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100% written and illustrated by kids ages 6-13


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The Mountain

I sit alone. The only thing I see is the mountain I always run into. Time. I am the only person that I know who has not seen black. I want the waves to hit me, but they miss. I will not force the wave, but it shall come to me. Because why stay in the white, when you have no yellow to be with you. For my white has turned black. The black will turn white. But the mountain will never stop. It will always stop me, until I am gone with the wave. Rhône Galchen, 11New York, NY


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In a Jar

Before a long heat wave turned the Earth into a desert, one person preserved each season I live in a tiny town. It’s not on any map you’ll ever see—except these days a map won’t help you. Everything looks the same. There are no landmarks. Things are being destroyed as fast as they are being built. The world is barren. I’m so old I’m the only one left who remembers why it happened. It happened because of us. The wildfires, the hurricanes, occurring one after the other, the heat wave that began when I was 12 and never stopped. I knew something like this might happen. I was very curious in my day. ‘Pensive” might have been a better word. You might say I was a scientist, or I would have been one if my parents had been able to send me to college. I studied weather patterns and read books on every topic you could imagine. In autumn, I watched the apples fall from the trees. In spring, I watched the children jump in mud puddles. In summer, I saw the rabbits frolicking in the dancing grass. And in winter, I saw the seasons die. The seasons were transient but transcendent. Then things began to change. I knew it had been mentioned in books. I had not thought much of it. They said one day it would ruin Earth. I thought it was a hoax. When the weather patterns started to change, the polar bears began to die, the biomes grew desolate, I started to believe. And then when the migratory birds stopped coming I had to believe it. The oil companies tried to suppress why this was happening, but everyone knew there was an impending doom chasing behind us. By the time the oil companies claimed that fake news was being published about them, everyone had a deep and passionate aversion toward them. When the weather patterns started to malform, I started to plan ahead. I wanted a way to remember the seasons when they were gone because this change seemed inexorable. As a way of not forgetting the seasons, I decided to put a memory of each season into its own, separate jar. I collected some mud from spring. And then in the summer, I scrambled through a hurricane to get a dandelion. In the fall, I raced through a flood to get the most beautiful leaf you could ever imagine. Green, orange, and red. Then when winter came, there was a snowstorm, and I collected a prism-like ice crystal. I put these all in jars. Ever since the seasons died, there was this abstract feeling of dread—dread that the seasons would never come back as I remembered them. There was tumult all around me as people experienced spring for the first time in many years I still have those jars—well, except for one. I have no one else left in this world who loves me as much as I love them. There is something odd about the jars though: The dandelion hasn’t wilted, and the mud hasn’t dried. The ice hasn’t melted, and the leaf hasn’t become crinkly. Maybe it’s magic, maybe there is a scientific explanation for it. I don’t know. Some people ask me why I kept the seasons in the jars. I did it because I don’t want anything from before to go away. I knew I couldn’t stop what was happening. It was like a train, and it wasn’t going to stop. So, I did what I thought was best. I didn’t pray to God for everything to stop. I didn’t cry for Mama. I decided to take matters into my own hands. I said to myself I will have these memories forever, no matter what happens. So, I tried my hardest to make that dream come true. I meant to keep that dream to myself, but that’s not how it went. One morning I turned around to grab my tea from the kettle when I noticed the spring jar that was on the windowsill was gone, and I became very scared. I heard a crash outside. I ran to the door and saw the jar on the ground and the mud lying on the hard earth in a blob. Then something started to happen. There was a flash of brilliant light. Then there appeared lush green grass, verdure, streams, the gleaming sun. There was a moment of silence. Not a forced silence, but completely necessary and natural. After about five seconds, my neighbors ran out in disbelief and sat down in the grass, ran their hands over the leaves, and stood with their arms outstretched toward the sun. There was tumult all around me as people experienced spring for the first time in many years. I just stared. Everything I had hoped for as a child, a teen, and an adult, memories that had once seemed remote, had just come true before my eyes. It was manifest that these children would have the same memories that I have today. In contrast to the felicity all around me, a boy was sitting against a tree crying. I walked over to him. “I did it,” he said. “I broke your jar.” “I’m not mad at you,” I said. “I’m grateful.” “Why?” “Because I had been living off of memories of the past, but now I am really experiencing it for the first time since I was a child. So come and enjoy it.” As he went out to play with his friends, I felt the part of me that had been missing had finally returned. Hudson Benites, 11Excelsior, MN Analise Braddock, 8Katonah, NY


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The Ghost of the Forest

A mysterious, ghostly figure wanders the forest at night The woods glowed that mildewy night in October as the transparent, lilac-colored figure hovered eerily between dense thickets of elegant dark green pine trees, whose rich aroma curled through the forest. The lady waded through roaring black-colored rivers, tearing through the determined barriers of water. She stopped, but only to lean against an ancient, knobbly tree, and let out a choked cry that rears up in your ears only to come rolling into your heart and leave it weeping the purest and most tender of tears for the lost caller. The pale being looked up at the luminous, pearly white moon and flinched, as if something so bright and hopeful had wounded her permanently and forced her to live in such darkness and be so helpless. Suddenly, the figure stood up and slunk away into the shadows where all strange things are called. Carmen Flax, 10Liechhardt, Australia Sloka Ganne, 9Overland Park, KS


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Editor’s Note

What unites these pieces of writing and art is their close, careful attention to the natural world: to migrating birds, to trees we see outside our window even if we live in a city, to the stark beauty of a desert sunset and the tragedy of changing weather patterns, to snowflakes and cut flowers, and even to the worlds we invent in our fiction. Each of these pieces enables me to see something I have seen thousands of times, like the sunset, in a new way. They also serve as necessary reminders, as the weather gets colder and the leaves begin to fall, of the beauty and significance of each season. After reading this issue, I hope you will feel inspired to look more closely at the world you see outside your window or on your way to school. Emma Wood


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Stone Soup Honor Roll: September 2019

Welcome to the Stone Soup Honor Roll! We receive hundreds of submissions every month by kids from around the world. Unfortunately, we can’t publish all the great work we receive. So we created the Stone Soup Honor Roll. We commend all of these talented writers and artists and encourage them to keep creating. – The Editors Scroll down to see all the names (alphabetical by section), including book reviewers and artists. FICTION Necla Asveren, 10 Alina Kaplan, 11 Kai Kathawala, 11 Claire Klein-Borgert, 8 Haeon Lee, 12 Shihoon Lee, 11 Julia Marcus, 12 Abigail Hope Jihye Park, 13 Connor Powell, 11 Eva Sanchez, 11 POETRY Isabella Cossaro, 10 Nora Finn, 8 Gwendolyn Gibbon, 9 Lily Jessen, 10 Carly Katzman, 12 Leah Koutal, 11 Mia Livaudais, 13 ART Justine Chu, 11 Isa Khan, 7 Mackenzie Reese, 11 Jaya Shankar, 10  


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Chipped

Closed casket Never can I see her again My heart chips My favorite song I will never hear again Another piece chips They try to take the casket to the car My sister can’t take it though She runs to the casket Screaming no no no I watch She doesn’t want to let go As they try to pry her off I chip again We get into the car Silently My heart chips They put her in the grave I know I won’t see her for a long time A big chip chips The gates close Behind the gates My heart hides Chipped and broken inside Scared to be broken again Scared to love Scared to come out But I live on Chipped I pushed people back Never showed love or feeling Only power, no pain No more love to show This myself now Broken in pain Do not fear I will be here again Powerful with feelings Showing myself Chipped And in pain I won’t care I will be here once again I ride back home My home Tuscaloosa I’m silent Watching the trees pass I see Mothers and daughters having fun I start to cry I suck up the tears I say to myself It will be okay Even though I know I won’t It’s been a week since the funeral I am home now Lying in my bed Repeating the poem I wrote during the funeral I look out my window My friend wants to hang out I say I can’t And shut the door Genesis Lee, 12Tuscaloosa, AL


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Overcoming

Awkward and shy, Ava’s only happiness comes from reading dictionaries and learning new words People are making room for me as I slither by. They are afraid to be “touched” by me. I quietly shuffle past, head down, eyes on the ground. As I enter my English classroom, someone yells, “Watch out!” Students laugh. My teacher, Mr. Gallagher, tries to quiet everyone down. I shrink, my stomach tightening, and hurry to the very back of the room, hunkering down low inside my big, black jacket. Hiding like a baby kangaroo in its mother’s pouch, I begin to feel safer. Slowly, I lug my 40-pound backpack onto my lap and relax when I feel its comforting weight. I know never to make any eye contact with the teacher because then he sometimes calls on me. And I definitely do not want that to happen. So I stare down at my feet for a minute, and then cautiously lift my head enough to look around my desk. “Pop quiz!” my teacher announces enthusiastically. All the other students sigh and moan, but I get pumped up. A test means no talking, and silent rooms with no talking are what I like the most. Then my teacher says, “Don’t worry! This isn’t going to be graded. This is just a pre-assessment for our next unit: Etymology!” I grin from ear to ear in my head, but my facial expression stays the same. It is a word test, and I love words. I love the way they look. I love the way they sound in my mouth. I even love the way they smell and taste. I don’t think anyone else knows that words have an odor and flavor, but I do. To me, each word is unique. I love to pore over dictionaries, spending hours at a time learning where words come from. I can instantly memorize everything that I read or see. Can other people do this as well? From what I have read, it seems that they can’t. I know my parents can’t, but they are unlike me in so many ways; this is just one more way. Slowly, I take out a pencil and wait for the quiz to be passed out. Mr. Gallagher hands me the quiz and smiles kindly at me. I don’t smile back. I just take the test and stare down at it. It really is all on etymology— where words come from. And even more than I love silent rooms, I love word origins. Even under my rough jacket, I notice that many students are glancing at each other’s answer sheets. But I know all the answers. I finish the quiz in five minutes flat. Then I crawl out of my chair and trudge to the front of the class to hand my paper in. When Mr. Gallagher sees me. His eyebrows rise. “Are you sure you’ve finished? Have you checked your work?” I nod. “Okay then.” I turn, slouching back into my chair, waiting for the time to pass. Staring at the clock, I wish the hour hand would move faster. Then I begin to daydream. I think about the clock and about the ancient Sumerians who gave us sexagesimal counting for time, and I begin to wonder about all the different kinds of counting and measuring we do. Our decimal system is Hindu-Arabic and we get inches and pounds from the United Kingdom, which uses the British Imperial System . . . I glance around at the other students. They seem to be having a challenging time with those problems. I am surprised and think that I may have gotten a high score on this quiz. But then, since I am so bored, my mind wanders off again. Suddenly, the bell rings. Everyone quickly passes their quiz in and hurries out the door. This is my last class of the day, so I go to the library and walk straight to the dictionary section. This is my daily schedule. I am so interested in learning new words that I can’t even keep track of my time. My parents let me stay because it keeps me occupied. And besides, they don’t really know what else to do with me. I know that I learn differently from other kids in my school. I just cannot concentrate at all during school except on things that I’m interested in. I don’t really care about school or tests in general because I’m not interested in them. I only do what I like to do. In math class, my mind wanders to thinking about how the words “integer” and “integral” are related. When I am in history class, instead of focusing on the chapter in my textbook about the Civil War, I have a debate in my head about whether or not the word, “Yankee” comes from Cherokee or Dutch. Things that I’m not interested in, I just can’t make myself do, no matter how hard I try. My grades are mostly C’s, but that’s only because the teachers feel bad for me. In most classes, I probably deserve F’s. I have never had friends. I don’t really know how to joke around and make small talk with the people around me. My feelings are all stuck inside, with no one to interact with. When I’ve tried, people just tease me. By now, I have stopped trying. The librarian has always been very kind to me. She understands my love of dictionaries and recommends good ones to me or tells me when a new dictionary has been bought. I feel safe in the library. I get to relax from my hard day with other students bullying me. I get to taste words and smell them. I get to be me. I also love to read other kinds of books, especially nonfiction books. But dictionaries are my first love. Some words I don’t like. For example, “chair.” That word tastes like cabbage to me, and I loathe cabbage. Other words