Adi,
Thanks so much for submitting your story, “Survival Song” to The Missouri Review for our consideration. We greatly enjoyed reading this, and found much to admire in the prose and characterization. Unfortunately, we ultimately decided that this particular story was not quite a perfect fit for our current needs. We do like your writing though, and we’d love to see more in the future, so please submit to us again. Thanks for thinking of us, and for continuing to support TMR. We wish both you and this story the very best of luck going forward.
Regards,
The Editors
So, a few weeks ago, I drove past some kids standing on the sidewalk, waiting for their school bus to show up. I felt a sudden wave of nostalgia for the school bus stop, and then I imagined what those kids would have to say about an adult looking back fondly on the bus stop. And that’s where the following story evolved from. It’s not quite done yet, but I feel I haven’t shared enough of my prose/fiction with you lately, so here it is. Enjoy!
Nostalgia
Seven a.m. again, breaths in tufts, so that the four of them on the sidewalk in front of the bushes looked like a factory letting out steam.
It was Jeff and Mindy and Erika and Michael and seven a.m., the bus’s arrival looming sometime in the unknowable future. As if the 3rd grade, 4th grade, 6th grade and 3rd grade, respectively, weren’t grueling enough, there was the cold and the waiting and the fact that it was still only Tuesday.
Michael shifted his weight from one foot to the next, trying to avoid that horrible itchy feeling that came from standing in the same place too long. Mindy was poking a stick into the underside of the bushes, trying to figure out if the thing was a dead thing or something less interesting.
It was Jeff, as per usual, who spoke first. “You guys think we’ll ever look back on these days and miss it all?” He was playing with a hand-held gaming device, dodging bullets as he sent the question visibly into the air.
“You mean nostalgia? The golden tint of memory,” Mindy said, stretching out the words dramatically, maybe a little mockingly, “the glorification of the past? You wonder if it might apply to even this?” She crouched down lower and poked the thing a little more. She was wearing her favorite, pink, rubber rain boots, so she was not afraid to step into the dirt next to the bush to get a closer look.
Erika sighed loudly, cursing the heavens for the millionth straight school day because there were no other kids her age at the bus stop. “What a stupid thing to say. Who would miss this? The cold, the purgatorial standing around, the same tired company— all for an unwanted destination, somewhere we’re forced to go. No matter how much time has passed, there’s no chance someone could find a way to romanticize this. It’d be like thinking back fondly on one’s time in the Gulag.”
She exhaled a cloud of breath as if it were proof of her authority, as if it were already carrying the heaviness of cigarette smoke that would one day become her trademark. She was getting to the age where she was feeling protective instincts toward young Michael, who was small and weird and spacey and could use a tough, big sister to stick up for him. That year’s fifth grade class was particularly full of bullies, some of whom were already in love with her, and would be for years.
Michael barely ever spoke at the bus stop, but he did now, his squeaky voice protruding from somewhere inside the layers of sweatshirts and the winter coat Grandma had given him as a gift on her last Christmas. It shocked Erika to hear Michael speak up. He always seemed so afraid of conversations, as if he sensed some danger in words. “I think we will, someday. I could see it happening,” he said, eyes on the ground, as if he were speaking to his shifting feet, “Someone driving past, getting just a glimpse of us, not long enough for him to really spend much time thinking about what it felt like being here. The scene would look like an embodiment of simpler times, which it is. Our worries are small. When the bus will get here, whether the teacher will call on us, if somebody will pick on us, the split our afternoons will have between homework and fun.
“One day, we’ll have bills, people whose love we have to try hard to keep, ambitions. A world trying to make us clearly defined versions of ourselves, no matter how vague we may feel. Our own kids to worry about.” He pulled a yo-yo out of his coat pocket and untangled the string. “I don’t know. I guess I just feel that where we are now isn’t so bad.”
Jeff wanted to agree, but he couldn’t help but think of how afraid he’d been when he’d broken the binoculars, how he didn’t know if his dad would still love him when he found out, and wasn’t that a bigger worry than whether one could afford eating out and fancy things? And even if his dad had only been angry for a little while and then forgiven him, weren’t those moments filled with a truer fear than not knowing what job to apply for? He found himself starting to wish that he were the hypothetical adult who drove past them, who could see just a moment and forget that there were discomforts attached to it. He tried very hard to picture himself as one. Suit, tie, cologne; preset radio stations of his own choosing. Coffee in the cup holder. Then a wonderful thing happened and he completely understood what it would feel like to be that adult, the pleasure that might come from remembering something fondly even when it hadn’t necessarily happened that way. He found he was nostalgic for a time that he was still immersed in.
Mindy was crouching even lower now, peering into the dark underbelly of the bushes. To everyone else it seemed like she hadn’t been listening to Michael’s words, but that was a carefully constructed façade of her persona, something she did because she had already learned that if people weren’t certain they had your attention, they battled harder for it. She had even closed her eyes, so that it would look like she didn’t care, but also so that his words could burrow their way into her. She wanted to remember Michael’s voice throughout the day, and especially right before falling asleep. She’d be sensitive to words all her life.
“And when we’re adults,” Mindy asked, hoping it’d be Michael that would answer, “Won’t we be blind to how good we have it then? The freedom, the experiences all tucked away knowledgably in our past. Love. ”
“If we can find it,” Jeff said softly, so that only his video game could hear it.
The still air broke with the sound of the bus turning the corner onto Desert Shadow Lane, a few blocks down. Murray, the mutt who lived with the Robinsons, began his ritualized barking, whether to greet the bus or bid the kids farewell, it was always hard to tell. It was an avuncular sound, affectionate but distant.
Mindy finally got a good angle with her stick and she brought the thing out from under the bushes. It turned out not to be something dead, but something on the verge of death, a pigeon mauled by a free-roaming neighborhood cat. As she let out a shriek, Mindy thought that being close to death made it more alive than any of them would feel the whole day. They gathered around it, watching the slow, steady rising of its chest. Erika thought she saw its tiny breath forming in the cold air. Mindy hid behind Michael, pretending to be frightened, fingers clutching his shoulder.
Jeff moved his shoe toward the pigeon, to give it a kick, but Erika held out her arm and lightly pushed back against his chest, “Don’t.”
Michael leaned over to get a closer look at it. “What do we do?” He looked up, seeing the approaching glint of yellow reflecting off the school bus, a worried look on his face as if the bus was forcing them into a decision.
They all looked to Erika, waiting for some indication. But she had no idea what to do with a nearly-dead bird. She was actually terrified. Of the bird, of the diseases her brother might get if he touched it. Terrified that the other kids might want her to kill it. She was terrified for the bird, most of all. That it was so close to the end of its life and that maybe not much had come before. What if it was just a kid, like her? What did she know about what sizes kid birds were? And here the bus was getting closer, and Erika would have to leave the bird on its own, or choose what to do with it. The other kids would just keep staring at her with those pleading looks on their faces, as if the couple of years that separated her from them had undoubtedly come with wisdom of what to do in just this situation.
The bus rumbled closer, like an angry parent tired of calling for quiet. They could see the windshield now, and the bus driver, Garret, looking blankly ahead at the road, as if he couldn’t see them standing there huddled around something almost dead, tufts of breath painted into the air around them. Garret was not at his happiest, as his wife had neglected to kiss him before he left the house, and that always soured the rest of the day for him. Even the children’s calm, quiet demeanor this morning failed to rouse any sort of pleasantness within him. It would be a waste of a day, motions being undertaken without any gusto, nothing in the hours ahead that could remotely pass for memorable. He hoped his lunch break would be nice. Maybe Joe, who drove the Green Valley route, would be around to play chess with.
Garret remembered the years when Jonah was still a boy. He thought about the everyday life of an eight-year-old, the joys and sorrows of it, the joys and sorrows Garret had imagined from his own aged perspective. He thought to himself that the drive to become a parent was nothing as grandiose as the propagation of the species, or even some subconscious desire to extend your own life through offspring, but rather the belief—the stubborn, unlikely, hopeful belief—that one could guide another through life and do it admirably. That you could lead someone toward the joys and away from the sorrows.
The bus pulled up where it always did, the worn tread of the front tire lining up perfectly with the crack in the ground that separated the blocks of cement which made up the sidewalk. Jeff looked away from the bird and focused on the alignment of the sidewalk and the tire, like he always did before climbing on the bus. The doors folded open with a sharp hiss of hydraulics and Garret looked at the four of them. “Come on,” he said, “We don’t want to be late, do we?”
Only Jeff was looking back at him, the other kids didn’t even acknowledge the fact that the bus had arrived.
ihaveasandwich asked: I just wanted to let you know that I bought the Kindle edition of Somewhere Over the Sun today. I am as of yet only four chapters in, but already the warmth of your writing has brought tears to my eyes. I can't wait to read on and see what else this book has in store for me! :)
:)
What a wonderful message. I hope you enjoy the rest of the book.
104 people have entered the Goodreads giveaway of Somewhere Over the Sun! You can click here to enter for the chance to win one of three copies.
Add my book, Somewhere Over the Sun to your to-read shelf! I realized that things have slowed down a lot with my promotion of the book, so I’m going to do a giveaway. I’ll give away three copies!
Details are through Goodreads.
(The giveaway is pending Goodreads approval, but should be up soon).
Dear Sylas,
It is again raining in Mexico City.
The people that know me are familiar with my disenchantment with rain. You don’t know it yet, I guess. But you will someday. Or maybe not, if I have anything to say about it.
Unlike many writers whose creativity seems to thrive in the rain, and many of my friends in Las Vegas, where you live, who’ve gone most of their lives without it, I do not like the sight/feel/implications of the heavens showering down upon us. It becomes tricky to walk around while carrying a computer. Traffic in the city becomes even worse. I have simply seen too much of it in my time living in this city, and enjoy going out to write too much, to be able to romanticize rain.
However, sitting here at the coffee shop, safe from the weather, I wonder if I can teach myself to like the rain. I’ve always felt that people are far too adamant about their tastes. I do not like green eggs and ham, they maybe sometimes proclaim. And hey, I’m just as guilty as everyone else, Sylas. You’ll see that sometimes, we get this idea that our tastes define us, that we must dislike something, that liking everything is a major character flaw. I took pride in the fact that you didn’t seem to enjoy bananas the first time you had them, because I don’t either. But, why?
Here’s a list of things that I used to dislike, or was even adamantly against, that, for one reason or another, I now greatly enjoy: coffee, beer, whiskey, football, certain rap music, large parties, bacon, The Black Keys, etc. Some of these were just change-of-heart moments where my preference inexplicably changed and I could not remember any reason why I used to dislike what I now like. Some of them, though, I approached with the specific intent to try to add another item to the long list of things I enjoy.
And want to know the surprising bit? It was easy. It really didn’t take much to force these acquired tastes on myself. Maybe just because I was willing. Maybe that’s all it takes for us to enjoy more of what life has to offer. To try. To say, I’m going to do/eat/drink/watch this until I can see the beauty in it, until I can get some enjoyment from it. And believe it or not, these things I now like do not feel forced. It does not feel like I’m feigning enjoyment. Maybe we just go around pretending we’re displeased by things, because it’s in our nature.
So maybe the rain deserves another chance from me. Maybe I should try walking around in it with an umbrella and no computer. Maybe I should stare at the way it gathers at the edge of things, and holds, holds, holds until it’s too heavy to resist gravity and drips down. Maybe, if I stare at a puddle long enough, try to count the ripples, I’ll be able to enjoy the rain. And then whenever it does rain, I won’t automatically feel that slight-to-heavy worsening in mood. I’ll just think to myself how much I like the rain and go about my merry day. Maybe, when you grow up, you’ll never believe that I once disliked the rain.
“…an honest and joyful attempt to reach out…and remind us all of the great things that can happen when we realize our words are powerful, that creativity changes existence, that we are capable of making the lives of the people around us happier.” — Once again, The Compass, a site here on Tumblr that reviewed my book, Somewhere Over the Sun.
If someone has ever told you to fear the blank white page, they are wrong. The blank white page is actually one of the best things that can happen to a writer. Nothing has gone wrong yet, nothing that doesn’t work, a world of opportunities ahead. It’d be like someone telling you to fear a fuel gauge pointing to the letter F. All you have to do is accelerate.
By all means, be afraid that you will not get there safely. That you shall be mangled by the journey. That you will lose more than you gain along the way. Fear the things that will come at you, the people that might try to destroy you. Fear how well you are built to resist collisions, whether you can keep momentum when you have slowed down to a near halt far away from your destination. Fear that you will battle through the journey and no one will have cared, or noticed. Or that, no matter how much you have already battled, people insist that you are not there yet.
And once you have moved past the fear of the blank white page, understand that all these other, bigger, realer fears, have the exact same solution. Every problem or fear or obstacle a writer faces can be dealt with simply: by writing.
“The final paragraph of Somewhere Over the Sun is like a song I never want to stop listening to. It’s worth reading for that paragraph alone.” — The Compass, a creator collective, a gathering of eight young artists and writers honing their craft and starting a conversation. It was founded on the belief that creative voices must be heard by others.