Art: toeken
The moth careening around Wenhong’s cramped kitchen is as large as a quail’s egg. Wincing at the resounding flutter of its wings, she folds a piece of cardboard and tries to guide the insect out the window, but it spirals and dodges. It ignores the fluorescent bulb on the ceiling, and throws itself against the closed door to the living room. Wenhong pales. Is it trying to get to the girl? She gasps as it flies at her face.
A knock at the window. Wenhong spins, cardboard shielding her head, to another moth butting against the glass, blind to the gap at the top of the casement. She dashes the panel up and swats at the one already inside, which is now flitting back and forth between the door, the window, Wenhong’s face. She takes off a slipper and swats wildly, slapping a bag of rice, kitchen towels, the wall. The slipper jerks as she makes contact, and the moth falls to the floor. She stamps on it, twists her foot. The body crunches.
If the authorities come for her, she will say it began with the seed, nut brown, dropped into her palm by a smiling Dr Li. But really, it started years before that, in her first few weeks working for the scientist.
“Ms Li?” Wenhong asked, hiding her surprise at finding her client at home. The agency she worked for had assigned her to the apartment a month previous, and she had formed an image of the woman based on the photos of her around the apartment. She had expected sleek manicures and coiffed hair to go with a prestigious white lab coat, not a middle-aged woman in her pyjamas at midday.
“Doctor Li.” The woman stepped back from the door and padded barefoot to the kitchen. Wenhong hesitated, but as the cleaning supplies were stored there, she had no choice but to follow the woman.
“You’re not working today,” said Wenhong, trying to gauge whether this was the type of client who minded a bit of chatter. Most of the people she cleaned for were happy to engage in conversation. Wenhong had started to rely on them to dispel her loneliness, what with her working long days alone and living so far from any reminders of her previous life. She bent to collect cloths and a bucket from under the sink. “Doctor… So you teach at a university, is that right? You must be really busy.”
“Not a teacher. Research scientist.” Dr Li pulled a bag of crackers from the back of a cupboard and left the room.
Wenhong had never worked for a scientist before. “Wow, that must be really something,” she said, poking her head around the kitchen door.
Dr Li, curled on the sofa with the crackers on her lap, sighed.
Wenhong took the hint. She busied herself with wiping down the kitchen surfaces. They didn’t look like they’d been used since she last cleaned them, but she was paid for three hours and prided herself on being thorough. She would treat the day like normal and clean as though Dr Li wasn’t there.
Once the kitchen was sparkling clean and fragrant with the scent of artificial lemons, Wenhong went to fetch the laundry. When she left the bedroom, the scientist watched her movements with cat-like curiosity.
“Do you have children?” Dr Li said.
Wenhong stopped still, surprised at the woman’s directness. Most clients only asked for details about her life once they’d become more familiar, but Wenhong was happy to oblige the scientist, if this got her to speak. “I had a daughter. But there was an accident. Twenty-three years back.”
“How sad.” The woman’s eyes were fixed on the ground. When she took a deep breath, Wenhong thought some words of consolation would follow, but instead, Dr Li took a cracker from the box on her lap and forced it, whole, into her mouth.
Unsure of how to react, Wenhong carried the wicker clothes basket into the quiet of the kitchen. She rubbed her hands over her face before crouching to load the washing.
“Would you have children again?”
Wenhong twisted, a hand clasped to her chest, to face Dr Li at the kitchen door. “You scared me.”
“Would you?”
Wenhong stared at the woman. When her daughter died, she had said goodbye to the dream of a family of her own. She had cloistered herself away from anyone who had known her, burned bridges with friends and family – starting with her husband. “It’s too late now.”
“But if it wasn’t too late. You would want that chance again, right?”
“I guess so.” Wenhong felt backed into a corner. She was accustomed to clients using her as a sounding board for their decisions – perhaps she could appease Dr Li by blindly agreeing with her suggestions.
“You’re exactly the type of woman my research would help.”
When the scientist continued to stare, Wenhong choked out some banal encouragement. “It’s very noble to help other women.”
“Right!” Dr Li snapped her fingers, her dark eyes fixed on the wall behind Wenhong. “But the board has me under review, questioning the ethical grounding of my research. Bunch of men, they have no idea.”
Wenhong shook her head sympathetically. So the scientist was in trouble at work. Once, Wenhong would have worried how this might affect her own income, but since she was only responsible for her own expenses, she could view the situation with detachment. She wondered if Dr Li’s predicament was the cause of her strange behaviour, or because of it. She retrieved the vacuum cleaner from its cupboard and rolled it to the living room, Dr Li close on her heels.
“I should decide what happens to my –” The scientist broke off and blinked at Wenhong. “I like you. When my chimera research gets underway, you’ll be the first person I help.”
Wenhong smiled and said thank you. Work issues aside, there was something not right about the woman, but Wenhong put it down to fatigue, or, perhaps, disappointment with her life choices. She had previously worked for a lawyer who had broken down after losing a big case. She, too, had taken to pouring her heart out to Wenhong when she went around to clean. Rest and relaxation saw her back to work in no time, and Wenhong was quite confident the situation would be the same for Dr Li.
Although Dr Li was, indeed, back at work within a month, Wenhong found the woman on leave from the lab a number of times over the next few years. On these occasions, the scientist would rant about the various disagreements which led to her period of leave, and Wenhong would hum in sympathy while she cleaned, enjoying that she could be of comfort to someone without making herself vulnerable in return. Though Wenhong thought about their first conversation often, they didn’t speak about children again.
She squats to inspect the broken insect. One white wing has detached from its furred body, but Wenhong’s eyes are drawn to its feathered antennae, or rather, what protrudes between them: a thin thread of yellow, only millimetres long. Cordyceps fungus. Should she burn it, she wonders, or will that hasten its spread? She gathers the little corpse and buries it in the rubbish bin.
Wenhong slides the kitchen door open an inch. There is no movement in the dark of the living room. “Xiaoya,” she says, her voice soft. A patterning of mould runs up the wall from the tomato plant half-hidden behind its wall of cardboard. “I had to do it.”
She crosses the room to the plant and lifts a leaf with her finger. There, her tiny body curled up like a cat’s, lies Xiaoya, half buried in the soil. Her green skin is pale. The girl lifts her head when Wenhong switches on a lamp, blinks her black eyes, then lays down again.
“You can’t go outside, Xiaoya.” Wenhong runs a careful finger down Xiaoya’s slender arm, but the girl doesn’t move. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s been incubated so it’ll, ah, sprout, quickly.” The scientist was in her pyjamas again, pillow creases imprinted on her cheek. She hadn’t gotten out of bed until Wenhong had packed the cleaning equipment away and was pulling on her shoes. “Make sure you keep it indoors.”
Wenhong assented, but she took Dr Li’s instructions with a pinch of salt. Her client might be a scientist, but Wenhong had grown up on a farm, and she knew a thing or two about planting seeds. Dr Li had on numerous occasions raved about research into fungal networks and plant communication. Though the language the scientist used was new, the ideas she spoke about were ones Wenhong had heard about as a child. Hearing Dr Li use phrases like ‘cutting-edge’, and ‘advanced research’ left Wenhong questioning the scientist’s knowledge, regarding agriculture at least.
Wenhong’s grandparents had been foragers. Brought up on stories of plants and fungi thriving in unison in the forest, from tales of mushrooms eating through an abandoned hut to fungi that could control the minds of insects, there was nothing much which could surprise Wenhong about the lives of plants and their neighbours.
She was, however, intrigued by what Dr Li had given her. The seed was ridged like a sunflower seed and of a similar size, but instead of being striped black and white, it was a solid brown.
Dr Li took a step forward, arm raised, when Wenhong put the seed into a pocket of her bag. “Please, be careful with it.”
“What kind of seed is it?”
“It’s a surprise. Something you’ll love. Just be very careful with it. And keep it indoors.”
Wenhong smiled and thanked her client. “Was there anything else you wanted me to do today?”
“I have everything I need,” Dr Li said, gesturing towards the kitchen. Wenhong guessed the woman was talking about the freshly replenished cracker cupboard, so full the cartons had tumbled out when she opened it to clean the door.
“I can make you something hot?”
Dr Li smiled. “I like you. No, you can go now.”
Wenhong spent the rest of the day distracted. She couldn’t stop thinking about the seed. Dr Li had shown her photos of plants she was working on in the lab: flowers with half their petals black, the others fuchsia; a chrysanthemum aglow with a jellyfish’s self-made light.
“These are just the ones my supervisors know about,” she had said.
Wenhong couldn’t wait to see what kind of strange hybrid she had been gifted. The journey to her village on the city’s outskirts had never felt so long. When she finally arrived home, she fumbled with her keys and dropped her bag on the kitchen counter before digging out the seed.
It really did resemble a sunflower seed, and Wenhong knew from experience that they did better outdoors. There was space in the planter right by the door – it was currently home to a tomato plant, but they made good neighbours for sunflowers. She would buy another pot once the seed had sprouted – the sooner she got it into soil, the better.
Heat retained from the hot summer’s day radiated from the concrete when she bent to the planter. She scooped a little hole into the dirt and nestled the seed in before covering it. Sitting back on her haunches, she shook her head. Where was this impatience coming from? The plant would take weeks to sprout, if it was anything like the sunflowers at home. And Dr Li, in one of her ‘at home’ phases, might have given her a normal seed, believing it was more than what it was. She ran her thumb over the soil, flicked off the bits that clung to her skin, and went inside.
The following morning, as Wenhong left to buy groceries, she frowned at a column of ants marching across her doorstep. They were streaming towards the tomato plant, right to the spot she had planted the seed, where a little mound had formed. She dropped to a squat and swept the ants away, hesitating before brushing aside the heaped soil.
The seed was still there, only, swollen three times its original size. Its coat, wrinkled as wet paper, tore away when Wenhong touched it. She blinked and fell backwards. It couldn’t be.
There was a baby cradled in the seed coat, perfectly formed except – green-skinned, and so small it would fit on the pad of her thumb. It opened its mouth in a scream, its chubby arms flailing, but it made no noise. Wenhong would have screamed herself, but she could barely breathe. She scooped the infant, seed coat and all, into the palm of her hand and hastened back inside.
At the edge of the plant, black-capped mushrooms have sprouted, their stems thick. Rings of moisture have appeared where they touch the cardboard. Wenhong moves to clear them, but as she wrenches one from the soil, Xiaoya springs to life, clinging to the woman’s hand and gnashing her teeth. Wenhong flings her away instinctively. The girl lands spread-eagled on the carpet but recovers herself quickly, her eyes afire with conviction. She opens her mouth in a silent howl which has the hair on Wenhong’s arms standing on end, then runs towards the door.
“Xiaoya!” Wenhong leaps across the room and grabs the girl as she reaches the kitchen. Anticipating another attack, Wenhong throws Xiaoya into a large wok, the closest receptacle at hand, and slams the glass lid down. Xiaoya lies dazed on the black surface for a moment before scrabbling up the curved walls and trying to raise the lid.
Wenhong’s heart sinks. “You can’t go outside,” she says, weakly. But the girl can’t stay inside either.
Her first thought was to kill it. An abomination. Dr Li was clearly out of her mind. She had spoken about creating hybrid beings like the legendary qilin, but Wenhong had always thought her research was limited to plants. The baby squalled in her palm, writhing like a salted slug. Would it be kinder to put it out of its misery? She cupped her hands together, ready to squash it between them, but faltered. Not like this.
Wenhong gathered a little soil from the tomato plant into a paper cup and placed the little being on top. She hid the cup in her bag and hastened to a spot where she could leave the monster to the elements. Surely it couldn’t survive long on its own? Nausea bubbled in her stomach as she thought about what she was carrying. Its gaping mouth, its grass-like skin. It was a monster, no matter how much it looked like a human infant.
Wenhong left the village and headed to a field of fallow land. When she was sure nobody was around, she pulled out the now slightly crushed paper cup and poured its contents among the wild grass shoots and dried wheat stalks. The baby’s skin had gone pale, but seconds after it touched the soil, it opened its mouth in a silent laugh. It reached its arms up towards Wenhong. She felt sick.
“What are you, little thing? Xiaoya,” she said, little sprout, poking its chubby leg with the tip of her little finger. It squirmed in delight. Wenhong winced when she realized she had been smiling. “What am I doing?”
She scooped the infant back into the cup and, needing someone to confirm she hadn’t gone crazy, entered the first store she came to: the village noodle shop. Cradling her bag to her belly, she pushed through the hygiene curtain over the door. The air inside, heavy with the savoury aroma from the store’s perpetually bubbling vat of broth, hit her like a wall of heat. The cash register was unmanned. The only movement in the room came from a plastic fan fixed to the wall above the counter, next to an old tv set on which the morning news was playing, its volume so low the whir of the fan drowned it out almost completely.
“Is anyone here?” Wenhong called into the kitchen, relieved when the shop owner’s adult son appeared at the door, his round eyes puffy with sleep. She smiled as he slouched into the room, but froze, her face rigid, when she saw Dr Li’s photo appear on the screen above his head.
“–calling – ethical – research–”
She strained to hear, but caught only snatches of the newscaster’s voice under the whir of the fan. “Could you turn that up?”
“Eh?” The man looked up from fiddling with the cash register.
“The news, up there.” Wenhong raised her voice and waved at the tv set, unable to hide her urgency. The man dug in a drawer to find the remote, increased the volume and craned over the counter to watch the screen himself. Her client’s immaculate apartment was now on show, teeming with people in hazmat suits.
“–confirmed to have involved the mutilation of human–”
“Are you going to order –” the young man began, but Wenhong shushed him.
“Quiet,” she pleaded. The man scowled and stomped back into the kitchen, calling for his father.
“–not ruled out the risk of biocontamination. All samples taken from the lab have been destroyed.” The newscaster reappeared on the screen, her fox-like face grim. “Li Ruiyuan and her team remain in police custody.”
Wenhong fled the store, her bag still clutched to her abdomen. She pulled it open as she walked and tilted the paper cup towards her. The baby, its black eyes wide, clutched pale little filaments in its fists. A blanket of furry white mould had appeared underneath it. Biocontamination. Did the authorities know what the scientist had created? And would they consider her a guilty party in this crime against nature? Her head spinning, Wenhong took the little green infant home.
The past few days have seen Wenhong plagued by a recurring dream. It comes to her now as she presses her forehead against the cool wood of the kitchen door. In the dream, she is running through a forest, stumbling over roots as thick as thighs. The light is serrated. The canopy is composed of leaves so large their veins look like branches.
“She is ours.” A voice sounds, or, a thousand voices in one. “Let her go.”
“I never wanted her,” she screams, her vision spinning as she looks for the source of the words. “I never asked –”
In every dream, she falls to the ground and the voice crescendos. “Let her go.” White filaments rise from the earth and creep over her limbs. Though Wenhong is awake, safe in her kitchen, a shiver runs through her at the thought.
She realises she is murmuring the words to herself. She bites down on her lip. How can Wenhong let the girl go, when doing so could put so much at risk?
Wenhong dragged the tomato plant into her kitchen, the heavy ceramic pot scraping tracks into the linoleum, and left the infant in the soil, unsure of what else to do. With Dr Li arrested, and fearing her own punishment if she was caught with this living ‘biocontaminant’, Wenhong saw no option but to destroy the infant.
Her father had told stories of how, following the Japanese occupation, his family had found the farm they were moved to contaminated, rendered infertile. It was so strikingly different from the forested land his parents had known that his mother wept herself to sleep each night. If the little sprout Dr Li had created could wreak such havoc… She couldn’t be responsible for that.
“I’m sorry.” She exhaled, pouring a saucepan’s worth of water into the plant pot. The infant appeared to cry out as its home was flooded, but still it made no noise. The liquid shimmered around its body, ripples forming from its wiggling arms. It was completely helpless.
Tears sprang to Wenhong’s eyes thinking of her own daughter as a baby, how easy she was to cheer up on the rare occasions she cried. If anyone had ever tried to harm her –
Wenhong grabbed a square of kitchen towel and lifted the child onto it. She rubbed its wet limbs and pressed its body to her chest, whispering apologies, pleading forgiveness. Even if this thing Dr Li had created was evil, she couldn’t excuse her own cruelty. When she pulled her hand back, it was asleep. Looking at its round little face, Wenhong made up her mind. For now, at least, she would let it live. If she was forced to do otherwise later, so be it, but she couldn’t harm something that so resembled a human baby.
She carried the sleeping Xiaoya back to the plant pot and, seeing the water had been absorbed, placed it back under the leaves. Wenhong blinked, shook her head. She could have sworn the tomato plant moved as Xiaoya snuggled into the soil, its leaves relaxing downwards.
Wenhong mopped up splashes of water around the planter, then withdrew into her windowless living room and sank into the armchair. She had lived alone for so long. Had she gone mad? The only person who could give her answers was Dr Li, but there was no point thinking of the woman, who was surely in the hands of the state by now. She messaged her clients to tell them she needed to take some time off, and sat with her hands folded in her lap.
Xiaoya was not her daughter. Was not, really, a child. But maybe it would not be such a bad thing, raising the girl as though she was her own. A migrant worker, Wenhong had spent only snatches of time with her daughter before the girl’s death. Every thought of her tarnished by visions of the accident, Wenhong had repressed the few happy memories they had shared. Xiaoya would not replace her, would not bring her back, and yet the girl had inspired in Wenhong a feeling she couldn’t describe. There was love she hadn’t been able to give her daughter. Could Xiaoya be an outlet? A sort of tranquillity settled over Wenhong.
It’s just for now, she reminded herself. It wouldn’t do to get attached to the child. Though it felt like a chance at redemption, Xiaoya was likely dangerous. Besides, the scientist could send the authorities her way any moment. Though guilt tightened her throat, Wenhong almost relished the thought. How much easier it would be if the decision of what to do, the action itself, was taken away from her.
Xiaoya tears at her hair and digs scratches into her arms when she sees Wenhong cutting leaves from the tomato plant. Tears fill the woman’s eyes at the distress the girl is in. She has already poured a cup of soil into the wok for Xiaoya to burrow in, but it doesn’t seem enough.
“It’s to make you more comfortable,” she says. “It won’t be for long.”
When she shakes the cuttings into the pan, the girl falls upon them, gripping their edges in grief as she presses them to her face. When she looks up to glare at Wenhong, there are little dots of moisture on the surface of the leaves.
Wenhong unscrews the handle from the wok and binds its lid down with red plastic string. She places it in a cardboard box and closes the lid without looking at Xiaoya. If she sees the expression on the girl’s face, she won’t be able to go through with this. She takes the box out and ties it onto the back of her scooter. The battery will get them out of the city. If she can’t find anywhere to recharge it past that, she will walk.
Xiaoya grew, fast and wild as a weed. Her skin ripened to the colour of fresh soybeans as she passed through infancy to adolescence in a matter of weeks, and her body lengthened to the height of Wenhong’s palm. Over those weeks, Wenhong’s clients stopped asking when she would return to work. They would have found replacement cleaners, but Wenhong had money enough – savings she hadn’t been able to spend on her daughter – to support herself. She delighted in watching the girl grow through childhood, each similarity to her daughter bringing untold joy as buried memories resurfaced.
Wenhong was left questioning why she had denied herself the pleasure of reminiscing for so long, but even as she opened herself to her past, her assuredness that raising Xiaoya had been the right choice faltered. The girl remained voiceless, but as she grew she made more frequent attempts to communicate, making frantic gestures with the whole of her body. There was only one thing Wenhong could interpret from these messages, but it was the one thing she couldn’t risk.
“You can’t go outside,” she found herself saying again and again. The girl would stamp her foot and point towards the door, the window, grabbing fistfuls of soil and letting its grains sift through her fingers until she was left with little white fibres of fungus clinging to her skin. She held the fibres up to Wenhong, thrusting her cupped hands to the ceiling. A ritual Wenhong couldn’t make sense of but was frightened by nonetheless. If Xiaoya escaped, Wenhong would be blamed for any destruction that befell nearby fields, and the fate that faced the girl would without a doubt be worse. That Wenhong would be left alone again was only a secondary worry.
Not knowing how Xiaoya would interact with other living things, Wenhong’s imagination ran wild. Informed by her grandparent’s stories, she began to see threats everywhere. Though she had previously seen spiders as a good omen, she swept them from the apartment on sight, and when willow seeds blew through the village streets, she opened the door as little as possible, lest they get into Xiaoya’s planter. She told herself it was so they couldn’t hurt Xiaoya, but she feared, too, that the girl might use them to escape.
“It’s for your sake as much as mine,” she said when she dragged the tomato plant from its spot by the front door to the living area, positioning it under a lamp. “You can have a good life here, with me.”
The girl’s black eyes widened as she took in her new surroundings, narrowed when she turned to Wenhong.
Having anticipated a negative reaction, Wenhong was ready. “I made this for you.” From her pocket, she pulled a little white dress she’d fashioned out of fabric from her own clothes. She dangled it in front of Xiaoya. “Take it, it’s yours.”
The girl tugged it from Wenhong’s fingers and ripped it to shreds. She crouched to gather the fragments from the soil, threw them out of the plant pot, and balled her hands into fists. They locked eyes for breathless moments, before Xiaoya threw herself to the soil.
Wenhong, eyes stinging, turned her back on the planter. Xiaoya looked to be about sixteen, a full five years older than her daughter had been at her death. Would her daughter have treated Wenhong with such contempt if she had survived to this age? No – she had been sweet, had responded to gifts with smiles and love. She had understood the sacrifices Wenhong made for her.
Attempting to raise Xiaoya, to tame her, was worse than a mistake – it was a betrayal. Wenhong would rather her love for her daughter lie stagnant than waste it on something so inhuman.
“I’d put you out if I could –” Wenhong looked back over her shoulder and squinted. Xiaoya was sprawled face-down, cradling the fledgling growth of mushrooms in the soil. Wenhong flicked the girl aside and uprooted the bloom. Hit by images of the spores breaching the confines of the planter and consuming her home, she rushed to the kitchen and threw them out the window.
When Wenhong returned to the living room, Xiaoya was at the edge of the planter, her tiny fingers gripping its ceramic lip.
Wenhong knelt by the plant. “If you want to live, you best accept this as your life,” said Wenhong. “There’s nothing for you outside.”
Xiaoya pressed her hands together, her face desperate. Wenhong looked away. Maybe it would have been kinder to kill the girl when she was young. It would have been easier, definitely, before she’d begun to express her desire for the outside world.
Because if she could desire, could dream, she must be truly alive. The thought troubled Wenhong. “It will be easier if you give up on all that,” she said. “It’s for your own –” Wenhong stopped short when the girl shot her a look of pure venom. Her verdant face was the image of determination. She was going to try to escape again.
Wenhong was losing control of the situation. She had to act. She fetched a cardboard box and a roll of tape from the kitchen. The box popped as she stepped on it, flattening to a sheet that she wrapped around the plant pot. There was no way Xiaoya could breach the cardboard wall – it towered over her, casting the tomato plant in shadow.
Wenhong relished the ripping noise of the tape as she wound it round the cardboard, but – Was she enjoying this? Xiaoya was staring up at her from the soil, her face frozen with fear. The roll of tape bounced, dangling from the cardboard, as Wenhong pulled away and sank into the armchair. She clasped her trembling hands over her ears. How had it come to this?
She fled to the kitchen and slid the door closed.
The sky is pale yellow with sunrise when Wenhong pulls the scooter to a stop. She has had to charge the vehicle three times through the night, but has finally reached a spot she likes: a stretch of road overlooking a forest. A summer breeze blows, bringing with it the cool scent of pine needles and a freshness Wenhong had forgotten existed.
She prises the box off the back of the vehicle, and has to lurch forward to catch the wok as it falls through its base. The cardboard is soaked through, covered in mould. When Wenhong peers through the glass lid, Xiaoya is clutching a leaf over her face, trembling. Her chest swells at the sight of the girl.
Leaving the scooter on the side of the road, she carries the wok under one arm and clambers gingerly down into the undergrowth. It is not an easy journey to even ground. Once her footing is secure, she holds the receptacle before her and whispers, “Xiaoya, take a look.”
Pine trees tower over them, their branches garlanded with strings of lichen. Fallen trunks coated in mosses and fungi are dotted over the forest floor, which is rich with flowers and fragrant herbs. Pinecones crunch underfoot when Wenhong steps forward.
But there is no movement under the glass. Wenhong falls to her knees. Xiaoya’s body shifts back and forth, her face still veiled by a leaf, as the woman scrambles to untie the string binding the lid to the wok. It breaks free, the lid tumbling loose, and Wenhong reaches in –
Xiaoya leaps out, her face bright, her skin brighter. She buries her face in the soil and then lifts it, laughing, to the sky. A ripple passes across the forest as though a strong wind has blown. Pinecones fall from above, and the leaves on plants in the undergrowth shiver. Xiaoya looks at Wenhong, her black eyes filled with glee. The woman nods, and the girl takes flight.
Is it wrong, letting the little lab-made life run free in the forest? Wenhong will never know for sure, but as she watches Xiaoya run from plant to plant, spinning round spindly stems and rubbing her face against the petals of summer blossoms, she knows she has done right by the girl.
Wildflowers bend and sway in Xiaoya’s wake, and Wenhong’s vision blurs with tears. The light splinters as she blinks them away, and for a split second, there is a smaller figure next to Xiaoya. Wenhong reaches out, but there is nothing but the forest before her now. As her hand falls, she remembers the voice from her dream, knows she will not hear it again, and smiles. Filled with a lightness she has not known in years, Wenhong turns from the jubilant forest, ready for her long journey home.
* * *
E. B. Siu is a writer and educator who grew up shuttling between Hong Kong and London. She is currently based in Beijing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Visual Verse, Prairie Fire and Inkwell’s Socially Distanced anthology.