HIGHLY COMMENDED
in the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2025!
The girl keeps to the margins—ink shy of the paper’s edge. Her English name, Ayane Nishida, floats up classroom registers in the wealthy New York suburbs the way a pale koi surfaces in water too clean to taste of river. Tarrytown, 2005: Abercrombie polos, razor-burn gossip, Destiny’s Child lilting through hallway vents. Locker doors slam. Ayane is sixteen, tenth grade, eight years exiled from Nagoya. By now she should have more friends. Instead she’s learned the acoustics of invisibility: glide, nod, vanish.
She’s scribbling in the corner of her physics notebook when the announcement crackles: cultural-exchange assembly, period seven. Nobody cheers—assemblies usually mean a PowerPoint on bullying or a pep rally against gateway drugs. Still, it’s a reprieve from class, so the auditorium swells to capacity.
A visiting youth band from Medellín, Colombia, the principal explains—impoverished barrio riddled by gangs, exceptional talent, brass as bright as the Andes at sunrise. The curtain lifts and the stage blooms: trumpets flaring, clarinets curling vines around trombone stems, timpani thrumming like a mountain heart. Ayane’s gaze magnetises to a boy half-hidden in the second-to-back row. He tilts his head the way Orlando Bloom does in Pirates, that just-let-me-loosen-the-plot smirk. Sun-lit ends of his hair glow bronze.
When he plays his trumpet, the auditorium exhales. Notes rise, then dive, then soar again—linger on a wistful blue note glancing over its shoulder before it vanishes. In that moment she sees a wavering shadow behind his grin, the same lonesome tint she wears inside her own ribs. Ayane feels something shift—the school’s false ceiling suddenly transparent, a slice of sky pinned overhead.
Applause bursts. Teachers herd students toward their next class. Ayane lingers, clinging to the echo. Her crushes normally reside in magazines bought second-hand at the Korean grocery, but this boy is alarmingly three-dimensional.
Backstage smells of valve oil, polyester, and jet-lag. The musicians chug water from crinkled plastic bottles. Ayane slips through the lattice of instrument cases, heart flexing like an accordion. She fingers a sheet from her notebook. She remembers first grade, the lunchroom roar when she mispronounced ‘mayonnaise,’ how she vowed never to speak before she was sure of every syllable again. The vow frays now, tugged loose by brass. She takes a leap. One sentence in textbook Spanish: ¿Quieres conocerme mañana después de la escuela en el río? She adds Me llamo Ayane and a hesitant smiley.
The boy looks up as if summoned. Their eyes snag—two travellers spotting the only familiar face in an alien airport. He reads. A smile unspools, slow as ribbon. “Tomás,” he says, thumbing his chest. The note disappears into his inside pocket, close to the hum of lungs.
Riverfront Park, the next afternoon. April sun, gulls quarrelling over a French fry, the Hudson breathing brackish secrets. Ayane finds Tomás already there, trumpet case balanced on his knees. She raises the deli bag in greeting. He answers with an almost-salute, half shy, half stage bow.
Tomás thumps the stubborn vending machine until two Sprites lean forward but stick. Ayane slips out her sky-blue wallet from her backpack, feeds the bills, and the cans drop with a bright, grateful clatter.
“Next time, I buy,” Tomás says, grinning.
“Deal,” she answers.
They settle on the graffiti-scarred bench—K+M 4EVER, EAT THE RICH, a Sharpie dinosaur roaring above both lines. Traffic brooms the distant bridge; gusts lift pigeon feathers into tiny, uncertain orbits. Ayane’s cheeks feel too warm.
Conversation proceeds in hopscotch: her Spanish verbs missing shoelaces, his English nouns wearing mismatched socks. They point, pantomime, laugh in the same off-balance rhythm birds use when they hop sideways on the grass.
Brothers? she asks, and he counts on fingers—two younger, one older—then mimes a toddler yanking hair, an older teen flexing muscle. Ayane shares she’s an only child. She almost tells him how dinner at home is three bowls, one kept steaming for a father late at the office, night after night, but the words come apart like over-boiled noodles. Tomás nods with startling gentleness, as if loneliness is a language he speaks fluently.
They peel sandwiches, nibble corners first. Bread fluff drifts like dandelion seeds across their hoodies. A gull lands, head cocked imperial. Tomás tears a morsel, tosses it.
Tomás nudges open the trumpet case, lifts the horn just enough to breathe a four-note phrase—soft, unfinished. The sound hangs between them. It skims Ayane’s skin, slips inward, nestles in a hollow below her collarbone.
A Metro-North express barrels past—their bench vibrates, soda cans shimmy. Tomás’s hand twitches toward hers. She meets him halfway. Their fingers tangle awkwardly, then settle, palms learning each other’s pulse as though matching metronomes before a duet.
“Treinta y cinco minutos,” Ayane says when he aims a question at the train tracks. Thirty-five minutes to Grand Central Terminal; another commuter screeches past to prove it. Tomás whistles, eyes wide: freedom measured in timetable columns. She tells him about the Met—marble wings, tombs that glow like captive dawn. She speaks of Broadway marquees, letters ablaze in rain. He listens, eyes bright, as if each syllable grants him citizenship. They trade dreams: her yearning to slip the choke-collar of suburbia, his thirst for anywhere else. Hands meet again between empty brown bags. His thumb graffitis circles into her heartbeat on her wrist. She confirms the planet still spins.
He asks—halting—if she’s climbed the Statue of Liberty. She admits she never has. They decide that next time he visits they’ll go. Próxima vez rests luminous between them, uncertain future tense carved into air.
The river slap-laps against the embankment. Cargo barges toil south, Manhattan ghosting the far-south horizon, a graphite mirage. Tomás closes his eyes, inhales. Ayane studies his profile: the way afternoon light feathers his lashes, the faint scar near his ear shaped like a comma. She raises a finger towards it, wondering what stories follow after it.
She pauses when Tomás opens his eyes.
“What word in English,” he asks slowly, “for when… what you want is big, but place you stand is small?” He spreads thumb and forefinger, pinches them smaller.
Ayane sifts through vocabulary: yearning feels too Victorian, ambition too mercenary. Finally she says, “Longing?” then, softer, “Homesick, but for a place you’ve never lived.” The definition startles her even as she speaks it. It tastes exactly like her own mouth.
Tomás tests “longing,” rolling it with the trumpet-player’s sensitivity to vowels. He repeats it until it fits, then taps his chest twice—I carry this. She mirrors the gesture—yes, me too—and wonders if this means they’re bound forever with this shared burden. For a moment it feels like they’re holding a clandestine instrument between them, an invisible cello humming on the same low string.
Dusk pulls the river over its head like a quilt. Tomorrow, final concert, then JFK. She asks about home. He opens, then closes, his arms—bougainvillea and bullet-holes woven into the same gesture. Medellín, he says, learned to bloom after teaching itself to bleed.
Bougainvillea—he prints the word in her notebook, block letters vine-thin.
The bus brays. Texts from her mother ping like tiny alarms, homework and curfew. She rises. Walks backward until distance forces surrender.
When she finally turns, Sprite fizz still prickling her tongue, Ayane counts—eleven steps, twelve—before chancing a glance. Tomás remains by the bench, silhouette against river shimmer, hand lifted. She lifts her notebook in reply, breeze riffing pages like applause.
Saturday’s finale unfurls. Ayane perches front row, heart a timpani roll. One empty trumpet chair stares at her, accusatory. The conductor starts anyway. Music surges, triumphant yet thinner. Backstage, teachers search restrooms, check stairwells. A phrase filters through: he never got on the morning bus.
Ayane’s stomach knots. She checks her backpack. Her wallet—gone. Sixty dollars birthday money, Barnes & Noble gift card. Betrayal tastes peri-metallic, like licking a battery.
Monday, local news: Colombian teen missing—suspected runaway. Grainy file photo of Tomás flashes. The anchor mispronounces his surname into something American. Online forums flare with jokes about visas and border tunnels. Ayane douses her laptop in blankets.
That night she keeps the cordless phone beside her pillow, as if the FBI might consult tenth-graders at 2 a.m. She clicks through news sites until each refresh feels like CPR that will not take. One rumor says a trumpet case was found in Yonkers; another claims he boarded a Chinatown bus heading south. In homeroom the next morning two boys joke about “the Colombian Jason Bourne,” and Ayane’s cheeks burn so hot she tastes copper behind her teeth. By Friday the posters on the school entrance doors curl at the corners, damp with rain.
Days expand. Cherry blossoms confetti the cul-de-sac. She mangles Chopin on her piano. Each discordant note prints his name onto her metronome heart. She Googles bus routes to Queens, deletes history. Tomás becomes folklore: a trumpet note trapped mid-air, reverberating as echoes in myth.
Then a postcard appears in her mailbox—no stamp. Central Park in autumn, leaves swirled like embers. On the back, neat letters:
Hudson reminds me of you every day. Gracias, T.
An initial, a promise, a loose atom.
She pictures sixty dollars funding an urban odyssey: train to Grand Central, subway to Jackson Heights, maybe a cheap bus south. She imagines him street-corner busking, brass bell catching neon drizzle, strangers dropping coins that sound like double-exposure wishes. She also imagines him cuffed in a van, trumpet confiscated. Both images overlay—light leak and scorch mark.
June, humidity thick enough to spoon. Ayane volunteers to design the Sophomore Farewell program—sanctuary among glue sticks and whisper-quiet paper trimmers. She paints a bridge over water: left bank, hillside shacks; right, a softened skyline; midspan, a lone figure with a trumpet case. Classmates flip through the booklet. “How poignant and hopeful” a teacher says. “Kinda sad,” says a classmate.
July. Ayane’s name badge reads BOOKSELLER. Barnes & Noble hums with chilled air and decaf regret. A boy enters—trumpet case slung. For a breath Ayane is sure, but this boy orders iced chai, laughs about driver’s-ed, vanishes into History.
Later, on break, she slips twenty dollars and her replaced gift card into El Guardián entre el Centeno. Shelves it where Spanish titles gather dust. At closing she checks. The book is gone. Coincidence tastes faintly of sugarcane, diesel.
September’s first cold front rustles suburban maple leaves like pages turning too fast. Ayane bikes to the river-bench. Their butterfly knife initials are blurring—T + A now looks like a math problem with no solution.
She fishes a postcard from her backpack—skyline at dusk, windows beginning to kindle. On the blank side she writes:
Play loud so I can hear you over the water.
She signs with her kanji, folds the card once, then tucks it beneath a splintered slat.
A commuter train hurtles past, windows flashing like empty measures of music. Wind kicked by its wake lifts the postcard, nudges it half-free, but the paper clings, trembling, still undecided on whether to stay or to go.
Ayane rests both palms on the bench. River light scallops across the water. Gulls wheel, practice landings they may never perfect. She realizes she isn’t waiting for Tomás, not exactly, but for the girl whose heart jumped key the moment a trumpet brushed a lonely blue note in an American auditorium, the girl who believed a three-line note could rearrange the geography of a future. When another train rushes by, she understands this girl won’t be here forever.
She throws her leg over her bike to head home, bike chain ticking in hard, even beats. She counts: melody found, note passed, boy met, wallet lost, boy missing, memory fixed, hope in motion, freedom uncharted. Silver flashes peripheral off the Hudson. She chases it, legs burning, sunset bright as trumpet brass ahead of her, breath snagging in her throat, a little dizzy, feels the motion.
Mizuki Yamagen is a writer from Japan, currently living in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with her half moon and two very spoiled farm dogs. In her writing, she explores humanity on the brink, or simply people in strange places and strange times. Mizuki is the Grand Prize winner of The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction 2025. Her writing has also appeared in HAD, Flash Flood, Five on the Fifth, and is forthcoming in Flash Frog, The Citron Review, Does It Have Pockets, and other places.