Content note: child abuse

 

You used to be in a band. Now you cut hair. The Institute hired you because you’re the daughter of the Floating City’s Founder’s fourth mistress, the one who always cooks up trouble when she gets too hungry. You don’t like the work, but you like all the different scissors. Short blades, fat blades, wave-cuts, goatee-serrated, wide-toothed thinning shears, blue, pink, neon green. They glimmer on the walls like the claws of prehistoric creatures.

They start you off sweeping floors at Barbershop AZ-1. The shop is located outside a quaint little train station between the Town Towers and the Floating City, the starting point of the “Ascent”—a half-mile, nearly vertical rise where the train rises from the polluted sea level to the red gates of the god class. On clear days, the red gardens and glass houses look almost close enough to touch from the concrete roof. The work is easy but mind-numbing. You name your broom Lappy, after the stray dog your mom wouldn’t let you keep. Lappy does a good job of keeping the floors clean even though he’s barely hanging in there, tangled bristles, splintered head and all. Your fingertips are filled with tiny, woody prickles of his love.

After a few months, you start cutting hair on the mannequin. The supervisor at the Institute lets you use the small blue scissors, the one with the lapis lazuli handle that makes you feel like an ancient Egyptian cosmetologist. You trim the bangs into jagged points, the same pattern as the electrified gates that keep the Town Tower folks off the train platform. A look-but-don’t-touch kinda thing you’ve heard your whole life. When no one is watching, you pull the wig off and fit the mesh net over your head, hiding your ratty black hair under it. You pucker your lips into the mirror to look more like the girls in the faded travel posters for the Floating City, the ones that line the cracked windows of the train station. You imagine what it would be like to wear the same long silk robes, to live in a big house with a view of the Silver Lake, the water so clear you can see the gold-scaled koi fish below, big as dogs, pecking at the algae-covered stones at the bottom. You imagine being one of the fish, admired but untouchable.

The first time you cut someone’s hair, they tell you, “Do it slowly, otherwise it’ll hurt.” These guys have never lived in the Town Towers so they don’t got a clue that no one from here knows how to do anything slowly. Doing anything slowly means being late, being left behind, being unpaid. It means starving and carving yourself up at the body markets to make rent.

You’ve been taught to do things fast, fast, fast. You’ve learned to finish the job before someone else can take it from you. So when you chop off a fourth of the lady’s curly locks in a single motion, the shock nearly brings you to your knees. The flood of images jolt your ill-prepared brain like a lightning storm. You struggle to remember how to breathe.

Fran, the supervisor on duty, clicks her tongue.

“Fuck Mina, I told you, slowly,” she says. You look up and apologize. She’s one of the nicer ones, so you try not to picture her boiling in oil when she takes the scissors out of your hands.

No one at the barbershop tells you how it works, but you’ve read the books. You know all about the memory streams, those tiny silver pathways that pass from the brain through the hair. How even the oldest memories, seemingly forgotten, can be coaxed to the surface with the right blade.

The first person to accidentally pluck out a memory stream, thinking it a white hair, was left in a coma for days. This makes you feel better. Few can see the streams, and even fewer can touch them without losing themselves. That means you’re special, even if no one has ever said it.

The second time you cut someone’s hair, you steady your hand and picture the cemeteries at the edge of town. Those chipped headstones, so numerous they form a single gray mass when viewed from a distance. That always calms you down. When the first strands of hair fall to your shoes like spiderwebs, you see a young girl digging for pill bugs in her yard, her hands and knees smeared with dirt. You cut a bit more. This time you see a teenage girl riding her bicycle down a city street, a teenage boy calling her name from behind, the summer air like smoking coals. You feel it in those delicate strands as they fall—that nervous, bursting, overwhelming joy only a first love can weave.

But more than a feeling, the memory has a taste. A delicious taste like buttery-fat steaks or sugar-powdered berries plucked from sun-washed orchards. You salivate, hungry for more.

The customer has tears in her eyes when you hold up the mirror to show her the back, the clean cut, the smooth lines around the ears, the strands of memories on the floor. She’ll be back, you can already tell.

By the end of the first year, you have a few regulars who ask for your hands specifically. One Friday night, Fran closes early and treats you to some hot, sweet red bean soup. She never says it, but you can feel her pride in the tiny hairs on her fingers when she pats you on the head. She lets you count the scissors with her at the end of the day and tells you stories about her favorite ones when there are no customers. You stop being a burden. You almost feel needed.

But then your mom starts getting hungry again.

She watches the alley cats, stroking their tangled fur for hours under the fire escapes.

She wails nightly as if in pain, beating her hands against the dusty sheets of the bed you share. It’s all your fault, you hear her say, even if the words are muffled by the pillow.

Sometimes she’s got a look on her face that makes you wonder if you’ll still be alive in the morning.

You tell Fran, so she prepares a bag for you.

“What is this?” you ask as she hands it to you.

“Hair.”

You’ve heard the rumors. How your mother used to cut hair in the Floating City. How she even cut the Founder’s hair once. You think of that man you’ve only ever seen in textbooks and in oil paintings, the face of a god. You think of how your mom touched, even kissed that face at some point.

“Your mama lost the sight, but not the hunger,” Fran says, flattening the frizzy hairs poking up from the back of your head. The gesture leaves a warm feeling radiating through your chest.

You don’t need to ask what she means. No one cuts hair in the Floating City unless they can see those silver streams, those delicious memories.

You squeeze the bag, the paper crinkling in your arms. Your mama lost the sight. Was that your fault too?

That night, as your mom lies on the old couch, murmuring something about birds, you sit down next to her with the bag.

“Mom, they said this is the last bit,” you tell her, just like Fran instructed you to.

The hair is gray and coarse, animal-like. She pats it gently at first, as if unsure, then threads her shaky fingers through it like someone searching for a switch in the dark. Her mouth quivers, teeth sinking into her lower lip. You look away, never sure how to watch her when she’s unraveling.

“This isn’t all of it,” she suddenly says, pulling her hand back, several strands of the hair falling to the floor. Her eyes are on you like a predator. “Did you take it?”

You’re used to her outbursts. Who on your Tower block wasn’t? Before you’d taken the job at the Institute, you’d accompanied her on her weekly trips to the Healing Rooms where the nurses would look sympathetically at the bruises on your arms and offer you a few pieces of candy. They’d compliment your tolerance, such a good daughter, as if the greater your pain, the more worthy of honor you were.

“I’ll ask Fran. Maybe she misplaced some,” you say. You think it’s ridiculous, the idea of misplacing strands of old, tasteless hair, like misplacing empty rusted cans, but your mom finally relaxes.

“Thank you,” she says, her gratitude unsettling you more than her anger.

The next morning, Fran isn’t in the mood to talk about hair. You pull Lappy off his wall hook and do a few sweeps until things cool down. You’re good at staying quiet when no one wants to hear your voice.

You listen to the trains rumbling into the station outside, full of Floating City tourists that have come to visit the Town Tower body markets or to watch one of the death fights in the House of Delights. Dying, in all its forms, always brings good money. You think of your old band and the dead drummer they brought you in to replace. You miss the night performances in the abandoned apartments, the dirt-faced kids and insomniac adults gathered around on the floor with their tongue-searing homemade ciders, needles kissing skin, the bonfires that burnt until the blue-gray hours of early morning. You think of all the different ways a person can die without ever leaving their body.

At noon, a guard arrives with a letter. Fran closes the shop and dismisses you for the day.

When you get home, your mom is pretending to be an airplane. She glides around the apartment, arms out, swerving behind the couch and old television and into the dark hall, making sounds through her cracked lips. Zzzzzzz-zzzzzzz-zzzzzz. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. Maybe she’s a fighter jet. When you were younger, you two did this together when you got too hungry, pretending to blast away invisible monsters with imaginary missiles, as if you could silence the pain in your stomach by keeping your brain busy with heroics.

But now, when you try to join her, she stops, her face still in the shadows of the hall.

“What did Fran say?” she asks.

“I didn’t have the chance to ask her,” you answer, knowing your mom can tell when you lie. “She was busy. A guard came by the Institute today.”

“You mean she’s dead?”

“No, he only brought a letter,” you answer, unsure.

Your mom nods, but she doesn’t look convinced.

You’ve read about people dusting letter paper with poison, the leftover bodies doused with gasoline and burnt for show in the Assembly Square by the drones, but that was a long time ago. Long before the people in the Town Towers better understood their place. Long enough ago for you to think your mother is just paranoid, that the medication doses need to be increased again.

One of your usuals comes in without an appointment and asks for a trim. Fran’s still in the back room with the “Don’t Disturb” sign hanging on the door, so you motion toward an empty chair and take one of the scissors off the wall. It’s your favorite one now, the silver-black shearing blade that Fran said the Institute’s founder himself designed.

You’ve gotten good enough where you know how to search for the memories the customers want to see, how to pat through the generic stuff to the ones that taste best. The first kisses, the hot summer festivals before the curfews were introduced, toes sinking in warm sand, the first train rides to the Floating City instead of the last ones away from it. You drape a plastic sheet over the woman’s shoulders, brush the lint from her neck. Saliva collects in your mouth as you bring the scissors’ blade to the hairs hanging down her forehead.

Before you can cut a single hair, there’s a knock on the front door.

The back room door flies open, nearly unhinging.

“Fucking, fuckers,” Fran curses, storming out before you can answer it, scratching furiously at her neck. She opens the front door; it slams shut behind her before you can see who it is. You think you hear Fran shouting, but it’s drowned by the sound of an incoming train.

The customer clears her throat in a way that reminds you that you’re still just a worker. That no matter how well they tip or compliment you, no matter how much you’ve seen of them or how many tears they’ve shed with you, you’re only allowed to be here as long as you’re useful to them. No different than a good pair of scissors.

You open the blades, the silver streams gleaming under your fingers, your appetite gone.

Fran doesn’t return. You pick up Lappy and sweep under the chairs, watching strangers’ hair mix, browns, silvers, fiery reds, and silky black like a tapestry of autumn colors. At sundown, one of the other supervisors comes to close the shop. This one’s got a fat mole between his eyes, and when he asks you to keep your eyes down, to not look at him, you picture him sinking to the bottom of the lake, the mole gnawed away by starving fish.

“Did you talk to her?” your mom asks the moment you come through the door. She’s lying on the couch, her arms raised toward the ceiling as if reaching for invisible birds.

“No. Someone came to the Institute today and she left with them.”

“You mean she’s dead?”

“I don’t know.”

Your mom sits up. “Come here.” She motions for you to join her on the couch, so you do. She smells like the industrial pink soap they use in the Healing Rooms. You remember how growing up, you loved that smell because it meant she was fresh off new meds, that she would be well enough to love you again for a few weeks.

“It’s not your fault,” she says, hovering a calloused hand over your knees, unsure of how to touch you. Growing up, you had longed for that elusive touch, but now the possibility of it leaves you nervous. “It happens to all of us. The moment you lose the sight, the taste, you become a liability. A useless lump of memory and bottomless hunger.”

The next day, Mole Man has taken over the Institute. He’s already decorated the register desk with a pair of rat-faced figurines in ballerina dresses. You’re relegated back to sweeping. Lappy is happy for the company again, but the splinters irritate you more than before.

They’ve brought in a new girl, someone from the Floating City who’s come for training. She looks at you like an exotic animal, marveling at your long black hair. She’s never seen anyone with this color.

“Can I touch it?” she asks, and you wonder if she can read your memories just by running her fingers through the hairs. Which would she find the tastiest? The ones of you combing the hair of naked dolls left in the trash heap near the train station? Or the ones of you hiding in the bathroom as your mother screamed at her imaginary enemies in the kitchen? Or maybe it’ll be the ones of you opening the window to your ninth floor apartment, the gush of hot wind, and wondering how long it takes a body to fall back to earth?

Go ahead, you want to tell her, eat up.

When Mole Man closes the register till for the day and motions for Girl #2 to bring in the signs from outside, you summon your courage like shaking the last few coins out of the bottom of a jar.

“Is Fran coming back?” you ask.

Mole Man looks up from his ledgers as if hearing a rat scratching in the walls. He frowns and points his pen at you. It’s sharp enough that you can almost feel the tip in your throat.

“Eyes down,” he spits, his mole shuddering with fury.

You look down at your sneakers, the fake leather peeling like scales; it looks the way you feel. Like falling apart.

Your mom keeps the gray hair in a lockbox under the kitchen sink. She takes it out sometimes like a child marveling at a collection of stones. She doesn’t let you touch it.

Sometimes you hear her crying in her sleep and you know the meds aren’t working so well anymore. You lie awake, staring at the flitting constellation of lights on the ceiling from the surveillance drones outside, and wait until her sobs dim to a whimper and her breathing evens. You reach for her hand but don’t take it, afraid of what she might say.

Then one day, you wake up to the sound of glass shattering.

“You stole it! You stole it!” she shrieks, hurling cups to the kitchen floor. The one you use for water, the one Fran gave you after your first year at the Institute, the one you got in middle school for best attendance before they closed the schools down. A field of broken glass on the dirty tiles, a cracked landscape of memory. “It’s all your fault. If you hadn’t been born…if only you hadn’t been born I would’ve still…”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” you say, bending over to pick up the glass before she can hurt herself or you.

You start sneaking a pair of scissors home in your bag. Mole Man isn’t as diligent about keeping inventory of all the cutting tools as Fran was. He doesn’t cut hair after all, you think, already looking down on him. That feels good too.

Girl #2 isn’t so bad. She smiles a lot, humming pretty songs you’ve never heard before, and always offers to help clean up the fallen hair with you. She’s got a scar just underneath her left eye, something that makes her even more desirable to the Floating City residents who are too used to perfection. She’s taken most of your regulars with her long silky blond hair and smooth hands. But you don’t blame them, who wouldn’t prefer a real Floating City girl to one of the Town Tower rodents?

You even let her cut your hair when she asks, just for practice. You half-wish she would do it faster, just to see her retch or crumble to her knees, but she cuts slowly, almost tenderly. She shows you sunny images of your mother, of summer-green parks and squirrels, fruits sweet on your tongue, tastes you didn’t remember.

You’re surprised by her tears.

A few days before the new year, your mom stops coming home. When you look under the sink, the hair is gone. You don’t know who to go to, so you tell Girl #2.

“She just disappeared?” she asks, pulling dusty clumps of hair from a brush.

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” you answer.

The girl purses her lips, dropping the hairs to the ground. She watches you sweep them up. Lappy likes the way she looks at him.

“Why do you think she left?” she asks.

“I don’t know.” You remember how the truth has always been a fatal line to your heart.

“Do people here just do that?”

“Do what?”

“Just disappear. Here one day, gone the next. No one even bothering to report it to the guards? To request a search party?”

Search party? You’ve only heard that combination of words once before. Was it like that game you played as a child where everyone gathered by the polluted river, pants rolled up, flashing lights into the muddy water, pretending to look for that classmate who had already moved with her family to the Floating City? You’d all been so jealous when she’d confided how her father, a chef from the Floating City, had saved up enough to bring over the whole family.

Girl #2’s questions make you bold: “What about in the Floating City?” you ask. “Do they always find people who disappear?”

She laughs. It’s the first time you’ve heard the clear bell-like sound outside of the fake laughter she always had ready for the customers.

“Do you want to cut my hair?” Girl #2 asks suddenly, tucking a loose strand behind her ears.

You don’t jump to conclusions. You speculate, but you never assume. No one survives the Town Towers with optimism or overconfidence. But your heart hammers behind your frail ribs with a strange kind of hunger.

The girl picks at her fingernails until the skin is red and raw, waiting for your response. You’ve seen her do this countless times before a client’s arrival, always afraid of coaxing out the wrong memories, of the ugly look of an unsatisfied customer. You think of how even beautiful things sometimes don’t know their own worth.

“Only if we can do it at my house,” you say finally.

Girl #2 doesn’t look twice at the hole in the drywall, the stains on the old carpet, the cracked tiles in the kitchen, the lopsided mountain of dirty dishes in the sink. She’s already seen them all before in your memories. In a way, it feels like coming home.

“Are all the Town Tower apartments like this one?” she asks, sitting down on a stool you’ve set up in the tiny bathroom. The lamp is so caked with grime that you’ve borrowed a mining light from a neighbor so you can see better.

“No. Most of them are worse,” you say. Your mother, despite all her misery, did try her best to create the closest replica she could of her old house in the Floating City. The carpet embroidered with yellow roses was purchased second-hand from an artist who had once lived in the Floating City before an incurable illness from the paints drove them to the Town Towers. She bought marble tiles to replace the cheap linoleum that originally lined the kitchen and bathroom floor, paying the quarry workers and carpenters with favors you know nothing of.

Girl #2 fidgets on the stool and you wonder if she’s never sat on a chair this hard before.

“Sorry if it’s a little—”

“No, no. This…I…this is my first time having my hair cut,” she stutters, and you’re reminded that before she was Girl #2 from the Floating City, she was just A Girl. You wonder if her mother combed through her long hair each night, braiding it with the gentleness only a person who once shared the same body could know. Your own mother did this once too, sitting you on her lap as she combed through the knots with a metal brush, a gift from an old friend she said. She told you then how you two would be boarding a train away from the Floating City, that soon your hair would hold different memories, less beautiful but at least all yours. As the flavor of this memory runs over the ridges of your tongue, you’re no longer sure if it’s yours or a customer’s memory. Every day, the differentiation matters less to you.

“Are you sure you want me to be your first cut?” you ask more out of fear than lack of confidence. You’ve heard the stories of old classmates ending up in the body markets, accused by Floating City residents of stolen firsts.

“I don’t want a Floating City barber to do it,” she says. “It won’t mean a thing to them.”

What about me? you wonder. What is it supposed to mean to me?

You take out the scissors you’ve been keeping in your bag, the silver-black shearing blade from the Institute’s founder, and put it on the metal tray your mother bought for bringing tea to her nonexistent guests. You hold the tips of the girl’s hair in your palm like someone catching snowflakes, her scalp warm under your fingertips. Her hair is coarser than you expected, her neck the color of fresh milk. On her back, barely visible under her shirt, you see the purple half-moons of fresh bruises. You’ll see the reasons for them soon enough, so you don’t ask.

“Ok, I’m going to start,” you warn.

The first cut feels like slamming your head into concrete. Her brain resists the invasion. You grip the edge of the sink to steady yourself. The second and third cuts feel more like digging a steel spade into frozen soil, chips fly, the land still resisting, but there’s a slight give. You catch a glimmer of a hand, an eye, a bruised face, a room covered in red silks. You smell perfume and sweat. You smell blood. You dig deeper, the hairs falling to the ground like soundless rain. You look at her face in the mirror, her eyes screwed shut.

“Are you okay?” you ask. Fran always taught you that it’s okay if something hurts, as long as the customer agreed to it.

“It’s a lot more painful on the receiving end than I expected,” she tries to laugh, her eyes still closed, tears clinging to her eyelashes.

“We can stop if you want.”

“People would wonder why I’m missing random bits of hair.” She finally opens her eyes. There’s a dark yellow ring in them from the light of the mining lantern, like the sun of a distant planet, but they still haven’t lost their kindness.

“Tell them it’s the latest hair style. You work at a barbershop, don’t you?” You laugh and for once it doesn’t feel practiced, the sound lurching from your body, buoyant.

“No, it’s okay. I want you to keep going.” She sucks in a deep breath. “If you don’t mind.”

You’re not used to people from the Floating City asking for anything. They just take. Your mom taught you this a long time ago. She grew up there too. She too was well-versed in the art of taking.

You watch the pulsing vein on the girl’s neck as she swallows.

“Alright. Just don’t complain later,” you say.

She nods.

You bring your scissors to the thickest memory stream and cut, waiting for the images to take shape, for the colors to congeal into a taste.

You’re in a golden hall with beautiful people. Scissors gleam on the walls like royal jewels. You cut hair here, but the backrooms of the barbershop are the real reason the clients visit. A silk sash is untied, smooth fabric pooling to your feet. The bulge of vertebrae and curve of ribs. You’re skinny, but not enough yet to repulse. A stranger’s thick fingers probe your face, your hair, your neck, their breaths on your ear. Show me what I want to see. You smile through the tears because it makes them less angry. You pray they finish quickly, that they don’t ask for a second time. Only the worst kinds of people want this service, this forced grafting of memory, a cut-and-stitch frenzy that leaves you feeling like patchwork paper doll, your own memories in chopped up pieces, some lost forever. But this is the Floating City, the land where desires become possibilities, where every dream, with the right price, can find a body willing to break itself to make that dream come true. Again and again, different strangers pull you apart, sewing their memories into yours. The Floating City has more cruel tools than you can imagine. Your head hurts so much you think you must be dying, but the taste jolts you back. That savory taste, like globules of fat, flavorful, disgusting, and addictive, rattling your insides, urging you on. Show me, show me, show me.

When it’s over, you drop the scissors back on the tray. You turn off the mining light, but you can still see the afterimages in the dark, the faces and hands of strangers. You don’t know why there are tears in your eyes, but they won’t stop. You try to steady your breaths, listening to your own heartbeat hammering in your ears.

“Are all the Floating City barbershops the same?” you ask quietly, but Girl #2 doesn’t answer. She doesn’t need to.

You find your mother in one of the body markets. The red neon lights turn you both demonic.

“Are you okay?” you ask, noticing her new limp.

“Go home,” she clicks her tongue, already shambling away from you.

“I found the rest of the hair,” you say.

She turns around, her eyes still hard. “Where?”

“At the barbershop. Fran was keeping it in the back room.”

Your mother scratches her neck, skin flaking off. She has that hungry look, but she still doesn’t trust you.

“What do you want for it?”

“Nothing. I told you I would get it for you.” Her eyes narrow, so you play along. “But it would be nice if you could go back to the Healing Rooms. Maybe get some new meds. Cleaning the house on my own is a bit tiring.”

Your mom frowns, but her eyes have lost their resolve.

“No more Healing Rooms,” she says. “I’m going home after I get the hair.”

“Home?”

She pulls out a black card from her grimy pockets. You’ve seen that card every morning since Girl #2 started working at the barbershop. A train ticket to the Floating City.

You take out a cardboard box from under the sink, the hair shimmering under the kitchen’s fluorescent lights. It’s not the right color, but after several days in the body markets, you know your mother isn’t lucid enough to notice.

She washes her hands in the kitchen sink. There’s a professional thoroughness to her motions as she scrubs her wrists and scrapes the black grime from underneath her fingernails. She still smells like the barbershop in Alley No. 5 of the body markets. The one you know she goes to every time she disappears. The one where they bring in drugged tourists from the Floating City so the addicts can get a taste of their memories. You’ve been in there once before, years ago, when your mom hadn’t come home for over a week, and you thought she was dead. You went expecting to pick up her body. The inside was illuminated in black light, choked in smoke and the pickled stink of formaldehyde, two rows of stained chairs with their cushioning innards poking out. Someone was passed out on one of the chairs. Your mother lived half her time in this darkness in order to silence the hunger. You couldn’t count how many times you’d researched which discount burial skin you would get her, which hologram priest you’d request to give a few words when it was finally time to put her to rest. Yet somehow she always found her way home.

“Is that it?” you mother asks, peering over your shoulder into the box.

“Yeah. The new supervisor was pretty eager to get rid of Fran’s stuff, so he let me have it without a second thought,” you say coolly, even though your face is burning up.

Before she can sink her hands into the hair, you pull away.

“What is it?” she frowns, almost snarling.

“I want to ask you a question,” you breathe. “Before you leave.”

She sighs, but she doesn’t refuse.

“What was your favorite memory?” you ask, staring into the box of silver hair as if expecting the dimming streams to speak. “Out of all the hair you’ve ever cut?”

She scratches her neck, studying your face.

“You probably don’t remember, but when you were still a baby, I used to cut your hair,” she says, an unfamiliar smile playing on her lips. “The other girls thought I was crazy, risking all that danger by cutting those tiny hairs on your head, but I told them that I didn’t want to miss them. Those memories that would be gone forever when you got older.”

Her lips part slightly, face contorting as if surprised by a taste.

“I think what I liked most was how you looked at me in those memories. Like I was some bird that had flown down from heaven to be with you. Like I was the sun itself. I could never see myself like that.”

She closes her eyes, but you don’t dare assume this is love or even sentimentality. You don’t even speculate. Your mom is like water. She can be anything, and it can drown you if you’re not careful.

“Do you know what they do to girls with the ability to read memories in the Floating City?” she asks suddenly.

You already know too well. You’ve seen it in Girl #2’s memories, but that knowledge doesn’t undo years of neglect, years of searching for your mother’s warmth only to be greeted by closed doors and hateful eyes. This anger clings to your heart, refusing to let go. You get this from your mom too. This superhuman ability to hate what you can’t forget.

“I left the Floating City so you wouldn’t have to do it too,” your mom says. “So at least you could be free.”

But what is freedom to a child whose mother is forever bound?

“You don’t need to go back,” you say, your hands reaching for her before you can stop yourself, like a body remembering an order from before it was even born. You reach for those silver threads winding through her short gray hair, the ones almost invisible under the kitchen’s fluorescent lights. You reach for those memory streams that only the two of you share. Midsummer nights spent watching the fireflies and stars from the fire escape, the red koi-fish shaped lanterns of the Floating City. Winter mornings counting coins, curling into each like branches in a storm on the walk to the market in your too-thin jackets, mouths salivating at the thought of fresh pears and warm slices of bread. You want to show her that in a dark room, as the other hunger sank her into the loneliest hell, devouring her, you reached for her hand. That all she needed to do was take it.

“Stay with me, Mom, please,” you say, shaking out the last of your courage. There’s still some left, you think, please let it be enough.

 

(Editors’ Note: Angela Liu is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2025 Angela Liu