"Suzanne" | The Walrus

"The albatross left the day our AC broke down. Suzanne brought a portable fan to the living room, and we watched the white blades julienne the coagulated heat. The plastic whirred, tracing circles and going nowhere. To cleave the silence, I spoke about the fledgling on the roof, now lapping up the sky with every wing stroke. How it left at dusk, its half-formed wings beating against the half-decayed horizon;"

"Suzanne lives in a white house, so plastered and pale that the wayward sand practically scars the surface. This is not surprising; the house does not stand so much as it crawls toward the ocean. Even the realtor printed "eroding foundation" in small text. I know that because I was the realtor. When Suzanne moved last spring, I did not know better than to ask why this house, in particular. The house, too, needed company, she answered, after staring at me long and hard."

Vicky Zhu is a BC writer and Iowa Young Writers Studio alumna, recognized by Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards, the New York Times, and the John Locke Institute. Her winning short story earned a $5,000 prize and will appear in The Walrus print edition, January/February 2026. The narrative evokes a late-summer domestic scene after the AC fails, where an albatross and a fledgling symbolize absence and lingering presence. Suzanne, a painter living in a pale, eroding house by the ocean, catalogs memories in paint while the narrator observes her rituals and questions the capacity of color to hold experience.

Read at The Walrus