Meet our featured author: Will Mikels-Carrasco Will is 13 and in 8th grade. Their favorite activities include drawing, working with their horse, Penny, and hanging out with Takami, a bird they raised after she fell out of her nest. Will also likes binge watching Watcher on YouTube. Find Will's art @spacemocha11 on Instagram.

          Rose petals by Will Mikels-Carrasco

Once, long ago before the time of sprawling cities, America consisted of countless little towns. There were many who were exclusively in the business of buying land and making it fit for farming, creating towns. One of these land developers was named Antony Brooks. Antony was a wicked man, who would cheat others out of their property only to sell it to the highest bidder. Though many people didn’t know it, what Mr. Brooks wanted more than anything was a wife and child, he felt there was something missing in his life without a family.

 Mr. Brooks was once visiting the tiny town of Oak Meadow, a town with less than a hundred residents and miles upon miles of swamp surrounding it. He was planning to turn the swamps into farmland, which the town desperately needed, but the town did not have enough money to pay for his services.  While working there he met Ann, the most beautiful young woman in the town. He desired her, and with large amounts of money and influence, he was used to getting what he wanted. Ann’s father was the mayor of Oak Meadow and so Mr. Brooks and Ann’s father struck a deal, Mr. Brooks would develop the swampland to be fit for farming, and he would have Ann’s hand in marriage. Ann was not entirely happy with being married off to someone she didn’t know, but she loved her town more than anything, and more farmland was extremely needed. She agreed to marry Mr. Brooks.

Ann did not meet Mr. Brooks before the wedding, which was huge and beautiful, yet cold, as if everyone in attendance could sense the lack of love between the two. As Ann stood at the altar on her wedding day she caught a glimpse of something in her new husband’s eye. She gulped as an ominous feeling spread through her veins like venom.

Unfortunately, Ann’s premonition on her wedding day was correct; Mr. Brooks saw her as nothing more than a pretty prize to be pranced around like a show horse.  Ann, however, was happy enough as long as her town would get the farmland it needed. But Mr. Brooks was bitter and angry, for Ann failed time and again to bear him a child. He became crueler to her, and after a year of marriage and no child on the way, his thin amount of patience was broken. He stopped working to turn Oak Meadows swamps into farmland until Ann would bear him a child. Ann tried urgently to explain that she was trying as hard as she could, and that it wasn’t her town’s fault that she couldn’t seem to have a child.

“Would you punish the innocents of Oak Meadow purely because you are angry?” Ann pleaded with her husband.

“As long as you refuse to give me what I desire, I would walk to the end of the world as long as it made you unhappy.” Mr. Brooks sneered.

 Ann was distraught, she hated her husband, and now her awful marriage didn’t even help her town. Ann besought Mr. Brooks to resume helping her town, but he refused. He told her if she didn’t have his child in one year, he would leave Oak Meadow to fend for themselves, despite the beginnings of his work there leaving them with less farmland then before.

Ann was walking through Mr. Brooks’s beautiful garden one day, two months into the allotted year, when the gardener approached her. The gardener was a very old woman, with skin textured like tree bark and eyes like the sea, ever-changing and eternal. The gardener told Ann to come out to the garden during the next full moon, and she would find two flower petals under the archway. The old woman explained that she was to eat one of them.

“The white flower will give your husband the child he wants, so he will resume working on the swamps of Oak Meadow, but the red flower will give you a way out of your misery. White petal for a child, red to be free. You have a week to choose your fate until the next full moon. On the night of the full moon come to the garden at one a.m. And Lady Ann, remember; only eat one, for eating both will leave you damned forever. I already know what you will choose dear, but I hope you at least try to change your fate. ” 

       Before Ann had a chance to ask what the gardener meant, the old woman seemed to disappear. Ann thought to trust her somehow. The old woman held a kind of ancient wisdom, like she had seen from the beginning to Armageddon already, and was just still living for the hell of it.

       Ann pondered her fate for the week leading up to the full moon. A child would mean Mr. Brooks would resume helping her town, but she also longed for freedom, free of Mr. Brooks, free of her marriage, free of her awful miserable life. By the night of the full moon, Ann had made her decision, she crept out of bed and into the foggy, moonlit garden. With the light mist covering all the flora, Ann could have sworn to anyone who would listen that the bushes had eyes. Ann trod over to the timeworn wooden arch, and just as the old gardener had said, there were two flower petals, one a deep, blood, red, and one a soft milky white. The petals seemed to glow with a breathtaking golden light. She ate the white petal, that was the choice she had made over the week, her town needed help, but the petal tasted of sunshine, and warm summers and her home, and a happiness Ann had not felt in far too long. She ate the red petal as well, needing the sunshine to stay just a little longer. She walked back up to her bed, her chest buzzing like bees were making honey in her heart, somehow so very unworried about the consequences of what she had done.

       Mr. Brooks awoke the next morning to the pitiful wailing of an infant down the hall. He rose from bed, planning to fire whoever’s baby had awakened him. He stomped down the hall to the spare bedroom and found, to his surprise a baby wrapped in a blanket made out of what appeared to be rose petals. The baby unmistakably had Ann’s sky blue eyes and Mr. Brooks’s mousey brown hair. She was just lying there staring at him with eyes so new, yet somehow still old looking. He knew somehow that it was his and Ann’s child and that the child was also somehow aware of that fact. He was confused, more so when Ann was nowhere to be found. He sent out bounty hunters after the whole town was searched and no one could find Ann. And though it went unnoticed by Mr. Brooks, his gardener went missing the same night as his child appeared. He stopped worrying about Ann’s disappearance soon after, he had a child after all, and that was all he wanted from Ann anyway.

Mr. Brooks remarried about a year after Ann’s disappearance and had another child, a boy. They lived as happily as a family can when no one in it really loves each other. By the time his daughter was five,  he was convinced that there was something seriously off about her, maybe it was the way she would find her way out to the garden every full moon, sitting below the old wooden arch. Maybe it was the way she would sometimes speak of things like traveling the world as if she had already experienced them. Maybe it was the way she knew things she wasn’t told, about Ann, about what he had done to Oakmeadow; or maybe it was the way she talked to everyone, Mr. Brooks, her stepmother, and her brother, like she knew what was going to happen. For instance, when she was 3 years old, she said to the family’s butler, 

“You’re going to be dead soon.”

 He died in a carriage crash 2 days later. But Mr. Brooks always swore the reason she was so strange was not that Ann had not shown signs of being with child before she was born, nor even her mother’s mysterious disappearance. No, he swore it was because when he looked at her out of the corner of his eye, she was made of rose petals and golden light.

Perfect by Will Mikels-Carrasco In my home resides the living embodiment of  perfection, in his opinion at least. His thoughts of  himself are not completely unwarranted, however. He has evergreen eyes with splashes of bright lime. His  dual-colored hair of both deepest ebony and palest dove  white is sleek and cottony, like freshly spun silk  strands waving in the breeze. He wears a stunning  tuxedo. He holds an indifference to the other occupants of my home, his personality as fierce as a wolverine and majestic as a hawk. His voice is piercing and melodious, with a rainbow of emotion in just one sound, like a wind chime in a hot summers breeze. His tone is never louder than the bark of a dog, but always louder than the voice of whomever he is speaking to. His title is Buckie, and he wears it like a medal of honor. As he slinks through the house on his tiny paws he will continue to think the world of himself, and he well deserves to. He is truly, the perfect cat.

The Inventor by Will Mikels-Carrasco            Hunched over his Legos, he stares intently at his work. Eyes narrowed in concentration.      “What are you working on?”  I ask.       He contemplates me for a second, his deep chocolate eyes unblinking and measuring, like a lizard stalking its prey. He begins to explain his project, his skinny arms wave energetically as he talks, pointing at his creation, and miming what it will do when completed. His curly to the roots, dusty brown hair bounces as he moves. Spare curls falling into his lightly freckled face, he brushes them back with a spare hand; his nails in desperate need of cleaning. His forever smudged glasses catch the light, obscuring his eyes for a moment as he talks - beaming with pride over his invention. He smiles when he finishes explaining, his pink lips turning up at the ends; the dimple on his left cheek becoming prominent. His smile reveals a missing tooth and the small silver band that exposes his retainer. As I get up to leave he turns back to his project, humming a song of his own devising, happy with his work.