Pre-chicken or post-chicken, the earliest legends of the region tell of two men; she learned this in child-rearing books— the same ones I once read— and voicemails from family members in the mainland. When the Sky’s angel drove them from the blooming garden of Nowhere, China with a butcher knife and sent them packing out west, the two grew into vastly different seeds of the same tree. In the Bay Area, the dominant kernel lowered half his body into the ground and likened himself to the new land; its ambiguity, its guile and apathy, its vapid, deceitful wealth, its awkward laugh, its shut curtains and lightning fast internet connection, its red-penned A’s, phones under desks, its live-streaming platforms where he siphoned humor through glass pipettes. The valley cut him into ergonomic paths— digestible inputs for all men to trace the shape of; either way, the future was his, and his sacrifice promised each man here a straight-edge path to predestiny.
In a time sixteen years before the chicken, a kid named Evan was lifted, like some kind of sunstone, out the horizon-line of his mother’s stomach. Soaked in her blood, he clutched the left side of himself, where remnants of the Sky— even as a member of the lesser seed— were still inside him. His mother saw him huddled into himself and understood which path he was meant for: restricted internet access and tiny guest bedroom windows, locked into a twisted slow dance with the hobby he showed the least bit of talent in when he was five or six (these days, the age must be even lower). She knew the lesser seeds, inexplicably, can not plant themselves; can not separate themselves from their mothers. Their paths contained more dignity, and usually less money. But he would need her, the house phone voice, like a messenger angel, scratched.
Sometimes, in this valley where life paths congealed together like rows of gilded wheat, deviants fled. Off-roaded, manically. Functionally, they were dead. Culturally. The night of their departures (and it’s often night when these kinds of decisions are made), urban mythology had already been passed around in various messaging apps, and the mothers were already commiserating, wishing their premature passing to at least be painless. Look, Evan’s mother would say, showing him her phone screen while the two usually ate without looking at one another: Online, there’s this kid that dropped out of computer science to become a basket weaver. Weaving. Then she would tell him to take bigger bites of his food, and in response to this motherly concern, Evan would never ask what the financial difference between spontaneous basket-weaving and meticulously building a professional guzheng career was. This ancient art he was moderately gifted at, which his mom, under the messenger angel’s guidance, allowed him to play in place of the violin or piano— that was the extent of the gamble in her. There was no difference, but it was in the preparation. It was in the knowing he would turn out this way: in the art of future-seeing, which all good mothers handing out water cups on the sides of their sons’ paths supposedly practiced. As the sun traveled in static increments over the funnel-shaped piece of land he lived on, Evan woke up, went to half his classes, spent the other half in private school practice rooms, got picked up by his mother, and then practiced in the guest-room-turned-practice-room in his own house. This specific set of life patterns and time commitments made it so that playing the songs he needed to play was a second natural function in the dark ecosystem of a guest room. Any mistake was like placing body parts into a fire without pulling away; an intrusive thought. A violation of his other, learned nature, that he lived life cycles of over and over again, sheathed in the smallness of his home. Over where there used to be a paint-peeled closet door, his mom had taped silver, reflective material so he could see himself slightly distorted if he raised his head past his music stand, which had just turned ten this year. His mother ate dinner first. When he came out of the practice room she sometimes feigned a few more bites so she could sit with him longer while raising her phone screen to his face and flashing him all the people the mothers were praying for on this day. Under her clothes, away from the dinner table, even later at night, she felt the stitch-line of her stomach and thought about how cruel it would be for a child pulled out to defect into a weaver.
This was when she let him watch TV. His mother used to thank the Sky (convenient for some atheist Chinese moms, the Sky was a moniker that could replace God) that he loved chosen-one shows. Because of how she had raised him, he was bound to mind his own business, music, more than anything else he had only an inchoate idea of. And like an infant form, his mind might become curious and begin to crawl elsewhere, but she could keep him fenced up in these boyish delights. She found reruns of eighties and nineties cartoons for eighties and nineties boys. He found superhero movies from the two-thousands. He would watch TV when she plunged her phone into social media— the cardinal sin that only she could perform with surgical precision in their household— to catalog the dead. She thought it was whatever; she heard his action heroes and warriors of light from the outside in, and though it had been a while since she was young, it was naive enough. She waited for his bedtime of eleven to strike before she could watch her own old, dialect-ridden romance DVDs; the only silver-screen media that still moved her. Let me tell you, women often resign themselves to believing that everything else in civilization fades; only love is true.
But that’s for women. Girls, even. Evan was pulled away by the lull of human construction that called upon all men. He loved the Sky-colored fence that his mother put her hands together and thanked when he wasn’t in the room, how tall it was, and how easily it could be mistaken for the real thing. That is: any movie with a hero, with gleaming light and bitter dark that the weak and evil fell into. The shows swaddled him— cooed that at a man’s apex, cameras would focus and music would swell and the lighting would catch his best angle as he succeeded in whatever honorable, glorious thing he was meant to do. And that if he died, if he died in his full glory and honor, the music would lower its head and enter serenely. The warring that defined the world at large would stop. The characters would gather around him, all cloaked together in some agonizing silence. If there was blood, it would be a few drops on the cheek, leaving the mouth intact for the cherished, final words; the ones that closed the arc, that left audiences misty-eyed and satisfied. That they would review as ‘wickedly good characterization.’ An arc begun with nothing but a dream, ending with the utmost respect a narrative can give— a shift in the way time was counted and that life retained itself in people. The freezing of time into iridescent icicles, the stalling of life’s slippage, as the man of the hour flows out tales of how he built a city from the ground up, how he fought when all else fled. Someone would place his head into their lap, and tears would drop from their eyes onto his outstretched hand. He would survey everyone that ever loved him one last time, and then enter the light where all the good people went.
In Evan’s dreams, which were more frequent than his non-dreams, the western symphony-instruments swelled perfectly when he did whatever amorphous hero-things he did. If he woke up in the AMs, sometimes, he would hear mucused sniffing in the living room, uncertain if it came from the TV or the woman watching. Sometimes, the crying sounded like piano, and the piano like a wind that blew in from a much bleaker timeline. This meant that the good people in the romance did not win. In his dreams, he manned mechs and decapitated space monsters, and the sheet music that made up the sun was written with dots and bars.
Two years before the chicken, Evan was flown to Shanghai for the first time, where he placed fifth in the male under-18 division for his instrument. He got a piece of paper with his name on it for his troubles. The problem was: when the world opened itself before him and the stage became brighter than before, his ecosystem had not prepared him for even that level of electricity. Evan surmised that his mother was punishing him on the flight back by allowing a middle-aged woman to sit between the two of them. She then, like Magritte’s thing that could not be replicated, faced the window for twelve hours. Even the perpetual dark of a plane traveling between different conceptions of time allowed Evan not a single reflection of her relevant features. Some indistinguishable emotion shadowed her like a veil. The woman between the two of them snored, and wore a sun visor in her sleep. When she woke up, still between a boy and something that could not be replicated, she shook herself off from an imaginary rain and asked the mother why she was sitting away from her son. The thing that could not be replicated asked her to ask the son, whose stare had glazed over, eye crust forming their geometric crystal around the caverns of his tear ducts. My son’s name is David, the woman said to the thing. If you’re flying to the same city as I am, that means our kids can meet one another. And then she said her own name.
Truthfully, the thing could not sit through even a one hour flight or car ride without her C-drama piano soundtracks— between the notes, she thought of her son and someone else’s dancing in the wilderness beyond herself. She snapped from her ekphrastic stance and felt the credits to her own lonesome episode roll between her and the visored woman. She brushed the veil aside and introduced herself with a name Evan had never heard aloud before.
When the day opened its eyes again, blinking to existence tumbling valleys and looping highways, the visored woman’s son also broke through the yolk of the world. His embryonic form was shaping as they walked through the tunnel, and then they reached the end and he was real. He held his arms out at the terminal with the sun blasting golden behind him, and like a magnet, her arms clicked around his. They were hugging. But Evan saw his mother was looking at him again, dragging a lethargic finger around the horizon of her stomach. The visored woman turned around, still clutching the sturdy shape in the sunlight. My son and your son go to the same school, she said. Evan squinted but the son was still a human-shaped hole in the glassy landscape behind him. For the life of him, he could not recognize the other. This is David, the woman said. The other woman said: My son is named Evan.
The open car window on the drive back complemented her mood’s light billow over the town. Evan could hear the soft sash of her face caressing itself, and the slicing of the faster cars on the highway. And the impassioned roar of a game where two highschool football programs with bloated budgets battered one another. The piano, which was always there when he passed between places, he didn’t even register as sound. When he lugged his guzheng from the garage to the practice room, she told him she got the mom’s phone number; they lived a matter of blocks away. She let him watch TV as late as he wanted. She slept facing the Sky; the Sky-colored Sky behind an off-white ceiling. He slept in front of the cyan-magenta-yellow screen, the trinity through which all other colors came into being.
I know Evan found David first; if the high school’s glass-and-metal nature was comparable to an airport, David was once again the one on the terminal tile, a sharp glint with a wide magnetic field. And even Evan, tumbling off his usual path from the conservatory to the bench below the cross where he ate lunch alone, knew latently that his plane bridge had begun creaking with rust. He wanted to see this other place, where the tile was so shiny he could view himself in them, rows and catalogs of his own image. It’s impossible to gauge how authentic this glimmer was. After all, Evan did not know the track-and-field-uniform David, who could’ve been skipping every other practice. Who may have held the phones of girls above his head as a way of flirting. Who may have dumped gatorade on his own head once, and attracted ants in his sleep. He did not see the David that laughed with a nervous edge when his grandmother told him, in his mature age and with her fondness of phrases only relevant to her time, that he’d grow up to be a heartbreaker. A person who’d hurt other people. When they collided, Evan caught in the net of his sight a son with no one else to answer to. He was alone, on the other side of the giant cross that defined the core mission of their private school. It was an inconceivable moment that would bury them under one another’s skins like bullets made of star material.
I’ve asked like fifty people— A series of plates that raised from the void to form the shape of a man said— Everyone knew you, no one knew where you were. Do you talk to anyone here?
Evan said no, not really. And David had pieced together from the ten people he asked Evan’s daily ritual. You do one thing all day, David said, you know. David lifted Evan’s hands up. It’s fucked up, he said. The fingertips on your left hand are white from pressing strings.
Your legs, Evan said. Lots of bruises and cuts.
The difference is, David responded, I don’t get them from doing one thing. Yeah, half of these are from track. But the others are from rock climbing and skateboarding and stuff.
You don’t wear knee protection? Evan asked. When you skateboard.
Nope. Not even a helmet. Next time I skate, come with me. Out of the infinity mirror of himself, David decided it would be skateboarding that he shared with Evan. He had only ever skated alone before.
When Evan asked his mom if his fingertips’ white-whorled calluses were staying for good, she had appealed to his CMYK social constructions and asked him to think in vague terms about his shining path into the Chinese traditional music industry. But Evan faced the small, shivered window in his practice room, which would eventually— if he tried enough— give way to mediocre concert halls and white tuxes with peony boutonnières, stiff bows, and decades of accumulated practice time in a poorly-lit box under the ground, and this was not the kind of honor he wanted. He thought about his mother crying (possibly) on the cushionless sofa in front of the TV: he believed she did not believe in the same things as him anyways.
The two could never make small talk; words always tunneled back to the body. Under the cross’s even shadow, Evan kept looking at David’s legs, which were a miniature museum of bruises, a collector’s edition of blues and purples. David asked Evan why his calluses would continue to form, without an end. Why: because it was one of the two ways that men could be. Unless he wanted to drive himself, like a needle and summoning the Sky’s own hammering force, into the wild. Off the road. David asked Evan if he was constantly on edge. If he took the edge off with music.
So Evan asked, his breath fogging up the maze of David’s reflections: How do you take the edge off? How do you imagine yourself as something else, for a little bit?
David said that when he cared more about track, he used to go for long runs at night through his neighborhood; sometimes, he would try to run to the edge of the town, where the backyards met the trees that crawled up the walls of the valley, so he could properly imagine himself dying, in the way where his spirit would distance from its host, dolly away from his own dead body and levitate into the air, and where he could passively observe all those concerned about his passing. You ever think about just going out like that? For no other reason. Just to see if anyone’s gonna care. He said. I, you know, used to always beat myself up for stopping. Because there’s always streetlights, and I end up noticing that I never really left. I’m still in this town. Someone with more stamina, or training, or whatever, maybe they could get out of this city in one go. Maybe the nation, and, like a knife, tear their way past the border of streetlights and into the dark flesh where the truth of the universe is. But it wouldn’t change anything. They’d still be stuck with the fear and loneliness inside of them. David said he stopped going on runs because all he did was run anyway. His mom suggested he start journaling instead. You don’t have to only do one thing.
You should stop doing the same thing all the time. You should write about what you like, he told Evan. If you see something cool or pretty, write it down. Connect it to yourself, how you’re feeling. What you want for your future, and for your relationships. Evan didn’t respond, but he did try this. When David took him skateboarding in the fall— the caveat was that he wore gloves to protect his fingers and a cloth mask so no one would recognize this version of him as his mother’s child— Evan’s spirits rose, and he could liken this sort of rise to the stochastic pattern of maple leaves in wind, the kind found in every suburban neighborhood, prime for piling on the porch and jumping into once or twice before daddy’s Tesla pulls up. All he could come up with, as David’s skateboard clicked against the concrete of the local elementary school, was: My emotions rise like tree leaves in fall.
It made the opposite of sense: leaves fell. It was an exercise in futility. But Evan sunk his white fingers across the left side of the guzheng, adding unmarked flourishes to whole-beat notes a hundred times a day, so he could continue this as he did all his daily exercises. The hundredth time on the hundredth day, when David tried to do that one move that he was always trying to do off the stairs, a raven had Evan’s full attention, and he was trying to make up some sentence that had to do with ‘soaring,’ which was a more fanciful word than ‘rise.’
He was still not particularly gifted in this regard, so the bird was just a bird. The head, which had just cracked against the side of a concrete block when he swung his own head around, was cracked by a concrete block that could crack heads. Something that should have been cosmic had ended. But like the dawn of yet another year in an angst-ridden age— the age when years first begin feeling less like a life lived, and more like a primordial countdown— the lack of substance left him with shock, then some emptiness. The only thing left was loss; a time, a person, who had gone and now could not be retrieved. Only a bit of blood had plastered itself to his high rise socks that his mom had urged him to wear for ‘activities like sports.’ The rest of it, the rest of the blood which had broken out of the body, was neatly filing itself into lines in the concrete. What once revolted was now ready to be another one of the stone-faced masses, to be put in order. All of which would turn around to face him, their silent godfather, decades later and tell him that the rebellion was never worth it. Nothing changed and nothing was better. It was as if fluids, people, all things except the things on bright screens, were like this. The skateboard, blood on its wheels, rocked back and forth, retracing its steps endlessly.
The son’s celestial event— the one which should’ve wrench all the disparate arcs of his life into an iron congruence— was liquid and all over the floor. Evan knelt over him, not minding if he were to have knelt in that blood; however, it happened to not spill in his direction, so his knees were dry. He listened, and there was nothing, so he closed his eyes and tried to open his ears as if they were eyes, and could be opened. As if he had something like peripheral hearing, and could hear things temporarily lodged between life and what happened after. One of David’s eyes was wide, and the other’s lids were weaved together with body liquid. It was like he was winking. But even that thought seemed disrespectful, so Evan wiped it from his mind when David’s mom said the funeral would be a small affair, held in her house.
He had forgotten to take off his shoes before he entered, so he had to double back silently and was almost late making his way to the front of the room in cloth slippers. For the longest seconds of his life, it felt as though he couldn’t clear his throat. Not just that, but that he’d never be able to clear it again; this was the scale of things in the repurposed living room that seemed so small he could fit it through the eye of a needle and use it to sew the hole all his words spilled from back up again. He tried to think strictly of eulogy-related matters, but his mind kept leading him back to the elementary school, the scrunched faces of children being told something ambiguously ‘unfortunate’ had happened at the stairs near their tetherball court. The audience was full of people he never met, sardined together too late to stall his friend’s life out. They gave nothing away— whether his speech actually made sense— but also it was a funeral; there were no outward shows of brava, like rose-throwing or giving pieces of papers with names. When Evan exhaled, his breath took a couple of petals off the day-old chrysanthemums strewn about the low ceiling. Next to the empty coffin, he almost bowed but stopped himself.
After the procession, David’s mom allowed him to touch the thin, chinoiserie vase where she kept her son. He dithered between a few options, but settled for a standard pat, as if it was a dog. She was sniffing and laughing and crying, and trying to blame it on pollen allergies in a comedic way where it was clear she intended for him to give a sad, little laugh as well. He didn’t.
Zero years before or after the hen: she hands him it. We kept her in our backyard. David loved her. He took such good care of her. Evan leaves the house with the hen grasped between his hands, in a similar posture to how one would usually grab In-and-Out burgers before shoving it in their mouth. She doesn’t struggle. She’s still in a way nothing with a pulse, with breath, should be. David’s mom texts Evan’s mother later, saying that the hen doesn’t need to be caged in their backyard, and that Evan did a great job at the funeral.
He doesn’t like looking at her. Her orange doorway eyes— mimicking the entrances to unpopulated luxury stores in the local mall, where he’d peek inside while walking past, and where a single attendant would be staring back through the dim lighting, like some esper. She takes her time shuffling from one end of the expansive yard to the other, browsing the same selection of invisible amenities hidden between stalks of invasive plants and dried grass, under unblinking washes of Sky, every day. When she needs to hide from the Sky, she stealths under a plastic slide that collects rainwater stains like precious coins, at an angle where Evan can’t see her standing behind the screen door. His mom makes him feed her, and one time, while he crouches to replace the seeds in her bowl, asks him: Did you cry when it happened? He shakes his head, no longer accustomed to using words to answer for himself. At night, he’s the last one to lock the backyard door. There she is, standing in the periphery of the light that the screen door let into the yard. Staring, unmoving, with the intensity of a thousand sharpened kitchen utensils, which Evan has never really noticed were in his house— sets and sets of pointed objects— but now feels the silver slants gleaming with intense proprioception, as if they were the same color as his blood. But there is always the danger of losing to the creature in the backyard. And there he’ll lie, a broken story. With no one to listen, ever again— this reality is becoming more and more likely. He instinctively balls his fists at this thought, and forever, this instinct replicates itself all throughout the nerves on his fingers, overriding its artistic discipline. She is still there, positioned amidst the possible owls and snakes and wild cats, the only sentient thing in the viewing field of his newest learned nature. Like all predators, she never moves.
Yes— in the year of the chicken— he can not find his music. It scatters when he looms over his guzheng, bending his neck in the fashion of an outdated street lamp, to look for it. It goes every direction except towards him, the thing carrying the most mass in the room, defying his previous conceptions of gravity. His fingers curl into a centrifugal force, from which all sound now separates itself into naked, disparate elements and flees. When he hooks his index finger over a string, the vibrations shelter themselves in the spiderwebs beside the door. Evaporate through his window, at the slightest touch of sunlight. He puts a music folder over the window. He stuffs his old practice books under the door; he tightens the tapes attaching the plucks to his fingers to preserve whatever remains of the music that had bound itself to his blood when he was young. But even when his fingertips begin to resemble the color and build of wilting heather, the things that should’ve been inside him all along, that he should transfer outward with muted eloquence, have dropped into a clatter of random noises. At sunset, he is left at the empty doorway of his body, the likelihood of the songs he nursed coming home bounding towards the horizon, becoming a speck and then nothing.
His mother doesn’t ask him why he stopped playing, why he stopped getting into the car on the days of his summer classes. She suddenly stopped looking for the car keys on the weekends; their minds melded together in this regard. Holding them in place like a mutual anchor. Evan makes round trips across his own personal ocean of grief, rippling from the pantry to the fridge, avoiding the guest room. His mother, fearing he would not eat anything else, buys him as many sweets as he can handle. But she fears the wrong thing— he isn’t picky anymore; anything that’s willing to make the trek into the bulk of his body, where it feels as though the light and valley paths have been knocked out of him, he welcomes. He pries his mouth open with both heathered hands, and every substance that ever tasted like what a human can taste flows in. His mother tells him, after buying an indefinite amount of coconut milk and ice cream, finally, that he is becoming fat. That she once feared grief would make him skinnier, but he became fat like the hen. His eyes are becoming doorways. His fingers accustomed to laziness, rather than musicality. Losing their whiteness. But she’s wrong. And anything— even the things she says— still triggers that acute attention to sharpness. He notices they always speak in the kitchen.
She continues to watch her shows, still crying every night about characters that weren’t real and scenes that didn't actually happen. When the two pass by one another in the labyrinth of their home, she nods at him, her way of heat-checking whether he is still responsive, still alive. She tries to go into his practice room to change the tapes he left unfurled and then wrap all of the turtle shell picks up again. When the door opens a crack, and the familiar half-face of his mother’s— deep-dimpled and high-browed— slots itself in, he is not there. Her open mouth, which could have said anything, gives its sound away to something larger than the both of them, than their two-thousand square foot house. She rolls her eyes upwards, seeking the place words go when they change nothing; when the world around them decides to drop the act and reveal them as the weakest, most insubstantial airwaves. She decides to feed the chicken herself. Most days, the hen stays a good distance away from the house, her stomach full of something else. Without the assistance of TV, her son goes to bed when he can not open his eyes any longer, and inadvertently gurgles in his sleep. His dreams contain colors he can’t name, that he’s never seen and never known were possible. He jumps from one scene to the next, without continuity. Sometimes, the camera of the mind pulls away from where he is and goes somewhere else entirely. And of course, there is no sound. So when he can not see himself, he loses himself completely.
This legend of the chicken falls under the same umbrella as all other legends in our region; in the only way he really believes, the man fulfills what is asked of him by notions of order and cosmic justice which he understands to be ‘himself.’ In the end, there is one thing to be done. Everything he needs, he’s always had inside of him. He’s made enough trips to know the sharpness of the objects in the kitchen. That his dreams are now beyond his comprehension. He knows the color of the things that belong in the body, when they escape. While his mother visits the visored woman with a tea set from Taobao, he takes his pointed edge and heads into the untamed part of his yard. She’s under the slide, where he once slid down before guzheng preoccupied all his days, and doesn’t struggle when he pulls her out and turns her around so her curled talons face the faceless Sky. The creature that swallows all sounds then returns them through its rich-red neck stump. Now they’re his again; reunited with the world they belong to. Because of the deed done on this day, there is still music that plays when people die, melancholic and beautiful. Now the piano will slip back to his mother’s TV, and wrap her crying in its lanky limbs. The trumpets will sprout lines of flawless solos in his dreams, revealing themselves like magic tricks in moon craters, valleys and valleys of them.
In the epilogue, her ribcage is more delicate than expected— a series of cirrus clouds to be broken by the jetblue of his knife. He feels the chest still pounding vestigial motions from when she devoured all. He squeezes her, sprinkling the stillwater lake of her blood over his yard, like a certain mother sprinkles her son over the sea where they used to chase sandcrabs seven years ago. Evan does not know about this, and I wonder if someday he will ask me for a story about his friend, but to spin sand and sea and son and mother into a legend of its own.
