Descending. You go down, and as you go down the light begins to change. You notice scattered fish in the upper level. Then you see the yellow light that brightens the surface dim. As it dims, the creatures become darker, as if to blend in with their watery homes. Like a rain forest, the sea has levels, and as you go down it’s as if you are in an elevator. Every floor is like the changing of a color. You feel as if you are descending into your grandfather’s basement that is full of relics he obtained when he was a kid. Then you’ve reached it, the light switch in the basement. It brightens the room with wonder. You gasp as the large and gel-like silk body balloons past. You have never seen anything like it. Its limbs wave like spaghetti as you twirl it on your fork. Its body has slight color, you suppose, but you can’t be certain due to the lack of light. It looks a bit like velvet and you long to touch the large jellyfish but remembering that jellyfish usually sting, you retreat. Noticing that this one seems to have blubbery limbs, you begin to wonder. Then your question is answered. A fish swims down from above and you watch as the large jellyfish grabs the fish with its limbs instead of stinging it. It shoves the fish into its balloon of a body and relishes the taste. You study it, and as it begins to descend you follow. It descends. You descend. Then panting, the purple brightens and sunlight breaks through the dark. I wake up. The version of me in the dream dies. “I know it’s real!” I say. I rub the sleepy sand from my eyes as I slowly put on my slippers. I stare at the snowflake patterns for a second. Then I announce the declaration in my head that I made two minutes previous. I know it’s real! I shake my head as if to release the memories of my dream so that they fall out my left ear and land in a pool by my bed. But, unsuccessful with the extraction, I simply get up. I stumbled to the kitchen where my dad was making waffles in our Belgian waffle maker. The upturned belly of my cat gave me a smile, and I rubbed her as she purred with her face pressed against the heater. I then stood up and helped my dad with the waffles. As I poured the batter into the iron, I wondered why waffles were only made in one print of checkered squares instead of many different patterns. It seemed dumb to have a singular pattern. I wished I could eat a waffle that had birds flying across it or a large elephant eating a leaf. Then I thought of all the people in the world and their differences and how maybe we had in some era agreed to make waffles the same so that we could all be united by them. Maybe so that we could feel as if we were all sharing something because waffles had a standard, and we had created that together. Nodding to myself, I decided that that was the answer. Then I quickly ate my waffle as I read the front page of the news. My dad tugged the news away from me saying that my young eyes shouldn’t be infected with that rubbish. I sighed and stood up to get ready for school. After I had meticulously packed my school things in the order I would take my classes, I walked to the bus stop. There I met my friend Jez (short for Jezelle). “Judy!” she called. Looking up I smiled, but I noticed a group of kids surrounding her. Wondering how she could have possibly become popular in one night I ran over to her. There was a circle of mist around her from all of the open mouths that were breathing into the crisp air. Everyone was singing along to the song that Jezelle was playing from her iPod. They sang,”Hey Jude, don’t be afraid, take a sad song and make it better.” A smile broke across my chilled face because I realized that they were singing to me! I smiled at them all and as I did I thought way, way, way, back . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Judy was born on crisp November morning. The first few years of her life had been spent doing the usual things like learning words and burping. When she was five, she got a bike and it immediately became her best friend. When she was eight, she took interest in creating small board games, but after a kid named Walter destroyed her best one, she gave up. When she was nine, she became best friends with Jezelle and they have been friends ever since. But the most important thing in her life happened when she was eleven. Ten days after her eleventh birthday, her grandfather passed away. When sorting through his old things, she found a dust-covered journal. The journal held so many secrets that it took her the whole year to figure everything out. When she finally finished reading the journal, she read it again and once more after that. The journal told of many different sea creatures that were so foreign, few believed that they even existed. But Judy refused to just push them aside, even though her father had told her many times that no such creatures could possibly be real. Judy decided to take the matter into her own hands and began to look up many of the creatures on the internet. To her dismay, she could not find many of the creatures that were in the journal. She found references to a few, but the most profound one she discovered was a large jellyfish that had thick limbs and velvety looking
Nature
In All Its Silvery Beauty
It was in the middle of the night. The sheets were thrown to the floor, useless. The window was open, and you could hear the sounds of summer. Cicadas chirping in unison, the occasional car starting, and the breeze that was so precious it was worth gold. My hair was sweaty, and I brushed away the bangs that clung to my forehead. Maybe I should get some air, I thought. I grabbed my flashlight and stood up. My sister was still fast asleep in another bed, sucking her thumb. Slowly, I walked over to the window and swung one leg over the ledge. The windowsill creaked and I froze. After ten seconds, I let out my breath. My sister still had her eyes closed. When my feet touched the grass, I was in a whole new world. Instead of rough, wooden boards, my feet felt soft dirt and grass. Instead of the artificial breeze from the broken-down fan, I felt a real breeze. The kind that is soft and comforting, like a quilt that your mother draped around you when it got cold. Oh, and the smells. The grass and the dirt and the bark on the trees. Even the moonlight. The silvery glow coming from the moon shone down on every blade of grass that dared to reach for it. It made the sidewalk look metallic—silver. Almost like how hose water tastes in your mouth. When my feet touched the grass, I was in a whole new world I could write a poem about moonlight. Light, fight, height, bite, I thought. Even at night, the air was as thick as my mother’s chowder. It was muggy and humid, not the dry heat from Phoenix. I turned on my flashlight and moved the sphere of light no bigger than a fist toward the house. Everything was calm. Flicking the flashlight off, I sank down to my knees. I lay down on the cool, soft grass and breathed in the scent of the ground. I let out a yelp when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Looking up, I realized it was my mother, her long black hair tumbling down her back. “I saw your flashlight beam,” she commented. She sat down next to me and squeezed my shoulder. “Time to go in.” She gave me a small, sad smile, like it wasn’t her choice that I had to go inside. I stood up and she took my hand. “Sorry, I needed some air, and…” my voice trailed off and faded away, like a line of watercolor paint. She nodded, as if she understood. “The moonlight,” she said. “The moonlight.” I nodded, and I took one last look at the silvery beauty before returning to the shelter of my house. Hannah Ferreira, 11Virginia Beach, Virginia Rachel Maughan, 11Keller, Texas
Waiting
The wind whispered through the long grass, blowing it gently into a lullaby of soft sounds. The grass rustled and the lake stirred as the setting sun dripped down the sky and below the stretch of trees that marked the horizon. The stains it left were stunning. Pinks and oranges smeared across the sky. They dripped lazily down the great sky, leaving behind a vast carpet of deep blue, intense and enveloping. As a myriad of stars became visible and bewitching with their bright twinkles, a little girl walked down the pathway to the dock. She pulled her hair back from her face and let the wind lift up the ends of it and toss it playfully. She was a very small girl, about five years old or so, with long red hair and freckles dotting her face. She had green eyes that shone like the tops of lighthouses, beckoning and beaming with a welcoming glow. Only today her eyes had lost their glow and the color in them had been washed away by tears. She sat on the edge of the dock and dipped her toes through the clear water. She looked up at the sky and watched the last rosy finger of the sunset disappear under the tall pine trees. She sighed heavily. It figured. Things were always disappearing before she got to them. Like the horse that she had wanted to ride at Holiday Acres, up the highway. Her mother had finally consented to the idea, and, grinning, the little girl had skipped up to the stables. The rustic smell of horses had filled her nose, tickling it with this new aroma of hay and wet hair. She rushed up to the large horse that stood tall above her, grinding hay between his strong jaws. He was handsome, brown dotted with white spots along his rump, as though some careless artist had waved a paintbrush over him, leaving him speckled. Then a young woman, flushed with heat and excitement, grabbed the horse’s halter and led him out of the ring. The little girl watched and saw another little girl, rosy with excitement and delight at her first horse ride, get lifted up and patted gently on the back; she was settled into the saddle. The horse tossed its head haughtily, though one could tell it was really his pleasure to be trotting off into the wooded trails with the little girl on his back, bobbing up and down and shrieking happily with each bump. The little girl sat on the dock and dipped her toes into the water. She slowly kicked them back and forth, back and forth, gently easing them into the warm lake as she contemplated it all. The other little girl probably wanted to ride the horse as much as she did, if not more, and was probably aching to for a while, just as she had. And suddenly, it didn’t matter, missing out on the horseback ride, for another little girl’s terrible want and longing had been fulfilled. The little girl sat back and thought some more. She was usually not very thoughtful; she was often too playful to think too much. But now, as the sun’s light sank out of view and the stars crept into the night sky, she thought about everything. Why was it that things disappeared before she got to them? Why did the sun set at night? Why were the stars scattered about the sky? Why did we have to wait until morning for the sun to smile again? She rushed up to the large horse that stood tall above her, grinding hay between his strong jaws And suddenly, all her thoughts were about waiting. Waiting for all the stars to twinkle, waiting for the pearly disk of the moon, waiting for the sun to rise up once more. Waiting for her mother to come home from her business trip in Milwaukee. Waiting for her chance to do something that usually disappeared before she reached it. Why did they have to wait? She thought hard about it, and unconsciously her mouth twisted into a little pout of concentration. Why did they have to wait? Waiting was not a thing, or an action, it was a state of being, she decided. A dangerous state of being. It was a time when people could become enveloped in self-pity, shrivel into a ball of nothingness. It was a time when doubt and deception could easily take control of the minds of people who were scared and alone because they were waiting, just waiting, for someone to come, or someone to go, or someone to stop and give them a hand because they needed one . . . And suddenly it wasn’t fair, all this waiting. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t tolerable, it wasn’t fun and it wasn’t safe. Maybe it would be better not to be waiting at all, so you wouldn’t have to feel the pangs that were thrust into you when you wanted something badly. Maybe it would be better not to be alive at all. This thought struck wonder and fright into her. But if she were just a canoe she could see water, fish and flowers. She could see ospreys and eagles, the three islands in Lake Katherine, the trees, the water lilies. The boathouse, the dock, the hydro-bike and the water-skiers. And she wouldn’t have to wait. But canoes had to wait too. Canoes had to wait for a chance to skim the surface of the lake. Canoes had to wait for passengers. Canoes had to wait for good weather. Did canoes feel tired and heavy when waiting so long? Did canoes feel sad about people forgetting about them? Did canoes feel as though things disappeared before they got to them? Almost desperately, she searched her mind for things that didn’t have to wait. Trees? No, a tree waited for rain so its roots could suck up water like giant straws. It waited for children