The Astonishing Color of After(60)

I try to shake the fog from my head. Everything’s looking jagged and cracked, speckled with black ink. I know it’s just my insomniac haze, and not the actual world. But I can’t help feeling like everything is starting to break.

This morning there is no one beneath the gazebo in the park, so Waigong and I have claimed one of its benches.

All around us: the chorus of cicadas, the conversations of little birds.

On the wooden table, there’s a square tablet made of stone, with white lines etched into it, drawing a system of grids. There are Chinese characters carved across the center. It is a board game. I wonder what the pieces are—if they’re round like coins, if they’re engraved with the hooks and strokes of more Chinese characters.

My grandfather runs his fingers over the board.

And then I have an idea. I pull out my phone and swipe past the first two screens until I find the right app. “Look! Want to play?”

Waigong doesn’t say anything, only frowns at the phone.

I hold up four fingers. “All you need to do is get four in a row. Then you win.” I point to myself and then place the first piece. I take his finger and tap the screen to make Player Two’s move. It’s the quickest game, and I let him win since it’s just a demo.

There’s a spark behind his eyes. I think he understands.

“Okay, so now let’s play for real,” I tell him.

As soon as it loads, he’s jabbing at the screen with his thumb, placing his piece right in the center.

We go back and forth. I’m so focused on strategizing that I’m careless, and suddenly he’s got four in a row and he’s won.

My grandfather glows, his cheeks rounding, mouth opening wide with quiet laughter. He rocks back and forth, looking pleased as linden green.

I win the next two games, but still he grins at me, totally thrilled, as if he’s the winner no matter the outcome.

The trees along the path reach up into the clouds, leaves gently swaying. We walk slowly, searching again for the perfect flower. I look carefully in every direction, trying to come up with an idea about how to use my net. I wonder if the bird ever comes here.

It’s on our way back that Waigong stops me with an arm and points to something on the thick branch of a tree at just about eye level.

A lone brown cicada, this one alive, swelling and pulling, swelling and pulling.

It’s molting.

We watch, transfixed, as it pushes its way out of the back, where the shell has opened like a costume unzipped. Slowly, the fresh body wriggles out, a pale summery green. The new legs kick a few times, inky eyes shining like they know everything of the world. Wrinkled, cabbage-like bunches unfurl themselves from the sides, smoothing out into long wings, green at the edges and translucent in the centers, tissue paper soft.

Its husk, brown and stiff, clings to the branch. A ghost left behind.





63





Did my mother ever get to see a cicada molting?

Did she wish that she could do exactly that? Shed her skin and be someone new?

There were the days when she seemed to transform into something quieter, darker. Her colors deeper but also muted. Both her truer self, and not.

Or maybe it wasn’t a transformation. Maybe it was a momentary reveal. A peeling back of the protective layers.

A sharpening of a pencil, bringing the tip to its most focused point.





64





Back at the apartment, everything seems quieter. Waipo smiled at this morning’s flower—a single stem shooting off into a patch of tiny coral blossoms, so cheerfully star-shaped—but still. Today she looks especially tired. Her features drooping, her eyes a bit darker.

As she ladles fluffy white congee into bowls, she glances at the door.

She misses Feng.

Her somber mood is my fault. The guilt drops heavily into the pit of my stomach, and shame wraps around me like the prickly side of Velcro, sharpens the thought that I’ve done so much wrong.

Naphthol red—the color of an angry pen marking the errors I’ve made.

In the living room, I watch Waipo scrape at the head of a match. In her other hand, the long stick of incense trembles. For a millisecond, the tip takes on its own little flame before dimming to a vague touch of light and heat. A whisper of life, issuing ash and smoke, salting the air.

Waigong leans back on the couch, watching music videos with the volume dialed all the way down. There’s a singer dressed like a pirate, holding a miniature version of himself in his palm. I blink, and in the next moment, he’s dancing with a posse of guys in masks.

“Waipo,” I say. “Lai.”

She looks up at me.

“Lai kan.” I have an idea for how to distract her, how to make her feel better.

“Kan shenme?” she asks. See what?

But I don’t know how to answer with words. I pull her by the elbow toward the guest room. We slide past inky cracks that stretch along the walls wider and higher than I am tall. We walk past a huge, gaping hole in one corner of the apartment. An abyss so black and empty it makes me shiver. The ceiling above almost completely cracked. Thin black lines fissure outward.

Of course, my grandmother doesn’t see any of this.

It’s my insomniac sight—I think of it as a superpower. The thought almost makes me smile.

When we get to my room, Waipo slumps down to sit on the bed.