FOREST FIRE Sparks Fly Crackling Sound Trees Down On fire Smoke rises up to the Sky Wolves Howl Bears Flee Ash Fills up the Ground Elk Run for their Lives. Birds and Butterflies try To Escape to Sky Crickets, Worms and Ants Fry Thunder Strikes, The Wind Blows, Making it Worse Animals Die Trees Burn, Dogs Bark, Fire Spreads Across, Lives Lost Homes Destroyed , Treasures Gone Memories Turned into Smoke Disappear into the Sky That has Turned Orange and Red.
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Flash Contest #34, August 2021: Use J.M.W. Turner’s painting The Banks of the Loire as a starting point for a stream of consciousness piece—our winners and their work
Our August Flash Contest was based on Creativity Prompt #164 (provided by Anya Geist, Stone Soup ’20–21 Intern), which, combining art and writing, challenged participants to write a stream of consciousness piece based off of J.M.W. Turner’s painting The Banks of the Loire. The result was, unsurprisingly, breathtaking! In their own unique ways, each piece evoked Turner’s painting with stunning vividity. Reading the participants’ work, it was easy to envision the kneeling lady in red, the arching trees, and the backdrop of the seacliff, the tops of sails just visible through the mist. Participants also interpreted the qualification of stream of consciousness in a variety of ways, with their submissions ranging from meandering prose without punctuation to highly structured poetry to paragraph blocks written from the perspective of a tree! As always, thank you to all who submitted, and please submit again next month! In particular, we congratulate our Winners and our Honorable Mentions, whose work you can appreciate below. Winners “A River Flows in Me” by Inca Acrobat, 11 (San Francisco, CA) “The Melancholy Landscape” by Sophie Liu, 9 (Surrey, BC, Canada) “The Watcher” by Lui Lung, 12 (Danville, CA) “Scattering Beams” by Emily Tang, 12 (Winterville, NC) “The Banks of the Loire” by Alexis Zou, 13 (Lake Oswego, OR) Honorable Mentions “A Dream or the End?” by Phoenix Crucillo, 13 (Los Angeles, CA) “Thoughts Harbored” by Rex Huang, 11 (Lake Oswego, OR) “Perspectives Not Human” by Ivy Liu, 9 (San Jose, CA) “So Still” by Sophie Yu, 13 (Houston, TX) “The Magical River” by Natalie Yue, 9 (San Carlos, CA) Inca Acrobat, 11 (San Francisco, CA) A River Flows in Me Inca Acrobat, 11 You fail to speak to me Even when the moon has risen Above the glittering Loire When my mind is awake But my body still Especially then You turn your back away My dreams fade away Sophie Liu, 9 (Surrey, BC, Canada) The Melancholy Landscape Sophie Liu, 9 A Dreary, Undisturbed, Abandoned, Landscape. As gloomy as a muddy, Dark, Overworked, Horse, In the rain. The trees wilting in the sky, No longer proud and sturdy, But miserable. The sky covered in menacing, Evil clouds, Hiding the jumpy, Comforting, Blue, Sky. Peaceful, And calm. Not even a single shout, A single bird chirping, Or the wind howling. The place is as tranquil as a person sitting beside a campfire, With the stars glittering above them, Without a sound being uttered. Only one, Lonely, Human being in the whole, Vast greenery world. The place is a boring Blobfish, Without any beings, Except blobs of nature to make up the empty, Lonely, Land. The unwelcoming, Still, Desolate, Landscape. Lui Lung, 12 (Danville, CA) The Watcher Lui Lung, 12 There was a stillness that hovered in the air. It wasn’t the peaceful kind, more of the silence before a storm struck and razed everything in its path. I dutifully remained unmoving, listening faithfully for the endless thrum of life already etched into my memory. It was constant and ever-changing all at once, the irresolute rhythm to an unfinished song. This had become my existence: eagerly awaiting nothing by the riverbanks, observing a world I could not make a difference in until I grew too old to stand. The crunch of a fallen leaf snatched my attention, a discordant note in the delicately balanced symphony. A woman knelt, the sleeve of her dress slipping from her shoulder. This sight was not new to me. There had been hundreds before her who had visited, and thousands before them. Those who came and went were far too many to be remembered, both old and young, some carrying joy, but most bearing misery. Whether it was happiness or grief that led them to my home, I knew they all sought something for themselves, and I could tell from their faces what it was that they looked for. The desperate found comfort in meaningless details that went unnoticed by another, so that even the babbling of water could be heard as a familiar voice, or a breeze could be the huff of a lost lover’s breath. Then the woman shifted, my gaze leaping to her again, and her face was turned from me. The gleam of her dark hair gilded by noon sun was all I could see. Her perch was motionless beside the river, enough so that she could have been a painted figure listening for what only she could hear. She was indecipherable this way, a statue carved to be admired but never touched, beautiful but unreachable. Who was this mystery? What brought her here, to sit by these banks as I did? Did she hear the music in the rush of the Loire? I wanted to… I simply wanted, I realized. I wanted, and I could not have. Frustration burst like a wave. The sky inevitably splotched to orange and red, and the woman left me. She rose, the hem of her skirt against the ground a whispered addition to my song. I remained rooted in my position. People wandered here to find their purpose, but what was my own? I was the Watcher, I supposed, and I always would be. My purpose was to see and not feel, to ask my questions and to know they would not be answered. It was a bitter truth. I watched until the crimson of her dress became a faint speck, until the spell she had cast was lifted. How much longer would I continue to watch? Was I to stand here for a lifetime? I’d crumble eventually, slower than those I saw passing by, but I was dying all the same. Perhaps everyone did have a place in this grand composition I could not yet make sense of, and this was my cruel fate, a punishment for a crime I did not know of. A cool gust of wind rustled my branches. I stood still once more. The river murmured on. Emily Tang, 12 (Winterville, NC) Scattering Beams Emily
Rubble
In the summer of 2017, a horrific earthquake hit the Greek island of Lesvos. In the summer of 2017, my family’s village, Vrisia, was reduced to a terrifying pile of fractured, falling buildings and rubble. My memories of Vrisia are damaged and seemingly random, like the items salvaged from the catastrophe-torn buildings. I remember the hedgehog we found on the side of the road that we squirreled away to our garden, my six-year-old hands wrapping tightly around its small, odd-looking body. The hedgehog’s spiky parts weren’t pointy enough to prevent me from hugging him close to my chest. When he escaped from our garden, I nearly cried. I remember the local museum and the preserved shell of a Pinta Island turtle inside. The turtle’s ancient shell seemed impossibly large. The majestic relic of the extinct breed of Galapagos island turtles seemed too foreign to comprehend. My only thought then was that I might strap it to my back and become a turtle myself. I can vaguely recall a Playmobil toy set of Antarctica. There were plastic glaciers that came with a basin you could fill with water. My sister and I played with it for hours. I’d attach the polar bear and penguins to the glaciers and she’d attempt to create a waterfall with the cups of water we were supposed to use to hydrate ourselves. By the end of our playing, we had thoroughly drenched each other. I remember our house. The porch and the tree-like vines that crept above it in a canopy, the unassuming blue door wedged between two other buildings that led down to our home, the room we would sleep in, the color of its walls—all of these things feature prominently in my attempts to reconstruct our Vrisia through memory. Five years and one earthquake later, we’ve returned. The house is still damaged even though my grandmother has been rebuilding these past years. She and my aunts live in Athens, an hour’s flight or an overnight boat ride away from Lesvos. My dad took us on a tour of the village yesterday. It’s strange to stare at a place almost totally changed and have your mind confront you with your younger self’s muddled, distorted, and fragmented memories. “This is the mini-market we would send you to buy groceries from,” he says, pointing at a few bricks surrounded by weeds. A memory flickers in its wake—seven-year-old me walking to the market with her twin sister, her younger sister scuttling behind on her four-year-old feet. The rush of happiness felt at the independence. The old grandmas sitting outside that greet us as we pass. “This is the house of a few of our old friends.” He gazes solemnly at a doorframe standing on its own, surrounded by dead grass and covered in dust. I can imagine a younger version of myself rushing past it on her way to the town square. “Here is the church.” The door bears a bright red spray-painted cross, a marker indicating that the building has been destroyed so much that the best course of action is to tear it down. Each place has a spray-painted cross in green, yellow, or red. Green is the most infrequent of the colors, meaning that a building has suffered little or no damage and is safe to inhabit. When a cross is yellow, there is a severe need for repairs. But the church, one of the primary sources of hope and inspiration in this village—destroyed. We continued to walk. One house resembling a Jenga tower before its collapse had us staring in awe. The front wall was missing, and you could see the slanted, falling floor and all the broken furniture covered in dust and debris. A car honked behind us, and we hurried out of the road. The man drove by, warning us to stay away from the houses—most of them could collapse at any moment. The situation is surreal. I feel like a piece of my identity is crumbling under my shaking fingers and before my petrified eyes. The repairs on our house are done, but we overlook a view of rubble. A bustling village that once housed nearly two-thousand now might be occupied by fewer than two-hundred. There are no open restaurants, most of the houses still need to be torn down or require severe repairs, the local school is damaged, so children are being taught in tiny container houses, and the earthquake destroyed the village’s two factories. Around the world, natural disasters are increasing. Scientists may not have found solid connections between climate change and an increase in earthquakes, but they have found that climate change causes an increased amount of other natural disasters. Central and Northern Europe recently suffered from intense flooding. California suffers from an ongoing drought. People are dying. The effects of humanity’s carelessness are manifesting. After witnessing the destruction nature can cause firsthand, I have only been made more aware of the gravity of our situation. Right now, we can save ourselves. It’s up to the youth to try to heal the Earth before it suffers irreparable damage. It’s up to us to stop our homes from turning into rubble.
