Thank you to all who submitted for the writing and art contest. After looking through and reading all the amazing submissions on the theme of “ghost(s)”, we are happy to announce that this edition's winners are: “Visions” a photograph by Alayna Nwadike and A Soft Haunting, a short story by Rebecca Showalter.
Visions
A Soft Haunting
Those moments right after dawn. The air is soft and the breeze forgiving as it rustles through those ochre reeds that have sprouted over the stained earth. The dust motes trail lazily through the tentative rays of light that trickle through the layering of clouds that blanket and protect. Those moments, those are the moments that are timeless.
In those seconds, there is noise, the kind that won’t hurt. The breeze billows through the curtains and rustles the pages of the books left open on the floor. The leather groans softly as the boy curls up in the armchair, before the curtains that are never closed, torn between either studying the still landscape or sinking into the book open in his lap.
There is clattering and footsteps from the kitchen, the sounds of life that start with dawn. Scents join the noises, scents of warm rolls generously slathered in creamy butter that will soon fill your stomach with content. The hands that stir the sumptuous batter with a wooden spoon belong to a girl whose smile is made of the pale rays that filter through the red and white checkered curtains of the kitchen, alighting the pans and pots in firelit bronze.
Just outside the curtains, the young boy crouches in the grass. He cups his hands around a sapling, pooling dirt towards it, fostering its growth. He has been here since before the sunlight arrived; his apron is already stained green with grass and he is oblivious to the leaves that have fallen into his hair. When he goes inside, the girl with the smile will pick the leaves out one by one, so gently that he might not notice.
Every window is open and natural light floods the house. Laughter joins the birdsong and everything is softly lit and everything is the kind of plush, softness that will never bruise. Then those moments fade, but the light and breeze remain kind, for our haunting is a soft one.
The leather chair is empty, though the book upon it remains open as do the rest of the books scattered across the floor. There is a light coating of dust upon the brown leather. The kitchen is silent but for the baby birds in the nest that was made in the rafters, for someone left the window open. Cream-colored oven mitts hang on the window sill, moss creeping over them.
Then as the light strengthens, it reveals something new and the present raises its claws. Overturned chairs. Dark stains on the floorboards. Bullet holes in the windows’ glass panes. But we still have some things the light cannot steal. The sapling the boy planted still curves against the house, growing, trying. The books on the floor are covered in penciled annotations proclaiming that once, someone existed here. The curtains are not drawn. They flutter in the breeze, for the windows are always open, and there is a splotch of blue on the yellow ones from the time the boy painted all the window sills the girl’s favorite color on the eve of her birthday.
We still have some things when the light is still kind before the world starts quaking and the noise begins to roar and tear the earth open, staining it, staining it dark. Then, the timelessness fades. The present slashes, trying to protect its bruised underbelly. The past
wanders, lost. The future has hidden away; perhaps she prodded the present too hard and that started this all.
But we still have some things.
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