Portal (Rendition)

 

The sun sat low over the Massanutten and shimmered off the river below. He set out early to jog the lower Riverview Trail. The night before, he had attended a charity event at the Seven Bends Fire Department House No. 12, drawn by the local fare—brick oven pizza and brewhouse ale—his favorites. A good workout would burn off the calories.

He tightened his shoelaces and started jogging slowly. A glance toward the river cost him—his toe caught a root. His head hit the dirt before he could drop his hands. The light began to fade…

Makani “Mak” Iona pushed himself up, unsure why he was lying there. When he reached up to rub his aching forehead, sandstone grit brushed away, and his fingertips came back wet with blood. His knees were scraped up, and his right shoulder felt as though someone had punched it. He wiped the dirt from his tattoo-covered arms.

Trying to collect himself, he turned back toward his car, but the trail was gone. The forest had changed. Old-growth trees with massive trunks towered overhead, and the understory was dense with ferns. The canopy was so full he could barely see the sky.

He pivoted himself in a tight circle, looking for a familiar landmark.

At the edge of the woods, he looked for his car—but it wasn't there. No ball fields or roads lay before him either. No sounds of Interstate traffic or airplanes in the distance, no balls pinging off bats, cheering crowds, or loud kids—no cows bellowing in the fields below. He scratched his head, and a sinking feeling bottomed out in his stomach.

The mountain before him hadn’t changed, and neither had the one across the valley. Between them was open grassland—no roads, houses, or farms. The sky was a different kind of blue—no haze. High above North Mountain to the west, a darkness fluttered across the sky like a brewing storm cloud or a never-ending flock of birds.

Then he heard a wolf howl.

#

Mak knew he had to find shelter—a respite where he would feel safe and plan his next steps. Using the mountains and sun as his guides, he walked to the river and followed it downstream. He had walked the same floodplain before, so he knew the general layout of each bend in the river—except this time, no maintained trail or suspension bridge led him where he was going. The low-water rapids offered a place to ford the river and reach the mountain. As he was crossing, he noticed a large, flat rock on his right, just inches below the surface.

On the other side, he studied the layout and chose his route up. High ground would give him a bird’s-eye view. He looked up but could not see the fire observation tower on the ridgeline. He gathered some pawpaws and started his climb. About halfway up, he heard rustling in the brush and stopped to observe. A muscular bull elk stepped out, grazing the ground in a stand of healthy chestnut trees. It stomped the ground to separate the nuts from their spiky outer shells. Its antlers spread wide—nearly as wide as a moose's. Mak stayed still and inconspicuous until it moved on. He knew this wasn’t a mere whitetail. Questions flooded his mind: what happened to his car, the ball fields, and the roads? Had he really heard a wolf? And that rock in the river? He knew that rock, the one he had waded out to and fished from before.

The elk grunted, snapping him out of those thoughts. It looked at him and snorted. Spooked, it ran off, still chewing on the chestnuts. Mak picked up a few and kept climbing.

#

At the top, where he thought the tower should have been, Mak looked to the east into Fort Valley. Still mostly forested and narrow, it looked much the same, minus the red-and-white-striped cell tower and the Forest Service Road leading to it. Looking west, however, the town of Seven Bends had vanished. An expansive prairie savannah lay below him, and what looked like herds of bison roaming the land.

I must be dreaming, he thought, and pinched himself. No change. How could he be home but not home? He knew where he was, but didn’t know where he was. He dropped his head into his hands, took a deep breath, and exhaled forcefully, as his psychologist had taught him.

Looking back down into the valley, he noticed the bison moving swiftly to the north. Smoke rose from the plain below, and fire advanced toward the herd.

Mak sat against the trunk of a white oak, taking cover under its impressive branches. His chest thumping, he closed his eyes and held back his tears.

When he composed himself, he bit into a pawpaw and savored its rich, buttery taste. He thought of the pizza from the night before and almost laughed, but the mood wasn’t there. Exhausted, he drifted to sleep.

#

A gust of wind and falling acorns woke him. For a fleeting moment, he thought he was on the trail, but it all came back to him in a flash. High in the tree above him, he heard chattering and movement within the leaves. He saw large green birds with yellow wings rummaging through the branches. They hopped and climbed about; some were even hanging upside down. One of them dropped down closer to Mak. It had reddish-orange feathers across its face, with bare white skin circling its eyes. They gazed at each other in their own silence, then the bird broke its stare and hopped back up the tree.

Mak rolled his tongue around the inside of his pasty mouth. He could still taste the pawpaw but wanted—needed—water. With no source on top of the mountain, he had to go back down. The sink faucet in his apartment entered his mind. How do I get back there?

A similar path led him through the high-bush blueberry and dense laurel stands, then onto the lower ground where the pawpaw trees grew. The river appeared clearer than usual, and against his best judgment, he pressed his face into the cool water and sucked up all he could drink until his belly jutted tight against his shorts.

The water stung the gash on his forehead, and the scratches across his knees still throbbed. A sharp, pin-prick pain in his shoulder caused him to wince as he pushed himself upright after drinking. A long, straight sycamore branch lay on the ground. It made for a good walking stick. He thought it was best to meander south with the river to find a familiar exit point. The sun was setting, and he needed a place to hole up for the night. Knowing Spring Hollow Run flowed through town to the river, he headed due west. When he reached the creek, he dropped to his knees, unaware of the beating they had taken. The view around him no longer resembled his town, his Virginia—it was more like the intermountain prairies of Montana, where he’d hunted with friends. He tried to reach for them in his mind, but what his eyes returned made that world hard to register. What about his classes? His mom?

#

The rising sun warmed his face as he stretched himself awake. The earthen hollow beneath a prominent shale ledge provided Mak shelter for the night. As he sat up, an enormous flight of birds blotted out the sun, unbelievable in number.

The morning was cool, so he needed to get moving to warm himself. The smell of burnt grass hung in the air as the tussocks still smoldered. He set out for the prairie, but as the river grew farther away, he decided to turn back. The river and mountain brought him familiarity and comfort against his odds.

Along the way, he chewed on some chestnuts that he had cracked open. They were bitter raw, so he spit them out. His last pawpaw was covered in ants, so he tossed it. Breakfast would have to wait. Because it offered good cover, Mak followed Spring Hollow to the river crossing. Digging his feet in as he climbed the steep bank, he noticed a broken arrow lodged in the dirt. He snapped off the upper portion with the stone tip and carried it. On top of the flat, he raced into the woods and found a game trail leading up a finger ridge. Thankful he didn’t have to weave through the twisted mountain laurel, Mak eased toward higher ground. A fork in the trail stopped him; he didn't know which path to take. He stepped to his right and followed fresh deer tracks through a stand of hemlocks. Broken shale made it hard to navigate, demanding more care with his footing. He stepped over a series of roots, lost his balance, and fell against the trunk of a young hemlock, catching himself before he slid down the hillside. The tree bent and swayed back into place, raining dying needles all over Mak and the trail. After brushing them out of his hair, he looked down at the river. At the edge of his vision, a figure stood motionless, less than fifty feet away. Two warriors, frozen in an awe-struck stare-down, as if neither had ever seen another man.

The other man wore an animal-skin tunic over his lower half. Dark markings trailed down both arms, from shoulders to hands. His hair was jet-black and sleek, pulled back into a tail that reached the middle of his back. Bare, his feet were surprisingly clean. He slung a hunting bow and quiver over his shoulder. The image was familiar to Mak, but he didn’t know why.

Mak stood tall, head and chest up. His gold tee, blue shorts, and running shoes caught the other man’s eye; he stepped a few paces closer. Mak tightened his grip on the arrow shank—his hand shaking slightly. After sizing each other up, they met eyes. Suddenly, a wolf's call echoed out. The man with the bow ran up the hillside. Mak stood and watched him disappear into the brush above him, wondering how a man could move so fast on that terrain. Mak made his way down the hill, slid into the river, and swam to the other side—his hand still clamped around the arrow. Grapevines helped him climb out of the water, propelling him through the scour. His lungs burning and legs quaking, he slowed and turned to look back. As he turned back, a low-hanging branch caught his head and sent him to the forest floor…

#

Mak pushed himself up, unsure why he was lying there. When he reached up to rub his aching forehead, sandstone grit brushed away, and his fingertips came back wet with blood. He heard a bat ping and the crowd's applause.

Gathering himself, he turned back toward his car and followed the trail to the parking lot. He turned his empty palm upright and thought of the arrow.

The Little League scoreboard showed an unscored game at the top of the third inning, with a pitch count of 0-2. Mak walked to the water fountain, splashed water on his face, looked up at the mountain, and headed to his car. As he got in, he glanced at his textbook on the passenger seat: Pre-Columbian Native American History. He wanted to laugh, but the mood wasn’t right—his mind wasn’t right.

Mak turned the ignition, shifted into drive, and rolled back into town to his second-story studio apartment near the County courthouse. Even though it was mid-morning, his stomach growled. A short walk north through town brought him to Ben’s Diner, where his burger and fries awaited. He flipped open his textbook and scanned the pages of “The Flora & Fauna of Native Shenandoah,” eager to find an image of the green parrot.

#

 Three weeks passed before Mak returned to the trail. He laced his shoes up tight and set out on a slow jog. He bounded over the root he had previously tripped on and continued along the loop five times, totaling about three and a half miles. No one was playing at the park. No other cars were in the parking lot. He walked to the water fountain and splashed water on his face.

Mak took a longer route home, deciding to drive by the dam to view the river’s water level. As he turned right and headed through French’s Woods, he heard a dog bark from within the trees. He slowed the car and looked over. A silhouette came into view. He slammed on the brakes and jerked forward, nearly bumping his head on the steering wheel. About fifty yards back, through the brush, stood a dark-haired man in brown clothing, a bow and quiver slung over his shoulder. Mak dropped his head into his hand and rubbed his eyes. When he looked up, the man wearing the tunic had disappeared.

 

Tony John began writing fiction in 2022, at age 50. His writing is grounded in the land, history, and people of the places he has lived. He spent his career as an Army officer, retired as a Major, and returned to Shenandoah County, where he grew up. He currently works for the National Park Service and lives and writes in Fort Valley, Virginia. His stories “Season (Observation)” and “Shower (Dissolution)” are forthcoming in The Ranger’s Almanac and Flash Phantom, respectively.

Wound

The oil never washes out.

Arthur Voss had learned that in forty years of clockmaking. The black grease settles into his skin's creases, into his old knuckles, into the whorls of his fingertips, until the man's hands look like blueprints of everywhere he has ever been.

The small shop was full of the smell of copper, of rust, of slow-burning time. In the corner, on a narrow cot, Clara breathed in shallow, ragged pulls.

Each one a countdown he could not stop.

He had built sixty-three clocks in this room. He was so obsessed with time that he had missed their first anniversary, their tenth, their twentieth, and the lovely holidays that seemed to exist. He had given her gears instead of tears, oil instead of toil, time instead of rhyme.

"Arthur," her voice came out thin as paper. "Come sit with me."

He stood at his bench, hands moving over the golden watch. It was his masterpiece. Its case was worn brass, soft as skin, its face a metallic sheen that caught the light, its second hand a whisper of silver that never lied and never faltered. He had built it to outlast everything. He had believed, with the furious faith of a foolish man, that perfect things could rescue imperfect ones.

"I can fix this," he said.

Clara closed her eyes. "You cannot fix everything with your hands." "I fix everything with my hands."

The silence was long and soft and sorrowful as winter snowfall. When she spoke again, her voice had gone somewhere far. "Arthur. Let the time go."

As Arthur was so focused, he could barely hear her voice from afar. He pressed his thumb to the crown of the watch.

Suddenly, something strange came into the room. A white powder-like gas filled the little shop. Clara's body vanished like smoke in a hard wind. Arthur screamed. His hands flew to his face. The white came after. The white colour like heavy fog swallowed the walls, the cot, the dark, each thing blinking out faster than the last. It pressed against his eyes like two burning coins and kept pressing. His scream died in his guts before it ever left his throat. Then he went too.

He woke up over his workbench. A dream, he thought. He looked at the cot where his wife used to be. Empty. He looked at the watch. It hummed against his palm, low and smug and settled.

He ran to the door.

White flash. The chair. The bench. The hum.

He raged. He wept. He begged. Anger and confusion made him drive a chisel through his own palm. He smashed every clock in the room to glass and brass and silence. He tried a dozen other ways to end this questionable phenomenon, to escape, each more desperate than the last, each rewarded with the same bright nothing and the same mocking tick-tick-tick of the watch on his desk. He was trapped in a prison of his own loving. He was, in every way that mattered, already dead.

What does a clockmaker do when brute force fails?

He had no patience left. He tore the watch open. The gears inside were reversed, rewound, running hard against themselves. He worked anyway, jamming each wheel back, forcing each spring, sweat dripping onto the mechanism; his breath loud in the silence.

Something snapped.

The door swung open.

He stepped outside.

A strong push of air hit him hard. The street looked right but felt like a copy of itself, like someone had built it from memory and gotten most of it correct. He stopped at an intersection. A woman crossed ahead in a yellow coat. The car was rounded, chrome-trimmed, wrong.

He looked down.

A newspaper, face-up on the cobblestones between his feet. He read the date.

Then he read it again.

The numbers did not change.

His stomach dropped through the pavement. His mouth went dry. The watch had not erased her. It had sent him back. Ten years. She was alive.

In a coffee shop, she sat with her friends, dark hair loose at her shoulders, a coffee cup cradled in her hands, her whole face open and lit from somewhere deep inside. She was so vivid it hurt. She was so real he forgot, for one terrible and magnificent second, everything else.

Through the door, through the room, through ten years of time that had no right to be crossed, his hand found her shoulder the way a drowning man finds the surface—desperate, shaking, too late to stop.

Clara looked up.

No love. No warmth. No recognition. Just a woman looking at a weeping, wild-eyed stranger who had grabbed her on a Tuesday.

To her, he was no one.

The coffee shop walls began to peel away like burning paper. Arthur looked down at his shaking fingers. The black grease wasn't oil from a workbench. It was ash, bleeding out from under his skin. The watch on his wrist cracked right down the middle, spilling out a tiny, swirling sky of stars. He wasn’t a man who had lost his wife. He built hearts for a living and never owned one.

Now, the whole pretending world was breaking. The people in the room melted into grey clay. Clara shrank back, her eyes wide, staring into the dark void where his face should have been.

"What are you?" she whispered, her voice rattling like copper.

He fell through the floor as the universe unraveled, watching her young, beautiful face get smaller and smaller. There was no grief in her eyes. There was no love. Just that terrible, polite look she gave a dying monster on the street.

The darkness slammed shut. The machine in his head reset, stuffing his huge, broken mind back into the skin of a helpless old man, forcing him to wake up and lose her all over again.

The oil never washes out. Arthur Voss had learned that in forty years of clockmaking.

 

Botao Liang is an energetic and creative person who likes skiing, enjoying nature and likes to share feelings, beauty of matter, and creative thoughts through writing. He is currently traveling through the mountains and valleys, where he is absorbing the essence of the earth to transform it into stories and poetry.

 

The Curator Of Half-Broken Things

The third roll of bubble wrap she ordered this month arrives smelling of cold rain. She cuts the plastic sheath with a box cutter and the wrap exhales—a tight, chemical breath—slackening into the room. On the floor of the apartment, twenty-three cardboard boxes wait in stacks of four.

She lifts a Royal Albert teacup from its newspaper bed. The crack runs from rim to base, hair-thin, holding a faint line of tea-stain. Someone else's tannin. Someone else's mornings. She wraps it in three layers of small-cell bubble wrap, folding the edges with the precision of a nurse dressing a wound, and places it in the box marked FRAGILE in letters pressed so deep the cardboard puckered around each stroke.

The Etsy notification pings. A buyer in Oregon: Does it leak? She types: It holds. Just keep the water under boiling.

The closet in the hallway hangs half-open. The empty hangers clink against each other when the heater kicks on—a cheap, accidental wind chime in the draft. She has not moved his remaining coat. It still holds the shape of shoulders.

For three months, she has popped the bubbles methodically, one by one, as she wraps each piece. It is not a habit. It is a countdown.

The blue extension cord. He texted about it last Tuesday. Not how are you. Not I'm sorry. Just the cord. She wrote back: I used it for the lamp. She did not add that she left it by the bookshelf so he would have to walk past her, or that he never came.

Tonight's shipment: the teacup, a porcelain cat missing one ear, and a sugar bowl with a hairline fissure visible only when held to the light. She presses her thumb along the edge of the crack, feeling where the glaze turns rough, where the integrity of the thing gave way and did not shatter. She wraps each piece until nothing moves inside the box.

The heavy vinyl tape has worn her fingers raw. The skin around her nails has split in three places, and the taste of adhesive lingers on her tongue from licking the packing slips—a bitter, industrial salt. The lamp above her flickers, its blue cord snaking across the dust toward the bookshelf—the bulb he said he'd replace and never did.

She seals the last box at eleven. The tape screeches from the roll—brown vinyl splitting in a clean, straight line—and she presses it down with the heel of her palm. She drags the final stack to the drafty hallway, leaving them by the door.

Outside, the FedEx truck idles in the midnight frost, its engine a low, steady frequency in the February dark. The driver loads them without knocking. He knows the routine.

She sits on the floor among empty rolls and newsprint rubbed grey with forgotten crises. The apartment ticks as it cools. She finds one last sheet of bubble wrap, one unpopped cell she missed, and presses it between her thumb and forefinger. A tiny, contained gasp—it sounds exactly like a truce.

 

 Zhaoming Li is an independent critic and theorist. His work explores the intersection of aesthetics, contemporary moving-image art and literature, and critical theory. His poems are forthcoming in The Worcester Review, and his writings have appeared in the Journal of Aesthetic Education, English Studies, Critique, and Chinese Arts Daily, among others.


The Butterfly Fall

Mama taught me how to swim the summer I turned thirteen. It was a sticky July, and the sun washed over our clothes so heavily they turned stark white. My fingertips stayed stained with sour cherry juices. That was the summer I took a boy behind the tree with the porch swing and let him touch the roof of my mouth with his tongue. I didn’t like it. I can’t wait to do it again.

I liked to sit in the rocking chair in the summer evenings and watch Mama waddle up the porch steps, some seven months pregnant. She was having Papa’s last baby before he died. He was thrown from his horse, Mama said, so high in the air the trees caught his fall. She said it was a Butterfly Fall, because he never came down. He just flew away like a butterfly into the clouds. It wasn’t nothing he hadn’t done before. Papa was a bullrider before I was born. He would be thrown from those bulls so high he’d see sunlight we’d never seen before. While he was up there he’d grab clouds for Mama to sleep on. But Papa got old, and had a bad hip, so he quit bullriding and moved to this town where I was born. Papa used to say I was born bucking like a horse, all legs and hooves and sneering teeth. 

Mama never let me sleep with the clouds Papa brought. I used to ask her every night when she’d tuck me into bed. Before we’d say our prayers, I would ask. Then I’d pray for her to say yes tomorrow. She never did. I would also pray for my brothers, but only halfway. They never wanted to play with me. I had to swim by myself. So I only prayed for their safe passage into heaven. That’s all Mama told me I had to do for them, so that’s all I did.

I learned to swim four months after Papa died. Mama just had the baby, and Papa didn’t leave any instructions for his burial. So Mama had to ask the neighbors down the road to dig Papa’s grave. I would have dug it myself, you know, but Mama said that my skinny arms couldn’t carry the shovel right, so I was tasked with washing and drying the dishes again. I hated washing and drying the dishes. My hands would get shriveled up like a prune and I couldn’t grip the plates right. It wasn’t anything like swimming. 

Mama taught me how to swim in the lake behind the church. She had me strip down to my britches and practice the motions on the shoreline. Sometimes she’d let me go ankle deep in. The mud squished underneath my heels. Only thing was, we’d practice after supper and by that time the sun had gone down and the water was cold on my toes. It was so dark I was left with eyes straining to see my bare skin arms paddling the air in front of me. Mama would haul me out of the lake by my ears while I howled for my dry stockings and a warm fireplace. She didn’t like me to make noise.

I always felt like people were watching me through the church windows out of the corner of my eye during those nights. I’d turn around to catch them, but only ever saw my own reflection staring back at me,  my eyes too round and my hair so long it reached past my wrists. I had to brush my hair three times a day to keep it slick enough. I hated having frizz and I’d picture myself with the short, sleek locks in the picture books Mama used to read to me. But the church elders told me I had to keep it long so God would recognize me and let me into Heaven when I died. I wished I knew if that were true.

Mama wasn’t liked by the church elders very much. That was because Mama and Papa never got married. Having me and my brothers they didn’t have time to. I was the second youngest and the only girl out of 6. That makes me the luckiest. I was lucky to be born a girl, because it meant I didn’t have to work in the town with my Papa and brothers. I stayed home with Mama and took care of the baby.  I changed the baby’s diaper. I fixed supper. I washed and dried the dishes. I only had time to swim after Mama tucked me into bed. I’d wait for her to be sound asleep on her cloud and sneak out to the lake behind the church, strip down to my britches, and close my eyes so I could concentrate on the motions. I never jumped in because I didn’t want to come home dripping muddy water all over and wake the baby up. I would never hear the end of it.  

I want to have a baby of my own. Two if I can. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll marry the man who gives me them. Mama told me the man gives the woman the baby. She said the woman carries the baby for the man because the man has to work in the town. The town was a long walk away from our house, but that’s okay because only the men had to go. Mama and I only went to church and the lake behind it. After I learned to swim, I asked Mama if I could go to town with my brothers. I was a big girl now, and could handle the walk. She got so mad that she raised her hand to strike me. I flinched. She put her hand down. I saw her eyes get as round as mine, like glass rocks stuck in a pile of red mud. I’d seen eyes like that before when Papa was home from working in the town. I didn’t know why he was always angry at her. Mama said it was because she didn’t dry the dishes well enough. That never made sense to me because I was the one to dry the dishes.

Mama lies to me about things sometimes. I know she lies because my brothers tell me she does. I wish I could pick the truth from her lies like I pluck straw from my mattress, sticky and yellow. My brothers sleep with straw mattresses, too. Mama is the only one to sleep with clouds. It doesn’t seem fair because it surely isn’t, but I am too scared of Mama raising her hand at me again to bring it up. I think she would never let me go swimming again.

I wonder if my oldest brother will give a baby to the girl he sits next to at church. I wonder if I will be given a baby by the boy behind the porch swing. I wonder if Mama would be mad. I wonder if Papa will ever come down from his butterfly fall. I wonder if I will die. I wonder if I will ever want to. I wonder if Mama lies about missing Papa. I wonder if Papa went to heaven. I wonder if heaven has enough room for my brothers and me. I wonder if heaven has clouds to sleep on. I wonder if I will teach my daughter how to swim. I wonder if I can swim all the way to the ocean. I wonder if I will ever make it back home.

 

Here Lies a Cold, Dead Heart

If I could live any part of my life over again it would be when she left me.

My life was an anthill, an underground galaxy of miraculous creatures, mingling with the fragrant concoction of perfumes and morning glories she grew in the garden. I often find myself there, still tending to the flowers. I can see their silky petals floating in the wet grass from the summer breeze. I can see the ants lining up like soldiers on the bricks, preparing themselves for battle against the gloopy rain droplets.

We are ants. All of us. We are smaller than you’d like to believe.  We are all ants in the same way. We plow through the soil searching for its nutrients. We are ants because we search and search for gaps to fill our heart’s holes. The universe doesn’t care about our heart’s holes.

What makes us whole? We often look beyond Earth’s atmosphere for answers. The human body has many things that connect it to the observable universe. As time ticks by, we see the decay of your cells turning into rot, deep within the dirt, mixing with the mushrooms and the soil. We see the stripes of your dress fade out of existence, the folds of your skin flattening and becoming a feast for the grub that lurks just below the surface. Stars are like that. Bursting their flames one day, then shrinking into black holes of absolute nothingness after their lifespan is up. Some stars explode into bits of new stars, birth and death all collected into one beautiful supernova. Kinda like how childbirth is harrowing and dangerous. The universe doesn’t care about danger to ants. The universe isn’t evil, it just exists to move forward.

She never understood that. How the universe works. How my mind works. Can you blame her for that? It’s not like she ever dug her fingernails into my scalp, smushing their way into my brain, the key to my thoughts. She could pull out her manicured hand, pruney and cold, and announce her findings: nothing but lust for a woman who could never understand. But my skull was too thick for that, she would say. It’s hard for me, I would say, fighting to keep my anthill strong. But it's harder for her, she would say. I’d scoff. It’s harder to be with someone who shares brain cells with a fig tree than it is with someone who knows the truth about the universe, I would retort back.

Did you know that figs come from wasps? I read that once, that wasps pollinate the fig tree’s fruits and are fully dissolved by the time their juice dribbles down your chin. Isn’t that something? Nature coming full circle. Funny how life works that way.

I told her this once, that I think life is funny. She says that life is only funny in a way that makes sense to the rest of us, to her. That life isn’t really all about fig trees and fingernails and stripes and supernovas. It’s not about that, she says, it’s just not. I don’t understand, I say, trying not to raise my voice. I’m shaking, my fists are balled and my stomach is in my throat. I don’t understand, I said, what is life about if not you? She looked up at me, her eyes boring through my body and into the depths of my soul. You just don’t get it, she said. I saw her wipe a tear dribbling down her cheek. You just don’t get me, she let out. I turned away.

She left the next evening and didn’t say goodbye. I made her chicken and rice for dinner, too much for two people but still not enough. Nothing I ever did was enough. I’m too small for her, too similar to the ants walking around on my windowsill, ignoring the crumbs on my floor and opting for everything she left behind instead.

We are ants. I’ve decided that I’ll never love again. We are ants. I don’t think she truly loved me. We are ants. I throw out the chicken and save the rice, though I don’t know what for. We are ants. I cover my body in soil, burying myself into her flowers. We are ants. The bugs crawl up my spine, gnawing at my flesh.

We are ants.

I am an ant.

I am an ant.

If I could relive any moment, it would be that one. Now I rest in her garden, letting the swallows peck at my eyeballs, my fingernails caked with dirt.

 

Olivia Ellisor is a storyteller and lifelong learner. She has been writing for as long as she can remember. When she's not working on a new piece, Olivia enjoys reading, editing for literary magazines, and spending time with her loved ones.


Teaches Even after His Death

“True teaching does not stop at the sound of the bell, or only during the lifetime, but at the conscience of the students, after the teacher's death.”

 

Belaw is an unostentatious village that rests on the verdant banks of the river Sone in Bihar. Here mornings dawn with a blanket of mist over green fields and the melodious singing of birds across the river water. The river has blessed Belaw with fertility since time immemorial with the gifts it bestows upon the village's soil. However, none could compare to the boon that the river brought along with all the other bounty to Belaw – a teacher by the name of Rambilas Singh, a teacher whose teachings have outlasted him for so many years.

Some people earn degrees. Some earn wealth. A few rare souls earn a place in human memory. Rambilas Singh belonged to the last category.

He was not merely an English teacher. He was one of those very few individuals for whom proximity was education. In fact, his name will crop up among old students whenever they get together under village trees, or in distant cities, like a well-loved mantra.

“Do you remember how he entered the classroom?” One former student asks.

"Yeah," responds the other softly.

Said he, "I felt as though the lore itself had walked into the room."

Born on May 2nd, 1940, in the village of his mother, Meghpur, he had his childhood days in Belaw. Rambilas Singh's childhood was spent in nearby Chanda while his higher studies took him all the way to Ara, Patna and Bodh-Gaya. No matter what his education has made him, he will never detach himself from the simple life of a village. Perhaps this was why he never allowed knowledge to become pride. For him, learning was not a ladder to stand on others. It was a lamp to light all others.

When he joined a high school in Obra, Aurangabad, teaching English, he came not as a worker into a profession but as a pilgrim into a shrine. Teaching was sacred to him. He believed that the duty of a teacher was not merely to complete lessons but to awaken human beings. 

Further, he poured his knowledge and wisdom into several other schools in Aurangabad and Nawada. He also taught at Ram Lakhan Singh Yadav College, Aurangabad, for a few years.

His students did not encounter dry grammar in his classroom. They encountered life.

He explained literature as if stories were happening around them at that very moment. Shakespeare, Bernard Shaw, and poetry were not distant names trapped in books. Under his guidance, they became mirrors reflecting human behaviour, morality, ego, sacrifice, and truth.

A former student once recalled his explanation of George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart. While discussing King Magnus, Rambilas Singh had said: “King Magnus stands like an overgrown banyan tree that chokes all other growths.”

The students never forgot that sentence. It was not difficult because of the words, because the images jumped into their minds as if in real life. It was the genius he had, the ability to turn complex things into simple terms in your consciousness and also enrich the learning, so that one could do work for the good of humanity and the world.

But perhaps his greatest subject was not English.

It was humanity.

He treated students like members of his own family. If a student performed poorly, he did not humiliate him. Instead, he searched patiently for the hidden reason behind the failure so that he could guide them properly.

“Every child carries a light,” he would say. “Sometimes the wind around them is too strong.”

He often visited his parents personally, encouraging them to educate their children. In villages where poverty forced many young minds away from classrooms, he became a bridge between despair and possibility.

Many students who had once abandoned hope returned to books because of his encouragement. Some became teachers. Some entered government service. Others succeeded in medicine, business, literature, and science. His influence travelled far beyond Bihar and crossed international borders through the achievements of those he taught.

Among them was the internationally recognised writer Rajeshwar Prasad, who considered Rambilas Singh not merely a teacher but the architect of his intellectual life. Such transformations were not accidents. They were the result of a teacher who believed deeply in the hidden greatness of ordinary human beings.

There are thousands of his disciples around India and the world, who are professors, teachers, doctors, engineers, officers, successful businessmen, government officials, enriching the legacy of his virtues and strengthening the fabric of humanity in their own ways.

Yet what made Rambilas Singh extraordinary was not only knowledge.

It was character.

Against the casteism, religious division and egoism that have gripped this world, Rambilas Singh stood silently. He never measured people by their social identity. He measured them by their humanity.

“All rivers,” he often said, “ultimately meet the same ocean.”

He considered religions to be divergent roads towards a singular reality. Religion in the name of hatred was, in his view, the largest human tragedy. He revered all spiritual and moral beings from various walks of life – Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Abdul Gaffar Khan, Leo Tolstoy, Kabir, Khalil Gibran, Abraham Lincoln and many others whom he deemed followers of peace and humanity.

His spirituality was not loud. It was lived.

He mostly sat in the Hanuman temple in Kushwahanagar, post-retirement. There, he explained issues like morality, compassion, metaphysics and the underlying principle of existence. The villagers, along with many listeners, sat in silence for hours listening to his explanations of divine principles, illustrated with everyday instances.

“God,” he once told a gathering, “does not ask how powerful we became. He asks how truthful we remained.”

What he said was not like someone who was performing but speaking from experience. His way of living was disciplined, truthful, moderate and nonviolent. Strict vegetarian, he was of the opinion that animals should not die to satisfy human greed or to facilitate ritual. Purity, for him, was an attitude rather than a show.

He was deeply punctual and believed that noble goals could never be achieved through immoral means.

“If the path was wrong, he would say.

He said further, “The destination can never be right.”

In this era where failure is a disgrace and success is worshipped without morals, such philosophies might seem archaic and archaic, which is the exact reason why the life of this man never ceases to be. He belonged to that disappearing generation which considered integrity more important than ambition.

And still, though it was his nature to be serious, he never remained distant.

He enjoyed music, conversation, rivers in the summer for swimming, good food, stylish attire and the pleasures of the day-to-day. He was quick to laughter, knew suffering intimately, but equally knew joyous, vibrant occasions. He earned regard not by demanding it, but because gentleness simply gravitated to him.

People of the village always came to him with their individual disputes and problems. He listened carefully and responded without arrogance. In many homes, his advice prevented conflicts from becoming permanent wounds.

“He never made us feel small,” an elderly villager once said. “Even while correcting us, he preserved our dignity.”

That quality is rare.

Many teachers transfer information. Very few sustain the self-regard of the student.

With the passing of time, age began to wither his body but not his mind. His life came to an end due to disorders of the urinary system and spine.

He was well nursed by his family members, particularly by his son Radharaman and daughter-in-law Manju.

The 23rd of February, 2026, arrived.

By 2 o'clock in the afternoon, it was felt that a great light had gone from the village.

News of his death spread quietly through Belaw and beyond. Former students called each other with trembling voices. Some wept openly. Others were left unable to speak, still unable to accept that the man who had carved out their lives was dead.

His dead body was cremated on 24 February at the Manikarnika Ghat in Varanasi, which is a historical place for cremation, and where the dead body of his wife, Suryakali, was cremated, and people believed that the person who is cremated, their soul gets a heavenly place.

His sacred ashes were floated in the holy Ganges, which reached the Indian Ocean, touching thousands of villages and cities.

Today, he is survived by his sons: Radharaman, Arbind, Arun, Kulshrestha, and Ravi Prakash and several other grandsons and granddaughters.

But perhaps he was not truly gone.

For certain individuals do not disappear. They continue through memory, values, and influence. Their physical departure becomes smaller than their spiritual presence.

Rambilas Singh belonged to such souls.

Up to this very day, while bringing up his own child, completing his own tasks, making moral choices, his students unconsciously continue speaking in the tone of their master. And somewhere, a doctor educated by him continues to heal. Somewhere, a teacher explains literature with patience because he once witnessed Rambilas Singh doing the same. Somewhere, a writer searches for truth in language because his teacher taught him that words possess moral power.

This is immortality in its purest form.

Not statues.

Not monuments.

But living influence inside human hearts.

The villagers still revere him in their memory. In discussions about education, morality or old village life, somebody says:

“There was once a teacher here who taught people how to live.”

And another voice quietly adds:

“He is still teaching us.”

Perhaps this is the true meaning of a teacher’s greatness. A teacher, then, not only gets pupils ready for exams but also for life. He is like a sower of hidden seeds; their blooms open, perhaps, thirty years hence, in strange gardens

It was Rambilas Singh who taught English. However, besides the nuances of grammar and intricacies of literature, he taught the essence of humbleness, understanding, discipline, truth and brotherliness. He revealed to the world that the purpose of education without morality is void and religion without humaneness is hazardous.

His life serves as a reminder that wisdom is defined not by the accumulation of knowledge, but by the extent of transformation of another.

The River Sone still flows at the side of Belaw as it did during his days. The seasons change, generations fade, and children are not children anymore. But some things remain oddly animated, lingering in the air.

In Belaw, in the morning, the wind passes through the fields and village, coming slowly under the sunshine, it looks like an old teacher is softly travelling through the air, reminding humans to be true, humane and compassionate.

And somewhere, beyond our perception, Rambilas Singh is perhaps still smiling softly at his students, his untransmitted lesson.

For death may silence a voice, but it cannot silence wisdom.

And a true teacher never really dies.

People pay their tribute to him, saying, “Our great lighthouse is no more to teach us, but his values and virtues are even more powerful to guide our minds and hearts. His ideals and practices will not inspire only us but thousands of people in the future, enriching the legacy of mankind and the world. We salute such a great spirit millions and millions of times! We also salute millions of times his parents, Manmati and Ramratan, who gave birth to such a great son who was our great lighthouse!"

Rajeshwar Prasad, the ‘Father of the Theatre of the Absurd in the East’ and the ‘Second Indian English Epic Poet’, is a professor, playwright, novelist, essayist, story writer, columnist, screenwriter, critic, humanist, researcher, philosopher, thinker, blogger, and academician. He is a prominent figure in English literature who infuses meaningful philosophical insights into appealing stories. Prasad has been honoured with 12 national and international awards, with 14 books, 29 research articles, 22 literary articles, and 140 blogs, which have been published in India, the UK, the US, Turkey, and Italy, as well as patents for 8 film scripts. 


Winterlude

On a winter afternoon, my siblings and I were watching television in our living room while our father was sleeping upstairs. My mother was at work in the laboratory at the county hospital. Now and then, my brother and sister and I laughed at what was on the TV or spoke loudly to each other. Presently, my father came downstairs and called me to his studio door.

“What do I have,” he asked, “another twenty years? That’s not enough time with you children around. Children should be seen and not heard.”

Not wanting to be heard, I left the house and walked to the nearby schoolyard.

*

No one else was around, so I sat on the swing set. A puddle had frozen under my seat. It was hard to push against the ice, but once I was in the air I bent my knees and kicked. I leaned back as I went up, then leaned forward as I came down. Each arc was longer than the last. I wondered if I could go high enough to make a complete circle around the crossbar. I extended my legs at the top of my forward motion but couldn’t get past an angle of about ninety degrees—maybe a hundred degrees. I was well short of the three-hundred-sixty degrees I needed to go all the way around.

But I didn’t want to stop. I kept moving like a pendulum as the sun went down.

Presently, my brother and sister appeared. “He wants you to come home,” they told me.

“I like it here,” I said.

“You have to come now.”

I got off the swing and walked back with them.

*

My mother wasn’t home when we got back. I guessed she’d been given an extra shift at the hospital lab. Perhaps an accident victim had come into the ER and needed a crossmatch.

My father set up chairs around a coffee table and gave my siblings and me drawing pads. He laid a green towel on the table and set a white vase and a blue-enameled pot on the towel. He draped a maroon cloth behind the objects, then gave each of us a small box of pastel sticks.

“From now on,” he said, “there won’t be any more TV.”

The three of us picked up the pastels and scraped them across the papers. The sticks were almost pure pigment, so the colors were intense. Sometimes, my father took a pastel and drew on our pictures for us. He focused on my sister’s sketch. When we were finished, he said to my brother and me, “You can keep yours.”

He tacked my sister’s drawing to a wall for all of us to see. Then he went into the kitchen and sat at the table with a bottle of beer. He waited there until our mother got home.

*

The next morning, my father woke early. I could hear his voice coming up the stairs from the kitchen.

“We should never have had that kid,” he said to my mother. “He was a mistake.”

“You’re traumatizing him,” my mother said.

“I have to keep him in line.”

“He needs me,” she said.

When my brother walked past my bedroom door, I asked him, “What are they talking about?”

“Look at my wall,” he said.

I went into his bedroom and saw a drawing on the white plasterboard. It showed a creature with the head of a bird and the body of a man. In one hand, the male creature held a sword. A woman in a tattered dress knelt on the ground beside him. She was looking up at the creature’s head. Around them, crows were frozen in flight. The drawing, in black marker, covered the entire wall.

“How did you do it?” I asked.

“I stayed up until it was done.”

Shortly, my father confronted my brother. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear my father’s high-pitched shouts. Then I heard scuffling. I ran to see what was happening and saw my father on the floor, with his hands on his knees.

“What happened,” I asked my brother.

“He pushed me, and he fell.”

*

I returned to the swing set in the schoolyard, but my new goal was not to push myself as high as I could. My idea was to jump off the swing at the top of its path. I would fly far before hitting the ground.

I got onto the seat and started pumping my legs. I tried throwing myself off when the seat wasn’t very high—maybe four feet from the ground. The force threw me up and away from the metal support. I landed on my feet and rolled forward. My bones didn’t break, at least as far as I could tell. Even so, I decided against another launch off the swing.

Still, I didn’t want to go home. The problem was, I had nowhere to go. I looked down a hill to where the schoolyard ended. There was a place where water from the nearby stream had overflowed and frozen. I ran toward one of the frozen patches and jumped onto the ice. I planted my feet as if I were on a skateboard and slid. There was no friction, and I covered a few yards. I had good balance. I repeated the motion, running faster and sliding farther each time. If I’d had ice skates, I could have been like Hans Brinker. He didn’t win the big prize—the silver skates—but he helped his family and went on to have a good life.

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of nine books, most recently Tracks in Snow, a poetry collection. His novel Haywire won an Asian American Writers’ Workshop award. He teaches at Medgar Evers College/City University of New York and at a YMCA. He received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Best Small Fictions award.