All of the plants are forced to harden

Pinched peonies gasping into copper

Drowned out by the last grasshopper

They must learn to grow like lemongrass

Waiting will only turn leaves to brass

Promises overheard through the grapevine

They’re tired of hearing that aging whine

If only they could be free as the sagebrush

And live without succumbing to the rush

Spring is not just a dream, says the dill

Winter is but a test of the will

And yet these plants have had their fill

Who will tell every sagging chive

Rust can be polished with only some drive

All of the plants are forced to thrive

The only winner in the end is thyme

So desperate for sun it began to climb

Rip away its roots for just another dime

The soil bleeds red as the crying rose

Thorns crumpling because each plant knows

The race for life is coming to a close

The only sound is the cawing of crows

A Red, White, and Green Dream was originally published in Revellations on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The stucco walls of the townhouses glow,
Painted a warm golden hue
By the setting sun.

Yet the sun itself remains unseen,
Tucked behind buildings and trees.
Clouds high above are mottled
With shades of pink and orange,
Kissed by the invisible sun.
Amber light envelopes the world
As twilight quickly approaches.

The sun will soon dip below the horizon,
But that moment is hidden away,
Blocked by the houses around me.
Every second ticks by,
Perhaps this was the one that marked the shift,
The last moment before the sun disappeared.

But I would never know.

I used to be so transfixed by that singular moment,
Watching intently as the sun shrank away,
Hiding below the Earth.
But it seems this evening I was robbed of that time,
Unable to know when the day ran away.

Yet I hardly feel like I am missing out.

The golden light,
The mottled clouds,
The light chill in the coming breeze
Hailing the oncoming night.

The Sunless Sunset was originally published in Revellations on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The first one to go was Alvin. He was a quiet man, kept to himself. Solitary, bordering on reclusive. He knew the computers better than anyone on board. Anele had never managed to tease more than a sentence out of him at a time. She’d been working on getting him to open up. He was a tough nut to crack, but she had been determined. She could’ve done it, given more time. His was a quick death, at least. If only Anele had known how much worse it would get, she would have appreciated the ease with which Alvin went. Maybe she would have saved some tears.

Alvin was working on the computers as usual, with his sound-proof headphones on — which technically were against safety protocols, but no one had ever bothered to enforce the rule. He was just looked so happy, typing and coding away. No one had the heart to pop his peaceful bubble. Because of the headphones, he didn’t hear when the alarms went off in the computer bay. No one realized he was missing when the crew gathered in the headquarters to figure out what was going on. He was just so quiet, it was as if he was never there at all. So it wasn’t their fault when he went unnoticed. Right?

Anele should have talked to him more. Maybe she could have noticed.

They realized that the computer bay was no longer safely attached to the ship. The repeated asteroid storms they had encountered while passing TRAPPIST-1 must have loosened some of the screws, or damaged the vacuum seal. The safest thing to do was to eject the computer bay. It was unnecessary, really, almost everything could be done from the computer in headquarters anyway. So Lucy gave the order to eject it and Anele checked all the readings and everything had gone splendidly. No further damage. It wasn’t until a few hours later, when Alvin’s meal went unclaimed at dinner, that anyone realized he had been ejected right along with the computer bay.

“At least,” Anele had thought, “it would have been a quick death.”

The sudden vacuum of space would have killed him almost instantly. It was perfect really, for Alvin. He would be at the computer forever now, in a perfectly silent world.

The next to go were Margot and Joko. Everyone onboard knew the two were dating. It was an open secret. While others in the crew found their…tactile relationship irritating, Anele thought the couple was cute. Joko had once admitted to her that he had a ring in mind to buy once they returned to Earth. If rings still existed when they returned, that is. It was going to be topaz. The color of Margot’s eyes.

“I wouldn’t mind someone touchy,” she thought to herself sometimes while watching them at meals, sat together with their thighs pressed up against each other, his hand on her waist. But the others turned out to be right; it was their touchiness that killed them. Margot and Joko were both outside, working on the ship’s hull, when Joko tried to hold Margot’s hand, not realizing she was holding the laser cutter. It sliced through his glove instantaneously, letting out all the air in his suit. In her panic, Margot impulsively sliced herself too, to be with him. It was romantic, in a way, Anele supposed. Very Romeo and Juliet. But stupid, considering they were the ship’s only two engineers.

It was this unfortunate lack of engineers that led to the next incident. The botanist and the doctor had taken over Margot and Joko’s engineering duties. But, since they were a botanist and a doctor, they didn’t do a very good job. They must have messed up the filtration system. Later, she would discover they had somehow crossed the pipes for the carbon monoxide and the oxygen. It was lucky Lucy had forced her to leave dinner early to go over course chartings for the next few planets. Ordinarily, she hated being indebted in any way to Lucy. Lucy was the ship’s captain, a role which meant she was free to boss Anele around however much she wanted. She made Anele assist her with tasks constantly, likely as a punishment for Anele being there when Lucy had argued against it. But if it wasn’t for Lucy’s vindictiveness, Anele would have been in the mess hall with everyone else when the gas began leaking. She was headed back to the mess hall, hoping to grab some dessert before it was gone, but paused as she reached the double glass doors. It appeared everyone inside was asleep.

“Weird,” Anele thought to herself. Why were they all sleeping in the mess hall instead of their bunks? Was it a prank they were pulling on her, or maybe Lucy? She was so high-strung and rigid, she made for an easy target. Anele studied them through the glass doors, the way they were all slumped over like marionettes whose strings had been cut. The botanist, whose name Anele could no longer recall, traced lazy circles as his body slowly pinwheeled through the air next to a tray of half-eaten food.

“Are you going to go in or float around all day?”

Lucy had caught up behind her. Anele ignored her question.

“What are they doing?” Lucy asked, cocking her head as she kicked off the wall toward the glass. As she took in the sight in front of her, her face contorted in a strange way. Was it — no, it couldn’t be panic. Anele had never seen her panic before. Not during training, or takeoff, or with Alvin. Even after losing Margot and Joko in one fell swoop, Lucy had no more to offer than a slight grimace and some half-assed words of comfort. Anele wasn’t sure she had ever met someone more emotionally repressed. Maybe this was Lucy laughing. Anele wouldn’t know, she had never seen it. That must be it. Lucy was laughing because of the prank. Just, silently. She was a silent laugher. Anele began to laugh with her.

“Oh god. Oh my god!” Lucy grabbed Anele’s sleeve. “Get out of here, come on! We need to get to the suits.”

“Calm down, Lucy, they’re just playing around. They’ll wake up soon.” A slight buzzing sound seemed to begin, though Anele wasn’t sure from where. Her thoughts felt funny, slow, like they were moving through syrup. Lucy grabbed her wrist, and it hurt, and she wanted to be mad but she couldn’t remember how. She was moving through the air and she wanted to stop but she didn’t have the strength and couldn’t the strangely frantic person pulling her just stop and let her sleep? She didn’t protest as the stranger shoved a helmet on her head, and yanked a spacesuit up and over her legs, forcing her feeble arms into the holes. The sterile, stale air from the oxygen tank filled her helmet. It was like breathing caffeine. Anele’s head began to clear, syrup turning to water, and her thoughts could suddenly swim again. Why was she wearing a suit —

“The mess hall!” Anele shouted. They had to go back and save everyone. Lucy, also wearing a suit now, was furiously typing away at a computer. She didn’t respond. Oh, right. The helmet. Anele turned on her comms.

“Lucy, the mess hall! We have to go back!” Anele pushed off the wall and began pulling herself back towards the mess hall.

“Stop.” Lucy said. Anele ignored her and kept going.

“Anele, stop. You can’t save them. Look.” She flipped the screen towards Anele. Anele recognized the page immediately. Crewmember vitals. She had pulled the page up often before, at night when everyone was asleep, to stare at the red bars that marked Alvin, Margot, and Joko. There were only two green bars now.

Anele and Lucy settled into a routine shockingly fast. They discovered the source of the carbon monoxide leak and fixed it (Lucy had picked up engineering within two days, because of course she had). They pumped new air into the ship. The bodies of their crewmates were stowed away neatly into the travel cryo-chambers. Anele could almost convince herself that they had just tucked in for the journey home early.

There was a brief argument, when Lucy and Anele disagreed on whether to continue with the mission or return. Lucy said that if they returned, their crewmates would have died for nothing. Anele pointed out the sunken-cost fallacy in Lucy’s argument, and Lucy ignored Anele. So they continued their exploration of the galaxies, orbiting planets and testing their atmospheres, collecting and sorting tidy little samples for scientists to study back home. Anele and Lucy ate all their meals together, in silence for the most part. They no longer had sessions. Anele had tried to continue, but Lucy had staunchly refused. She had grown more repressed and withdrawn than ever, but Anele found herself seeking out her company anyway. It was strange, the effects of loneliness on a person. If someone had told her at the start of her mission that she would be purposely spending time with Lucy, she would have laughed in their face. Lucy moved into the bunk above Anele. Neither of them said a word about it. Anele grew chattier than ever, talking between bites of meals and late into the night at her bunk, or while following Lucy around the ship. Lucy still rarely responded, but it was different. Before, it was clear she was deliberately ignoring Anele. Sometimes, she had even caught Lucy sighing as Anele launched into a new rant. But now, it was as if Anele could see her absorbing the words. Lucy’s stony exterior had turned spongy, and she couldn’t stop herself from soaking in Anele’s chatter. Once, Lucy admitted that sometimes, she felt like they were the only two people left in the universe.

Their strange existence as a pair lasted for a year. Then, Lucy began to ignore her again, worse than before. She couldn’t even look Anele in the eyes anymore. She spent all her free time at the main computer, reading a message from Earth that she blocked Anele from seeing. Anele could tell it was the same message, she had gotten a partial peek at the subject title a few times before Lucy could stop her. It read “URGENT: NOTIFICATION OF EARTH’S-”

Though Lucy never revealed anything, Anele suspected that the message was about Earth’s restoration. The scientists back home must have figured out a solution to save Earth. It was a load off, honestly, it put a lot less pressure on their mission to find a new habitable planet. Anele still remembered the anxiety she had felt boarding the ship as the crowd waved to her. Some of them were crying, some laughing. The SCYLAX crew held the world’s future in their hands. Anele found it hard to comprehend. All those people, relying on her? Well, not her exactly. She was just the ship’s psychologist. Their hopes rested on the others in the crew. They were the serious, focused kind of people that seemed destined to carry the lives of others in their hands. Not Anele. It was her friendly, non-confrontational demeanor and positive attitude that had won her a spot on the ship. Not any kind of competency. She was just there to keep the crew from killing each other. Or themselves. So far she hadn’t done a very good job.

She hadn’t yet found a way to broach the subject of the message with Lucy that wouldn’t result in her shutting down immediately. Then it happened. Lucy had wandered off after lunch, muttering something about checking the course chartings. After finishing her dessert (she was having some with every meal now that there was no worry of running out) Anele went off in search of her. As she passed the airlock, she noticed something strange. A small white pinprick in the distance. They weren’t passing any planets today. Was it a moon? Whatever it was, it was awfully close. She rushed to the cockpit to check. Though not an engineer, Anele knew how to use the ship’s periscopic camera. She used to enjoy sneaking into the cockpit during breaks to observe the planets they passed. She could stare at them for hours. They were like massive marbles suspended in mid-air (there’s no air in space, but you get the picture). She had seen blue and purple and green and orange ones, swirled with milky clouds. She was still waiting for a pink planet. They were supposed to pass one, GJ 504-B, in a few months. She was looking forward to it. She pressed her face up to the eyepiece, scanning for the white pinprick. There it was, to the left of the ship.

“Gotcha now!” she thought, proud of herself. Even Lucy would have to be stoked if this was a new planet. Anele couldn’t wait to tell her. And maybe rub the fact that she found it in Lucy’s face a little. She zoomed in on the white pinprick. It was blurry. She leaned back from the eyepiece, to adjust the focus, and there —

“No.”

She recoiled from the eyepiece. It couldn’t be. She wouldn’t- would she? Anele didn’t want to believe it, but she also couldn’t bring herself to look in the eyepiece again, to see that again. The white spacesuit. The focus so clear, so well-calibrated that she had absorbed the initials, L. C., stitched onto the shoulder of it with blood-red thread, before looking away. The mighty, formidable, indomitable Lucy Cortez, gone.

Of course, she panicked. Just for a day or two. She ate almost an entire month’s worth of desserts and cried in her bunk and screamed into her pillow. Healthy coping mechanisms. How could she have missed this?

She found the note tucked under Lucy’s pillow. “I’m sorry,” the note read. That was it? That was her whole apology? For giving up? For leaving her all alone? Icy rage replaced her grief. Fine. She would do it on her own. She would prove to Lucy that she could complete the mission without her. She was capable and competent and —

Anele lasted six months before she gave up. There were still six planets left on her list, in four different galaxies they had been meant to explore, but she couldn’t do it.

“They’ll understand on Earth,” she thought, as she climbed into the travel chamber. They had to. How was any human being meant to go on like this? Besides, she wasn’t a botanist or an engineer or a doctor. She was a psychologist. She wasn’t qualified to do this research. This wasn’t her job.

“This was a task for a team, not an I,” she reasoned, as the icy air began to seep in, the lid of the cryo-chamber locking above her. She took comfort in the phrase. She was an “I” and she had no team, and they had to understand.

Anele spent the week before the return staring out the airlock at the green and blue marble that was steadily growing larger. If only the cryo-chamber hadn’t woken her up so early. It had been planned this way when there was supposed to be samples to prepare, a crew with tasks to complete. Anele had nothing to do besides stare out the tiny circle of warped plastic.

She hoped Earth hadn’t changed too much, though she knew this was futile, considering how many years had passed. She wasn’t a physicist, but she understood time dilation well enough to understand how long it had been since they had left for their journey. She hoped Earth wouldn’t be mad at her for failing their mission. By now, they must have found a way to fix everything, right? She couldn’t read the message Lucy had been so obsessed with. Her clearance wasn’t high enough, and she didn’t know how to update it in the system now that she was technically captain of the ship. She assumed that was why Lucy had decided to…leave. She just couldn’t continue now that their mission was unnecessary. She couldn’t face the thought of returning, almost the entire crew sacrificed in an effort that had been made superfluous by Earth’s restoration.

Anele tried contacting ground control to let them know she would be landing soon, but she got no response. Something must have been wrong with comms. She didn’t know if it was a computer issue or mechanical. It didn’t really matter which it was. She wasn’t Alvin or Margot. She didn’t have Alvin or Margot. But they would know what was happening when they saw the SCYLAX breach the atmosphere, and someone would come and get her.

“Someone is coming for me.”

She comforted herself with the thought as she strapped herself into the pilot’s chair.

“Someone is coming for me.”

She wrapped herself with the words, protection, as the ship began to plummet towards the ocean.

“Someone is coming for me.”

She extinguished the flames of panic with the mantra as the ship hit water.

“Someone is coming for me.”

She repeated the phrase to herself as the ship began to drift.

“SOMEONE IS COMING FOR ME.”

She screamed it over and over as the days began to pile into weeks which formed months as the food ran out and her ship continued to float. The words tucked her in as she lost consciousness, slipping into sleep.

“Someone is coming for me.”

Endling was originally published in Revellations on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Look up,

I beg of you.

Pull your eyes from the cracked concrete

And monotonous trek.

Shoot your gaze past the metallic ache

Of man.

You will find a painting there.

It coasts through the mountains.

It pours along trees.

Look up,

At where the sun

cradles the horizon,

Where the clouds scrape land.

It bathes the world in eternity,

With each brushstroke carving

Pink,

Blue,

And golden hues

Into the wind.

Look up,

Is all I ask,

Even as your feet ache

And your mind strays.

The trees that rustle with time

Will carve a song

And the mountains that kiss the sky

Will still greet you after so long.

Look up, was originally published in Revellations on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The summer heat is stagnant
An oppressive force
Barely moving with the slightest breeze
From a fan on full blast
Everything is withered
Unwilling to spend the energy to move

But somehow
Time sneaks by
On quiet feet
Just loud enough to hear
If one really listens

And before it registers
The heat is fading
Leached out of the world
Like color from a painting
Left too long in the sun
Nothing but the imprint of a memory
Sun bleached and faint

And fall sinks it’s claws in the world
The sharp point of leaves
In vibrant colors
Poking at the soul
As if broadcasting their brilliance
Will cause us to forget
The poison of the passage of time
As if autumn isn’t a reminder of the fall,
Of death

Because time is running away from me
Sprinting toward the sunset
On a summer day
I don’t want to end.

Summer’s Evening was originally published in Revellations on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Lights!”

The principal’s voice came at first from the dark gymnasium; then the students seated in rows could see that the stout, middle-aged man had really been standing behind a podium set up in the cleared court in front of them, his face pinker than usual under the orange neon lights.

“Music!”

The electric speaker coughed before spitting out a single line of Mozart’s Waltz.

“He Tao (walnut)!”

And this was the moment the children had been waiting for. The cheering and shouting reverberated in the empty gym as a walnut, the size of a basketball, Michael-Jacksoned his way onto the center stage.

“Tao, Tao, Tao.” The cheers continued as the students welcomed their favorite science teacher, Mr. Tao, to take his place next to the podium. A few kids even attempted to run up to give him a hug, which the sensitive Mr. Tao felt and responded very gently by simulating a bear hug in the children’s minds. After the chaos died down a little, the principal started again:

“Welcome to the first-ever ‘Build A Body’ festival! Today, you will be gathering any materials you can find on campus to build Mr. Tao a body!”

The giant walnut shrank a little, then expanded back up, talking to the children as air molecules formed into sound waves by moving through his vibrating grooves: “Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for coming today. But as you scavenge around, just stay away from the toxic waste, don’t get close to anything sharp, and please, please, nothing from the science classroom. And oh yes, it is quite hot today, so don’t forget to drink water and use the bathroom. And — I almost forgot about this — when you touch anything that is black outside, it is going to be hot from absorbing all that sunlight, which we will be learning about next Monday. So just be careful. Alright, everyone?”

And with that, the students scattered to find anything they could get their hands on to build Mr. Tao the most beautiful, perfect body.

Just in case you were wondering, Mr. Tao hadn’t always been an elementary school science teacher. In fact, before he landed this job, he had been a cleaning person, a doorstop, and a prop in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (he played the giant Talking Head). It’s a long story, so how about you grab some hot chocolate, find a cozy spot on the sofa, and close your eyes. When you do, I promise you will see the story unfold before your eyes.

Do you see it?

“Grandma, I am going out!” A boy shouts at the door. He has a new T-shirt and khaki shorts on, and a barely visible scar on his left cheek from catching an escaping chicken from the coop.

“Alright, Xiao Feng. Bring me a couple of tomatoes. We are having 西红柿炒鸡蛋 (tomatoes & eggs) for dinner!” Grandma shouts back from the kitchen. We don’t see her face, but from her voice, one can imagine a well-dressed but bad-tempered old lady.

Xiao Feng hops on his bike and zooms through the neighborhood. Beijing is organized in rings: there are five rings in total, with the Forbidden City right in the middle, encircled by the 1st ring, while anything outside the 5th ring is considered to be the outskirts. Xiao Feng lives on the edge of the 4th ring, where the stone road is dappled by shadows from ancient willow trees. In the spring, the willow catkins fly out like cotton fillings in pillows, so the whole street becomes a place of dreams.

His grandma has always wanted him to go to a college inside the 1st or 2nd ring, to go to the center of the city with its high walls and hard concrete. This migration inward has been a generational hope and aspiration for the rural villagers, where their only way out is to go in.

Xiao Feng turns around and goes for a shortcut his friend Da Lei told him about before summer break started. He soon bikes into a little grove — a site that has been “under construction” for years as the government promised to convert it to a park. But the effort has been delayed indefinitely. Some say the government is experiencing a shortage of money; others claim that the government is secretly using it as a military base. The day Xiao Feng ducks under the yellow “Do Not Enter” line, the place is still filled with bricks, half-cut logs, and a few vacant trucks parked inside.

According to Da Lei, once he enters the “park”, he should walk straight north until he comes out on the other side, where he will find himself across the street from the grocery store. But at one point, the needle on his compass starts rotating frantically: north sometimes becomes northeast, east, or south altogether. If Xiao Feng knew any basic science or understood how magnetic fields work, he would be afraid and perhaps turn around. But then, he would never meet the alien who eventually becomes Mr. Tao.

“Ouch.” Something hard-shelled falls on his head. The world is temporarily dark as Xiao Feng closes his eyes from pain. He is reminded of the time when a giant grape fruit fell on his head when he was trying to reach for a pigeon’s nest. When he opens them again, a walnut, double the size of his head, is standing in front of him. The walnut, of course, has no legs, but Xiao Feng feels that “it” is standing– there is something about the posture that reminds him of the proud chicken in his backyard.

The walnut stares right into his eyes — your eyes — and listen! It is speaking!

“Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello…” The voice slowly dims out, like an echo in between two mountains — except the mountains are on the walnut. It is a walnut filled with grooves and ridges, dips and hills, like a complicated map that can only be read by the wind.

Now that he has had some time to observe the curious object in front of him, Xiao Feng sees that it resembles the Chinese mythical creature 饕餮 (Tao Tie) from 山海经 (The Classics of Mountains and Seas), which is the animal form of ancestral gods, its big eyes capable of seeing the ghosts and sprites unwilling to let go of their previous worldly lives. And for a moment, he forgets to be scared.

“Is that your brain? Where is your body? Can you tell me your name? Do you have a name? Where do you come from? Are you lost? Do you need my help to get home? Are you hungry? My grandma is making some tomatoes and eggs tonight; you are welcome to have dinner with us.”

Imagine the walnut scratching his head — if you could, because let me tell you that Sidurian alien is confused. He doesn’t know earthlings can be so… inquisitive. For a while, the walnut does not know how to respond. Now, keep in mind that this walnut used to be a professor at the SEA, or Space Exploration Academy, who was eloquent enough to debate against 20 other experts in favor of sending spaceships to search for extraterrestrial life, so it is quite rare for him to be speechless.

Seeing that the walnut is silent, Xiao Feng is now recalling his grandma’s teachings to never ask a stranger too many questions. But before he can apologize, the walnut chuckles (the sound of soap bubbles popping). “Do you know where I am from?”

Xiao Feng shakes his head.

“26 thousand light-years away from Earth.”

“Is it far?”

“Very, very, very far indeed. It took me just about 30 thousand years to get here since our spaceship can not yet travel at the speed of light. And that is why I don’t have my body, because it is too heavy to bring along with me.”

The walnut doesn’t really know why he is telling a young earthling all of this. Maybe it is because he wants to prove himself right: that interstellar travel is worth the energy expenditure, that it is possible, though separated by thousands of light-years of distance, to establish a connection with another intelligent species in the universe.

Now it is Xiao Feng’s turn to be silent. He knows that this walnut must’ve come a long way, because his grandma only used two “very”s when describing how far his parents are working to earn his tuition. And this walnut used three “very”! How afraid and lonely must it feel — traveling for so long without even his own body as company!

Broken beads of coldness dampen Xiao Feng’s face, and to the grown-ups reading, of course, you would not understand, for you have lost that soft part of your heart that weeps when it feels for others’ sorrow. But to the children, they feel; they feel the most deeply and personally, so that when they can stand the pain no more, the blood pumping into their hearts turns into the rains falling down from their eyes to moisten the desert that is people’s apathy.

And the walnut is startled. He has never seen water flow out of a creature’s eyes before — for Sidurians do not cry; their eyes, having evolved in the harsh arid conditions at the center of the galaxy, have lost the ability to cry to conserve water in the body. Though the walnut fails to understand Xiao Feng’s behavior, his brain, which also happens to be his whole self, nevertheless detects that the energy field around Xiao Feng has changed. The neurons move in a senseless manner; the potential voltage fluctuates; the electric signals become intense yet lost in the intricate maze of Xiao Feng’s brain. The walnut reasons that he must have upset the kid in some way, and that the sudden randomization of the electromagnetic field has also disrupted his own, which he has worked hard to maintain in equilibrium. Though he does not understand tears nor sadness, connected by the interactions of the electric field, he can feel it. And he wills the frantic activity in Xiao Feng’s brain to stop.

The walnut has never tried to manipulate the brain waves of someone who is not a Sidurian before. But he figures that getting closer would probably help, so he hops toward Xiao Feng and rests gently next to his feet.

The scene is a weird one. A kid sobbing, weeping as a giant walnut nestles gently by him, shrinking and expanding, as if patting the kid’s calves.

Back at 实验 (Shi yan) Elementary School, a girl found an abandoned pigeon nest in a tree, but her tiny body could not reach it. Another kid soon spotted the nest as well and began to run back to the gymnasium for a ladder. But the girl wanted the nest for herself, and as she stomped on her feet for a solution, she remembered Mr. Tao’s teaching to close her eyes whenever she needed help.

And there, she saw it: a rock flying in an elegant projectile motion and hitting the nest with a bang. No, no, no, she shook her head. That won’t do; she wanted a complete nest for Mr. Tao. So she closed her eyes again, imagining the tree in her head, and willing for the nest to grow pigeons’ wings and fly into her hands.

The kid who ran to fetch the ladder came back empty-handed, for the teacher had deemed it too dangerous for him to use it. Seeing the girl had her eyes closed, he, too, closed his eyes.

“Are we seeing the same tree?”

“Yes.”

“Can you picture the nest?”

“Yes.”

“Want to help me get it?”

The girl imagined the boy had nodded his head.

I wouldn’t bore you with the “developmental stages” of the story, about how Xiao Feng brought the brain back home with him, how the well-dressed but bad-tempered grandma was furious at first, how she learned to make peace with it once she realized the walnut could do chores and read the newspaper in Chinese. Tao was mesmerized by the Chinese language; there were words that sound the same but mean different things, and words that sound different but mean the same things.

Had the alien landed anywhere else in the world, he probably would have spent his entire domestic life in peace, making philosophical musings and cultural comparisons — but no, he landed in Beijing, the bustling capital of China, where no matter whether you are a singing elephant or a talking walnut, you have to get a job. Grandma — and I feel that at this point we should give her a name — or, Qing Lan, is quite keen about this. She insisted that Tao must get a job. In her own rather pushy string of questioning, she explained the reasons:

“How else will you be able to make a living?”

“How else would you be able to get a wife?”

“Don’t tell me you are not marrying because that’s what Xiao Feng’s mom told me, and she got a whipping from me.”

“And think about it, you gonna have kids? Kids use up so much money, oh god, they need to go to school, and they grow so fast, you gotta keep buying clothes for them.”

Now Tao understands where Xiao Feng gets his habit of asking too many questions. What bothers him is that Xiao Feng also seems to think he needs to get a job. But his reasoning was:

“I am at school most of the time, so who is there to keep you company?”

He clearly didn’t think Qing Lan was the appropriate company for Tao, and he was right, for Qing Lan was increasingly treating Tao like another grandson, and she was copy-pasting all the hopes and standards she once applied to him onto Tao. (I must say something here in Qing Lan’s defense. In her eyes, Tao looks no different than a newborn baby, and a highly intelligent one. It is really hard for a Chinese grandma to not fulfill her responsibility of helping an especially bright child to reach his potential — which is too bad for Tao, because he is neither a kid, nor very bright, nor used to the Chinese granny way of thinking things.)

All in all, Tao decided to get a job, and Xiao Feng decided to help him.

Tao’s resume, drawn by Xiao Feng:

Name: [crossed out scribbles] 核桃 (He Tao)

Education: [flowers] [flowers] [question mark]

Expertise (in Pinyin): Cleaning floors [happy emoji], being a good friend [drawing of a boy holding a basketball that looks like a walnut], doing some air stuff [drawing of a basketball that appears to be yawning but is really blowing air]

Experience: interstellar travel (again in Pinyin) [sun] [moon] [happy emoji] [shock emoji]

Thank you for considering Wali’s application. We love him [heart]. We hope you love him, too! (omitting 100 more heart emojis here)

I hope that it is no surprise to you, dear reader, that Tao did not get a job. The few jobs he did get, such as a doorstop and being a prop in a movie, were really by accident (the doorstop job is an unpaid one, and the director who was doing a Chinese version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz happened to be a friend of Qing Lan’s). Tao is not discouraged, though; Xiao Feng is, and Qing Lan is just disappointed.

But then comes the time for school to start again, and now Xiao Feng is a 5th grader; he is having some more (or so he thinks) complicated and intelligent thoughts.

“What if you come to school with me, and enroll as a student?”

Qin Lang adamantly refuses. She wants Tao to do chores for her. But the next morning, Xiao Feng puts Tao in his backpack and brings him to school anyway, because that’s what ten-year-olds do: they defy orders from the authorities.

(Is that hot chocolate you were sipping at the beginning getting cold? Go ahead, heat it up, because I am about to get to the good part.)

It is a math class, and the students are learning about cubes and symmetry planes:

“A cube has 9 symmetry planes.” The teacher says to the children as though it is obvious.

But then she seems to remember she at least needs to pretend she cares a little, and acquire some evidence of understanding from the students before she moves on, so she does what every teacher loves to do — ask a follow-up question.

“Can someone tell me why?” And she utilizes her teacher’s power to call on a student she thinks is listening.

“Xiao Feng, you answer this question.”

So Xiao Feng stands up, because he is a good student — or at least trying to be, because it is the only way to repay his parents’ hard-earned money, and because he wants to make Qing Lan happy. But he stands there, half-opening his mouth, then closing it back up. He can feel Tao moving in his backpack, and he is temporarily distracted, but he forces himself to look at the blackboard, and he forces himself to think. But his brain is stuck in mush.

“Xiao Feng?” The teacher is impatient.

There, he sees it! A cube, which seems to be floating right in front of him, yet he knows a cube cannot possibly be there — Unless! Unless it is in his imagination, for he does see a cube and a plane cutting through it. He can rotate it if he wants, cut it in half, change the color of the cube, and do all kinds of stuff he’s only seen magicians do on TV.

“Yes, it has 9 symmetry planes because when you cut it this way,” he twists his arm in a certain direction, “and this way”, points at another direction, “and this and this and this and that way, you all get a cube that is evenly split into two identical halves.” To the students watching, Xiao Feng is doing a dance routine of some sort, waving his arms all around.

The teacher is satisfied, or pretends to be, and Xiao Feng is allowed to sit back down.

Back in Shi Yan Elementary School, the boy was holding a long stick poking the nest, as the girl held a blanket below, preparing to catch it at any moment.

Inside the classroom, a kid fetched colorful crayons. Another grabbed a ruler from his backpack. Someone outside was picking daisies and dandelions; a kid was trying to catch a fish in the pond; someone over in the storage room found an old sports Jersey; a girl peeled off a piece of wallpaper from the science classroom; a boy was taking Newton’s cradle; another one — God forbid — brought with her a suspiciously-looking green liquid in a beaker.

The kids did this all while Mr. Tao waited silently in the gymnasium. He knew, very well, that if he’d wanted to see what these kids were doing, he could. If he wanted, he could even tell the kids what to get and what not to get, and it was probably for the best if he did so. But as a Sidurian, he knew the right thing was often not the best thing to do; and as a teacher, he knew he had to let the kids just be kids sometimes.

And if he was being honest, there was also a selfish reason behind this: he wanted to know how the kids saw him in their eyes. Would he be painted in pink? A superhero with wings? Or something else altogether? Mr. Tao wanted, at least for once, to see the kids’ imagination play out on its own course, to be a bystander, to not interfere with whatever curious, messy, complicated stuff that was going on in a bunch of young earthlings’ brains. And to just be — be whatever they imagine him to be.

Dear reader, there is a moment in this story where you, too, must take the lead and use your imagination to fill in the gaps. I do not know how or why or what happened for the principal to hire Mr. Tao as a science teacher. But then again, it is not the first time the Chinese educational system has experimented with a different way of teaching. In the over 3000 years of history and across the 80 dynasties, the testing and the criteria have changed no less than a dozen times: from Chun Qiu times when Confucius made education accessible to the peasantry class, to the Tang dynasty when the government adopted the Imperial Examination, to the Song Dynasty when the examination emphasized more the ability to produce original arguments than reciting old ones. Every time a national change is about to take place, there is always a first province, a town, a village that is selected to be the experiment. And it seems quite fitting that Shi Yan Elementary School has been selected in this case, as Shi Yan (实验) literally means “The Experiment.”

But I must admit, as I’m sure you will soon agree with me, that Mr. Tao is — in some weird sense — the perfect science teacher for children in elementary schools. There is one thing Xiao Feng has forgotten to put in Mr. Tao’s resume, for he can not only control sound waves but also electromagnetic waves. By altering the configurations of his own brain, he can send electric signals and interact with neurons firing inside other people’s brains. When the alteration and the frequency are just right, he can create certain images in the student’s head, so they can “see” what is in his or their imagination. So now science teaching is never confined within the tangible; it takes a leap into the abstract, the surreal, the unearthly.

Mr. Tao’s teaching has very little unnecessary talking; being in his class is like embarking on a hitchhiker’s journey to the universe. To allow students to experience the addition of velocity, Mr. Tao places the children on an old green train that was once the only means of transportation in the 80s in China, and they ride on the slow train, and experiment with throwing a baseball inside of it. Of course, Mr. Tao does not know what an 80s green train looks like, but he’s heard Qing Lan describe it. It is a lesson taught through generations of memories, interwoven between galaxies.

Imagine this:

The baseball flies on the cranky train, and whenever Mr. Tao clicks on the baseball, it stops in mid-air, showing a profile in the children’s peripheral view. On the profile are the mass and the speed of the ball in the x and y directions. As he speeds up the train, the speed of the ball would stay the same. Then he takes the students off the train, lets them stand on the platform, and observes the whole baseball throwing all over again, but from a different reference frame, which shows the speed of the ball increasing as the train’s speed up.

So the students stand inside a shared imagination, waiting, as Qing Lan once waited for her mother to come back from the city, as Qu Yuan once stood by the Miluo River waiting for the emperor to call him back to court, as Li Bai once did on Yellow Crane Tower waiting for the sun to set., It is not the same sun that Mr. Tao has seen on the Sidurian planet, but somehow, it doesn’t matter. The light, the packet of energy, the photons, are all the same.

The beautiful scene cannot last for longer than 2 minutes before Mr. Tao yells at the kids, “Bai Yun, stop trying to climb back onto the train!” or makes sure Xiao Feng didn’t try to slip out of his view and open his eyes. To truly engage with the students’ imagination, Mr. Tao decides to go further.

“Does anyone want to feel what it is like to run on top of a beam of light? Let’s give it a try and see if we can outrun light!”

So the children hop back onto the train, but this time, they are on top of it, and they begin to run as Mr. Tao starts to increase the train’s speed exponentially (the train is infinitely long, so there is no danger of falling off). At first, nothing happens, but then something weird occurs.

“My body! It is disappearing away!”

“My belly is gone!”

“My nose!”

“My double-chin!”

As the children keep running, the train beneath them starts to glow so that, eventually, they are really just running on a beam of sunlight. And as they run, their bodies are contracted in the direction of motion until they all become two-dimensional figures that have no width. Of course, the students do not feel any actual pain — Mr. Tao makes sure of it. Seeing the students jumping, laughing, and chasing each other on top of the sunray, he suddenly has an urge to invite them to Siduria, to show them his home. They remind him of his nephews and nieces, who love to sit on his head as he strolls around the street. When all features blur under the high speed of light, the earthlings look no different than the Sidurians.

[Content warning: You might want to grab yourself a tissue box before you proceed reading. Crying is allowed, but please don’t get my story wet.]

Mr. Tao doesn’t know if he is also experiencing arthritis like Grandma Qing is. Although he has no joints, his entire brain starts to hurt. When he looks at himself in the mirror, he can tell that he has shrunk, and the ridges and valleys on his surface are less pronounced, which makes talking more difficult. He knows, although unwilling to admit it, that his time has come.

Back in Siduria, they were only able to send over his brain, as his entire body is too heavy, and the spaceship would require a lot more fuel to arrive in the same amount of time. The plan had originally been that they would send over his brain first, where it would wait for the body to come in the next 50 years. But Mr. Tao doesn’t know if he can wait that long. Without a body, he has to rely on moving through air molecules, and the wind brushing past him constantly dries him out faster.

He tries to hide the fact that he is drying out by taking a long bath every night before going to bed, until Granny Qing finds out. One night, she calls him over to her bedroom for a conversation.

“Tao Tao, this teaching position is tiring you out.”

Mr. Tao sits down next to Qing Lan and begins to smooth out his wrinkles.

“I am doing just fine, don’t worry about me. It’s just that Beijing can get so dry in the fall.”

Qing Lan reaches for her hand lotion on the dressing table. “Here, have some of this.” She squeezes out some lotion and spreads it on Tao’s face.

“Ah! I can’t breathe!”

“Oops, sorry, sorry. I’ll wipe it off. Old people can’t do anything right.” Qing Lan gives Tao a sad smile.

“I don’t know physics and space stuff or anything like that, but can you just tell me what is going on?”

Tao can’t give Qing Lan a sad smile to let her know that he tried but failed, so he allows her the liberty to imagine it. That is what connection is truly based on, he has discovered after being on Earth long enough: a shared imagination, a knowledge of how someone feels without needing them to tell you because you already felt it.

“Grandma, what if I can’t make a living, what if I can’t find a wife, if I don’t want to have children, and maybe I do, but I can’t pay for his tuition.”

And these, translated in Qing Lan’s imagination, become:

Grandma, what if one day I can’t make a living to support you, what if I disappoint you, make you sad, angry, and can’t do anything right when I am not even old enough to have that excuse?

What if one day I am not here.

What if.

Qing Lan doesn’t say anything. She has never been particularly good with words — they never mean what she actually wants them to mean. So she gives Tao a hug. A bear hug.

Xiao Feng, eavesdropping at the door, decides to say something at that moment. He’s watched enough movies and read enough comic books to know that this is a hero moment. And he understands enough of all the physics and space stuff, which Qing Lan does not, but he does because he has spent hours on the internet trying to figure it out. Or should I say, that he understands just enough for a kid — enough to be hopeful and think that a body is all he needs to save Tao. And he does want to save him, his best alien friend, his favorite science teacher.

So he pushes open the door, holding back tears that are threatening to overflow, and says in his best hero voice,

“We will build you a body.”

The students were starting to come back with a handful of stuff they’ve found around campus. So, part by part, tissue by tissue, tape by tape, the children built Mr. Tao a body.

The neck was a half-eaten cucumber from a kid’s lunch box; the chest had yellow daisies, and there were wings made out of chalk. The belly button was the pigeon nest; the legs: one was a rolled-up poster found in the hallway, and the other was three stacked-up basketballs. In-between places were colorful ceramic shards, potato chips, torn-out textbook pages, and little LED lights stolen from the Christmas Tree in the storage room.

It was hard to describe what Mr. Tao looked like — certainly not human. But then again, he was never a human to begin with.

“Where is the arm?” The principal was watching the entire time as the student worked on the body. The kids looked at each other. The legs were for walking so Mr. Tao wouldn’t have to be bouncing around all the time; the flowers were there so Mr. Tao could smell the nice fragrance whenever he wanted to; the LED lights were there so no one would bump into him at night and break his body. But arms? They never thought Mr. Tao would need arms. After all, he had learned how to hug them even without arms, and for the children, that was more than enough.

And as the children were working, Mr. Tao was shrinking and expanding; his grooves and ridges were vibrating. No one had ever seen an alien cry. But these children, they did not know Mr. Tao was crying. For all their naivete, they thought Mr. Tao was laughing. What they did not know — and would never know — was that Mr. Tao had secretly altered the neuron signalling of their brains so that they would think he was laughing. Because they had not yet developed the cognitive ability to understand happy tears, and Mr. Tao wanted to make sure that these children knew he was happy, unbelievably, incredibly, immeasurably happy.

Later in the week, when Mr. Tao walked into class with his new body, he would talk about the non-conservation of mass.

When an object is broken into tiny parts, the weight of the sum of parts is less than the weight of the original object. Why? Because it takes energy to hold those tiny pieces together, and energy has weight. But what Mr. Tao really wanted the children to understand was that in order to make something whole, it takes more than just mass. To make someone whole, it also takes love, and the children’s love for him was really quite heavy.

Build Your Science Teacher A Body was originally published in Revellations on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

More vibrant than sunrises;

The former’s angry flare

Of copper wiping blood over the sky

The sun gasping violet before going quiet,

The latter’s furtive tiptoes

After the night’s mourning

Shaky blue breath into brass

Why do I find the sun’s death

More beautiful than its birth?

A bright warning before dark

More comforting than

The light at hardship’s horizon?

Perhaps it is the night’s chivalrous constance

Loyal in its presence

It is easier to prepare for war

Than for dawn’s domesticity;

The night can guide my galley

Breadcrumbs across the sky

But once the sky clears,

I must chart my own waters

Sail to unknown harbors

Perhaps it is easier to hold on

To the light, arm in arm in dance

Until the sun collapses,

Than to brace for its coming absence

Parry and persist in pushing

Cold steel away

Hoping a morning star won’t

Get to your head

A mirage before orange ends the siege

It is easier to expect the end

Than to imagine a beginning

Night’s Edge was originally published in Revellations on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Cold and heavy in my mouth,

As we stare into each other’s copper eyes.

With each piece of blazing coal

Falling from your lips,

I am suffocated

Until time becomes elusive.

The sphalerite tears stabbing my eyes

Do not fall,

Even when my head threatens to topple

From limestone shoulders

And succumb to flooding heat.

Dumortierite cracks where I step

In my attempt to escape,

Leaving rivulets of molten ore

Tearing through the world’s floors.

It creates islands,

Separating ruby hearts.

Stained and scuffed,

We can now only watch the other from afar.

But the smoke of coal obscures

Our copper vision,

Creating mirages of diamonds

And iolite,

Disguising the painful, raging division.

Minerals was originally published in Revellations on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Eggs.

Chatter.

Milk.

Chatter.

Bread.

Chatter.

It was impressive, honestly. He didn’t seem to require oxygen at all. Maybe he was an alien. Or a robot. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Esther sighed as she rolled into the produce section. George took no notice of her. She picked a few red apples, then a bunch of near-ripe bananas. As she wheeled past the grapes, she gasped, the cart coming to a screeching halt.

“Persimmons!”

“What?” George asked.

“They have persimmons!” she repeated.

“You know, interestingly enough, there’s been a scarcity of persimmons in the past few years due to a drought in the area of China where they’re grown, which reminds me…”

He started again. Esther stared at the persimmons. Maybe she was imagining it, but she felt as though the drought was visible in the persimmons. She felt as though would have known something was lacking even if George hadn’t told her. Or maybe it had been too long since she’d had a persimmon. They weren’t as vibrant as she remembered. They lacked a certain zhuzh. Or maybe they had never had zhuzh.

A Scarcity of Persimmons with a Certain Zhuzh was originally published in Revellations on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I don’t believe in forever
Not when there’s no promise of tomorrow

Because I need hope to be certain
And wrap myself in cynicism

And good things come to those
Who already hold them in their hands

And no one is destined for greatness
For all fates lead to death

And the world spins slow and cruel
With the inevitability of change

So I don’t believe in forever.

But if this moment was my lifetime
I know I’d die without regrets

And if I could bottle your laughter
It’s sweetness would last like honey

And I’d proclaim my love in sharpie
Along the white walls of our house

Because your name sounds like infinity
Tattooed inside my heart

So I don’t believe in forever
But with you I wish I did.

Forever? was originally published in Revellations on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.