NOVEMBER 2025 (STORY): Jack Gross

"'In all its glory, the sun bathed him as it rose, and it sat upon him as such. The sun burned away what once was, a night anew, a person anew.'" ("0710081009101010")

This November is a busy month for Artists from Maryland! After finishing up our high school creative writing contest with Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, we have decided on three winners and one runner up! We are featuring the third winner, Jack Gross! Below is his winning story, and you can read our interview with him here!

Jack Gross (he/him, b. Jan. 2010) is a filmmaker, writer, artist, amateur documentarian, and occasional photographer. His work has been shown at the New Works Baltimore’s August 2025 Summer Screening (co-curated by JHU/MICA senior lecturer of film and media studies Jimmy Joe Roche). He is currently working on his second short film, STRETCHES OF BLACK. His work can be found at jackgross.neocities.org, and he can be accessed on Instagram at @jjjackgross or by email at jackelliottgross@gmail.com.

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July 10. When it would hit 4:30, 5 in the morning or so, the birds would come. I sat in a chair in the basement, awake. The computer screen bathed me in pinks, blues; the fish tank whirred behind me. I’d play Love Deluxe on CD, and let the colors of the old Windows Media Visualizer swallow me whole. I hated the sight of the sky growing lighter, lighter, into a brighter blue. Colors made my memories shapeless, molding about across my mind. The flashes of light came in through then, when the exhaustion became too much to bear. I’d close my eyes, and the nothingness stretched into pieces of thin, white cloth, blanketing my vision. The ceiling moved sometimes when I closed my eyes for too long, so later I’d stare at the walls. Grey walls. The cicadas were incessant those days. My eyes would burn, and water, and itch, the longer I sat, staring at the screen. The album would loop, and the cycle would repeat. I laid on the couch down there, felt the cold floor as I walked towards it, and distracted myself from the looming nothingness; an empty hole. I laid awake, a deer in headlights, thinking. When the nights became agonizing, I slid from myself into a mysterious other, watching through a fisheye lens, narrating.

“The white, white ceiling. It moved sometimes, as it did now. The shapes, the abstractions he saw in his half-awake dizziness, were talking to him. Transfixed by the noise, the light, the buzzing of his computer running. The morning sun, the sunrise, was pretty, even if he hated knowing the night had gone how it had.”

I fell asleep shortly thereafter, lying facing the wall. The first flash of light in the dream was brief, lasting only a few moments. I felt tens, hundreds, thousands of kettles whistling behind me, before a sudden end. A cold, windy, endless plane, a floor coated in snow, melting quicker than it had settled. The night had come to a close.

August 10. I woke up. It was some time in the morning, a dull blue summer. The sun shone on my cheeks as I lay in bed. I listened to a man cutting the grass in someone's backyard. Cicadas sounded like fireworks. The lights were on in the bathroom, and my door was open. Someone was standing in its way. I sat upright, blurry-eyed. My room was warm, hot. I was covered in a kind of duvet of my own sweat, a haze filling the room I couldn’t quite place. The number 18 flew across the house, sitting itself in the living room as I lazily watched TV or sneaking itself into my conversations. It stuck to my back while I walked. There was no avoiding it, only growing used to it, as the number grew lower and lower. It is what it is, such is life, mantras of continuous helplessness. And as it does, time flew, grazing my ears, the summer was over. The night before the first day, the second flash of light was faster, whipping and cracking across the plane of endless black. It burned, imprinting my skin like birthmarks. The heat was everlasting, moments stretching into eons. A sun I couldn’t see, blanketing my vision, flashes of red, orange, beautiful symphonies of noise. The screen through which I watched my own mind became noisy, impossible to interpret. Signals of grey, stretching, confounding themselves. Imagine if you’d closed your eyes and rubbed them real hard, with the ferocity of wiping away your own sight. I’d blinked, and—

“In all its glory, the sun bathed him as it rose, and it sat upon him as such. The sun burned away what once was, a night anew, a person anew.”

September 10. The shuffling of feet and the rumbling of the bus, standing, humidity, the morning drifting into school day, into afternoon, into bus, into evening; the continuously shifting and shaking movement of the worldly body and soul, news reports. My bag slipped in and out of the aisle. If I could sit, I stared, at the monastery the route took me past, the private school the bus stopped at, the people entering and exiting. My mind was an empty canvas covered in TV static, buzzing so loud you couldn’t think. Papers, a screen with endless scribbled ink. Red House Painters, some homework, YouTube interviews, podcasts—sleep. An article about Israeli war crimes, family conversations, the shower hitting my back, a running sink—sleep. Events aligned and connected through me, involving me, passing through. When I think about those times, I remember the shuffling of sheets and the mumbling of my brothers, lying, humidity, the night drifting into dreams from dawn into morning. Flashes, flashes, white flashes. The rolling of a bus down a hill. My girlfriend often asked if I was okay. My texts got shorter, more lonely as they filled the screen and mingled with hers. My fingers felt empty as I typed.

“i’m fine, honey”
“i’m tired is all, but i’ll get used to it, i always get used to it”
“it’s not you, i’m trying for you, and it’s hard, but it’s okay”
“sometimes i don’t think i’m, like, seriously depressed, but it’s a kind of emptiness that hits and it hurts and it stays, and i can’t let it go. i don’t wanna be irresponsible and take meds i don’t need, but i hate feeling like this [@#$%^&]”

It was hard to love myself those days. 

“He’d wash the sweat off of his face, cupping his hands in the sink and splashing at it before the shower. When he sat in the living room, it was cold, air-conditioning problems. His fingers, hands, shoulders, the very nerves within stood. Days stretched forward, guiding his steps. Time stood, lock in step, with the soul.”

October 10. Fall gave way to dreams of a different caliber. The cool, wet air, the brisk mornings. The natural cold felt comforting in its absence. I tried writing, pretending to fuel a real something I couldn’t materialize quite yet. I remember standing by the bus stop in the early morning, a sky darker than once before. The dull blue summer mornings were gone. The sky grew lighter and lighter, into a brighter blue, as the bus drove. The floor shook, and I watched through the foggy windows, thinking of my mom, or of my friends. Trees along Northern Parkway and Roland Avenue, big sprawling ones by houses and lines of cars ahead and behind, lines of people lying in wait. Traffic. I listened to the dings and sounds, beautiful music, of the bus. a woman talking to a friend, a man’s phone, the sounds of rustling as it went downhill. The mundanities of the routine became permanent truths, privileges, of existence. I sat upright in the chair, resting my bag on my lap. The sprawling endlessness of suffering, in its infinitude, and perhaps comforting boundlessness, was entirely pointless—the sadness was still there, and the exhaustion, but so was hope, the very ability to allow the soul its processes and understand oneself. The incessant became routine as the days marched forward. We read poems in class in Spanish one day. Caminante, no el camino. You’ve gotta march forward to make a path, or else it’ll be treacherous.

The third flash of light was a peace offering; it was an opening, the reminder of the impermanence of dreams, of misery. A hand, ever so gentle, was brought forward. I accepted. When it would hit 7, 7:25 in the morning or so, the bus would come. I’d walk to my stop, tasting the air and feeling it between my fingers, behind my ears. I’d feel the weight of my backpack become a part of me, lotion on the back of my neck and my arms. I’d listen, finally, to the cicadas. I smiled. I liked that they were always around.

I stood at my stop accordingly. I looked at myself in its reflection when it came, for a brief moment, and the flashes of light appeared, simultaneously. I stared at them, through them, my vision ever blurry, and walked forward.

“The night bathed him as it came, and it sat upon him as such. The night melted away what once was, a day anew, a person anew.”

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