The Storm We Made

by Vanessa Chan

The Japanese occupiers killed more people in three years than the British colonizers had in fifty. The brutality shocked the quiet population of Malaya, accustomed by then to the stiff upper lip and bored disinterest of the British, who mostly stayed away from the locals as long as the tin-mining and rubber-tapping quotas were reached.

Cecily said nothing. For a few minutes before the guilt took hold of her, it was a relief to see her terror realized. It had finally come to pass, and this was all her fault. She had caused this, all of it.

Sometimes, they thought, Cecily really didn’t know how to act right. They were all mothers; they knew how mothers should act. And when a mother loses a son, she should cry, she should collapse, she should seek comfort in other mothers. She should not just hold her pain as a shield, act so prickly that everyone was afraid to come near.

Though all love was humiliation, in a way, Cecily supposed. All love was someone breaking their soul into smaller pieces and offering the broken pieces of themselves as a puzzle to someone else—help me put myself back together.

“That’s love, isn’t it?” she said. “To know badness lives in someone but to love anyway.

“Maybe I love him more for his badness. My mother used to say maybe love is just ignoring the bad things,” she said. She looked up at Cecily, face shiny with tears and the moon. “Is something wrong with me?”

Grief sucked everything with it, left holes in the body that nothing, not even music, could fill.

Perhaps the real victim in all this was Gordon, ignorant of every pulsing tension around him, unaware just how quickly the world he idolized was going to change, how the child she carried might not even be his child. She should pity him; he deserved her compassion. But all she wanted to do in that moment was slam her knuckles into his face. Just you wait, she thought. Her body, having steeled itself for days, felt prepared for battle, sharp and vicious, ready to pounce on whatever came next.