As he moves to a new room in a new house, a boy recalls the view from his old window As I stood in my new room, as decided at Burger Heaven on Tuesday, I looked around and saw a blank white wall, two closets, and two windows. I looked out the window on the left and saw a beautiful tree outside my window. It was gently swaying in the wind. I remembered the other tree outside my window in my old room. You could see the roughness of the bark, and the leaves slowly turned yellow, orange, and red as we got closer and closer to the end of the fall. The tree was wise and old. It had a posture that was relaxed but knew everything at all times, like Yoda! One day, I asked my dad if I could go play laser tag with my friend Michael. “You know why you can’t,” he said. Unfortunately, I did. My dad was against all types of guns or weapons. I understood why, but I was still frustrated. “But all of my friends are going and I don’t want to be left out because everyone will be talking about it at school,” I told him. He said: “Just because you’re friends do it doesn’t mean you have to.” I stormed into my room. Then I looked out the window, and I thought about the tree. It couldn’t do anything people did. And people didn’t respect it. They even had their dogs pee on it. But it was content to just watch the world go by. Another time, I was watching the news with my mom when they said a hurricane was going to hit New York. I asked my mom if we’d be safe. She said we would but we went to the store to stock up on canned food. At the store, I asked her, “Can a hurricane kill someone?” “Yes, if you’re not careful.” Now I was so scared I didn’t go outside the house at all the next few days, and school was closed, so my parents couldn’t make me. As the storm was raging outside my window, I thought about what would happen if my building fell over. With those thoughts of destruction, I fell asleep. Hours later, I woke to an ear-splitting snap. At first I thought it was lightning, but it was sunny outside. I slid off my bed into the slippers I got for Christmas, and I walked to my window, careful not to step on the Lego creations I had made the day before. I looked around. Something was missing, but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Then I realized. “No, no, no, no, no,” I muttered under my breath, progressively getting louder as I went on. I look down at the ground. The tree, my true friend, always loyal, never faltering, so wise, had split in half. It was just lying there helpless, cracked in half, gone. Gone forever. I went into my mom’s room and shook my mom as I did if I’d had a nightmare. I showed her the tree and then she called the super to take the tree off the sidewalk. We watched out our window as he struggled to push it to the side of the road. It was hard to be too appreciative of the beautiful sunny day because my tree was gone. But now, in the present, I had a new tree, even better than the old one. Elegant and graceful. And no storms are going to hit New York anytime soon, so it should be safe for at least a while. Over the years I have learned more and more that you appreciate things more when they are gone, so you should try to appreciate them as much as you can before they leave. Then my mom walked into my room and asked me if I wanted to have lunch. I realized I was very hungry since I had spent the whole morning packing up our stuff from our old apartment. As I walked out into our new living room, I saw boxes upon boxes and even more boxes. I looked in one, and I saw the back of a picture frame. The photo was of me playing in my room in my pajamas with yellow stripes. I was playing with my train tracks, and I was holding my favorite train, Thomas. In the back of the picture, I could just make out the tree. Suddenly, I remembered one day when I found out I hadn’t made the soccer team. I had been outside my old building, and I had kicked the tree repeatedly in my anger. I went back into my room and put the photo on the radiator next to my new tree. Then I ran back into the living room because I was very hungry, and I smelled quesadillas so I knew this would be a good lunch. Daniel Shaw, 11New York, NY
October 2019
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
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
