By Karen Huang, Class of 2026, Winner of “The Roar”‘s High School Fall Writing Contest!
First frost — it’s getting colder these days.
The sun refuses to rise; it floats and meanders across the heavens with a thin gray light. You bask in whichever lazy ray of light peeks through; capitalize on the brief warmth, step on the tail-ends of summer. Abandoned porches and unyielding weather, with wind that blows through the skies to enter your marrow. As always, it carries the smell of decay, of too many leaves forgotten in the pile; you have scarcely finished clearing each thick layer of crusted debris before the next has covered the lawn. The deciduous trees keep shedding like the neighbor’s Siberian husky, and vaguely, it becomes impossible to distinguish between the grass and the dew, the branches and the sky.
You cheerfully slave away in a whirlwind of tasks you never remember. Between blinks the warmth is replaced with a soft coldness, the fog across your eyes a quiet herald of icy onslaughts. Strange to call it fall when it is really an ascendancy: the rise of forgotten things, replacing lukewarm winds with icy lawn chairs under murky yellow sconces. Thanksgiving, too — disregarded, of course, after your gratitude has been nominally given — an excuse to frequent the mall. When the wind blows it is far too dry, but the clouds arrive and each step you take squelches into mud, earthworms coming from the depths.
Father has forgotten to take the squash and pumpkins to the compost; they still sit there, marinating silently. Rain running down the pipes — rushing gravity, screaming with water, a weary creaking that will bring green hills. Here, the grass only grows when the trees fade gray: small images of a vanished summer, but where you live, summer is musty, a yellowed beige. You take what you can get: rain-soaked stains of leaf veins on the pavement — her palm on your chest, heartbeats pulsing in tandem; look at the clouds and laugh. It’s raining again, everlasting droplets to make you grow, little weed against a muted sky.
The weary embrace of browning foliage ages finely, a bottle of red wine collecting dust in the topmost cabinet; sometimes it is pulled out to accompany an evening’s hot-pot. There is no such thing as a bad time: each week the heavens shed tears in blessings on the ground, and it is enough, world fading between each breath and the next.
The Roar 