Dear Margot

Excerpt

Dear Margot,

I promised Mom that I won’t use swear words in my letters to you. Mom is very sad nowadays and when I told her I would start writing to you I could see her pale lips stretch into a faint smile. So, I am doing this for Mom, not for you. I’d never want to do anything for you.

I started school a couple of days ago, and I have Mr. Hendricks for third period English. When he was doing roll call he noticed my last name and paused, just for a few seconds, but I could feel it. It was like when a singer is singing a song, and their voice rises and rises and the music builds and builds until suddenly, a single, empty beat is heard, and right as you think that the pause is too long, that the emptiness is taking over the song, the chorus comes crashing in with the drums and the guitars and the singer starts singing again.

Sometimes I think that we are living in that pause, Mom and Dad and I. Desolation travels up the walls and down the hallways of the house, and although we know that we all feel it, we never speak of it, which just lets it take up more time, more space. We are all waiting for the moment the drums and guitar start playing again, and the singer sings. Sometimes I feel like that day will never come.

Shira Zur

Shira Zur is a senior in high school living in the Greater Seattle Area in Washington state. She has loved to read and write ever since she can remember and hopes to pursue storytelling in the future! Her work has been published in several online teen publications, which include Junebug Journal and Orange Blush Zine. She is the founder and head editor of the online teen creative magazine Love Letters Magazine.

Patrick Ryan on “Dear Margot”

The time has come to publish the second of three winners from One Teen Story’s 2021 Teen Writing Contest. As I mentioned when introducing our previous winner, 2020 brought us more than 450 entrees, which is the most we’ve ever received. Given that our submission window didn’t open until September of that year, we found it very impressive that so many teens were tapping into their creative impulses during lockdown. Our goal was to pick the most outstanding entree in each age category (13-15, 16-17, 18-19), and our work was cut out for us.

For our second installment, we present to you “Dear Margot” by Shira Zur. This story is a good old-fashioned epistolary. More specifically, it’s a one-sided correspondence: a teen who refers to herself as “S.L.” is writing letters to her sister Margot—only, Margot has passed away. That premise brings with it several immediate questions any reader might have, such as How did Margot die? and Were the sisters close? and What’s the point of writing to a dead person? Questions, for me, make up at least a third of a good reading experience.

What I love most about this story, however, is that, while answering some of the questions we bring to the table, it also provides us with questions we might not even have thought to ask—and answers them, as well. In a fairly short amount of space, Shira Zur covers a lot of emotional ground, weaving together a portrait of two siblings out of the grief of the one who survived. We at One Teen Story are delighted to be ushering “Dear Margot” into the world.