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100% written and illustrated by kids ages 6-13


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The Place Where It Isn’t

  There was a space. The space was empty, but, if you think about it, it wasn’t an absence; it was a presence. It didn’t belong. Inside her heart, there was the absence, or presence. In her heart was an empty space, or filled space, and it just didn’t belong. The rest of her heart, though, could take years to describe thoroughly. There was art, there was math, there was writing, there were jokes, and there was family. What was missing? In the very back, there was sorrow, but sorrow had its place. Of course, it was hidden. Everyone has sorrow hidden in them. It is human. But everything about this girl was normal. Except for the absence, she felt as if she was complete. Not special, not out of the ordinary, but she was fine. You could almost say she was perfect, but even in perfection, there are flaws. You see, even in perfection, it is hard to learn, to improve, and to do better. You cannot set goals, not achieve, for what is there to achieve in perfection? The perfection, as the girl saw it, was something she loved. But not until she learned of what that perfection did to her did she realize what it took from her. Every day, she would watch the other children get scolded, and taught, and corrected. She laughed and thanked the gods for what she had achieved. Two days later, the girl was crying. She was crying, and crying. For she was told by her teacher that she had to stay home from school. “Why?” the girl cried out. She was upset at the teacher. So, so, so upset. For that teacher, unintentionally, had spoiled her lifelong journey toward perfection. She had never cried. Even as a baby. Now she let it out, and, surprisingly, it felt good. She approached her teacher. Screams and screams were aimed at the teacher. The teacher looked hurt. What was hurt? It didn’t make the girl happy. There was something else, like the opposite of happiness. Then, she hugged her. It was a solution. Why would she need a solution? The solution helped. It filled up the hole of hurt. The hurt was still there, but it was covered, and the covering made her happy. It was an accomplishment, and that felt good. Eliana Schaffer, 11Los Angeles, CA Sloka Ganne, 9Overland Park, KS


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The Monster

Some people think that monsters are bad, that monsters are scary hairy and mad, but maybe just maybe if you hear a roar outside your bedroom door and you invite the sound in, maybe you won’t see a scary, bad, mad, monsterest creature; you’ll see a scared, sad, lonely creature instead. And when you say “come to my bed,” you see the monster shrink just a thread, and when the monster is snuggled up close, you feel the monster shrink a foot. By the time you’ve laughed and played a game, the monster is the same size as the helmet you wear when you’re polluxing the polluxes out of your hair. After you read the monster a book about a band, the monster could fit in your hand. As your eyes were trying to stay awake, the monster disappeared just like that but all you can do is hope the monster hopefully, just hopefully, will come back. Ivy Cordle, 9Princeton, NJ


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Stone Soup Honor Roll: June 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 Alexander Antelman, 12 Anya Geist, 12 Savanna Hopson, 13 Keira Krisburg, 11 Macy Li, 13 Grace Malary McAndrew, 12 Ilya Rosenbaum, 11 Alexa Troob, 12 POETRY Sascha Farmer, 11 Ruth Gebhardt, 11 Leah Koutal, 11 Zaid Nazif, 10 Zoe Smith, 11 Alexa Zielkowski, 12 ART Sage Millen, 11 Cameron Purdy, 9 Kathleen Werth, 9 PLAYS Liana Zhu, 10  


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The Four Seasons

  A golden leaf falls on Little Deer’s nose, he jumps around playfully, “Fall has come! Fall has come!” he calls. His father bellows, “We must go find more food or the cold white sheet will bury it all!” Little Fox jumps around in the white powder, that once had millions of flowers in it. Now it is cold and wet. He whines to his mother, “I must go play with Brown Bear!” His mother whispers, “You must wait till spring.” Spring has come! Little Horse is only a month old, yet he jumps as high as his mother. “Look! Look! I see a bush of daffodils!” He prances over to the bush and sighs, “Spring is here.” Two happy birds sing, “Summer has come! Food is plentiful, but we must eat lots because fall is soon to come.” It is fall again, Little Deer has grown up. Now he has his own mate and child. A fawn calls, “Fall is here! Fall is here!” He smiles at the fawn and calls, “We must go find more food or the cold white sheet will bury it all!” He sounds just like his father. Grace Jiang, 11Ontario, Canada Meredith Rohrer, 10El Cajon, CA


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Innocent Yet Dire Words

  Like the mythical creature, It calls out a sound. Just not a pleasant one; A torture in its own way. Siren. I hold my ears and tell myself to breathe. One, two, three, four . . . 12, 13 . . . 20. This will pass; don’t worry. It’s just a siren, you don’t have to have another Freak Out, Lila. It’s okay, it’s okay. See, it’s leaving? Okay, okay. I open my eyes, slowly uncurl myself from my Freak Out Stance, and take one last deep breath. I shake myself off; it’s over now. I peer out the dirt-encrusted window and see a hazed-out dawn. I look at the clock which shows me that it is 6:17. Two hours and 13 minutes left. In the far distance, a careless person pushes a little too hard on the gas and their car makes that God awful noise that makes me wince despite myself. After doing a pointless once over of the three-room shack that is supposedly for two, I scan this “house” (not home) for a woman who doesn’t deserve the title of mother. I prefer to call her by her first name, Ilene. She’s barely ever here. Figures. Last night was the Fourth of July; she probably ran off to San Francisco with only the clothes on her back trying to fill her never-ending want for “adventure.” She’s nicknamed her spontaneous outings “longings” in order to make them sound more magical. Let me assure you, it doesn’t work. After I do my usual morning routine— make the bed, dust the window (singular), eat breakfast (dry cereal)—I get dressed and ready to go. By now it’s 6:50, which means one hour and 40 minutes . . . Well, better just treat it like it’s a normal day, even when my stomach is churning as a way of calling out, Don’t do it! I just hope that Ilene’s back on time. Once I’ve located and thrown on my only decent pair of shoes, I thrust the door open and breathe in the hot air. A moving ghost, Too large to maintain. Clear as day, yet blinding. I stumble through like a wounded soldier; Life Before I give myself over to the overwhelming humiliation that will happen in about an hour and fifteen minutes, I decide to go to my comfort place, the library. My neighborhood is not spectacular in any way, except for maybe the dusty, old makeshift library. To me, this ancient building is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a home. I love the way it’s always been there for me as though it was the parent I never had. The people and books there have become my family to run to whenever I need a home base. It’s the only place I know that didn’t move when I did. When Ilene first had me, she was still living with her parents because she was so young. A month after I was born, she ran away on a train to this small town in Nevada. For the first two years we lived with Wanda, an old widow who took us in. However, she died the day before she and Ilene were going out to look for potential apartments for us to stay in. Since nothing in her will was dedicated to us, we were left to our own devices. It took my mother three months to find a steady job that she could use as a money source. And even then, it only lasted for six months. When she finally had enough money to buy us a somewhat bearable apartment, it was a small, overheated two-room that was extremely uncomfortable for a four-year-old and her single mom. Since then, we’ve been evicted from 32 various apartments, shacks, and Airbnbs. Usually, we overstayed our welcome or my mother hadn’t paid the rent. Either way, we still moved our 10 or so possessions to yet another dingy, uncomfortable place in the same dingy, uncomfortable neighborhood. Needless to say, I’ve gotten pretty used to reliving the same nightmare over and over again. As I unthinkingly play one-person soccer with a rock along the sidewalk, I rehearse exactly what I’m going to say in one hour and five minutes. I’ve had everything planned down to the syllable for three weeks now. I’m just praying they don’t ask anything about my living situation. Ilene better be there and sober, or else I’ll be immediately excused. No parental guardian, no acceptance. This is the only opportunity I’ve ever had, and I will not let my self-centered, sorry excuse for a mother dictate whether or not it goes my way for once. I feel myself start to panic. The definition of fear, Powerful yet the weakest. I find myself consumed. It rules my thoughts, Anger When the library’s welcoming facade comes into view, I release a tired breath in an audible sigh. It’s a beautiful place built of brick and wood. Morning glories reach all the way to the top as though they are trying to protect the knowledge that lives here. The faded windows have frames of magenta that come straight out of a fairy tale. But this is just the outside— so little compared to the interior that I long ago memorized. A dozen spacious rooms with stained-glass windows taken right out of a church. Soft leather seats surrounding dim fireplaces. And then, the shelves themselves. Their oak wood carvings tinted with well-worn paint. They are the perfect pieces to hold the most wonderful things on Earth. I’m practically skipping towards the door when I’m hit with a shock of ice-cold water. My gasp is involuntary. It takes me a few freezing moments before I look up to where the attack came from. My gaze focuses in on a broken gutter. The bolt holding it to the side of the roof falls to the ground as if to shove it in my face. Well, this is perfect, isn’t it. Now I


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The Rose

  A little seed falls on the ground, it becomes a little sprout. When the wind blows, it starts dancing all about. It sways from side to side, it bobs up and down. The little sprout is growing, it has become a rose. The rose is growing, it is taller than a little mouse, it is taller than a rabbit, it has become the size of a dog! The rose stops growing, it stands in the same spot, for many, many days until winter comes. The frost and snow come, now it must hide underground. So, petal by petal it withers away. The next year it happens again, and again, and again . . . Grace Jiang, 11Ontario, Canada


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Possibility

At the first whisper of the unicorn’s warm breath in my ear, my worries begin to fade. I lean back against a burnt tree stump and close my eyes. I can feel the dewy grass of the clearing tickling my ankles above my sneakers. The heavy summer wind falls like a mantle on my shoulders. A bitter-tasting lump has formed in my throat, but I let myself sink into the warmth. Words fl it through my mind. Descriptions. Serene. Sun-drenched. Dappled wood. Magical. Paradise. They comfort me, as they always do. I steady my mind, focusing on them, on their shapes and colors and structures, the myriad ways they fi t together. Solace. Consolation. Assuagement. Relief. The unicorn nickers softly. I reach up and rub its muzzle. I let my heart brim with the feeling of luckiness, that I have such a friend to love, such a place to stay. The only place that stays the same. No matter what. I hear a girl’s voice behind me. I turn around. She has two short pigtails and a pink, sooty face. She is grinning. I grin back. The unicorn grunts. I mouth her name, the silent word bursting with joy. For a moment, I pause awkwardly. But she doesn’t care about my height, or the fact that I have never, will never, be able to speak to anyone but her. She squeezes my hand and leads me away, the unicorn clopping behind us. When I am with her, the lump in my throat begins to disappear. So that 20 minutes later, I am able to whisper two words. Thank you. And she smiles and nods and squeezes my hand. Friendship. It’s a beautiful word, the color of winter sunsets and summer tangerines. My mind lingers on the image, and the time passes by. Words fl oat out of my mouth now, light and sweet like spun sugar. At the same time, they form in my mind, as always, unspoken. Gratitude. Serendipity. Liberation. And then all of it is shattered. The sound of a bell ringing echoes against my eardrums, loud and insistent. I can feel the worn, tattered cover of a book in my hand. The golden-lit clearing is gone. The ground underneath me is cold. Students fill the hallways and cluster around lockers. I should be one of them. The lunch break is over. It is time to enter the world again, to be subject to a classroom of pitying stares . . . to try and find the courage I left behind in the unicorn’s world. I rise and wrap the book in my coat. It is close to falling apart. I cannot count the times I have slipped it into my backpack, always comforted by the image on the cover: a sooty-faced, pigtailed girl leading a unicorn into the forest. Vandana Ravi, 12Palo Alto, 12


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Editor’s Note

This is an issue about potential, possibility, and change. In Isabel Swain’s story “Innocent but Dire Words,” a young poet dreams of a better future for herself, while in Vandana Ravi’s short story, a girl dreams of simply another place. In Grace Jiang’s poems, nature comes to life again, after its seasonal death and hibernation, and in Andrew Wu’s story sequence “Nature in my Eyes,” nature changes in our eyes, as we attempt to see it from the angles and experiences of different creatures. Change is inevitable: we change, the world changes, time moves along. And, in the spaces between, in the time when it feels as if nothing is changing, we dream of the change that might happen. And yet when that change finally does occur—when yet again the rose blooms—it still feels miraculous. After reading this issue, I hope you will feel inspired to think and write about change—in the world or in you, past or future, real or imagined. Happy summer!