Clay Bodies, Burning Bones
B
efore my mother was my mother, she was a lump of unfired clay in Hunan. She lived in a warm corner of a craftsman’s bedroom with lumps of clay that would become jars, urns, and pots. They were all stolen from the riverbank, then mixed with ash and dust to become stiff enough to mold into shapes for human use.
On a cool autumn day, the craftsman took the lump of clay that happened to be my mother and began to build. His hands wrapped around the ball of clay, kneading it until it was malleable enough to mold. Then, with practiced fingers, he carved out my mother’s hips, wide and fertile. He continued, slowly and surely pulling and pushing the clay into the shape of my mother’s body. My mother’s breasts sagged against her torso, heavy with promises. Her neck was long and elegant but also soft enough to pillow a baby’s head. He rolled out her long legs with feet too small to stand upon and arches too flat to run on. Her arms were round and slightly too big for her shoulders. He ran out of time at the end to sculpt individual fingers, so my mother had flat open palms for hands that pointed to the sky.
In the kiln, he fired her for three days and three nights. That is where my mother was born; in between the embers and the smoke, she took her first breaths. They were shallow but strong. As she emptied her lungs, she coughed up suffocating small balls of clay. They bounced around the kiln before settling at my mother’s feet. On the second night of the firing, my mother could wiggle them like toes.
My childhood felt unremarkable at the time, although when I told Maryam about it, she often raised a few eyebrows. My mother was my mother; she cooked, cleaned, and scolded just as much as other mothers. It wasn’t that strange that I didn’t have a father. There were a few other kids in my primary school who were only raised by their mothers. Sure, we rarely left the house, but when I was a child, it never seemed like much of a loss. The walk to anywhere else of interest was long and muddy whereas the house was where my mother was.
Up until middle school, my mother had long black hair that reached to her butt. I would braid it for her when a festival rolled around every season. I would split her hair into three plaits. The middle one was rolled into a bun that sat right above the nape of her neck. I pinned the other two into spiral patterns across her scalp. My mother would then take my short hair and simply clip it with a gold claw.
“Why can’t I have braids?” I asked.
“You look more beautiful without them,” she replied.
I thought it was unfair, so I snuck into the washroom one day, stood on a stool so I could see myself in the mirror above the sink, and braided my own hair. I was in the midst of wrapping my middle plait into a bun when my mother came in.
My mother lived on the craftsman’s shelf for eighteen years, breathing in the smoke of the kiln and the grief of a father. She often wondered what the craftsman’s daughter looked like, if she was as delicate as the plum flower embroidered on her dress.
She didn’t say anything as she pried my fingers off my hair and began to unpin and unbraid my hair. She didn’t listen to my protests, simply holding me still against her when I struggled to escape as she undid all of my work.
When she finished unbraiding, she looked at me coldly like I was an ant to her.
“When you are ugly and old, you can braid your hair,” she said. “In fact, that is precisely when you will know you are finally a hag instead of a girl.”
Then, she hobbled out of the washroom on arthritis-ridden ankles.
After the firing, the craftsman began the tedious job of painting my mother. First, he washed her body with an old cloth that he had once used to wipe his own daughter’s forehead when she was sick with tuberculosis. She died within the month. Half of her ashes lived in the urn next to his bed and the other half were mixed into my mother’s clay.
Once my mother was wiped clean, the craftsman began with her eyes. With a lithe brush and a touch of black ink, he drew almond-shaped eyes and thin lashes that flicked up to the sky. He painted her eyebrows one hair at a time, making sure one wasn’t higher than the other. My mother’s lips were rose-red, the pigment newly bought from the local art merchant. Straight from Shenzhen, the merchant claimed, but my mother, right before she died, told me her lips were really just beet juice mixed with cornstarch.
The craftsman gave my mother strands from a horse’s mane for hair. They were long and curled up slightly once they reached her hips. He sewed a long dress for her out of his daughter’s New Years’ dresses. Red and white cotton flowed from my mother’s neck to her knees, flowers and dragons embroidered along the breasts.
My mother lived on the craftsman’s shelf for eighteen years, breathing in the smoke of the kiln and the grief of a father. She often wondered what the craftsman’s daughter looked like, if she was as delicate as the plum flower embroidered on her dress.
When I was sixteen, I fought with my mother. Not one of those little verbal spats you have with your parents on a weekly basis; rather, we were hitting each other, pulling at each other’s hair. I remember my mother bit me on the cheek and broke skin. She left bruises on my right arm in the shape of a chicken’s foot. I’m sure I hurt her just the same, but she never told me about any injuries even after we made up.
After the fight, she kicked me out of the house, and I just stood outside our little shack, leaning against my girlfriend’s stolen moped. The world smelled like wet clay from recent rains. The air was so humid that even though I only wore a sports bra and running shorts, I could feel sweat sliding across my skin and taste salt on the tip of my tongue whenever I licked my lips.
“You ready to leave?” Maryam asked, tapping me on the shoulder. Her short black hair brushed against my shoulder, free from the hijab she normally wears in the city. I always wanted to cut my hair short like hers, but my mother would never let me. I wanted her hair, the way it fell around her neck like dahlia petals and seemed to cut through the air like a newly whetted knife when she shook her head. I liked to run my fingers through Maryam’s hair when we were alone, which wasn’t often enough. She shared an apartment with six other people at any given time, the exact persons rotating on an irregular basis. If I were to leave home, I would be crashing on their sagging couch, falling asleep to the music and banter of the raucous bar two floors down.
I looked away from Maryam and to the house. Through the vapor haze, I could see that the home which I used to think was extravagantly large as a little girl, was actually just two wooden rooms stitched together with clay and Buddha’s blessings. Windows arched across the left side of the house, our kitchen. At dawn and dusk, a pale pink floral design hand-stained by my mother would bloom in the glass. I used to spend hours tracing the design when I was especially bored as a child.
The roof was shaped in the traditional Indonesian style. Like a ship’s bow and stern, the front and back of the roof pointed up to the sky with the middle hull sagging into the teak frame. A magpie’s nest built from pipe cleaners and golden grass perched on the tip of the roof. Though I couldn't see any feathers at the moment, I could hear its sweet gurgle of a song, murmured lyrics bouncing between the palm trees. I used to look out the front window during storms and mimic the birdsongs, attempting to coax them into shelter, but they never heeded me.
“I used to think this was the biggest house in the world,” I said, bruises pulsing with dull pain. “But now it looks so small.”
My mother lived on the craftsman’s shelf for eighteen years, trapped between clay horses and decorative pots. She learned what it was like to want to speak but have no one there to listen, so she mastered the art of silent observation. She saw how the craftsman’s tongue twisted itself when he lied about the quality of a piece, how every customer’s eye lingered on her for a moment before returning to the ceramics they intended to buy.
One day, a family with a mother, father, and little girl came into the shop. They were looking to buy new plates but couldn’t afford porcelain, so they found a local shop with cheap wares. As they browsed the craftsman’s shelves, the father was impressed by the quality on display.
The little girl was the one who saw my mother first. She tugged on her mother’s skirt and pointed up to me, drawn in by my mother’s beauty. The girl’s mother said no, but the father asked to inspect my mother. He felt my mother’s skin, her clothes, and her hair. The little girl begged and so my mother was sold to a family on their way to Indonesia along with a set of three plates.
My mother found herself in the grasp of a little girl scared of the water. She sang lullabies to calm the little girl’s nerves as they sailed across the South China Sea on a ship so crowded even my mother at her stature of barely thirty centimeters started to develop claustrophobia. The air was sticky with regretful exhales and wet coughs.
What surprised me most was how slowly she moved. She had never been able to walk quickly, but her arthritis seemed to have spread.
At night, while the little girl slept, my mother eavesdropped on the parents’ conversations.
“With what money?” the mother asked, sneering at the father. Her hands clad in silk gloves grabbed at the fabric of her cheongsam as if she was afraid the dress could vanish at any moment. “Please tell me what your plan is.”
“We have an apartment in the city. The landlord is Chinese and will help us adjust,” the father replied. He reached for his wife, but she recoiled from the mere gesture of his touch.
My mother wondered why they were married when they clearly hated each other. But then she looked at the sleeping girl and thought maybe it was worth it to have a little girl to take care of.
I came crawling back home at twenty-two with a red pixie cut, four piercings spread across my belly button, nose, and ears, and a duffel bag full of clothes. The taxi driver had dropped me off a mile from the house, so I walked along the muddy road while a typhoon pelted the island, raindrops pelting me the entire path. Once I reached home, I knocked, and my mother opened the front door to a drowned rat that called itself her daughter.
“You look well,” she said as she took my soaking-wet duffel and gestured for me to enter.
My mother had her hair in a single braid, black strands threaded with more silver than I remembered. New folds traced the hollow of her cheeks and the pits under her eyes. What surprised me most was how slowly she moved. She had never been able to walk quickly, but her arthritis seemed to have spread. Her hands slightly drooped at the bend of her wrist, light spots dotting the backs of her palms. As she turned around to take my belongings to the living room, I noticed that she shuffled her feet in a semi-circle instead of twisting her torso.
“I missed home,” I lied.
After I showered and changed into dry clothes, I sat at the kitchen table. I was wearing my high school gym uniform because most of the rest of my childhood clothes had been repurposed by my mother. She had cut up my t-shirts, pants, dresses, skirts, and sewed them into patchwork curtains that covered every window in the house. I saw one of my toddler pinafore dresses and a pair of bedazzled low-rise jeans stretch across the kitchen window. A quilt hung from the living room window, each square meticulously cut from the middle of one of my many t-shirts. My mother had pinned one panel of that curtain back so that some light filtered into the house.
My mother set a bowl of steaming jasmine rice in front of me. Small plates of steamed eggplants soaked in chili oil, lumpia filled with mushrooms and glass noodles, and various greens stir-fried with ground pork were in the middle of the table. My mother sat across from me, gingerly bending her hips to lower onto the wooden chair.
“The orchid trees bloomed early this year,” my mother said, picking at a piece of eggplant.
“They’re pretty,” I said, as I tried to slowly eat the food so as not to reveal that I hadn’t eaten since the day before. Traveling from Jakarta to home wasn’t cheap, and I didn’t have much money.
Chewing my lumpia, I looked out the window next to the table. Through a sheer satin skirt that I only ever wore once, I saw the outline of the orchid tree flowers. They were a dark magenta, nearly ripe enough to fall off the branch and decay into the dirt.
“Maryam left you?” my mother asked.
“Yes,” I replied. Maryam’s parents had been pressuring her to marry a childhood friend of hers, and she had finally caved. He was an electrical engineer with enough money to buy them a house in the nice part of town. She told me the day before they signed the marriage certificate.
“I never liked her,” my mother said, slowly chewing her rice. “I’m sorry.”
I choked on the glass noodles. I don’t think she had ever said those words to me before.
My mother got up from her chair and opened the window just enough to pick an orchid from the tree in the backyard. Once she plucked it from the branch, its violet petals browned at the tips.
“They grow so quickly just to die,” she murmured, brushing her fingers against the flower.
A damp breeze through the window, trembling the air inside the house. Every inhale drew in the scent of mud. It filled my lungs up, clogging the bottoms so much so that every time I exhaled, I was afraid of coughing up a clot of soaked soil.
My mother dropped a single eggplant slice into my bowl. She stared at me, her gaze glazing the skin of my face like she couldn’t quite decide who I should be.
The little girl choked on scorching smoke one morning. The apartment built of bamboo beams and blackened concrete that the mother and father had rented from the elderly Mr. Lau was completely engulfed in flames. Outside, my mother could hear jeers from a crowd on the ground floor. Something glass shattered and a small explosion went off, rocking the bedframe.
The bedroom door burst open and the mother grabbed the little girl, cursing the heavens in Cantonese. Her hair was in pale pink rollers, the plastic bits slowly melting from the heat. The little girl tried to keep up with her mother, crying as the soles of her feet blistered with every step. The bedroom door slammed shut behind them as they hurried down the stairs, hoping that relief was outside.
The fumes spread through her body like a lullaby, soothing her to sleep. In some ways, she missed the heat, the way it unrelentingly licked at her smooth ceramic skin.
Still in the bedroom, my mother wondered what the people outside were saying. She hadn’t fully grasped the Indonesian language yet, but she imagined that the people outside were angry at the people in the apartment building. She wondered what a little girl and her family could’ve possibly done to upset so many people.
The fire crept across the carpet to the bedframe. Every second, it ebbed a bit before racing forward a few more centimetres. Another explosion. It rocked the building enough that an ember flew from the flames onto the wool blanket that covered my mother’s body. It caught on fire immediately, trapping the sheets and cotton-filled mattress in its warmth.
As my mother breathed, thick smoke expanded her lungs. Bamboo ash was different from wood ash, but it was a welcome taste nevertheless. The fumes spread through her body like a lullaby, soothing her to sleep. In some ways, she missed the heat, the way it unrelentingly licked at her smooth ceramic skin.
Once the roof began to cave in and the ceiling beams became torches in the dark night, once even the metal bed frame began to melt underneath the pressure of the fire, the glaze on my mother’s body began to crack. She thought she was dying and began to thank the craftsman for giving her life and to apologize to him for not living longer. She fell asleep to the sound of glowing charcoal clinking against her skin as it spurted from the flames.
Then, she woke up in a pile of ash, the morning sun slapping her across the face, and she realized she was neither dead nor a doll.
In the middle of illicit sex with Maryam in the cheapest motel in Jakarta, my finger fell off. I had been running my hands through Maryam’s newly curled hair while she breathed my name like an oath the day before her first wedding anniversary when I heard a loud crack. I felt my finger break like a shard of porcelain, a sharp tingle of pain running up my left arm.
“What happened?” Maryam asked, catching her breath. She swept her hair to one side and my pinky finger dropped from the nape of her neck onto the questionably beige comforter.
My finger was paler than the skin still attached to my body. Like a mirrorball, it reflected the half-blown incandescent light hanging from the ceiling onto the walls, illuminating the peeling purple polka-dot wallpaper. The light also refracted onto Maryam’s face like a spotlight, highlighting the dark bags sunken underneath her eyes. She hadn’t slept well for the past year, despite claiming that her marriage wasn’t as bad as it seemed. I wanted to hold her, but Maryam wasn’t that type of girl. Or maybe she was now. Maryam had grown her hair out, permed it in the style her mother wanted. She painted foundation a shade paler than her neck on her face, using blush to emphasize the sweetness of her lips and cheeks. She lived in her own house with a husband who had a good job. She reminded me of all the girls she never liked when we were dating.
Maryam tried to pick up my finger, but immediately cut her palm on its sharp edges. She let out a yelp of pain and dropped my finger in between my thighs. As she cradled her hand, I could see a thin line of blood pooled in the lifeline crease of her palm.
Gingerly, I pinched the nail end of my finger and inspected it. My finger was hollow, a fact I didn’t know. The inside smelled vaguely of smoke, and when I stuck my other pinky finger inside, I felt warmth, like my blood was still pulsing through it.
“Is that your finger?” Maryam asked. Wide-eyed, she brought my left hand to her chest, caressing the knuckle that once held the finger. It wasn’t bleeding. It was as if I never had a pinky finger at all. “It was just here a minute ago.”
“I didn’t know fingers were hollow,” I commented, peering into my finger. It was all darkness inside. It was as if only the skin of my finger could reflect light. The hollow middle was lined with something else.
“Should we try to put it back on?” Maryam’s normally confident voice was tinged with anxiety. That was another new aspect of her. When I was sixteen and Maryam was nineteen, she had seemed to be the only person who knew exactly what to do in every situation. Now, she was the type of person to question her instincts.
“Yeah, why not,” I said.
Then in one fell swoop, Maryam pressed the serrated edge of my broken-off pinky onto the knuckle where it once attached to. The sharp edges sliced through my skin and blood dropped onto the hotel bedsheets. Like a vaccine jab, it pinched at the skin of my hand, but it wasn’t unbearable as long as I focused on something else, like the way Maryam firmly held my wrist as she pressed my body back together. Sometimes I felt like pieces of something hard crumbled off my pinky and made their way into my bloodstream. I tasted wet clay in my mouth.
After a few minutes, Maryam let go and the pinky was back on my hand. The skin was still a shade paler than the rest of my body, but when I tried to flex the finger, it followed my bidding. It still didn’t seem like it was a part of my body. I tapped on my severed pinky and like a struck bell, a sweet note rang out in the room. I tapped my chest, and no sound came out except the normal thud. At least the rest of my body was flesh.
Then Maryam fell into me and I felt her warm body against mine, both of us sweaty all over from the humidity. I forgot about my broken finger, and tried to remember why I had loved Maryam in the first place.
My mother never told me how I was born. I always assumed I had a father somewhere, but I never asked and my mother never told. My mother didn’t speak of her life at all after the apartment fire. When I was little and still believed I could pry secrets out of my mother, I would ask about what she did after she became a real woman. She would respond with a tilt of the head and say, “After you were born, nothing before mattered.”
I used to imagine my mother’s past in daydreams. First, I thought she became a model. My mother was the most beautiful person I knew, and I had assumed her beauty was evident to others as well. I imagined her in a fashion studio in Jakarta, posing for the camera. She would stare into the lens like she stared at me whenever I said anything that piqued her interest—a slight tilt of her jaw, a faint spark in her eye, an ambiguity that lent itself to interpretation.
Then, I grew older and realized my mother was too short to be a model. Besides, she was Chinese and one could still hear the accent in her voice. So, I figured my mother was a waitress, a simple serving job that anyone could learn and do. Maybe my father was one of the customers, and from one phone number scribbled on a napkin, I was born. Or maybe he was the bartender, someone who commiserated with my mother when they had long shifts together. Then, I realized that my mother could never work a customer service job without being fired within a month. She hadn’t the acting ability.
Eventually, I figured that my mother was probably lying. Before my mother was my mother, she was probably a farmer’s daughter who was learning her numbers, so she could be a good wife. She probably became a teenager lost in Guangzhou, desperately trying to find a job, so she didn’t have to get married to her uncle’s friend just to keep farmland in the village. Maybe she wanted to be a dancer, but her feet were too small to leap. Maybe she wanted to be an artist, her fingers didn’t have the strength to wield a brush. Whatever she wanted, Indonesia was the place where she thought she could find it. And then when the riots broke out in the cities, she somehow made her way into the jungles of Indonesia, hiding in a house long abandoned by its previous owners.
When I was sixteen and told Maryam of this revelation, she had asked if any of it even mattered. She was a preacher of the present; to live was to live in the moment, she used to say while smoking marijuana smuggled from Thailand. We lived in Indonesia: the monsoons washed away the past and the typhoons blew apart the future.
I moved out of the house again within a year. I could only live with my mother for so long. She refused to go to the doctor, instead forcing me to go if we ever needed to leave the house. The grocer was a fifteen-minute walk, and my mother could only make it there with a cane. Her cane collected dust in the bedroom closet. She tried to give me a curfew and scolded me when I broke it. When we conversed, it seemed that there were always promises we had never made that we inevitably broke.
I finally made a mother-approved choice when I stopped responding to Maryam’s calls. I saw the Facebook announcement of her pregnancy. She wore a dull red hijab and smiled without creasing her eyes. Her husband had bags under his eyes and held her hand tightly, as if he knew that she had flown away before.
Then, I decided to move to Hong Kong for no particular reason. I said it was for university, but I dropped out the first semester. When I arrived in Hong Kong, I felt as if I was in a different world. Jakarta was technically more populated and more dense, but Hong Kong felt tall, as if there were no limits to how high one could go in the city. There were no monsoons in Hong Kong, and besides the designated natural parks, developers had long tamed any jungle into private property. It felt as if the seven million inhabitants never stopped walking; everything worth going to was in a building somewhere. No matter where I was, I could feel the breaths of other people, the warmth of bodies hustling through to work, to school, to home.
I found work as a waitress, letting people laugh at me as I fumbled through Cantonese before giving up and just speaking broken English. I could understand the hostess well enough to follow instructions and that was all I needed. I found a few hook-ups, but didn’t make many friends. The shine of the city wore off; in the sea of people, I would always be the lonely Indonesian girl.
One day, while I was apartment hunting in Hong Kong after I realized that the university was going to kick me out of the dormitory soon, my mother called me out of the blue. I checked the calendar before picking up to make sure it wasn’t a holiday or birthday. It wasn’t.
“Hello?” I said, inspecting the wood flooring of the studio I was touring. My friend’s apartment had a divot in the floor from water damage. It attracted cockroaches, a fact that she didn’t learn until two months into the lease.
“How are you?” My mother’s voice crackled on the iffy connection. Cell service back home was finicky.
“I’m good.” I noticed a crack in the kitchen wall and took a photo. The place was cheap enough to have a few flaws, just not too many. “Why are you calling?”
As I inspected the toilet, I spotted a leak in the plumbing. When I pointed it out to the broker, he told me that the landlords were planning to fix it the next day. I was doubtful of that, and it must’ve shown on my face because the broker suddenly began to pay much more attention to the other girl surveying the apartment.
“I went to the doctor yesterday,” my mother said. She began to say something else, but then fell into a coughing fit. In between wheezes, I heard her whisper, “He told me I have tuberculosis, latent onset triggered by the flu.”
“Are you sure?”
“I know when people lie.” My mother’s voice cracked as she wetly hacked a few more times into the phone speaker.
“Is it bad?” I asked. The broker ushered us out of the apartment, handing us the rental application. I shoved the paper in my purse and leaned against the railing of the staircase. We were four floors up, and it was louder outside than in the echoing stairwell.
“The tuberculosis is drug-resistant. He said I am dying,” she replied.
The line went quiet as the cell phone struggled to find adequate service. Without meaning to, I began to cry. Big, fat, salty tears rolled down my cheeks. My face flushed, and my pink nose began to leak snot. How embarrassing to cry in the stairwell of an apartment building I didn’t even live in. I wiped the tears, coughed instead of sobbed, and listened as my mother asked me to come home.
When I arrived back in the little house in Indonesia, I was greeted by a woman who I didn’t think could possibly be my mother. Standing in front of a storm-battered front door, I could tell she had shrunk almost ten centimetres. I could put my chin on her head which I’d never thought was possible. Her upper eyelids sagged so much they almost covered her eyes. Her cheeks pressed against the folds in her nose, revealing striking cheekbones I didn’t know my mother had underneath her round face. My mother had lost even more weight. In her bathrobe, she was nothing more than a skeleton that could walk and talk. Her collarbone jutted out like door handles, and her arms were so thin I was afraid a stray breeze would snap them in two. Her white hair was braided, revealing the tendons in her neck that poked through her paper-thin skin. In one year, she had aged twenty.
She didn’t cook anymore, subsisting off of congee, pickled vegetables, and the butcher’s meat scraps that he generously grilled for her before sending them in a plastic bag to the house. I knew of tuberculosis, but I had never seen it before. I, and everyone I knew, had been vaccinated for it as babies. I didn’t know that it was more than a lung infection. As I watched my mother lie in bed, coughing blood and phlegm into an old rag, shivering and sweating too much to sleep, I thought that the old novels where people died of consumption weren’t exaggerations. The illness was draining the life out of her, one day at a time.
My main responsibilities at home were to bring my mother food when she was hungry and try to convince her to take the pills her doctor had prescribed. I was not particularly good at the latter. For most of the day, my mother was in bed and tired from insomnia, and I was in an empty house. My bedroom had been untouched since the last time I visited. The sheets and comforter were in a tangled pile, the pillowcase stained from my bleeding hair dye. The carpeted floors that we never vacuumed were just as suspect as before, probably full of my shed hair and dust mites.
Shakily, she rose from her bed as I was feeding her congee and dressed herself in her white cheongsam, a dress I hadn’t seen her wear in years. It was white with pink lotus flowers embroidered on the collar, a small lithe dragon hiding between the petals.
The living room and kitchen had some evidence of life. The cabinets on the top shelf were flung open when I first came home. When I asked about it, my mother said something that implied that she had opened them once only to find that she was too weak to close them. The grease stains that my mother meticulously wiped as a child were evident on the countertops and tables, remnants of a time when she had the strength to cook but not the will to clean. I couldn’t imagine my mother lacking will.
Out of instinct, I began to tidy the house. I scoured the countertops, not leaving any speck of stain. I vacuumed the nooks and crannies of every carpeted room. I swept the floors like I was beating back the bad spirits that I never believed in. I even tried to cook for my mother once, though I think she was offended by my attempt at lumpia. I was just glad she had enough spirit to describe the exact way I had rolled it incorrectly.
On the evening before Chinese New Year, my mother seemed invigorated by a sudden absence of her cough. Shakily, she rose from her bed as I was feeding her congee and dressed herself in her white cheongsam, a dress I hadn’t seen her wear in years. It was white with pink lotus flowers embroidered on the collar, a small lithe dragon hiding between the petals. It hung off her body like an oversized trench coat, the sleeves on the upper arm loosely sagging around her humerus. The dress was the one of the only things my mother had kept from Hunan.
From her underwear drawer, she plucked a case of unopened cigarettes before walking to the kitchen at a pace I could barely keep up with. It was as if her arthritis had disappeared, and she was twenty years young again.
“Cigarettes aren’t good for your lungs,” I said, setting the bowl of congee down on the table.
“It reminds me of home,” my mother replied.
She lit her cigarette with a stray lighter and looked to the window. In between the bedazzled panels of denim, she peered through the tinted glass, admiring the storm wrecking the forest. Despite being out of typhoon season, clouds claimed every inch of sky and thunder from miles away cracked like a whip. Beneath the swirling pink stains of the window, gusts of wind bent tree trunks like pipe cleaners as fat raindrops slammed against every object in sight. My mother took a deep breath and blew out a cloud of smoke as gray as the sky. Then she coughed blood into the palm of her hand.
“Here,” I said, handing her the rag she liked to cough into.
She took it, dabbing the corners of her mouth delicately as if she was afraid of breaking through skin.
“Did you like Hong Kong?” my mother asked, taking in another puff of the cigarette.
“I don’t think I fit in there,” I answered. After a brief pause of consideration, I sat down at the table across from my mother, the way we would always sit to eat meals. “You know, I dropped out of university.”
My mother nodded, her eyes fixated on the bending tree branches and crackling rain.
“All I wanted was for you to be happy,” she said. “Happy and real.”
I didn't know what she meant by the latter statement, but I assumed the tuberculosis was also affecting her mind. Or maybe this was what happened when people grew old.
“Can you unbraid my hair?” my mother asked.
I was taken aback at the request. I hadn’t seen her with her hair down since I was a child, braiding her hair for the festivals. Once I reached twelve or thirteen, she just always kept it braided. My mother turned the back of her head to me expectantly. Her white hair was thinning rapidly, but there was still enough for a small rattail of a braid. I ran my fingers through the strands and gently began to untangle them from each other. I could tell from how stubborn and stuck together the plaits were that my mother hadn’t undone her hair since she fell ill.
When I was down to the very last twist, I looked up to my mother only to see her take the lit end of her cigarette and press it against the quilted curtain of the kitchen window. It was tinder to the flame, catching on fire so quickly that within a blink of an eye, the entire piece of fabric was engulfed. I saw the wooden walls of our house begin to smolder as well.
“We have to leave,” I said, slipping on my boots and grabbing a coat.
But my mother simply closed her eyes and dropped the cigarette on to the floor. She leaned against the back of the chair and breathed in the black smoke. Her figure clad in the white cheongsam shone like a lantern in the firelight. She didn’t cough at all.
“Mama,” I said. I reached to touch her shoulder, but it scalded me like a stove heated for so long even the oil smoked. I recoiled instantly; I could feel the burn forming on my skin.
The flames were growing exponentially. My childhood clothing burnt the fastest, acting as the fuel to heat the house enough to catch the supposedly heat-resistant wood beams on fire. I could do nothing but run out the front door into the typhoon, leaving my mother behind.
The air outside struck me like a wall. But the water was at least cooler than the fire, so I trudged my way through the gusts of wind and pelting rain to a place a few dozen yards away from the house where I no longer felt the creeping heat touch my skin.
I watched as the fire shot up the columns of the house, undeterred by the rain. If anything, the wind fanned the flames, buffeting them into the unlit parts of the house. I had never seen a fire grow so quickly. The tip of the roof caught on fire, and little charred pieces of the old magpie nest fell straight to the ground, the wind bending around it. I wondered how long birds lived, if that magpie was still around somewhere, flitting about in the branches trying to find shelter from the rain. But tonight, in lieu of the birdsong, the fire crackled in harmony with the snap of the teak trees.
Beam by beam, the house frame began to collapse, and the grey smoke darkened into a black too thick for even the rain to penetrate. In two intertwined columns, it slow-danced into the sky, puffing out a hundred years worth of carcinogens.
Crack.
I thought a tree fell and braced for the impact, praying it didn’t land on me, but there was no thud shaking the earth. Instead I looked down to see my left hand was on the ground. It was hollow just like my finger had been, the edges jagged as pure porcelain. I looked at the rest of my arm and ran my right hand against my stub of a wrist. Soft as human skin.
The fire had almost entirely consumed the house now. It had eaten all there was to be had and was just licking at the ashes. The rain began to erase the flames, and through the lightening smoke, I saw a little porcelain doll, small enough to hold with my remaining hand. The remnants of the fire were languishing as it burned the dress the doll wore.
Right before the last flicker of flame was extinguished by the rain, I picked up my left hand with my right and chucked it into the house. Then, I closed my eyes and breathed in the remnants of the smoke, letting it tingle the back of my throat, tasting a home I would never rebuild.
