Student poetry
Winner: Annie Hall
Begonia Boyfriends
We share a
Flat.
My
contemporary boyfriend
Owns a pet
plant
in our
mundane little
life.
His
favourites are begonias -
dark,
swirling
escargot of
purples and
midnight blues.
The sun reflecting,
catching
their leaves,
drooping onto the
carpet floors,
hanging off
the half-done porch.
I love our
life.
Student fiction
Winner: Anindita Chatterjee
The Second Kettle
The first thing I noticed about Dunedin was not the biting cold. It was its silence.
Not the heavy, awkward silence that follows a sharp argument, nor the sterile, antiseptic quiet of a hospital waiting room where people sit staring at the floorboards. This silence felt alive. It carried the soft rustle of broadleaf trees, the clear, bell-like call, which is unseen tūī in the overhead canopy, and the distant, low hum of yellow buses crawling up the steep grades of Mornington and Roslyn. I had never heard a city breathe before.
Back home in the Delhi cantonment, silence meant something entirely different. Life was not quiet; it was ordered and loud with deep-seated purpose. My father’s service in the Indian Army meant our days were measured out by bugle calls from the distant barracks, morning parade drills drifting over the whitewashed boundary walls, and school buses honking impatiently at the armed check posts. Even at the officers’ mess, there was the constant, comforting clatter of bone china plates, the scrape of solid teak high-back dining chairs, and the steady hum of a tightly knit community. Noise was not chaotic within these premises; it was an indication of being disciplined and upholding values of duty and caution.
But here at Dunedin, life whispered secretively.
At twenty-three, I had travelled farther than anyone in my family ever had. When my plane finally touched down on the tarmac at Dunedin Airport, surrounded by rolling green hills that looked like they belonged in a watercolor painting, my mother cried over a grainy WhatsApp video call. She sat on the edge of her bed in Delhi, holding the phone at a strange, tilted angle while pretending she was not crying at all.
“Eat properly, Meera,” she had said, her voice wavering through the digital static. “Call every day. The moment you wake up, call us. And do not skip breakfast. You always skip breakfast when you’re stressed.”
That last instruction made me smile every morning, even when breakfast was nothing more than a single slice of plain white toast eaten beside an open window, looking out over the damp, sometimes sunny rooftops of North Valley.
My first two weeks dissolved into a blur of grey administrative offices, student ID photos taken under fluorescent lights, and the overwhelming confusion of local supermarket aisles. I spent nearly twenty minutes on my first trip to the grocery store just staring at the dairy section, where milk came in more varieties that one would have imagined- standard, trim, calcium-enriched, permeate-free, organic, homogenized. Did I leave out anything else?
I also spent a lot of time trying to understand why people thanked the bus driver. The first time I rode the Number 8 bus down George Street, I sat near the back, my hands tucked deep into the pockets of my heavy wool coat. Every time the doors hissed open at a stop, passengers heading out called out across the aisle.
‘Thanks!’
“Cheers, mate!”
“Have a good one!”
One after another, school children with heavy backpacks, older women holding canvas bags, and the university students wearing oversized hoodies called out as they stepped off into the drizzle. I assumed the first passenger knew the driver personally, perhaps they were neighbours, or distant relatives. But when every single person did it, I realized it was not about familiarity. It was a local rhythm of bonding.
By my fourth day, I mustered the courage to join in. As my stop near the University of Otago clocktower approached, I pressed the red button, stood up on my trembling legs, and walked towards the front. As the door opened, I swallowed the lump in my throat and let my voice out, quiet and uncertain.
“Thank you.”
The driver, a white-bearded man wearing a high-vis vest over his woolen jumper, glanced at me through the rearview mirror and smiled warmly into the rear glass.
“No worries, love,” he called back. “Stay warm.”
It was such a tiny exchange, a fraction of a second in an otherwise gray afternoon, yet somehow it made the freezing ride down the valley feel a little less lonely.
The hardest hours were always the late evenings.
Dunedin sits near the bottom of the world, and the time difference between New Zealand and India was a persistent, invisible wall. When India was waking up to morning tea and the morning news, Dunedin was settling into the dark hush of night. Phone calls home became very complex with delicate negotiations with time zones.
I found myself living in a strange, fractured reality. Sometimes I sat in my small room, washing my morning tea mug at 8:00 am while watching my parents eat their dinner through a lagging phone screen at 1:30 pm their time. I could see the familiar cream-colored walls of our cantonment quarter behind them, hear the faint bark of the neighbour’s Golden Retriever, and smell, through sheer memory, the warm garlic tadka (aroma) my mother had just poured over the dal (lentil soup).
The distance was not really measured in the twelve thousand kilometers of ocean and land that lay between us. It was measured in those ordinary, fleeting moments I no longer shared with them in real time. I was living in their future; they were living in my past.
The university library became my second home, but even there, the quietness felt vast. I was enrolled in a postgraduate program, surrounded by reading lists that felt like endless mountains. My flatmates were polite, a second-year geology student who lived on instant noodles and left his rugby boots by the front door, and a quiet law student who spent eighteen hours a day behind her closed bedroom door. But we operated like ships passing in the night. We shared a kitchen but rarely shared a moment.
One rainy Tuesday, four months into my first semester, the sky over Otago Peninsula turned the color of bruised iron. A steady, freezing rain fell straight down, turning the pavements slick with wet birch leaves.
I sat alone at the wooden table in the shared kitchen of our flat, huddled near the small wall-mounted radiator that clicked and groaned without producing much actual heat. Spread across the table were my notebooks, a lukewarm cup of instant coffee, and a thick, heavy photocopy of a research paper on the volcanic origins of the Otago Harbour, how millions of years ago, violent eruptions created the massive caldera that eventually eroded, flooded, and smoothed out into the quiet water channel that sat just a few kilometers from my window.
I could barely focus on the geology. The dense terminology – basaltic lava flows, pyroclastic mantle, subduction erosion kept blurring on the page. The idea of a landscape being violently torn apart only to slowly rebuild itself into something tranquil over millions of years felt a little too close to home. I felt broken down, smoothed out by sheer isolation, wondering if the pieces of who I was would ever settle back into a shape that made sense.
The radiator clicked again. Rain tapped rhythmically against the fogged windowpane. Water began to bubble in the flat’s only electric kettle, a battered white plastic thing with a broken filter.
The back door opened with a scrape, bringing in a gust of frigid air, and another student walked in. He was a taller guy from my building whom I had seen passing, usually carrying a battered leather satchel. He looked just as exhausted as I felt, his hair damp from the rain, his coat dripping onto the linoleum floor.
He dropped his bag by the counter, glanced at the boiling kettle, and then looked at the empty ceramic mug waiting beside my open laptop. He could see the kettle was barely big enough to fill one mug to the brim.
Without saying a word, without making a dramatic show of it, he reached up to the top cupboard, pulled out a second electric kettle that someone must have left behind years ago, brought it to the sink, filled it with tap water, and plugged it into the spare wall socket beside mine.
He flipped the switch down. The red indicator light glowed softly in the dim kitchen.
“There,” he said, offering a small, tired smile that did not demand anything in return. “We’ll both get tea faster.”
That was all.
No formal speech. No over-friendly introduction. No probe into where I was from, what I was studying, or why I looked like I was about to burst into tears over a geology paper. No unrealistic expectations of conversation at all. Just another kettle plugged into the wall.
“Thank you,” I said softly.
He gave a brief, quiet nod, picked up his boiled water a minute later, and walked out down the hallway toward his room.
I never even learned his name. I do not think I ever spoke to him for more than two sentences again during my time in that flat. But that night, as I cupped my hands around the hot mug and watched the steam rise into the cool air of the kitchen, something inside me finally unclenched.
Weeks blurred into months, and winter settled properly over the southern island.
The frost began to coat the grass on the University Oval in delicate, crystal sheets every morning. I stopped wearing three sweaters under my coat and bought a proper windbreaker. I learned the names of the local birds- the bold korimako with their sweet, ringing notes, and the heavy kererū that wood-pigeon-flopped between the native trees with loud, swooping wingbeats.
I learned that the wind sweeping off the Pacific Ocean at St. Clair Beach could make your eyes water so heavily that tears would run down your cheeks even when you weren’t sad at all. I learned that local children in the primary school where I volunteered asked impossible, unfiltered questions- “Why do you say ‘schedule’ like that?” and then immediately burst into laughter without an ounce of malice, completely unbothered by accents or origins.
I still missed home with a physical ache. There were days when I would walk into the local Asian grocery store on Dunedin’s main street, smell the familiar scent of toasted cumin and dried chilies, and have to pause in the aisle to catch my breath. I still reached automatically for fresh coriander that the local supermarkets did not always stock in winter, and I still mentally multiplied every price tag by fifty-five to convert New Zealand dollars into Indian rupees before catching myself and forcing my brain to stop.
But the homesickness slowly changed its shape.
In the beginning, it had felt like an open wound, sharp, raw, and easily struck by the slightest breeze or a sudden memory. Over the long, quiet months, it transformed into an old scar. It was always there, etched into the skin of who I was, but it no longer throbbed with every step. It had become a part of my architecture, a stark reminder of where I came from rather than an obstacle to where I was.
By the time the early spring blossoms began to show on the cherry trees near the Leith Stream with Mystery of Love by Sufjan Stevens playing in my dangled earplugs in the faint background, the city no longer felt like a place I was merely visiting. I had carved small, imperceptible grooves into its surface. The baristas at the small coffee cart near the library knew I drank my regular hot chocolate with marshmallows; the bus drivers on my route no longer looked like strangers; the sharp incline of Baldwin Street no longer made my lungs burn quite so fiercely.
One late October afternoon, near the end of the academic year, I went to the postgraduate office to drop off a stack of final assignments.
The sun was low, throwing long, golden shadows across the stone arches of the historic university buildings. As I walked into the carpeted lobby, I saw a girl standing near the noticeboard. She had a thick winter coat zipped all the way to her chin, a heavy backpack slouched over one shoulder, and a paper campus map folded completely the wrong way in her hands.
She was staring at the directions printed on the wall with wide, frantic eyes, turning the map sideways, then upside down, trying to make sense of building names- Richardson, Hocken, Adams that meant nothing to someone who had arrived forty-eight hours ago.
I stopped in the doorway. I recognized that look instantly. It was not just confusion; it was the quiet, terrifying effort of someone pretending with all her strength not to be completely overwhelmed by the vastness of a new world.
“You heading to the central library?” I asked, stepping closer and keeping my tone light.
The girl jumped slightly, then looked at me, her eyes widening with visible, sudden relief.
“Yes,” she said, her voice small, accented, and tight with strain. “I think so. I’m trying to find the postgraduate quiet study room, but I…I think I’ve taken a wrong turn twice.”
“It’s a maze when you first get here,” I smiled gently. “I’m heading that way now. I’ll walk with you.”
We stepped out into the crisp afternoon air together. We didn’t talk much on the walk across the lawn; the wind coming off the harbour was biting and cold, cutting through our jackets, making conversation feel like unnecessary work. But every few steps, I glanced sideways and saw her shoulders slowly drop an inch lower, dropping the heavy tension she had been carrying all day.
When we reached the library café on the ground floor, she paused near the entrance, looking around at the self-service hot water station, the stacked mugs, and the silver tea dispensers. She hesitated in front of the counter, holding an empty paper cup, entirely unsure of how the system worked or whether she was allowed to just help herself.
I did not offer a lengthy explanation. I did not give her a lecture on campus etiquette or try to make her feel like a guest.
Instead, I reached past her, picked up an empty metal jug from the tray, placed it under the steam tap, and pulled the lever down. Hot water rushed in with a soft, cheerful hiss.
“We’ll both get tea faster,” I said.
The words slipped out of my mouth before I even realized where they had come from, echoing across months of quiet kitchen mornings and rainy Tuesdays.
The girl looked at the steaming jug, then up at me, and suddenly she laughed, a light, genuine sound that broke the chill in the air between us.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice steady now.
As we stood there beside the stainless-steel counter waiting for the jug to fill, steam rising quietly between us in delicate white clouds, a sudden realization washed over me.
I had spent my first six months in this country searching desperately for a dramatic milestone- a specific, cinematic moment when I could finally say, I belong here now. I had thought it would come with a high grade on an assignment, or the day I stopped converting currency in my head, or the moment I made a group of lifelong friends who understood every nuance of my past.
But belonging had not arrived with a grand gesture or a ceremonial fanfare. It had arrived disguised as ordinary, quiet kindness.
It was a second kettle plugged into an outlet by a stranger who saw I was tired. It was a bus driver smiling through rearview mirror on a freezing morning. It was a stranger on the pavement saying, “Morning,” as our paths crossed in the drizzle.
Small, unremembered things. The sort of minor, everyday occurrences that most people forget because they are absolutely trivial. But they were the very things that invisibly remade a person from the inside out, stitching them into the fabric of a new landscape until the alien felt familiar, and the unfamiliar felt like home.
Outside the high glass windows of the library, a light spring rain began to drift across the stone quadrangle in long, silver threads. For the first time since landing in Dunedin, I watched the rain fall without feeling that familiar, sharp tug in my chest, that desperate urge to look away, to check my phone for messages from Delhi, to wish I were somewhere else.
I lifted my mug, pressing both hands against the warm, rough ceramic, letting the heat soak deep into my fingers.
Home, I realized as the steam drifted up toward the high ceiling, is not always the place you come from, nor is it a place you leave behind forever. Sometimes, it is something you build, one quiet day, one open door, one small kindness at a time.
Staff poetry
Winner: Nat Christensen
The Only Copy
Frost forms below zero, it says.
It has never seen ice hold
to the city's shadowed corners,
or refuse the morning
in the one strip of sun,
unmelted when I return.
It wouldn’t wait cold-footed on the lino
for first coffee’s steam.
It advises against ice cream in a southerly.
It has never wanted one anyway,
while I walk Warrington in salted wind
reaching into a pocket unworn a week,
to find a shell,
a handful of sand,
already going through my fingers.
Ask it about sunrise and it can explain, with three neat analogies, why light scatters through the morning air.
It would never describe
the way my daughter does,
three years old, on my shoulders,
walking to daycare,
fingers on my neck not yet warmed,
naming green. And purple. And orange.
It can tell me wood burns at four hundred degrees, pine faster than larch.
It would never take a log from the pile
and go still,
watching,
until resin flames roll up and over.
It can offer condolences in a steady, appropriate voice.
It cannot hear my grandmother,
months on,
as she sits for a spell,
thank my father
for each cup of tea he made her.
It can define big sister: sibling, elder, the one who came before.
It would never see my daughter go quiet,
asking which books to read first
as one becomes two.
If I told it about my grandparents, it would keep them perfectly.
It would never feel the panic
that I am the only copy now.
That I have to teach her
how they salted the porridge,
how they said grace before dinner,
how they fed a horse at the side of the road,
how they filled a room from the piano stool,
and how they
Staff fiction
Winner: Tino Mercado
Longganisa – a story of small things
(Filipino sweet-garlic pork sausage)
✦ ✦
1978.
History, when it finally reaches us, does not arrive as dates and battles. It arrives as small things: a window cracked exactly two knuckle-widths. A thumb pressed to the inside of a wrist. A sausage on a wooden board.
I was six years old the summer Divina taught me to make longganisa, and I arrived at her house believing my grandmother was simply my grandmother — a tall woman in a duster who sold sausages at the palengke (wet market) and tied her carabao to a bamboo post, two knots, quick and tight. I did not know yet what those hands had done.
She came into the kitchen and said only: "Today, we make longganisa." The recipe was generational, passed hand to hand, and now it was passing to ours.
Kapampangan longganisa is particular. Garlicky in a way that announces itself, sweet underneath the garlic, smaller and denser than any other province's, the achuete turning the meat a deep orange-red. She showed us once: the garlic pounded to paste, the vinegar and sugar and salt, the casing fed onto the funnel, the meat packed in one steady motion — no air pockets, no thin spots, every link the same size. She made it the way she did everything: with her whole self. Then she set us to it, grandchildren around the table, small hands greasy, and when we finished she went from board to board and looked at what each of us had made. She did not praise. She looked.
Then she sorted the links, set mine aside, and said, plainly: the others' we fry for dinner. This one's go to the palengke.
I sat at the bottom of the bamboo stairs with the dogs and decided mine must have been the worst — that she was sending them away because they were bad. She came and sat beside me on the small step, though she was not a small woman, and looked at me the way she looked at the longganisa: directly, without sentimentality.
"Your longganisa was the best one at the table," she said. "Your cousins will eat what they made tonight and enjoy it, because family eats what you make because they love you. Love makes the thing taste better than it is. But a stranger at the palengke does not love you. A stranger looks at the longganisa — only the longganisa. Your longganisa would pass that test."
I thought about the stranger, and the thought had a shape both exposing and clean: you could not charm a stranger. The thing had to be good on its own, because the world is not your family.
When she made longganisa, she was making herself — something that could stand in the market of the world and pass. It would be years before I understood what she had needed to be good against, and that she had been teaching me, in a kitchen, over garlic and casing, the whole history of our country disguised as an ordinary morning.
✦ ✦ ✦
1938.
The small thing Gracia carried was a gesture: her thumb pressed to the inside of her wrist, her private prayer — I am here, something in me is still moving. She was twenty-six, the most beautiful woman in San Simon, Pampanga, and she did not know it, the way the rice field does not know it is green. She hummed the Spanish hymns her mother had taught her. Her father had been dead a year — they were walking to church for his babang luksa — and her mother had followed three months after; the doctors said fever, but grief is a terminal illness when it wants to be.
Her sister Divina walked beside her with a son in each hand — Cesar, five, a butterfly-shaped birthmark on his cheek; Edwin, three — and at the edge of the family walked her husband, Fausto Alvarez, the Spaniard: tall, charming, a guest who knew where everything in the house was kept but had never shed the guest's awareness of being one.
And near Gracia, always, was Mario, the quiet farmhand saving to buy land. Their love was made of small things too ordinary to name: the dipper of water passed between them in the rows, the hands that almost touched reaching for the same seedling, the way he arrived before dawn and worked without being asked, the way he looked at her when he thought she was not looking — which she always was, because Gracia saw everything and said nothing. He was a good man. Goodness, in peacetime, is enough.
At that church, Andres approached her — thin, narrow-chested, carrying since childhood a wheeze the way other men carry a scar — and Divina told him, before the whole barrio, to get his own farm, get his own house, before courting anyone. A small humiliation. Public. The kind that does not heal.
✦ ✦ ✦
1943.
Fausto left in 1940, on a Tuesday morning, to look for work. He did not return, did not send money, sent one letter and then nothing — the way Spain itself had left these islands: not with a farewell but with a transaction. What he left behind were small things. A surname on school records. A religion on an altar. A habit of memory in the stairs.
Then Japan came. Pearl Harbor; Bataan; the Death March; MacArthur gone and promising to return. And the occupation, too, was made of small things. Banana money in the pocket, buying less each week. A woven bilao basket with two holes cut for eyes, worn by a Filipino man who walked beside the patrols and pointed. The men he pointed at went to the garrison, and often to the river. The beautiful women went to the City Hall on the plaza, whose lights burned at night — the Comfort Station, the most feared building in town.
I was not there. What follows is what I was given in kitchens thick with steam, passed hand to hand the way grief is passed, keeping its original shape.
Late in 1943 two soldiers came along the dyke road to the field where Gracia, thirty-one, was planting rice beside Mario, humming one of the old hymns. Mario saw them first. He stepped in front of her and held up his hands — open, empty, the universal gesture of wait. The first soldier swung his rifle stock into the side of Mario's head. A thick, damp sound. Then the splash. Then the paddy water going the colour of rust.
Gracia was not built for resistance but for endurance, which is a worse thing, and she let herself be taken, because Mario was face-down in the water and fighting would only hurt him more. Where the dyke met the bamboo she saw a thin figure in the shadow of the culms, and underneath her own crying she heard it: the wheeze. Andres. Watching. He had whispered the word and pointed, and could not resist watching what he had made happen. She looked at him across the bamboo, and the looking said everything: I see you. You chose this.
Of the City Hall I will say only this: a voice used too thoroughly by others goes underground. The fragility that had made Gracia beautiful was the thing the war selected for, the way it selects everywhere — the delicate thing is the thing that breaks, and the breaking is the point.
Divina's war was different. When two soldiers came into her house in the dark, she took their own bayonets and killed them, and dragged the bodies to the rice paddy, and kept one bayonet at her hip for the rest of her life — with the same hands that packed longganisa and held her grandsons. She carried her boys to Mount Arayat and searched for her sister for two years. My father was eleven, selling cigarettes outside the City Hall, when he understood which building his Tita Gracia was in.
In February 1945 the Battle of Manila lasted twenty-nine days and left the Pearl of the Orient in ruins. The garrisons fell. The guerrillas burned the City Hall themselves. And one night, after midnight, they brought Gracia home — in the dark, not because of the Japanese, who were gone, but because of the town, which had known all along and had never discussed it. Divina walked her across the plaza, the firelight moving over the ground, Mario behind them carrying a bag of clothes that belonged to no one. Divina had cleaned the house and laid out their mother's mat near the altar — because the proximity of sacred things to a suffering body is not superstition but architecture: the things do not judge you, and the things do not look away.
For twenty-one days Gracia did not speak. Divina did not ask her to. She placed food and sat nearby, and the consistency was the care. On the fifth day she bathed her, and she washed her sister's hands first, because the hands were the part of her the Comfort Station had not owned: I am starting here, because here is where you are still yourself. Gracia pressed her thumb to her wrist. The water ran clear. Slowly the voice found its way back — quieter, marked for life, but hers.
✦ ✦ ✦
1946.
The Americans came back as liberators, and one of them stayed. Tom had fought his way up from Leyte, and when he stood in front of Gracia he saw a woman and not a wound. His love was also made of small things: his trousers, washed and ironed to Divina's standards; his patience at the table; the way he learned the shape of her silences and never once asked her to fill them. America arrived with liberation and remained with influence — rescue and complication in the same khaki uniform — but Tom, the man, simply loved her.
Mario came back too, half-deaf from the rifle blow. He stood in Divina's yard with his hat in his hands and looked at Gracia, and Gracia looked back at him gently, and between them lay the consequence of the war — not his failure in the field, which any brave man might have suffered, but what he could not live with afterward: that she had been taken while he lay face-down, that her survival was a thing he had not earned and could not repay, that loving her now would mean carrying a wound he preferred to call hers. He was a good man. Goodness, after a war, is not always enough. He walked away, and the family never saw him again.
And in March the postman's bicycle brought a letter on thick Spanish paper, bearing the profile of Franco. Querida Divina — I have married again, her name is Carmen, she is from Seville, we are very happy — life is good. Five years of silence, and then that. Divina finished hanging the washing. Then she took the letter down to the kawa — the iron pot that had fed her family through the war — laid it in without crumpling it, struck a match, and watched the flame cross the page the way she watched everything: completely, without looking away. The second page burned unread.
Spain was dead to her. Not Spain the country — Spain the man. What he left could not be returned, and what he left was names. Alvarez, propagating down the generations the way Spanish propagated through the language. The Catholic faith, in the rosary and the susmaryosep. Nothing else. She tipped the ash into the yard. Ash never goes far.
Gracia married Tom, and crossed the Pacific with him — mano po, Ate, at the door, the last time the sisters would touch for forty-two years. Andres fled north, into the category of things that are out there somewhere still.
✦ ✦ ✦
1988.
I was sixteen when my grandmother fell on a bar of soap — green Palmolive, the oval kind, the most ordinary object in the house — and in the hospital in Angeles she began to tell me all of it, and then the door opened and the story itself walked in: Gracia, seventy-six, in a cream Chanel suit, Tom beside her, their three children, half-Filipino, half-American, all of them somehow hers. She had flown across the Pacific because her sister had fallen on a bar of soap.
She crossed the room the way light crosses a space. She took Divina's rough, calloused hand — the hand that had killed two soldiers and made longganisa — and pressed it to her forehead. Mano po, Ate.
You came, Divina said.
Of course I came, Gracia said. You fell on a bar of soap.
And the room erupted — Cesar, Edwin, Danny, the grandchildren, the Americans — and the laughter leaked into the corridor until the nurses and the doctors and an old man in a wheelchair were laughing too, and it became, they said afterward, the most crowded room in that hospital. In the centre of it the two sisters held hands — the strong Filipina and the fragile one, both survivors, which in the end is the same thing — and I understood that the telling would be my work.
✦ ✦ ✦
2025.
I am a surgeon now, in Sydney, and I have come home for the babang luksa, the ceremony that ends mourning. From my window the light on the harbour is not Philippine light, but light is light.
We think of history as the large things: treaties, invasions, liberations. But the large things only ever touch us through the small ones. Spain is a surname. Japan is a bayonet at a grandmother's hip and a word for goodbye. America is a pair of clean trousers and a Chanel suit. The war is a wheeze behind bamboo, a thumb on a wrist, a bar of soap on a bathroom floor. And love — the love of a quiet man who was good but not strong enough, the love of a foreign man who stayed, the love of two sisters across an ocean — love is the smallest thing of all, and the only one that lasts.
The women remain — the ones who were taken, and the ones who held them afterward. Some never spoke. Some spoke and were not heard. Acknowledging is the least we can offer, and the least is not enough, but the least is what we have. This story is my least. My mano po.
I write it the way she made longganisa — every link the same size, packed without air pockets, with my whole self — because the world is not my family, and the thing has to be good on its own, and the stranger who picks it up will look only at the thing itself.
Sayonara, Divina. Sayonara, Gracia. Sayonara, Cesar.
Not farewell. Remembering. The smallest thing of all, and the one that lasts.
Alumni poetry
Winner: Sarah Gallagher
Small
You didn’t stay in the kitchen like I asked
You found your small spade and
Joined me in the garden
burying our murdered chickens
Desperate to find fairies you
Staked out the elderberry tree
From your teepee
tempting them with coloured pebbles
Moving one brick at a time
In your plastic barrow
Rescuing a bee
from the water butt
Catching a field mouse
bought in by the cat
Gently applying salve
with a cottonbud
Tending a window-crashed
song thrush
Shocked and gasping
in a shoebox
Small actions
Huge heart
My girl
Alumni fiction
Winner: Nicki Macklin
Dear Josie
Josie, you won’t know me anymore. And you won’t guess why a white middle-class lady thinks about you when she thinks about kindness. Or why you are my first example that comes to mind when I try to explain how very disproportionate the experience of small acts of kindness are when one is fraying at the edges, trying to hold on to a ‘competent copers’ mask through endless years of hospital visits.
Because you won’t remember what you did for us. It was nothing, and everything. A series of seemingly insignificant little gestures every time we showed up in your hospital café, accumulated over seasons.
You noticed us. That’s simply it. By the second or third time we came in, I could see by the almost imperceptible twitch at the corner of your mouth that you recognised us as back again. One day, you told my daughter that she was beautiful and that her blue eyes were a precious gift. The day before, I’d stood on the street holding her little hand as a stranger approached us, asking what was wrong with her and if she was dying (she wasn’t). If you weren’t too busy at the till, you started coming by our table as we sat with our coffee, our fluffy, our little shared gingerbread man. You never said much, but you smiled at us like we were your kin and you were happy to see us.
By the time we were done with our hospital journey, we couldn’t drive up that long sloping hill to the front doors without gravel collecting in our hearts and teeth set for hurt we knew was coming. You, in your café, became our harbour before heading up the stairs, knowing we would find a last reliable draw of kindness before the fray. In these tiny actions you chose for us. Your smile that felt just for us. Using our name. Wishing us luck. Choosing not to see the tube stuck to a face as part of the story of who we were.
And you didn’t need to know our story to be our friend. Sometimes I wondered what your own story was, beyond being ‘Josie at the café’. What mattered to you, who loved you, who showed you how to trade in these small kindnesses, even in the midst of such busy days. I wondered if maybe you knew what these little moments meant, because you’d been there too, experiencing ordinary kindnesses for their extraordinary radiance in dark places.
It’s been ten years since we drove that hill to get to you. You don’t know me. You never did. That was the gift.