Soft red wheat breaks through my dormant reflection on the windowpane. I press my cheek into the dreaming pillow; beyond, the sky is the colour of artichoke hearts. In the trees — the downy trees covering the woods with white mist — I see my cousin hiking on a grass slope overwhelmed by spreading yellow flowers. Before she can motion for me to join her, I’m already off the train and submerged in spring sunshine, inhaling memory, mycelium, fiddlehead fern half unfurled. To remember is to deny memory — to remember is to reimagine, restructure, recombine. Only through memory’s silver window can my cousin reappear. The soft, round nose, the open shell of her ear, a droplet of sweat on her temple, the skin there a little shiny, a little pink, never anything but enchanting. My hand is small in hers; in the pale grass, she harvests a fistful of black hair from the field and wraps it around her wrist like a circle of leeches.
My parents kept their decision to emigrate a secret from the family until a week before our flight. I was happy not to have to complete that day’s homework and immediately went to tell my cousin. When my cousin heard, she brought her little finger to my hair and began splitting the strands, building a lattice from the temple down. I couldn’t see what she was doing, but my head moved with each tug. When she was done, she guided my hand down the flat braid and told me we were going for a walk. I was more than happy to accompany her — while she was only older than me by a year, my cousin was precise and clear-headed in a way I could never be; for example, she knew to dip a wooden toothpick into a vial of her mom’s stinky eyebrow tint for application, and to eat black sesame for shiny eyes. Every time we went for a stroll, she would take my hand solicitously, and I would tighten my grip around hers. The combined sound our slippers made was rhythmic. Whenever we stood against the wall of her building, people would come and pat our heads. “This is my sister,” my cousin would say by way of introduction, tā shì wǒ meì meì, and just like that, I belonged everywhere.
I followed my cousin, not expecting that we would be stopped by a crowd of people gathered outside the building, and so I collided with her. Everyone was whispering into their palms and looking suspiciously sweaty. There was even a police car blocking off the road. The dizzying flow of voices was making me anxious, so I tugged on my cousin’s hand, ready to shrink back into the building.
My cousin shifted, then plunged forward. “Don’t look or a ghost will haunt you,” she yelled as we ran. A ghost? We dodged our way through the crowd and across the graveled courtyard, stopping with our hands on our knees behind a hedge. Out of breath, my cousin repeated only one word of what she said — guǐ — ghost, like a white snake protruding from the bud of her mouth. Later she told me that a girl had fallen from a window and cracked her head open on the pavement. That’s what those people were there to see. The girl’s nǎo jiāng was on the pavement: a little shiny, a little pink.
Children from the village were fishing for frogs in the pond. I rolled up my pants to join them in the water, but as soon as I took my first step, my toes squished upon something soft and jelly-like, causing me to slip and fall. Soaking wet, I looked up and saw my cousin kneeling by my side. I could not see her clearly through the hair covering my eyes, but I could see her mouth, scattering — g-u-ǐ — and all the children were kneeling — their eyes hidden by blood and hair.
Years later, when I asked my mom about the girl who fell from my cousin’s building, she stared at me full of suspicion. She hadn’t heard about the accident. I recalled the record-breaking temperatures, the countryside heat embroidering flowers in my vision. My mom threw a dirty rag into the garbage can. She told me she remembered reading about a car crash that had killed a baby — maybe I got it confused with that? Her disregard upset me. I thought that I was finally going to get some answers.
I ran over to my dad, who had just come home from his job at the warehouse. He was holding his hand in a weird way. I started to ask him about the girl, but he would not hear it. He went into the kitchen and started yelling. All at once I was afraid: Was it possible that I was wrong? I locked myself in the washroom and propped my elbows on the counter. An ant was crawling on the mirror. It stopped in my iris like a second pupil. I held my finger over my eye and rolled my finger in a circle.
I used to take the train into the countryside every summer. Children slapped on the windows with greasy palms, holding up baskets of apples and jujube for sale. They pinched for coal on the railroad, sticking the sooty pieces into burlap bags. The yellow mountaintops, straw hats in the rice paddy, all would fall away in the long tunnel of time.
Eventually, the train would pull into a snow country. The cold voices of my teachers would pour through the window, telling me, “You’re writing your name wrong. That’s not your name here.”
Here, here. Snow confused one place for another. Snow covered my name.
Lily Wang was born in Shanghai, China, and immigrated to Canada at the age of six. They have an MA in English and creative writing from the University of Toronto. They live in Toronto. Their debut novel Silver Repetition will be published by House of Anansi Press in 2024.