thick grooves.
She slept only during the day
cat naps
light naps
ladylike naps
and at night
she would get things done.
One night
she held a knife
(glints in moonlight)
(glints and reflections of streetlamps).
An ambulance eruption.
Her reflection in the window
a floating face above the potted violets
omniscient.
She was chopping something
perhaps
when Tom came in.
“You like omelets, remember Tom?”
Oh, yes.
Padded footsteps
back to bed
long hallways
devoid of a pacifier
or little plastic
lady
to trip on.
Somewhere else
another beige kitchen.
There is a different man hovering at the door
looking at greenish liquid upon broken countertops,
disregarded light purple shoes,
an ugly crying face,
snot and black streaks.
Turning, ignoring.
Later,
light purple pumps tremble
legs unbalanced,
prone to falling,
plopping tears,
drowning ants,
chipped nails,
press into palms.
A knock on a pale yellow door.
Talk is a dangerous thing.
And when Suzie Davids killed her husband with a carrot peeler,
talk travels.
Only an intention lags behind, slow,
stagnant.
Control
KARA FREEWIND
To me, being bold means revealing all the weird, jagged, confusing parts of ourselves. After attending the Girls Write Now Suspense Writing workshop and Poetry workshop, Economy of Words, I was inspired to investigate why I love one of my favorite genres.
He melted through back doors
(Not mine)
He grazed fingers in underwear drawers
(Not mine)
He slowly slit lines in cheeks, torsos,
Tendons, denim,
Women,
Women,
Women,
Women,
Women,
(That aren’t me)
Whale secretions make sweet perfume
Charred calves make Monday dinner
and stories of killing
make me calm
KAYLA SANTOS SABINO
YEARS AS MENTEE: 1
GRADE: Junior
HIGH SCHOOL: Benjamin N. Cardozo High School
BORN: Queens, NY
LIVES: Queens, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Scholastic Art & Writing Award: Honorable Mention
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: I’ve had many great Girls Write Now experiences. However, the best would have to be when Elise took the time to make a whole lesson plan for me about her line of work. She managed to convince not only her boss, but other coworkers to put aside what they were doing and join the lesson. I learned the basics of copywriting and am so grateful for what she has done for me. Not only taking the time to meet with me but also for continuously checking and editing my work. I am glad to have joined Girls Write Now and to have met Elise.
ELISE BURCHARD
YEARS AS MENTOR: 1
OCCUPATION: Copywriter
BORN: Evanston, IL
LIVES: New York, NY
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: I’m learning so much from Kayla this year—sometimes I feel like she is mentoring me, too. She was the first one to raise her hand and volunteer to read her work in a room full of strangers. When asked to describe her, I describe her as the first hand or volunteer. Whether it’s introducing me to new worlds and webtoons, writing profound prose and rhymes on the spot, or using her down-smash to damage a foe while playing Kirby in Super Smash video games, she’s always doing it with her own special light, fearlessness, and grace.
Uncle (Let’s Say) Bob
KAYLA SANTOS SABINO
This story is a work of fiction based on my childhood. It shows courage and bravery within a child who, with no fear, tries to conquer a beast, even if it isn’t real.
I fought off my first monster at age five. The night was cold, seemingly subzero, and the room was pitch black with curtains that danced over the windows. The door, completely normal by day, now took on the form of a witch. My father and I had just watched a zombie movie together (I know, right … What parent allows their five-year-old to watch a horror movie before bed?). It was fine, though, because I liked them and still grew up to be a semiokay person.
As I snuggled up next to my father, who was already out like a bear during hibernation mode, I heard strange noises coming from the first floor. (Do keep in mind I had just watched Zombie Town.) I slowly removed my blankets and got up. Before opening the door, I gave myself a little encouragement then headed for the stairway.
Looking into my living room, I searched for the source of the noise. The air was ominous, or was it my five-year-old imagination? All that was visible was TV static. That was when I heard it again. A loud beastlike grunt and groan.
The gulping noises emerged. Guurrrlllp. There it was, a dark figure, seemingly ten feet tall or more, (as a five-year-old I was probably the height of a dinner table). It was rummaging through the fridge until it groaned at me. Guuuurrrrllllllpppp. I ran back to my father’s room, as fast as my little legs could take me.
My mind had only one explanation. Zombie. Here for our brains. I panicked, but as a five-year-old, my first thought was not about what it was doing there, or how it got there, or even concern for my father’s safety. Rather, I thought what to name it. (Gary? Tom? If female, Tomette?) And in my tiny head, I knew I would conquer this beast and make it my pet.
I thought of all the advantages. With a zombie by my side, no one would fight me over Smarties anymore, and I’d be a source of admiration (again, for the nth time, I was five.) Just imagine me standing on a lunch table, Smarties in one hand and my zombie on the other, surrounded by my drooling peers.
I tried to wake my father, thinking I would need his assistance to beat this beast. No matter what I tried—pushing, pulling, taking off his blanket, and even smacking him—he wouldn’t get up from hibernation. Meh. He probably would have tried to take all the credit for my discovery or gotten himself hurt anyway. So I prepared for my battle that was to come. Like the movies, I pretended to put war paint on my face and geared up with pillows. I was ready to go (and watched way too many films).
When I got downstairs, the figure was still near my fridge making gulping sounds. Yeesh. How much was he going to drink? What was he drinking? I snapped myself back into focus, there was no time for such silly thoughts (yet I was about to fight a zombie …).
“You can do this,” I pep-talked myself, fluffed my pillow, and roared in my best Al Pacino accent, “Zombie! Say hello to my little friend!”
I jumped from the stairs, attacking the zombie with my pillow over and over until I felt it grabbed and lifted high above my head. The zombie began to yell my name, “What are you doing awake?”
That’s a funny zombie accent, I thought for a moment. Then I realized that the voice sounded familiar. The figure turned on the kitchen light, blinding me for a quick second, only to reveal none other than my uncle (let’s say) Bob (sorry, privacy purposes). He stood in front of me with an angry stare and once again asked why I was up.
I hesitated for a moment. “Wait, so you weren’t a zombie trying to eat our brains?”
He held back a chuckle before reprimanding my father for letting me watch a scary movie before bed again. Trying to make sense of everything, I asked him about the gulping. He said he was just tired.
After all that, I was a bit disappointed in the fact that I couldn’t have a pet zombi
e. My uncle returned to his room and sent me up the stairs. My veins were still running with adrenaline, so sleep was the last thing on my mind. That’s when I heard it. A loud screech coming from the bathroom. It could only mean one thing … a vampire. And I would make it my underling.
How to Feed a Monster
ELISE BURCHARD
This work is inspired by Kayla’s kindhearted fearlessness and her piece about unconventional monsters. Perhaps we might look at monsters in a new light.
It’s a common misconception that monsters prefer human flesh and fluids. You’ve been on this planet for some time, you’ve heard the rumors. Vampires and vein draining, ghouls and soul sipping, zombies and brains (or Brians). Sea sirens devouring the hearts of coastline locals who are tired of getting ghosted by online singles. Giant ogres that give entirely new meanings to “got a bone to pick,” as they floss their molars with the adolescent femurs of teenage rebellion. Oh, and that whiny camper around the fire—the one who kept complaining about the ash-to-marshmallow ratio of the smores—you had a feeling he’d be the first one to go when the Yeti showed up.
“Everyone is out to get me,” a very typical human philosophy, isn’t it? Have you ever found an unexplained, lone blue fruit loop on the kitchen windowsill? Ever met a zombie that didn’t love cereal? Ever met a monster at all?
There are monsters who love junk food—ones that love stale Halloween candies, and others outside the bakery waiting to catch a whiff of doughnuts fresher than sunrise. There are monsters who make their special guacamole for other monsters at parties. Yes, they also cry while chopping the onions. And yes, they also cry on the inside while purchasing the avocados, because they’re also shocked at the significant rise in price and demand. Some monsters are eating the same bland rice dish, for the fourth bland time this week, because they finally looked at their bank account. Sustainable monsters are trying to go vegan and plucking fresh tomatoes from the plant growing in the small sliver of apartment sunlight. Others are caring for beautiful gardens full of herbs and hand-carved birdhouses. There are brokenhearted monsters who weep into bowls of pasta as the hum of the laundry machine rinses their towels and bedsheets behind them. Daddy monsters who decorate strawberry birthday cakes for five-year-old daughter monsters. Excited monsters who wait by the phone and can’t even eat anything at all. And, of course, that one monster who loves to pick up a dollar slice of pizza, because nothing feels as liberating, or as New York City, as walking briskly down the street with a folded pizza hanging out the corner of your mouth. All this, and we think monsters prefer humans?
CAROLYN SCHMIT
YEARS AS MENTEE: 2
GRADE: Junior
HIGH SCHOOL: Columbia Secondary School
BORN: Detroit, MI
LIVES: New York, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: When my mentor and I discussed the topic of boldness, we talked about the people we have met who have made us who we are and who have inspired us to be bold in both huge and minuscule ways. In particular, we talked about powerful girl friends we’ve had who overstepped boundaries and expectations, and we decided to write about the moments in which we realized they were bold.
JAN ALEXANDER
YEARS AS MENTOR: 4
OCCUPATION: Business and Literary Writer and Editor
BORN: Chicago, IL
LIVES: New York, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Editor-at-large at Neworld Review; novel Ms. Ming’s Guide to Civilization, a Leapfrog Fiction semifinalist
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: Carolyn and I looked up Ctrl + B and saw that it’s an old code for boldface. So we asked each other, “Who do you know who’s bold?” We thought immediately of high school friends, and for me that brought to mind a girl who almost literally soared above her circumstances. We took great pride in being known as the crazy girls. Not that I recommend anyone try the stunt that I did.
The People You Meet
CAROLYN SCHMIT
When I think about the word “bold,” I think about all of the bold people who have changed my life, and so I wrote this piece as an ode to some of the boldest.
Marina. The first time I met Marina, at the beginning of sixth grade in band class, she was two days new and acting like she had never felt more comfortable, yelling out, laughing loudly; she looked bold.
Her bedroom is dark, barring the red and blue disco lights. She turns up the speaker and dances around in her socks and pajama shorts. “Get up!” she yells to me, but I don’t like to dance and she can tell so she comes over and drags me up off the bed, “Just feel the music, just move.” Because it’s Marina telling me, I dance, because on the second day of sixth grade I looked over and thought she looked bold. I’ve aspired to stay within that light ever since.
Yara. The first time I met Yara, the first day of our new assigned seats in freshman Ancient History, she was talking about sex, and kinks, and the cuts on her arms, and she was not the least bit shy; she was crazy and she radiated bold.
She was lying on her back, pounding on the cafeteria floor, sobbing and screaming about how her boyfriend had gone through her journal. “Yara,” I whispered, “get up; if he sees you he’ll know you’re crying over this!” She looked at me like I was crazy, and she looked crazy when she started laughing, mascara stained down her face, tears dripping onto her undone tie and the school jumper knotted haphazardly around her waist. Then she got up, and told me I was crazy, of course she didn’t care if he saw her. Maybe that was the point; unconventionally perhaps, she radiated bold.
Sam. The first time I met Sam, we were in tenth-grade music class, and I was talking to (listening to) him and his friend have a conversation, and he kept inserting me even though I was new and shy; he made me feel bold.
We ran up from the Fifty-Ninth Street station because I had to pee really bad, and we ran past the cars across Broadway into Starbucks and I told him he had to buy a water, or else they wouldn’t let me in the bathroom so he ordered one. The lady said the bathroom wasn’t working so I ran out. I looked back to see that he wasn’t behind me and I yelled to him to come on and he was laughing and he said he had to wait for his water and I was laughing and I told him to come on and so he came, and we went into Subway, and I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, and I looked happy, and alive and I came out and he was sitting there waiting and he smiled and I laughed, and he told me he loved me and I told him he makes me feel bold.
Sophia. I don’t remember the first time I met Sophia, but I remember when we became friends. We were at volleyball practice and she talked to me and asked if she could be my partner, ignoring everybody else in our grade on the team begging to be hers; she makes people feel important and she makes people feel bold.
On the court that summer, the sun still out in the late afternoon, our team was losing by a few points and we were losing energy, except her; she was as alive and energetic as she’d been since the game started, and point by point and cheer by cheer she brought our team back because she spread boldness and she made us feel like we could win, and win we did.
Cam. The first time I met Campbell, we smiled shyly at each other as we introduced ourselves. She is bold in ways I never thought I’d see.
The first time her mom kicked her out, she went to the twenty-four-hour deli on 155th Street and stayed there overnight, until she felt like she’d given her mother long enough to simmer. The second time, she went to Big Daddy’s on East Twentieth Street, because she had the time for a long train ride, and she stayed there till three a.m., when she knew her mother would be sleeping. The third time she walked, for hours and hours straight, and the fourth, she went to Macomb’s Dam Bridge and looked over the edge, and then walked back home. And each time, she got up the next morning and put on her uniform and went to school and no one could have guessed, because people are bold where you cannot see them.
The Girl Who Could Do Anything
JAN ALEXANDER
My piece is a fictionalized memoir of the friend who showed me what it m
eans to be fearless.
I wanted Reggie to be my friend the moment I saw her. It was in Spanish class, sophomore year, my first day in a new school in the otherworldly South. She was blond and laughing, as if whatever she wanted belonged to her. I observed her cheap white blouse and knew it didn’t matter, though no one at my school back in Chicago would dress that way. I felt bold, smiling at her, begging for approval, my preppy shirt and hippy ring calculated to mask my fears.
She smiled back.
I was shocked when I saw Reggie’s tiny house, especially the National Enquirers scattered on the floor. She made A’s, she was a cheerleader, and the most buttoned-down boys followed her through the halls. She had a handsome father who delivered peanuts to vending machines, and a mom who worked at a hotel and seemed to come home late a lot. “They’re a happy family,” I told my mother, who had always said money didn’t buy happiness. Only later, when her father drove away in the night and her mother sliced Reggie’s prettiest dress right off her did I realize there were secrets.
Her house became a playground with no parents about. On Saturday afternoons Reggie tried to teach me to turn cartwheels in the yard. She had muscles made of rubber. She climbed a ladder to the roof—it was only one story, but I shivered when she beckoned me up. “Come jump—we do this all the time!” she commanded me. I looked at her two little sisters. The youngest shrugged, the middle one nodded. There were other girlfriends who would jump down with Reggie if I didn’t. I climbed up.
“Look!” She gestured at the green prairie, pink and blue and white houses dotting the expanse, the sun kissing us. “If you can do this you can do anything.”
She flexed her knees, waved her arms for liftoff, and flew down.
“We can do anything!” she called up to me from the grass.
And so I followed her.
I landed on my right leg, somehow, my ankle twisted into the soil.
My ACE wrap was a badge on Monday. I’d never had a battle wound before.
SANJIDA SHEUBA
YEARS AS MENTEE: 1
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