A much celebrated and reviled Nass tradition. To telescope, writers write a brief 300 word piece on a theme (this year, “melt”). Then, a 150 word piece. Then, 75 words. Then, 37 and a half. You’ll see.

By Emily Yang

300 words:

The following is an excerpt from Current Exhibitions at the Museum of Melting.

 

EXHIBIT A: Ice cube, melting. An interactive installation inviting visitors to engage with the physicality of water and its phase transitions. This piece investigates the form of matter and inevitability of entropy. Visitors are encouraged to watch the ice cube in an experience blurring the line between visual and performance art.

 

EXHIBIT B: Upside-down ice cream cone, melting. A critique of consumerism wrapped in a warm waffle cone, this sculptural encounter interrogates the waste generated by societies of consumption. Though this is an interactive exhibit, visitors are strongly discouraged from eating ice cream off the floor.

 

EXHIBIT C: Several clocks and watches, melting. This installation symbolizes the multiplicity of experienced time: we abide by arbitrary social constructions of time while simultaneously having the capacity to redefine it. We’ll admit, this one has been done before, but who doesn’t appreciate a reminder that time is a construct? 

 

EXHIBIT D: Glaciers, melting. Visitors are confronted with the reality of anthropogenic climate change and its consequences, embodied in the form of three glaciers in an air-conditioned room. We’ll admit, this one has also been done before, but will be shown with all-new exhibition pieces!

 

EXHIBIT E: Sticks of butter and margarine, melting. A commentary on domesticity and interiority, represented by the slow but constant transformation of melting butter and margarine sticks in a mixing bowl. Be sure to check the Museum Events page for upcoming baking workshops and an exclusive recipe for buttercream frosting!

After your visit to the Museum of Melting (MOM), we encourage you to stop by the Museum of Modern MArt (MoMMA), which is currently displaying a limited series of immersive installations including Watching Paint Dry, Watching Grass Grow, and Waiting for You to Leave This Exhibit. 

 

150 words

7:44 PM. Monday, in the dining hall. 

 

Porcelain bowl, metal spoon. If this ice cream doesn’t melt by 8:00, I’ll eat it myself.

 

One scoop of Chocolate Thunder, one scoop of Cookie Dough. I like flavors with texture, names that need to be explained with more than one word. The ice cream bar had toppings today, so I went all out: chocolate chips, chocolate sprinkles, whipped cream, and two blue M&Ms. 

 

This is a slow process.

 

Anticipating it now: the melt. Yes, I live and relive this transformation: once by imagining it, once by seeing it happen.

 

Time is a slow motion drip to me. But in the bowl, the ice cream particles are working as fast as they can. Wiggling their toes back and forth to the beat of entropy — heat exchange, with tap shoes on.

 

What’s the line between solid and liquid?

 

Molecule by molecule, the structure

shifts.

 

75 words

Molten butter sunshine moved in blinds,

Mundane as metamorphic rock.

 

Mold and moss manifested on my nose;

It made me itchy, morose.

 

Of melancholy melodies and mashed potatoes,

I don’t know which magic I’d miss most.

 

I’ll admit, mail might’ve reached you

Better than muttering in meadows.

 

Message by mockingbird, next time.

Can I offer you an M&M in these trying times?

 

Hey, stop being so melodramatic.

Wasn’t there something you were meaning to do?

 

37.5 words

My ice cream was melting into spools of yarn. Threads caught in my teeth. 

 

I’d like to melt into your arms. Tell you my secrets. Tell you my fears. 

 

But I won’t. Oh, I couldn’t give you my—

 

By Sasha Rotko

300 words:

When I fell in love for the first time, something happened to my heart. Physically, I mean. If I had taken out my heart that day and held it in my hands, I would have seen something melted, like liquid chocolate, ready to be dipped in-to. My heart has hardened over time. I’m not quite sure how to describe it to you, but the heat went away and the cold front moved in and my heart, which had been liquified is now congealed all inside my chest. It remains amorphous, in some shape no one has ever likened to a heart–but it isn’t melted. You cannot dip in-to me like you could before, not even if you wanted to, not even if I wanted you to. 

 

I don’t want this all to sound like some sort of cheesy metaphor. It isn’t. This is actually what happened to me. The splatterings of my melted heart stick to the inside of my ribcage, cold and unmoving. My aortas lead to nowhere. My heart doesn’t beat, but it hums, and this is how I know it is alive. I’m not sure where the blood is coming from, when it starts coming out of me, because nothing has been pumping it through my body because my heart melted the first time I fell in love.

 

I walk around with stars in my eyes looking for the fix for the mess in my chest. I watch the passersby with ambition. I watch from my perch all the potential heat sources, holding my heart out in my hands, waiting for some old flame to melt it again, so that I can shape it again, so that I can put my aortas back in their place. This is a pragmatic search. Love is a utile thing.

 

150 words:     

I sit here with my mother at the counter and I watch the pot on the stove emit criminal fumes into the clear Connecticut air. I watch my mother watch the pot on the stove. Sometimes she stirs, sometimes she changes the burner heat. The room starts to stink as the cheese melts. In French, fondue means to melt. In English, it means stinky cheese or sweet, sweet chocolate made gooey so that we can dip things into it. In ballet, it means to bend your leg in a very specific way. My mother takes the fondue pot off the stove. She puts it on a trivet in the center of the counter. We both stare into the pot, into yellow. There is nothing. It is perfect. I don’t know what to think about this. I wonder if it is perfect because it is natural or because it is polluted.

 

75 words:

I don’t mean to sound all high and mighty when I say, I think it’s kind of stupid that you didn’t answer the text I sent to you, that you didn’t respond to me saying, “Hi, I hope you’re good and Berkeley is awesome.” I did all this work tearing up the scab over the wound you gave me. I did all this work defrosting. Now I’m melted again, and it’s all stupid, all silly.

 

37 words:

I left the oil pastels in the sun all summer while I was away, while I was running, or, as some say, gallivanting. I came back and there was a very pretty accident all over the cement.     

By Sophia Macklin

CW: Illness

1.

She had been sick for a while. Longer than a while. Her whole life, maybe. Once she got so bad, tired of being tired, everyone decided it was time to do something. There weren’t many people she trusted, but that small “everyone” convinced her that maybe there was a treatment out there. She laughed at the thought that help was just hiding instead of non-existent. But she wasn’t too proud to admit that there might be something a little better than the trudge. She was admitted, not for the first time but for the last. 

It would have been worse in the summer. She was grateful for the cold, and she had always hated sweat. The gray of the sky went nicely with the gray of her skin. The flowers were more beautiful because they were the only color in the room. 

She watched a lot of reruns and movies she’d already seen on the mounted tv, not even bothered by the sticky buttons on the remote. Sometimes she’d catch a movie playing two days in a row. That made her feel so good because she could anticipate everything that was going to happen. She would speak all the lines she could remember aloud. 

In the end, there was one thing that she loved even more than the little she remembered of being healthy. When she could no longer eat or even sit up for a straw, she found a friend in faithful ice chips. So good to her. Patient, kind, did not boast. They would just wet her dry lips with their loving moisture, coat her sticky gums in cool water. So soft, she barely had to chew. How long had she waited for something to give her exactly what she needed? How long had she been thirsty? 

2.

Growing up, the fights with his older brother were never ending. They fought about the shower, what to eat for dinner, and who got to drive the car. They were complete opposites; it was a wonder they were even related.

     The day his nephew was brought home from the hospital, premature but gaining strength, he met the beautiful little thing that his big brother took part in making. The baby’s fingers were so small–soft and searching for something to grip. The younger brother watched the new father lean in to say hello, breathing in the baby’s scent. He heard a voice he didn’t know his brother possessed, high-pitched and sweet, as he stroked his baby’s supple cheek.

     In a way, he met his older brother that day, too. He finally saw the heart he had never seen before and watched it melt at the sight of new life. 

3.

I will not unstick my spine from the sheet. I will not wipe my brow. I will not swing my legs around, rise to change the thermostat. I will lie here and feel my thoughts slide out of my sweaty ears, looking for solace on the underside of the pillow. I’ll flip it over soon, press my face into the freshness. For now, I will lie here with my molasses brain, my dew-like skin.     

4.

hot brown butter, thousands of marshmallows,

dip my finger in and singe it.

that huge blue box from the cupboard,

my mom pours the cereal into

to the melted sweetness,

promising a perfect treat if I’m patient.

 

By Melanie Garcia

Doing Home

We’re wrapping up the mixer. Me and the other events planners step around the higher-ups (everyone else) and delicately lead them to the conference room, saying things like, If I may direct you inside, we’ll be starting the next phase of the event soon. They like it when I talk that way. Makes their faces pleasant, which I’ve learned is their closest thing to happy. 

I glide through the multipurpose room. I’m carefully natural here, inconspicuous. I feel myself blending. Usually, The higher-ups laugh at only each other, but they smile at me when I pass. Their laughs and smiles are like the ones in Claritin commercials: neat and oval-shaped. Real people don’t work like that, I know. They make me comfortable and uneasy at the same time. I smile back, which makes them smile more. They like the way I blend well. They like how I echo their smiles. I’ve practiced them in the mirror. I’m their little ripple. If there’s something they love, it’s that.

Soon most of the higher-ups are gone. The ladies and me — I’m the only male planner — pack up. The ladies are feminists, so they take the tables. When I roll up my sleeves and carry three chairs below each arm, they call me a church boy. I laugh big — much bigger than I should.

One of the higher-ups laughs something that’s just beyond a Claritin Laugh. I ask if everything’s alright. It’s nothing, he says. But roll your sleeves back down maybe. He’s smiling all the way up to his eyes, which look a little cruel. That’s the closest thing I’ve seen to happy here.

Just getting the job done, I say, with that light-chested feeling you get when you do something wrong. He waves me off and strides into the conference room.

—

On the drive to my apartment I think of home. Way Back Home. It always comes back when I forget how to blend, because home’s usually the reason why it stops, because home didn’t teach me Claritin Smiles or walking smooth. It taught me church boy chair-carrying and jaw-smacking and knee-slapping and joint-snapping. Good-for-nothing place, I think. It didn’t have anything to give me.

I remember all the times I’ve been back. I stiffen more each time I step in Ma’s front door. Ma doesn’t like how I smile anymore. She says it makes me look stuck. I always try to unstick myself, but I’m a gummy person that Way Back Home spat out a long time ago. I’m a student that Way Back Home stopped teaching how to be home. How to do home.

Do Home. That sounds like it should be sweet. But my breath tastes like seawater.

—

Do Home.

I do work just fine. But doing home? Leaning on the back legs of my chair to holler on the porch is a thing I’ve done a thousand times. But my body’s lost its slack. It doesn’t remember sweating in noontime sun and sticking to the air and to my chair and to myself. It doesn’t remember days so wet, walking’s like swimming.

Home wants me to swim again. But I’ve forgotten how.

—

In my apartment, I sit. At first I feel like I’m drowning. But I know that’s not right; I’m still afloat, still slightly alive. I feel like a sugarcube, dissolving someplace where I’m not allowed to swim.

 

By Isabelle Clayton

Trouble was the boy who rolled chewed gum between his fingertips to paste beneath those desks that only looked like wood. Packs and packs of gum just to leave some trouble-making Trouble-marks. Maybe he wanted to do some justice by his name. Maybe he just wanted to imprint himself somewhere, anywhere.

Clocks turned to dry the spit-soaked gum; beheld a plop-plop-plopping in every classroom. Gum raining down onto linoleum floors. The janitor swept up the gumbits into the checkerboarded hallways where girls wore bell bottoms and walked with their hips swinging side to side. They sipped on lukewarm Fanta; slammed orange lockers hard because they were in high school and the force of their palms on a door felt like a power they never thought they could know. Once, Sloan slammed a locker so hard that the sparkly pink chandelier hanging from its ceiling fell and shattered. Imagine what it must have looked like inside that orange cell as it filled with a thousand sparkling gemdrops, ricocheting around like something alive. 

That year, spring felt more like summer, and the two-mile trek home burned Sloan’s shoulders just as much as it dampened her with sticky sweat. She gripped the railing to heave her haggard limbs up the steps and onto the front stoop, only to find her palms blackened with paint and with rust. Deep breaths in and breaths out. Turn the door handle. Step your right foot inside first. Throw your backpack on the carpet and hurry up to your room. Get under the covers. Shut your eyes. 

But then a bang in the kitchen would jolt the frame of the big, old house, would rouse Sloan from her slumber, as it did, every afternoon. The house was shaking, she could feel it. The neighbors probably felt it too. 

 

—-

Unfurl the covers, just a bit. Sloan’s eyes could peer up to the photographs peeling from her walls; down to the blanket of ink memories laying atop her moth-eaten sheets. Photographs fluttering through the air like ashes around a bonfire. She fascinated herself with these moving faces, places, for fascination could muffle the voices booming beneath the trembling legs of her bed. 

When silence came, so did stillness. Sloan collected her photographs and retrieved the tape. She reinsulated her room until every inch of wall was covered. Out the window, Sloan’s mother knelt among her flowers. In that spring that felt like summer, at least the heat could grow the plants. At least the water flowing down Mom’s cheeks could make something beautiful out of tulips and daffodils; could nurture the bushes to grow up and cover all the paint that was peeling from the exteriors of that ancient house. 

 

—-

 

It has something to do with the fact that every second becomes the past and sometimes, memories do not warm but scorch the skin. You can never know what you’ll remember, can never control what you’ll leave behind for the remembering. Sloan keeps putting her images back up. She’s running out of tape. One day she’ll wake and realize the ephemerality of it all; and her photographs will sleep beneath her bed, obfuscated in dust. 

 

—

The tape has run out. Sloan’s looking out and locking eyes with a pair in the window across the way. Under the sun, the yellow paint is peeling from Trouble’s house. His house, she reckons, is shaking, too.

 

By Sofiia Shapovalova

There is a city that sits in the east, in the grey. Energy’s gift, dropped on the south bank of a clouded river coursing through an ancient, ashen country. It is meant to generate light, but it has been stifled by some coal-fired power that battles with physics. Pulsed, plasma power. The city’s subject to drab, daily schedule. It is peppered with people, barely over some fifty thousand. They are specks in the smoke, easier to forget in the grey which turns blacker by each pass of the night that never ceases its advance into the darkening of this world. 

It is an estimate. One cannot count all the bodies, shaded in this swirling of all colours’ presence and all colours’ absence. With sun’s rise and sun’s set, the residents, like meagre mice, scurry between the dull silver blocks they call shelter and the core of this dying energy. There are hardly any scraps to bring back to the hungry, much less to nourish the grey rotting within their own intestines. It has been rotting since birth. The grey emerges from within – the body, the city, the east. The grey comes with the clink of the boots and the crack of the rifles. The deafening tanks, a sombre occupation. It is not possible to count all the bodies eaten up by the grey. 

When the bodies still breathed, they lined the roads with sand. Barricaded them with bags and vehicles meant to hinder the grey. A refusal to acknowledge. Bring back the gold, they cry. Our golden ages and golden domes! The fields of wheat that bring us our daily bread! 

They are dusted by blood’s rust. The people are hungry while the sky has lost its blue. The grey tears the sky, which tears the fields in its misery. 

 

A leaden war, over two years of violation; the sprawling fields and steppes of freedom turn to sheets of death that no longer dance with the wind’s whisper, under the sun’s warmth. The grey plagues the fields, the grain, the flour, the dough. The bread and the people’s bellies. Out there in the east, only scarlet remains to dapple the numbed soil bathed in unforgiving moonlight. 

The grey snakes past the fields until it has infected each city, stalking through the streets and the stomachs of a ravished nation. The grey has bent and swallowed the light. It is in the cough of the dacha chimney. The goose’s last feather and the serving of kasha scraped in the bowl. Grey like a long winter without snow. Rain with not a drop of heaven’s paint to follow. 

And the waiting. For the sun to return and bring back the gold.

 

Though, such a restoration would not be based on the mere glitter of precious jewels and coins. The gold brought by the sun is found elsewhere. In the bones and the fibres of being that animate this city in the east, built when a bit of the sun flowed down from the heavens and fused itself to the banks of the river. 

The city waits now for the sun to resurrect the gold.

 

Life would flow in the people again. The wind would raise its whisper, run once more through the shining stalks of wheat that sway against the cerulean stage’s background. The grey would fade to brightness. Energy’s gift.