Emily Zhang’s “History of Navigation” received third place in the 2015 Glazner Prize for Creative Writing contest, sponsored by SFUAD’s Creative Writing and Literature Department. On Atlantic Street a girl lies on the street with vultures in her throat, the moon melting into the eggshell of her eyes melting into me. I don’t know if she swallowed the sky or if the sky swallowed her, but she is spilled like a run on sentence, preserved in past tense and the holy glow of streetlight. An exercise in forbearance. Two months after my grandfather said the name of what would kill him, we spilled salt on our tongues and drank soup too sparse to be unstill. My uncle drove without a seatbelt swathed across his shoulders. He drove until he saw a lake that wrapped its fingers around the sky’s neck and exhaled while the sky inhaled. Until he saw a bird and tried to catch it, but its wings broke off when he grazed it, and he closed his palms over its eyes and pressed, learned that he couldn’t protect anything anymore. Six years ago a man on the telephone told her to put her hands between her thighs and squeeze and she told him nothing. A ritual in reverse. All I know is that we all have the animal want in our stomachs to float, that they are burning newspapers on Atlantic Street now. When the universe was first beginning a bird took a flashlight from a trashcan and dropped it into a beautiful coffin. In five hundred years someone will unearth this moment without the girl, in the wicked heat of June, tucked in concrete like an exhalation. I wish I...
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