1. When my mother first came to the United States in the 1970s, she was disappointed by the treeless tenements my father brought her to. She had grown up on a bustling island beach in what was then called…
In Sarah Blake’s sophomore novel, Clean Air, the cause of the climate apocalypse comes as a surprise. It’s not rising oceans or wildfires or air pollution. The trees release enough pollen to suffocate humankind: a drawn-out, mass-casualty event known…
“Only you can prevent….” —Smokey LYLAS The ice cream truck is coming. Get moving. Raleigh yanks a drawer: a thatch of utensils skids toward the light, but no loose change. The next drawer resists her tug—promising! Maybe the previous…
They always knock with questions and promises. They assure me that checking these boxes will only take a few. forward. minutes. But time winds serpentine when so many voices crescendo with each box that asks me to fit inside.…
Content Warnings—ableism, audism We corner our resident assistant right outside her dorm room. Her back presses flat against the door. Her hands come up. She is ready to escape, but she is also ready to give a reason. I…
CRAFT is thrilled to welcome Alan Heathcock as guest judge for our 2022 Short Fiction Prize. Heathcock is the author of Volt, a collection of short stories from 2011, and 40, a debut novel that publishes on August 2,…
Content Warnings—cesarean section, traumatic birth I could not milk. Was it due to upset levels of oxytocin, prolactin, beta-endorphin? May have been the morphine pump I kept firing like a trigger from my hospital bed in the postlabor/delivery room.…
We had gone to bed late, on usual terms: “Let’s just talk about this in the morning.” That night we did what we called “No Touch Sleep,” a nickname for exactly what it sounds like, lying next to each…
Thank you for your submission. We must begin with the lines—far too restated in this piece. Like I’ve mentioned before, a good artist looks more at their subject than at the paper. Think about what your mind is naturally…
I We’re closer than sisters. That’s what she tells me on the night of the full moon. We undress in her bedroom and wrap our hair with twine. This is what sisters do, she says, spreading a deck of…
I started writing this story as a means of uncovering something about myself—something about my experiences as a girl, in girlhood friendships. I love stories that are phantasmagorical because once the expectations of realism are removed, you can focus on the subjective experience.
This story focuses on the subjective experience of the protagonist—the way she views friendship, motherhood, family, love, loyalty, boundaries. There are no names, no locations, no real grasp on reality. All we see is her, feeling through little moments and experiences, grappling with her identity and her sense of power. There is the saying, “Watch out for the quiet ones,” and this story is in conversation with that message. By the end, it’s the “innocent” and “naïve” one who lives, not because she stays small but because she reclaims her power and revels in it.
In a way, this is a coming-of-age story that isn’t necessarily pretty or soft. I’ve always thought of girlhood as a kind of inescapable terror. Girlhood is where I found and lost myself, where I created imaginary friends, had one best friend after another, was ditched in school bathrooms, sometimes coerced to be cruel. But it was also where I heard the scariest stories of my life, kept pinky-promise secrets, practiced summoning spirits with makeshift Ouija boards, chanted Bloody Mary in mirrors, felt my body threatened by the neighbor boy, had sleepovers with best friends where we prank-called every boy we knew, and where my mom bought me my first tarot deck.
At that age, every best friend is like a sister.
I find myself endlessly fascinated by girlhood and the psychology of girlhood friendships because it is an age of transformation, which can be both empowering and terrifying. “Terrible things” lurk in every corner, whether real or imagined. How we escape this moment is beyond me. (I still cringe when I read my girlhood diaries.) I chose to write this story with a twinge of horror because it feels most honest that way. What is brutal is also what is innocent.
I’d like to say this story is a love letter to the sister I never had, but maybe it is a love letter to my younger self, who did escape.
ADELINA SARKISYAN is an Armenian-American writer from Los Angeles. She holds an undergraduate degree in anthropology and a graduate degree in social work. She is currently studying Jungian fairy tale analysis. She was a therapist in her former life. Follow her ever-changing moods on Instagram @adelinasarkisyan and Twitter @sheisadelina.
