States of Being by Elane Kim
Associate editor Camila Garcia on today’s bonus story: Elane Kim burrows into the internal and the expansive with heartbreaking precision, urging readers to contemplate living in an undefinable world as ever-changing, sentient beings and what it even means to be human.
States of Being
It is summer in the city without a name, and the sky is heavy with birds.
All the homes of the city are square and neat, arranged like rows of teeth. We live in one of the city’s incisors, where we raise a cat that we give many names: Schrödinger, Anubis, Peanut. I choose butter over jam at the breakfast table. We invite the neighbors over for dinner, and they bring their beige Maine Coon. The roads yawn and stretch across the land, and during car trips, you point out every cow. There are more cows with every roundtrip: sixteen, then thirty-two, then sixty-four, and then you lose count. In the junctions of overlapping roads, children shriek with laughter. They splay their hands out toward the sky, as if to say, What a wonderful place, and I join them.
The photon detector registers light in warm waves. The weather forecast says there will be rain tomorrow, and I don’t believe it. I put on the radio and have faith in the certainties of life: the world is green and beautiful; we are green and so beautiful.
*
Above all else, the summers of the nameless city are cold. The city is unforgiving, all sharp corners and unending roads. I spread jam on my toast in heaving spoonfuls. The neighbors go missing in mid-July, their tabby in August, and there is no time for mourning. The roads grow rigid with rain. You show up to dinner in an ambulance, and there is no time for counting cows and still no time for mourning. At road junctions, children point upward, accusatory, as if to say, This can’t be right, and the sky stares back and shrugs, as if to say, Sorry, you’ve got the wrong sky. In a quiet street, I open my palms and they fill with cold rain, the city bleeding green—ugly, ugly green.
The city splits into two and Schrödinger or Anubis or Peanut disappears one night and the cows grow sparse in the fields. You are not here, although sometimes, I see your face superimposed in TV screens, book covers, mirrors. There is light in a way that stops feeling warm; the detector blips, calls it a photon. Soon, there is no light at all.
I move to one of the city’s molars and live a small, cramped life. I trust in probabilities: I believe it when the weather forecast says there will be rain tomorrow, and I believe it when I say that the world is terrible at worst and nonsensical at best, everything suspended in the jelly of the sky. I believe it when I forget your name, then mine, and the radio shrieks with static.
*
It is summer, and the sky is pale with heat. I skip breakfast and mill around in the streets. I wait for the shrieking of rain, cats, birds, children—and when there is nothing to be heard, I wait some more. You call to place a reservation for two. The roads run parallel to each other in one geometry and converge in another. The children move out of the city, and so do we. The world turns lopsided, shiny, and other adjectives we assign without much fuss. We settle in new cities that we give many names: Schrödinger, Anubis, Peanut. We are young and foolish, and then we are old and still foolish.
When the detector breaks, I consider probabilities: there is a chance that the world is not as terrible as it seems. I put on the radio and it leaks light in half-waves, half-photons.
For every city without a name, there is one to be loved. For every unsure ending, there is a cow to be counted. For every tabby gone missing, there is one finding warmth for the first time. For every wrong sky, there is a right one.
We can never be sure, so we watch as the city splits into sixteen, then thirty-two, then sixty-four, and then we stop counting. So long as this is the last, we think, though we both know this will never be true. Still, when you tell me that there will be rain tomorrow, I imagine its softness before anything else. Still, I start to believe in something bright, something whole.
Elane Kim is a high school student based in California. Her writing has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation, the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, Narrative Magazine, and Bow Seat, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. When she is not writing, she enjoys going on runs and playing the guitar. She is very happy to meet you.
