Mollika Singh

When she was little, they used to plant marigolds together. Her mother wasn’t soft. She didn’t do bedtime stories or kiss scraped knees. Their little house was quiet: full of clattering pans, unspoken tension, and words that needed to be said but stopped just short of the tongue.

There were rare occasions of peace. One of them: the first time her mother gardened with her; she spoke one of those rare, kind sentences.

“We grow things, so the world knows we still believe in it.”

It was idealistic, something she had never seen her mother be before. She had only ever seen her mother be stubborn. It startled her. Drew her in. Made her believe too, even. Thus, it became a tradition. Every spring, like a ritual, her mother would haul down a battered seed crate and press a pair of gloves into her hands, no words said. And out they’d go, into the backyard where the soil was still dark and forgiving.

They knelt side by side, digging rows with their hands, sweat streaking their faces. It was sacred. It was the only time they were easy around each other—when their mouths were shut and their fingers were working, folding seeds into the ground like secrets. Dirt under her nails was the only trait she was willing to inherit from her mother. (She pointedly ignored the twist of her mother’s smile or the small mole under her left eye when she looked in the mirror.) These few weeks of gardening were the most familial thing they were capable of.

But at age twelve, she noticed the berries came up slower. At fifteen, half of them died before she could taste them, and her mother’s fingers trembled when she tried to hold the hose. The sun was scalding. Still, every year, her mother planted. Even when the rain didn’t come.

Even when the earth was dry and cracked. Her mother’s attempts to mimic normalcy enraged her. She refused the gloves the next spring, disgusted.

Then she left for college. Didn’t come home one summer. The next, she stayed only two days. The first to bury her mother. The second to bury the old seed crate beside her. She thought it was fitting. But she kept the gloves. She kept the gloves.

And she didn’t sell the house, despite it all. She convinced herself it was an investment worth keeping. So, after graduation, she moved back to her small town with her little house.

It wasn’t theirs anymore. The garden was dust. The tools were still hanging in the shed like bones. The house was as silent as it had been when her mother was alive. After all, they had never really spoken.

That fall, she remembered the gloves hanging from their rusted hook. Something in her demanded she wear them. Recklessly, she bought and planted whatever shitty seeds the cashier said would grow in November.

When they didn’t, she cried. Maybe, she thought, maybe she killed them. Maybe she killed her mother. Maybe if she’d been more grateful, maybe if she’d been a better daughter, then everything around her wouldn’t be dead. So, what if it was irrational or absurd? It didn’t make it any less true.

A few months later, the news said the ground had officially been reclassified as sterile. Nothing would grow now. Close to nothing had been able to grow for a while before that, they announced. At hearing that, she felt hollow. Eventually, she stopped staring at the TV and got up off the couch. She found the gloves again. She folded them gently. She didn’t cry this time.

There was no one left to cry to, and nothing left to cry for. She buried them in the garden. And she moved on.

She kept the house. She found love. Not the star-crossed kind she used to write stories about, but the mundane, everyday kind. It seems miraculous to be mundane when the world was falling apart, to her at least. Regardless, it was love, and that was enough. She never had children, but she never thought about her childhood either—not the garden or the crate or the gloves—not any of it. The house wasn’t full of oppressive silence anymore, just a calm quiet, with little moments of happiness in between.

But sometimes, when the wind cuts through the quiet just right, she thinks she hears something scratching at the parched earth beneath her feet. Not her mother. Something old and forgotten.

It asks her:

“Do you still believe in it? The world?”

 

Giya Agarwal is a student at Interlake High School. Her poetry has previously been published or recognized by the New York Times, the Eyre, Polyphony Lit, Hollins University, and the Pulitzer Center.

Grandma’s newly hired caretaker, Ah Ling, leaned across the restaurant table in Xi’an. A tall forty-ish woman with short hair, she pointed to an online picture of palm trees and ocean. “It’s beautiful there. Don’t you think Grandma deserves a nice break?”

“Hmm,” Mom grunted. “Mother, do you want to go to Hainan?”

Grandma gazed out the window and laughed as if she just remembered a joke.

Sensing our silence, Ah Ling rose from her seat and trotted away. She returned with bowls of rice and handed us each one. With a ladle, she scooped some chicken onto Grandma’s plate. “Eat more.”

Aunt leaned forward and asked Ah Ling, “Do you need some rest from caring for Grandma?”

“Oh, no, no. I just thought I should bring her on a trip.”

Half-eaten braised pork and crispy chicken slowly became lukewarm in their bowls. The turntable stopped rotating, and it seemed with it Earth had stopped spinning too. Grandma, once a semi-famous Chinese opera singer who appeared on Chinese TV variety shows, had been a houseplant for the entire dinner. Beside her, Ah Ling’s movements became akin to how a video game character might sway back and forth during a pause screen. Although the restaurant bustled, our table stilled, the passage of time tangible.

Grandma lived a life completely independent from mine in California, so there was no reason for me to worry. Still, I couldn’t help feeling uneasy. Was Ah Ling taking advantage of her? I knew that feeling. The school dance. My classmates’ sneers. Chuckling all around. For Grandma, the consequences of neglect or trickery could be much more grave. She had a set of pills Ah Ling needed to remind her to take. Sometimes, in a fit of confused anger, Grandma slapped people around her. I tried to imagine Ah Ling helping Grandma put on clothes, walking her down the stairs, cooking her food, being slapped. Maybe she wanted to leave Grandma in a hotel room to parasail, snorkel, and dance with locals.

But maybe going to Hainan would allow Grandma to draw a line through the circular flow she had floated along for years. The stream of time must have felt different to her at eighty-three. Every day, the hands of the clock returned to where they were a day ago. Every year, the sun and the earth aligned at the same spot. Perhaps it was truly Grandma’s desire to go on vacation, or was Ah Ling gently steering Grandma in that direction?

***

“Did the call go through?” Mom asked. Grandma’s face popped up on the phone screen.

Mom tilted the camera towards me, and I waved hello. Grandma had Mom’s prominent cheekbones and satiated eyes. The yellow kitchen light shone behind her, as if she were the sun.

“Remember what to say?” my mother asked me.

Proud of my twelve-year-old memorization skills, I began my blessings.

“Happy new year! Congratulations and stay prosperous!” I said in Chinese. “Wishing you good health!” On the floor, I bowed down for Grandma.

She smiled and let out a hearty laugh. “Ohhh, your Chinese is getting so good!” She clapped. Behind her, plastered to the wall, was a large photo of her in opera regalia, face decorated with colorful paints. The focus was her headpiece, embroidered with shimmering jewels and beads.

I didn’t really know what I had done or what it meant, but I wanted her approval.

She began to hum a tune that Mom often sang in the kitchen. She sang nasally. She was quiet, but every note pierced, and I could immediately tell what song it was—the Huanghe Daechang, about the defense of the Yellow River, the second longest river in China. Chinese resilience in the face of oppression.

What I knew was that in her prime, Grandma wouldn’t need my assurance to prosper. She had created her own prosperity through her voice, a life of parties, gifts, and operatic tours. I was proud to be sharing her family heritage. I bragged to my classmates, music friends, and teachers. “Look!” I held up my phone, displaying articles about her beauty and her uniquely gripping voice.

***

Back at Grandma’s apartment, the caretaker stepped out. “I’m going to pick up some cough medicine.”

In a hushed tone, Mom asked Aunt Liu Xin, “What has Ah Ling been up to?”

“She spends a lot of money on groceries and keeps saying how Grandma really wants to go to Hainan. I think it’s odd.”

“If there’s a real issue, then we’ll have to replace her,” Mom said.

“She’s been eating my wallet for years now! We’re not engineers like you in the U.S.!

But there’s no one else. I’ve tried to find someone.”

We stayed at Grandma’s apartment that night. While organizing a closet, Ah Ling dug up a discolored, old robe. A cloud of dust shrouded layers of red and gold silk, meticulous embroidery, lined with an array of faux jewels. Most of them had lost their shine, but they still faintly glowed. Ah Ling shook the Xifu up and down, and called Grandma over.

“What is this?” Ah Ling asked. I didn’t know if Grandma chose not to speak, or if she really didn’t know. There was a highly probable chance of both. In China’s Cultural Revolution, Grandma had been trained to hide keepsakes. The robe was central to Chinese opera, a dying art that had no place in Mao’s ideal society. Still, I hoped that she remembered something. I often listened to old DVD’s of her singing. Her dramatic melodies would sweep me from my disappointing life, from my room to the open Chinese countryside where I was strong and beautiful, too.

I envisioned what she must have felt donning the Xifu on stage. Her voice wasn’t silky, but rather gravelly and rich. As she sang her flying melodies, she must have flown with conviction and strength even more than brilliance. A stark contrast to her passive demeanor nowadays. Where did the opera singer go, when she tossed the costume into her closet for the last time? Did this identity stay stowed away, gathering dust over the years? Or did it follow her, yearning to surface again?

The next morning, Grandma told us in her own words, “I want to go on a vacation. I want to take the plane to Hainan.”

“Are you sure?” Mom asked. “Why do you want to go?”

Grandma didn’t explain why. Maybe she just wanted to fly again, one way or another.

While Mom and Aunt went back to work, Ah Ling took Grandma on vacation.

***

A week later, a video call came in from a Hainan hospital. “How did that happen?” Mom demanded.

“We were walking up a set of stairs, and she fell backwards.” “Weren’t you supporting her?”

“I—”

“Grandma,” Mother said, “Do you feel alright?” “You have to come get me,” Grandma muttered.

“But Grandma, she has work to—” Ah Ling reached for the phone. But Grandma slapped her.

“All of you are useless!”

Grandma stared indignantly into the camera, right at Mom. She appeared confused, like a child lost in her emotions, with only her fist to convey them.

“That’s it. I have to get her,” Mom said, stuffing a week’s worth of clothes into her suitcase. Dad and I drove her to the airport.

“I’ll be back soon, once Grandma is well enough to get on a plane,” she told me. Waving goodbye at the terminal, she left, and I didn’t see her until six months later. She was wearing the same clothes she had on when she left, but Grandma was beside her, shakily grasping her left hand.

***

In California, I sat on our backyard patio next to Grandma. Above our heads, a hummingbird fluttered from left to right, and the leaves of our oak tree rustled gently.

“Do you hear it?” Grandma asked. “Hear what?”

“The song.” Her wheelchair was parked between a lawn chair and potted tomato plants. I realized that I had never thought about the squirrels, finches, and trees in my backyard that way. Unlike Grandma, I hadn’t grown up around urban sounds of car horns and shouting. I never had to forget the sound of my own singing.

“Get me some water,” Grandma said, sending me inside. Through a gap in the kitchen window, I heard a distant but characteristic voice singing.

Instead of layered red regalia, she wore a simple flowery shirt that conformed to her slightly hunched back. She sang for herself in a shallow tone, but with the same confidence she had in front of an audience of thousands. Instead of the dazzling textures of traditional Chinese percussion, she was accompanied by a choir of birds and bees. Though it was softer and less nasally, Grandma’s voice still soared. Here was a version of Grandma nobody ever saw on national television. I hummed along with her, following her lead as we flew among the birds.

 

Garrett Cai is a rising senior at Homestead High School and has been writing short stories since his freshman year. In his spare time, he likes to play the piano or meet up with friends for some tennis. Because he’s always on one keyboard or another he learned to type really fast.