The elephant leers down at me.
It’s not really an elephant. It’s a water stain with a trunk and two sloping tusks, a tail flicking to the right, wrinkly lower lip curled in a sneer.
I roll out of my cot—there’s a faint dip in the mattress after nine years—and crawl to the dresser, too bone-weary to stand up.
Eight months ago, James left a china doll in our mailbox. She has waxy skin, red paint flaking from her glossy red lips. An ivory qipao stretches over her chest and my thumb brushes over her porcelain curves as I pick her up. I pinch the stained silk between two fingertips, rubbing it in circles. It’s brittle. Transparent. Like him.
He used to write me letters in his sloppy, stilted handwriting. Then, he started mailing me threadbare cadet hats. Dane’s shoelaces. The prom tickets we bought together. An embroidered handkerchief with a spring chicken stitched into the fabric.
The doll smells like leather and cigars and his rosemary aftershave. The way men used to smell, my mother says, when women wore two-inch pumps and walked with halting steps. She told me that smoking was an act of elegance “back in the day” — men were seen lighting cigarettes dressed in Saint Laurent suits, while women in cocktail gowns flicked ashes from sleek cigarette holders.
One month after the china doll, the gifts came to a halt. Just like that. My mother was flipping through crosswords when James’ father, Joseph, knocked on our door. The door nearly snapped off its hinges when he flung it open, his face worn and drooping like Dalí’s melting clocks.
His words bounce around my head as I pull the white canvas from Dollar Tree out from underneath my dresser. “He died from a blast injury two days ago,” Joseph rasped. “An’ don’t tell me he’s in a better place. He’s an eighteen-year-old boy for God’s sake.”
Like clockwork, I climb into a streetcar twenty minutes later and watch the storefront windows pass in a blur of FOR RENT signs and flaking paint. The trees lining the sidewalk grow in small square plots, leaves still stubbornly clinging to their branches. The city is asleep. I haven’t brushed my teeth yet.
The china doll is tucked away in my drawstring knapsack, which rests against my feet. I lean against the plastic seat and line the bottles of paint on the seat next to me. Magenta. Red. Blue. Brown. Three seats away, a wiry old man with a puckered red face puffs on a pipe, his chest heaving.
I squeeze a drop of brown paint onto a paper plate caked with old paint. James didn’t use white or black. Ever. He painted bright, bold geometric shapes — yellow diamonds for feathers, green triangles for pine trees. Uniform strips of red, orange and pink sunsets.
I never paid attention to the mint fragrance of his cologne, or the calluses on his palms, until he was gone. I took his raspy laughter and crooked smiles for granted, never saving the stems of angel’s breath that he’d snap off and tuck behind my ear.
You don’t long for the sweltering heat of Tucson summers until winter rolls in.
I start by painting his thick, dark curls, easing the bristles into the thin canvas. His eyes, a dark mauve. Slashes of magenta to suggest lips. A strong, square chin. A single dot for the mole beneath his cheekbone and—
The old man behind me begins sputtering, his coffee splashing down the front of his Oxford shirt.
The stain is shaped like Africa.
“Jesus,” he spits, dabbing at the coffee stain with a tissue. “I’m gonna die young.” But he won’t.
He won’t ever know what it means to “die young.”
He lived in a sweeping Craftsman home, I imagine. Probably owned a cocker spaniel named Gloria. He could afford luxury smoke pipes and premium rolling papers, cannabis gummies and bottles of whiskey that he drank like orange juice.
He lived three times the life James could have lived, and he didn’t deserve half of it. And suddenly, I’m making my way down the aisle as the streetcar jolts to a stop.
It’s like I’m watching a YouTube video through a first-person camera. I watch her hands grab his cooled coffee cup. She tears the cardboard sleeve to shreds. She dumps the rest of the liquid down his shirt.
She stumbles into the gray morning, leaving behind the china doll and the painting of her boyfriend on the streetcar.
Robina Nguyen (she/her) is a queer Vietnamese-Canadian freelance writer based in Toronto, as well as the current Editor-in-Chief of The Outland Magazine. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Shameless Magazine, Disobedient Magazine, the Yale Daily News, Ambré Magazine and West End Phoenix, among others.