Foreshadow Read online

  For the writers waiting to share their voices with the universe,

  who trace fingers along shelves, dreaming of spines with their own names,

  who scrabble and dig for words in the dark and unholy hours,

  who know their hearts are full of tales, and are just beginning to hope—

  we can’t wait to read your words. The world needs your story.

  And for Michael Bourret, incredible friend and human and advocate.

  Contents

  {INTRODUCTION } by Emily X.R. PanI

  {FLIGHT} by Tanya Aydelott

  Character Connection in FLIGHT by Nova Ren Suma

  {RISK} by Rachel Hylton

  Voice in RISK by Emily X.R. Pan

  Story Prompt: Building Conflict

  { SWEETMEATS } by Linda Cheng

  Suspension of Disbelief in SWEETMEATS by Emily X.R. Pan

  { GLOW } by Joanna Truman

  Emotional Resonance in GLOW by Nova Ren Suma

  Story Prompt: The End of the World

  { ESCAPE } by Tanvi Berwah

  The Twist in ESCAPE by Nova Ren Suma

  { PAN DULCE } by Flor Salcedo

  Raising the Stakes in PAN DULCE by Emily X.R. Pan

  Story Prompt: Enigma

  { SOLACE } by Nora Elghazzawi

  Mood in SOLACE by Nova Ren Suma

  { PRINCESS } by Maya Prasad

  Worldbuilding in PRINCESS by Emily X.R. Pan

  Story Prompt: Fleshing Out the World

  { FOOLS } by Gina Chen

  Imagery in FOOLS by Emily X.R. Pan

  { MONSTERS } by Adriana Marachlian

  The Creep Factor in MONSTERS by Nova Ren Suma

  Story Prompt: Embodying a Fear

  { BREAK } by Sophie Meridien

  Building the Romance in BREAK by Emily X.R. Pan

  { RESILIENT } by Mayra Cuevas

  Moment of Change in RESILIENT by Nova Ren Suma

  Story Prompt: Opening the Door

  { BELLY } by Desiree S. Evans

  The Motif in BELLY by Emily X.R. Pan

  The Editor’s Perspective: Q&A with the Foreshadow Fiction Editors

  How a Story Is Born: Authors Share the Original Seeds of Their Ideas

  Story Prompt: The Last Word

  { AFTERWORD } by Nova Ren Suma

  The Magical Origin Story of Foreshadow

  Masthead

  Bios

  Masthead

  INTRODUCTION

  by Emily X.R. Pan

  Stories are the best kind of spell. There’s nothing like cracking open a book and being magicked away to a different time and place, giving your heart over to characters who will live forever in your mind. What’s remarkable about the short story is how an author manages to sharpen that experience, condensing it into something powerful.

  This is why a short story is so difficult to write: How do you make someone fall in love with your characters in the span of so few words? How do you pull your reader in fast enough and make them feel the hum of a deeply resonant emotion? There’s also the question of structure, the style of the prose. In a short story, all the things that make a good novel have to be compressed into a neat little package.

  Tell the blank page a story, and it will tell you who you are. It will shine back at you the quiet undercurrents of your mind. Peer into those waters, and you’ll see your swells of confidence, your sleep-stealing fears. Storytelling, if you think about it, is the most human thing we do. It’s a universal language. It’s so instinctive, baked into our way of surviving and connecting, that we do it without even thinking about it.

  Whether or not you’ve ever tried to catch a story and pin it to the page, you are a storyteller. I’m sure, for example, that you could easily tell me about the time you got into such trouble that people who love you wheeze with laughter to remember it. The hilarious thing that happened to you some weekends ago. The best moment of your life so far. The most devastating way you’ve ever had to say goodbye.

  This is how we connect. We share experiences. We tell of what happened. Many of us even conjure our stories up out of nothing.

  There was one time, a handful of years ago, that writing a short story changed my life.

  I had sent a fantasy novel out to agents, crossing every bone in my body, hoping-wishing-praying . . . but what came back were only rejections. I felt fragile; I needed to rebuild my confidence. That was when I turned to a short story I’d written years earlier. The execution had never been right, but I still loved the idea. With new characters and new stakes, I rewrote the whole thing from scratch.

  That was a turning point for so many reasons. First, it offered the reminder that I could finish something, that I was capable of it. Those agent rejections had not destroyed my love or my creativity. Second, the process of rewriting something so thoroughly and successfully turned me bold. It takes a great deal of bravery to scrap existing words. From that experience I learned to trust myself. I learned that returning to the blank page isn’t truly starting over, because all the earlier sentences make for crucial scaffolding. It changed the way I think about the revision process.

  But most importantly, that story—weird and sad with a touch of the fantastical—carried me back to my instincts and helped me pin down the kind of writer I wanted to be. My excitement for it was electricity crackling in my veins.

  People often ask me about the process of writing The Astonishing Color of After. I explain how I rewrote it again and again. How I found new angles, how the premise morphed. The book wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t first developed the courage to rewrite from scratch.

  When I read short stories now, I find myself searching for similar sparks in the works of other writers. Sometimes you can see them wrestling with creative questions on the page. Sometimes you can see the first few bricks being laid for works that came later. Always, there’s something of the author preserved like a fossil in amber—you can see it so much more clearly because a short story is sliced so thin.

  FORESHADOW was originally born as an ode to the short story, and it was our way of finding brand-new writers whose voices we wanted to champion. We wanted to celebrate young adult stories by authors of many different backgrounds in an online format of our own invention.

  And since our love for the short story came from our devotion to the craft of writing, here is a book with a sprinkling of exactly that. We’ve added commentary to go along with each piece, a peek behind the curtain as we discuss the various facets of storytelling. Like an orchestra with its many instruments, the individual elements of fiction—voice, worldbuilding, stakes, just to name a few—must work together and take their turns being loud and soft.

  So please: Drink these stories in. Taste the words on your tongue. Relish the worlds that have been built here. After all, what’s the point of storytelling magic if it isn’t shared?

  Flight

  Tanya Aydelott

  “I adore mother-daughter stories, and this dreamlike one by Tanya Aydelott kept me rapt with its mysterious atmosphere and mythic elements. With a delicate hand, the author seduced me into a strange, magical world that feels very original, surprising, and psychologically complex.”

  —Jandy Nelson, author of I’ll Give You the Sun

  i

  She remembers the first time she saw the unicorn tapestries. Mama had just moved them to New York City, piling their weathered brown suitcases in the foyer of an apartment almost too small to be called a home. On a sticky August afternoon before Mama started her new job on TV, they took the M4 bus, crowded and noisy, up to the top of Manhattan. She sat in Mama’s lap
, watching the other passengers: the teenager with the headphones so much larger than his ears, the tired woman with thick ankles and stretched shopping bags, the older gentleman with a checkered hat tugged low over his bushy white eyebrows. She couldn’t see his eyes. There were young twins, their hair bound up in braids, babbling to each other in a language she couldn’t understand, and an older brother watching them with exasperation. Maybe she wasn’t the only one who didn’t know their language.

  “We’re here,” Mama said gently, and pried her loose.

  She hopped down the big step of the bus and looked up at the imposing building, this place Mama said was important for her to see. Mama said that about many things, and usually the girl wasn’t sure why they were important, even after she had seen them.

  The museum was fairly large, with narrow stairwells and hushed, cool rooms. She felt her heart leap when Mama pointed out that one entire archway had been brought over from Spain, dismantled and reassembled to look exactly as it had in its original location. She thought, This is what I am, too. Brought here like a stone and expected to fit. She reached out to touch the pitted arch, but Mama gently tugged her back.

  Outside, there were spindly dwarf trees and a small herb garden laid out by the curators based on a medieval plan. Mama pointed out the fruit that was beginning to grow, the small glossy bodies rounding into recognizable shapes. The girl watched butterflies and squirrels dart in and out of the greenery. The air was scented with herbs and flowers, nothing like the greasy gas smell of the city. She wanted to stay here, away from the cold stone walls that had been stolen from their homes, but Mama took her hand and moved them back inside.

  They stayed for a long time in the room with the unicorns. Mama had told her stories, but nothing looked the way she had imagined. Instead of gentle, sloping heads, the unicorns had beards, and their mouths were turned down as if they were sad or worried. And they were being hunted, first by dogs and then by men. The final unicorn was captured and enclosed, its body torn by sharp spears. The cage around it was low, but the unicorn could not escape it.

  Mama touched her cheek, and she realized she was crying.

  “Yes,” said Mama, “we should cry for them.”

  “But they’re not real,” she remembers saying, her young voice high and hot.

  “Things can be real even if we never see them,” Mama said. “Most things are. Don’t say a thing isn’t real until you know for certain.”

  She remembers being bewildered and afraid. “Why is there a belt around its neck?”

  Mama let out a breath. The dark shadows that had begun to ring her eyes seemed to have moved lower, into her voice. She said, “Things that are unexplainable—these are things that people feel they must control. Magic. Beauty. Art. Creatures like the unicorn, which they aren’t even sure are real. Even in their imaginations, they cage them.”

  Her eyes moved from the unicorn to Mama. This was something important, something she needed to know. “People, too?” she asked, her voice hollow like a shell.

  Mama passed a hand across the girl’s head, smoothing the stray hairs at her temples. “Oh,” she said softly, and, “Yes.”

  Someone came into the room then, feet slapping against stone, and bumped up against Mama so she had to move to the side. “Hey,” the voice said, and then, “Hey, I know you—you did the desserts on that morning show! Let me get a picture with you.”

  Mama demurred, as she always did, and they left very soon after.

  On the way out, the girl had wanted to buy a postcard—one of the ones showing the unicorn with its horn in water, before it was brought down by the hunters. But Mama said no, the magic was in remembering the unicorn, not in owning it.

  ii

  Mama’s new cooking show was not, initially, a success. That came later, after the producer suggested she wear low-cut blouses and skirts that flared and heels that made her stand differently. She became someone else. The makeup crew curled her hair and threw red on her lips and splashed dark paint across her eyelids and eyelashes. She and the girl laughed about the transformation; they called the TV version of her “Marlena,” after an actress Mama had admired when she was young. Marlena would smile and the live audience would thrill to her; she would bend over in one of her new blouses to reveal a soufflé, and the producer would promise her champagne. “The camera loves you!” he would crow every time the ratings came in.

  “It won’t last,” Mama would say in her throaty Marlena voice, fluffing her skirts and patting her dark hair. “We’ll leave here soon and do something else. But for now, this is fine for us.”

  The girl spent afternoons in the studio watching her mother become Marlena, and nights watching Marlena turn back into her mother. There were trips to restaurants and museums, evenings at literary salons where the adults talked for hours in smoky, dull-scented rooms, weekend out-of-town trips to go antiquing and pick through racks of fashionable old stoles, and jaunts to toy stores where they bought puzzles and paints.

  There was one place Mama wouldn’t take her. When her class had a field trip to the Prospect Park Zoo, Mama drew her out of school for the day and they went across the city to the Museum of Modern Art. The girl remembers protesting; she had wanted to spend more time with the other children in her class. But Mama was adamant. “Bodies are cages already,” Mama said, something dark and pained in her eyes. “There’s no need to see cages inside cages.”

  At the MoMA, Mama stood for a long time in front of Willem de Kooning’s Woman I. “Can you see?” she finally asked, one hand so tight around her purse strap that her knuckles showed white as bone. “Look how she escapes her body. Look how he’s given her wings.” She led the girl through the exhibit, stopping before Picasso’s Two Nudes and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. “Look how their bodies are and are not, at the same time.”

  There was a wistfulness to Mama’s voice that was all hers, with none of Marlena’s brass.

  “They’re ugly,” the girl said. She remembers how she had hated the way the artists smudged the women’s bodies so they looked small and vulnerable. She remembers how her own body felt as though its edges were smudging into curves. Some days, it had felt like she was becoming a stranger to herself. “They don’t look finished.”

  “They’re in the wrong skins.” Mama’s cheeks were pale, like the blush roses she sometimes received from fans and left with the studio’s doorman. “Being trapped inside the wrong skin can feel like a curse. The moment you find the right one, you can’t wait to live in it.”

  Her gaze grew faraway then, as though she were looking past the paintings, and the girl turned away from Les Demoiselles, uncomfortable.

  When they got home, Mama poured so much rosewater into her coffee that the air was nearly pink with it. She drew from her oracle deck that night, and the first card she pulled was Grief.

  Mama stopped using the subway soon after that, saying that more and more people recognized her; she was uncomfortable with their attention. “New York is fine,” Mama would say. “There’s no need to go national.” Her producer was upset; he wanted to send Marlena on tour across the US, not just giving cooking lessons but interacting with local chefs. Mama had loud phone arguments with him, her sharp heels clicking against the hardwood floors of their second New York apartment—slightly bigger than the first, with an armoire they’d found at an antiques shop in Hudson and a sideboard and mirror from Essex. It seemed like home always reflected cities or towns they visited and left, never the city they walked every day. “I know what I want,” Mama would tell her producer, “and I know what I don’t. Stop trying to change my mind.”

  One night, Mama hurried them home from the studio without even taking off her makeup. She stank of grease and had an angry splotch of red at the base of her neck. Once the door was closed and locked behind them, she brewed and drank two cups of tea scented with rosewater, then met her own eyes in the mirror over the sideboard
. “Don’t ever put yourself on display,” Marlena said in Mama’s voice, her eyes heavy with liquid eyeliner and exhaustion. “They’ll never give you back.”

  The girl knew their time in New York was up when Mama stopped using rosewater in Marlena’s desserts. It wasn’t because the rosewater was running out—Mama was careful to have three bottles in the cupboard, always, just in case. But the bottles disappeared from the television kitchen, and then the three bottles at home became six, and then nine. Mama began staying up late to check and recheck the numbers in her bank account; one morning, the girl found a fistful of cash tucked inside one of the tea caddies. She began putting her favorite books into a suitcase and deciding which of her clothes to bring with her and which to donate, and when Mama said they needed to go, she already had one bag packed and was nearly finished with a second.

  The week before they left, they went to see the unicorns again. This time in a taxi, with a driver whose music jangled and slurred, and who eyed Mama again and again in the rearview mirror. Mama tipped him so he would not wait for them.

  They did not walk through the gardens of the Cloisters. They did not spend time looking at the Spanish archway or the French chapels, even though she ached to see that Spanish stone again, to reassure herself that it was still there.

  They went straight to the unicorns and stood for a long time with them. This time, she noticed that the colors on the tapestries were faded and whole sections were coming loose, but the majesty of the creatures was still there in each thread. The unicorns were beautiful, or perhaps a word beyond beautiful. They were calm, exaltation, peace. And for their otherworldly beauty, they were hunted.

  “Remember them,” Mama told her. “It will be a long time, I think, until we are here again.”

  Mama squeezed her hand then, so tightly her bones squeaked, and stepped away.

  The girl stood alone before the unicorns. She felt her body move with every cold breath, her ribs and skin and lungs stretching to keep her alive. She looked at each unicorn in turn, counting them, memorizing them. And for a lonely, chilled moment, she was sure they looked back.