Kaylyn Zhong | A Limited Perspective Escape, mixed media
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Loud SilenceThe silence is thick and unbearable. The tension is just as palpable as the sticky summer heat, an uninvited guest that sits with us at our dining room table. Thunder rumbles precariously in the distance as it has the entire day, waiting - waiting for a drop to tip over and unleash the flood. I feel sweat slide down my neck and vaguely wonder if it's a consequence of the physical heat or the intolerable silence of the table. All it took was a few curt exchanges to turn the restlessness into a dangerous simmer, and I watch as my dad reaches for conversation, only to falter at the rapidly thinning ice. It’s a shame. Family meals used to be quite nice.
Joy Hwang
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Sit Still My Soul The man sat underneath the bridge, bundled in trash bags, clothed in dirtied rags, breathing in, breathing out frosted air while watching the wispy curls wash away in the wind. He was huddled beneath a bridge and, as he listened to the familiar lull of car wheels scraping along, he remembered a time when he was younger, holding a bouquet of rosy-gold balloons in the backseat of his car. Something special was happening that day. The balloons were not for him though, it was not his special day. He did not like looking back, and he suddenly felt as if his innards were shriveling up prune-like, perhaps hollowing themselves out. The emptiness like a gaping, growing chasm would ultimately leave him a vacant shell-- this he was sure of -- just some hollow form left to collect all the pathetic dust and debris left behind.
In the early days, when he had first retired beneath the bridge, the man had wondered where all these people were going… what with their fancy cars and quickening speed and unceasing whooshes overhead which rattled the concrete pillars. Each year they seemed to be growing faster as if they had places to be. Once, he had places to be, people to see, something interesting to buy or sell or loan or watch. Didn’t he? Maybe someday the bridge would collapse, he thought absentmindedly with no small hint of cruelty, taking those dozens of little cars and those dozens of little passengers with dozens of little silly dreams down with it. It would take him, a petulant toad squatting beneath the bridge, as well… him and whatever little he had left… his dreams that were popped balloons lining his pockets, once brilliant and now blanched of color, useless trinkets he held onto for no reason at all. On special days, when the air was not so cold and every intake of breath not so sharp, the man would get up and walk if only to stretch his aching limbs. Those days were few and far between. On terrible days, when the numbness overtook his digits, when it pinched his ears and nose, the man would stay squatting beneath the bridge. Those days were too numerous to count and his memory blended the particularly long stretches into one day, one year of nothing. No cars would be there to jostle the bridge from its pillars or the man from his memories.On normal days like today, when the bridge was busy enough to keep the man’s mind blank, the man wished for an end to come. Not with a bang… but something peaceful and slow and soft… Seated on his haunches, the man breathed in and out and watched the dwindling puffs dance across the winter air. Christine Baek
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Tara Alexander | Solitude, digital
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Diane Zhao | Emerald, digital
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Awakeningts first stirrings of life begin surrounded by four white walls.
Curving, bending, bowing walls that, seemingly aware of the force it contains, draw ever so closely into each other. Liquid pale as water yet thick as syrup folds and churns with each twitch of a scrawny limb, of a shriveled claw feebly fighting back against the unyielding viscosity. Its first taste of triumph accompanies the scratch of a clipped black nail across the wall’s surface, forming a scar that is later joined by many more. Time passes. The paint is slowly chipping off, forming islands of white in the roiling waves below. It feels rather than sees the faint light seeping in. Finding a chink in the walls, it pokes an insistent digit into the same vulnerable spot-- cautiously, carefully-- until it punctures a small hole in the shell. Cold air squeezes in and golden light from the outside floods its confines. |
Made feverish by its claustrophobic prison and the light’s promise of freedom, it digs fervently, kicking and pecking the rip in the wall. Sweltering heat presses in at all sides as the white walls refuse to give. It throws itself bodily into the shell side with a strength born of determination and desperation. The hole rips apart, leaving a gaping chasm in its wake. To chase the light, it lurches forward from the shattered remains of its shell and emerges into the new world.
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A crunch. The schoolteacher gathers her children around the incubation chamber, allowing them to peer inside through the transparent upper lid. With soft coos and surprised gasps, the children point excitedly at the new arrival.
Fragments of eggshell like brown and white flower petals scatter the soft hay as the mottled crown of the chick pops out-- drenched in thick, clingy amniotic fluid. The chick gazes around jadedly, soaking in the grey walls of its chamber, silently observing its own shadow on the floor. Before it shakes its small head in disillusionment, pointedly crawling back into its shell. Christine Baek
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