Tag: ComingofageP

The Man in the Mirror

.Reading time 44 minutes.

By Marissa Yuan

-After Chelsea Bieker

I see him when I look in the mirror, my father, the coach of my 5 a.m. 800-meter runs, who sacrificed to finance my education and once presented a twenty-five-slide PowerPoint on how to live my college life in the U.S. He carried a black-and-white photo of our family in his wallet. People say we look the same.  

He was the first in his village to go to college after China’s Culture Revolution. He brought honor to and redeemed his once politically shamed family. By his mid-thirties, he already made tenure and was named vice president, the youngest in his university’s history. I remember him waking up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, punching the air and yelling, “You can’t get me!” My mother once gave me a peek into his childhood: being hung up-side-down to the ceiling with a rope tied to his ankles while my grandfather beat him until he had broken all three broom sticks. Wrinkles cover my father’s face now, his temples all gray, sharp shoulder bones gathering under his shirt. At my wedding, he hugged me long and tight, with tears of joy and pride, though I had walked down the aisle by myself and never asked him for the honor. I freeze-frame this minute. It was the moment I want to see him in and remember. 

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Praying I Wouldn’t Be Last

.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Maya Afilalo

The Featured Art is “Blossoming” by Greta Delapp

The summer after ninth grade, I had my first kiss. All school year, I’d been on a mission to no longer be “prude”—the kissing equivalent of a virgin. It seemed other girls were always talking about their conquests. Who they had kissed, and where, and whether the boys felt them up over or under the bra. I longed to be part of these conversations, to offer my own tale of triumph, to sagely weigh in on others’ dilemmas. Instead, I stood to the side, quiet, fiddling with my razr flip phone. That summer was the Summer of Death: Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite, Farrah Fawcett, Billy Mays. Others, whose names I didn’t recognize. I was fourteen years old, and death was no deterrent to my desire.

I wondered if my lack of suitors had something to do with my appearance. Through middle school, I had sported frizzy curls cropped into an unfortunate bob. Every day, I wore a Life is Good T-shirt or a hoodie or both. Adidas track pants. I had what my well-intentioned cousin once called “only a little bit of a mustache.” When high school started, I made an effort. I traded my swishy pants for jeans, my shapeless T-shirts for fitted tops from Old Navy. I got my ears pierced. I kept the bob, though I began styling it with John Frieda mousse that came in a tall silver can. It was my cousin who showed me how to apply the mousse. He was my age, also curly-haired, had been kissing girls for years.

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Come as You Are

.Reading time 60 minutes.

By Ryan Shoemaker

Featured Art: Delta Bloom by John Sabraw

“Bruises on the fruit, tender age in bloom.”
— Kurt Cobain, “In Bloom”

“He walked out the back door of Exodus and climbed the six-foot wall … over the next two days, there were scattered sightings of Kurt.”
— Charles R. Cross, Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain

Thursday, March 31, 1994, my eighteenth birthday. That was the day Scotty and I helped Kurt Cobain out of a tight spot and then jammed with him in my basement. I know what you’re thinking — I’d have thought the same if it hadn’t happened to me. But it did. This was back when I played guitar and Scotty drummed, back when we had this crazy idea, like a million other kids drunk on the grunge zeitgeist, that all we needed to be rock stars were some ratty jeans, a thrift-store cardigan, three guitar chords, and enough repressed angst to pen the next great teenage anthem. But that was years ago, six days before Kurt put a shotgun in his mouth, before Scotty really did become a rock star, and before I stopped caring about all of it. That day I met Kurt, that changed everything. 

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Rabbit Summer

.Reading time 45 minutes.

By Jane Marcellus

Winner, Editors’ Prize for Prose, selected by Dinty W. Moore

He is standing there in a spattered white lab coat, holding up a bunch of carrots. I am standing here in the doorway, hoping I’ve come to the right place.

“You must be Jane,” he says. “Guess who these are for?”

From a few feet away, I notice his eyes. They are brown—so brown that I cannot see his pupils. I keep looking at his eyes, trying to nd them, trying to make certain that it is me, here, that he is looking at. His gaze makes me aware that I am actually a person standing here, in this spot—a person with a name, which is Jane, which he knows. I am not used to feeling seen. I am used to feeling invisible. It is unnerving—blinding even—to be seen by a person whose pupils I cannot see, a person who knows my name.

I am young, although I do not know it. Twenty-one. I confuse feeling seen, and this odd feeling of being blinded, for love.

“Yes,” I say. “I’m Jane.”

*

The job is feeding lab rabbits and washing beakers in the college biology labs. It is my third job this summer, on account of an argument with my mother. For the past four summers, I have worked at one of the jobs she got me. She is a legal secretary for the state of Oklahoma, and she likes to get me typing jobs. Since the summer I was seventeen, I have gone along with this. I can live at home and make more money there than waitressing or busing tables. I save the money to pay for the college, which is in Connecticut and expensive, even with the scholarship. I am not sure I deserve the college, so typing has seemed like a kind of penance. But it is beginning to feel dangerous. I will graduate in another year. I sense relief rising in my mother like a prayer. Finally, I will come home for good and she can get me on with the state. I will be a secretary, not for the summer but for life.

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The Oregon Trail

.Reading time 21 minutes.

By Corey Van Landingham

Featured Art: Wooden fence with two black buffaloes by Markus Spiske

When my first boyfriend’s mother died of breast cancer, I spoke with him on the cordless, from the bathtub, trying to console him. He was calm in his grief, and I broke his heart soon after. A cruelty only vaguely acceptable at fourteen. A week before we had snuck out, in the middle of the night, and driven up the snaking mountain roads of southern Oregon. Toward what? Toward something. We could feel a pull all around us, the silence in the woods, the ghosts of the Shasta people passing below our windows.

What did we know of love? Across the screen, in the dark computer labs of our youth where we played The Oregon Trail on our soon-to-be-extinct Apple II computers, love was entering in the names of those you wanted to take with you, west, toward the promised land. We could all begin a new life together, if we purchased the right supplies. Unless we were in a particularly harsh environment, we knew to conduct a brief funeral. Here lies Laura. We wrote epitaphs across the virtual tombstones before continuing down the trail.

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We Handle It

.Reading time 24 minutes.

By Gwen E. Kirby

Featured Art: Fisherman’s Cottage by Harald Sohlberg, 1906

We see him first at the reservoir, a middle-aged man with an oval of fur on his chest, nipples like button eyes, and blue swim trunks with yellow Hawaiian flowers. We are swimming, and he regards us from the shore in that way we are learning to expect from a certain kind of man.

Like every day in Tennessee, it is hot, and in the early afternoon, we walk from the stone campus of this small college to the lake. We are at a summer music camp, our fingertips sore from strings, our backs sticky with sweat, and when we reach the lake we shed our summer dresses and leap from a boulder into the water, which is deep and clean. Around the lake, tall pines and the heavy hum of Southern bug life. We float on our backs, conscious of how our breasts protrude from the water, pleased that we are sixteen, except for Caisa who is seventeen and over-proud of it. For her birthday, she buzzed her head. Her cheekbones are sharp and high, and even if she were not older, she would be our leader because she walks with confidence and draws checkers on the white rubber of her Converse in ballpoint pen, cheap ink that shimmers like oilslick. We wish we could go home and buzz our heads, draw on our shoes, but our faces are round, we like our sneakers white, we like our mothers happy.

The man doesn’t jump into the water. He walks down the wooden stairs to the dock, sits, then eases himself into the water as if it pains him. Though we don’t say anything, we cease floating on our backs, tucking ourselves under the surface, our heads and shoulders bobbing in a circle.

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Sixteen in Vegas

.Reading time 36 minutes.

by Anastasia Selby

Featured image: Edvard Munch. The Girl by the Window, 1893. The Art Institute of Chicago.

It’s Vegas and I’m sixteen years old. I’ve been playing in the arcade for hours; I’m leaning on the console of Mortal Combat, pushing the quarters my stepdad has given me into the slot one after another, wearing the tips of my thumbs down with their ridged edges. I’m bored as hell and my parents have abandoned me in this wasteland, I can practically see the tumbleweeds and hear western music as I walk across the patterned carpet. I pass all the men and women with their heads almost touching the bright lights of the slot machines, their hands like lobster claws around the levers, as if they’re waiting for the secrets of life to come pouring out when they hit the right combination. The secrets must be what they see on billboards, what they see in magazines. The arcade smells like the sweat of children and sounds like broken glass.

Starting at the Excalibur, a gaudy Disney imitation that should have been torn down years ago, I walk from casino to casino, reveling in the transition from air-conditioning to the surreal heat that cloaks everyone who ventures outside in a thin layer of plastic wrap. I stare back at the men who gawk at me on the sidewalk as I walk past them, men who are over twice my age and probably have daughters half my age. They must give their daughters baths and put them in their pajamas at night, patting their heads as they tuck them into bed. I can’t remember one time my father actually tucked me into bed. He left when I was two.

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