We are sitting in the kitchen when I ask her if she still loves me.

As she answers, she begins to remove all of the things I don’t like from a paper container of fried rice—the peas, the carrots, the chicken—until there is nothing left but browned rice and slimy onions.

I feel her doing the same thing with her words—spoon feeding me answers of little substance because she thinks I like the taste of them, how easily they slip down to my stomach.

She’s right. I eat it all.

I’m still hungry late into the night.

It is in August when the rains fall thickly and your ghost disappears. I am seated on the porch swing, my feet dusting the floorboards, our farm fields overrun and expansive in the distance. I am work-weary, grief-stricken, manifesting moisture of any sort. Our son joins me, his hair tousled by the day, his feet a soft padding down the hallway. I saw Peter’s ghost, he says, pausing to shovel blueberries into his mouth. I saw Peter’s ghost on my bed when I woke, and I wish I could see you like he does: Peter’s ghost sat next to me on the bus, Peter’s ghost did a cannonball off the diving board and soaked my whole class, Peter’s ghost rubbed my back while I barfed in the bathroom.

But I don’t see you at all.

You mean Dad, I whisper in our son’s ear, pulling him closer, he was your dad.

Our son cries and I rock us back and forth. The air is unmoving, stale.

You used to join me here at dusk, when the falling light made it dangerous to flail blackberries along the ditches, when you couldn’t hold the steering wheel or shovel a fence post any longer. You’d rub my feet, I’d rub your hands. We’d light a fire, watch our son marvel at the magic surrounding him.

Tonight, our son will wake next to me on the porch swing sobbing. He will say: I saw Peter’s ghost at the barn, at the barn, at the barn, and, for the hundredth time, I will wish he hadn’t followed me there that night. That I hadn’t told you I was worried about the rains. The run-off from the river. The momentum that builds when water has nowhere to go.

“It’s cold in here,” the woman says, lighting a cigarette, blue smoke catching in the light of the laser.

“It needs to be cold to work,” I say, “and there’s no smoking in here.”

In the reflection of my computer screen, I notice her looking around the lab. Her left arm sticking up, the still-lit cigarette in between thin fingers, right arm around her waist supporting the left elbow.

“I need to know why you’re here,” I say, punching in the code for the entanglement.

“Why?”

My chair squeaks unprofessionally as I spin around, “Because, what if I send you to another reality where whatever brought you here has already happened?”

I wait. This was usually the time where either the reality of what they were about to do hit them or their brain began doubting what I was saying.

Her body slumps a little, “My son died.”

I nod and spin back around with a counter squeak from my chair. Typing in random coordinates, I let the quantum machine hum on the desk. The black box was doing its job. It would be a few minutes before she spoke again.

“Is that it?” she steps over, staring the flat black box.

It was unimpressive at best. I could hear it in her voice. Just a small six-inch square metal cube, humming as if thinking, which it was.

“Yep.”

I took in the full measure of this woman. Tall, well-dressed, nails impeccably done, hair unimaginably soft with expensive products. She had money. It wasn’t cheap to buy a new life, a new reality where the tragedy never happened. Or a new life where they were rich, or a woman, or man, or had no children, or their mothers loved them. But these days, it was mostly a dead kid. Word must be spreading.

“How long?” she asks.

“Couple minutes.”

On the edges of the machine, I could already see the white frost. It was working hard, finding the right coordinates to send this lady back where her son was alive and well.

“How does it work?’ she steps closer to the oblong ring in the center of the room. A see-through sheet of clear glass covering the opening.

“I don’t know.”

Twisting in surprise, her perfectly tailored eyebrows raise. “You don’t know?”

“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” I smile at my joke.

The temperature drops ten degrees as the glass on the portal changes.

“It’s a mirror now,” the woman whispers.

Letting the air out of my lungs, I say, “It’s not a…seriously, didn’t you read the contract?”

Hugging herself against the cold, she stares at the woman staring back at her, “Most of it.”

“It’s a reflection from a similar world as ours. She’s you, looking at you from another dimension. Okay?”

Raising her hand, she waves at herself in the next world.

“She’s not the one I’m going to replace, is it?” stepping closer to the aperture.

“No, but that’s the closest world to ours, so it comes up first.” I kept typing, the humming box slows, and the cold stabilizes. By this time, it was nearly forty degrees in the lab.

“So, I just walk through here and boom, I’m back with my son?”

“More or less.”

Another flash and the woman in the reflection is gone, only a copy of my lab staring back.

“Hey, where did I go?” she says, upset.

“Well, the other you is probably doing something else. Like at work or with your husband,” I hesitate, “Or with your kid.”

The words sting. Enough for her straighten her back and almost jump through the portal. This was the moment.

“There’s a little business we need to take care of,” I say casually.

Shaking hands pull a silver ring from her pocket, she touches it to mine. On the outer ring, my credits jump six figures.

Reaching over, I pull out a silver box and open it. Taking out the small device, I walk over and hand it to her. “Now, you do know what happens next?”

“I go across, and my son’s alive.”

“Jesus, did you read any of the contract?” I mutter, dropping the round object into her hand.

“Oh, you mean the fine print? Yeah, I read it. I need to kill the other me, then take over her life.”

I nod, “Place this within ten feet of her, and there’ll be nothing left.”

Hefting the ball, the woman asks, “Then what?”

“Then you live with the guilt.”

A curt laugh escapes her lips, “No guilt here, buddy. Besides, it’s me, right? I can’t really feel guilty replacing myself?”

I don’t answer. Instead, I say, “Safe trip.”

She’s two feet from the portal.

“Now?” she asks.

“Anytime.”

Placing the ball in her pocket, the woman steps through the glass window, disappearing from this world.

“What happened?” she asks, stunned.

“Jesus, did you read any of the contract?” I ask.

“Yeah, but...”

“You went through. I’m the other guy in the other lab.”

It always took a few seconds for their brains to figure it out. Multiverses, other dimensions, portals. And I look slightly different.

“You know where to go?” I ask.

Her face changes; she knew where to go. It was her life, after all.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t get caught,” I call out as the woman leaves.

“Hey.”

I turn and see myself looking out of the portal.

“Hey,” I say back.

“Did you send anyone today?” I ask.

“Yeah, he wanted to be rich. What’s with her?” I nod to the door.

“Dead kid.”

“Damn,” I say.

“Things used to be so simple. Now there’s all this emotional baggage they bring with them. I mean killing yourself, who does that?”

Staring at myself, I look well dressed, thinner, and have a wedding ring. Turning back, I mark the coordinates in the computer and smile.

“It’s a lot to think about,” I tell him.

For the unfamiliar, IFComp is the biggest event in the IF community, with usually 50+ entrants each year. The link is to all the games—which are, of course, free. Consider becoming a judge or donating to the prize pool!

For the familiar—what are your favourites this year? Which game do you think will win?

image

One summer she goes into the field as usual stopping for a bit at the pool where she often looks at herself, to see if she detects any changes. She sees the same person, the horrible mantle of daughterliness still clinging to her.

The sun seems, in the water, very close. That's my uncle spying again, she thinks— everything in nature is in some way her relative. I am never alone, she thinks, turning the thought into a prayer. Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer.

No one understands anymore how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers. Also that he embraced her, right there, with her uncle watching. She remembers sunlight flashing on his bare arms.

This is the last moment she remembers clearly. Then the dark god bore her away.

She also remembers, less clearly, the chilling insight that from this moment she couldn't live without him again.

The girl who disappears from the pool will never return. A woman will return, looking for the girl she was.

She stands by the pool saying, from time to time, I was abducted, but it sounds wrong to her, nothing like what she felt. Then she says, I was not abducted. Then she says, I offered myself, I wanted to escape my body. Even, sometimes, I willed this. But ignorance

cannot will knowledge. Ignorance wills something imagined, which it believes exists.

All the different nouns— she says them in rotation. Death, husband, god, stranger. Everything sounds so simple, so conventional. I must have been, she thinks, a simple girl.

She can't remember herself as that person but she keeps thinking the pool will remember and explain to her the meaning of her prayer so she can understand whether it was answered or not.

Image link

After attending a talk where Kuo Jiang Hong spoke about how she once asked her mother whether her late father, Kuo Pao Kun, was really a Communist. (Further context for non-Singaporeans: in our country's early years, the government was very militant in purging all traces of communism. Kuo Pao Kun, a playwright who wrote very political plays, was detained for over four years without trial on communist conspiracy charges, among others.)

The flipside of a conviction is an acquittal. The upside of total despair is my denial. There can be no downside. There can be no middle ground in this memory of home written on bare walls. One man's life pivots upon a cutting edge so let's pray the wind doesn't blow. When innocence falls by the wayside the flipside of anger is a calm demeanour. But silence can be a strength, just as too many words can be troublesome. Do not trade kisses for hard knocks. Do not trade your eye for my tooth. There are nightmares we do not rise from while too much time has taken flight. The curbside of a road is where the wildflowers come to life. The flipside of a flipside brings us somewhere else. And we cannot be sure if we have turned or returned. In the end there is only my conviction. Do not doubt me or your father. Just come warm your frigid hands by the fireside. The flipside of a prolonged winter is this incandescent bulb that pretends to be the sun.

image

And Still It Comes

like a downhill brakes-burned freight train full of pig iron ingots, full of lead life-size statues of Richard Nixon, like an avalanche of smoke and black fog lashed by bent pins, the broken-off tips of switchblade knives, the dust of dried offal, remorseless, it comes, faster when you turn your back, faster when you turn to face it, like a fine rain, then colder showers, then downpour to razor sleet, then egg-size hail, fist-size, then jagged laser, shrapnel hail thudding and tearing like footsteps of drunk gods or fathers; it comes polite, loutish, assured, suave, breathing through its mouth (which is a hole eaten by a cave), it comes like an elephant annoyed, like a black mamba terrified, it slides down the valley, grease on grease, like fire eating birds’ nests, like fire melting the fuzz off a baby’s skull, still it comes: mute and gorging, never to cease, insatiable, gorging and mute.

image

For Detroit

There are birds here, so many birds here is what I was trying to say when they said those birds were metaphors for what is trapped between buildings and buildings. No. The birds are here to root around for bread the girl’s hands tear and toss like confetti. No, I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton, I said confetti, and no not the confetti a tank can make of a building. I mean the confetti a boy can’t stop smiling about and no his smile isn’t much like a skeleton at all. And no his neighborhood is not like a war zone. I am trying to say his neighborhood is as tattered and feathered as anything else, as shadow pierced by sun and light parted by shadow-dance as anything else, but they won’t stop saying how lovely the ruins, how ruined the lovely children must be in that birdless city.

image form

Because my husband would not read my poems, I wrote one about how I did not love him. In lines of strict iambic pentameter, I detailed his coldness, his lack of humor. It felt good to do this.

Stanza by stanza, I grew bolder and bolder. Towards the end, struck by inspiration, I wrote about my old boyfriend, a boy I had not loved enough to marry but who could make me laugh and laugh. I wrote about a night years after we parted when my husband's coldness drove me from the house and back to my old boyfriend. I even included the name of a seedy motel well-known for hosting quickies. I have a talent for verisimilitude.

In sensuous images, I described how my boyfriend and I stripped off our clothes, got into bed, and kissed and kissed, then spent half the night telling jokes, many of them about my husband. I left the ending deliberately ambiguous, then hid the poem away in an old trunk in the basement.

You know how this story ends, how my husband one day loses something, goes into the basement, and rummages through the old trunk, how he uncovers the hidden poem and sits down to read it.

But do you hear the strange sounds that floated up the stairs that day, the sounds of an animal, its paw caught in one of those traps with teeth of steel? Do you see the wounded creature at the bottom of the stairs, his shoulders hunched over and shaking, fist in his mouth and choking back sobs? It was my husband paying tribute to my art.

Image version (original is also right-aligned but i couldn't do that in lemmy)

The first sound was the quieting of my fingers brushing the first, brief shocks of hair from your head. Still. There when our father said we had five seconds to cry before he’d get angry or cry himself. When the child psychiatrist watched you play with ghosts, diagnosed seems like a perfectly happy child to me. Am I

both or neither of us now? My fingers through your hair aren’t so much fingers anymore. My touch not so much touch. Only breeze, your dark hair like mine, this absence you’ll hear now and for the rest of our lives. Half-drowned tree in the lake shrouded in mist. Listening, beyond the doorway of that haunted shore where you wake from every dream, our mother saying, I speak with the dead. If I can

reach and hold across this always, these galaxies, your forehead like a steaming cup to my lips. If I can mouth my silent swan- song into you, know this without my saying it: Brother, lend your ear. There are many different ways to sing yourself to sleep. Like in your head? Our father pleads. No, she mouths. Like I’m speaking to you now.

Image version

To pull the metal splinter from my palm my father recited a story in a low voice. I watched his lovely face and not the blade. Before the story ended, he’d removed the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale, but hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer. And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness he laid against my face, the flames of discipline he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon you would have thought you saw a man planting something in a boy’s palm, a silver tear, a tiny flame. Had you followed that boy you would have arrived here, where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down so carefully she feels no pain. Watch as I lift the splinter out. I was seven when my father took my hand like this, and I did not hold that shard between my fingers and think, Metal that will bury me, christen it Little Assassin, Ore Going Deep for My Heart. And I did not lift up my wound and cry, Death visited here! I did what a child does when he’s given something to keep. I kissed my father.