The Legend of the Immortal
KENIA TORRES
People always wish for more time. This story explains how I think it would feel to have an unlimited amount of time to live and why it wouldn’t be as great as it’s perceived.
“Remember, Nova,” her mother told her one night. “Immortals live forever, but depending on how things go, they can also suffer eternally.”
Those words, repeating over and over again like a broken record as she ran. Through fields, valleys, oceans, forests, and everything in between. The entirety of the world flashing before her eyes in one continuous blur. One last time. Throughout her early years, she lived in oblivion as to who she really was—better said, what she really was, an immortal. While any other person would have been thrilled at this revelation, she soon discovered that forever wasn’t as good as people made it out to be and so she spent her days wishing for the type of forever that isn’t actually real. Like the type of forever that couples in love promise to give to each other. That kind. The more realistic and exciting kind that has an end, unlike hers, which seemed more like a burden.
For centuries, Nova wandered around the world in search of something—anything. But she encountered nothing but lonely nights, followed by even lonelier days.
Until that century that marked the beginning of the end. It started with the sound of silence getting louder and louder each time as the population slowly diminished. It was now so loud that the ringing alone could have made her ears bleed, but she was so caught up in the moment that she didn’t even mind it.
The wind blew fiercely, stronger than ever before and with such magnitude that the tallest building in the world would have toppled over within the first few seconds of this raging wind. To her, however, it did nothing more than blow her fiery red hair in a dramatic fashion, making it look like flames following her as she ran.
Feet pounding, heavy breathing, wide-eyed excitement as she saw everything one last time. Had she not waited ages for this moment to come she would have stopped and taken in her surroundings one last time. The emptiness of the desert that mirrored her soul or the ocean which had been with her to every country she had traveled to. Everything looked so much prettier from a temporary perspective; it was absolutely breathtaking. Somehow the ocean looked bluer, sparkled brighter, spread out farther.
If only the wait hadn’t been so long, perhaps she would have paused for a moment and climbed a tree to admire the cotton candy sky that was begging to appear. Immortals don’t live forever, they exist forever. Or at least until forever comes to an end. This was her end, and these were the feelings she had wished upon a star for, blown on a dandelion for, begged the universe for, eyes closed while whispering a silent prayer into the darkness. And now was time and it was nothing but magical, so magical in fact that for a split second she wished it didn’t have to end.
But it did. It had to, and that’s what made it special.
When she arrived at the place, she immediately knew that this was where she belonged. At that moment, standing in the middle of nowhere and everything she felt complete, free, and at ease—something she had been longing to feel for a while.
She had longed for this moment since the beginning of time. Her entire being into one wish. Eternities later, she stood majestically at the cliff’s edge. She rivaled the night sky; her skin iridescent and her eyes the prettiest of the stars. The earth’s plates would soon collide, and the world she once knew would be swallowed. Unhesitatingly she jumped, forsaking only vague memories.
The Swerve
HANNAH SHELDON-DEAN
Kenia and I both love creating female characters who don’t behave quite like the world wants them to. This excerpt is based on my dark fascination with why and how women do the “wrong” thing.
The potential was always there. The first time I noticed it, age six, I was in the passenger’s seat of my mom’s rust-red Volvo sedan, watching the scrubby trees fly by as we drove the salt-scented road to my grandma’s on Cape Cod. That was Sunday night—Mom was having me skip school like she did sometimes when her worries got heavy, and so the lane going the other way was packed full of cars leaving the Cape after the weekend.
I was peering out toward those fast cars, across the double yellow line, when suddenly I was overwhelmed by the thinness of that line. In fact it wasn’t just thin, it was nothing, it was flat paint on asphalt, it had no power at all to stop a car—any one of those hundreds of cars!—from veering into our lane and smashing into us, full speed. It could happen at any moment. There was no reason it couldn’t. I looked at the face of each passing driver and wondered who it would be. Then I looked at my mom’s calm face, her soft hands on the wheel. I looked at my own hands. I started to cry.
It’s happened thousands of times since then, almost every day it feels like sometimes. I look at my hand holding my expensive phone and wonder if I’ll suddenly decide to smash it on the sidewalk. The paperback book over the cozy fireplace. The small girl at the edge of the observation deck, hands on the low rail, toes on point. It’s not that I want to do these things. It’s only that the lines are so thin.
So, I guess I wasn’t surprised when I looked at the man through the steam of my coffee, at far end of the dining car, and said: “Okay.”
I told myself it was because Mom was dead, buried under those heavy worries at last. And on top of that, Beatrice was gone—no warm bulk next to me in bed, no wet nose pressed into my hand when I came in the door, no quiet barks as she slept, dreaming, on the hearth. Without the two of them, I was unmoored. So in some way, maybe it was because they were gone. But in another way, it certainly was not. I did it because I could. So that I could know, at last, what the swerve felt like.
KIMBERLY UNCINI
YEARS AS MENTEE: 1
GRADE: Junior
HIGH SCHOOL: University Heights High School
BORN: Bronx, NY
LIVES: Bronx, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: At just a glance, Lucy and I look so different, but if you’re our waiter, Tony, or any customer at the diner, you’d see the complete opposite. You’d see Lucy listening attentively as I break into one of my rants or me listening to her talk about a book she likes. Seeing Lucy scribble onto a napkin when we get the ball rolling on a story, Tuesdays at the Court Deli are never dull. Lucy never fails to inspire me and make me feel heard.
LUCY FRANK
YEARS AS MENTOR: 3
OCCUPATION: Writer
BORN: New York, NY
LIVES: New York, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Eight novels for middle-school and young-adult readers
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: Kimberly and I meet in a 1970s-era diner near the Bronx County Courthouse. I always wonder what our kindly waiter, Tony, and all the lawyers, cops, and neighborhood regulars think as they see us every week hunched over the table in our booth, talking, breaking into laughter, talking some more, Kimberly typing, me scribbling on a napkin. Do they see the light in our eyes when an idea hits, or the Aha! smile when the right word or sentence pops? And the pride in my eyes when I look at Kimberly? Do they know how much serious fun this is?
Wednesday
KIMBERLY UNCINI
Destined to a sad factory life, he is tired of the quality of life he has. However, now it’s not just his life that he must think about. When punished for his crime he now faces a choice: to control himself or to be bold.
The room was a bright and pure white just like the hard chair below him. His confusion started to cause a panic deep in his core. Both of his eyes fell to his feet to find a torn white piece of printer paper reading: You have been banned from society.
He couldn’t believe that this was The Council’s decision … You have been banned from society. A life of solitude, without food or water or human contact in the days before his body caved in and died. You have been banned from society.
“How dare they do this!” In a fit of rage he grabbed this piece of paper and screamed. His hands gripped it hard and
pulled.
Suddenly the void room was filled with a strong voice. “Calm down, terrorist.”
Terrorist. From an expendable worker to a dangerous terrorist in a span of twenty-four hours.
Unless it had been more …
“Calm down or we will calm you ourselves,” the voice warned.
“I refuse to speak to any of you, I stand by what—”
“You should know by now that we have ways of making you do what we want.”
Oh, he knew that all too well. Every single happy moment over the course of his life had been drowned out by fear. Fear of being too happy. Fear that in a blink of an eye that happiness would be gone. He made no apologies for what he had done. Had The Council let him finish they would have heard that he stands by what he did.
“However, this process is all in your hands. You decide your fate.”
“You bet I do,” he barked.
“Hundreds of people have suffered and yet you stand before The Council without an ounce of regret. Hundreds! So now, if you wish to be freed here is what you must complete.”
A whooshing sound so intense it could’ve blown him away, bounced off the four walls of the room. Suddenly the room was no longer white. The previously blank walls depicted his home and the love of his life. Mateo. He fell to his knees when he saw his prepubescent golden-brown-haired son.
“Tell us what happened,” The Council said.
“Go to hell,” he said with tears in his eyes and a lump in his throat.
“Fine, we talk and you fill in the blanks. You were tired of being an upstanding working citizen—”
“The Council has every male of age slaved away in those factories. Who are you to decide the life everyone has to live?!” His throat felt tight at the raise of his voice as he watched Mateo.
“So you decided to end a way of life that has existed for generations.”
The Council spoke, but his mind was on the footage in front of him. From the day it happened. The morning his plans were ruined.
“Where did you hide the bombs?”
In the film in front of him two national guards now walked up to the house, the way they did that morning. “At fifteen hundred hours is The Great Collection. Have your male of age packed and ready to go before then,” he said aloud, even though the footage had no sound.
“What?” the Council boomed.
“That’s what he said to me that morning. Mateo would have been gone before I even got home from the factory that day. I didn’t want my ‘male of age’ to endure what I have! Is that such a crime?!”
“Yes! It is. It is if hundreds of people pay the price for your male of age. But you can undo this. Undo all this pain, Joseph. All you have to do is hold the detonator in your hand—”
At his feet appeared the detonator. The same one he used to make his bombs go off, killing all the people in the factories. The him in the footage picked up the detonator, too.
“You can change this. Just don’t detonate the bombs, Joseph, and you will be welcomed back into society. You will be with Mateo.”
He rolled the trigger in his hand pondering the thought. To undo all of this and see Mateo again, Joseph took a deep breath. “I was going to do it on Thursday.”
“What?”
“I was going to do it on Thursday. When everyone was on break. But The Council moved up The Great Collection day. I couldn’t let you guys take him even if that meant killing all those people. The alternative was watching you guys kill my son slowly over the years and that I couldn’t do.” He caught a final glimpse of Mateo on the screen and his heart elated. “Which is why, given the choice, I’d do it a hundred times.”
He closed his eyes with Mateo imprinted in his mind and pressed the button.
FIFTY YEARS AGO
LUCY FRANK
I was inspired to write this take on both Ctrl + B by a piece I read recently in The New Yorker. The quotations are from that article and other interviews with Alice De Rivera.
Alice De Rivera, thirteen,
precocious, great at math,
a ninety-ninth percentile kind of girl
at a not-so-good school
lived twenty minutes from the finest
public science school
not just in New York City
but the country.
Stuyvesant High School,
home of the “future male leaders
of the world” didn’t
take girls.
Alice, a girl with arching
eyebrows that looked like
they were “questioning everything”
thought that
was “pretty stupid.”
This, after all, was 1969,
time of raised fists,
marching for rights, protesting
the war in Vietnam,
folks standing up, fighting,
sometimes murdered
for who they were,
what they believed in.
Yet girls were still schooled
to be ladies, trained
to cross legs primly
at the ankle, women were still
called girls, bred to control
not just dreams and voices
but our bodies
in control-top pantyhose.
Stuyvesant’s principal, fond of bow ties
and known to students as The Flea, said
he had no gym for girls,
no bathrooms, no amenities.
Alice found a lawyer
to take the case for free.
Sued the Board of Education.
News stories warned
girls in miniskirts
would be a dangerous disruption.
“I intend to be disruptive not
with my presence
but with my ideas,” said Alice.
Three months later, when she won,
the headline in The New York Times smirked,
“Boys at Stuyvesant High School
can look forward to a new extracurricular
attraction next fall—a girl.”
Her family moved before
she could go to Stuyvesant.
But thanks to Alice,
that fall a dozen girls
claimed their places,
and the next year,
two hundred twenty-three.
Years later, she said it was her “opinionated
and slightly arrogant disposition”
that made her take on
the Board of Education.
I, a raised-eyebrow ninety-ninth percentile girl
who kept her dreams and voice controlled
for decades, say,
No, Alice.
You simply knew your worth.
You knew your mind.
And you were bold.
SHANAI WILLIAMS
YEARS AS MENTEE: 3
GRADE: Senior
HIGH SCHOOL: NYC iSchool
BORN: Bronx, NY
LIVES: Bronx, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Girls Write Now: Two Decades of True Stories from Young Female Voices, published by Tin House
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: The 2018–2019 Girls Write Now year marks another successful one for Julia and I. We found inspiration at the Andy Warhol exhibit at the Whitney, in the theater watching If Beale Street Could Talk, and at our usual spot, Maison Kayser, on Fifty-Ninth Street. We’ve had so much chemistry in our two years together. After our meetings I can count on having something to write about or another way to flesh out an idea. Julia has been more than a mentor to me, she’s been a friend, and since I’ll be off at college next year, I hope we stay in contact.
JULIA CARPENTER
YEARS AS MENTOR: 2
OCCUPATION: Journalist
BORN: Atlanta, GA
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: The Write for Rights Award, National Lesbian & Gay Journalist Excellence in Journalism Award nominee
MENTOR’S AN
ECDOTE: Shanai has had such a roller-coaster year! Winning Posse, applying for scholarships, prepping for graduation and college—it’s been an honor to cheer her on every step of the way. I’m going to miss our coffee dates (hot cocoa for her, cappuccino for me, bread for us both) and our frenzied idea-storming sessions. Her powers of determination push me to push myself. When I’m nervous about it, I think, Be like Shanai. She’s fearless in going after what she wants. I think we all need some of that Shanai spirit sometimes.
Who wants to be great?
SHANAI WILLIAMS
A lot of the time I find myself scared to feel good for fear of being disappointed. This piece is representative of the stage of my life where I actively began trying to think differently.
“You can’t be so scared of life. I know you’re thinking ‘what if’ ‘what if,’ but what if you’re fucking great?” —My Dad
…
About twenty of us were there, but only ten would be fortunate enough to be a part of Wheaton Posse 20, Class of 2023. A full tuition scholarship, to be accepted Early Decision and go with a group of nine other high school graduates from the same city—sounds like a scared, sad, broke girl’s dream.
And it seemed everyone knew I was that girl, except me. Why? Well, maybe it’ll make sense if I explain it in the way that I know it is true.
In my soon-to-be-eighteen years of living I’ve realized my life is what some may call a telenovela, others may call it a movie, but universally my life can be regarded as a roller coaster.
A concise timeline of my life up until that point would go something like this:
My Birth—Strap in the ride, thumbs up is given for us to proceed.
My childhood until the fifth grade—On the up and up, reaching the first peak of the ride, sun shining in my face.
After fifth grade graduation—aka my family of seven separating and being reduced down to two—And down we go for the first drop.
Beginning of middle school, my dad meets a woman with kids, they move in, they seem nice—A small pick back up, I’m starting to feel the sun.
Ctrl + B Page 32