Children rarely deal in the abstract, and you are no exception. You know Love in the way Mother runs her fingers through your braided locks, and you know Beauty through her, too—hair smooth and black as the river at night, skin bronze like the fields of sand that stretch as far as the eye can see.
“When I grow up, Mother,” you declare, “I would like to be as you are.”
You remember only bits and pieces of Father, fragments that, when slotted together, never quite make a coherent whole. But you never do try very hard, for there is little to desire outside the life Mother has crafted for you. Mornings, you feed the chickens and tend your garden. There is lemongrass, of course, and peppers and snow peas and scallions. But it is the flowers you care for. Mother points to each of them in turn.
“Sun Lily. Empress’s Thistle. Blue Mayapple… If you sing for them, they will sing for you.”
When you are old enough, Mother teaches you your characters. But you already know Horse and Jar and Empress’s Thistle, just as you know Love and Beauty. You know how they taste, you know how they sound, you know how they feel to the touch.
But Mother only smiles away your objections and says, “To capture a moment in words is to preserve it in resin.”
Paper and brush, stick and stone. Around and around you go. Your wrist hurts; you develop a crick in your neck. You have not the patience for these exercises of tedium. But you weather them all for Mother… and the trips that are promised at the close of each. Your lesson of the day over, Mother takes you to the edge of the forest, where a great banyan stands. Again and again, you climb its knotted limbs, lose your grip, and scrape your knees against the tree’s rough bark. But you are a daring child, with limitless energy, and it is not long before you manage to scale the first juncture.
You live with Mother in a cottage on the outskirts of a small village. Visitors rarely grace your doorstep. But it is neither fear nor scorn that deters villagers, merchants, and travelers alike; there is simply nothing to gain from venturing this far west, where the road eventually gives way to legions of shifting sand.
And yet, he comes. He, with his long, black locks and skin like white jade.
The first time you see his footprints in the dirt, you do not know what to do with yourself. For you know little of boys and even less of men. But you know flowers, and he picks them for you, white ones that perfume the room you share with Mother.
“Like honey,” you say.
“Like honey,” Mother agrees.
And you find, suddenly, that you have little need for anything else. The flowers in Mother’s garden pale in comparison, and as for the great banyan—you feel certain your conquest of it has finally come to an end. So you scrub the dirt from beneath your fingers; you spend hours oiling your knees to a shine; you avoid the sun like the plague.
Your wedding is a joyous occasion. Mother braids your hair and drapes you in robes red as the blood that spills from the pig they slaughter in your honor. That night, you lie beside him in that grand, old house of his and, long after he has drifted off, relive again and again your sweet love making. You knew what to do, then. Knew the way a body can come undone.
Mother came with you to live in this grand, old house. It is some consolation. The place is like a maze. There are more rooms than you ever could have thought possible, and you spend the first few days losing your way to the kitchen, thinking wistfully of the little cottage and the little life Mother spun for you.
But there is a pleasure, too—a certain thrill, of slipping from one echoing hall to the next, knowing all the while that this is yours.
It is a mild winter. The snow, when it arrives, does not remain for long. At breakfast, you serve Husband first, then pour cups of tea for Mother and yourself. You wait, patiently, for Husband to raise the cup to his lips, and only then do you inquire, “Have you seen my mother?”
Steam turns his eyes opaque. “She is out there, in the garden.”
You are seconds from taking your first sip of tea when Husband speaks once more. “You are fortunate not to have taken after her.”
When the steam clears, you follow the direction of his gaze out the window, and gasp. For you find that he is quite right; with her thin, scraggly hair, pockmarked skin, and dark, sunken eyes, Mother is a hideous sight. How in the world did you fail to notice? Heat creeps up your neck and floods your cheeks. How long have you been sharing your home with a monster?
At dinner that evening, Mother recounts a chance meeting in the garden with a curious squirrel.
“I thought they’d all gone to sleep for the winter. You should have seen him!” Mother chuckles. “I swear, he was as intelligent as any human child. He had such shen.”
“You shouldn’t laugh quite so much,” you blurt out. “Your teeth are rotting where they hang.”
Mother falls still. Husband brings a bowl of steaming rice to his lips. In the quiet that follows, you sigh your relief.
The midwife prescribes you a diet of bitter teas and broths.
“Nothing cold,” she warns, “unless you wish to be barren as the sand fields to the west.”
You grimace as the last spoonful of soup slides down your throat. You can feel Mother’s eyes on you. You wish she wouldn’t. She holds a hand over her lips. She has taken to doing so on the few occasions you speak.
“What?” Husband interrupts. “Mother, I cannot understand you. You must speak up.”
Mother wishes to tell us that the flowers have bloomed before their time, you think of saying. Instead, you fix your gaze on the opposite wall and reply, “It is nothing, Husband. It is nothing worth repeating.”
You see little of Mother and hear even less of her. But more important matters occupy your days.
“You are to have a daughter,” the midwife proclaims.
Husband wanted a son, of course. But there is still time; you are still so very young. You place a hand upon your stomach. You have yet to show, but you imagine you can feel the flutter of life beneath your palm.
How splendid. How very splendid.
Movement draws your attention. You look up just in time to catch a silhouette shifting out of view.
“I thought it was the rats scurrying about.” Husband shakes his head. “But it is only ever her, scattering with the shadows of dusk.”
That night, as you ready for bed, another shadow shifts in the corner of your eye, and you know she is there. Her calling card. You feel her eyes on your back. You wish she wouldn’t.
“This house,” Mother murmurs. “It feels smaller and smaller with each passing day, does it not?”
You say nothing. It is exactly how you feel. But there is no need to encourage the old woman.
Wordlessly, Mother hobbles forward and, from the folds of her green, tattered robes, draws out a plain, wooden box.
“How many times do I have to tell you I have no need for your old scraps?” you say in exasperation.
“Then humor your mother this last time.”
You take the box from Mother’s sun-bitten hands and make to open it.
“Not yet, my love.”
“Why not?”
“The time is not yet right.” She dips her head. “But when it comes, you will know.”
“What is it?”
But she says nothing more. When, at last, the door closes behind Mother, you cross the room and bury the wooden box at the bottom of your wardrobe.
The next morning, you wake, as you always do, before Husband. You allow your gaze to dance across the dining room.
“Did we have a guest over the night before?” you ask.
Husband glances up from his tea and frowns. “No, we did not.”
“Yes, of course.” You breathe out a laugh. Touch the third cup of tea you have poured. “We did not.” Slowly, you reach over and roll up the extra mat of bamboo. And yet how strange it is that the house feels far emptier than it had before.
When you return to your tea, you find that it has already gone cold.
The child comes in July, just as the first birdsong of dawn splits the horizon.
“What a splendid omen!” the midwife cries.
But you have ears only for the gentle breaths of Daughter, finally fallen fast asleep. What a thrill it is to know you made such a wondrous thing. That she comes from you. That your love is hers.
How splendid. How very splendid.
After Daughter is born, you are given a month of restoration. You venture not a step beyond the front door. You are forbidden to bathe or tread across marble. You adopt a diet of rice wine that leaves you heady at night. Minor inconveniences. For Daughter, you would spend an eternity with your hair unwashed.
But it comes as some relief to feel again the wind, infused with the last remnants of summer, upon your cheeks. Husband takes you on a walk down the main road. Each time he asks whether it is time to turn back, you reply, “Just a little farther.” It has been so long since you felt the smooth contours of the earth beneath your feet, and you allow your body to do as it pleases.
It takes you to a place where the trees grow wild.
“There is nothing beyond here,” Husband says, waving a dismissive hand. “Nothing but an ocean of sand. It is a pity, yes, a pity. Think of all we could do with so much land.”
You are listening, of course. But not quite hearing. For, among the trees, you have gleaned the outline of a house. A cottage, really, and as you draw closer, you glimpse a garden out front. It is a sickly tangle of green; weeds have all but strangled the life out of the small, drooping blossoms between.
Who would so callously allow these flowers to wilt? It fills you with such inexplicable rage, and it is a wonder you manage to hold your tongue the whole way back.
But he must see the anger written across your face. “It is not such a loss, really,” Husband consoles you later that evening. “Those flowers are not such lovely things.”
You sigh. He is right; you are being quite unreasonable. “Who lives there?” you inquire. “Do you know, Husband?”
“No one lives there. No one has lived there for as long as I can remember.”
The plague comes as the frost begins to melt and takes with it your husband. For a month, you wear nothing but white—white robes, white veil, and white socks—to match the profundity of your sorrow. When you catch your reflection in the mirror, you are reminded of the white flowers he once picked for you.
Daughter is too young to mourn him. You know she will remember only bits and pieces of her father, fragments that, when slotted together, never quite make a coherent whole. But you hope she will never try very hard, that she will desire little beyond the life you give her.
The two of you have no need for such a grand, old house anymore, so you pack your belongings and move into the cottage among the grove of wild trees. You spend hours toiling in the garden. The herbs and vegetables have long since rotted off and need to be replanted. But the flowers persisted. Hardy little things. You sing as you work, and the flowers burst brazenly forth.
“Sun Lily,” you tell Daughter. “Empress’s Thistle. Blue Mayapple… If you sing for them, they will sing for you.”
One evening, long after Daughter has drifted off, you find, hidden in a dusty cupboard, brush, paper, stick, and stone. How strange, you think, as you set them out on the table. For, brush in hand, your body seems to move of its own accord.
Horse, you write. Jar. Empress’s Thistle.
Outside, the night creatures softly sing. But the house is quiet. Quiet, save for you.
“To capture a moment in words is to preserve it in resin.”
You press your fingers to your lips. You do not quite understand the meaning of it all. Only that it needed to be said. Only that you have heard it once before.
Daughter learns her characters reluctantly, but she climbs the great banyan at the edge of the forest with startling enthusiasm. After a long day out in the sun, her hair is sorely in need of re-braiding. You sit her before the mirror in your room and run a wooden brush through her thick, black locks, until it feels, at last, as if water is spilling between your hands…
“Is something wrong, Mother?” Daughter twists around to grin up at you. A mischievous expression. “You look as if you’ve seen a phantom.”
“No, my love.” Laughing, you nudge her head back around and begin braiding once more. “Phantoms do not tread among the living.”
She taps you lightly on the arm. “When I grow up, Mother,” Daughter sighs, “I wish to be just as you are.”
She shares your eyes. You miss the next weft. You will have to start all over again.
Daughter makes good progress on her brushwork. And the tree. She grows like one, too. Her robes require fitting and refitting; the fat has sloughed off her cheeks, gone elsewhere upon her body. Tonight, you will have to coax out another stitch.
Only yesterday, you were crawling into my lap, you think of saying. Instead, you smile, take a seat on a weathered, gray stone, and watch her climb.
It is a difficult thing to explain, only that what happens next feels all but inevitable: one afternoon, you spot a pair of unfamiliar footprints stamped into the dirt outside your house. Back inside, you smell their honeyed fragrance before you lay eyes on them—a collection of white flowers strewn across the bedroom sill.
“What do you call these, Mother?” Daughter’s cheeks are gently flushed, and there is a luster in her eyes you have never seen before.
You smile against the seed of despair that has taken root in your heart. “It will come to me.”
Daughter marries him on a warm, summer night, and you move with the two newlyweds into their house. It is a grand, old place; on days when the sun floods dazzling through the windows, you feel as if there is room enough for the whole village within the walls of the house.
But it is evening now, and you stand behind Daughter, running a brush through her long, black hair. There is something on her mind; you can tell by the slight tremor that runs along her jaw, as if she is tasting words she is not yet ready to share.
So you wait. You wait until she is ready. And when she is, Daughter confesses, in a small voice, “Sometimes, I cannot even find the front door.”
For a moment, you say nothing. Then, you caress her chin and reply, “If you are ever lost, you need only listen for the wind.”
It works. The days come and go, and you watch Daughter transform from a guest in her own home into the lady of the house. There is a surety in her step when she strides from room to room; her spine uncurls.
When autumn arrives, you find yourself seeking the garden and the last of the sun’s fleeting warmth. Their season of life over, the flowers have begun to draw in on themselves. A little bird, sweetly singing, lands next to you.
“Will it be a difficult winter?” you ask it.
To your surprise, the bird tilts its head to one side, as if pondering your question, and lets loose a series of chatters.
You are laughing in delight when you hear Son’s voice low in the distance.
“She has a braying sort of voice,” he observes.
Your blood turns cold; your muscles follow. But the laughter does not quite die from your lips. Until you hear Daughter’s reply, in an odd sort of voice:
“Yes. I suppose she does.”
You learn silence quickly enough. Alone in your garden, however, you allow yourself to sing. Softly, unobtrusively, so it can only be mistaken for the wind. It is a secret all your own. Or not quite. For the flowers know, too, and it seems to you they possess the loosest of lips, bursting forth before their time with every stolen song they overhear.
Yes. They possess the loosest of lips. If only, you think, if only Daughter cared to listen.
You keep your hands busy: cooking, cleaning, tending the garden. But it is not always enough; at night, you find your fingers reaching for phantom strands, tracing wefting patterns in the still air.
One morning, you are tossing out the last dregs of tea when Daughter walks past. She catches sight of you and slows and shakes her head.
“I wish you would not go out in public, looking as you are,” Daughter sighs.
You abandon the teapot. In the quiet of your room, you stare into the mirror’s blurred depths, and gasp. For you find that Daughter is quite right. From then on, you wrap what is left of your thinning hair in a moth-bitten scarf. But there is little you can do about your dark, sunken eyes, except learn to make yourself small. Keep to the wee hours of the day.
When the midwife comes, however, you cannot help yourself; you follow her to Daughter’s bedroom, where she and Son are already gathered. You press yourself into the shadows. Minutes pass in silence. You do not dare breathe, not until the proclamation comes:
You are to have a granddaughter. A granddaughter. You press a hand to your heart; your eyes fill with tears. And perhaps that is why you do not step aside quickly enough to evade Son’s scrolling gaze.
“There your mother goes again,” he mutters, “creeping about like some phantom of the night.”
Daughter turns to stare at you. An opaque look. “Phantoms do not tread among the living.”
When the midwife leaves, you return to your room and retrieve, from the depths of your wardrobe, a cloth sack. You do it without venom, without malice. You have not the words to describe what lies in your heart. But you imagine yourself as an hourglass. Not a very good one. There is a puncture in the lower bulb, and you are hollowing out.
You fetch the brush and your underthings first. Though your hands move with certainty, it is slow work. You stare down at the contents of your existence. How strange it is that the sum of one’s life can fit so comfortably within a cloth sack. Sighing, you lift the last of your robes off the bottom of your wardrobe, and gasp. For there, lying quite inconspicuously, is a small, wooden box.
The time is not yet right. But when it comes, you will know. Someone had told you so, years ago. But who was it? Husband?
Or perhaps a visitor, for whom you had lain out a third mat at the table.
Slowly, you nudge open the lid. Small though it is, the box is far too large for its contents: enveloped between the petals of a living blossom, a square of folded parchment. This, you take between your leathery fingers and smooth as best you can against your knee. Lines of writing, outlined in an unhurried hand, stare back at you. A letter. It has been years since you last went over your characters. You were young, then. Beautiful, too. Daughter had told you as much. You squint down at the paper, and, despite the cataracts in your eyes, despite the sudden pain in your chest, you read, haltingly, the contents of the letter:
My love—
By the time you read this, you will have forgotten my name, my very voice. Such is the curse we bear. But even if you cannot remember all the nights you fell into my embrace, you must know you came from somewhere.
Can we begin, first, with the flowers? Sun Lily. Empress’s Thistle. Blue Mayapple. The ones who persist. If you sing to them, they will sing to you. You are starting to remember now, aren’t you? Your hand between another’s, tracing the characters for horse, jar, Blue Mayapple. Like a seed taking root in your mind, like an echo, you know that to capture a moment is to preserve it in resin.
This is where our tale begins; this is where it ends—with sand, legions upon legions of it stretching as far as the eye can see. Cup a handful of sand between your palms, and what does it do? It scatters on the wind.
Does it surprise you, daughter, to know this is where we come from? You, I, my mother before me, and your daughter after you—that we should be so pliant, so easily impressed, so coolly forgotten? It should not, my love. For who are we? Who are we if not reflections of how the world sees us? What is our worth, if not rooted in the love we give and the love we receive?
But look again. Look once more upon the sand dunes to the west. Try to take those between your palms. It is not such a simple task, is it? They are not so effortlessly displaced.
Daughter, this is nothing you do not already know. For you remember the flowers and the braids and the character for horse. But do you remember the great banyan? The one your daughter climbed once, twice, three times before she fell and scraped her knees. She cried into your arms that day, and you wondered what you had done in your life to deserve such happiness. Tonight and every night after, this is where you will find me, waiting beneath the branches of the towering tree.
There is a thorn in your heart, daughter. An ache. It is only natural. But do not cry, my love. Do not mourn us. For is it not a blessing to know a love like this? A love that waits. A love that endures. A love not so effortlessly displaced.
By the time you step foot in the valley where the forest begins, there is no trace of the sun on the horizon. This is fine. For you no longer need the light of day to see what your body remembers: a gentle dip beneath your feet, the scent of furred moss. When, at long last, the banyan’s great crown draws into view, you slow.
For all the memories come flooding back again, and Mother—Mother is just as lovely as you remember, with hair smooth and black as the river at night, skin bronze like the fields of sand that stretch as far as the eye can see. And her laughter, when it leaps off her tongue, is sweet as birdsong.
Do not cry, you remind yourself. Do not mourn us. But you allow yourself this much: to run the rest of the way, to fling yourself into Mother’s warm, familiar embrace. Where she touches you, your spine uncurves; where she kisses you, your skin grows tender; and when she runs her fingers through your hair, silky, black locks burst forth like water from an undammed spring.
At long last, you extricate yourself from Mother’s arms, and only then do you realize the two of you are not alone; for there are others standing beneath the tree’s knobby branches, and their eyes, when you gaze into each of them in turn, look just like yours.
The ground crunches beneath your feet as you pace forward. You glance down. You never noticed before all the sand here, caught between the tree’s knotted roots. You bend and scoop up a handful. Almost immediately, an errant breath of wind whisks off the fine grains. You smile, stand, and embrace each of the women. Then, there is nothing left to do but take a seat by the weathered, gray stone.
Paper and brush, stick and stone. This is what the women give and you receive in turn. You gaze down at the blank page. It has been years since you last went over your characters. You were young, then. Beautiful, too. Just as you are now.
My love, you write.
Sophia Zhao is a fiction writer whose work is forthcoming in Apricity Magazine. She is currently based in New York City.