When I step through the rickety bamboo door, everything is as I left it. The lanterns are unlit, the shutters tightly closed, though a pale predawn light seeps through the cracks,revealing the silhouette of my mother. She is curled up on the birchwood bed that doubles as her seat during the daytime.
“Ma, I’m back,” I say softly, striding over and placing a kiss on her forehead. She is perfectly tucked beneath our finest blankets, and I brush a hand over the little chrysanthemum flowers Méi’zi sewed for her. I can see in the semidarkness that my mother’s eyes are open.
I turn away. “Did you sleep well?”
Silence.
“I had a good trip,” I continue, moving to unload my pack. “The flowers are still in bloom: peonies and orchids, osmanthus and cherry blossoms. You’d love them, Ma—and so would Bà. And I saw a giant carp. You used to tell me stories of how they were descended from the dragons of the Four Seas, do you remember?”
No response.
Gingerly, I take out the light lotuses. They’re still glowing softly, as if I hold stars in my palms. I set a kettle of water to boil, then rinse the flowers in the water bucket.
“I came across one.” My words are no longer light and cajoling. “A young male, newly formed.” A flash of his beautiful face, the body with the entrails showing. “I took him down in two strokes, Ma. Poison first, to slow him and distract him—then Striker to his core. Bà would be proud, right?”
Nothing.
I grasp the pestle and mortar and begin to crush the light lotuses. They are meant to be sacred, containing the life energy of stars, and it always feels as though I am committing a sin, taking them and grinding them up.
I no longer care. I would commit a thousand lifetimes of sin if that meant I could protect my family.
I’m careful to scrape every last piece into the kettle to stew. Once the flowers are brewing, I take the bucket of water and sit by my mother.
“Come, let’s get you up,” I murmur. She’s nothing but skin and bones, and I am afraid my coarse hands will snap her as I bring her into a sitting position. Méi’zi usually does this. She is much better at it—at being gentle, at taking care of things—but I wanted to do it today, since this is my last day here.
I dip the towel into the water bucket and turn to Ma. The sun is nearly out, and light filters through our wooden shutters onto my mother’s face. My breath hitches for a moment.
Her eyes are wide open, and they are staring at me. There is no flicker of recognition in them. Wisps of her hair—now completely white—fall into her face, and she makes no motion to brush them aside. Her mouth is slack; a line of drool winds down her chin.
Every so often, there are moments that nearly break me. This is one of them.
It is one thing to die. I miss my father more than life, but that is an old pain, a scar that has grown over even if it will never truly heal.
My mother is a wound in my chest that tears itself open sunrise after sunrise. To see her alive yet not, existing with a half-devoured soul, is a reminder of everything I have lost and everything I might still save.
Of all that has befallen us, it is the cruelty of hope that hurts the most.
I lower my gaze to her swollen hands, reminding myself of how those fingers taught me to sew. My eyes heat, and for a moment, I wish I were back in the spring with that demon.
I swallow hard, pick up my mother’s arm, and begin washing her.
Throughout nine years of searching, I have never come across anything similar to what’s become of my mother. I’ve seen the shriveled corpses mó leave in the wake of their feasting, but I always thought drinking a mortal’s soul meant killing us outright—that is, until my father threw himself at the demon drinking my mother’s soul before the mó had completely finished. Sometimes, I look up at the doorway and still expect to see my father lying there, clutched in the demon’s grasp and bleeding out, his hands clawing the floor as she covered his mouth with hers and drank his life from him.
Most of all, I remember that demon’s face. I remember how she stood gracefully afterward and conversed with me, my father’s blood still staining her teeth. I remember the flash of garnet winking in the sunlight, the hoops of her hair done in imperial fashion, and the rustle of her clothes, spun of the finest samite. I remember the cruel, impossible beauty of her face. And I wonder, for the thousandth time, why she did this. Why she killed only my father, then left me, my sister, and a half-dead mother to live in the debris of her destruction.
She is the reason I am leaving my family today to journey to the Temple of Dawn, the fabled practitioning school in the immortal realm.
“Ying’ying?”
I look up. As my sister bounds into the living room, the memories I hold in the dark of my mind fall away and it is as if the sun shines again.
When my father named us, he might as well have prophesied our lives. My name, Àn’ying, is an uncommon one,meaning “cherry blossom in the dark.” I was born during the thickest blizzard of the winter. My father said he had been lost in the snow, half-frozen and unable to find his way home, when he saw a flash of red in the dark: miraculously, a single blossom on our tree was in bloom. It was then that he heard my cries, which he said had guided him safely home.
When my sister was born, it was the warmest day of spring. She was named Chun’méi, after the flowering plum in our yard.
Bà made a mistake in naming me, though. The tree outside our home is a plum blossom, not a cherry blossom. Strange, for Bà never made mistakes. He only made puzzles, and secrets to those puzzles. Secrets that he took to his grave.
“You tricked meagain!” Méi’zi exclaims, her mouth puckered as she glares at me. “You promised you wouldn’t leave for the mountains without telling me.” Her gaze travels to the towel in my hands and the bucket at my feet. “And that’smyjob.”
