Inhale.
You’re standing in the middle of a mossy garden that does not realize that you are there.
In many ways, this is familiar. There’s the snow peas that your tender hands grasped, the taste lingering long into the night. There’s the blooming daylilies, fiery bursts of amber and crimson that you so eagerly clutched in small, sticky hands to give to your mother. And then there are the daisies you and your friends would spend hours twining into long, delicate chains, seeing how far you could go before you were called back home for dinner.
Now, take a step back.
Your eyes fall on a still blue pool, eerily similar to the one you and your friends would dance at the edge of, daring each other to dip your toes into the deep darkness. You move on to the muddy banks where you’d play chef with whatever you could find.
You push past the leaves that once encased your whimsical world. And there it will remain, forever be preserved—a world composed of ideas that were too quixotic to follow you into adulthood.
Exhale. The salt-bleached hour still holds. Let it grip you, touch you, twine the ends of your memories with the chasm of forgetting and remembering
You’re no longer in the midst of stained blooms and crystal water. You sink back to reality, to a world of salt-bleached and yet these flickering flashes of innocence will never quite leave.
—the Editors, Winter 2017
Table of Contents
Poetry
Rida Khawaja: Again
Ria Chaudhary: april 5th
Joyce Ker: Chang E
Kai Tsao: Showerhead
Lauren Ho: What I Conceive of the Voice Unheard by All
Prose
Kaylia Mai: A Flight of Fancy to the Young
Raksha Narasimhan: Castle
Pranav Mishra: Cornfields
Cynthia Li: Culaccino
Suphala Nibhanupudi: Curiosity Killed the Cat
Caitlin Leong: emp-tea
Saniya Doshi: Illusion
Sherry Huang: Mud Pies
Maya Sabatino: One-of-a-Kind
Melissa Chen: The Gifts They Bear
Grace Tian: the other world inside a star
Christine Lee: The Prisoner’s Dilemma
Yiu-On Li: Veil
Grace Huang: Worlds of Discontent