About All Ways Open is a publication aiming to tell small stories about place: stories about pigeons and mountain ranges, stories both real and imagined. It's an experiment in opening writing outwards, directing readers towards visual histories and archives. We aim to think in triplicate: to consider past / present / future, visual / written / read, self / friend /community. In this game of telephone, we always begin with an archival image, which a writer interprets, which an artist then reinterprets. Each time the meaning shifts, changes, opens.

All Ways Open is open for submissions.

▲ illustration by Charles Sindelar for “The Divine Director’s Discourse at Sindelar’s Class, December 23, 1936,” The Voice of the I Am no. 10 (Sindelar Studios, December 1936), p. 2, Mabry Hazen House Collection.
▲ Jaiden Kasaval

Vanishing Point

Sydney Osborne Eby
Jaiden Kasaval

All my life I have loved the sea.

My baby brother and I churning the sand with our toes
Waves melting our prints with each passing

Picnics with gritty sandwiches. Each bite catching my windswept hair in my mouth, peanut butter and strawberry
jam gooping in my split ends
Cheeto powder glued to my fingers

The too bright sun pinking up my skin
Me oblivious to it in those moments

My mother laughing, holding her hat to her head with one hand
So pretty in her carefreeness

The sea cascading its ions over us
Turning negatives into positives like some kind of ancient magic

_______________________________

These memories assault me as I now footslog to the sea
To the last sliver of beach I will ever know
Heading toward the sea is easy now that no land remains

Our latest home—last of the domed cities—can support us no longer
There are too few of us with fewer resources
Staying here a few more hours means death

Thus have we put our faith in these pills
Tiny wonder-inducing things. They work quickly, if they work
Science’s last effort to save humankind, by transforming it.

Our odds are horrifying, a mere one in 53 surviving
My hands trembled as I brought the pill to my mouth, swallowed
Now, waiting . . .

Is that change I feel, or am I hoping too hard?
Will my gills and webbing evolve in time? Will they work?
Do I want them to?

Many chose not to take the pill
To abide with loved ones, or no ones,
In their remaining breaths

My few companions and I continue
To the narrow peninsula point outside our city
My own seawater streams unbidden down my cheeks

A single sob escapes the woman beside me
Her change has begun, but the child she holds
Remains wholly human

My turn . . .
I urge my legs onward
The black velvet of the water obscuring my feet

The sun’s fractured light spills out
Making it impossible to discern sky from sea
May Poseidon not turn us away

Spreading arms, fingers, toes
I dive in
and vanish
beneath the small waves