hybrid prose by olivia van guinn
Mulberry Literary Fresh Voices Award First Place Winner in Prose

A Soft Place to Land

You have plunged to a familiar place. Warm palms pressed to your face are the cranberry punch Davidson spiked without telling anyone, and your ears throb with EDM. Two globes of strobing disco lights do little to offset Mr. and Mrs. Gordon’s mellow ceiling lamps. Davidson is now daring Nicole to join Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck at the beer pong table. You try to remember whether Mickey and Donald are dating or just friends with benefits—or are they engaged? The air is so dense. You press your back to the wall, clasp your palms together, and close your eyes. In your stomach, a ship is overturned at sea. But you’re okay. You’re totally okay.

A firm hand squeezes your arm, jars you back to life. Rejoining the raucous night of faded lights and smoke, you look up. Slightly bloodshot eyes ask you if you want to head out to the pool.

You do.

And though the thick party tries to hold you, its clutch slips off your shoulders, your waist, and breaking from the noise through swinging porch doors, you’re free. You are made of the same blue butterflies swimming in the night’s cool breeze. When you sigh, the butterflies come home.

Slightly bloodshot eyes sits on the edge of the pool, dangles his legs over the water, lets his soles skim the velveteen. You join him, and though the cold tile is shocking, it’ll warm up to you soon. 

You’ve known each other so long, yet hardly know each other at all. He’s a writer. You read. You read not just him, but everything. No handful of books slung in your arms could say everything about you; your tastes blaze from one end of this earth to the next. From distant planets to desert islands to crowded cities to the Swiss Alps, you’ve seen it all. Your time with him is just a few cobblestones.

Your cell phone yaps in your purse.

—hey hey hey

—whered you go???

—were looking for u :(

The soft song of nightlife blankets the distance. The writer’s hand trails through the air, falls over your fingers, and curls. It’s okay. 

Time walks so quickly, and so coldly. Four years of university now feels like the adventure of a few months, and it’s almost done. Maybe it would have seemed longer if you majored in education like your parents wanted. But you couldn’t bring yourself to do something that you didn’t love with your whole heart. You did English instead. At some point, you and the writer crossed paths. And what a hapless dance of alliterations and similes brought you here, to the pool’s edge, staring into that fragile glass below, wondering what swims beyond the last class of the term, the last assignment stamped. What do normal people do instead of edit citations? Maybe, you think, you’ll invest in a PS5. But you’re kidding yourself—you’ll still be reading all day.

Are you worried? You turn to the writer, facing him with your full chest. Your eyes light up. Something about the night with its silence, the drapes unveiling outer space—unyielding and unending—thrums through your hands, your eyes, your lips. You’re ready. More than you have ever been. You want to go face the world no matter what looks back at you. You don’t want to be here anymore.

Okay, says the writer.

Then we’re not.

We’re out there—far away. A blushing sun paints the sky in watercolor. The birds are organettos and violins. We’re travelers, you and I, all bandanas and rags, hoisting sacks of precious metals to sell. Sweat sticks our fingers together, and saliva sticks our lips. We’re in the sprawling Venice streets, the tall brick faces of palazzos watching over us as you rise from the ledge of the river canal. It’s been a fruitful rest watching gondolas ride the stream, but now you stand, stretch your legs, toss your orange peels and cheese rinds for the strays, and rejoin the path winding into town.

The wandering is your favorite part. And when you sigh with satisfaction as you come into town, you will also wilt in grief for the journey that brought you here from Modena, overcoming the sun, crossing bridges, sweeping your fingers on the marble railings. If you could cross bridges all day, circling the whole world on wooden planks and tan bricks, you would. And all the damp soil in Italy would bear your footprints, and all the bouquets in market stalls would have kissed your nose.

Just sometimes, you would turn over your shoulder, tracing the stones left behind, and I would be there with you. Daylight would make stained glass windows of your sunglasses, and I would peek inside, and almost hear the hymns, the candlelight. 

As travelers, our journeys can take us from distant lands to the bottom of the sea, through fairy circles into magic realms, through fires and armies and floods if you’d like. We could do this forever if you don’t mind. Eventually though, you might start pondering for some sign of accomplishment, some sense of closure, a signal that you’d done enough. And at that time, we’d be travelers no longer—we would be Andean eagles with pale beaks and ombre wings slashing through the cold, crisp blue of the Colombian skies. As eagles, we would rip and tear the air from one patch of forest to the next; that distant green seems to sprout from nothing but barren rock, but it thrives. And as we swoop upward, a jagged crown of mountains would extend open hands and cool shade. Our sighs would mist the air. We would visit the cliffside to pluck mice and shrews from their holes, and soar the sullen mountain pass.

We’d do all this—and then we would come home. To the small and shrinking plot of green forest persisting against the mountain range, we’d come home, trace the veins of the trees back to our nest of twigs and straw folded into the elbow of the boughs. This branch from the valley. These bones from the plateau. This pebble from the highest up on the mountain we’d ever been. Nobody around for miles and miles. Just the murmur and yelp of eagle chicks. 

And in the night, when the curtains unfurls and the forest stuffs itself away, we would sleep pillowed in our downy breasts, holding tight to the straw of our home.

I think eventually that when you journey for long enough in any direction, you end up here. In the Andes. No one for miles, and nothing to want. Nothing to prove. You fly only for the sake of flying, because you need it to survive. And so you follow the rotation of the sun and moon, nodding between opposite ends of the sky. And that path always brings you home.

I would do that for you.

Because eventually

that rotation would take us to some ink-spotted place where the Andes fills with emptiness. 

There 

are tendrils twisting through the plains that have no smell, no feeling, no face. The further we roam into this dark space, the world diminishes, and the wind disappears, and what seems to blanket the ground like snow is actually the grass and gravel vanished, curling away. What icicles seem to burgeon from white skies are really climbing through the sheet, and this world folds in pain. We escape through black tunnels. The tunnels dip down,

and down and down,

we nosedive,

and where we land 

is the farthest from you I have ever been. The abyss between us goes on for miles. You peer down and find all the dead stars silenced and stilled. I’m on the other side, crouched. A small pink grain flecked away into the dark. A vine that has hit the ceiling, folding back on itself. Glowing naked. Eyes shut. 

That has always been how I respond to fear—I fold. 

There has always been much to be scared of—and I suppose I am afraid. 

I’m afraid because I’m afraid because I’m afraid that all my writing will fail to reach anybody. And then I’m afraid that all of my writing will contain none of me, that I am not, I am without am, and not am I. 

I’m afraid most of all that my fiction contains too much of me. 

Because I am so suicidal. And in my writing, I don’t think most other readers do but

I can see my sadness drift through the text, in the sad way these sentences 

unroll from my hands, in the way 

happy things evoke emptiness and expanse, in the way 

everything is about an end, in the way 

everything ends. I am scared 

that some few readers will see that sadness, 

and it will hurt them. 

And I will hurt them.

Yet—

on some horrific, evil plane of my being,

all I want is 

for a reader to see it. 

See the sadness.

Know it’s there. 

Unmask

the vast paths, the venomous gardens, 

because my truth is that 

when I’m sad, I don’t want anyone’s advice, consolation, suggestion of sympathy

—god, no—

I just want people to know.

And for that reason,

these stories come brandishing talons and teeth,

even if no one can see them. These stories come clenching under the skin even if no one can feel them. I am holding a knife to my throat even if I am smiling at you, but even until now you have always smiled back at me. 

And it hasn’t always been easy. 

But that

is what makes you home to me.

If you are the plie of a piano’s afternoon song, I am the whistle of a tea kettle on the stove. Our reflection in the window makes us ghosts on the lawn from the comfort of our studio apartment. We swim through the air all afternoon. If you are left, then I am right. If you are a rock, I am a rock. If you are stranded on the cold beach shore of an endless abyss, and I am a small pink grain folding on the other side (just phosphenes in your eyes), you would take a step off the ground and fly. No storm could touch you. You would land on the other side, step toward me, place your hand on my shoulder, and smile. And I would twist around, throw a hug around your legs, and smile. 

You made it.

You could have bowed out at any point, to quit and read some other fantasy, but you—perusing some of the final words of this story—have made it. It was not easy to do. I rarely ever make it easy, just to see who makes it to the end with me, and you do. 

We’re on the last page together.

When I am by your side, you are always adventuring but I am always home. Home to me is not a place where the lights are always on, the oven is always warm, and everything is happy. I have my meanness, my nails, my clenched teeth, and so my home will, too. But home is where I can tumble and trip but always have a soft place to land. 

And you—you, folding your fingers around these damp, sagging words I place inside your palm—you are home to me.