The Astonishing Color of After(15)

Morning light peels in around the dusty edges of the curtain. I drag the fabric aside for a look at the city.

My gaze locks on two eyes, shiny and round, the color of flames, but inky in the centers. They’re just beyond the bars outside my window, intensely focused on me. There’s a beak, long and charcoal black and pointed. Bold red feathers curl up and back into a crest atop its head.

The air sticks in my throat; my stomach clenches. Panic and relief swirl in my head, a mess of oranges and yellows.

“Mom?” I reach for her and my fingertips land too hard against the glass. The bird snaps her head aside, startled. She angles her beak toward the clouds and opens it wide. Her scream rips across the sky, vibrates against the window.

She launches up and away, one claw slipping off the metal, tearing into the screen behind the glass.

My bedroom door bursts open, and Waipo stumbles in, looking about wildly.

“Mama” is all I say before I rush around her and into the hallway, my feet scrambling to find their place in a pair of shoes—any pair. I throw the front door open and skip the elevator, racing down the stairs, the sandals on my feet slightly too big and slap-slap-slapping.

“Leigh!” Waipo calls from above, but I’m already at the bottom, shoving my way out into the morning light.

Where is she?

I try to slow my breath, get enough air into my lungs so I can think. At the end of the alley, I swing right to get behind the building my grandparents call home.

Why is it so dark now?

My eyes search for the window with the slash in its screen.

The sky opens up and warm rain dumps down hard. Within seconds, the water has claimed every inch of me.

There’s no sign of the bird anywhere. I look up and all I see is the wide, flat gray.

“Leigh!” Waipo’s panting hard as she pulls a plastic poncho over me one-handed. She stretches out her umbrella, a pastel-pink thing with a broken spoke, and mutters something about rain. I can barely hear the words over the noise of the storm.

Back at the apartment, she finds me some fresh clothes. She towels off my hair, blows it dry, the air pouring hot and fast. How strange it is to have her fingers against my scalp, so gentle and certain. With my eyes closed, they feel just like my mother’s hands.





The first thing I notice when I blink my eyes open is the fan on the chair buzzing as the blades spin. The sound makes me think of summer bugs skimming over grass, of sitting in a field and sketching trees with a charcoal nub, Axel making a face as he checked whether a spot on his leg was a tick, a blue sky smoothed out flat like a sheet.

Some strange, unexplainable compulsion makes me roll out of bed and walk over to the dresser. I pull open the top left drawer and find the inside empty except for two things:

A curved Winsor red feather. And a slim, rectangular box I’ve never seen.

The feather is what I pick up first. It’s slightly oily between my fingers, smelling strongly of a wild musk. It looks so much like the other feather I have from the bird. Was this left as a message? How is it that I didn’t know what I would find, but somehow I knew exactly where to look?

The box is approximately the right size and shape for holding a letter opener—or maybe a feather—and made of a stiff cardboard material that’s so old and worn it’s gone soft. My fingertips come away gray; it’s coated in a layer of silty dust. The whole thing is a faded marigold orange with Chinese characters printed on it vertically in red:





The only character I recognize is the one with just two strokes. Ren. It means people.

The lid comes away easily enough, just like the top of a shoe box, scraping away with a light shushing sound as if to warn of its contents: long sticks smelling of smoke and wreckage and used-up matches. A scent like a mess of colors swirling into darkness.

Incense. Roughly the same size and shape as the sticks burning atop my grandparents’ altar, except these are solid black. I lift one out carefully, overcome with the strong urge to light it. Between my thumb and finger, it’s strangely hot, like it’s been warming in the sun.

And then: the whispering. The tiniest, most hushed of voices. It’s coming from the incense.

I bring it close to my ear—

A knock at the door makes me jump.

“Hold on—deng yixia!” I call, scrambling to shove the box and the feather back in the drawer, and dropping onto the bed just as the door squeaks open.

Waipo looks at me through the crack, her face hesitant.

“Hi,” I say, my heart slamming in my ears. I don’t know why I felt like I had to hide anything. Why I’m weirdly nervous now.

My grandmother beckons me out. “Lai chi zaocan,” she says.

Zaocan. Breakfast. Right. A stab of guilt—have they been waiting for me all this time?

Her gaze drops to something next to the bed. She makes a beeline toward the nightstand and picks up my mother’s necklace, holding the cicada pendant up to a sliver of sun peeking out from behind the curtain. The light catches on the jade. She points at me and smiles as she says the next thing.

All I understand is ni. You. Before I can try to guess, she’s leaning over me, sweeping my hair to one side, clasping the chain around my neck.

The weight of the cicada settles against my sternum. Waipo takes my hand, pulling me to my feet.

There’s so much food on the dining table. I recognize the fried cruller sticks glistening with oil; youtiao—my mother’s favorite, I remember with a pang. And the rectangular shaobing flatbread. Then there are all the things I’ve never seen before. Steamed rectangular cakes drizzled with a dark sauce. A bowl of some kind of vegetable, pale and spongy. Sliced pieces of a rolled crepe with a glistening white skin. A strange brownish soup.