We took pity on Arkansas
Cherry blossoms Image by Getty Images
Editor’s Note: The Forward is featuring essays, poems and short stories written for our Young Writers Contest. Today’s entry was written by Nora Wyrtzen, a fifteen-year-old student from New Haven, Conn. You can find more work from our young writers here.
Spring, and pale pink cherry blossoms kissed the earth with gossamer petals; lamenting their unborn offspring. I had an older sister who still played in the dirt and a neighbor who knew more than we did, but had decided she wasn’t ready to outgrow childhood. It was spring on Belmont Street, and we had a bright red wagon and we were sure that we would be going places.
Contestant: Nora Wyrtzen is a fifteen-year-old student at Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven, CT Image by Courtesy of Nora Wyrtzen
She introduced herself as Adele, “like the singer,” between mouthfuls of microwaved mac and cheese, sitting on her front steps of the purple house across the street. Towering over us, she resembled a lofty fortress of thin limbs, crowned with cropped, snowy-white hair. She had a brother, Henry, who used to come out and give my sister Lola and I piggy-back rides and frozen waffles. Back when he used to paint his nails and grow out his hair. Lately his toenails have been bare and he’s developed an aversion to the outdoors.
It was spring, and we were bored, and had exhausted the supply of neighborhood cats to terrorize and wood to drive meaningless nails through. Adele was homesick for Ohio, but didn’t really want to go back. I wanted a snack. All Lola wanted was an excuse for not cleaning her room. We weren’t really in the mood for a road trip, but we didn’t have any better suggestions either, as Adele pointed out. We would go to Arkansas, she decided, as the self-appointed higher authority. She said she’d always pitied Arkansas and its general neglect by the majority of the world, and besides, she liked how the word felt when she said it.
We tied empty handkerchiefs to sticks and set off down the street towards what we decided was Pennsylvania. I had to pull Lola because she was older and genetically lazier. We were actually making good progress until we got hungry half-way through what we imagined to be Kentucky. So we had to make a detour to Wisconsin for some strawberry cheese danishes. When we got to the busy avenue that marked the border between Missouri and Arkansas, we had to turn back as we were forbidden from crossing it. But it was, after all, spring, and we had sticky fingers, and we were happy.
Henry was sitting on his steps when we arrived home. He began to lecture us on the stupidity of trying to travel hundreds of miles in a wagon, but trailed off mid-sentence, staring mournfully at the sky.
“I was thinking, Adele.” He ignored Lola and I, having decided that we were younger and therefore not worth his time. “I was thinking, about how people are dying all the time. I read somewhere on the internet that two people die every second.” He paused. “That’s six people gone in a moment and I’m not even sad. Isn’t that sad, that there are people dying and we can still feel happy?”
Adele’s eyebrows were genuinely trying to understand what he was saying, but eventually gave up. Whatever deep philosophy Henry’s ten-year-old mind had conjured was wasted on his older sister.
“I guess. Henry, you’re so pale, you really should come out more. Why don’t you come play soccer in the street with us?”
He shrugged silently and turned to go inside. “Wait, Henry!” His hand paused on the door knob. “Are you sure?”
He walked inside.
Soon the cherry blossoms would decompose into a brown paste that coated the sidewalks and the insides of our lives until rain came. And Lola would break the wagon trying to ride it down a hill backwards. And Adele would leave for Ohio and return wishing she had never left, because nostalgia is a cruel, cruel thing. And Henry would emerge from his obsolete world to taste the sunlight again. And I would watch days decay into years slippery with soapy memories, trailing suds behind them.
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