Fish Bones
by Angela Huo| Grade 11 | Scholastic 2022 | Short Story | Silver Medal
The Spring Festival – always plenty of good food and joy. By custom, the two of us would stick paper cut-outs to every empty wall. Paper lanterns, paper streamers, paper animals, wrapping the house to safeguard against evil. Tonight is different, though; I am alone. But paper cuttings still ripple like sheaths of silk, drifting through the hallways in wraiths. They are hong se, red, lucky – three synonymous ideas. I stand here now and consider myself blessed because a red thread has consistently interwoven itself into the swells of my life. It’s been so long that I can’t imagine my memories draped in anything but red:
The flushed lips of my son Jianyu. Poppy red. Chapped but always pulled back into a smile. And even if they weren’t, a mole on the corner of his mouth gave the illusion they were. This too I remember: Jianyu hated the annual steamed fish that lounged in the center of the table. With the pads of his dirty fingers he poked its bulbous head until the eyes lolled away from him.
“It’s staring at me! Let’s get rid of it, for just this one year,” he whispered tenderly, as if the dead fish could hear us.
“You know that’s unlucky.”
“But still. How ‘bout next year? Or next, next year?”
If he was here today, I would listen.
I pull up the Spring Festival Gala, chunwan, on my laptop and set it on top of the weathered piano in the living room. Golden swirls of cloth and static-laced applause keep me company as tradition watches over like a ghostly visitor. On the newspaper covered countertop, a batch of pork buns rests on paper lily pads while in front of me, mounds of egg and chive scatter across the cutting board. I seesaw a knife back and forth across the pile, watching as the light from flame-filled lanterns glides from one edge of the blade to the other. Overlooking it all, a whole snapper fish lies like a sacrifice at an altar, its spine curved but supported on both ends by the brim of a glass pan. Opaque eyes stare up with slitted pupils. If I stare for too long, its rubbery lips might gasp open. The fish asks of me: “Will it be this year? Or next year? Or next, next year?”
Which year will it be, Jianyu, that you finally come home?
Crepe paper lanterns flood all corners of the house with liquid amber, except one. One, which has long since been tucked into abandonment’s cold embrace. In Jianyu’s bedroom, traces of a lingering spirit remain. His story presents itself frozen in time, on walls and the floor and the air itself. Ironed clothes, prepared but never worn. New volumes of Suzuki, opened but never marked. Photographs of friends, colleagues, himself, never of me. Held with hesitant fingerprints, but set down and left behind.
Below this surface facade there are hints of someone else, too. A cookie tin hidden under his bed frame is sealed close with dozens of paper stickers. I peel away one, then two. What lies inside? The anchoring roots of a blossoming dream, perhaps. Something forbidden and worth protecting. Paper stickers, stuck on here and there, the corners still crisp and pristine, decorating the floor in a growing pile. Passions ruptured and unearthed — was it by me?
I slide the tin box back under the bed, stripped of its paper protection but unopened.
***
I remember Jianyu’s face before his performance, a manic mask as he pummeled the piano keys. They were off tune, crooked, scraping and gasping for air. He glanced up from time to time to make sure I noticed.
I remember how he seethed. How a pencil snapped in his tense fingers, how he slammed the door to his room and twisted the lock. Always with that permanent smile. I kicked his door in rage, crashing into the door frame over and over but it wouldn’t budge.
I remember beads of cherry red falling from my foot.
What I don’t remember is his hand, or the sting on my right cheek. Only the humiliating blush that bloomed in its wake, washing over my skin like a spilled glass of wine.
***
Red: luck, fortune, but also desolation. Against my wishes, Jianyu’s face floods my mind– where is he now? Happy at last, perhaps. I see my son’s back bent over a piano, eyes straining too close to black and white keys. Languid notes pour out as easily as breathing, sweet and delicate, the kind that pops in your mouth like caviar. I sit down at the dining table. His wooden chair directly across from mine is cold. Which feels wrong. I kneel down and gently brush off the dust with a damp rag.
The table creaks under rows of dishes. The steaming tray of fish, a sheer mountain of black bean noodles, masses of dumplings, and pudgy stuffed buns. The chunwan ends on farewells and hopes that the audience will join again next year. I sit back and sigh. The silence is full: a rawness trapped within the house, lustful, somehow gory. Any second now, a knock at the door and Jianyu’s pale frame will appear in the doorway. But the hours tick by from twelve to one, from one to two. Rice congeals in the pot, a layer of oil pools in the noodles, a sheet of cooled fat glimmers on rosy fish scales. I check the time – two thirty in the morning.
Swallowing once, I pick up a pair of wooden chopsticks and scoop a pork bun into my bowl. Pride hangs heavy as I gulp down a soggy chunk. Cotton clogs my chest with a warm fuzziness. Not the secure kind, either, but the kind that bubbles up to your throat and leaks out in reluctant tears. The steamed fish swims in front of me, blurred by a haze of heartache, but if I squint through the blur I can make out a faint shape sitting in front of me: my son.
I smile, and pray for another year of good fortune to JianYu.
hong se: red color
