Fiction

Merilyn Chang – ‘God’s Seat’

SEPTEMBER 25th 2023

Merilyn Chang is a journalist and digital media manager based between New York and Berlin. She’s studied comparative literature and creative writing for her bachelor’s and has since been working on her first novel. Her work has been published by Dazed, Resident Advisor, Fact Mag and more.

God’s Seat

The day August died was just like any other day. It was all the days after that were different. That morning he woke up earlier than I did, as always, and made tea for us in the kitchen while I journaled in bed. August didn’t like to lay around in the morning. He liked to get up minutes after opening his eyes. Said it helped him start the day instead of ruminating. Not that I’m running away from anything, he said. It just never did anyone any good to swim in your thoughts.

I was writing about our evening by the lake yesterday. Since I met August a year ago, my journal was filled to the brim with notes about him. In the beginning, his moppy hair and big hands. He had a curious obsession with birds, even though he rejected bird watching as a hobby. He liked to read about them in books and always kept a pocket-sized notebook in his shoulder bag. It was from a trip he took with his family to Thailand years ago. He had detailed drawings of all the birds he’d seen then. Even the one that broke his arm. He always laughed when he told that story.

A few months in, my journal entries grew more detailed. I wondered why he didn’t like to speak to his family. The only person he’d talk about was his sister Ryan. He loved her more than he loved most other things. One word by her could make or break his entire day. He kept talking about having her fly out so I could meet her. You guys would love each other, He said. You both have this thing about you…the thing that makes other people want to get close to you. Like you both just get people.

I think what he meant to say was that we were softer, more pliable, easy to bounce ideas off, or be a sounding board for. I didn’t know Ryan, but I knew she became the mother that they lost to depression. A divorce gone haywire, rich fathers with powerful lawyers, white horses, and country houses. All lost in a moment of breakage. I thought August would be deeply opposed to marriage, but he seemed to want it all the more. Even if it is an act of insanity, weak knees giving into momentary desire, it’s a feat to be able to feel anything at all, he argued. We all know nothing lasts. So isn’t it all the more fantastic that people still feel strong enough to do it? They’re saying, fuck probability and shit, we feel so much right now that we may be the exception. And they’re probably not. But that kind of thinking, isn’t it the point of being alive?

He asked me to marry him five months in. I couldn’t tell where the line was drawn between joke and reality. Sometimes it seemed like August couldn’t tell either.

He called me from the kitchen and my pen went stray, trailing off the page.

“Tea?” He chimed from behind the walls.

I set the journal beside my bed and lifted my feet from under the covers. It was February, but winter never really came where we lived. Still the air was chilly as it hit my body.

August had a cigarette between his lips and all the windows open. He was straining the tea leaves, making puddles on the counter.

“Come on, August. It’s 10 am in the morning. Kinda early for a cig, no?”

“It’s been like three days! Life’s about moderation isn’t it?”

“Moderating death, if that’s what you mean.”

August put the cigarette out in the sink. His mom had picked up the habit after the divorce, leaving a permanent scent of nicotine on all her clothes. August had this brown leather jacket from his mother. It was his favorite piece. Went well with everything. But the smell of smoke seemed so ingrained in the fibers of the leather that I could smell it from across the room. He loved it. Said it smelled like her.

I watched August spread jam on his toast, making sure to cover all corners of the bread. He didn’t like any part untouched. “Why don’t we go to Thailand together?” He suddenly raised his head.

I laughed. “You tell me! Why don’t we?”

It was a special place to him. The last place he saw his parents happy, the last trip they took as a unit. He wanted to reclaim that trip.

“Maybe we should go before it gets too hot there. Like this winter. I can buy your ticket!”

August had funds from his dad. Perhaps from the guilt of his absence, or the regret of having let down his only son, post the failure of his second family. His younger wife left him after seven years, taking their little daughter with them. They got child support every month, but August’s dad was denied visiting rights. After Ryan cut him out, he turned to August, the only child left that would still give him the time of day. They didn’t have a good relationship, but it was salvageable. And his dad knew that. He would spend the rest of his life investing in automobile safety research, after the accident that killed his son. When he reached the old age of 85, his daughter would finally speak to him again, long after their mother passed. She would go to her father’s big house upstate and tell him she forgave him, after realizing that there were, indeed, still good men out there. Like her husband, she would say. Like August, they would both agree before staring off into the emptiness of the big driveway that rarely saw more than its own car.

August didn’t like accepting his money, but we were still in college. He swore that the moment he graduated, he’d make his own.

I fumbled the spoon around my empty teacup that was waiting for liquid. “I feel bad taking your dad’s money.”

“Don’t. He’s got more than he knows what to do with. And it’s not going to any good use anyways.” August was scrubbing down the counter, waiting for the boiled water to cool slightly. He was a stickler for morning routines, even though no other parts of his existence beckoned any type of routine. Being with him calmed me down from the noise of the rest of the day. Even just a morning together. If I could piece together all our mornings like a puzzle, I would, and re-live each of them, every single day. Pitchy kettle and hot tea. The crunch of a butter knife on toasted bread.

He poured hot water into my mug. We were on a coffee break to reset our tolerance. After tea August would realize that we had no more tea bags for tomorrow and run out to the market. He would die before reaching the market—my 1967 vintage Jaguar, or, our car, as he liked to call it, totaled in a messy heap of metal and leather. In the eulogy his mother, more consumed by madness than before, would reach a moment of clarity and commend her son for getting more out of his 21 years of life than most did in a lifetime. She would say that her son broke the curse of the family, sacrificing himself in return, then, retreating back into madness, mumble antics about his childhood till Ryan escorted her off the stage. His sister would deliver a speech that garnered a standing ovation from the funeral attendees. She would go on to become a renown psychologist years later, giving speeches becoming part of her profession. In her eulogy for August, she asked the crowd to imagine the feeling of getting out of bed in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. Imagine it was the dead of winter, bare feet on hard tiled floors. The kind of cold that stings like glass. The starkness of overhead lights in your eyes after the dark bedroom. That’s what it feels like to live without August she said. That feeling will be there for as long as she lives.

But I digress. I want to linger on this moment a little longer. Maybe rewind to last night. Yes, that sounds right.

Last night August drove us out to the lake where we spent summer evenings last year. We were only months into the relationship, then, and everything still felt new. My stomach flip-flopped whenever he would ring my bell, and my appetite was unreliable. The lake was where college kids came to get drunk at the end of the semester. Skinny dipping, and keg stands, fireworks in the summer. Sometimes someone would bring some hash, some of the good green stuff, and the night would take a calmer turn.

We went there with our friends before it was closed off indefinitely for the last month of summer break. A freshman named Olive, petite girl with long red hair and pale eyelashes hit her head on one of the rocks on the deeper end of the lake. There was a part out by the east end of the lake where kids tied an old rope to a tree calling it the God’s Swing. It attracted the younger kids more than it did my friends. But sometimes we’d drive by and watch the commotion.

Toward the end of summer, Olive took a faithful dive, after a couple rounds of beers coaxed by her friends and dove straight into the shallow end of the water. She’d apparently hit her head and died on the spot. Some of the kids scrammed when they found her floating face down. Others called the cops. August and I weren’t around that night, but it was local campus news for a few months. The lake closed entirely—the rope cut off from the tree. Pictures of Olive were placed at the entrance to the lake—fresh flowers replaced every few weeks for the first months. Everyone at school knew her name by the first week of classes.

August and I tried to go back several times in the fall, but it was still closed off. Only last night, did we find the blockade to the entrance removed. We drove in and parked at our side of the lake, across from where Olive head-dived into heaven.

It was different without the backdrop of summer. Without our friend’s horsing around in the back, without the slight buzz of alcohol and the yells of our classmates. Neil Young’s Only Love Can Break Your Heart was playing on the radio. It was a throwback kind of night, where they only played music from over 10 years ago.

“They stopped giving Olive flowers.” August said, after a long silence.

“I guess they can’t stay alive in February.”

“Not in California. Everything stays alive here.”

August was gazing across the water, his hand fidgeting with my nail, as he gripped my hand. “When my mom tried to kill herself, I thought that was a young death.”

“What do you mean?”

“When someone dies young, we’re programmed to be sad.”

“It’s all about the potential. Someone older might have lived out their lives to the fullest. Younger people haven’t had the chance yet.”

“Yeah but, I think most old people haven’t really lived out their full potentials either. They’re just pulling their weight along, trying to make something meaningful of all this time we have.”

“It’s a lot of time.”

“We can’t waste any of it, Amelia. We have to do something.”

“I’m down. For something!” I laughed. “Like what?”

“I want to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, and I want take the Trans-Siberian railway from Russia to China. Then we’re going to make a film about it.” August looked me in the eyes, half joking, half serious. Then he drifted his gaze across the water again. He went on about the places we would go. Ice climbing in Iceland, Svalbard, the most remote Northern town in Greenland for the northern lights, dancing in Cusco, Peru. He had an uncanny knowledge of geography and wanted to turn everything he saw into a film. When he finished, he looked me dead in the eyes again. “We’re going to do it?”

We sat for a little longer and talked about the first film we would make. An intercontinental journey from Moscow to Beijing. And we would be the first people to cover it entirely on film. We’d revolutionize the documentary filmmaking scene. Change it overnight, once our piece dropped. “Maybe we can do it when we graduate this year.” He said.

“Seems like a nice grad gift.” I brought his hand to my lips and grazed against it.

We went for a small dip in the water later. Just our feet. It was too cold to take clothes off, just socks and shoes thrown haphazardly in the car as we tiptoed down by the water. The grass was cold and sharp against my feet. I clenched my teeth as we waded closer to the water. August seemed to like the cold. He rolled up his pants and dipped both feet in, walking deeper till he was several feet from the shore. “Come here!” He motioned.

It was too cold for me. I dipped my feet in and squealed, jumping back onto the grass, which felt warm in comparison. August laughed and ran back to me. The bottom half of his pants were a shade darker, wet, and half stuck to his calves. “I’ll keep you warm.” He lifted me up and ran toward the car, throwing me into the passenger’s seat before grabbing my feet and rubbing them between his hands. He threw his breath onto it, huffing warm air onto my skin as I laughed at the tickle.

Later as we drove home he reached into his backpack and pulled out a flower. He stopped right by Olive’s photo, at the entrance to the lake, and lightly placed the white flower in front of the framed image.

“You didn’t know her, did you?” I asked.

“No. But I feel like I did. Or I do.” He shrugged.

At home, August brought me tea in bed. He had some more cinema readings to do before class the following week, so sat with the lamp on, in the corner of the room while I wrote in my journal.

I wrote about him, of course. I’d loved a few boys before. It was hard to decipher what love really was to me. Was it the comfort of feeling a home in someone else, or the intensity of a more passionate union. Did one mutually exclude the other? What was the difference between loving someone and being in love with them? People have told me they fell in love after three weeks. For me it was always much longer. Months and months until one day, I’m sitting on my couch, eating take out with August, staring at the TV which is playing a re-run of some dumb show, his foot rubbing against mine, to show he was still there despite the boxes of Chinese food between us. It hit at that moment. I realized I loved him.

It was the first kind of love I’d felt that wasn’t contingent on something else. All the past loves felt like they had to lead somewhere. Somehow, at some point, we were all fed the narrative that finding love and finding a partner should spearhead a direct pipeline to marriage and a forever union. It made sense. But it detracted from how present I could feel in the relationship. Always waiting for something else, always fearful of it being taken away. With August, I felt just right, just at home, with the exact present moment. There didn’t have to be plans for a future, as long as we could just continue on like this, everything would be ok.

I glanced up at him, focused on his texts. Papers thrown around messily, gathered by his feet, the light from the lamp cast a gauzy halo around him. He sensed me staring at him and looked up. We both started laughing. He put down his book and tackled me onto the bed, pushing my journal out of the way.

We almost fell asleep in our clothes that night, until I woke up in the middle of the night and stripped it off both of us. We lay naked next to each other, all the lights off, except the streetlamps from the outside bleeding through the white sheets we had up for curtains.

“Let’s stay up till the morning.” August said as I closed my eyes.

“Keep me awake then.”

August moved closer and kissed my shoulder. “You look too peaceful. I feel bad.”

I opened my eyes. Moonlight fell on his face, erasing all the lines and creases that came from being alive. He looked smooth, like something out of a photograph. I held his face in my hands and he did the same, to my waist. I think we stayed awake for another hour or so, saying nothing to each other, until gradually we drifted to sleep. I couldn’t tell who fell asleep first. I suppose I would never know if August really did stay up all night.

And that brings us back to where we started. I hate this part of the story, really. Even though I think about it nearly every day.

When we finished our tea that morning, August leaned over the table and lightly grabbed my face. He liked to give standing kisses, the ones with our bodies straddling a dining table—knees half crouched, half straight. The kind of motion that screams we couldn’t even wait long enough to get on the same side of the table to start kissing! Sometimes, though, we liked to sit on the same side of the table at restaurants—the waiters giving us funny looks before turning into smiles. It made talking easier, we both had quiet voices. It made us feel closer to each other amidst the chaos and conversations of all the other people we didn’t know around us.

But tea in the morning was our thing to do with the absence of anyone else around. It was something I looked forward to every night. And an extra treat if we had the time to eat breakfast together. Which we did, on that morning. It was sunny that day. The type of sun that tasted fresh with the cool air, the kind that performed warmth in the early afternoon, before setting at 5 pm. But it was still so early for us. Only 10 in the morning.

August turned and placed our cups into the sink. “Need anything else from the store? Should we get some peanut butter? Can make some PB&J’s for later?”

“Whatever you want. I think we have everything here.”

I watched him slip into his favorite jacket. I replay that image in my head again and again and again. It’s really one of my favorite moments to remember. The way he moves the hair out of his eyes, the flick of the jacket over his elbows and onto his shoulders. Like something out of a movie. The jacket, his mother’s old favorite, ripped apart in the midst of the crash. It was thrown aside by one of the officers when he tried to perform CPR at the scene of the accident. Later, after the two victims were taken away in their ambulances, one which carried a dead man, and the other, a living one, the leather jacket would be left on the street, crumpled at the ledge of a sidewalk even after the police removed the yellow hazard tape. August’s mom would throw a fit at the hospital, asking for her all her son’s clothes back, breaking into tears when the nurses said they hadn’t found a brown jacket. She would go home and throw away all her leather, making a promise to her dead son that she would never wear the fabric again. Until years later, right before she is sent to the senior home, she’ll see her grandson, Augustus, Ryan’s first and only child, on the day of his college graduation wearing a brown leather jacket under his cap and gown. When he throws his cap into the air, the leather peaks through, almost shimmering in the morning light. She’ll look at her daughter and see tears in her eyes before they look at one another and share a smile.

“Amelia, baby” August had his hand on the door. “I’ll be right back.”

I kissed him. Once and once again, for good measure. He indulged and kissed me on the cheek once more before opening the door and stepping outside. I closed it behind him. We still had the whole day ahead of us, I thought. We were going to make sandwiches and head out for a hike, maybe watch a movie later in the evening with blankets taken from the bedroom and splayed out on the couch in my living room. My favorite kind of day. I walked back to the kitchen and took some bread out of the cabinet. He’d be hungry when he got back. I’d start cooking now.

~

Edward Allen – ‘Other People’

JUNE 19th 2023

Edward Allen is a PhD student in archaeology at Fudan University and occasional translator. This is his first short story.

Other People

 I always found the look of another special, though I rarely caught their eyes directly. I can remember this in specific moments. An ice-cream van, a soft scrape from the metal scoop, dollops of vanilla smooshed on my cone. It was a van upon short grass in a country field, and a man passed me a cone with a hand from the sliding window. A gravelly parking spot lay behind us, glistening under quiet sun and pleasingly fronted by the ocean. I went back to our car past the local boys and girls, holding the cone with my left hand. A voice intruded into my mind that we were sharing something. I must have believed they offered their own thought back, though I could have been imagining it, in the rapid exchange of glances.

I lived with my father, an undertaker with a certain noblesse oblige. It seemed he was always tearing apart one organization to help an even larger one. I must have been around ten when I first tagged along to the social events. My impression, indistinct but striking even then, was that we needed each other. We liked one another and would have done so in any case. I smelt like an apple and I was always among different groups of suits and dresses. But I might feel distracted by the presence of the overlooked waiters and waitresses. “Don’t make it awkward,” I ordered myself, time and time again. I had to interest the person opposite just I was magnifying the imagined, split-second glare from the servers.

Then I went off to my further schooling, while, to linger for a time here, I gradually observed a wholehearted retreat from dad’s former life and the roast-meat parties. I’m only adding this because I feel it’s relevant. Country hedges became his new life. I’d say there was now no earlier life at all. We went back, to the sticks, as he referred to them (a London perspective). Modest garden, more spacious rooms, fewer visitors, longer journeys for food and comfort. Coming down from college, we still met in the heart of the city. Time passed quickly in London. This street was once lined up as so – bookmaker, off-license, fry-up, laundry, artist-operated gallery, accountancy offices, For Rent signs, inexplicably, eternally, in the upper floors. Now it was recombined under one-stop shops and coffee bars. They glassed out entire façades in one part of the city, while a multitude of languages and cultures took over the other. I could have sworn to you that it meant to coincide with my departure for uni. The baristas at Costa were indifferent. It was like they owned the place, every coffee particle in the air. The streets were the starting point for our new regional foot-surveys where we visited his angel investments. We renewed a sense of pride at each other’s side. We engaged with groups of time- and space-travelers. I felt a quiet pain that I never quite got rid of at that gradual diminishment in the scale of plans. It’s been there ever since, I realize. High above us there remained the undertakers in glossy suits, only now I imagined them as like the ones in TV series. Maybe there weren’t men at all. Still they re-arranged and re-constituted whole groups around us.

Hydraulic engineering may seem like a commitment, but I graduated with no idea of a career or specific focus. The only thought that had grabbed me was… not quite escape, more the notion of prolonging a process begun at some nebulous point in time. I lived with a comforting thought of friendlessness or loneliness. It was like I’d counted time to this point, deliberately and methodically and also unknowingly. I was proud of it. I didn’t despise any of the groups forming close to me or now and then latching on. I dehisced naturally or never glommed on. I suppose I had nothing to regret. You’ll know some of the next stage. With two years of Japanese study and a summer camp under my belt and crucial support from various quarters (the kindnesses you would encounter, heading East…), I segued to a study-apprenticeship at an engineering firm (that we all know) in Nagoya, northwest of Tokyo.

What can I remember from the first few months in Japan? To me it condenses to a stunning if skewed confirmation of that previous, compelling loneliness. The friendship denied or else acquainted-with was also there – in the places I visited in my foreign clothes, and not the offices or laboratories or our firm’s projects, which I remember finding alternately fascinating and bland (the linking of logic, facilitated by separation of culture and place, occasionally glistened brilliantly before my eyes; everything was worthwhile and critical in the world of sanitation if you just thought long enough about it) but the interstices of the suburban town where we lived. Did I find a kind of lodge for my mind and heart, I wonder? There was the restaurant with leather-padded stools and the wooden bar, whose manageress never seemed to change a jot, but whose edges were as if painted thin, new elements and colors flecking from walls and surfaces on every visit, new books appearing on the sporadic shelves, and of course new customers, new empties on other shelves. We had an understated aquarium, and a borderless lake that was intoxicating in the autumn mist. This is a particularly Japanese type of endlessness because the mind refuses to imagine a body of water like this within an island so neatly surrounded by ocean, so the horizon, when you stare at it searching for the other shore, looks back at you even harder. At this lake, also, and tucked away at one afterthought of a building, was a coffee shop where suited men and women and regulars and irregulars in sweaters, caps and jeans enjoyed the quiet, each other, or the view. They were as assuredly there as I felt I was. Which was hardly anywhere. I never made a single friend or (I think) managed a conversation outside the firm. But I could have known the country for decades.

Other people tell me they went through much the same thing. I was so stimulated that I hardly read a book for months. Partly that was the catacombs of files encircling us inside the office. A typing patience was required to implement rules and programs on the computer. Under my breath I called this the gorgeousness of papers and hardback binders. Our office was never musty but crisp and clean. There was my history, my literature – an archive to enliven more creatively than some library or museum catalog. The key was only in my mind. Things were indescribably solid as well as fictional, fantastical – the limitless potential of a sanitation grid. Some have told me their own eye-opening moments started with a book. That felt perilous to me. To live always with that writer in your mind like they’d never leave. Like designing clothes with a brand and model stamped onto your brain. I felt the relationship should be the opposite. I should be the creator with my own characters written by me for them, or for me by them. I wasn’t to write myself anywhere or write them anywhere; we weren’t to be sure where either of us would go. Characters existed and I was the better for them. The characters as far as I could see them were the lists and rows of other people in the files, at the ends of our projects, those faces I could see hiding in the hundreds and thousands at the terminus of this or that point.

Indistinctly I wondered where this would end, if it would, and in one or two flashes of insight whether it already had long ago, or a path already laid. Soon my apprenticeship was in its eighteenth month and I was summoned to meeting with Hirota, as we’ll call him. Hirota supervised about a dozen of us. Given the general positive rapport I had, I thought I could qualify for a full-time post in Japan, or that I could negotiate or be expected to ask for a place back in Europe. I hadn’t really pushed myself further, much as I hadn’t disintegrated like some do. I’d just plodded on assuming something would happen one day. And here it was. The possibility was not raised obliquely as you might imagine it would be. Rather, I was asked straight up what my keikaku (plans) were for the ambiguous atode (after this…). When I told Hirota how I could see myself staying here or there, if the opportunity was furnished, etc., he proceeded to open a whole new box of possibilities. With that in the air, Hirota could give voice to his idea. I could hone my skills and acquire practice on the ground in a third environment and country. I nodded, curious about what came next. “The company’s hoping to expand operations in Southeast Asia,” he carried on….

So, twenty-four hours later, with generous forewarning, Hirota ushered me into a rarely-opened conference room. I was struck with a wave of leather. A PowerPoint slide presented the grid of a huge, sprawling urban district with planned water points in bright blue dots like nails on a crazy octopus, purification centers in yellow, red capillaries for the unbreakable body of substations, pumps, channels and pipes. What was going to happen, and it had only been talked about in secret till then, was that the government would make the primary investment in a pilot scheme for purifying the worst slums in the city at really bargain basement prices. But we might end up cleaning half the dirty water (the half that needed to be cleaned) of the population of that city and then who could imagine which other parts of that large nation if we had our foot in the door and if, as the government was suggesting, other installations would be needed. So, if we do a good job, the anonymous-looking project manager stressed towards the end, then we will achieve a triple goal of advancing the credibility of Japanese technology in this competitive industry, of expanding our firm’s footprint and improving its reputation internationally, and finally, he concluded, raising living standards and potentially saving innumerable lives.

It wasn’t long before my mind grabbed hold of the proposal. It connected with what I had always been or had been becoming, which was neither on nor off this enormous chain of events beginning in a place that wasn’t my own but fitting the size of the thoughts that I’d always had. It would go back to my roots and indeed higher, because the passage between was logical. The strong compulsion came either out of admiration for and desire to emulate teachers like Hirota or that chain of thoughts deep in my memory bank, an impulse sown deep in childhood. Both urged me forward.

We had a huge task ahead of us, and only a small body of core employees to execute the plans. The entire city had to be mapped or re-mapped in order to draw out purification centers, pumps, connecting points, inspection points, all while liaising with Nagoya and working within an impractical timeframe, a foreign government to please and wheedle assistance from at every juncture, all before we knew how to deal with them or even how to say “Hello.” We’d have a pair of mysterious offices, in a sweltering and moist environment thousands of miles from my current home and even further away from London. And the more I embraced the facts as they appeared – millions whose lives we could impact positively; what the company considered the innate scalability of our plans – the more I see now that the germ of a second thought began to sprout in my mind. Now I was engaged in my story. It was one that had evolved more professionally than naturally, or even vocationally. I’m a professional – that was my mantra.

In Japan I’d learned how the collection, filtration, processing and delivery of water through inner-city pipelines and related infrastructure across urban and non-urban landscapes and its accompanying network of supply, pricing, costs and subsidization wove seamlessly into the national fabric. There was a breathless need for higher-quality materials emanating from updated procedures, and higher environmental and sanitation demands in government buildings, multinationals and Japanese zaibatsu that in a sense pushed the whole economy upwards along with it like one big boat. The destination country ran an opposing course, however. That was clear. Costs were cut rather than raised in all but the highest echelons. About halfway down, what should have been brought together fell apart. Pipes soon literally collapsed or corroded. People lived with stop-gap solutions until once or twice a decade the crisis struck. Cholera devastated a city or class; endemics that we hardly heard the name of raced through the population. Staring down such issues elicited a physical response before even help and hope. It was enough to think about that middle-point where the possibility had been allowed and to feel anxious from a thousand miles away for decisions made or not made.

So I remember how I spaced out over the refracted light in my coffee by the aquarium – the white cup and its iridescent contents. I swapped my old coats for long-sleeved sweaters. I craved comfort and warmth. I saw the acquaintances at my old haunts far more intermittently. If I’d been feeding off something appealing and grounding in my environment, I now starved myself. Meanwhile, Hirota and I had a handful of meetings with government representatives, bashing out some of the final details. I began to share something of the ambiguity of hope and despair that we both likely felt. I tried to observe these new characters to break them down into types, as if we could get things easier once there. In my enthusiasm I shared some first thoughts with Hirota. To my surprise he broke out in an expression bordering on a frown. We forged ahead with another topic for a while. The following day, a small manila file had appeared in my keyboard drawer. In it were some short biographies of former government ministers from that country and some business leaders from my adopted one with long-term investments there. I packed that into my personal archives, though I didn’t think much further of it for years. Yet I think it had a sobering effect, just prior to the plunge.

Then I was switching sweaters for jeans and T-shirts; thick hiking shoes for sandals. I was a plant nurtured anew on foreign soil, a brain walking un-resting between a new home and the country and city in England. My father treated it as all natural. I could have said we were working on the moon and he’d have been just as excited. A third space thrust itself upon me, and it was difficult to share how that felt. Giving back to myself or others from this new position in a third place meant removing something from one of others, in other words from myself.  Our long-term projects had to be my rescue. I had to eke out the requisite space to keep going and keep breaking even. Days piled on through introductions and liaisons with government departments and the maintenance of a steady stream of updates from headquarters. We powered through, and gradually my spirits were uplifted by the strength of healthy technical procedure. Meetings were set with higher-ups, and budgets finalized for laying of pipeline and building of stations.

When I left a conference with some sub-mayoral office one day I remember receiving a vision of the city. It was a three-dimensional model that I witnessed as if it was pulling away from me, on the top deck of a ferry leaving port. As we dragged ourselves further from the shore the image entered my view of homes watered in brilliant blue for a few zones that I knew with assurance were secure against the pollution of earth, air and mercury. Yet I saw alongside this, also, the tentacles of fetid water in other areas, the lingering possibility of a punctured and pustule-ridden humanity that might still emerge from that ground. The work still to be done. If I’d been born with a name, that name was meant to be inscribed with this work. In fact I could even watch my name being laid down. There I was. Here the projects powered on. I was glad not to think further. Having sat down and revised this narrative a few times, this point, that vision, seems the best place to pause.

About three months into planning – it must have been, around January or February that year – a journalist turned up at the lobby of the high-rise that contained our offices. Everybody exchanged glances when the information came through from reception. I couldn’t tell what almost any of those looks meant. Don’t they normally call ahead? asked one of our number, in Japanese. It was quite the scene, and I should say I agree, although that is how Mesh did his business. We couldn’t have him and we couldn’t not have him. Our proper natures were just about intact. I felt less confident than I had in months, maybe years, the way we promptly agreed to offer something while giving up nothing. It was agreed that I’d go downstairs, as the best face they could put on this. I felt crude the whole way down, like a creature crawling from under a shell into the brilliant sunlight. The second-floor stairwell where I liked to take off at times like this had a window with a view on paddy-fields and a few distant apartment blocks. The colors came together to show me for a moment how this country and its people might see us – connected by dark tentacles to the central government trying to remove the stain of filthy water for months and years. I was practically shaking.

I entered the lobby to present Mesh with what my authority had granted. We had a short conference and training program where he might find answers to any questions about what we were doing and how we were doing it. Clothed in this company armor, I shook his hand, and was totally disarmed. Not by the man but by the actions, and the thought preceding it. Was I feeling loyalty or its opposite? Suddenly I was face-to-face with a man who inspired dedication. I would tell him everything we envisage and my little adventure besides. The idea of being written at another level. I saw myself zoom out from first-person and observe the scene. Did it look like the unbudgeable employee and the fact-finding… intruder? I asked this alongside question of whether Mesh was my Angel of Deliverance, why that thought came in, where it belonged.

Mesh’s only substantive question wasn’t about the company or much myself, however. He wanted to know more about our relationship with a Mr. C – This wasn’t a name to set alarm bells ringing, but I certainly couldn’t answer it at once. A vista appeared at the back of my mind. Some connection was made between the recently retired finance minister being mentioned and the rumblings and stirring beneath our feet, first stirring at the conference tables in Nagoya. I could practically read the exposé that he was writing (he later did). It was glorious but I wanted us well out of it. I had to turn away while trying to preserve this invader, this dear and trusted friend. I gave myself some clairvoyant power as well. I could see Mesh for the strength behind the strength. There were always stories far greater than this for Mesh to uncover.

It was a let-down for him, of course. Yet it could have been everything for me. Following a quick search online, I was eager to buy into my first friendship. In essay after essay I studied how the journalist, my journalist, beat a path connecting states, cities, communities and families back through the core of this country’s issues. Life there was gargantuan and silent yelling of the mess of human problems, needs with endless complications, and Mesh was on top of it. The investigations were more tangible than if I’d imagined them, because apart from speaking to the subtexts, they spoke to continuing actors and villains and victims. He was the other end of an equation I could have been near to my whole life. I was pulled back to some feeling of co-existence, to the afternoon by the sea. The children, the passersby, the great blue sparkling behind us. Thrown out, eventually, here. People had wandered the streets of this or any country in the meantime. Into the darkest alleys and most sinister gangs, just to see where those paths led them.

Hirota wrote to report that the firm’s relationship with Mr. C-  was out of bounds. In fact I’m sure obscure to him at his level and that if he cast the lamp upwards we wouldn’t have heard from him again. He may have implied he would – I wasn’t sure. Better he said if the journalist-san might sit down with a company representative, present some questions or themes in advance on the company’s word for forthcoming answers and follow-ups. I dialed my journalist’s cell-phone, strategizing even as the tone rang on how to arrange this information, and crucially where I could slip in my thoughts. “Listen!” he yelled down the line (demolition work was underway in the background), “It’s alright –” cutting me off quarter-way through the explanation, “I sent off the article already. You foreign firms aren’t so easy. OK!” he cried out again. I felt breathless. The clanging and banging escalated. They were circling around him. “OK! So thanks!” He was on the edge of hanging up. The phrase It’s now or never ran through my skull. My mouth half-formed the shape of the words. Then I experienced that half-second of absolutely certainty characterized by the absence of any thought that must be the trailer to any buckshot question in the history of mankind. I asked if maybe I could call or text or write even at a more convenient time. Not much for a girl from London to ask but it sure felt like something at the time. “No problem! Sure!” was the clear-throated response down line, “Ok! Ok!” I replied, smiling broadly, “We’ll I’ll be in touch then! Goodbye!” Finally able to breathe.

The morning we met my ears were ringing. I wasn’t clear if it was my own or everybody’s problem, nor when it had started, but there it was. We were then driving a jeep around the outskirts of the city and my ears were ringing. We were jittering along and my ears were ringing. My left shoulder careened back and forth along the window, back to the seatbelt holder. I looked towards the front passenger seat, where Mesh in his perennial, unforgettable shades expatiated with the local driver. My left ear kept on its ineradicable ringing. I saw endless grey I saw through the glass.

I asked to see the invisible side of water management, which some of you will have heard about in your careers. This was the second major decision I must have made, after going to Japan. I theorized that he must know something, though in hindsight I think he really dug for me. We were headed to the most concealed edges of the city. These were the communities I imagined we were serving, but so often it seemed I’d never heard of them. I had an oversized buzz in my brain. We stepped out upon a large triangle of mud before a path to a group of shacks up ahead. We met the de facto mayor. I took in his clothing, his kind expression, the animated gestures he made in the local language. Children rushed around, kicking a brown football. We then passed through rows of shacks with all kinds of extraneous clutter in an endless variety forcing us to zigzag and duck through, past stores and beat-up homes, rooms with silent folk and rooms with wailing babies. In the tiny mayor’s office Mesh and he spoke in half-code about a gang that seemed to have an agent in the town. That was his expertise and prerogative, but for my sake they pushed the conversation to some failed sanitation program. We crammed inside a miniscule annex with files and photographs of how it was done. As we stood and squatted outside I leaned gently on a warm metal frame of the office, sure I tasted mercury on my tongue. My ears were still ringing. The sun shone bravely through the haze as we walked over the river. On their haunches a small gang of girls played some improvised game with the pebbles. I caught the eye of one like it was scene from my childhood. The ringing began to fade. It hardly mattered which space I was in.

Water remained the focus. I paid rapt attention. Then, I might say now, the third thing happened. I sensed I had to be disregarding something. Space was opening up, and a larger, perhaps infinite room beyond that. There was some terminal point to the journey I’d stuck with or dragged myself through till now. Mesh was inspecting a low-lying drainage pipe by the river, the flow practically stagnant and dead. He had one foot in a boot in the grimy pool and must have been surprised when I asked if there was a school. He relayed the question to the obliging group. I came to and focused on the water, did my best to follow the story of sabotage and offer opinions on the rudimentary system they dealt with now. Then I found myself inside a small brick building tucked away even further the shacks. Things were less chaotic. It was a clean single classroom. There was a way around if you fancied the muddy shore, but we took instead a snaking route between the homes. The rooftops were scalding in the heat of the midday sun.

Fortunately the one teacher was visiting. Schools there couldn’t afford to open on Monday through Friday so did so odd days as teachers became available. Those instructors were always volunteers who had about a thousand other lines of business but never failed to find the time. Sheilar – I only ever learned her English name – regularly commuted from several dozen kilometers out here and to another school in another similarly immiserated neighborhood. I entered her details into my phone and sent across my own number immediately.

She belonged to – and, I’d say, was – the backbone of a charity school system dependent upon donations from a small group of wealthy businessmen and a much larger number sourced from churches and mosques. For a reasonable reimbursement a teacher could take on full- or part-time duties. With the teachers driven to the task through love, they persisted despite the harsher of reality of hours, effort, and emotional wear-and-tear. I was enraptured by something that others might find overbearing in Sheilar. It could have been her wavy, dark hair or the appeal of one totally secure and present in their role. If I was discovering friendship with Mesh, here I had a sense of sisterhood. Not instantly in the classroom. More it evolved through the experiences we shared, though we’re getting ahead of ourselves again.

I was recruited to provide English lessons, which covered math and geography and principally anything using the English language. The point as Sheilar presented it was to inspire with the story of how a young woman could build her own world and future. We agreed to give it a shot. To them it was natural. But it felt painfully ironic, at first, to lecture these children on chances they’d never had. It was impossible to distinguish that right from wrong. What I can say is that I did it, and the fact of the matter was their eyes lit up just I was in their home. They could relate through that and so see themselves anywhere. Write yourself into their story, and they’ll feel they’ll have it any possible world. It’s become their own.

So I became involved in a new social, educational mix. I was giving classes to the students on the weekends, as well as spending occasional time with Mesh. In time I associated with his close colleagues and friends inside and outside work. I usually feeling like an interloper of sorts, but I was always unselfishly welcomed into their midst. From those corners I heard tales of the ministers and the generals; of the partition of the country and the myriad related problems. The undertow and the underbelly. Theirs was a nation like many others, where the automobile and train had conquered the city, everything promising to aggregate as one under a novel, intermediate core to the world economy. It wasn’t the holistic integration I could see going on so effortlessly in Japan or London. Fresh ideas were brought in but they often revolved back on themselves – marriages of a colonial core with a new shadow. It ran around itself enough to smack of prophesy. I offered what I could, proofreading our materials, working on new books, planning small library that was open to anyone able to make the trip to the center of town. Our own archive. From the talk of billions flowing into the country and nodes into the national elite, American senators and finance ministers everywhere, the specter of money’s silent hand, lingering in the air in balmy late night talks with Mesh and co., I would be thrown back into a world of only tens and hundreds. I watched the numbers with pride and frustration. The thing with tens and hundreds is that they titrate, like some sick coin-game machine, into tens and even single digits. To be left with nothing and potentially less. The larger numbers divided one way – firm funds ultimately decanted into or hundreds- or tens-of-thousands and went contentedly into all kinds of life. The only sky above us was the realm of terror, of war, information and mega-firms, figures inflated to sky-size. Figures that couldn’t ever be brought down, figures that were in fact elemental. I’d be stuck in this thought, and then a student of mine might start missing class for want of a few pennies, a lamp-light economized through the night, a book or a pen, or entering the labor market at the age of eleven. Our resources were not infrequently destroyed, purloined or redistributed by students or parents, willingly or not. We made do. But we could see that our charity, even if playing the machine with utmost skill, lost out in fractions, and was always barely hanging on. Everything was never-ending fashion and that, so long as the technology slowly improved, whoever was inflating it from the top felt welcome to their extra share – yet the fractions persisted.

I could bring myself back to earth if I reminded myself that I’d come here through those three decisions. I had by now an ingrained sense of a combination lock, a combined call to action at the back of my mind. I was engaged in something qualitative: I offered and exhausted what I could, the result being that a new space would unravel in my mind, a new story to fill in. People stayed, people learned, and there were always characters such as Sheilar to inspire me with a steely energy I hadn’t come close to acquiring through practice. Sometimes I felt it had to catch up with me one day. I was walking the thinnest line.

Different from Sheilar and the others, I suspect, was how my mind soon began to process this information and experience. I mean this as a difference, perhaps the one main difference between myself as an outsider and them as insider-outsiders. Patterns started nagging at the back of my mind, like a new itch to scratch. It occurred to me, for instance, that over time a number of my students, though in separate neighborhoods were statistically (felt emotionally) prone to a kind of memory loss. This was quite a nebulous idea for me until one afternoon with Mesh, uncovering some hidden factories near a similar neighborhood as the one I taught in, I noticed a similar glazed-over look on the children. Not even Mesh would visit those sites without a camera crew or escort. If I could take measurements from the wells and streams nearby I could prove the presence of some shared toxicity. It wasn’t like they suffered from this daily, but that intermediate exposure still had its effects. These must combine with the social pressures and somehow in the expectations people grew to have of themselves. Sheilar had comforted me previously, when I’d lamented the loss of one promising student. Here I could at least lay out the metrics. But the thought implied a challenge, in that context, equivalent to shifting the earth.

I must have had over two-hundred students over the shortest of tenures or the entirety of my brief spell, distributed in over a dozen classrooms, mostly on the edges. Over time I’d strived to learn more about their backgrounds. Many were rural children whose parents couldn’t afford anywhere else to call home and held on wherever was available. The men worked in construction, sometimes on the most mundane projects, even in a few cases working underground; the women worked all kinds of jobs, some of which don’t bear going into. The difference between hanging on in those frequently miserable homes and moving further out was time – even though hours could be spent commuting, the slums were their only and best option. Some kids were born nearby, but emigrated in what was a descent into greater poverty that seemed to have taken over many of them and their families. At the forefront of my mind at this point was their age. Most weren’t any older than twelve, when I had to expect some of the girls to begin to drop out and into marriages. As I saw it we served the purpose of helping them, to hope and anticipate those cases where the mothers and fathers understood the abilities those daughters acquired through further education – a ticket back to the nearer suburbs or newer communities. It was what you call work in progress. The majority of our cohort hadn’t hit double-digits. Even so there had been some, and I began to hear more and more stories as time went on, who were taking on preternaturally early employment at the factories. Like it had been so long ago in my memory, the process was one of disarticulation, but this time financed by organs working sideways through society, the same ones that should have been organizing for these communities’ betterment.

Both Sheilar and I felt those seeds of improvement were beginning to be blown over broader space, pushing students away from even the towns, occasionally into forbidding villages. Students hurled outwards on that wind would never return. If they did they might be missing digits or even hands, or have an eye knocked put. I have to stop myself here. What mattered was, if I could render the parameters properly, I could determine the damage to young minds in ways un-appreciated by the literature, with a theory of how minds might also limit themselves under the circumstances. It was something unmeasurable. You didn’t just have to boil the water; you had to perform some unknown magic. The children were always compelled into a relative decline. Sanitation, clean water, removing the worst elements at the source – any technique still kept some chemicals and toxicity for them, and I reckoned more in some places than others.

How that work came together was like this. Over nearly two years of instruction I’d implemented all variety of small quizzes, and optional monthly thirty minute exam on what we’d been studying. I had stored all such material two large boxes that, more for convenience than anything, that were stacked by the wall by my two-chair dining table. On a handful of evenings one October, with the balmy breeze frequently whistling through my fingers and hair, circling round my legs like smoke, and with dim lamplight my sole company, I roamed through this harvest. I pieced together the correlating factors, grades and performances, dropout rates and in-class performance of all analyzable students over time. I made what I thought was a valid metric – a combination of sanitation and a quantity of factors, including vicinity to essential services, gender, family opportunity, gang activity. Too many factors not to precipitate disaster. I was transported by that sniffing sense of being tantalizingly close to my prey. Nothing else in my schedule could compare next to the argument I could present, on the extensive and prolonged negative impact of even short-term negligence of sanitation… and the unplanned and uncontrolled illegal construction that clogged the downstream with dirt and shit no matter what we did. On the peril of general development when avoiding the tragedy of typhus and cholera, which we’d enjoyed an almost miraculous absence of in ___ .

As far as myself and the firm were concerned, this was test of time and nothing else. Not commitment or loyalty: I’d say those are grounded in me. Again, the simple facet of time. The more the paper came together, the more I imagined a clock candidly ticking away in the background. Gently it was, like a partitioning cell, pulling apart the curtains. My world and the firm’s appeared to be separating. It didn’t have to be, though. I locked myself in both worlds for the time being. More time passed as I wrote my ideas down and continued to teach, work at the offices and perform the tasks of bringing our new sanitation systems slowly online. I pieced together my arguments and read what literature I could find in other countries. I saw the great spread of poverty and slums and the unwanted population of the earth that defined all but the core I knew myself to be from. I found new heroes who wrote about this globally or in their meticulous case studies, the heart beating through every sentence. I was loyal, but a voice had grown inside of me, like a plant in the mind.

I could also say that I know what broke down the walls or that I could sense it coming. That I know how eventually this would culminate in bigger events which forced a change, which forced me away from other people, which compelled them to be in my mind forever, like I’d perhaps always asked for. It happened subtly, silently and overnight. A huge, migrant population had been hurriedly settled in a makeshift spread of tents on the edge our inner-city village. It was like discovering a person sleeping in your corridor. We stepped lightly around them at first, before we took them in. Refugees from the most suffering and despised peoples across the planet – we had to. The government might have let them in the country on a legal matter, but it fell on us imperfectly and haphazardly accept them. The men were hired, like the locals themselves, as workhands and short-term contractors; the women found themselves in the same factories and garment warehouses. The boys, more querulous than the salt-of-the-earth lads I’d known, after turning football matches into stake-outs, almost started a war before parents and elders defused the situation. So the boys kept to their own, and I never saw all but a few of the girls at first. Short lives of toil beheld them to the maintenance of the elderly.

So it dawned on us all that the R– wouldn’t be returning home and we had to bring them out of the corridor. I was sure word enough would go around and they’d visit our classroom. Again, though, I think Sheilar may have been behind this. A fortnight passed before a half-dozen new students all sat sheepishly on the back rows one morning. Two boys and four girls. The remaining students were quieter than usual. Some, I remember, had adorable smiles, waiting to see how teacher Jill would react. One of the overseers for our community, a kind of matriarchal figure known there and further abroad, stepped in just as I was equivocating. With her were some of the mothers and one father that I all knew well, a lady of the R. – and Mr. E, the ever-bespectacled and much-loved music teacher, who ran a similar double-life to mine, though he taught at the university, and to be honest I don’t think either of us would have called it a double-life at the time. If it was – and just as mine whispered that it might pull itself apart – here was the final rope to tie it together. With their introduction and a good warning for the students to behave, I launched into the lesson as if not much had changed.

Eagle was the name of one of the new students. She was slightly older than the majority of the class, and possessed the most exquisite handwriting I’d ever seen. The tails of letters dipped and curled below every imagined (or real) line; each word was exquisitely formed. Fanning open one of her answer booklets was like communicating with a grown-up. She was an adult in a child’s body, and also a force partly constituted of everything I’d imagined about her people. In a way, she was my partner in another life. To the best of my knowledge from the staggered meetings with family members, seeing her as an adult-child was closer to the truth than I knew. Back in her homeland she’d been educated as best they could manage. She could have advanced and continued to advance had the situation not taken her away. To my fancy she was extraordinary in some other, undefined sense. In a practical sense when we got into the math and science as I instructed, she was average or uninterested. But the delicacy of her self-presentation, the detail on the clothes and the items they brought from their homeland, took me somewhere deeper. It was like the community was finally made living and breathing for me. I might ask myself how many experiences I needed to finally reach this point. I certainly did need an Eagle.

It was my little secret. Furtively, I spent the next week on evenings with the answer-books, once more roaming through the figures. On this iteration, I thumbed through six months, a year or more of calligraphy from a number of students – kids who’d dropped in and flunked out as time had passed. Some seemed to have gained strength as they first picked up writing, only to lose it after in some unwelcome snap. Others maintained a steady albeit imperfect hand throughout. Rarer were those who showed consistent progress. A few gave me the impression of having forgotten how to write entirely; a handful of students I realized I couldn’t recall, despite much head-scratching. It dawned on me more than ever that I was only ever recording segments of time, small patterns in a loop that ran on its own course. There was potential beauty in it at all times, but so many of them were snapped off, taken away, removed from that soul of loveliness. With just the figures and no heart I was only giving weak premeditation of some more massive change beyond anybody’s power to change. I had been sprinting to keep up with it, the gift of creativity and the wounds of the devil.

Meanwhile, I hadn’t left the country in almost two years. Any vacation time had been given over to these projects, and Dad was fully supportive of things in South East Asia. As it was fate or organizational mechanics, started to intervene. It was clear that some movement was on the cards. Rumors had spread through our offices of a new regional hub in Singapore. Employees were being hired with specialties that were still only theoretical when I was coming up – hyper-advanced chemical treatments, micro-plastics and the sort. Some staff, untrained in these matters but essential company personnel, were getting oriented Europe, acquiring knowledge from larger firms or partner labs. We were rushing headlong into the realm of a panacea. Once the plastics, the water and the fumes were identified and segregated, was there anywhere they could hide? Was there anything to prevent our slowly laid plains from coming to fruition, any government or politician who wouldn’t in time and with budgeting be brought into the fold? So I brought it all together – the figures, factors and theory – the words and writing of Eagle and others, packed into a handful of essays, a few journals outlined, a few proposals sent off, and took the opposite route from all of this, back to our headquarters in Nagoya.

The rumors were accurate. We were scaling up once more. Our glowing reputation for excellence in sanitation would be translated through new investment and government and international funding to the syncretic world of renewables and smart materials. One division, in five years, we envisaged, could position itself as a world-leader in the solution of problems relating to the hazards of micro- and macro-plastic; another would latch onto that and strike out with a whole new generation of materials, materials that might breed their own problems and already came with some known imperfections there at the back of the data. We’d expanded into regions elsewhere in Southeast Asia, as well. I felt indifferent, but most employees were thrilled at the prospect of a Singapore hub. Much as I protest, I sensed the power of some of inherent casualness towards life. It was working out while I was doing other things. Though when I look at it now I was the opposite of who I became. To the outside world and more often than not within it, I was demure. I was waiting for them to approach me, waiting to be placed in the position the meet seem always to inherit. Inwards I wasn’t ever meek or ever quite making that final step.

One morning I was waiting on the sidelines, a take-out cup from the aquarium coffee house, reliably caffeinated as ever in my hands, when Hirota, more primly dressed than I remembered, sat down in the chair beside me. “Jill-san,” he asked, “would you not have any other keikaku apart from joining the company at the Singapore offices?” I warbled, uttering a solid Japanese ummm for the first time in years, before launching into a roundabout digression, Hirota nodding and humming. I lead him through the experiences I’d had, fleshing out a story I knew had partially reached his ears. It wasn’t premeditated, I’m still certain, though why at certain points I could hear that voice declaring “You always planned this!” even once “This was always your keikaku.” Now I was opening the Word-docs and spreadsheets that prevented the best chronological progression of my research and even some of the essays with my name on them like a diamond on a golden ring. “Jill-san,” he interrupted, shortly (some meeting room would open soon), “this is not the kind of work that you should stop.” Later that day “This is the kind of work that the company can sponsor. I think we would be willing to sponsor. I’d like to mention your study with the directors.”

I nearly spilled my coffee. I surrendered my entire research project on a USB. As reunions and meetings carried on to the following day, I remember this occasional pang of embarrassment at my behavior – too sentimental, too gushing. I almost felt sick. My essays – three of them, I think – were nicely presented and properly tied together, like a quipu. They walked the reader recursively back to the point where they began and they said they would go, demonstrating the cruel double bind of poor sanitation and social factors unique to those communities, links between declines in mental capacity and ingestion of certain compounds whether once or dozens of times, I theorized, with that undercurrent of communities matching themselves to expectations. Statistically only the fundamental argument was solid and I felt unimpeachable. It ran around like a perfect story. But through a fog of exceptional cases at the back of my thinking, each piece moved quietly or like cannon-fire towards a kind of improvised clarion call towards the end. At one point, in an experimental archaeology of the written word, I’d tried to show through an analysis of descender and ascender letters and the jaggedness and roundedness of the students’ scripts, how that imbalance and shakiness had crept into the writing of so many, including those dozens, some with small biographies who left and never came back. I copy-pasted beautiful calligraphy deteriorating over time. One of my students wrote short-stories months apart that I picked apart for the language, the presentation and the imagination and found lacking in the latter case. But I felt all I had were paragraphs at most. I wanted to find an overarching name for it.

I don’t know what caught their eye, but I suspect it may have been the practical afterthought, the concluding remarks and correlating advise that remained consistent throughout. Those were lines written after the final expenditure of energy, often in a kind of trance, like jogging the extra five-minutes after an hour on the treadmill. I worried more that this might be interpreted, especially in this culture, as a letter of resignation or veiled criticism of our entire program. As evening crept in on the third day these questions were finally put to rest, obliquely, with new words and thoughts, by Mr. Takeshi, who served as a Vice President. I’ve asked people about this experience since, and read a few times of what I might call a similar sensation in others – a similar transformative act of persuasion. Takeshi was colorblind in that other sense. That, or like a consummate chess master, you received this sense that Takeshi knew where the pieces were and where they belonged. He could intuit what a person was and where he, in his momentary engagement with them, might be able to direct them according to their innate movement, where they belonged on the board and how they were creating their own game, searching for the optimal move, often in the critical position. Something in his manner, modesty or forthcoming nature was disengaging. It was like I never fully grasped the implications of what I was writing and doing for almost all other people. In his words I saw myself, the London girl from a good family crashing almost blindly along, something of the good collected, but where and how to sow that seed, I realized in a flash of near-blinding light, still there in the ever-unexplored unknown. It was only by him standing in my shoes, almost as if I was him – not that he said it, but his words, phrasing and personhood implied it – that had the effect of casting me fully in his and then so many other’s eyes. It raised the question of how, though this continuing swathes of interactions and projects, something more, something defined in the world could become of me, Jill-san.

In simple contractual terms, I was offered the chance to expand my scope of enquiry nationwide and to the wider region if I felt it necessary – anywhere they had offices. Takeshi’s department funded several research groups, until then confined to their own quiet rooms, now opening up in their own worlds. Here the practical difficulties of any company operation might distill into elegant, ground-based solutions. We’d need the full regalia of possibilities, so tying in every single aspect of pollution and its control would be crucial. That meant all the new technology we were talking about then, and throw in the cultural, political and economic worlds I knew. In the medium- to long-run Takeshi suggested that this be synthesized in the form of a degree, conveniently enough in Singapore. I could do that with their supported provide I kept up duties and was there for the standard planned maintenance of existing projects on the firm’s behalf.

I went back and locked the hotel room door. I pulled the latch all the way across, and sat cross-legged on my bed. The core of it was that, in taking their offer on hand, I’d be relegating my school and acquaintances. He may have known and wanted me to take this plunge. The ever-developing group I was a part of would be relegated to research subject. The paperwork would process the same, still through the company and with the same old visa. I could come and go between the university, its burgeoning new headquarters, and my projects. Further schooling was less appealing than the accompanying promise of wider knowledge. Takeshi’s offer of full support was persuasive. As he’d spoken it had occurred to me, I’ll admit as a vision from deep within, of the power of some higher scholarship, some grand intellectual framework which I hoped could encompass mine. For their part, as long as the firm name was associated with Jill-san and I stayed in the fold, it was an unmitigated positive. For my part, whether through Takeshi’s inspiration or my own crystallization of the essays I’d written till then, I almost spotted a guiding light, a universe of light that led back to the schools and the R. – as much as myself. Embalmed in this, I was brought off the bed, marching on the soft floor to the laptop on the desk, writing to Takeshi to accept the offer I felt giddy and nervous. I went outside onto the chilly streets. I must have walked for two or three hours that night.

No matter how I might think things would stay the same, I sensed I was moving up, or on. It was then that I changed, and the world around began to go its way. Maybe because it could never be otherwise, I sensed barriers I had not known existed, roadblocks I’d drawn up, cutting off zones of the imagination, temporarily, suddenly vanishing like simple illusions. It was a contagious feeling, emanating from some center I hadn’t known previously. It was unprecedented, though I dealt with things as someone familiar to herself and as some key part of the firm’s apparatus.

I think it oozed in naturally, if eerily. We’d taken on a number of other Europeans and North Europeans. Some I had heard of or corresponded with in e-mails from their regional offices. Others I couldn’t tell from a clean bar of soap. Few spoke a lick of Japanese, but they made a natural roving band of foreigners. I’d never had such a pack much less embraced the awesome feeling of superiority that came with showing them around. I felt chuffed even describing even the simpler problems of getting on in Japan. When this group quickly hunted down a few of the more notorious watering holes in Nagoya, I tried to dissuade them with some more localized suggestions. But I made a plan – it must have been the first time; I let it happen – to let my hair own and enjoy time with these gaijin (foreigner) strangers. Yet I didn’t arrange so without booking a flight, north to Hokkaido, for the morning after. I can’t explain. It was a week before my return in a flight around China to my third home. Those seven days took on a limited and endless dimension, as did my finances. It was all beyond my control and I liked it.

Old colleagues appeared that evening, their faces freshened, and escorted our new friends to restaurants and bars, put forward the bulk of the toasts. I slugged it through. A fresh graduate by the name of ‘Toby’ was the quietest among us until (as happened numerous times after and had happened often enough before), Toby got the right amount of liquor in him. Several hours into the evening he leaned against a metal frame outside, reminding me of myself at the kombini, smoking a Marlboro, and I went to bum one off him. We watched the pitter-patter of small conspiracies of slightly drunken salarymen stumbling by. Toby was gesticulating with his fingers, like he wanted to place a hand on my knee, I guessed. “You’re quite the legend back home” he said, with a kind of understated, un-invasive but resolute bravery. “You remind me of a big sister or summat.” I chuckled. “Noooo!” he carried on, “I’m not implying anything, man.” “It’s sweet, it’s sweet,” I said, echoing some line from somewhere. “This is a good place to be,” he said. “For sure.” We headed back inside, Toby only a few inches from my back.

Hokkaido came and went. A frigid, pure, blue air. Snacks and even bottled water twice the regular price in Japan. The curious beauty and intrigue of that part of the world, where only a slighter of ocean on the map suddenly presents itself from the plane window as a true sleeve of water defining the main island from its eternal north. The towns and villages – I could have looked into the backyards. The child in the middle seat pointed out of the window past me. He hadn’t had manners instilled in him yet, his hand flirting with my personal space. Some reminder of the previous night, I thought, and let the sweetness pass. Now was the sense of moving around new places, of ladders going ever downwards, upwards, sideways. I was alone throughout. I wondered now and then about the impossibility of thinking about Mesh, Sheilar or Eagle at that time and what that said about me. It was like the end of the universe a fork two leading in equally meaningless or meaningful paths. Determined to travel overland to the cities in the farthest north, I decided at the last call to head back to Honshu (Japan’s main island) by ferry. As we pulled out of the harbor I looked down on the land-borne crew below, waving upwards with Mickey Mouse white gloves. I stayed on duck until the maximum reach of the island came into view in the cold and fading light. We disembarked at around midnight. I spent an hour strolling through the belly of the small town before settling into a warm lodge.

I’d written to Hirota before leaving, with thanks for the kindness and suggesting a meal or drink I return. Back in the outskirts of Nagoya, I wrote again. The response came back almost immediately that a group from the firm had some junket-based tickets to an amusement park. It was on the other side of the city and departure was from the HQ in thirty minutes. Hiro and I set a collection point halfway, where I sat by a landmark, taking in a Marlboro and the view. We had the best part of a half-day traipsing around the park and the rides. The mascots, the rides, the blaring sounds were like a fantasy. Yet, following I think the principles of the Japanese historical royal garden, the architects had excavated a full-blown lake in the heart of the park. Here visitors imperceptibly entered a realm of peace that was punctuated by snack and refreshment bars. Like notes on a scale I could hear something I calling back from memory as a watched a group of boys sharing fried fish balls by a red-and-white striped snack booth. At the next a boy and girl, holding ice-cream, brought from a van that could have been on any green or parking lot in England, half-skipped by and half-started up at us with bright eyes.

Once again the community drank until late in the evening. My colleagues, seniors and now some juniors dropped off from the meal back to the accommodation, the weaklings, and Hirota and I were left alone much later and stumbling through the hotel lobby and corridors. I’d never been sure of Hirota’s status or defined any sensation towards him outside of trust and occasionally a sense of humor from selflessness Now he was in my room and we were holdings hands, and I couldn’t tell you who started that because I can’t remember. He was attentive, methodical, never rushing, and awkwardness gave way to ticklish pleasure and then more. I didn’t know much about how to move but I was a quick learner. It was about time some concept of a man might develop. The meaning of desire changed and maybe only then was introduced. After one round, interrupted and occasionally fumbling, we took showers, slept, and near the break of dawn Hirota pottered back to his room. I placed my head against the cold window, taking in a view of the hills that seemed to extend infinitely to the north.

The firm and I laid plans that must have been the fantasy of any researcher. They’d help liaise with anyone, anywhere, provided they had feet on the ground. Some fate of my past would fit in the with the destiny of their future. Towards, well, towards what was the question. Just as the visual image of surveying that entire geography entered my head, events began to work in their own fashion. In the way of a dog ripping off his leash. Even in my third home, which I now returned to.

Mesh and I always kept close contact, but his investigations had veered in a different direction. Around one-hundred kilometers south of the city was a port town. It was depressing and glum on the exterior, but increasingly rampant around the docks. Mesh had segued into an obsessive interest in the world erected around all this infrastructure. As he put it, the thing started in the mountainous center of the country. It was a sight I must have witnessed before my brief departure – more and more glassed-eyes on the faces of more and more youths. It was a dual tier system – the white stuff was purveyed through the country and some supply points before it went extraterritorial north, east and west. It was all under established gangs but bore the dangerous promise of new challengers. Then there was the peppery stuff, the dreaded bootlegged powder, a dirt-cheap quick hit produced thousands of miles away and that sold well here as anywhere. The upper tier scarped the foam off the lower tier and strong-armed them into new careers in their gangs, while the tower tier declined, as fast as you could go back and forth from Japan, into the synthetic underworld. It was like a sadistic renovation of society. Some fortunes were made and a wave of political figures were being mentioned among Mesh’s crowds; but a pall of secrecy much darker than before begun to loom over everything. For the time being Mesh was limited to an implicit reportage – not naming names, apart from the deceased, where the mentioning was a salve for the communities. The full breadth and depth of events had to be crowded into the dark.

As the inner-city blocs and larger slums of Mesh’s world grew and brewed these struggles daily, my teaching posts became quite tranquil. I explained that I wouldn’t be around every weekend, while we worked around-the-clock on to take more and more students. We were thinking of a combination of funding leading to sponsored study, towards higher schooling and potentially universities. We were on the edge. The edge of achieving what Sheilar had imagined and inspired many others to join – at least its first phase, its proof of concept. Eagle, everyone noticed, was maturing into a beautiful young woman. Through her natural talents she’d outperformed all the other students. Meanwhile either through her culture or her refugee status she took an affectionate care for the other kids, whether their kind or ours. But there were threats, and I became acutely aware of them at points, on this rosy horizon. We’d started an hour-long advanced study session for Eagle and a handful of other advanced students. As part of our logistical planning we met when time allowed to share our more private evaluations of the students. While neither of us doubted Eagle or, from our professional standpoints, any aspect of her abilities – she had in fact begun to excel in math to an astounding degree – I remember my counterpart addressing her case with an air of unfamiliar despondency. It was a long road for Eagle to tread, he said, and we didn’t know where her or her people, almost any of the boys or girls, might end up. “You have to see it as they do,” he pointed out, “There’s not one family or extended family that doesn’t have someone in that industry, or someone who died in the wars long ago, or maybe just last month. We’re like as island of paradise in an archipelago of fire. We just hope to maintain them long enough for them to make the next step to safety.”

Leaving the country for my first semester in Singapore, the plane took off amidst the strongest tropical rain for decades. It lifted, my stomach dropped, and I felt an unfamiliar lump in my throat. For the next thirty seconds I was crying, silently, so as not to move or betray the emotion to the stranger beside me. I smiled as well,. Memories fly past at this point. To my pleasant surprise, terrified that I wouldn’t fit in, or straggle behind my classmates, I was considered the new golden girl of the department. I had experience in industry and its charitable arm but others had precious little. Long as it related to water, I could go on at will. Any other aspect I could bring back to my own. My project, still a molting chick, caught plenty of imaginations. As never before, I became loquacious; even loud. The thought of colleagues back home really got me inflamed, times some smart-Alec digressed on the virtues of grand solutions, or failed to grasp some of the complexities I’d come to understand. Do you know the significance of the different way a man and woman has to relieve themselves, the demands on privacy and dignity we have to fulfil for the latter bud don’t? Do you not see that without a process that understands the damage being done and seeks to correct it, we can’t actually do better than standing still, or sit here and talk about it?

With a few weeks I also had my eyes on a certain person: a tall boy working in some peripheral relationship to our field. I kept up my Nagoya coffee shop habit, engrained, always associated with the neutrality of good things, and around about the third week he walked in and sat opposite. By which I mean we were separated by several tables, as imposing as ocean waves. He looked disinterested in his surroundings and fascinated, constantly, in whatever he read. I liked that. We rubbed shoulders once, twice, three times in the weeks ahead, at the kisatten (coffee shop) or this or that hotspot. Once I thought he was going to approach, but he spilled or dropped something. Another time we stood waiting at entrance to the same event, glued together with a gaggle of other students, but my mouth was stuck shut, and I’m sure his was too. The final time I returned from a brisk walk around the bay and spotted him directly opposite. It was our just so happened moment.

The main adjective that comes to mind is handsome. It wasn’t hard for him, being a mixed kid. I thought he could have been a spy in a thriller, and told him so. It felt that he’d waltzed in from some novel. He worked out in Yunnan, southwest China. Ethics of public health, of the treatment of the critically ill and other types of therapeutic care. When a person digresses on the complexities of human interaction and solicitude in those situations, you can tell the great enhancing effect it must have on them and others. I began to enjoy my bit, though unspoken, in the special privilege of hearing him lecture in front of others. He seemed to love the roles being reversed, and more often than not I was rushing back to work on some idea after a speech or class, sometimes with whoever had extended some invitation that evening, and he’d always see me off with a smile and an “Off you go” or some stage lines like that. It made me chuckle at first, but it was also erotic. That’s getting ahead of a few things, though. I was hungry. Weak and strong alternatively. I wasn’t particularly romantic. I liked to play him songs by the Beatles, lyrics we all know by heart in my edge of the world. It started in this confused way when the lines from “All I’ve Got To Do” entered my brain. The saccharine lilting about wanting to kiss or hold someone whose presence alone mattered.. My wanting it just one more time, twice, three times, n more times. Resurrecting some ancient memory of my parents or siblings singing some carefree part of the song, I sang any number of lyrics over the next few months.

I went with Derek back and forth around Singapore over the next few months, to his sites in Yunnan as well. Invited to the home of one of his study families, I had the sense of almost suffocating joy. Walks on beaches, hikes through the mountains, in short some giddy feeling that as simply, whenever I got down to thinking about it, going at the pace of life. Over six months, closer to a year later, his father called in sick. His mother was also unwell, quite uninterruptedly. You have to get back home, they said. So he took them into his care. That was a chapter in my life for the longest time. Of course when I married later it was for love as much as the next person.

No one was ever to blame, but it’s true that I visited my survey area less and less. Around or after the time we separated I must have spent a month to myself at the now near empty campus, in the eerie silence, among small islands of stragglers in the main library. The urge was there, a call at the back of my mind, to find a plane ticket and surprise him at home, to make the necessary clicks on a few webpages. I couldn’t tell what kept me back – the fear of another home to add to the list, of another part of the world where my emotions and self would gradually and this time, in some final way, seep out? Was it another way of avoiding thinking about what I was gaining and losing elsewhere?

Instead I brought myself back to the UK. There I was with my father again. London was freezing. I wore a scarf and thick coat and sweated at the sight of a Christmas tree. I was looking at new stores behind giant glass windows, at products stacked like mountain bedrock, newly glistening. I was watching the broken-down poor shuffle past with their rickety prams and Benson & Hedges teeth. I waited to meet an acquaintance, wearing a gilet. He escorts me – many people may have had the same experience – to a bookstore, then Starbucks. He digresses on a girl and some love affair when he’s not asking after my work and praising it to the skies. He’s the kind of individual forever on the cusp of maturity in five years’ time. Or do I mean seven? Five, a voice intrudes. He’ll hurt, he’ll suffer, it says, uncharitably. I feel like I’m missing something, Maybe the pace of the beaches and mountains. I’m scrolling through social media, unfocused for the first time I know, uncharacteristically curious. So-and-so looks good now and so-and-so is balding. So-and-so plays music and so-and-so shadows some politician, and this might ultimately go back to where I’m from, to the R. – as well. Then, one day, a long paragraph shows up on Mesh’s page: Our great friend, colleague and inspiring mentor… has passed away… unflagging commitment and bravery even in the face of mortal danger… The events that transpired… a tragedy that shows the grave threat faced by the journalistic community in … and other states where freedom of the press is not considered by all to be a right.. our only solace that… doing what he loved. The search for justice will go on. I pack my mental luggage and re-route myself through streets we wandered together. I refrain from weeping, telling myself it’ll happen when it happens. What I feel instead is a slow bleeding, seeping through my body and breathing. Like the bullet that struck him.

Then it’s passed on that the funeral’s in two weeks. When it happens – and all the landing, check-in, night-time walks and catch-ups in-between slip out of memory – it’s oddly formal, like filling in paperwork. One solid, heavy outpouring of tears, when I finally let it go. The momentary awareness of a total belief in the spirits when we lay him in the ground. Then a long and protracted social event which I spend mostly listening and learning. Mesh was a man adored by many – hundreds, thousands. They’re all new to me. Not a fresh face in the room outside his closest colleagues. No Sheilar? There, within the same land where it began, the untrimmed edges of the city are even more distant memory.

I sit up against the hotel bed-board that evening, aware of the present loss, cognizant of the other thing – some gradual return to the present tense. As the sensation returned, it brought with it nerves, near immobility. I couldn’t write, couldn’t speak a word to them until I was back. I felt I should apologize. From downtown the following morning I took the long-legged bus to the east, disembarked and took the familiar, smaller service in the direction of ___ . Your memory’s a broken clock, I told myself. We’re not there. We’re still at the factories. Just look. You’re confusing things – that wasn’t the hairpin prior to the bend that you think it was. You’ve been away too long and they’ve changed routes for some sharper turn you never took. I kept up such a monologue as this, until we stop at a makeshift terminal of dust-covered  buses. ___ is gone, blandly stated the conductor, who I hadn’t noticed through his beard. You have to take of at E.S. (Electricity Station).

Define gone, I commented, over and over that day, half to the image of the driver still in my mind, half for myself. For all intents and purposes, as they say, ___was flattened. In more official parlance, ___was cleared. My eyes followed the former row of stores and shacks now torn down. I walked alongside then, and an old man, arms behind his back, came passively up to me and past, trailing a large garbage bag half-satisfied with plastic bottles. The old lakeside view behind us had vanished, transformed forever by new dirt and weeds. To my right, the former makeshift entrance through to the labyrinth of backstreets and my school – every possible edge was sealed. The flimsy steel fence might as well have been made of concrete. A prison wall for my and their memories, weighing on me from the outside. Everything inside was levelled. A greater transformation I hadn’t seen in all those years, than this sudden flattening of grey tarmac.

“This is not yours anymore,” I said to myself, uncontrollably. Visible in the background were the mechanical contraptions, earth-movers, diggers – layers of a new foundation. I could see – whispering prophetically in the wind and in my recollections after – the thin laminated notice that laid out in half-detail the construction work ahead. I approached the sign. Maybe it could speak to me and tell me where my friends had gone. But it wasn’t about them. It was about all those other people. I tried to peer through this haze and plan my next move. I tunneled through my list of contacts, past those potential carriers of information whom I thought it impolite to bother, almost embarrassed to do so, in fact. I reached Sheilar’s name and finally called after several failed attempts to press down. “If she’s not dead too,” I pushed the voice out of my mind.

We talk enough to convince ourselves we grasp the idea and even the experience of breakneck development in up-and-coming countries. We know there’s something discomfiting at the core but that it’s inevitable as shopping malls and highways. When it does happen to you, when it descends like an alien spaceship across your rotoscope view of the world it feels incalculably different. It was almost my badge of honor – to be wearing that experience, to have it pinned on me and to embody it. I daresay I felt a spring in my step to accept that. But was me, and me alone. I recognized that the others had to be accounted for. I lived for them, I’m sure. I had to know where they were and what we were doing, if we could be doing anything. “Shipped off,” Sheilar answered, “They packed them off to three different parts of the city, if you can call them parts of the city, if you can call it anything. It happened about two months ago. We didn’t think to disturb you.” The following morning I was in her small office, unchanged, chaotic as ever, as she slammed a sheet of paper on the desk. On it were the names of the three different address, all wildly far apart, only half-familiar to me. Images of the children and their parents swam into view. “We’ll go there, won’t we?” I asked. “Sure we will,” Sheilar answered. Then she was spirited away to some other arresting matter.

I was barely working. Deadlines, whatever they meant, were off. A mile off. Any work with the firm was streamlined and infrequent enough that it would have grabbed undivided attention had it come. But it didn’t. My thoughts wondered towards what were suddenly loose ends. It didn’t seem that I’d exist at the end of them. I had a week remaining in the country and Hirota was asking about my keikaku for the New Year. My heart beat fast enough to keep me awake at night. I’d been up in this other thing – with myself, the new developments in my life, with all of us – for many months that now seemed entirely fruitless.

I’d done it all willingly, I said, not without a quiet regret. I’d taken a step in some unspoken and treacherous direction. I sat wondering how to respond to Hirota. It may have been the years together, the implicit trust, that compelled me to type out the slow response: Plan to seek out some of my old students. One of my volunteer areas was demolished. My students have scattered like the autumn leaves in the wind. Hirota replied: zannen (What a shame). Shame! I added, though not without the counterthought of something beautiful and natural in that decay.

I took the temporary view of being engaged in yet another round of transformation. Losing one home shouldn’t prevent me from further engagement with three more promising communities. More were involved this way, not less. The story was simply carrying on in new form. I could visit the estates on alternate days and strike the addresses off my list as I went. I’d send pictures to Hirota, who’d recently taken to sharing shots of his hometown. (Till today I feel embraced by the undying call of the Japanese winter – the only permanence I ever found.)

The southern districts of – have always been a land of hills. Shaped like steam buns, they were furry with trees when I first arrived. Villages and estates crawled around the back some hills. Poorer communities were laid out over others. I’m sure you have the right image in your mind when you think of this – but I didn’t. Now the postcard view of the city, taking facing north, which ignores these hills of humanity, is equally foreign. Not the city I know either. Not a place I can refer to. The point is, and I’m not trying to be naïve, but I’d never considered from my vantage point what seems like an obvious fact – that all hills have another side, that it’s even possible for life to hold out there. As the bus trundled along the path to the first address, I noted that this indeed was what we were doing, first meandering through an established, old neighborhood, then through more metal-frame homes and endless appended alleys appended, finally around the belly of the hill to a site down-wind. From one side we felt ourselves to be standing on the aorta of the city. From another we felt like guardians of the panoramic view along the flats through to Mesh’s port city.

The first new home was built on a steep incline, contraptions spread out like a starfish around us. I could see how their water supply lynched onto the existing network as did electricity. The type or arrangement for the most impoverished. The self-organization we wished to prolong and ameliorate had been given over to a rental system. Those directly above them on the precipice or some organization back on the sunny side of the slope paid directly for their utilities and rented energy downwards at an inflated cost that no family could cover. This explained the black-outs in many of the homes I passed and the eerie light emerging from computer screens in one from which a boy stalked out and walked past with darkened eyes. Sheilar and I exchanged glances, while my mind weaved together picture acquired only from reading. At least you could say the pipes were clean. No more mercury and no more filthy rivers and less cholera. The experience was near-automatic. It was like returning to a home I’d known all my life but never visited, except in dreams that had replaced reality.

I felt a hand tugging at the hem of my dress. We’d been exposed by a former student of mine. She promptly dragged us along to see mother, father and brother. A cubby-hole room, whose one light was switched on for our impromptu visit, Sheilar and the mother launching into a long and undulating discussion. The sense returned of having been here before – knowing each and every face. My reverie broken by Sheilar, who spoke to me in English: I don’t think they’re safe here. They’re saving up to move out, like they were back in ___. They’ve always been saving up. Probably they’ll do it a hundred-years from now. It’s not in them to leave, but still I’m worried. My student left to play outside. We sat for ten more minutes or so, then departed. I walked, sweating buckets, up and around the hill again, until the scene in its entirety was out of view. I could have left a whole world behind; such was the sharp and sudden sense of loss.

Back in my lodgings that night, I slipped into a confused sleep, then a long dream. Mesh and I were driving along a narrow trail by the port. He seemed to be massaging some of the green fur into a roll. He smiled with black molars. I felt a foul taste in my mouth and my teeth clicking as if out of place. The car raced forward, apparently over or through the flanking vehicles. A metallic crush reverberated through my skull and around my ringing ears. My body experienced the paralytic pain only administered in a dream. I slipped from this into a second dream standing among faces that were mostly blank and anonymous, statues at Mesh’s funeral. “You didn’t have to do this!” I screamed at a group of young boys, fancying I’d identified the killers. “You didn’t have to! You always had a choice!” I rang Sheilar the following morning. “I don’t think I can handle this, my dear,” (we’d used the epithet since early on) “Yesterday was rough. I let them down.” She paused and I heard her sigh. “We all feel like this from time-to-time. I believe you ought to come tomorrow. There are people there we’ve known from the beginning. I’m sure they’d love to see you, Jill.”

Forty-eight hours later, we sought out the second group of dispossessed. They’d relocated deep into the heart of the city. One wave of development seemed to have washed over the area and left in the devastation a small chain of aging apartments. It was a free-for-all initially. As much as forty percent of our number squatted in the leftover apartments, aware there was nothing permanent here, aware as we all were that they waited for The Man. But he was busy elsewhere, and fortunately any of rougher elements were in abeyance. The one commonality was the rationing of running water a strict regimen on lighting and appliances. They’d been the first group to leave, which they did practically the minute the order came down. They’d mixed with rural and gypsy folk peacefully. “There’s someone I’ll reintroduce you to,” whispered Sheilar, ushering down a corridor, eyes occasionally glaring at door numbers. At the end of a third floor row she opens a door, we walk inside, and I strain to work out the face in front. Thoughts meander back through rapidly opening portals to the same pony-tailed girl who placed herself in Mesh’s arms (hadn’t they all?) and brought me to my first classroom. She was taller and as anybody from there would notice, at marriageable age. Her legs had grown long and spindly and her hips widened. In a side-kitchen her mother stirred the contents of a large wok. We sat for lunch, and as I looked between Dot and her mother, I realized this wasn’t the only time I’d seen them recently. Unsure where this tale was headed, I stood by the window afterwards, looking down on a miniature playground. Dot appeared by my side. Into my hands she placed – I felt the hardened sides first – a black-and-white photograph. I turned it right-ways up to see Mesh’s beaming smile. “Uncle,” said Dot. I put one arm around her shoulders and we took in the temporary view outside.

“The last one’s always the hardest,” commented Sheilar, nonchalantly. We were seated on the bus headed back downtown. A light drizzle pattered down outside. I brought the folded single A4 sheet from my pocket and studied the third address for a good while. I didn’t recognize the street or even neighborhood; even the general part of the city was unknown to me. “That’s because it’s not in – ” explained Sheilar, looking away. “It must be a good three-hour drive.” My heart sank as I figured this was where the K– had ended up. I thought of them and my dear Eagle.

Three days passed before we were sat in a minivan headed for the northern plains, beyond even the wetlands, through towns screaming with cabbies and hustlers, to a place triangulated not between our capital and its countryside but some urban identity even further out on one side and, almost in another universe, a notorious border city from a neighboring state. It wasn’t anywhere closer to home for Eagle or her people, but the thought felt insignificant against the background, where it was taking all these other people, what it might mean and what they might be through it. At length we emerged from a hilly valley, down a sharp corner and a kind of ring-road allied to a train track; I peeked out at the passengers, their eyes all turned forward; out of the dusty window.

We parked in a square on the edge of town. Space was arranged in grids of interlocked pentagons, settlements lining the intersections, each with their central square and standard sets of stones and conveniences and transport down the chain. We knew the K– had been centrally placed. We hopped down from the bus headed for the perceived core.

We never could have anticipated the scene before us. Bright yellow K- garb against the blacks and greys of the local uniform. We watched a member of their community push through a crowd, towards a bustling market. We followed like spies until we found ourselves in the shaded lanes of the market. Several of Eagle’s countrymen stood out strikingly in stalls. I thought I recognized a few. Like any old marketplace, I repeated to myself. Then turned to the owner of one store and saw the outlook of my former student. From the look in Eagle’s eye, she’d seen us approaching. She was taller, and what I immediately recognized as womanhood was fully blossomed upon her. There was also that local style, as we’d never known ten minutes previously. I was saved from any awkward pretense at asking the price of fruit when she shimmied out and put an arm around each of myself and Sheilar. With a few rushed and excited words she transferred duties to an assistant who’d appeared magically beside her. “Please meet my family,” she said, leading us through the endpoints of the marketplace and down an alleyway. But I’ve met them before, I thought, as she looked back at me, with the same confident eyes. Out of the alleyway, we entered a block of cream-terraced buildings, two-floor homes with surrounding walls and metal fences for entrances. A dog ran up to the gate, followed by a nanny, who led us up to the door that opened to a room with a glass chandelier above and modest leather sofa. She bid us to sit and wait. A phone-call and fifteen minutes later we were shaking hands with her husband, a balding man in his thirties who’d hurried back from business to honor the teachers Eagle spoke so highly of.

It came to a close and reached a beginning at that point. Eagle’s home, the grace our host, the pieces of their engagement and hasty marriage – I was able to situate it within its own logic and time and space. But at the same time it was disconcerting, and strangely discontinuous. I felt my body separate from my thoughts. I felt the intruder. The more they smiled, the more Eagle showed contentedness and joy at her new position, the stronger my sense of thoughts and emotions moved in the opposite direction.

I’ve told the story in bits and pieces over the years, but I’ve never had the time to sit down and write it out. Closest I came was when I achieved this career of mine and managed to have subordinates, and even adversaries. Sometimes I ended up at parties where, engaged something genuine in his or her curiosity, I ran through this or that part of my experience. There were longer stories, laugh-out-loud moments, and I think I few less sanguine tales as well. But they’re locked in their own box, contained in the above. This record is only for myself, as much as it’s for you. I can only bring you the sketch of what survives. I want to live on.

I left the country soon after the meeting with Eagle. I settled on the culture of academic work, further procuration and presentation of data. It was almost as if nothing else had ever happened or mattered, almost as if Japan or ___ no longer existed. I was doing it, I felt, in a body that was slowly transforming. It was as if I’d returned to a natural indifference, revealed to a younger version of myself, with no friends, only acquaintances and contacts. Yet I was also aware, presently aware – especially when we’d discuss a place I knew, somewhere from the past – of a new warmth of feeling, an unfamiliar smile appearing over my face, stretching my cheeks.

Strange still, that while acting in this way I knew, or came around to knowing, that I was burying all the older thoughts, one memory at a time. I’d relinquished any hope to be at the center of changes in Eagle’s life or the lives of others, and along with that (or should I have this the other way round?) the thought of any area of the world beyond my front door as mutable under present conditions. The problem was one of so many patterns that I had to imagine between areas. I wasn’t wedded to the law of averages, more the case-by-case scenario that we call the world. Frankly I was convinced that only scandals could force the hand of change that would improve other lives, or issues so dire that international effort could subsidized for misplaced ill will and insecurity. It wasn’t possible to go further. Best we could settle on was a five-percent improvement, I said to myself. Five percent more staying in school and not paralyzed by basis lack of access or custom, or the ways of local and global sabotage that I was in and out of. Even then I’ve never been close to that I really think would work, which would be for the states themselves to be annulled and replaced with ethnic or geographic groups capable of representing their interests all the way through, to the very marrow. This dreamed future I only peer at through a veil, only envisage through what is not, what was not for them. I hope we reach a technological singularity when all we’ve done is driven to involute scandalously and drag everybody up with it – then we can talk about races and nations.

I wonder if all this doesn’t constitute something secretive about me and that’s what I always was, despite the openness with which I acted and did things in my own mind. Hirota and Takeshi and a great many others must have been shocked and betrayed when I switched to the people we all saw as our main rivals upon graduation. We sought to disentangle the networks of other firms in across a bewildering stretch of the globe. Rather infamously for some, we lobbied for and succeeded in acquiring Hirota’s firm. We didn’t break that car into parts, but clumped it together with our own magic adhesive. I sent my people. We launched a behemoth, without knowing what it meant, headed somewhere, also guided by fate.

Inevitably and I bottomed out. I moved from one thing to another. Most if not all of the remainder has been peeled away, irretrievably. I don’t know why I won’t think of it but it stopped remembering at one point. It might be like others experience their memories of school. Sometimes indeed I dream of that classroom, only its theirs now, in the village that was destroyed. We’re hurrying around, concocting plans, screaming out that we’ll salvage what we can. The demolition crew’s due to arrive tomorrow morning. The pervasive dread of unpreparedness haunts the dream. It prolongs through to the following day. I have to tell myself the time has passed, but unlike dreaming and waking from the dream, there’s none of the slow relief, and after all it’s not clear what there is to be relieved from. I can’t tell if I grew up or stayed a child. I don’t know whether I’m immature or the mother of the universe. I don’t know if I’m standing above it, or if something deeper canvasses everything. But the night presents an answer to me, once in a while, through an unspoken fear.

This is the final stretch – that extra half-hour at the end of a marathon. Mesh reached the end of his life but he’s always stayed with me. Never could I accommodate that loss. He still lives and breathes somewhere, I believe. I also believe the other thing, that somehow by virtue of being alive and in completely different terms with the world, Eagle has become, impossibly, not a part of me. There are times I try to arrest this by some trick of the brain. I give her not just a home but a new project, one suited to her abilities and great latent talents. She connects with local and international fundraisers to set up a clothing workshop for her people; not at a choking, poking slum cabin. A courtyard in some unknown valley, blue skies, where they sell the garments at a steady profit and educate the women about writing, mathematics and business. One becomes a lawyer and represents the rights of her people. Another becomes an actress and marries into Indian film royalty, divorces and is later feted as a singer popular in her new home and Pakistan. People from those countries drink and toast to her in revels on lakes in Peshawar. Maybe in that future past Eagle grows to be the person with qualities that I’ve lost. Still a part of me registers her as mine. But she and they have become others.

That is how it is to be made by someone. We don’t ask them for permission. For our own reasons and through our own causes we make ourselves through them. Their departure from us is a gift, most of the time. I’m fortunate that the search took me this way, but part of me wonders whether I’d feel the loss I imagine if her fate was worse. Part of me imagines, too, whether all this musing is in vain. Part of me still has to ask, why this irrepressible urge to finally write about it? Then I’m reminded of how I see all those characters in places they shouldn’t be found. In faces that aren’t their own. There were dozens of other girls and boys, and almost each one transposed to someone in my own culture. I find myself speaking to them in a different, softer, maybe kinder tone. I wonder if they are aware of it. Sometimes I hear a voice beyond that which says, It doesn’t matter what we think, even what we feel, but what happens. It started there; it carried on till now.

These memories have become all about the future, informed and built through the past. Still building. Yet their essence has no past. I’ve only been able to sit down and write so far. Maybe there’s something personally epochal in the rehearsal. It’s never a story that looks for another, at least of the same kind. But something in it repeats. Finally, there’s myself, pushing and pulling at the bottom of this. I might on occasion see the Jill of five years from now. In some metropole, preferably a European one with an old district, perusing bookstores, locating the best paella or underground bars at night, cultivating a new interest or acquiring literacy in history of film. These imaginings are, suitably or not, now empty of others. To imagine others is to see them like pieces on a chessboard.

Times I feel I was meant to be elsewhere. I was meant to spend my later years there. I should have arrived there already. Now and then I feel dragged down by the thought. A girl on the subway in this city, her hair curls the way a student of mine did. Unconsciously I register the language in background whispers – that same subway, a mall, a park – and I’m transported to what’s an indistinct place now. No Mesh, no friends. I picked up a bit of knowledge the other day, on the influence of posture / diet on complications during pregnancy. My mind had to bring it back to them. They’re my teachers now.

Other times I say I’ve positioned myself outside it all – the hierarchy of gains and losses to which everything succumbs. I don’t think it’s ever possible to be empty and give. It’s more about the movement. If you want to give, simply position yourself away, harness your skills and build around them. Welcome visitors as they arrive. Times like those I think I’ve paid back the debt for a thread that was slowly lost. Then I wonder what other people might say.

~

A.K. Kulshreshth – ‘No Place for Soft Men’

APRIL 25th 2023

A.K. Kulshreshth’s short stories have been published in eight countries. Together with his mother, he has translated four books from Hindi to English. In 2021, he completed Bride of the City, the first ever translation into English of the classic 1949 Hindi novel Vaishali Ki Nagarvadhu. His first novel Lying Eyes was longlisted for 2022 Epigram Books Fiction Prize.

No Place for Soft Men

The company sword was heavy in my hands. Matsumoto lay before me, his arm positioned along the middle of a thick branch. I raised the sword and took a deep breath. The air was heavy and damp.

I brought the sword down with all my might. It hissed as it sliced through the oppressive, humid, cursed air of Singapore, so different from the cool, scented air of my village.

The pain exploded in my shoulder before the crack echoed through the plantation. There was a pattern in the mud splotches on my boots. My eyes drifted to Matsumoto’s wrist. There was a gaping cut and white flesh peeked out from it. There was no blood. I had not been able to cut through the bone.

One of the men screamed. I followed his gaze. Matsumotos’s eyes had flipped open. They showed no reproach. I knelt by my dead friend’s side and closed his eyes. In death, as in life, he was patient. “Forgive me,” I said.

Oichi, the platoon leader, stood watching. I thought about what to do. Perhaps a little lower down the wrist? I closed my eyes and steadied myself. I stretched to raise the sword high. I rocked back and then brought it down. This time, there was less pain from the impact.

The man standing on the other side, in front of me, lowered his eyes. I knew I had failed again. Now there were two gashes in Matsumoto’s arm. “I will buy you many drinks in heaven, my friend,” I said.

#

It was hate at first sight. Matsumoto’s eyes were distant and scornful, the eyes of a city boy who read books. We met at the Junior Course School in Asaka. I counted a thousand slaps in my first ninety days of training in the Imperial Guards. On nights when the ache in my cheeks became unbearable, I liked thinking how much harder it must be for Matsumoto, who got twice the slaps I did.

I fell in love with him on the 11^th of February in 1941, before I fell in love with his sister.

It was Kigensetsu and we were at Joe’s in Shanghai. Arai, the guy on my right, was a village boy with bulging biceps. He was more my type than Matsumoto, who had landed up on my left.

Arai was beside himself at the sight of a dozen undressed girls. He had, as usual, been drinking the fastest of all of us. “Look at that!” He shouted into my ear. “Just look!”

“What do you think I’m doing, asshole?” I said.

“You know,” he said, squeezing my shoulder, “this place. Shanghai! There’s no better place to be alive. There’s a ripeness in the air that seeps into the bodies of women.”

I gave him a smack on the back of his head. “Shut up and let me look.”

His eyes were glazing. He would pass out soon. He said, “On— Onichi, you know, I’ve made love to Russians with breasts the size of my head, Japanese who don’t raise their legs, Indians whose energy is okay but their bones fucking hurt me.” He took a swig. “You know who’s the best?”

“Russians?” I said.

 “No! Chinese! The best of them all! Supple bodies, and shaved…” He brought two fingers together in the shape of a vagina.

I have to admit that until Keiko planted the seeds of doubt in my mind, those shows with their abundance of women were the happiest moments of my life.

“Hey! Will you marry me?” Arai shouted. He was on his feet. His Chinese was no better than mine. We knew just enough. He was pointing at one of the women on stage. The music had paused for a second as the women curtsied. The whole hall burst into shouts, laughter, and ripostes. The dancer he had pointed to did an elaborate act of being overwhelmed. There was more thumping of tables and whistling.

Matsumoto had been his quiet self all the time. I prodded him in the side. “So, Matsumoto? Nothing like a bald pussy, right? So pure!”

He gulped and opened his mouth. I could not hear him. It was his blush that told me that had never enjoyed a woman. At the age of twenty, when we were prepared for our highest purpose –- to die for the Emperor –- Matsumoto had not seen the meaning of life.

“Did you not love it?” I asked him when we were back at the barracks. We had hauled Arai into his bunk, left him snoring and stepped outside to finish the night with a last smoke in the cold air. We stamped on the ground to keep ourselves warm.

He looked at me and then his eyes darted beyond me. I realised then that what I had taken for arrogance was actually painful shyness.

His eyes lit up as he exhaled a thick cloud of smoke. He kept the cigarette instead of giving it to me. “Well, it was my first time,” he said. “When I finished, I thought I was…”

“In heaven?” I said.

“Yes! But right after, I wished I had saved myself for a woman I loved.”

I snorted. “That’s why they say books make you less manly.”

He looked into my eyes and held my gaze.  I had pricked him.

I poked him and beckoned with my finger for the Kinshi cigarette. Its fragrant plume had turned thicker. He handed it over with an apology. I pulled hard on it. Its end glowed. When I let out a thick cloud of smoke, my head whirled with happiness. I had climaxed twice, and the girl had planted a kiss on my cheek when I paid her. I had drunk like an animal, and I had held it. And I had a new friend in Matsumoto. The cigarette smoke got into my eye, making it water, but I did not mind that.

Matsumoto spoke then for a long time. My mind reeled. He talked about the time when the police came to his house and confiscated his books. The despair at having to pull out of university. “There is nothing worse than this fucking army of morons. It is built on a pack of lies!” he said.

The cigarette singed my fingers. I pinched it between my middle finger and thumb and flicked it far away. Its embers reminded me of the glow worms back in my village. I took a deep breath. The cold night air, still laced with tobacco, made me giddy.

I looked around. There was no one else. I pressed his shoulder. “Listen to me, Matsumoto!” His eyes widened. The fog in my mind had cleared in an instant. Now I wanted to hit my bunk right away. “Listen,” I repeated. “Do not, ever, say that again. Never again. Not to me. Not to anyone. Clear?”

He lowered his eyes. “Thanks, Onichi,” he said.

We were both quiet. I ached for another cigarette, but we were out of them. I exhaled towards the half-moon and made smoke with my breath in the cold air.

“Tell me, Onichi, do you really believe all this? About Jimmu, about the world under our roof? And the way they behave, like fucking animals?”

“You’ve been idiotised by reading, Matsumoto,” I said. “I do what I am told to. And then, I do what I like.” I made a circle with two fingers of my left hand, and in and out motions with the index of my right. I spoke with the wisdom of a twenty-year-old who had been sent to do his duty towards the Emperor.

Matsumoto’s eyes flared. Then he shook his head, and exhaled long and hard through his mouth, as if he was breathing out toxic thoughts.

#

I learned much later that Keiko was his sister. We only met together once, the three of us, and it was awkward. I had met Keiko at the Shanghai Shrine one spring afternoon when the flowers were blooming. She did not rebuff me when I strode up to her, full of purpose, and greeted her with respect. We met often in the coffee houses and cinemas. The White Horse Inn and Xinguang, of course, but many others as well.

Brother and sister showed me different sides of life. Keiko scolded me for learning Chinese only to buy girls. There was something in the way she did that – a faint reddening of cheeks, an iciness in her eyes, a warmth in her heart – that aroused me. In my mind, I undressed her and feasted on the points of her small breasts. She knew what I was up to. With an exasperated flicker, she slapped away my fantasies. She left me craving for more time with her. I thought of taking her to Joe’s. I would have the most beautiful girl by my side. I never did. We never went beyond holding hands.

The last time we met, she wore a light blue kimono. She brought me a box of Sakuma candies. I knew she had given one to Matsumoto as well. Those were the last Sakuma boxes we would see.

#

In Malaya, the sun scraped our necks and foreheads, as it had all through our southward campaign. This was supposed to be winter, but the heat was fierce. We were cycling down a road that cut through endless, neatly arranged rubber trees. Jitra, where our advance troops saw heavy action, was still far away.

I stood up on both pedals and stretched my back in an arc, turning my head up towards the sky. I enjoyed the sight of the sky framed by the jagged canopy of branches and leaves flitting by. My backbone purred in gratitude.

“Onichi!” Matsumoto cried out. “Motherfucker! Watch out!” Another man shouted something I could not make out. I brought my butt back to the hard seat and braked in time to avoid entangling with the guy in front.

#

On 8^th December 1941, we cowered, shivering in the warmth, in an overloaded launch. The placid water of Johor strait barely rocked us. Our launch had slowed and was headed straight towards the tree, barely visible in the pitch dark, that was our target, our first step on the soil of Singapore.

The trees and the shore ahead became a brilliant red. The sky was streaked with a thousand flares. A column of water rose to our left. I wondered if I had become deaf. The explosion that followed was, in fact, deafening. Time had slowed down.

We were on our knees. There was a chaotic rattling as the British machine guns opened fire on us. The shoreline heaved to our right. It was the launch steering hard left to avoid the enemy fire. A couple of hundred metres to our left, there was a loud bang. It was a direct hit on a launch. “Save me this night, Jimmu,” I prayed. “I am too young.”

The saltiness of the sea gave way to a familiar but odd smell. It was the smell of oil, a heady, pleasant, vaporous smell. Before I could think where all the oil came from, the night was on fire.

Some of the soldiers who had been wading through the waters ahead of our launch became blurred, writhing shapes. Fires danced over the water and on the trees.

Our launch lurched and shuddered to a halt. When the engines were cut, I heard strange sounds behind me. I turned to see that two men had been hit. One was jerking back and forth in pain. His shoulder was dark with blood. The other was screaming as he lay still. The medic squatted beside him.

Oichi’s lips moved and he pointed to a clump of trees that had ghostly roots jutting out of the ground and towards the skies. Clouds of fire bloomed on both sides of that group of trees, but there was a clear path through to them.

I have no memory of what happened between then and the time I was holding on to one of the roots. I do not know if five minutes or an hour had elapsed in between. I saw more men moving in on my right. To my left there was one vast inferno. I moved towards the men.

“What company is this?” I shouted. No one answered. They were all strangers, coated in oil and mud, silhouettes without features.

A dark figure came running through towards me. The man was coated black with oil. Only the whites of his eyes glistened in the pale glow of fire, flares and stars.

“Onichi, it’s me, Matsumoto!” He said.

The fire turned brighter. The heat was like a blanket that would suffocate me.

“Matsumoto!” I cried. “It’s a relief -–” A shell exploded far to our left.

“Onichi, you asshole, get a move on. Better to face the guns than to fry here,” Matsumoto said. He was panting and his teeth chattered as if he was cold.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Onichi, one thing -–”

“Move on!” A group of men stumbled towards us. One of them was shouting. “Go on, don’t burn to death here!”

Many of us had reached that conclusion. We charged towards a squat building on top of an embankment. During our briefing we had been told that it was a storehouse.

There were many charred bodies on the way to the building. When we got to it, it was a relief to find the shutters open and to hear the chaotic hubbub of Japanese voices from inside. From deeper inland, we heard the rumbling of engines. They must have been in the hundreds. The British were retreating from the front.

#

It was late afternoon. We had ensconced ourselves on a 150-metre-high position that gave us a clear view of flat low land for about a kilometre. The land was covered by sugarcane fields and vegetable plantations. The company had finished moving in and we were resting.

“Enemy ahead!” A sentry cried.

“Hold your fire. Let them all come on to the vegetable field,” Company Commander Nemoto shouted. The enemy were still far away, strolling into our field of vision without a care. They wore brown shirts and shorts and flat tin helmets. Nemoto had ordered two heavy machine guns to be placed at the highest point. I lay on my belly next to one of them. I unclipped my safety catch. I locked the rifle on to one of the enemy. I could see him looking over his shoulder at his comrade, laughing. I resisted the temptation to pull the trigger. I felt breathless. The air was still and humid. The shrill songs of the insects seemed to become louder.

“Fire!” Nemoto screamed as the front man of the enemy reached a stone’s throw away from us. I squeezed the trigger, and sure enough, the man I had in sight collapsed. The heavy machine guns drowned out the pops of our rifles as they cut dozens of Australians down.

That was when Matsumoto cried, “Aah, I’m hit! Oh god! Onichi –”

A medic came rushing to Matsumoto. He was the only one hit. The medic looked at me and shrugged. “He is dead,” he said.

I knelt by my dead friend’s side. The medic said, “The bullet came from behind.” It had been fired from the heavy machine gun and ricocheted off a branch straight into Matsumoto’s neck. I could only lower my head and nod numbly. As the medic closed my friend’s eyes and laid him flat on the ground, the blood was still seeping from his left side, mixing with the red earth.

#

All these memories flitted by in my mind as I stood panting in the forest with the sword in my hand. Matsumoto’s life, like anyone else’s, was like a sugoroku, full of ups and downs, except that there was a throw of the die that could stub you out when the game had just begun.

“Strength, motherfucker! Put some strength into it!” Oichi barked. “Do it in one hard blow!”

A breeze rustled through the trees and gently fanned me. It cooled my armpits and my back. The blue shirt I had taken from the farmer and rubbed with mud was damp with sweat. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw two yellow birds flit away. I took a few deep breaths. Over the mixed smell of damp red earth and forest, a delicate layer of a flower’s scent wafted through. I prayed to Jimmu to spare my friend from more pain. It struck me that I should aim even lower. I focused on the spot between my eyes till I felt it tingle. I raised and felled the sword in a clean and smooth move. There was a loud crunch. Matsumoto’s hand fell onto the grassy earth.

I stayed bent for a while before straightening my back. My head swam as I looked Oichi in the eye. He nodded. Matusomoto lay at peace now. I picked up the severed hand. I had kept his mess tin next to me with its lid open. I put the hand into it and fastened it. I gripped the tin tightly, to stop my hands from shaking.

Matsumoto had carried his mess tin from Hiroshima to Shanghai, to Kysuhu and all the way through Malaya. Now it would carry a small part of him, the ashes of his hand, back to his family. The empire took his life and it would give his family those ashes, because it made no sense to carry his whole body to Japan. Keiko would tremble, as I was trembling now, when she saw the mess tin.

My own mess tin lay snug in my backpack, six feet away.

Acknowledgement and glossary

This story draws very heavily on Henry P. Frei’s Guns of February: Ordinary Japanese Soldiers’ Views of the Malayan Campaign and the Fall of Singapore, 1941-42 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2004)

Kigensetsu – the day of ascension to the throne of the mythical Emperor Jimmu

Sugoroku – a traditional game, close to snakes and ladders

~

Srinjay Chakravarti – ‘The Butterfly Net’

 JUNE 12th 2021

Srinjay Chakravarti is a writer, editor and translator based in Salt Lake City, Calcutta, India. A former journalist with The Financial Times Group, his creative writing has appeared in over 150 publications in 30-odd countries. His first book of poems Occam’s Razor received the Salt Literary Award in 1995. He has won one of the top prizes ($7,500) in the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Poetry Competition 2007–08. www.srinjaychakravarti.com.

The Butterfly Net

The little boy was skipping about in the green paddy fields under the mild winter sun, now catching a dragonfly and then setting it free, now chasing a grasshopper and then teasing it, annoying it no end.

Suddenly he stopped in alarm. A tall bearded man, dressed in a white flannel shirt and khaki corduroy trousers, with a sola topi on his head, was peering at him from behind a bamboo grove. But then the man smiled, a nice kindly gentle smile, and the boy felt more at ease.

‘Who are you? What do you want?’

‘My name is Prof. Chayan Rakshit. I am a professor of entomology at a university in Calcutta. Can you do something for me?’

‘Anto—antomo—what? What’s that?’

The man smiled again. ‘Entomology. It’s the study of insects. You know—grasshoppers and dragonflies, mantids and moths, butterflies, bees, and ants…’

‘Ants? You study ants? What for?’ The little village boy was astounded.

Prof. Rakshit sighed. ‘Oh, never mind. Can you do a little task for me?’

‘What sort of job?’ The boy’s guard was up.

‘Can you catch me a few butterflies? I’ll pay you good money.’

‘Butterflies? What for?’

‘To study them, of course.’

‘Why do you want to study them?’

Prof. Rakshit was exasperated. ‘Look, boy—now, what’s your name again?’

‘Shobuj Tanti.’

‘Ah, “Shobuj”, which means “green” in Bangla. How appropriate! Well, Shobuj, take me to your parents. I’ll explain it to them.’

Shobuj’s father ran a small grocery shop in the nearby village, a few miles from the town of Anjanagunj. The boy announced the professor as he entered the shop. ‘Here’s an antologist to meet you, baba. He teaches everything about ants in a big school.’

‘Huh?’ The boy’s father stared at them, startled.

Over a cup of tea, Prof. Rakshit explained what he wanted. ‘I’ll pay you an advance of a hundred rupees. And twenty rupees for every butterfly Shobuj can catch.’

Shobuj’s father, Mr Niramoy Tanti, was astounded. ‘If my son catches fifty of those flying insects, you’ll pay him a thousand rupees?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’

‘I’m too old for it, for one thing. I’m over fifty. I can’t go gallivanting over all that mud and slush at this age. This boy can do it much better than me.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Shobuj’s father, dubiously.

Prof. Rakshit produced a crisp hundred-rupee note, which Mr Tanti pocketed with alacrity. The professor went to his vehicle, a Tata Sumo, and took out a big butterfly net.

Shobuj woke up at dawn the next day and skipped off to the fields, armed with the ‘antologist’s’ butterfly net and a packet of muri and gur his mother had given him.

He roamed all day, netting all sorts of butterflies—emperors and monarchs, cardinals and satyrs, metalmarks and swallowtails.

At the end of the day, when he returned with his catch, his parents were dazzled—‘You’ve caught at least thirty!’ said his delighted father. Mrs Deboki Tanti said, ‘How lovely! That should bring us at least six hundred rupees!’

It was a happy and contented Shobuj who went to sleep that night. But just before daybreak, he crashed out of his little bed, entangled in the mosquito net. His body was drenched in a cold sweat, and he was trembling with terror as he struggled in the fine cotton mesh in which he was trapped.

His parents had come running over on hearing the crash. They rescued him and pulled him out. ‘What happened?’

‘I—I—dreamt that I had become a butterfly, and that I was caught in the professor’s net! I had nowhere to escape!’

Shobuj started weeping. ‘Oh, it was horrible. Just horrible! I felt someone was suffocating me. I felt as though I would die!’

‘Don’t worry, son,’ said his father soothingly, ‘you had a bad dream. Just a nightmare.’

‘No,’ said Shobuj, ‘I won’t keep the butterflies. I shall set them free!’

‘What! Set them free! What for?! What about the cash?’

Mr Tanti went on threatening and cajoling his son, but Shobuj was obdurate. When Prof. Rakshit arrived at seven o’clock, Mr Tanti was still haranguing his son.

Shobuj came running out. He told the professor all about his dream, then pulled out the butterfly net. Before anyone could protest, he opened the net and set his entire harvest free.

‘Hey, what’re you doing? Wait a minute!’ said Prof. Rakshit. But he was too late. The lepidoptera blossomed out in a brilliant burst of fluttering, multicoloured wings and dispersed immediately, revelling in their new-found freedom.

Mr Niramoy Tanti fell upon his son, pummelling Shobuj with blows and slaps. Prof. Rakshit intervened and stayed his hand.

The entomologist then said, more to himself, ‘Chuang Tzu dreamt at dawn that a butterfly had lost its way…’

‘What’s that?’ Shobuj’s father was still panting with rage.

‘Oh, it came to my mind that there was an old Chinese philosopher, who once dreamt he had become a butterfly. When he woke up, he wasn’t sure whether he was a man who had been dreaming he had been a butterfly in his sleep, or a butterfly dreaming it was Chuang Tzu in its own sleep.’

Shobuj’s parents exchanged astounded glances. Shobuj was now looking distinctly happier.

Prof. Rakshit patted the boy on his head, then extracted a couple of five-hundred rupee notes from his wallet.

‘Keep the money,’ he said to Shobuj and his dumbstruck parents.

The entomologist picked up his butterfly net and strode out of the courtyard. Shobuj and his parents stood there, gaping after him.

~

Corey Miller – ‘All That Remained’

NOVEMBER 8th 2021

Corey Miller was a finalist for the F(r)iction Flash Fiction Contest (’20) and shortlisted for The Forge Flash Competition (’20). His writing has appeared in Booth, Pithead Chapel, Third Point Press, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. He reads for TriQuarterly, Longleaf Review, and Barren Magazine. When Corey isn’t brewing beer for a living in Cleveland, he likes to take his dogs for adventures. Follow him on Twitter @IronBrewer or at www.CoreyMillerWrites.com

All That Remained

Li sprinted through the grimy city street on the hunt for the beast. The smell of fried crucian carp was suspended in the air like a welcoming veil to the Chinese New Year. Street vendors huddled over their fires, their breath fogging their faces as they flipped and confirmed meats for tenderness. Every year the festivities ended the same way — with the Grand Parade. The city came together and was packed elbow to elbow. Li ran past them.

The boy was small, even for his age. His hair was shoulder length, stringy, and jet black. He wished he could afford what the vendors were selling, being that the chicken had more fat on its bones than he did. Even if he could, he wouldn’t be able to stomach food now. Li pushed his long hair back and tucked it behind his ears to utilize his peripheral — but he knew he would hear it first.

As Li sprinted down a back alley he reflected on his Grandfather’s wisdom, “Li, the dragon is the symbol for power and strength. More importantly for me now, it is also the symbol of luck.” Fits of coughing exploded from the old man’s throat as he grabbed for his handkerchief. The noises were hard and crackling, but Li stayed at his hospital bedside. The veins glowed through his Grandfather’s pale skin, speckled with blue and purple blotches that were widening.

“Grandfather, you need your rest. You need your strength.”

“Listen closely, Li. It’s your turn to be the protector of the house and watch the family. You can no longer be scared.”

The parade commenced and last in line was the Dragon’s Dance. Every year the puppeteers moved fluently as they dipped and dived, holding tall poles that supported the paper scales. They soared snake-like between the gangs of percussionists. In previous years, Li would hide behind his Grandfather as the monster approached. To Li, the dragon was alive and warm. “You don’t need to hide behind me, young one. It knows me, and it knows to leave my bloodline alone. You are safe.” The memory burned in his mind, but Li remained hidden all those years. Back then his grandfather stood with such force. His presence was luminous and shielding.

The memory faded. Li lengthened his stride.

Patrons of the festival lined the road. They showcased beautiful silk gowns embellished by gold lining that swirled and circled to create intricate designs that shone bright in the sunset. They danced and cheered with pride. Everything was different today. There was less garbage blocking the fire hydrants, and the blue trash bags that did exist blended in with the banners hanging from the residents’ awnings, which were normally draped with faded clothes drying for the next work day.

Li felt the shifting energy as he turned the corner. The sun was omnipotent on the horizon, and the rays raced down the blocks, striking him sharply in the face. Even though he was expecting it, Li still flinched when the drums pounded. They were distant, but sounded like they were coming from within his mind. The high frequencies cut through the children’s laughter, and the bass rumbled the pavement. Its vibration traveled up through his body into his skull. The hard mallets pounded in unison and became the city’s heartbeat. The buildings in front of the boy were tall and intimidating. This was the street that led the way.

The population was dense; the crowd was pulled towards the parade like a positive charge, creating a solid wall along the sidewalk. The beating grew louder and much more fierce. Li rushed like an arrow toward the barricade and sharply penetrated. He was encompassed by scaled performers wearing ruby red and deep yellow to mimic the beast they carried. The heat felt like the center of a volcano and stole his breath. The dancers moved with vigor, swaying and throwing their poles side to side as the dragon formed helixes around Li. The dragon was flying and the performers were merely chasing, trying to keep up. Smoke from its nostrils bellowed out, and Li’s vision became hazy. The crowd vanished and the performers disappeared. All that remained was Li and the dragon. It looked at Li with its wide emerald eyes and smiled. Its lips were full and plump, and its teeth were sharp and many. The scales were gems that reflected ancient history. The beast was a flame and the embers bounced with the loud heavy beats. It knew Li and it welcomed him.

The memory of his Grandfather resonated. “Grandfather, I’m not just scared of the dragon. I’m scared of losing you. I’m scared of disgracing my family. I’m scared of getting older.”

Li didn’t expect it, but his Grandfather laughed. “Li, you probably aren’t as scared as I am.” That was the moment Li knew he must leave his Grandfather’s bedside, to run for the fire.

The drums went silent. The dragon was before him. Li’s heart froze.

The smoke cleared. The dragon sprung high in the air, opening its mouth, ready to swallow him whole.

Strength conquering fear, Li stood his ground.

~

Marcus Fedder – ‘Jia Chen’

NOVEMBER 1st 2021

Marcus spent 18 months in Shanghai’s former French Concession. He is the author of two novels, German Justice, which was published by Blackspring Press in 2020 and Sarabande, published in 2008. This short story is part of a collection of stories titled “Loneliness”.  Marcus works in development-finance and writes and paints in his spare time. The proceeds of his writings and art sales go to support the children charity Children of the Mekong (www.childrenofthemekong.org).

Jia Chen

Jia closed the window mainly to shut out the sound of the rain and took her photo album out of the drawer again. Ten years ago she had collected all the photos of the moments she had shared with her husband Bingwen. At least ten more years it should have been, alas, the last ten years she had spent alone in their apartment in the Xincun in Xuhui, Shanghai. She remembered well the day she had been waiting for him for hours to come back, for the screeching sound of his bicycle when he braked in front of the door, for the click in the lock and the footsteps on the staircase. By ten pm he had not returned from playing Mahjong with his mates and Jia sensed that something was not right. Just after midnight the call from the hospital came. At one am she was standing at his bedside but it was too late. Bingwen smiled when he saw her. At least this is what she thought.

“I am sorry, he is dead,” said the doctor. “It looks like he had a heart attack and fell off his bike.”

Bingwen continued smiling and his wife smiled back at him, holding his hand which seemed cold.

Jia remembered she could not cry. The funeral took place, her son Donghai arrived from New York and still she could not cry. She tried, but failed.

“When you cry, you finally accept fate,” she explained to her son. “I just cannot accept it yet.” Her son tried to comfort her but she did not need comforting, preferring to smoke and listen to Chopin, which her son played for her. She had kept the Bechstein in her apartment even though she could not play. Bingwen had been a superb pianist and she used to love to listen to him. Music was love. And now the piano was cold and slightly out of tune.

Donghai was 35 at that time and already working as a surgeon at Mount Sinai hospital in New York. He had married an American born Chinese colleague and had no intention of ever returning to China for good, which saddened his mother. Jia hated New York and found Nantucket, where Donghai spent the summers, just too American. She felt a bit out of place, even though the people were friendly. As were most Americans. Jia did not understand her daughter in law, which of course was another reason. How come that after only one generation, we are so different, she had asked herself at the wedding. Her daughter in law had made all the efforts to welcome her, but only the American way, not the Chinese way, and so Jia felt like an outsider in her own family. When she and Bingwen flew back after the wedding, it felt like flying back after a funeral. First class, paid by her daughter in law, and Jia somehow felt that it was an insult to herself, her husband and their lives that she was shipped back first class, almost as if it was expected of them never to return.

Was it? To her friends she told a different story, how proud she was of her daughter in law, how luxurious the first class flat bed and the Veuve Clicquot champagne had been.

Jia looked at the photos, the wedding photos of her son, her husband in a tuxedo, which made him look so weirdly out of place. She took a photo out from the previous page which showed her husband in 1975, in a Mao dress, a revolutionary, full of idealism. Both Bingwen and she had been dedicated to build a better China and both had become engineers. And China had become such a better place, she reflected, comparing the two photos. Did her daughter in law not realise? Did Donghai not appreciate all the efforts they put into his education from kindergarten to university? And the money they spent on Columbia Medical School straight after Fudan.

Another photo of her alone on Staten Island, and one with her grandchild on the beach of Nantucket. The toddler could not even speak Chinese.

Jia closed the album and took out a cigarette but put it back again as she realised the rain had stopped. Like every evening she walked over to Xujiahui Park to join the group of friends practicing square dance to both Korean pop and then to revolutionary music. She loved the atmosphere, being with her friends, talking about the good times, comparing notes on their smartphones.

The previous week she had met with some of her former work mates. All grandmothers like herself, alas more fortunate than her as their grandchildren were now part of their daily routines. Jia would have loved to live with her son, or at least nearby, picking up her granddaughter from school, accompanying her to piano lessons and ballet classes, teaching her proper Chinese and calligraphy. Alas.

One of her former workmates had discovered on Taobao, the Chinese ebay, a manufacturer of revolutionary clothing. Just like in the early 1970s. The group decided to order uniforms for each of them and when the dresses arrived three days later, they all dressed up and went to Xujiahui Park. Properly dressed, she thought and felt proud for the first time in ages. She did not mind the stares of some of the youngster. What little did they know.

Later that evening she decided to sit outside for a while on the bench in front of her house. Here nobody stared as everybody knew her and she knew that most people had either already been living here in the Xincun in the 1970s or moved in during the Revolution. She finally lit a cigarette and inhaled, slowly blowing out the blueish smoke. She watched it rise into the evening sky, a sky that never ever went totally black anymore, black, as she had experienced it in her youth. Her phone rang but she declined the wechat call request, as she realised it was her son who tried to reach her. A video chat in revolutionary dress would be too much, she thought, and had to smile. He would not understand, having been born only in 1975. She would call him later, or over the weekend. She was not lonely, she thought as she inhaled again and again blew out the smoke towards the trees.

~

Richard C Lin – ‘Fight Fire with Fire’

JUNE 28th 2021

Richard and his family live in Shanghai, where he writes, supports his wife’s philanthropic efforts, and ensures their two teens and one toddler don’t sit on any of their nine hamsters. His work has appeared or will appear in Sonora Review, The Dillydoun Review, The Write Launch, Potato Soup Journal, Prometheus Dreaming, The Adelaide Literary Magazine, and other literary magazines. He can be reached via his author website at Richard-c-lin-author.com. He is a proud member of the highly selective ROOTS. WOUNDS. WORDS. Penning My Pieces family of emerging BIPOC authors. “Fight Fire with Fire” is from Richard’s debut memoir, ARIZONA AWAKENING, to be published in Fall 2023.

Fight Fire with Fire

Crackle, crackle, crackle. This is the sound of Dad eating cereal each morning. Crackle, crackle, crackle. There is no Snap, Crackle, Pop like in the commercials because there is no snap or pop in Dad other than his temper. Weekday mornings we two eat together with only this sound to keep us company. Dad squeezes his eyes tightly shut while crackling away. Is he trying to will away the stab of the morning light? Or rid himself the dread of sweating through the long, sticky drive to work because we own the only car in the entire state without a/c? Or is he purging the thought of spending another day amidst those of such foreign culture and values?

Then again, perhaps Dad just fell back to sleep.

I’ll never know what taunts Dad because we have father/son chats as often as we have father/son game night. Or father/son football toss in the cul-de-sac. Or father/son anything remotely pleasant or fun. And so I watch him eat in this way each morning with unequal measures of fear, dismay, and disdain. When I was younger, it was mostly fear, but increasingly I’ve been consumed by the latter two of late. How can this be my father?

During the weekends, our mornings unfold in near silence, as if we’re a family of mice foraging for food while the lion sleeps nearby. One snapped twig or small puddle splash and…splat! goes the lion’s paw. And Sundays? These are particularly muted occasions as Dad deals with Monday Morning Blues a whole day earlier than the rest of America.

The worst is a morning like this one, an actual Monday morning. Some people, like Mom and I, experience Monday Morning Baby Blues. Pleasant, powdery, pastel. As innocuous to the touch as a baby’s bottom. Others may experience the blues along the spectrum of cerulean to cobalt, on to royal blue and azure. Perhaps even navy blue if they’re prone to depression. Not Dad, he shoots well past midnight blue, the darkest of blues, entering the realm of night and trepidation.

The only thing worse than the sound of crackle, crackle, crackle from Dad in the morning? Him speaking to me.

“How you doing in school?” he asks. Dad typically acknowledges my existence with questions about school. And no, not to ascertain how my baseball tryouts went or how I fared in Model UN. It’s all about the grades.

“I, um, I’m doing ok. I guess.”

“Ok?… You guess?” Dad says, with his voice nearing a low growl. “I didn’t raise a son to guess he’s doing ok.”

I wish to counter with something forceful like You’re not raising your son at all. You’re simply beating him down all the time. However, it’s too early for one of our all-out fights, so I merely say, “Yeah, sure, Dad.”

That’s it. That’s the extent of our morning congeniality.

So I finish my breakfast as soon as possible, utter a quick bye to Dad, offer a more sustained farewell and kiss to Mom, and toss a few choice insults at Mei-mei, my little sister, as she stretches and yawns while passing me on the way out.

Her Monday Mornings start off as blue as a lemon, so despite my name-calling, it’s always, “Oh, good morning Gege!” from her. To which I always respond with the roll of my eyes. No wonder Dad resents me in the morning. I’m to him what Mei is to me. Everything’s relative, and no one enjoys seeing someone chirpier than they on a Monday morning.

I do what I’ve always done when the darkness of Dad weighs too heavily upon me. I escape. Once outside, I enjoy a reprieve during my walk to the bus stop. Although it’s only 8 am, in Arizona, it’s sweltering already. I start to sweat, in part from the heat but also from stress as well. Historically, the bus has been anything but a haven for me.

*****

“Houston to Asswipe 13, you copy?”

It’s Jeff, rousing me out of my stupor as I stare out the bus window. I’ve never touched a drop of alcohol in my young life, but I feel like I know firsthand its debilitating effect with the taste of bile from my morning interaction with Dad still moist on my lips.

“Yeah, sorry, I was thinking of my life.”

“What life?”

“Exactly.”

Jeff is my first best friend and, at times, rival. We are of similar build, height, and temperament. He’s more athletic while I’m more academic. That should equal things out between us. However, this being high school, sports comes out on top, followed closely by sex, drugs, and rock & roll in the hierarchy of high school passions. Academics barely makes the top ten, likely sandwiched between the chess club and yearbook. As best friends and rivals, he and I end up cutting each other down more often than we build each other up. You know, to prevent the other from getting too far ahead. However, at the moment, Jeff accelerates much more rapidly than I along the highway of cool.

Jeff says, “Listen, we need to get you laid. Take your mind off the rest of your sorry life.”

“Yeah? And you can arrange this for me while you involuntarily remain a virgin yourself?”

“Yeah,” he says with a laugh. “But it may be tougher to get you laid than me.”

I punch him in the arm. He hits me back. We chuckle. Boys. Inflicting pain on each other and then laughing it all off.

Deep down inside, I feel what Jeff says is true. For me, an American-born Chinese or ABC, assuming the role of a romantic leading man is a plot twist even John Hughes couldn’t dream up. And if he did somehow, he could never get the movie greenlighted. It’s just not something mainstream Americans want to see.

“Well, I think you’ll get laid soon. Or at least maybe kiss a girl before too long.”

It’s Mike, my fourth best friend. I’ve forgotten he sits beside me. Blond, somewhat pudgy with round glasses over round eyes on a round face, Mike tends to utter only sphinx-like pronouncements of great profundity or complete insignificance. Often it sounds like it could be either, so we have to parse his words carefully each time to determine whether it is the sage or fool in him speaking. I hope this time he has found the sage.

“Thanks, brother.”

As we get off the bus together and start walking towards class, I feel buoyed by Mike’s validation. However, this quiet moment of joy is punctured by a guttural voice from behind us, “Hey Chinaman, give me a drink of your water.”

In the autumnal days of Phoenix, with the heat still so oppressive that even the cacti seem to recoil a bit, we frequently carry large water canteens to and from school. Being called Chinaman is somewhat less offensive than other variants such as chink or flat-face. However, it’s not far from those. My cheeks redden as I turn to see who’s the latest racist for the day.

It’s Keith, who got held back last year. To me, he’s always looked like he’s come straight off the set of Deliverance and might be the product of a few generations of Appalachian inbreeding. Clearly, I’m not above my own bias either, but at the moment, I’m too pissed to consider the irony.

“Get your own water,” I say.

He makes a lunge for the canteen in my right hand, and I deck him in the arm with my left, which holds my math and social studies textbooks. As each is a fairly hefty tome, my blow staggers him towards the right and backward.

“Just like a chink. Have to resort to fighting with weapons.”

“Uh, these are books.”

“Whatever, flat-face.”

He’s hit the trifecta. Now I’m super pissed. Yet, I stay my hand and don’t call him Deliverance Boy in return. The fact that he’s a full head taller and fashioned from pure muscle helps mightily in keeping me on the high road in this exchange.

“I’m gonna kick your ass, Chinky,” he says as he reapproaches me, fists clenched. As an ABC, I’m no stranger to melee. Nevertheless, instead of settling into a fighting stance, I feel my body freezing. So this is what a deer experiences just before the Range Rover sends it sailing back into the woods.

However, just before he can drop my ass, the bell rings. Just like in every boxing and high school movie, I’m saved by the bell.

“This ain’t over, Chinky boy. We fight after school. I’m gonna personally drop your ass off today at your bus stop.”

I finally find the play button for my mouth again and utter softly, “How kind of you.”

“Shit, man,” says Jeff as everyone disperses for class. “Shit.”

With one powerful word, Jeff eloquently sums up the situation…along with the rest of my crappy life.

*****

“Heard you’re gonna fight after school,” Don says with fire in his eyes as he plops down his backpack and sack lunch at our table.

Just a year ago, my number two best friend was a gangly, hobbit-loving fellow Dungeons & Dragons geek who spouted Rush lyrics off-key. Fast forward twelve months, and he’s evolved into a Greek demigod, all because he’s the first to have facial and body hair emerge in all the appropriate places. Picking up weight training didn’t hurt either, as Don has developed biceps the size of our quads.

“Yeah, I get more invitations to fight than Rocky. Everyone wants to test their kung-fu on me.” And they do. I get challenged to fight before school, after school, at recess, during lunch, in the locker room, in between classes, after detention, pretty much whenever and wherever there’s no adult supervision to be found.

“You want me there for you?” asks Don. He’s always at the ready for a good fight. Like it’s part of his workout regimen.

“Nah, thanks, I’m good. I got this one,” I say, trying to pump myself up. “I’ve been watching lots of Jackie Chan movies each Saturday afternoon. And I started taking jiu-jitsu.”

“Hope you’re a fast learner. I think he kicked some junior’s ass last month,” says Jeff. “He’s a year older and has about six inches, maybe twenty pounds on you,”

“And that’s twenty pounds of pure muscle,” Don says. He looks somewhat concerned. “Appalachian Guy is nothing to joke about.”

“I call him Deliverance Boy. And I can take him.” I really don’t want Don jumping in as he did with the Walden twins. At least that time, it was two of them, both on the varsity wrestling team as freshmen. This time, if I can’t take on one, I might as well drop out of high school.

“Who do you call Deliverance Boy?” asks Dave, who just joined us from another table. Dave is my third best friend, whereas I probably barely crack his top 100. It’s not that he doesn’t like me. It’s just that he’s that popular. Every day at lunch, he goes from table to table, working his way around his different groups of friends at Deer Valley. Dave’s like a prophet tending to the twelve tribes of Israel but without the constant risk of death by stoning.

“Appalachian Guy,” says Don.

“Oh, that dude. I’m glad none of us here are that bigoted,” Dave says with a chuckle and roll of his eyes.

“Well, he called me Chinaman first,” I counter.

“And chink and flat-face,” adds Mike helpfully.

“And so you call him Deliverance Boy. Nice job of taking the high road, Rich.”

Don gets back to the vital point of the conversation. “High road or not, you’d better not call him Deliverance Boy to his face, Rich. He’s a badass. There’s a reason why he’s repeating a year.”

The bell rings, and my buddies scatter to the winds. I’m left to wonder what this badass did to get held back a year.

Maim a teacher?

*****

“Hey, what’s up, fellas?” Deliverance Boy walks towards the back of the bus, high-fiving, fist-bumping, and back-slapping a bunch of sophomores and juniors that don’t usually take our bus. Guess he’s invited his own home crowd.

Meanwhile, I’ve got no partisans. Jeff’s mom picked him up from school for a dental appointment while Mike has mock trial. I’m regretting big time that I hadn’t taken up Don’s offer to show up with me. Indeed, Deliverance Boy looks like he’s composed entirely of unadulterated muscle. As I try to slink down in my seat near the middle of the bus, Deliverance Boy catches sight of me. “Hey, Chinky Boy. We gonna have some fun today!”

I prepare to snap off a witty refrain and then realize I don’t have one. Fortunately, he’s moved on to more high fives and fist bumps with his fans at the back of the bus. And it seems there’s some money changing hands. Such a festive atmosphere. It’s as if we’re all headed to a tailgate party before a Sun Devils football game. And I’m the football.

When we arrive at our stop, I try to get off the bus as quickly yet casually as possible. I don’t want to have to deal with Deliverance Boy’s trash-talking before the bout.

“Hey Rich,” says our bus driver in a low voice as I approach him.

“Yeah, Mr. Wilson?”

“I put a fiver on you. Kick his ass. But be careful while you’re at it.” He looks as concerned as Don did at lunch.

Deliverance Boy and his entourage proceed off the bus, which takes a while with all the extra kids. Mr. Wilson sighs as he watches everyone disembark. It seems even he feels tempted

to park the bus and join the fiesta. I wish he would; it’d be nice to have at least one guy in my corner today. We all walk about twenty yards to a spot without too many tumbleweeds blowing about and wide enough to afford everyone a good view of the bout, then put down our books and canteens. The Arizona sun shines so blindingly hot, it feels as if we’re on the set of Unforgiven.

I think for a second about stretching and cracking my back one vertebra at a time like Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris do before their epic battle at the Colosseum. Then I decide I’d better get down to business as I have quite a bit of homework. The other kids quickly form an impromptu amphitheater around us. All we need are some guys hawking giant pretzels or cotton candy and Michael Buffer bellowing, “Let’s get ready to rumble” to complete the scene.

This is definitely not my crowd. Apparently, none of them wants to see Bruce Lee yank out Chuck Norris’ chest hairs just before maiming and killing him in Way of the Dragon. No, most of them want to see Deliverance Boy kick the shit out of Long Duk Dong, the sex-crazed Asian geek of Sixteen Candles. So as we start to circle each other, with the dust of the desert swirling around us, the air soon fills with a mélange of “Kick Bruce’s ass!” and “Fuck up Kwai Chang Caine!”

The fight begins well enough with me landing the first few blows as I move in close to eliminate his reach advantage. I guess all those afternoons of watching Jackie on TV start to kick in literally. At some point, I knock him to the ground and stomp on him several times as he rolls away. I feel his rib cage give a bit each time through my sneakers, and it feels pretty satisfying with each kick. I like this fighting shit.

However, this feeling doesn’t last. While Deliverance Boy scrambles back to his feet, I notice a group of adults chatting, eating peanuts, and otherwise watching us as if they are at a Cactus League spring training game. They appear slightly detached like they’re here more for the sun than the actual event itself.

“Hey, hey, hey. Stop, stop, there’s grownups over there!” I whisper urgently. “We’re going to get busted.”

He looks over his shoulder at the adults, “Nah, it’s ok. Don’t worry about it. Those just my parents. And their friends.” He stops just short of introducing each one by name.

So quintessential for me. Your son’s going to fight a Chinaman? Terrific, grab some snacks, invite your neighbors, and join the spectacle. His home crowd has grown much more intimidating, and my confidence wavers for but a split second. That’s all he requires. Like a rattlesnake sniffing fear through the flick of its tongue, he shifts into attack mode. A jab straight to my eye, a roundhouse glancing off my cheek, and an uppercut to my chin­—suddenly, I’m reeling. I’m not thinking I like this fighting shit no more. I’m thinking how do I survive this rather sudden turn of fortune.

I try to close in to extract myself from this kill zone he’s created, but I’m met with a knee, and this time it’s my ribs that crunch under his strike. Instantly, I’m having trouble catching my breath and seeing out of my right eye. I manage to land two quick jabs to his throat and chin, which affords me some space to breathe but only serves to enrage Deliverance Boy as he comes at me with a flurry of fists and feet. I slump to the earth under this barrage, and it takes three of his friends to pull him off me.

Before he leaves, Deliverance Boy spits at me, nailing my shoes. “Next time, you do what I tell ya, Chinaman.”

As the crowd dissipates, with me still on the ground feeling the heat of the desert sand on my ass, all I can think is, what am I gonna tell Dad?

I elect to tell Mom first.

“Richard, how you can get in fight?” Mom asks as she pulls out some ice cubes, wraps them in a hand towel, and hands to me the cold compress.

“Ma, the guy called me a Chinaman, a chink…a flat-face.”

“Your face not flat. Actually quite swollen now.”

“It’s an expression, Mom. White people been calling me this since the fifth grade.”

“Those just words. Why you have to fight?”

“Because they’re fighting words, Ma.”

As a petite and pretty Asian woman, Mom lives in an America populated by the Brady Bunch and the Partridge Family. Nice white people who treat her warmly. Not ones that inhabit the world in which I reside, ones who call us chink, nip, or other terms she doesn’t quite understand.

For her, when Americans ask her where she came from, it’s easy for her to reply, “from Taiwan.” But for me, I have to go through this whole song and dance:

“I’m from Utah. I was born there.”

“Ah, got it…But, you know, where are you really from?”

“Uh, well, my parents are from Taiwan.”

“Oh, cool. I love Thai food.”

And that’s with nice white people.

When Dad arrives home that evening, I share with him what has transpired. I don’t want to, but my facial bruises reveal too much of the tale.

“How could you let other boy beat on you?” Dad says as he sits down at the head of our dining room table.

“Well, for one thing, his parents and their friends were there.”

“His parents and their friends were there? Like what happened Vincent Chin?”

“No, not like him. They didn’t have a baseball bat. And his father only watched.” Vincent Chin was a fellow ABC. Last year, he got his head bashed in with a baseball bat by two white autoworkers who felt they had lost their jobs because of the Japanese. He died at age twenty-seven during his bachelor party, just days before his wedding. Judge assigned the father and son duo two years probation and fined them, setting the price of a Chinaman’s life in America at $3000. I guess about what you’d pay for a decent second-hand American-built automobile.

“So fair fight?”

“Yeah, fair fight if you don’t factor in his friends cheering him on and doing the wave while we fought.”

“Then you shouldn’t fight,” Dad yells. “Only fight when can fair fight. Otherwise, you get beat on.”

“Well, you beat on me all the time, Dad, so what’s the difference?”

“Difference? Simple. You’re my son. I didn’t raise you be beaten by others.”

“No, you just raised me to be your punching bag, Dad.”

Boom! Punch to the shoulder to shut me up and simultaneously affirm his point and mine.

Dad pounds on me whenever I speak or act out of line. Typical infringements may involve talking too much, talking too excitedly, talking without the proper level of respect. Or just talking. Most often, this occurs around the dining room table during dinner time. As I sit to my dad’s right, my left arm takes the brunt of the blows, so it has become slightly larger than my right. The swelling, like other traumas of youth, never seems to subside completely.

Recently Mom has moved me to the opposite end of the table. However, this affords me little respite as Dad simply resorts to throwing his chopsticks at me to express his displeasure and rage. If he misses with his chopsticks, he’ll grab Mom’s or Mei’s, raining them down on me like Patriot missiles upon Lebanon. Getting hit by a chopstick isn’t much of a big deal physically. However, getting nailed on the face with one or two courtesy of Dad knocks the emotional wind out of me each time.

“Let’s go bike riding,” Dad says out of nowhere after dinner. “Get some exercise.”

“What?” I ask, a bit stunned by his invitation. Father/son cycling is certainly not the norm in our family. Father/son algebra and one-way boxing matches, yes. Father/son cycling, exercise, or any other recreational activities, no.

After ten minutes of riding around the neighborhood, Dad asks me to show him where the boy lives. I comply with a measure of apprehension. When we turn into Deliverance Boy’s cul-de-sac, I see him there with his father working under the hood of their car. Not sure what Dad might do, I pedal nervously behind him. As he glides past them, he doesn’t say a word. Instead, he simply expels an impressive amount of phlegm right at the feet of both. When they look up with surprise and repulsion, he stops his bike and glares at them with the Eyes of Genghis Kahn and centuries of derision and disgust. They don’t say a word. Off we ride, and I feel a slight warmth in my stomach. Guess that’s sufficient to get the message across: no one beats on Philip’s son other than Philip himself.

*****

Five years ago, in Saint Anthony Village, a quiet, quaintly named suburb of Minneapolis, the Thompsons lived across the street. The family had five brothers, the oldest twelve and the youngest around my age, eight. On weekdays, they kindly escorted me off the bus after school.

They welcomed me each evening, forming a charming barbershop quintet of sorts with their chorus of: “Chinese Japanese, dirty knees, look at these!” You know, that hit classic. And they kept me company. We didn’t make snow angels together in the winter. Instead, they tossed me to and fro, creating so many this-is-how-the-victim’s-body-was-splayed-upon-the-ground-chalk-outlines upon the snow.

One day Dad came home early. Having so much fun, none of us noticed him driving by, then backing up the Dodge Dart to park beside us at the edge of our front yard. He got out of the vehicle, sized up the situation, and pounced, managing to grab the eleven- and twelve-year-old brothers. Out flared the Eyes of Genghis. He roughly walked both of them across the street, all the while slamming their heads together every few steps.

“Quit bang heads, or you hurt yourself. Or you dizzy from running around? This game very fun. But you must be tired. Let me escort you back home. You know, take you back to where you come from. Like you say to Richard each day.”

Dad walked them across the street and tossed them into their front yard. I smiled. Finally, Dad terrifying some other kids for once.

The next day their parents arranged a pow-wow with Dad and Mom. It took place in the middle of the street, which had become a sort of DMZ.

“My sons said you manhandled them yesterday. Just because they walked on the sidewalk in front of your house. We don’t appreciate that.”

“I thought they Richard’s friends. They wrestle him five-on-one in the snow. So I join the game. Make the teams even.”

“Our sons would never pick on your son. We are Christian.”

“Yes, same, same. I would never manhandle your sons. I am Buddhist.”

Dad was about as Buddhist as Moses, Mohammed, and Jesus combined. I guess he made his point. The Thompson boys never escorted me anywhere again after that day.

*****

So Dad protects the family from outsiders. Meanwhile, Mom protects us from Dad.

Filled with the incandescence of a thousand suns with just the slightest hint of sadness at times, Mom makes Mei-mei and me her life, providing us with a welcome refuge from the thunder and lightning of Dad’s fury.

She can be a fierce Tiger Mom, but for the most part, Mom saves her most extreme ferocity for Dad, erupting in the occasional uprising against his domineering ways and protecting us when she feels he goes too far. Their arguments are pitched battles. They dredge up personal slights and sins from years ago and hurl them at each other like sharpened sticks tipped with venom or serrated stone covered in vitriol.

Mom often threatens to leave Dad, but then thoughts from the significant (how to divide the family finances) to the trivial (how to split the family photo albums) keep her tethered to him. This evening she again broaches the subject with me at the dining room table while Dad showers.

“Why won’t you come with Mei-mei and me? We can start a new life without your dad.”

“No, Ma, you and Mei-mei go. I’ll stay with Dad,” I say, despite a part of me wishing to run off with them.

“But he yells, hits you all the time.”

“Well, Mom, you do too sometimes.”

“But not all the time, not like your dad.”

“Yeah, Mom, you make up for the quantity with quality,” I say softly with a wan smile. “Besides, he doesn’t strike me when you’re not around.”

“So, you won’t come with us if we go?”

“No, Ma, sorry. Dad will be all alone if we all leave.”

Mom sighs, resigned and tired. I feel she cannot find the strength to leave without me, and I can’t muster sufficient bitterness or apathy to leave my dad.

They say that battered people don’t leave because they are afraid or ashamed. Or they somehow feel responsible or want to help their abuser. I’m not sure which is the case with Dad and me. I’m no longer deathly afraid of him. I’ve never been ashamed or blamed myself for his internal fires. But I’m not sure I want to help him either, even though he may be more battered internally than I am externally. And even if I had wanted to, how can I help him when I can barely fight for myself?

~

Rachel Fung – ‘One Call’

AUGUST 9th 2021

Rachel Fung graduated from King’s College London where she read law. She is particularly interested in stories of modern life and identity in South East Asia and has lived in three different cities in the region. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of publications, including an anthology of flash fiction – A Girl’s Guide to Fly Fishing.

One Call

I

He slipped his hand into his left pocket and a chill ran from his ring finger along to his heart. He pushed his hand deeper, burrowed, repeated a mirror routine with right hand, right pocket but again – nothing. The chill by now had successfully reached its destination and encased his heart in a thin layer of ice. He sighed.

He had left his handphone behind.

II

The wheels of a pram over his shoes snapped him back to himself and his surroundings rushed to present themselves to him all at once. Lanterns flashed with multi-coloured aggressiveness as “cai shen dao” re-looped for the 7th time that evening. Shopping malls were particularly unbearable during festive periods. He had an important meeting with a key client but could not remember where they were supposed to meet. Everything was in his phone. He thought of calling for a cab but was hit anew by the lack of his phone. He mentally cast about himself. A sea of impassive faces carrying the burdens of festivity weaved about him. Cursing him silently for standing still in a busy thoroughfare. The mall was swallowing him up. He had to get out.

The sky was newly dark with stains of pink by the time he exited the mall and raining lightly. He estimated the time to be around 7pm. The taxi line snaking around the mall cut short any quick plan of redress or escape. Resigned, he sat down on one of the cold metal benches that dotted the periphery of the building and watched the rain fall in thin sheets lit up by the shop windows behind him. He usually loved this time of the night. The new darkness felt hesitant yet promising. He watched as the streetlamps around the mall flickered on. All at once and not consecutively like they do in cartoons.

Only when the lights were on however, did he see that just 10 feet from where he was sitting, there stood an old phone booth. It must have been one of the earliest models from the 60s for it was a proper standalone phone booth with a swing door to enter and exit. A relict from a time when the country looked to Great Britain for guidance on how to structure practically everything in society. The phone booths in the country had evolved since then to be more cost and weather effective. Completely enclosed phone booths like the one before him now turned into mini glasshouses under the unforgiving tropical sun. Still, looking upon this near obsolete dinosaur of a phone booth before him gave his heart a little nostalgic tug. Hide and seek, sticky fingers on 999, screeching laughter and running. He studied its weathered exterior – all metal seams rusting at joints and scratchy glass panes. He had an overwhelming urge to be inside it. He finally had a reason to as well. Perhaps if he even dialled his handphone number, some straggler at the office may pick up and he could coax or bribe them to bring his phone over.

A pre-emptory storm wind passed, blowing his tie over his left shoulder, making him choose very suddenly whether to stay by the safe confines of the mall or venture outwards and risk being marooned in the phonebooth during a thunderstorm. Before he knew it though, his feet were cutting across the manicured lawn ring-fencing the mall. Rain brushed past his face, down his neck and trailed down to the small of his back. And then he was inside. Feeling like he had disturbed a space enshrined in time. He couldn’t describe it then but on later reflection he would explain this feeling as arising from the fact that the air inside distinctly felt, a decade old.

III

Change.

He forgot you needed change to operate these dinosaurs. He started fidgeting on the spot. An old nervous tick. The sky was now black outside and the storm was working itself up to a not too distant crescendo. The phone booth was located by the road turning into the mall. So every time a car made the turn, he would be momentarily bathed in brilliantly bright headlights. It was a disconcerting feeling. Like he was watching death brush by with every car. The sound of jingling coins made him stop fidgeting and he remembered the 50 cents in his right pocket. Perfect. That should be just enough to cover it. He withdrew the 2 twenties and 1 ten from his pocket and in a gesture which showed his age, fed the coins into the machine with one hand. Index and thumb acting as feeder; palm and other fingers acting as hold and release levers. He waited until he heard the last coin tumble down that dark rabbit hole to the bottom of substitute gold and then he reached for the clunky bright red receiver.

The wind outside was now howling, spinning, dancing. A particularly strong gust travelled with the headlights of a car and caused the entire booth to shake, making him grab the receiver a little faster than he meant to. He brought the receiver close to him and angling his neck, cradled it snugly between shoulder and ear. Right hand hovering in front of the number pad, he stared at the pad trying to remember his number, when his ear was suddenly greeted with a

“hello”

Then before he could even respond, the voice – female, light, airy, like a voice standing in a brighter, sunnier place with a taste of ocean wind and sun imbued in it, continued: “Is this Mary’s Cake Shop?”. And the necessity of a question waiting for an answer made his voice sputter back into action. What must it sound like – cold, hard, lonely, like a voice trapped in a tin box with no one to hear it.

“I think you have the wrong number. This is a phonebooth.”

Crackle. The warning of a tenuous line threatening to cut off.

“Can I order your classic cheesecake please”

“I wish you could. But again, this is a phonebooth.”

The crackling stopped.

“A phonebooth?!” the sun exclaimed. And he waited for its light to recede, but it burst forth even brighter with beaming laughter. “That’s really strange.”

To his surprise, he found himself laughing too. Hesitant but genuine laughter. “Yes, I was really shocked too actually.”

But her voice, suddenly serious, like a thin veil of clouds had floated in front of it, asked, “But is Mary’s Cake Shop nearby you?” Then, because he had lived his whole life in this city, he could answer with certainty: “No, they’ve closed down.”

“Oh”, she said. And the disappointment in that “oh” seeped through the line and dripped into his ear.

“I believe they closed over 10 years ago actually.”

“Oh really?”

“Yea.”

“Oh.”

The rain outside showed no sign of letting up. There was a small jam leading into the mall now as cars piled up and inched through the rain. They didn’t swing around the turning anymore. So headlights came and focused on him for extended and alternating periods of time. He felt like he was in a play, readying himself for each time the spotlight would fall on him again.

IV

The next thing she said was, “My mother is dying.”

He said he was sorry to hear that.

“Is it strange me telling you that?” she asked.

“No”, he lied.

“Do you mind me telling you that?” she asked.

“No”, he said.

V

He lost track of how much time passed after that point. Because for the duration of that call, Time couldn’t reach him as he hurtled through Then, Now and To Come with no regard to its linear character and became simultaneously both young and old. Thus with Time eluded, he could laugh, cry and speak freely on the phone. He shared how he coped with the passing of his own mother. Told her that he had never talked about that period until this moment. Which was true. She told him why the cheesecake was crucial. That it was the only cake her mother ever ate. They left the city 10 years ago for a small coastal town when her mother’s health deteriorated whilst living costs kept accelerating. But she wanted to surprise her mother with some cake. She said she didn’t tell anyone else the real reason for her move. That distance and circumstance would tear at friendships till you were only left with shreds of birthday greetings on Facebook walls. Better a clean break than drawn out ends.  He asked whether sunsets there were truly better. She said they were. Like God himself had set the skies alight in a slow blaze to wipe out each passing day. She said the sunsets here could bring you to tears. He said he believed her. That he hoped to see it with his own eyes one day.

Thus in this manner, word chased after word and the conversation spooled like a gossamer thread with no end. He felt like he could talk to her forever. Feeding on words, on feelings captured, solidified. This phonebooth felt like it was the entire world and this tenuous call the only thing that mattered.

Then she said, “I have to check on my mother. She’ll be waking up soon.”

Like a man jolted awake, he whipped up his head and saw that it had stopped raining. There were no more cars waiting to turn in. A security guard was doing his rounds in sleepy silence and the sky was cloaked in a muted midnight blue.

Then her voice again, “Is it raining your end anymore?”

“No,” he said

“That’s good.” Pause. “It was really nice talking to you.”

“You too,” he said.

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

Then after a beat, “Take care.” But she was already gone.

He looked down at his legs. Gave them a shake to wake the one that was asleep. Then slowly, he reached out to put the receiver back to its holder, which in turn triggered a mini shower of coins in the change receptacle at the bottom. He collected them – 1, 2, 3 coins, making 50 cents in total. He stared at the coins for a while. Then he picked up the receiver again. He fed the coins back into the phone, waited for the clang of the last coin caught and then looped the receiver over the top of the phone. He could give this city one call.

~

Wong Xiu Wei – ‘Eggshells’

JULY 20th 2021

Xiu Wei writes from Malaysia. She was born in Klang, a small town where big, black crows fly amok. The crows have inspired her to (attempt to) fly amok as well. She aspires to acquire the gentle, happy disposition of an alpaca, and to be the best human she can possibly be.

Eggshells

The conjuring of one’s primary school memories usually gave Big People a fond feeling in their belly. “Those good old days,” one would say. “It was the happiest time of my life,” said another. Or: “I wish I could go back.” At least, this was what she observed. It happened with her brother, who was not really a Big Person per se, but he was two years closer to becoming one compared to her. She heard the same echoes from her mother, father, and relatives too. “Appreciate the time you have now at school,” the Aunty at the store would tell her. “You’re going to miss it when you’re older!”

But she wasn’t so sure about that. For this little girl, school was strange, to say the least. It was a time of such fixity that it often made her feel quite uncomfortable. I mean, even the categories of their age groups were called Standards. She was in afternoon class Standard 3, just one year before she turned 10, when she would become a morning upperclassman. The teachers’ words whipped their world into shape. Everyone had to wear uniforms, and she didn’t quite like the dark blue pinafore and white button-up blouse combo. The uniforms she wore were hand-me-downs outgrown by her mother’s friends. They were older, bigger than her, but still the uniforms fit rather snugly. They had always said that she was tall for her age. In fact, she was the tallest girl in class. She towered over even the boys – but she must stress that inside she always teetered rather daintily.

And that was why she was always a different shade of color compared to the other girls: her pinafore a little less blue, and her blouse just a little more gray. She had to wear a cloth belt too, and it cinched in her waist a tad too tightly. It had already been altered by her mom; she took out the hook and sewed it at the very far-most edge of the belt possible. And yet all that extra space was not enough for her – she would sheepishly, ashamedly, secretly undo the clasp of her belt during class when nobody was looking and breathe a little easier after that, hooking it back when they have to go for recess.

Everyone in class had a nickname, but you could not choose it. Her classmates called her Tsunami because of her very curly hair that stuck out in all directions like strong waves. Nobody knew who exactly came up with these nicknames, but they just appear out of thin air and cling onto you like goosebumps. Tsunami walked into class every day with a ponytail so tight that it raised her eyebrows 2 millimeters higher, and she wore a pair of big, black metal pins that clipped her bangs onto her scalp like a jail – she would always hope that this taming would make her seem less Tsunami-y, but the nickname never dropped. Shi Yi’s hair was jet-black, silky straight and soft, and yet, her nickname was Dove. Like the shampoo Dove and like the gentle white bird dove. Tsunami thought it was rather unfair. Why not call her Seaweed or Crow instead?

But still, all was tolerable because Tsunami had a window seat. There were 45 little boys and girls in class, and because she was the tallest, she sat at the back-most row by herself, right next to the window that overlooked the big rectangular school field (which was also right in front of the class dustbin). Tsunami was the only one in class who knew that if you leaned back against the wooden chair until it stood on two legs (exactly like how the teachers say you were not supposed to), and peer just across the missing panel of the folding glass window, you could catch a glimpse of it. There! At the eye-level of a tall 9-year-old girl, within the foliage of a thin tree, nestled a nest of tiny bird eggs. Quail eggs, grey and frail and speckled with brown. The tree housing the nest was shaped rather oddly, being sparse and spindly, and its branches extended towards Tsunami’s window like an outstretched palm as if it were offering her a gift. Tsunami took this as a sign that she was fated to watch over the eggs, and she would puff up with pride even though it made her belt constrict even tighter. Whenever Tsunami checked on the nest – discreetly of course, so nobody discovered it – she dared not look down. She dared not look down because the nest balancing on the two-story tall tree would suddenly seem so very far away from the ground, and the eggs would seem so very precious that it made her heart ache in a rather peculiar way. She didn’t lay them, she knew that of course, but those were her eggs all the same. They made her special.

It was class intermission time and Tsunami was performing her usual nest-checking before Ms. Fang, their homeroom teacher, entered the classroom. Ms. Fang was a very thin lady with big bulbous eyes that tended to glaze off halfway during class when she would drift into stories of her younger years. Everyone was rather fond of her, though she could get a bit too naggy at times. Tsunami thought Ms. Fang was alright except for the fact that she looked a little scary up close – her eyes always seemed to stare right into your insides. And Tsunami could never be sure what exactly Ms. Fang saw inside of her.

The eggs were alright as usual, peacefully residing in their nest, when they were suddenly seemingly seized by an invisible hand and began to shake in a frantic manner. Tsunami’s eyes opened as wide as Ms. Fang’s and she held her breath, afraid that the eggs would plummet onto the pavement below. Sticking her head out of the window hole with the missing panel, she forced herself to look down and quickly realized that this shaking was caused by an upperclassmen boy. He was almost bald with tanned skin, and his shirt was untucked into his pants (which was a sure bad sign). He also had the stupidest, biggest grin on his face as he shook the thin tree with both his arms, with all his might.

Tsunami’s heart beat so violently it was about to fly away from her ribcage. She had to do something.

“Hey, you!” she yelled after summoning all the courage that hid in her marrows. She rarely yelled.

The boy ignored her and continued shaking the tree in a demented manner.

“YOU! BOY!” Tsunami roared desperately.

He finally heard her.

“What?!” he said.

Tsunami knew the boy was shaking it because of the nest. So it was no use to tell him not to harm the eggs. Frantically, she thought about how to convince him to stop.

“If you keep shaking the tree, I’ll tell the teacher!” she threatened.

The boy sneered and jeered like an idiot. “Yeah right! You would already have if you could!”

Frustrated, Tsunami turned around. Ms. Fang wasn’t there yet. Tears started trickling out of her eyes like a leaky faucet.

“Hey,” Tsunami quickly stopped one of her classmates, Mei Fang, who was passing by after throwing pencil shavings in the dustbin behind class.

“Hey, Tsunami,” Mei Fang exclaimed in surprise. “Why are you crying?”

Tsunami pointed helplessly outside to the tree that was quaking in fright.

“There’s a boy shaking that tree.”

Mei Fang frowned.

“He’s just one of those naughty boys,” she said dismissively. “Don’t mind him.”

“No, no,” Tsunami said hurriedly. Mei Fang didn’t understand. She took a quick breath and decided to share her secret.

“There’s a nest in the tree.”

Mei Fang peered at where she was pointing and caught sight of the dainty eggs sitting on the tree, behaving so well despite the havoc being wrecked upon their home.

“Ohhhh,” Mei Fang exclaimed. She didn’t react as much as Tsunami had expected her to. “That boy is so naughty.”

“We need to stop him,” Tsunami said commandingly although she did not know what to do. She knew Mei Fang would not know what to do either. It was just simply unthinkable to run out of the classroom during class time; nobody did that. Especially not well-behaved little girls. And she couldn’t bear the thought of tearing her eyes away from those precious eggs. What if they fell while she was gone?

“I don’t think we can,” Mei Fang said gravely. Tsunami’s heart sank. Just at that moment, the steady click-clack-click of heeled footsteps clocked into their ears, and Mei Fang hastily patted Tsunami’s head before rushing back to her seat. “Don’t cry Tsunami,” she whispered compassionately. Ms. Fang entered the class.

“Atten-tion!” The class monitor commanded.

“Good morning, Ms. Fang,” All of them rose, droned, and bowed to the teacher.

“Sit down,” Ms. Fang said.

“Thank you tea-cher,” they droned again before sitting back down. Tsunami’s tears were still sliding down the curve of her cheeks.

The classroom was quiet now, stiflingly quiet, as they awaited Ms. Fang to announce what they were going to do that day. It is important to know that Tsunami was usually very good at keeping her sorrows in the drawers of her chest. They shut tight when she breathed in deeply and opened when she breathed out, during which some sorrowful wisps would escape through her nostrils. But it did not work for now no matter how hard she tried. Now she was suffering in quiet indignation. She badly needed to tell Ms. Fang about the boy, but to tell her now at this very moment would be to cause a scene – and the idea of everyone turning around to look at her and her wet face was just simply too much to bear.

Ms. Fang was looking around at everyone’s face in the class with her bulbous eyes before they landed on Tsunami at the back of the class. Ms. Fang squinted, as if she couldn’t tell if Tsunami was crying.

“Girl,” Ms. Fang said, looking at her pointedly. She got up from her seat and started walking towards her. “Why are you crying, girl?”

This recognition made Tsunami suck in a quick, shaky teary breath. It was time to tell.

“There’s a boy,” she pointed outside the window with a dart of her finger. “Shaking the tree. There’s a nest in the tree. He’s killing the baby birds!”

Then they both looked out the window together – Ms. Fang standing, Tsunami on her two-legged chair. The boy spotted Ms. Fang and ran off without a word. Tsunami couldn’t tell if the nest had fallen onto the floor while seeing out of misty eyes, but her heart was a ship sinking in sorrow.

“I need two prefects,” Ms. Fang commanded.

Two prefect boys stood up – A and A, Aaron and Anson, the twins who loved running teachers’ chores that required getting out of the classroom.

“Go down and check on the nest,” she said. “And see if you can get that boy’s name.”

A and A went out of the class eagerly at a speed just below running (they weren’t allowed to run in school).

Ms. Fang walked back to her desk at the front of the class and rummaged in her handbag. Since all eyes were on the teacher, Tsunami allowed herself some sobs. She sniffled and snorted, when suddenly she saw a tissue paper being handed to her.

It was Ms. Fang. Tsunami took the tissue gratefully as her nose had exceeded its mucus-holding capacity, just like how her chest had exceeded its sorrow-holding capacity.

“Class,” Ms. Fang said in a grave tone. “What the boy did there was very bad. He had fun at the expense of innocent unborn lives.”

Ms. Fang started pacing around regally like a queen departing a most important message.

“We should always respect nature,” she added like a commandment.

“But,” Ms. Fang continued, and turned to Tsunami. Tsunami’s heart stilled. She thought she was going to be reprimanded for leaning back on her chair. Or for failing to tell her earlier, for disturbing the class. For causing a scene. Or perhaps, for keeping the eggs her secret.

“I think Xin Mei’s provided a wonderful example for you all to learn from,” Ms. Fang said gently. “She was brave to try to stop the boy, and the fact that she’s crying shows that she has a big, good, kind, heart.”

Tsunami’s tears stopped and she looked up and met Ms. Fang’s bulbous eyes in surprise. She saw two images of herself reflected in Ms. Fang’s eyes, looking back at her.

“And for that, I think she deserves a round of applause,” Ms. Fang told the class.

Just like that, a magnificent round of applause ensued.

Ms. Fang was clapping as well.

The tears on her face dried up slowly due to all the wind from everyone’s clapping hands.

Tsunami knew that her classmates were only clapping because the teacher told them to. She also knew that if it weren’t for Ms. Fang, none of them would have –could have–helped her. But somehow it all didn’t matter. She had 45 pairs of hands dedicated to her heart.

Tsunami’s breast swelled with something like pride and she felt as if she were hatching out of a shell. Deep down she knew that the nest had fallen. In her mind’s eye she could see the eggs with their shells cracked, watery yellow bleeding out of them before they could morph into feathered flight. But in that moment, everything was covered by the sound of congratulations. So she let the thunderous applause gently rain down on her, with arms outstretched like wings.

~

Habib Mohana – ‘The Deserter’

JUNE 21st 2021

Habib Mohana was born in 1969 in Daraban Kalan, a town in the district of Dera Imsail Khan, Pakistan. He is an assistant professor of English at Government Degree College No 3, D. I. Khan. He writes fiction in English, Urdu, and Saraiki (his mother tongue). He has four books under his belt, one in Urdu and three in Saraiki. His Saraiki novel forms part of the syllabus for the MA in Saraiki at Zikria University Multan. His short stories in English have appeared in literary journals in India and Canada. In 2010 and 2014, his Saraiki books won the Khawaja Ghulam Farid Award from the Pakistan Academy of Letters. His book of short stories in Urdu, titled Adhori Neend, won the Abaseen award from the Government of KPK. He is currently seeking a publisher for his novel The Village Café.

‘The Deserter’

Six-footer Ditto was a renowned kabaddi player. He had avid fans in every village in the district of Dera Ismael Khan, and some of his fans had named their sons and nephews after him. He was a brown-complexioned man of twenty-three, with dark curly hair and a long bushy moustache. He played kabaddi in the village fairs, to which he was always accompanied by a group of friends. At the edge of the ground his friends would stand in tight circle around him while he removed his clothes and tied a loincloth around his hips and groin. Like any other wrestler, he entered the ground half dancing and half jogging to the beat of the drums, his lithe athletic body glistening in the sun. If he won, his friends would hoist him onto their shoulders, showering one rupee notes over him. The drummers would scramble to collect the money. Several men had offered their daughters hands to him in marriage, but he politely refused, arguing that he was married to kabaddi.

He was born into a prosperous farming family of Daraban – a village located five miles east of the Suleiman Range and famed for date palm groves. Since he was a source of fame and honour for the family, his brothers kept him away from the toil and sweat of farm work. Every month his brothers slaughtered a billy goat for him. He ate some mutton fresh, while the remainder was first lightly grilled over embers and then hung on the clothesline for his subsequent use. In summers he drank sherbet made from almonds and poppy seeds and in winters he ate halva made with wheat flour, butter oil and cow-feet jelly to enhance his physical strength. His afternoons passed doing vigorous exercises and rubbing mustard oil into his toned body to make him strong and healthy.

Every year on the first Friday of April, people from the villages of Damaan Plains converged on the shrine of the saint Kaloo Qalandar at the village of Shah Alam to celebrate the annual fair, which coincided with his birthday. Some of the villagers reached the venue on horses and camels while some took vehicles, and they pitched their tents in the fairground around the shrine. The shopkeepers sold toys, sweets, sherbets, and agricultural tools in tents and reed sheds. The villagers spent two nights in the fairground dancing, singing, and playing, or watching games of strength.

In the late morning the kabaddi players were doing warm-ups in the fairground to the music played by the drummers and pipers while a gigantic crowd of spectators restlessly waited for their favourite players to go into action. There were four tiers of spectators: in the front tier, people sat in a massive circle on the bare ground; behind them, people perched on charpoys; the third layer consisted of standing spectators, while in the outermost tier were the ones who sat atop busses, trucks, and tractor-drawn trollies. More than twenty parties of drummers and pipers hailing from different villages were walking and playing their instruments, creating the chaotically lively background music for the action.

The rules of Damaani kabaddi are primitive and simple: a raider sprints to reach the finish line while two defenders chase to intercept him. The rivals shove one another using hands and shoulders. Slapping is not allowed. The teams are divided on the basis of the two main tribes of the area, and final victory depends on team effort as well as individual performance.

It was Ditto’s turn to carry out the raid. He dashed towards the finish line while two players from the rival team leapt at him to deter him from reaching it. Ditto levelled the first defender to the ground by pushing him with his shoulder, however the second one clutched at his loincloth in desperation. It came off, rendering the raider stark naked. About one lakh* eyes stared at him. A grunt of grief and anguish emerged from his friends’ and fans’ mouths, while his rivals and the majority of the spectators erupted into jeering and whistling and clapping their hands. All players wore bikini-like underwear under their loincloths and he too used to wear it but that day, as the bad luck would have it, he had left it at home.

He had a blackout, and on coming round he found himself sitting cross-legged on the ground. The drummers had stopped banging their drums, his ears buzzed with the rush of blood and he wished the earth would swallow him up. He felt as if the sky had cracks, the ground spewed smoke, and the busses and trucks were on fire. He felt like he was a circus beast on the loose and that the spectators would charge at him and beat him to a pulp.

With their shoulder sheets open and waving like unfurled flags, his friends rushed to Ditto and enfolded him in the sheets. One of his friends had brought him his clothes, and he scrambled into them, his eyes directed to the ground to avoid catching their gaze. Wrapping arms around him his friends ushered him out of the ground, which still faintly echoed with clapping and whistling. They brought him to the tent, and said reassuring words to him but it was of no avail as he had taken the thing to heart. Without eating his dinner, he curled up on the charpoy, wrapped a quilt around his face and cried into it. All night long he lay wide awake with the images of the morning’s incident playing and replaying through his mind. ‘Life will never be the same again for me,’ he thought. ‘I won’t be able to live among these people who witnessed me standing without a stich on.’

Next morning, his friends took him to Daraban but he dared not face the women of his family so he stayed in the guesthouse of one of his friends. He mulled over several options to stay away from his village so that the people would not poke fun at him for having seen him buck naked.

After extended consultation with his friends and brothers he decided to enlist in the army as a soldier. As the educational requirement for this job was fifth grade certificate, he fortunately had the requisite qualification.

After training he was posted in the desert of Bahawalpur near the Indian border, and after two years his company was transferred to Rawalpindi. His third year was in progress and he had not returned to his village even for one day. Whenever his colleagues went home for the vacations, his heart flew to his village but the unsavoury incident that occurred three years ago prevented him from visiting his home and seeing his loved ones. He spent the annual long vacations in the long gloomy army barracks listening to his radio or wandering around the cantonment roads, sulking and fretting as he saw no end to his suffering. Several times his brothers visited him and begged him to return to his home village but he would not listen. He did not feel at home with army life, although it provided him a shell under which he could hide his shame.

Once his father and elder brother visited him at the Rawalpindi cantonment to persuade him to go home with them. ‘People don’t remember things for such a long time. They’ve other headaches,’ his father said.

‘People of the area miss you at their fairs and festivals,’ his elder brother claimed.

‘I can’t go with you. I don’t have the grit to face people,’ Ditto replied.

‘You’re wrong! For how long will you keep avoiding the people of your village and area? One day you have to return to your people,’ his father said.

He had served in the army for over four years when one evening he absconded from the Rawalpindi cantonment. To avoid arrest by the army men, the deserter did not return home. After wandering in different cities for about two months, one night he secretly arrived home. He revealed to his family that he had quit his job, and they hid him in a room, but within a fortnight his secret was out.

One noon while he was having lunch with his friends in the palm-tree grove at the edge of the gurgling stream that meandered through the village, three soldiers in plain clothes sneaked upon him to arrest him and take him back to his regiment. With a half-chewed morsel in his mouth and without bothering with his shoes, he tore away. The soldiers chased after him in hot pursuit. The gruelling race continued for some time but he, being an experienced kabaddi player who also knew the village streets like the back of his hand, soon lost his pursuers. After this incident, the army men came to Daraban several times in plain clothes to apprehend the deserter, but each time he escaped them.

About eight months had passed since his desertion, and now he sometimes walked the village streets in the daytime, and sometimes he assisted his brothers in the farm work.

April brought a pleasant change to the weather, and the villagers gathered in the village of Shah Alam for the annual fair. It was the last day of the fair, and the kabaddi match was in full swing. Ditto sat with his friends on the charpoy watching the kabaddi match, his face half swathed in the turban sheet to hide himself from the public, as he had not forgotten the unpleasant incident that had taken place in the same place. His friends had been urging him to play kabaddi since early morning, but he would not listen. Some kabaddi players approached him and requested him to play, but he did not accede to their request. Next, the chief of his tribe in white clothes and a tall turban approached him and without heeding his protestations dragged him to the place where the action was. Half-heartedly, he stripped off his clothes and tied the loincloth around his waist and groin. Clutching Ditto’s wrist the chief held his arm aloft for the audience to see that he was back. The entire audience rose to their feet, clapping their hands with delight. The musicians played even more vigorously.

Ditto accepted the challenge of the two veteran players. He made a dash for the finish line and the defenders chased him to nail him down. He was midway when he noticed that four men were chasing him: two in loincloths and two in full clothes. The men in loincloths stopped when they saw Ditto had won, but the two in full clothes kept perusing him. First he thought that they were his friends who were racing after him to give him money as a reward and hoist him to their shoulders. But when he had a closer look at them, their unfamiliar faces and army hair cut suddenly pressed an alarm button in his head. He increased his speed to lose his pursuers, but they were bent upon catching him.

The drummers had stopped beating their drums. All the spectators stood up, and buzzing emanated from them like thousands of bee colonies on the move. Some of the spectators thought that the pursuers were his enemies who had found an opportunity to settle some old scores, so they encouraged him to run faster. His worried eyes searched for a cleft to pass through in the four-tiered human bulwark, but there was none. For a while he raced in a zigzag pattern to evade arrest, but then he began to run towards the northeast where his friends were. He had only just drawn closer when a fissure appeared in the human bulwark, and he wove his way through the spectators. In the meantime two more army men had also joined the chase. Ditto was on the brink of surrendering when he found himself near a bus. He frantically clambered the ladder of the bus and reached its roof, which was crawling with kabaddi fans.

The army men surrounded the bus and the spectators jostled for the best place to view the live drama. The tribal elders strode towards the bus to investigate the affair. The tall, grumpy hawaladar told the crowd that they were only acting upon orders, and warned people not to interfere in their business. Next, he yelled at the deserter to get off the bus.

About 50,000 people stood packed around the bus, which had become the focus of all eyes and ears. The elders requested the pursuers to allow the deserter to put on clothes and shoes, after which he would go with them of his own accord. His friends threw him his clothes and shoes while the impatiently curious multitude pressed closer to see and hear better. After donning the clothes and shoes, Ditto wrapped the turban around his head in a way that nearly hid his face. Standing close to the bus, his friends and fans instructed him to jump into their arms. He followed their instructions and thus made it to terra firma. Yelling with excitement and waving their hands and caps, the people urged him to run, which he was already planning to do. He ducked and pushed ahead through the cooperative and sympathetic throng. Flailing their arms and shouting furiously, the army men tried hard to catch him, but it was tantamount to finding a needle in a haystack. In the ensuing tumult the army men were put off the scent and the deserter dissolved into the sea of people.

* a unit in the Indian numbering system equal to 100,000.

~

Ken Lye – ‘The Last Dance’

MAY 31st 2021

Ken Lye’s short plays have been performed in Singapore at The Substation and Drama Centre Black Box, and his short stories have appeared in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and the upcoming Singapore at Home: Life Across Lines anthology. He completed his MA in Creative Writing in 2019, and is currently working on his first novel.

The Last Dance

Mabel purses her burgundy lips, sucking hard on the straw, though only ice cubes remain. If only she had not finished her second Long Island iced tea so quickly. Thirty-six years of marriage, and there Raymond is, gliding across the dancefloor of their favourite salsa club with another woman, their outstretched arms forming a perfect rectangle, while their feet jab and jive exuberantly to The Gipsy Kings’ “Djobi, Djoba.”

Other men in their sixties try to slow their decline with languid evening strolls, and unhurried breast-strokes up and down the pool, their manatee potbellies hanging underwater. Raymond, however, is thriving, every day either lifting weights at the community centre gym or conquering forty freestyle laps, each stroke a forceful thrust into the water, body flat and rigid as his grandson’s kickboard. From where she sits with their friends, Mabel can see the curve of thick muscle in his slightly flexed biceps, the canary yellow polo t-shirt straining across his broad chest, and the smooth crescent of his bum in the brown cotton trousers she bought him last week from Giordano.

Her hand, as wrinkly as crepe paper, falls to the small mound of soft flesh around her waist. Her girlfriends strip the fatty skin off the poultry on their husbands’ chicken rice (when they are allowed to have it at all). Mabel, however, feasts on beef steaks and pork chops with Raymond every Saturday evening when their three sons bring wives, boyfriend and children back from across Singapore to their apartment at Marine Parade. She only bought this sequinned silk dress a week ago, but already the garment feels chidingly snug. Perhaps less protein, more salad this weekend.

Raymond hooks one firm hand around the back of Mei Yun’s bare shoulders, and effortlessly guides his partner into a dip, her enviably slim body draped across his sturdy forearm, her neck exposed as if to receive a kiss or a vampire’s bite. His legs wide open in a victor’s stance, he holds the pose for a beat, then two, as if expecting wild applause. Mabel manages a polite smile.

Lily, pressing close against her, leans over on a wave of Chanel No 5, and brushes aside the mahogany curls embalmed in hairspray around Mabel’s right ear.

“You don’t mind if I ask him for the next dance, do you?”

“No, of course not,” Mabel replies. “He’s all yours.”

She continues to suck aggressively at the mangled straw. Lily, looking suspiciously reupholstered, swivels over to Serene on her other side, the two women’s bobbing heads close in jocund conversation, the rusty red rinse in their hair sparking in the undulating shower of disco lights. The three men at the end of the table are already on their third round of Carlsberg. She cannot quite hear what The Husbands are saying, no doubt more grumbling about some government policy or another, not that they would ever do anything about it except pontificate loudly in the company of other equally belligerent old men. (Did one of them really just say, “If I were Prime Minister…”?) Lily’s doctor husband, Patrick, is, as usual, holding court, gesticulating dramatically as if trying to win an argument by knocking his opponent over or poking him in the eye. They must be so relieved that they do not have to dance with their wives this evening. Just because they have been dragged to salsa classes by their better halves does not mean they have to like it. Or are any good at it. What men hate most, after all, is having to do anything in public that doesn’t allow them to show off.

She stabs at her phone with her index finger. She has only danced twice with Raymond tonight, the other three women taking turns as if her husband were a slice of black forest being passed back and forth. Is there time for another round? Maybe, but it is already eleven. She needs to be up at six for school, and still has a small stack of marking to power through before she can go to bed. Raymond, of course, will not even need to set his alarm. His latest job trying to sell insurance means he can wake up whenever he wants. How lovely.

Lily turns back to regale her with a meticulous account of her vacation to the French Alps: so cold my face couldn’t move. Mabel has to swallow back the obvious joke. Her eyes remain locked on Lily’s in the half-light, hands folded neatly on her lap as if posing for a Renaissance painting. Underneath their table, however, Mabel’s manicured feet, nails hard candy shells, tap-tap-tap restlessly on the linoleum flooring as the band starts up her favourite song.

Just ask one of the other men to dance, Raymond argues each time they fight on the drive home. They are our friends, they won’t be so rude as to say no. (Raymond certainly never does.) Mabel gives him the same reply every time: you’re a man, you won’t understand. She does not know what they taught at Raffles or Nanyang or any of those fancy schools that her friends went to, but she was raised a good convent girl.

Then again, Sister Dolores had never heard the call of Enrique Iglesias’ “Bailamos.”

An intake of breath, slow and deep, fills her lungs with courage. She turned sixty last week. What could be scarier than that? She surveys The Husbands. They huddle even closer together, closing ranks so she cannot easily pick one off. The last time she saw any of them on the dancefloor was an obligatory tango at a wedding anniversary, their faces in rigor mortis.

Of course, she should have foreseen her current predicament from the first group dance class. It’ll be such fun, Lily had promised. The Husbands, creased brows, crossed arms and sweaty armpits, knew better. Six months later, and the three men still occasionally crash into their partners, step on their toes, always managing at some point during the song to become entangled with their spouse in a cacophony of flailing limbs. Raymond, on the other hand, moves like a jungle cat. She feels safe with him leading, knowing he will support her whether she is turning in for a spin or leaning in for a dip. Their instructor was particularly impressed by how a man of his age and build would merrily shimmy his shoulders and wiggle his hips with such teenage abandon. Patrick raised an eyebrow once, and called him “flamboyant.” Please! Raymond was the captain of three sports teams in school, and always had the prettiest girls chasing after him. He has never had anything to prove. When their youngest son Philip, fresh out of Oxford on a government scholarship, sat his parents down at the family dining table, and told them he was gay, it was Mabel who sputtered and stuttered. Raymond, however, simply took Philip in his arms, saying, you are my son, and nothing will ever change that.

“Do you want to dance, Patrick?”

Of the three men, he has shown the most interest, occasionally initiating a dance with his wife without prompting, especially after a few drinks. She glances at the table top. She should have asked for another round before making her move, but how could she when she knows Patrick will pick up the tab as usual?

She is just about to tell him that it’s okay, she was just asking, when a nervous grin forms across Patrick’s face as if being carefully drawn by a child.

“Why not?” He looks like he has agreed to bungee jump off a cliff, equal measures excitement and fear.

Her enthusiasm deflates quickly. He is better than when she last saw him dance with Lily, a little less stiff. Still, he moves like he is checking off a list in his head, so she is hesitant about executing any elaborate moves. She studies his face to occupy the time instead. He is not unattractive. His face is weary and mottled with age, but decent and kind, with a hint of playfulness. An Indian Cliff Richard. It is sweet that he does not look directly at her: she is his best friend’s wife after all. As she feels the chunky strap of his Rolex watch against her waist, she thinks about how lucky Lily is, never having had to work. No late nights planning lessons and marking, no Saturdays taken up by Drama Club, remedial lessons, class camps. Thankfully, none of Mabel’s boys has taken after their father, whose past is one failed business venture after another, a ribbon of regrets. They all have good, steady jobs: two lawyers and a high-flying civil servant.

The songs ends, and she diplomatically mumbles something about having to work the next morning. As they navigate past other couples to get back to their table, she notices Raymond and Mei Yun returning as well.

“Don’t worry,” says Patrick, clapping Raymond on the back as he plops into his seat with a heavy whoosh, relieved to have come home to the sanctuary of other men. “You’re still the king.”

Mabel is about to tell her husband that it is time to go, when he stretches his hand out to her.

“Can I have the last dance?” he asks, desire in his eyes. No, not desire. A sort of pride.

He takes her by the wrist, and with a gentle but insistent tug, pulls her onto the floor, his left palm softly cradling her back. Then, with his right hand, he shoots her left arm straight up towards the ceiling, as if calling the band and all the other couples to attention. For a moment, it seems to her that the music has stopped, and everyone is frozen in place, waiting for his cue.

As she tilts her head up towards him, a swirl of lights catches Raymond across the face like he is having his photograph taken. He looks so young. She remembers their last holiday together. It was only to Malacca, only for a weekend. They sang along to all her favourite Teresa Teng albums on the three-hour drive (even though he is more of a Bee Gees kind of guy), and walked along the river that Saturday evening, hand in hand, secondary school sweethearts again. She remembers being sixteen (pigtails, pinafore, pimples), Mousey Mabel, quiet and grey, and how he had all these grand plans laid out. He was going to be the towkay of a big company, buy her a bungalow, a Mercedes, maybe one for each of them. She laughed, and said she would go to the Teachers Training College anyway. Just in case.

The music starts up again, releasing the other dancers from its spell. He pulls her close to him, almost lifting her off the ground. She closes her eyes, and breathes him in.

There is another world where he is everything he has ever hoped to be, and everything she has dreamed for him to be. This is not that world. But tonight, the most handsome man in the room has taken her in his arms. They will go home together after this last dance, and, without being asked to, Raymond will make her a bowl of instant noodles, and stay up reading the latest John Grisham novel beside her while she finishes grading test papers.

~

Choo Yi Feng – ‘An Investor’s Guide to Abyssal Burial’

APRIL 12th 2021

Choo Yi Feng is currently an undergraduate majoring in life sciences at the National University of Singapore (NUS). His short stories have been published in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Alluvium, the journal of Literary Shanghai, and Curios. His aspirations are divided between becoming a fiction writer and a marine biologist.

An Investor’s Guide to Abyssal Burial

Imagine with me what the experience of biological death might be like: a long sleep, an all-enveloping heaviness, a gentle and irreversible descent away from the world of light and into a mysterious, unknowable plane of darkness. The body grows cold, its metabolic processes slowing down. Skin becomes clammy, bloodless and prone to rupture. Soft tissue melts away, boundaries between body and earth blurred until even hard, mineral bone is chiselled and ground into dust.

<<I’m hungry. It’s like I haven’t eaten in months. Life is lightless, cold, and there is a weight crushing upon my body. There is always a weight crushing upon my body. I am drifting, an erratic tick coursing along my flesh every half-minute or so, in bold defiance of the void before me, scandalising it with my vulgar display of motion, of liveliness>>

For decades, marine science enthusiasts have been obsessed with whale falls: infrequent occurrences where the massive bodies of dead whales are devoured by the lightless abyss, collapsing upon the flat, grey expanse of the ocean floor with all the entropic force of a sub-nuclear missile. Blubbery flesh and decaying tissue is greedily exploited by an eclectic and charismatic community of bizarre sea creatures: chunks of flesh are first shorn away by giant sharks and monstrous deep-sea isopods. The residue hardly goes to waste, and is picked clean by an army of skeletal brittle stars, phantasmal octopuses and squat lobsters. Whale falls are able to support complex (yet transient) ecosystems anywhere from decades to even two centuries. They have been studied intensively as highly effective vessels for carbon sequestration, and their impacts on abyssal communities are well-documented.

<<The carcass calls out to me, its chemical trails of rot hitting me like a wall of heat, sending a liquid fire spreading through my limbs, my nerves stinging and ablaze. A blinding light tugs at a point just behind the soft palate of the roof of my mouth, producing an itch that cannot be scratched. This is what a magnet feels like when placed enticingly close, yet insufferably separate, to its opposite pole>>

Kyeong-Pane Pelagic Mortuary Services has been providing clients with the unique experience of abyssal burials for coming to twenty-five years now. With new footage from our remote deep-sea submersible, we show you the inner workings of a funerary practice that has become massively popular in the past few years.

<<I have reached a twenty-four-hour convenience store along a bygone alley down the middle of a city district where every other door is shuttered and everyone has fled, gone home. The lights are blinding, the cans and packets lining the aluminium shelves glossed in hyper-colour, screaming in glee. It is dark outside. There are shapes and shades that scare me. In here, I am free to eat air-flown Italian pesto with sun-dried cherry tomatoes. Semi-molten butterscotch brownies. Flash-fried Instant noodles with individually-sealed sachets of oil, seasoning, fried shallots and dark sauce>>

The first location our vessel will be visiting is the South Banda Basin in Indonesia, a country well-known for the rich coral reefs its archipelago hosts, and for many, a poignant symbol of the wonders of the underwater world. This burial ship bearing the legacies of eighty of our clients was sunken only eight months ago, and is still in the first phase of abyssal burial. Within hours of its touchdown upon the soft sediments of the vast, grey abyssal plain, a wealth of opportunistic predators emerged from the darkness, drawn by the scent trail of decomposing soft tissue. We documented twenty-two different species that were drawn to the burial ship within this period, including several bluntnose sixgill shark, a new record for the region.

<<I widen my jaws and sink my teeth in, spasming and writhing with my last reserves of strength in order to separate clods of soft tissue and twangy sinew from tasteless bone. The first bite, the first swallow does nothing to fill the emptiness within. I circle around, diving in for another, hurling myself into the orgy of bodies dead and living. In the hazy confusion, the pesto jar spills and is mixed with the golden butterscotch core of the chocolate pastries. A flurry of flavours—tangy, sharp, sickly sweet, greasy, gooey, crumbly, juicy, woody—assaults me. Ruinous flesh for ruinous beings. They slide along my guy, spreading their half-digested richness to fill out the contours of my being over and over. As I consume flesh, it consumes me>>

Moving now to our colleagues further north, we encounter a burial ship sunken eight years ago near the Meiyo-Daisan Seamount in the Sea of Japan. By now, most of the soft tissue has been devoured, and even fine particles of organic matter carefully combed and scavenged by smaller creatures such as spider crabs and octopuses. Osedax bone worms now colonise the hard skeleton that is remaining, boring into the vestigial osseous structures and beginning the process of converting this last trace of a body into ocean dust. Our burial ship here is so densely matted with the sinuous forms of bone worms that from afar, the skulls and femurs take on a fuzzy appearance. One notable tenant of the Meiyo-Daisan burial ship is the legacy of Mr Ryuji Tsugoda, who headed the Tsugoda multinational tech firm during his brief, yet productive twenty-nine-year reign. Mr Ryuji was one of the first individuals to publicly endorse and promote abyssal burials, and thus a key contributing figure to the massive popularity that Kyeong-Pane enjoys today.

<<The shelves were picked clean lifetimes ago, and yet everyone remained—persisting in the light, in the comfort of a twenty-four-hour convenience store on the ocean floor. Now we comb the containers that rise out of the ground, that branch and bifurcate. They grow steel arms and legs but have no heads. They are vending machines arrayed with dozens of slots, mostly empty, but some hosting the occasional prize. Chocolate rounds with peanut butter filling. Alaskan king crab, offered by the leg. Disposable panties. We sift, climb, parse, forage, salvage, disassemble, gather. This place is chronically understocked. Each generation reckons with the possibility that it will be the last, until generations bleed into one another, and precarity and finality become perennial>>

Research and monitoring remain our top priorities. We are constantly planning prospective studies and follow-ups to existing burials in order to verify and substantiate claims of carbon sequestration and to ensure that our projects are truly zero-energy and zero-waste.

<<The first flakes brush lightly against the crown of my cilia as they make their ethereal decent downwards, and it is a while before I recognise the taste of snow. The lights will grow stronger again now, after burning for so long. A storm of fairy dust descends with all the entropic force of a comet. I feel the paper-thin veneer of my shell begin to tremble and rupture with the glee of possibilities>>

We want to know how the legacies of our clients continue to nourish and enrich the abyss, whether it be on a timeline of eight months, eight years or eight decades. One current development that my colleagues are working on is a periodic re-infusion of human-derived nutrients into existing burial sites to facilitate complex, multi-layered successional eco-scapes. The possibilities, like the endless benthos that we are mapping in ever-finer detail, are multiplying exponentially. At Kyeong-Pane, it is not just about what you are buying, but what you are buying into.

~

Karolina Wróblewska – Guilin Park

JANUARY 4th 2021

Karolina Wróblewska is a Shanghai enthusiast. She has lived there for over a decade, mesmerised by old Shanghai lanes and their inhabitants. Trained in sinology, she enjoys Chinese ink wash painting and writing about her Shanghai experience.

Guilin Park

It was pure naivety on her side to go to a park in the middle of October holiday to seek some tranquillity. She realised that as soon as she reached Guilin Park on Wednesday morning. Renshan renhai, as they say in Chinese, which literally means people mountain people sea, or in one word – crowded.

It felt unreal to be surrounded by this sea of people while in other parts of the world people sought shelter in their homes, and were advised not to leave their seclusions unless necessary.

Nevertheless, she was determined to find a quiet spot, away from the crowds, where she could open her drawing pad and do some sketches of nature, pretending it was a remote place, somewhere in the country, not a busy park in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world. She spotted a little pavilion on a tiny hill. To find the way to the top of it was not easy, because the stairs were hidden among tall trees and bushes, and there was a pond on the other side of the hillock.

She was surrounded by vivid colours. The grass was dazzling green. The sun shone brightly, the sky was perfectly blue and so was the still water of the pond, mirroring the heavens. As if to complement this idyllic ambience from time to time she could sense the sweet fragrance of Osmanthus blossoms. The most marvellous and ephemeral scent ever.

Her chosen spot looked completely deserted but while she was climbing the winding stairs she noticed a man coming out of nowhere, aiming the same direction. They reached the pinnacle at the same moment. The situation was awkward. It was obvious that both of them wanted to be left alone, but none wanted to withdraw. The spot was too perfect to give it up easily. The pavilion was surrounded with a short concrete fence, and the passing which constituted an entry to the little square in front of the building was blocked by a blue tape, so none of them could give way and go to the opposite side.  She put her bag down, he put his flask on the wall. “He might as well stay,” she thought generously, after all, she wanted to avoid crowds not a single person. He must have thought otherwise because, after a while of hesitation, he grabbed his glass flask filled with tea, which has probably been refilled many times, and turned to mildly rusty colour, and left.

Pretending to be indifferent to the situation (although she did feel guilty a bit), she took out her sketchbook and pencils and sat quite restfully on the short wall. As soon as she made herself perfectly comfortable she heard the sound of a whistle. She looked around, and as could be expected, there was a guard down the mound near the pond pointing at her and shaking his head as if saying, “sitting on the wall is not allowed.” “I should have brought my bamboo chair” – she thought. People do bring strange objects to parks all the time. People here carry strange objects around the town all of the time! No one would be surprised or indignant. Even today she saw old men strolling around the park lanes with beautifully ornamented cages and birds inside them. Not to mention all those senior citizens with their own foldable stools that frequented subways during rush hours.

Let alone strange things that happen here all the time. Just yesterday she had witnessed that utterly surreal scene. She walked down Shanxi Road when suddenly someone walking a dog came straight at her. As she stepped sideways to let them pass she nearly bumped into a pig! It was quite a handsome pig with grey patches all over its pink body; as if carrying a map of the world on its back. The owner, a young man, was pushing his pet gently forward with nudges. Would anyone pay any attention to a bamboo chair if she brought it to the park? Very unlikely. She caught eye contact with the guard, made an OK sign with her hand and stood up, just to lean against the wall, which was less comfortable but still acceptable.

She created a little view of a pond with a small stone bridge over it, with an old crooked tree, a strange stone, so-called guai shitou or gongshi, and a pagoda in the distance. Gongshi means Scholar’s rock and is a must-have element of a traditional Chinese garden, and so should also appear in landscape paintings. Three places in China are sources of scholar’s rocks. The ones in Shanghai are the most probably from Lake Tai area, from neighbouring Jiangsu province, so are called Taihu stones (Taihu shi). Their appearance must be very unique, the shape irregular, and they have to have some holes and cavities in them.  And so she placed a big and perfectly irregular Taihu shi in the foreground. Her sketch emanated calmness. The place she created was quiet and deserted, and so black and white compared to the bright colours of the nature that encircled her on that perfectly sunny day.

She has always been surrounded by woods, she thought dreamily. The view of the crippled tree made her think of those handsome, tall trees in her Chinese name; Lin sounded dignified and earnest. Funnily enough by adding merely three drops of water to her two slim trees you would get yet another version of lin – a shower; thousands of little tears. But it was a bright day with no threatens of showers.

At some point, by the corner of her eye, she noticed the man with the tea flask on the other side of the pavilion. There must be another way up the mound to the other side of it. He placed his bottle on the wall and put his hands together in prayer. He bowed several times and was gone.

She witnessed a great and clandestine scene, she thought. The park was once  (at the beginning of the XX^th century) privately owned by a rich gangster. She knew that much. It’s a very picturesque place full of magical hidden corners, beautiful pagodas, charming pavilions, tiny hills, old bamboo trees. The place radiates wealth and splendour. There is water, there is a mountain, elements of a perfect landscape much loved by southern Chinese.

Now, she was sure of that, she uncovered a great secret, she had figured out that the man (most probably) was a descendant of that powerful family.  He comes to pay respects to his ancestors, intimately when no one is there. She was overwhelmed by solving the mystery. No one else, but she knew who the man was.

She continued drawing, occasionally disturbed by passers-by who probably wanted to take a photo with the house as a background. And they did with the pavilion and a foreign lady in the background. But she did not mind… She drew.

At one moment “a descendant” of the rich gangster appeared again with his glass tea flask and a middle-aged couple and gesticulating was explaining something to them vividly. “So what is this place?” she asked as if in passing, pretending disinterest, but in fact deeply curious to hear about his family secrets. “It’s Guanyin pavilion, you know?” She turned back, and behind herself she noticed a large board hanging above a beautifully carved front door. The sign in huge golden characters on black background clearly stated Guanyin ge. She realised once again that she tends to be carried away by her imagination quite some times.

Of course, she knew the slim statue of Guanyin, seen so many times in Buddhists temples. “She is the Goddess of Mercy, you know?” “I do.” And upon realizing that she can understand what he says, he explained with great engagement: “You see those twisted stone stairs? They are so tricky, that old person should not try to climb them. And do you know why? Because human life is intricate. In the course of our lives, we deviate from the straight route. That’s why our life path is not straightforward, just like this path up the hillock. Now we must climb up this mound to seek Guanyin’s mercy and forgiveness, repent the sins, you know?”

The couple was still there, mesmerised by this surreal scene. It seemed there was something wrong there. A Chinese man was explaining some intricate stories in his mother tongue using sophisticated expressions to a foreign woman, and she nodded as if in understanding. “Do you understand what he says?” – a man asked in disbelief. “I do,” she replied and immediately was overpowered by the feeling of losing the ability to comprehend this foreign speech. It happened repeatedly before. Often when someone praised her language skills she froze and blocked the words from her ears.

As expected, from that moment onwards she couldn’t grasp the meaning of what he was trying to convey. “Blah, blah, blah, you know?’ “No,” she admitted with shame. “No?” now he was surprised. “It’s history, you know?” She might as well keep on nodding, after all, she knew he was introducing her to the history of Guilin Park, which was not owned by his ancestors after all, and which she could later google. So she was “nodding in advance.”

And later on, she did make it up and learnt that the residence was built by one of the three most infamous Shanghai criminals, Huang Jinrong, in 1929. Even Wikipedia states his occupation as a gangster!

Huang and his family moved to Shanghai from Suzhou when he was only 5. He was a good and obedient child. As a young boy, he worked as an apprentice in a picture framing shop near Yu Garden. Back then he did not show any signs of making a gangster. Later on, he shifted to work in his father’s teahouse. Here he found opportunities to make connections with the underground world and built his first gang. He led a double life. In 1892 Huang entered the French Concession police force and became a detective in the Criminal Justice Section. He proved to be an outstanding detective. Doubtlessly thanks to his wide connections in the criminal world. Having built a broad network of informants he had great achievements. It is said that he used to accept bribes and gifts while receiving visitors in his teahouse. “Friends” would pay for dropping investigations, or intensifying the investigation on their enemies. He worked for Police force while running his profitable “business” at the same time, until his dismissal. Some say he crossed a line by beating in public a son of one of Shanghai Warlord in 1924. He was even arrested but soon released thanks to the help of his faithful friends; two other prominent figures of The Green Gang – Du Yuesheng and Zhang Xiaolin. Some say he simply retired in 1925. After that, he entirely devoted himself to the shady businesses of qingbang triad.

He must have sinned greatly throughout his life. Now she understood the need of those winding steps up the hill to Guanyin Pavilion climbed to repent of sins.  She understood also the meaning of qingbang repeated by the old man in the park as if the alien word would be more understandable if is repeated enough number of times (qingbang meaning green gang).

“Blah, blah, qingbang, blah, blah, qingbang (…)” the man perorated. The situation got a bit awkward, she was not sure whether to nod or to shake her head. Maybe her face expression was not showing enough understanding or emotions, because she was soon left to herself again in the pious vicinity of Guanyin. Not for long though. Soon a rather very elderly lady, with heavy make-up, wearing a traditional dress (from some ancient times), with bizarre ornaments in her hair and a silk flat fan with a wooden handle, so-called tuanshan, appeared with a male photographer. Lin put her sketchpad down and looked at the scene with a certain dose of disbelieve. The woman was looking fantastical, as she posed with grace half-hidden behind the fan. She was mesmerised by the absurdity of that scene. There were other people like herself here, acting as if they existed in another world and a different era. They too left her alone, soon afterwards.

The drawing was nearly completed; an idyllic picture of a non-existing landscape, an idealized world. From far away she could hear a man’s voice. He was singing old Shanghai hits, she knew them from the soundtrack of “In the Mood for Love” by Wong Kar Wai. Her favourite movie. “Huayang de nianhua”. She was moved by the feeling of nostalgia. “Ruguo meiyou ni”. The tune made her emotional. Nage bu duo qing”. She wanted to run down the winding stone stairs to listen to it at close range. It didn’t matter that the old man was not a first-class singer, but just merely a neighbourhood songster. “Ni zhen meili”.

She eventually went down the stairs. Down there people were doing more strange things. Some women were dressed up in traditional Chinese qipaos, made of shiny colourful fabrics. They posed with paper sun umbrellas, which were as colourful as their qipaos. They would raise their hands high up and freeze in that pose like statues of ballerinas or dancers accidentally scattered around Guilin Park. Their shadows were dancing simultaneously with them as they changed their postures. They looked somewhat grotesque but heart-warming at the same time. They were all smiling and laughing, clearly having a good time, indifferent to the glares of onlookers. They did not mind little kids running here and there around the place, adding ambience to that spectacle. The weather was splendid and the photographs would look fantastic on their moments on Social media.

Eventually, she made it to the open-space gallery where an enthusiastic crowd was just applauding the home-grown singer. He was still singing some old hits to the great delight of people. There he was, dancing and gesticulating with exaggeration to the rapture of gathered Shanghainese ladies. It was an extraordinary and peculiar performance. The crowd was clearly in a festive mood. Everyone was so cheerful and joyful, you could tell it was the middle of the long October holiday, and for a moment people forgot about their worries, everyday problems. As if the world outside Guilin Park was an entirely different reality.

But the sun will only be up for a few more hours, and eventually, before dusk, they all will have to wrap up their belongings and return to the real world, and people mountain people sea will flood Shanghai streets again.

October-December 2020.

~

Laetitia Keok – ‘Memorabilia’

AUGUST 3rd, 2020

Laetitia Keok is a poet, writer, & English Literature student from Singapore. Her work has appeared in Vagabond City Lit, Tongue Tied Magazine & elsewhere. 

Memorabilia

Shanghai is so much like Singapore—another cityscape brimming with new beginnings.

You step out of a six-hour flight into a world that still seems unchanged, your entire life stuffed into a single luggage that spills out onto the carpeted floor of the new place. Years later you will realise that every uprooting was a kind of violence, years later you will not know how to fit the fragments together, but for now, you are eight and in a new country and it is almost exciting.

For now, this has to be home.

You live in 徐家汇, on the 16^th floor. There is a window overlooking the carpark, from which you squint to look at every car’s plate number. There is another window that overlooks nothing. There is a painting that you decide looks like a dog (before you learnt what abstract was), and a hallway light that goes out every two weeks. When you forget the access card to the building, you press your face to the glass door until the old lady with three dogs lets you in. It is a place you do not bother to remember, or even to photograph. Only years later will you recognise the dull ache of a fading memory, scrambling for an image that no longer exists.

Now though, you stumble only over explaining the difference between mee kiat and mee pok to a noodle store owner, who ends up not having either. You hunt supermarket aisles with your mother for tau kee and kangkong, memorising their Mandarin variations.

Does a place become a home, simply by way of inhabiting it?

Your mother says: we look just like locals until we open our mouths, and for months you are afraid to speak—to tell the truth of your unbelonging. Between mouthfuls of chicken rice at a “Singaporean restaurant”, you catch the eyes of strangers who speak unapologetic Singlish—faster lah, oi don’t anyhow—and you love them for that.

You savour every reminder of Singapore like a spreading warmth: ready-to-cook laksa paste, bak kut teh spice sachets that your grandmother sent over.

There are still things you have not unpacked, relics from another life, untouched by the Shanghai air.

*

Shanghai is surprising.

外滩 is more beautiful than you’d thought it would be. At night, you cannot stop staring at the streetlights glistening in the river’s reflection. You are dazzled by 东方明珠塔, a tower with an apex so sharp, it could pierce the sky—your first taste of invincible. You walk from end to boundless end, counting your steps, then losing count.

You are fascinated by this place you are learning to call home. By 美罗城—the mall in a crystal ball. By the huge Christmas tree outside of 港汇广场 with the sign that translates to DANGER DO NOT TOUCH. By the shophouses of 田子坊 that you will soon learn to tell apart. By the way the word 巨鹿路 rolls off your tongue—Giant Deer Street, you say to your mother. By your new 羽绒服—a striking red down jacket for the winter. By the club-house with a pool where you almost learnt to swim. By the episodes of 喜羊羊与灰太狼 that you now watch with your sister.

Everything is grand and endearing. You have never seen a billboard, and have to be dragged across the road as you stare at one.

At your new international school, there is a trampoline and a playground and a field with earthworms you will soon dangle in front of your new friends. There is a monkey bar where you learn to skip first, one bar, then two, bringing home fresh blisters on your hands. You learn Korean curse words, and algebra and how to light a Bunsen burner. You write your first poem and earn a badge for it. You get in trouble, and wish to leave. In the end, you are glad you had stayed. You start learning to play the 二胡, even though you’d wanted to learn the 笛子, really. Years later it will be the one thing from Shanghai that still belongs to you.

When it snows, you can see it from the canteen window. You are told that it rarely snows in Shanghai. The field, snowed over, is beautiful.

You now have a best friend here in Shanghai and a best friend back in Singapore. Your best friend in Shanghai has a best friend in Hong Kong. All your friends in Shanghai have friends somewhere else in the world. It is the way things are. You think it’s cool, but your best friend in Singapore thinks she has too many other friends in Singapore, for a friend like you who is from Singapore, but in Shanghai.

You and your best friend in Shanghai do not talk about departures.

*

The day you leave, you marvel at how quickly a place can become a home, and then at how quickly it has to stop being one. But you do not cry, you are not sad.

When you close your eyes, you can still picture everything: the way back to the apartment, the garden downstairs, stuffing your hand into the gap above the letterbox to get the mail, screaming at a classmate to 闭嘴—shut up. When you close your eyes, you are playing basketball with your friends. You are spending recess with your best friend in the school library. You are sneaking out of class to meet your sister in the toilet. You are zig-zagging through mazes of school buses to pass notes to the boy you like, who also happens to be the boy who likes you. You are spending bus rides home learning the careless sweeps of his handwriting and the careful folds of notebook paper.

You do not think you will ever forget. You do not think you will miss what you will always remember. Years later you will close your eyes to a painful emptiness and you will cry, then.

It is always like this. You love people you will miss for the rest of your life.

*

It is seven years later, when you see him again, but there is something about the night that makes you think that no time has passed. But you are not in Shanghai, you are in a café in Korea, sharing three hours with someone who could almost pass for a stranger now. When he hugs you, you are breathless with familiarity, wondering where all the time had gone.

You talk about friends you have not seen in years and people you no longer know. He tells you about his life now, and you tell him about yours, but mostly you just talk about the past. It is at once comforting and devastating.

You look at this boy you knew from another life, whom you liked so much, giddy with sadness.

*

We are in a train station and I do not want this end. It is good to see you. I am still shy, and you are still funny in the way that makes me jealous. You are still so smart, and you are holding me with a gaze so tender, it could break my heart.

There is so much I can say that also means so little. The old campus that no longer exists, the duck of your head when you are told to get out of the class, the duck of mine when you catch my eye. I am thinking of all the times we couldn’t have wished to stay—when you left to see your sick grandfather, when I left without looking back.

We are leaving again.

I want to ask you: how do we gather all this leaving and make a life out of it? But we already have.

*

Back in a city punctured by absence, I awaken to koel song, to the sound of rain ushering in monsoon season. I picture the soft morning hue draping over the feet of the people I love so much, and the sun rising along the skylines of the cities I love so much.

Goodbye in Chinese also means see you again.

I salt my knees, holding distance to the light, tracing the point where one lifetime ends and another begins. There is a heart heavy with forgetting, tender as memory.

再见—goodbye, 再见—see you again.

~

Jowell Tan – ‘April Wheeler’

MARCH 23rd, 2019

Jowell Tan works in television commercials. He writes in various formats about many things, translating observations made in the day into words at night. He is currently working on having enough material for submission to publishers.

April Wheeler

Where am I? The void between life and death. The light at the end is flickering, not as bright nor as strong as I’d hoped it would be.

—

I am in a living room, 1995. The lights are off, but illumination comes from the seven candles burning atop a birthday cake. Chocolate, my favourite. On the other end of the table I see my family – My father, face half obscured by a camera as he rolls off shot after shot after shot. My mother saying, “Make a wish!”

I close my eyes, breathe in, and I wish.

—

I am in the family car, 2003. We’re on our way home from school, after a disastrous Results Day. My father whistles along to the radio, trying to defuse the tension. My mother eyes me through the rear-view mirror as she speaks about my poor showing at the exams. I’m in the backseat, looking out the window as the view changes in blurs, buildings and emptiness rotating shifts to fill up my vision.

Is this what we pay your tuition for? She asks. Is this because of your sports? Should we pull you out of your after-school activities? I reply in monosyllables to her questions, silence to her sentences. I have no words for her, to her babbling and her opinions and her incessant need to hear me speak. Soon enough she runs out of things to say, and only the radio sounds fill up the interior space.

I look out the window, speeding through each second of life.

—

I am in Jacob’s bedroom, 2008. We’ve been planning this for weeks, and today is the day. Today is my birthday, and tonight Jacob will be my first.

We dim the lights and undress. Naked we move onto his bed, single-sized and barely able to contain the both of us. We kiss with our eyes closed, our hands caressing every part of each other. He puts the condom on. He lowers himself into me. It feels strange and awkward, a foreigner asserting himself within the borders of my body. Where once it was empty it is now unbearably full. His hips thrust back and forth against me. He makes these strange noises that sound nothing like human speech, more like the language of animals and savages.

Eventually, he quietens down. With one final thrust, he comes. “Did you..?” “Yes, I did. It was good, love,” I lie. “Okay. Good, good..” He lifts himself off me and lies on his side. Not long after, his rhythmic snoring begins, the measured pulse of his snorts and inhalations. I lie there in the half-darkened room, bare, unfulfilled, and begin to cry.

I look up at the ceiling, shadows playing with shape and size, the unbearable hum of disappointment whirring up.

—

I am in the bathroom, 2013. I’m naked in front of the mirror, still. Unmoving. My eyes examine my body – my freckled face, my small chest, my bony knees. My mind examines my life – My shortcomings, my failures, my unfulfilled wishes.

These next few moments, I remember as clear as day. I move with robotic precision. I act without regret, only clarity as I make these decisions on my own volition:

I pick up my father’s shaver, a straight razor. I remove the blade from its casing. Its silver surface shines in the fluorescent overhead light. I hold it between my fingers, edge facing out. I slowly, gingerly, slice across the underside of my wrist. I change hands, and do the same to the other wrist.

The blades makes a quiet pinging sound as I drop it into the sink. I watch the blood from my wrists spill out on the floor in a steady stream of glistening red. I look up in the mirror. I smile my second real smile. The only real other smile I remember was when I was seven, and it was my birthday, and I made a wish that my life would be without disappointment, and I had really wanted it to come true. But it didn’t. And now, here we are.

I look at my reflection, my sadness draining out of me with the blood, flowing down my arms, onto the floor, into the abyss.

—

I wonder, what is the afterlife like? I wonder, if I have another chance at life, will I remember all the notes I took down during this one and apply them to the next one?

I wonder, what’s going to happen next?

~

Habib Mohana – ‘The Dark Dawn’

NOVEMBER 4th, 2019

Habib Mohana was born in 1969 in Daraban Kalan, a town in the district of Dera Imsail Khan, Pakistan. He is an assistant professor of English at Government Degree College No 3, D. I. Khan. He writes fiction in English, Urdu, and Saraiki (his mother tongue). He has four books under his belt, one in Urdu and three in Saraiki. His Saraiki novel forms part of the syllabus for the MA in Saraiki at Zikria University Multan. His short stories in English have appeared in literary journals in India and Canada. In 2010 and 2014, his Saraiki books won the Khawaja Ghulam Farid Award from the Pakistan Academy of Letters. His book of short stories in Urdu, titled Adhori Neend, won the Abaseen award from the Government of KPK. He is currently seeking a publisher for his novel The Village Café.

‘The Dark Dawn’

The bountiful monsoon season was drawing to a close, and the village farmers were busy preparing their land for the winter crops. Whistling to himself, tall clove-coloured Soobha was cutting the wild grass from his land when all of a sudden a cobra bit him on the forearm. He lifted the sickle and brought it down on the snake but it slithered away into the high waving grass. Soobha shouted to a shepherd who was passing by on his donkey. The shepherd took a close look at the two deep puncture wounds and tightly tied a jute string around Soobha’s forearm to limit the flow of blood and to slow the traffic of the poison to the other parts of the body.

The shepherd helped Soobha onto his donkey. They had just started out towards their village when a farmer asked the shepherd not to take Soobha there.

‘In the village, a pregnant woman’s voice can have a harmful effect on a person who has been bitten by a snake,’ he said. ‘I’ll sit with Soobha under this acacia. You go and tell his family what has happened.’

So the shepherd straddled the donkey and sped towards the village, about twenty minutes away.

Soobha, his elder brother Shadu, and their children lived in a sprawling adobe house in the middle of the village of Mastan. No sooner had the bad news reached Soobha’s house than his wife, sister-in-law, daughter, and nieces burst into tears. The men and women of the village crowded into their house to commiserate and give advice.

Shadu asked the mullah to gather his students in the mosque to recite the Koran and pray to God for Soobha’s recovery. The village chief sent his son to Daraban Kalan on horseback to bring the hakim.

‘Offering an animal sacrifice wards off evil,’ Soobha’s wife said to her son, Dani. Being staunch believers, Dani and some neighbours slaughtered the ox that was chomping on sorghum stalks in the corner of the house.

Carrying charpoys, pillows, lanterns, and pitchers of water, a procession of over twenty men strode towards the place where the patient rested. They placed the charpoys on a treeless plane spot and laid the patient down on one of them. It was late afternoon and the village cattle were returning from the pasturelands, leaving plumes of dust in their wake.

Redness and swelling had started to appear around the snake bite on Soobha’s forearm. He was sweating profusely and had vomited several times.

The shepherd returned with a bowl of butter oil. To suck out the poison he took a draught of the oil, put his mouth on the snakebite on Soobha’s forearm, and sucked and spat. He repeated this more than ten times, and then swilled his mouth out with water.

‘Give him milk to drink. It will soak up the poison. Don’t let him have any bread,’ the shepherd advised.

The sun was setting when the village cobbler brought a brood of seven juvenile chickens in a cage made of tamarisk sticks. To suck the poison out of Soobha’s arm, he put the backside of one of the chickens over the snakebite, held it there for some time, and then let it go free. One after another he used all the chickens this way. Clucking, they perched on the legs of the charpoys, and some climbed up a nearby dwarf bush.

After sunset, the village chief’s son retuned with the white-bearded hakim. The hakim opened a small silver box containing a zehar mohra—a snake’s head that was believed to suck the poison out of the body.  He took the item from the red ocher, dipped it into a bowl of milk, and placed it on the snakebite. After a minute he took it off and plopped it in the bowl of milk to release its load of poison. He repeated this process more than ten times.

‘If he can survive three nights then he is out of danger,’ the hakim said, then took Shadu to one side and whispered in his ear. ‘Send for the drummer and tell him to beat his drum over the patient’s head to stop him from sleeping, because sleep is a killer for anyone bitten by a snake. Also – I almost forgot – we’ll also need the barber to make a cut.’

Shadu’s elder son Ramza was sent to bring the drummer and barber. Ramza went to find them but they weren’t at home.

The men sat on the charpoys around the patient, who was rolling around in pain, his face haggard and pale. Darkness fell and cloud of mosquitoes danced over the men’s heads. Shadu’s younger son brought dinner for the attendants and sweetened milk for the patient. The attendants spread a palm leaf mat on the ground and sat down to eat. Two chickens started clucking around the men, and Shadu slung them bread crumbs.

‘Give me some bread.’ Soobha requested.

‘No. Bread is not good for you. It causes drowsiness. If you are hungry, drink milk,’ the hakim replied.

‘Give me just one morsel.’

‘No.’

‘Give me just a bit of meat.’

‘We can’t. Sorry. It will kill you. Solid food brings drowsiness and drowsiness brings sleep and sleep means death for you.’

All they could give him was sweetened milk.

After night prayers the barber’s brakeless bicycle rolled up.

‘Sorry I’m late. I was in the village of Loni for circumcisions,’ he said, hands clasped.

‘We have an emergency you stupid fool,’ Shadu said, teeth bared.

The barber unstrapped the bag of his tools from the pannier of his bicycle. Like a veteran surgeon, he examined the snakebite in the light of the lanterns.

‘What a terrible thing,’ he said, and started honing his cutthroat razor on the small whetstone.

Four people pinioned the patient, and the barber cut the bite wound on the hakim’s instructions. Soobha bawled with pain. The hakim untied the jute string from around the patient’s forearm and squeezed the bitten arm hard. Black-brown blood started trickling down.

‘Let him sleep for a while, but not for long,’ the hakim said to Shadu.

He dragged a charpoy some yards away from the patient and lay down on it. To keep the patient awake, Dani, Shadu, and their neighbours took turns talking to him. If Soobha drifted off to sleep, Shadu and Dani would wake him up by pinching his arms or shoulders.

‘Please let me sleep,’ Soobha said in a weak, tearful voice. ‘My head is splitting with pain.’

‘Brother, please try to stay awake,’ Shadu said. ‘Too much sleep brings death to a person like you,’

To keep him awake, Shadu started telling a story and after a while asked, ‘Brother, are you awake? Are you listening?’

When he received no answer from his brother, he pinched him. Soobha woke up.

After midnight, pinching had no effect on Soobha, and he drifted off to sleep. Shadu brought acacia thorns and pricked his brother, but it was no use. So Shadu and Dani went into a huddle. Shadu brought out a little packet of paprika from his pocket, and with a small smooth stick applied it to the patient’s eyes, which started burning.

‘What is this?’ Soobha cried. ‘Paprika in my eyes? Don’t treat me like an animal!’

‘It’s not paprika,’ Shadu fibbed. ‘It’s bitter antimony. It cleans eyes and wards off sleep.’

They applied the paprika to his second eye.

Soobha cried out again. ‘If you’re bent on killing me, then do it in a gentle way. Don’t kill me like I’m an animal.’

The night wore on. A prowling jackal closed in on the bush where the chickens were roosting. It pounced. The victim uttered a startled squawk, and the jackal scrambled away with its prize. The sudden noise pulled the hakim out of sleep. He gibbered and then drifted off again.

At long last, the call to morning prayer echoed from the village mosque. Soobha had fallen asleep. Shadu felt his brother’s wrist and then lifted his hands towards the sky.

‘Thank you, God. If the night has passed without an incident, please let all nights pass the same. Life is in your hands, O God. Give my brother another chance!’

In the morning, two villagers brought tea for the attendants. Shadu dipped one end of his turban sheet in water and swabbed his brother’s face with it, then gave him a cup of tea. The attendants were taking morning tea when a pir with a white flowing beard arrived on a roan horse. All the villagers stood up and shook his hand. He had come from the village of Punjan Shah.

‘I was in the mosque for night prayers when this sad news reached me,’ the pir said, settling on the charpoy and holding the patient’s hand in his soft white palm.

He recited holy verses from the Koran and blew over the dark bloody spot. He patted Soobha’s back.

‘You’ll be alright, my son. The Master of the Blue Roof will help you. It’s nothing!’

After a while he took his leave. Shadu scurried after him and thrust a one-rupee note into his delicate fingers. The pir mounted his horse and rode off, leaving a ribbon of fine dust behind him.

When he finished his tea, the hakim took a long look at the bite on Soobha’s arm. Then, he peeled the man’s eyelids back and examined his eyeballs.

‘Have courage, Soobha!’ he said. ‘You have survived. You have crossed the hardest part of the journey.’

When the sun became hot, they moved the patient’s charpoy into a shady toothbrush tree. Then, the men from the surrounding villages poured in to commiserate with Shadu and Dani.

In the late afternoon, the attendants returned the patient to his former spot.

‘Take me home and let me die in peace there,’ Soobha moaned. ‘I can’t see clearly. I’m sure I won’t survive. Last night I saw my late father in dream, standing on a hilltop. He called to me. I know he was calling me to the other world.’

‘We can’t take you home. In the village, a pregnant woman’s voice can have an adverse effect. We’re keeping you here, for your own good.’

‘Then if you can’t take me home, bring my sister, my wife, my daughter Zaibu, and my nieces. I want to see them before I die.’

‘Ok, we will bring them,’ Shadu said.

‘Uncle, we should not do it,’ Dani said. ‘The women would weep and cause chaos. You can’t let them come here.’

His uncle didn’t listen.

That afternoon, the women came with a group of other ladies. They wrapped their arms around Soobha and dissolved into tears.

Soobha said, ‘I know I won’t survive. The poison has reached my heart. I can feel it. I’m dying. Please forgive me if I have said or done anything wrong to any single one of you.’ He clasped his shaking hands.

‘Don’t say that,’ his sister wiped her tears with her scarf. ‘You are going to be alright,’

‘Allah will give you long and healthy life,’ his wife said, passing her fingers through his dusty hair.

Soobha turned to Shadu.

‘Please, brother – accept my daughter Zaibu’s hand in marriage for your son Ramza. Ramza, I have one daughter and I want you to keep her happy. And Khero, my dear sister, I beg of you – please give your daughter to Dani in marriage. They will make a wonderful couple.’ Tears were rolling down Soobha’s pale leathery cheeks. He then turned to Shadu again. His sleepless eyes were red and puffy. ‘And after my death, my brother, take care of my wife and kids, they will be…’

‘What are you talking about, brother?’ Shadu cut in. ‘You will live to see your children marry and live happily.’

‘Please take me home. Don’t let me breathe my last in the wilderness.’

The women sat down on the bare ground around the patient’s charpoy and wept collectively.

‘Didn’t I tell you not to bring the women here? Look at them,’ Dani said to Shadu, who shooed them away.

The wailing women made their way listlessly to Mastan, looking over their shoulders from time to time.

The second night fell. To keep the mosquitos at bay, the attendants had set piles of cowpats smouldering. A cloud of smoke hung in the air. They gave Soobha milk and then allowed him to sleep for a while.

Towards night prayers, the one-eyed drummer showed up, his double-headed drum strapped to his broad back.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ Shadu yelled at him.

‘I was in Madi for a wedding. I’m terribly sorry. As soon as I got your message I headed to Mastan.’ The drummer settled down on the string bed near the patient’s head and started beating the drum to keep Soobha from sleeping. The attendants dragged their charpoys some yards away from the patient and lay down on them.

‘Please stop beating the drum. I feel as if you’re hitting my head with your drumsticks,’ Soobha said but the drummer did not listen to him.

The stars shone brilliantly in the sky. The drummer carried on beating his drum, and the patient’s brain throbbed in his skull.

‘Don’t kill me cruelly. Take me home and let me die in peace.’ Soobha moaned, but his voice was lost in the sound of the drum.

All the attendants were snoring. The drummer’s hands were moving wearily, and the patient was breathing with great difficulty. Then the drummer too succumbed to sleep. Dani woke up, and he shouted at him to keep drumming.

‘Let me sleep!’ the man begged. ‘I’m exhausted. I beat my drum continuously for three nights at a wedding in Loni.’

Dani woke Shadu and told him that the drummer had fallen asleep. Shadu stumbled to the charpoy and slapped the man across the face. The drummer sat up and started playing again.

‘For God’s sake, stop beating this monstrous thing,’ Soobha pled. ‘My head is bursting with pain and sleeplessness.’

‘Don’t listen to him!’ Shadu ordered. ‘Carry on.’

The night had deepened. The drummer’s sticks were banging the drum. From Mastan came the barking of dogs, while nearby the jackals were howling hysterically. A lone chicken jumped onto the string bed beside the drummer. He hit it with his drumstick and it flapped away, squealing in panic.

After about an hour, Shadu let Soobha have some sleep. Then, he asked the drummer to play again.

‘I’m awake,’ Soobha muttered. ‘Please don’t beat the drum. Give it a break.’

‘I can’t,’ the drummer said.

Soobha snatched one of his drumsticks and tossed it away. As soon as the drumbeat faded, Shadu woke up. ‘Why have you stopped?’

‘Soobha threw my drumstick away,’ the drummer explained. ‘I’m going to retrieve it.’

As soon as he returned, he started pounding the drum again.

‘Please stop,’ Soobha begged. ‘It’ll kill me.’

‘I can’t help you,’ the drummer replied.

Soobha lifted his hand. ‘Please! If you stop, I’ll give you these two silver rings.’

‘Never. Your life is worth more than that.’

‘I’ll give you a cow if you stop.’

‘No. I can’t do it. I can’t orphan your children. I won’t stop even if you fill this drum with cold coins.’

‘I’ll not die of snake poison, but I’ll surely die of the noise of your goddamn drum,’ Soobha put his finger into his ears.

Late into the night, the drummer was overcome by sleep. The drumsticks fell from his hands and a deep silence descended over the wilderness. Only the crickets’ chir-chur filled the star-bedecked night. Soobha too dropped off to sleep.

The jungle birds were heralding the dawn. A soft breeze soughed eerily through the tamarisks. A red-wattled lapwing lighted near the attendants’ charpoys, then took off again with its plaintive cry of did-he-do-it and pity-to-do-it. The saffron sun peeped over the horizon, and suddenly everything was casting long shadows: trees, string beds, pitchers, and tumblers. From Mastan came a faint mix of sounds: the bleating of goats, the crowing of cockerels, and the barking of dogs. Plumes of blue smoke rose from the houses as the women prepared breakfast.

All the men lay deep asleep with their limp, sprawling limbs. Soobha’s body had turned stiff in the meanwhile. His face was a figure of anguish with a slightly open mouth, a fly drinking from its corner.

~

Habib Mohana – ‘The Florist’

NOVEMBER 4th, 2019

Habib Mohana was born in 1969 in Daraban Kalan, a town in the district of Dera Imsail Khan, Pakistan. He is an assistant professor of English at Government Degree College No 3, D. I. Khan. He writes fiction in English, Urdu, and Saraiki (his mother tongue). He has four books under his belt, one in Urdu and three in Saraiki. His Saraiki novel forms part of the syllabus for the MA in Saraiki at Zikria University Multan. His short stories in English have appeared in literary journals in India and Canada. In 2010 and 2014, his Saraiki books won the Khawaja Ghulam Farid Award from the Pakistan Academy of Letters. His book of short stories in Urdu, titled Adhori Neend, won the Abaseen award from the Government of KPK. He is currently seeking a publisher for his novel The Village Café.

The Florist

Irfan’s face was familiar to a many in the city, because he sold flowers at Chowgalia—the place where the four bazaars met.

Just after eating his breakfast, the twenty-two-year-old florist would cycle to the garden to buy roses and jasmine blossoms. First, he would help the chatty, hump-backed gardener pick them. Then, he would strap the basket of roses and jasmine flowers to the carrier of his bicycle and race back to his house, where he and his mother would make bracelets from the jasmine flowers and garlands from the roses. When the bracelets and garlands were ready, Irfan would hang them on his left arm and head for the Chowgalia—a mere ten minutes’ walk from his house. Through doing this, he earned enough money to run his two-member household.

Every Thursday afternoon Irfan sold flowers at the shrine of Pir Inayat Shah, as Thursday was the day when visitors came there in droves. He would park himself by the formidable wooden gate of the shrine, and passing visitors would buy his flowers to hang over the grave of the Pir Sahib. They always sold like hot cakes. After exhausting his stock Irfan would join the pilgrims dancing dhamal in ecstasy or listening to qawwali. He also ate his evening meal in the lungar at the shrine, and most times he took rice or halwa home to his mother.

Irfan had been in fifth grade when his father married another woman without informing his wife, and moved to another city. His father had a small provision shop in the neighbourhood, and they had led a prosperous life. With his father gone, Irfan could not continue his studies. His maternal grandfather was a florist, and thus his mother knew how to make bracelets and garlands. So mother and son eked out a living by making and selling jasmine bracelet and rose garlands.

In his childhood, Irfan had no idea why and for whom the buyers bought the flowers. One day he went to the shrine of Pir Inayat with his mother and saw bunches of jasmine bracelets and rose garlands hanging over the white marble grave. For years he believed that this was the flowers’ only purpose.

When he was fifteen, his aunt bought a colour TV. Every evening he went to her house to watch primetime soap operas. One evening he saw a dashing young man presenting a jasmine blossom bracelet to a shy and pretty woman. The picture became imprinted on Irfan’s mind. Whenever he was making bracelets and garlands, the fragrance from the freshly-picked flowers would make him think of a girl who was even prettier than the one he had seen on TV. At the Chowgalia, his eyes would chase each passing girl. Every one of them was his beloved, his future wife. He was dying to give the gift of a bracelet to a potential lover.

Some days, the bracelets and garlands did not sell well. He brought the remainder to his house, wrapped in a moist rag, and asked his neighbour to put them in his refrigerator. The next day he sold the day-old flowers at a reduced price, along with fresh ones. Sometimes his neighbour refused to store them. ‘Sorry,’ the middle aged man would say. ‘Our refrigerator is groaning with food.’

That day, Irfan gave the unsold bracelets and garlands to the children in his neighbourhood. He made the noisy bands of kids stand in a circle, and threw the flowers into the air for them to catch. The strings of roses and jasmine shot up into the air like fireworks, and the children moved to catch them. Only a few succeeded. The successful children started sprinting home with their booty, but soon they were intercepted by the ones who’d been unable to grab anything. The laughing kids tried to snatch the strings of flowers from one another until the bracelet and garland strings snapped, after which they fought over the shower of flowers. When the dust had settled, the more diligent children sought the rose and jasmine petals that lay scattered in the dust.

One day, Irfan knocked at his neighbour’s door. The neighbour’s daughter Dilshad craned her neck around the curtain that hung at the door, her body concealed.

Irfan pushed the small, moist bundle towards her.

‘Could you put this in your refrigerator?’ he asked.

‘Sure,’ Dilshad replied.

She had been Irfan’s classmate when he was in fifth grade. He hadn’t seen her for years because she observed purdah now, and he was taken aback by her beauty.

‘By the way,’ he said. ‘Where’s your father?’

‘He’s down with fever,’ she said, before disappearing behind the curtain.

As he headed home, Irfan thought to himself, A few years back, she was a skinny girl whose face was covered in white patches, always buzzing with flies.

On the second day, Dilshad answered the door again. By the third day, Irfan had mustered up enough courage to hand her a small, moist paper packet. ‘This is for you.’

‘What is it?’ Dilshad lightly pressed the bundle.

‘Open it.’

She gingerly obeyed, and saw a pair of fresh jasmine bracelets. Irfan feared that she might hurl them away contemptuously, but she accepted the gift, blushing crimson.

On the fourth day, to Irfan’s disappointment, Dilshad’s father answered the door, having recovered from his fever.

The lovers managed to rendezvous on the roof.

One evening, Irfan’s mother caught them swapping gifts. She went to Dilshad’s mother to beg for the girl’s hand in marriage to her son, but Dilshad’s family turned down the proposal on the grounds that their families were adherents of different sects, and that their daughter was educated while Irfan was not.

The next morning, when Irfan was making bracelets and garlands, he felt like the flowers were burning his hands. Their fragrance made him sick. He hung the bracelets and garlands on his arm and limped out of the house. They felt like small snakes wrapped around his arm, and he wanted to throw them away. He did not go to his usual place; instead he roamed aimlessly in the city until he feared that his legs would buckle underneath him. It was afternoon when he wandered into a park. He plunked the bundle of flowers on the unkempt lawn as if they were a bag of trash, and lay down under a sprawling pipal tree. He had not sold a single bracelet or garland. His belly growled from hunger and his pocket was empty. With a weak smile, he said to himself, The unsold flowers are of no use. You can’t eat them. It is better to sell bananas, melons, and apples. If they don’t sell, at least you can eat them.

A young couple approached Irfan. The man shyly asked to buy a pair of jasmine bracelets, but the florist shook his head morosely. The man gave his girlfriend a silly, embarrassed smile. The couple had only gone a few paces when Irfan hurled the bracelets and garlands into the air, screaming madly. The flowers flew up like a swarm of red and white butterflies. Some bracelets and garlands got caught on the branches of the pipal tree while the remainder tumbled to the ground. Irfan collected the remainder and thundered towards the park exit. He tossed the tangled bracelets and garlands into the open sewer that passed on the other side of the park. The dark, filthy water carried the flowers away in the company of leaves, plastic shoppers, banana peels, and diapers. For a while Irfan walked along the sewer, and got a grim sense of satisfaction by observing the flowers’ miserable fate.

A year passed.

Dilshad got a job as a nurse at the teaching hospital.

On the 8^th of Muharram, Irfan’s wares sold like hotcakes. This was because the Sunnis bought flowers for the graves of their loved ones, while the Shiites bought them to decorate the rozas they made in honour of their Imams. The florist stood at his usual spot. Today he had brought three times as many flowers as usual, and had sold them all except for three garlands and a pair of bracelets. His side pocket was bulging with one rupee bills, and he was jubilant.

Suddenly, out of nowhere there appeared two swarms of angry men chanting slogans against each other’s sects. Brandishing flags, bludgeons, and guns, they charged at one another. There was a brief scuffle before the firing started—pa-taka-pa-taka. The shopkeepers pulled down their shutters and raced away from the trouble. Customers and passers-by fled the scene like terrified herds of sheep. The shopkeeper closest to Irfan pulled his shutter down, locking it from the inside. Then, he opened the lock and lifted the shutter just enough to tell Irfan to duck into his shop, but the florist was already bolting in the direction of home.

Sirens wailing, police vans appeared on the scene. Some rioters had absconded, and others lay dead. Sunnis and Shiites alike were collecting their dead. The air was thick with the stench of gunpowder and teargas fumes. The road had been cleared of bodies, and small pools of blood shone in the scarlet of the setting sun. Only one corpse lay unclaimed. It was Irfan the florist’s, his right hand still clutching his bracelets and garlands. A stray bullet had pierced his chest. A passer-by uncoiled his white turban and spread it over him. Then, police offices hauled the flower vendor’s body into a dark blue van, and it was carted off to the city’s teaching hospital.

On duty in the emergency room were Dilshad, her husband Naimat, her middle-aged female colleague, and a newly-qualified doctor. A police officer pushed the stretcher towards them.

‘He was killed by a stray bullet in the sectarian violence. He sold flowers at the Chowgalia, the poor boy.’

The newly-qualified doctor lifted the white sheet away from Irfan’s and issued an order for the body to be prepared for post-mortem. Dilshad gasped in horror when she saw who it was. The doctor asked Naimat to follow him, and they disappeared into the post-mortem room to attend to other cases.

The senior nurse said to Dilshad, ‘Take the bracelets and garlands from his hands while I remove his shirt.’

But Dilshad didn’t move. Instead, she slumped down at the foot of the stretcher on which Irfan’s body lay. She tried to choke back tears but couldn’t stop them rolling down her cheeks.

The senior nurse placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Dilshad replied, gathering herself. ‘I was a bit dizzy, that’s all.’

The senior nurse brought her a glass of water.

Dilshad tried to remove the garlands and bracelets from Irfan’s tightly closed fist but his grip was too strong.

‘He won’t let go,’ she said to the senior nurse.

‘No big deal. Cut them with scissors.’

‘I can’t…’ Dilshad caressed the flowers, then brought a roll of surgical cotton and started wiping Irfan’s face.

‘Do you know him?’ the senior nurse asked.

‘Yes. His name was Irfan. He was my classmate and neighbour. He used to give me bracelets every day,’ Dilshad whispered to her colleague, who was cutting Irfan’s shirt over his chest. The senior nurse stopped and looked up. She had cut the shirt up to his navel.

Just then, the doctor stormed out of the post-mortem room, with Naimat at his heels.

‘Is he ready for the autopsy yet?’ the doctor snapped, glaring at them. ‘Why are you gossiping? Take off his shirt and the other things. Have him ready within the next minute.’ He hurried away, Naimat trying to keep up with him.

When the men had gone, the senior nurse turned to Dilshad, wanting to know more.

‘Well?’ she pressed.

Dilshad had managed to free the bracelets and garlands from Irfan’s grip.

‘Every evening he came to his roof and I came to mine. A yard-high wall separated our roofs. Every day he gave me a pair of jasmine bracelets.’

Her fingers were unconsciously moving the jasmine flowers as if they were the beads of a rosary. The edges of the petals of the wilted flowers had yellowed. ‘He was so cute and…and he always smelled of roses and jasmine. We were so madly in love… Once, we even planned to run away.’ Dilshad tried to stifle a tearful smile. ‘A year ago he sent his mother to my house to ask for my hand, but my father blew his top, saying It’s an impossibility. He is not from our sect. I will not tie my educated daughter to an uneducated man. I was crestfallen for months. After some time I started working at this hospital, and then one day I met Naimat, my husband.’

‘Yes I know.’

Dilshad couldn’t bear the sight of Irfan’s body anymore.

She asked her colleague to carry on without her. Then, barely suppressing her sobs, she placed the rose garlands on the florist’s chest, stashed the jasmine bracelets in her purse, and hurried out of the emergency room.

~

REVIEW: The Euphoria of Violence and The Absurdity of Heroism in Ai Wei’s ‘The Road Home’ (Aiden Heung)

SEPTEMBER 30th, 2019

Ai Wei (Author), Alice Xin Liu (Translator, Chinese to English ) , The Road Home, Penguin Random House/Penguin Books, 2019, 81 pages

Violence, by definition, is the intentional use of force against oneself or others to inflict injury, death or trauma. Despite being widely reprimanded and censured, more often than not, the use of violence is justified, or even celebrated once it is labeled as nationalism. The mistaking of violence for glory is like a ghost that can never be exorcised, and is the basis of countless tragedies. It is therefore a writer’s responsibility to reflect on these tragedies, and ask why they occurred, even if he knows there won’t be any answers. As for readers, it is up to us not to forget.

That is exactly what Ai Wei does in his novel, The Road Home. One of the most lauded authors of the 1960s generation, he writes about the insignificance of a life entangled in a hostile social environment, eulogizing on the greatness and tenacity of human nature by trying to understand our raison d’être. He cares about those who find themselves “under the wheels of creakily-forward-moving history”.

The story takes place around the time of the China-Soviet border conflict, several years after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. An obsession with violence already permeates the small village where the main protagonist Jiefang, a teenage boy, lives. In school, teachers show students the different modes of Soviet weapons and teach a military drill game to expose and catch “enemy commanders”. Jiefang often confronts his nemesis Strongbull, and their typical way of solving problems is a fist fight.

In the village, people spy and tell on each other, and torture the children of “four sinister elements, or people considered inimical to the new regime”. One day, when the children discover a trench full of bullets, joy “spreads like wildfire” in the village. Jiefang takes an active part in finding and hoarding them.

Trouble comes when Jiefang’s father is reported as a counter-revolutionary for painting a picture of the war hero Dong Cuirun bombing a bunker beneath a portrait of Chairman Mao. To atone for his father’s “crime” and redeem himself as a son of a counter-revolutionary, he has to become a true hero; a scarred soldier in the war. Jiefang makes use of the gun-powder inside a bomb he accidentally finds, and thus embarks on a “heroic” journey.

 The story centers on conflict: between Jiefang and Strongbull, between Jiefang’s father and the Revolutionaries, and between “politically correct” people and counter-revolutionaries. In any conflict there must be a winner or a hero.

Violence permeates the air. “Jiefang thinks the smell of gunpowder is the best smell in the whole world, all of the pores of his body open up after he smells gun powder and his whole being is relaxed”. It is every boy’s dream to become a hero and be received with “ drums and gongs”. However, in the end, the euphoria of violence leads only to fear and insecurity; Jiefang constantly escapes into the shells of the bomb for solace.

The story is full of metaphors. The smell of gun powder and the squirrels are particularly interesting, reflecting the antithesis of themes, as if the author were offering his own idea of redemption.

The setting is simple, logical, and almost true to history, with a touch of dramatic exaggeration that lifts the story to a higher level of tragicomedy. It leads us to ponder the uselessness of human endeavor, and the futility of being better or different in an absurd society, especially when this endeavor is tarnished from the very beginning by illusions.

Praise must also be given to Ai Wei’s dispassionate approach to the story. He tells but does not judge or suggest. He is the kind of writer who toys with the shadow of death by using the idea of a blade instead of blood.

Alice Xin Liu’s translation perfectly conveys the details and the mood of the text itself, as many historical facts are made easily approachable through her words. This is not an easy task for a novel with a strong connection with China’s tumultuous past.

If the purpose of this story is to “commemorate the past and enlighten the future”,  Ai Wei certainly delivers. Half a century later, we now more than ever need to be reminded of the dire consequences of conflating violence with heroism.

Aiden Heung is a prize-winning poet born and raised on the edge of Tibetan Plateau. He holds an MA in literature from Tongji University in Shanghai, the city he calls home. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous online and offline magazines including Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Literary Shanghai, Proverse Anthology, The Shanghai Literary Review, New English Review, The Bangalore Review, Esthetic Apostle, Mekong Review, among many other places.He can be found on twitter @AidenHeung or www.aiden-heung.com

~

Alicia Liu – “You, a Cactus Planter”

SEPTEMBER 23rd, 2019

You say you’ve never liked flowers, but the truth is, you simply can’t bear to see them wilt. Perhaps it’s because they remind you that one day, you’ll wilt too. So you prefer cacti, or maybe an aloe vera. They’re low-maintenance. Shrivel-proof: if you forget to water them for a week or two they’ll gladly resuscitate. They’re not as beautiful so when they finally die, your soft heart won’t feel a thing.

On Sundays, you tag along with whoever of your friends happens to be going to the Flower Market. Casually chatting as you walk along aisles of peonies and pansies, primroses and hyacinths, no one has to know that you won’t ever make a purchase. Just watching is enough. It gets a little hard somedays when the light is just right and the petals so soft and dewy and you watch your friends debating how much sugar to mix into the water as they load up flowers in their car.

Fools! They’re wasting time and money on something that’ll be in the compost bin after two weeks. Three if they’re lucky.

But one day, Oh! What’s this!

Petrified, you stand in the aisles of the flower market. Your friends tugs you along, but an invisible hammer has pounded nails through the soft flesh of your feet, deep into the ground.

Flowers aren’t supposed to be this beautiful.

Your world slides off the edge. Forget wasting money, you want to slice bits off your heart and bury it in the soil; this is a flower worth wilting for.

“Sorry, honey. That one’s been paid for already. Can I interest you in some roses? Freshly picked this morning!”

But you can’t tear your eyes off the flower, even as that smiley-faced bastard comes and places the flower on a cart bursting full of two hundred other blossoms and wheels it all away.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

You go home, telling yourself you never saw that flower. As you water a cactus, the familiar emptiness reaches unbearable heights. So you slam your hand down on a cactus and it bursts. Doesn’t matter. Just a cactus.  You throw the pieces outside the window, but those spines remain lodged in the tips of your finger, burrowed into the palm of your hand.

There they are now still, festering, drawing pus.

There they will be, forever reminding you of their existence, of the existence of the flower that you’ll never see again, any time you tenderly extend your fingers to feel, anytime you feebly attempt to hold anything close.

~

Habib Mohana – an extract from ‘The Village Cafe’

AUGUST 12th, 2019

Habib Mohana was born in 1969 in Daraban Kalan, a town in the district of Dera Imsail Khan, Pakistan. He is an assistant professor of English at Government Degree College No 3, D. I. Khan. He writes fiction in English, Urdu, and Saraiki (his mother tongue). He has four books under his belt, one in Urdu and three in Saraiki. His Saraiki novel forms part of the syllabus for the MA in Saraiki at Zikria University Multan. His short stories in English have appeared in literary journals in India and Canada. In 2010 and 2014, his Saraiki books won the Khawaja Ghulam Farid Award from the Pakistan Academy of Letters. His book of short stories in Urdu, titled Adhori Neend, won the Abaseen award from the Government of KPK. This is the opening chapter of his novell, The Village Café, for which he is seeking a publisher.

The Village Café

I

The year was 1942. In  Daraban—a flourishing village on the drab and dusty Damaan plains—there lived an eight-year-old boy named Molu. His father had perished in a smallpox epidemic, and his elder brother Dadu worked in Musa Zai, in the house of a feudal lord. Dadu’s employer paid him in wheat. He gave him four gunnysacks per annum. This was enough for them and their one-horned nanny goat, but wheat alone could not keep the family afloat.

Dadu visited his family every other Friday, and brought gifts of the fruit that grew in his boss’s orchard.

For a few weeks Molu grazed his neighbours’ cows to eke out a decent living, but the work proved too hard for him and soon his mother made him stop.

One day, Molu’s mother—whose name was Bakhtawir—said to her neighbour, ‘We are living in desperate circumstances. Find Molu some work. He needs some money. We do, too. His father’s death has left us penniless.’

The next day, the neighbour took Molu by the hand and set off for bazar. Molu’s brindled dog tagged along with them. He yelled at it to go away, and it turned homewards. But after a while it came back, determined to follow its owner. Young Molu, with his wheat-coloured skin and pencil-thin body, was thrilled; he had only been to the bazaar a few times before. His callused feet were shoeless, and his faded indigo shirt did not go with his patched pyjamas. The lower part of the front panel of his oversize shirt had virtually turned into a tube for want of ironing.

The early summer sun shone brightly in the pale sky.

Their short journey ended at a café that sold tea and homemade doughnuts. The neighbour was an acquaintance of Ramzi, the café man. He introduced the boy, ‘This is Molu, an orphan. He has a mother and a little sister to support. I have known them forever. They’ve fallen on hard times. Can you take him on as an all-purpose boy? Pay him whatever you consider reasonable.’

‘What did he do before coming here?’

‘He grazed cows.’

‘You’ve brought me a jungly guy… Okay. I’ll take him on. I’ll give him three rupees a month. I’ll also give him tea, lunch, and one penny per day as pocket money.’

‘Alright. Can he start work today?’

‘Yes. Why not?’

The café man brought them tea in glazed teacups positioned in saucers. The neighbour started drinking, but it was too hot for Molu. To cool the liquid, he poured it into the saucer and blew on it. He slurped it, still standing. His belly stuck out, his nose was running, and his breath was whistling, but he savoured every sip. It was worlds away from the hot brown liquid he had at home. For the first time in his life he was drinking tea made with sugar and not with gur. The café’s teacups were stylish too. They had fine-looking flowers painted on them, unlike the crude clay cups he used at home, which were made by the village potters. In those unglazed cups his mother’s cloudy tea took the hue of floodwater.

His neighbour gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

‘Molu, I’m going,’ he said. ‘Ramzi is an old friend of mine. He’ll treat you like his son. Work hard, and never give him a chance to complain.’

Molu glanced up at his neighbour, feeling as if he’d been sold off to the café man. The neighbour said his goodbyes and left. Molu’s gaze lingered on him until he was swallowed by the crowd of pedestrians. He wanted to run and lock his arms around his neighbours’ legs, but he stayed where he was.

The café was a long mud room with low ceilings. The inside walls were spattered with streaks of sputum and naswar—moist powdered tobacco snuff that was stuffed under the lower lip or inside the cheek. The café’s double-leaf door was slightly higher than Molu. To enter, you had to bend low. Half a dozen twine cots lined the walls, and between them stood a long low mud platform, which acted as a table for cups, caps, and turbans.

Rolling his sleeves up Molu approached the table, on which lay a batch of dirty teacups quilted in houseflies. When his shadow fell on the table, a dark cloud swirled into the air. He had never washed cups in his life, but luckily it didn’t require much skill.

He grabbed a teacup by the handle, plunged it into in the bucket of murky water, and whirled it around. When he fished it out, it was as clean and spotless as a peeled egg. He didn’t feel the need to scrub the cups. He had finished. Touching water was so relaxing. When the cups were clean, he flipped them over and arrayed them in lines on the moss-encrusted table. First he arranged them colour-wise, and then shape-wise. He upturned the saucers on the teacups, but shook his head and changed his mind. Finally, he stacked the saucers in piles of five. He made to give the cups yet another dunk, but Ramzi stopped him. ‘Give it a rest. You’ll rub the paint off them.’

Molu dried his hands on his shirt. He hated sitting idle, so he put some logs on the fire, causing the flames to rise and roar.

‘Take them off!’ Ramzi bellowed. ‘We don’t need a fire. We don’t have any customers.’

Molu planted himself on a string bed, his feet bicycling in the air. Then he remembered the stone marbles in his pocket. He had carved them when he went to the scrublands to graze cattle. He sat down in a corner of the café and played with them, all by himself.

Across the room, Ramzi reclined in his rustic straw-bottomed chair, plucking nose hair with a pair of tarnished tweezers. Tears were streaming down his cheek, and he was depositing the nasal hairs on his trousered knee, leaving it strangely furred.

Molu’s dog, which had been hanging around outside for a while, sneaked into the café. To dissociate himself from it, Molu turned away. When he hissed at his pet in muffled tones, it only nuzzled him and licked his feet. He pushed it with his toe but it rolled over onto its back, showing its bald belly and private parts.

Ramzi rose from his seat and strode over to the fireplace, edging an ember out of the fireplace with a stick as if he were playing ping-pong. Then, he strode back to his seat and dumped the ember into the tobacco-filled bowl of his hubble-bubble pipe. His eyes fell on the dog, and he yelled at it. This emboldened Molu. He hurled a clod of earth at the creature. It bolted but waited outside the café, wagging its tail in eager anticipation. When Ramzi went to relieve himself in the bushes behind the building, Molu slung his canine companion a juicy blob of old tea leaves. It lapped them up like ice cream.

Ramzi’s son brought lunch in a double-decker tiffin container. Ramzi skimmed the cream off the milk, put it on a plate, and covered it with coarse sugar. They sat down at the mud table and dug into the sweetened cream, paper-thin chapattis, roasted okra, onions rings, and chutney. For Molu it was the feast of his life.

Ramzi’s son was taking the lunch things home when he noticed a dog hanging around outside the café. The boy picked up a discarded date-frond twine from the street, lassoed the dog and pulled, but the creature wouldn’t go with him. It shot an anxious look at Molu. Not wanting to reveal that the dog belonged to him, Molu didn’t do anything to help. It yelped and wriggled to free itself, but to no avail. Molu watched helplessly as the other boy dragged the struggling dog homewards. It left a long trail in the brown yielding dust.

After a while, the tired creature made its way back to the café, trailing its makeshift leash. It was a sorry sight, waiting outside the café for its master to finish work.

Ramzi lounged in his chair while Molu worked like a robot. He washed cups, took tea to the customers, and brought money to his boss, which he dropped into the small wooden cashbox. Curious, Molu wondered what sort of things the grimy cashbox contained. Many a time he was tempted to sneak a peek, but managed to resist. At last, he had a stroke of luck. As he was handing money to Ramzi, he got a tantalizing glimpse at the contents of the cashbox. It held pigeonholes, tiny shelves, and a murky underground store. It was cluttered with coins of various colours and sizes, as well as paper money. It also held cowry shells, a pair of tweezers, a rosary crafted from date seeds, a phial of perfume, and a fine-toothed wooden comb.

Towards the end of the day, Molu’s shirt was smudged with tea stains. His feet were wet and muddy and his toes squelched. He was worn-out but glad. In a single day he had seen and experienced many new and enthralling things. And so much cash had passed through his scrawny little fingers.

Before he closed the shop, Ramzi opened the moneybox to count the day’s takings, which mostly consisted of coins. As he went through the cash-counting ritual, his piggy eyes sparkled. After counting it, he cascaded the jingly palmful of loose change into the side pocket of his kurta so it bulged like a nanny goat’s udder.

Molu went home and told his mother and grandmother about all the marvellous things he had witnessed at the café. They listened with rapt attention, as if he had arrived from another planet. They were living in the same village, so how come they were unaware of these astonishing things?

*

In the café, Ramzi kept all edible items under lock and key except for moist brown sugar, which he stored in a lidless bin. When he went to relieve himself, Molu would shovel sugar into his mouth and chew it quickly, gulping water to wash it down. In order to conceal his theft, he assumed an expression of innocence.

One sweltering noon, his boss had gone for a toilet break, and Molu decided to experiment. He scooped some sugar into a tumbler, added water, and stirred it nervously. His heart was going a mile a minute. The sugar wasn’t dissolving properly, and he was running short of time. He swallowed the saccharine mixture in three big gulps, wiped his mouth on his threadbare sleeve, and sat the tumbler on the mud table. To avert suspicion, he busied himself scrubbing a pot with crushed charcoal and a gourd sponge.

Ramzi returned, holding the tasselled ends of a knitted drawstring in his clenched teeth. Inside his loose trousers his left hand was busy catching a drop of urine on a clod of earth as was the custom. When he was satisfied that the dripping had stopped, he chucked the urine-soaked clod away, tied the string of his trousers, and picked up the tumbler Molu had just used. As he shuffled towards the earthenware vat to wash his hands, he realised that the tumbler was sticky. He peered into it, and there it was: a small, wet heap of sugar. He scooped it up with his forefinger and licked it tentatively. Then he tugged Molu’s raven hair harshly. ‘You stole my sugar? You drank it? Does sugar grow in the goddamn fields of Daraban?’

‘I didn’t steal it.’

‘Then how on earth did it get into this tumbler?’

Molu was promptly fired. After two days, his neighbour went to Ramzi, apologized on the boy’s behalf, and persuaded him to reconsider.

*

During spare moments Molu sat in front of the café and played with his stone marbles. Every now and again he was joined by Ramzi’s son, and they would play short games in the middle of the bazaar. Once, Molu screwed a hexagonal iron nut onto a little stick, and taught his friend how to shape marbles by striking a small piece of stone with this improvised hammer.

~

Lillian Zhou – ‘Once More Back Home’

JULY 8th, 2019

Lillian (Quan) Zhou is a student at Beijing No. 4 High School. She began learning English at a young age, and has a passion for prose.

Once More Back Home

I spent nine years – my childhood years – with my grandmother in an old Chinese house in the countryside. I developed a deep-seated aversion to caterpillars from their ubiquitous presence, and had to wear long-sleeved shirts in the garden, since my grandmother hated using pesticides on her organic herbs and naturally nourished sakura trees. But apart from that, my grandma’s house and the countryside became my idea of heaven. From then on, I never thought there was any place in the world like that tranquil haven. Those years and my childhood were exquisite. My memory is filled with tender chartreuse springs, fiery cerulean summers, autumns with a mixture of amber and crimson hues, and frosted winters with a pleasant smell of home-made cherry pie. I have since become a city dweller, but sometimes there are days when the restlessness of urban traffic, the gnaw of loneliness, and the incessant crowds make me wish for the peace of the countryside. Two months ago, this feeling grew so strong that I bought myself a long-sleeved shirt and returned to my grandmother’s house for a week’s rest away from the urban heat, planning to revisit my old haunts.

On the journey back to that familiar landscape, I began to wonder what it would be like. I wondered how time would have marred this unique and almost sacred spot — the blossoms and the forests, the woods that the sun set into, the quaint house and yard in front of it. It’s strange how vividly you can recall a usually blurred piece of memory like that, once you allow your mind to return into the groove that led back to that countryside, back home. You recall one scene, and it suddenly immerses you into another one. I guess what I remembered most clearly were the cozy middays, when the sun was casting its leisurely heat and light; I remembered how Grandma’s cherry pie smelled of the blossoms it once took the shape of, and of the mellow wheat whose scent permeates through the field a mile away from the house.

My memories are just as lively as the actuality: again, I was exposed to that pleasantly warm sunshine as my senses captured a wonderful and familiar mixture of smells. As I settled into the house (the dusting kept me busy for a while) and the kind of tranquility I had known, I could tell that it was going to be pretty much the same as it had been before — I knew it, smearing oil on the fissured wooden pillars, sleeping until middays on weekends, and inhaling the satisfyingly blended aromas of the field and home-made pastries from the neighborhood. I began to sustain the illusion that no time has passed, and thus that I was the nine-year-old me. I would be in the middle of a simple act – wandering in the field of mingled green and yellow, or deliberating over whether to have salmon and beef for lunch – and suddenly it would not be me but a carefree child who was making these gestures, saying these words. It was not an entirely new feeling, but it grew much stronger and more compelling during this visit, after six years away. I seemed to be living backwards through time.

On the second day, I went to the sakura forest, my weariness having ebbed after the first day’s midday nap. A faint but familiar sense of melancholy fell upon me as I trod lightly on the moist earth, which was covered in a pale-pink veil woven from fallen petals. An early, rose-toned light shed on the maroon twigs. I saw a butterfly alight on one of them after hovering a few inches above me. It was the arrival of this creature that convinced me beyond any doubt that everything was as it always had been. The years were only a mirage; there had been no years. The flowers were just the same, blooming fully under beams of golden sunshine, petals drifting to the ground as a breeze ruffled the leaves. The sun was the sun from six years ago, coloring the trees with the same gradation of muted shades that move from pink to rose to scarlet and to a glistening gold. I stared silently at the tip of the twig, at the butterfly that had seemingly traveled six years to approach me. I deliberately made the branch quiver, dislodging the butterfly. It flitted five inches away, paused, flitted five inches back, and came to rest again on another twig a little farther above. There had been no years between this butterfly and the other one — the one that was part of my memory.

The countryside, the summertime, the indelible pattern of life, the fade-proof woods, the ineffaceable house, the meadow of four-leaf clovers and daisies forever and ever, summer without end; this was the life away from the coiled urban mess. It seemed to me, as I remembered all this, that those times had been infinitely precious and worth saving. There had been jollity, calm, and goodness.

The ride to shuttle back and forth through the field had been big business in itself: on the bumpy paths my bike tires crunched the gravel, sometimes with a hollow rush of wind generated by a thrilled acceleration. I would catch the first glimpse of smiling neighbors from the other cottages, and at the end of the last long street, the first view of Grandma’s house, reaping the assuring feeling of home after an exhausting day. Sometimes, in a hurry, I would cross the field, prickly crops making the skin around my ankles itch, and speed up to form a blurred profile when an angry farmer tried to recognize the mischievous saboteur. Traveling is far less exciting nowadays. You get into your car and let GPS choose one of the flattest cement roads. You intentionally seek a smile from a neighbor through the car window. In ten minutes, the trip through the field would be over with no fuss. No itchy, thrilling, wonderful fuss.

Happiness and goodness and calm . The only thing that was wrong now, really, was the sound – an unfamiliar nervous sound from the shopping mall . This was the note that jarred, the one thing that would sometimes break the illusion and set the years moving. Among the extensive stretch of farmlands and scattered cottages, the mall had previously been a market – the only place where crowds had gathered. In the old days, it had been busy in a cordial way. The noise of hawkers bargaining with buyers was a comfort, an ingredient of countryside gusto. The fun part about wandering through the market was the conversations. There were polite reciprocations and rowdy squabbles. Some were appraisals of summer clothing between housewives, and some were vendors’ concessions to a ten cent discount, but they all cast a comforting and intriguing sound across the landscape. Plastic bags rustled and swished, and footsteps pattered and pattered. That was a heartening sound as well. But now, the crowded market had been transformed into a modern shopping mall. The sounds of peddlers selling home-grown vegetables and craftsmen showing off their wares were overwhelmed by the stiffly sweet sound of welcome from the trained salesgirls. After years of faking this affected, urban style, I loathed its bourgeois overtones. Other teenage girls loved the mall, and coveted the outfits on display. They soon learned the trick of befriending the salesgirls, who would let them wear expensive skin-tight sundresses for a day. Watching them, I remembered the things you could do in the old crowded market, where a pleasant chat could be everything. I remembered how you could grow attached to a place if you got really close to the heart of it. Old-style markets in those days didn’t attract stylish young consumers. They sold basic necessities and fresh food, not high-end commodities associated with fads and fashions. However, frequent visitors to the market were captivated its charms. You could have frequent interactions with neighboring cottagers, or with tired travelers who always carried a heap of weirdly compelling stories in their dusty backpacks. Sometimes you would be lucky enough to spot a workshop selling the sort of fine, hand-made gadgets that my grandmother loved. In the early morning the market was always quiet. Swept by a refreshing breeze , it was difficult not to slow down and stop worrying about trivial things.

Now, listening to the canned pop music in the shopping mall, for a moment I missed the market terribly – the hawkers, the shoppers, the backpackers and its crowded serenity. It gave me a menacing feeling.

I had a good week in the countryside. The flowers smelled sweet and the sun shone endlessly, day after day. When I grew tired at night, I would lie down in the heat of the little bedroom after a long hot day. The breeze would stir almost imperceptibly outside, the smell of the field and swamp drifting in through the open windows. Sleep would come easily, and in the morning a mockingbird would be on the windowsill, tapping out his morning routine. Lying in bed until midday, I sorted through my memories— the pink bicycle with a wicker front basket woven by my grandmother, and how proudly I rode it in front of other girls. The older boys playing their guitars and the girls watching them as we sat around a bonfire, and how sweet the music was across the field under shining moonlight. What it had felt like to ride a bright pink bike and let the breeze waft the faint smell of my perfume to the boys. After lunch I would quietly explore the streams running by the fields, where groups of tadpoles quickly spread out in all directions when they detected minor man-made tremors. I wanted to see a turtle and pretend it was the one that my grandma let go years ago, after a boy gave it to me as a gift. Everywhere I went I had trouble telling whether those years had genuinely passed, or whether I was still the unworldly girl who spent hours waiting for a turtle.

One afternoon while I was watering the cherry trees a postman arrived. It was like the revival of an old tradition that I had seen long ago with childish delight. My first instinct was to run to the gate and greet the smiling middle-aged man. This was a daily necessity, and is still a daily necessity. The whole thing was so familiar: the first feeling of curiosity for news, the excitement to hear fresh countryside anecdotes, and the one moment among all tranquilities that is close to drama. I heard him stuffing newspapers and mail through the crack of the door.

When I opened the gate the postman couldn’t hide his astonishment at encountering a girl in an old abandoned house. A letter in his right hand, he stood still for five full seconds. Then he greeted me in a warm, professional tone, and I took the mail from him. Wincing slightly, I watched his figure disappear over the horizon, and suddenly my heart began to ache. It ached from the sudden collapse of my illusion – the sudden recollection of my grandmother’s death six years before.

~

Habib Mohana – ‘The Village Court’

JULY 1st, 2019

Habib Mohana was born in 1969 in Daraban Kalan, a town in the district of Dera Imsail Khan, Pakistan. He is an assistant professor of English at Government Degree College No 3, D. I. Khan. He writes fiction in English, Urdu, and Saraiki (his mother tongue). He has four books under his belt, one in Urdu and three in Saraiki. His Saraiki novel forms part of the syllabus for the MA in Saraiki at Zikria University Multan. His short stories in English have appeared in literary journals in India and Canada. In 2010 and 2014, his Saraiki books won the Khawaja Ghulam Farid Award from the Pakistan Academy of Letters. His book of short stories in Urdu, titled Adhori Neend, won the Abaseen award from the Government of KPK. He is currently seeking a publisher for his novel The Village Café.

            The Village Court

Ikram sold cosmetics and items for women and children. He travelled on his brakeless Sohrab bicycle through the scattered villages on Damaan, peddling his wares. The itinerant hawker was a well-known figure in the village of Kot Lalu. Upon his arrival into the village he would blow his rusty whistle beguilingly, and women, girls, and children would gravitate towards him like rats of Hamelin. His weathered bicycle groaned under his wares. Only its saddle and pedals were visible. The rest of the bicycle was buried under cartons, baskets, and bundles that housed lipsticks, creams, perfumes, hairclips, face powders, glass bangles, fake jewelry, looking glasses, toys, and toffees. Only Ikram had the knack of riding or wheeling a bicycle so chaotically laden with goods.

The chatty hawker was a cheerful, decent man. He would exchange gossip and news with his female customers, cracking jokes with them and asking them about their kids and their lives. He ran tabs for ladies who were strapped for cash. Sometimes the women paid him in eggs, wheat, or butter oil. If Ikram was thirsty he asked the women for water, and if he was hungry he asked them for bread. His female customers obliged graciously.

Seldom did the village men buy anything from the hawker. They held a very low opinion of him. In their view, he was a crafty and clever creature who made his living by preying upon the imaginations of ignorant village women, and tricking them into buying his substandard trinkets. The village men considered Ikram effeminate and weak, as he shunned manly professions like farming or herding or wood-chopping. Some men would shoo him away from their doors so that he wouldn’t be able to entice their women and children into buying his third-rate stuff. But the women folk always held him in high esteem. For them he was a huge source of modern trends in fashion and news from the outside world. He gave the village women useful beauty tips and offered them advice about their children’s health. He had once lived and worked in Karachi, and he told the women breathtaking stories of the city with its sky-hugging buildings, and the fashionable ladies that walk in high heels in busy markets. For the illiterate village housewives whose horizons were limited, the hawker was an entertainer, educator, and trendsetter.

His arrival into the village was always keenly awaited, especially before festive occasions like Big and Small Eid.

Although the forty-year-old wheat-colored hawker hailed from a village, his clothes were relatively well-stitched and cleaner than the clothes of other villagers. His lustrous eyes were always lined with kohl; his well-oiled, raven hair was done in the style of film actors’, and his clothes exuded a heady fragrance of attar. He was a short man, and inwardly he seemed painfully aware of it, but God had compensated him in another way—he was blessed with a long aristocratic nose. He had been married for ten years and had sired four children.

It was whispered among the womenfolk of Kot Lalu that the hawker was having an affair with the potter’s wife who had borne three children. They said that Ikram spent more time at his beloved’s door, and gave her cosmetics and knick-knacks either for free or at an insanely low price.

Mid-June’s punishing sun was in the middle of the sky and the village streets lay deserted. The villagers had confined themselves to their homes or thatched sheds that were erected in the orchards. A farmer, who had searched every nook and cranny of the village for his lost donkey, found himself at the village graveyard. The fenceless cemetery sprawled over a huge area. He was scanning it for his lost donkey when he saw a reflection of something from a clump of trees. Goaded by curiosity, the farmer pushed on through the tangle of vegetation and young acacias towards the source of the reflection. It was coming from a looking glass that was suspended from the handlebar of the hawker’s Sohrab bicycle, which was propped up against a gnarly tree in the middle of the graveyard. Then he heard whispering from a nearby clump of toothbrush trees. He tiptoed to the clump, parted the lacy branches, and saw the hawker and the potter’s wife engaged in an amorous tête-à-tête.

The peeping Tom hurried to his friends who were playing cards under the thatched shed in the village community centre. He told them what he had witnessed in the cemetery. A posse of ten men rushed to the scene and crept into the clump of toothbrush trees, catching the besotted pair in the act. Ikram and his lover scrambled to their feet and made a dash towards the exit point, but the glowering men had blocked all routes of escape. Gibbering like a monkey, the hawker went down on bended knees and beseeched the men to forgive him. Weeping, the woman threw her head scarf at the men’s feet and begged them to let her go, but they wouldn’t listen to their pleas.

‘Have you no respect for the deceased? Weren’t you ashamed for the dead who are buried here? You call yourself Muslim? Even a Kafir would not dare to do such a filthy thing in the graveyard.’ The first villager gave the hawker a stinging clout across the face.

‘Blacken their faces with soot, seat them on a donkey, and give them a tour of the village,’ the second man screamed.

‘Hang garlands of old broken shoes around their sinful necks,’ the third man thundered.

‘Take the adulterous couple to the mullah. He shall decide it according to sharia.’ The fourth man stamped his foot.

The hawker’s mistress slumped to the ground and started writhing in the dust like a crushed bug. The men let her go, but captured her lover. First they thrashed him brutally, then tied his hands behind his back with his shoulder sheet and dragged him to the village community centre.

The news that the hawker and the potter’s wife were found in a compromising position spread through Kot Lalu like wildfire. The male villagers converged upon the community centre. The offender was tied to the leg of a charpoy. Tears were rolling down his cheeks; saliva was drooling from his mouth, and his hair was awry. Every newcomer gave him two or three spicy slaps in the face or hot kicks to his side. Some made shaming gestures at him, and others spat at him. One man brought a platter full of fresh cow dung and dumped it over the hawker’s head.

‘I have eaten crap! I have committed an awfully wicked thing. Please pardon me! I will never do it again. I will never set foot in this village again,’ the hawker begged the village chief.

‘You should have thought about it before. But lust rendered you blind. This is a village of respectable people. This is not a brothel.’ The old village chief lashed him with his crooked waking stick.

Later, the village headman sent for the potter, but he had gone to the neighbouring village to sell pots, pitchers, and spouted jugs. The news had hit the nearby villages. Some men got onto their bicycles and whooshed to Kot Lalu, anticipating some action. The news reached the farmers and goatherds, and they raced towards the village to witness the drama. The community centre heaved with men and boys. To get a better view of the proceedings, several men had climbed the roofs and walls of their houses.

More than five cooking disks were brought to the scene. Those who stood close to the hawker scraped soot from the lower side of the cooking disk with their fingers and then applied the dark powder to his face. He looked like a stage character of some morality play being punished for his sins. Some laughed at him and some hurled abuse. Then from nowhere appeared garlands made out of old, broken shoes. The shoe-garlands were put around the hawker’s neck. A boy was passing by with his donkey laden with fuel wood. The spectators pushed the load off the beast’s back and dragged it into the community centre. The ringleaders made the hawker ride the creature, and it was led out into the street followed by the shouting, clapping crowd. The hawker sat hunched on the donkey. The broken shoes hung from his neck like dried gourds. They yelled abuse at the rider. Some men beat the donkey while others beat the rider. Twice he was given a tour of the village. Afterwards he was brought back to the community centre in a pathetic condition.

The congregants offered opinions as to what sort of punishment Ikram deserved. Some said that the case should be reported to the police; some suggested that his throat be slit, while others maintained that his nose should be chopped off. After a while, the village court agreed upon the last punishment. Now the question was, who would cut off the hawker’s nose? The ringleaders sent for the barber but he had gone to a nearby village to perform circumcision on a child. Instead, they sent another man to the barber’s house to ask his wife to lend them a razor, but she replied that her husband had taken all his tools with him. The ringleaders looked at one another.

Rolling up his sleeves, a middle-aged goatherd stepped forward. He pulled out a small, tough knife from his pocket. The ringleaders pinioned the culprit, who bleated like a goat. Unhurriedly, the goatherd touched the hawker’s nose on each side. He thought for a while, and then positioned the shiny blade on the nasal bridge and pressed. In a flash, the nose had been sliced off neatly. The amputator held it, dripping with blood, between his thumb and forefinger and showed it to the crowd. The throng let out a thundering roar of moral triumph. The amateur surgeon placed the nose in an upright position on his callused left palm. It looked like a frog on the verge of taking a leap. He knocked it down with the tip of his bloody knife so it lay on its side. For some moments he examined the dismembered organ, and then threw it down on the ground as if it were a malignant growth. The spectators crowded around the nose. They expected it to jump, dance, and wriggle like the hacked-off tail of a lizard, but it showed no sign of life. The villagers looked a little disappointed. The nose lay on the ground motionless, like a small pear chopped in half. One villager tentatively kicked it with the toe of his shoe. Another hurled a stone at it, and yet another struck it with a stick. Then, a flight of stones, clods, sticks, and brickbats landed on the nose until it was buried under a heap of assorted missiles.

The onlookers had lost interest in the owner of the nose, who was screaming in excruciating pain. A small fountain of blood was bubbling from the place where once had stood a long, proud, aristocratic nose. It ran into the hawker’s mouth, spilling over his chin and then down his neck, painting his shirt crimson red.

The disoriented, noseless hawker lurched to his feet. He placed his shoulder sheet on the bleeding stump and stumbled towards the exit. No one stopped him leaving.

‘Where are you going?’ someone remarked. ‘Will you not take your snout with you? Gentlemen, give him back his nose. After all, it’s his property.’ Mad laughter erupted from the crowd.

‘No, we won’t do that,’ the village chief said. ‘We should feed it to the dogs.’

‘No –’ the amputator replied. ‘Even dogs wouldn’t eat the nose of an adulterer.’

~

Vaughn M. Watson – ‘The Brightest Light It Will Ever Know’

JUNE 24th, 2019

Vaughn M. Watson is a New York-based fiction and non-fiction writer who lived in China for two years. He has appeared on NPR and has work forthcoming in Tahoma Literary Review. He was the winner of the 2016 Winston-Salem Writer’s Flying South competition and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He is currently working on a collection of stories and essays, Payaos, and serving on the Newtown Literary editorial board.

The Brightest Light It Will Ever Know

They are beautiful at first, their wings adorned with symmetrical patterns. They are browns, golds, and reds, always dark and earthy colors that contrast the green of local flora and the blue Yunnan sky. Their wings are camouflaged in the red dirt roads that connect this town to the city. This does not matter; however, as more often than not one sees them in rooms, reflected on the cold stone floors or perched on walls painted in layers of beige. The moths hang from the walls patterned and colored, their wings spread flat against the wall, two-dimensional as paper.

They come in through the windows and always at night. Their entrances are made of glass and metal, painted a red, Martian rust. A section of it, one that can slide, is left open to let wet air into the room. They come in on their second or third attempts. As if propelled by winds, the moths enter the room and settle on a resting place. They move once or twice, shifting around as things do in an effort to prepare for a resting state. In the case of the moth, this state is called torpor, and if the moth survives the night, it may remain on the wall or the stone floor in that state for the daylight hours. Its resting state mirrors that of humans, but entomologists say they are more aware than humans are when sleeping. They are resting but aware, able to return to their nocturnal state at the slightest change in stimulus.

When night falls, a moth comes alive. It is decorated with colors of the earthy, dark shades of brown and black and brass. Its wings and the lines on them curl like brackets, perfectly even on both halves. It is on the western wall, the emptiest one. Of the four walls, this one is painted the best. Most of the it has been painted using the same shade of white, but there are patches that have been painted over in a slightly darker beige. The room smells of smoke.

The moth lands on one of these patches, near the upper left corner, as if able to discern this difference in color. Its wings flap twice and then rest flat, revealing their naked detail. Hanging from the ceiling’s center is a string and a makeshift light fixture. A light-emitting diode (LED) light bulb is screwed into the fixture. The light is off now, but the sun will set soon.

At night, the windows should be closed to prevent the moths from clamoring in to experience the siren of fluorescent light. The mountain nights get cold and after the sun disappears behind the clouds and myriad peaks, one begins to feel the effects of altitude. With the doors and windows closed, the room is a comfortable temperature, just slightly cooler than that of a room at sea level, because stone lacks insulating properties.

The light goes on and the bracket moth is aware of this. It is still in torpor, resting but conscious. It considers movement, its wings aflutter, but the moth’s interaction with the light is troubling. Instead of flying directly into the light, a moth to metaphorical flame, it begins a choreography.

Moths are positively phototactic. They are attracted to light, counterintuitive to their nocturnal nature. Entomologists theorize that they are so attracted because they use the moon, the brightest known light to them, as a compass. The invention of light, the use of fire and electricity, has confused them. The brightest lights have now become closer than ever before, and the moths have confounded these lights with the light of the moon. They approach the brightest lights, thinking they will carry them to safer places. It is their nature; it is their tragedy.

Now the moth is dancing, circling the brightest light it will ever know. After several rotations, the moth winds around the bulb with sickening speed, always getting closer and closer. It is pulled into the light it believes has guided it for most of its short life. It is pure instinct; it is their romance.

The moth is closing in on the light and beginning to touch it for the first time. It circles and touches, then it only touches, knocking into the light with all its might, the path to the heavens. It knocks and knocks, but then it knocks a final time and retreats to the wall. The moths in Yunnan are large and do not die so easily. Instead, it goes into shock, experiencing the singeing of its insect flesh for the first time. It rests, a brief torpor, then convulses, flying to each corner of the room, taking off as abruptly as it lands. The wings are still for seconds, resting on the stone floor. It convulses again, moving three-quarters of an inch at a time but somehow managing to fly.

When it is certain that the moth is dead, it is swept into a metal dustpan and left outside to rot. But for tonight, it will remain on the coldness of that uncovered and dusty section of the stone floor, not in torpor but in death.

The room is silent without the fluttering of its wings and its constant crashing into the furniture. It sounds empty and the light goes off. A fainter light goes on beneath the covers.

From the front window a sound can be heard. It is like human knocking. The room is quiet all except for that drumming. The moths are knocking against the doors and the windows. They are knocking with all their might.

~

Habib Mohana – ‘The Brutal Spring’

JUNE 17th, 2019

Habib Mohana was born in 1969 in Daraban Kalan, a town in the district of Dera Imsail Khan, Pakistan. He is an assistant professor of English at Government Degree College No 3, D. I. Khan. He writes fiction in English, Urdu, and Saraiki (his mother tongue). He has four books under his belt, one in Urdu and three in Saraiki. His Saraiki novel forms part of the syllabus for the MA in Saraiki at Zikria University Multan. His short stories in English have appeared in literary journals in India and Canada. In 2010 and 2014, his Saraiki books won the Khawaja Ghulam Farid Award from the Pakistan Academy of Letters. His book of short stories in Urdu, titled Adhori Neend, won the Abaseen award from the Government of KPK. He is currently seeking a publisher for his novel The Village Café.

The Brutal Spring

Back then, we lived in an adobe house in a village on the Damaan plains, and all our mud rooms were bird-friendly. In fact, they were more bird-friendly than human-friendly. Even after having been bolted or locked, the doors of the rooms were wide enough for winged creatures—swifts, swallows, house sparrows—and they could easily squeeze in and out. Then there were the holes that were punched near the ceilings for sun and air and smoke. Our straw-wood ceilings had enough gaps and spaces for the birds to build nests. The beaten earth floors of the rooms were always messy with nesting materials. Every morning my mother would sweep them away, grumbling, “Why don’t they build their nests in the village orchards?”

At our house, one small mud room was under my occupancy, where I would study or sit daydreaming. The ceiling of my room was hummocky with bulging nests of house sparrows, but they all lay deserted.

Then, one afternoon a lone female house sparrow flitted in. She looked at all the abandoned nests, chirped, frisked on the plate rack for a good while, and then flew away. I was expecting her to bring her mate in and show him her pick. I was jubilant that now my silent mud study would ring with the twittering of nesting sparrows. Towards the evening, she flew in and squatted in one of the best nests, all by herself. The single sparrow spent entire winter in my room. Every morning she would wake me up with her staccato chirping.

One afternoon, the sparrow hopped into the room, dragging her right wing and leaving a bloody trail in her wake. Her wing was badly wounded, certainly the doing of some impish urchins. She would fly for a few feet and then come tumbling down like a paper airplane. But still she gave me a tough time catching her. I cleaned and dressed her wound. I put her in a twig cage and filled the two little bowls with wheat grains and water. I did not release her until I was sure she would not be an easy meal for cats on the prowl.

Spring arrived. There was love in the air. For the birds it was time of spring dancing, but for me, the hectic exam season had just kicked off. The village orchards were a blaze of colours. Now and then, the fragrance of lemon blooms would waft in from the orchard belt, and I would think of freedom and friends. Away from the colours and fragrances, I sat besieged by bulky books.

Then one day my lady sparrow glided in, a dashing male in tow. She showed him around her property like an expert real estate agent. Her choosy mate was a little jumpy. He flew back, and the resident sparrow tailgated him, twittering incessantly as if she was saying, “Wait – I have something else to show to you.” A little before evening, she arrived back with her new boyfriend, who seemed to like her choice. They started living together, not bothering to get my blessing.

The birds would sit on the beam or on the wing of the ceiling fan, and mated right in front of me, excited calls streaming from their short beaks. But the pleasures of coupling also brought a basketful of responsibilities for my birds. To give their future chicks a comfortable bed, they flung themselves into collecting straw and husk for the nest, while I remained immersed in my books.

One morning, I woke up to the peep of newly-hatched chicks. The pair was busy ferrying tidbits to their new arrivals. Spring also brought the creaky ceiling fan back into action. Whirring over my head, the rickety fan sliced the air with its rusty blades. Their beaks wriggling with worms and flying low, the pair fed their demanding chicks with the feasts they found. They were fully aware of the squeaky fan, and had learnt to dodge its whirling wings. In one hour they made several manic trips, flying in and out until the gorged chicks fell silent with satisfaction.

One crisp morning, the male sparrow was returning with his pickings when he was suddenly sucked into the vortex churned up by the ceiling fan. He was hit like a cricket ball is hit for six. He cannoned into the whitewashed wall, imprinting it with a bloody abstract painting. Then he fell to the ground with a dull thud. A bouquet of green worms wriggled free from his unclamped beak. I made a dash for him, and took him in my palms. I had hardly located his warm wound when his beak opened and closed for the last time. I made a lunge towards the power point and pawed the fan off. The cursed thing groaned, then came to a standstill, its one blade flaunting shameless blood stains.

I was responsible for the death of the father sparrow. I was disgusted with myself.

With her partner gone, the mother sparrow girded her loins and raised her two chicks single-handedly.

I took some security measures. Firstly, I was extremely careful with the fan. Secondly, I bricked up the smoke holes so that the lone parent would not drift into the deadly droning blades. I wanted her to enter from the door and fly low get to her nest.

One day when I came back from delivering a paper, I stumbled upon a wriggling ball of tiny yellow ants. I took a closer look and found that it was a featherless sparrow chick that had tumbled down to the ground. It squirmed helplessly while the ravenous ants feasted on it. I picked it up, plucked at the predatory ants with my fingers, and blew them off. The chick’s tender, almost transparent body was riddled with multiple tiny wounds. A few ambitious ants had blazed a trail into its flimsy digestive system. Sensing danger, the ants stumbled out, their mouthparts gory from the bloody feast. The doomed chick yawned for the last time.

The mother bird was now left with one chick. After a couple of days, it grew into a fledgling. It would peek out of its straw home, surveying the weird world below. Their nest was positioned exactly over a huge chest that was filled with winter things. The distance between the nest and the chest was less than a yard. Often, the restive chick would flap down to the chest, scamper on it for a while, and then wing its way back to its dwelling.

One day when its mother was out, the chick landed on the chest. I offered it cracked wheat in a saucer. While it was chirping blithely and pecking at the food, a cat appeared from nowhere, pounced, and took off with the tiny bird. I scrambled after it, but it climbed onto the roof and tore away. I was angry at myself. After some time the mother sparrow flew in, her beak bristling with choice worms. I could not face her. She headed for her nest but found it silent and empty. She popped in and out several times, confounded. She called to her baby, but to no avail. She called and called and called. Her panic made me nauseous. I averted my gaze. She perched on the peg that supported my ironed college shirt. She pumped a slushy dropping over the stiff collar and flew back to her abode. She flapped out the room and then came back again. She made many restless trips back and forth, keening. That day I was utterly miserable. The words in my book seemed to bite me like scorpion’s sting.

Evening fell. The mother sparrow came to roost, but couldn’t accept reality. She wailed. All night long I could hear her quiet weeping. She drifted in and out of sleep like a sick child. I couldn’t sleep peacefully either that night.

The next morning, she once again bulleted out to hunt for breakfast, and reported back, her beak full of larvae.

After a few days, the disconsolate sparrow left. Each day I waited for her, but she didn’t return. Eventually, her haunt was occupied by a new and hopeful pair.

~

Choo Yi-feng – “Brightest Day”

APRIL 29th, 2019

In the dawn before the sun had fully risen, my bedroom was flushed in a deep blue light that promised to stain everything it touched forever with its saturated tint. My eyes opened, and it was as if my body was instantly filled with an electric vitality, my heart pounding from either the thrill of a forgotten dream or the anticipation of a good day. I eased out of bed and poured myself a cup of water. There was none of the usual grogginess and heavy lids, and even the usual stuffy nose was gone too. It was as if I had closed my eyes last night, counted to three, and simply opened my eyes to welcome the new day.

Inside the stale auditorium I was seated somewhere in the middle rows, finishing the remains of my bread. The lecturer entered with a tote bag slung on his shoulder. From it he drew out a thick stack of papers. His assistant divided them into even piles and laid them out on the table, and he instructed us through the mike to come down and collect our scripts. I did decently, but didn’t score as highly as expected. There was a particularly thorny question right at the beginning that tested Euler’s formula, which I didn’t understand very well. It had thrown off my momentum for the rest of the paper. At the end of the period, as I was sliding the swivel table back into place, I felt a sharp graze on my arm and swore in a low whisper. The auditorium was quite old, and the table had a crack in it. A sharp, jutting edge had carved a thin line, which quickly began to bleed.

The next few hours passed in a slow blur. I cleaned the wound. It stung for a while, but the blood cleared fast, leaving only a pale stroke. I was aware of a lot of walking, of one crowded venue growing in volume as it approached, until I was fully immersed in the ripe hustle and din of activity, and then fading with relief and growing quiet as I left. Then I would enter another space and the cycle would repeat itself, over and over. I tried to look for people, but I couldn’t find any. There were plenty of students and a smattering of staff, but if they were queuing at a stall for food, then that was all that mattered. They only existed to me in that very confined space for those short moments. I found it difficult to think of them as people rather than just elements of physical geography.

Someone was studying at the table next to me as I ate lunch in the canteen. I threw one or two glances at him because I felt like I had seen his face somewhere, but when he looked up I averted my eyes. Last week – I think it was a Tuesday – another person had also been studying at a table next to me as I ate. I finished my lunch and joined the short queue of people carrying empty bowls and plates to the return point. Later in the day I had a vague idea of failing to understand the cause of centripetal acceleration along a wave element. I leaned back and became conscious of a cold, mild ache in my legs.

Outside this lecture theatre there were booths set up – a makeshift basketball arcade game crafted inventively from basic materials. Young people in matching t-shirts were stopping passers-by to talk to them, and passers-by were listening to nothing in particular, deflecting away as though repulsed by an invisible current. There was a display of eco-conscious things, of pens and stickers, but also of folders, pouches, cases, cloth bags – things designed ostentatiously to hold other things. I lingered there, as I enjoyed looking at these things. Inevitably, one of the young people started sharing their ideas with me, about a project involving a neighbouring, poorer country, and rebuilding homes for displaced people and animals.

The difference that I noticed, which she later also explained, was that they were using a novel approach – reconstituting the natural habitat by first reconstructing the human environment, which sounded familiar to me but also very new – almost ground-breaking. I offered her my well wishes. As I approached the bus stop I heard someone speaking loudly. He was a middle-aged man dressed in loose clothes, and he walked with a pronounced limp. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but he kept repeating it, sometimes at a random stranger but mostly into thin air.

I was basically alone in the chill upper deck of the nearly-empty bus as it crawled along its route. At one stop, the sound of someone clambering up the stairs could be heard, growing louder with every step. She approached and fell into the seat next to me with such weight that I bounced slightly. She wore a black hoodie, and her eyes were framed by messy, dark purple bangs tinged with orange. Her eyes bore into me as I took in the sight of her. Someone in the lower deck pressed the bell for the bus to stop. The girl said nothing, and I said nothing, and afterwards I turned my attention back to my phone for the remainder of the ride. She stayed where she was. Her heavy, laborious breathing grated on me.

In my room I tried to sift through the tasks of the day, but the golden glow of the late afternoon cast sharp, oblique shadows that distracted me, splayed across the furniture in whimsical postures. I only tended to get any work done after the sky had darkened, but then it would almost be dinner time. I took my Lexapro and gazed out of the window instead. The heat of the afternoon was quietly receding, and there was a mild breeze stirring. I felt like going for a walk. Mommy would not be home for at least another half-hour.

The girl from the bus was at the void deck, seated at the green metal table with her feet propped up. She looked at me, and then turned her attention back to her cigarette, saying nothing. I walked cautiously towards the table but did not sit down. She puffed up her cheeks and blew a smoke ring. It pulsed in my direction and dissipated, leaving the sharp odour of tobacco. A pair of cats were meowling aggressively some distance away, perhaps in the next block.

“Look, I don’t really want to be here either, but it felt like it was necessary to at least make you aware of this. If you’re just going to stand there and show me that ugly pout then give me the word and I’ll go.”

I took a deep breath and slid into the chair opposite her, chewing my lower lip. We sat in silence for a while more, the lighted tip of her cigarette flaring up with every breath she sucked through it. Her hair was really quite mesmerising. It was a rich, deep purple, but when she brushed her hands through it, there were unmistakable patches of bleached orange that almost glimmered. We stayed silent together for a while and watched as the daylight faded further.

“You used to write letters to me. Remember?”

I groaned involuntarily, burying my face in my palm as the goose-bumps rose on my neck.

“Oh don’t act so coy. It happens.” She stubbed out her cigarette against the table and flicked it aside, shifting her feet off the chair so that she could turn towards me.

“I need to go back to that day. Jog the memory. What happened?”

I leaned my chin against my hand and stared at the space around her, trying to recall. Now I really was pouting.

“I stapled a whole bunch of recycled paper together and started scribbling down everything on my mind. About why I was doing this and how I felt and what my intention was, and who I was sorry to and what would happen to the things in my bedroom.”

She made an attempt at a sincere smile that came across as a smirk instead.

“Because it felt like the worst day of my life and it felt like I wasn’t going to make it through, and I thought I should write a letter and that way I could either feel better after that, or if I didn’t it wouldn’t be a total waste.”

“On your way home. You had your report book in your hand because it wouldn’t fit in the bag. Just after the overhead bridge. Was the neighbourhood quiet that day?”

“I – I can’t remember.”

“Did you remember somebody dropping a bunch of coins?”

“Yes. I… think so.”

“And you stopped to help him pick them up.”

“Oh yeah. Okay, I remember that.”

She stayed quiet for a while. I felt like asking her now. She got up and turned towards the small field next to the flat.

“Come with me. We’ll go somewhere. Field trip.”

I stayed in my seat, fingers curling weakly. She turned back around at me.

“Come on. You’ll like it.”

We travelled there by bus. We sat in the upper deck. Again it was basically empty. I sat on the inner seat, the one closer to the window. She sat next to me, closer to the aisle, and when she took her place again it was with a force that caused me to bounce a little in my seat. She was heavily built, and I could feel her weight pressing against me at every sharp turn. The streets were so quiet that we skipped many stops. Eventually we got off on a secluded road that I didn’t recognise.

She opened the gate and I walked through it. The guard at the post didn’t notice us and he looked monumentally stoic. The prison compound was almost empty. We passed through gantries and steel doors that I didn’t even know how to operate. Every handle opened magically under her hand, and every door without a clear mechanism seemed to give way at her touch. We passed through a warren of passages, making turns to the left and right, taking elevators, climbing staircases.

At last we were in a sparse, tight room with silver panels lining the walls and a couple of surgical beds in the middle. It was unnaturally cold, and I was reminded of my lecture theatre. We stood against the sides of the room. I felt the cool concrete of the wall, and heard the silent whirring of the vents. In the stillness, again I felt like asking her, but she spoke first.

“That person whose coins you helped pick up. Let’s call him Jared for simplicity. In a sense, you could say that he was your neighbour, even though he lived in the rental flat two blocks down from your own. I’m not usually in the business of judging, but somebody like you would say that he was an actual waste of a life.”

She took out an iPad from her bag and scrolled through it. I was facing her and couldn’t see what was on the screen.

“He did some pretty fucked up things, by your standards. Stole money from his mom’s medicine fund to fuel his addiction. At an earlier point he had twice tried to get away with not paying prostitutes, and later raped them. But that part isn’t on his criminal record. The thing that did the job was just the packet of heroin found in his jeans, on the day that you nearly jumped.” She looked up at me.

I opened my mouth wanting to say something then closed it again, thinking. Finally I just said, “That was seven years ago. And I’m guessing it was today.”

“Clever kid. It’s unfortunate, because he was running the drugs to buy more medicine for his mother but, well, guess he was already in too deep.”

“Is he…dead?”

“Yeah, they hanged him three days ago. His wife came to collect his body afterwards. There’s no funeral because she doesn’t have any money.”

I tried to recall if I had ever seen a funeral at the bottom of the rental flats. There were weddings, which were usually glimmering, riotous affairs, but no funerals.

“That’s the whole lot of them. His mother was cremated just two months before that, too, from neurodegeneration – genetic, but those years of heroin didn’t help either. The father…he’s somewhere in my archives, long gone. His only living relative is the uncle in prison – for sexual abuse – but he’s due soon, too. His sentence is going to outlast that cancer-ridden body. No funerals for any of them, just straight into the chute. Well, at least that makes things easier for me.”

“If he’s already gone, why are you only telling me now?”

She gave me a certain kind of a look, brows furrowed. “What, did you want to watch the hanging?”

“No!”

“Then?”

“I – I don’t know, I could at least see him, see what he looked like before they hanged him.”

Her eyes bore into my and she smirked again. This time it was the kind of smirk that would ordinarily have got on my nerves, but now made me wince in fear.

“See him? What are you talking about? Nobody sees Jared.”

“What do you mean?”

She stifled a chuckle, a manic look in her eyes as she stared at me, first in silent disbelief, then with an explosive bark of laughter as she threw her head back.

“Trust me, nobody in this country wants to see Jared. Nobody thinks about people like Jared, and nobody talks about people like Jared. Your lot do such a good job of turning death row criminals into a series of numbers and things that it makes me look bad. That’s saying something. That’s a big fucking deal.”

The idea seemed to amuse her so much that she doubled over, clinging to my shoulder for support. She laughed and laughed and laughed. I looked at her in horror, unsure of what to say. The pumping in my chest was so intense it seemed as if my heart was trying to drown the world in blood.

Eventually she laughed herself out. All that remained was a smile. She got up and shook her head, wiping a tear from her eye and sweeping the bangs out of her face.

“So that day, and those coins,” I said. “What was that? Was it like, he had to die because I didn’t die in the end?”

She stifled another giggle. “Not everything’s about you, you know. Look, it’s so simple. You borrow something and you return it when you’re done. You romantics make it into such a big deal – your masochistic jack-offs, your lurid death cults. Do I care whether you come back to me in a carriage or a sack, in April or December? No. The answer’s no.”

I leaned back against the wall and felt my knees buckle. I suddenly felt tired and out of place. I sat on the floor and looked at the bare, white tiles. She was busy with her iPad. She walked over to the silver panels and grabbed the handles, pulling out the long drawers with a tremor of stainless steel. She lifted the blankets, took notes of the faces, and dropped them back before bumping the drawers shut with her hip. Occasionally she made noises of approval or looks of surprise.

“You know sometimes, the cord’s too short. You can tell when there’s a gash on the neck. That’s what you might call a botched execution, and you could actually sue for that. Oh, but – not here, of course.”

A while later she gave her document a quick appraisal and put the iPad back inside her bag.

“Ready to go, kid? My car’s parked nearby so I can give you lift home.”

It turned out that she drove a Lamborghini. We cruised over the road without a single bump, and made clean, sharp turns at junctions. I sat next to her in silence, looking out of the window. My hands were shaking a little, and my fingers were curled on my lap in a loose fist. Inside my head, our conversation in the morgue looped over and over. We stopped at a red light at the junction right outside the promenade. We were the only vehicle on the road.

“Sometimes I think about what might have happened if I really had ended up killing myself seven years ago. At lunch, in the middle of an especially boring lecture. I think of all the pain, the guilt, the confusion of the people that I love so, so much. I think of them having to sort through the things in my bedroom, or just leaving the door closed. I think of all the little moments this week when things were actually okay, I guess, and how I would have missed all that. I think that I don’t deserve this. Maybe I have it too good.”

She didn’t turn to look at me. She just stared straight ahead at the traffic light, nodding lightly. She had been tapping her finger on the steering wheel but stopped by the time I finished speaking. The light turned green and the car accelerated to a smooth sixty.

“Look, all this cause-and-effect stuff is really… I just don’t deal with it. It’s not in my business. I take numbers. I track the inflow and the outflow. Maybe it’s God. Maybe it’s Dharmic karma. Maybe it’s just pure cosmic chaos.” The blinker went on and we flushed into the leftmost lane. “I don’t know if you’d call it good luck or bad. But if you’re thinking that way, maybe the universe dealt you a joker.”

“And it’s up to me to decide how to play it?”

“Clever kid. No wonder you’re at university.”

“I grew up without a father too. But for Jared, that… on top of everything else. It’s almost like he never got a chance to be anything other than a shadow of his parents’ failures. And if they couldn’t even raise him right, I wonder why they tried. I wonder who gave them the right to cause all this suffering.”

“It’s a mystery. The world could be burning and they’ll try anyway. Over and over, with their children, and their children’s children. On and on for as long as it’s possible. Many things change, but that doesn’t.” “Waiting for the execution date nearly broke him. Each time the prison officer came to announce the coming month’s numbers, he would think it was him. Days before he would tell his girlfriend his final wishes. They would announce it, and his number wouldn’t be there, and he would have salvaged another month. This happened repeatedly over fourteen months. Even I had to change my projections a few times because his attorney tried to stay the date.”

“At least it’s done now.”

We drove on until we were back at the bottom of my flat.

“Well,  don’t think too much about it. It’ll just fire up your depression again.” She tousled my head. “Don’t talk to lawyers, don’t listen to politicians, and don’t go on Facebook. It’ll pass out of your brain in about a week. I’ll see you whenever, I guess. If it starts hurting when you pee, get yourself checked for cancer. Just in case.”

I managed a weak smile and waved, watching as the bright orange car slipped back into the moonless night and vanished from my view. I stood at the same spot, staring at the space where it should have been. It was all quiet now.

~

Jennifer Mackenzie – “The Hairdressing Salon”

JANUARY 14th, 2019

It was early evening.  Some of us had gone to our favourite salon, a baroque palace of plunging mirrors, marble staircases, and tiny alcoves, where secrets were whispered between staff and clientele. Many of the hairdressers had drifted into town from the city of G.; they did not confine themselves to black suits or black hair.  Blonde streaks ran through long twisted locks, patterned shirts flowed over slinky pants and diamante belts.  Labour was strictly divided; the men cut hair, their tools of trade lodged in jewelled cases.

M. had put on weight. He strode through the salon to an elevated platform reserved for people like him. As long as it took to have his hair cut, the staff danced to his tune. Not in any obvious way of course; more in the manner in which he was allowed to bark out orders, in the almost ceremonial arrangement of towels around his shoulders, in the way a glass of tea was swiftly placed near his large hands. This attention was not so much ostentatious as detached, a gesture bestowed without commentary or irony.

 As his hands are dipped into warm paraffin wax, a rival gang is raided. As his hair is blow-dried, his enemy is being beaten to the very inch of her life. As his nails are being polished the police rush to close a particular nightclub so lucrative to Her. As he rises to take his coat, an ambulance rushes up the coast road.

~

Nancy L. Conyers – “Wei Han”

OCTOBER 22nd, 2018

          Take the girl, I don’t want her.

         This is the only thing Wei Han remembered about her father.

          Take the girl, I don’t want her.

—

When Wei Han was nine she opened up a letter she found in a box in her mother’s closet. Her father had written the letter to her mother two years before when Wei Han was living in Shanghai with her father and brother. Wei Han’s parents had divorced in the US and her mother didn’t want the girl or the boy. She wanted to be free, so Wei Han, her father and her brother left and went back to live in Shanghai.

It had made no sense to the then seven year old when her mother showed up and took her on a boat to the US. Her mother never seemed as if she wanted Wei Han around. All she wanted Wei Han to do was do chores on the farm. Now I understand why I had to come back here and live with my mean mother.

Wei Han missed Shanghai. It wasn’t that she was so happy in Shanghai, but that she was so lonely on the farm in Vermont. Chores, chores, chores, that’s all she did when she wasn’t in school. She was responsible for tending to the goats but the goats were her playmates, her brothers and sisters. Wei Han felt like she was robbing them when she had to milk them so her mother could make the goat cheese they sold. What a strange pair they were, this odd Chinese woman and her daughter in Vermont in the 1930’s.

“Nobody looks like me here Mama. People look at me, but they don’t look like me. Why are there no Chinese people here?”

“What does it matter? We are better than them. Now, get your pail and get to work.”

Sometimes Wei Han pretended the goats were her siblings. She would grab the sides of their faces and pull their eyes back hoping they might look like her.

“We have to stick together. It’s just us,” she would tell the goats.

When she was finished her chores for the night, Wei Han would sit in front of her mirror, put her hands on the sides of her own face and push forward. My eyes are round now. I look like everyone else. If she were allowed, Wei Han would do this for hours, but inevitably her mother would come into her room and bark, “Wei Han, turn out that light, you are wasting electricity! Get to bed, you have chores to do tomorrow morning.”

More often than not, after Wei Han had turned off the light, she would lay awake waiting for sleep to come. As she waited she would repeat the same phrase over and over until she was carried away to her dreams.

                     Take the mother, I don’t want her.

                     Take the mother, I don’t want her.

~

Peter Niu – ‘Home’

 SEPTEMBER 24th, 2018

Where are you from? He asked us. Char-coaled brow, face bronzed by poor skin care, smile crooked. We gazed into a dusty mirror. We heard his snicker, after we had spoken in tongues and broken words, after our wallet stripped bare and he thought us gone, walked away in our cheap knockoff sneakers.

It was the rebel act of a wayward son. We had loved a girl with fair hair and a nose ring, and eyes the color of skies before they muddled it with ashes, a girl who loved us too, flesh and all. They glanced at our interlaced fingers and their sly titters cut us to the bone. She’s not someone to bring home.

This home. A home into which we were born, from which we were sent away, before we could be stuffed by their proper ways of salt and snow, harsh liquor and flattened knuckles. Into the sun, the ocean, the wine, and the olive scented humor we were tossed.

This home. Anchored by its name. Burdened by its name. Shackled by its name. Their children called us uncle. They called their driver uncle. They called the dentist uncle, the garbage man uncle. We had a name once. We took on a name once.

This home. Wherever we charged our laptop, that’s our home. The place below the Vietnamese buffet, with a mattress that smelled like spring rolls. The place that took three trains and four hours to get to, where sewage leaked into our breakfast. The place corralled between rows of lawns trimmed with the regularity of nose hair. The place near King’s Cross, with a king’s bed, that we shared for three nights with our first girl.

This home, upon which we now intrude with our funny bleached ways. We bought them gilded houses and big cars. We partook in the venerable rituals timeworn as their currency. We built cages around our lives. They took our compliance as submission.

We are fickle leaves blown adrift, returning to the root, returning to the grave.

~

Mini Gautam – ‘A Muslim Takes a Dip in the Ganges’

MAY 28th, 2018

It is believed in the Hindu religion that a dip in the holy Ganges River in India can rid a man of all his sins and trespasses. Asif was Muslim by birth, and he was raised in London. He had wanted to visit Varanasi for many years, but his mother told him it was not an appropriate place for Muslims. She asked him why he was interested in visiting what was a Hindu Mecca. What could he possibly need from there? He replied that he felt a strong urge to take a dip in the river. It was difficult for him to explain, but he needed to visit the oldest city in India, which had changed its name and character from Kashi to Benares to Varanasi.

Each year Asif asked his mother, and each year she refused. He grew tired of it. Finally he decided that he had to hoodwink her. He informed her that he was visiting the more suitable and immensely popular Muslim mausoleum – the Taj Mahal in Agra – for a short while. His mother approved immediately, and Asif took the flight to Varanasi.

The chaos of the city engulfed him. He felt as if he was in a trance. The month of Ramzan had started, and a large number of people were wearing skullcaps. The Muslims in these areas were not very affluent; many of them were aged and tired. The silk weavers in the areas of Madanpura and Jaitpura were largely Muslim, and Asif spent hours watching them busy at their craft. Varanasi was stained with blood from the riots. It had long since been compartmentalized into Hindu and Muslim residential areas.

Asif didn’t feel threatened. His English upbringing made him look like any other foreigner – like a rich man. The next morning, he showered and walked down the steps of Assi Ghat for a dip. The experience was something he hadn’t anticipated. Although the water was unclean, he felt a sudden sense of peace and belonging. What was it that had attracted him to a place that did not belong to his people, or to his religion? What magical quality was there in the water that made him believe in its healing powers, and in its ability to eradicate evil? And, the most important question of all: why was he here?

Asif was checking out of the hotel the next day when his mother called him:

“Beta, where are you?”

“I told you, Ammi. I am in Agra –”

His mother stopped him. “You don’t have to lie to me. I know you’re in Varanasi.”

“Ammi, I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry. I know I violated our religion…”

“No – you did no such thing. The Ganga is water, and water is life. It doesn’t belong to any religion or any man. It gives birth to all religions and all men. It does not rely on anyone, but everyone relies on it.”

~

Kaitlin Solimine – An Excerpt from “Empire of Glass” (Chapter 1)

 MARCH 19th, 2018

Translator’s Note

You never enter Beijing the same way twice. For centuries this was a hidden, forbidden empire: nine gates through which to pass, each with a melliferous name (Gate of Peace, Gate of Security, Gate Facing the Sun), each moat, wall, guard tower knocked down then rebuilt. First the Mongols, the Manchus, then the Boxers and Brits. So many defenses needed to protect the Peaceful Capital that eventually it was renamed Northern Capital—Beijing—for fear of instilling a false sense of quiet.

In the twenty years I’ve lived here, I witnessed hutong alleyways paved over by four-lane highways, a landscape of construction cranes pocking the horizon with hungry, steel arms; my old neighborhood with its elderly inhabitants, once accustomed to shared squat toilets and courtyard kitchen fires, shipped to the suburbs to make way for a Holiday Inn and an office tower with iridescent windows reflecting an endlessly gray, heavy sky.

The world feels drenched in that same impenetrable gray as my taxicab from Beijing international airport reaches suburban Huairou Cemetery. The city around us begs for rain. Along the dirt alleyway to the cemetery gates, a pack of street dogs lazily rise, sniffing their tails. A pair of eyes faces our approaching headlights, briefly golden, briefly human. Hello, old friend, I want to say, only I haven’t met this dog before. There’s just the feeling of having known him for quite some time.

Not far from Huairou Cemetery, the Gobi hovers, China’s “endless sea” of golden sand dunes and failed reforestation: parched, exposed roots and nomadic tribes now cemented to rows of apartment blocks buttressing northern winds. In spring, these winds roll south, roiling the capital’s streets, clogging alleyways with dust, narrowing eyes of bicyclists who tongue grains from their teeth, cursing the season’s turn. In April, snow arrives: fallen catkin blossoms drifting to earth in a city overpopulated with poplars and willows, too many females of the species lending seeds, expectations unmet. And in late May, I land in the city, temperatures climbing past thirty centigrade, old men in tank tops on wooden benches fanning sagging breasts, the sky a dome of heat and haze, encapsulating one of the world’s largest cities, once my favorite in the world.

In my pocket, Baba’s missive from two weeks earlier pulses digital blue:

Come home for Mama’s twentieth memorial.

The first and last text message he ever sent.

I’d replied in Mandarin: You have a mobile phone? 🙂

He didn’t answer. He never understood messaging to be a two-way conversation.

Beyond the gate announcing the cemetery’s Peaceful Garden, parched willows rake thin soil. A concrete wall guards the dead inside: stone steles and a mausoleum for the poorer souls in sealed boxes. Ashes rise from a crematorium to a nondescript sky, quickly lost. I want to tip my head upwards to swallow it all, disappear.

“Menglian!” someone calls from behind the gates as I hand the driver my fare. The stranger uses my Chinese name, the one I give to acquaintances and write on China’s never-ending bureaucratic forms. Baba named me Menglian during my earliest days living with his family, the Wangs: Menglian, or ‘Dream of the Lotus,’ similar to the Chinese name for Marilyn—as in Monroe. I’m not blonde, I said, but Baba laughed and said, “All Americans are blonde.” Only later did he call me “Lao K” after his wife, Li-Ming, decided this was appropriate—“Old K,” the girl named “K” who keeps returning—because it was expected from my teenage years onward I’d always return from my hometown in coastal Maine to this city, one of the world’s most populated, and to the strange Chinese family who first hosted me here.

“Menglian!” the voice repeats.

Rounding the corner, I see a woman wearing silver-rimmed glasses and waving a red glove. She looks vaguely familiar—a scent you pass on the street yielding a feeling but not a name.

“Nice to see you again, Menglian!” Her short hair, the same as Li-Ming’s in her last days, is not a style befitting older women yet she and her friends sport the hairdo like it’s required for Party pension. She’s tall and thin to Li-Ming’s short and squat. Her oblong face is mottled with sunspots. She squeezes my shoulder, inferring we once shared something deep and lasting. I can’t pull the woman’s name from my jetlagged memory; in her dying days, Li-Ming had so many friends, cheery-faced women drifting in and out of the apartment like ants attempting, unsuccessfully, to transport a rotting piece of fruit.

The woman introduces me to a laughing, happy crew of women. They wear blunt, dowdy heels dusty from the walk from bus station to cemetery, long skirts glancing socked ankles, bright colored cardigans (peacock, seafoam, lavender) buttoned to their necks, hair the requisite crop.

“This is Li Xiahua,” she says, pulling me to a tall, pretty lady with plum-lined eyes.

“And Pang Huayang.” Pang: stout with a humped back, dyed black hair, an elbow-shaped chin; someone you know your entire life and only in middle age realize is your best friend.

“Of course you know Mama’s oldest friend, Kang-Lin.” I’m led to a woman with large breasts peeking beneath a tight, too-sheer aqua blouse. The only name I’ve remembered from those early days is Kang-Lin’s—and her face, from photographs—the uncharacteristic freckles dotting her cheeks and nose, the round, rimless glasses guarding a pair of well-kohled eyes. Kang-Lin was Li-Ming’s friend decades earlier, a girl Li-Ming referred to as the “owner of the books”—it was Kang-Lin who gave Li-Ming her beloved Cold Mountain poetry when they were young. Li-Ming never spoke of what had happened to Kang-Lin, but the woman’s re-appearance seems something of a celebration. After Li-Ming’s death Kang-Lin sent my Chinese host mother’s sarira to me in Maine—the Buddhist crystals that form in the cremated remains of only the most devout. Cold Mountain himself left behind sarira. Li-Ming did too, or so I hoped the afternoon Kang-Lin’s package arrived, the envelope’s gritty contents entrenching my finger as it dug deeper, as I wondered how a body so fleshy could turn granular and coarse.

“Nice to finally meet you, Kang-Lin,” I say. She takes my hands in hers, priest-like. The chimney in the distance spews smoke—ashes of a body expired?

Baba, usually on time to pre-arranged meetings, isn’t here to explain Kang-Lin’s return; his tardiness feels like the hollow of an unrung bell. Where is he?

“Your Baba will be here soon,” Kang-Lin says, insinuating she and Baba have recently been in touch.

The plain-faced woman perks up, waves into the distance. “There he is! There’s Wang Guanmiao!”

I follow her finger’s point as Kang-Lin also turns, dropping my hand. Crows bobbing between trash piles on the path to the cemetery look up too, staring down the road to where the suburbs hum and chatter, preoccupied with their forward-looking progress.

Ba, the crows bleat.

Ba, my heart beats.

Ba. Ba. Ba.

            I once read crows have the ability to remember a face they saw years earlier. Are these the same crows Baba passes on his annual pilgrimage to his wife’s grave? Do they recognize him? His hair, what’s left of it, parted? His body in the Western-style suit I bought him five years earlier (he’d giggled when the tailor traced his armpits; I’d reveled in this childishness, my generosity)? His feet are crammed into loafers his daughter Xiaofei brought from Hong Kong, recently spiffed and shined. When dressed smartly, he looks like a boy in man’s clothing, never quite grown into the adult he became. He strides, oblivious to the pines above his head, the curious crows bowing in unison. He waves. And waves… It’s taking him too long to reach us.

“Yes! We’re here!” We say.

Waiting. Waiting and waving.

Time takes on a curious rounded feel like the edge of an old coin.

Finally he places a hand on my arm. With the other, he pats down what remains of his hair. He’s an injured bird attempting to fly: all heart, no hop.

“Here,” he says, reaching that same hand into his knapsack and extending a book for us to see. “She told me you were looking for this.”

He hands me a book wrapped in a tattered pink pashmina (the same pashmina I left in his apartment during my Beijing University year) and I don’t need to unwrap the package to know—Li-Ming’s Cold Mountain poems, the collection of eighth century Taoist-Buddhist poetry she wanted to read me during the last weeks of her life and yet we always found ourselves speaking of other things, distracted by a life waning into its final form—

What makes a young man grieve

            He grieves to see his hair turn white…

“Now that we’re all here, shall we go?” The short-haired woman gestures at the burial grounds hidden behind lazy willows.

“Quick, quick,” Baba says, leaning so close I smell his lunch—garlicked and soyed—on old man’s breath. He whispers, “Did she visit you today too?”

Before I can reply I haven’t heard Li-Ming’s voice in years, he forces a smile—stained teeth, suntanned cheeks, cracked lips—evidence of a life lived in this thirsty city. He grips my elbow as we follow Kang-Lin’s knowing sashay, the woman’s slender hips hidden beneath folds of a long, black skirt, heels clicking a consistent beat, all of us entering this walled city of bones together.

Confident there will be time for reading later, I tuck the book into my purse, its weight slapping my side, Beijing’s sun shouldering the last touch of dusk.

*

But the book isn’t what I thought. I learn this a few hours after I return to Baba’s apartment in Deshengmen, the six-story building with brown walls scarred by Beijing’s arid seasons, trash chutes with chunks of hardened zhou, dusty bikes rusting in entranceways, abandoned a decade earlier for Xiali sedans that crowd the courtyard.

“Where are Li-Ming’s Cold Mountain poems?” I hold up the book to Baba’s face, peel open the pages that aren’t full of the ancient poems I hoped but of Li-Ming’s scrawl—a journal or notebook. At the kitchen table in the living room where Baba sleeps nightly on a futon, he leans over a warmed bowl of soy milk from breakfast; in this apartment, no meal is too old to reheat, no room holds a single purpose. This is the China of old.

“That’s the book,” he says, nonchalant as a cat.

“No, Li-Ming had a book of Cold Mountain poems. She said one day it would be mine.”

I hold open the spine of the Cold Mountain poetry book whose pages are bizarrely absent, ripped out and discarded, replaced by a blue-lined bijiben notebook—the kind Chinese high school students use for character study. Contained inside are rows of tight, careful calligraphy, penmanship I recognize as Li-Ming’s. On the outer cover, a new title, “Empire of Glass,” is repeatedly scrawled over the smiling hermit face of Cold Mountain—EmpireofGlassEmpireofGlassEmpireofGlass—like a schoolgirl obsessively penning her beloved’s name.

“It has to be here somewhere,” I say, ducking below the bed. I want the poems she promised she’d leave me. I want to read the notes she wrote in the margins, the criticisms she said would one day make sense, the book I couldn’t find after her death no matter how much I searched the apartment shelves full of Xiaofei’s tattered textbooks and mothballed baby clothing.

“Don’t bother,” Baba says. “This is all that’s left.”

*

I first met Empire of Glass’s author, Huang Li-Ming, twenty years ago when I was sixteen and she was forty-four. I was an American high school exchange student living with her family in a cluttered apartment in the center of Beijing during an auspicious year according to Chinese superstitions, my 16^th (16: one followed by six, 一六, also means “will go smoothly”), and a terribly inauspicious year for her, her 44th (the number four, 四, a homophone for the Chinese word for death). Beijing wasn’t as gray then—yes, the populace wore tans, olives, and navies, and Tiananmen’s bloody stains were only recently painted over, but there was an energy to the wide boulevards filled with bicyclists and yam vendors and smells you hated at first then yearned for decades later when they were replaced by car exhaust and factory run-off from the suburbs. That energy was humanity. Life. Limbs and elbows spurring rusted bikes to the most exciting of newly-formed ventures (black market currency exchanges outside China Construction Bank, stolen factory Patagonia fleeces in Silk Market alleyways, or hamburgers—and free ketchup!—at McDonalds).

There was no better time to be an American teenager in Beijing, bicycling wide willow-lined avenues, getting lost in endless mazes of hutong alleyways still clustered around the city’s heart. When my Mandarin was advanced enough to hold a lengthy conversation, Li-Ming invited me to sit with her on the sundeck after school for what she called her “poetry lessons.” We never actually talked about poetry.

“Do you remember the days you couldn’t tell the difference between a baozi and jiaozi?” she once asked, then launched into a diatribe about the tastiest red bean baozi she discovered in a Tianjin back alley. “Like the Buddha’s touch: the baozi was that good.” She ran her tongue along the memory of sweet paste clinging to her gums.

Another afternoon: “Did you know there’s a particle of physics so small it controls all the energy in the universe?” At the most cellular level as well as the most expansive, she said, science’s knowledge breaks down. “Big and small, equally unknown.” She peeled apart the fingers of Baba’s beloved ficus plants, oblivious to her destruction.

“Fools,” Baba called us every afternoon he returned home from his danwei where he grinded glass for telescopic lenses, carrying bags of wilting lettuce and flaccid carrots from WuMart and smelling like metal—cold and distant. 神经病.

“Did you know there’s a hill in the center of the city so cursed only the bravest go there to die?” This she asked me the afternoon she also told me about the cancer crawling from her breasts to her brain. The same afternoon she told me about her plans on Coal Hill—how I’d help her get there in a few months’ time. How everything would be different once we reached the mountain’s crest, once we read the poems together, able to see everything and nothing.

Our minds are not the same

If they were the same

You would be here?

During each session, the book of Cold Mountain poetry sat on her lap, opened to a page she’d occasionally glimpse, running her fingers over the lines as if they had a shape, but never reading them aloud. She took comfort in the fact I sat with her, and I sat there because I took comfort in the fact she sat with me. Not until much later did I realize the greatest friendships are those with whom we have the easiest ability to sit still together, the people in our lives who don’t question our intentions or why we find ourselves side-by-side on lazy Beijing afternoons with dust caught like a yawn between the sun’s fingers, ficuses scratching our backs, pages open on laps lit so white by the final burst of light, we can’t read the lines.

Li-Ming was impetuous, stubborn, fanciful, and at times, adrift as a spring aspen seed. Her daughter sought in her a distant, loving approval, and her husband, or so I thought at the time, saw her as a companion, that person you forget to question after so many years, a presence critical to your life, but never illuminated as such. Not until I read Li-Ming’s book would the world of that year flip on its head, my involvement in her final days proving I was just one last spoke in a wheel rolling for a long time; despite how much I desired to be the central hub, for Li-Ming, the world was not so carefully defined—was she mentally unstable? A genius? A spiritual scribe? Who was she? I now wonder, lifting my pen from the page and glimpsing a city so full of silver skyscrapers the sky has been made irrelevant….

Had I known of Empire of Glass’s existence, I may never have returned to China after Li-Ming’s death. I may have been too disillusioned to believe China could retain something of the old in the new, that the woman I knew may be there yet, waiting at the top of Coal Hill for me to join her beneath that sickly Scholar Tree, to hand her an ending, close the loop. But I’ll explain more of that later.

For most of its existence, Empire of Glass was hidden beneath the living room’s futon, discovered by Baba when sweeping away decades of dust. Had he still believed in poetry, still heard the beat of his own poetic heart, he may have studied the pages longer—but he merely kicked it under the bed the way he’d nudge a stray Deshengmen cat out of his path. Not until the days drew nearer to his wife’s memorial, when his daughter moved to Hong Kong and I settled in the U.S., did he feel the oppressive loneliness that comes with age, with living too long in one place, the corners of his apartment edging closer, such that eventually he knelt on the concrete, dug deep beneath that futon he once shared with his wife, and cursed the heavens for smacking his head on the wooden frame. “Here you are, old friend,” he said, rubbing the sore bump, but then again, so much of what I’m telling you is already reimagined, reconfigured so convex angles are made concave, mirrors reflecting other mirrors reflecting an uncertain, setting sun.

The ethical challenge of translating Empire of Glass is not lost on me: this strange, hodgepodge book was Li-Ming’s last gift to me and my implication in its narrative makes me an unusual, if suspect, translator. Yet I expect this was carefully orchestrated—Li-Ming would’ve known of my return for her memorial, the agony on the stray dog’s eyes, the lichen climbing the cemetery’s front wall. She expected me to understand her language as well I could, and to one day provide this translation, which has become her last work, this novel. Li-Ming’s Empire of Glass reflects the desires of poet Stephen Dunn: “Every day, if I could, I’d oppose history by altering one detail.” Li-Ming took this directive one step further, altering enough of her life’s details to completely rewrite the world we expected her to leave us.

For Li-Ming, the world we see with our eyes or touch with our fingers is but one dimension. There’s another perspective, one read between letters and shuffled barefoot over the cold dirt of mountain caves while tempered pines shake off spring snow. And this is where we find a circular, ever-coiling link between beginning and end, that and this, other and self, form and formlessness that is the subject of Taoism, Buddhism, and of course, we’d be remiss not to mention here, Li-Ming’s beloved Tang Dynasty poet, Han Shan—or “Cold Mountain.”

If young men grieve growing old, what do old men grieve?

Li-Ming would’ve rewritten Cold Mountain’s verse to assert that old men—and women!—grieve the beginning. Which is why in the end she returned to hers. And although we carried her there on her backs, the load is much lighter now.

“Lao K”

Beijing, China

2016

~

Chris Ruffle – “Evening Ferry”

JANUARY 8th, 2018

Good. The boat was at the wharf, so he wouldn’t need to wait long. He flipped the plastic entry token into a basket and hurried down the broad gangplank, coat flapping. Actually he was not in a rush. He rarely was these days; business was quiet. It’s just that he did not want the gate to slam shut right in front of his face. The muddy river slid unappetisingly beneath the gaps in the rusted steel. The surface was slippy so his manly stride became an undignified waddle. Still, better that than a pratfall before the eyes of those already aboard. Carefully minding the gap, he climbed aboard.

It was rush-hour in the middle of one of the world’s largest cities, but the crowd on the ferry was thin. A two-decade building boom had added several rival bridges and tunnels to nudge the old ferry towards obsolescence. Growing wealth had also bought a surge in car ownership – a warmer and more convenient transport alternative on this cool evening in early spring. He remembered his first ride on this ferry thirty years before. It had been packed with people pushing bicycles or motorbikes, many of them heavily-laden. Once he had seen a pig strapped to the handlebars. Now his fellow travellers seemed mostly to be local tourists. They were not the cap-wearing, flag-following tourists of yore; this too had changed. These ones, dressed in sports-leisure clothes, lined the top deck, taking pictures of each other and the East bank’s towering skyscrapers. After a few minutes, the lady in a New York Yankees cap lost interest in her surroundings, re-inserted her earphones and started flicking through her WeChat messages. Emboldened, he took his own unsteady photo.

On his first trip, he had only taken the ferry to take a picture of the famous colonial architecture along the West bank. He had stayed on the boat when it turned around – there had been nothing on the East side of the river worth getting off for. This photograph, now rather faded, was still pinned above his desk. The old 1920’s skyline that it showed was now lost, dwarfed by the work of a new generation of empire builders and their architects.

At least the ferry still smelled the same; a hint of the sea above the engine oil and an ammonia-based cleaning fluid. Also unchanged was the practised ease with which the blue-clad crew member unlooped the rope from its stanchion and cast off into the stream. The propellers suddenly churned against the tide and he pressed his hand against a cabin window to steady himself. He caught his own reflection and was startled to see how much he stood out, in his grey suit, long, frayed raincoat and dark glasses. “Daddy, look, it’s an old foreigner.” The child was quickly shushed by the father and distracted with something more interesting – a passing barge heaped with sand.

He could have taken a taxi, of course, but his office looked right across at the club where the lecture was taking place. Even considering the ferry’s leisurely pace, the taxi would not have been any quicker, having tunnel traffic to contend with. Also, after a day at his desk, staring at a computer, he fancied a walk in the almost fresh air. A heron slowly laboured overhead. The return of bird life meant that the government’s attempts to clean up the river must finally be bearing fruit. You wouldn’t want to fall in, though.

One developer had thought it was a good idea to convert the whole side of his gold-mirrored edifice into a giant LED screen. This had already been turned on, although the sun was still setting in a pinkish glow over the Bund. The 40-storey high, pixilated advertising sporadically declared “I heart SH”. As the boat passed mid-river, he could make out the old clock tower above the Customs House, which showed that it was almost VI o’clock. Plenty of time. He opened his briefcase just to double-check that he had brought the invitation. The title of this evening’s talk, to be held above the Prada showroom, was “The Death of American Capitalism”. In his guise as “hedge fund manager” he would certainly be in a position to play the devil’s advocate. It would be good for an argument.

The sound of the engines suddenly cut, as the pilot used the speed of the current to slew around and approach the landing-stage side on. There were more people waiting on this side. They pressed up against the bars of the gate impatiently, watching the passengers embark, passengers who had just come from where they wanted to go. As a ferry veteran, he knew where the door started to open, so was first off, striding towards his date with dialectics and a glass of red wine.

~

Tim Tomlinson – “This is Not Happening to You”

NOVEMBER 13th, 2017

You are now in the proximity of Extra-Strength Tylenol caplets. Don’t trust your shaking hands, bend to the kitchen counter, dip to the spilled caplets like a dog to a puddle. Tongue several up, a half-dozen, never mind the recommended dosage. At this point, to consider recommended dosages would be a category mistake. Recommended dosages apply to children or adults and you, you remember head-poundingly, belong to neither category. You are a headache, an extra-strength headache, nothing more. Focus, do not multi-task, be here now.

The fridge, the half-quart of Old Milwaukee, crack it . . . and linger briefly in that reassuring skershsh, the audio anesthetic of it, the promise of its wet sizzle. Lift the can, tilt back your head, and pour the lager heavily over your tongue and onto your sawdust-dry throat. Feel the caplets pebble past the uvula, scraping the parched ringlets of the esophagus, hear them “plip” into that vast vat of Saturday night stewing in your guts on top of Friday’s vat, Thursday’s vat, the vats of your weeks and months and lifetimes in New Orleans. The Old Milwaukee chills your sternum, its crisp cold bubbles ping wetly in your skull. Slowly it stills your trembling fingers until they hang from your wrists inert as gloves. In your eyes gather pools of relief.

With relief begins perspective. Rather than unpuzzling the night, better to consider where you just were, only minutes before the Tylenol accomplishment: the dining room floor amidst overturned furniture and scattered Tylenol caplets. Many good people have been found on floors: William Holden, Lenny Bruce, Janis Joplin. Good company, all, and isn’t Sunday a day for company?

Company requires food. On the kitchen counter, an avocado, or what remains of it. How quaint: you—or someone—had taken pains to militate against hunger, a condition that would arise only in the future. Evidence that some level of maturity’s been achieved. You are not hungry now, at this very moment, but this object, this avocado, it intrigues, it calls to you. On inspection you discover that one side of this avocado is grooved, its green skin gouged, its soft yellow flesh ridged. Ridged, you speculate, by what appears to be a pair of teeth not your own. A rodent’s teeth? You measure the groove against a book of matches. It is a wide groove, matchbook wide. You are not an orthodontist, not an oral surgeon, nor have you earned any graduate credits in zoology. Still, you feel qualified to venture a second speculation: this groove was not made by the teeth of a mouse, or Bugs Bunny. Find the flashlight. Is it under the sink? Poking about, banging into objects, you imagine rat teeth sinking into your knuckles. Forget the flashlight, light a match. Light two matches. Now poke past the insecticide canisters and find a rat trap. The rat trap made with glue. Many French Quarter rentals come replete with rat traps. Peel open carefully, set the trap glue face up (not like the last time) where the avocado had been, there where a patina of rat fur subtle as tooth plaque laminates the formica. Set it snugly against the formica ledge, but allow the crack between ledge and counter to breathe. In order for the trap to succeed, everything around the trap’s milieu must appear normal, so you must provide passage to your housemates the cockroaches, who will press up through the crack onto the ledge and scitter-scatter across the rat trap, leaving at least their scent, perhaps the coffee-ground speckles of their droppings, and these reassuring signs will encourage the rat to venture into the sticky shallow La Brea of his destiny. You are thinking like a rat, cautiously, selfishly, and horizontally sniffing out possibilities in front of your bloodshot beady eyes. Satisfied, you can anticipate results.

Now: you have worked. You have arisen to find a problem in your home, two problems—your head, the avocado—you have addressed them, and they have been dispatched, with prejudice: a thirst has been raised. This thirst creeps up from your stomach and down from your lips, two separate thirst-fronts creeping, creeping, creeping like desert sand in steady wind until they join at the throat and provide a satisfying discomfort—satisfying in that this fresh discomfort introduces a new challenge, a challenge you now meet with the new Old Milwaukee you are cracking. Oh, that stinging in the throat, that dry desert sand washing back whence it came, cool oases irrigating your eyes. Ahhhhhh, you think, the poetry of ahhhhhh. So very fucking ahhhhhh. You are confronting problems. You are meeting them on the playing field of life and the problems are trailing, nil to three.

Like life, you find Sunday, too, is a problem and you have constructed strategies to address it. On the surface, one might find your strategies formless, shapeless, random. But isn’t that precisely the point? Form is emptiness, emptiness form. Bodhi swaha! On Sunday one awakens to problems one can count on—blue laws, headaches, the crossword puzzle; and problems particular to each specific calendar occurrence of Sunday—today’s grooved avocado comes to mind. In this sense, Sunday is both a comfort and a challenge. A character is defined, you recall reading, by its struggles with challenge.

Now there is the challenge of your hunger, a vestigial drive at this point, a habit more than an urgency, but there is strength in ritual, comfort in repetition, meaning in tradition. What tradition might you employ then against your hunger?

The avocado.

Inspect the avocado. Can you salvage the ungrooved portion? Can you cut the groove out from the soft ripe yellow flesh, excavate it in a sense, then scrape your own choppers against the flesh’s green shell? You can’t see why not, can you, and you’re the only one looking (unless, unaware, you are observed by the rat or its minions). So ask yourself: should you be reluctant to place your teeth near where the rat dragged his?

All god’s chilluns gots teeth, you’re thinking, even Mr. Rat.

And don’t you hear the rats each night, gnawing their teeth clean on the rafters in your attic? Wouldn’t dirty teeth fail to leave clean grooves?

Convinced of the viability of said avocado, you look for a clean spoon, a clean knife, anything to avoid actual contact with the remnants of Mr. Rat’s spittle. A bit squeamish, perhaps, but you don’t know Mr. Rat personally, you don’t know his habits with floss. With spoon in hand, look for the dish soap. Failing that, look for a scrub. Where might a scrub be? Ask yourself, and be honest, are you really that hungry?

Reschedule the avocado.

Wash down more Tylenol.

Engage the outdoors.

Up Dauphine Street, paw through the late afternoon humidity, a humidity that hangs like a shower curtain.

Ah, Vieux Carré, you talk a lot, let’s have a look at you. Think I busted a button on me trousers, hope they don’t fall down.

On the sidewalk the hymn of flies on redolent dog droppings baking in the sun with a metallic aromaticity. Consider the regularity of said dogs, the solidity of their stools, the satisfactions the dogs must anticipate every time they assume their pinched posture. Try to recall the last solid stool you passed. Is it your bipedality, you wonder, or your booze that prevents you from experiencing the pleasure of that most canine release?

Avoid the carcasses of roaches the size of harmonicas. Avoid carcasses.

Approaching the corner of Dauphine and Touro, you discern the sickening deposits of last night’s bacchanal percolating throatwards. Clutching the sticky trunk of a banana tree, you hurl. Violently, agonizingly, remedially. Even as you discharge, you think. You are thinking, you are a thought machine. It’s a juxtaposition this time that commands your ideation, the juxtaposition “pink-green vomit and brown-black Louisiana loam.” You are not certain if “loam” is the correct term, horticulturally speaking. You are not certain if horticulture is the correct term. You are certain that you don’t give a fuck because although your gastro-intestinal distress has been somewhat alleviated by the reverse peristalsis, your head now hurts worse. A bit of a pain in the Gulliver . . . And there in the pink-green, brown-black gloop of yester-eve you spy the barely dissolved, barely discolored Extra-Strength Tylenol caplets, the very things that enabled this excursion. Two conflicting impulses obtain: disgust at the puke and desire for the objects of relief that lie therein.

Some persons, you reflect, many even—that vast horde of unstout souls, might, at this time, experience the first stirrings of remorse, depression, self-recrimination. Not you. This is not happening to you, it is happening to the Undiscovered Genius, the character you’ve created to play you in the tragicomic farce you know as “your life.”  The talents of this Undiscovered Genius have yet to manifest in any recognizable form that might ultimately be remunerated by an institution, a governing body, a critical faculty, a network or publishing house, or rewarded by an adoring public. Its nebulosity, you understand, is part of its genius: the suspense! What form will it finally take, you imagine the public you have yet to seduce wondering? As far as forms are concerned, you have already conceded painting; painting is a form for which you demonstrated little if any aptitude. This was evidenced early on and most acutely by the F you took, and deserved, in ninth-grade Studio Art, the year you gave painting the brush. Singing, dancing, the violin . . . these, too, have been purged from your schema. You are practicing the process of discovery through elimination, one step at a time.

Baby steps, increments, walk before you run. These are the building blocks of emotional maturity, psychological wellbeing, if not wisdom. You are, for the moment, satisfied, undissuaded. You retrieve the Tylenol caplets. Demurely, you palm the caplets along your shorts, then mouth them. And you take comfort in the fact that there is nothing that hasn’t been seen in New Orleans, nothing that hasn’t been done. You proceed, head held high, the caplets dissolving, toward the avenue.

At the Li’l General, the beer is buried in the back. Grab two forties. Rip a bag of pork rinds from the wire rack. Rip another. Pinch some hot sauce from a shelf, deliver it to the transvestite who works the register. Do not acknowledge her wink. Do not acknowledge the privileged glimpse she affords you of her newly acquired and, objectively speaking and all context removed, perfectly lovely cleavage, cleavage that, you must admit, sometimes has you imagining improper intimacies. Do not acknowledge the warm stirrings of your loins. You are a man, you come from an era before sex drives became gendered norms. You have no norms. You are instinct. Instinct with boundaries, and this realization carries you back to your earlier speculations re: maturity, psychological wellbeing, wisdom.

With a look of concern, she says, “Sugar Pie, are you going under?”

You tell her a man’s gotta have breakfast.

“It’s suppertime, Sugar,” she says, ringing you up, her long nails clacking on the register’s keys. “Besides, pork rinds and hot sauce do not a breakfast make.”

Technically, you tell her, it’s brunch.

Ignore her offer of brunch.

The New York Times is stacked by the door. Grab one.

On Esplanade, you field strip the paper. The News, the Region, the Week in Review, Business—they all join the beer cans and go-cups and chewed ears of corn bulging from the wire mesh trash basket. Garbage you are happy to leave behind.

Ah but time will tell just who has fell, and who’s been left behind . . .

The rest awaits your scorn at home.

On the avenue’s median, a bearded man walks two giant schnauzers in the shade of the sycamores. This would be you, you reflect, if you had a beard. You, If you Had a Beard, you think: there is a title. You, if you had two schnauzers, you if you had a life. You if there were living things whose welfare depended on you.

The leaves of the banana trees hang like wet towels over the heads of the frail humans who pass below in the fogs of their own biographies. Slow traffic idles by as if it’s arriving from the 1950s. You have arrived from the late 1960s by way of the Reagan ’80s. A life bracketed at one end by Question Mark and the Mysterians, Debbie Gibson at the other. Your once reckless idealism slowly turned to cynicism and that, you can’t for the life of you remember when, turned into despair. Despair was the last feeling-state you recall inhabiting. You recall it, like your long-lost evacuations, with a certain physiological nostalgia. Now you are a drunk, and the feeling-range that that lifestyle affords is either: working well, or not working well. When it’s not working well, its failures are the issue. When it is working well, there are no issues. And isn’t that a reasonable definition of freedom? Not that you’re a particular advocate of reason. Or freedom, for that matter. You may have been once, one, or the other, or both, since, in your thinking they don’t appear to be mutually exclusive. But these are Sunday afternoon ideations under the sagging banana trees of the Vieux Carré, two years into Reagan’s second term, a tickertape of monkey-mind nonsense, really, something to occupy the restless coconut on your shoulders while you step around dog droppings and over the thick roots pressing up sidewalks.

On Frenchmen St., the pedestrian traffic lingers before pottery shops and thrift shops and schedules for bands at Snug Harbor. On a lamppost, the announcement of a new play: I Found a Brain Inside My Boyfriend’s Head. Check the name of the playwright—do you know her? Have you balled her? Balling—that other vestigial drive. A woman is just a woman, you’re thinking, but an ale, a cold ale, even a warm flat stagnant ale, an ale with a fly floating in its scuzz, an ale torpedoed by cigarette butts, an ale impossible to distinguish in color and general rancidity from the urinal in Coop’s, that ale can save your life, and has.

You start at the Arts & Leisure, and the groans begin. That should have been you in the “Conversation with the Filmmaker,” you in the “Profile: Up and Coming”—if you had had the connections. Just look at the names: Redgrave, Coppola, Lennon . . . does anyone start out on their own anymore? Who the fuck did, like, Adam know, back in the garden? Fucking Yawveh?

Sauce up a pork rind, swallow some ale, turn the page.

Move on to the Book Review.

The groans resume.

That should have been you doing the review. No: you being reviewed, you creeping up the “New & Noteworthy,” responding to earnest questions with transcendent irony. If you hadn’t been stuck in a public school. If you hadn’t quit the public school. If your parents read books instead of watched television. Toss the Book Review, toss Arts & Leisure, toss them the fuck across the floor to . . . ah, yes, the TV.

Surf the narrow range of TV channels. A gospel show, an evangelical event, local news figures chatting, a couple of Cajuns fishing, reruns of reruns. You mute the box and stand in front of your record collection, that vast catalogue of the best of mankind. What music do you need to hear? What gnossiènne, what ètude, what Concerto in H-moll will create the correct adjustment to the afternoon’s numbing malaise? But now you discern another noise . . .

. . . a scraping . . . from the direction of the kitchen . . . et voila!

Monsieur Rat (suddenly, you hope momentarily, he has become French), asquirm upon his bed of glue, pinned from the narrow underbite all the way to the asshole. Only the tail and one rear leg, working furiously, remain unstuck.

He is long, slender, gray. Obviously guilty. Still, you interrogate indirectly.

“So tell me,” you begin, “you like avocados?”

The rat wriggles with a violence that vibrates the trap, its fear rippling from ass over ribs.

You wonder at its slender physique. Wouldn’t the meat of an avocado, with its generous fat content and abundance of carbohydrates, wouldn’t it flesh out a little rodent, fill in the valleys between the ribs?

“Maybe you’re the wrong rat?” you say, and the rat just wriggles. “Still,” you suggest, “you wouldn’t be in a fix like this if you hadn’t done something wrong, sometime somewhere. Am I right?”

You turn on the faucet, and the sound of the water rushing further animates the rat’s anxiety.

“Relax,” you tell it. “You’re not guilty, you won’t drown. How do you like it, warm? Hot? Cold?”

With a broomstick you nudge the rat closer to the sink. Its contractions become more violent.

You watch the sink fill. It is dirty. It will be dirtier. Make a note to move before it needs to be cleaned.

“What do you think?” you ask the rat. “You ready? Meet this shit head-on, get it over with?”

The rat’s spasms cause the trap to bounce slightly along the formica.

“Ah come on,” you say with exasperation, “work with me on this.”

Now it is shitting.

It continues to shit when it hits the water, a dirty ink the color of charcoal trailing out its ass like a streamer from a party favor.

“Hey,” you tell it, comfortingly, “you gotta go, you gotta go.”

You watch it struggle, watch it wrestle its fur from the glue—a shoulder, maybe a leg—but as soon as one part’s free another is stuck. You place the broom handle at the trap’s corner and press the trap under. The struggle slows, becomes smaller. Spasms, shudders, tiny bubbles. No disrespect intended, but a measure or two of Don Ho cross the endless jukebox of your mind.

“Aloha,” you tell it.

Et voila—Monsieur Rat est mort.

You look at it there below the surface, its sharp tiny teeth, its long black whiskers, its innocent eyes, and damn if that’s not a grimace of horror you see on its face.

Suddenly there’s a part of you that’s not so glib. You can feel it, there, just under your ribs. A kind of mammalian identification, a kind of dread, a kind of premonition. But in the same instant that you feel it, it disappears. Poof! Gone. It’s not happening to you.

You grab your hat, the crossword puzzle, a pen.

“Be cool,” you tell Mr. Rat.

You’re ready to go out.

~

 Victoria Giang – “My Saint Sebastian”

~

Lynette Tan – “Jellyfish Pirates”

NOVEMBER 6th, 2017

She didn’t think that it could but the sinking feeling in her stomach had gotten even worse. They were in mid-rumble and the other pirates were not only way better than her, her own troops appeared to be struck with some wasting disease and were melting on the battlefield like they were made of jello. They reminded her of the jellyfish that she and her cousins had brought back to Ah Kong’s house at Pasir Ris, meeting a fate much worse than being stranded on the beach where they had been picked up. Nefarious imps that they were the children (she included of course) had gingerly placed the unfortunate creatures on the cement steps under the blazing sun, and watched them liquefy before their wicked eyes. She groaned inwardly as her last recruit met his demise and the foul 6 letter word blazed across the screen.

++++++

Her husband looked over at her, a bemused expression on his face.

‘What’s wrong?’

They were sitting in bed, in that wonderful hour just before sleep where the world stopped spinning and nothing else mattered but just the two of them sharing one space, one life, one destiny. Well usually anyway.

‘Just got defeated in battle.’ She could hear the disgust in the brittle tones of her voice.

‘Look at this’ he pointed to his iPad. ‘I’m really worried about Trump and that crazy North Korean president… we’re not far from another world war.’

She put her phone down and snuggled next to him, laying her head on his warm chest. Two belligerent men stared at her. She should be frightened by what she saw, their eyes like ice chips and the grim lines of their mouth shouted to the world that they were more than. More than what you would expect, more than what you could handle, more than it would take for there to be peace, more than the world could contain and definitely more than ready to send some nukes out there and obliterate life as we know it. But what could she do about it anyway? The world was broken, a thing of beauty when you were looking from far far away, like in 2001 a Space Odyssey, all blue and green and white and perfectly round, but when you got closer the stench suddenly hits you — decaying flesh and rotten blood, vultures preying on the weak, destruction and chaos for no other reason than man’s inhumanity to man. It was too depressing.

‘We’ll just plan on doing what you said’ she let her voice be sweet and planted a kiss on his grizzled cheek. He nodded. The grand plan was to buy some property in New Zealand, far far away from everyone and everything, Lord of the Rings country. Farm the land and find a way to recreate Eden, then when the apocalypse came and hopefully there were no zombies, they would be Adam and Eve, or maybe Mr. and Mrs. Noah, and there would be a new earth all clean and shiny, just green and blue and white and perfect.

++++++

Her island was being attacked again — the enemy troops were on the rampage and her villagers were scurrying into the buildings to hide as if they actually had a hope of staying alive. The buildings were actually the worst places to go to in these attacks, if she were on that island she would dive into the surrounding sea and float on her back, threading the water until the carnage was past. She wanted to shout to her little minions ‘Put on your swimmers you fools! All the buildings are going to collapse on your heads, run into the sea! Run like the dickens!’. Perhaps if the game developers had deigned to draw some ears on her villagers it would have helped, as it was however, her poor deaf pirates ran to certain death as fast as their little legs could take them.

-22! That was brutal. A drop in rank after an attack was the norm, but sometimes the extent of that drop still caused a double take. A victory led to an edging upwards of sometimes +2, or if you were lucky, a +10 in rank, but these defeats … it was one step forward and two steps back much of the time.

The day her mother died had been like that — life before was golden, so bright that she couldn’t bear to look back it hurt too much. It was a steady building up of positives, every smile, the kind words, the looks that said ‘I’m so proud of you’ the holidays and the presents that said ‘I can’t say I love you but I’m showing you’. And then the plunge on that black day. It was like the game, but more than. -1000 points after all the +1 and +10’s over the years until her rank was in deficit. The hollowness was the worst of it, like someone had burrowed in through your heart and proceeded to eat up all your insides, starting with your organs, the soft fleshy tissues, moving onto your muscles and gristly tendons then finally crunching on your bones until you were a walking balloon. That was the unbearable lightness of being, when you were a balloon being tugged along by the hand of fate, wishing you could pop and put an end to your miserable existence but being dragged along relentlessly. Then as if by some miracle (some have called it time) your insides start to re-grow. First the stomach and you begin to feel hungry again. Then your lungs, you start to take deep breaths and notice that the air isn’t quite as stale as it used to be. Then (you never thought this would be possible), your heart. You’re still a mushy walking creature without your bones but pumping at your centre is your heart and it’s urging your backbone to reform. And it does, vertebrae by vertebrae until you’ve got your spine back and you can pull at the string in the hand of fate. There’s some reluctance but fate knows it’s fated and lets go.

+++++++

He was sleeping now. His reading glasses still on his nose, and his mouth open. His features are eerie in the light of his iPad but they are familiar to her. She takes his glasses off and puts them on his bedside table. He’s got quite a firm grip on his iPad but she manages to ease it gently out of his hand and she places that next to his glasses.

‘Wha? I was just asleep there! You do this every night, you have to stop waking me up!’ He grumbles and turns over, burrowing deeper under the covers.

She grins at their little routine, and leans into his neck to get one last whiff of his scent.

A message blinks on her phone, ‘pirate recruitment complete’. Logging on to her game again she sees that her village has regenerated, the buildings pristine as the first day they were made, and it’s time to get back in the rumble.

~

Tim Tomlinson – “Look Closer”

OCTOBER 20th, 2017

“I know you all know what a dick is,” Rosie said to the sixth-grade girls. “Well, here’s mine.”

From the open zipper in his jeans, Rosie fished his little eraser of a penis.

Some of the girls gasped and covered their mouths with their hands. Some laughed. Some pretended to look away, but few actually could.

They were in the woods just off the recess field, their perimeter guarded by fourth and fifth grade boys.

Rosie said, “You can look closer if you want.”

Kathy Christmas pulled the hair from her face and leaned closer. Maria Bella and Debbie Fancy followed.

Debbie said, “Is it . . . is it getting bigger?”

The soft little pink thing had lengthened, the wrinkles in its shaft smoothed and hardened.

“Probably,” Rosie said. “It sometimes does that.”

Kneeling now, looking more closely, Kathy Christmas said, “Weird.”

Rosie said, “It’s okay to touch it.”

“I’m not touching that,” Kathy said, laughing.

Maria Bella knelt alongside her. “I will,” she said.

She placed the tip of her index finger on the shaft and the penis hardened further.

“Why is it doing that?” Maria asked.

Rosie said he didn’t know.

Maria said, “It’s so smooth.”

Debby Fancy leaned forward. She put her finger on, too, right at the tip.

“Ewww,” she said, “it’s all gooey.” But she didn’t take her finger away.

Then Billy Kanes, a fourth grader, came racing through the scrub.

“Morawski,” he shouted once, and vanished up the path.

Violently, the girls on the periphery scattered into the woods. They disappeared quickly up the paths through the low scrub. Before they could be identified, they would all find hidden exits onto the playing field. But Kathy and Maria were slow getting up from where they knelt. Soil stuck to the knees they exposed between mini-skirts and the tops of white go-go boots. And Rosie was having trouble pressing his erection back into his jeans.

Then Mrs. Morawski appeared.

“Do not a single one of you move,” she said.

Rosie was a new kid. His mother married Chris Hulse’s father, and they arrived in town from Nassau County some place close to the city. They lived at the edge of a sod field stadiums wide. You could see their house all the way from 25A. It looked like a red Monopoly hotel at the corner of a ping-pong table.

Rumors preceded Rosie’s appearance in school. He’d been left back at least once—he should have been in the seventh grade, maybe even eighth. There may have been some trouble in his last school, something to do with Rosie in the shower after gym class. Chris Hulse told his friends he wouldn’t sleep in the same room as Rosie, but he didn’t fully explain why. He moved into the basement where he slept on the couch, and he acted like he preferred that, but there was more to the story. No one, not even Rosie when he arrived, could explain why Rosie was called Rosie. His real name was John Scratchley. One thing Chris said: “My father better not adopt him. I don’t want the same last name as that fat freak.”

Rosie wasn’t really fat, he was chubby. He wore size 32” jeans, and his freckled face was puffy at the cheeks and under the chin. His hair was very short, a crew cut, the kind boys got when they got into trouble, but you could see that it was blond.

In the office, Kathy and Maria and Rosie stood, hands folded, in front of Principal Siegel’s desk. Principal Siegel was new, too, but not as new as Rosie. He was supposed to be strict, but all he did now was look from Kathy’s face to Maria’s to Rosie’s and back again. He drummed the fingers of one hand on his desk and continued to watch their faces. You could hear a watch tick, and sounds from the hall filtered in like echoes in a tunnel.

Finally, Kathy said, “Are we gonna just, like, stand here?”

Rosie snorted, and Maria bit hard on her lower lip.

“I mean,” Kathy said, “we’re missing I think social studies or some crap.”

The three of them, then, led by Rosie, burst out laughing. They laughed against their efforts to hold in the laughter. Tears leaked from their eyes onto the floor of Principal Siegel’s office where they splotched and darkened the gray and white tiles. They tried to suck back their guffaws, they tried to straighten from their waists, but they couldn’t. It seemed almost like the harder they tried to stop, the more the laughter poured forth. But slowly, painfully, they gulped it back, they swallowed it down, until they mastered it and they all three stared at the floor and avoided each other’s moist reddened eyes.

Principal Siegel continued drumming his fingers, for a minute, another minute, an eternity.

Kathy said, “Dude,” and their laughter exploded again.

Rosie said, “I’m gonna piss my fucking pants,” and they laughed harder and harder, their stomachs twisting into knots, and they pleaded with each other to stop, but they couldn’t, again, for a very long time.

When they looked up this time, Principal Siegel was reaching for the phone.

Maria Bella’s mother arrived second.

“He just showed it to us, Mama,” Maria said, ducking blows. “How were we supposed to know?”

To Rosie’s mother, Mrs. Bella said, “I’m gonna have that freak of yours locked up, you hear me?”

Mrs. Hulse stood behind Rosie holding his shoulders, sniffling back tears.

“We’re both sorry,” she told Mrs. Bella.

Mrs. Bella pushed Maria out the door. “Sorry my ass,” she said over her shoulder. “You can tell it to the judge.”

Kathy Christmas’s mother wasn’t home. Kathy was sent to spend the rest of the day in the nurse’s office.

“What were you thinking,” Nurse Meadows asked her.

“I dunno,” Kathy said. “Just how funny and little it looked.”

Nurse Meadows was taken aback. She fixed the glasses hanging round her neck onto the bridge of her nose.

“Funny and little,” she repeated. “Young lady, do you have any idea what you have done?”

“Yeah,” Kathy said, “I, like, looked at a dick. What’s the big deal?”

Nurse Bellows sent Kathy back to Principal Siegel’s office, but on the way she ducked into the unfinished wing of the new school. She entered an empty classroom whose unlocked doors opened onto a staircase to the side drive. She flashed across the drive faster than a squirrel, and back home she ignored the ringing telephone and watched cartoons.

When she got bored, she went outside and walked through the woods to Maria Bella’s house on John Street. She tapped at Maria’s window.

“My mother’s gonna kill me,” Maria said, pulling her friend over the sill.

“Fuck your mother,” Kathy said.

Kathy was something of a leader. Of all the girls, she developed noticeable breasts first, early in the fifth grade. By early sixth, which she was in now, she’d hung out with seventh and eighth grade boys, and she’d been felt up seven times. Maria had been felt up once. Debby Fancy wanted to be, but Kathy told her she needed to wait until there was something to feel.

“What did it feel like,” Kathy asked, “when you, like, touched it.”

“I don’t know,” Maria said, “kind of soft and smooth like velour.”

Kathy said, “Really?”

“Even when it got hard,” Maria said.

Kathy said, “Wow.”

Maria said, “I know.”

“But it didn’t feel gooey? Debby said it was gooey.”

“It didn’t feel gooey to me.”

Kathy said, “You think we should call her?”

“I can’t call anyone,” Maria said. “My mother would kill me.”

“How would she know.”

“That bitch knows everything.”

“You should come to my house,” Kathy said. “My mother lets us alone.”

Maria said, “Yeah, well my mother loves me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just she loves me, that’s all.”

“And what, my mother doesn’t?”

From another part of the house, Maria’s mother shouted.

“What’s all that noise in there?”

Maria said, “You better get out of here.”

Kathy said, “You’re such a wuss.”

Maria said, “Okay, I’m a wuss. But I know more than you.”

Kathy took the other woods, the woods that led away from home. She felt unsettled. She felt something had changed. She was the leader, the first one with a bra, the first one with a boyfriend, the first one French kissed, the first one felt up. It was like a shelf full of trophies. Then, all of a sudden, one shitty recess, and she’s the one asking questions. What the hell did Debby mean, all gooey?

Rosie stood in front of the mirror looking at the way his little dick must have looked when he pulled it out. He thought about how it had lengthened and how good that felt, like something really good was about to happen. Had to happen. And he thought about how much fun it was in Principal Siegel’s office, to laugh right in his face. No matter how much trouble he was in, it was worth it finally to laugh right in one of their faces.

He was in a lot of trouble, he knew that. He didn’t know exactly how much, but the phone had been ringing nearly non-stop since the school buses dropped the kids back home. He could hear his mother crying, sighing, apologizing. And once his step-brother came in, without knocking, and said, “Dad’s gonna send you to a home.”

“This is my home,” Rosie told him.

His brother said, “This is our home, you fat freak,” and he slammed the door.

Rosie liked Chris. He was a fast runner, good at math, but he was so uptight.

In the mirror, he could see the distant traffic rolling on 25A. It was almost thirty minutes to the nearest town, a town with a luncheonette and a pharmacy and a candy store. He felt like he was living nowhere, at the edge of a huge lawn that didn’t even have houses.

The school buses were just heading back out to pick up the late kids, the kids who stayed after for sports or clubs. Rosie had wanted to join a club. He thought he could do cross-country, but his step-brother told him they don’t accept fat freaks. Then he thought he could do quilting, but Mrs. Morawski told him that was only for girls.

Something in the mirror caught his eye. He went to the window, and there . . . halfway across the sod field . . . was a figure . . . a girl . . . in a skirt . . . a mini-skirt . . . and white go-go boots . . . Kathy . . . Kathy Christmas. And she was coming toward his house. She was coming closer. And closer. So close she saw him. She saw him and waved. She indicated with her hands that he should lift up his window.

He looked down. He was still unzipped.

He wondered if he should raise his zipper. He guessed Kathy could tell him.

He raised the window.

10:21:26

~

Greg Baines – Excerpts from “Guerilla War: A Love Story” (Part 3)

Zhen – Delays

“All warfare is based on deception.” (Sun Tzu, Chpt 1, 18)

I have been in this bar so many times, it’s like reading the same book again and again. The pages are grubby and hold no surprises. I’m here alone tonight, hoping beer will wash my irritation with Sun.

My head feels like it’s being split with each bass thud, makes it hard to think. DJ’s all sound the same don’t they? Just different posters. Stupid names; DJ Missile, DJ Jam.

Each drink purchase is studied, timed. I switch to cognac from the cheap beer. I work out each glass of cognac costs me four point one hours of my meagre wages. This is not to be taken lightly. But I don’t care anymore. It relaxes me, softens the sound of jackhammers in my head. The bartender pours a small stain of four hours labour into my glass, I wince. Here’s to my family-friendly fiance who has been so busy at work I’ve been stuck at my parents for two long extra days. He thinks his meetings with his boss are more important than moving me into our flat.

I swig another small mouthful of cognac and message my friend Mei to see how she is. But there is no reply.

Some cheap looking girl moves in front of me and eyes a foreigner. She must think I’m competition, but I don’t have the required layers of makeup. I wear jeans, not a short skirt. And I don’t like foreign men, not like that. The foreigner smiles at her, doesn’t see me. His eyes move down her legs to her high heels. We are playthings to them. He is like a child.

The cheap girl, in heels that are more like school made stilts, stumbles onto my toes causing a sharp stab of pain. Worse, I see in a quick machine gun fire of strobe that she’s stained the toes of my favourite shoes. I try to push her away but end up stumbling myself. Too much cognac and out manoeuvred, I fall off my stool and onto my feet, but kick out at her as I do. Mud that always seems to be caked to the bottom of my shoes stains her clothes, makes me smile. My handbag strikes the foreigner in the side. He doesn’t notice though, he is too busy trying to scoop up the heeled painted doll falling at his feet. He looks like a baby happy with a cheap breakable toy. You get what you pay for, right?

I feel more lost than when I arrived. Drink has clouded me. I feel like I’m sinking inside. More music, too loud. I have to get out so I head toward the flood of light spilling from the exit. There are lots of people between me and the coat rack. I’m going through my pockets looking for the tag. Hair is in my eyes, sticky with sweat. People behind wait for me, watching.

A foreigner stumbles ahead of the queue, with a small group around him. I can’t see his face clearly. He has sandy coloured hair that was once styled in some sort of business cut, but it’s now slightly overgrown. I see a flash of dark eyes. His clothes look cheap, but I notice an expensive pair of shoes, one of the brands Mei goes on about. He looks bored, numb. He’s too drunk or too clueless to see a system and pushes ahead of me.

I must have drunk too much, I am never so direct with strangers, “Wait, line up. They are getting my coat.” I feel blood rush to my cheeks as I say this, want to rewind that last moment and keep my mouth shut.

He mutters, “Doesn’t even seem to be a line, don’t know how you can tell.”

I push hair out of my face, fold my arms, “Foreigners often miss the obvious.”

He rocks back on his heels now, steadies himself on the counter. I see him examine my face. The group with him has drifted off toward the door. He doesn’t seem to care, says to me, “I’ve fucked up. I…” He looks down at his shoes, takes one hand out to steady himself against the wall near him. He splutters, “I didn’t mean it quite like that…” The words run together like ink. I wince at the toxic smell of what he has drunk, I can smell it from where I am.

I pull back a little, “I don’t talk with drunks.” I regret starting this, look over his shoulder hoping someone will come back with my coat. I fold my arms and stand there, hoping I can escape quickly. My bravery is evaporating.

He grunts, points his finger at me, trying to end the tense silence between us, “You know… I’ve seen no system in this city so far… crazy drivers, brave cyclists…”

He stops pointing when he realises I won’t respond. People are looking, I just want to go home now. He turns away from me, sighs, runs his hands through his hair, says, “Sorry.” I glance at him, he looks lost. I feel a flicker of pity for him.

I mutter, “You’ll feel better tomorrow.” He doesn’t reply.

Someone comes with my coat and I take it off her, anxious to flee. In my haste I stumble, and he lurches to help me, grabs my arm. I jump away and move toward the door. I feel the air from the outside smother the sound from the club behind me. It shrinks it to monotone.

He follows me outside. I stumble to the head of a taxi queue and try to muscle my way into a taxi to get away from him. I hear him from behind me, “There’s a system, a line…” His interruption has prevented me from being pushed by three women I have offended as I take their place in the taxi queue. He looks happy seeing this revenge and leads me away before they vent their rage at me.

He says, “I’d buy you a drink, to say sorry, but I don’t have any money left.”

He must be lying, “How can a foreigner not have money?” I grunt.

He smiles, looks at my shoes, “Well, not all of us have money to burn.”

I should walk away, but I don’t, I stand on the edge of the street not in a line for a taxi and not walking away. I can’t explain why I don’t want to move or why half of me stops the other half from moving, a stalemate. I say, “Well, you must have something, you couldn’t have swum here from your country.”

I hope he will walk away, but he chuckles. I see a flash of those eyes and I look down at the pavement, and he says, “My company paid for the ticket and set me up, so… no great swimming skills.” He tries to say something else but the wind picks up and we both recoil as the cold hits us.

We shuffle back away from the road toward the door where there is some shelter. I notice, with enough light now from the light in the doorway, that he is unshaven. “You don’t need to buy me a drink, I’m used to foreigners.”

He raises his eyebrows, “Used to arrogance?”

I nod, “Yes.” My cheeks flush and I turn away from him, my arms folded and pressed against my breasts to hold the warmth in.

He says, “Funny, I was just thinking you were arrogant.” I grit my teeth, want to yell at him but I am incapable of even grasping at an English word to respond.

He finds a business card and holds it in one hand in front of me, “Well, I should give this to you. They say that’s the right thing to do here.” I feel my eyebrows arch. Such thick skin; ‘the nerve’, as they say in foreign movies. It says, ‘Golden Dragon Property’ above his name, Lindon. He works for them.

I snatch it quickly, my upbringing forbids me from leaving it in his hands. I pull too hard and he topples forward, almost falls to the street. I leave, turn my back on him, heading for the subway as rain starts to fall. I only get a few metres form him and he yells, “What’s your name?”

I wonder why he cares. I stop and turn around. Rain starts to prick my face with icy water and I breath hard, “Zhen Yi.” The rain gets heavier and I rush away.

I look back as the subway entrance looms up in front of me and see he is following me. I notice, in the rain that’s fanning out on the road, the mud from his shoes is leaving a trail behind him. He looks like a child, a large clumsy child. I being to laugh, a real laugh. I’m more used to giving ‘show faces’ and deceitful body language. That is my life. Smile to the right people, strategic-emotional-display. But this laugh is real. I put his card into a pocket, careful to remember where I put it, and disappear into the subway.

Later on the platform I see him squinting in the glare of fluorescent light. We don’t talk. He has retreated into himself anyway, is far away. I turn to go to my side of the platform and I am happy a train glides in right away. I don’t look at him again, I just turn and disappear into the carriage.

My phone begins screeching. It’s Sun, I see his name on the screen and I’m relieved to hear from him. I want to hear his voice after everything that’s gone on tonight. The night has flushed out the frustration. Was I bitch to him? Should I be a more supportive fiancé? There are ads for bras opposite me, Sun sounds perfect, as usual. His voice deep and calm. He apologises for being out so late again. He has signed a big new contract. Says this one will “change everything” but I’ve heard this before.

I say, “I’m not feeling well baby. I need to be in our own place. My parents are driving me crazy…” I listen to his voice, my toe aches from the club. The foreigner’s smile is everywhere I look in the subway. It’s the only thing I can see and I feel terrible for this small emotional betrayal of Sun. I don’t even know why I would think about that stupid arrogant man.

The train gathers speed as we head away from the station, Sun is saying, “…and you should make sure you keep warm, it’s starting to rain they say, and I hope you were careful with-” but as the train disappears into a tunnel we lose our signal. His voice disappears mid-sentence and my shoulders go slack. I sink back against the door. I look forward to being surrounded by him, smelling his skin. But I won’t see him again tonight, and I will be with my parents.

When I get off at my stop, rain has started to descend in heavy sheets. At home I clear my pockets. All the paper has formed a soft mess of running ink and pulp. There is no number left. I’m relieved about this, almost happy.

Why would I want some arrogant foreign man’s phone number anyway?

Lindon – Foam realities

“Knowledge of the enemy’s dispositions can only be obtained from other men.”
(Sun Zi, Chpt. 13, 6)

I have been hired much like a mascot on a sports team to smile and drink and show my face at ceremonies, not to actually work. I have the foam model in my head, but there is no “nail house” on the model so I have escaped today, slipped out of a press conference between camera flashes and toasting glasses and managed to get a taxi; we are speeding out across endless overpass toward the site, Chinese news blaring over the car’s speakers. I must get a look at this nail house for myself, size it up and give them their marching orders.

I sit in the back, sandwiched with the young guy they have given me to translate, his eyes permanently attached to his mobile phone. I don’t know his name and he doesn’t seem to care too much to know mine. I notice another taxi travels behind us the whole way and stops a block ahead of us as we arrive and I wonder, in a made-for-TV moment, if I am being followed. I watch an old guy get out of the taxi clutching a shopping bag wander off ahead to a small row of shops in the distance but he doesn’t look back.

I leave paranoid thoughts behind and stride across the road through the torn muddy shreds of earth left in machines wakes. Blue construction steel fence has enveloped the site. I duck under a loosely chained driveway in the centre on the front side of the fence next to the company logo and I smile to myself as the translator trips on a rise of mud as he texts and walks- serves him right.

Once inside I stop, trying to take in what I see, startled. There are two deep round pits that all this construction rises out of; behind this, in the distance is a block of apartments that have, on the plans at least, already been removed but they are still partially standing. I see only two cranes installed to service the ten stories of the building that has currently been started in the pit to the left of me; there should be more machinery, more activity. Workers accommodation, at least, has been built at the far end of the site, opposite me- small white sheds are piled on top of each other, some sort of makeshift kitchen next to it billows smoke. Some of the bottom sheds have been made with what I assume are the bricks of the houses already demolished.

As I look around men stop around me – one guy stands in front of me to my left and a couple thrust pages at me that are tattered and torn. I ignore them for the moment taking in the nail house in front of me. I’d pictured a house or two standing amongst machinery but this is so much more than that- there is an island of land left in the middle of the second pit, and a narrow land bridge has been left to connect it to where I stand.

Sitting on top of that is a house, a regular terrace house that’s had other buildings obviously demolished around it, but this one has been spared, left intact and it’s perched up on top of the island like a rotten tooth. An old man shuffles around on the roof, piling up stones and rocks. He has red flags flying from makeshift beams of wood from the corners of the roof and he stops when he sees me and stares in our direction, peers at us like we are somehow the odd ones in this scene. The translator shuffles up beside me breathing heavily from the short walk and doesn’t seem to be at all taken aback, like what is in front of us is an ‘everyday’ occurrence.

Voices now attract my attention. I count over a dozen people wandering toward me. One guy has an ill-fitting security uniform on and a jar of tea in his hand and they all talk at once at me. The guard points back at the gate and I shrug and yell, “I don’t understand…” I wave my company ID at them, hope this scares them off, intimidates in some way. A dog starts barking from within the house in the pit. The translator looks at me for direction but I shrug and move closer to the earth bridge that connects the nail house to the edge. The small crowd that has gathered follows me.

As I stop on the land bridge itself to take a couple of images with my phone, the translator pulls on my sleeve, “We should go back, let others deal with this.”

The people who have followed us start to back up, won’t set foot on the bridge. I pull away from the translator, say, “I just need to let them know a couple of thingd, I’ll be all right.”

He laughs “Mr, the on-site office is over that way…” He points back behind us and I notice the small crowd are looking at each other- some smile and I wonder what these smiles mean.

“I won’t take long.” I start to walk across the land bridge. No one, including the translator, are moving with me; they stand watching like they are looking at an accident, but this suits me, it makes things less complicated. I notice a camera crew have run up behind the crowd but they keep their distance as well.

As I turn my head from them I look up to find the old man but he seems to have disappeared from site. It’s then the first projectile hits me. I am lucky that the first one is just a ball of mud that strikes my leg so it doesn’t hurt too much, but I still stagger a bit with the force and surprise of it. I’m off balance and I lurch toward the side of the land bridge, hands instinctively now over my head waiting for the next blow and I overbalance at the edge. I hear a collective sigh behind me and look down – the drop looks to be about twenty metres and I feel my fingers and toes tingle as I pull my weight back the other way to avoid dropping into the pit. I stumble as I do this and end up on my hands and knees.

Mud covers my legs and looks like it will stain my only suit and I curse under my breath but another projectile hits my head. It’s softer and larger. My legs crumple. Soft mud cascades down my face and brings me safely down to the ground where I curse again. I hear laughter from behind and I turn to hurl abuse at them but as I open my mouth the third projectile hits my back and pain shoots up into my neck.

Another harder object hits the ground in front of me as I try to get up, my eyes foggy with mud. It’s then I hear a loud woman’s voice from in front of me yell “Stop!”

I wipe mud off my face and it drips off the ends of my fingers. I peer through the grime looking for the source of the voice. I can’t see her face under a woollen hat and a hooded jacket.

I can only really see her eyes – they shine somehow out of the cold. She walks from the nail house and the old man trails twenty metres or so behind her, some sort of projectile still in his hand ready for battle.

Anger overwhelms me driven by the pain in my back, “What the fuck was that for?”

She comes closer now, pushes back the hood and she is instantly familiar- the girl from the nightclub. She says, “My father is causing all of us lots of trouble. I’m sorry.”

It takes her a fraction longer to recognize me, but then it’s there in the way her face tightens as I speak, “Your father is mad.”

She frowns, “My father is under a lot of pressure.”

Pain radiates across my back again in a new wave and I wince. “I just came out to chat with him, not get attacked.”

“My father was the one that attacked you, talk to him.” She turns to leave.

“I assume that animal behind you is your father?”

Zhen stops, spins around, “Don’t call my father names, drunk.”

“Drunk?” Mud is trickling into the corners of my mouth, it’s gritty in my teeth. I sneer, happy this has offended her, “You’re just lucky I don’t get the police out here.”

Zhen whistles and I hear the dog bark again. It appears from a hole in the wall at the front of her home and races toward me. I grin despite the pain, pretend the dog doesn’t frighten the piss out of me, “Calling out your attack dogs?” I leer.

Zhen stands opposite me, impassive and the dog, much to my relief, stops beside her. I look back, smiling. The film crew have advanced onto the land bridge and are still filming. I notice a brand on the side of the camera that seems to suggest some sort of local news station so I consider my next words carefully now. I clear my throat, straighten my muddy tie, push muddy hair out of my face and say, “Well I won’t bill you for the dry cleaning I’ll need.”

I hold out my hand to pressure her into a handshake, but the dog darts forward and sinks its teeth into my calf. There is excited chatter from the crowd behind and no one stops to help. I curse, trying to flick the dog away with my hand but only the translator makes an effort and the dog lets go of me to lash out at him. I launch a kick at the dog but my other foot slips in the mud and I end up landing on my backside. The jolt aggravates the pain in my back but scares the dog and I hear clapping from the now excited audience behind.

I keep my voice calm for the cameras, try my best to smile. When I look up at Zhen I notice she is holding her hand over her obviously grinning mouth and I say through gritted teeth, “Just remind your father he only has another forty eight hours to leave. We are behind schedule already and this building won’t stop for him or anyone else.”

Zhen turns and marches away, obviously filled with contempt and hate for me, yet I have sent her a clear strong message; at least I have that satisfaction. I get up slowly, fighting pain and mud. The foam model could not be more false, more unlike this muddy shitty fucking hole.

I get to the road, the crowd stares and smiles at me with my muddy suit and hair and I see a man with a shopping bag watching me from across the street. He smiles at me. He looks like an ordinary person, but he has perfectly straight white shining teeth and he nods his head at me when we make eye contact.

~

Greg Baines – Excerpts from “Guerilla War: A Love Story” (Part 2)

SEPTEMBER 15th, 2017

Lindon – Glass rooms

“Ground which can be abandoned but is hard to re-occupy is called ‘entangling’. From a position of this sort, if the enemy is unprepared, you may sally forth and defeat him. But if the enemy is prepared for your coming, and you fail to defeat him, then, return being impossible, disaster will ensue.”
(Sun Zi, Chpt. 10, 4 and 5)

I’m hung over from the third formal welcome dinner for me in the last several days. My throat is dry and my clothes smell of a hotpot meal and bijoe, a potent head-splitting white spirit. I squeeze out of the taxi into a bloom of humanity and as soon as I am upright and ready to walk away from the curb someone has jumped into the taxi and it is away again. I thread through people and pass between two bicycles with fruit laid out for sale on a tray behind the bicycle seats, my head pounding with each footstep like there is a direct line from my feet to my brain. I side step a beggar in blue jeans and Nike shoes who smells of mold and pushes a small dented plastic disposable cup full of old coins at me. I need all my coins and so I ignore him, pretend I haven’t see him.

A glass cube stuck to the side of the building hauls me away from the mess below. I notice a couple holding hands in the throng and I watch them as the lift ascends, wondering if I will ever be able to forget the scars Julie has left and be able to do that again with someone.

The American CEO is standing waiting for me as the lift doors ease open, an age-scarred version of the young man in the image with Zhang Zimin. He shakes my hand so hard the bones in my fingers creak under the strain and I wonder if he shook Zhang Ziminn’s hand like that, wonder if he dared.

We go up to the boardroom, a space almost completely devoid of concrete walls- it’s just curtains of glass on never ending city. The carpet has probably just been rolled out in here because it hasn’t even been attached to the floor, I can see it rolls up at the corners and sides.

I have borrowed all I can, stretched the goodwill of my family and friends to the limit just to get here- I’m anxious to get my signature down on the contract so I can start paying people back. But I forget all that for a moment and allow myself to be distracted by the view; it’s overwhelming, engulfing. The CEO notices and he says, “It’s quite a city isn’t it?” and I nod, trying to obscure my hunger. An old grey landscape is being swept away by glass steel and concrete stacked up by hundreds of cranes. It’s mesmerizing and my heart starts to pound when I think of the money to be made here, the staggering numbers that must lie beneath me.

His secretary comes in, she looks perfect, newly minted, like she has just come out of a box on a shelf. She tilts her head and smiles at me but doesn’t stop to talk- I’m part of a task she must perform, nothing more.

A large model of the apartment complex sits in the middle of a new office in a corner, the completed foam replica of the apartments we will build twenty stories into the sky. It looks small after my last job, like a toy. The CEO sees me looking over at the model and he waves me over toward it. From a distance it looks like a miniature of the real thing, but as we get closer I see plastic edges, sloppy paint and it looks fragile and cheap.

He begins to talk me through some figures on the number of apartments and their expectations but he is interrupted. Some locals in suits come to the door, ask to speak to him. He speaks for a while in Chinese that, to my untrained ear, sounds as good as the locals he is talking to, then excuses himself from me and turns to go.

I put out my hand, touch his sleeve, my anxiety spilling out, “The contract, is it ready to sign?”

He smiles, glances down at my hand, “It’s been finalized now, but if you have some settling in tasks to do, you can come back this afternoon or tomorrow morning.”

I try to curb my impatience, keep a smile on my face, slow my voice down, “I may as well sign it now, I can wait here.”

He nods and points in the direction of a meeting room he says my contract will be delivered to in a little while. He says there is a pile of magazines in there and then he strides away from me engrossed in his next conversation.

I take a wrong turn, end up at the doorway to another office. A lady in a black suit sits opposite a shorter woman who is crying- tears roll down her cheeks and drip off her chin. I stand shocked for a second, I don’t know what to say. The woman in black points in the other direction and pushes the door shut on me. I don’t understand what I have just seen, I’m trying to survive each day blindfolded and I’m stumbling ahead one step at a time.

His secretary is in the meeting room, she has a thick wad of paper wedged in her hands. I stare at it, hoping it’s my contract and she looks up at me and says, “Mr Lin, we are ready.”

“It’s Lindon.” I correct her, my eyes on the paper in her hands.

She laughs but her eyes are on something over my shoulder, “Mr Lin, please step inside so we can deal with the documents.” She motions for me to enter the meeting room and I step toward her and settle into a seat, lean forward in her direction opposite me. She lays the document down between us, the tips of her fingers resting on it. Her nails are painted a thick glossy red. She looks at me, the smile gone. I reach forward to pull the document toward me but her fingers press down and the document is stuck between us.

She says quietly, “There are certain formalities that we must discuss first.”

“Of course.”

“This is China so one of the documents you will sign here requires you to be aware that your contract will be terminated if you violate the laws and morals of the People’s Republic of China.” I pull a little harder on the document but she doesn’t release it, she asks, “Are you aware of what this means?”

I’m not but I don’t care. I say, to dodge more lengthy unnecessary talk, “Yes, of course.”

She lifts her fingers and I pull the document toward me, start flicking through the pages. She anticipates me and as I look up to ask for it, she slides across a black pen. She makes no eye contact, she is already lost in her mobile phone, onto a new person, a new task.

I scribble in signatures where required, ignoring all the fine print, ignoring all the conditions. The only figure I check is the monthly salary and bonus. I smile as I finish and slide the documents eagerly across the table. I sit back, relieved. I have not disguised how much I need the job with my eagerness.

The numbers in the contract have so many zeros I forget my hang over, the jackhammers in my head. As I rise to leave, smiling stupidly, she says she has to tell me something else. She slides the meeting room door closed, and shuffles her chair next to mine as I sit back down. I can smell her perfume, it’s strong and flowery. She leans toward me and begins to tell me about nail houses.

The lift seems to take an age to get to the ground floor. I stare at the floor working through what I have just learned, feel the weight of it bearing down on me. I find myself, naively, looking for the couple holding hands but I see instead people alone, their hands in pockets, their eyes far away.

~

Greg Baines – Excerpts from “Guerilla War: A Love Story” (Part 1)

SEPTEMBER 11th, 2017

Zhen Yi – Caged

“Be stern in the council-chamber, so that you may control the situation.” (Sun Zi, “The Art of War”, Chpt. 11, 64)

Even from here, three blocks away, I can feel the small shock waves from the school as the walls crash down. It’s one of the last buildings to be demolished, the chalk stained white washed walls in which I completed my schooling. Dust is dislodged in my room, it drifts in small currents towards the window. I have lived here, in my parent’s house, forever. I’m itching to leave. I want to fly away.

The door still has my name carved in it, Zhen Yi, from my school days. If you are a foreigner reading this, you say my name “Jen Ee”. My parents have already stuck the red double happy character paper cut out above my name even though the wedding is weeks away.

I feel the lightness of the bag leave my hand. It’s ready to be filled with memories from here. My finance, Sun, will come tonight after work to pick me up and we will spend our first night in the flat we rented across the city. This will all be an ‘open secret’ of course. Something everyone knows is happening, but no one talks about. We can’t officially start living together until our wedding night. He said he will borrow his cousin’s car, an old VW Santana that breaks down more often than it completes a trip, to rescue me from my parents.

My mother is trying to paper over her sadness about me going, and the avalanche of other things. She shoves food at me as I go back out into the living room. She has tea made in her chipped enamel cups. I say no to the food. It looks reheated and dead. She doesn’t seem to have the energy to cook fresh food each day now. She looks pale, too thin, like the part of her I know is wilting. She says she is glad the school is gone, she says it was old and mouldy. But her eyes betray a different feeling. There are no more shockwaves now.

My father is by the front window cleaning up glass, sweeping it up into an old red cracked dustpan. Someone smashed the front window last night, used a broken piece of concrete. The lights reflected from the glass buzz around him, flies around the dying. Last week they jammed pig shit in the guttering. The week before that they burnt my mother’s clothes. That was the last straw for her, that’s when she passed out for the first time.

The property company desperately want us gone, we are the last house left on site undemolished. My father has turned our house into a ‘nail house’. It’s a pun that refers to nails that are stuck in wood, and can’t be pulled out. My father is the nail. We have even been in the papers. Defiant photos of my father on the roof pelting attackers with rocks. He is our family’s greatest embarrassment. He has some old fashioned idea about this being “his home” but it’s just a sad sagging old building that needs tearing down. Some of our family friends have already moved into new flats across town, with air con and sealed windows. I had respect for him when I thought he was just hanging out for a better compensation package, but I despaired when he started ranting about “our rights”.

The tea burns my lip. I blow gently across the steaming surface of the liquid and watch my mother through the fog. She goes to the kitchen to wash up and I can see her from here. Her hands shake. I tell her to stop but she ignores me. My father does nothing, I can hear the sound of shattered glass scratching across the concrete floor like gnashing dragons teeth as he continues to sweep, lost in his own battle. I sigh and leave my tea as I head for the kitchen to stop my mother washing. I look at the clock, willing it forward. In a few hours Sun will rescue me from all this shit.

Lindon – Making luxury home future

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” (Sun Zi, Chpt. 3, 18)

How could I end up somewhere so grey, so cold, cocooned in concrete and smog at the end of the world? Then I close my eyes against an icy gust of wind and I see her nasty smile and that image tightens my stomach, brings the anger up into my throat. The end of a relationship haunts you in ways other things don’t; it hounds you through the beginnings of your new life. China seemed to be the best place to forget Julie’s face, a place far enough away, big enough to allow me to forget- where a bankrupt person can work off their debt.

I open my eyes. They don’t seem to understand my English and I don’t understand a thing; but they smile nonetheless, cigarette stained teeth and touched up carbon fibre black hair. It has started to snow, it settles on our coats like icing sugar on puff pastry. I look up at the small stage next to us constantly to see if we will begin soon, but there’s only a lonely microphone there now.

We are outside our office building in the city, my seventh day in China; seven days of semi-comprehensible ceremonies and planning meetings. We stomp around in hats and gloves and heavy coats trying to keep warm, but I am optimistic today- this is the official start of the project, start of what I hope will be actual work. I gaze up at a banner above the stage with the company name “Golden Dragon Property” printed across it; below that, “Making luxury home future first-class world in modern harmonious China” for all to see with its lost articles and persuasive impotence.

Finally, three beautiful girls in long red traditional dresses wobble up on stage in high heels and we are pointed at, the translator and I, to join them. We clamber up and stand to the right of the pretty girls and others file on stage to the left; one of them is the CEO. I’ve only seen his photograph in the city offices, above the front entrance, as a young man smoking cigarettes with Premier Zhang Ziming, the one-time head of the country. The image is blown up to garish proportions, maybe a metre wide- a totem of power. It arrests you as you walk in, presses you down, reminding you how powerful he is- the white man from over the ocean who smoked cigarettes with Zhang Zimin isn’t to be fucked with.

Suits move forward with more urgency to the ribbon, cigarettes hanging out the corner of their mouths; lazy precarious columns of ash jut out at angles and make grey smudges on the shoulders of their jackets. The CEO holds scissors up high, the metallic edge catches in the sunlight and he brings the scissors down like he’s slaughtering an animal, sacrificing to something. The ribbon falls to the ground with no cheers, just a crescendo of a band’s rhythm and some lukewarm clapping – classic corporate propaganda.

I thought this would all be so simple, come cheaply; but everything has its price.

Zhen – Model houses

“While heeding the profit of my counsel, avail yourself also of any helpful circumstances over and beyond the ordinary rules.”

(Sun Zi, Chpt. 1, 16)

It’s good to see Sun for a change. But why are we here? My bags are bulging with objects ready for our flat. But he has told me that can wait, that he wants to show me an ‘exciting development’ first. Our plan had been to buy our own apartment close to my parents in the city, to buy a place in an adjoining block of the new development. Instead we are here, on the edge of town, on the edge of civilization. Sun doesn’t listen.

More lines. Small kids play toys on the side, bored old people squat. They put down newspaper and sit on it. Above us a giant bill board is stretched out, it flaps softly in the wind. Two perfect looking people with digitally altered white teeth and no blemishes stand with an impossibly cute child. They live in the completed development in some indefinite future. It has made them happy, four walls and a roof. The woman’s breasts look like they have been stretched. Everyone around them smiles like they are in an American movie, and the sky is blue. Blue in blue, fluffy white clouds. We see blue sky like this two or three weeks a year. Perhaps that’s why they have the imported smiles.

Sun has bought snacks. He slides them out of his bag and starts cracking open nuts, throws the shells at his feet. He peels a small handful and offers them to me. He does it quickly, excitedly. I take one. It’s dry and flavourless. It gets stuck in my teeth and I spit the rest out.

He is looking through the leaflet, like everyone else. They flap in the breeze in people’s hands, some blow away down the line toward the street.

I don’t know what to say to him, he feels thousands of miles away, even as we touch. I’m thinking of my full bags at my parents place, bulging with the possibility of a new freedom with Sun.

“I like the north block…” Sun says, spitting some husks out onto the ground at his feet, “…there are some good floor plans still left.” He looks up the line. He knows that a lot depends on how quickly we get to the front of that line. Lots of what we like will be sold by the time we get there.

“They are better.” I throw in, irritated. I’m watching the leaflets blow into the street and my eyes follow one that gets picked up by a gust and drifts back into a farmer’s field next door. This development is in farmland, rising from a peasants village that’s being demolished. I scan the city on the horizon. Every side of this development is framed by wheat fields, a little rice. I can smell animals on the wind. Maybe pigs. No one seems to look into the farms, they all have their heads stuck in their brochures. They are all dreaming of high rise, the future not the present.

Sun speaks, excitement lacing the edges of his words “There will be a small shopping area built on the east side, and two more developments the other side.” He knows I’m wondering why we are here, he doesn’t want to answer the question.

I let the wind take my pamphlet, it flutters away, “This is not what we agreed. I don’t want to be a farmer.” He sighs, puts his arm around me. He is blushing at my very public directness, “We couldn’t get a place this size in the city.” He smiles more to the people around us than me. To cover his loss of face.

I nod, watching a farmer cycle out to a spot in a wheat field. It all looks the same to me but he must know of a spot, and he stops and gets something out of a bag. It looks to be a long tool of some kind. He starts to attack the earth.

“We are getting in at the right time…” He must be looking at me for a reply, I sense it in his silence. The knowing of lovers.

I say, “Yes, good time.”

He squints at me, “You seem to be thinking about something else. I thought you’d be happy.”

“I am.” I say, trying to keep my irritation from getting out.

“This is where our baby will be.” He says. I have small future snaps in my head of our life, but they seem to be fading. The colour is blurring. Wedding nerves.

I touch his leg, “Don’t you think it’s a little cold?” He rummages for a light jacket, drapes it on my shoulders. I let my shoulders slump under the jacket. I pick at the edges of a nail that has split.

I say, “I hate lines. You know that.” He examines my face not convinced.

The line starts to shorten. Sun draws some ideas on a couple of the plans, and we discuss what designs will be good. “That will be good for the baby…”, “That will be good for our parents…”, “We should focus on decorating like xxx here…”. I agree, seeing the good all these will do everyone.

A couple of families leave, frustrated with the line. Or perhaps they’ve heard the place they want has been sold? We are in the showroom now. Three large models are buried in a glass box like jewels made of foam. People in purple suits with laser pointers stand around looking bored, or hungry or both. They flash the light around, show what places are left. I hear a lot of talk about price. These are cheap places.

Sun elbows his way in closer to the model, starts matching the plans to the model. His eyes hunt the small doll-house-like windows. He turns around, he has taken a laser pointer and points for me, drags me closer and out of my daydream. “That would be good for us, the kids. Our parents would like the way it faces.”

I agree, “It would please everyone.” I have a fantasy, just for a moment like I’ve never had before. In this fantasy I back away while Sun is preoccupied and slip through the people and run.

I run through fields of wheat, disappearing to find my own potholed road after stealing the peasant’s bicycle.

~

Jason Erik Lundberg – ‘Bodhisattva at the Heat Death of the Universe’*

JULY 28th, 2017

Zha materialized in my front yard, having finally found me after an interval of roughly five million years, give or take a few millennia. He was human again, and male, wearing those ragged worn-out monk’s robes he seemed to cherish so much; they rippled and fluttered in the breeze, even though my little asteroid hosted no atmosphere and, therefore, no wind. Above us, the twin red supergiants of this system—which I’d long ago named Mother and Father, so much bigger and older than when I had first settled in this place—rotated in their dance of peanut-shaped illumination.

“Hello, Zha,” I said, continuing to rake pebbles into the form of a gigantic asterisk, the image reaching halfway round the asteroid’s face, taking patience and artistry and determination; he and I both knew what the message meant, and I suppose I’d done so in order to call him here. Despite millions of years of solitude, I supposed I still wanted the occasional contact.

Yha. My name was projected, sent directly into my mind. I preferred the physical act of talking, of sending air up my esophagus to vibrate my vocal cords and produce sounds. The fact that no air could be found in the immediate vicinity was irrelevant, and both Zha and I were past such trivialities. Have you finally decided to forgo this existence and travel with me into the Pure Land?

“Can’t a person call her former lover for a chat without leaping into the subject of existence-transcending? Has it been so long that you’ve forgotten how to engage in small talk?”

Zha’s expression remained neutral, but a dozen microscopic gestures flitted across his face. I smiled at the thought that I still knew how to irritate him. What would be the point, Yha? We have had every conversation that it is possible to have, in so many incarnations and iterations that I have lost count. Even after achieving enlightenment, I remained in cyclic existence in order to guide every last sentient being to Nirvana, including you, who are now the last. I am tired, and the stars are tired. It is time to end this foolish game of yours.

“Game? You think I’ve been playing a game all this time?” I threw my rake down onto the carbonaceous chondrite and began kicking at the pebbles of my asterisk, scattering the image into unrecognizability. It seemed that my message had been both prescient and affirmative: Zha was still an unbelievable asshole. “You still don’t understand me, you arrogant bastard. Not during the many incarnations in which we were married, not when I was your daughter, or mother or father or brother or sister, and certainly not now. You want games? I’ll give you games.”

I dematerialized, leaving behind my corporeal form, my latest home, and the plants and pets I had conjured up from the asteroid’s physical material and manipulated for my amusement and companionship; I left it all to crumble and became pure consciousness, leaping light years with but a thought, pushing myself beyond the bounds of the Milky Way, skipping from one star system to another as easily as I once had skipped over the paving stones on a pond filled with artificially-enlarged koi, the pond where we had first met, all those endless lives ago. After I’d slipped from a wet stone and splashed into the shallow pond, Zha, crouching on the bank, had laughed, not maliciously, but with a wisdom that already understood futility and acceptance; I had taken his hand then, and laughed too at my sorry state, and our karmas become forever intertwined, like a carefully sculpted bamboo.

I felt Zha’s presence dozens of light years behind me but closing the gap quickly. My path led directly through the hearts of moribund blue supergiants, immersed me in the violent radiation of hypernovae, and skirted the infinitesimally-detectable event horizons of supermassive black holes. I felt the urge to clutch every passing star to me and fling them back at Zha as casually as a clod of dirt, but incorporeal as we both were, the effect would have been negligible.

I ran, Zha chased, and billions of years flowed by. It gave me time to think, and to reflect on the gradual darkening of the space around us. The galaxies were burning themselves out, what had seemed like endless fuel and energy proving its finitude before my vision. Would it be possible to exist once the universe had expired? And, as Zha had so frustratingly pointed out, what would be the point? Damn him.

I became somatic once more and reposed onto the shifting plasma surface of a white dwarf on the outer edge of the known universe, warming myself with the dying star’s heat. The crackling and hissing of its radiation in extremis tickled my auditory senses. Why was I still clinging to this existence? Was I really so afraid of death? It was unclear how long I sat there contemplating my stubbornness and fear, but at some point Zha arrived, as I’d known he would. He didn’t say or think a word, and instead just rested next to me, still infinitely patient despite everything I’d ever said and done to him. Calm and resignation settled over me like a blanket as the white dwarf’s energy cooled.

“I’m ready,” I told him, and his response was not condescension or arrogance, but relief. He took my hand and vocalized the mantras he’d so long ago devoted himself to learning and tried to teach me. The ancient words flowed around us as a palpable living river, and I repeated them in sync with Zha’s utterances. All around us the stars winked out, but the chanted syllables took their place, filling every occupiable space in the now-cold universe with Om, our white dwarf the last to burn out, but deplete itself it did, bleeding its energy into us, into the words, lending us strength, and as its temperature reached absolute zero and its atoms ceased movement, a doorway of blissful orange light opened in my mind.

Zha turned to me, his smile both beautiful and beatific, his essence the very apotheosis of empathy and love, and held out his hand. I took it and followed him through.

–fin-

* originally published in Strange Mammals, Infinity Plus Books, Oct 2013

~

Jason Erik Lundberg – ‘Occupy: An Exhibition’

JULY 21st, 2017

1. The early morning sky over Singapore’s Central Business District, grey and overcast. The clouds harshen the sunlight into flatness; one can almost hear them rumbling with impotent thunder, holding the air tense and stiflingly still with the anxiety of the forthcoming rainstorm that will not come.

2. The ground floor steel-and-glass entrance of One Raffles Quay, Asian headquarters for international banks such as UBS, Barclays, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and Societe Generale. A chain of elderly women and men with interlinked arms forms a blockaded perimeter, some sitting in wheelchairs, some standing on aged legs and propped up with canes or walkers, some sitting on blankets directly on the ground, all of them staring straight ahead, unmoving.

3. A similar linear barricade of the elderly, this time blocking the entrance to the ORQ offices inside the pedestrian underpass that links up with the MRT train station.

4. A wide shot of the CBD’s other skyscraping seats of capitalist power and influence—including the UOB Building, the Far East Finance Building, and Ocean Financial Centre—all surrounded on the ground by calm, unmoving chains of the elderly, looked on by armies of ambitious civil servants and financial wizards eager to cross the line and earn the day’s manna.

5. The gathered crowd outside ORQ, an ocean of white button-down long-sleeved shirts and black slacks and skirts. In the foreground, a handsome European man of indeterminate ethnicity in his late 20s, dressed from head to toe in tailored Massimo Dutti and holding a Fendi briefcase, representative of the financial success of the young men and women around him, likely with clients all over Asia and Europe, and an imported Jaguar housed in ORQ’s basement car park. On the man’s face is an expression of bemused confusion, as if unsure whether this is all a publicity stunt, or a government-mandated day of observance, or something else entirely.

6. A close-up of one of the ORQ “protestors,” a Chinese octogenarian so thin that he appears barely more alive than a skeleton, clothed only in a stained singlet, greyish Bermuda shorts, and undersized thong sandals. The old uncle’s face is lined with deep crevasses, his skin leathery with a lifetime spent working outside under the scorching tropical sun. Despite his tired appearance, his eyes blaze with determination.

7. A female police negotiator, engaged in a one-way conversation with an old Malay woman in a wheelchair. The negotiator’s posture and gestures are indicative of a willingness to discover what the protestors want, but the old woman’s gaze purposefully avoids eye contact, making it apparent that the police are not who the elderly will open to. Out of focus in the background are just visible a number of other police officers in their dark blue uniforms of authority.

8. Mr. Massimo Dutti stands less than half a meter from the old uncle in the singlet, his mouth open in an angry tirade, no longer bemused or confused, his pointing index finger only centimeters from the uncle’s nose, the tendons in his neck protruding, a vein in his forehead swollen and standing out. The bankers in the immediate vicinity look uncertain whether to cheer the young man on or restrain his outburst.

9. Mere seconds later, yet Mr. Massimo Dutti and his cohorts are recoiling backward in incredulity at the sight of the entire chain of elderly surrounding ORQ having transformed into stone as a reaction to the threat, looking for all intents and purposes as if they have been sculpted and then placed in that location as a work of public art.

10. The ORQ protestors once again flesh and blood, the old uncle’s eyes projecting an implicit warning. The elderly on either side silently share the uncle’s expression, their attention now focused.

11. Mr. Massimo Dutti, very likely not accustomed to being treated in such a way from a runty little uncle who looks as if he normally hassles hawker center patrons to buy packets of tissues, leans forward with his arm over his head, his Fendi briefcase in mid-swing on a trajectory to connect with the old man’s cranium, his lips drawn back sharply over his teeth. In the background, horrified looks from the assembled bankers. The female police negotiator reaches forward with one hand, her mouth open in a shout.

12. The octogenarian effortlessly grips Mr. Massimo Dutti’s wrist holding the briefcase with one hand, a steely strength belying his age and appearance, preventing the Fendi from making contact. With the other, he has pulled the young banker close by the lapels of his designer suit jacket, his tight grip wrinkling the material into distortion, their faces close enough to kiss. The old uncle is completely calm. The young man’s eyes are widened in surprise.

13. Close-up on the horrified expressions of the young bankers. Their features are pinched, as if responding to the sound of horrible unearthly shrieks that seem as though they will never end, and then cut off abruptly. Out of focus, a young Chinese man’s head is turned to the side, his hand over his mouth, as though about to vomit in terror.

14. The sidewalk in front of the old uncle, where lies a desiccated corpse still clad in Massimo Dutti, the clothing now hanging loosely from the steaming husk of a human being. Only the legs of the old uncle and the elderly to either side are visible in the frame, but their skin glows golden as if from an infusion of siphoned energy.

15. An overhead shot of the entrance of ORQ, where hundreds of people scatter in all directions at once, away from the elderly perimeter. The police officers in dark blue are just barely noticeable, attempting the futility of calming down the fleeing bankers or directing their egress.

16. A long shot of the CBD, utterly abandoned but for the single street-level ring around each financial building and a smattering of drained corpses, the noon sunlight gleaming off skyscraper glass onto the empty thoroughfares below. Police barricades as far back as Niccol Highway form a secondary security perimeter.

17. A shellacked MediaCorp television anchor, her mouth open in mid-word, nearly crowded off of the screen by the gigantic inset displaying an image of the link-armed elderly at ORQ and the words: WHO ARE THE 35K? WHAT DO THEY WANT? The static ribbon up top, in bright red letters: A National Day of Emergency. The news crawl at the bottom of the screen displays the time (2:24 p.m.), the Straits Times Index (down over 1,300 points), and the score of the latest Manchester United vs. Arsenal match (2-1).

18. An army tank squats on the street just outside of ORQ, its cannon barrel aimed directly at the elderly perimeter, the afternoon sun glinting off of its green metal exterior, surrounded on all sides by young National Servicemen called up on reservist duty, covered head to toe in pixelated camo gear, their rifles raised and ready.

19. The air thick with rifle smoke. Pockmarks dot the neighboring buildings, broken glass litters the concrete sidewalk. Three NSmen lay on the ground, their faces contorted in pain, hands attempting to quell the blood oozing from the holes punched through their bodies by their own ricocheting bullets.

20. Out of focus, a camouflaged pant leg retreating to a distance behind the tank, a blurred variegation of greens.

21. Close in on the muzzle flash from the barrel of the tank’s 120-millimeter cannon, the explosion of force a blazing orange mushroom, with a lighter orange line of trajectory extending forward from its middle, reaching, reaching, reaching for the statues in such close proximity.

22. Stillness. Billowing smoke. What on first glance appears to be a grey sheet of paper drifting to the ground; on closer inspection: a rectangular sliver of concrete.

23. The tank in retreat, its rear end displayed to the unharmed once-again flesh-and-blood elderly, turned away by non-violent resistance. On the sidewalk and the city street: concrete and rubble and shards of glass, all loosed by the massive concussion of energy.

24. A line of young protestors beyond the police barricades, none older than thirty, mouths open in defiant yells, fists pumping the air, each holding a man-made placard: THE 35K ARE ALL OUR GRANDPARENTS! ABANDONED BY SOCIETY ≠ NATIONAL THREAT! THE 35K ARE NOT YOUR ENEMY! WHERE’S YOUR FILIAL PIETY NOW?! Unlikely that they would have been granted a permit for this protest, and yet the nearby police officers stand back, unable to join in, but unwilling to disperse.

25. A MediaCorp news feed, but off-kilter as though the video camera has been bumped, zoomed in on a leg emerging from the rear passenger door of a black Mercedes-Benz limousine, clad in charcoal grey designer pants, the equally expensive shoe polished to a high shine. Recognizable outfitting of the Old Man. The time indicated on the crawl: 6:37 p.m.

26. The mass of elderly protestors all stares at the Old Man, whose hands are raised in a questioning gesture. His face out of view, his back muscles tense against his ironed white short-sleeved dress shirt, his white hair cropped close to his skull as if just cut earlier in the day. A small irregular oval of perspiration in the middle of his back.

27. The ORQ perimeter, now unfurled, reaching around to encircle the Old Man, all elderly eyes on their contemporary in age. The Old Man’s head is turned, shouting to someone out of frame, his hand up in a gesture of halt against the barrel of the handgun only just visible.

28. From above, a double ring of protestors completely pens in the Old Man at its center. Outside the protective paddock, a confusion of security officers, hands to ear-mounted Bluetooth communication, body language indicative of panic.

29. The wrinkled octogenarian uncle in singlet and Bermudas faces the Old Man, his mouth open, his hand extended to shake. The Old Man’s gaze at the proffered hand is wary and anxious, as though recalling the fate of Mr. Massimo Dutti and the other expendable bankers.

30. Close-up on a tight handshake, the skin of both hands creased and liver-spotted, yet the muscles and bones underneath still convey power and confidence from both men.

31. Tight on the Old Man’s face, his expression full of surprise and relief. The elderly in view behind him relax; some begin to smile.

32. The entire perimeter, and the Old Man, sit down directly on the ground. The old uncle speaks. The Old Man leans in to listen.

33. Over the shoulder of the Old Man as he calls to the other limousines parked next to his, the assembled crowd consisting of his son, the entire Cabinet, and various other members of Parliament, who lean forward to catch every one of the Old Man’s utterances.

34. The suited government figures spreading out in all directions, each man and woman headed toward a different occupied area, not entirely comfortable but unwilling to contravene the Old Man’s dictum.

35. An Indian woman in leg braces shakes the hand of the Old Man’s son, whose smile is practiced yet genuine. The woman’s sari is faded, its colors dulled with use and wear, yet it glitters in the fading sunlight, throwing sparkles onto her interlocutor’s face.

36. A longer shot of the CBD, displaying more double rings, inside which sit each Cabinet minister and the other members of Parliament gathered for this summit, each locus of political power straining to hear the quiet, yet firm, voices of their constituency.

37. From far overhead, the thick orange rays of the setting sun illuminate more than two dozen perfect circles, each circumference glowing a light gold, a color endemic of hope, acceptance, and optimism.

–fin-

* originally published in Red Dot Irreal, Revised Edition, Infinity Plus Books, Dec 2012

~

Jerica Wong – ‘Sandpaper Towels’

JULY 7, 2017

You can dry my tears

With abrasive

Sandpaper towels

Weak light bathed her in a soft glow. Her gnarled hands rested limply on the armrests of her wheelchair as she stared out at the same maddening view she had seen for the past five years. A smog of different fumes enveloped the city, casting yet more gloom onto the despondent cityscape (which she was merely imagining – row after row of tiny apartments filled up most of the view). Her time was nearing.

The end comes from the beginning. The beginning to the cycle of life puzzled her. Why would a woman put herself through such suffering to raise a child? The reason lay before her eyes now – to birth the possibility of changing things for a better future.

In her youth, she had scorned the sacrifice and hardship a mother had to endure. She had scorned the pitiful resources left on Earth, and the dying Earth itself that would be pushed into her child’s palms as inheritance when her generation died out and washed their hands of it. She had scorned the obligation of filial piety her child would have to fulfil, even though the child had no other freedom of choice but to live.

A child was optional in her life, compulsory for humankind.

Now she was three decades past the expiration date of her fertility, alone. Her paralysis immobilized most of her body but could not freeze the tears that were trickling on her face. The unnatural sound of moving metal parts unnerved her.

“There, there. You must be going through grief. I can only imagine your pain. It’s alright to cry, and if you need to talk I’ll be here.”

The robot was only uttering recordings of soothing, comforting words, scripted by psychiatrists to fit a situation it had identified. A mathematical algorithm enabled lifeless objects to take care of the elderly. A hand even rested on her shoulder to mimic human warmth. And when she died, this same warm personality would be the one to put her death into an equation and a series of commands:

= no protoplasm detected

= no signs of life

= find corpse

= clean up

= notify robots in residences of acquaintances/friends (if any [living]) of deceased’s passing + Block 2679 Unit #14-19 ’s vacancy

= cremate.

= report to distribution centre for new human

Her mouth opened and shut like a goldfish, gasping for air as sobs stole her breath. A dry, abrasive square was pressed against her face, rubbing up and down. She opened her eyes a crack and saw the robot in front of her.

Sandpaper.

The robot had mistaken it for her face towel – the sandpaper she kept in an old wooden tissue box from her days as an artisan.

The Elderly Care Association had assured the government that the robot was “99% compatible for all ages”. But the 1% incompatibility had manifested itself.

Her lips to cry out but her feeble vocal chords refused to comply. The shutdown button was frustratingly out of reach. Even if it was within reach, she wouldn’t have been able to press it. She desperately willed it to run out of battery. The salty tears stung the abrasion; the agony of the roughness on top of existing pain brought forth more tears.

Perhaps this removal of layers, sanded away to smoothness, would reveal the essence of humanity. What was left for humans to do? The robot moved away from her. The sandpaper fluttered to the ground.

~

Josh Stenberg – ‘Reentry’

JUNE 16, 2017

Let me introduce you to Caroline Miao just as she is becoming Miao Tingting once again, the customs uniform wordlessly waving for her to go through, to pass on, to proceed already. She picks up her luggage at the carousel, missing it on the first go-round because she is distracted by an urgent dingle from her phone, now she zips the big suitcase open to check that none of the LV packages are missing, she has seen online that sometimes they are purloined, and now she struggles out to wait for the bus that will take her from Pudong back to her home across the Yangtze, in Yangang. She will need to take two buses, actually, but for the moment she can only wait for the first of these. Thanks for your understanding.

Oh, we are already three days later, at one of the inescapable banquets. Which one, neither she nor I can properly remember—they run together, like similes in the rain. Her father is showing her off to other men of his approximate age and status; the fathers of the eligible; the peers. They are complementing her prettiness, they do not know or care that their compliments are, objectively, appalling; thankfully it does not occur to her that if she were a little poorer and a little prettier they would want her as a mistress. She sees through, but not too far.

On her earlobes, where else, she is wearing her French earrings, her hair is bobbed and highlighted, everyone is sipping a red wine she has lugged back with her, which privately everyone thinks is too sour but which cannot be openly criticized. The airport duty-free woman at Charles De Gaulle suggested it; it is known to be very popular in China; it bears the name and sketch of an imaginary chateau. If deception is being practiced, it is remote, almost generous.

Since her father is executive assistant to the vice-mayor, the abalone is free; and how she loathes, how she execrates, abalone! She tries, unsuccessfully, to deflect it, to humble it off, when the server, mumbly in her submissiveness, flourishes it. To no avail. It gleams in front of Tingting returned, obscene blob, tasteless, self-indulgent; she politely amputates a corner; it jiggles. In her mouth it is warm and tasteless like homecoming.

The restaurant manager enters and theatrically says “Bonjou” and she rises and says “Bonjou” and everybody raucously echoes Bonjou and what fun, what fun. And also, before I forget: what fun.

In her room, which thankfully her mother has not touched, except to clean, weekly and once especially thoroughly before her daughter’s return, Tingting texts her friends. She wants to be texting with France, or at least to be known in Yangang to be texting with France, but the people she knows there do not use WeChat and Facebook is of course blocked. With her gift of moderate foresight, she forced some of them download WeChat before she left but time has shown that none of them will ever check it, despite promises, despite friendship signals and parleys; Pauline had tried to explain her that WeChat was a mechanism of authoritarian control and therefore to be principled against in the desultory, relativistic European way. French people talked a great deal of nonsense about China—suspicious of WeChat but supportive of the Cultural Revolution.

Meanwhile, stretched out on her bed like a depilated cat, Tingting can feel her store of French words eroding, depleting, like a talent or an illness slowing being shed. Leaving a foreign country is like dementia, you know that you are forgetting, you are permitted to be conscious of the fact that you are losing it, there is a grace available somewhere. Forgiveness is a rearrangement of foreignness. Tingting memorises words like “memory” so that the next time she meets a French person she can talk about her affliction and by so talking to deny it. To have something, almost someone, to blame. Oh, beloved.

I should mention: everybody is at home from Shanghai or Beijing or Hong Kong and comparing, exchanging boredoms for the holidays. They do not go out and meet each other, everything is closed anyway, the staff is in its villages, but society is not totally eradicated, they send each other cartoon images indicating New Year’s celebrations. So raucous. In the real world, of course, firecrackers have been banned in the city centre for eleven years; it is a prosperous and a civilized city. Tingting’s district was named Jiangsu Province Class Two Civilised City only months ago. Older people speak of celebration as if it were a bygone era.

Around the bend, it will be the year of the Rooster: most often in her wish-messages Tingting deploys the picture of two red roosters, joined at the tail in an imitation of a paper-cutting, with lanterns dangling from their beaks with “Auspicious” printed upon them and the characters flowing together. Furthermore circulating are many videos of fat babies and stacks of gold ingots and memes that purport to show Justin Bieber wishing a happy year of the rooster, and these zip around between the youngish people with their phones on beds and their doors shut and the heating on. The laziest kids, the worst ones, or maybe the ones with secret lives in the real world, just answer every message with to you too.

She googles (well, since she cannot get on Google, she Baidus, but you knew what I meant) several horoscopes. She is going to have an outstanding a mediocre a lucky and/or a cautious year. She applies all these prognostications to Peng, because Peng is somehow still the point to which everything tends, the pivot around which meaning arranged, or else he is emphatically not the point; which amounts to the same thing, men being a question of emphasis, of stress on a syllable (in French) or of tonality (in Chinese). Peng is not back yet, he is working in Shanghai, and won’t come home until the day before New Year’s, he is said to claim it is on account of work, but she believes him to be designing to keep her waiting. She does not text him yet. She is very forbearing, self-abnegating. She wants him to believe that he does not occur to her. Both occur to one another constantly, and the courtship of silences and punishments is raising their respective temperature, like any bug, like any chronic, low-grade inflammation. Is love a parasite you host?

Every day she wonders whether, when he arrives, she will deign to see him or not, and decides the issue firmly one way; and then firmly the other way hours later. These twice-daily final resolutions give her a sense of accomplishment, of progress, of newness and rebirth that charms with the endless and endlessly delayed promise of the festival. And there is a joy, like opening a present, to start reconsidering the issue, the interminable nostalgia of Peng, the next morning, or after the lunchtime nap.

Once, thankfully, almost by sleight of hand, she escapes to the lake park with her friend Yuli. Tingting’s mother is subsumed with an aunt in the kitchen-cooking crackle and her father is at a banquet (her father has always been at a banquet; it is his habitat); she is not missed. Yuli rewards her with news.

Yuli has been recently engaged to be married to the manager of a factory that manufactures the machines that make sewage pipes. “No one makes them anywhere else, anymore” exclaims Yuli, proud-embarrassed-humble, “It’s practically a monopoly.” They are young and it seems like the market situation of sewage pipe manufacturing machines will continue unchanged forever. Tingting wishes Yuli luck and happiness. She will try to be there for the wedding. She does not inquire but Yuli volunteers that the factory town where she will live, where they make the machines, does not especially smell. Why would it?

Yuli’s forever future established, admired, and discarded, they round the manmade lake and sit on a bench of the concrete pavilion with the crude plastic dragons on the eaves, and Yuli extrudes the crumbly little haw roundlets that Tingting does not know she has been missing. As they fall to pieces in her mouth, Tingting realizes that she had thought them gone forever, one more feature snuffed out by progress, by development, by the march towards special characteristics, one does not quite know of what. She feels guilty for almost having missed them.

Meanwhile, Yuli shows Tingting some tricks about how not to breathe too deeply when outside. The air pollution is better than in the north, but still one has to be artful, one must take care if one has just arrived from abroad; she has read so online. A school of carp has been collecting nearby them, and against coins they grind feed from a machine and watch the carps nip one another for the treats. They stretch and move on; the girls try to keep talking, but any depth of conversation is rendered impossible by the spectacle of the cloud of hungry carp now following the girls along the riverbank. Tingting asks whether the carp would eat Yuli if she fell in and Yuli says it is more dangerous for Tingting because she is sweeter. Tingting answers that they will both taste of haw.

They do not talk about boys because it is only three days to New Year and everybody has come to air their children in stuffed jackets and so they could be too easily overheard. Yangang has a population of 1.1 million, but somehow everybody is a cousin, a classmate, or a hybrid of the two. The park children clamour for candied fruits; a migrant sells rooster with glowing green eyes that will, if you do not suppress it, crow for a full minute.

Already!— the round of New Year’s visits. The women cook all day and the men smoke and eat sunflower seeds and young people sit in the other room and play on their phones or watch replays of the patriotic highlights and homages to mothers and soldiers from the New Year’s Gala. Then they eat, always too much, religiously too much. The parents sit on the furniture, in the half-dark, and discuss the marriageability, job prospects, and weights of one another’s progeny. Tingting has been to France and come back, they think, with some kind of degree, or certificate; they grant her leeway. At least France is not a country that makes fat. But in a month of her two her immunity will wear off. One or two of the aunts is preparing a comment, perhaps for next year, about how the make-up can no longer quite mask the crow’s-eye, the droop. Twenty-six in autumn.

New Year’s brings the man. The first time she meets Peng again, they arrange to go to the bakery that Koreans have opened, with the stickers of the Eiffel tower on the coffee-bean wallpaper. He knows the chain from Shanghai; he has familiar objects to order. Tingting doesn’t bother saying that it is not like in France; it is understood. But it is the most Parisian thing Yangang has to offer, and Peng was polite to pay this homage.

Their conversation is awkward, tetchy. They ask about each other’s parents, but everybody is fine, there is so little say. Peng’s cousin is to be married. Yuli is to be married. Quiet girls in their class that they didn’t know or like are to be married.

But then, in a pinch, it turns out that Tingting’s aunt is sick; it is a serious disease, not as serious as cancer, but she has forgotten the name. Oh yes it is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Tingting has not forgotten after all. The aunt lives on the fifth floor, and wheezes on the stairs. Peng is surprised to learn from Tingting that French apartments on the fifth-floor might also have no elevator, or only a very small one. Tingting remarks, a little professionally, that is not clear whether the aunt will have to be moved. The air in the countryside is also no longer, etc.

Peng attempts a joke about everyone having to move, by which he means to hint at mortality, which ought to come back to age and therefore love, but Tingting understands him to mean that all the buildings are always being torn down and that he is alluding to his relative security in his Shanghai apartment, which is only seven years old. A three-legged dog passes the window and they agree that it is to be pitied.

They understand each other poorly, which is as it should be, but eventually, awkwardly, the opening generated by allusion, confusion, interpretation permits Tingting to ask him about girls, how his life with girls is progressing, but Peng murmuringly disavows girls, it is not clear whether as a subject or as the object. She presses; he begins to mumble about Shanghai girls, he stutters to a stop. This was perhaps the declaration; she cannot tell. Tingting says, in the name of freedom but accusingly, that she had told him not to think of her; not to miss her—she, in Paris, had not waited for him, or thought of him too much. She thought she had made this very clear. No missing was to be permitted; certainly none to be logged as virtue.

He agrees, meekly, meekly, that she made this very clear, but a man cannot help himself, which objectively speaking sounds like compulsive self-satisfaction but is interpreted by both, for reasons of decency, as romance.

For what it matters, she is not bluffing. Tingting, or at least Caroline, has a creditable experience of French men. Several kinds. Some of them had intruded, become memorable or at least nude. They were always telling her how something she was for a Chinese girl—elegant, tall, good at rolling the French r; they conceived of compliments as distinction among a gallery of Chinese girls, most of them fantastical, with whom she understood herself to be competing.

One such Frenchman, Christian, had of course claimed to be a Buddhist, she thought it was meant to explain his failure to text or show up on time, rudeness gussied up as transience. The world was changeable, Christian told her, especially the self. He expected her to understand and perhaps his reason for vanishing was that it was necessary for the illusion of Christian to dissolve once he was truly understood. In any event, there is something to be said for the dispersal of some men.

She tries now to explain to Peng how French people, for (at present she had digested them and they can be processed and generalized en masse) always seemed to have a chessboard in front of them, to have many chessboards in front of them, always making moves in a game which wavered between downright seduction, mere possibility and the faintest tinges of suggestion. Not everybody cared whether they won; often there were no stakes. But everybody played, constantly, as though this were the business of life, and this made them joyful, confused, incessantly talkative—it furnished their movies and their television and their songs and their imaginations. It was hopelessly complex and also perversely single-minded, but it lent a tension, not always unpleasant, to the act of buying a croque-monsieur from a baker, or sharing a seat on a bus—even with an older gentleman, or a teenage girl. Of course, Tingting opines, eroticism is being slowly criminalized and it promises to be a bad century for the French. But for now it is still in the air. Peng nods, trying to look grave.

And she has learnt things from them. Tristan, for instance, taught her to mix café nihilism with pleasure; how to skip classes with insouciance, even panache; how to make use of one another within the bounds of morality. If she had understood Tristan correctly, the self was incapable of truly apprehending the other—and for this reason one could only appear to solicit consent and mutuality from the other being, the beloved (there was something in here about virgins and prostitutes)—but it could not actually understand an alien humanity. Therefore humans had no choice but treat each other as tools to whom they attributed, intellectually, realization—but without access to the realization, without feedback from the other. When comprehensible she found his ideas idiotic, but she enjoyed the consequences, and the sense of perceiving the foolishness at the heart of all his lofty abstraction, and even the delicious pain she could inflict on him with the merest breath of mockery, perceived momentarily before his natural arrogance once again took him in hand.

On the earthly plane, she understood that with Tristan, too, there would be body and metaphor but very little, for instance, marriage. And all around her were Chinese women and their French boyfriends who refused to help them get status. It seemed that a fear of religion had destroyed the men’s sense of responsibility. Whereas Chineseness seemed to soldier blindly through, across belief. She was young enough to like it, to like them, to accept pleasure and friendship inconsequentially. She had known she was a bad girl, and a modern woman, and French men were apparently placed within reach for no better reason than to prove it.

Peng is listening politely. Purity is a laughable, faraway, television thing; and he quite agrees that European men, as Tingting is saying, do not partake of reality. He feigns concern at her exploits; that is the least he could do for her. They part with him telling her that he will have to think over all she has told him. He does concern, doubt, and disillusion rather well.

In good time the school will send her parents a letter of expulsion in French; she will have told them it was a commendation. Of course, by then, she will need no certificates.

It is the second time they meet, Peng and she, to which we now turn our attention. A week later, perhaps; actually six days, as either one could have told you instantly. It is a sushi restaurant, and none of their parents’ generation is likely to have their moles in here, so she allows herself a Kirin and imposes a Kirin on him too; and, do you know what?, she is imagining the ridge of his muscle, she has forgotten its name, the one that holds the thigh together. She applies a little bit of pressure under the table to his front toe, because otherwise he will continue to act too maidenly.

The toe pressure does its work, because she is able to take him, though he smells of that orange Japanese fish egg stuff, back to the traveller’s hotel, the one run by the train station. The same room—the same bank card that her father never queries and which fills up with money from some subterranean source—even the same discreet out-of-towner at the desk, aged more since last time than was reasonable. Poor people from the provinces are safe, they can be told anything, they are so hopelessly unconnected, and therefore have no access to the determinations of truth, even when they have the facts.

He wants the lights off but she has dispensed with this decorum, she tells him that this is a custom she has unlearnt in France. He makes no objection; he says very little anymore. He is not averse to experiments in style. If she insists on it, Tingting will be captured by means of what she calls her liberation.

Too late, in too deep, she grows concerned by the smile on his face, the beatitude, the triumph which is male bliss even when the woman has done all the work. Of course, she cannot be sure, because she is right up against him and half turned away from him, too close to see him and not at the kind of angle that allows expressions to be properly interpreted. But he is feverish with sleep and she can feel the smugness radiating off his bare skin.

Ah, but he takes her to the breakfast place they used to go to, he shows sign of a will reviving, and it is the congee with the pickled vegetables and the divine fried dough. The fried dough, he tells her, as he has told her on three previous occasions (one of them at this very table) is a reminder of the traitor to the Chinese people and his wife, who are bound together in this spiral and fried forever for opening the capital to the Mongol hordes.

Tingting says it looks like a spiral of DNA. She wants to be pleasant, but doesn’t know how to handle the fact that he is still too greatly pleased, too obviously satisfied. Defensively, she talks about going to France again, perhaps she will do another degree.

Although the congee looks very good, he looks suitably downcast at this. She remarks that perhaps China could use another Mongol horde. He laughs and tells her a story about a camel tour his colleagues made in Inner Mongolia and he shows her a picture they have sent him on WeChat with a yurt replica. With this distraction, with this dismissal of any last-ditch escape she might design, Peng has squelched Tristan and Christian—snuffed them out— has suffocated France.

She is driven to take him to the hotel a few more times; she is sure that it is not a revenge. Perhaps she can in some way break him? Or if it is a vengeance, it is not against him. In fact, she is very sure that it is carefree, and shows a healthy interest in life, and demonstrates that she is in control of her body and her destiny.

But she can glimpse it now, sometimes, before she wriggles out of his arms: every repetition of the act grants Peng another layer of security, she senses that he believes that things will turn out alright now, in the social sense, that she has come around, come back. It is that post-coital male satisfaction, that fantasy of taming, that illusion of ownership that the best of them cannot disguise. Surely this is how all the stories of werewolves come from—the revelations on the face, through the body, during the act, in the wake of it. And the guilty men, feeling their power, translate their own possession into fairy tales about snake-women and fox-girls.

And so on the seventh morning, when he comes up behind her to join her in admiring herself in the mirror, she says, you know that this is just for fun, right?

            He smiles, bashful in his boxers, and assents to the fact of the fun.

She goes on: We’re both adults, right? It doesn’t mean anything. I mean it’s nice, but it’s not…enduring.

He asks whether she wants him to hold back for longer before—

No, what I mean is: all this, it doesn’t mean we’re back together. We both have our freedoms, right? I mean, I’m glad that China has progressed, in our generation. But we aren’t built for marriage. That goes without saying.   

            He gives the grunt which is reaction, acknowledgment, agreement, and dissent. He sits on the edge of the bed; then reaches for his phone. He begins to play Lost Planet: Devolution a game which has only recently come out for Androids, and which he downloaded yesterday when he went to the bathroom at 2 am. This sulky intentness is the expression she hates most about him, and it makes it easier for her to concentrate on delivering the message.

If I had known you were so immature, she murmurs. I would have.

            But he laughs, not exactly at her. Nevertheless, she has figured it out.

It is in the order of things for Yuli to be the first to congratulate her; they arrange to have their weddings two weeks apart; close enough together that they can share and maybe disperse some of the planning stress.

Her father is not especially pleased with Peng—rumours have reached him— but the boy’s family will pay for the wedding and of course there is the Shanghai apartment; and so Peng is technically unexceptionable.

The invitation sits in Tristan’s WeChat forever, unread, because he drops his cell phone in the Rhone accidentally, when he and a girl and another couple take the Marne canal down to near Strasbourg. He is going through a technocratic phase, and never, until his death at 57 in a mountain-climbing accident, will he download WeChat again. Pauline sends her congratulations, three weeks after the message is sent, but does not mention coming. And Christian has reached anatta; understandably, since he no longer has any Self, he cannot be expected to reply to wedding invites.

And, unless I am mistaken, or lying, a mere seventy years later an engineering student in Padua is saying to her girlfriend—yeah, she even had a French guy, then, before the war, before she married my grandpa—with the lung disease, you remember? But she was herself always so healthy. She used to try to pull up the pictures on this old gadget she had, and I could never explain to her that they were all inconvertible now—you should have seen the phones then, they were as big as your hand. I never understood her much; she’d forgotten all her French, and my Chinese is hopeless. I would have liked to say goodbye, but she died right in the middle of exams, and you can’t even get a visa that quick. 

Furthermore, it is my understanding that there are various man-made satellites which orbit the earth and then burn up in the atmosphere upon reentry, on account of friction or speed or various astrophysical variables which you can look up if you so choose or which perhaps you know already. Sometimes they fail to burn up entirely and hit the earth. But since Earth is mostly water, desert, taiga and ice, very rarely is anyone harmed, and even if they were they would have to be very isolated, disconnected people to be hit individually, so if anyone actually were hurt or killed by a reentry likely we would never hear about it.

~

Tyree Campbell – ”That I might sleep…”

JUNE 5, 2017

The boulder of white feldspar in the center of the Shavrrna village square was empty of meaning.  Neither pictographs nor ideographs did it bear, nor any marks or inscriptions that might serve to convey information.  Not ten seasons of rain ago had I visited Shavrrna to leave my own marks.  These, too, were gone.

Obliterated?  If so, why?  To what possible end?

Or had some dark magic swept them away.  But again, why?

The sense of foreboding was a lizard scurrying up my spine, its tiny claws raking my scales.  I shrugged it off.  Things happen for a reason.  Even dark magic does not act of its own accord, but is directed, purposeful.  The erasure of the feldspar had not been a random, senseless event.  Someone had willed it so.

Passing adult Shavarrsh scarcely acknowledged me with a glance, but the young gazed fixedly, their inquisitive vermilion eyes remaining on me until their parents tugged at their tails, urging them away.  The season of sun had fallen upon Shavrrna in full force, tanning their wintry olive drab hides to a vivid verdant green, and all around me hung the ripe, intoxicating aroma of old cabbage.  The harvest of the season’s first crops had begun, the vegetables and fruits and berries not eaten prepared for storage during the season of the chills, and after long days in the fields and over the hearths, surely the Shavarrsh still had need of quiet moments around the storystone.

I sat on the grass at the base of the feldspar, in the shade of the massive kerka, waiting, but no one stopped to hear my tales or to watch while I recorded them.  A light breeze bade the fresh green leaves above speak to me, their rustling reminding me of a tale I had once told, long long ago.  From a pouch at my side I withdrew a plume and a welljar of tinte and prepared to inscribe the parable of The Tulip and the Chainsaw onto the white face of rock worn smooth by the abrasive they had used to eradicate the earlier inscriptions.  I remained alone in my task, so I thought, but when I neared the end of the parable, and began to inscribe the explicit lesson–that regardless of the damage inflicted on a flower by those of a mindless, destructive bent, a flower will bloom again the following year–I was startled to hear the tiny, plaintive voice behind me.

“Why are you smearing paint onto that stone?”

I turned around, almost spilling the tinte.  The question had been asked of me by a young female Shavarrsh, surely no more than seven or eight seasons of rain on this land.  Could she not interpret the ideograms I had so carefully scriven onto the stone?  Had the adults not taught her?

I started to respond, but her female parent appeared, tugging at her to draw her from my work.  Voices faded as they departed in the direction of the dwellings.

“But mahr, I just want to know why she—“

“I’ve told you time and time again to stay away from…”

It occurred to me, hearing these fragments, that there is nothing so desolate as a storyteller without an audience, nor so plaintive as a tale which reaches no other ears.  I felt as if I had carried this boulder on my shoulders, from village to village, for a century of seasons.  For reasons not evident, the adults in Shavrrna had stopped listening, and had neglected to teach their young that there was something to be listened to.

What could have happened here?

My stomach began to rumble.

During visits past, the Shavarrsh had brought in the middle of the day and just before dark tureens and ewers and amphora containing nourishment of which I and those gathered around me might partake.  Aromas tantalized me, but nothing was brought.  If I desired sustenance, I would have to rummage through the kibikopila at my side.  I touched the drawstring looped over my shoulder, and thought better.  Food might wait, and it is ever useful to assert control over one’s internal functions.

So I sat once more, and waited once more.  The leaves above continued to sing.  In a sea of movement, of living, I was alone.  I recalled some lines lilted to me by my own mahr, further back in years than I cared to remember:

Be not alarmed when troubles come

And you find that I am alone

Please only rock me quietly

That I might sleep until this passes

With another color of tinte I began to inscribe this fragment onto the feldspar.  From behind, someone approached.  I could hear the blades of grass double and snap under their weight, and feel the vibrations of their footfalls.  Finished, I put away the tools of my life, and turned around, my heart beginning to skip like a child on the first day of the season of sun.

Seeing the two adult males, my heart thudded into the pit of my first stomach.  Already I knew that nothing good could come of this.

The closest one said, “You are being detained.  Come with us.  Do not resist.”

Armed with only a kibikopila of dried fruit and vegetable matter and some scrivener’s tools, I had scant means of resistance.  At least, I thought, as they led me away, I might in time learn the facts as they pertained to the erasure of the storystone.

* * *

But they told me nothing helpful.  Thrust into a dank cavern in the north face of a limestone cliff, and secured within by a portcullis whose counterweight was a boulder of approximately my size, I was reduced to simple meditations upon the tales I told and to waiting for someone to explain the need for my incarceration.  The orientation of the entrance denied me direct sunlight in which I might warm myself for the coming cool night, but I found that, late in the day, I might capture the energy I needed in a sliver of light from the west.

Unfortunately, that spot had already been taken.

Her name, she said, was Mashrrv, and she had been in this cell since the onset of the season of chills–a circumstance which moved me to allow her first turn in the warmth, what there was of it.  I did not think her so old, but after a speculative tilting of her head, an appraisal of eyes pale yellow in this dim light, she concluded that she remembered me.

“I was but a nestling at the time, Storyteller,” she told me, “only recently come from the egg, clumsy and without guile.  My mahr brought me to the storystone the night before your arrival, to await your coming.  There were fresh berries from the mountain shrubs, and tubers from the soil moistened by the last of the seasonal rains, and much gaiety.  We had gathered in circles, the shorter of stature in front the better so as to see and hear you…and oh, as the disk of light arose from the horizon you came, on foot, as if you had just emerged from that disk.  Did you intend that effect, I wonder?  I’ve always wondered that.”

“It is customary for the storyteller to approach from the east at the birth of the day,” I said.  “I do not know the origin or purpose of the custom.”

“You are the only storyteller I have ever seen,” said Mashrrv.  “No others have come after you.”

I could scarcely credit the sounds which reached my timpana.  “Oh, surely not!  What about Glembethth?  And Orrthag?  And I know Ffazgl spent a full season of sun in this region.”

Mashrrv’s tailtip fluttered in distress.  “None of them, Storyteller, oh, none know I.  Nor have I heard these names.  None has visited since you.”

“And why have they placed you in here, Mashrrv?”

Her green skin paled to chartreuse, and she averted her eyes.  Again her tailtip tattooed the dirt.  “I invoked the parable of The Tulip and the Chainsaw to demonstrate the futility of fighting,” she confided.

I wondered whether we were being overheard.  Though I saw not so much as a shadow outside, I began to suspect as much when Mashrrv led me to the cool rear of the cavern, and I kept my voice low.  “Which fighting is this you speak of?”

“Many villages have we fought, Storyteller, in these few seasons.  Urtha’s Ford at the great bend of the Savernon.  And as far away as Windscape, at the edge of the great Cornukibi plains.  Even tiny Uthrrvna at the first cataract up the Savernon—“

I was unable to contain my horror.  “In the name of the Light of the First Day, why?“  Mashrrv withdrew a pace; I had frightened her.  I slipped my tail over and under hers, reassuring with coils.  “Forgive me, young one.  I meant no trembling.”

“No one asks why,” she replied.  “No one dares.  But I know why.”

“You must tell me.”

Mashrrv gave me a sidelong, upward glance.  Now her eyes were darker than the tartfruit which flourishes along the banks of the Savernon.  Her voice dropped.  “It is said that at Urtha’s Ford it is possible to impede the flow of water.  It is said that the Urthash could do this.”  And she cast her eyes about furtively, fearing ears in the limestone.

“It is said?”

“It is what is heard.”

Scant light of day remained.  In our sliver of warmth our shadows had lengthened to the east wall of the cavern, and now they were dying, as was the day.  I felt a chill, but there was nothing to be done about it.  Mashrrv trudged to the west wall and curled into a ball there, to preserve what warmth she might until indirect light of the next sun roused her.  I might have followed her example, for surely she knew the caveways.

But she knew the caveways.  She had accepted her incarceration.  This I could not do, for two reasons.  First, to accept my circumstance without question gave my imprisoners sanction, for I would then have been placed here by my own permission.  And second…

Second came my duty as a Storyteller.  I had now an audience–a captive one, true, but an audience nevertheless.

On most rock the dark colors of tinte show best.  With light, they would show on the limestone.  But light and warmth were denied me.  I selected a broad plume and a fresh welljar of tinte and a vial of pulverized vozvor, a difficult substance to work with because it will burn through scales on contact.  Carefully I tapped three measures of vozvor into the tinte, capped it tightly, and shook it quickly.  In the confined space, and without sufficient air, the burning soon ceased.  The welljar felt warm in my hand.

In the now-almost-dark I cautiously approached the back wall of the cavern, and began to inscribe my tale.  Alive with vozvor, the pictographs and ideographs glowed, and gave me just enough illumination to finish my task.

*     *     *

At the next light Mashrrv clapped her hands together and crowed, at first in pleasure, then in dismay.  “They will see it,” she cried, with furtive glances over her shoulder.  “You must remove it.  Quickly!”

I began putting away the tools of my craft.  “No such thing will I do.”

She continued to fret.  “For this defiance they will not feed us.”

“And should we dwindle our days here, eating?”  But my presumption was improper:  alone, I might protest in my manner, accepting consequences.  But Mashrrv had neither been informed of my choices, nor had she acquiesced in them.

“Forgive me,” I said, and prepared an erasive solution which reeked faintly in the cave.

Her hand on mine stayed me.  “Perhaps you are correct, Storyteller.  The village would speak with one voice, muting ours in here.  About that, we can do nothing.  But we need not be silent for our own sakes.  Leave the story, please.”

I led Mashrrv toward the opening of the cave, there to absorb as much warmth as possible.  When we were comfortable, I said, “Tell me of your sight of the parable.  How came you to be here for it?”

Mashrrv flicked her tongue, uncomfortable with our possible proximity to the ears of others.  I nuzzled her with my nose, a reminder that our voices would not be stilled.  “The interpretation upon which I drew is standard,” she said slowly, thinking her way through it.  “Destroying the flower over and over again will not diminish it, for it returns each season.  Accommodation, with the flower here and you there, allows both to thrive.”

“Such a lesson we impart to the young.”

“But it was said the parable warns that we cannot defeat our enemies,” she continued.  “In this, it opposed the wishes of our village.”

“Of the leaders of the village.”

“Yes.”

“Leaders change.”

“But if the young do not learn of the storyways, how will the leaders themselves grow differently?”  Her tail thumped against the wall of the cave, and she made a gurgling sound of mirth.  “So I asked them if they were at war with flowers,” she said.  “And after some consternation, they confined me within.  Storyteller…I’m hungry.”

I shared my morsels with Mashrrv, while the light brightened, and faded, and died.  We drew what warmth we could, and curled up together, still hungry.  Our captors had seen the glowing inscription on the wall, perhaps, and had condemned us to silence, condemning our words as well.  I touched my hand to Mashrrv’s neck and felt the life coursing, but slower than it should have coursed.  The strength of her voice had concealed her true weakness.  Deprived of warmth, of light, and now of food, she was falling into that ultimate torpidity.  Long ago our ancestors had survived the seasons of chills through such torpor, but they had done so on bodies filled with nutrients in preparation for that deep slumber.  For us, our hunger remained, the ache of stone on raw bone.

She would not awaken, come the next light.

* * *

Two lights have passed and Mashrrv remains still, her life coursing so feebly that this time I scarcely could find it.  When I touched her neck, I thought to hear a sound from her, but perhaps it was the settling of the stone around us, no more.

And so I resumed my task.  Tinte remains, and ought be used.  I have inscribed on these walls the Tale of Mashrrv and the Storyteller, the lines of words coming to a close on the wall above where I sit holding Mashrrv, sharing with her what little warmth remains.  Presently my hand will move, and inscribe a final word, and will then fall to my side as I curl around her and sigh the very last of my words with the very last of my strength.  One day, perhaps, the Tale will be found, and perhaps read, so that the readers will know that we clung to our ways and our truth—and perhaps the power of our truth will give them strength in their own times of troubles…for leaders cannot lead when no one will follow.

“Oh, Mashrrv,” I will whisper, and, gently rocking her, lay my face across her body, and bring my last story to an end.

~

Nancy L. Conyers – ‘Honey Lou’

May 15, 2017

Nancy L. Conyers has an MFA from Antioch University in Los Angeles and lived in Shanghai from 2004-2009. She has been published in Lunch Ticket, The Manifest-Station, Role Reboot, The Citron Review, Alluvium, Tiferet, and Hupdaditty, and contributed the last chapter to Unconditional: A Guide to Loving and Supporting Your LGBTQ Child, by Telaina Eriksen. Honey Lou is adapted from a novel she is writing entitled A Walk in the Mist. Her website is www.nancylconyers.com

Honey Lou Parker was a native Texan with tumbleweed flowing through her veins.  Honey had bottled blond hair, a ballsy laugh, and she truly believed in the Texas truism, the higher the hair, the closer to God.  She was big, in all manner and form:  her hair was big, her mouth was big, and her body took up the whole width of a Shanghai sidewalk.  When she walked, her enormous breasts and generous backside undulated in opposite directions, giving her the effect of a human tsunami.  Honey’s calling card, though, was her beautiful, flawless skin.  It was porcelain white with nary a pore or wrinkle and no matter where Honey went, people complimented her on her perfect skin.  They kept their eyes on her face, as much as they kept their eyes on her substantial girth.

When Lisa first arrived in Shanghai, the first thing Honey said to her was, “Lisa, darlin,’ it’s not real important to learn the language.”  Honey had been in Shanghai for almost three years and she’d only managed to learn to say hello, goodbye and thank you in Mandarin, all with a bad accent. When she said xie xie, thank you, Honey, in all her Texan splendor, would say shay shay, shay shay and she was damn proud of her self for it.

“They oughta learn how to speak English,” Lisa heard Honey say one day to the posse Honey always travelled with when she passed by as they were sitting outside of Starbucks, the only store foreigners recognized at what passed for a mall in Jin Qiao. “They oughta learn how to speak English.  I mean I’m not having my taxes pay for some wetback to fill up a seat in our school system, and then you’re going to tell me they don’t have to speak English?  Not on my nickel, they’re not.” She was talking about the Mexicans in Texas.

“Honey Lou, when you’re right, you’re right, and, sweetheart, you are right on this one, right girls?” said Sheralee Watson.  The posse nodded in unison. The posse were all tai tais from Texas—housewives of the Texas oil barons who believed they were lording over Shanghai, all of whom hated Shanghai for what it wasn’t, and couldn’t see Shanghai for what it was. Like Chinese women who travelled together and linked arms to create their friendspace, the posse always travelled in a pack.  Instead of linking arms, the posse was armed with iPhones covered by bejeweled cases of the Texas flag that Honey had gotten made for them in Yu Yuan.

“So, ladies, how much Chinese have y’all learned?”  Lisa asked as she walked past their table.  The question was out of her mouth before her mind could tell herself not to start something.  Honey whipped her head around and fixed Lisa with her Texas stink eye.

“Well, Lisa Downey, I’ll be.”

“Hey, Honey.  Ladies.”  Lisa nodded in their direction.

“How much Chinese have we learned? Now, Linda darlin’, that’s a whole different story, a whole different ballgame,” Honey sputtered.

“Why’s that, Honey?”

“It’s just different, is all.”

“Why? I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Well, well,” Honey was flustered.  She wasn’t used to people challenging her.  In the three years Lisa had known her, she’d never seen Honey Lou flustered.  She ran the posse and she ran the Expat Women’s Club like a Chinese warlord—often wrong, never in doubt.  She was enjoying seeing Honey Lou scramble.  Most people, when they’re flustered, get red in the face and splotchy necks, but Honey’s skin became brighter and glowed like a Texas click beetle.

“We’re in China, Honey, so if I follow your logic, then shouldn’t we learn to speak Chinese?”

“We are not here illegally, Lisa Downey, we are rightfully here.”  Honey had quickly gotten her footing back. “And, furthermore, we do not want to live here, we’re here because our husbands have come here for work.  Legally, I might add.  And we are here giving people jobs, not taking jobs away from them, for God’s sake!  We are putting food on their tables, not taking food away from them.”

“Honey, how is someone in Dallas who speaks Spanish taking food off your table, other than clearing off your large plates?”  Every single one of the posse were tapping away on their iPhones, pretending like they weren’t listening.

“Oh for God’s sake, Lisa, it was just an expression.  Let’s not spoil our morning with this.  It’s just not the same situation, is all.”  Just then a bell tinkled.

“Well, I’ll be, saved by the bell,” Honey Lou looked at her iPhone and tapped the screen with her long, fake fingernail.  “That’s my signal, girls.  I’ve got to go get my facial.”  Her large body rippled wildly as she stood up.  She winked at Lisa and said, “The good Lord works in mysterious and wondrous ways, wouldn’t you say, darlin’?”

Because Honey had never learned how to speak Mandarin, she never learned that there are no secrets in China, and Honey had a dirty little secret she was sure nobody knew about.  The secret to Honey’s facials, the secret to her beautiful skin was that she ate soup.  Placenta soup.  Human placenta soup.  Placenta soup that came from aborted babies.  Aborted girl babies.

Before Honey arrived in Shanghai she believed in the sanctity of two things—the flag of Texas and the goodness of her God.  Now, she also believed in the power of those girl babies’ placentas.  She told herself it was better for that soup to slide down her throat than for those babies to be strewn on the side of the road somewhere, no better than a stray dog.

Yes, the good Lord did work in mysterious and wondrous ways.  He gave Honey the ability to cast her born again eyes downward when the weekly delivery of special treasure soup was delivered to her kitchen door, and the ability to cast her eyes upward in a heavenly thanks as the luscious liquid continued to work its wonders on Honey’s luminescent skin.

The good Lord also gave Honey’s housekeeper a big mouth.  Honey’s housekeeper told every other housekeeper in Honey’s neighborhood about the soup and those housekeepers told other housekeepers, who told the drivers, who told the security guards, who told their wives.  Some of the housekeepers who worked for Mandarin speaking foreign women told the expat women and those women told their friends. It didn’t take long before the only secret about Honey’s facials was that Honey was the only one who thought nobody knew.

A few weeks after Lisa saw Honey at Starbucks, she heard Honey in Yu Yuan buying embroidered pictures.  She turned around and watched from a distance as Honey repeated shay shay, shay shay, and she listened and laughed to herself as the other people in the small stall shrieked, Waah, na ge laowai hen pang!  “Wow, that foreigner is really fat!”  Honey just kept smiling at them, and nodding her head.  Shay shay, shay shay.

Lisa walked over to the stall where Honey was transacting her purchase.

“Lisa darlin’, good to see you,” Honey said and gave her an air kiss on each cheek.  “Look at these gorgeous embroideries I just bought.”

“They are gorgeous, Honey.  How much did you pay for them?”

“Oh lord, they were a steal, 500rmb.”

“You ought to learn how to speak Mandarin, Honey,” Lisa told her.

“Why would you say that?”

“Because you’ll get a better price if you bargain in Mandarin.”

“I’ve never heard such a thing.”

“It’s true.  Have you ever tried to bargain in Mandarin?”

“Lisa, are you going to start this all over again?  I thought we finished with all that.”

“Honey, darlin’, I’m trying to help you.  Those pictures you just bought…guess what?  I got them for 100 rmb each.”

“You did not!”

“Yes I did and it’s because I bargained in Mandarin.  If you do that they’ll give you a better price.”

“Oh for God’s sake.”

“It’s true.” Lisa turned around to the shopkeepers and said, Ru guo ta hui shuo Putonghua, ni men hui gei ta hen hao de jia qian, dui ma? “If she spoke Mandarin you would give her a good price, right?”

“Dui de!”  Right, they all yelled.

“Ni men pian le ta,”  Lisa told them.  You cheated her.

Hahaha. They gave Lisa that sick bu hao yisi smile.

The shopkeepers weren’t the only ones who were cheating Honey.  Her husband, Harlan, was too.  What a cliché he was, a balding, pot-bellied, white foreigner with a bad comb over and a beautiful, young Chinese girlfriend.

Lisa watched one night as a couple of stunning girls went up to Harlan and his friends in Xintiandi.  Soon the waitress was pulling another table up, serving drinks and before you know it, Harlan was walking off hand-in-hand with one of the girls.  If Honey were a real friend, Lisa would have told her what she’d seen, but she wasn’t a true friend and there was something in her that enjoyed watching the whole situation unfold, something base in her that took perverse pleasure in knowing that Harlan had his girl in an apartment in the same apartment complex Lisa and Sheila lived in, away from the expat compound, and in knowing that Harlan knew Lisa knew.  Lisa wondered if Honey knew and if that were the reason why Harlan and Honey quickly left Shanghai the following fall.  She also wondered where in the goodness of God’s good Texas Honey was going to buy her girl baby placenta soup.

~

Nancy L. Conyers – ‘Who Will Serve Me?’