*Fiction — November 15, 2022
Coffin Nights
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I walk where the world is gray. I walk where yellow-flecked sludge creeps through walls of peeling white. I walk, walk, walk and lie.
There is red in my world, the color I wished I could have seen one day, standing before me, brocaded with gold or white, there. Glossed black hair. Blushing cheeks. Hawthorn eyes. Would’ve doomed her. We could’ve lain in my coffin together, and she’d push fraying hair back from her sallow cheeks with a gentle hand. And whisper.
Whisper to me. When have I spoken? I wear a freshly pressed suit, good and black. I carry shredded plastic bags and the perpetual tiredness that lingers around coffin nights. Coffin nights. I hear children at night, laughing around me. Sometimes they are real, and sometimes they float above my head, calling, calling, calling. I wonder what they’d do to me.
Red, red, red. A girl in red, like the blood I shed. Mosquitos come at night and find their way through my coffin doors, settle on my tobacco-stained shirt, on my hands, my legs. They light me with tiny pinpricks of fire, grow angry hills on my flesh, exasperate my ears.
A young girl. When was I a young boy? Time does not wear me down. My hair is still thick and dark. My face is the problem. A shiny mask pulled too tight, too close to splitting apart. If she had seen me when I was young, would she have known who I would become? Would she have seen the dull in my eyes? Would she have seen?
Hong Kong falls and folds around me. The city is cracked cement and stacked coffins, green cages and screaming red on tattered flags, ice-packed fish and brown-spotted vegetables, black hair, and black suits. Skyscrapers rimmed with neon, drooling blue artificial light onto packed streets, lean over me, laughing monsters. People swarm like ants. The more alike, the better. Who am I, with my belongings strapped to my chest and my brain bleeding out?
A dull circle floats above my vision. I see the moon through the haze, a burnished bronze, chipping, pieces falling like sparks on a computer wire.
Chipping, chipping, and bronze, spread so gloriously. Return to the gray.
Up an endless stairwell, cigarette butts worming into the treads of my shoe. Mold and muted air. The sign on the door displays a weary five, but I live on the fourth floor. I don’t like to think about that.
She. She. Red dress. Black hair. Again, and again. Red dress. Black hair.
I pry open the door to my steel coffin, the sound of my TV crackling, a crash of relief. I hang the bag I carry on a peg and sit on the mattress. I pull a blanket over me, the grooves of the weaving packed with crumbs. A news reporter interviews a girl, asking if she will wear a traditional pinyin.
It should not matter to me.
I close my eyes but leave the TV on. It is never off.
I am afraid of the dark.
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 10. View full issue & more.
2022 Young Writers' Prize for Prose, Honorable Mention