alter ego

Sophia Pan, United States

I.

dead things are fascinating. i once brought a goldfish home, its body sparkling in the three pm

sun like firecrackers on new years in fluid motion, i thought it would melt through the ziploc

baggie. that night watching my father arrange plastic parts in its new plastic bowl, you wished to

be among the fishes if only to take rest in the purple corals placed with visible care. a week of

admiration daily before you saw it belly up, so relaxed you wished your body could contort like

that. you watched as i threw the carassius auratus with a lifespan too short to get a name down

the toilet—clogging it—and wondered why i was crying; you would have dessicated the corpse

paper thin to pin like a freak trophy, you swam alone in the water all evening.

II.

when i became conscious enough to hear hushed tones and side-eyes, i tried to lock you away

somewhere, quietly crinkling tape over your eyes to tear my corneas away from hex code shade

#652A0E, dried blood encrusted roadkill that made me want to vomit. you would stand there

staring at maggots burrowing their way from the spilled guts of a shriveled squirrel to its empty

eye socket, flies so thick the air moved in black plumes on canary yellow pavement markings. in

company, you never looked for too long.

III.

you were fascinated by the deeper layers of blue so entrenched they were black, plunging me

into lifeless abysses on the web so your eyes could feast on the abstractism of the bathypelagic

abnormalities. social media pasted “pick-me”s across feeds, so i told you to be regular. you

thought i sounded like my mother, always looking for more horrors in the mouth of a child, like

yanking out a tooth: a tepid probing of the gap to fill, my free-will the dentist peering in,

looking-glass self be damned.

IV.

purgatory is a place of limbo, when the heavens don’t feel like comprehending the complexity of

a schoolgirl’s plight. brain and flesh conjoin, wisps of light-grey cloud the soul freefalling into

dreams; i close my eyes and will for a microscopic lens into the threads of ash.

V.

under cover of nocturnes, you took my pupils beneath the pale haze of a moon, we fled to the

scene of a once dead star. i lifted your lock to witness the miracles of dust, an animal alive in the

spirits of the giant oak’s shadow, gathering acorns. you fed our soul a beam of the dark, sprayed

it like glittering drops of water that dripped on my eyelash, why, how things got beautiful in the

dusk.

VI.

we found second chances in aquariums, in fish tanks under fake solar lights: i fed the betta fish

dried flakes that clung to surface tension, seven days in we named it blue after the iridescent

navy it wore like a string of pearls. you placed plastic purple corals in the upper left corner of the

glass box. we swam in the luminescence all night, i wished i had gills.

VII.

dead things are fascinating. i once brought a childhood pet home in a patch of fresh mulch

scented with monsoon, gave it a tiny grave while you dripped in the corner. We buried the hole,

blue & fish flakes & purple corals whole and i ask you why you’re crying.

you and i are still

the same body, breathing, yet

this time it's not me.

Sophia is a junior currently attending Adlai E. Stevenson high school. She enjoys reading poetry as a hobby, and writes historical research papers that have received recognition in the John Locke essay competition and Scholastic. Outside of writing, Sophia also likes long distance running, and runs on her school's cross country team.