Refraction
by Savannah Voll
I wonder if my mother is
the Loch Ness Monster.
We splash in the shallows
and I marvel at the
delicate beads of sea foam
that adorn her long lashes,
and the serpentine sway of her hair
in the thick slap of the waves.
The same roiling surf that is
eternally unruly towards me
caresses the dolphin-smooth
skin of her shoulders,
and the silver gossamer spray
that dances across her forehead
glints in the summer sun
like a crown.
She disappears under the surface
over and over,
sometimes here, more often not,
gone for who knows how long
only to shatter the glassy water,
emerging when I least expect it
with a sly, coquettish grin,
finding pleasure in the surprise,
and every time she returns—
it’s pure magic.
But when she stands
in the shallow water
I notice that the lines of her legs
don’t match up with
those seaweed-covered ankles
beneath the surface,
instead there is a sharp bend
where the waves lap at her shins,
and at once I see that she is not
the Queen of the Sea;
she is just the monster.
The Snow Queen of Singapore
by Savannah Voll
She was covered in icy glitter, no more than three feet tall, spying on me from
behind her mother’s dragon fruit and guava stand, adorned in a tattered
Queen Elsa costume over a pair of pajamas—unequivocally
the loveliest burst of magic I’ve ever seen—and she
dashed over to me with electric stars in her
eyes, saying that I must be from
Wonderland.
She took my hand in both of hers, pulling it under the streetlight to
inspect the galaxy-blue veins in my wrist, brushing two teeny
fingers across the underside of my forearm, her eyebrows
sky-high, captivated by the pieces of my skin that the
sun hadn’t reached, tracing invisible legends and
myths from elbow to palm, whispering
Alice and Belle, then meeting my
eyes; Beautiful, she declared,
like Snow
White.
She looked down again at her hands on
mine, honeyed bronze against tepid
oatmeal, then in an instant her
face changed, and it’s been
years but that confused
frown still keeps
me up at
night.