The light changes and off you fly, my body is still in yours. Knee touches knee, helmet cheek on helmet head. We’ve barely met. You pick me up from the station. We throw my weekend bag in the apartment. “Do you want to watch the recommended French movie?” you ask. I hesitate, “Yes!”
Salvation by Collier Lumpkin
Christian scripture writes, and you may have heard before, “The truth will set you free.” And while not a theologian, I am confident other religious doctrines contain a similar teaching and that several interpretations exist as to what this might mean. For me, a woman in her twenties working and living in New York City, being free means staying true to myself.
Truth and telling can have potent consequences in narrative. When you speak the truth, a weight is lifted, and the burden of your secret is spread evenly throughout your history. The truth becomes a part of the fabric of your life. But it’s not always our turn to share our truths; sometimes, secrets are revealed to us. And they are frequently not welcome.
We sometimes talk about protagonists revealing and not revealing secrets in Sense Writing III workshops, as a way to create subtext in a scene and anticipation in the reader. In the stories chosen for this issue, our protagonists find themselves, instead, on the receiving end, either dealing with or just enduring the weight of the truth.
The story “Mourning” from Christie Barron, set in Israel, begins and ends with a boom. I like to think of these as “truth bombs,” relentlessly blasting reminders of this fractured reality. In this apocalyptic landscape, our protagonist is reaching out for tranquility, even vapidity (“the vacuous Twitter feeds”), only to be inevitably shattered by another boom.” But there is no shelter from what she knows is coming and cannot stop.
Mortality is possibly the most difficult truth anyone will face, and many don’t give enough credit to achieving its reconciliation—until it’s too late. In Pilar Rueda García Yakar’s “Intimate Silent Storm,” we find the narrator approaching this very milestone when she visits her dying aunt. This realization is depicted almost literally in the cleaning of the jar: “ I surrendered to knowing with all my being and sobbed quietly, with the sparking clean vessel…”
In the other stories, our narrators assume a more proactive role. Dan Martin’s “Old White Dude Does Hip Hop” explores, almost aggressively, what it truly means to be an “old white dude in a hip hop club.” Amidst hearty conversation with just the right kind of inquisitor, he is finally able to ask himself that question. In “Wound,” a wife imagines her divorce as a personified version of the severed tree outside her window. Healing would take time, she knew that much, but how to treat the gash? Emily Tobey writes, “I didn’t know whether to cover it or let it breathe.” The pain of divorce did eventually subside, as it should, and the narrator finds herself free to explore her unencumbered truth.
Certainly, in any good story there is a revelation. Conflict by its very nature reveals at once unseen truths that at least one character was not wishing to face. From compartmentalizing it or rolling with it, the intrigue in a story does not arise from the truth itself, but how the characters use it.
Mourning by Christie Barron
Intimate Silent Storm by Pilar Rueda García Yakar
Old White Dude Does Hip Hop by Dan Martin
Wound by Emily Tobey
Being Sure by Linda Moniz
I know the green of trees. They were a comfort in my long, dry childhood. Leaf after leaf against a strong blue sky, crisp and unapologetic. I know the green of dark summer grass through which the pale praying mantis barely moves. How could something so frightening appear so kind to my little eyes? His insect skin, pale and vivid.
Gray Ghost by Susannah Hardaway
On a cold, overcast day, a girl leans her back against a cypress tree and feels the strips of rough bark through her coat, a coat that matches the sky. Her friends – aren’t they her friends? - rush to the other side of the playground, a fluttering flock of birds flying away from her. She closes her eyes and tries not to cry.
Soup by Iva Radivojevic
Everything is yellow. The day is yellow, my sleeveless over sized shirt is yellow, dad’s jeep is yellow, happiness is yellow. Summer is yellow too and it shows up as pale streaks in my long long brown hair. The day wears a July’s burn - though - it’s not really a burn but a cozy warmth in which we wear almost nothing.
Untitled by Lynley Shimat
I’m walking down the hallway to meet my friend Dhara for lunch. I smell wind and leaves. I pass classrooms, people spilling out into the hall, I see tan lockers, I hear the sound of lockers opening and closing. I feel footsteps, I hear people moving echo down the hall. I walk fast, I feel my muscles, strong from track team practices, the angular slant of my hips. Fluorescent lights follow me down the hall into the geometry room. Berkeley grey cool morning slants diagonally through the window into the class, which smells of chalk and desks and math smell. I smell the cold. And I hardly walk into the room and he’s there, luminescent brown eyes. He’s standing with Dhara, looking at math books, and I don’t even see him cross the room and he’s asking me about a geometry final. I hear him say, “Are you in first period?"
I write this as a sit vigil in a hospital room. The walls are a pale shade of pink—a color known to soothe the seer’s eyes and mind. Yet the color pink is not as strong as my powerful melancholy, which seems to wash my world in grey. His skin is a deep purple against the crisp bleach-white of the sheets, and my eyes are red. But outside a warm, golden yellow glows through the cracks of a pale blue cloud, and the fabled silver lining appears.
Colors are the most basic and definitive descriptor (“Roses are red, violets are blue…”), and often assumed to be universal. But consider that the Japanese language originally had no word for the color blue. It's not that they don't have blue skies or birds, they just don't differentiate between the colors of grass and oceans. A translated description would paint a very different picture.
Animals developed eyes some 600 million years ago, before which color didn't matter. If all the animals of earth developed eyes at different points during evolution, how can we be so sure that my orange is the same as yours or another animals?
If a forest is green in a blind world, does it have a color? Is color so black and white?
As a matter of fact, we do know that the ability to see red is associated with the X-chromosome, and since women are born with two Xs to a man’s X-Y, scientists concur that women are able to perceive a broader spectrum of red than men. If, in theory, everyone may be perceiving colors differently, then how we associate the linguistic symbols for colors with certain ideas or emotions should yield some interesting literary illustrations. We’ll explore this with four stories from our Sense Writers.
“Being Sure,” deals with just this issue—perception vs. reality—but the eyes of Linda Moniz’s protagonist do not fool her even after all these years. Susannah Hardaway’s “Gray Ghost” shows us how a color can be imprinted with a lasting and poignant childhood memory. At one point, the protagonist describes herself as a ghost in limbo, stuck between heaven and earth. Yet, is grey not also a color in limbo, not quite white and not quite black? The repeating use of yellow in Iva Radivojevic’s “Soup” is somehow both appetizing and innocent. And Lynley Shimat's untitled piece is simply palpable and almost synesthetic in its colorful descriptions. In this issue of Popcorn, explore your perception of color in literature because, while colors may just be in our heads, it sure makes our world interesting.
Welcome to the refreshed edition of Popcorn! So glad you could stop by. First let me probably be the last person to tell you Happy New Year. My name is Hannah, and I’m new at this, so please humor me and while I employ a predictable if not cliché theme for this issue. This is a resurrected Popcorn with a first-time editor in a not-that-new year, and this newness refuses to be ignored in my mind.
Every story has three main parts: beginning, middle, and end. There’s a story in 2015 that lasted 365 days, culminating on New Year’s Eve. As a society we cherish the notion of starting fresh and second chances, so even the last day of the year is a day devoted to looking forward to the new one a few hours away.
On the other hand we tend to be annoyed by stories that end without clear endings. We don’t like stories to be so much like our lives: irresolute, ongoing, ever-changing. But most authors don’t aim to write stories that make us feel comfortable and safe. They are revealing truths and parallels in life, extrapolating on feelings we didn’t realize could be put into words.
It’s crucial for a story to have a gripping lead-in. If the first sentence doesn’t pique your imagination, there’s little hope the story will be read. But there’s something equally intriguing about stories that leave you feeling there’s more to unfold where the words stop. Many of our Sense Writers are working on larger projects, and what is submitted is only a fragment of a large piece, so it’s natural for some of these stories to leave you with questions. But that doesn’t make its occurrence any less interesting.
Donnaldson Brown’s “The Bamboo Bike” is a story about a father and son building a bike, but more so an reflection of the father Mike. Somewhere in there is a sense of acceptance, but also a feeling that the narrator has discovered a new understanding of the father and their relationship.
“Floor Man” by Megan Heise is an account of a morning invaded by a contractor doing work on her floors. The narrator must decide whether or not to open the door, or else be locked-in. While she knows her responsibilities are on the other side, there is an urge to resist it and stay trapped inside.
Along with Deborah Kaetz’s “Coming to Nova Scotia” and Mateo Lynch Gil's “October Third,” this issue is called Endings with Beginnings, featuring stories that end with an anticipation of a whole new story to come. Because everyone loves a redemption story.
The Bamboo Bike by Donnaldson Brown
October Third by Mateo Lynch Gil
Floor Man by Megan Heise
I want nothing more than to sleep. My alarm app wakes me up, says I got 9 hours of sleep, says it’s 94% quality sleep but still I’m exhausted. My head is foggy with exhaustion. It seemed so reasonable last night -- wake up early, get things done, walk to work instead of wasting $2.50 on a three subway stop ride.
