Bedtime Stories
2020 Scholastics Art & Writing Awards
National Gold Medal
Illustration by Julia Cheng
Vignettes
- 月 yuè, moon.
- craters
- 天 tiān, sky
- typhoon
- 倒影 dào yǐng, reflection
- Shapeshifter
- 日 rì, sun
- supernova
- 生 shèng, life
- bedtime stories
8 | supernova
I was eleven when Jun began smoking menthols.
Everywhere he went, Jun carried with him the scent of ash and fire. Cheeks gaunt and limbs awkwardly long after his growth spurt, my brother was a walking matchstick, threatening to shoot up in flames at the smallest spark. He didn’t need to hide the boxes from Ma, either—she spent more time at work, mopping the floors of offices downtown, than home.
“It just makes you feel stronger,” he explained when I found the box kicked under our bed. “Sometimes it makes you feel all loose. And sometimes you feel like—like you can do anything.”
That matter-of-fact air he’d always used when we were kids was long gone. I haunt Jun’s room sometimes, looking for the boy he’d begun hiding by chasing sensations & empty friends.
The last year of high school opened up on a ruthless battleground, with expectations hanging over our heads like a guillotine and the uncertain prospects of our futures rooting us in place. Everyone wanted to escape the suffocating walls of this little town, you could feel it—in the rolling rejections that felt like missed lifeboats off a sinking ship. After all, there could only be one sun in the sky.
They say the class president fell asleep one late night, and his heart never woke him back up. A month later, they began to board up our rooftop.
The empty desks in our classes grew like cavities, empty sockets that seemed to swallow up the entire room. Maybe when I was younger, I would’ve imagined them as as the craters falling stars made, tearing blazing trails behind them before they crashed into the charred earth—but death, I knew now, was hardly ever as glorious. Less like a supernova, Jun would have said, more like a black hole.
On her eighteenth birthday, Liz died from organ failure, her self-starved body still laying on her bed until her mother found her. The years and schools had pushed us apart, but when I stepped back into her room, the walls plastered with sun-faded posters and carpet still littered with magazines, it was as if time had stopped flowing for Liz long ago.
How does the sun continue to rise every morning, knowing he is the last one in the sky?