, worn and purple, the color of dry-aged steak. They always seem to have blood on them.

“They’re moisturized, I’ll say that much,” Zach says.

Besides his muscular arms, he’s an all-around skinny guy with next to no fat. If I were to cut him up and cook him, he’d be very tough and dry — not very tasty at all.

His white apron is spattered with dried blood, and his knife sheath hangs from a white chain around his waist. Zach has three knives: a breaking knife, a stiff

boning knife and a curved boning knife. They each cost him less than $20, and I differentiate them by the colors of their handles: blue, black and yellow, respectively. Zach sharpens his knives often, and he rarely gets injured. His hand movements are balletic.

Armed with his knives, Zach is unconquerable. The carcass doesn’t stand a chance. Zach will cut it up, and it will become food.

Once the curved boning knife has built up a gap between meat and bone, Zach is able to shove one of his thick hands into the chasm, pull the meat upward, and stretch out the webby fat until the beef separates cleanly from the bone.

The goal is to get as much meat off the bone as he can. Unlike the butchers behind the counter at a large grocery store, whole animal butchers don’t have the luxury of endless flank steaks and briskets. Zach gets only a certain number of carcasses each week, and a surprising amount of their weight is in the bones.

Sometimes, he predicts he’ll have high demand for particular cuts, so he orders spare portions from farmers and other butchers to supplement. He calls the process “carcass balancing.” The balance depends on the season: in summer, they sell more skirt steak, good for barbecues; in winter, more short ribs, for stews.

Then, there are scheduled orders Zach can rely on: a guy on the carnivore diet comes in every other week to buy 15 1-pound ribeyes and 10 8-ounce bags of beef fat. Other times, people come to the shop with unanticipated requests: a guy producing a horror movie once came in to buy all the eyeballs Zach had in stock.

It’s important to keep the balance, because money is tight and overhead is low. You’re not going to find Stop & Shop prices at a place like Provisions. Zach’s customers often experience sticker shock. They’re used to a $10 New York strip; a $30 price tag can be unnerving. But Zach is selling a different product.

According to Zach, if you buy the $6.49-a-pound ground beef at a place like Stop & Shop, you may end up with a thousand different cows in that cellophane-wrapped package; at Provisions on State, for $8.99 a pound, you can be sure the meat is all coming from the same animal. Zach says the shop is part of “the bougie boutique butcher world.” The cuts may cost a few times the Stop & Shop prices, but they’re custom, artisan and delicious.

Yale Daily News | 5

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An Objection to Meat: I often consider becoming a vegetarian. My reasons are mostly environmental. The looming threat of climate collapse tends to put a sour taste in my mouth every time I eat meat. Not literally — in general I think meat tastes very good, very umami. Farmed animals are some of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses in the world: the methane from cows — we’re talking burps, we’re talking farts — adds up across the 1.5 billion of them globally. If I were to go vegan, I would cut my emissions in half.

We devote more land space to animal agriculture than to any other purpose: a quarter of all land on earth houses animals, and a third of all land grows crops to feed animals.

We’ve cleared hundreds of millions of acres of forest just to satisfy our meat addiction. And it truly is an addiction: we slaughter seventy billion animals each year. In America, we need to produce 892 billion pounds of meat a year to satisfy our hunger.

But as the population increases, it’s getting harder and harder to sustain this behavior. We’re running out of space, nutrients, water and — because of climate change — time.

Most cheap meat in America comes from concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, that pack livestock in tight quarters. Each CAFO may hold over 125,000 chickens, 1,000 cows and 10,000 pigs.

And CAFOs are massive polluters — one CAFO can produce 1.6 million tons of waste a year. This waste finds its way into the local soil, air, and water, almost always in low-income communities of color.

In CAFOs, bulls and male pigs are usually castrated to render them docile and flavorful. This process is almost always conducted without anesthesia, since it would cost an

6 | Wallace 2022

extra 25 cents an animal. Bulls have been reported to have their eyes roll back in their heads and have all the muscles in their body contort. About 19 million cattle are estimated to undergo this torture each year. And it’s not just castration. Animals are also subjected to hot branding irons, tight crates and physical mutilation — pigs get their tails chopped off, chickens get debeaked.

On small farms, like the ones Zach buys from, things can be better. Zach gets his lambs from a 70year old farmer with a balding head and an infectious smile. The farmer loves his lambs dearly, and although he emphasizes that they aren’t pets, he basically treats them as such: he scratches their heads, he tends to their injuries with gentle care and every time he sees them, he bellows, “Helloooooo!”

And his lambs aren’t castrated.

On the contrary, there’s only one ram on the farm, and he’s there for breeding. “The ram has quite a life,” the farmer tells me with a smirk.

Of course, his lambs end up getting slaughtered, but they get to frolic in pastures for a while before meeting their demise. Zach describes it as, “One bad day for the animals. They just go have one bad day and that’s it.” A primary tenet of whole animal butchering is respect: let the animal live happily, and when it’s slaughtered, use as much of its body as possible. Zach tells me it’s the love and care shown to his animals that make them taste so good.

It’s the difference between a steak from Provisions and a steak from Stop & Shop.

Yet some still find “one bad day” to be reprehensible. Almost all farmed animals live shorter lives than they would outside of captivity, and they are subjected to brutal killing practices. Most are stunned by a

bolt gun before having their throats slit, but often the bolt gun fails, and the animals remain fully conscious as they choke on their own blood.

And we don’t even need meat to survive. We’re omnivores. Entire empires have been built on agricultural systems that barely even involve animals. And while it’s easy to believe that one’s personal decision has no effect on the larger world, a single vegetarian can save around 400 animals from slaughter each year. Admittedly, most of these are fish and small crustaceans, but that’s still a big number.

But you don’t care about any of that, do you? If you’re not a vegetarian yet, chances are that’s not going to change. You’ve probably heard all of this before, and it still hasn’t changed your mind. Because it just tastes so good.

When you don’t witness the killing, when you don’t feel the blood, when you don’t hear the screams, it’s easy to pretend the meat has always been meat.

I stop by Provisions about a week later, on a warm Saturday in October. Zach is just finishing breaking down chicken halves for the dinner special at Tavern on State, the restaurant from which Provisions was birthed. His butcher block is smeared with blood and viscera, so he takes his bench scraper and zigzags across the wood, collecting the gunk in a little pile before depositing it in the trash.

We step outside and sit at a metal table, usually meant for customers to enjoy a Provisions sandwich.

Zach removes his mask to sip on a hipster soda. He has a sharp, masculine face, with patchy mutton chops running down his cheeks and a thin

FIRST PRIZE, NONFICTION

mustache cradling his nostrils. His t-shirt bears an image of Rocky Balboa raising a leg of mutton in the air, and his hat says “Thicc Chops” in white block letters.

Zach has pretty much always worked with meat. In college, he made sausage for a German restaurant, cubing 300 pounds of meat a day. But despite the adage to the contrary, Zach found nothing gross about learning how the sausage gets made. He tells me, “Sausage is just pork that’s ground up. If you’ve ever had dumplings, that’s basically sausage.”

His primary training in whole animal butchering was at Fleishers in Westport, Connecticut. Fleishers is well known in the butcher world.

When craft butchering experienced a renaissance in the mid-2000s, Fleishers was the East Coast’s bellwether. It was at Fleishers that Zach met Emily, the owner of Tavern on State, in 2014. Early in the pandemic, Emily reached out to Zach to ask him, if she were to open a butcher shop, would he be interested in running it? An enthusiastic yes from Zach. No questions asked.

As Provisions was getting off the ground, he hired two of his Fleishers compatriots, Jared and Sam, as butcher and deli manager, respectively. Zach sourced his meat via old contacts and furnished the shop through Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace and what Zach calls his “butcher mafia”: a network of butchers he knows through Instagram, past butchering jobs and travel. Whenever Zach goes on vacation, he always seeks out craft butchers, always adding members to his mafia.

Zach loves his work, but he recognizes that he could be making more money. The salary from working at Stop & Shop would be

a downgrade, but the salary from working 30 years at Stop & Shop would be an upgrade. But it’s not about the money for Zach; it’s about the animals, and it’s about the meat.

“It’s kinda like, how much do you wanna sell your soul for?” he says.

A bee flies around Zach’s head.

He flinches, but ignores it. He’s an animal lover. He grew up with dogs, and he and his fiancé now own two. Zach is not a huge meat eater — three nights a week, he eats vegetarian. He likes pork, enjoys a Provisions steak every once in a while, doesn’t mind a fried chicken sandwich — but in general, he feels healthier when he eats less meat.

In fact, many of his buddies in the butcher mafia are former vegetarians. Most were dissatisfied with the industrial meat system and found a home in whole animal butchering. Zach, Jared and Sam are no different. Sometimes when I’m around the shop, the three of them will talk about YouTube videos they’ve seen showcasing the terrible treatment of animals in CAFOs. Since the most ethical meat production doesn’t operate at scale, Zach argues that people should buy less meat. Of course, the problem with ethics is that they’re expensive. Zach’s solution is, “Eat the same dollars’ worth amount of meat, but just eat better meat.” Invest in one Provisions steak instead of three Stop & Shop ones.

A Defense of Meat, Part I: Um. Uhhhh. Hmmmmm.

Well …

Come back to me.

It’s the middle of November, the precipice of the Holiday season: a very busy time of year for Zach, with Thanksgiving turkeys, Hanukkah briskets and Christmas rib roasts right around the corner.

When I arrive, Zach is bagging up steaks and beef fat for the Carnivore. The shop has changed since I last stopped by. There’s a new meat case, which Zach hopes won’t break as often as the old one bought off Facebook Marketplace. Zach now has a second butcher block, this one pointed toward the entrance of the shop and fitted with a glass screen, so customers can see him cut without contaminating the meat, and without the meat contaminating them.

This week’s lamb arrived shortly before I did, and Zach heads out to the walk-in to grab it. He heaves the bloody, garbage-bag-wrapped carcass over his shoulder like a sleeping toddler, and he walks down State Street with her in his arms. He brings the lamb into the shop, lays her down on the butcher block and removes the garbage bag.

Zach motions to the carcass and explains to me, “All four-legged creatures, great and small, have the same anatomy. Actually, you and I have the same anatomy, we just walk upright. So if you want to be graphic, imagine this as a human.”

He begins the process of breaking down the carcass into primals — the larger subsections of the animal, like a leg or a loin — and subprimals, moving from front to back.

The first step: decapitation. He finds the lamb’s Atlas joint — where the head connects to the neck — places his knife against it, and slices. As he works to sever the joint, I notice that the lamb still has a tongue, which hangs below her chin through a hole in her jaw. She still

Yale Daily News | 7

FIRST PRIZE, NONFICTION

has teeth, black in the back and white in the front. Her skinned face is bloody and scowling. Her eyes are wet, like little balls of Jell-O. I watch the head jiggle as Zach attacks it with the knife.

Watching this makes me throw up slightly. That’s not a metaphor; I had to swallow it back down.

Zach removes the head. He says this step literally “takes the face off” and makes the lamb look significantly less alive. It’s true. I notice the change: headless, mindless, the lamb is significantly easier to look at.

Next, Zach squares off the neck. He makes a mark at the edge of the shoulder with his knife, then takes a large hacksaw and drags it back and forth till he breaks the bone. He cuts the rest of the meat with his knife — the hacksaw would just tear the flesh up — till the neck is removed.

He sticks his hand inside the carcass. Most of the organs have been removed, but the lamb still has its liver and kidneys; usually, the lambs have hearts, but this one doesn’t. Zach wonders if it might have fallen off onto State Street when he carried it over from the walk-in. He counts out five ribs from the inside, and he makes a mark on the outside. Then, he moves his knife around the lamb’s circumference, the blade gliding as smoothly as an ice skater. The hacksaw returns, and he scrapes away at the bones until the shoulder separates from the rest of the body. He then proceeds to saw off the ribs — one of the most prized cuts, where crown roasts and racks of lamb come from, or any lamb dish you see on the menu of a fancy restaurant — before transferring them along with the shoulder to the smorgasbord of meat accumulating on the new butcher block.

When it comes to butchering, lambs are a peculiar species. Of the standard livestock, they’re the most expensive, offer the lowest yield and

8 | Wallace 2022

have the least marketability to American customers. For Zach, lamb is essentially a loss-leader: something relatively unprofitable, but which he needs to sell to get customers in the door.

You can’t be a butcher without selling lamb. When butchers learn their craft, they begin with chicken, then graduate to pork, then beef and finally finish with lamb. There’s a lot of risk in breaking down a lamb, many points at which money can end up in the trash can. Already, around 30 percent of the lamb carcass, between the fat and the bones, is unsellable. A 70 percent yield is considered extraordinary. Whenever Zach makes a small error, nicking the edge of a rib, tearing the meat with his hacksaw, he announces how much money he just lost. Eighty cents. A dollar twenty. “It’s really a pennies business.”

Now, only the hind section of the lamb remains on the butcher block.

Zach feels for the end of the sirloin bone to determine where he’ll split the loin from the legs. He caresses the meat gently, before guiding his knife through the line formed by the bone. Then, he hangs the sirloin over the edge of the table and pushes down, cracking the spine and separating the final two portions. Zach holds the sirloin in his hands. The leg is left on the table, with a thin white tube hanging out of it like toothpaste. This is the spinal cord.

Zach pinches it with his fingers and invites me to do the same. Squishy.

Zach positions all the cuts of lamb on the new butcher block. They no longer look like an animal, no longer like anything that can reasonably, unironically, be given a pronoun other than “it.” Though watching this process made me feel a bit sick, when I look at the finished cuts, they just look like food, with deep red meat and cream-colored fat. It’s an appetizing tableau.

I ask Zach if I can purchase a couple

lamb chops and a bag of neck bones. He obliges, slicing the shoulder to give me some round bone chops. Meanwhile, Sam breaks up the neck bones and bags them. The chops cost around $12, the neck bones he gives me free of charge.

I exit the shop and walk down State Street, looking down at the sidewalk to see if I can spot the missing heart.

A Defense of Meat, Part II: I’ve done a lot of digging to find an ethical case for eating meat, but there is little to find. Most of what is out there boils down to, “Meat tastes good,” or, “It’s only natural.” Many cite René Descartes, famous for saying animals are machines lacking feeling. Of course, animals do feel, and recent research indicates they might even have sentience akin to humans. Also, Descartes was a vegetarian.

But regardless of how much philosophy I read, how many documentaries I watch, how many PETA ads show up before my YouTube videos, I still eat meat. I don’t really plan on stopping.

I’ve been hardwired to crave the taste of flesh. In the womb, our amniotic fluid is flavored with glutamate, the molecule that makes meat taste umami.

Temple Grandin, a noted animal rights advocate, has stated that meat eating could perhaps be justified if we “give animals a life worth living.” In other words, if we assure that they have only one bad day.

Many of the arguments against meat don’t apply to Zach’s cuts. Yes, Zach’s animals still emit greenhouse gasses, but at a significantly lower rate than factory farms. The transportation cost of the meat falls and almost no part of the animal gets wasted. And the animals are treated well — they have the taste to prove it.

FIRST PRIZE, NONFICTION

It’s 10 p.m., and I’m getting ready to fry up my lamb chops. I gifted the neck bones to a friend so she could make lamb soup, in exchange for letting me use her kitchen. The chops, lying on the counter, have oxidized to the color of wine. I salt them and allow them to rest for a few minutes, letting the salt burrow into the meat. Then, I drop a couple tablespoons of butter into the pan. I let it sputter and brown, and a rich, fatty smell fills the kitchen.

I lay the first chop down in its hot butter bath. The meat crackles as it begins secreting blood and juices. After a few minutes, I flip it. The cooked side is grayish-brown, frankly much uglier than when it was raw. A few minutes later, I flip it again, till the other side reaches that

same ugly gray. I’ve never cooked meat before, so I’m not sure when the chop is done. I let it sit for a little while longer, until it crisps and caramelizes, blackens and browns. I remove the chop from the pan and set it on the plate.

I visited the lamb farm, and I met the lamb I’m about to eat. I watched her carcass meet the knife. I’ve seen her outsides, I’ve seen her insides, I’ve seen her insides’ insides.

I cut off a piece and take a bite: overcooked, too salty, a bit chewy. I keep eating. Very fatty. I excavate lamb from the filmy strips of fat attaching meat to bone.

Armed with a butter knife, I lack the agile fluidity with which Zach approached meat. Every bite I take adds to my disappointment, the torn edges sitting un-

comfortably in my mouth. Of course, all the issues with the chop were my own fault — Zach’s meat was high-quality, and in the hands of a better chef, I’m sure it could have been outstanding. Yet I can’t help but think, the lamb gave its life for this?

When I finish, I feel a little sad.

First and foremost, because there’s no more lamb. It wasn’t delicious, but it was meat. With nothing left to do, I chew on the fat. I suck the marrow out of the bones. I’m full, but I want more. Just as Zach balances carcasses on his account sheet, I balance carcasses on my conscience. I imagine thousands of them stacked up: oozing blood, dripping liquid from their eyes, staring at me.

// CECILIA LEE Yale Daily News | 9

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Unearthed

ANA PADILLA CASTELLANOS

A hazy summer day in first grade. Dani and I were sitting on the steps of her grandfather’s house. Our mouths and hands dripped mango juice as we swung together on a worn hammock, our bare feet dangling off the edge. In our shirts, we cradled mangoes like babies and threw the large seeds at each other and out into the yard. I dozed off on her lap, my hair fanned out across her stomach, head rising and falling in sync with her breathing. I remember Dani in that sweet glamor of childhood, which is to say it aches when I miss her.

Before there was “Ana and Dani,” there was “Rosario and Luisa.” Our moms had stumble-met in their teens: they’d played volleyball together, then forgotten about each other, only to find themselves, years later, living a few houses apart. And so Dani and I were born neighbors. Dani was my pseudo-sister in the sense that I couldn’t recall a time before her.

We attended the same kindergarten and wdalked there together, mothers and sisters in tow. Then one day my mom insisted we walk home alone, just the two of us. This was around the time that Dani had started chewing leaves around the playground; she had decided to become a giraffe and walked forever on her tiptoes. During our walk, my mom warned me against copying her. “If

10 | Wallace 2022

Dani jumps off a cliff,” she said, “are you gonna jump too?”

That was the “before” of our friendship, glossy and sticky. The transition is foggy now: Dani was there, then wasn’t. Suddenly she was missing from school, from our neighborhood. All I knew was that her family had moved because there were too many stairs in their old house. I knew not to ask too many questions. I also knew that when Dani’s dad, Eduardo, came out in his new wheelchair, I should kiss his unshaven cheek and not be afraid.

Sometimes my mom would take me to visit them. On those occasions, Dani and I would chase each other up and down the many ramps they had installed for her father. Like the ivy in her new backyard, we adapted. On the day of her First Communion, we danced in our white dresses and ran around her garden in childhood bliss.

We played with our dolls, resting plastic babies on our still-bony hips. The game was always the same: we were mothers to beautiful babies and wives to husbands busy working in abstract, foreign places.

One day, however, Dani added new words to our game.

“Me violó,” she giggle-whispered as I bottle-fed my baby. “He violated me.”

“What?” I asked.

“The father of my baby is not traveling.

And he is not my husband,” she said. “He forced me, which means I don’t know who he is.”

Looking back, I wish I had asked how she knew about these things, asked why.

We were only 9. Now I understand why my mom was scared. We didn’t know it then but our days together were counted; we were at last Peter Panning out of our childhood.

A year passed before I saw Dani again.

Her mom had opened a clothing boutique in the center of town in her latest attempt to support her husband, children and aging parents. My mom hauled my siblings and me into the family car and over to the boutique to support her. Dani was taller by then, and her lankiness was endearing.

This was my friend: the girl I had made a home of before I could appreciate the abstraction of belonging. I had missed her more than I knew.

But there was something I didn’t recognize. Dani didn’t quite smile anymore; she’d become cold with awkwardness. When we were looking at ourselves in the mirror, she pulled away from me. “You got fat,” she said, then disappeared into the back of the boutique.

I cried the whole ride home. But I cried

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a lot in those days. It was around that time that I had begun to realize that someday I would die and my mom would die, and this wasn’t a game we were playing. Sitting in the bathtub that night, watching the skin on my fingers whiten and wrinkle like prunes, I decided to forget about Dani. She was mean, and crude and my new friends are better, I thought.

Six years later found my family living in New Haven, where the ground is always wet and summer feels like a dry heave. I never did forget Dani. During first year finals, she became a recurring dream. Even now I think I see her in convenience stores in New Haven.

Dani in a Texas airport. Dani in my school’s B-wing. Leaving Guatemala had made me nostalgic, and I examined every memory with a magnifying glass. But everything was fuzzy with childhood adoration. I didn’t trust myself. And with the distrust came fear.

I was scared for Dani. She had known too much. I should have said something. But she had been my normal, and now it was too late.

For years I ached to unload all of this with her.

Once again I needed her validation. For her to say, Yes, that’s what happened. Yes, we did that, we felt that.

Four years after we had left, my family returned to Guatemala on the coattails of my uncle’s funeral. During his 40-day Mass, I glanced back and spotted Dani clutching her hymnal and felt even more disoriented. Beside me, I could hear the hum of my grandmother’s praying: y en tu casa, oh Señor, yo siempre viviré. Meanwhile, I twitched with otherness from my front-row pew. When I turned around again, I saw that Dani’s mom Luisa was as pretty and tired as I remembered: all blond and translucent. Beside her, Dani looked like a fun-house reflection, too tall and thin in her black jeans.

“Did you know?” my sister asked, tilting her head back towards them.

“That they were coming? No. Did you?”

I whispered back. She shook her head.

I was not surprised. Of course, she re-

membered her. Dani was one of those never-quite-forget, appeared-in-my-dreamsfour-years-later kind of people. Te pegas como la goma de mascar, I sang to myself.

You stay stuck like bubble gum. And for a moment I resented her and how much space she had always taken in my life.

The mass passed in a blur of sitting and standing and praying. When it ended, I walked my grandmother down the aisle to the exit like in a telenovela. She greeted people as we walked, taking their hands in hers and introducing me to everyone. Do you see? My granddaughters are back, she repeated even as her church lady friends left.

I let her bony fingers clutch the soft of my arm. I wanted to be a comfort. But mainly I wanted to avoid Dani. As I tried to sneak away, I felt a tap on my shoulder followed by a soft “Ana Paula.”

“Hi, Dani.” Our hug felt almost automatic.

She was a few inches taller than me. Are you ok? I wanted to ask her. Did you turn out ok?

“My mom saw about your uncle’s passing on Facebook,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

When we were ten we had gotten in trouble for spilling nail polish on my uncle’s bedroom wall. Still, I could tell she meant it.

“How long are you staying?” she asked.

“Just another week,” I said. Behind us, our mothers embraced. “We’re staying at my aunt’s in Monterey until our passports get updated.”

“Nice,” she smiled. “Monterey’s by the water, right?” She didn’t wait for me to answer but instead glanced somewhere above my head. “You always loved swimming.”

Dani had been there when I placed in the top twenty in the 12-and under nationals. I didn’t tell her I hadn’t raced in six years, nor did I ask about her dad.

“Is this your first time back?” she asked.

“What? I mean yeah,” I said.

Dani reached for my hand but settled somewhere along way for the pocket of her jeans. Together we walked towards the park.

It was late in the afternoon and only a few kids were left. A couple of boys played basketball, and some girls giggled through the monkey bars. It was the same park where Dani had once told me the firework noises we heard during the day were sometimes gunshots. Sometimes, she’d stress as she’d glanced towards the street. I turned to see if she also remembered but she was tying her shoe. I watched her fiddle with her boot laces. We were the last two kids in our class to learn how to tie our shoes: I had been hiding from her under our kindergarten’s slide the day I finally learned. That had been during her giraffe phase and I was tired of chasing after her. Maybe I still was.

When Dani made no move to get up, I sat on the sidewalk beside her. She patted her lap and I laid my head down like muscle memory.

“When did your hair get curly?” she asked as she weaved skinny fingers through it.

“I don’t know. Puberty?” I said, and she laughed.

The street lights turned on around us, and the park emptied as kids raced home before their mothers came calling.

“Last time I saw you was by that playground near your house, remember?” Dani said.

At first, I was angry. I wanted to correct her. To remind her about the boutique, about calling me fat and how I had cried. But at that moment, I realized she was right.

It had been the year before my family moved to New Haven. I had been on my way home from the corner store when Dani had waved at me from the swings. I remember thinking she had run away from home, but she’d told me her mom had wanted to pay a visit. We’d walked home in half-silence; there’d been so much I wanted to tell her, but it all stayed wedged in my throat.

Two blocks from my house, she had stopped under a lampost.

“This is where they shot my dad,” she’d

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SECOND PRIZE, NONFICTION

said. “Did anyone ever tell you?”

“No.” I’d felt myself tearing up.

“That’s what I thought,” she’d said as she traced the cement post. I took a step towards her, my instinct to comfort her overriding the distance between us.

“I’m okay,” she’d smiled, backing up. “Don’t worry. I’ve gotten used to it.”

After our move to New Haven, my parents would tell eager Americans our story and stress our newfound safety. We can walk with our phones.

The girls can walk alone, they would say. I had thought them dishonest at the time: What exactly was the danger we had supposedly run away from?

Somewhere along the line, I think I had blocked it: the months my mom stopped driving after having been robbed outside a bank; the alarm system my parents installed after someone broke into our house; the truth about Dani’s dad. The safe haven of my childhood dripped with fiction.

As I remembered our conversation in the park, I realized that maybe Dani had been jealous the day she called me fat. Jealous I was allowed not to know when she had to deal every day with wheelchairs and ramps, her dad getting weaker every minute.

Maybe we had both been hurting.

“Yeah,” I told Dani as we got up and walked back towards the church.

“I remember.”

// WINNIE JIANG 12 | Wallace 2022

THIRD PRIZE, NONFICTION

Tor Olsson’s Reputation Precedes Him AUDREY KOLKER

T

he Legend of Barefoot Kid crosses state lines two weeks into the school year, when my friend Lila calls to tell me about the insane time she’s having at college in Minnesota. She spends the better part of an hour discussing people I’ve never met and parties I didn’t attend while I hide in my dorm room from the nine strangers I apparently live with now, until she stops, mid-anecdote: “Wait,” she says, “have I told you about Tor yet?” *** Tor Olsson is a first year at Macalester College who doesn’t wear shoes — hence, “Barefoot Kid.” Two months into the semester, he is already a campus idol. Most of the freshmen — Tor’s classmates, hookups, enemies and friends, tablemates at his future alumni events — are somewhat devoted to him. He features in their TikToks and stars in their drunk group chat messages. They ask him to sign pieces of paper with his feet; They steal a pair of rainbow Puma slides from his dorm; They start and spread rumors that he got kicked out of the Whole Foods on Selby Avenue — no shoes, no service. Spotting Tor, even if he’s just sitting in Café Mac eating ketchup straight out of the packet, is a celebrity encounter. just ran into him in the science building, Lila texts me, barefoot king. He is a central part of life at Macalester, as fixed and as focal as

the Twin Cities: Minneapolis on the left, St. Paul on the right and Tor in the middle, talking to everyone, his feet callused and filthy and bare. *** I’ve spent a grand total of 41 minutes on a FaceTime call staring at Tor, and I can report with confidence that for an enigma, he looks normal. If you took a child actor, some best friend on the Disney Channel, and stretched him out into a college freshman — over six feet tall, rail-thin, and sporting a haircut the internet lovingly deems “the white boy swoosh”— you would end up with a guy who looked like Tor. (I write “wholesome (?)” in my notes.)

Tor is half an hour late to our interview. He’s late to most everything, I learn. There is a lot that’s more important to Tor than being on time: his religious studies class, the cross country and track teams, a global perspective on climate change, the six-foot long tapestry of a (fake) DaBaby tweet (“my dentist say im grindin even in my sleep”) hanging in his dorm room and the fact that I know that he knows that DaBaby was cancelled. We talk about bagpipes and astronauts and his recent meditations on spirituality, until finally I ask Tor how he thinks his classmates perceive him. He says, “So you’ve heard that around campus I’m sort of known as like the guy

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THIRD PRIZE, NONFICTION

who walks around without shoes, right?” I have. “Which I totally didn’t plan for, actually,” he stresses. In fact, he’s sort of confused why no one else is going shoeless.

“It feels so good. I don’t like my feet to be trapped. When I showed up at college there was so much grass — it’s like, why not?”

Tor is a firm believer in the barefoot lifestyle. Nonetheless, he does not proselytize — he doesn’t need to; We come to him. (“I should try it,” I say, very excited. “Don’t feel pressured to,” he replies.) He’s aware of the inevitability of snow — Minnesota winters are already hard enough for those wearing boots. “We’ll see when we get there,” he says. He’s either using the royal we or referring to the potential legion of unsolicited barefoot followers over whom he could reign. “We’ll get there later. We’ll hang in there until it’s too much to handle.” *** In the middle of our interview Tor mentions that he is — get this — a representative for the Class of 2025 on the Macalester College Student Government, and I make the professional journalistic choice to not say Wait, what? out loud. Lila confesses that his candidacy caught her off guard too: “Mostly because when somebody has, like, a gimmick, I assume that’s their way of getting their name out there.” Tor already had a Thing — did he really need another?

He can certainly multitask. People voted for him, of course — he’s a nice dude — and he speaks passionately — if vaguely — about how he wants to bridge the gap between the powerful administration and the student body and reach out to the firstyear class. But scandal rocked the election cycle. Another candidate ran

14 | Wallace 2022

on the policy of mandatory shoes in Café Mac, targeting not Tor Olsson, good-guy political organizer, but Barefoot Kid, unhygienic communal diner. There were five seats available for Representative; When Tor won, his opponent did too. *** How does it feel, barely two months into your first semester, to be inspiring negative ad campaigns, to be known for just one thing? Tor says he’s collected reputations like this his entire life. “Up until probably fourth and fifth grade, I was, like, always the super quiet kid; I just did not talk. I was sort of known for that.

People just really had no idea what I was thinking,” he says. But they needed to find out. “Who is this kid?

What’s he up to? For some reason, people find something to kind of, like, idolize me for. I sort of wish it didn’t happen as much.” Tor’s been thinking about it a lot, lately, and he can’t figure out what it is about himself — why this happens to him everywhere he goes.

I think this is a little ridiculous.

It is almost impossible to be innocent in the creation of your own cult of personality, one so flourishing that random students from other colleges write charmed essays about you. Maybe Tor doesn’t actively seek the spotlight, but I do think it has become the place where he feels most comfortable. It’s easy to imagine getting used to that attention, that individuality, that influence. Why wouldn’t he cling to a parodic version of his own behavior, especially in the first difficult months of freshman year?

After all, Tor is like his friends, his classmates and his interviewer: somewhere people don’t really know him, trying to figure out how

to let them know him. He’s never done this alone before; He has a twin sister, and he didn’t realize how hard it would be to go to college without her. “We’re very similar,” Tor says. It’s unclear if she also hates shoes. “We know each other like we know ourselves, sort of, which is really crazy.” Being a twin can be defining. For better or for worse, you’re permanently associated with another person: one half of a whole, part of a package deal.

When your twin is at Vassar, 1,200 miles away, who are you? *** Tor finds comfort in how no one is feeling settled. He could let go a little of the self-consciousness, the social anxiety, when he remembered that everyone was feeling the same — more comfortable with the scheduled academic periods than the nebulous free time for socializing, all worried about how they were presenting themselves to each other.

Many first-years might try to give a polished, collected, blandly nice first impression; For his, Tor emailed his future cross country teammates about how he couldn’t do a cartwheel and was planning on bringing bright pink leopard-print sheets for his dorm bed. He thinks the transition into college helped him to stop overthinking his interactions with others: “The fact that no one’s really comfortable, no one has a lot of people to talk to … that helped me let go of a little bit of the social anxiety.”

I can’t say the same, and I don’t know any other freshmen who can either. After a year and a half spent alone, college is an overcorrection: whether we’re learning, sleeping, eating or using communal bathrooms, we’re constantly with other

THIRD PRIZE, NONFICTION

// CECILIA LEE

people. It’s exciting to be face to face again, but it feels like we have to relearn it from scratch: “Be present in conversation, make facial gestures like you’re listening — these things that you haven’t thought about in a while, putting it all back together piece by piece … that’s been overwhelming,” Lila admits.

The pandemic still isn’t over, and it likely never really will be. Everyone could be sent home the moment positive testing rates climb too high.

What’s the point of getting invested in these relationships, this place, the person you’re becoming in this new phase of your life? How do you go cold turkey from a year of online everything — when you didn’t have to pretend that you were okay, that you were someone functioning well enough to put shoes on every day — to an entirely new environment, away from home, that constantly demands from you the social and academic fluency you lost in March of 2020? *** Tor Olsson has made a pretty enviable name for himself; he is, by all accounts, a charming, entrancing conversationalist, a thoughtful, spontaneous friend and a genuine stand-up guy. In the grand tradition of weird extroverts, he wouldn’t make a bad cult leader. He’d find fame rewarding, Tor tells me, if he could be some sort of spiritual leader, inspiring people to separate themselves from their societal constraints. Once, when studying with his teammate Nick, Tor said out of nowhere, “Yesterday, I sat in the fitness center and closed

my eyes and tried to levitate for ten minutes.”

Nick: Do you mean meditate?

Tor: No. Levitate. Like, float.

Nick: What are you—how could you do that, Tor? Tor: Well, I don’t know, but it felt like my soul was leaving my body, so something was happening.

Nick laughs recounting the story. He thought it was ridiculous — but he was sort of convinced. “I’m like, ‘Okay, now I have to try that.

Now I have to sit for ten minutes and try to levitate.’ He’ll just say stuff like that. And I love it. Cause now, now I have to think about …”

Nick trails off. “What if one day he

gets it, you know? What if one day he just floats off the ground? Cause if anyone could do it, he could.” *** I decide to become Tor’s first long-distance disciple: I spend two hours one evening walking barefoot around my own campus. I get attention, which I love, and cold, which I do not. I think I would recommend it. It is, as promised, freeing. It’s also anxiety-producing, and odd, and fun, and scary, and on top of all of that it kind of hurts — it feels, in other words, the way navigating the new is supposed to feel.

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// GIOVANNA TRUONG

16 | Wallace 2022

HONORABLE MENTION, NONFICTION

1. Nước: the Vietnamese word for country and water.

2. Nước mắt chảy xuống. Tears flow down, my mother

tells me. By which she means: a child’s love for their parents doesn’t match the parents’ love for their child. The glassy drops travel from one generation to the next. Never the other direction. Gravity holds all things — concrete and abstract — in thrall.

Upon hearing this proverb, I recalled Ma singing a Vietnamese folk poem in which an egret urges a passerby not to cook her offspring, but to boil her instead. The ultimate sacrifice in life, then, is not death — but parenthood.

3. Nước Mỹ: the United States, realm of my birth. Minne-

sota, the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, is where Ma pushed three fat-headed babies out of her underwear line. My vagina is weak, she explained to my sisters and me our birth story, so I did a C-section. She often flaunts the scar, because with the scalpel’s incision came diamonds that can’t be appraised.

When I emerged from my mother, gooey and unprepared for life on this planet, my father wasn’t present. Ba, whose face is mean, says Ma, succumbed to the lure of McDonald’s: he bought fries and chicken nuggets for my older sister. So the first people I met were Ma and the midwives, who wore kind faces, she said. Faces so powerful that they even influenced my sexual orientation: Johnny, that’s why you’re gay! she enlightened me. Although Ma didn’t elaborate, I knew she was intertwining my softness, in voice and in behavior, with homosexuality — a stereotypical yet painfully accurate association.

Cindy, Angela and I didn’t finish nursing until we reached five years. Spoiled, Ma called us. I imagine now breasts reddening, bruised by three mini-vampires, swollen as dragon fruit.

4. Nước Việt Nam: the place where my mother, father,

and grandmother first met the world. Ma and Ba say they’d like to return to the homeland one day, but my grandmother reproaches them: No, never go back to Vietnam. Decades later, war trauma continues to ring. In addition to water, country is a window, on the other side of which lies a beautiful landscape of rice terraces and floating markets and motorcycle-filled streets of childhood — a window that, once closed, should not be opened.

In 1963, my grandmother watched in the crowds as monk Thich Quang Duc committed self-immolation to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. Flames twisted around him in the already roasting Vietnam air. As a seventh-grader, I would see that scene in my American history textbook, half a hundred years later.

5. Nước biển: seawater. Having fled Vietnam follow-

ing Saigon’s fall, thousands of refugees died at sea due to drowning, piracy, or dehydration. The world, I have realized, meets you — and it doesn’t set up rendezvous points.

Part of the fortunate group, my uncle and grandfather made it to surrounding countries like Malaysia, whose officials relocated refugees to new lands like France, Australia and the United States. The two made it here first. Why they chose Minnesota, where snow reigns — a climate they’d never encountered — Ma doesn’t know.

Nevertheless, my family has bloomed in this crystallized whiteness.

6. Má thực khát nước. Có ai cho má nước được không?

Mother’s very thirsty. Can anyone give Mother water? she asks, having woken up from her daily post-work nap.

On the dining room wall hangs a photo in which a young Ma flaunts her golden áo dài, a Vietnamese dress of silk, and a matching headpiece. Wearing claw-like, metal fingerpicks, Ma plucks her zither, the light glossing her porcelain skin.

But that was thirty years ago. She—her body—has changed. Ma’s name is Diemlan: diem for beauty, lan for orchid. And names are liars. An ephemeral orchid, she does not rise and wither yearly. Only wilts. When Ma asks me to bring her water, it seems as if she’s saying, The factory shatters me. After handing Ma the cup, I examine her, the exhausted limbs after toiling on the assembly line. An anatomy lesson: carpal tunnel has weakened my mother’s hands; a gel spacer occupies the web between her first two toes, to alleviate bunion pain; the soles of her feet are dry, cracked, as if someone has sprinkled sand on them. She has poor posture, her back always hunched — It hurts, stop! Ma groans when I try to give her a shoulder massage —; Her footsteps are slow, growing slower. The body is flesh and blood, yes, but it may as well be glass.

On grocery runs, I zoom through the sliding doors of Cub Foods, but she isn’t as swift. Hoping to view Ma behind me,

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HONORABLE MENTION, NONFICTION I crane my neck backward — only to see her still in the parking lot, ambling, according to her, like a penguin. Impatience pervading me, I sigh and frown at her lack of speed. To walk quickly is a privilege. Lessons are learned so late.

like notes of a violin.

They didn’t teach us, the Old Masters, that a synonym for dream is gradual destruction.

Nooo, not mad. Ma turned to look at me. You’re my son.

7. Cho ba nước lạnh. Child, give Fa-

ther cold water, Ma orders. She’s just placed the bowl of spicy bún bò on the kitchen table. I grab a clear cup, dash to the freezer, scoop up some ice, then pour water for the perching emperor — my mother standing, washing dishes.

8. Không tốt nước bo-bah. I hate

boba tea, Ma grimaces. She dislikes it when my sisters and I pay $18 at ChaTime for three cups of jasmine milk tea.

It’s so expensive. Easy — I can make it at home! Ma complains, praising her own culinary gifts.

Boba is actually how I came out to her. Black Friday, 2020: my little sister, Ma and I strolled around Mall of America to participate in capitalist conformity. Angela shopped for clothes at H&M, leaving me and Ma in line at ChaTime. The two of us stood for a moment, she on her phone, I on mine.

Around us shoppers chattered, their bags drooping and crinkling. Unable to withstand this loud silence, I unleashed my secret.

I have something to tell you, I began, … but you might get mad.

No, I promise! Tell me!

I’m gay, I whisper-shouted.

Haaaaa?! she replied, tilting her head, the exclamation rising in pitch,

18 | Wallace 2022

Moments later, Angela returned empty-handed from H&M and found out what had transpired. Are you mad? she asked Ma.

9. Má sẽ cho con nước khi má đến

trường. Mother will give Child water once Mother arrives at Child’s school, Ma would tell me over phone when I was in ninth grade, as I waited in the school atrium for her to pick me up.

Overhead, flags from many countries, to remind students of their culture, of an invisible home that inhabits the imagination — unable to be touched.

After tossing my bookbag in the backseat and jumping to the front, I chugged the cup of iced water. Never did she fail to cure my dehydration.

In Vietnamese, which I can barely read and write in, one refers to oneself relative to the person with whom one speaks. When my mother talks about herself to me or my sisters, there is no I. Only this maternal role. For eternity.

And hopefully, in our next lives, we will be reunited. Unchanged. Mother and son. Bearing the same identities — I her con, she my ma.

10.

Nước mắt chảy xuống. Tears flow down, Ma tells me.

Why does she love so much?

How many words must a son utter or scribble in order to show his mother that love, like a wide-winged egret, can fly up?

11. Nước chanh: lemonade. Con phải

uống nước chanh. Child has to drink lemonade, Ma says frequently. Having noticed my academic diligence, my mother sets onto the desk a mug of freshly conjured lemonade, with clinking ice and undissolved sugar on the cubes. As if I am the one who deserves a drink. As if seated busyness takes precedence over the standing kind.

With a straw, I stir the concoction then sip. The coldness streams down my throat and into my tummy, shrouding me like a quilt.

I now submerge myself in nostalgia, returning to those winter nights when, with the heater malfunctioning, Ma would cover me in two ripped blankets — one with floral patterns, another with Pikachu and his tail of lightning. As if to protect me from the universe she knew too well, from unkind people, from notnice languages.

Through millions of years of human existence, let tenderness never cease being our greatest power.

12.

My mother seldom paints her love through words. Hence the lemonade. Hence the sacrifices. Rarely do I hear, Má thương con. Mother loves Child. Though, when she does express endearment, Ma says, Love you, con, uniting two nước. Like blossoms of watercolor bleeding into one another.

But those four letters prove insignificant. She’s already imprinted her affection onto me with something more memorable, in an iteration of English — the language of my deliverance, and of my alienation — that’s not broken, but her own: You’re my son.

To which I respond, in my head and on this once snow-fresh canvas, You’re my ma.

HONORABLE MENTION, NONFICTION

Yamaha, Jr. ERIC KREBS

F

or my ninth Christmas, Dad bought me a right-handed Yamaha FG-Junior acoustic guitar. I was left-handed and so furious with my father for handicapping me that for eight months thereafter the guitar leaned against the basement futon, mostly untouched. Mostly.

From time to time — in secret — I’d swipe at the instrument like a curious, unmusical animal. A guitar’s open strings spell E-A-DG-B-E, and a full strum forms an E-minor-seventh chord with a suspended fourth. Suspended chords demand resolution, and strumming in the violent way non-guitar players always strum in search of it, I pulled the instrument out of tune. One day I tried to pull it back. Instead, I snapped a string.

Dad noticed. The broken string was physical evidence of the interest that I, out of spite, had tried to hide. He swapped the nickel strings for nylon so my un-calloused fingers could press them a bit easier.

My act was waning. Sure, the Yamaha still felt foreign. It was still the wrong way around, and, in any orientation, I still couldn’t play it. But the guitar and I had something in common, something I could no longer deny.

I was a hormonally stunted kid. Dr. Cervantes, my first endocrinologist, had a scatter plot of percentiles for age and height in her office. I hugged the horizontal axis until, at thirteen years old and four feet six inches tall, I began nightly injections of human growth hormone.

The Yamaha, similarly, was three-quarters scale, small. So small that, in my runty hands, it — and I — looked normal.

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HONORABLE MENTION, NONFICTION

My first guitar lesson was in the living room at 4 p.m. on Wed., August 26, 2009. My teacher, Rob, an old neighborhood rockstar, drew in my notebook a picture of a guitar with its anatomy labeled: headstock, nut, neck, strings, frets, bridge, body. He taught me two riffs and wrote them in tablature notation. The first was Henry Mancini’s theme to “Peter Gunn,” which is little more than a single-string exercise:

The second was The Beatles’ “Day Tripper.” It was a real riff from a real song, one I knew and liked and had already wanted to play. And, in theory at least, I could:

Guitar snobs love to say that “tone is all in the fingers,” that the instrument is little more than an extension of the body — really, the hands. My left hand could only stretch to the fourth fret, and four frets was as many as “Day Tripper” required. I held the pick in my right hand and struck the open E string. It rang. I pressed down on the nylon, my index finger nestled just behind the third fret. I plucked. It rang again, and I felt — to my surprise — my mind and body in something other than conflict.

I fumbled through the song again, and again. Later that night — to my surprise — Dad brought his old warped Yamaha up from the basement and fumbled along with me. # Dad’s childhood home is just two blocks from mine. We both grew up in Middle Village, Queens — but in different New Yorks.

Dad’s first favorite song was The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic,” which came out in November 1965, the month he turned four. When he was eight or nine, he heard Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” on the jukebox in Carlos’ Pizzeria on Metropolitan Avenue. He found a guitar teacher not long thereafter. As an aimless teenager in New York in

20 | Wallace 2022

the 1970s, Dad crawled the club scene. He went to CBGB, to Max’s Kansas City, to every since-shuttered venue imaginable. Twisted Sister, The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads — he saw them all.

I too prowled New York in high school, but urban renewal — and my study habits — foreclosed most opportunities for live music and teenage debauchery. My Jesuit high school jazz band gave us shirts with AMDG — Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam — in the CGBG font across the front. That’s about as close as Dad’s teenage experience and my teenage experience ever got. And for that, he is proud.

Dad was a bad student. He probably had ADHD. He doesn’t know. In the 60s, ADHD was cured with a rap on the knuckles. The unnamed handicap haunted him. It sent him to a technical high school instead of an academic one, and to an extra make-up senior semester thereafter. Sure, he later became an electrician, and a great one at that (construction-site nicknames are notoriously crude, Dad’s was “John the Gentleman”) but Dad the electrician often wonders whether he would have made a great electrical engineer, someone with a desk and a tie and without permanent damage to his hands or elbows or spine. Who knows? Maybe he could have, if only someone had been there to help him along, to push him.

Dad never stopped listening to music, but his high school band fell apart after just a few rehearsals and he quit guitar lessons once easier thrills like cars and girls and parties came around. Loving music and loving a musical instrument are two related but distinct acts. Appreciation comes easy. The latter takes practice, discipline, dedication. It takes a real push. # Dad’s first push, when I was five, landed me at soccer practice. I hated soccer. I hated it because — for seven long years, Kindergarten to 6th grade — Dad wouldn’t let me quit.

I wanted to quit because I was bad at it, and I was bad at it because I was an osteological six-year-old playing in a nineyear-old boys’ league.

Throughout adolescence, my friends tormented me over my height with the chummy cruelty only children possess; By pubescence, I figured myself vertically castrated. I’d stare in the mirror of the K-Mart fitting room and peer up above my sightline, picturing a normal-sized, normal-shaped me staring back down. Then I’d hang my head and stare at the khaki pooled around my ankles.

Dad never liked the mirror, either. He was a chubby kid.

He had asthma that kept him on the couch and away from sports. He liked pretzels too much. When he was a teenag-

HONORABLE MENTION, NONFICTION

er, he found powerlifting and drinking, and for the rest of his life — long after he quit both activities — the resulting weight would oscillate between muscle and fat, but it would never go away.

Sometimes, after dropping me off at soccer practice, Dad would run laps around the park. After practice, he and I would drive home in his rusty Pathfinder. The ride back smelled like sweat and it was silent, save for the radio. #

// SOPHIE HENRY

The Guitar Center in Long Island City has a parking lot above it and a Chuck-E-Cheese across the hall. It takes an escalator to get in and an echoing stairwell to get out. When I was first learning guitar, Dad and I descended that escalator and climbed those stairs just about every weekend.

We window-shopped. Standing before the great guitar wall, I’d point one out, and Dad would reach up and take it down for me. He’d plug it in, and I’d play.

I was learning fast. Just a few months after “Day Tripper,” I was playing riffs and chords and songs, and even writing my own. I was good. People watched. I was ten, playing like I was fifteen, looking like I was seven. Dad listened, leaning against the stack of amps with a permanent grin.

The Guitar Center in Long Island City is where Dad bought the original Yamaha Junior, back in 2008. In 2012, we bought my second acoustic — another Yamaha, larger and better than the first — also from Guitar Center. That acoustic served me until 2019, when I upgraded yet again.

Same store, same brand.

Save for one pathetic southpaw corner, Guitar Center stocked only right-handed instruments. If I had learned to play lefty, my in-store selection would have been dismal; my chances of finding a good used guitar on Craigslist, slim; and my ability to hop over to a friend’s house and pick up his guitar and play, non-existent. Had Dad capitulated and bought me a lefty guitar, had he allowed me the easier thrill, he would have been setting me up for a life of needless musical difficulty.

Dad never stopped pushing. He just got better at discerning where pressure was effective, where pressure was needed. # When I first left for college and Connecticut, Dad and I started texting on a nightly basis, trading YouTube links as currency. I would try to impart my college-educated aesthetic sensibilities with showtunes and art rock. He would

Yale Daily News | 21

HONORABLE MENTION, NONFICTION HONORABLE MENTION, NONFICTION My first guitar lesson was in the living room at 4 p.m. on Wed., August 26, 2009. My teacher, Rob, an old neighborhood rockstar, drew in my notebook a picture of a guitar with its anatomy labeled: headstock, nut, neck, strings, frets, bridge, body. He taught me two riffs and wrote them insend tablature first was back notation. whateverThe he had heard Henry Mancini’s to “Peter Gunn, ” that day ontheme the radio, listening in the which is little more a single-string work truck onthan the way to a manhole exercise: somewhere.

Beyond pure exploration, the particulars of our musical exchange offered subliminal windows into our inner lives. If he was sending early ’60s garage rock, I knew all was well in his world. Early in college, when I started sending a lot of Elliot Smith (a singer-songwriter who would go on Thetosecond ThebyBeatles’ commitwas suicide stabbing“Day himTripper.self ” It was a real riffwith fromaasteak real song, in the heart knife) one I knew and me liked andmy had alreadyof Dad asked about regiment wantedantidepressants. to play. And, in Then theory at least, I he’d send me could: something happy, something like The Lovin’ Spoonful.

This November, Dad celebrated his retirement with a major back surgery. I felt guilty for not visiting him in the hospital or calling him enough in the painful days after, so I sent him a YouTube link. It was a John Prine Guitar snobs say that “tone show I’d love just to discovered, one is ofall his in the fingers, ” that the“Listen instrument is little last concerts. to this when more than extension of”the body Dad — reyouan have a chance, I wrote. really, theplied hands.

My left hand could now. only” immediately: “Listening stretch to When the fourth four frets the fret, well and of new music was as many as “Day required. dries, Dad and ITripper” turn to the classics.I held the pick in mytell right hand struckof I can’t you theand number the open E string. rang. Iout pressed down times I’ve It looked the passenon the nylon, mywindow index finger just ger-side on nestled I-95 south, behind heading the third fret.from I plucked.

It rang home New Haven with again, and I felt — to surprise — my my bookbag andmy acoustic in the back mind and body in something other than seat, and asked Dad what his favorite conflict.

Zeppelin track is.

I fumbled through the song I know what song it again, is. It’s and “The again. Later nightthe — toSame, my ”surprise Song that Remains the live — Dad brought his old warped Yamaha up from the basement and fumbled along with me. #

20 | Wallace 2022

Dad’s childhood home is just two blocks from mine. We both grew up in Middle Village, Queens — but in different New Yorks.

Dad’s first favorite song was The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic,” which came out in November 1965, the monthfrom he turned four.

WhenGarhe wasin silence. version Madison Square eight nine, he heard Led Zeppelin’s den,or 1973, recorded four years before In the spring of my sophomore “Whole Lotta Love” theprecipice jukebox inyear, the night before the musical I a teenage Dad — ononthe Carlos’ Pizzeria on Metropolitan Avenue.was playing in was set to open, my of so many memories and so many He found a guitar notbeer longand there-amplifier completely fried. No obvimistakes, full ofteacher so much after. an aimless teenager GodAs knows what else — sawin theNew bandYorkous reason, no sign of life. The next inat the 1970s, Dadand crawled the club scene.day — still wearing his work clothes the Garden fireworks rained He wentthe to CBGB, to Max’s Kansasin City, from balconies like missiles a to— Dad appeared in New Haven with every since-shuttered teenage warzone andvenue lit the imaginable. smoggy a backup in the trunk of his Jeep.

Twisted Sister, The Ramones, Television, In the fall of my junior year, I arena air in a transient crimson.

Talking Heads — he sawitthem all. the put together a band for a basement I know what song is. I know I tooIprowled York in high story. ask DadNew so I can hear himschool, tell show the weekend of Halloween. but urbanso renewal — and my study habitsWe played the hits: Michael Jackit again, I can listen.

— foreclosed most opportunities for liveson, Tears for Fears, The Human music#and teenage debauchery. My JesuitLeague, Talking Heads. Before the high school jazz band gave us shirts withset began, I put my phone down AMDG Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam In — memory, the trilogy — Ya-— inon the shelf next to me and hit rethe CGBG the front.

That’scord. Once the show was over and maha I, IIfont and across III — provides some about as close Dad’s teenage experiencethe video was processed, I sent it linearity to as the motley collection and mywould teenage experience ever got. that come to consume ourAndto Dad. He called me, thrilled. He forbasement that, he isin proud. the decade that fol- wished he could have been there.

Dad was bad student.

Hewithprobably In the weeks that followed, I lowed “Daya Tripper. ” A bass had He doesn’t In the 60s,watched the video back dozens of outADHD. its volume knob,know. a keyboard ADHD wason cured a rap on thethat knuck-times. I did not care that the cambought sale,with a pedal steel les.

The unnamed handicap ahaunted folded into a briefcase, vintagehim.era showed just the paunch of my ItYamaha sent himDX7 to asynthesizer, technical high school in-stomach and the outline of my ass. a dumpstead of an academic one,anand an extraThat night, I played so hard that I ster-dived drum kit, oldtoGermake-up senior semester thereafter.for Sure,snapped a string. man accordion still auditioning heheirloom later became an electrician, and a great When the pandemic arrived and status, a collective heap one at that (construction-site nicknamesI returned home in exile, I spent a of unfocused interest. are notoriously Dad’s was “John Guitar, ofcrude, course, always re- thelot of time in my bedroom. Dad still Gentleman”) Dad the electrician oftenwent to work, but when he got home, mained firstbut among equals.

I kept wonders he would have made playing.whether I got better.

I brought it ahe’d sit in his chair in the living great electrical engineer, to college.

I poured mysomeone heart intowithroom, pick up the guitar, and nooa the deskinstrument. and a tie and without I played it inpermanent clubs, dle. Sometimes, I’d head downstairs damage to his hands or elbows or spine.and play with him, teach him a lick or theaters, backyards, and baseWho knows?

Maybe he could have, if onlytwo. He played not on his old warped ments.

On the nights my first-year someone haddarkest, been there to help him along,Yamaha but on one of mine. After all, dorm felt I sat at the foot toof push myhim. bed and plucked the strings we both play right-handed.

Dad never stopped listening to music, but his high school band fell apart after just a few rehearsals and he quit guitar lessons once easier thrills like cars and girls and parties came around. Loving music and loving a musical instrument are two relat

FIRST PRIZE, FICTION

Cherry ISABELLE QIAN

I

n the days and even in the hours leading up to Margot’s first boy-girl pool party, I practiced taking my clothes off in front of the mirror. I studied it like it was something to be mastered, relentlessly, lifting the hem of my shirt and slipping it over my head in one fluid motion, the way I saw actresses do it in the movies. Under my clothes was my new bikini, which I wore like a present. My entire body was hairless and soft. I shaved it every day to maintain its hairlessness.

I shaved my armpits and my legs and the pink, wrinkled caps of my knees.

My body, when shaved, was beautiful. I liked how easy it was to touch. I liked the thought of someone running his hand along my calf and thinking to himself — how smooth!

I bought the bikini a week before Margot’s party. It was the first bikini that I had ever owned, and I bought it specifically for the party, or really for Brandon, who I knew would be there. When I thought about someone’s hands touching my legs, those hands were usually Brandon’s.

I liked to imagine him gripping my foot, his thumb rubbing circles on the inside dimple of my left ankle. I thought about him watching as I climbed — shining, newborn-wet — out of the pool and burned my flat soles on the white tile. I thought about him kissing the heart of my foot. His mouth would be cold from swallowing so much chlorine.

Inside the department store, I stripped off my clothes and stood naked in my socks under the fluorescent lights. The bikini that I had chosen was red. Cherry, according to the woman in the store. I loved cherries. In the summer, I would eat so many that they made my stomach hurt. I would eat them all in one sitting, when they were firm but not hard, the flesh swelling with moisture and sweetness, almost bursting from their oily, dark skins — the tautness that held for maybe a day after you took them out of the fridge, before they went soft and old in your mouth. They would leave stains everywhere, all over my lips, my fingers, the front of my shirt.

Once, when I was little, I swallowed a cherry pit, and Margot told me that I was going to die.

“Those are poisonous,” she said. “If you eat them, you go into shock.”

“Right now?” I asked. “I’m going to die right now?”

“We need to make you throw up,” said Margot.

Following her lead, I shoved my index and middle fingers into my throat and prodded them around. My mouth felt so small on the inside. I coughed until I cried, my gag reflex convulsing against my hand.

“Let me do it,” said Margot. “Just hold still.”

When she slipped her fingers into my

mouth, I imagined them like pale flashlights, searching through the darkness, past the stalactites and stalagmites of my teeth, towards the strange, red cavern of my pharynx. I coughed and sobbed around her little white hand, and she kept saying, just hold still, I’ve almost got it, until her mom came running out of the house and told me that I would only die if I crushed the pit beneath my teeth and released the poison into my system.

“Did you chew it?” she asked. “Or did you just swallow?”

“I swallowed,” I said.

“You’ll be ok,” she told me. “Be more careful next time.”

After that, I started picturing cherries growing in my stomach. Not the trees with their pink blossoms, but the dark, red fruits — two of them tied together by their stems like twin babies connected by the same umbilical cord.

“I see a lot of girls coming in to buy this one,” the woman in the store had said, shoving the red, nylon scraps into my hands. “It’s very popular for girls your age.”

In the changing room, I put the scraps on and looked at my body in the glass. It did not look like my body, but it was. It was a body in a red bikini, and I realize that it was probably the kind of body that made people turn their heads around and think — wow. As I ran my hand over my stomach and stroked its smoothness, I

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felt a kind of pleasure that was almost close to sick. I had never known that it could be so beautiful, my body, not just a shape but a series of curves and planes, shining under the department store lights like something out of someone else’s dream.

I looked at myself and looked at myself, until my mother pushed the drapes aside without warning and stepped into the changing room.

“It’s very red,” she said, after a moment.

“It’s supposed to be red,” I replied, annoyed. “I wanted it to be red.”

“Well,” said my mother. “If you’re sure that’s what you want.”

She stood for a second and looked at my reflection. I folded my arms over my chest.

“God,” she sighed. “You have such a perfect body.”

In my room back at home, I put my new bikini on under my clothes and stood before the mirror with the curtains open to let in the light. I took my shirt off. Then I put it back on so that I could take it off again, more intentionally this time. In my head, I was a flower, unfolding myself under the summer heat like you see in a nature documentary, how the petals spread themselves apart, flushed and opened. I unbuttoned my shorts and pushed them down my legs. I let the sun fall on my body, let it run all over my limbs. I did this endlessly. It was an impulse of its own. Every time I put my clothes back on, I would watch my body disappear beneath my t-shirt, obscured by the space between the damp cotton and my own sweaty skin. Then, I always wanted to see it again, just one more time, to prove that it was still there. Nothing could compare to that moment of first nakedness, the surprise I always felt when I saw myself in the glass. I was like a little kid unwrapping a gift, peeling back the paper, and laughing at the toy inside.

Losing clothes was an art, I thought. A thing of perfection, and if I could just get it absolutely right, it would be beautiful.

When we were little, we used to make-believe that we were mermaids in Margot’s pool. It was Margot, Sarah, Sruthi,

24 | Wallace 2022

and me. We would sit on the edge of the water, flashing our legs in the sun like long, gorgeous tails, and we would spread our hair over our bare shoulders the way that mermaids did to cover their breasts, even though we didn’t have breasts yet, and we didn’t spend any time wanting them either. Breasts were uninteresting to us. We weren’t old enough to care about our bodies. We only cared about mermaids.

Sometimes, we would make Margot’s little brother pretend to be a sailor. We would tell him to stand behind the pine tree in the corner of Margot’s backyard, and we would sit in a row along the pool deck, splashing our tails in the water like we didn’t know he was there, even though that was the whole point of the game. When he came charging out into the open, we would beckon at him and laugh.

“Come here!” we would say. “You can’t catch us!”

As soon as he got too close, we would dive into the water, swimming down to the bottom as quickly as our hollow bodies would sink us, our opalescent tails flaring as we dolphin-kicked our way to safety.

We imagined him running up to the water and touching his hands against the surface in despair. We imagined him jumping into the pool to chase after us. We imagined him kneeling on a sandy beach with his face to the sun, crying because he knew that he had just seen the most beautiful thing that he would ever see, and now it was lost to him forever.

After an appropriate amount of time had passed, we would swim back up and do it all over again. This was our favorite game.

When, in high school, we finally became friends with boys, it occurred to us that maybe we should start inviting them to pool parties too. Mainly, we wanted to see them shirtless, but nobody ever said this out loud.

Of all the boys, I wanted to see Brandon shirtless most of all. Brandon wasn’t exactly cute, but he was tall, and that could screw with your head a little bit because sometimes he would come up and stand behind you while you were doing math homework,

and he would tell you exactly what you were doing wrong, and as he was explaining the right way to find the derivative of a tangent function, he would lean so close over your shoulder that you thought you could feel the warmth emanating from his chest to the hairs at the base of your neck.

Two months before Margot’s pool party, we went with the boys to a park, where we sat in a circle on the grass like kindergarteners, but also not kindergarteners because we were all very horny. Brandon complained a lot. He kept groaning over and over again that it was so hot, sitting on the grass with the sun like a warm hand over his nape. It made him sweat. He didn’t like sweating.

He showed us the dark and souring spot staining the back of his t-shirt.

“If I could take my shirt off, I wouldn’t be so sweaty,” he said.

“Do it then,” I told him. “You won’t.”

“You think I’m a pussy?” he asked.

In one movement, he pulled his shirt off. He did it so beautifully that I wondered if he had practiced it before. When he threw the shirt triumphantly into the center of the circle, all of us looked at each other and rolled our eyes and laughed, until he lay back down on the ground, pale and sweating, and I kept laughing, but it was different. It had never fully occurred to me before that his body could exist beneath his shirt like mine did. But I realized then that he was hot, in an undercover way. It was like he had been hiding a secret the whole time, and now he seemed to flash behind my eyes, underneath my tongue, like a scar: a broad and solid white line in the scorched grass.

We were 14. Everyone was a mystery under their shirt.

“Nice abs,” said Pranav to Brandon.

“Thanks,” Brandon said. “They were intentional.”

It had been so hot that afternoon. I kept looking at him, and then not looking, like he was too much, too bright, for my eyes.

He had to be viewed in fragments. When I wasn’t looking at him, I looked at the sky. It, too, looked hot to touch, like the top of a car that has been sitting in the sun all day, and

FIRST PRIZE, FICTION

even before you burn your fingers against the metal hood, you can see that kind of sheen on it that tells you it will hurt.

I used to think about mermaids before I went to sleep. It was like the game that we played with Margot’s little brother, only, in my head, it was an actual prince with dark, floppy hair and blue eyes. He would be wandering around in some great, beastly forest, alone. Suddenly, he would push through the bushes and, stumbling upon the edge of a lagoon, he would see a beautiful mermaid swimming there in the sparkling water. Don’t be scared, he would say, when she saw him. Then, in my fantasy, he would tear his shirt off and wade into the shallows and kiss her on the mouth. Their faces would press together — so tightly that the distance between their noses would be erased, would be swallowed by the closeness, so dark and warm and unknown — but they would make no sound because in my head, kissing was supposed to be silent. The truth was, I had never been kissed before. But I could still imagine Brandon and I tasting the wetness on each other’s tongues The sun kept hitting my eyes. It refracted off the water, the glass of Margot’s sliding doors, and the pale, hot bone of Brandon’s shoulder blade. All that light — it took to my cornea like a metal baseball bat.

“You can’t just stay up there forever,” said Brandon, pulling at the giant, inflated turtle that I was sunbathing on. “Share the wealth.”

I stretched my hairless legs and extended them across the turtle’s rubbery, green back. The rest of our friends were in the shallow end, on the other side of the pool.

In my head, I kept replaying the moment when I had emerged from my clothes and stood before Brandon in my new, red bikini, my skin slightly damp from sweat — another surface of refraction. Even without looking, I had felt his eyes sticking to me as I walked up to the lip of the water. His gaze was a coat of white glue, something that dried on you like a second skin and had to be peeled off. He must have looked almost stupid, I thought. A wide-eyed baby suck-

ing milk from its mother’s tit, staring at me like I was the moment that you rewind again and again in a VCR, where the movie star arches her back over the hood of a car and time slows down just to stare at her a little bit longer. I was so beautiful. I was a mermaid, and I just knew that he was looking at me like something he had never seen before.

A new discovery, so perfect, it was too much for his mind to conceive.

“Come on,” said Brandon. “Get off.”

“No,” I laughed.

There were little beads of water collecting on my shoulder, and I thought about how nice the cup of that shoulder must seem to him. It was scented with citrus-flavored sunscreen. I believed that I could hear inside of his head. He was looking at me, and he was saying to himself — so beautiful, so beautiful! It looped through my brain like a song, and I was letting myself drop into the rhythm of its chorus, how I pointed my perfect feet and rolled my long, tanned neck to the same beat.

“Fuck you,” Brandon told me. “If you don’t get off, I’ll make you.”

I flipped over so that my back hit the sunlight and grabbed hold of the turtle’s fat, yielding neck.

“Go ahead,” I said.

When he pushed himself up onto the plastic floaty, the water poured off his body the way I imagined it would off the back of a dolphin. His mouth was pink. I knew that it must be clean on the inside. Under the sun, his teeth looked like the tiles that ran around the circumference of the pool: white, hard, and smooth. He grabbed my arm with his right hand and pulled. For a moment — as we toppled off the turtle with the rubbery sound of skin scrubbing against plastic and plunged into the water where the air fell from our lungs and our bodies seemed to disintegrate into the foam that they themselves had produced — I pictured myself colliding against those teeth, crashing with the enamel, my fingernails scratching the ivory of his canines. They were so bright.

They took up all the space in my eye.

When we surfaced, Brandon’s hand was

still gripping my arm.

“You suck,” I told him.

“I won,” he said.

“You kicked me when we were underwater,” I said.

“You kicked me too,” he replied.

My foot grazed his leg. I felt the hair that grew along his calf with the pad of my big toe. His irises were so blue, they tasted like copper coins under my tongue. I could have swallowed them whole. I imagined us in the middle of the ocean, clinging to each other to survive, licking at each other’s teeth, disappearing into each other’s mouths as we drowned. Kiss me, I thought. I didn’t know much about boys. I didn’t know how anyone knew to kiss anyone else. I didn’t even really want him to kiss me, but I wanted to be the girl wearing the red bikini who was so beautiful that she got kissed in a swimming pool because the boy couldn’t help himself.

Kiss me, I willed, again. I was so stupid that I almost believed he would.

For a long time, whenever I thought back to that moment, I would always cut the memory there. Like how you edit the endings of stories you don’t like: I would leave us where we were, floating forever in circles, not saying a word, his hand tethering me like a buoy to the bottom of the ocean, and the water dripping from our hair to our eyes. When I got older and started having a lot of sex — some of it bad, most of it kind of average — I realized that bodies weren’t mysteries at all, that they were in fact just variations of flesh, which could always be boiled down to the same basic compounds.

By then, I had started telling this story a lot.

I told it like it was a joke, which, in the end, it probably was.

“It was so bad,” I would tell my friends, as we sat in the emptying college dining hall. “I was so horny for this boy. There was more horniness in me than my tiny body knew how to hold.”

My new college friends would grin.

They were easier to tell such things to because they hadn’t known me at the time.

They couldn’t remind me of how seriously I had taken it, how seriously we had taken all

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FIRST PRIZE, FICTION

// ARIEL KIM

26 | Wallace 2022

things as children, before we were old enough to look at ourselves and laugh.

“So, we’re floating there,” I would say. “I’m staring into his eyes. My heart is going crazy, and for some reason, I’m like, oh my god, he’s going to kiss me. But then, instead of kissing me, he looks at my chest, turns bright red, and starts stammering. And when I look down at myself, I realize that my entire right boob is just hanging out in the open, and he has basically been making eye-contact with my nipple.”

We would laugh and laugh, until they turned the dining hall lights out over our heads. Then, we would go back to our rooms and remember about how glad we were to be away from that era of our lives, and we would forget how brightly and painfully we had known the world in those days, back when we didn’t talk about our bodies because we spent so much time thinking about them, back when we were excited and humiliated by anything, back when everything under our fingertips seemed so new and so ripe, even our own skin.

Never did I mention exactly how, that day in Margot’s pool, I looked down and saw my own breast collapsed nakedly against my stomach like an exhausted whale — a pale and drowning mound of fat. How I wondered if Brandon thought that I had orchestrated the whole thing on purpose, the way that I had really orchestrated everything else, and how that made me hate myself. And later, after Brandon had swum away to join the others, how I told myself that I didn’t care about him, didn’t care if he thought that I was some kind of sex-crazed sociopath, which I almost believed I was. I dove back down to the bottom of the pool and pretended that I was a mermaid. It was so beautiful there, with the light from the sun carving a white hole through the ripples above my head, and the shadows of those ripples falling all over the pool floor, all over my body, which was a mermaid’s body. This was what we forgot, in our laughter.

We had misunderstood the mermaids in our games, I realized, in those lost moments at the bottom of Margot’s pool. All they really wanted was to swim around where no one else was looking. I stayed under the water until my lungs ran out. It was too bad that I couldn’t be a mermaid.

It was too bad that I couldn’t stop myself from wanting the air.

RUNNER-UP, FICTION

The Rubber Band Test JOHN NGUYEN

A

t the seafood section of Buddha Amazing Market, the reek of death was especially prominent. The lobster tanks spellbound Trời and Lá. In one glass prison, the creatures, with rubber bands restricting their red pincers, climbed onto each other, as though trying to escape. The pile resembled a hunched back. One crustacean nearly made it out — but Chuông poked it with a chopstick. The clawed optimist fell slowly to the bottom.

“Ha! Sneaky guy.”

“Hey, why’d you do that?” asked Lá.

Grabbing a silver knife, Chuông prepared to cut up a salmon. “What?

You want freedom for animals?” He chuckled. “Stupid!”

“Sorry, Chuông,” said Hồng, catching up to her teenagers, struggling to push a wonky-wheeled cart.

“Hồng! No problem. What would you like?”

“Salmon. Three pounds. And five blue crabs. Maybe toss a couple lobsters in there.”

“Full house tonight?”

“No no no.” She shook her hands and head. “Can never be too prepared about food!”

“Ah, okay.” Chuông put the raw fish into a plastic bag. “Here.”

She examined its contents. “Sorry,

could you get new crabs and lobsters?

Live ones! I’ll boil them extra fresh!” “‘Course.”

He gave her a new batch. Hồng moved the cabbages and scallions to one side of the cart, the seafood occupying the other.

“Thanks, Chuông.”

“Any time.”

“Let’s go.” She motioned to the twins, swiping a pack of oxtail from the meat shelves.

Beginning to tail Hồng, Lá stuck his tongue out at Chuông, and Trời followed behind his brother. The family headed to the cashier.

“Byebye, stupid!” Chuông said to Lá. The salmon deboning continued.

The Tran twins grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota. They lived on The Very Old People’s Street — also known as Minnehaha. Nearly all the residents surpassed 70; Trời felt they paraded their age too much.

Only when surrounded by family, or by Vietnamese people, did they utter their real identities. At school, Trời was Oliver and Lá was Frederick — names they had seen on T.V. But luck showered over Hồng, since hers boasted a pleasant English translation: Rose. (Also pink, which isn’t as lyrical).

The name of almost every Vietnamese they knew carried poetry: Lotus, Apricot Blossom, Ocean. As with their mother, colors imbued the boys’ names: Xanh Da Trời (blue, like the “skin” of the sky) and Xanh Lá Cây (green, like a tree leaf). Economical with her syllables, Hồng called them Trời and Lá.

But even so, Trời’s confusion about colors never vanished. Everything in nature cycles through hues, doesn’t it? he wondered. The sky — it’s also magenta and murky and golden.

The neighborhood treasured the boys’ vitality, with which they became jewels of the street. Hồng could call any of the old couples to look after her children when she had to work an extra shift at the bakery.

At three in the afternoon, the school bus halted beside the street sign and opened its doors. The two 14-year-olds ran out. They said hello to Bertha, the classically trained pianist next door, who was swaying on her hammock as usual.

The twins marched into the house, their Superman and Captain America backpacks heavy with dreams.

Each removed his shoes. Passing the kitchen —“Hey, con!” Hồng said — they scurried to their bedroom. Steam from the minty pho broth humidi-

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fied the home, stuck to everything and spared none. Not even the clothes.

On the bottom of the bunk bed, Trời lay on his side. Above him, Lá’s body, within minutes, had surrendered to sleep, as happened daily. Trời dwelled on Cameron, a boy in his math class.

Tracing both their names on the frosty window, Trời lived up to his name: He was blue. Then he stared outside, his gaze roaming away from the house, to where the grass ended and the fractured street began. Beside their mailbox posed a naked pear tree, from which he tried to extract meaning.

The next week, only Trời shopped for groceries with Hồng. While she inspected the cabbages and red onions, he stared at the lobsters, elbows on the glass, chin on fists. Like a daydreamer.

“Hey, what the heck you doing?” a muffled voice asked.

Trời flinched. A boy stood on the other side of the tank. They peered at each other through the aqua glass, as though at a border.

“Uh, nothing,” said Trời, stepping to the side. He thought the boy was weird.

Weird Boy mirrored the daydreamer’s move; The lobster tank no longer obstructed their eye contact.

“I like the crabs, too. I have one as a pet! George. I like to rub his belly. Just gotta never take off the rubber bands.

Keep him cuffed. Ba hates George, thinks animals are money-makers, not friends.”

“Who’s your ba?”

He pointed at Chuông, who glanced up from his work. “Trời Tran!” He was cutting salmon and tuna. “Where’s your mom?”

Trời turned to the direction of Hồng, who struggled to choose the best greens.

The overhead lights began to flicker. In seconds Buddha Amazing succumbed to darkness; A power outage infected the whole city. Chuông

28 | Wallace 2022

grabbed a flashlight from beneath the counter and shined it at the two boys.

They stared into each other’s soilbrown eyes. Then Trời, his face pink as a sunset, moved his focus to the boy’s mouth: sweat twinkling, the vertical canyon between his nose and upper lip, black dots. An absence of light wasn’t so bad, Trời thought.

“I like your mustache.” He pointed at the blooming facial hair.

Weird Boy tapped his mouth. “No”— he shook his head —“you shouldn’t. It means I’m growing up — and I don’t wanna.”

Chuông carried on with his duties as another worker positioned the flashlight’s mouth to his cutting board. The deboning continued — as if nothing had occurred.

That left two boys, hearts beating fast as a caged bird’s wings. Standing in the shadows. In nothing and everything.

“What’s your name, anyways?” asked Trời.

“Oh — I’m Bài. You?” “People call me Oliver, but I’m Trời.”

“Nice to meet you, crab-lover.”

“Hey I’m not — ” “Whoawhoa, I’m joking, bro.” NoLonger-Weird Boy’s voice cracked.

“They’re not crabs, dummy.” Trời rolled his eyes. “They’re lobsters.”

“Okay,” replied Bài, raising his arms up, as if to surrender. “Okay.”

For Trời, the first glance was a test.

The second, a revelation. He couldn’t ignore it, this beautiful tension. The lobsters seemed to be side-eyeing him.

The world, Hồng had taught her kids, has two types of people: conformists and rebels. A third, unofficial category also exists: those who choose to do nothing — which also means conformity.

The following Saturday, Trời entered Buddha Amazing by himself. Hồng had gone to drop off her famous spring rolls for ill friends.

Trời carried two shopping baskets.

In his palm: a wrinkled sticky note, on which his mother had recorded a list: a dozen eggs, two cartons of milk, cabbage, scallions, chicken feet, chicken breast, four corn-on-the-cobs, clementines, dragonfruit and oxtail. No fish needed this round.

An astute observer of his mother, Trời found every item, swiftly reaching the checkout stations.

While waiting for an available cashier, Trời unzipped his jacket and removed Hồng’s food stamp card.

Its intricate designs hypnotized him: snow-capped mountains, the flaming sky, two deer facing one another, their touching antlers, cherry blossom branches hovering over the frozen lake, bone-white camellias.

In front of him an elderly woman finished paying. And the cashier summoning the next customer was Bài.

“Hey, why the heck you here?” he asked Trời, who, struggling to raise the overweight baskets onto the conveyor belt, left Bài’s question in the fishadorned air.

Pitying the lobster enthusiast, Bài slipped out from behind the cash register and hopped over to Trời. Without any words, the teens lifted the first basket together, each holding one handle, as though they had rehearsed.

The whole time, Trời stared down. Bài placed the second basket on the conveyor and resumed his post.

“Thanks.”

“So, where’s Mrs. Tran?”

“I’m helping Ma with groceries. She’s busy.”

“I see.”

“And you — why’re you here?” Trời interrogated him, studying the checkout station.

“A worker’s sick, so I’m helping Ba with the seafood back there and the register up here.”

“Cool.”

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In the lane beside them a baby wailed in its stroller.

“You know your mom makes the best pho?” Bài asked, holding the scanner.

“Ba tried it once. He fed me and I fell in love with the noodles.”

“Yeah, she’s the best.”

At that moment, Chuông stepped in to check on his son-turned-cashier. “It’s the not-stupid twin! How’re you?”

Trời nodded.

Smiling, Chuông helped bag up the groceries.

“We were talking about Trời’s mom and how good a cook she is,” said Bài.

“Dang right! She makes the best soups. But I don’t think her rice pancakes are better than mine.” Chuông shot a proud thumb at his chest. “Why not come eat dinner with us tomorrow— you, your brother, your mom!”

With each scanned item came a beep. “That works, since it’s after school,” Trời replied. “I’ll let them know.”

“Great, see you.” Chuông tied the four bags and looped two in each of Trời’s index fingers. After patting each boy on the shoulder, he returned to the seafood section.

Bài spotted the food stamp card.

“Paying with EBT?” “Huh?” He pointed to the plastic card.

“You mean food stamps?”

“Yeah, it’s called EBT. Eat. Bad. Today.” He laughed, noticing the Hershey’s bar Trời had placed onto the conveyor belt. The final item.

Trời shoved the card into the reader, typed the password, and clicked enter.

“Mkay, you’re all set.” He saluted Trời.

“See ya.”

“Thanks.” The black-haired boy disappeared through the sliding doors and waited in the parking lot for his mother’s car.

Hồng drove past a lake on the way to Chuông’s, the boys’ heads sticking out

of the backseat windows. Trời admired the October landscape: families sprinkling a line of breadcrumbs, bringing the ducks closer to them; remnants of that abrupt snow from the day before, dampening the sidewalks and grass; the rainbow playground in the sandbox, children zooming up and down the slides, dangling from monkey bars, as though over melted iron.

Pulling onto Magnolia Street, they saw Chuông’s one-story house.

Painted yellow, it stood ten blocks from Buddha Amazing. The brightest thing in the tedium of white and gray, of foliage. Hồng parked in front of the mailbox.

“Welcome, Trans,” said Chuông, yelling from the front door. He wore sunglasses.

Hồng reached the entrance, her sons behind. “Hi, Chuông.”

Holding the door open, he waited for them to enter. Once everyone set their shoes on the rack, he led them to the dining room, where Bài was waiting. On the table rose five candles.

“What are those for?” Hồng stared at the flames.

“Ah, to save on electricity.” Chuông winked.

“Clever!”

Trời and Lá greeted Bài as their parents chatted.

“Hey! Crab-lover and brother!” He fist-bumped each twin.

Trời beamed. “Hi, Bài.”

Hồng, the twins and Bài took their seats. Chuông entered the kitchen and returned with a pan of his rice pancakes, dandelion yellow. Containing shrimp, mung beans, scallions and pork belly, every circle had been cut into quarters. Trời considered every burnt spot a condiment, his mouth watering when he beheld the bronzed edges. Then the appetizers joined the show: purple mint leaves, lettuce, bean sprouts. And, of course, fish sauce.

“Eat a lot! Don’t wait for me,” Chuông begged.

The boys dug in. No teen touched the greens. After them, Hồng clamped mint and bean sprouts between her chopsticks.

Chuông took his seat and, copying Hồng, added veggies to his plate.

“So, how’s everyone?” He scanned the boys’ faces.

“Normal.” Trời and Lá spoke simultaneously.

“Same,” said Bài.

“Love lifes?” Hồng entered.

Lá scratched his head. “Uh …”

“Bruhhhh,” uttered Bài.

“I like … someone,” Trời suddenly began, munching on a peppered shrimp.

“But I’m not the one. I know.”

“Well, I guess I lied yesterday. You’re both stupids, you” — Chuông pointed at Trời — “and him,” his forefinger then aimed at Lá. “How’re you so smart at school but not in real life?”

“Chuông’s right, con. You don’t know until you go out there — what the Americans always say!” Hồng said, as though they observed the country through a snow globe.

“Just put rubber bands around life’s pinchers!” Chuông exclaimed, giving a thumbs up.

“Where’s the bathroom?” Trời whispered to Bài.

“Right there.” Chuông smirked as he pointed to the hallway.

Fleeing, Trời found his destination. He flumped onto the toilet seat and drained the amber pool in his body.

Once he finished washing his hands, Trời noticed on the other side of the hallway a closed door, from which hung a drawing with cartoon lobsters, crayoned brown like autumn leaves. Wielding swords, they seemed angry, as if about to fight. At the center gleamed Bài’s name, in curly letters. Trời, his mouth ajar like a puppet’s, discovered in his pocket a dull pencil. He approached

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Bài’s door and scribbled a message on the name tag: “Hangout?” Trời tenderly separated the sign from its tape, and slipped it halfway beneath the door.

But he chickened out.

Trời withdrew the sign and, finding out the pencil bore no eraser, crumpled it into a paper ball, which he placed in his coat pocket. The cartoon lobsters didn’t have a chance to start their duel.

Chuông had to pick up shipments of fish and bring them to Swordfish Amazing, so he dropped Bài off at Hồng’s the next evening. The sun, like a far-away explosion with increasing radius, was setting behind the oak trees.

The twins, Hồng, and Bài banded together to fashion a bonfire at the center of the lawn. They collected twigs and branches, tossing them into the pit. Hồng squeezed the bottle of lighter fluid until the wood grew wet, and then lit a match.

Spreading like watercolor, a fire was born.

Hồng slipped into the home to throw clothes in the washing machine. The boys remained outside, sitting in foldable chairs. Trời noted the fishy stench of Bài’s skin and t-shirt — but said nothing.

Playing games on his phone, Lá drooped into his seat. Bài and Trời were practically alone; they took sips from the hot chocolate Hồng had whipped up.

“Peaceful,” Bài said, exhal-

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ing.

Trời smiled without teeth.

After a breeze whispered through the oak leaves, he spoke: “I just remembered — you didn’t show me George yesterday.”

“You’re right!”

Trời chewed on a softened marshmallow, which had absorbed the creamy brown sweetness. “Maybe you can take off his rubber bands when you show me?” he said hopefully. The flames gained power.

Flashes of crystals in their eyes.

“I guess I should help out my best bud.” Bài laughed. “Gonna ask me to let him on my bed, too?”

His head lifted to the indigo sky, Trời giggled unapologetically, holding his stomach with both hands as though to keep it from falling off. “Yep!” He gave a thumbs up.

As if to celebrate the night, crickets gradually formed a choir. From Bertha’s half-open window piano notes whirled.

Fireflies flashed on. A lovely stink, as of orchids, permeated the evening air.

Hồng returned to the lawn and covered the boys in handmade quilts; they had conceded to sleep’s clutches.

Trời’s coat, in which the crumpled lobster nametag still hid, was probably being soaked in soap. The fire continued to make cracking sounds, but it didn’t shatter. Drool escaped Lá’s snoring mouth. Beside him, Trời’s head had fallen, as gently as a shooting star, onto Bài’s shoulder.

// DORA GUO

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The Whistle of a Pressure Cooker ARINJAY SINGH

O

n the eve of his long journey to America, Ronit Lobo — that is, Swami Ronny, as most of Bhopal had come to know him — acquired himself a wife. The Lobos were prominent tobacconists; His bride’s parents, meanwhile, were proud farmhands of decidedly humbler means. Nevertheless, his ammi had begun to experience sleepless nights at the thought of her only child going unpampered in a foreign land, so when the Patel family offered as a parting gift one young goat, twothirds of their life savings and their Asha — a thin, dark-skinned, quiet teenager who they secretly feared was slightly cosmically doomed — the Lobos were willing to engage.

Asha, for her part, had been withdrawn from the local convent school at age nine. The day she had been made to swap her pencil-box for a rake and a pail, she had kicked and screamed and cried herself to sleep as torrential afternoon rain battered the Patels’ thatched roof.

Now, one misplaced adolescence later, she spent her days ambling around the family fields, daydreaming, ferrying milk to sleazy storemen and occasionally joining games of gully cricket with her younger siblings.

On Asha’s wedding day, the Patel children were midway through the second innings of a particularly riveting affair when their father approached from afar, clutching to his chest the finest clothes and the only earrings that the family owned. Jaldi chalo mere saath, he exhorted in Asha’s direction, sounding animated for the first time since the previous year’s bountiful summer.

Emerging some time later from the makeshift bathhouse behind the barn, Asha mounted his scooter wordlessly, wearily, yet still unable to quell her optimistic curiosity as she clutched Mr. Patel’s sweaty midriff and motored toward her first meeting with her new husband — the first person, she convinced herself, who had ever voluntarily agreed to love her.

By this time, Swami Ronny, always clad in billowing, sequined orange robes, had built quite a reputation in Bhopal. The Patels could hardly believe their collective fortune. Ronny was rather unlike other Swamis, though, in that he considered the Bhagavad Gita — India’s most seminal spiritual text — to be impractical bullshit, a prized specimen of chutiyapa. In fact, at the time of his self-anointment the previous year, he had only read the

Gita twice, and that too in abridged form.

His higher calling, as it were, revealed itself to him through mediums he considered far more sacred.

For one, from the stack of Times of India clippings in which his father wrapped and sold paan, he had quickly gathered that the West was far more inclined toward AC/ DC than anything remotely ascetic. Through the rickety radio on the counter, meanwhile, he had been introduced to one Freddie Mercury, a man with skin like Swami Ronny’s own who remarkably appeared to hold the collective Western libido in his vice grip.

Impulsive as ever, Swami Ronny quickly perceived an opportunity, a niche. Those fucking firangis, he thought, his thoughts darting away as his family performed its Diwali prayers. Those fucking firangis, they hate chastity but want to feel exotic, enlightened, smart. America, he reasoned, could use a guide, a curator, a real moderate — yes, someone who could deliver sexy South Asian lore in exactly the way people wanted to hear it. Bhopali vernacular, it bears noting, offered no precise translation for the concept of a charlatan, and Swami Ronny’s English vocabulary didn’t

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extend quite that far. All in all, then, it felt like an utterly inspired idea — perhaps his best since he’d convinced his papa to add bhaang to a not-so-secret menu at the shop.

Never one to waste time, he sat his parents down the very next morning and explained to them his intentions, his new identity. As his ammi cried into her shawl, his papa sat in silence, digesting, ruminating, as if for the first time considering the prospect of saying no to his son. Before long, though, his stained fingers teased open the lockbox he kept in a kitchen cupboard, and then, in a purely symbolic, uniquely Indian gesture of paternal support, peeled several thousand rupees’ worth of damp notes from within it and slammed them on the table with gusto. Jaao, Swami Ronny. Go. As father and son embraced tenderly, even ammi couldn’t help but betray half a smile.

Buoyed by his family’s support yet cognizant that his avant-garde approach would scarcely resonate in Bhopal, Swami Ronny spent the 12 months leading up to his proposed departure advertising rather than qualifying it. Indeed, on account of his intended missionary bravery, he quickly became something of a sensation, spending evening after evening basking in the felicitations and home-cooked meals showered upon him by neighbors and strangers alike.

When asked at the dinner table for morsels of sagely counsel, though, he would simply laugh, returning a knowing, increasingly emblematic smile to his cherubic face. Naaa babu, he would say to aspiring devotees young and old, it isn’t time yet. The tease delighted everyone. Business at the tobaccowala boomed.

When the time did finally come, the Lobos, the Patels and assorted, weeping townsfolk followed Swami Ronny and his new bride by train to Delhi’s international airport. That morning, Asha had been tutored by Swami Ronny’s ammi in the art of hand-washing and folding a crisp robe, 11 of which were now scattered across three ‘Lobo’-inscribed trunks, each carried by an adoring shophand. Asha, for her part,

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brought along a single suitcase of her own.

As she dragged it over the curb, it clanged metallically, her wedding bangles and Hindi books drumming against the Patels’ beloved pressure cooker within its cheap, acrylic walls. Khichdi banaa, Swami Ronny’s ammi offered Asha by way of a farewell, pausing her dramatic wailing to gesticulate toward the cooker and impart one final instruction for her son’s care as the newlyweds disappeared into the terminal. Having never been near an airport, Asha’s parents and seven-year-old twin brothers stood at the periphery of the scene, staring blankly and not knowing exactly what to think.

Swami Ronny and Asha said little to each other over their 35-hour journey to Morningside Heights. Asha refused to cry in front of her husband, stifling racking sobs with her shawl in the dusk of the Boeing 707 cabin, and withdrawing to a bathroom stall during their layover in Frankfurt. Afterwards, she ate white bread for the first time while Swami Ronny browsed for stationery. On the final leg of their journey, Swami Ronny read his dog-eared, abridged copy of the Gita cover-to-cover for the third time, using two highlighters — one a darkish pink, reserved for notions like renouncing bodily temptation, and the other green, for platitudes like ‘whatever happens is for the better’ — to begin assembling his material. From the adjacent seat, Asha watched as Sigourney Weaver fought aliens on a tiny screen at the front of the cabin, drifting in and out of sleep, waking abruptly from time to time as her husband jerked her head from his shoulder.

In New York, Swami Ronny hit the ground running. He already spoke impressive, charming English, as the receptionist at their 111th Street hostel would corroborate within five minutes of their arrival, and was thus able to begin actualizing his grand vision with rather surprising ease. On top of this, Swami Ronny could scarcely have imagined a more fortunate set of logistical circumstances. Living near a YMCA building meant that a large community venue existed not thirty seconds from home,

sharing a neighborhood with Columbia in all of its hippie glory meant an endless supply of impressionable white graduate students and their curious, artsy, insidiously rich friends, and the very nature of America meant that were very few Gita scholars — or Indians of any kind, for that matter — roaming the streets, lying in wait to discredit Swami Ronny’s facade. Swami Ronny plunged himself into work.

Unfortunately for Asha, though, these latter particularities meant that her own earliest memories of New York would come to be of lugging a dictionary through Harlem’s bus network, trying and failing to find lentils and spices and with them, perhaps a friendly dark brown face to talk to, her eyes filling with hot tears as the cracks of Yankees bats over the radio reminded her of cricket with her little brothers. Her struggles meant weeks full of oatmeal and long silences, only ever punctured by Swami Ronny’s muttering scowls as he inhaled The New York Times and scrawled yet more shorthand notes into the margins of his personal Gita.

Night after night, meanwhile, her earnest attempts to either seduce or simply learn more about her husband were met with the same, chaste strain of rejection. Swami hoon main. I’m a Swami. Asha felt wretched and desperately unwanted, which was the truth, but knew that there was nothing to be gained by verbalizing it. Quietly, she let her husband toil, trying her very best behind the scenes to make his life — and by proxy, the marriage that superseded her own life — more comfortable.

Precisely seven weeks after their arrival, then, Swami Ronny emerged suddenly from his haze to host his first event at the Morningside YMCA. Entitled ‘Modern Soul Food and Freethought in 1981’, it attracted 17 Caucasians who had taken notice of flyers plastered at local bus stops and now sat scattered across the square room’s plastic seating, eating wafers and drinking tepid water that Asha had served to them in plastic cups. The room hummed with anticipation, even if the precise nature of what beckoned remained unclear. Soon, though,

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this blind faith was to be vindicated.

Introducing himself mysteriously in an exaggerated, colonial accent, Swami Ronny wasted no time in diving into an account of the Gita so revisionist, so precariously close to the line of blasphemy, that it left its inaugural audience spellbound. For the better part of an hour, he moulded one after another of Lord Krishna’s teachings into soundbites left initially ambiguous, and then illustrated daringly with such canonically American constructs as sexual liberty (change is the law of the universe) and marijuana (discipline is crucial, but so is meditation).

Yet if his morals were dubious, the success of his strategy was not — somehow, from weeks of poring over essentially a child’s version of a single spiritual text, he had produced exotic gold. His audience on this autumn day lapped up every word, the image of a desi messiah reflected in masses of wide, blue eyes. Freddie Mercury, he congratulated himself as he pressed his palms together, bowed, and accepted his audience’s clattering applause, would have been fucking impressed.

Though she said nothing and understood even less, Asha stood near the door and smiled, clutching a thin stack of entrance fees between her thumb and finger.

That same night, Swami Ronny made love to her for the first time, his rough manner leaving dark bruises on Asha’s neck, bruises she would wear on the bus the next day with pride and optimism, before concealing with a shawl in time for refreshment duty at Swami Ronny’s next event.

As leaves took on colors that neither Indian had seen before and then disappeared outright, Swami Ronny’s stature began to swell. Through the receptionist at 111th Street, Swami Ronny had become aware of several other YMCAs willing to host his gatherings and so, sporting a new handlebar moustache, he decided to take ‘Modern Soul Food and Freethought in 1981’ downtown. Asha, meanwhile, had begun to settle into a comforting routine, serving wafers and waters, collecting change at the

door and then retiring to a corner of his increasingly bustling sermons to pore over the colorful Hindi-English textbooks a kindly Uruguayan night manager would borrow from the library and then lend to her. One late November evening, after a rousing climax which covered the importance of enjoying nightlife (fortunes can change in a second, and you only live once), she pulled Swami Ronny aside. Clutching his arm, she said in English “nice, I like it very much”, still understanding very little, but nevertheless wanting to prove her commitment, the love she was teaching herself to embrace. As Swami Ronny ran an affectionate if slightly performative hand through her hair and then left hurriedly to hold court among a throng of twenty-something artists, she choked back a happy tear.

‘Modern Soul Food and Freethought in 1982’ was launched the following February, by which time Swami Ronny’s stock was rising meteorically. Asha saw him less and less, taking the subway back uptown after his events with leftover cups and snacks in tow while he hit the city with groups of devotees who had started to insist on buying him drinks. Once in a while, he would return before midnight, and instead of collapsing straight into drunken snores, he would join her for a late supper on the laminated floor of their hostel room. Sitting cross-legged, they would share a pot of khichdi as he recounted the evening’s stories of Upper East Side preschools and downtown speakeasies, stories of unfamiliar people and places and things that his increasingly sophisticated clientele had begun to expose him to.

Asha relished these moments. By now, Asha had found a store selling Indian sundries, which although run by Sri Lankans, meant that she could begin to put her pressure cooker to use. This had helped to endear her to her husband, even if not their neighbors along the hallway. To their mutual surprise, she was a terrific cook.

Life proceeded in benign fashion until one day — a rare snow day late in the spring — Swami Ronny announced that he was clearing his afternoon. Ever since he was

a child, this had tended to mean that a big, sweeping plan was about to be unveiled.

His parents, had they been around, would have seen it coming. With a copy of a tabloid in his left hand and a spring in his step, he returned to 111th Street from his weekly late-morning tea with a group of ladies he had met in December at Bleecker Street — a group for whom he had become something of an alternative sex guru. Unbeknownst to them, of course, was the fact that he had mostly only ever been with prostitutes from villages near Bhopal, and certainly no one who had ever done a tantric pelvic floor exercise. Knowing even less was Asha, who like a waiting puppy sprang to her feet to greet him. Reaching for his hat, she offered him some piping hot rajma chawal, a food she had learned he loved to eat in the still Bhopal winter after an evening of street cricket. Today, though, Swami Ronny was in a rush. His excitement was palpable. Come, he said to Asha in English, ignoring his food and beckoning her to grab her bright green puffer jacket.

Asha longed to hold Swami Ronny’s gloved right hand as they strolled through the Heights, frozen leaves crunching underfoot. Oblivious to how ridiculous her husband looked in orange robes and a coat, this felt to her like one of the movies that played on the screen in the lobby, like something truly Hollywood. As they settled onto a frigid park bench, Asha coughed quietly, peering contently at her husband through the little, staccato clouds of steamy breath collecting in front of her face.

My dear wife, Swami Ronny began, reverting to Hindi as he placed his palm on her shivering knee. Do you like the cold?

She did, but she shook her beanie-clad head anyway, perceiving the expectant expression beneath her husband’s unwieldy mustache.

People like us, he continued, buoyed by her response, belong in warmer weather. Next week, he informed Asha, we move somewhere better than New York.

Asha stared blankly at him as she grappled with the very notion of an America be-

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yond the Big Apple. Her expression bore a striking resemblance to her mother’s at the airport some months earlier, a unique blend of awe and resignation and utter confusion.

At the thought of moving, the prospect of their nascent metropolitan life unravelling as quickly as it had materialized, she felt instinctive pangs of sadness. Quickly, though, she realized that she had nothing to be sad about, nothing and no one to miss, and most pressingly, no say in the matter. So she listened.

Swami Ronny smiled obligingly as he plied his wife with a carefully curated summary of a series of events that, truth be told, hardly concerned a passenger like herself.

As it happened, earlier that year, one of his star struck Bleecker Street cohort had moved with her husband — a younger IT entrepreneur with no real geographic tethers — to Puerto Rico.

Portoricko, Asha blurted back, rolling these strange, foreign syllables across her tongue, straining to make sense of them.

This lady, a Dallas-born blonde thirty-something named Gladys, apparently credited Swami Ronny with having temporarily revitalized her outlook on love — even if, he thought to himself, her resurgent sex life now extended beyond the husband in question. In any event, that day, as she rose from her seat, put her gloves back on and bid Swami Ronny a tearful farewell, she had vowed to return to New York for a catchup when the weather got warmer, at which time she would present to him a vignette of life in San Juan, which she was sure that he and his ‘sweet’ wife would appreciate.

Saanwan, Asha parroted, more slowly this time.

After Gladys left, I started looking into San Juan, Swami Ronny explained, unfurling and then pointing for visual effect at the old paper he’d been carrying around all day, in which a fourth-page article described San Juan variously as a Caribbean cubby-hole, a tax haven and a burgeoning

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white Republican outpost.

Today, he continued, Gladys surprised us all and came back.

San Juan, she had recounted, was a tropical paradise, and at the very least stood in stark contrast to New York, where April snowfall had by now begun to soak through the lap of Swami Ronny’s robes. By her description, San Juan was all that they (he) longed for in one place — open-minded (read: gullible) white people, accessible (read: cheap and unstigmatized) domestic help, warm weather and what’s more, an aura of foreignness profound enough that Gladys and her adopted community would be inclined to help them (him) settle.

There’s a place for us there, he concluded triumphantly, inhaling heavy, frigid air through his nose as he waited for Asha’s ceremonial assent.

Chalo, theek hai, okay, she replied, exhaling wearily as she resolved to be optimistic for lack of any other alternative.

Swami Ronny turned out to be right about Gladys, who picked them up at San Juan’s sweltering airport exactly sixteen days of packing and logistics and phone calls later. Arriving wearing sultry red lipstick with a minivan for the couple’s luggage, she took them straight to a tiny, sun-bathed apartment in Condado, an up-and-coming neighborhood stretching along the island city’s northern coast. Rent is covered for your first month, Gladys mentioned casually on her way out, and I live in a gated compound ten minutes away. As the door shut behind her, Asha yelped and clapped her hands, barely able to contain her excitement at the tropical ambience that had replaced their 111th Street hostel room. Swami Ronny smiled. The universe seemed to have dealt them a good hand.

I’ll start unpacking, he offered magnanimously, and maybe you can make us something to eat?

Dragging his trunks to the bedroom, he pointed to the third of four wooden kitch-

en cabinets, where Asha would find that Gladys had left bananas, kidney beans and strange, yellow rice for her to cook with.

That night, Asha unwittingly served Swami Ronny a plate of habichuelas guisadas, which he went so far as to label some of the best rajma chawal he had ever eaten.

The next afternoon, Gladys called on the apartment to check on its new inhabitants, who had just finished unpacking. Opening the door in baggy shorts and an ill-fitting banyan rather than his typical attire, Swami Ronny felt terribly self-conscious. Still, he asked Gladys to stay for tea, which Asha quickly set about to make. As Swami Ronny sat with his de facto sponsor, drank his wife’s chai and discussed how best to embed ‘Modern Soul Food and Freethought’ into an entirely new fabric — Gladys’ proposal being to start doing home consultations in her gated community, which Swami Ronny thought was ingenious — Asha retreated into the bedroom in silence, barely noticing Gladys’ painted nails on her husband’s bare knee. Digging around in her drawer for something to read, she fished out a Hindi-English textbook that she felt guilty for having forgotten to return to the kindly Uruguayan watchman at the hostel.

As she flipped absent-mindedly through its juvenile illustrations, she found herself hoping — to her immense surprise — that everyone spoke English in Puerto Rico, not wanting her hard work on phonics and phrases to go to waste. The thought of such futility riled her, and she soon found herself engrossed, muttering the names of colors and vegetables with a feverish resolve interrupted only by Swami Ronny’s heavy footsteps as he walked into the bedroom an hour later. Feeling particularly chipper after his conversation with Gladys and unable to contain his laughter at his wife’s furious attempts to pronounce the word ‘apple’, he took a seat next to her at the foot of the bed and placed what felt to Asha like a protective arm around her shoulder.

// DORA GUO Gladys left you this before she went home, he said to her in Hindi, handing her a scrap of paper with a phone number and a little heart scrawled on it in red ink.

It’s for a cleaner, he clarified, because things get mouldy in the salty air and besides, you already do so much work with the cooking.

He pointed to his right at the drawer he had kept their cash in, explaining that the cleaner would come every third day unless called and told otherwise, and that she was

to be paid exactly three dollars on her way out.

Treat yourself a little bit, he crooned, basking in his own generosity. We’re really going to make it to the top here.

The thought of this left Asha dizzy, the smell of muddy Bhopali primary school floors echoing through her synapses.

Magda came to the apartment for the first time on the Tuesday of the following week, while Swami Ronny was away enjoying a working lunch of fish and tostones

at Gladys’. A 67-year-old Guatemalan lady with a complexion nearly as leathery as Asha’s, Magda had a kind face and small hands which were good for reaching into small kitchen corners.

Hola, she said to Asha, flashing her an unfamiliar, maternal smile.

Hoela, Asha stuttered back, raising her hand awkwardly and retreating instantaneously to the bedroom.

30 minutes later, Magda knocked twice on the bedroom door.

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¿Puedo limpiar aquí?, she asked, pointing through the doorway in the direction of the crinkled floral bedsheet behind Asha.

Nodding, Asha vacated her room and decided to keep herself busy by making some food. Her kitchen, she noticed, now sparkled. Magda was worth her rate.

She decided to make a simple vegetable porridge, throwing spices, carrots and cauliflower florets into her pressure cooker — now miraculously liberated of its gunk — along with the yellow rice she was secretly beginning to warm to. As the pressure cooker whistled, the narrow kitchen counter twinkled in the afternoon sun, and the room filled with a blended aroma of cleaning liquid and comfort food.

Magda emerged from the bedroom and set her broomstick down by the counter as Asha licked her lips and prepared to ladle a serving of porridge onto a plate for herself. ¿Qué es eso?, she asked Asha, staring at the cooker with great curiosity, inhaling deeply through her nostrils, and making exaggerated, circular hand gestures in front of her face.

Not knowing how to describe her creation in Hindi or English, let alone Spanish, Asha simply slid her plate down the counter for Magda to look at.

Huele increible, she marvelled, grinning warmly, genuinely at her newest client.

Asha blushed and flashed a fleeting smile back before the unfamiliarity of the whole situation jogged her instincts into action.

Her-is-yoor-munny, she blurted out suddenly, reaching into her pant pocket and handing Magda the three dollar bills she had carefully retrieved and folded while she waited nervously for her arrival. She handed them over with two hands, as was respectful in India, and patted them politely into Magda’s crinkled palms.

Gracias, señorita, Magda replied. As she packed her supplies back into her chipped

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red bucket, she chuckled to herself at the very concept of Asha, for whom she had almost instantaneously started to feel an affinity.

Not really needing the apartment to be cleaned, but equally reluctant to pick up the phone and try to tell her this, Asha welcomed Magda and her red bucket back into the apartment three days later. The two ladies moved silently around each other as they had on Tuesday — one in the kitchen, one in the room, swap — holding down the fort while Swami Ronny spent the afternoon in Dorado Beach, leading his first consultation with the wife of one of Gladys’ husband’s golf friends.

Today, Asha had decided to make a spicy bhindi and rice, thinking she would surprise Swami Ronny that evening with one of his other childhood favorites. Like clockwork, she once again lifted the lid of her cooker right as Magda emerged from her room.

Seeing Magda’s wrinkled eyes perk up at the smell of masala and charred okra sent an inexplicable affection coursing through Asha’s bony frame. Whether borne out of deprivation or homesickness she wasn’t sure, but suddenly, she found herself ladling generous servings of bhindi and rice into not one but two plates.

The two ladies said nothing to each other as they ate standing at the counter, Magda wolfing her food down ravenously, and Asha picking at it as she watched this strange, old, dark lady eating something she associated with the dust and musk of Bhopal.

Gracias, señorita, Magda said, her voice dripping with gratitude as she washed their plates clean. No one had made food for her in years.

Yoor-welcum, Asha replied, mentally patting herself on the back about her English, which she thought was on its way to being stellar, even if she spoke not a shred of Spanish. Handing Magda her pay as she

walked her to the door, Asha felt both delight and devastation, like a child bidding farewell to their playmate. It had been a while since she had had a friend.

Through the summer, Asha and Magda enjoyed twice-or-thrice-weekly lunches.

Swami Ronny had begun to spend more and more time on the road in San Juan, his network of clients and disciples snaking its tendrils into every corner of the island.

Asha, then, began to be needed for very little — gone were the days of large events where she would serve water, and so, too, the days of Swami Ronny ever returning home in time for supper or having time for breakfast. Still, she felt grateful and relieved to have someone to miss so terribly.

In June, Swami Ronny had spent some of his earnings on a grainy, second-hand television, belatedly clocking the extent of Asha’s isolation. Asha had never owned one before, so at first, she traced wary circles around it. She much preferred to lose herself in her homemade language school, which consisted of the Uruguayan’s Hindi-English textbook, and the English-Spanish textbook that Magda had sourced for her, lined up side-by-side in perfect transitivity.

Spanish, she began to find, was a forgiving language for people with Indian accents.

Over time, though, the ladies’ lunches moved from the counter to the TV area near the window, where they would sit together on threadbare cushions, eat lentils and vegetables, and watch telenovelas under the harsh glare of the afternoon sun. Magda would laugh and cry heartily, and though Asha seldom understood why, she held onto their afternoons for dear life, totally content with simply being around someone who bared first-order emotions. In July, Asha started hugging Magda before she left. In August, Magda stopped accepting money, the pair having realized that a four-hundred square-foot apartment could only be cleaned so many times, and moreover,

RUNNER-UP, FICTION

that they’d much prefer to be able to hang out every day, to be lonely together with no transactions to worry about. One day, after an advertisement for Tourism India had appeared on TV for the first time, Asha even daydreamed about bringing Magda with her to Bhopal to meet her brothers. That afternoon, words posed no obstacle between the two ladies as Asha giggled and gesticulated in explanation of her clearest, rosiest vision of home since she had left it behind.

In Bhopal, she figured, Magda would umpire one of their cricket games, eat special-occasion food with her hands under the Patels’ thatched roof, and sleep on a brand-new floormat next to Asha’s own.

Magda, she reasoned, could turn even Bhopal into a place of fun.

In September, Swami Ronny packed his bags for a trip to the mainland — Dallas, to be more precise. Gladys, he explained, wanted him to meet her family and friends, to speak to them, to run a couple of events for Texans. They’re a people in dire need of guidance, he explained. Asha had asked if she could come with him, and he had dissuaded her, telling her that he would be on bumpy roads constantly, which he knew she so despised. Asha had asked if Gladys was coming with him, noticing a split-second of hesitation as he said no, her sister would pick him up at the airport. Swami Ronny was to be gone for four days.

It took nine for Asha to confront the notion that Gladys did not, in fact, have a sister. It would be even longer before her other stupidities, her total oblivion, really dawned on her. Eventually she would feel downright gullible — where in the world does it rain so much that one would need eight pairs of orange robes and all of their underwear? Why would he leave her a fraction of their money and take the rest, rather than the other way around? Why wouldn’t he call?

On the ninth day in question, Magda came to the apartment as usual. She had

noticed the growing pit in Asha’s stomach on the fifth day, pointed at Asha’s reddened, cried-out eyes on the seventh, and on the eighth, had asked Asha the simplest of questions, and one she actually understood. ¿Todo bien?

Swami, Asha had replied, gulping. Yono-sé.

On the sixth day, Magda had noticed that Gladys wasn’t home — the cook let her in, and her house was empty. They’re probably travelling, the cook had said, but they didn’t tell me anything.

On the ninth, after her second mid-morning cleaning trip to Gladys’ Condado townhouse, Magda felt nauseous.

Asha noticed the somber expression on her face, her usual bubbliness absent as she accepted a bowl of daal.

Ashita, Magda began, using the endearing nickname she had coined weeks earlier. Ashita, su marido estaba llorando, y la señora Gladees no estaba en casa, she spelled out slowly, paving tear tracks under her eyelids and pinching a strand of her gray hair to confirm a suspicion that Asha hadn’t allowed herself to fully confront: the blonde whore had stolen Swami Ronny. Of that, there now remained little doubt.

With Swami Ronny no longer around, Asha wept freely, openly, desperately. She felt the wounds of season after season of alienation ripped wide open as she clutched the pile of his orange robes that remained.

For nearly two hours, Magda lay with Asha on her bed, cradling her skeletal face atop her gooey, grandmotherly stomach, and running her coarse fingers through her coconutty hair.

Tengo-hahmbre, Asha finally croaked after the sun had set, her own stomach rumbling audibly.

Ven conmigo, Magda cooed back.

Come.

Asha took her hand, seeing no other choice. Together, the two ladies took one

bus and then another, the streets empty as they walked slowly toward Magda’s decrepit first-floor flat in La Perla, a notoriously rough shanty town running parallel to the stone walls of Old San Juan.

Magda’s flat smelled of cumin and incense — had Asha not been so desolate, she would likely have smiled at how much it reminded her of her grandmother’s cozy hut outside Bhopal. Guiding Asha through one cramped doorway and then another, she brought her to a room in which a male human being had clearly once lived. Adorned with football posters and a single, framed photo of a handsome, well-built youth in military uniform, Asha would later learn that this meticulously cleaned room had once belonged to Magda’s son Antonio, who had died in Guatemala’s Civil War some years prior, having returned home to fight at his father’s insistence. The room felt heavy with Magda’s maternal guilt, the toll she had paid from afar to be able to provide for a son she was unable to protect. Asha often wondered whether her parents felt any such guilt, but would remind herself that she had no means or medium by which to prompt it, and no reason to seek it.

After a dinner of soup and a reheated empanada, which the tearful, starving, vegetarian Asha had eaten without a second’s hesitation, Magda directed Asha toward her bathroom, where she had placed a fresh towel and a nightgown for her to sleep in.

Deep into the night, Magda sat on the edge of her son’s bed and sang old Spanish nursery rhymes until Asha finally fell asleep.

The next day, Magda took Asha back to Condado to pick up some of her things. In her suitcase Asha packed everything she called her own — her pressure cooker, her eight outfits, her green puffer jacket. The apartment was in Swami Ronny’s name, so that wasn’t her problem anymore.

Returning to La Perla, the two ladies set about trying to find Asha’s feet. Asha wal-

Yale Daily News | 37

RUNNER-UP, FICTION

lowed for a week at first, draping herself over an armchair in front of the Spanish channel on Magda’s tiny television, rising only to bathe and to help Magda cook when she returned from her day’s labor. But as she regained her strength, she began to join Magda on her cleaning trips, carrying the creaking red bucket on bus after bus, and collecting a dollar or two as a token of Magda’s appreciation, even though she was really just grateful for something to do. Asha hated the work, as it were, but turned out to be very good at it, her own small hands proving as adept as Magda’s at extracting dirt from the narrowest of cracks.

By the time the notorious winter of 1982 had begun to rear its head elsewhere in the United States, Asha and Magda had settled into a routine. Every night upon the duo’s return from work, one of them would clean their equipment and the other would cook.

Together, they would take piping hot bowls of food across the living room where they would sit on the floor, watch whatever cable offering caught their fancy, and rest their aching legs. Magda took care to teach Asha new Spanish phrases every day, celebrating raucously on the occasions that Asha would pronounce things perfectly. Asha, in return, had tried to teach Magda some of her own language — though she had little use for it, Magda would nevertheless sportingly pepper little tidbits of Hindi into their interactions, her old eyes glowing in the candlelight as she complimented Asha’s cooking.

Yeh khana bahut achcha hai, she would often say, enunciating each word like a Bhopali native.

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Somewhere in her limping heart, though — a heart which had taught itself to love Swami Ronny and still pined for his protection, his sponsorship, even if not for his reciprocation — Asha knew that the arrangement had to end at some point.

Magda, for her part, thought the same, albeit in a totally different way. She was willing to take care of Asha like a friend, a sister, her own blood, she thought, but knew that her old, creaking, arthritic body would not hold up forever. Indeed, detecting in Asha a version of herself, a version for whom there remained time to steer away from the aching loneliness that had come to mar her own life, Magda longed desperately to be able to provide Asha with a future, a purpose, something to call her own and to share with others.

Nevertheless, as the two ladies’ clocks ticked, Asha’s suspended in ambiguous, existential fear, and Magda’s in mortality, neither said anything to the other, not wanting to disturb the companionship that they had both come to depend on.

Months passed in this amber until, in March of 1983, Asha came down with the flu. At first, Magda had feared that Asha was just depressed. After all, the two ladies had just the previous week inadvertently caught the tail-end of a tabloid TV interview featuring none other than Condado’s former darlings – Swami and Gladys: Live from Texas. That evening, Asha had gasped audibly and then begun to weep at seeing her earnest affections so spectacularly, publicly rejected in favor of Gladys’ cloying, box-office smile; Magda, meanwhile, had lunged

swiftly for the kill-switch, her joints creaking as she sought to protect Asha from visual manifestation of several months’ worth of nightmares. No importa, no importa, she had whispered soothingly as Asha’s shivers and sobs began to cease, a healing silence slowly easing its way into the air once more.

Asha, to her credit, and to Magda’s great relief, had seemed to take this jolt in stride.

And to Magda’s even greater relief, a palm to Asha’s hot, ashy forehead that morning had confirmed that she was, in fact, quite feverish. Before heading to work, then, Magda had left her with hot tea, medicine she had bartered from an upstairs neighbor, and free reign over the television dials. Draped over the armchair once again, Asha began watching a rerun of a telenovela episode she had already seen, but quickly became bored. Heaving herself to her feet and limping toward the box, she decided to switch to the English channel — why not, she reasoned, noting that she had forgotten most of the words she had learned after months of treating the language as a symbolic conduit between Hindi and Spanish textbooks.

The last time she had watched Sigourney Weaver’s Aliens — or at least, parts of it — had been on her flight over from Delhi.

Memories of bread and cold seatbelt metal and German stewardesses came flooding back into her consciousness as she tried this time to trace some semblance of a narrative.

Once again, though, she failed in this endeavor, albeit on this occasion for a wildly different reason. All of a sudden, her neurons began firing frantically, triggered by something on-screen as if jerked awake

RUNNER-UP, FICTION

once more by Swami Ronny’s cold shoulder. In front of her, a group of CGI Androids had gathered around a table for dinner, and it was the most inspiring thing she had ever seen. She almost couldn’t believe that the thoughts that now flooded her brain had never occurred to her. She resolved to clear her afternoon the next day, and to take Magda for a walk. Suddenly, she felt a lot better.

When Magda returned home that night, she found Asha in bed, poring over her two textbooks atop the thin bedspread.

Magda, Asha began, perking up.

Maneeana, no trabaho. She crossed her arms in an ‘X’ in an attempt to indicate the generality of her proposal, the fact that it applied to both of them.

Claro, cariña, estas enferma, Magda replied, as if reminding Asha that she was sick.

No, no, Asha replied, her voice growing louder, more animated. Tengo idea.

The next afternoon, Asha and Magda set off down the streets of La Perla, arriving at a benign-looking bench a couple of hundred meters from home. Asha brought homemade samosas and empanadas in foil — the former she had made that morning, and the latter were left over from a few nights prior. ¿Qué pasa, Ashita?, Magda finally implored, confused and amused in equal measure by the twitching smile Asha had worn on her face since she had awoken.

Magda, Asha responded, enunciating every rehearsed word slowly, carefully.

Magda, tengo idea.

Cuentame.

Tu, Asha said, retrieving a samosa and an empanada and holding one in each hand, y yo. Tu y yo. Magda, quiero abrir restaronte contigo. ¿Restaurante?, Magda spluttered, her face reflecting her visceral surprise at the idea Asha had just shared, her shock at its simple, elegant beauty, her memory of her son’s little feet dangling from his high chair as he purred into the food his máma served him. Cocinera, cocinera he would run around chanting, giggling as he collapsed into her arms when he tired.

Restaurante, Asha replied.

Instinctively, Magda reached for Asha’s face, cupping its sharp angles softly between her palms.

Bien entonces, mi amor, she finally croaked, pulling Asha into an embrace and sending crumbs flying from the surfaces of both pastries. Tenemos que trabajar.

There they sat for an age, both ladies aware of yet utterly at peace about the trials of recipe, spices, money, space and time that beckoned, neither lady fully comprehending how much they meant to the other, and each of them certain only of the fact that if such a spiritual construct could really, truly exist, they had found their soulmates. *** “Bienvenido a La Guatemal-India, la mejor takeaway de San Juan según la lista del San Juan Tatler de 1995. Soy la jefa de la cocina. ¿Le puedo ayudar en algo?”

“One dal makhani with rice, three tostones, and a mango lassi, please. I just moved back here on my own from Tex—” “¿Utensilios?”

“One set” “¿Nombre?”, the lady asked, rolling her vowels, her accent equal parts Guatemalan and Puerto Rican.

“Ronit Lobo, but back when I lived here most people actually knew me as Swa—”, the man replied, his voice losing its thinness and his head beginning to swell until he heard the phone line disconnect ferociously, instantaneously. Clack. When he tried to call back, no one answered.

Asha ignored the shrill ringing as she strode numbly into the kitchen to retrieve plates of saffron khichdi for Table 23. As the ringing began to fade, she paused fleetingly beneath the framed photo of Magda which took pride of place above the stove. Under the watchful gaze of her first real friend, she basked in a deep, fragrant breath and a moment’s quiet. No importa, she reminded herself. No importa.

As her own steel returned, ushered in by a drafty Caribbean breeze buffeting the nape of her neck, Asha ran her bony fingers along the cold, metallic contours of her trusty pressure-cooker. Tracing the grooves into which thick subcontinental dust had once burrowed, she paused to admire how durable it had proved, how far from Bhopal it had come, how gracefully it had adapted to its new, exotic identity as the bringer of comforts from a home that no longer felt like hers.

Yale Daily News | 39

Cherry

BY ISABELLE QIAN

FIRST PRIZE, FICTION, page 23

Carcass Balancing

BY ELLIOT LEWIS

FIRST PRIZE, NONFICTION, page 4