marina

Marina believed in the romanticism of life. It’s one of the qualities I most wish I had. She could take something small and believe instead in its enormity. She took joy in stories such as the man and the starfish along the beach.

Her favorite creature was a caterpillar. Not a butterfly, she believed them to be cliché. But a caterpillar. A slimy little worm with a fat roll for a body and eyes black with longing to develop, to change. She collected them on her finger, picked them right out of the grass and let them crawl to their little hearts’ content. It made her smile, and she would look up with her big blue eyes. “Wanna hold him?” I never did.

            I remember the way Marina used to smile at me. Her gentle lips would curve, and her red nail polish would sparkle as she brought her fingers to cover the cherry abyss of soft words.

Time was kind to Marina, I can attest to that. As she grew into her eyelashes and gained the swirl of her hips that every woman needs to truly conquer sensuality, I remember watching in awe. How life could develop that way amazed me.

I remember the day when Marina’s smile dimmed. We were listening to the radio for the first time in weeks; the war was raging and we didn’t want to get out of touch. War in its infinite ugliness took away the bliss of ignorance.

The words stung like daggers. Well, one word in particular, really: deportation. As if my yellow star wasn’t dangerous enough. You could be beaten to death in the streets simply for looking at someone the wrong way; it didn’t matter because the star was a toxin. It made you hideous to look at, a waste of god’s energy manifested into a spirit of supposed worthlessness. The toxin was so strong that eventually you were forced to believe in it.

Marina looked at me with fearful eyes, but they lingered only for a moment. Something stronger pulled at her; she blinked and turned toward the bedrooms. Her ears cocked, she stood silent as a mouse and still as a cocoon, waiting for a muffled cry to push her fear underneath her instincts.

The ghettos were awful; I remember them as the worst kind of prison. Humiliation was the main focus of all those around us. It was as if we were vermin. Crammed into little spaces meant to quarantine us in our disease spread by the toxin of the yellow star.

Marina would occasionally bring me food, but she never ventured past our secret meeting spot: just outside the ghetto. I spared her the details regarding my living conditions; to this day I will never know whether she actually knew what they were like.

I remember that day my worst nightmare became a reality. Deportation was no longer just a phrase, and the day came for me to take my turn. I spent days on end crushed against the walls of a car meant for cattle. I suppose it was fitting. To be treated as an animal from the very beginning. The fear was the worst. I feared for myself, but mostly I feared for Marina. She couldn’t live without me, without my income, without my reassurance that things would be okay. A beautiful Christian girl, I believed, was next. How naïve. Her beauty was what saved her.

Days in the camp were long, bitter, painful. Mocking signs, dirty faces, and stinging words almost killed me. But nothing could ever compare to the day when I saw Marina again. She was behind bars, but it was I who was on the wrong side. A man held her hand, smacked me across the face for taking too long a glimpse. She was more beautiful than I remembered, but her smile was not the same. Everything about her seemed wrong.

I became numb. To understand was to die, I believed, therefore I refused to comprehend. I moved with the motions of a corpse, and did not wish to see Marina again. Little did I know that Marina was yet another matter with which I had no say.

The next time I saw her was the last. It was the end, the final destination, the time for me to see my god. The god of tolerance, the god of hypocrisy. As I was undressing to take a final shower, I saw her again. Her lipstick cherry red, her eyes a dull gray, her nails gripping a key.

We were separated by a wall of people, and I was forced head-on into a man who moved me into the chamber, the deathly shower. As the door was closed, I remember closing my eyes and taking one last deep breath.

Suddenly the door creaked open again, and a hand grasped me, pulling me out of the chamber and into the “fresh” air again. As I blinked open my eyes, I caught one last glimpse of cherry red lips as Marina swallowed the key and closed herself inside.

The tiny space was not mine to keep; I was forced to trade my death.

I hope she dreamed of caterpillars.

heaven/hell

What if heaven is a place where

All is forgotten.

Nothing can hurt you because nothing

Can touch you.

You’re stuck in constant solitude, but you never mind

Because you’ve forgotten what everything else feels like.

Emotions run dry because there is no need for

Change.

The only way to escape reality is

To forget that it exists.

All you have to do is

Breathe.

What if hell is a place where

all you have to do is breathe.

There is no change, only ways to escape reality.

The well of emotions is the only thing drier

Than you.

How long can you stand this solitude

Until you’ve forgotten what else exists?

Everything hurts because you cannot feel anything.

How can you remember

When everything screams to forget?

there once was a man who wore his heart on his sleeve

There once was a man who wore his heart on his sleeve.

He was sensitive and gentle, like all people wish for others to be.

When he was born, his mother gave him a kind smile, and his father a tender touch.

It was easy to be softhearted in a place where beauty was recognizably weightless.

He wore his heart on his sleeve, but never realized the dangers of love until he gave the heart away.

A girl with a wistful smile and pretty freckles and shiny hair convinced him to blow the heart over like a kiss.

With a kiss.

When she ran away, the boy shed a tear and became a man.

Hurt by her departure, he wondered about how to fill the hole in his shirtsleeve.

He sewed in everything, all sizes, shapes, and textures.

It was a long time until he realized what it was he needed to fill his sleeve.

It has been fifty years and it is a miracle she is still alive.

Sometimes that is all we need,

That love that defends love but defeats love.

the shell

Emily Cashour

Shell

I’m not like everyone else. No one stops to look at me, gasping in awe of my unique beauty. No children say “Daddy, daddy! Let’s take this one home!” No couples smile as they pick me up and put me in their bucket for a cheap wedding decoration.

I’m a black shell. Old, holed, and a reminder of the igneous rock that formed me. I have no defined shape; I’m just kind of a slab. Nothing special, never have been. Never will be.

What’s this? I feel something caressing my back. It’s different than the normal gentle kiss of the waves. I look up, and there’s a girl. She’s maybe about fourteen, and she’s holding me with tears in her eyes. She brushes off some sand, and sets me gently into her purple bucket. A bucket! I’ve made it into a bucket!

As she carries me further along the beach, I meet some of the other shells. None of them are like the shells I’ve seen on the beach. They’re all flawed in some way. One is only a chip, another is grey like storm clouds. I sigh, content and at home.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Eventually we leave the beach, and she sets the bucket with us down onto the passenger’s seat of a car. A short drive later, she walks into a small beach house, and sets us down on the counter. She sighs, and then picks up the bucket and turns it upside-down. We shells are spread all over the marble surface, and she gently spreads us all out so she can see each everything.

She smiles, but I don’t understand it; tears are streaming down her face and I can’t exactly tell why.

She runs out of the room and returns a few minutes later; with paint, paintbrushes, and string. She uses the holes in some shells and creates small holes in others, stringing them all together to make what appears to be a necklace. I’m confused and sad because she just keeps skipping over me. The only black shell and it’s blatantly obvious. I can’t even fit in with the misfits; that’s saying something.

When all the shells are used, she ties one more special knot on the middle of the necklace. She picks me up, and connects me with another, more intricate knot. I finally understand; I’m the centerpiece. All the other shells have swooshes of paint on them, but me, I remain black as night and different as day. She smiles again, but this time the tears don’t flow. She puts the necklace on, and smiles gently. She walks over to the mantle, and picks up a picture with a beautiful woman on it. She has laugh lines and sparkling green eyes. Her blonde hair is golden in the sun, and the picture has clearly been picked up a lot; the edges are worn a lighter brown.

“I love you mom.” She says gently, smiling through the tears. 

routine and smiling

Routine is a danger

It’s so easy to slip into it, as easy as it is to catch yourself smiling 

To slip into a routine is to fall into bed soon before you need to get up again

How warm it is

How easy

Welcome

To sweet sweet

Familiarity.

I like smiling

It’s universal

How much can be said in one facial expression

Is limitless to the possibilities of the wandering imagination

One who has never smiled at a stranger and gotten a smile back is one

Who will never know the significance of a butterfly’s wings

One who has never smiled back at a stranger is one

Who will never understand the complexity of a gentle flower petal

As it floats in the iris

Of a ray of

Sunshine

love ability

Love Ability

By: Emily Cashour

I wonder what makes a person loveable.

Is it something about what they share with the world? What they allow the world to see about them, whom they publicly admire, the portions of their talents they are willing to showcase?

Is there something about the way they smile at exactly the right times, or something about when they mourn in convenient empathy?

How about the way they smile as a polite hello, or shake hands and wish for a pleasant tomorrow?

I wonder if it is something everyone can see, if that’s the secret that makes someone loveable.

Or to fall in love with someone, do you have to understand the side of them they keep hidden from the world? Is there something about the way they smile and look down at the ground, sharing a secret with it that everyone is dying to know but cannot seem to understand?

In order to love someone, do you have to love the way they sit when they are alone, or admire the junk food they crave?

Do you have to smile at the pen that simply kisses the paper, nothing more, or are you only allowed to love the epic masterpiece?

How many times are you allowed to smile to yourself as you picture them deep in humble intelligent thought until you realize that they are unbelievably loveable and you are irrevocably drawn to them?

When they absentmindedly chew on their pen cap, is this when you imagine your lives together? Do you wish your lives to be as tangled as their messy hair?

Or is it even possible to love someone simply for their flaws?

To swoon when they let their façade slip, laugh at their simple misconceptions. How much time are you allowed to spend counting the freckles between their shoulder blades, each one brightening your smile and adding weight to their make-up bag?

It’s lovely to understand their humanity. To realize that even the best and brightest can make dumb mistakes. When they cry at a movie or grow angry with an outcome, are you allowed to nod in agreement, loving them all the more?

How many wrinkles may you caress until they understand and laugh with you to make ones anew?

How much salty seawater will you brave until you dry your eyes and blink in awe?

Perhaps being loveable is a combination, as all good things are.

The way they cheer and wave makes you beam. The way they lower their arms and clench something in their pocket clings in your mind. The sweat wiped from their nervous brow lets you into their world.

The way they poke and prod until your feelings burst from within.

 The way the key to their hope chest fits neatly in your palm.

Their dreams small enough to be coherently fulfilled.

I wonder what it is that makes a person loveable. Maybe it is just that humanity is perfectly romantic?

To find love in this world is a part of human nature and human nature is powerfully consistent. 

dust roads

The sun gleams off of the dashboard in a display that makes me wrinkle my nose. Yet my skin drinks in the heat, swallows greedily the glow that comes through the sun roof in the old four wheeled machine. I let my eyelashes dust off my cheeks for a moment and when I reopen them I glimpse at my hands, wondering whether they will be the ones to tell me how different today is.

It is my birthday and in the backseat of the car is a single red balloon. It floats in the rearview mirror and I see a splash of it every time I look up and back. It is partially deflated in that it has been in this car for too long with the same air on its inside and on its outside.

When I look to either side of me, I see dust and highway, dust and highway. Everything is brown, like my butterscotch cupcake. I already ate my cupcake, yet it looks like every rock is a crumb. I wish for once on my birthday I wouldn’t be the one who can’t eat all the cake they put in front of me.

I glance over at the figure with his aviator sunglasses and his tanned hands on the steering wheel. He is a familiar face, familiar to me when I look directly at him and familiar to me when I look in the mirror. But the familiarity ends where the looks stop. The sounds, the smell, the texture of the seat where I am sitting, all are that unfamiliar question of a place you don’t visit often enough.

But it is all right. Everything is all right, as long as I am not here alone. My tiny sneakers don’t touch the floor but that’s okay. I am small enough to understand that size only matters when age takes me. I turn my head. It’s enough for one look, I decide, and I close my eyes, just for a minute.

It’s a shame I had to leave my birthday party. I could have had more than a single red balloon to show for my birthday.  But it’s okay, because I don’t mind that there are two sides to every story of me. This dusty road is the second half of my birthday chapter.

What a wonderful day anyway, because it has that feeling of selfishness, and nobody can take it from me. When else could I wake up, after all, with only myself in mind?

We finally slow down as we get to where we are going. I stumble out of the car with a dizziness that comes from stillness in the wake of motion. This walk will become routine for me, it will relate the drive and the destination with the leaving and the preparation.

It becomes a dream.

Perhaps it was a dream after all. 

85

It is a world untouched by the limitations of change. Every human being is allotted eighty-five years of breaths, eighty-five years and not a second more. From the very beginning to the absolute end, humans can know exactly how much time they have on this simple blue planet.

The difference of this world lies in a choice unlike any other. Each person chooses an age as his favorite, and when he does so he remains that age for the rest of his life. To grow and develop each year is allowed; until the choice is made. After the choice there is not a single eyelash added to the body, not a day more of development to the mind. To choose thirty-two years and four days as a favorite, for instance, means to remain thirty-two years and four days old for an additional fifty-two years and three hundred and sixty days.

The simplest people choose their age early. Six, seven, eight. They choose to breathe in the choice of innocence, to understand the happiness that comes with instant gratification. To never leave this age means to never have to feel nostalgic for it. These people are content knowing what they know now. They wish not for anything more than what they received today.

People with a little more depth make their way to twelve, thirteen, fourteen. They wish to be old enough to be taken seriously. The boundaries of the playground are not enough for them, and they reach to touch something a little darker than their nightlight. However, they are afraid of anything that much more. With too much responsibility comes fear, and they can never truly leave the comfort of familiarity. These are the types of people that enjoy by sight, not experience.

Some of the more complicated people choose eighteen as their age. They want to be old enough to experience. Their minds are sharp enough to take them past the early stages of adolescence. These people live in their imaginations. The potential is right there; they can feel it as it wraps itself around their minds. These people are dying to understand experience, but to move past the want and take it is more than their personalities are made of.

Many people choose mid-twenties as their age. How could anything get any better than this kind of youth? Youth that sings of its self-important glory? To grow old is the enemy of this kind of person, and to end their growing here appears to be the only solution. They live in late nights and late mornings, they smile through reliving memories—half of all the fun they have.

People who enjoy safety choose to live in their thirties. Job security comes with this age, the children are young, the body can still handle all that life demands. To be thirty in this world means to live on the edge of a shallow pool. It is not difficult to step out and get wet, but safe avoidance is tolerated vehemently.

Very few choose to remain in their forties. To make it this far means to understand that life is intensely dynamic. To remain in a portion of life as difficult as this one, full of changes and mood swings and facts of life that wedge their way into the body’s new unappreciated cracks means to erase the conviction with which these individuals have pushed through every other age.

The bulk of those who pushed past the forties choose to live in their fifties and sixties.  It is as good of a time as any, they say. There isn’t much time left, there must not be much excitement left either, they say. These people are adventurous enough to dream of better times, but not adventurous enough to wait for them. Rest is familiar here, tiredness is what keeps them.

Very very few people make it past their seventies. Here is where life begins to pull at them and they give in. The people who choose to stay here choose to out of fear of not doing so. They lie down and rest their heads, smiling at all they have made it through.

The people who make it all the way to eighty-five are the most absolutely fascinating. Fear does not grip them, exhaustion affects only the speed in which they ascend the stairs to get to another morning. They believe not in the past, but instead in the future. They are the bravest, the ones who give the most of themselves, the ones who understand the most about life. To them, what it means to be happy is not to take joy in routine. It is not to fear the future from a safe post in the past. No, happiness is something else entirely. Happiness is never acceptance, instead it is a series of ups and downs. Happiness comes to them in their death, in their knowing for sure that in this life, they never missed a moment. 

Happiness

Happiness is gentle, soft, and sweet. It doesn’t want to intrude, so it never jumps out or clearly makes its presence known. Happiness just kind of suddenly appears, unexpected and easy. It’s like taking a deep breath after being underwater, and it’s overwhelmingly intoxicating. It’s so easy to take a breath of happiness and forget that sadness exists.

To smile and forget why because there are so many reasons to smile is the most beautiful thing. I wish that happiness could last forever, but happiness is always eaten quickly and the only thing left is a funny fearful aftertaste.

Because to be this happy can’t possibly last forever. If it isn’t possible to be sad for life’s entirety, why could it be possible to remain content?

Life is a cruel and unfair mistress, and happiness is one of the only solaces. She flutters gently, like a butterfly, and tiptoes around sadness. She tries to help and ease pain, and she does so with short bursts of feeling that can swallow even the most gruesome thoughts of self-pity. Without her, life would not be bland, it would only be dark.

Without sunshine, how is it possible to understand the darkness?

I always thought that to be happy, I needed what I didn’t have. Popularity, possessions, things that so easily overshadowed everything I was with thoughts of what I needed to become. I’m not going to say that I got everything I ever wanted because I don’t think anyone ever has. But what I will say is that I have had control of my future this entire time, and I think that learning to understand what I wanted was more than I ever could have imagined. To interpret issues and wonder why they are so coveted is something that will never make full sense in my brain.

Popularity: something I have always wished for; yet I still do not understand what it is. In my mind, the types of popularity are endless. Being popular for what you are, being popular for what you give, being popular for what you have; being popular for what you take. All these are examples and I don’t think I ever had the potential for any of them. The worth? I never really knew.

Something that I am is something no one else will ever be, and I do not understand why certain people were popular and other people with personalities just as diverse and learned were cast off to the side. What I am has never been popular, so clearly fitting into the first category would never become reality.

What do I give? Anything but myself, and I quickly came to realize that the things I have are only so important until people find out I have a limit. People only like what you have to give until the well of your gifts is empty, or until you say so. Giving up myself is something I am too terrified to do, because I am the only thing I have. Once I betray myself, there is no limit to the damage I can inflict. Damage that will only hurt to the extent of pain that I can remember. Because giving up myself turns into something more vile than the word give was ever meant to be. 

Being popular for what I have; what a reckless and disappointing way to live. You never have enough. There will never be enough time, money, or energy to be popular enough to satisfy the needs of the tiniest flea, and it saddens me to understand that.

I cannot take. Not consciously, not without the tug on my heartstrings that makes me understand and resent morality. It isn’t right and I don’t think it will ever be. Those who take are those who wish to give but are afraid to lose.