Jenny Wong

Jenny Wong is a writer, traveler, and occasional business analyst. Lately, her writings have been more about indoor things, but she still dreams about evening wanderings around Tokyo alleys, Singapore hawker centres, and Parisian cemeteries. She was a participant in Moving Words 2020 with ARTS By The People and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions. She resides in the foothills of Alberta, Canada. Find her on Twitter.

Overhead, the Night Sky is Stained with Light

Lia’s weekly laundry piles on the bed in front of her, just tumbled and warm from the dryer.  Her body is already fully folded.  Cross-legged.  Shoulders hunched.  Neck bent.  She squints at the stitch patterns in coal-black dress socks, matching them with their mates.  Her fingers pick at the edges of t-shirts and pinch along the seams.  Every flip and fold reduces an item’s size in order to stuff as many as possible into squeaky dresser drawers.  

      Tonight, she feels like company, so the TV is on.  The wide screen takes up a large chunk of wall space in her cramped bachelor suite.  Usually, she will click past the news.  But tonight, there is a special segment on Mt. Etna.  Amber and red pour down the volcano’s sides, bathing her white walls in an emergency-colored glow. The newscaster spouts words like “fury” and “wrath.”  Lia nods.  Awakenings need not be gentle.  

      A glimmer on the screen catches her eye.  The footage is from a cruise ship sailing past the volcano at night.  All is black except for two red sparks set into the simmering slope. She names them scarlet stars, earth-born and destined to burn out before they find a place in the sky.  The pair are quiet compared to an erupting molten rush, yet Lia feels their ruby rhythms flicker and pulse in her throat. An epicenter stirs.  She stretches her legs, unkinks her neck.  

Her mound of clothes grows cold, the weight pressing wrinkles into the cottons.  She no longer wants to fold and stuff them into tiny spaces in her tiny apartment.  

      The narration flips to a mid-day scene taken years after the last eruption.  New greenery edges footpaths and stones. Rivulets of lava rock, halted mid-boil and pebbled with debris decades ago, still cling to the mountainside like blackened fingers holding onto a few reminders of flame.  Terracotta roofs peek over rubble.  A red fox slinks across the road. A child’s orange watering can lays half submerged in ash. 

      The final clip is a rainy panorama of the summit.  Small droplets nick at exposed rock, and soak the thin topsoil.  But a cold storm cannot dispel the heat growing in Lia’s body, as if the volcano, although dormant and sleeping, shares its churning warmth from beneath.  She is the center of crater, mountain, island, ocean. Landscape ripples out from under her. And when the newscaster says that the volcano’s cap is so thick the next eruption might blow sideways instead of up, she closes her eyes.  

      A mouth cracks open in a glorious scream of fire.  

Packing Up

Friday afternoon.  My final Friday here.

      It took me twenty years to visit my little sister's cottage by the sea, a blue box topped with a triangle cap of grey wood shingles.  The four walls lean to one side in an overgrown yard of ferns, bracken, and bugleweed.  In this town, all things to pull towards the shore, towards a place they’d rather be.  

      There are not enough bedrooms, so for the past three weeks, I’ve spent my nights tucked sideways on their living room couch, bunking down with the stern red-brick fireplace and its saggy bookshelves.  As I sit on my makeshift bed, putting the final shoves on my repacked luggage, my brother-in-law, Jacques, slides a couple of old boxes across the floor with his foot.  The boxes come to a halt in the space between the coffee table and my knee caps.

      "Sam?" he asks.  “Can you do the last bit?”  He nods towards the disheveled bookshelves and their dusty contents.  "I have to pick up Maia."  

      My niece is twelve, and today is her last day of school before summer vacation.  I glance at my watch.  He'll arrive half-an-hour early if he leaves now, but I know it's Jacques' way of getting some space.

      I envy his opportunity to flee.  But that’s all I envy.  My head tilts towards the window and the constant, beckoning waters beyond.  "It'll be done by the time you get back," I say.       

      He rubs the pinched line over his left eyebrow.  "More boxes in the kitchen," he mumbles as he turns to go.  I’m not sure whether those words were meant as instruction to me or an observation for him.  I hear the scuffle of shoes, the click of a latch, and he's gone.

      The fireplace and I stare into the dead space between us.

The old paperbacks go quick and easy into boxes.  The lower shelves take more time and contain more haphazard contents. Odd shaped kiddie books, glossy fishing magazines, university text books on Greek Pottery from the Geometric Period (hers) and over a dozen well-used Haynes car manuals specializing in American vehicles (his).  I box and un-box these several times before Tetris-ing them into a sturdy crate that still holds a faint apple smell. 

      The last book is thick and black, a leatherbound beast wedged tight between shelves.  I attempt to coax it out with my fingers, but it holds fast. Eventually, I tighten my grip and heave. There is a short screech and the unfortunate crack of a shelf, but in the end, the book rests in my lap.

I lean my back against the couch and open the cover.  The heavy white pages are covered in plastic film, sharp at the edges, and only half full.  A photo album.  Flip.

      The honeymoon pictures.  New Orleans.  My brother-in-law is ever the tourist in his pale bread dough skin, sunglasses, and baseball cap.  His blond hairline a little thicker, his middle a little thinner.  The space over his left eyebrow is smooth and worry-line free.  

      My sister Sarah looks right at home among the Mardi Gras crowd, owning the festive atmosphere with a bold peace sign and a wink.  Her dark hair, a wild horse's mane, frames strings of cheap glitzy green beads swinging around her neck. There are many close-ups of Sarah, laughing, blushing, making faces.  Some are out of focus, blurry, but still kept for the memories, I guess.  Portraits from a man in love with his new wife.  Flip.  Flip.  Flip.

      The honeymoon series is followed by a merging of their early childhood photos.  There’s a montage dedicated to Sarah and me, dreaded baby photos included.  There’s Jacques' "Mom and Dad" and "Nanna", according to my sister's handwritten labels.  I met them at the wedding.   I don't actually remember their faces.  There were a lot of polyester hugs and stranger hand-shakes that day.  Not to mention a few rather loud indiscretions involving Asshole Uncle Len and a few drunken guests behind an unlocked janitor door.  Flip. 

      "Our First Home."  Moldy brown paint covers the walls.  Crooked purple cupboards hang in the kitchen.  

      After getting married, Sarah and Jacques moved to the other side of the country, which might've been the other side of the world for all the times we actually saw each other.  It takes me a minute to realize the rundown house in the photos is the same place I'm sitting in now.  I recognize the fireplace, the bookshelves, but the rest of the house was remodeled.  Sarah loved the place and Jacques, as it turned out, was a whiz with a sponge roller and hand saw.  Flip.

      Big puppy-love eyes stare back.  A large husky with a crazy tail and a love of red frisbees adorns the page.  Rodney? Ricki?

      "Riley" Sarah’s writing says.  I can almost hear her disapproval. 

      Riley sleeping.  Running.  Panting.  Riley in a big furry dog pile on a couch with a shaggy red Irish setter and a floppy eared German Shepherd.  "Riley, Hux, and Canton."  Flip.  Flip.

      Smiley happy friends I've never seen or heard of. "Dean, Marge, Cindy, Wes" are large big-boned people with white toothy smiles sitting and posing in front of barbeques, ball games, and large overstuffed couches. We perform our introductions in silence.  Flip.

      And then, it's all about Maia.  Her hospital bracelet.  Tiny ink footprints.  Maia sleeping, sticking out her little pink nubby tongue, wearing matching pink-striped outfits with Sarah.  I can tell Jacques commandeered the camera for the last few pictures, his blurry close-up style similar to that of his honeymoon photos.  True love found once again.  Flip.

      Maia's preschool pictures come next, and a few local trips to the seaside.  I recognize one or two that were sent to me over the years.  Another few pages are devoted to Maia's crafts and other handiwork.  Letters written in the uneven but careful blocky letters of a child.  "Dear bruther or sistr in mummy's tummy" one began.  They'd never had a second child.  Sarah told me they were trying once, but I'd never heard more about it after that.  Flip.

      The remaining photos are of happy events.  Flip.  Flip.  Flip.

      Birthdays.  Christmases.  Playtimes.  Before bedtimes. 

      The before times.  Before the diagnosis, before the surface of her flesh sunk towards her bones.  Before we sunk her into the coldness of the earth.  

      The last pages are empty.  I wonder if they’ll remain that way or if there are more photos, somewhere on film and memory cards, to re-emerge once the storm of grief has passed.

      The door clicks open. 

      Bare feet slap towards me on the wood floors.  Dark hair flies.  A horse’s mane.  Thick, tangled.  Warm twelve-year-old arms are thrown around my neck, squeezing tight, but they feel older, more familiar, like a pair of arms I’ve known since childhood.  I blink, my vision becoming blurry with wetness, like driving lost in a rainstorm, or sifting through the remainders of old memories locked in paper and chemicals and light.