I. Grasshoppers
By Vivian Walman-Randall
My home is full of grasshoppers. Big ones, little ones, and the average medium-sized ones. Last weekend, I found one in my hair, and that felt like an invasion of privacy, close to not only my skin, but my brain, combing at the follicles of my hair with tiny, two-toed feet. When I’m sitting at my table, I can see them crawling around on the floor.
They’re plotting something. They want to overtake me, live in this house alone. It makes sense, I eat much more than they do. Sometimes, I vacuum under the couch, which sucks one or two of them up violently. And I probably smell odd, not like the seedy, grassy smell of their home, but like bleach and hair spray and lemon pepper, things that are likely altogether abrasive to grasshoppers.
I’ve always considered myself a pacifist, so although I note their growing numbers and increasingly agitated hopping, I’m only devising small plans of defense, for example, sweeping up the crumbs twice a day, so as to provide less sustenance for their reproduction. I’m not sure if this is working, since I do not know what grasshoppers eat.
They are not responding to my tactics and are becoming more aggressive. They’re hiding in my shoes, they’re nibbling at the crumbs in my lunchbox, they’re crawling in my bed. Last night, I turned on the TV, and all I could see were their legs, their small, pod-shaped bodies, squirming, full of vengeance. In their seething, I saw myself, long and lanky, skin stretched over bones and meat. With my knees folded in front of me and my arms crossed, all my angles look harsh, insect-like. In their scratching and shivering, I hear the words: “Who are you to call yourself human?”
II. Perfect Fit
On a summer afternoon, I followed my older brothers down the little gully behind our farm, through the small wood, across a glade full of weeds and dandelion, around some boulders, and into the cave. I was the youngest of six siblings, and the only girl. I had a small round head and callused hands, and at eight, I still didn’t know how to talk. At least, not out loud.
What I was most afraid of and enthralled by in that cave was not the darkness, not the rock formations, or the mucus-like sheen on the stalagmites. It was the smell. A warm, damp, moldy smell. A smell that kept me coming back, again and again, following my brothers when they snuck out of chores to go spelunking.
We went through corridor after corridor, left, right, left, left, down, down, down, through a room with a crystalline pool, through a room filled with the squeaks of bats, through a room with ceilings low enough my brothers had to hunch their heads into their shoulders, like they were praying. The flashlights flickered. My brother’s whispers bounced off the wall. I stayed silent, lips sealed tight to the sour taste of the air.
After perhaps an hour, perhaps ten, my brothers began to turn back. The corridors were getting narrower. It was becoming hotter and harder to breathe. But I didn’t go back with them. Instead, I pushed on, until I was on my hands and knees, crawling, and then lying on my stomach and pulling myself forward, inch by inch in the darkness. And then, I felt the rock press close to me, so that I couldn’t move forward, backward, or to either side, and I was wedged there, tightly, held with a relentless force, and for once I fit perfectly.
III. Updo
Elsie is getting me ready for prom, just like she’d always promised she would. We’d been looking forward to this moment since we were little girls, and she’d sit across from me on my bed, applying her mother’s red lipstick all over my mouth.
Now, she combs through my hair with the pointy ends of her long, electric blue fingernails, separating each strand like spaghetti before curling it around the hot iron.
“You’re going to look so pretty, with your hair all up and out of your face like this.”
I nod, and then wince as the curling iron taps my scalp. “Ouch.”
“Be still.” Elsie snaps. I watch her in the mirror, her eyeliner soft and ragged, her slightly too-big glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose. I look alien, silver eyeshadow and pink glittery blush obscuring the face I was familiar with. Through the glass, we both look like strangers.
“Don’t you wish you were going?” I whisper.
Elsie smiles a cracked smile that’s trying so hard to be carefree. “I couldn’t fit in a prom dress if I tried. Besides, you won’t have time for me. You’ll be dancing with all the boys.”
But we both knew the truth — nobody would be asking me to dance, just like nobody had asked me to go. I’d spend the night perched on a white folding chair, sipping punch, wishing Elsie was there to swing me around on the dancefloor, to retouch my lip gloss in the bathroom, to kiss my cheek at the end of the night. I’ll go home early and get in bed without taking my makeup off.
And she’ll be here, in her bedroom, watching TV and eating cottage cheese, her baby bump pushing up the hem of her tank top, alone, alone, alone.
Lela Masters, Little Lela, 2026, wire, clay, papier mache, plastic bags, thrifted clothing and paint, 34" x 9".
Vivian Walman-Randall is a writer and scholar from Southern California. In her work, she’s interested in exploring themes of environment, feminism, climate change, and cyclicity. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and a BA in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is currently a PhD candidate in English with a creative writing emphasis at Oklahoma State University. She is a Co-Founder and the Prose Editor of Fork Apple Press. Her prose and poetry can be read in Santa Barbara Literary Journal, Yellow Arrow Journal, and Apricity Magazine. Vivian currently lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma with her partner and their standard poodle, Clover.
Lela Masters is a sophomore at VCU’s School of the Arts. After VCU’s comprehensive first year of art school, her horizons have been exponentially broadened, especially in terms of media. She was recently accepted into the major of painting and printmaking and will begin in the fall of 2026. She has been making art her whole life and has big, albeit vague, plans for a career in it. Her preferred mediums are typically pen and paint, so ‘Little Lela’ was a drastic step outside the comfort zone for her. The experience was exciting, and she hopes to create more three-dimensional pieces in the future.