The nightmare always goes the same way: Giang wakes up gasping in an empty house, listening to a distant sound like fireworks. The bed is cold and hard, the paintings sharp and painfully garish, the landscapes of mountains and rivers arranged in unfamiliar configurations.
She wanders into the kitchen, desperately looking for something familiar—and something crunches under her feet. For a single, heartbreaking moment she thinks it’s dry bones, but instead it’s a desiccated cicada with the faintest suggestion of folded wings on its back—the shriveled husks left after their last, desperate molting and lovemaking, after they’ve sent their children to the safety of the darkness below the earth. But when Giang kneels to pick it up, it moves, spreading its wings and flying away from her.
It shimmers and shifts and stretches, and the ghost of the cicada woman coalesces into existence—the five-panel tunic, the broad-brimmed hat, the face in shadow, and every detail Giang remembers from that long, long stumble to the border of the Everlasting Empire. On the hem of her wide robes, two faint shapes—half-open wings—and the hint of a segmented body on the front panel of her tunic, except that on her chest is a large red smudge, the color of blood, and when she holds out her hands they’re stained the same red. She gestures towards Giang, the imperious movement of someone used to command.
Come.
Behind Giang, the sound of fireworks rises and swells and fill the entire world; and she realizes, all of a sudden, that they’re not fireworks at all, but an older, more frightening memory: the bombs going off, and the cloud of dust, and Mother’s still face, and Cousin Ly lying in the dust—and blood on Giang’s hands, hardening into a dense, opaque shell.
And then Giang really wakes up, with the taste of burnt flowers in her mouth and on her clothes. When it doesn’t go away, she rolls out of bed, over the space where Lan Anh used to sleep, and pours herself tea from the teapot in the kitchen. She stares at the portrait of Cousin Ly, in its old spot on the bookshelves, trying to guess at the pictures on the ancestral altar behind her cousin, at which one could possibly be Mother’s—but all the faces are dark and blurred, and indistinguishable.
* * *
By the time Giang’s daughters come to visit for the spring festival, the cicada woman has moved from nightmares to daylight—haunting the hearth and kitchen, a translucent shape that no neighbor seems to be able to see. Giang isn’t really surprised that neither of her daughters see her, either.
Giang has pulled out all of Cousin Ly’s letters—the fragmentary, fragile news of the old country, rereading them in the dim light of a lantern, trying to discern meaning in holes and patched-up words.
“You don’t look well, First Mother,” Chau says. Behind her, the ghostly cicada woman shakes her head and gestures, once again, for Giang to come to her.
“You can talk,” Giang says.
“Only to be expected.” Chau shifts in the chair with a grimace, the large mound of her belly protruding under the silk tunic she wears. “At this stage of the pregnancy—”
“You shouldn’t even be travelling,” Hai Ngan says, a little more sharply than warranted. But of course she’s the eldest, and she’s always had a tendency to boss Chau around, even before she started being in charge of trading expeditions. “Where did you hide that husband of yours?”
“Dinh Toan? He’s coming later,” Chau says. “He had something to finish at the tribunal, a case that dragged on longer than foreseen.”
“Hmm,” Hai Ngan says. She’s never much liked Dinh Toan and the feeling is mutual. But that’s just Hai Ngan being bitter: Chau married above her station to a county magistrate, and she’s herself a graduate of the provincial examination, a steady, bright future that is everything Giang could wish for; Hai Ngan, for all that merchant is a profession without much prestige in the Empire, has been growing wealthier and wealthier, and it’s her money that’s paying the rent on Giang’s house.
Hai Ngan goes to the kitchen and comes back with three filled cups on a tray and the food Giang has made. There’s always something infinitely comforting in the familiar gestures, the ones Lan Anh taught her—the feel of the knife coming down on the wooden board; the smoothness of mushroom slices; the stubborn stickiness of courgette skins needing to be scrubbed away until the sides of her fingers turn ruddy and raw.
“Here.” Hai Ngan rummages in her sleeves, withdraws a package wrapped in oiled paper. “I brought some sweet cakes from the east.”
Chau eats in silence. Hai Ngan, who can’t sit still, wanders over to Giang’s desk, the cicada woman following, desultorily floating in her wake. Too late, as Hai Ngan bends over the papers, Giang realizes she hasn’t put away Cousin Ly’s letters, or the old portrait. “I remember that letter,” Hai Ngan says. “From Second Aunt Ly.” As she rises, the cicada woman becomes visible behind her—but it’s not to Hai Ngan that she holds out her bloodied hands.
Giang ponders, for a split second, what she can say; and the only thing that comes to mind is the truth. “I’ve been thinking about the old country.”
Chau nods, putting away her teacup and carefully rising from the chair to join her sister at the desk. “Because of the memorial?”
“Don’t be silly,” Hai Ngan says, quick and lithe. “First Mother’s never kept that custom.”
No, because there was no point in keeping anniversaries of cities’ falls. Because the old country was dead and shut off; her last letter sent without answer; her cities lost, Giang’s cousin and her first adolescent crush since long gone silent, a youth that ended without a chance to flower.
“Ssh,” Chau says—and in the silence that follows, Giang hears the buzzing of the cicada woman, rising and rising until it seems to erase everything else.
“First Mother? First Mother?” Hai Ngan is shaking her, her face creased in concern.
Giang forces herself to move, though all she can see is the blood on the cicada woman’s hands. “It’s nothing. I’m just tired.”
“Just tired. Second Mother said she was just tired too,” Hai Ngan’s face is stern, an expression Giang knows all too well, one that masks fear rather than annoyance. “Before the diagnosis.”
“I’m fine,” Giang says. “Don’t worry on my account.”
Chau shakes her head. “Of course we’re going to worry. We’re your daughters.” She doesn’t ask about the papers, but that’s only because she’s more polite than her elder sister.
“You’re going to have a child,” Giang says, shaking her head. “That’s what should matter.” She stares at the cicada woman, and finally says, “I’ve been having nightmares. About what happened in the old country.” They never name it—none of the refugees do. Superstition, as if it were a dead person that shouldn’t be recalled.
Chau’s face is grave. She opens her mouth, shuts it again. “I don’t know what it was like. No one does, not in our generation.”
“No trading expeditions go there.” Hai Ngan pulls a chair, stares at Giang—but doesn’t sit down. Of course. She prefers being in control. “We could get in—that would be easy—but getting out would be all but impossible.”
“I know,” Giang says, curtly. “But—” She’s told them their grandmother died getting her out of the old country, but not about the cicada woman, or what it meant—if she can even be sure of what it meant at all. “I’ve been thinking about my cousin, lately. Your Second Aunt Ly.” She hesitates again; hears only the relentless buzzing of the cicadas. “She survived the war, but not through anything I did. I left her behind when Mother died. She’d fallen to the ground after the bombs hit, and I couldn’t carry her. Too much—” she takes a deep, shaking breath, not looking at her daughters. She could say she was following Mother’s orders, but that’s never been anything but the flimsiest of excuses. “There were fliers and they were coming back, and I thought we were going to die. I—”
Silence. Chau looks shocked. Hai Ngan shakes her head. “Second Mother always said that there was no shame in surviving.”
“Isn?
??t there?” Giang asks, staring at the cicada woman.
“Don’t be silly,” Chau says. Her voice is slow, careful. Controlled. Still in shock, then; as if this utterly changed what she thought of Giang. “You can’t turn back time.”
No. She can’t. But—
But Lan Anh is dead, and her children are grown; perhaps it’s time for all debts to be finally paid.
Hai Ngan’s gaze is sharp again. She holds out the plate with the sweet cakes. “You should eat.”
As if she was a child, and her own daughter the parent. Giang snorts. “I’m not senile yet.”
“Of course not,” Chau says, smoothly, but she doesn’t say anything as Hai Ngan holds out the plate again.
Giang takes a cake, bites into it, keeping her eye on the shadowed face of the cicada woman. It tastes, not of sugar or honey, but acrid like smoke, like burnt flowers.
* * *
That night, Giang has the nightmare again—waking up in an unfamiliar house, going into the kitchen to find only the cicada woman staring at her, and the sound of fireworks filling her entire world. She wakes up gasping for breath, swallowing the acrid taste in her mouth—and is halfway to the kitchen for a cup of tea before she realizes there’s a lantern burning there, and the faint sounds of a conversation.
“She’s too stubborn.”
“As if you didn’t know what that was like.”
Hai Ngan and Chau sit at the table, around two cups of tea. They look up, startled, when Giang wanders in—and fall silent, as if it wasn’t perfectly clear what they’d been discussing. Between them, the cicada woman stands, a ghostly, uncannily still shape—the bright red stain on her clothes gleaming in the dim light, sharp and more focused than all the rest of her. “I’m sorry,” Giang says. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Nightmares again?” Hai Ngan’s voice is disconcertingly sharp.
Giang stares at them—at the curve of Chau’s belly, at Hai Ngan’s rich silk pajamas, her face for once free of the dust of the trail; at daughters she’s raised from infancy, now safely grown into adults of their own, earning their own living, expecting a child—and finds the words welling like blood out of a wound. “I need to go back. To the old country.”
Silence. She’s expected to hear the buzzing of cicadas, but everything is mercilessly clear, as sharp as broken glass. Hai Ngan’s gaze rests on her, and Chau moves, shifting positions with deliberate slowness.
“You live here.” Hai Ngan’s words are clipped and precise, the way they always are when she’s angry, and every one of them is a fist beating against Giang’s chest. “You’ve always lived here. This is your home. You just can’t—for Heaven’s sake, Chau is expecting a child. If there was ever a time—”
“To stay?” Giang looks down at her feet, small and shamed. “You don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t! You always said it was the past. You always said there was no going back. You—” She stops, breathes; starts again more slowly, words used as tools and as weapons, as she’s always done. “You always said we were safe here.”
In a way that Giang wouldn’t be, in the old country—even if the war is over, what kind of welcome can she expect, in a country devastated by battles, where her cousin all but starves? “I have to.”
“No,” Hai Ngan said. And, more softly, “I’m sorry, First Mother. It just makes no sense.”
A shifting sound from the chair: Chau, slowly pulling herself upwards—giving up, and rolling sideways until she can stand up. She stares, for a while, at Giang—with the same wide eyes she had, as a toddler, when she clung to tables and chairs and plates, and broke all the cups of Lan Anh’s best tea set. “I can’t understand either,” Chau says, slowly. “But I don’t pretend to.” And, to Hai Ngan, “She carried us this far. You can’t possibly think to set boundaries now.”
“She’s our mother.”
“Yes,” Chau says.
“Your child—” Giang starts, and Chau shakes her head.
“You worry too much about us, and not enough about yourself. You’ll eat yourself to the bone.”
“There’s no coming back, if you do this. Not for a while.” Hai Ngan looks at her cup of tea, bites her lips. “There’s talk they might reopen the wall, but that would be in years.”
Giang knows. “I don’t know what to say—”
“Then don’t. Just stay. Please.”
Giang walks closer. She hugs her eldest daughter, as she did when Hai Ngan was very small, coming barely up to her waist, as stubborn and as fearful of change as she is now. “I failed your aunt, in the old country. And for years she’s been living there in the hell it’s become, while I had everything I could possibly dream of here.”
“Life is unfair,” Hai Ngan says. “It’s none of your business.”
“It is,” Giang says. “I stole that life from my cousin, and I have to make amends for it. You know what debts mean.”
“I don’t want to know.”
Chau says, from behind Giang, “Let go, big’sis.”
“Like you find this easy?”
“No,” Chau says. She sounds exhausted again. “I’m not happy. Why should I be?” When Giang turns, she catches sight of Chau’s hands, clenched so hard blood has fled the knuckles. “But I’m not going to tell my mother how to live her own life.”
“I—” It sounded so easy, so certain when she walked into the kitchen, and now Giang finds that words have fled her. The price of going back is like that of going into exile: there is no clear path, nothing that is painless or without cost.
“Do you want me to stay?” she asks.
Hai Ngan pulls herself away, watches her; watches Chau. “Yes,” she says, and just as Giang’s breath catches, “but Chau is right. It’s your choice, First Mother.”
Between Giang’s daughters, the cicada woman raises her head, to the light of the lantern. Giang half-expects to see Mother or Cousin Ly, or some half-insectile monstrosity she’d recoil from—but there’s nothing of that, merely an impenetrable, featureless darkness, with only the barest suggestion of a human face. She hears, again, Mother’s voice, humming that tuneless song—her voice faltering, scattering into the low buzzing of cicadas, a sound that pierces Giang’s heart as surely as the tip of a knife.
* * *
Seen from afar, the old country looks almost peaceful. The wall stands on the edge of an expanse of deserted mountains on either side, slowly curving away like the body of a great dragon: the cities and countryside all lie further in, and there’s barely anything that seems to reflect the broken, starving land of Cousin Ly’s letters.
An illusion, though one that brings no ease or comfort.
Giang stands on the border of the Everlasting Empire, at the gates of the wall. Besides her is the cicada woman—her five-panel tunic whipped around by the rising wind, her hands bloodied as Giang’s were, forty years ago.
In her mind is Hai Ngan’s voice, clipped and precise and careful. You know there’s no coming back. And Chau’s: you’ll eat yourself to the bone—and further on, Lan Anh’s words, about doing what they could, with the gifts they’ve been given.
A wife and two daughters; and some measure of happiness—all bought for her because she ran away, because she abandoned Cousin Ly. Because she wanted to live so much, so selfishly, that she never looked back.
You’ve carried us this far, First Mother.
The cicada woman doesn’t speak. She merely holds out her hands, offers a choice. To turn back, to where Hai Ngan is waiting, forever fleeing that dusty plateau where Mother died and where Giang left Cousin Ly; or to walk away from her children and the life she’s built, and finally go back to Cousin Ly and everything she left behind.
Giang takes her first step forward, onto the dry, rock-strewn soil of the old country, feeling its warmth under the soles of her feet like that of a hearth.
DYING ON STAGE
Andrew Dunlop
Sunday
“Did you hear about the church that burnt down? Holy smo
ke!”
Ray O’Connor awoke to a bad comedy routine on his front drive. A loud comedy routine. Somewhat morbid, too. There were probably worse ways to start a Sunday morning, but none sprang rapidly to mind.
“What did one skeleton say to the other? I’ve got a bone to pick with you!”
After some internal debate, Ray decided that investigating the cause was more important than his morning cup of coffee. Even before his retirement, he had treasured weekend mornings. As a high school teacher, they had been his sole indulgence in the field of sloth. That he could rise at whatever hour pleased him any day of the week, now that he was fully retired, was a trivial fact. Weekend mornings—Sunday mornings—still retained a special quality.
He flirted with the idea of calling the cops, for public nuisance and trespassing, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. At his retirement party, the other teachers had told Ray that his curiosity would be the death of him someday, and it was difficult to argue the point. If the would-be comedienne was dragged away, he’d never find out what this was all about.
“You know, they have to keep a gate up around the cemetery—people are dying to get in!”
As Ray opened his front door, he saw the woman standing on his driveway, spouting corny one-liners. If she was at the wrong address—if this was just some oddball way of harassing a friend and she had gone to the wrong place—then his appearance at the front door hadn’t persuaded her of it. She was of indeterminate age, in full mourner’s clothing, complete with veil, and was shouting jokes through a megaphone.
Ray furrowed his brow. He was coming to regret skipping the coffee. Years of indulging that single vice had made him a creature of habit, and it was distressingly difficult to face…whatever this was, without it. He had at least set the machine to percolate away, before striking out to investigate. Better to rationalize the coffee as a reward, then; a pat on the back for resolving the oddest problem that he had faced in the last few years.