Crescit Eundo (It Grows as it Goes) by Alejandra B.
The flower sprouts.
The flower blooms.
The flower wilts.
The flower dies.
In the beginning, the flower was born to the sight of the
freshly come Spring. You may picture Spring as a little girl, unsure about this
strange world yet ready for it anyway. You may imagine her to have skin as soft
as the soil, eyes as bright as the sun, and a voice as sweet as the chirping
birds. And she treated this flower with care. She nurtured it, gave it water,
fed it sun, and blanketed it with soil.
The flower sprouts.
Eventually, Spring faded. Her existence was important, but
it could not last forever. Though she disappeared, the flower did not. It found
itself in the embrace of Summer, filled with the warmth of happiness and
cherished memories. The flower grew strong with the beaming, beautiful
sunlight, and it became fond of the life it had come to have.
The flower blooms.
Summer, however, did not last forever, and soon her
existence faded away with a cool gust of wind and a bittersweet smile. The
flower drooped, but still it moved forward, into the grasp of Autumn. But Autumn
did not appreciate the flower like Spring and Summer, did not hold it with
care, for Autumn worried for something
else. Autumn, with tough working hands and a determination to finish work not
yet completed, wanted to be ready for what would happen when its turn came to
fade away. So Autumn handled the flower with a rough hold, and the flower,
though strong from Summer, began to weaken. It could not last through Autumn’s
clutch.
The flower wilts.
None to soon, Autumn disappeared, letting out the breath it
had long been holding. Its work had been done. Its turn was through. It was
time to let another take its place.
A cold wind blew, and Winter came with a face as old as the
mountains and eyes as young as the freshly fallen snow. His features were
carved with stern, tough lines, yet if
you could look past his harsh glare, you would see irises of soft silver and blue that held Winter’s strange beauty.
He handled the flower with rock-frozen, gentle hands.
“You have seen much, haven’t you?” Winter spoke with a voice
that sounded like a bitter wind blowing through a gorge. Though his tone was
cold, his words smiled.
“You have seen the beginning, the happiness of life, the
worry of work, and now you have seen me.”
He offered an apologetic smile.
“The inescapable truth.”
Winter shifted, and fresh snow fell around a spot of soil. A
spot of soil which held a weakened flower.
“That’s the thing about life,” Winter wheezed. “You begin
with nothing to have and everything to gain. You search for something to
create. You move forward to find a reason to move forward.
“But once you move too far, you realize that you were much
more content with having the world be a mystery to discover, rather than a
problem to solve. Your past becomes a beautiful memory,”
he sighed sadly,
“and your present becomes a stark reality.”
Winter shifted for the last time, and the flower was enveloped
by a blanket of snow and the inescapable truth.
The flower dies.
Somewhere, among the vast sea of snow, a drop of sunlight
fell. And with that sunlight, the earth
warmed and winter disappeared. From the disappearance of Winter came the coming
of Spring, and with the coming of Spring came a seed.
and a life.
The flower sprouted.
Ugly Stitches by Isabele R.
My father’s house was silent. It always was. If there were a day when there was anything like
laughter or music, it would have been because there weren’t a soul in sight but me. The house was sad
too, as if there was an overwhelming sorrow that wraps itself around the faded floorboards and rusty
door hinges. This engulfs the place with a pain that could only be assuaged by a peek of sunlight through the boarded windows and thick curtains. It had a creaking couch that was a dark matted red and sunk inwards when anyone thicker than a pecan tree sat in it’s hollow embrace. Across the room there was a sun bleached bookcase filled with old books that had been read by a thousand pairs of eyes. The third and last main component in the room was an old table. It was small, plain and did nothing but sit in the room and wallow. The house reflected what it held: pain, silence, sorrow, and lonely. I often compared myself to the table as we were so alike. I had no purpose, and no reason. I held nothing, but the idea of me was meant for much more.
I pulled out one of my fathers books, an encyclopedia. Behind it I slipped my hand into the
bookcase and found the red journal I had been searching for. I opened it and traced the letters as they
seemed to be pressed harder into the page. It was an erratic scrawl. The broken print of a young boy. I
could barely read it.
I declined into the sunken embrace of the couch attempting to translate the mangled scrawl. The
first time I found my old book I had remembered being small again. Hopeful and imaginative, somewhat curious and always delighted to see a surprise. When Nathan left, I decided to sneak outside for the first time. That was when I noticed a hole in our old tree, so I decided to fill it. The next day I waited for the Finch children to find it. Naturally, they did. The girl found it first and examined it with extensive caution, and to my great pleasure, she followed the action by scampering away to examine her findings.
The presents left in the tree were hard to come by, but I didn’t mind. I found the gum in a box in
my room, the coins in my father’s neglected shed. I must’ve provoked the Finch interest because they
seemed to stop and stare at the house everyday after school when walking home. I always waited to
see them and if I weren’t there to see them they could surely be heard. Silence is not hard to adapt to,
it’s really quite simple. The noise is not what scares me though, what scares me is the silence itself. So,
my ears have upgraded themselves according to my irrational fears.
The day I knew I had provoked too much interest in the Finch children was sometime in the late
summer. It was hot and humid, which was typical Maycomb weather. Inside the house I had been
fanning a magazine by my face to keep cool, as the day drew closer to the end, the sky darkened the
slightest bit. The shadows brought on by trees darkened my fathers house like a brown smudge among
the white fashioned houses. I was flipping through the encyclopedia and Nathan was reading in a
different room. I heard a noise like the wind. Soft and menacing, but more forced and precise. It was
followed by spewing sounds. Someone spitting I reckon. Spitting themselves dry, spraying out the devil.
Shuffles followed and I looked at the window. There were three shadows inching closer towards the
back of the house, I stayed quiet and watched as the shadows tiptoed out of view. Nathan appeared
from nowhere, he looked out the window and his eyes widened, he shot me a glare and reached for his
gun. He slid out of the front door, onto the porch and he disappeared from view. This was my chance to bolt, I lept off the couch and saw stars reach my vision, but I ran quickly. As I had adapted to the
silence I had learned how to move like it too.
crept round back to the opposite of Nathan. A I peered ‘round the corner of the house I saw Jem discarding his pants and Scout and Dill running ahead, glancing back as they escaped. The gunfire
had awakened the whole neighborhood and they were peering out of their disfigured shutters into the
humid street. I saw the pants dangling at the fence and crept towards them with precision. Nathan
walked four feet into the road to examine the escapees. I snatched the pants and darted inside as
Nathan gloomily treaded towards the confused neighbors.
When I got inside I examined the damaged fabric and glanced out the window. Jem was there
too, he was blushing and stuttering as the neighborhood scorned the children. They were nice pants and
I would have thought that it would be a shame to waste them, so I fixed them. I was sloppy with
scissors and needles, and I would occasionally prick my finger on the cold metallic bodkin. Nathan
walked through the door rigidly and I hid the pants as he strolled menacingly towards the kitchen. I
waited until I heard his nearly silent footsteps tread up the stairs. I had examined my progress in all of
the five minutes I had been working on it. They seemed perfectly fine and the stitching was impressive
for my level of experience. I listened for a solid ten minutes until I heard the muted shutter of the lamp in Nathan’s room turn off.
I crept through the squeaking door in the kitchen and into the humid night air to place the newly
stitched pants right where I had found them. When I left to go inside I heard the slight patter of footsteps on the street. I hid behind the house and peered around the corner into the dim lit street. The light reflected upon a frightened and breathless face sneaking around to the fence. Jem was grimm as he
examined the progress I had made with his pants. His eyes widened with morbidity and he looked
around with fear creeping up his neck like a snake. His jaw tightened and his lips pulled into a tight line.
His cheeks went pale and his eyes shimmered as they began to dilate. His forehead glistened and he managed to pull a shaky hand up to wipe the sweat from his brow. He looked around and ran frantically back down the street. I crept back through the squeaking door and locked it tight. I began to slip upstairs to my quarters and removed my shoes. Flicking on the light I changed into loose clothes. I
flicked off the dim light, climbed into bed, and wondered what I had just done.
A Very Maui Christmas By Samuel C.
Once upon a time, on the island of Maui, there lived a young chicken named Moa. Born in the springtime, she learned to bask in the sun, chase butterflies, and watched the dolphins play in the blue waves. It was a good life for a chicken. She was a free range chicken, and had lots of family and friends to hang out with. Her cousins, the turkeys, kind of kept to themselves, and didn't seem very smart. One time, while it was raining, one of her turkey cousins looked up open mouthed, as if to look where the rain was coming from. She would have drowned herself if Moa hadn't taken her inside.
Anyway, around the time of Thanksgiving, she started to notice unusual things around the turkeys, such as more rations of food, and lots of angry grumbling, but they never told her why, and they always ate what was put in front of them. Then on Thanksgiving Day all the turkeys suddenly disappeared!
Moa thought they all had taken the day to go surfing the waves, but when she asked
her Uncle Cow otherwise, he told her the reality.
“TURKEYS GET EATEN FOR THANKSGIVING!”
No wonder the food, no wonder the attitude! The turkeys were not dumb! Well maybe a little, but really what they were was scared! And so was Moa. Didn't the pigs say right after Thanksgiving was Christmas? WHAT IF CHICKEN WAS ON THE MENU? Moa was so scared she ran as fast as her stubby chicken legs would carry her. She went to Aunt Iguana's house under the camellia bush. Aunt iguana was lying on the ground eating crickets and camellia petals.
“Come in, come in,” she said. Moa sat down and asked her question about Christmas. Aunt Iguana looked at Moa with delight about the question. “Christmas is like this bush Moa,” said Aunt Iguana, “it gives you shelter and hope. It even blooms once a year around Christmas time to give beauty, just like Christmas!”
“But I still don’t want to be eaten,” said Moa.
“Well, I’ve never seen anyone eat chicken for Christmas, but I know people give food
and shelter to others around this time of year,” said Aunt Iguana.“Do you ever give your food or shelter to others? Do you share the beautiful flowers of the Camilla bush?” asked Moa. Aunt Iguana thought for what seemed hours, then finally shook her head sadly.
“I haven’t ever thought about it,” said Aunt Iguana.
“Well maybe you could do it next year,” suggested Moa, and Aunt Iguana nodded
her head enthusiastically.
Next she went to Uncle Sheep because she still wanted reassurance that she wasn’t
going to be eaten, and now she was a little curious about Christmas . Uncle Sheep's house
was at the edge of a meadow underneath a fallen tree and he was playing with some twigs.
“Hi Uncle Sheep” said Moa, and asked him her Christmas question.
Uncle Sheep smiled wryly. “Christmas is about toys and entertainment from
others,”he said. “We sheep give our wool for warm sweaters, give rides to small children, and generally just play around on Christmas Day.”
“But Aunt Iguana said that Christmas is about food and shelter, and by the way, am I
going to be eaten for Christmas?” asked Moa. Uncle Sheep looked very puzzled.
“Not that I know of,” he baaed, “and I don’t know how your auntie celebrates Christmas, but that’s how I’ve always celebrated it.”
Still, Moa wasn't sure if she was going to be eaten, and she was still curious about Christmas. She ran right to her Grand Chicken's house at the base of an old willow tree, “Grandma, Grandma,” she clucked in misery! And she told her tragic terrible Thanksgiving Turkey terror tale from Uncle Cow.
The wise chicken nodded her head, clucked loudly, and laid an egg. “Christmas is like this egg, so many ways to enjoy it,” clucked Grand Chicken. Moa was more confused than ever! So Grand Chicken began her story, “Christmas is not about food on your plate, it is about food for your spirit.” “Your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great...............Grand Chicken celebrated the first Christmas in a stable in a faraway land. In that stable a baby human was born. He was born there because there was no room in any other place in the land. You might think that baby was not important, but we hear that there was quite a celebration that night! Lambs, pigs, camels, sheep,chickens, and even turkeys were there!! Oh, there were those people, too, but the whole host from heaven the angels came to cluck over that baby! Turns out that that baby grew up and was pretty important to the whole world. He gave people hope even when they didn’t have shelter, beauty when bushes weren’t blooming, and warm hearts even when they didn’t have warm clothes or toys, or any other thing. “Moa, don’t worry about whose meal you might be, it will all work out for good. Oh, one more thing,... Hawaiian people
don’t eat chicken for Christmas, they eat spam! They eat spam because we wild chicken’s
have too much muscle, and it was hard for them to chew us down! Poor uncle pig, we never
heard from him again!”
Moa went away from Grandchicken’s home feeling much better. She knew exactly
how to spend Christmas...SURFING! MAUI CHRISTMAS to all, and to all, a can of spam.
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