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" 2019 Award-Winning Short Stories “No More Lighthouses” by Ning Soong Page 2 “Still” by Kyla Kurosawa Page 17 “Perhaps It Was Just Humanity” by Stephen Jeffries Page 32 “When Listening Doesn’t Work” by Kelly Wu Page 48 “Charcoal Smudges” by Amanda Chacon Page 60 “Esperanza” by Aliyaa Pathan Page 71 “Ceibo” by Nikolas Romano Page 86 “Marshland” by Cullen Allen Page 101 “The Boy Who Kept Running” by Disha Gupta Page 111 “No Diamonds, No Butter” by Lydia Close Page 119 “The Fall” by Daisy Dolicker Page 133 “Iluula” by Keltin Grimes Page 138 “The Customer is Always Right” by Olivia Gschwind Page 145 “Apricity” by Maggie Hall Page 150 “Homeland” by Molly James Page 168 “Topanga” Jenni Mangala Page 176 “Yellow Daisies & Hummingbird” by Shubhangi Patel Page 186 “The Sound of Silence” by Sparsh Patel Page 198 “Bloody Square” by Anneke Oosten Page 207 No More Lighthouses by Ning Soong He has always walked home from school, or at least for as long as he can remember. But of course the only thing always about always is that there are exceptions; some long time ago, his father came and held his hand and then, smiling, hoisted him up for a piggyback ride and they laughed down the street. When he broke his ankle he had waited at the curb, burning with humiliation, while his mother loaded his crutches into their car and helped him in. But for the most part, Draka has always walked home from school and he has always walked past the gas station. The gas station has stood at the corner for as long as the corner has been there. If Draka closes his eyes, he can easily imagine it standing there eons ago, with dinosaurs walking around it, one ancient behemoth circling another. The gas station is dingy, but it’s a dingy town with dingy people, so nobody really minds. Other gas stations came, startlingly clean: scrubbed of memory and grime. The nostalgia surrounding that station is powerful, I remember my first car here. We met there, right there. Bulky competitors, with their loud slogans and reek of new paint, faded under firm boycott. Maybe the gas station is so firmly part of the town because it never smells like gas. Other gas stations stank of gasoline, motor oil, idling cars. Their gas station, because it is theirs, because they have kept it for years and years, smells like the ocean. The gas station is dingy, the town is dingy. The gas station smells like the ocean, the town smells like the ocean. They are mirror images, or perhaps, microcosms. He walks past the gas station and turns the corner. The sky is cloudy and on cloudy days he visits the sea. At first it was a choice and then it was a habit and now it is a superstition: If it is cloudy, I will go to the ocean. It’s pleasantly overcast, filtered light as if through a paper screen. His house isn’t so far from the shore that he can’t see it, but he likes seeing the ocean. He has lived his whole life in this town, and he still hasn’t tired of looking at the ocean. Draka drops his backpack in the sand and then himself next to it. The beach is a lonely landscape around him. Perhaps calling it a beach is too generous; it’s a little expanse tucked behind a wall behind a building. Seaweed has built up around the rocky shore until the entire area is marked by the scent of fish and salt. Draka doesn’t intend on doing anything. He’ll just sit in the sand and look at the ocean because it is cloudy. Then he’ll go home, but for now, he is separated. He is light: nobody knows where he is, nobody knows how to find him. He is untethered and, if he wished, he could disappear forever. He won’t, but there is still a sense of freedom in loose chances. He breathes in and out, slowly. He feels perfectly alone—until he sees a figure walking down the shore. Who else is on his beach? He doesn’t want to appear too interested, so he turns his head back to the ocean. But still, the sense of heightened self-awareness lingers. He can see now that it’s Moses, so Draka begins reaching for his things. He, like everybody else at school, doesn’t want anything to do with Moses. Adults used to reach out to him, to smile and pat him on the head, but he had already been so isolated from the other children that they too caught onto his air of outsiderness. Their smiles faded wanly and soon became pitying. He doesn’t know Moses’ real name, doesn’t think anybody else does. The town smells like the ocean, the gas station smells like the ocean, the people smell like the ocean, but Moses smells like gas. He lives above the gas station with his parents, who seem bewildered to have a son that smells of gasoline. Moses’ jacket shakes in the wind as he squints out into the ocean, his black hair plastered at first against his forehead and then ripping free, waving in the wind. He hasn’t noticed Draka, quietly brushing the sand off and picking up his backpack. Draka hesitates because Moses is in the way. Moses stands between the sand and the water, and he stands between Draka and the road. But Draka starts walking anyways. Moses doesn’t talk at school and it is doubtful he will talk now. But he does. “You don’t have to leave because of me.” Draka freezes. Moses has spoken to him before. They’ve been in the same classes, even. Small fragments, Thank you. Excuse me?, that never carried meaning. “I’m not leaving because of you,” Draka says. Moses shrugs.“Sorry, then.” Draka feels a wash of annoyance. No wonder why nobody talks to Moses, not when he’s bitingly cocksure. He should be softer, scared into sameness after a long isolation. “You’re good,” Draka settles for, a brusque, utilitarian sentence. He suddenly doesn’t want to be here anymore, and he is irrationally annoyed at Moses for stealing his silence from him. Moses finally turns his head and looks Draka in the face. “You can stay, if you want. Seriously.” His eyes are unafraid. They aren’t the deferential gaze of a lowly outcast, not the hostile glare of a lone wolf. Draka doesn’t know what he expected, but Moses looks away again before Draka can say anything. “It’s not your beach,” he says, instead, because it isn’t and because he doesn’t know what else to say. It comes out prissy and irritable. Draka still doesn’t know what he expected, but Moses just smiles. “Yeah, but it’s not yours, either,” he says lightly. “We can draw a line in the sand if you want,” he adds, a touch sarcastically. Unsettled, Draka shifts his weight in the sand. “No, I meant…” But since he hadn’t known what he had meant, he leaves the sentence unfinished and settles for, “I was already leaving.” Moses nods. “Okay. See you around, Draka.” “Yeah. Uh, bye…” he leaves an empty pause at the end of his sentence and an embarrassed expression on his face. Moses laughs outright at Draka’s pause. “It’s okay, I know you guys call me Moses.” He smiles, a little twisted, but not angry. “I’m sorry,” Draka says, face hot even in the ocean breeze. “I just completely—” “Setor,” Moses says. “My name is Setor.” — Setor. Draka rolls the name around in his head over and over but he feels stupid just saying it out loud into the silence of his room. “Setor,” he whispers, and then wishes he hadn’t. The whisper had made it felt intimate, hushed, like Moses—Setor—was in the room with him. He has heard the name before, maybe, but to everybody, Moses was Moses. Now, Moses is Setor. Maybe Draka is the only one who knows Setor’s name, the only one who can whisper it to himself in his quiet room. Halfway through dinner with his parents and brother, Draka says, “Do you guys know Setor’s parents?” It’s the second time he’s said Setor’s name out loud, and it fills his mouth with its taste. Setor. His parents exchange a look. “Setor?” his mom asks, around a mouthful of rice. “Who is that?” “Moses,” Draka says. “But his name is really Setor.” He doesn’t know why he’s asked, except that he wonders, now, why they don’t talk to Setor, why they don’t know anything about him. “Setor,” his mom mutters. Hearing his mother say it is even stranger. Every person who says Setor’s name out loud makes it more palpable, like Setor is taking form, unruffled by wind and unglossed by sand. “Oh! They live over the gas station,” his dad says. “The Parks, uh, Sekju and...uh…” “Dohyen!” his mother says. “Oh, she was a year above me—I remember she traveled for her wedding, up to Canada, she said.” “Canada?” his father says, disbelievingly. “Too far, what if you have grandparents.” His mother shakes her head. “I know. Much better to have it here, or at least in the country.” “What about Setor?” Draka cuts in impatiently. His parents exchange another look again. He hates that look, it’s when they’re deciding if he’s old enough to know something.

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