"Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
-Benjamin Franklin 

Truth
mahaila smith

We did not know 
How much we could
Hurt each other.
I hurt you first.
Sorry,
Not.

Your lies stabbed me
In the back,
My secrets
Burned you like acid.
Ready for another?

I never liked you that much anyway.

TALIA VOGT

WOrds of wisdom from the stalls
marie benedek

*This piece is entirely composed of phrases that were found in bathroom stalls. Secrets, if you will.*

This way to the ministry of magic, but beware of the limbo dancers. Oh, and by the way, you’re beautiful. And before I forget—congrats on not being pregnant!

Did you know that, technically, the taste of broccoli does not influence the taste of chocolate? But a word of advice: don’t eat chocolate all day. If you do, you’ll soon be sick of it.

You should try to stay positive.

Who am I? An optimist, which leads me to my next point: everyone should really be nicer to each other. I mean, why can’t we just all get along?

Who the hell am I? Not a pessimist, and I just want you to know that it only takes twenty seconds of bravery to get what you want, and even though you’ll always be haunted by the idea that you’re wasting your life, it won’t be enough to keep you from living.

So get your shit together. I mean, it’s just high school.

Don’t cry. I've been there.

You’ll make it. 

the ants have secretly been plotting:
kelsey nowlan

We, the ants, have had enough. You have smacked us with your last newspaper, destroyed your last ant hill, laid your last trap. For years now, we have secretly been plotting to unite as one. Every time you heard your name being called, and thought it was the wind, that was us. The sensation of tiny legs crawling up the length of your arm was not your mind playing tricks on you. It was us. We are everywhere and it is no use trying to hide.

This should not surprise you. Did you really think you could get away with treating us poorly for so long? Were you under the assumption that we were fine with you teasing us with your delicious picnic snacks only to flick us away? Are you aware that we have a queen to feed? Surely you would not like it if we came in and swiped your turkey right from under your noses at thanksgiving.

Any attempts at reconciliation will be futile. The ant revolution is officially underway. You should consider yourselves warned. We will take over your grocery stores, your farmer’s markets, your bakeries. Bid farewell to the Dorito crumbs you eat when you are desperate. They are now ours. Every crumb. Every morsel of food. It is ours from now on.

We will no longer be seen as a joke. The ants will at last be seen for what we truly are, a force to be reckoned with.

"BURIED TREASURE, HIDDEN FOREVER" BY SARAH COLLINS

The secret keeper
sonia Gill 

Strangers are the best secret-keepers.
When a heavy burden weighs you to the ground,
unload your woes on a stranger you found
in the street; you are sure to feel pounds
lighter. Perhaps whisper your crime to the woman
beside you on a one-way flight,
and watch as her eyes widen,
and her fingers tighten around the armrest
Spill your secrets to the homeless man
sitting on the bench beside you,
as he blinks and says
“Do you have a cigarette?”
Tell the little girl sitting beside you on OC Transpo,
about the time you accidentally killed
your pet hamster when you were her age,
and she’ll tell you about when Mommy
accidentally hurt Daddy during an while they argued.
Okay, maybe some things are better left unsaid;
just write in your diary next time.

keeping you
arifah baksh

I tried to ignore you,
but you didn't go away.
You tore at my guilt,
my mind,
my conscience.

I needed to tell somebody,
so I did.
Then I waited for a reaction.
Nothing happened.

 I told someone else.
 No reaction.

Maybe I was a bore
or maybe no one really cared.
I wanted them to know.
The more people I told,
the more said it was old news

The suitcase
jessica wilson

Every night I pack my shiny red suitcase. I make sure that my jar of coins and my toothbrush are inside and then I walk up the stairs. I try to not drop my shiny red suitcase as I go up the beige carpeted stairs. I put on my too-big boots and open the door and take a few steps before he grabs me and pulls me back in. Every night he says, “Why do you try to run away? I love you, sweetie.” Then he takes me back down to my room with the shiny red suitcase thumping down the beige carpeted steps behind him.

AMANDA VENTRUDO

rumour has it
Hannah Pinilla

Hushed undertones
A game of broken telephone
Cupped hands
Drawn curtains
Flitting eyes
A raspy diction
"Shhh it's a secret"
Quote on quote and quote on quote
They're not rumours
They're embellishments
Bring your finger to your lips
Put your tongue to your teeth
And shh
Cross your heart and hope to die
Promise
No more lies

There are no secrets
aeriana narbonne

Downtown is made up of one street. Black lines try to cover up the cracks, like the city worker’s attempt to cover up the city’s lack of money with his patch work job. On a summer’s day, sometime in our younger years, the air was thick and the sun was bright. Although we wore sun glasses and covered our eyes with our hands (just like the explorers), it was painful for us to look up when the plane flew by. “Where do you think it’s going?” I asked my friend. She shrugged, unconcerned. “Someone knows. Nothing can be a secret from everybody.” I knew she was right. She knew about secrets; her mother kept many the year before. It was nearly impossible for anyone to keep a secret in that apartment; they all escaped. That night I slept over at her house. It was always an adventure to go through her apartment, cluttered with souvenirs from a time she knew she would not revisit anytime soon. We looked up into the darkening sky, remembering the airplane that had flown by, and wondered where it went.

Émilie Montreuil Strub

He told me the truth.
A truth I understood, a truth I might have known a long time and just not realized it. 
A truth that hurt all the same.

untilted
claire hendrickson-jones

all the words we
aren’t saying drip
between us like
molasses slowing the
flow of our conversation to a standstill.

all the things i don’t have the courage to say and all the things you think i couldn’t forgive and the thickest of all the realization (known but never spoken) that we are not what we once were.

i begin to wonder if there’s something wrong with me or if the problem is simply that time has eroded our edges and we are two puzzle pieces that fit together no longer.

you ask me if i’m
okay and i
lie smoothly. we
are used to
secrets.

Indigo
kate reeve

Burnt sugar throat spinning see-through stories. 
Palms up, wannabe waifer-babies talking trash
in back alleys hawking scrap metal to the homeless
(don’t be a holdout) 

You remind me of the 6am blues:
Head to toe in dress code drag, 
back hunched over book carts, overstocking
Gwyneth Paltrow; nice to see "It’s All Good". 

Cashiers blinking their spider lashes, tarantula eyes
handling old men with steady hands - little black widow dolls.
Coffee and cinnamon, dark roast, slow toast to myself
for sticking to the plan, sticking to my guns, staying stuck 
in the same rut - congratulations - 

Light on the exclamation points please.
My fingers are still jittery, wrists still seizing
from ripping covers off old books too expensive
to send home. Cry a bit for these books then keep tearing. 

$10.25 an hour cannot stretch far enough to cover 
all my bases. I know three strikes and I’m out
down for the count and days like these seem so much
longer than just dawn till dusk.

and it repeats
and it repeats

And in this way I pass five months, 
coughing up the dust
of new age and non-fiction and the history
of all things.

ARCHANA RAGUPARAN

"SECRET GARDEN" BY SAVANNAH CRAIG

winked
anonymous

Muscles, brawn and dirty blonde hair all spiked up in the front
Sport jerseys and jackets, football teams and baseball cleats
Mr. Popular, the typical jock

“I bet you get all the girls”, I said, jokingly, after baseball practice

He just laughed and winked
Laughed real hard
And maybe it was just a little more than a wink

mommy and daddy
meg collins

In my house, secrets crawled up walls like spiders. No one spoke about what they did, or what they still do. Mommy and Daddy tucked me into my bed and didn’t face each other in their own. Mommy and Daddy only talked when there was a fight to be had, or something wrong with me. I tried to make things go wrong a lot, so that Mommy and Daddy would talk. When Daddy got into his car and went to the gym, I got sad. And when Daddy got home with lipstick stains on his face, I had to promise not to tell Mommy.

MAB SPEELMAN

buried alive
isabelle flack

She wanted to take her secrets to the grave.
Let them lurk six feet under, away from the light.
Where the voices, taunting, maiming, and haunting
Would cease battle and surrender to strife.

She knew the earth could imprison her secrets.
That once buried, nothing returns to the day.
Where darkness and death pave a path into hell,
Where time itself waits and decays.

Her secrets fought back, unwilling to die,
Refusing restraint by her ultimate demise.
For if secrets can’t escape through whispers and wait,
Then they’re chained to the soul they had prized.

chains
Mareim Salman

What creates enemies are those whispers heard in hallways 
Those malicious words that ruin lives.
It all starts with one thing
That leads to another 
The pinky promises 
And crossing your heart
A vow that if you speak a single word
You’ll hope to die.
It's a chain of secrets, you see,
Maybe death would be the next best thing.

The Man Who Died in Antigua
Tyrin Kelly

He kept himself in his villa in Antigua. He would send invitations for visits to see his polished floors, oiled gates and in-house-garden by the living room. Thick bellied men of wealth who chuckle deeply, drunken lovers who clink glasses before a drink, dancers who trample barefoot in the garden, and musicians who play the lute and viola for amusement in the courtyard would make their way through his doors. 

The staircase to the rooftop view of heaven was made of rock, and once at the summit there was an outlook onto the cheerful neighbourhood where the streets were paved with cobblestone. The upper floor was dirty, strewn with imperfection. And whilst seated at the dinner table over brunch, he had a conversation with a fellow comrade in a foreign language of his hallucinogenic wayfaring after digesting ayahuasca. He spoke of his spiritual intimacy with the brewed plant infusion; descriptions of him hunched over under the shelter of a cool cove where the walls sweat as he boiled the mixture in the company of a shaman.

In the backyard, he kept a greenhouse of exotic plants picked from Eden. As he entered, the humidity cascaded over him. His breath grew heavy as if imprisoned in a blanket fort in the midst of the Sahara, propped up by tree limbs. There, he nurtured his greenery with gifts of 
fruition and spoken kindness. Cacti that had been growing for close to a decade, carnivorous plants, and bloomed flowers that danced in the breeze grew beneath the shelter of the greenhouse. Many of them kept secrets of the man. His planted greenery knew things no man should ever want to be known. They soon whispered his secrets into the heated breeze of the distant night, giving the man the gift of shame and sadness. The next day, he locked his doors and sought a shaman, seeking to purge his sins. And during his ayahuasca travels, the man died in the glimpse of a morose dream, shedding lustrous tears, and was laid to rest among his potted plants on the roof of his villa.

"SOCIETY'S SECRET" BY KASSANDRA BYERS

TRAPEZE artists
emma rektor

Sharing a secret is a leap of faith.

Keeping a secret is hanging suspended in the air, and trusting your confidant to not cut the ropes holding you aloft.

Over two years I made a puzzle; each piece was a snippet of information. It did not result in a full picture, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that the puzzle was a combined effort. Three people in total shared the things we did. Looking back, our grand and convoluted story, crafted from secrets, was not nearly as important or interesting as we thought. Yet, it retained its relevancy for much longer than any of us expected. The secret became a test when a fourth person approached the cliff we had already leapt from. A test for the secret holders: We each held ownership to one part of the secret. Who would be the one to start giving away pieces? The temptation pulled at me. A test for the fourth: Curiosity battled respect for privacy. Would he collect the pieces and build the puzzle for himself?

In the end, we all passed. We still hang suspended in the air. He still stands, firmly planted on the ground. We will stay that way until the picture on the puzzle fades, bleached by time, until the secret is no longer a secret because we will have forgotten.

Once
anonymous

I let my fingers dance
On the white-and black ballroom floor
Of the piano keys.
They twirled discordant pirouettes,
Leaped clumsy Jetés,
And marched across the dance hall
Without keeping time.
My ears
Curled in on themselves;
Protection against the onslaught
Of noise.
Then my fingers learned to dance
With a pencil, pen,
And keyboard.
My ears learned to love
The hum,
The rasp,
The clickity-clack
Of the keys.

CHARLOTTE JORY

sad bed track
cami stanley

her skin's so milky you
poured it in your coffee and
ever since she left
it’s never tasted as good

you stood together under fluorescent lights
palms kissing in the parking lot
your sweaty hands gripping
trying to get back what you lost but

now that she's gone
your mood's dark blue
the hue that filled her bedroom
at 4:52 AM

you used to watch her sleep
listening to the soft sighs of her breathing
 but now you lie alone
trapped between cold sheets

you dream of her big teeth
the way your necks fit together
and the freckles on her back
which made a path for your fingers

 you’ve been feeling small inside
spending your evenings
sitting lonely and sighing
on a seedy couch made for two

honestly
MaCayla Nesbitt-Batten

“I just hope that one day- preferably when we're both blind drunk- we can talk about it."- J.D. Salinger
 
I hope you either disappoint, or we become great friends.
For being in the midst of this attraction makes me feel sick and weak, impulsive and aware. 

One day you'll be just a name and a side smile on my face, or a bad joke and a sad story. 
And so, I just want this to end, for the story to unravel and for me to be once again safe, sitting on the coast line watching your ship sail away.

Untitled
Kimiya Aghazadeh

There is so much that I have kept from you. There is so much that I want to say to you (I have a galaxy of words waiting).

But every time I see you, I just go cold. I can't speak. I can't breathe. 

And I am sorry.

Please, talk to me

Skeletons in the closet
erin jackson

Why do you wish to see the
Skeletons in my closet?
They’re hideous, really;
Fractured and not presentable.
I hear them banging against the doors every night,
Rattling their fingers in the tight spaces between ribs;
Their bare limbs are darker than I thought they’d be.
These skeletons lack brains yet they possess desire.
They want out.
If I let them out though, they’ll shove me inside the closet.
They’ll steal my clothes and my house and my children.
You see, I put them in there when they were ugly
But now they’re absolutely revolting.

ERIN JACKSON

the secret to happiness
natasha laycock

Happiness is not hidden, nor protected. Happiness is small. Happiness is simple. Happiness is the top part of muffins, and the chocolate found at the bottom of Drumsticks. Happiness is coming home after a hard day to find that mom made cookies, or waking up to the aroma of cinnamon buns. It’s that feeling you get when a stoplight turns green as you approach it, and a neighbour waving when you pass. A compliment on a project you put hours of work into, and the euphoria of receiving a 97.

Happiness comes from soft ducklings, Saturday nights curled up in bed with a good book and a thundershower, or when your favourite song plays on the radio (and you know the lyrics), when the teachers announces that quiz you bombed won’t count, and when you bathe with as many salts and candles as you damn well please.

Happiness is when you go home homework free. Happiness is when you slip into your pajamas at six o’clock. Happiness is when you favourite fictional couple finally kiss.

Happiness is on the house. It’s relief. Guilty pleasures. Comfort. Pride.

Indulge, appreciate, and take part in these. After all, the only secret to happiness is that there is no secret.

secrets
krista hum

“It’s a secret.”
That’s what my sister would tell me when I asked questions.
Who was on the phone?
Where are you going?
Who gave you that?
Why are you sneaking out?
Why aren’t you ever around anymore?
Why did you come back?
Was it not good enough?
It was always a secret.
The day she stopped keeping secrets
was the day I stopped asking questions.

cricket songs
cassia pelton

He lives with houseplants on dusty shelves,
listens to the radio and eats chocolate pudding.
He can’t bend down to wipe the shoe prints off the floor anymore
but he likes to look at them.
The small ones were hers.
In the evening, he sits on the back porch and sings to the crickets
because they stopped singing to him.
And sometimes he swears the house is full again-
full of kids and dogs and homemade birthday cakes
And her voice, reading at book club,
never pausing unless she caught him listening in,
then she’d smile and the ladies would giggle.
He could listen to her read all day.
The book club ladies come by with shortbread sometimes,
but they don’t act like they used to
And each visit seems shorter than the last.
He can't remember the last time they came.
His mind feels foggy,
like the early mornings in September
when he has to squint to see the garden she planted in the yard-
violets, sunflowers, chives.
Sometimes
he has to remind himself of how others see him-
nothing more than a frail, old man living off of memories.
Memories
of shoe prints, birthday cakes, and cricket songs.
He’s forgotten
the difference
between memories and imagination.
People say,
“It’s okay to be confused.”
But the cricket songs are real to him
and so was Gracie Lou.

the secret life of the thing under your bed
Rowan o'brien

1. He knows your breathing patterns like old people know bird calls. He even has names for each of them.
   
2. When you wake up in the morning feeling particularly relaxed, it is most likely because he gave you one of his famous Swedish massages while you were asleep. You’re welcome.
   
3. He carved his name into your bed frame. Don’t bother looking. You won’t be able to find it.
   
4. On nights when he’s bored, he likes to move everything in your room exactly 0.46 centimeters to the left.
   
5. He ate the last cookie.
   
6. He adopted the stuffed dog you thought you lost as his own. It is the only thing with which he feels he has a personal connection - besides you, of course.
   
7. He likes to watch you sleep because you look more peaceful that way.
   
8. When you look under your bed, perhaps searching for a missing sock or misplaced science assignment, he stares into your eyes, but as usual,  you do not see him.
   
9. He dreams of becoming a famous jazz musician, who plays the alto saxophone on New York subways, and lives off forgotten Starbucks and the generosity of strangers.
   
10. Contrary to your beliefs, your bed does not creak. The sounds you hear are actually his sobs when he recalls the time you referred to him as the “monster” under the bed.

---

Oh, hello there. You caught us by surprise. Let us introduce ourselves. 

We are the Secret Spotlight Society. We may not be the Skulls & Bones or the Illuminati, however we do claim such notable alumni as Nicholas Cage's dog and three of the four Beatles (we cannot disclose which members were part of the Society). The Heads of our Society (or "editors" as you young ones might call them) are Claire Hendrickson-JaJaJones, Kelsey Rightnowlan, Sonia Guillotine, Emma Rektoraus and Rowan Bro'Broen. 

We would like to thank everyone who donated their souls - ahem, I mean pieces - to our Spotlight, as well as Mr. Blauer for all of his help and support.

On that note, we encourage you to have a wonderful day and continue to be splendiferous!

“Why is it that some secrets can drown you while some pull you close to others in a way you never want to lose?” 
― Libba Bray