Harmon sits back down, a lopsided smile finding its way to the disused muscles of her face, and the rain slows to an intermittent tap on the cellar door, and then it stops. Her dad picks up the rifle and blows out the candles, one at a time, smoke tailspinning.
“Well, let’s get, I guess.”
He opens the hatch to the outside, abrupt light closing the aperture of her eyes in a spasm. They climb up the ladder and stand in the driveway, shot through with sunset all at once. The sky is enormous, alien, belonging to some other kind of planet, pressing down on them in pinks and blues and purples. In the mixed-up landscape of the yard, tree branches, two-by-fours, lawn chairs are stranded wildly, shipwrecked. The air is now sweet and flat and settled. “Guess it missed us,” her dad says. Their overgrown garden sits neglected by the patio, and the silhouettes of something fidgety—rabbits—are shaking the ragged foxtail between the heads of cabbage pocked with dark marks of rot.
“The rabbits came out,” Harmon says, pointing toward them. Her dad looks her in the eyes for a vacant moment, and then, in one floating motion, he lifts the rifle and presses its wooden stock to his cheek, clicks back the hammer, and sends an echoing shot toward the garden. The rabbits scatter.
Her dad turns toward the boys, who look startled, unsure about what happens next. “You boys better get home before I call Clifton Black.”
As she watches their hunched shapes recede toward the road, she hears the far-off hum of an engine growing louder. A new truck is gliding up the road toward the house, crunching the gravel, the thin, twining vocals of a country song blaring distantly. The truck is red and white, flat-nosed, sharp—it’s Jimmy’s new truck, and she jumps to smooth the static of her hair, to wipe the mascara under her eyes onto her thumbs. Her bare feet are caked in dirt, and she hadn’t noticed until now that she’s bleeding from her toe a little, a notch missing from the hard skin above her big toenail. She looks at her dad, picking up the lumber from the yard and putting it back in its pile on the back porch. Her stomach turns over. A hollow, swallowing place opens up in her. What’s he going to do here by himself? She’ll have to come back and visit all the time, then. Dallas is only five hours on the highway, four if you drive real fast. She’ll be back.
Jimmy parks in front of her, gets out of the cab, and reaches his hands in the air. “Whew! I did not think I was going to make it. I’ve been trying to call you all week! It just rings and rings.”
And she looks at him, standing underneath the lurid wall of collapsing sky. He doesn’t look quite the way she remembers. The expression on his face is not one she knows.
Marilyn Manolakas lives in Iowa City. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Santa Monica Review. She is at work on a novel about 1970s Los Angeles.
EDITOR’S NOTE
When I first read “Cicadas and the Dead Chairman” by Pingmei Lan, I was moved by its quiet oddity and its rendering of an unusual relationship between the child narrator and a woman she knows as the old maid. The world drawn is cruel, but there are transcendental pockets in the relationships between renegades. Lan captures how women who subvert their prescribed roles become in local rumor creaturely, mythological. They become mysterious life forms illegible to the disciplinary gaze of the conventional. They are often despised. Yet Lan’s narrator describes the old maid devotionally, and their friendship is a brief silo where they can run strange together. In the end, this is a tragic narrative, one that clasps shut around the old maid’s disappearance from the narrator’s life, or from life entirely. I read it and was stunned by the wake it left.
Tracy O’Neill, Editor in Chief, 2018
Epiphany
CICADAS AND THE DEAD CHAIRMAN
Pingmei Lan
THAT SUMMER WHEN Chairman Mao died I saw a funeral for the first time, a national one. It had gone on for weeks. Everywhere I turned, people were wearing black armbands and making white paper flowers. The usual sea of blue Mao suits seemed to be foaming, churning, shaping into dark and light swells. Thousands of mourning wreaths blanketed Tiananmen Square, eventually spilling down to the sidewalks of Chang’an Avenue. For days, then weeks, it looked like snow in summer.
Then an old farmer came to Beijing riding a donkey cart. He cried over Mao’s body while waving his copy of the Little Red Book. The Chairman looked down at this loyal subject from an old photo hung above the Tiananmen Fort. A half smile flashed permanently between his smooth pink cheeks and bright black beauty mark. The farmer made the news after crying for days and passing out, his fingers brittle and curled over the good book.
I didn’t understand that kind of devotion and grief, having just turned seven that spring. And the only thing I knew about death was from the old maid who lived across the hutong.
“My lover died and came back to life,” she said one day.
I walked away without answering. I didn’t know if she was crazy. I didn’t know if she was talking to me.
She was sitting on her doorstep, watching the clouds move and threading her fingers through her hair. Everyone in the hutong gossiped about how she had gotten that creepy head of white hair when she was only twenty-six.
She never ate salt. (Eat your salt or your hair would turn like that.)
She lived in a cave for ten years and ate mushrooms that grew on the walls.
She was a white snake who turned into this thing when she ate the magic ginseng roots from the Manchurian mountains.
I preferred to think of her as having been born that way, with hair frosted by Yan Wang’s brew to prove her connection to the underworld. Her eyes too, they had this dark pull, at once mercurial and warm. Her lashes were pale and shiny like the hooks fringing a Venus flytrap. I imagined men who inched closer, willing to latch on. They’d follow her into this other place, where gremlins made decisions to either feast on the dead or send them back to life untouched. The old maid—no one knew her name, so we called her that—was the only one who could sway that decision one way or the other.
ONE DAY, I decided to ask Dad about the old maid. My parents were propaganda writers for the Department of Education eager to please their party secretary. Dad, however, had a bad cough from his days in an education camp. So sometimes he gazed out the window when he was supposed to be working. This is what he was doing while Mom slaved over “Virtues of China’s Own Brand of Democracy.”
When I approached Dad, Mom looked up from her desk. “Shut up,” she said. “Have you done your calligraphy today?” She fished out a book of Mao’s poetry, rice paper, and her calligraphy kits, and told me to copy ten poems.
The stench of her ink mill made me gag. But I held my breath and sat next to her. The ink stick bled, diminishing as I ground it against the stone water tray.
When mom left to go look up something at the National Library of Beijing, I went to Dad. He handed me a five-fen coin and whispered, “Go! Play outside and get a snack or something,” but he did not speak of the old maid.
IT WAS ONE of those thirty-nine-degrees-Celsius days. Sunlight bounced onto every surface, until even the dingy outhouse walls glared like sheet metal. The old maid was sitting on her steps, mumbling to herself, her skin pale for someone who sat in the sun so much.
We walked to Drum Street to get a slice of watermelon.
Near the fruit-and-vegetable stand, a group of men were unloading boxes of tomatoes. They stopped their work and watched us, their eyes darting up at the old maid. Her shirt was open, with several buttons missing. I hardly noticed it then, having seen her dressed like that year-round. But the men must have been new to the neighborhood. Their mouths fell open, and I could see their yellow teeth thrusting above swollen gums.
The tallest man shouted, “Hey, honey, come here!” He was staring at this heart-shaped mole between her breasts. It looked like a button that could open some kind of hidden door.
We tried to ignore him. The old maid covered her face with a sleeve while I picked a fat slice of melon from a
neatly layered pile, despite the vendor’s chiding.
The center of the melon was sweet and juicy. The old maid took the rest, the pink-white flesh along the rim. I’d always leave plenty for her. But more so on that day. I was uneasy with the men’s hard eyes.
“Hey, want me to buy you a slice?” The man who had shouted earlier took a step forward and gave her a wink.
When she didn’t answer, he took another step and lifted a hand as if to pet or to strike her. I couldn’t tell. His knuckles were covered in scabs, either from working or from punching something hard, or both.
The old maid looked at me and I could see that she wanted to dash. That was one of the reasons I liked to hang around her. If I tried hard enough, I could read her thoughts.
We broke into a sprint, the last of the watermelon rind drawing a pink arc in the air. I must have muttered a curse as she shouted over me, “Shish . . . I like the rind!”
We ran down a block, then another, deeper into the maze of hutongs. After a few minutes, the only thing I could hear was the sound of our feet slapping the pavement. The men seemed to have given up. So we began to double back. As we ran, I could see the wind splitting her hair into light strands. They looked silvery, as if dissolving into streaks of moonlight.
“I can’t breathe!” I crashed under the nearest pagoda tree.
The cicadas screamed. It made the hutong feel empty, vast.
“Shut up, shut up.” The old maid plopped down next to me and shouted at the restless insects.
When I squinted, I saw a ball of white light bursting through the pagoda’s canopy. Tian Gong, the sky’s emperor, seemed to be staring down at it, or at me, with disapproving looks. When my eyes began to water, I turned to see the old maid lying down on her side. On the back of her neck was a blue-black bruise. I rubbed my eyes.
I was about to ask her about it when something small and hard fell on my head. I froze, a scream rasping in my throat.
She leaped up. “A cicada!” she said, picking the nugget of black out of my hair. “It’s dead. That’s why it was screaming. Her last song.”
I breathed hard, unsure of what to say. She plopped back down to show me the cicada, then shoved it in her mouth. Maybe she only took a bite. Either way, a squirt of green liquid flew out, thin and curling, like a snake.
I shut my eyes. But it was too late.
She laughed and smeared something damp on my hand. “Look. Green blood. Isn’t that cool? No red. No red. No red at all! That’s what I like.”
When I tried to reply that that was a dangerous thing to say, I threw up green bile.
She hopped up and stared blankly, as if I were morphing into a cicada with my eyes bulging, my skin cold and shiny, and a pair of bright sticky wings rubbing out desperate, screechy songs against my back.
AS I SAID, the neighborhood had plenty to say about the old maid. The popsicle lady, for example, rolled up with her little wooden cart when she saw me with her and pulled me away.
“Don’t you know that old maid is messed up in her head, crazy as a winter snake?” She patted my hair with her knobby, spotted hands. “They need to send her to an asylum. And comb her hair and find her a shirt that still has a button.”
Opium Andy appeared out of nowhere to cut her off, his wife-beater riddled with holes that weren’t supposed to be there. “No shit,” he said. “But the retard isn’t hurting anyone. Besides, in the West—that’s the other side of the world—women walk around bare-chested. And men wear high-collared buttoned shirts. So it is us that got everything backwards.”
I knew nothing about this other side, this Western world. It sounded like the underworld to which the old maid belonged. The hutong hushed as if to consider Andy’s perspective.
The popsicle lady shook her head and touched her high collar. It pushed against her skin and made these folds on her throat. We padded farther down the street, her bound feet pecking the hot asphalt. She waited until Andy was out of sight. “You’d never know that he was a big opium ghost. What a handsome devil! Shame he’s got such a pretty wife but no kids after all these years.” Andy’s wife, Char, was our neighbor, and she would talk up a storm with Mom nearly every day. Dad called her the Chain-Smoking Gossip Mill Operator when Mom wasn’t around, which made Andy chuckle, and I kind of liked that. The popsicle lady continued. “I bet he’s spreading his seed around somewhere else. Char is holding up more than half the sky, if you ask me.”
It was a Chairman Mao saying. Women hold up half the sky. I was tired of hearing it. Maybe Andy was, too, and figured he wouldn’t have to hold anything if he spread it around. But I liked hearing words like opium ghost. Nobody else said things like that to a little kid.
That night the moon was the size of Mom’s dinner plate. No clouds. I watched the old maid’s window through mine, thinking she might wave good night to me. The street got quiet after a while and a man came up and knocked on her glass. Then the window opened and he climbed inside. So it was true. She had a lover, and he’d come back for her.
I didn’t like the idea. What if, this time, he snatched her away to the underworld?
The man didn’t come out for days. And neither did she. I tried to peer through her window whenever the hutong was empty. But nothing materialized.
When she reappeared, a week later, her hair was all tangled and big. Her eyes looked weepy, red around the rims. When she turned her face I saw the bruise again. I wanted to ask her if her lover had come back and taken her somewhere. And did he leave again or did he die this time. But she wasn’t in the mood to talk. In fact, she seemed to be sinking under oceans of water. My only connection to her was this string of thought bubbles I couldn’t read.
I pretended I’d noticed nothing and sat next to her. Mom had said once, after I lost a balloon, “Forget about it.” So I told the old maid the same thing.
She nodded and folded herself into a tight little ball. A few minutes later she shifted her head closer. Or maybe I was leaning toward her. Our heads touched, and it felt nice, her hair cool and hot like the dying flame on a candle. I kept trying to read her thoughts, but nothing came through. Our heads knocked gently against each other while splashes of summer poured.
Later, we washed our feet in the river near Temple Street, where the air was cool and damp. Along the banks, green summer worms slicked shiny trails over willow leaves while dragonflies dashed among floaters, drawing bright red arcs like upside-down smiles. We made a shrine by piling up pebbles under the pagoda tree. I wrote “Peace Under the Other World” on a piece of paper and secured it near the top. We bowed a dozen times and murmured nonsense as prayers to silence her lover’s lingering spirit.
Over that summer, the old maid and I added a few more things to the little shrine. A button. A bottle cap. A pressed, flattened cigarette-pack wrapper. Each commemorating the departure of someone she called “her lover.”
It never occurred to me to ask her whether there was more than one.
People had stopped walking around in black armbands by then. All the wreaths had disappeared from Tiananmen Square, too. The giant photo of Chairman Mao remained on top of the Tiananmen Fort as always, the beauty mark above his lips a hard black like cicada shells.
During those weeks Mom and Dad occasionally fought around dinnertime. One night, Dad banged on the table until it tilted, spilling a bowl of cabbage soup. The way his lips trembled gave me a chill. I ducked under the table to catch bubbles of grease so they didn’t make the floor slippery. The shouting continued. Apparently Mom should have considered marrying herself to work instead. And Dad was perfectly capable of taking care of himself.
I, for once, didn’t have much to say.
When they finally stopped yelling, Mom was shaking so much her chair went ta, ta, ta. I thought about touching her hand, but she stood up and tripped on me. Dad started cursing again. Mom stomped to the big window and shuffled things on her desk. The house was like a balloon ready to burst. I had to sneak away.
Outside, a dozen boys i
n the neighborhood were chasing the old maid until they were up against the outhouse. She was wearing a shirt that almost covered her. Still, it was open in the front.
The boys yelled, Retard! Stinky shoe! And they pushed her into a corner and tore at her shirt. Mom had shown me picture books about how the Red Guards had done such things, during the fat Chairman Mao years. However, I hadn’t seen it in person. The boys narrowed their eyes, and the muscles on their faces quivered. They spat on the old maid as if she were a slab of the sidewalk.
I flapped my arms and opened my mouth but my voice was lost. My feet weighed a thousand pounds. A part of me was glad they ignored me as if I were nothing but a vision, a ghost. Another part of me wanted to break the little circle of boys wrapped around her.
When the boys left, I crept closer. Her shirt had fallen to her waist. Her hair was damp with spit; her hair was stuck to her chest. But she smelled like the outside, not stinky. I scooted until I was close enough to touch her or to shout into her ears, Play time, watermelon time, run away time! It was sort of our song. But I never got up the nerve.
She must have sensed I was there, but she couldn’t seem to recognize me. It would be my first inkling that something was indeed not right about her. And it wasn’t because I couldn’t rescue her. Her body was rigid, her eyes hollow, so that things of this world seemed to be falling through, getting lost in a void. I could see that she’d gone to that other place where I couldn’t follow, from where I couldn’t try to bring her back.
Still, I lifted a finger toward her, willing her to touch me back, waiting, as my legs fell asleep, waiting.
It was nearly dark, so I was drifting off a bit when she split my eardrums with a long howl. Like the cicada’s death song and its awful green blood, it made me want to scream.
PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019 Page 14