Congratulations to English major Letty Mundt ’19 on her win in this year’s Undergraduate Research Forum! Letty was honored with the award for best oral presentation at the April 20 event, for her short story “Skylark Drive.” Letty, a committed and passionate author, will soon be joining the communications team as one of our student associates. Meanwhile, we are delighted that she has given us permission to share her winning piece.
Skylark Drive
Skylark Drive.
It was not a street sign I had noticed before, despite its stiff presence in the air just yards from my front lawn. I had never been one for letting the obvious punch into me—in fact, I skirted it deliberately, tunneling headfirst into details without coming up for air.
Which was why it came as no surprise that it took until a gangly age of fourteen for me to peer around my street corner and discover Skylark Drive beaming back at me. Back then, I had legs cramped from restless resting and a mind ready to wander alongside my footsteps. Taking a break to walk the neighborhood in my five-dollar flip-flops was a common occurrence, though it never was here that I walked. Never this road. I’d lived here for a lifetime, but never marked this path.
Yet the angle of the curb drew my eyes along it now, down to where oaks shook rainwater from their leaves in a misty sort of shimmy, copycat birches following suit. The road was an imitation of a puddle’s surface, shimmering with sun, gleaming with a taunt, begging me to walk forth and splash.
I let my feet have at it. My ears buzzed with the songs of April playing from a screen in my jean-shorts pocket, and when the music swelled, so did the sun. It kissed the clouds just right, pecking their edges with silver and gold.
Skylark, I thought, and the length of my hair blew in lazy shades behind me. The street swallowed me whole, right into its shine, illuminating my silhouette with a fresh breath of something I could not quite lift words to.
Skylark, wouldn’t that make a name?
~
Sunny squinted at the sheet of dollar-store paper as though it were being presented to her by an official court, not her best friend of a decade and then some. The curling nest of her hair could not hide the expression poking through in abstract disappointment.
“Letty Skylark,” she repeated. “Messenger of Water.” An eyebrow arched. “Look, isn’t it cheap to name a character after yourself? Self-insertion is the first sign of a Mary Sue character.”
I snatched the paper away with a furtive scowl. “I didn’t name her after me,” I protested, and propped my feet up on the cool, scaly leather of her dad’s couch. “I named her after this doll I saw at the hair salon. ‘Aletta’— it means ‘little winged one.’ She’s nothing like me. I don’t even like her.”
Sunny snorted, but the Neptune blue of her eyes softened. “Well, if you can pull it off, it might make a decent book. But we’re going to need to do a lot more—y’know. Plot. More characters. Themes. All that English-class shit.”
“A real book?” Those were the only words I had bothered to comprehend. “You really think so? I’m not even a freshman yet.”
“The dude who wrote Eragon was, like, fifteen, right?” Sunny shrugged, and tossed a few more of my character sheets my way. They littered in discord at my feet. “It can’t hurt to try. You’re good already. Damn good.”
“Only my mom says that,” I protested, but I grabbed the pages all the same, let their stories run between my fingers—Letty and Maji and Raizy and Jay and the rest.
Perhaps they were waiting for me to tap a key, open a document, part my mouth and let harmonies of sentences flow.
So I did, that fall, under a canopy of golden-crisped maples. For nine straight months, my eyes dragged to my screen with a force magnetism would have envied. Nine months I watched seasons pass in slow-motion cinematography over the edges of my laptop—sticky sun, milky moon, bone-bright snow and the rise and fall of backyard blossoms. All along, my fingers clap-clap-clapped to the beat of the story brewing and bubbling inside me, and I pried it word for word from my veins.
I wrote in my early-morning unmade bed; I wrote behind the cedar-wood door of my basement closet; I wrote in the front room’s white chair that made my back ache for days. Characters spilled from me in tidal waves, and the splash and foam that roared up with them was their progress, their sky-high dreams, what made them breathe to life.
Clap-clap-clap, I heard. Only a thousand more words for today, only an hour, come on, let Maji finish his scene and then you can be done.
~
The road fell away behind me. I turned off Skylark Drive and onto more familiar ground, to the place where conifers hung their arms out to dry over the sidewalk. This turn of my feet implied a commitment to adventure beyond my neighborhood boundaries.
This was me grasping the curves of my path full force and heading into them without regard for the time it would take to conquer them. This was me ignoring the strident yaps of the Yorkie testing his leash, letting bare toes glide into fresh puddles littered with suburban grit. This was me moving perhaps not forward, but somewhere.
Spring smells were everywhere, awakened from their naps by the afternoon drizzle. It was the time of year I always sang along to out loud, especially when I could see new corners up ahead, see the sun teasing the cracks of the pavement and tickling them with warmth.
The nagging blue jays in the trees ordered me to keep moving.
~
By the time the unpolished drafts of three fledging novels were complete, my hair was cut, shorn flat across my shoulders with knife-like precision. It was the kind of chopped and clean my chapters and sentences needed to become, I knew. Perhaps I was mirroring my own methods.
Now it was time to pick apart every scene like a vulture tearing at roadkill, pull the strings and sinews of characters out of place and rearrange them. It was all about stitching, the editing process. Learning to knit conflict and metaphor between the seams without pricking yourself repeatedly on the needle.
Years twirled on, with a thousand pizzas, with Sunny, with brainstorming ways to reword the ambiguity in book two, with my rehearsed pen-on-paper scratch of chapter outlines.
I kept telling myself the end would meet me when it was ready.
Draft after draft, I said it.
“I’m not ready. I’m not ready.”
“I’m on my way.”
“I’m almost there.”
~
It was the final stretch before the private property signs, before the nature-spattered retention ponds and lake’s edge where Sunny and I had once come to discuss our newborn characters against the fallen leaves. Back then, we had re-imagined our world until it emerged as the setting for ten thousand fantastical tales.
The sudden heat hit me in a blaze as I followed the sidewalk to its abrupt but graceful demise at the end of the street. Back when I had first learned to set sail in these parts, there were no houses crushing the brittle prairie grass or patios jabbing at the lakeshore. It was just the wild, the crickets and ribbon-thin garden snakes, the sounds of nearby water.
In the sun, my hair was a flame-burned autumnal envoy, and following the light, I could finally view in full the eggy sunset headed west over the distant woods. The outlines of the clouds were baby-blue, the grass pointing its arrows all in one direction: forward.
Everything strained to come together the further I stepped, every color and shadow puddle-wet and evening-bright in the distance.
If I squinted, I could see it all up ahead, a lighthouse beacon letting me know, “you’re almost there, but don’t crash, alright?”
~
“One last time,” I kept insisting, with every draft that came out of me. I knew I sounded like an addict, like someone frayed and shaken and begging for a final dose of what could kill her. “Trust me. This is the last one.”
The last draft, burning through the hottest summer. Sweat bubbled over my chin, but my editing notebook promised refreshment and reprieve.
“Raizy’s scenes are fixed,” I promised aloud. “Sparta’s arc comes full-circle now.” It was all colored in, and shaded this time, subplots in full bloom.
“It’s done, alright?” my mother would say. “That editor we met with said you have to learn when to let it go and just put it out there. That was years ago.”
“Years ago I didn’t know what a query letter was, or how to properly carry all my weather motifs,” I protested.
“But you do now.”
“I know, I know. Next month I’m sending the letters out. As soon as the third book’s polished. I’ve got ten agents right here who represent fantasy, and I’ll send my synopsis to them. I’m not going to let six years of dribbling words out of my heart go to waste.”
~
Dear author,
Thanks so much for sending along the sample pages of Water and Earth. I’m sorry to say, though, that I just wasn’t as completely drawn in by the material as much as I had hoped. What with my reservations, I’d better bow out. Thanks so much for contacting me, though! I really appreciate it, and wish you the best of luck.
– Andrea
~
I arrived at Crystal Lake just in time for the darkness to erupt over the trees, transform them into gloomy silhouettes. It was too late to see reds and yellows dancing on the water, or find cotton-candy pinks blushing against cloud cover.
Though I swiveled my head, I caught no leggy herons taking off in well-earned flight, nothing soaring or blossoming even after a hard winter’s work. It was as if spring was stalled on the side of the road, waiting for someone to come along and give it a nudge.
I stalled, too; I skidded to a halt where the road bowed out, and looked to the bell-curves of the hills. My heart sank to my feet. It wasn’t as if it were my last chance to hold this beauty in the horizons of my sight, but it still hurt.
I just didn’t know why it couldn’t have been this time, right here, while I stretched my arms open wide and waited for it.
But then the sounds of murmuring water called my name. It was a stream, something I had forgotten was there on the roadside, though it had run beside me since I turned the street-corner. It was barely enough to be called a creek; it was a mere dribble of lake-water spilling into larger bodies where it was needed. Yet I could hear it from where I stood, demanding not to be ignored any longer.
I watched it, then, saw its tiny body flowing, and I began to flow with it, feeling my legs move of their own accord until I was down where the stream met the lake’s lapping shore.
It hit me, then—I was a stream, too, under the rising moon. I could not stop flowing when it got dark. I had to end up here—at the edge of something greater than myself. I had come so far, even small, even slow, even largely unseen.
Beauty was not in the strength of a current, but in the will to keep bustling along.
I would bustle, I decided. I could handle that.
~
Hello,
Thank you for the opportunity to review your manuscript Water and Earth. My team and I enjoyed the story and would love to work with you to publish it! I would like to set up a phone meeting for next week. What date and time work best for you? I look forward to working with you and bringing your book series to life!
Best regards,
Shannon Ishizaki, Owner of Orange Hat Publishing
