The Night Tiger

by Yangsze Choo

The worst part about death is forgetting the image of the beloved. It’s the final robbery, the last betrayal.

Listening to the crank of pedals, the wheels humming in the falling velvet dusk, I closed my eyes and wished fiercely that I could leave this place. Leave everything and start over somewhere else.

We got along best when there was a job to be done, just as we’d done the housework swiftly and efficiently when we were younger. If we were both hired as janitors, I thought, there would be no disagreements between us.

But that’s the way people are, I think. We forget all the bad things in favor of what’s normal, what feels safe.

“I know what it’s like in your family,” she said. So he’s really told her everything, I thought in amazed resentment. “But I want to make Shin happy. And if it means giving myself to him, that’s all right with me.” Was that love or stupidity? But maybe that was just the hardheaded part of me, calculating my chances of survival. I wouldn’t give myself away to some man, become one of his possessions. Not without the economic assurance of a wedding ring. Even then, from what I could see of my mother’s choice, perhaps the price was too high.

Perhaps that was what it meant to be family—you were shackled together by obligations that you could never escape.

I bit back the urge to jump out, run home. I wanted my mother. Wanted to bury my face in her lap, feel her soft hand on my hair, and forget about everything but the two of us.

“What happens in your dream?” I was treading carefully here, feeling my way. I’d done this dozens of times at the May Flower. They said they wanted to dance but they really just wanted to talk about themselves.

If the dead lived on in people’s memories, then I’d keep him safe forever.

Most of all, though, I wanted my mother to forgive me, and bless me, and tell me everything would be all right, just as she had when I was little, and there were only the two of us in the whole wide world. But perhaps that was part of not being a child anymore.