I once looked out the window from their apartment and had felt sick. The building was built so high, trying to relive the glory of its past, that I could see the wasteland of the Old Territories. Almost nothing survived the Flood that took over a quarter of the world. The old skyline looked dead and charred, a city that housed hundreds of thousands of ghosts. Hong Kong was one of the first cities to construct a floating city with a protective dome against the poisonous sun. We hung in the clouds, building replicas of the once grand buildings from below.
The Ah-ma who gives me the elixir of dreams shakes her head at me as she opens her spotted hand revealing the vial. Her gnarled fingers and light eyes indicate her age and also lack of wealth. Someday, and I do not know how soon, but I will look like her. When I swipe the vial from her palm, her mouth twists in disapproval, but I don’t care. The drug brings me one step closer to her, the only one I will ever need.
When I get back to my apartment, I pull the yellow moth-eaten shades down to avoid the blistering sun. Even with the tinted windows, I can still see dust motes rising and swirling. I unbutton my cheongsam, my fingers lingering over the flower stitching. I remember how she used to pull down the zipper slowly past my waist, her lips ghosting my neck and every expanse of skin exposed, helping me out of the dress. I bury myself into the bed, straightening the cotton sheets over my chest. With the drug in my system, my limbs become heavy, and with one last effort, I curl onto my side. I close my eyes and wait for her to appear.
§
On her last night, she said to me, “I wish I could feel your hand again.”
Like a lovesick fool, not knowing that promises should never be spoken unless they could be kept, I said to her, “You will.”
Still, there was the barricade between us. Not only did her glass cage keep her away from me, but Death and Start Labs had already claimed her as theirs.
§
Before I give into the drug, I always remember her the best way I can. I make sure she looks healthy like the first time I ever locked eyes with her. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I marvelled at her slightly darker skin, like the sun had kissed it graciously. I kissed it lovingly from her temples to the rounded tip of her nose, from her prominent shoulder blades to her hips, from her knees to the smooth insides of her ankles. Her eyes were smaller than the large ones that had become so popular, and her teeth were slightly crooked. She had thick and long black hair, usually piled high, and always smelling like roses.
When I open my eyes, she is here, lying next to me. Her fingers are soft and delicate like flower petals brushing against my skin. She is wearing a thin camisole, her collarbone straining against flesh and looking like it will break through. Her eyes are bright and her hair is loose around us. In this small sanctuary, we are perfect just like before.
“I’m not the only one,” she whispers against my brow.
She starts to ashen, and I see flakes forming against her jutting bone.
“What do you mean?” My words fall flat as I try to hold onto her disintegrating body.
She isn’t supposed to be like this. In these lucid dreams, I hold her and keep the promises I make.
I hear her laugh, the one that she was embarrassed about because she snorted like a pig. She palms my cheek and presses her mouth against mine. I feel her rubbery gums mash against my lips.
“There are others who are suffering from this, too.”
We are no longer together in my bed. Instead, she is standing at the edge of New Hong Kong, her feet above the water. I try to reach out and grab her, but she is out of reach. She goes through the phases of her disease, the one that had caught everyone by surprise. The one that wasn’t supposed to exist. The one that Start Labs products had promised to fight but instead accelerated the process.
Her skin turns bone-white and her eyes look bloody from popped capillaries. Her once healthy, red-and-pink muscles become grey. Her hair falls out, clumps floating in the air. The water spray from behind her doesn’t get her nightgown wet. The skin I had once adored sags from her bones. It drops into the water unevenly like pale slugs losing grip. Her mouth gapes open, her lower mandible shifting lower and slowly dipping. I scream and scream because this isn’t supposed to happen. Before her jaw disappears into the bay, I see her mouth form a word.
I wake up hours later, my throat raw, and my body clammy from cold sweat. My room is dark and filled with shadows, and I feel like the loneliness in my heart will kill me. I know she will never appear to me again, not the way I want to dream of her. I keep the empty vials on the window ledge. As I walk amongst the masses or when I am alone, staring into the darkest corners of my room, I hear her final whisper, like the way she told me she loved me:
Help.
§
“What happens when the souls are reincarnated again?” she asked me once.
I could hear air rattle in her chest as she pushed out the words from her mouth. Her ribcage looked fragile like if I stroked the bone, it would turn to dust.
“They spend years looking for each other,” I tell her. “Since she was a ghost, she was able to deceive Meng Po. But he drank the Five Flavoured Tea of Forgetfulness that was offered. A sip was all that was needed for him to forget his past lives. But the ghost was determined that her human would remember the only life that mattered to her.”
I was looking into her glass cell as I told the story. My hand pressed against the bottom. With obvious effort, she strained and lifted her half-bone, half-muscle arm and tried to press her decaying palm against the glass. She didn’t have much skin left on her fingers at that point, but I tried as hard as I could to have her feel my warmth. My breath fogged the glass. I wished I could hold onto whatever was left and clutch it against my heart.
“I won’t drink the tea,” she said; one of the last things she ever said.
* * *
About Tabitha Sin
Tabitha Sin enjoys stories that make her skin crawl. She has been published in Moonroot zine and Thought Catalog. She is currently working on a speculative fiction YA novel set in the same world as “Dreams” while occasionally dabbling in hybrid fiction-memoir pieces. You can find her at http://tabithasin.wordpress.com or follow her thoughts on Twitter: @tabithameep.
Bumbye! Said the Candelarios
Ailia Hopkins
~ Hawai‘i ~
The change was so innocuous and most were too busy to notice it, but the beach had grown over twenty-two feet that night, and if Chandel Reyes, under the influence of a heady mix of beer and bootleg psycho-pharmaceuticals, had not been driving down a deserted strip of coastal highway that subsequent afternoon, she might never have alerted the town in time. Of course, this fact was soon forgotten.
She had dozed off, the beer cans on the passenger floorboard rolling out from under the seat, the automotive receipts on the dashboard flying, the Ocean-Air air freshener in the rear view mirror twisting like a breathless scream. She was slammed forward and awake, then back down and unconscious. She awoke to the sound of Spanish guitars. The hood smoked as the radio played on and Chandel, instead of sighting, or maybe because of sighting, the scarlet stream dribbling down the dashboard of her corvette, found herself mesmerised by what she was certain the foreign tongue over the trill of the band was singing. You pursue me as if I were a dove you want to devour! She peeled her face from the steering wheel and felt her head spin. The chorus faded and the voice resumed its inscrutable Spanish.
Chandel fell against the car door, popping it open. Oblivious to the heat, she slid from the driver’s seat to the sand, sat up and caught another strain of the haunted radio, this time without guitars. Torn to shreds like my fucking heart. Chandel touched her temple to rub it sober. It was time for a tonic. Squinting ahead, through a patch of yellow light, she saw where the beach ascended, narrowed, and dropped to sheer cliff. If not for the crash she would had been headed straight for the ocean.
She stood up, her thick arms trembling like the strings of those Spanish gu
itars, which trailed her, ever so softly, as she made her way to the passenger side. She felt her ribs, then looked at the windshield, and winced. The tyre, its rubber caught on a heap of seaweed and rock, was another mess entirely. She stuck her hand through the passenger window and clicked open the glove compartment, spilling a carton of cigarettes and a hoard of paper napkins onto the seat as she fumbled for the smooth metal knob of her flask. The front surface had been etched prettily with someone’s silver initial: another souvenir. In it was the last seven ounces of a prime-grade whiskey, which, unlike anything else she currently owned, including the car itself, she had in fact purchased.
“Cariño,” she said, unaware she wasn’t speaking in English, and threw her head back for two generous gulps.
A sudden gust blew the last smoke from the car.
Her t-shirt clung to her chest in darkening splotches. She took a deep breath. In one swoop she ripped it up over her head, tossing it along with her shabby cargo pants into the back seat of the car. She polished off the last of the Maker’s Mark and set the empty flask down about five yards from the water, plenty of room for high tide to come in. She strode toward the tide, ignoring the feeling of being a body-sized bruise, and dove in. The ocean bloomed into one foaming mouth, rushing forward as if to form another body around her.
It was a long while before she felt half-way sober enough to turn back to the car, and by then, she was much farther down from where she had started. She walked, for what seemed like hours, letting her body dry in the sun, until a sharp glinting, like the pinnacle of a church, signalled the flask, the rest of it buried underneath sand. It, too, seemed much farther from the tide than she remembered. The sun quivered with the same level intensity, yet there was no trace of her footprints and the water had ebbed. She wondered how long she’d been in the water. Perhaps she had simply gotten the tides mixed. Even the radio was silent, in all probability dead. She slipped back into her blood-stained t-shirt and tattered pants, and finding a pair of slippers in the trunk of the car, turned for the road. By the time she passed the torn guard rail, the stand of blighted pines and the crumbling outcrop that did nothing to buffer her fall to the bottom of the beach, the ocean had retreated another thirty feet.
§
Back from the coastal highway on which our hero had just begun lay a dreamy valley of little wooden houses raised on little wooden stilts. Some of the houses sat perched before macadamia groves, or coffee. Some simply overlooked ponds. All of them stood above gardens—gardens of such lushness and variety as if to have bloomed in response to a prehistoric explosion. There had not been any volcanic activity for quite some time now. It is important to note these details, for at the end of this road, tucked into a grove of plumeria and pines, stands the centre of our story—an inconspicuous shop, more like a glorified shed, in which three women in faded, slim-fitting dresses have just banged through the door, the copper bell nailed above ringing in irritating succession.
“You Candelarios need to stop bangin’ that blessed door.” The man behind the counter, his coarse hair clipped close above his leathery ears, stood over a pile of coupons arranged on top of an inventory binder, his elbow and forearm greasy with newspaper ink. This was the only market for several miles, and the customers were either the odd local neighbours or the odd lost tourist, though most tourists had good enough aim of getting lost farther along down the road.
The first woman clucked. “What’s wrong? Mister Savei stay a virgin?” They were standing in a row, their hair-sprayed up-dos and prosthetic eyelashes towering over the top of the aisle. They busily filled a basket with Revlon nail polish.
“Goddamn trannies,” Saveliy said under his breath.
“Aww.” The third Candelario cooed. “Papa’s got his panties in a twist ’cause we’re bangin’ his door, and not bangin’—”
“Say, why don’t you ladies go sell yourselves?” Saveliy snapped open a newspaper.
“How you think we get the cash for come shop your junk superette?” said the second Candelario. The other two laughed as they moved to the feminine hygiene aisle.
Saveliy looked up. “What the hell do you need that for?”
The first Candelario held up two boxes and the sisters, heads cocked to one side, shrugged, signalling her to drop both cartons into the basket as the bell rang with a new customer. She was slightly sun-burned and kind of bruised, which made for an irregular combination on her skin—under normal circumstances, a mute sienna; that, and her scalp seemed to be bleeding onto her shirt, adding brighter splotches to what might have been older and dried-up instants of other such splotches, or mud. She looked as if she’d been through a washing machine, but her clothes were dry and not especially clean. Saveliy and the three women paused to look at her. Chandel ignored them and headed for the liquor, trailing sand.
The third Candelario resumed a conversation that seemed to have been going on for quite some time now. “I don’t care how much work he’s had done, or how messed-up his nose looks, I’d sit on his face.” They were closer to the register now, each poised over respective copies of People Magazine’s Sexiest Man of The Year. Chandel stood with a focused stance before the glassed fridge.
“I don’t know, I’d have to be pretty strung-out, myself,” said the second Candelario, turning her neck, long and stubbled, with the other Candelarios, to the woman contemplating the alcohol at the back of the store.
Saveliy glanced up over the rim of his round-frame glasses. “You read it, you buy it. This ain’t a library.”
The third Candelario huffed, her laughter suddenly low in pitch. “Does it look like this tita can read?”
The first Candelario tossed her hibiscus-print lava-lava over one shoulder, and the second tossed back her hair—all three delicately replacing their magazines as Chandel slipped a 26oz. bottle of SKYY vodka between the cotton of her underwear and the wide elastic band of her pants.
“That’ll be $28.66,” said Saveliy.
“Bumbye,” said the Candelarios. The women lined up to consolidate their funds, their purses filling the counter and forcing Saveliy to move his newspaper coupons to one side. He didn’t notice the audible crunch of Chandel’s pockets holding two packages of dried ika and a bag of li-hing mui candy, nor the bell for the shop as she exited, her shirt a little more filled out and angular with a bottle of mouthwash and the last three boxes of lime Jell-O.
“Must be Gigi’s new tits,” said the second Candelario, arching her left painted-on eyebrow in the direction of the third Candelario, as the other two searched the bottom of their bags for the last sixteen cents. “Sava here distracted, letting that chronic just up and run off with his alcohol.”
Saveliy felt himself blush, processing the intolerable thought he’d let a thief get by. He dropped the cash in the register and flung it closed, bolting from behind the counter out the door.
“Thanks for the discount!” yelled the first Candelario.
Each extended a long dark arm to a stand of Dum-Dum lollipops next to the register.
The second Candelario concurred, leaning forward over the counter. “That Savei there ain’t so bad, you know.”
Their eyes followed him out past the store window, where he had paused at the edge of the parking, scanning both ways. They unwrapped the suckers and popped them in their mouths.
The third Candelario sighed. “Poor virgin.”
Although it had been no more than a minute since he had been robbed, by the time Saveliy made it past the stand of plumeria enfolding the entrance of the shop, he found himself at a clear disadvantage—very nearly out of breath, with the thief out of sight. He was hardly accustomed to coming this far down the valley, much less out to the highway. He had spent much of the past eight years in that three mile-radius, moving from his house to the shop, and it had been so long since he’d been to the beach or the harbour, for good reason. As he liked to tell himself, it was the age of retreat for a man of his status, or at the very least, years.
But now h
e was running, his gut flopping heavily, his neck hair gathering sweat, overcome with the inexplicable feeling he was on an important mission. He flushed with a new vitality, even as he felt he would surely die if he did not stop for breath, at which exact moment, heaving with his hands on his 58-year-old thighs, he looked up in time to see that net of black hair from the superette disappearing over the crest of the valley at the end of the black-grit road.
“You bitch! My shit!”
The mass of black hair continued without missing a beat. “Knees up, old man.”
He coughed, and with feigned energy sprinted down the hill. The bobbing net of hair rounded the second bend in the black-grit road to where it met up with the highway and then dived in a parallel curve by the shore. He pumped his legs harder than ever. His side burned and his teeth ached. The tree trunks narrowed and zipped past, and the ground rose up as his boots kicked up a storm of dirt and pine needles but he knew, just a few more steps and he would reach out and snatch the thief by that net of hair, a few more steps, a few more breaths, and he would have justice. But instead, as he cleared the entrance to the beach, fully ready to lay hold of her, he stopped cold and nearly collapsed in fright.
Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction Page 7