October Featured Pieces
Imposter Syndrome by Anika Kotapally
She goes to India to find herself. Or know herself, she’s not sure. She thinks this might come under the Eat, Pray, Love umbrella even though she’s brown, so she hasn’t let herself think too hard about it yet. ____________ In Delhi, she speaks a language that is only hers when no one else is around, and waits for someone to clock her as what she is: an imposter, someone who could never belong. She eats street food: pav bhaji with fresh butter melted over it, parathas that taste just like her mother’s, jalebis that leave syrupy stickiness on her fingers no matter how hard she tries to get it off. You can’t find good ones anywhere outside India, and she hasn’t eaten any since she was fourteen. What she wants more than anything is to blend in, be like anybody else here. When they walk down the street, they know who they are, what they are supposed to be. But she still mixes her words up when she gets nervous, tongue-tied and afraid to show it. She thinks about America, how, even there, everything is a performance; how, when she talks to cold callers on the phone, her voice trips over itself into English, cool and easy. Like she’s saying, this is the only language I've ever known; this is the only person I've ever been. In America, she knows who she is, but only sometimes, every so often. In America, she can never learn to be anybody, too caught up in all the performances of all the people she isn’t. Even there, she is afraid of being found out, imposter, out the airlock. What she wants more than anything is to belong. ____________ This city kills her sometimes. Literally. The smog is awful. The cars are loud. So are the people. Her father used to tell her about the city when he was growing up. He talks about it like an ancient civilization, a myth. He says it was green, green, green. He says the birds were everywhere. She used to drink those stories up, starving for a life she would never know, a version of herself she could never meet. Delhi, like the motherland. Delhi, like a home that was supposed to be hers. She sees glimpses of it between the windows, in the twisting gullies and vast parks. Maybe it’s wishful thinking. It’s probably wishful thinking. ____________ At the market, she accidentally asks for tomatoes instead of tamatr, and her stomach drops out immediately. Imposter, imposter, you will never be one of us. The man gives her the tomatoes anyway, but the illusion is broken. She can’t pretend now. He must know now. Coconut, ABCD. Brown on the outside but always, always white on the inside. How dare you think you could be anything else. She will never be able to do it right. Even in India, she can’t belong, still too caught up in the performance of a person she can never be. But she wants. She wants proof that she can have this, too. That this place could be hers, not just her parents’. That she is allowed to have it without the play-pretend. She knows what they think of people like her, over here. They pity her, cut off from her culture and her roots. They know she was supposed to be one of them, but was twisted away, into a place where assimilation is a dirty word, synonymous with sellout, weak. And she has sold out, no matter how hard she tried to play the game right, both sides the same. Maybe that’s not the right way to think about it, but she knows it’s true, the same way she knows her name. How many things has she lost that she doesn’t even know about? ____________ As she sits quietly outside the hotel that evening, clutching her bag of tomatoes, pigeons float off the nearby banyans, cooing quietly as they peck, peck, peck near her. It’s barely April, and the leaves are turning slightly pink already. Just like her dad said. The smog is thick today, blotting out the sun just a little too much. It aggravates her asthma. Still, she loves this place. Even when they don’t love her back. The pigeons keep pecking, congregating around some dropped bread. Still, her fingers are jalebi-sticky. And she knows it doesn’t wash off. "The Essence of Lemon Green", Katelyn Wang
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"Akin to a Jester", Niki Chen
Fruit Flies in August by Anika Kotapally
The summer I was sixteen, the house suffered an invasion of fruit flies. It became a game of sorts, how fast could you kill them, how many did you get in a day. My dad and I would compare statistics like professional athletes. I got eleven today. Well, I got fifteen. Even in August, as the weather began shifting ever-so-slightly cooler and the sun set by eight forty-five instead of nine p.m., the fruit flies were everywhere, and we began plotting to find and take down their stronghold. One of the plant pots, we were almost certain. We dragged them out onto the deck and carefully inspected the soil in each one, marking the suspicious with bright yellow twine and taking the rest inside. The sun was hot and still in the center of the sky. Sweat curled down my neck as I tied my string to the next pot. I could've sworn I had seen them scurrying around in there somewhere. It was the first week of August. In July, I had gotten my license, driven out for ice cream with my friends to celebrate. I hadn’t been anywhere since. A fly flew right in front of my face and I caught it in my hand, dead in a second. The fruit flies were back. It had only taken four days for them to repopulate. Tactics had to be changed. My dad looked online for plant-safe pest killers while I lay on the attic floor. It was easily the hottest place in the house, but the old fan had been running in the background for a couple of hours, puffing out somewhat cooler air every few minutes. The dog panted next to me as I scrolled on my phone. Everyone was somewhere I wasn’t. Cancun, Acadia, the Alps. I opened my texts, closed out of the app, opened Snapchat, closed out of it too. No one was saying anything. I didn’t know what to say either. Sunrays beamed in from the skylights, lying still across my stomach, my heart, just too present for comfort. The heat sank into me and I let it curdle in my stomach, a strange combination of summer anxiety and sun. I put the phone down, snapped my hands shut—a Venus flytrap human, closing my hungry mouth around anything close enough to touch—and opened them to see a dead fruit fly stuck to my palm. The pest killer hadn’t arrived yet and the flies were getting smarter, evading our murderous hands with ease. My kill count dropped from a minimum of ten per day to a measly five. Outside was too hot to imagine, air conditioning feeling like a blessing, benediction in its dried sweat and ice-cold water. August reached its peak, beating in on us all, just as I had reached the most unbearable part of summer, when everyone seemed just too far away to reach and loneliness was creeping in, a thief through my locked windows. The kitchen was full of flies, flitting around everywhere, over the bananas and oranges, into the fridge and cupboards. Their rule was absolute, my efforts to stave them off more half-hearted by the day. It felt almost like there was no point at all, like they had been there forever, just as summer seemed to drag on, endless and overbearing. It caught in me like phlegm in my throat, like the first phantom stirrings of fever, something I could never quite manage to cough up, spit out like the sickness it was. I zeroed in on a slower fly, crawling over the fruit. Its wings stayed on my finger as I pulled away. The fruit flies had finally met their match. Within a few days, they were wiped from the house, save for a few hardy stragglers. My dad left a 5-star Amazon review for the pest killer and rejoiced. August was coming to a close with the reign of the fruit flies, school inching closer and closer. Outside, the clouds seemed to rush by, a time lapse until life restarted, like the world was breathing a sigh of relief, a collective finally I could feel in my bones. August always felt liminal, false and forever until it wasn’t, until you were staring down its last few days, relief and surprise and sadness making an odd soup in your chest. The leaves wouldn’t turn yet, not for a while, and yet, somehow, I could already see them changing as I was, dropping their greens and dried-out yellow for reds and crunchy brown. In the attic the fan chugged away, faithful and solid after years and years, reliable for as long as I needed it to be. A survivor of the great fly purge buzzed by my ear. I swatted for a second and then let it be. They’d all go, eventually. |