Anna Teng // For <strong>The</strong>o // honorable mention Stephanie Lie // Rice Bowl 5
Kate Bullion // Smoke and Smiles <strong>The</strong> little girl sat in her room, puzzled by what she had just seen. She stared out at the spiraling snowflakes streaming from the sky. Yet her eyes were not focused on the crystals. She had long forgotten that her original intention upon arriving home had been to check how much snow her modest little town would be receiving. Alone after school; she had flipped on the black box sitting on her kitchen counter, praying that the magic screen would inform her that conditions would make school unsafe the next day. A meteorologist popped out of the black, in the midst of prattling on about an expected thirteen inches of accumulation. <strong>The</strong> slight, nimble figure commenced to twirl around the kitchen table, her laughter sparkling around the room like the ice outside. <strong>The</strong> sprite grabbed the phone off its receiver as she whizzed by, and, stopping mid-spin, she began punching in her mother’s number. But a new image on the screen interrupted her thin thumb in its descent. She looked upon a photo of two tan, tough-looking boots at the base of an odd-looking black pole. At the top of the pole rested a thick inverted bowl. <strong>The</strong> little girl giggled, reflecting that if she had been told to make a sculpture it would have turned out much better than this one. However, as she focused more of her attention on the screen, she realized that the black portion of the arrangement was no ordinary pole. It was a gun. A big gun. And the oddly-shaped bowl was not something out of which she would ever find herself eating cereal. It was a helmet. <strong>The</strong> scenario made little sense to the young mind, and soon a reporter’s voice floated through her confusion, only adding to the chaos of the girl’s thoughts. She caught the phrases, “three new deaths this week” and “withdrawal of troops” along with words she didn’t understand, like “suicide bomber” and “al qaeda.” <strong>The</strong> screen proceeded to show images of fiery explosions, heavy trucks zooming across a desert, crying men and women. <strong>The</strong> child was horrified. She threw down the phone, which she had been clutching tightly to her breast, and snatched up the remote. Yet as she scrambled to send the terrors before her back into darkness, the images shifted again. <strong>The</strong>re was a low, grey-brown building on the outskirts of a sprawling town. Filing into it were children, children about her age. <strong>The</strong> girl’s fears shrank and were replaced by a hesitant curiosity. She watched in rapture as the newscast took her through an off-white door into a simple classroom. In the space, the children, and what appeared to be a schoolteacher, were smiling unabashedly at two men dressed in thick vests and heavy helmets. But despite the busyness of the scene, the young girl’s eyes were drawn to the men’s footwear. <strong>The</strong>y wore boots. <strong>The</strong> same boots as those that had been used in the strange sculpture at the beginning of the broadcast. <strong>The</strong>se two tall figures were handing out pencils and notebooks to the children in the report, and the little outside observer was amazed by how elated the students seemed. <strong>The</strong>y were only receiving school supplies after all, just pens and paper. She watched, befuddled, as the report ended with a shot of a boy’s dark beaming face. He reminded her of one of her classmates at school, a boy with whom she had talked not even a half an hour ago on the bus ride home. Abruptly, a blaring commercial burst onto the screen, and the miniature body quickly switched off the box. She distractedly mounted the stairs, contemplating in her adolescent thoughts all that she had just witnessed. A story beginning with death and fire had ended with smiling faces. Faces so small, so similar to her own. What did those men in the boots understand that she didn’t 6
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