3 posts tagged “fiction”

Mrs. Meggy Plaidy was giving her feet a pedicure, after soaking them in flowery-soaped water. Sitting by an open window in her living room, she scrubbed her heels with the pumice stone and carefully buffed her toenails with a nail buff. She applied a light coat of metallic blue enamel onto her mom-toes separated by puffy cotton pieces. Her young daughter Dina sat nearby stacking alphabet blocks. The ceiling fan above them circulated 1970s air and dried her mother's nail polish scentless.

The two of them were alone until Meggy's husband Marco came home from his job at the plant. Some days it felt like all they did was wait. There was nothing to do in their home. Meggy decided to see if she could get little Dina to walk for the first time. "Come here, Dina. Come give mama a kiss," she practically sung these words. Meggy reached her arms out, curling and uncurling her fingers to get her daughter's attention. Dina watched her mother for a long moment, no longer focusing on her blocks. She grinned and huffed a tiny laugh. A few more sing-song phrases and Dina began to pull herself up using a nearby chair. After more sugary mother-smiles, Dina released one of her little hands from the seat of her chair. She zeroed in on her mother's face, blue sweater, aura. She approached her mother with her first steps.

Meggy was overjoyed and beaming and almost crying as she watched Dina approaching her. "I'm so excited! Marco's going to be so excited!" she thought.

Dina hadn't taken a third step before she vanished, having crossed a threshold of some kind and wandered onto a separate plane. Every atom in her little body slipped into an invisible wormhole that happened to lie between where Dina had been and where Meggy was waiting for her. Everything slowed down so severely that it felt like time was frozen. Meggy froze. The activity in her brain picked up deathly slow drawls heard in all the space that surrounded her. Had these sounds been recorded and played at a more human-paced speed, Dina's baby voice gabbed from nowhere visible. And other indistinguishable sounds and voices unraveled a brand new narrative. Somehow, Dina was in a new dimension that existed on the same spot where she should have been toddling.

The theoretical listener could have listened to everything that happened for the rest of that day, for the rest of the time the house would ever exist, forever at that very spot where a connection into one of the many near-impossible locales of relative space and time existed. Only Dina could have put visions to those sounds.

That would have been the day where Meggy would never have seen her daughter again. But she did. In her universe, in her safe and welcome perceptions of it, Meggy did not really watch Dina cross into a time-warping, space-defying wormhole. Dina continued her happy steps towards her mother who greeted her with a hug and too-excited tears.

That night, Marco came home and they had dinner. She recited what a happy moment it was watching Dina's first steps. The evening brought cheerful talk and kisses. And regardless of what really happened that day, as they all slept well into the midnight hours, Meggy's brain translated what it had caught and began to process the dream of Dina's actual disappearance.

The sun had grown cold that day as fog wafted into the city early in the morning. Their boat was to dock a few miles outside of Shanghai, where they would have some lunch. The boat carried mostly American children whose parents sat inside the cabin, quiet and tired from all of the touring they've endured in the past week.

Their kids were eager to find marine life outside on the biting cold deck, neglecting the plethora of plant life, islands, gorges, and spectacular views that surrounded them. The sun was now completely blocked out by clouds and threatening precipitation. Still, the children all kept staring into the water. Every once in a while, Song Yang, their tour guide would hear one or two of them make giddy commentary about seeing a huge koi or little turtle shuffle about within eyesight. Suddenly, after a half hour of sailing, the children saw something in the water just beyond the ferry's starboard. Through the curdling foam, a plate-sized fin cut the water and submerged. One of the kids pointed and shrieked eagerly at a white fish the size of a human that appeared for only a few seconds and then vanished into the green depths of the river. Everyone who was on the front of the deck saw it as clear as a ray of light in the dark.

"Beiji!" shouted the tour guide. Song Yang dug through her backpack right away to find her cell phone. She called her companion tour guide Zhu Ge. All the children turned their attention from the water to her spontaneous behavior as she yelled frantically and excitedly into the receiver. "Wei? Wei?!" The phone lost its signal in the middle of her conversation. She decided to let the kids in on the commotion. "Beiji was the Goddess of the Yangzte River for many centuries. She had become formally declared extinct in 2006. No one could find her. We've found her!"

"What is she?" asked one of the children.

"She is in the form of a white dolphin and has a long, elegant nose."

All of the kids appeared to be in a dream-state, enchanted at this news about a goddess of the river. They all turned themselves back to get a good view from the front of the boat, but could not see as well as before. The fog had grown as thick as heavy smoke and their eyes diverted to things they were able to see clearly. After mintues, only the hands in front of their faces were visible. The fog was beginning to grapple with their breathing.

Song Yang gripped a rail at the edge of the boat, feeling dizzy and trying not to succumb to unconsciousness so as to be of complete assistance to her very young brood of passengers. She could have thought that they were all evaporating into tiny molecules, each of them slowly disappearing. Her eyes fluttered open to see gray gray fog. She did not know how long she had them closed. She calmly asked everyone to hold hands and count the numbers she had taught them in Mandarin. They only thing to be heard was the rippling water and children's uniform voices.

The fog dissipated in all directions as they approached number 25. It disappeared into the wide river, illuminating it. The fog was sucked into the sky, making it blue. And it fled into the mountains, turning them lush. Never had any of them seen a world that was so alive. Suddenly there were chirps and splashes, sounds of wildlife that were dormant before the fog. Song Yang felt awakened, aware that this reality was different, therefore acknowledging that a separate reality could co-exist with the diurnal and mundane experiences that everyone was used to. She wondered why it had to happen this way, while she was working, teaching little students on this very boat. For long minutes, they were suspended in time. They lost the idea of time altogether, of who they were, of where they were. All they knew for certain was what surrounded them: in the willows, the peach blossoms, the wind, the mountains, the squirrels, the birds, the turtles, the fish, the beiji.

The fog slowly came out of hiding, creeping upon them and ending their waking dream. The sky became as it had appeared when they boarded, the sun only a glowing white disc through the clouds. The boat docked as the captain appeared from inside, followed by the children's parents, visibly unaffected. The children and their guide were the last ones off the boat.

"I wonder if that is what the world would be like if we stopped throwing trash wherever we wanted." pondered a student.

Surprised at the child's unordinary aptitude, Song Yang laughed and said, "Many possibilities would give us that world. Let's go have some wufan." 

            Looking up, Julia saw that something in his face was distant. She sipped her coffee, wiped the mug clean of her slight red lip gloss and asked, “You’re lying, aren’t you?”

            “What. Lie about what? What are we talking about?”

            She looked out the window at cars. “New Year’s Eve.”

            “Yeah? And? What is it?” After no reply from his stoic friend, he added, “I need a cigarette, Julia.” He moved her hand way from her mug to hold it, warmly. “Do you have a cigarette?” he pouted.

            “No,” followed her exasperated sigh, “no and no and no and no. I don’t have a cigarette.” She freed her hand from his and shoved her bangs out of her face. “I do not have a cigarette and I read your journal the other day.” She pushed away from the table, leaning against the seat, staring at him on the opposite side. Her face looked tired and defeated. Her mouth was slightly open with eyes almost dead.

            “Oh, so now you’re the one keeping secrets, clandestine.”

            “Then we both are, apparently. Why didn’t you just tell me that what you did was what you really did, instead of just telling me it was ‘fine and dandy with your family’?” Julia even added finger quotation marks in an attempt to extract his secret. She waited for a few seconds, moving forward, knowing he’d be silent for those moments. “Why didn’t you just tell me you had a New Year’s dinner with ‘insert-single-syllabic-name-here’?”

            “Mike.”

            “Hmm, yes, Mike, whatever.” She spoke in a funny mocking voice, unpleased.

            “Don’t roll your eyes at me, it looks ugly. Hey, when are you going to finish reading that book so I could borrow it?” Just then the waitress came up to their table and handed Julia the tab. “Let me get that,” he pleaded, “I got paid today.”

            “No, that’s okay, Ferdinand. I got paid today, too.” He could tell she hated him more by the moment. Her body changed to reveal a forthwith posture. She held his eyes for a moment, hoping her glare could communicate with him that she thought he was a frivolous, uncaring friend.

            “But you only had coffee!” He tried to take the slip of paper from the girlish fingertips that covered it. She immediately denied him the paper and shifted out of the green vinyl booth to go pay. “Julia, sweetie. Julia, best friend!”

            “You lie!” She quietly resolved as she took her change. The cashier, “Tasha,”who really didn’t care about their situation, looked at Julia with an upraised eyebrow and stiff upper lip. Girls her age always looked at her like that, whether they were better looking than her or not. What Julia had never realized was that if she brushed her hair a little better or put on a bit of mascara once in a while, she could make an acceptable match for the alpha male college student. So, her peers subconsciously acknowledged their dormant rival with either disgust or pity. She was unaware of this, of course, and yet was a constant complainer: “Why can’t I get a date?” Blah, blah, blah. No one ever seemed to know how to respond. Except Ferdinand, who would clarify and address much of her unneeded whining during hours-long phone conversations. Her mother tried to persuade her to keep a tube of lip gloss in her bag, which she did, and she applied every now and then when she was out in public.   

             They both left the restaurant. Ferdinand continued to wonder what the matter was with his sorry companion. He put on his sunglasses and got in his car. Since they had met in separate vehicles, it was easy for Julia to escape from being seen with such an unflattering look on her face. The muscles in her mouth were put to full use, pressing her lips together so furiously they were almost white.

To be continued...