MOTHER DEEREST
My headphones successfully block all the construction noise of Washington Heights outside, but not the voices living in my head. They’re a chorus of songs I’ve never heard before in languages I don’t speak. They speak of people whose names are foreign to me, perhaps picked out of random pages from Nai Nai’s old telephone book. They show me stories of rickshaws and markets open only on Sundays and laughter shared over Chinese New Year meals.
These voices grow too loud, a deafening cacophony that renders me paralyzed. When they do, the accompanying images aren’t the sepia-tinted, nostalgia-infused family album pictures of a warm dinner table or a newborn baby’s first time coming home. It’s black-and-white and marred with static lines, haphazard and crackling, transporting me into a world that exists only in my head, that feels too real to be plain imagination. Invisible monsters gnaw on my emotions and turn me into a hollow person until it chooses to subside. They always come with a sharp stab in my stomach. Always freaks my boyfriend out whenever I petrify and stop blinking for a couple seconds.
These horrendous horrors started nearly a year ago, becoming wilder as I’m nearing my twenty-eighth birthday on the next sunrise. Every day they come and go whenever they want, oftentimes as a rude awakening in the middle of my sleep. Midnights are filled with banshee screeches and stabbing pain under the skin of my stomach. Under those circumstances, there’s only one thing I could do: grab my tin of graphite chalks and art paper. Moonlight illuminates my tiny desk and guides my fingers as the images pounce out of my head and spill onto the sheets. No one believes me when I say I’m not an artist, telling me the sketches strung up around this corner of our small brownstone beg to differ. People call me ridiculous when I say my hands take a life of its own once my fingers are wrapped around those chalks. I never mean it as a metaphor.
Pushing off my desk, I pull off my headphones and gaze at the hand-drawn enigmas strewn across the walls, as if watching me. Some are fantastical and dark. Like my most recent, where the black graphite shrouds the paper like dense plumes of smoke. But jagged tendrils make it unmistakably recognizable as fire. Flames shoot upward, licking up fourteen finless koi. Or this one, an emerald deer without its front legs prancing among tall wild grass next to two headless tigers conjoined by their rears submerged halfway in black water.
Others are more lifelike—a busy farmer’s market, a congested intersection, or a warung with its curtains drawn. But there’s always an unsettling aura emanating from the disorderly lines of these realistic drawings. The market stalls are empty, cars lie overturned across the busy streets, and a broken plank obstructs the only entrance of the warung.
None of these are the Philly streets I grew up on; I recognize them as Jakarta from the pictures Papa showed me, where he and Mama came from. The city where Papa’s favorite nasi goreng was, where Mama gave birth to me. The city that rises the same time the sun does but doesn’t sleep when the moon is out. That bustles with life and burning passion.
The city where Mama’s soul lives on even though her body doesn’t.
Who knows her even though her child doesn’t, because the city killed her first in the wake of its darkest moment for our people.
I never knew what she looked like. The stories she would’ve told to put me to sleep died with her when Papa boarded that plane with nothing but his only baby and the clothes off his back. He never told me how Mama died, and that’s probably best for both of us. After all, we don’t find life among the dead.
Climbing back into bed, I reply to Dad’s text confirming his visit in the morning. After I turn my phone off, I try to sleep. The moment I close my eyes, a soft breeze tickles my skin, licking the crevices between my toes. Despite the sweltering summer, the breeze is cool. Cold, even, like smoke from dry ice. All my windows are tightly shut, too, a habit Papa nurtured since my childhood. “So the looters can’t get in, right?” I kept on telling him nonchalantly. But he never liked me saying that.
I put a sweater on, but no amount of fabric can wick off the cold. Goosebumps run up and down my skin as the icy mist swirling under my skin swells. As if it’s coming from inside me.
Tension squeezes its talons around my chest, and I writhe, buck my back, gasp for air. I try to scream, but with the air knocked out of my lungs, I can’t reach my voice. Gritting my teeth, I push upward with whatever strength I could muster. My nails dig into the skin on my palms, hard enough to draw blood, but not strong enough to break the surface.
Then I’m catapulted upwards, sitting up straight. My stomach churns with the threat of vomit. I swallow the bile that rises to the back of my throat. It’s happening again. The voices, a thunderstorm of crackling static and cataclysmic uproar, more violent than ever.
Fighting past the paralysis, I leap into my desk chair. Despite the obstinate quiver of my hands, they manage to tightly grip the graphite chalk. It disappears into my fist, manifesting as scraggly black lines slicing and splitting the sheets of yellow paper splayed on the desk as my hands glide over them. I beat my own allegations of not being an artist as a face takes form— misshapen head, horror-filled eyes, lips frozen in a scream for help.
A single continuous beep occupies the hollow of my skull. My head throbs with the squall of angry mobs, turning the frost inside me into a searing burn. Heat blooms across my skin. Like a knife slashing my flesh, sharp pain twists my stomach. No matter how much I wince or try to scream, this pandemonium doesn’t end.
Phantasmic memories of a dystopian city cloud my mind. Smoke rising from unfinished skyscrapers stings my eyes, the rancid smell of burning rubber punctures my nostrils. A primal fear grapples my chest as I draw skeletons of cars with broken windows and missing tires, burning buildings, and Chinese grocery stores being looted. Crying mothers holding their crying children for dear life as men run around them with sticks and batons. Streets cry from under piles of debris and ashes. A tsunami of people crashes against cops in brown uniforms. Anarchy like I’ve never experienced but seem to remember vividly.
My fingers drag across the mental images I’ve transferred onto the paper. Bedlam melts under my fingertips, swirling into ghosts of this imagination that transcends reality, this memory that breaks the threshold of cognition.
I clutch my head as the uproar in my head swells. When I open my mouth to scream, a high-pitched shriek comes out. It isn’t my voice. I scramble to my vanity and meet a reflection with bloodshot eyes. But that isn’t me.
It’s a beautiful Chinese woman. Round cheeks, wavy hair in a messy bun, a thin wisp of scarlet streaming down the corner of her lips. Misshapen head, horror-filled eyes, lips frozen in a scream for help. I collapse to the floor with tears running down my cheeks, the twisting stab in my stomach intensifying. I curl into a fetal position as I clutch myself, as if on the precipice of death.
My apartment door barrels open. I look up and see my boyfriend stumbling in, what I suppose was meant as my neatly wrapped surprise gift freefalling from his hand. My dad totters in behind him. “Robin, what’s going on?”
“The woman,” I pant. A familiar stranger—a face I’ve never seen, but her memories latch onto mine.
Outside, the indigo sky has been replaced by a mellow blue, the sun replacing the haunt of the moon’s silver. Papa helps me up from one side as Antonio props my shoulder from the other. Antonio tends to me, wrapping me in his real arms and trying to return my own memories to me. Usually it works, but right now, it doesn’t.
Then Papa sits beside me, last night’s drawing in his hand. His tears blot the paper.
“That’s her, isn’t it?” I ask. “May 14, 1998. She was stabbed in the stomach. That’s why we came here.”
“She was twenty-eight when she died.” Papa’s eyes are a mix of horror and wonder. “She was a brilliant artist.”
This is impossible. My heart gallops with the realization, my chest tightening. I look at myself in the mirror again. The woman screams back at me, and I’m not me anymore.
Because how can you remember something you didn’t experience?
These voices grow too loud, a deafening cacophony that renders me paralyzed. When they do, the accompanying images aren’t the sepia-tinted, nostalgia-infused family album pictures of a warm dinner table or a newborn baby’s first time coming home. It’s black-and-white and marred with static lines, haphazard and crackling, transporting me into a world that exists only in my head, that feels too real to be plain imagination. Invisible monsters gnaw on my emotions and turn me into a hollow person until it chooses to subside. They always come with a sharp stab in my stomach. Always freaks my boyfriend out whenever I petrify and stop blinking for a couple seconds.
These horrendous horrors started nearly a year ago, becoming wilder as I’m nearing my twenty-eighth birthday on the next sunrise. Every day they come and go whenever they want, oftentimes as a rude awakening in the middle of my sleep. Midnights are filled with banshee screeches and stabbing pain under the skin of my stomach. Under those circumstances, there’s only one thing I could do: grab my tin of graphite chalks and art paper. Moonlight illuminates my tiny desk and guides my fingers as the images pounce out of my head and spill onto the sheets. No one believes me when I say I’m not an artist, telling me the sketches strung up around this corner of our small brownstone beg to differ. People call me ridiculous when I say my hands take a life of its own once my fingers are wrapped around those chalks. I never mean it as a metaphor.
Pushing off my desk, I pull off my headphones and gaze at the hand-drawn enigmas strewn across the walls, as if watching me. Some are fantastical and dark. Like my most recent, where the black graphite shrouds the paper like dense plumes of smoke. But jagged tendrils make it unmistakably recognizable as fire. Flames shoot upward, licking up fourteen finless koi. Or this one, an emerald deer without its front legs prancing among tall wild grass next to two headless tigers conjoined by their rears submerged halfway in black water.
Others are more lifelike—a busy farmer’s market, a congested intersection, or a warung with its curtains drawn. But there’s always an unsettling aura emanating from the disorderly lines of these realistic drawings. The market stalls are empty, cars lie overturned across the busy streets, and a broken plank obstructs the only entrance of the warung.
None of these are the Philly streets I grew up on; I recognize them as Jakarta from the pictures Papa showed me, where he and Mama came from. The city where Papa’s favorite nasi goreng was, where Mama gave birth to me. The city that rises the same time the sun does but doesn’t sleep when the moon is out. That bustles with life and burning passion.
The city where Mama’s soul lives on even though her body doesn’t.
Who knows her even though her child doesn’t, because the city killed her first in the wake of its darkest moment for our people.
I never knew what she looked like. The stories she would’ve told to put me to sleep died with her when Papa boarded that plane with nothing but his only baby and the clothes off his back. He never told me how Mama died, and that’s probably best for both of us. After all, we don’t find life among the dead.
Climbing back into bed, I reply to Dad’s text confirming his visit in the morning. After I turn my phone off, I try to sleep. The moment I close my eyes, a soft breeze tickles my skin, licking the crevices between my toes. Despite the sweltering summer, the breeze is cool. Cold, even, like smoke from dry ice. All my windows are tightly shut, too, a habit Papa nurtured since my childhood. “So the looters can’t get in, right?” I kept on telling him nonchalantly. But he never liked me saying that.
I put a sweater on, but no amount of fabric can wick off the cold. Goosebumps run up and down my skin as the icy mist swirling under my skin swells. As if it’s coming from inside me.
Tension squeezes its talons around my chest, and I writhe, buck my back, gasp for air. I try to scream, but with the air knocked out of my lungs, I can’t reach my voice. Gritting my teeth, I push upward with whatever strength I could muster. My nails dig into the skin on my palms, hard enough to draw blood, but not strong enough to break the surface.
Then I’m catapulted upwards, sitting up straight. My stomach churns with the threat of vomit. I swallow the bile that rises to the back of my throat. It’s happening again. The voices, a thunderstorm of crackling static and cataclysmic uproar, more violent than ever.
Fighting past the paralysis, I leap into my desk chair. Despite the obstinate quiver of my hands, they manage to tightly grip the graphite chalk. It disappears into my fist, manifesting as scraggly black lines slicing and splitting the sheets of yellow paper splayed on the desk as my hands glide over them. I beat my own allegations of not being an artist as a face takes form— misshapen head, horror-filled eyes, lips frozen in a scream for help.
A single continuous beep occupies the hollow of my skull. My head throbs with the squall of angry mobs, turning the frost inside me into a searing burn. Heat blooms across my skin. Like a knife slashing my flesh, sharp pain twists my stomach. No matter how much I wince or try to scream, this pandemonium doesn’t end.
Phantasmic memories of a dystopian city cloud my mind. Smoke rising from unfinished skyscrapers stings my eyes, the rancid smell of burning rubber punctures my nostrils. A primal fear grapples my chest as I draw skeletons of cars with broken windows and missing tires, burning buildings, and Chinese grocery stores being looted. Crying mothers holding their crying children for dear life as men run around them with sticks and batons. Streets cry from under piles of debris and ashes. A tsunami of people crashes against cops in brown uniforms. Anarchy like I’ve never experienced but seem to remember vividly.
My fingers drag across the mental images I’ve transferred onto the paper. Bedlam melts under my fingertips, swirling into ghosts of this imagination that transcends reality, this memory that breaks the threshold of cognition.
I clutch my head as the uproar in my head swells. When I open my mouth to scream, a high-pitched shriek comes out. It isn’t my voice. I scramble to my vanity and meet a reflection with bloodshot eyes. But that isn’t me.
It’s a beautiful Chinese woman. Round cheeks, wavy hair in a messy bun, a thin wisp of scarlet streaming down the corner of her lips. Misshapen head, horror-filled eyes, lips frozen in a scream for help. I collapse to the floor with tears running down my cheeks, the twisting stab in my stomach intensifying. I curl into a fetal position as I clutch myself, as if on the precipice of death.
My apartment door barrels open. I look up and see my boyfriend stumbling in, what I suppose was meant as my neatly wrapped surprise gift freefalling from his hand. My dad totters in behind him. “Robin, what’s going on?”
“The woman,” I pant. A familiar stranger—a face I’ve never seen, but her memories latch onto mine.
Outside, the indigo sky has been replaced by a mellow blue, the sun replacing the haunt of the moon’s silver. Papa helps me up from one side as Antonio props my shoulder from the other. Antonio tends to me, wrapping me in his real arms and trying to return my own memories to me. Usually it works, but right now, it doesn’t.
Then Papa sits beside me, last night’s drawing in his hand. His tears blot the paper.
“That’s her, isn’t it?” I ask. “May 14, 1998. She was stabbed in the stomach. That’s why we came here.”
“She was twenty-eight when she died.” Papa’s eyes are a mix of horror and wonder. “She was a brilliant artist.”
This is impossible. My heart gallops with the realization, my chest tightening. I look at myself in the mirror again. The woman screams back at me, and I’m not me anymore.
Because how can you remember something you didn’t experience?
About the Author
Quinn Huang (they/them) is a 22-year-old writer whose stories act as a love letter to their intersecting Chinese and queer cultures. They're still in their California era despite relocating back to their hometown of Jakarta, Indonesia, where they’re planning their next big adventure—albeit fictional ones. When they’re not writing, they can be found at a coffee shop somewhere chugging down a large iced coffee that makes them walk twice as fast as everyone else or wearing a flour-covered apron perfecting their next chocolate chip cookie recipe. Their work has been previously published in BLEACH! Magazine.