SHORT FICTION

selected by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood, author of A Small Thing to Want

“White Trash” by Rachele Salvini

“Wayward Women” by Cody Shrum

“Harbour” by Marcus Tan

White Trash

A-Side

The first time Giulia goes out in Oklahoma, she likes herself. She’s a single woman who can go out alone, order a drink alone, and sit alone at a bar in a country that is not hers.

Giulia moved to Oklahoma a few weeks ago for a band, like a groupie in the seventies. She had no intention of sleeping with the members. She just needed somewhere to go to make Italy feel like someone else’s home. Oklahoma seemed far enough.

She’s sitting at the counter, wearing a new sweater. It feels soft on her wrists, the candid white fabric in perfect contrast with her tattoos and heavy make-up. The smoke of the bar scratches her eyes.

Tonight she likes herself. Tonight, with her pitch-black hair, the new sweater and the small hoops dangling from her ears, Giulia feels like she’s new. She wants to meet someone. A girl never remains alone at the counter for too long. As predicted, a guy sits on the stool next to hers. “Did you know this is the place where Garth Brooks played for the first time?” he asks. Giulia must give him some points for the vaguely interesting opening line.

The guy, honey-blond hair and plaid shirt, points somewhere behind Giulia’s back, towards a plaque: Garth Brooks, first public performances, 1985-1987.

He smiles. Giulia notices some black lines between his teeth. He has a thick southern drawl, something that Giulia is not used to hearing in the halls of the university where she works. But the guy passes the initial test: he’s blond and he sounds like Matthew McConaughey.

Only, Giulia doesn’t know how to tell him that she couldn’t care less about Garth Brooks. As pathetic as it sounds, she moved to Oklahoma because of The Flaming Lips.

B-Side 

Her father sang Flaming Lips’ songs to her to make her fall asleep. His voice was fat with smoke. The neighbors from upstairs, downstairs, and next door never stopped fighting and screaming. Not like her parents were any different. Her mother, with her stretchy white bra on her pale skin, marched around the house yelling at her father, until he got tired and sat in the yard, the black tattoo of the hammer and sickle glistening on his sweaty tan. In the summer, Livorno sun burned the cactus and the yellow concrete of the front yard.

Small plastic bags of flour and moss from the nativity scene were aligned on the kitchen table, even in August; that was her mother’s domain. The room smelled like bleach every time her mom called for dinner. Giulia saw the rubber gloves and the masks piled up in the corner behind the microwave. 

Her mother told her that she was a home hairdresser. Giulia believed her for many years, but when her customers left the kitchen, they always had the same haircut they had when they came. 

A-Side

Giulia is twenty-two and she’s free, 8,527 miles away from home. Giulia can go out alone and chat with a guy with honey blond hair and a flannel plaid shirt. If she wanted, she could take him home. She could play a record, light up a sandalwood candle, pour him a glass of Fireball and lead him towards her bed. Giulia lives alone for the first time. The quietness of her apartment crushes her, so she always plays a Flaming Lips record.

Over the cacophony of the bar—the music, students drinking and yelling and playing darts, shot glasses slammed on the counter like nails—the guy tells her about the small town in Oklahoma where he grew up. His name is Travis, and like every other guy sitting alone at the counter of a bar, he talks too much. 

“My mom taught me how to smoke meth when I was thirteen.”

As Travis says that, Giulia stops still, her back straight against the stool as she feels the arches of her feet tremble. When he mentions meth, Giulia understands the reason for the black lines between his teeth. She nods, feels the gin claw at her tongue. She tells herself that her face won’t change. She’ll remain unperturbed.

“But I’m alive now,” he goes on. “I have three daughters, go to church every Sunday. I’m new.” Giulia wonders how a twenty-two-year-old girl with a good job and a nice apartment in small-town Oklahoma could find herself sitting next to a guy like this.

As soon as she thinks that, she makes herself sick. She already doesn’t like herself anymore.

B-Side

Her father punched the plasterboard. His fist disappeared, eaten by the hole in the wall, knuckles to elbow. Her mom screamed and hit him with the hair dryer. Giulia ran outside, in the front yard, finding herself next to the cactus. It was dead, because it was January and no one watered it anymore. Giulia saw her father leaving the house, wearing only his tank top with the Che Guevara print and his bathing suit, his arm still all dirty and dusty with plasterboard.

Her mother ran outside, slamming the door behind her; the neighbors looked from their windows like bees in a hive. That was when Giulia realized, for the first time ever, that she wanted to escape as far away as possible. It didn’t matter where.

Her father didn’t leave any other memories, except for a Flaming Lips album he left in the record player of the living room. After he was gone, her mother sold or threw away all his stuff, but didn’t realize that The Flaming Lips album was still there. Giulia pulled it up from the plate slowly, to avoid making any noise, and she brought it to her room. She hid it under a drawer. She went through an old book about the history of rock and found them: The Flaming Lips, from Oklahoma. Giulia couldn't listen to them when her mother was home. She sat on the floor of her room, trying to imagine every song without hearing it. The solos, the lyrics, the choruses, Oklahoma.

A-Side

The bartender asks her if she wants another gin and tonic. Giulia realizes that, since Travis told her that his mom taught him how to smoke meth when he was thirteen, she has kept sucking on her straw without even hearing the noise of the ice against the glass, the last drops of gin hobbling towards her lips. Giulia wonders if she should tell the bartender that Travis is bothering her, that she just wanted to go out and have a drink by herself; that a woman, as young and attractive and alone as she might be, shouldn’t feel constantly hunted by men who want to take her home. But again, these thoughts make her dislike herself; they make her herself sick. She feels the distance from her mother, from their dump in the council complex in Livorno, and she knows she became someone else. She feels about Travis the same way she feels when she drives to Oklahoma City and sees homeless people sitting with their dogs on the street, the cans of Budweiser and wine bottles in paper bags between moldy sleeping bags. She hates the way other people look at them, people who look like her, but she’d be afraid to get too close, too. Giulia tells the bartender she’s actually about to leave, but Travis leans towards her. His flannel plaid shirt smells like stale smoke. “Come on, tell me about you,” he says. He smiles like he really wants to know. “What do you do?” Giulia doesn’t know what to say. She’d like to tell him, I gotta go. But it’s her first time out in this country, and she doesn’t know how to get out of uncomfortable situations.

And Travis is really like any other guy. It’s the meth situation, the black lines between his teeth, the stale smell of smoke from his shirt. The way he reminds her too much of home, even here, even this far away. It’s not his fault. She should be nicer.

“I work for the international students office on campus,” she blurts out, and regrets it immediately.

“Cool.” He grins. “You must be brainy too.”

It’s her cue to leave. Giulia doesn’t reply, and turns to the bartender to close her tab.

“I was just joking, ma’am,” Travis says, his Southern politeness finally reminding her that she’s not in Livorno anymore. “Didn’t mean to upset you.” It’s too late. She’s exhausted. Giulia only wants to leave. The bartender gets her tab, but Travis stops him. “I got this,” he says.

Giulia says, “No, no, no,” but Travis’s voice is deeper than hers, and the bartender lets him pay. Travis’s words bounce and echo like a drum solo, the bass lines trying to mark the passing of time only for those who want to hear it.

B-Side

Giulia moved to Oklahoma when her mother was arrested for cooking and selling weed and coke. Giulia was alone. She had no reason to stay.

Giulia loved Livorno—the scooter chases on the seafront, the bathing suit shorts sticking to her sweaty skin, the time she got happy hour with her girlfriends on the seaside and she thought she had seen her father in the crowd, the hammer and sickle tattoo on his arm, a beer glistening between his fingers.

Giulia didn’t pack much more than her father’s Flaming Lips album.

As soon as she landed on Oklahoma soil, she drove to the closest tattoo parlor and got her first tattoo, between her breasts, as if an incision on her skin could turn her into a new person. She got a tattoo of a tiny cactus that looked like the dead one in the front yard of her place in Livorno.

She started buying new things, as if being able to afford them made her someone else, as if owning new objects meant molding a newer self.

Giulia spent her first week in Oklahoma shopping around the Plaza District. She bought a pair of cowboy boots, a second-hand fur coat that she would not need until the winter, and every record she could find by The Flaming Lips. She couldn’t yet afford to buy a record player. But she remembered the hours spent imagining her father’s album. She knew that, sometimes, listening to the songs didn’t matter.

A-Side

After Travis pays, Giulia gets off the stool to leave. It’s early, only nine, and Giulia doesn’t know if she wants to go home or simply walk to another bar. She still wants to meet someone. She just doesn’t want to meet someone like Travis. She still wants to be a different person, a new self, and she doesn’t want to be alone.

Travis gets up from the stool. “Let me walk you home.”

Giulia remembers that she’s never screamed with her parents, even when she realized that her mother wasn’t a hairdresser, even when her father kept threatening to leave until he did for real. Now, Giulia wants to scream loudly. “No,” she says. Travis looks at her. Giulia steps back. “Let me at least give you a hug,” he tells her, and Giulia shudders at the thought of getting close to his stale-smelling shirt, but then she feels bad. “Fine,” she says, “but don’t try to pull any other shit,” and she feels like an asshole for saying that, whatever she meant.

Travis smiles, resigned. “It’s because I’m white trash,” he says. It isn’t a question.

White trash.

Giulia knows that Travis is right. He represents everything she hates about Oklahoma: religion, meth, three kids before turning thirty. She pictures him smoking in his trailer, his pick-up parked outside, the confederate flag, the pit bull snoring in front of the door. All the stereotypes in one. But then Giulia imagines her father living alone in a dump in Livorno, the sweat dripping down his hammer and sickle tattoo, two flags of Livorno City soccer team and Che Guevara used as curtains.

Giulia leaves the bar without replying, without looking back, not even when she finds herself in the middle of the street, safe, surrounded by students in line to get into other bars.

She hopes Travis didn’t follow her outside. Giulia only turns back when she finds herself in front of her apartment, her fingers sinking inside her bag as she looks for the keys. She looks back to see if Travis is behind her, following her to know exactly where to find her in the future. Giulia doesn’t see him anywhere, and she feels like a piece of shit for thinking that he could do such a thing. She switches on the light, her feet still outside the door. The sleeves of her new, candid white sweater feel itchy already. The quietness of her place swallows her whole.

B-Side

On the day she could finally afford a record player, Giulia listened to her father’s record for the first time. She felt like a new person, even in a small town in Oklahoma, seven thousand miles away from her dump in Livorno. She placed the record on the plate and listened. It was just a B-Sides collection—all the songs that hadn’t made it into the main albums; discarded tracks, unfit memories left behind. Secondary stories impressed on the back of vinyl records. Old tattoos.

~ ~ ~

Rachele Salvini is an Italian woman based in the US, where she's doing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. She spent most of her life in Italy, and she writes both in English and Italian. Her work in English has been published or is forthcoming in BULL, Necessary Fiction, Takahe Magazine, Sagebrush Review, Sarah Lawrence College Review, and several Italian journals. She's also a translator, and her translation work has appeared or is forthcoming in a few literary journals, including Lunch Ticket. 

Wayward Women

Outside, spring was coming on, though all that freshness was still layered in cold. Laura’s car, parked in the circle drive, was dusted with the remnants of winter slush she’d come through during the seven-hour drive from Denver. Inside the house, Laura watched her mother sleep, the bedroom window blinds cracked. Laura was tempted to call this place “home,” but it wasn’t. Her parents had moved so many times over the years that Laura had only been to this house three times, and her brother James, once. James would be flying in “soon,” but that was all relative to his perception of time and James had never been on time for anything in his life. How would she do this until then, without him? Without her piece-of-shit dad who’d left her mother to die?

“Son of a bitch,” she said to herself, or to her sleeping mother, or just to fill the air in the room with something other than shallow breath.

Her mother had sworn off chemo. Laura had been there to take her home on her last day of treatment, months earlier, and as they left the parking lot, her mother had flipped the bird to the hospital and doctors and nurses and the cancer. “A big ol’ fuck you,” she’d said. Her mother thought it was hilarious—she’d smoked heavily her whole life and what was killing her was liver cancer.

Now, Laura put her hand on her mother’s. “Everything’s going to be okay I’m here,” Her mother’s face looked weathered in a new way, like wet cardboard dried in the sun. Surely this weathered woman lying in front of her wasn’t her real mother.

“Quit your bellyaching,” her mother said suddenly. “I ain’t dead yet.”

Laura laughed. “Jesus, Mom, don’t talk like that. I thought you were sleeping.”

“Hard to sleep with you staring at me like I’m some circus freak. Go make yourself useful. I’ll be fine.”

Laura left the door cracked. Her mother would act fine, refuse to take help or charity, bestow sage wisdom about what Laura’s love life ought to look like, and pretend like nothing’s wrong. Par for the course. Laura paced around the house. She’d brought her laptop and some work to do, but she wouldn’t get jack shit done sitting in her dying mother’s house. She checked her email, then scrolled through her social feeds. Another school shooting had just happened. Politicians offered prayers to families of the deceased, but nothing more. A new Kardashian baby now existed.

The oversized clock in the kitchen ticked three in the afternoon. She’d been there for almost five hours and her mother had only been awake an hour. The kitchen and island counters were cluttered with dishes and crumpled-up paper towels. For as long as she could remember, her mother had had a compulsion to have paper towels and napkins around, to crumple, to have one in hand at all times. Laura had been smacked growing up for suggesting her mother had a problem. Laura collected all the paper towels and threw them away.

She took her mother’s Chihuahua, Pooh, for a walk around the block while her mother slept. Growing up, they’d had German shepherds. Laura thought a life without kids, grandkids, or a husband around, and no dogs, was incredibly sad, so she’d gotten the dog for her mother last year. Laura told her naming the dog Pooh would make people think of dog shit. “Kiss my ass, it’s cute,” her mother had said.

Pooh led the way along the cracking sidewalk. The sun was dropping to the tree-riddled horizon and Pooh’s little shadow danced alongside hers. Years ago, Laura had moved just far enough away to escape that umbrella of the Midwest. But even in Colorado, she still felt the Midwest coded somewhere in her DNA. When it rained she felt cornstalks rustle in her bones. When she was thirsty she craved “pop” or her aunt Linda’s sweet tea. Walking home from shopping on Larimer Square, she knew she wouldn’t recognize a single face and it filled her with both satisfaction and a yearning for home. Now, with her mother so close to the end, she hated herself for leaving, for moving away for a job, and a guy. Were those the only reasons? Guilt layered the lining of her stomach. But James had moved away too—further, even. Pooh tugged to go home.

When she returned, the lines of her mother’s face looked softer. Laura’s breath caught in her throat. Would this be what she looked like when she passed, or was she already gone? She took a step forward, not sure if she could bring herself to say anything, if words would escape her mouth even if she tried.

“Jesus, you’re the loudest person,” her mother said, opening her eyes. “Where’d you learn that? Denver’s turned you into a bull in a goddamned China shop.”

Laura exhaled.

“Listen, I’ve rested enough.” Her mother sat up slowly.

“Are you sure? The doctor said—”

“Fuck the doctor, and the creepy-ass stuffed bunnies in his office. He always talked down to me, like it’s that hard to get a medical degree. I’m fine. Let’s go out.”

~

Laura drove her mother’s car—she’d insisted—into town as the sun was setting. They drove down streets, past houses Laura had never seen, through air she’d never breathed. Even the name of the town, Oakaville, Kansas, felt new and strange in her mouth when she uttered it. Her mother gave directions to her friend’s house as they drove.

“Take a right up here on Walnut. Just past that bright-pink mailbox.”

The town seemed hushed. She’d barely seen anyone, let alone talked to anyone, during her few visits. She never noticed dogs barking or anyone playing loud music, no construction noises, no ice cream truck jingles, as if the soundtrack of the town had been stripped away.

“Does Dad know about the cancer?” Laura asked. She hoped he didn’t know, that he hadn’t talked to her, that he would stay away.

Her mother looked forward, her face not registering Laura’s having spoken at all. Laura kept driving. “He knows,” her mother eventually said.

As they were coming up on the trailer park, her mother told her to pull down an alley, and Laura became uneasy. Halfway down, they parked in a gravel driveway behind a two-story house with its weathered vinyl siding beginning to shed away.

“This is your friend’s house?” Laura asked as they approached the back door.

“Yeah. He’s my weed dealer,” she said.

The statement was so nonchalant that Laura didn’t register it until she’d already helped her mother up the two steps to the wooden deck leading to the back door.

“What, no snippy judgement?” her mother asked.

“It’s for the pain?”

“It helps. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t coming here before I was diagnosed, though. Hell, I’ve been smoking pot since I was a kid. Your father and I used to get high with the best of ’em.”

As Laura processed this revelation, the door opened and a man in his twenties, wearing a blue flannel over a Star Wars tee, opened the door wide for her mother. He didn’t seem startled that Laura was with her. They walked inside and Laura was surprised by how clean the house looked, how uncluttered all the surfaces were. She smelled pine, maybe a candle burning somewhere.

“Marty, who’s your friend?” he asked.

“You know I don’t have friends. This is my daughter, Laura.” She pointed a finger back and forth between them. “Laura, Trevor.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Laura,” he said.

They shook hands. She couldn’t decide how she felt about shaking a drug-dealer’s hand. Surely if her mother was doing business with him, he was cool. His shaggy hair and beard were messy but he was good-looking. Aside from drug-dealing, she liked cute nerds, guys who were kind of sexy because they weren’t trying to be.

“Got the good stuff?” her mother asked. She walked into the kitchen and drew a glass of water from the faucet.

“Sure do, OG Kush—same as before. Y’know, maybe don’t smoke my whole stash this time, Marty.”

Laura felt like Dorothy waking from her dream, finally seeing the true, raw picture of her mother: a suffering, lonely, hard-bitten woman smoking weed regularly with her male drug dealer who was about Laura’s own age. She and Trevor seemed like best friends, and the feeling made her nauseous.

“Laura, what brings you to my humble abode for wayward women and herbal healing? Just visiting?”

“Wow,” she said. “What a way to put it.”

“I don’t actually think that highly of myself—just your friendly neighborhood weed dealer who dabbles in word play. But hey, glad you’re here. And that Marty has someone else to bitch to.”

“I heard that, dipshit,” her mother said from the kitchen.

“Yeah, I drove in from Denver. You know. At the end. I should have been here sooner.”

“She’s pretty independent, though,” Trevor said.

“Yeah. She is.”

Laura mostly knew what her mother had been through over the years—been put through. It was difficult to think of her as a blameless victim, though; she could have saved herself from a lot of it. Divorcing her father years earlier, for example—not putting up with his shit, holding him accountable, standing up to him, not crawling back, finding someone new, any or all of the above. But Laura couldn’t fault her mother for the cancer, not to mention her two children bagging ass and leaving her all alone. Life’s funny, Laura mused, fucking hilarious. She was unable to imagine what living her mother’s life was like. She’d never even tried.

Trevor went to the kitchen where Laura’s mother was still going through cabinets. Trevor seemed to live alone—odd for such a big house. Laura assumed three bedrooms at least. The walls were painted a light mint-green, a soothing seafoam. Several oil paintings hung on each of the walls in the living room and Laura walked around, arms crossed, admiring them, not knowing what else to do. Hanging over the couch was an oil painting with a worn wooden frame. The sky was a swirl of reds and oranges, dead trees lining the edges, and two skeletons held hands, dancing around a tall, centered tree beginning to sprout leaves from its withered branches. Laura didn’t know much about paintings or high art, but she thought the artist was talented. She wanted to touch the surface, feel the smooth ridges of dried oil paint. A drug-dealer with artistic skills? Or was this purchased art? She scanned the edges of the painting but couldn’t find any initials.

Her mother and Trevor came back from the kitchen, Trevor carrying a metal tray. Her mother smiled as she sat on the couch. Laura had only smoked weed a couple times in college and even then, she hadn’t done it with her mother or a strange dealer. Though she knew her mother was in pain, and she had no qualms about watching her smoke, she sat at the opposite end of the couch. Trevor took the recliner on the other side of the end table. He put weed in a metallic blue grinder that sat on the tray with an array of paraphernalia she didn’t recognize. She watched as Trevor quickly and artfully rolled a joint with the ground weed and two small sheets of smoking paper. The pine aroma mixed with the dank, pungent marijuana filled the room, and the mixture smelled surprisingly good.

“Marty refuses my ‘black magic’ methods,” Trevor said. “Bull-headed, this one.” He handed the joint to Laura and she just stared at it.

“You kids and your fancy tech. I know my way around a doobie just fine. Well, c’mon short stuff, hand me the goods!” her mother said.

Laura passed it over and her mother lit up, filling the living room with thick smoke. It had been years since Laura’s mother had called her “short stuff.” Short stuff, shorty, tiny, shortcake—all hilariously ironic names referencing her above-average height. She’d been the tallest girl on her high school basketball team. She’d always liked these names growing up because only her mother used them, never her father. It was one of the few things they shared.

“So do you two smoke on the regular? She must be paying out the ass if you know each other so well from just smoking,” Laura said.

“You know, friend discount,” Trevor said.

“Wait, are you two sleeping together?” she asked, raising her voice at the end.

Her mother laughed so hard she began to wheeze, which turned into a coughing fit.

“No, no, shit,” he said. “Nothing like that.”

“He couldn’t handle me,” her mother said.

“Jesus. What is happening?” Laura said.

Trevor once again concentrated on making weed magic. He grabbed a small, circular machine from the floor beside his recliner and sat it in his lap.

“This is the sorcery your mom’s afraid of: the Cadillac of vaporizers. Made by a rocket scientist in California. It heats the weed up to the perfect temperature in ten seconds with a halogen bulb, vaporizing without burning it. I call her Helen of Troy. You know, most beautiful woman in the world. Far superior to the Marty method,” he said, eying Laura’s mother.

With her eyes closed and the joint sitting on an ashtray, still faintly glowing red, her mother nodded, as if to say yeah, yeah, wiseass.

“Rocket scientist, huh?” Laura asked. “Shouldn’t rocket scientists be, I don’t know, putting people in space?”

“They call it being ‘high’ for a reason, I suppose. The way I see it, getting people really, scientifically high is a noble pursuit. I damn well don’t want some tire mechanic or Wal-Mart greeter designing my weed vaporizers.”

A valid point, Laura thought. She laughed to herself, snorted. Trevor held a plastic bag with some sort of rubber breather in the corner of it, and attached it to the vaporizer.

“Is that an oven bag? For a turkey?” she asked.

“Good eye. Yeah, it seems dumb but you’ll thank me later. You’re smoking with me, right?”

“Oh, no. I’m fine, thanks. Just here for my mom.” She shifted on the couch and crossed her arms.

“I coulda told you she’d say that,” her mother said, eyes still closed. Laura could tell she was about to fall asleep.

“Is it so wrong I don’t feel like smoking marijuana with my mother at her drug-dealer’s house?” she asked. She turned to Trevor. “No offense.”

“Oh, it’s cool. Nail on the head, as it were.”

She leaned back into the couch and watched the turkey bag fill with marijuana vapor, the machine whirring like a cat’s purr. Laura found it strange that centuries of scientific research and progress had culminated in this device. By the time the bag was filled, Laura’s mother was snoring. Trevor released the vaporizer and held in his hands a fully inflated plastic bag. He pressed his lips to the bag and inhaled, the bag deflating partially into his lungs.

“You sure you don’t want to try? No pressure. Marty’s out; you may be here a while,” he said, exhaling vapor.

Laura knew her mother must have had a low opinion of her, for many reasons. For setting up shop so far away and hardly coming back. For not pursuing collegiate basketball despite the offers she’d gotten. For never sticking it out in any relationship she’d been in. Specifically for breaking it off with Derek, whom her mother had adored. She couldn’t prove it, but she assumed also for not popping out any grandkids. And now for not smoking weed. For playing it safe. But she’d taken risks. Moving so far away alone took giant ovaries, right? That counted for something.

She took the bag from Trevor and squeezed the breather, inhaling. It didn’t burn as bad as she thought it would, but she coughed wildly all the same.

“Wow, that’s a good one,” he said. “You’ll feel that.”

Her mother was fully asleep, mouth hanging open, gentle snores timed in an irregular rhythm like some grotesque bird song.

“It’s so weird,” Trevor said. “Marty never mentioned she had a daughter. Or any kids,” he said. He took another hit from the turkey bag.

“Yeah. Well, my brother and I don’t come around much. Long story,” she said.

“Why’s that?” Trevor asked.

“The short version: there was a guy. Derek,” she said. She sank back into the cushions. “I kind of followed him to Denver. He was the worst. I didn’t see it. Mom didn’t either. She actually liked him, believe it or not.”

“Yeah, we’re usually the worst,” he said, earnestly. “I’m surprised Marty didn’t see it.” He handed her the bag and she finished it off, coughing less than the first time.

“And the long version?” Trevor asked.

 “My dad really fucked us up, made us all dysfunctional. It was already stressful growing up with that, then Mom being hard on me during high school. Then she moved here, someplace foreign. It became easy to stay away, I guess.” She’d never said this out loud, she realized.

“I’m sure it was tough. I bet Marty’s parenting is . . . rigorous,” Trevor said.

Laura nodded. She suddenly became hyper aware of her own head. She felt a buzzing behind her eyes.

“What’s weird is you calling her Marty. She’s always been Mom to me, but everyone always called her Martha. Who the hell are you calling her Marty?”

“Pretty sure she introduced herself as Marty,” he said. He cocked his head as if thinking on it. “But that’s classic Marty for you.”

Trevor rocked in his chair and smiled to himself, cheek dimples showing. Laura felt the sudden urge to fuck him, something she hadn’t felt, strongly anyway, in a long time, let alone for someone she’d just met. It could be the weed talking, she thought. Probably is the weed talking. Did it work that fast? She imagined them fucking on the carpet all sprawled out, sweating while her mother snored away, that painting blooming brightly above them. She snorted.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, laughing himself.

“Nothing. Just imagining you and my mom smoking pot in here on a nightly basis. Smokin’ some doobies, blazin’ it up, tokin’ that kush.” She really was imagining this now, and she couldn’t stop laughing. It felt great. Everything in her body, firing synapses, tummy, and all, felt light, like flying.

“Yep, hilarious. Your mom’s a regular pothead and I’m an enabler. Classic Marty-Trevor shenanigans.”

They laughed together for a while and after a long silence she reached across the end table and grabbed Trevor’s hand. She wrapped her fingers in his and squeezed. She was slumped on her end of the couch and leaning with her head tilted across the table toward him. She didn’t know she was crying until the tears tickled her cheeks.

“Fuck,” she said. “I don’t know what to do. She’s my mother. Marty. Only one I’ll get, and soon she’ll be gone.” She was whispering now. “Everyone’s fucked her over her whole life, me included. My dad, worst of all. Goddamnit, I should have been here.” More tears.

“Hey, you’re here now. And I’m here. And Marty’s a strong independent woman who doesn’t take shit from nobody. Let that cancer try to bring her down. But when it does,” Trevor said, pointing at her, “you’ll be ready. And you know where to find me if you want to talk about it. And we can get high again, high as fuck, in honor of the esteemed Marty.”

Laura started to laugh but felt her nose running, so she sniffed. “Thanks, Trevor.” She squeezed his hand and stood up. “Mom, let’s get you home,” she said, rubbing her mother’s shoulder.

Her mother’s snoring stopped and she squinted her eyes open. “Yeah, yeah, whatever.”

As they were leaving, Laura exchanged a long look with Trevor and she felt less certain that her feelings for him were weed-driven. She wondered how many guys, people, she’d denied the benefit of the doubt based on a first impression. He shot finger guns at her and she smiled, pretended to be shot and fly back into the doorframe, banging her head loudly against the wood, and felt like an idiot all the way home.

~

Despite being nearly midnight when they got back, Laura’s mother was still wide awake, energized from her pot cat nap. She had all the lights on in the house and a Bob Seger CD playing in the background. She walked through each room as if lost, holding a wad of paper towels which she occasionally brought to her face and wiped at her nose. During all this, Laura lounged on the couch, still coming down from her high, petting a panting Pooh.

Her mother emerged from her bedroom with a big cardboard box Laura knew she shouldn’t be carrying. Before she could stand to help, her mother dropped the box in the middle of the living room floor, where it busted at the seams and its contents spilled across the gray carpet: photos, drawings, terrible grade school art, trophies, and other miscellaneous, nostalgic riffraff her mother had been packing around from house to house.

“Well, that’s one way to do it,” her mother said, plopping into the rocking chair. “Shit, that wore me out.” That chair, too, was a relic of nostalgia—her mother’d had it since James was born, and it still rocked beautifully.

“What’s all this?” Laura asked.

“Well, I’ll be dead soon and I want you to figure out what shit of mine you want. That’s just one box and you can have all of it, none of it, I don’t care. But I wanted to give you the option. There’s more where that came from on my bed.”

Laura sat cross-legged on the floor and started going through the mess. She remembered going through old photos with her mother once, but it had been many years and houses earlier.

A knock came from the front door. Laura imagined Trevor standing there, holding something they’d forgotten, or a weed care package for Marty, or nothing at all, just wanting to see Laura again. Her mother groaned as she tried sitting upright.

“Mom, I got it. Just sit down.”

“It’s my damn house, I can do it,” her mother said. She managed to stand, but Laura was already pulling the door open.

At the sight of her father, Laura stepped back, kicking over the pile of scattershot memories. He was heavier than the last time she’d seen him. His face was thicker, trimmed beard grayer. He looked rough and something about that made it easier to see him standing there.

“Laura,” he started. “I didn’t know … it’s good to see you. How have you—”

“Don’t,” Laura said, stepping back. “What are you doing here?”

He walked inside and closed the door, and Laura took another step back. She looked between him and her mother. Her mother, still standing, didn’t seem surprised to see him. She even had some semblance of a half-smile.

“Mom, what the hell is he doing here? Did you invite him?”

“Laura, I’m just here to check up on your mom, see how things are going. Honestly, I didn’t know you were here. Otherwise I might’ve, I don’t know, dressed differently, brought some wine or something,” he said. He patted down the front of his dirty jacket.

“Hey, Seth,” her mother said, that same half-smile visible.

Her father smiled in return. They were holding one another in their soft gazes, like fucking idiots, Laura thought.

Laura took two steps and punched her father as hard as she could in the face. He yelled out but didn’t move. She’d never punched anyone before, and now her fist felt numb. Seeing him in pain, pain she’d caused, made her feel lighter inside.

“Well, do you feel better about yourself, short-shit?” her mother asked.

“I probably deserved that,” her father said, massaging his cheek.

“No you didn’t,” her mother said.

Laura had always been shorter than her father, just barely, but now it seemed like he’d shrunk. She felt like running out of the house, driving to Trevor’s, back to Denver—anywhere but there. But her dad was blocking the door, and her mother had since sunk back into her chair.

“Wait,” Laura said. She turned to her mother. “Is this a regular thing? Has he been coming to see you?” She pointed to her father without looking, as if he weren’t there.

Her mother’s eyes were sunken, sockets dark like bruises. She wiped sweat from her forehead with a paper towel.

“Holy shit. Why didn’t you tell me? Seems like something I should know.” Laura felt her heartbeat in her ears. Her whole body grew hot. She felt her father’s presence soaking up all the air in the room, but she refused to look.

“You gave up on him years ago, and that’s fine, and now our relationship is none of your business. We reminisced; he made me feel better about the soon-to-be-dead elephant in the room, what else is there to say? We’re still friends. You and your brother weren’t here, but your father was. It’s been nice,” her mother said.

Still friends. The words made Laura feel physical pain, somewhere deep she couldn’t define. She finally looked at her father and he was again smiling at her mother, at Marty. His cheek was swollen now, too. She was speechless. She didn’t know how he’d weaseled his way back into her mother’s life in the first place, let alone somehow passed Laura in importance. She was an outsider, just as bad as James. Worse.

She didn’t know what combination of things was the cause, but she was crying again. She sat on the floor in front of the box her mother had brought out.

“Look, Seth, why don’t you come back tomorrow,” her mother said.

“Do you need anything?” he said. “I can run to the store tomorrow, grab some things.”

“No, I’m good. Thanks. I’ll still be alive tomorrow. See you then.”

Laura’s father stood with the door open. He waved at her mother and then looked at Laura. “Bye, Laura. I’m sorry,” he said and ducked his head as he closed the door.

A silence came over the house. Even Pooh was quiet. Laura’s sobs were silent. She started to laugh but felt her nose running, so she sniffed and then faded to nothing. All that was left was the buzzing head high, making her feel good, though it was false.

~

Laura plucked a Polaroid from inside the box. In the picture, her father was standing behind a swing set, poised to catch the swing on its return and send it back flying in an arc away from him. The child in the swing—it was a bad picture, she couldn’t tell if it was she or James—sat high off the ground with dirty feet, frozen in a suspension of potential energy.

“Laura, I can’t believe you. Why can’t you just get over yourself, let the past stay there? Your father’s changed. I can’t believe you did that to him. After what he’s done for me. For us.”

“How can you say that? You must have amnesia. After what he did to you? To this family? He’s a monster.” She tossed the now-crumpled photo into the pile with the rest.

“You’re being dramatic. We had a pretty happy marriage. As these pictures testify, I have a lot of fond memories of spending time with that man. And we’ve made some good ones since. And you sure as shit can’t take those from me.”

“Mom, the verbal abuse? Him calling you a cunt so many times in front of us, those times you threatened to call the cops, the one time you actually did, when he hit you in the driveway and you fell down to the gravel, everything he missed when he was off doing god knows what?” She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Her mother actually defending that man. She’d rarely seen happiness from her mother growing up.

“When you get married one day, you’ll understand. And then when you get divorced, you’ll understand more,” her mother said, eyes closed the whole time. “And then when you get liver cancer, you’ll really see. But you haven’t gone through what I have.”

She was right. She left her mother there, her rocking slowing to a soft vacillation. Laura felt in her bones that her mother would die soon. Her mother might have had weeks left, according to the last doctor’s estimate, and she may have acted like she felt fine, like she wasn’t in pain, but Laura knew all that would be crashing down around her any time. Laura was okay with it. If her mother had come to terms with it, then she had to as well.

Laura wondered what James was doing, imagined him at home with his fiancée, watching TV, no intention of making it to the airport. He’d have some excuse. And if that wasn’t bullshit, she didn’t know what was. She’d rather Trevor be with Marty at the end than either of them. Further, she admitted to herself, Trevor had more of a right to be there than she did. She knew it wasn’t likely, but she imagined Trevor at his house alone, smoking more weed, staring at that painting, watching those skeletons dance, humming along to a song she might know.

Laura sat on her mother’s bed next to the array of boxes and inhaled, exhaled. It was too much to go through in one night, especially given how late it was. She was tired. She could go through it all the next couple days. But she wanted to make room for her mom to sleep in her own bed that night. She moved all the boxes to the floor by the dresser, and the last box tipped over, toppling some cassettes under the bed. She knelt down to reach for them and grabbed something rubbery. A dog toy? Pulling her arm free, she saw that the object was a dildo.

“What the fuck,” she shouted, dropping it.

She stared at it. She didn’t know how to react. Shocked put it lightly. She didn’t want to know how recently it had been used; the fact that it was under the bed and not in dresser drawer gave her an uneasy feeling. It was big and green and had a battery slot at the bottom. She didn’t have one herself, but her own mother did. Classic Marty. She kicked it and the thing came alive, buzzing around on the floor. She covered her mouth with her hand, and laughed. She laughed herself to tears, filling a dying woman’s bedroom with noise, Marty’s dildo rumbling life into the house.

~ ~ ~

Cody Shrum is a teacher and writer based in Kansas City, and has earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cody’s fiction and poetry have appeared in such journals as Five on the Fifth, Rust + Moth, and Harbor Review, as well as the anthology, Kansas Time + Place: An Anthology of Heartland Poetry.

Harbour

Before Mui sits down, before she even meets my eye, she picks up the menu, brandishing it as a shield between us, and says: "I don't want to be upset on an empty stomach, so at least wait for the food to arrive."

That we are having dinner by a food cart in the middle of the street is a compromise—I had wanted to meet at a restaurant where we could have a proper conversation with minimal distraction, and she had wanted to talk over the phone instead. This is middle ground—us hunching over one of the many foldable tables littered across the tarmac, surrounded by families or strangers forced to sit together like disparate families.

"I brought your umbrella," I say. "It slid behind the sofa."

She runs her fingers along the length of string that tethers the menu to the table, rolling it between her thumb and forefinger. "Do you already know what you want to eat?" she says from behind the menu.

"You have no idea how dusty it is back there," I say. "It even stained the walls gray." I lean the umbrella against the table, catching its curved handle on the edge. "But don't worry, I've wiped it down."

She's pried weaves of the string apart now, looping the unfettered strands around her fingers, then unlooping them, over and over. "Do you know what you want?"

"The soup," I say. "I'll have the soup."

"There's more than one option."

I tap twice on the back of her menu, as if seeking permission to intrude upon the wall of privacy she has erected. "It says here the pig stomach is their signature."

She puts down the menu and I meet her eye for the first time in three weeks. Her hair is matted from the last incessant drops of rain still trickling down from this afternoon’s thunderstorm. I lean forward to shorten the distance between us, not because I can't hear her, but because I seek reciprocity, which she does not offer. Instead she lets the silence hang between us, longer than necessary, before waving the waitress over.

In the low light of the street I don't notice the waitress until she sets the plastic jug down, causing a splash of hot tea to coat the table and drip onto the road beneath us, which is already glistening with any number of mystery liquids.

“Sihk mutye?” the waitress asks in Cantonese, what would you like to have?

Bolstered by the very misguided hope that it will somehow disarm Mui, I stutter a reply in Cantonese, barely making it through half a sentence before I'm forced to give up and switch to a combination of English and gesturing at the menu. Mui repeats our order, quickly and with an apology on my behalf, perhaps to salvage whatever patience is left in the waitress or, more likely, to reinforce how transparent my antics are. If it were in the early days of our relationship my confidence might have faltered, but recently I've found myself craving her mocking tone, having not heard it in a while. "You've got to buck up if you ever want to meet my parents," she reminds me whenever I embarrass myself speaking Cantonese.

The waitress asks if we would like a bucket of Blue Girls, but I order two glasses of ningcaa, lemon tea, grateful this much is still within my repertoire. She yells our order at no one in particular before moving on to the next table.

Mui shoots me an exaggerated glare, her nostrils flaring the way they always do when she's annoyed. "One beer wouldn’t hurt," she says, returning, thankfully, to English.

"It might," I say.

"The science says it won’t."

"The science?"

"I read an article online," she says.

"Clickbait listicles aren’t science."

"You're doing it again."

"I'm stating a fact," I say. "Those articles are written by marketers, not actual scientists."

"Does it make you feel clever?"

"What?"

"When you say stuff like that," she says. "Does it make you feel clever?"

"Fine," I say. "Have your beer."

"I don’t need your permission." She picks up her phone, her face cast in a blue halo as her screen lights up. Even from where I'm sitting I can see the large crack in the corner of her phone from where she dropped it on an escalator. I remember surprising her the next day with the latest flagship iPhone, but without even uttering a single word of thanks she'd told me to return it. Her busted-up Samsung worked just fine, she insisted, chip on its shoulder and all.

The waitress returns with our soups. A cloud of steam rises as I pour hot tea into the large plastic basin in the center of the table, making sure to coat the chopsticks and spoons I pull out from a ceramic mug, a holdover ritual I have only recently gotten comfortable with—when I first moved to Hong Kong I had only dared observe it from a safe distance, always afraid of coming across as an ignorant foreigner by committing a faux pas like drinking the tea instead.

Mui stirs her soup. "You're clearly waiting for me to eat before you begin whatever it is you're here to do."

Out of habit I reach towards my breast pocket for my pack of cigarettes, but I stop, savoring instead the ever-present haze of secondhand smoke. "You know what I want to talk about."

"You can smoke if you want," she says. "Don't hold back on my behalf."

"I’m okay."

"Don’t," she says, picking a slice of pig stomach out of her bowl. "Don’t do this dance. If you want to smoke, smoke. And instead of saying you know what I want to talk about, just, you know, talk."

I pick at the calluses on my fingers. "Okay," I say to my palm. "I don’t want you to do it."

"You asked me out just to say that?"

"I asked you out so we could talk," I say. "And as a subset of talk, yes, I thought maybe I could, if you would so kindly allow it, bring up a topic or two that’s been weighing on my mind over the past couple of weeks."

"I needed time," she says. "To think."

"I know. That’s why I didn’t just show up at your doorstep."

"I wouldn’t have answered the door."

"Again, that’s why I didn’t do it," I say, returning my gaze to her. "Look—Mui. I just think you’re being a little rash."

"That's not for you to decide."

"I’m not deciding for you," I say. "I’m offering an opinion, which I hope matters."

"That’s not how you phrased it."

"I’m sorry," I say. "What I mean is, I think we should consider our options."

"You’re just saying that so we can arrive at the one you want."

"That’s not true," I say.

"We’ve had many, many conversations that involve considering our options," she says. "And look how they all turn out. Do I need to remind you of what happened with your flat?"

"It has decent amenities," I say. "And I can walk to work."

"It's an expat trap," she says. "I don’t have to care, by the way. I’m not the one spending half my salary on it."

"Let’s not get into that again, okay?"

I will never admit it to Mui, not so much out of pride as out of fear she will finally see just how different we are, but I like my gentrified comforts, and I like to think I work hard precisely so I can afford and maintain them. It's frivolous and unnecessary, I can already hear her retort. Looking back, she has always tried to steer me towards what she considers the real Hong Kong—impossibly narrow, winding streets flanked by old crumbling flats, where you eat mere steps away from a man who has his T-shirt rolled up his belly while he slices his cleaver through a large slimy bladder of a pig’s stomach, splitting it open along its seam, squeezing its gray, pus-like contents into a large bowl.

"This city is depressing," Mui says.

"I know."

"No, you don’t," she says. "That’s your problem. You think you do. You think you know too many things."

"That’s not true."

She turns to look at the television set. "I can’t believe this."

"Maybe this isn’t the right place to talk," I say. "Maybe we should leave it and I’ll come over tomorrow and—"

"No," she says, clicking her nails on the table. "Whatever you want to say, you say right now."

"I understand it is your decision to make," I say. "But this is a life we're talking about."

"Not yet a life," she says. "But that's kind of the point too, isn't it? If we want to bring a life into this world, we have a responsibility to ensure that they will be safe, that they will have a good quality of life. And if we cannot promise that, then we shouldn't do it in the first place."

"And why don't you think we can keep them safe and provide for them?"

"There are things you don't have to worry about that I do."

"Such as?"

"How we're going to afford it," she says.

"You don't have to worry about that."

~

It was one of the first things I ever said to Mui, even before I knew her name. You don't have to worry about that. She was a server for my table then at Pierre & Heloise, a Michelin-starred restaurant lauded by critics and amateur food bloggers alike for its delightfully delicate approach towards fusion, where French techniques are used to elevate local ingredients. I was there with a few coworkers to celebrate a recent promotion, and I had remarked to Mui, in between sips of a vintage Bordeaux, that I particularly enjoyed the smoked duck egg appetizer, to which she replied that most patrons said the same, though she'd personally never had it. In fact, she'd been working at the restaurant for close to a year and had never had anything more than the daily staff meals of rice stir-fried with leftover ingredients from the kitchen. She didn't say this last part while serving the table, of course—she'd worked in hospitality long enough to know what she could and couldn't say to patrons, even within the confines of friendly banter. She revealed this to me only after I insisted on buying her a serving of the smoked duck egg so she could finally taste it. At first she refused the offer, implying it was an unnecessary expense on my part, to which I said: You don't have to worry about that. It was only after she reluctantly agreed and cracked a slight smile that I remembered to ask for her name. She blushed when I later asked her out, promising to bring her to a fancy restaurant just like Pierre & Heloise, only this time she didn't have to wear a uniform or memorize the day's specials.

I would eventually learn, while accompanying her on the siubaa—the minibus she would take home from the city—that on top of being a waitress, she also worked the front desk at a five-star hotel overlooking the sea. "There's a taitai who comes in every week for the dinner buffet, and all she eats is crab legs, plate after plate after plate—can you imagine that?" Mui would say after a particularly long shift. "Each time she comes in she has a different handbag hanging off her elbow—Chanel, Hermes, LV, you name it. Every single one of those bags costs more than my monthly salary, and she still sits there for hours trying to gorge her money's worth. I don't get it," Mui would say, throwing her hands up, unable to hide her bewilderment at how cheap the rich could be.

Over Sunday dim sum, after correcting my pronunciation of the different dishes and proclaiming her mum’s cooking as far better than anything she'd tasted that afternoon, she’d tell me she was saving to pay for her younger brother's university tuition. "He's a history major and he wants to be a professor at HKU one day," she’d say. "I think he'd be great—you can tell he'd care a lot about his students. He's just passionate, you know?"

As we'd sit by Victoria Harbour with convenience store beers, she'd point to the buildings across the water and tell me the lights looked like stars. While standing on a bench, her finger shaking from the effects of alcohol, she'd swear she just saw a comet streak across Central. I would stop myself from telling her it was totally just a car on an overpass. Late at night, as her fingertips traced my collarbones under the blankets, she'd say I made her remember what it was like to be carefree. She'd always know she had to leave in the morning to start her first of two shifts, but in the time we had together she could pretend life was good and okay. I didn't know what she meant then, but it didn't matter to me, as long as I could remain buoyed by the thought of having something of value to give. I made a promise that night, either to myself or to the back of her as she slept, to always remember and pursue that feeling.

The months passed quickly. With each new layer I discovered, my admiration of her grew, overshadowing the spark of infatuation that had defined our early days. Before I knew it I developed a habit of saying, whenever she would insist on splitting a bill I knew she couldn't afford, you don't have to worry about that. It had become a chorus, a refrain to which I returned in order to reiterate my support of her, or to resolve any and all problems that arose between us.

~

"I don't think you're worrying enough," Mui says.

"I earn enough to be comfortable," I say. "For all three of us."

"It's not just about money, is it?" she says. "It's also about what will happen to this city in the future. We'll be old by 2047, so it won't matter to us. But it will matter to the next generation, who will not get to live in a free Hong Kong."

"We don't have to stay here forever. Does that help?" I say. "We can move in two, three years."

"Three years is a long time," she says. "Long enough for another recession. Long enough for the resurgence of a new plague that can somehow pass through walls. Hell, the hakgau may get bored of rubber bullets by then and—"

"You've made your point," I say, turning on instinct to look behind me, hoping we aren't within earshot of the wrong company. "We don't have to wait that long. I can speak to management about an earlier transfer back to the Singapore office."

"And then what? Then things magically work out, like they always do in your head? What about my mum, my brother?" she says. "How am I going to get a work visa?"

"I don't have all the answers right now," I say. "But we're both survivors, aren't we? We're both good at figuring things out along the way. Just like you did when your brother got accepted into HKU and suddenly needed money you didn't have. And just like I did when I first moved here with no friends, no place to stay, and not even a bank account."

"I'm not leaving Hong Kong," she says, shifting her gaze away from me, the corners of her lips softening.

"I thought you called it depressing."

"Let me rephrase," she says. "I'm not leaving my mum and brother here. In a different life I would want to be like you. I would want to be from a normal country where you can have a normal life and raise a normal family. But I'm not. So I've got to be satzai. I don't want to hope for things that are not possible."

"And I guess me saying I can stay here doesn't make a difference?" I say.

"If I was making this decision five years ago, sure—we could talk about our options all day," she says. "After the Umbrella Revolution it felt like there was a tiny chance things could actually get better. But look at us now. This is no place to live," she says. "It's certainly no place to raise a child." She says my name, not just my name but a shortened version of it, a pet name she hasn't used in a while. "I'm sorry," she says, repeating my name, with all the tenderness drained from it.

"Don't be," I say.

"You must hate me," she says.

"I don't."

"That makes it worse."

"So what does this mean?" I say.

"This means I do what I have to do," she says.

"I was referring to us. What does this mean for us?"

There is commotion on the street. A chair falls as someone jolts up. The old woman at the food stand tucks her cash into a biscuit tin and clears the countertop. A young man in a suit drops loose bills on the table and leaves without finishing his food.

Someone says: "They're coming up Sailsbury Road."

Their voices are the first thing I hear. A low indistinguishable rumble, then a crescendo of singing meshed with syncopated chanting. There is clapping and what sounds like the pounding of fists on trash cans. The music of people wanting—no, demanding—to be heard. In the past weeks the protests have grown both in numbers and intensity, with songs of hope and calls for universal suffrage accompanied by countermelodies of gunshots ripping through the streets, tear gas canisters hissing, and bones breaking against riot shields. A reprise of the Umbrella Revolution but more energetic, the audacity of idealists with nothing more to lose.

Mui puts away another mouthful of noodles. "We go back to our normal lives," she says.

"What?" I say.

"You asked me what the future means for us," she says. "It means we go back to our normal lives. As if nothing ever happened."

"Should we go?" I say.

"I don't want you to be there," she says. "It's not a complicated procedure. They just give you a pill. And then it feels like a really nasty period. Or so I've heard."

"I meant now," I say. "Here. Should we leave this street before the protesters come?"

"They're heading towards Kowloon Park," she says. "Are you afraid?"

If my only experience of the protests was from what I read in the newspapers or saw on television, with all the doomsday headlines and cropped images of graphic violence, then yes, maybe I would be afraid. But what I have learned is that even in the midst of great conflict, everyday, practical life has a way of trudging along. While the superpowers of the world wage their petty wars, people still have lives to live. People still go to work. People still sit in the streets for dinner. People still fall in and out of love.

"I'm more worried about the transport situation," I say.

"The western tunnel will be open."

"No, I'll take the siubaa home with you."

"We used to do that a lot, didn't we," she says, "when we first started going out?"

"Number 81, right outside Pierre and Heloise."

"You were so pretentious back then, with your fancy blazer and your rich banker friends."

"Still worked on you, didn't it?" I say.

"Don't remind me. Those were dark days."

I reach for her hand, the tips of my fingers grazing her knuckles, half expecting her to pull back at our first contact of the night. But she does not. I keep my fingers on hers, stopping myself from fully grasping her hand.

"I miss this," I say. "Talking to you."

"Me too."

"How did things get so complicated?"

"Because Hong Kongers are complicated. And I'm not simple either." She smiles and lets her fingers slip out of mine as she leans back. "By the way," she says, nodding her chin towards my bowl, "has the sight of me ruined your appetite?"

It is only when she says this that I realize my soup has sat there untouched all night. But the only pang I feel is from nicotine withdrawal, a pang that I let sit and try to will away.

"I'm not as hungry as I thought I would be," I say.

"Well I am," she says. "You're not in a hurry, are you?"

"No, of course not," I say. "We should wait for Sailsbury Road to clear out anyway."

And so we savor our time.

We don't know it yet at this point, but after tonight, after we go our separate ways home, we'll try our best to make things work, but we won't succeed. We won't go back to our normal lives as if nothing ever happened. Everything will happen and we'll never go back.

~

In the last hours of our time together I walk Mui to the MTR station. We say our goodbyes but we don't leave. We find ourselves instead at the harbour, which is completely empty, with the brave at Kowloon Park, and the not-so-brave as far away from it as possible. It's too windy and too cold for comfort, but we sit anyway. We have between us six bottles of Blue Girl from the convenience store because I couldn’t stop Mui a second time. "It hardly seems to matter," she says. It hardly seems to matter. When there are no good decisions left to make, you might as well get comfortable with the bad ones.

In between gulps of beer, with her hair cast back against the wind, Mui says: "I know I called Hong Kong depressing, but she can be incredibly beautiful at night, don't you think?" I nod, if only to continue hearing her speak.

"The lights are so bright," she says. "Look at the Bank of China tower, over there, right at the top," she says, pointing into the distance. "Doesn’t that look like the Big Dipper? You can see all the other constellations too," she says, leading my gaze with her fingertips. "And if you sit here long enough, you'll see the constellations disappear as the shops and restaurants close for the night." She tongues the inside of her cheek, her eyes searching, as if trying to piece together a distant memory.

"What is it?" I ask.

"Disappear is not the right word," she says. "The constellations won't disappear. Their stars will go out, one after the other, the lights growing more and more distant, until the patterns become too scattered, too unrecognizable. What's the word for that?"

We go through a few iterations before settling on the word diminish. As the night wears on the constellations across the harbour diminish.

"It'll still be beautiful, don’t get me wrong," Mui says as she empties her last bottle of beer and reaches for mine. "It'll still be beautiful as long as you’re looking at it from afar. As long as you’re lucky enough to call someplace else home. As long as you don’t still have to be here when the stars are gone and the city turns into something you don’t recognize anymore. I don’t want to be here when that happens. And I sure as hell don't want to bring a child into this world only to have them suffer through it."

I squeeze Mui's hand to let her know, yes, I understand.

"What's it like," she says, "back home? Do you ever get afraid that one day it won't be home anymore?"

I don't reply, not because I don't want to, but because the question is rhetorical and the answer is cruel. No, I've never felt that fear before and no, I don't know what that feels like and no, I can't promise I ever will.

"My brother is at Kowloon Park," Mui tells me. "He feels like it's his duty because his generation is the one that will have to live with the consequences. I used to feel that way too," Mui says. "You think I don't care? I sat in a tent outside Civic Square for seventy days in 2014. But now that my brother is old enough to go to university it is my duty to work so he doesn't have to," she says. "I don't want him to lose hope. I don't want him to be like me. I'm not sure if things will ever get better but at least he can hope."

When I hear Mui say this I apologize to her, not out of sympathy, but out of an admittance of blindness. Homes are not eternal safe harbours to which we are entitled to return. I have been lucky and Mui has not. "But it is not luck," Mui says. "It is my mingwun, my fate."

The rest of the night passes quickly. We sit in silence, floating a cigarette between us, watching the lights across the water diminish, listening to the distant songs of the protests, which may be my imagination, or Mui humming softly beside me. By the time we do leave, we say our final goodbyes before she boards the siubaa alone. We wish each other well and make promises we will not keep. When she's gone I watch the sea throw itself against the breakwater. The rain returns, first in droplets, then in a relentless pour, as umbrellas blossom around me.

~ ~ ~

Marcus Tan is a writer from Singapore currently residing in Hong Kong. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in No Contact Magazine, The Lumiere Review, and Ethos Books’ anthologies Kepulauan and Unhomed. Visit him at marcus-tan.com