Page 24 - Solstice Art & Literary Magazine 2020

JOHN TISCHKE
AUTHOR PROFILE
My name is John Tischke and I’m a junior. For starters, I like to write in pieces; long- form work is hard. I work best in vignettes and can’t seem to develop a plot. I like the melodrama of writing and indulge too often in the classic teenage tropes of en- nui, angst, and infatuation – except I tend to abstract these themes into colors and shapes. For me, writing is a visual practice, and often is the simple exercise of trans- ferring a striking mental image, either a movement or a color or a composition, into a succinct set of pretty words. You’ll often find my poems border on Impres- sionism and my stories hinge on singular moments of detail.
If you’d like to read more of my work, you can find it buried in the recesses of my notes app.
MARY
JOHN TISCHKE
When I was young, I had a friend whose sister died. She lurched herself before a train, overcome by a deep blue melancholia, and was gone in a ghastly flash of silver. She had been thirteen at the time. She was depressed. But this is not a story about her—it is about her sister, my friend, whom I will call Ava.
It is also a story about my grandmother, who was eighty- four when she died in a nursing home in Medina, Ohio, unable to breathe or see, having cooked her body with cigarettes, but happy nonetheless.
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Ava’s sister died when we were in third grade, and the teacher sat us down and announced it to us in a lofty, dream-like voice: “This is a very hard time for Ava; we should give her our deepest sympathies,” she cooed, shift- ing her body closer to us, “so we’re each going to make ‘sor- ry for your loss’ cards to show her our support.” She stood and wrote on the board an outline of what we were to say, and on the desk she put a stack of construction paper and markers with which we were to cure the girl’s anguish. An obsequious assembly line, we quickly filled our pages with vibrant platitudes and unremarkable drawings. In half an hour, we finished. We had succeeded in manufacturing our condolences, so that Ava, freshly grieving, could read “I am sorry for your loss”, “it gets better” and “she’s always in our hearts” ceaselessly, twenty-four times straight; so that she could use those wise aphorisms to heal.
But when she came back a week later, our two-dozen reminders of her dead sister had not, apparently, changed her disposition on the matter. She was sullen, seemed
to walk with cinder blocks about her feet, bent over and leaden. And it seemed that despite the teacher’s advice to tell Ava how deeply, truly sorry we were, these words only compressed her into a tighter and tighter Gordian knot that no ‘we’re here for you’ could slice.
Our third-grade class changed. What was once twen- ty-five kids became twenty-four students plus one sad girl. Our sympathies became the most isolating factor. Ava was not our friend; she was the eggshell girl with a dead sister whom we must treat with delicacy. And once we cracked through every condolence we could give, she became the girl with a dead sister whom we mustn’t talk to, because no regular word is soft enough for her sor- row. We watched her with disdain, like an endangered creature, from far away, with our own happier friends.
Our every sympathy summed to an omnipresent remind- er that she was just a small girl with an elephant of grief, made miniature behind our circus cage, as twenty-some children threw paper peanuts inside.
When she walked home after that first week, she nearly washed away in the rain.
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