The Fountain 2024-2025

The Package of Opportunity

Anonymous

  She sees a silhouette peeking around a corner “shit,” she murmurs, knowing she's been spotted. She continues walking back to her house, staying out of the streetlights. She opens the door and turns the lock rapidly. She squints her eyes, looking through the blinds without opening them, attempting to see the street. She looks to where she saw the shadow minutes ago, but it’s gone. “Fuck,” she says under her breath, stressing the k sound. She turns her head, careful not to brush the blinds. With her head cocked to the left, she looks at the street. She inspects the hedge of bushes that lines the sidewalk, looking at their shadow on the ground. She sees someone walking there, she can tell they're being careful to stay in the dark. If she weren’t staring, she wouldn’t have noticed. She wouldn't be able to see them without opening the door, which she can't do. The package clutched tight in her faintly clammy hand served as a reminder. 

She needs to pull herself together; she'd give herself some grace since it's been quite a few years since she left this business in her past. She knows giving grace will get her killed or worse, though, so no, she can't afford that. She needs to get out of her head and calm down before she makes a stupid mistake that’ll cost her her life. She steps back from the window and door, collecting her thoughts. Ok, package secured, but someone knows she has the package, and now they know where it is and, of course, where she is. She can’t leave the house because she doesn’t know exactly how many people there are, so it’s not worth the risk. She pads up the stairs, feeling in the dark; she doesn’t want to confirm her location with anything unnecessary. If whoever's outside isn’t one hundred percent positive on her whereabouts, she won’t confirm. She walks into the room, thankful that she's memorized the layout of the house within the few weeks she's been here. Moving often to stay safe had become a part of the job; she can't keep ties with many people or places for more than a couple of months max. She’s learned to be forgettable, constantly being ready to disappear in an instant. 

Even though she's no longer a field agent, her years of training will forever be drilled into her. If anything, switching to a case officer role after the incident has taught her even more because now she can look at a case from two perspectives. If she wants to make it back to being a permanent field agent, she must deliver this package back to HQ. She opens her closet and pushes past clothing she’s never touched. She grabs her bag, which stores her laptop, and closes the closet. While the house is decorated to appear like it’s lived in, none of it is essential to her and is more or less just there for props to give the house a lived-in appearance. To be fair, though, this is her favorite safe house she's stayed in. She walks over to the dresser and grabs a photo, which she tucks gently into her waistband. On it are two girls and two women. The girls are looking at each other mid-laughter; it’s visible that they love each other. The women were smiling adoringly at the girls, but you could see the slight tension in their faces. All four looked similar, from their tight curly hair to their smiles with full lips and noses.

 She ties her locs up into a ponytail on the back of her head. Typically, in a situation like this, a field agent would call their case handler and they’d strategize on how to efficiently get said agent out of their situation, but she’d taken on this case by herself, so she’d finish it the same. She swings her bag over her shoulder, tucks the package into the inside of her shirt, and goes back downstairs. 

The doorbell rings, she takes off her bag swiftly, and checks that her watch is still on. It always is, but she can never be too careful. It’s her only tie to humanity, or really, just other agents. Having a phone makes an agent traceable; it’d jeopardize missions and leave them constantly vulnerable, so they all have a single watch from HQ. 

She stuffs her bag in a hidden compartment, built into the dining room table, and treads lightly toward the door, ready to get this over with. 

The doorbell rings again before a sharp bang is delivered to it. The door is between two walls. She spider crawls up so she can balance directly above the door. She knows they won’t patiently knock for much longer, so she presses her legs in opposite directions, keeping herself up. She waits. With just her luck, they'll hopefully be inexperienced hired thugs that just want to make quick work of their job so they can get paid. She hears murmuring, just as she expected, followed by another loud thud. 

They were going to try and break down the door. Honestly, how dumb do you have to be? What idiot would hire them? They have no type of decorum or common sense. At the very least, they could’ve attempted to pick the lock or something logical. 

She knew the door would break within a couple more firm jabs, so she braced herself against the walls, listening to the wood below her splinter. It burst open. She looked down, observing their builds, deciding what would be the most effective way to get them out of her way so she could finish with her operation. She drops from the ceiling quietly after they decide they’re going to split up. The moment the first guy walks away, she jumps down, knowing it’d be most effective to knock him out since he was a bigger guy.

 She strikes him in the back of his head with the bone of her wrist and fist. He falls with a loud thud. She hears the footsteps of the other guy pause from a different room. “Vane?” She heard the other guy call. Obviously, there was no response. She hears the second guy walking back towards her. Without warning, she feels a blinding pain in the side of her neck. Before she can reach to feel her neck, she falls to the floor and sees two pairs of shoes in front of her. 

She abruptly wakes up with an ear-splitting, hair-raising scream. She's in a bright white room. She's wearing a hospital gown, her hair’s down. She sits up in her position, where she was previously lying on the floor. Then bright lights flood her vision, “Good, you're up. Someone will be with you shortly,” she hears over a PA system. She thought, keeping her face stoic, she stood up and inspected the bright room. There's nothing in it, not a bathroom, not water, and no areas where they'd slide in a tray of food or anything. Only one solid door. She looks up, there's a single camera; it has no blind spots. Ok, so obviously she won't be kept in this room permanently, they’ll be moving her. 

She thinks about how she got in here in the first place: one, she had just knocked out one of the two guys that had broken into her house, two she had heard the other one walk back towards her and was going to face him when, three she felt something hit the right side of her neck, she brushed her neck while remembering this, then she had hit the floor. She had seen two pairs of shoes in front of her before she passed out. Wait, how were there two pairs? The other guy was already knocked out. She thought back, rethinking the whole night. Damn it, of course, there were three of them. She forgot about the one she had seen walking in the shadows earlier, she could tell they were going about it discreetly, attempting not to be caught, they were going about it with finesse that the other two clearly didn’t possess. The two who broke in were meant to be a distraction, and she fell for it.

 After all her years of experience she forgot about such an obvious detail and screwed up, now she's locked somewhere and an escape route has yet to reveal itself. Beating herself up about it right this second, though, won’t fix the situation. She needs to think. “DAMN IT,” she says loudly, her stoic expression breaking, realizing now the full severity of her situation. Her being kidnapped, fine, whatever, it’s happened before, not the biggest deal in the world. Her watch and package, though, are gone. Both of them. She’s screwed. She’s so so so so screwed, fuck.

 She hears the door open slowly, and she turns to face it swiftly. “How nice to see you again,” she registers the voice before the face. The room starts to spin. This can’t be real. The person steps fully through the door, and she sees that it’s her cousin. More specifically, the one who attempted to kill her and then proceeded to try and steal her identity. Namely, one of the little girls from the picture she carries with her, or at least used to. She looked back down at her hospital gown, then at her wrist, and glared at her cousin. 

“What do you want?” she said.

Not Ethnic Enough

Anonymous

I am 10, riding a taxi in Shanghai. The driver is holding a comfortable conversation with my mother that I chime into whenever my need to contribute exceeds my social anxiety with unknown adults. My mom mentions that I am from the United States, to which the taxi driver seems shocked. I feel a surge of pride and a small smile bubbles to my lips.

I am 12, sitting in the car playing with the frays in my zipper as my dad re-recites his childhood story to me. He was valedictorian, an absolute prodigy who spent spare money on textbooks he ingested so completely he could prove all the theories in there himself. His score was so high on the gaokao that he could pick and choose whichever college he wanted to attend. My father speaks of the difficulty of Chinese education and the gaokao with a clear stroke of pride. He gives me a look through the car mirror with the silent reminder that I, as a child born and raised in the U.S., work much less hard and have an easy education. I pull at one of the threads in my zipper, watching it unravel.

I am 15, standing at the doorway of a family friend’s house. They compliment my Mandarin. My parents are frantic to correct them, mentioning how much better my brother is. My throat twists a little. I awkwardly raise the corners of my mouth and wait for the conversation to shift.

I am 16, standing in the kitchen as my parents scoff at me. They question my decision to sign up for AP Chinese. Countless car rides, always the mention that I don’t even need to hope– I can only get a four.

My face screams my ethnicity to the world, but I have never felt like a true Chinese; I can barely write, can only read basic texts. My parents imprinted a glorified image of China and what it meant to be Chinese in my head. They looked down on my embodiment of this image and made me feel as if I was truly the furthest thing from Chinese possible while sporting a face that deceives others into thinking they have found their kin. I hated asking for help with my Chinese homework because of the relentless comments– comments of horrification about how easy my work was and why couldn’t I just get it myself? I began to feel the need to hide my ethnic ties, not for shame of my culture, but the shame that I couldn’t live up to it.

Hiding this part of my identity left me with a slight emptiness that I, for a long time, hardly noticed. It was better than confronting my inadequacy in being Chinese. Thus began a twisted cycle of turning away from my ethnicity, becoming less adept at the language and increasingly unfamiliar with the culture, then turning further away from my ancestry. Appreciating an aspect of your identity should not be an exclusive thing. You cannot be not-Chinese-enough to celebrate this part of you, and how is one supposed to become more wrapped in the culture without starting somewhere?

Over time, I have also found my parents’ glorification of the Chinese education system to put down the U.S. system unnecessarily. While drilling school education into children and teaching high levels of difficulty in classes may be the strategy in China, this system has its merits and respective challenges too. The U.S. system rewards self discovery– here, performing well in school is not enough to be at the top. There is only so much you can learn from textbooks, and so much more life can offer. My father may have been valedictorian, but I juggle countless extracurriculars on the side which take hard work. There is no one way of working hard that is inherently better than the other, and my parents do not understand this because they grew up under such different societal conditions.

Where We’re From

A selection of lines written from prompts on slips of paper by LS students during the Identity Fair in May, arranged by Newt Barletta

I am from dogwood trees

From blue collar and factory workers

I am from the books I read

I am from hagel slag and toast

From challah with salt and Manischewitz wine

I'm from adobo

I'm from krumkakes and sarcasm

From vacuums and frypans

From the blind trust to the superstition 

From art collecting

I am from lilacs,

the stars above to the core below

From guitars and injured animals

I am from oatmeal packets

From black coffee and beech trees

I'm from Italian cookies on Christmas and Easter 

From bleach and tide pods

From being destined to drop out and graduating next year

We are from moments, family traditions, good food shared 

and household chores, brought here, together.

Silence

MS

Silence was a word unknown to the small river, a seemingly unimportant stream that led absolutely nowhere. The humans that lived nearby would never imagine the torrents that had led to this tiny trickle; great waves that had swept through, covering the night, rendering life inconsequential. Instead, they only noticed it as a minor inconvenience, something annoying but not significant enough to put effort into removing. Little did they know the river knew everything, hopes and dreams shared through salty tears, history born of now-smooth rocks. The only thing it had never known was silence. 

A cacophony of noises, previously beautiful - the frogs croaking, hydrogen and oxygen bound together burbling over stones - had become chaotic as the highway had been built and children began to shout in the houses nearby. With this noise brought struggles, not for the river - for it would always remain, even when it eventually evaporated the drops would inevitably find a new place to settle and learn - but for the life within it. 

Where silver streaks of minnows used to dart through its shallow crests, now straws and other debris floated softly. This trash, the unloved castaways of the humans, did not want to be there either, and yet the life that once inhabited the stream had no means of removal. Instead they continued to live, against all odds, until one by one, the families of dragonflies and moss, the stray crane and spider, ceased to visit, ceased to exist, either by forgetfulness or death. 

The only ones left were a brood of mosquitos who deigned to stop by in the summer, feasting on flesh, a quiet vengeance for the ecosystem that had left. After gorging on the scarlet that spewed from tender skin, the female dropped to a pool of dew on a nearby leaf, laying her batch of eggs. 200 not quite glowing orbs sat and sat until they were no longer stagnant balls, but wriggling larvae, live and squirming against each other. Satisfied, the mother fluttered above the stream, proud of her work, as the river looked on approvingly, glad to have someone to continue its legacy. 

It shuddered though, an unnatural blip in its otherwise steady movement as something plunged into its track. Rubber soles disturbed silt as clouds descended on the once peaceful scene, the mother flying into a panic, the larvae not yet wise enough to be scared. The clouds descended with an aim to choke, reaching down with an unmerciful hand to close eyes softly, leaving all who were there gasping for air. Apparently, the mother’s meals had not been taken kindly by the humans, and karma had been taken into their own hands. As she fell, twirling down and down and down, only to be carried into the water that had once been a safe place, the river sighed.

For now, at night, when the cars stopped, and the children were in bed, and the water flowed not strong enough to burble over the stones, it knew, for the first time, silence.