What was Frank trying to say through the book? That these men were wrong? That it didn’t matter where they died? It bothered her, his skepticism, and the feeling that he was trying to disabuse her of something.
She set the book down and gazed at the river, where traffic today was heavier. What she saw mostly were ragged bands of soldiers, rifles in hand, cigarettes dangling. At one point, a young, hungry-looking soldier spied her on the banks—alone, supine, bursting with life—and kept his eyes fixed as his skiff puddled past. He stared with such intent that she was sure he would leap off the skiff and splash toward her, drenching himself as he went. By the time he cleared the bend, her heart was surging painfully. Not just from fear but also the knowledge that she hadn’t looked away.
In her guilt, she recalled something Frank had told her, that despite once being widely read, De rerum natura virtually disappeared during the Middle Ages until a rare medieval copy was found in a monastery during the Renaissance. That, she decided, was what Frank was really trying to say, that he too would slip through the bottleneck. That he and he alone would come to her.
—
It took a day for Alice to realize they should have been on the move too, that her in-laws were tarrying for her sake, letting her keep vigil. “If we have to leave…” she said in the morning, and her in-laws nodded, relieved.
As her uncle gathered food, she helped her aunt sew money into the lining of their clothes. Before they could finish, however, the family servant, Old Chang, burst through the inner gate and locked it frantically behind him. “Jih-pen-ren lai-le!” he gasped. “Are you sure?” her uncle asked. The old man nodded. “White bandanas,” he said, tying an imaginary one to his head. “On the crest of the hill.” Her uncle’s brow buckled. He looked at Alice, at her distension, and said, “It’s too late to run. We have to hide.”
“Where?” his wife asked.
Her uncle surveyed the house in his mind, then strode to the very back, to a long, narrow, dimly lit room with a marble counter along its length, atop which sat two candles, a platter of oranges, a censer full of charred stalks, and dozens of red and gold funeral plaques, rising like buildings in a model city. The altar room.
Below the counter was a cabinet with a small door. Her uncle slid it open.
Her aunt peered. “Are you sure?”
“We have no choice.”
Her aunt lowered herself to the floor. Out of modesty, she sat down and backed in, so it seemed she was not so much entering as being swallowed whole. “Are you all right?” her uncle asked once she was in. “Yes, yes,” she replied impatiently, her voice already cavernous. Alice sat down, helped by her uncle and Old Chang, the stone floor plungingly cold. After walking her haunches over the lip of the door, she slid back, hands pocked with grit. She should have loosed her bun, which would have given her poor neck an extra inch of space. As it was, she sat with her face nearly pressed to the sudden monstrosity of her belly.
“After I get in,” her uncle instructed Old Chang, “put some stools in front of the altar. Then unlock the gates. If they can’t get in, they’ll burn the house down. Open some drawers, make it look like we’ve left in a hurry. Then climb onto the roof and stay out of sight. Don’t come down till they’re gone. Can you manage that?” Alice heard no reply, only what sounded like a clap on the back, and she pictured a lifetime of fealty, Old Chang carrying a boy on his shoulders. Then her uncle got in and the world went dark.
The slap and shuffle of Old Chang’s slippers, retreating, returning, retreating again. Stools scraped, drawers whinnied, and then the house fell silent. Alice would have felt safer in total darkness, her body dematerialized, but a gap between two panels let in a spray of light, enough to prove that she was still there. If she angled her head just so, she could see out, the breach sharpening the room like a lens, and this made her fear the opposite, that someone might see in, catch her eyes glinting in darkness. So she closed them and in that more complete darkness wondered how her life had come to this.
If her ghost were left to wander here, would it feel lost or at home?
A pounding at the gate. Belligerent shouts, muffled, remote, then ringingly clear. Footsteps in the house, dozens of sets, it seemed, all scurrying toward them. The splintering of wood, the bursting tinkle of china, and raucous laughter, all strangely amplified by the roaring in her ears.
In no time, footsteps were outside the altar-room door, where they slowed, quieted. With what seemed like caution, unseen figures entered. Had they heard something? Was one already holding a finger to his lips and pointing? Out of sheer terror, Alice opened her eyes. Through the breach, she glimpsed camel-toed shoes, tightly wrapped puttees, and the dull gleam of a bayonet.
She prayed, hard.
As if in answer, the soldiers muttered and left. Alice couldn’t tell how long she was forced to stay there, tensed in silence, waiting for the soldiers to finish ransacking the house, but by the time Old Chang came padding back, every muscle in her body yowled for release. There was no more blood in her legs. She could hardly stand. But she was alive.
“They were afraid,” her uncle said. “They have no mercy for the living, but they still respect the dead.”
If not God, then ghosts. Someone had saved them.
Suddenly Alice was in flight. She ran to her room and tore through the clothes that now lined the floor. And there it still was, her book.
—
“We can’t stay,” Old Chang said. “More are coming to spend the night. I heard them.”
Warm beds. Provisions. Of course they would be back. But the four of them couldn’t exactly run, not with the enemy everywhere. Better to let the first wave pass and take their chances later.
In a copse beyond the house was a wooden shed, her uncle said. They could spend the night there. As soon as they gathered themselves, they dared the few hundred yards to the woods, the men lugging a ladder between them. When they came to the battered shed and its makeshift boards, Old Chang clambered onto the roof and Alice was made to follow. The ladder was then raised and thrust down through the skylight, and she climbed down. Only then did she understand the elaborate entrance: the shed was full of rice. She stifled laughter, sinking into the unexpected dune.
The ladder retracted and reappeared until all of them were safely in. There on the rice, they made little beds for themselves, Alice relieved for something reasonably solid against the small of her back. Within the hour, the coughing of engines, followed by drunken revelry long into the night.
—
Sometime in the night, Alice awoke from a dream she instantly forgot. The others were still asleep, her in-laws huddled for warmth, Old Chang off in a corner, and the shed unexpectedly bright. The gloaming that had fizzled in like a mist was now a clear shaft of moonlight, teeming, undulant, alive. Motes of dust they must have kicked up themselves were still floating, spinning, swirling through the air. She watched them flit and dodge, dance and collide, coming together and breaking apart in endless motion through the mighty void. She looked on with something like awe.
—
Long into the morning, the four of them stayed put until every last engine had rumbled away. Then they ventured out, blinded, dazed. As they set off, Alice slowed, letting the others walk ahead. When she felt safely behind, she turned and looked back.
Somehow she wasn’t surprised to see Frank at the edge of the copse. Nor was she surprised that he hadn’t called out. There he stood in his wedding suit, looking as gentle, handsome, and proud, as untarnished by life as the day they were married, and she raised an arm, her heart smote by joy. Joy that flamed into the air, filling the woods, the universe. Then Frank did something strange. With lips pursed, he bent his knees and leapt into the air, and all that heat went cold.
In that moment there were any number of things she didn’t know. For instance, that she would survive the day. That the four of them would make their way to the banks of the Yangtze River and push their way through water cannons onto a Briti
sh steamer. That Old Chang would slip and fall in the chaos and never be seen again. She didn’t know that she would lie in an iron hold for five days without so much as matting until they reached Wuhan, or that from there they would go on another two hundred miles by train to Changsha, where with ether and an episiotomy she would give birth to a son at the hands of a stranger. Neither did she know that by the time they reached Hong Kong the whole world would be descended into madness, nor that the Japanese would take on the British too, not one month after she set sail for home. She didn’t know that China would eventually win, or that after the war she would vote for the first time, or that one day her only grandchild, a girl, would play soccer on King’s College Circle and walk in cap and gown through Convocation Hall in Toronto, just like her grandfather. She didn’t know that one day she would see her great-grandchildren through a magic portal she could hold in her hands, and she didn’t know that in the end her ashes would be scattered over the Huangpu River, which curled like a hairpin through the heart of Shanghai, the last place she had been truly happy, though life would not be without happiness, as far as happiness went.
And she didn’t know if she believed in God or the afterlife. All she knew, what she finally came to accept, was that the sweet, inimitable assemblage of atoms that was Frank Yeung was no more. And indeed, when she looked again, he was gone.
PATRICK DOERKSEN
LEECH
Why do Mom and Dad shut their door every night? Liz says they do. I haven’t seen it. I go to bed too early. I wonder if they have one too, coming after them. I wonder if they know a door can’t stop it?
I’ve never thought that maybe everyone has one. If Liz has one it would be something with wings. Liz spends all day with her friends in the tree fort. She likes to jump from the high dive at the pool. She says if she had one super power she would choose to fly.
If I had a superpower I would fly too, but for different reasons.
Mom and Dad are in the military. It’s nothing to do with guns and bombs. Actually, it’s more boring than even being a plumber. I watched the plumber last week fix the sink. He seemed much happier than Dad. Dad’s behind a desk and sometimes he doesn’t talk to anybody at all for a whole day, except on the phone. Mom’s behind a desk too, but she’s the opposite, all day she’s talking to people. She’s a chaplain. That’s probably just as boring.
In the military you always have someone telling you what to do. Mostly they tell Mom and Dad to move here, now move there. We’ve moved twice in the past four years. This is great for me, it keeps me away from it. I don’t like to think what will happen when we stop moving. Liz hates moving, but maybe she should be grateful if she also has one.
—
I dreamed last night about a forest of bonsai. Bonsai are trees shrunken by a laser beam so that people can put them in their house. I don’t really believe that, but how else do they get so small? Dad says he has a friend with a shrink ray, and now we have a bonsai in the bathroom. I like to imagine an owl got caught sleeping when they shrunk the tree and woke up tiny and now lives on the sow bugs behind the toilet. In my dream I was walking in the bonsai forest trying not to break the trees. It turned out the whole world had become a bonsai. I could see everywhere, over mountains even, like I was looking at a map, and I could see it coming toward me.
That’s not so different from what I imagine during the day though. When we’re in a circle and Mrs. Schulz is reading I look out the window and am afraid it’s there moving along the fence. A couple nights ago I imagined it wriggling through the muck beneath a river somewhere miles and miles away. It’s something like a slug or a leech, shot out from some weird place in the ground, or maybe from space.
It’s very slow, and that’s my only hope. It takes an afternoon to cross a road, a year to cross a state. But it’s still scary because it never stops moving. It’s not annoyed by buildings or lakes or anything in its way, it just keeps going. It doesn’t need to sleep or eat. I don’t know where it gets its energy from. Everything needs energy to keep it moving. Maybe there are things that don’t? Maybe it’s not doing the moving, maybe it’s being pulled, reeled into me like a fish.
I’m not sure what happens if it catches me. I used to have nightmares of falling into a pit of leeches.
Something like that, I’m guessing.
I tried to explain this to Mom. She just kept asking me why I was so sure.
But I’m not sure. I can’t be sure. So sometimes when I’ve been playing for too long with LEGO in the basement, or reading too long under the trampoline, I need to get up and go somewhere else, just in case.
—
Today Mom did something she’d never done before. She brought back a map and a big sheet of paper from work and spread it over the kitchen table.
Where did you see it last, she said.
When we were camping by the lake near Grandma and Grandpa’s, I said.
It’s summertime and I do a lot of exploring. I collect things. I was climbing a tree to get this huge pinecone when I thought I saw it across the lake.
How long would it take to get from the fridge to where I’m standing, Mom said.
Half an hour, I said.
Mom wrote all this down on the paper. I stood on my tiptoes watching her write down numbers and cross out numbers. Eventually she circled one big number at the bottom.
I’ve calculated it out, she said. From the lake to us it will take a year and three months. I looked at the paper but it was just a bunch of numbers.
Are you sure, I said.
I’ve used math, she said, and math is the surest thing in the world.
I’m not sure I saw it at the lake, I said.
Mom grabbed up the paper with the numbers and crunched it into the garbage. She was mad.
I’m sorry, I said. I didn’t know she was going to do all that work. She had her hands all tangled up in her hair.
The only sure thing is that it always moves toward me, I said.
She sat down at the table then and told me to sit down too.
I want you to imagine something for me, Hans, she said. Imagine it showing up right here in our kitchen, right there on the floor where the carpet becomes tiles. It’s so slow, you could leap right over it! You could even tap dance around it if you wanted!
I’d be too scared, I said.
Then I’d help you scoop it up into a box and ship it to Africa, she said.
When it arrived there it would just start crawling back toward me, it wouldn’t even be angry, I said.
We could send it into space, she said.
No we couldn’t, I said.
We could confuse it, she said. Maybe it was tracking me by my hair, maybe we could cut off my hair and send it to Uncle Bernie out east and make it go there?
But we can’t confuse it, I said.
The only way we could confuse it would be if I died. I didn’t say this though. It was a new thought.
—
Last night Mom and Dad were yelling with their door closed. I only know because I couldn’t sleep, I was thinking the new thought again. I was thinking that maybe if I did kill myself it would finally get annoyed. But when I try to imagine it out there, growing slack and stopping under some rock, not moving at all, I can’t. It’s like it needs me. To be itself. It would be like if a rock were falling and suddenly the whole earth disappeared and the rock was left with nowhere to fall.
Is this what would really happen? I feel weird when I think about it, because I can never know. It’s set up that way. If I die I won’t be able to watch what happens, but if I don’t die nothing different will happen.
—
Today Liz told me that we were going to live with Grandma and Grandpa for a while. Five minutes later, Mom told me the same thing.
I’m really scared. Mom didn’t make any calculations for that. It would reach me much quicker, I can’t say how quick, but a lot quicker, since I saw it out there when we went camping. I told Mom that I wasn’t going. She just hugged me a
nd kissed me again and again on my forehead.
Please, Mom, what should I do, I said. I was crying. Mom was crying too.
I’m laying a spell on you, she said. She was still kissing me.
What does the spell do, I said.
It’s so that it can’t touch you, not for a moment, she said. If you see it, if it comes to your door when you’re in bed, don’t be scared.
How long will the spell last, I said.
Two days, she said.
That’s not very long, I said.
It’s the best I got, she said. But I will renew it every two days. I will never let it expire.
—
I’ve been at Grandma and Grandpa’s now for five days and I haven’t seen it. Mom’s come twice, Dad’s come once. I’m not sure kisses are enough to stop it. I’m not sure because Mom kisses Liz too and Liz is starting to get really sick. I think hers is getting close. Everyone has one, I’m pretty sure of that now. I’m telling Mom and Dad we need to get Liz back home, we need to or something horrible will happen, but Mom and Dad don’t understand, they just keep kissing us like that will make everything okay.
KELLY WARD
A GIRL AND A DOG ON A FRIDAY NIGHT
Rachel can see half of her windshield through the front window of the store, above the pile of overstuffed bright pink pigs that lines the entryway. That helps. The constant glint of sunlight prevents her from seeing inside the car, but still she oscillates between glaring at the cashier—frantically willing her to move faster—and checking the windshield. It disturbs her that with every step she takes toward the register the visible area of her car shrinks behind the behemoth cab of a pickup parked next to her sedan.
On a wire rack beside her, a few headlines call out the unseasonably low temperatures expected for the weekend. Nineteen is still hot, Rachel thinks. No. Not hot. Warm. Seeing the checkout girl’s hand move to the phone next to her till and hearing her voice over the store’s PA system, Rachel cringes.
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