The Candle

My newborn eyes open. I can’t wait for life. The fire inside me starts growing as I too start growing up. Six years old. I want to be a ballerina. NO NO NO. You must become a doctor no ballerina nonsense. Dreams crushed, waterfalls come out of my eyes. Ok, I won’t dream anymore. I will be number one. Anything other is unacceptable. Constantly studying and doing homework. Working and pushing to my best. Why Why Why. No matter how hard I try it’s never good enough for you. Why is it that I am the firstborn of immigrants? Why is it that my Asian grandparents expect this of me? Suffering is what they felt escaping Vietnam. Escaping and drowning is me trying to run from these expectations. Silence and darkness as the candle that is me gets blown out and now I am burnt out. There is nothing left, but I still have to trek across the vast deep tiding ocean with all my family’s expectations bound on my back.

Sun-Kissed Heart

She poured lukewarm water into the spherical vase filled with yellow roses. She could see him watching her out of the corner of her eye. He watched her with the same admiration he had for the last fifty years. She finished filling the vase and slid her chair closer to his bedside. When children, grandchildren and cousins visited, they could only see how his brown skin wrinkled and the wires connecting his frail body to medicine and monitors. When they held his hand, they only felt the dry cracks in his palms. But when she looked at him, she saw the fresh seeds of sunflowers and yellow roses that they planted after buying their first home. She thought about how the beaming sun reflected the light from his heart onto her skin. When she touched his hands, she remembered how many times she had to stitch them up because he was always clumsy with garden shears. When she held him for the last time, she thought about how he held their first baby girl in his arms with genuine care she’d only seen him give to everyone he held close to his sun-kissed heart.

It’s cacciatore time (2022)

cacciatore is a project cooked up by the vision+voice team. The days are getting shorter and the weather is getting colder. November means cacciatore!

What’s it all about?

It’s cacciatore: a hunter’s stew made by throwing things into a pot and letting them simmer.

It’s ACC: a literary stew created only by ACC dual credit students.

And it’s CC: the Roman numeral for 200, as in, 200 words. That’s it. Your chance to tell the world what’s on your mind, in 200 words or less. Fiction, chicken, poetry, mushrooms, love-letter, tomatoes, raves, or rabbits: the pot holds 200 words. Your thing.

How does it work?

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Submit your piece here, by April 25th. We’ll review all the submissions and choose some for serving hot, right here in our online literary magazine. We’re planning a celebration for cacciatore authors in May — stay tuned for details!