Navigating the Margins Volume 2 (eBook)

A Collection of Stories by High School Students

Percie Musselman (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
264 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3178-1750-3 (ISBN)

Infos

Navigating the Margins is a writing program funded by a grant through It Gets Better with the goal of creating a short story collection of the same name, featuring high school student writers within the Howard County Public School System. Each student author was selected to participate in the program due to their strong desire to write, improve, and share their stories. This short story collection features the stories students wanted to tell, and to read. From fantasy and dystopian fiction to realistic school stories and murder mysteries, this volume contains stories told by teens with one common thread... a shared commitment and desire to become professional writers. This is the result of our second year of the program.

Percie enjoys writing, reading, cheering on their fellow writers, playing golf, working backstage in Theatre, and listening to Hamilton in the car. They hope to write and publish stories that expand the margins of writing and inspire others to write their true selves.

Textauszug

Before There Was Nothing

by Madelyn Schuster

Before there was life, there was matter. Before there was matter, there was nothing. Before there was nothing, there was God. I have existed longer than the oldest of craggy and desolate planets. Longer, even, than the concept of existence has existed at all. I am the almighty Be All and End All of all things.

Before creation, I existed in a state of deafness and blindness, floating empty and nonexistent, and Being in a spaceless womb of unknown origin. Time stretched across the boundless nature of the void without any meaning at all, crawling along in stifling silence. To the courses of the planets, suns, and creatures of my mind, I am all-knowing; to my own existence I am as hopelessly dumb as the worms that crawl ceaselessly through the soil of the planets. On they crawl with no knowledge of why they are here or of anything at all. And yet they keep crawling, their pink skin stretching and condensing over and over again until the day comes once more when the equally endless cycles of the planets shift, changing them into something else entirely. For now they sew the soil for green things, and thus preserve the life I have created. The love I have for them—for it is certain that, if nothing else, it can be called love—is a thing as complex as a string cradle strung between the plump fingers of a child. At once, it is the love of a mother for her children and the love of an artist for his masterpiece, and yet I often wonder if my creation, my baby, is worth nothing more than the faintest of passing daydreams.

At this moment, at any moment, on some planet tucked into the warm and infinite folds of the universe, a child concocts a fantasy to while away a hazy afternoon. In all likelihood, the boy will have forgotten all about it the moment the school bell rings, but it serves a function, a purpose. However, it is still a lie, albeit a harmless one, that he has told himself. Often, I wonder if my creation is the same way.

And yet, I carry on creating, and the worms carry on crawling, all without an inkling of knowledge about why we do so. Each day I create new blazing suns for steadfast planets of gas and rock, some barren and forlorn craters and some teaming with life more varied and complex than the universe itself. Each day, my creation grows. Each and every day, the universe expands like the iridescent and fragile film of a soap bubble, stretching evermore as it floats through the air, reflecting a thousand colors in the sunshine, though I have never truly known why. Is it simply a way to pass the endless spiral of time before me, or is there more meaning to it than that? My mind flips between the two like a flipbook, a paper animation on an endless cycle of the most simplistic of gestures. It is when I flirt with the latter of the two options, that all I am and everything I do serves a purpose, that my mind graces the notion that ignorance is necessary to that purpose. If I knew of the place or of the mind from which I had come, would I continue to add to my creation? Would I do so with the passion and care that I do now? I couldn’t say.

On some planet of mine, there is a man who preaches in a stone building multiple times a week to a congregation that listens with a range of captivation and tedium. He believes in a cobbled together welter of answers to tormenting questions, so much so that he has dedicated his one life to teaching it to others. If the people who showed up to listen to him knew the answers, if he himself knew, he wouldn’t be preaching at all. But when those people gather together, they share something. They share a small bit of peace, a piece that brings them closer together, draws them toward each others’ arms in a way that makes my weltering love for them grow ever stronger.

If ignorance among them has led to something like this, something as beautiful and accidental as the curves and ridges of a conch shell tossed among the deep and multi-colored waves, it seems possible to believe that I haven’t wasted my time, as ceaseless as it may be, that all this matters in a way that is more than just the fillings of perpetual time.

Still, this could be nothing more than Hope, something to cling to in order to prevent losing my mind to the Nothing that is all there really is. There’s no way I’ll ever know.

I suppose I take some solace in the fact that many of the more complex beings in the universe have been drawn down the same path I have, the same questions. Though, it is impossible to know if I am the cause of this behavior, if I have subconsciously swirled it into the pigments of their genetic code as early as the earliest forms in which they began or if this is instead merely a hard byproduct of thinking and feeling, there being nothing I could have done to alter this effect. On most planets, they fill the holes in their knowledge with stories, something that makes my heart swell for each and every one of them each and every time. It’s that same accidental beauty all over again. The sweet creations of my sweet creations spread from one to another, packed with more substance and meaning each time. Over and over and over again, no matter what physical form life takes, they dream of a creator God, a being above them who knows all and is all. I’m not like their gods. No, that isn’t fair. I am their God. I am their creator, after all. I listen to their prayers, after all. But, I am no great bringer of justice or peace.

And yet, my creations continue to tell stories of their creator. I’ve heard stories that serve just about every purpose a story can serve. They entertain crowds of people, make them smile, make them think. They lull children to sleep and teach them how to stumble down the short road of their lives. They preach to the masses about love and sorrow and kindness and death. These stories dampen eyes and clog throats, it sends laughter bouncing off walls and rocks and bones. They speculate on the deep recesses of space that only I am privy to, and even those things that I am not. These stories ebb and flow between minds like water down a stream, life after life and story after story, shaping, adding to the compendium of those after it. My people tumble over sharp river rocks and trickle down beautiful waterfalls, their stories changing with their lives, always flowing right along with them.

When times are good, when the water is calm and pretty, some thank me. This always feels better than one might imagine. These beings that I have created, these miniscule collections of atoms and molecules, are my greatest joys in my endless life. They are but tiny specks in the great magnitude of my creation, and yet they feel and think like I do.

Tiny and miniscule is exactly what they are. No matter what I do, no matter what planet and what life, the same thing happens. After ten, fifty, eighty, one hundred, perhaps even a thousand years, depending on circumstance, their organs halt work; the precise factory the body once was becomes a place of sterile and empty shells. The brain that spent a lifetime being crafted and carved by careful and careless time and experience stops its busy whirring. With death comes tears, prayers, guilt, and grief.

Often, my little people dream of an existence after the one that ends with their bodies, one in which their lives swirl on and on forever. Time and time again my creations have promised ongoing life, of one kind or another, to their children and their friends and their sick and dying. And they use that promise as a rag to dry their tears at wakes and funerals. Watching this never fails to send a pang through my heart. Because I have the ability to create such a place. I could bring forth a Heaven where I may be near and speak to those I have created and loved for so long. Time and time again, I’ve been on the verge of doing just that, but each time I think better of myself. I watch those I have created age and wither, acquire gray hair and wrinkles and liver spots and crow’s feet while I remain as unchanged as the void of my own making, where I am eternally ensconced. Unlike me, their time alive is fleeting. They dance, they drink, they cry, they kiss, they tell stories and teach one another. They fight, they kill, they hurt, all as quick as a two-step, feet landing over and over on hardwood floors, all out-of-sync and imperfect but loud as the music that drives it all forward.

My life is a slow one. I crawl by, millenia by millenia. I move inch by inch without moving at all. My life is one of silence, broken only by the faint groans of my ever-turning planets.

Such is a life that knows no end, and the idea of dooming my creations, even the worst among them, to a life like mine is even more unbearable than watching them age and die in what seems like seconds, no matter how long it may seem to them.

And so, every life ends. Every sun explodes, every planet goes cold, every worm goes stiff in the afternoon sun, and every pair of eyes shuts for good, or else remains open: milky, unseeing marbles to be trod upon by beetles and buzzing black flies who will themselves die one day. Death is as varied and differing as life is. Often it comes loud and thundering like the crack of a rifle, bringing with it bright red blood gushing from mangled flesh, littering the world around it with its scarlet stains. It happens to anyone at any time, and the universe carries on without them. Billions of times my name has been cursed for wounds and gore and those wide, unseeing eyes. They get down on their knees in churches and temples and mosques and plump mattresses and prison floors, demanding to know how I could let this happen....

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.11.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3178-1750-3 / 9798317817503