SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

John stared at her, his jaw working. Too much. The fire had spread to her mouth, the spider scratching her tongue trying to get out. She bit down on that impulse, kept her mouth closed even though it felt like her skin would rupture unless she let the creature out.

"Okay," said John very slowly. "Okay." His eyes were like black holes now. It wasn’t true that he had no backbone, because he was showing it now, fighting back the hurt in his eyes, keeping his own spider in his mouth.

"I think that spider’s more than ready to go," he finally said. He put the laptop away and turned on his side. Sook Yee crept onto the bed next to him as he turned the lights out. Neither of them said anything more until they both fell asleep.

Sook Yee woke to a landscape of cold and empty sheets beside her. Clock numerals on the wall glowed 6:00. Two hours late. She tumbled out of bed, angrily combing through a hive of reasons why John hadn’t woken her.

Her mouth ached dully with the weight of spider. She could feel it buzzing with yesterday’s bitter energy, just waiting to spring out at someone.

In the kitchen Sook Yee found Cecilia, Ah Guan’s mother, struggling with the expresso machine. This house had belonged to the old woman’s father before her, and it was the the house they had all grown up in. Sook Yee saw a kind of pathos in Cecilia’s face as she pushed unresponsive buttons over and over, fighting the instruments of a home she no longer recognized.

She made breakfast for her father-in-law, scraping kaya and sugar over toast. Old-fashioned drip coffee. Two hardboiled eggs. Simple fare. She arranged everything on a gaudily-painted enamel tray and went upstairs.

Sook Yee liked her father-in-law. She had called him Pa almost from the moment John and she had gotten engaged. A quiet man by nature, he was a jazz enthusiast, and had his own study in the house, filled wall-to-ceiling with carefully-curated records arranged by publishing house, year, and alphabetical order. By day he had been an engineer in a small construction firm, by night a lover of the arts. He would take tone-deaf, grade 1 piano Sook Yee through his collection with profound enthusiasm. And she would listen.

Since his wife had died Pa had spent most of his time in his study, emerging on the first day to greet relatives and mourners, and subsequently only showing his face in periodic breachings now and then. The reins were with his daughter now, an arrangement that seemed to suit both. Over the past few days he’d been feeding Sook Yee stories of his childhood, in exchange for the breakfasts she brought for him.

But when Sook Yee pushed open the door to his study this time she found Kathy already there, in the middle of serious conversation with her father. Kathy’s narrow eyes fixed on her. "I’ve already brought his breakfast." The coffee in the tin mug on the desk was no longer steaming.

Pa smiled at her, sheepish and small.

Sook Yee brought the enamel tray back downstairs. Her irritation made her mouth spider more restless; she could feel it straining against her beleaguered tongue. In the narrow, cluttered stairwell she ran into John, who was coming up. "Where have you been?" he hissed. "Do you know she’s upstairs already?"

"Why didn’t you wake me?" she hissed back through her teeth, refusing to part her jaws.

"Why didn’t you set an alarm clock?"

"You were supposed to be my alarm clock."

Sook Yee stomped back to the kitchen to eat the unloved breakfast perched on a stool. Cecilia, having tamed the expresso machine, tried to make small talk. "Bernard doesn’t want the breakfast you made for him? Why?"

"My sis already made him something."

"Aiyah. Wasted."

"No, I’m eating it, so it’s not wasted."

Cecilia laughed, a jackhammer sound. "I wasn’t referring to the food."

Sook Yee stopped eating to jam her teeth together. Cecilia looked at her and recognized the face of a person trying very hard not to start a spiderfight. "Sorry," she said, and left the kitchen.

Sook Yee decided that she would spend the rest of the day avoiding people. Her mouth already hurt enough. Instead, was going to clean. One of the stories Pa had told her was the story of his own mother-in-law’s funeral. She passed away less than a month after he’d married John’s mother, in full view of the family’s disapproval of this working-class graft, a factory hand’s boy who had plugged his way into a university scholarship by kerosene oil light. Alone in a house full of tutting relatives, and afraid of the offense that might spill from his mouth, he had turned to cleaning. He picked up after people. He took out the trash. He tidied things that did not need to be tidied. In so doing he kept his mouth shut and kept himself out of trouble. And people saw that he was useful—a conscientious boy. Hardworking. Not lazy. It hadn’t won him instant acceptance, but it had been a start.

So, before the house began to fill up with fresh and returning guests, Sook Yee picked up a broom and swept. And when she was done with that she filled a pail with soapy water and got a mop and mopped every floor surface she could find, darting around the stacks of old magazines and board games. And when she was done with that she got a feather duster and a damp cloth and started in the rooms at the top of the house. These were places she would not have dared to touch under the old woman’s absolute dictatorship. By lunchtime her shirt was soaked with sweat and her arms ached. But at least her mouth no longer felt like it was full of hot coals.

John came to talk to her at lunchtime. "That’s a good strategy," he told her. "Pa will like it."

His eyes seemed kinder, or maybe he was just too tired to keep their quarrel up. Sook Yee rubbed his arm, saying nothing. "You should get some rest," he told her. "The Taoist priest is coming later today. There’s going to be rituals all the way past midnight."

But rest didn’t exist in Sook Yee’s vocabulary. After lunch she took to the second floor rooms. As she cleaned she found thoughts about death and inheritances and the flattery of fathers-in-law falling away from her. Her world shrank into a tiny, tidy thing where the only things which mattered were wiping the black dirt from the next object or arranging the next unrestrained pile of barang-barang into pleasing architecture.

She would have stayed in that little bubble of joy forever, but it was not to be. The tranquility was shattered as the shadows lengthened and the crickets began to sing. On the top floor of the house, Kathy was shouting.

Sook Yee crept upstairs to the upper study, the room that the old woman had used as an occasional home office and for filing storage. Cabinets full of paper lined the walls, and their tops were cluttered with kitsch and knick-knacks picked up from travels around the world: Crystal vases and laser-etched glass blocks and vaguely erotic wooden objets d’art. Sook Yee had rearranged them thematically after wiping them all. A small pail of water had turned grey with the dust.

Kathy turned to Sook Yee the moment she stepped through the door, brandishing one of the balsa wood statues in her fist."Who rearranged all this? Was it you?"

"I was cleaning," Sook Yee said, meekly.

"Who asked you? Did I say you could rearrange everything?"

It was the schoolteacher tone she couldn’t stand. Kathy had used that voice on her from the day John had brought her home. And the way she wagged that wooden block at her, as though she was a misbehaving dog. All thoughts of peace had fled. "Do I need your permission? You’re not my mother. This isn’t your house."

Kathy chucked the wooden object at Sook Yee. It struck her squarely on the collarbone and clattered to the floor with an empty sound. "This isn’t my house? I grew up here. Who are you? You think you can come in here and move my mother’s things when her body is still lying in the coffin? You think you can marry my brother and try to steal everything? Who do you think you are?"