白蝴蝶
The weather turned toward autumn with the wind, the light, and the leaves. It was late coming, but he felt it in the air that morning, in the market where he bought his fish. The smell he loved was mellow, more subtle than summer, quiet and clean.
It had been raining for hours, even in his dreams, so he slept in. After tea, he pulled on his boots and left for groceries.
His mad head of hair his only umbrella, a plastic bag inside another of canvas protected his fish, snapper wrapped in stiff paper, bright white, neatly tied. Together they swam back to the train.
There’s a point a man reaches without bathing when he begins to smell like an unkempt woman, and the gentleman beside him had reached it, so he moved further down the car for a bench against the rail, away from distraction.
Across the aisle, a young woman knitted a tiny blanket. Two ends of yarn snaked up from a bag at her feet to the work-in-progress warming her belly, while to her right an old man held a box of crackers for his wife to pick at. The train rocked and cracked against the tracks. Lights passed the windows in scratched whites and reds before giving way to the bridge, as the cracker lady watched a little boy taunt his mother.
He ran his hands together, each finger speaking to the others. The years a hand collects are like a face, only harder.
When he was a boy he was stabbed in the gut with a branch of bamboo. He and his friends played smacking a swallow’s nest by their favorite bend in the creek outside Xia Hei. It was an accident. Giving up, they fought like barefoot samurai until he slipped and fell, his tongue went numb, and the creek bled red. They ran for help as he curled up, shaking with his cheek against the cold, wet earth. Reaching, he clasped the trunk of a sapling, rolled over and focused on his breathing.
There in the mud, a butterfly as white as the sun fluttered above him before landing on his hip, wings moving gently.
He grew calm and passed out.
“Siddown boy, or I’m gonna whoop yo’ ass!” the rowdy boy's mother hollered as he crawled across the orange plastic seats to watch the city sweep by.
Everyone opened their phones. Some punched buttons, others left messages, most spoke loudly. Surrounded by commotion, he closed his eyes and relaxed with the wind against the train as it swayed over the river.
He thought of his dinner and grinned.
The stairs beneath his feet moaned and creaked. It was three flights to the top, where layers of crayon and chipped paint covered the door to his apartment. He remembered every color but one.
Inside he lived with an old gentle tabby – a gift he gave his daughter for her seventh birthday. As a girl, she chased the kitten up and down the hall and named her Tabitha. Much quieter now, the rooms were neatly cluttered, void of two women gone – one to the world, the other the earth.
He turned the bolt, set his groceries down, drew the boots from his feet and coat from his back, before breaking the quiet with the button on his answering machine.
“Hi Daddy, it’s me. Just wanted to talk. Milan is amazing! Italians are so much cooler than the French. So fiery! I saw Auntie Sophie’s designs for the spring, and they’re gorgeous. I hope New York's okay. Sorry it’s been so long since I made it out, but you know… I might have a show there in December though. I'll let you know. Maybe we can have tea or something. Anyway, I better go. I love you Daddy, and give my love to Tabitha. Hope to talk soon.”
Silence returned.
He prepared his teakettle on the stove, blue flame whipping, played the message again and stared outside, Tabitha in his arms, until long after the water whistled.
Setting the cat on the counter, he unscrewed a jar of tea and scooped its leaves into an old teapot of orange, seasoned clay. With a towel wrapped around his hand, he poured the hot water over dried leaves and thought of them on the tree before they were pruned, the sun, wind, rain, everything they might have seen, animals and insects, and life back home. As a boy, he was mischievous. His mother used to tease that the day she crashed her bicycle into the lake with him in the basket, he turned into an eel.
Tea freshly poured, he put the needle to a record and sat in his chair. He closed his eyes. Fang’s weeping erhu filled the air with salt and sea. He heard his father calling, shells exploding, and screams in the distance. Fire lit windows, where his wife lay wheezing, minutes before dying, her fingers dancing slowly through his. She smiled. A tear welled in his eye and he stood.
Lifting his teacup, he crossed back into the kitchen. In its satchel on the table sat his fish. First he needed seasoning, so he gathered from the canvas sack the scallions, ginger and garlic to steam with the snapper.
Tabitha licked her lips, watching from his chair.
Reaching beside the oven, he took out a cutting board worn concave, etched with rifts of meals celebrated and solitary.
His hands moved alone as he twisted the tie off each vegetable’s bag, aligned their contents along his workspace, and pulled a knife from the block beside it.
First, he chopped the ends from the scallions and sliced them razor thin, collecting a neat pile in the corner of the board with his knife. It felt great.
The mind of an old man is like a child’s, in constant awe.
He forgot how sharp his knife was. Flattening the blade, he crushed the husks from the garlic, then allowed it to move on its own with ease.
Garlic sliced, he reached for the ginger. Its smell reminded him of his mother. He would peel, she would cut. Again, the blade took to task, sliding beneath the skin, cutting the root's flesh into thin, small strips.
Seasoning ready, the music stopped. He rinsed his hands in the sink and dried them on a towel before turning the record.
Back in the kitchen, he reached for his tea. Drinking its final sips by the window, he turned on the light and put another kettle on the stove.
His bamboo steamer and wok were cleaned ready below the counter, so after adding water, he placed them on the burner next to his kettle.
Reaching into the plastic bag, he removed the neat white package. It was moist. He untied the twine, unfolded the wrapping, and gently with both hands, pulled the flesh from its parchment.
The light overhead flickered at a train in the distance.
Placing the fish in the middle of his cutting board, he rubbed its body lightly, already cleaned and scaled.
As a little girl, Mei loved the feeling of fish on her fingers. Seasoning was her favorite part. “Look Daddy, I have fishy fingers like you!” she would holler, pinching his face, giggling.
He dressed it with the ginger, garlic and scallions, laid it across a piece of cheesecloth, and placed it on the steamer in the wok above the water.
His teakettle whistled.
The light in his refrigerator clicked on as he opened the door. Its contents were sparse. To occupy his time, he shopped daily. Each morning he planned the day’s menu, and the only thing he made leftovers of was rice. Ever since he was a boy, he loved it cold. For breakfast he ate it with milk.
He reached for a wooden bowl wrapped with plastic and closed the door.
Using his hands, he heaped five wads of rice onto a plate at his place at the table, already set with his teacup and a pair of chopsticks on a piece of green silk.
He lifted the steamer lid and its fragrance singed his face. Peeling cheesecloth from the edges, he slid the fish to the side of his rice, then sprinkled it with oil and soy.
As he sat, the music stopped.
Perfect, he thought, closing his eyes. He sipped his tea, felt it hot on his tongue, and swallowed. On a saucer he set a small cut of snapper next to a smaller mound of rice on the floor beside him. Tabitha rubbed against his leg on her way to dinner.
Together they ate in silence.
His reading glasses sat beside his chair. He bought them twenty-five years ago to read Mei bedtime stories. Only her favorites were not from books, but the ones where he took her with him to China, and the creek outside of Xia Hei. When they smacked swallow’s nests, magical things happened. Giant birds flew out and carried them over oceans, forests and mountaintops.
He smiled.
Every night after washing the dishes he set them out to dry while he rested with a newspaper in his chair, laid a blanket across his feet and settled in. There Tabitha made her home, curling up as he read.
The world unfolded before him in colorful columns of murder and merger, competition and consumption. Athletes lose in every language and fire burns everything.
His furnace snapped and popped, hissing heat in the corner as he drifted off.
On the bank of a creek near a bamboo thicket, a small waterfall trickled quietly. Birds sang songs in trees overhead, while a nearby frog kept time.
The little girl he once forged stories with sat staring at the water, headed some place far off.
He laughed and heard laughter as his body ran toward her. Looking down, the earth passed closer. The shoes on his feet were the same size as hers.
He laughed again and she turned toward him.
“C’mon Daddy, let’s find a swallow's nest!” she called as she ran.
His little body followed, chasing along the water’s edge as a crane took flight from a log down the bank.
She hid behind the trunk of a tree, sprang out and scared him, tickling him to the ground until he nearly passed out. Then she looked up.
“Look Daddy, I found one!” She jumped up and down, pointing to the branches. “Do you think it’s magic? You think there’s eggs in there? Get a stick, Daddy, get a stick! Knock it down! We gotta knock it down!”
He stood and grabbed a bamboo reed from the ground. Whacking the branch beneath it, he couldn’t budge the nest from its resting place over the creek.
“Let me try, Daddy,” Mei pleaded, taking the reed from his sticky fingers.
With her first smack, the bird’s nest exploded, and thousands of butterflies of every shape and color fluttered out. She squealed, running in circles trying to catch them, giggling, “Catch me a butterfly, Daddy! I want the white one!”
And indeed, in a rainbow of hues aflutter, one pure white butterfly flew.
He reached for it, wet sandpaper brushed his face, and he woke.
It was Tabitha.
The room was hot, and he was sweating.
Tabitha jumped from his chest and started off, glancing back with a meow. She was leading him somewhere.
Crackling all around, it was snowing in the apartment, white flakes drifting to the sound of sirens screeching closer.
He rose and followed Tabitha into the kitchen. Pulling the window open, he felt her brush against him as she stepped onto the fire escape. In the flickering orange, she turned with her tail and stared back, nudged the glass, then started her long climb down to the street.
The sirens stopped at his stoop.
Hot snow thick in the air, butterflies filled the room. He took off his glasses and put them in the case beside his chair as he sat back down, pulling the blanket over his feet. Warm feet helped him dream.
Coughing, he closed his eyes, and drifted quickly back to sleep.
Back at the creek, Mei was laughing and he was spinning, magical creatures swirling clumsy around them. Together they danced with the colors, reaching, until suddenly she screamed, “I got him, Daddy! Look!” and her tiny hands opened just enough for him to see the bright white butterfly inside.
It had been raining for hours, even in his dreams, so he slept in. After tea, he pulled on his boots and left for groceries.
His mad head of hair his only umbrella, a plastic bag inside another of canvas protected his fish, snapper wrapped in stiff paper, bright white, neatly tied. Together they swam back to the train.
There’s a point a man reaches without bathing when he begins to smell like an unkempt woman, and the gentleman beside him had reached it, so he moved further down the car for a bench against the rail, away from distraction.
Across the aisle, a young woman knitted a tiny blanket. Two ends of yarn snaked up from a bag at her feet to the work-in-progress warming her belly, while to her right an old man held a box of crackers for his wife to pick at. The train rocked and cracked against the tracks. Lights passed the windows in scratched whites and reds before giving way to the bridge, as the cracker lady watched a little boy taunt his mother.
He ran his hands together, each finger speaking to the others. The years a hand collects are like a face, only harder.
When he was a boy he was stabbed in the gut with a branch of bamboo. He and his friends played smacking a swallow’s nest by their favorite bend in the creek outside Xia Hei. It was an accident. Giving up, they fought like barefoot samurai until he slipped and fell, his tongue went numb, and the creek bled red. They ran for help as he curled up, shaking with his cheek against the cold, wet earth. Reaching, he clasped the trunk of a sapling, rolled over and focused on his breathing.
There in the mud, a butterfly as white as the sun fluttered above him before landing on his hip, wings moving gently.
He grew calm and passed out.
“Siddown boy, or I’m gonna whoop yo’ ass!” the rowdy boy's mother hollered as he crawled across the orange plastic seats to watch the city sweep by.
Everyone opened their phones. Some punched buttons, others left messages, most spoke loudly. Surrounded by commotion, he closed his eyes and relaxed with the wind against the train as it swayed over the river.
He thought of his dinner and grinned.
The stairs beneath his feet moaned and creaked. It was three flights to the top, where layers of crayon and chipped paint covered the door to his apartment. He remembered every color but one.
Inside he lived with an old gentle tabby – a gift he gave his daughter for her seventh birthday. As a girl, she chased the kitten up and down the hall and named her Tabitha. Much quieter now, the rooms were neatly cluttered, void of two women gone – one to the world, the other the earth.
He turned the bolt, set his groceries down, drew the boots from his feet and coat from his back, before breaking the quiet with the button on his answering machine.
“Hi Daddy, it’s me. Just wanted to talk. Milan is amazing! Italians are so much cooler than the French. So fiery! I saw Auntie Sophie’s designs for the spring, and they’re gorgeous. I hope New York's okay. Sorry it’s been so long since I made it out, but you know… I might have a show there in December though. I'll let you know. Maybe we can have tea or something. Anyway, I better go. I love you Daddy, and give my love to Tabitha. Hope to talk soon.”
Silence returned.
He prepared his teakettle on the stove, blue flame whipping, played the message again and stared outside, Tabitha in his arms, until long after the water whistled.
Setting the cat on the counter, he unscrewed a jar of tea and scooped its leaves into an old teapot of orange, seasoned clay. With a towel wrapped around his hand, he poured the hot water over dried leaves and thought of them on the tree before they were pruned, the sun, wind, rain, everything they might have seen, animals and insects, and life back home. As a boy, he was mischievous. His mother used to tease that the day she crashed her bicycle into the lake with him in the basket, he turned into an eel.
Tea freshly poured, he put the needle to a record and sat in his chair. He closed his eyes. Fang’s weeping erhu filled the air with salt and sea. He heard his father calling, shells exploding, and screams in the distance. Fire lit windows, where his wife lay wheezing, minutes before dying, her fingers dancing slowly through his. She smiled. A tear welled in his eye and he stood.
Lifting his teacup, he crossed back into the kitchen. In its satchel on the table sat his fish. First he needed seasoning, so he gathered from the canvas sack the scallions, ginger and garlic to steam with the snapper.
Tabitha licked her lips, watching from his chair.
Reaching beside the oven, he took out a cutting board worn concave, etched with rifts of meals celebrated and solitary.
His hands moved alone as he twisted the tie off each vegetable’s bag, aligned their contents along his workspace, and pulled a knife from the block beside it.
First, he chopped the ends from the scallions and sliced them razor thin, collecting a neat pile in the corner of the board with his knife. It felt great.
The mind of an old man is like a child’s, in constant awe.
He forgot how sharp his knife was. Flattening the blade, he crushed the husks from the garlic, then allowed it to move on its own with ease.
Garlic sliced, he reached for the ginger. Its smell reminded him of his mother. He would peel, she would cut. Again, the blade took to task, sliding beneath the skin, cutting the root's flesh into thin, small strips.
Seasoning ready, the music stopped. He rinsed his hands in the sink and dried them on a towel before turning the record.
Back in the kitchen, he reached for his tea. Drinking its final sips by the window, he turned on the light and put another kettle on the stove.
His bamboo steamer and wok were cleaned ready below the counter, so after adding water, he placed them on the burner next to his kettle.
Reaching into the plastic bag, he removed the neat white package. It was moist. He untied the twine, unfolded the wrapping, and gently with both hands, pulled the flesh from its parchment.
The light overhead flickered at a train in the distance.
Placing the fish in the middle of his cutting board, he rubbed its body lightly, already cleaned and scaled.
As a little girl, Mei loved the feeling of fish on her fingers. Seasoning was her favorite part. “Look Daddy, I have fishy fingers like you!” she would holler, pinching his face, giggling.
He dressed it with the ginger, garlic and scallions, laid it across a piece of cheesecloth, and placed it on the steamer in the wok above the water.
His teakettle whistled.
The light in his refrigerator clicked on as he opened the door. Its contents were sparse. To occupy his time, he shopped daily. Each morning he planned the day’s menu, and the only thing he made leftovers of was rice. Ever since he was a boy, he loved it cold. For breakfast he ate it with milk.
He reached for a wooden bowl wrapped with plastic and closed the door.
Using his hands, he heaped five wads of rice onto a plate at his place at the table, already set with his teacup and a pair of chopsticks on a piece of green silk.
He lifted the steamer lid and its fragrance singed his face. Peeling cheesecloth from the edges, he slid the fish to the side of his rice, then sprinkled it with oil and soy.
As he sat, the music stopped.
Perfect, he thought, closing his eyes. He sipped his tea, felt it hot on his tongue, and swallowed. On a saucer he set a small cut of snapper next to a smaller mound of rice on the floor beside him. Tabitha rubbed against his leg on her way to dinner.
Together they ate in silence.
His reading glasses sat beside his chair. He bought them twenty-five years ago to read Mei bedtime stories. Only her favorites were not from books, but the ones where he took her with him to China, and the creek outside of Xia Hei. When they smacked swallow’s nests, magical things happened. Giant birds flew out and carried them over oceans, forests and mountaintops.
He smiled.
Every night after washing the dishes he set them out to dry while he rested with a newspaper in his chair, laid a blanket across his feet and settled in. There Tabitha made her home, curling up as he read.
The world unfolded before him in colorful columns of murder and merger, competition and consumption. Athletes lose in every language and fire burns everything.
His furnace snapped and popped, hissing heat in the corner as he drifted off.
On the bank of a creek near a bamboo thicket, a small waterfall trickled quietly. Birds sang songs in trees overhead, while a nearby frog kept time.
The little girl he once forged stories with sat staring at the water, headed some place far off.
He laughed and heard laughter as his body ran toward her. Looking down, the earth passed closer. The shoes on his feet were the same size as hers.
He laughed again and she turned toward him.
“C’mon Daddy, let’s find a swallow's nest!” she called as she ran.
His little body followed, chasing along the water’s edge as a crane took flight from a log down the bank.
She hid behind the trunk of a tree, sprang out and scared him, tickling him to the ground until he nearly passed out. Then she looked up.
“Look Daddy, I found one!” She jumped up and down, pointing to the branches. “Do you think it’s magic? You think there’s eggs in there? Get a stick, Daddy, get a stick! Knock it down! We gotta knock it down!”
He stood and grabbed a bamboo reed from the ground. Whacking the branch beneath it, he couldn’t budge the nest from its resting place over the creek.
“Let me try, Daddy,” Mei pleaded, taking the reed from his sticky fingers.
With her first smack, the bird’s nest exploded, and thousands of butterflies of every shape and color fluttered out. She squealed, running in circles trying to catch them, giggling, “Catch me a butterfly, Daddy! I want the white one!”
And indeed, in a rainbow of hues aflutter, one pure white butterfly flew.
He reached for it, wet sandpaper brushed his face, and he woke.
It was Tabitha.
The room was hot, and he was sweating.
Tabitha jumped from his chest and started off, glancing back with a meow. She was leading him somewhere.
Crackling all around, it was snowing in the apartment, white flakes drifting to the sound of sirens screeching closer.
He rose and followed Tabitha into the kitchen. Pulling the window open, he felt her brush against him as she stepped onto the fire escape. In the flickering orange, she turned with her tail and stared back, nudged the glass, then started her long climb down to the street.
The sirens stopped at his stoop.
Hot snow thick in the air, butterflies filled the room. He took off his glasses and put them in the case beside his chair as he sat back down, pulling the blanket over his feet. Warm feet helped him dream.
Coughing, he closed his eyes, and drifted quickly back to sleep.
Back at the creek, Mei was laughing and he was spinning, magical creatures swirling clumsy around them. Together they danced with the colors, reaching, until suddenly she screamed, “I got him, Daddy! Look!” and her tiny hands opened just enough for him to see the bright white butterfly inside.
