Foreshadow

by Nova Ren Suma, Emily X.R. Pan

Genres: YA Social Themes; YA Fantasy; YA Romance

Synopsis

A BookPage Best Book of 2020, Young Adult

Thirteen Short Stories from Bold New YA Voices & Writing Advice from YA Icons

Created by New York Times bestselling authors Emily X. R. Pan and Nova Ren Suma, Foreshadow is so much more than a short story collection. A trove of unforgettable fiction makes up the beating heart of this book, and the accompanying essays offer an ode to young adult literature, as well as practical advice to writers.

Featured in print for the first time, the thirteen stories anthologized here were originally released via the buzzed-about online platform Foreshadow. Ranging from contemporary romance to mind-bending fantasy, the Foreshadow stories showcase underrepresented voices and highlight the beauty and power of YA fiction. Each piece is selected and introduced by a YA luminary, among them Gayle Forman, Laurie Halse Anderson, Jason Reynolds, and Sabaa Tahir.

What makes these memorable stories tick? What sparked them? How do authors build a world or refine a voice or weave in that deliciously creepy atmosphere to bring their writing to the next level? Addressing these questions and many more are essays and discussions on craft and process by Nova Ren Suma and Emily X. R. Pan.
 
This unique compilation reveals and celebrates the magic of reading and writing for young adults. 

Release date: October 20, 2020

Publisher: Workman Publishing Company

Print pages: 352

Sample

INTRODUCTION

by Emily X.R. Pan

Stories are the best kind of spell. There’s nothing like cracking open a book and being magicked away to a different time and place, giving your heart over to characters who will live forever in your mind. What’s remarkable about the short story is how an author manages to sharpen that experience, condensing it into something powerful.

This is why a short story is so difficult to write: How do you make someone fall in love with your characters in the span of so few words? How do you pull your reader in fast enough and make them feel the hum of a deeply resonant emotion? There’s also the question of structure, the style of the prose. In a short story, all the things that make a good novel have to be compressed into a neat little package.

Tell the blank page a story, and it will tell you who you are. It will shine back at you the quiet undercurrents of your mind. Peer into those waters, and you’ll see your swells of confidence, your sleep-stealing fears. Storytelling, if you think about it, is the most human thing we do. It’s a universal language. It’s so instinctive, baked into our way of surviving and connecting, that we do it without even thinking about it.

Whether or not you’ve ever tried to catch a story and pin it to the page, you are a storyteller. I’m sure, for example, that you could easily tell me about the time you got into such trouble that people who love you wheeze with laughter to remember it. The hilarious thing that happened to you some weekends ago. The best moment of your life so far. The most devastating way you’ve ever had to say goodbye.

This is how we connect. We share experiences. We tell of what happened. Many of us even conjure our stories up out of nothing.

There was one time, a handful of years ago, that writing a short story changed my life.

I had sent a fantasy novel out to agents, crossing every bone in my body, hoping-wishing-praying . . . but what came back were only rejections. I felt fragile; I needed to rebuild my confidence. That was when I turned to a short story I’d written years earlier. The execution had never been right, but I still loved the idea. With new characters and new stakes, I rewrote the whole thing from scratch.

That was a turning point for so many reasons. First, it offered the reminder that I could finish something, that I was capable of it. Those agent rejections had not destroyed my love or my creativity. Second, the process of rewriting something so thoroughly and successfully turned me bold. It takes a great deal of bravery to scrap existing words. From that experience I learned to trust myself. I learned that returning to the blank page isn’t truly starting over, because all the earlier sentences make for crucial scaffolding. It changed the way I think about the revision process.

But most importantly, that story—weird and sad with a touch of the fantastical—carried me back to my instincts and helped me pin down the kind of writer I wanted to be. My excitement for it was electricity crackling in my veins.

People often ask me about the process of writing The Astonishing Color of After. I explain how I rewrote it again and again. How I found new angles, how the premise morphed. The book wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t first developed the courage to rewrite from scratch.

When I read short stories now, I find myself searching for similar sparks in the works of other writers. Sometimes you can see them wrestling with creative questions on the page. Sometimes you can see the first few bricks being laid for works that came later. Always, there’s something of the author preserved like a fossil in amber—you can see it so much more clearly because a short story is sliced so thin.

FORESHADOW was originally born as an ode to the short story, and it was our way of finding brand-new writers whose voices we wanted to champion. We wanted to celebrate young adult stories by authors of many different backgrounds in an online format of our own invention.

And since our love for the short story came from our devotion to the craft of writing, here is a book with a sprinkling of exactly that. We’ve added commentary to go along with each piece, a peek behind the curtain as we discuss the various facets of storytelling. Like an orchestra with its many instruments, the individual elements of fiction—voice, worldbuilding, stakes, just to name a few—must work together and take their turns being loud and soft.

So please: Drink these stories in. Taste the words on your tongue. Relish the worlds that have been built here. After all, what’s the point of storytelling magic if it isn’t shared?

Flight

Tanya Aydelott

I adore mother-daughter stories, and this dreamlike one by Tanya Aydelott kept me rapt with its mysterious atmosphere and mythic elements. With a delicate hand, the author seduced me into a strange, magical world that feels very original, surprising, and psychologically complex.

—Jandy Nelson, author of I’ll Give You the Sun

i

She remembers the first time she saw the unicorn tapestries. Mama had just moved them to New York City, piling their weathered brown suitcases in the foyer of an apartment almost too small to be called a home. On a sticky August afternoon before Mama started her new job on TV, they took the M4 bus, crowded and noisy, up to the top of Manhattan. She sat in Mama’s lap, watching the other passengers: the teenager with the headphones so much larger than his ears, the tired woman with thick ankles and stretched shopping bags, the older gentleman with a checkered hat tugged low over his bushy white eyebrows. She couldn’t see his eyes. There were young twins, their hair bound up in braids, babbling to each other in a language she couldn’t understand, and an older brother watching them with exasperation. Maybe she wasn’t the only one who didn’t know their language.

“We’re here,” Mama said gently, and pried her loose. 

She hopped down the big step of the bus and looked up at the imposing building, this place Mama said was important for her to see. Mama said that about many things, and usually the girl wasn’t sure why they were important, even after she had seen them.

The museum was fairly large, with narrow stairwells and hushed, cool rooms. She felt her heart leap when Mama pointed out that one entire archway had been brought over from Spain, dismantled and reassembled to look exactly as it had in its original location. She thought, This is what I am, too. Brought here like a stone and expected to fit. She reached out to touch the pitted arch, but Mama gently tugged her back.

Outside, there were spindly dwarf trees and a small herb garden laid out by the curators based on a medieval plan. Mama pointed out the fruit that was beginning to grow, the small glossy bodies rounding into recognizable shapes. The girl watched butterflies and squirrels dart in and out of the greenery. The air was scented with herbs and flowers, nothing like the greasy gas smell of the city. She wanted to stay here, away from the cold stone walls that had been stolen from their homes, but Mama took her hand and moved them back inside.

They stayed for a long time in the room with the unicorns. Mama had told her stories, but nothing looked the way she had imagined. Instead of gentle, sloping heads, the unicorns had beards, and their mouths were turned down as if they were sad or worried. And they were being hunted, first by dogs and then by men. The final unicorn was captured and enclosed, its body torn by sharp spears. The cage around it was low, but the unicorn could not escape it.

Mama touched her cheek, and she realized she was crying. 

“Yes,” said Mama, “we should cry for them.”

“But they’re not real,” she remembers saying, her young voice high and hot.

“Things can be real even if we never see them,” Mama said. “Most things are. Don’t say a thing isn’t real until you know for certain.”

She remembers being bewildered and afraid. “Why is there a belt around its neck?”

Mama let out a breath. The dark shadows that had begun to ring her eyes seemed to have moved lower, into her voice. She said, “Things that are unexplainable—these are things that people feel they must control. Magic. Beauty. Art. Creatures like the unicorn, which they aren’t even sure are real. Even in their imaginations, they cage them.”

Her eyes moved from the unicorn to Mama. This was something important, something she needed to know. “People, too?” she asked, her voice hollow like a shell.

Mama passed a hand across the girl’s head, smoothing the stray hairs at her temples. “Oh,” she said softly, and, “Yes.”

Someone came into the room then, feet slapping against stone, and bumped up against Mama so she had to move to the side. “Hey,” the voice said, and then, “Hey, I know you—you did the desserts on that morning show! Let me get a picture with you.”

Mama demurred, as she always did, and they left very soon after.

On the way out, the girl had wanted to buy a postcard—one of the ones showing the unicorn with its horn in water, before it was brought down by the hunters. But Mama said no, the magic was in remembering the unicorn, not in owning it.

ii

Mama’s new cooking show was not, initially, a success. That came later, after the producer suggested she wear low-cut blouses and skirts that flared and heels that made her stand differently. She became someone else. The makeup crew curled her hair and threw red on her lips and splashed dark paint across her eyelids and eyelashes. She and the girl laughed about the transformation; they called the TV version of her “Marlena,” after an actress Mama had admired when she was young. Marlena would smile and the live audience would thrill to her; she would bend over in one of her new blouses to reveal a soufflé, and the producer would promise her champagne. “The camera loves you!” he would crow every time the ratings came in. 

“It won’t last,” Mama would say in her throaty Marlena voice, fluffing her skirts and patting her dark hair. “We’ll leave here soon and do something else. But for now, this is fine for us.”

The girl spent afternoons in the studio watching her mother become Marlena, and nights watching Marlena turn back into her mother. There were trips to restaurants and museums, evenings at literary salons where the adults talked for hours in smoky, dull-scented rooms, weekend out-of-town trips to go antiquing and pick through racks of fashionable old stoles, and jaunts to toy stores where they bought puzzles and paints. 

There was one place Mama wouldn’t take her. When her class had a field trip to the Prospect Park Zoo, Mama drew her out of school for the day and they went across the city to the Museum of Modern Art. The girl remembers protesting; she had wanted to spend more time with the other children in her class. But Mama was adamant. “Bodies are cages already,” Mama said, something dark and pained in her eyes. “There’s no need to see cages inside cages.” 

At the MoMA, Mama stood for a long time in front of Willem de Kooning’s Woman I. “Can you see?” she finally asked, one hand so tight around her purse strap that her knuckles showed white as bone. “Look how she escapes her body. Look how he’s given her wings.” She led the girl through the exhibit, stopping before Picasso’s Two Nudes and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. “Look how their bodies are and are not, at the same time.”

There was a wistfulness to Mama’s voice that was all hers, with none of Marlena’s brass.

“They’re ugly,” the girl said. She remembers how she had hated the way the artists smudged the women’s bodies so they looked small and vulnerable. She remembers how her own body felt as though its edges were smudging into curves. Some days, it had felt like she was becoming a stranger to herself. “They don’t look finished.”

“They’re in the wrong skins.” Mama’s cheeks were pale, like the blush roses she sometimes received from fans and left with the studio’s doorman. “Being trapped inside the wrong skin can feel like a curse. The moment you find the right one, you can’t wait to live in it.”

Her gaze grew faraway then, as though she were looking past the paintings, and the girl turned away from Les Demoiselles, uncomfortable.

When they got home, Mama poured so much rosewater into her coffee that the air was nearly pink with it. She drew from her oracle deck that night, and the first card she pulled was Grief.

Mama stopped using the subway soon after that, saying that more and more people recognized her; she was uncomfortable with their attention. “New York is fine,” Mama would say. “There’s no need to go national.” Her producer was upset; he wanted to send Marlena on tour across the US, not just giving cooking lessons but interacting with local chefs. Mama had loud phone arguments with him, her sharp heels clicking against the hardwood floors of their second New York apartment—slightly bigger than the first, with an armoire they’d found at an antiques shop in Hudson and a sideboard and mirror from Essex. It seemed like home always reflected cities or towns they visited and left, never the city they walked every day. “I know what I want,” Mama would tell her producer, “and I know what I don’t. Stop trying to change my mind.”

One night, Mama hurried them home from the studio without even taking off her makeup. She stank of grease and had an angry splotch of red at the base of her neck. Once the door was closed and locked behind them, she brewed and drank two cups of tea scented with rosewater, then met her own eyes in the mirror over the sideboard. “Don’t ever put yourself on display,” Marlena said in Mama’s voice, her eyes heavy with liquid eyeliner and exhaustion. “They’ll never give you back.”

The girl knew their time in New York was up when Mama stopped using rosewater in Marlena’s desserts. It wasn’t because the rosewater was running out—Mama was careful to have three bottles in the cupboard, always, just in case. But the bottles disappeared from the television kitchen, and then the three bottles at home became six, and then nine. Mama began staying up late to check and recheck the numbers in her bank account; one morning, the girl found a fistful of cash tucked inside one of the tea caddies. She began putting her favorite books into a suitcase and deciding which of her clothes to bring with her and which to donate, and when Mama said they needed to go, she already had one bag packed and was nearly finished with a second.

The week before they left, they went to see the unicorns again. This time in a taxi, with a driver whose music jangled and slurred, and who eyed Mama again and again in the rearview mirror. Mama tipped him so he would not wait for them.

They did not walk through the gardens of the Cloisters. They did not spend time looking at the Spanish archway or the French chapels, even though she ached to see that Spanish stone again, to reassure herself that it was still there.

They went straight to the unicorns and stood for a long time with them. This time, she noticed that the colors on the tapestries were faded and whole sections were coming loose, but the majesty of the creatures was still there in each thread. The unicorns were beautiful, or perhaps a word beyond beautiful. They were calm, exaltation, peace. And for their otherworldly beauty, they were hunted.

“Remember them,” Mama told her. “It will be a long time, I think, until we are here again.”

Mama squeezed her hand then, so tightly her bones squeaked, and stepped away. 

The girl stood alone before the unicorns. She felt her body move with every cold breath, her ribs and skin and lungs stretching to keep her alive. She looked at each unicorn in turn, counting them, memorizing them. And for a lonely, chilled moment, she was sure they looked back.

iii

They moved south. Mama’s hair became gold, then black, then auburn. She darkened and lightened her eyebrows, changed her shoes from heels to flats to sandals to boots. Bracelets appeared on her arms, became watches, then disappeared. She had four earrings, then none, then two. A beauty mark rose high on her right cheek, but was gone one morning and reappeared days later by her clavicle. Her smile widened and shrank, grew brittle, grew edges. Marlena came back only once, for a television commercial for a cooking oil, and then Mama threw out all of Marlena’s dresses and makeup. They wouldn’t even watch the real Marlene’s movies, Mama said; they were done with that name forever.

She bought a car, threw their books and clothes into the trunk, and locked it tight. Sunglasses to hide their eyes; haircuts to frame their faces differently. Mama said she was enrolling the girl in the school of life, and bought an entire set of encyclopedias for her to read. She sent postcards to New York and Chicago and places the girl did not remember, mail that never had a return address. When they checked into new hotels and found messages awaiting their arrival, Mama did not read them aloud.

One night, the girl woke in a dark, sterile hotel room to the sound of Mama weeping. It was a wrenching noise, no less horrible for being muffled in the overstuffed hotel pillow. She crept from her bed to her mother’s, placing her hand on Mama’s elbow. Mama’s skin was hot, too hot, and she snatched her stinging hand back.

“Mama?” She remembers the fear, the worry.

“It hurts.” Her mother’s voice was tight and scratchy, and the girl realized that it was Mama’s whimper that had woken her. “It hurts.”

The girl knew what to do, or at least where to start. She boiled water in the electric kettle they always carried, filled a mug, and poured in enough rosewater that the air above the mug was fragrant and wet. She carried the steaming mug back to Mama and tried to get her to sit up. “Here,” she said, and reached around her mother’s shoulders.

Something pricked at her palm. Hissing, she bent over Mama to see. Something was on her skin, or maybe in it, something sharp, something trying to grow—

Mama sat up quickly, rubbing her hands across her face. She took the mug from the nightstand and gulped down the hot rosewater. As she drank, the color returned to her face. “I’m sorry,” she said when she had emptied the mug. Her voice sounded almost normal. “Did I wake you? You should go back to sleep.”

“Mama,” the girl asked, “what’s wrong with your back?”

Mama looked at her for a long moment. She pulled at the neck of her nightgown, easing it down and baring her shoulder blade. There was a dark red blotch, like a burn or a bruise that hadn’t yet realized it was supposed to purple, and Mama let out a quick breath when the girl gently touched its edge. 

Nothing poked out from her skin. It was still hot to the touch, but it was smooth.

“Are you okay?” The girl didn’t know what else to say.

Mama nodded. “Could you—would you put some cream on it for me?”

The girl brought three of her mother’s creams to the bed. As the months had gone by, she’d noticed the growing collection of bottles and lotions and wondered why they were all suddenly necessary. When she was little, Mama had only kept one or two bottles on her dresser. Now there were so many that they had their own case, a zippered bag embroidered with swans. Mama kept it in her suitcase with her cards. 

Mama touched each of the bottles in turn and chose the one she wanted. It was made from rose hips, and when the girl unscrewed the lid and released the scent into the room, Mama sighed and her face gentled. “Thank you,” she whispered. “I don’t know what came over me.”

They left the next day. Mama’s face was still swollen from crying, but they said nothing to each other about the tears, the red blotch on her right shoulder, or the one she had revealed, after the girl had spread the cool white cream on her skin, on her left. 

When they checked into their next hotel, Mama said she was taking a bath and locked the bathroom door. She was inside for a long time, and when she finally emerged, the steam that billowed out of the room was tinted pink and smelled like roses. She drew her cards before bed, and the first card she pulled was Deception.

It was in Knoxville, Tennessee, that it happened. They were coming out of a department store, Mama slicking on a new lipstick, when a shout stopped her. “Hey—hey, Lianne! Lianne, wait.”

Her face froze. Her foot, about to lift and propel her into the next step, paused; her heel was already off the ground. It would have been comical, except that when she turned, her face was ashen, and the lipstick color, which had been so perfect just moments before, was suddenly all wrong for her. 

“Lianne, I knew it was you,” the man said, striding toward them. His face was deeply tanned, flat and grooved like the back side of a hatchet, but his hands were steady on Mama’s wrists. He shook her, very gently, as though he were afraid movement would cause her to disappear. “Where did you go?”

He caught sight of the girl, and his eyes widened. 

“Lianne?” he whispered, and Mama seemed to crumple, right there, so that he was holding her wrists but somehow also holding her heart.

“I can’t, I can’t,” Mama said, but of course they did.

iv

The man’s name was Ted, and he knew Mama from—before. Before everything, it seemed. Before the television program, before New York City, before D.C. and Chicago and Savannah. Before she learned how to paint her face and talk into spotlights. He knew her when she traveled alone. 

A few days after he found them, they accompanied him to Nashville. Mama was careful to tell the girl that they would be staying with Ted for a time, but she was also careful not to say when they would leave.

In Ted’s house, she helped her mother take down the heavy, dark drapes and replace them with lighter fabrics; hang bright paintings and prints in place of the mirrors he had on every wall; and lay richly colored carpets on his cold floors. It was like doing magic, the girl thought, the way Mama transformed his house from a mausoleum into a home.



And there was another new school for her. Mama refused to let Ted pay for it. “Some things,” she said testily when he offered, again, “we can manage on our own.” The girl did not feel brave enough to ask Mama which things they couldn’t manage. 

“So she had dark hair when you met her?” the girl asked him once.

“And she was skinny,” he said, shuffling a deck of cards. He was teaching her to play gin rummy. “Bones, mostly. I used to feed her pancakes with extra syrup and milkshakes with three cherries on top, and still she was just this bitty thing. My momma thought she must be half-noodle.”

The girl laughed, thinking of the desserts her mother made with thin noodles curled around one another, fragrant fruits and syrups nestled in their curves. 

He flashed his teeth at her and dealt. “She was skinny as a rose stem,” he drawled. “Like a line of paint down a highway. I kept feeding her and feeding her, and that line didn’t get any wider.” He looked at his hand and reordered the cards. “And then she wasn’t skinny anymore, and then she wasn’t here anymore.”

“Was that because of me?” the girl asked, lifting the top card from the deck. She paused, looking tightly at the eleven cards in her hand, trying hard to concentrate only on which card she would trade back. 

He put his cards down—facedown, because he wouldn’t let her win easily, not even like this—and looked at her. She liked this about him, that he could look directly at her without flinching, that his eyes were patient and did not judge. He simply met her gaze and waited.

“No,” he said after a quiet moment. “But I’ve been missing you all these years, even when I didn’t know it.” His gaze touched her eyebrows, her cheekbones, the light glinting on her middle part. “Even your hair is like mine.”

She lifted the end of her braid and looked at it. Her hair was brown; his hair was brown. But Mama’s hair could be brown, too, any shade she wanted. If he’d said that her eyes were like his, she might have agreed. Or her height—she was going to be tall, just like him, probably at least four inches taller than Mama. If he’d said the shape of her chin, the way her big toe edged ever so slightly to the side, the way her nostrils flared when she got angry—any of those would have convinced her. But he said hair, the thing she was most sure was changeable.

“Mama’s hair is brown,” she replied.

“It’s the curl,” he said, and picked his cards back up. “The curl in your hair doesn’t come from your momma.”

There were days she was glad she didn’t look very much like her mother. She’d seen how Marlena tried to dodge but could not escape the people around her, how the eyes on her were a constant weight she struggled against. But she’d also spent days wishing she had the same grace, the same smooth-milk skin, the same casual wave and flip to her hair. When she was little, she had tried on her mother’s lipsticks and frowned when they didn’t look good on her; clipped on earrings and grimaced to find them too big for her face. She’d once tried styling her hair with her mother’s hairbrush, and then had to ask to be unsnarled from its bristles. 

“It isn’t—I’m not—” she said, and blushed hotly when Ted looked at her.

“Of course not,” he said mildly, and waited for her to play her card. 

She played; he played. The hand continued for a few more moments, and as she drew close to making her third set, she asked, “Do you hate her for any of it?”

Ted’s answer was swift. “No.” He chewed for a moment on the next thought. “How could I? Even when I missed her, even when I was confused and hurt, even at the lowest point, she was always—Lianne.” He played his final card, facedown, laying out a perfect hand, ace to the ten of spades. “One day, hopefully, you’ll see.”

The girl considered this. She wasn’t sure how she felt about getting romantic advice from Ted, particularly when he was winning. “What about me?” she asked. “Are you mad she took me away from you?”

Ted sighed. “I didn’t know why she left, not at first,” he admitted. “And I didn’t know about you, so how could I be mad about that? If anything, I was hurt. But then—well, she had her reasons.”

The girl’s nose wrinkled, and she gathered the cards to shuffle and deal. The deck was well-worn and slick; the design on its back was a loon, the patterned feathers carefully reproduced in dark blue ink. 

“Reasons?” She thought about where they’d lived, the things they’d seen. She wondered what would compel her mother to leave. “Like being on TV?”

Even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t right.

He laughed, low and wary. “Sure,” he said, “we can say that.” But then he shook his head. “No, it wasn’t that. It was—well, she lost something important, and I couldn’t help her find it. Maybe she’s spent all this time looking for it.”

The girl thought about the trips she and Mama took, the antique stores and vintage clothing shops, the auction houses and flea markets and midnight bus rides to cities she could barely pronounce. She wondered what a search would have looked like if Mama had stayed in one place.

Mama had rolled her eyes when Ted started teaching the girl gin rummy. “It’s a g. . .