The Astonishing Color of After

by Emily X.R. Pan

My mother is a bird. This isn’t like some William Faulkner stream-of-consciousness metaphorical crap. My mother. Is literally. A bird. I know it’s true the way I know the stain on the bedroom floor is as permanent as the sky, the way I know my father will never forgive himself. Nobody believes me, but it is a fact. I am absolutely certain. In the beginning, that mother-shaped hole was made of blood. Dark and sticky, soaked to the roots of the carpet. Over and over again, I rewind back to that June afternoon. I walked home from Axel’s just in time to see my father stumble out onto the porch, clearly looking for me. I’ll never be able to erase that image: his hands slick and shaking, maroon smeared across his temple, chest heaving like it was iron filings getting sucked into his lungs and not air. At first I thought he was injured. “Leigh—your mother—” He choked on the sentence, face puckering into something awful. When he finally got the words out, his voice crawled through an ocean to get to me. It was a cold cerulean sound, far away and garbled. I couldn’t process what he said. Not for a long time. Not when the police arrived. Not even when the people came to carry my mother’s body out the front door.

I made dark, pooling shapes. I pressed my stick of charcoal down as hard as I could until my knuckles were stained and aching and a waxy puddle of black shined up at me. Maybe if I could draw the emptiness, I could control it. But it was never dark enough. It was never the blackest black. It’d been a long time since I colored anything in. Charcoal and pencil were all I was using, and I mostly stuck to outlines. I was saving the colors for later.

It felt so different from the parks back home, full of thick trees draped with scraggly brown beards. Star-shaped flowers smelling like kumquats. Long leaves waving like flags, flapping their rusty undersides. We watched children racing down a path toward a small playground. Kites sprinkled the sky like confetti—a butterfly, a phoenix, a winged monkey. It was an Axel type of scene. He would’ve pulled out his portable watercolors and made us stay until he’d gotten at least two good pages. And once he went home, his quick strokes of color would bake from raw visual into warm, delicious audio. The kites would be rendered in arpeggios. The children would become little timpani gods roaming the earth in seven-eight time. For Axel, watercolors are just his way of taking notes—his own form of shorthand. He uses the colors to guide his compositions, to produce pieces of what he calls opera electronica.

When I close my eyes, willing my body to relax… I can’t shut off my mind. Images rewind, replay, again and again. I think of that red and feathered creature sailing across the sky. The box of things that my grandparents said they’d burned. That gray body, arranged in the casket like a doll. And what about the box of incense? I’d never seen incense sticks so black. I hear them again: the whispery voices, words I can’t decipher. The shushing of syllables that slide up against each other. Cold light puddles in the wide crack between the bottom of my door and the linoleum. It seeps in from the window behind the thin curtain, washing the walls in spectral beams. At first I think it’s the moon snaking down the alley, and then I realize it’s the streetlamps. My eyes settle; the darkness lifts. There’s just enough glow to see by. My bare feet slide out of the low bed to find the floor, carrying me to the dresser. I guess I was expecting the whispers to grow louder, but they abruptly halt the moment I touch the handle. I pull at the drawer slowly, quietly. This is a small apartment with thin walls; sound travels. There’s the feather. There’s the incense. And this time, there’s also an old-looking book of matches. Where did these come from? A shiver traces the curve of my spine. I can’t help checking over my shoulder. The light outside the window flickers and dims, as if answering a question I didn’t know I was asking. I’m convinced they’re from the bird—the feather is like a signat...

Whose fault was it? That’s the question on everyone’s mind, isn’t it? Nobody will ever say it out loud. It’s a question people would call inappropriate. The kind of thing where everyone tells you, “It’s nobody’s fault.” But is that even true? It’s only human nature to look for a place to lay the blame. Our fingers are more than ready to do the pointing, but it’s like we’re all blindfolded and spinning. What makes a person want to die? She had me. She had Dad. She had her best friend, Tina. She taught piano lessons to a third of the kids in our neighborhood. Anyone who knew her would have said she seemed like the happiest. The most alive. When she laughed, her face bloomed and you felt warm at the center. Those last few months her laughs came rare. I noticed it, I really did. But I chalked it up to moodiness; she’d always been in the habit of swinging from one extreme to the other. I excused it too quickly, too easily. Was it my fault? If I had only— Or if Dad had only— If Mom had only— What?

We try so hard to make these little time capsules. Memories strung up just so, like holiday lights, casting the perfect glow in the perfect tones. But that picking and choosing what to look at, what to put on display—that’s not the true nature of remembering. Memory is a mean thing, slicing at you from the harshest angles, dipping your consciousness into the wrong colors again and again. A moment of humiliation, or devastation, or absolute rage, to be rewound and replayed, spinning a thread that wraps around the brain, knotting itself into something of a noose. It won’t exactly kill you, but it makes you feel the squeeze of every horrible moment. How do you stop it? How do you work the mind free? I wish I could command my brain, say to it: Here. Go ahead. Unspool, and let the memories go. Let them be gone.

The eighty-ninth floor of the Taipei 101 tower is the observatory deck, where you can look out at the entire city through walls of glass. Buildings in miniature. Mountains layered in the distance like gentle strokes of watercolor, the farthest ones fogged and fading into the clouds. It’s a strange juxtaposition: the city so tightly packed, everything built so closely together—and beyond that, the sprawling greens and blues of lush forests.

My mother’s hands have turned to wings. Her hair, to feathers. Her pale complexion now red as blood, red as wine, every shade of every red in the universe. The bird. The bird. The bird. That’s all I can think about. Crawling into bed is like swimming through something thick and murky. My every limb weighed down. Brain hazy with sleep deprivation. Eyes aching, the periphery of my vision dull and watery. I should be able to sleep. I’m exhausted. But the moment I close my eyes, they flutter. I have to strain to keep them shut. The bird the bird the bird. My mother the bird.

Funny how when you can’t sleep the brain turns itself inside out, becomes a desperate and hungering thing. All I want right now is to fall headfirst into the blackest black. All I want is for everything to shut off so I can finally rest. Make the colors stop. Send the thoughts away. Let everything go still. Is this what it feels like to want to reach the end? Is this the kind of existence that led my mother to become a bird?