A Map for the Missing

by Belinda Huijuan Tang

He was reminded of how she’d approached each book they read so rigorously and methodically. Each time they met she brought an organized notebook, containing all the copied passages that she thought were important.

This was the worst part of a death: that the dead could not collect on the balance they were owed, that they left all their burden to the living.

It was amazing, he’d thought back then, that an unchanging property of an object wasn’t only what was there, but also what wasn’t. It meant that if you could define what was absent, create a map for the missing, that was also a way of knowing a thing.

She could see more clearly now that some things were not about want, but rather about the sacrifices one had to make to survive in this place, in this time. What her mother had been trying to tell her was that her dreams could no longer hold.

Each opening had necessitated a closure enabling it, the hinge upon which the door had swung.