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

Humiliation blossomed from Sook Yee’s bruised collarbone. Her heart beat harder, in time with the pulses of pain. A line had been crossed. She was vaguely aware of the crowd of rubbernecking relatives that had collected behind her. Wondering if blood would be shed between daughter and daughter-in-law.

Good. Let them watch. Sook Yee smiled sweetly at Kathy. "I’m the one who’s married and doing something with my life. I’m the one who isn’t rotting away. I’m the one who’s going to give Pa grandchildren. How about you?"

That did it. That hit a nerve. "How dare you. I raised that boy you call your husband!"

"And you did a shit job. He hates you. He’s never said a single good thing about you."

"Go to hell," Kathy said, and as she said that the spider crawled out of her mouth, onto her cheek. Her hand shook as she put it down one of the crystal blocks Sook Yee had cleaned, a tacky thing with the Beijing Imperial Palace laser-etched into its centre.

"I’ll see you there." Sook Yee opened her mouth and let her own spider out.

The tongue softening and going limp was a sensation Sook Yee hadn’t felt in far too long. John and Pa had joined the crowd of onlookers. She heard Pa whispering, "What’s happening?" and John hushing him.

Sook Yee locked eyes with Kathy as their spiders danced.

There was an alien vulnerability in Kathy’s eyes. The stress of her mother’s death and the funeral had weakened her. Sook Yee’s words had hit their mark; she was haemorrhaging inside. Now was not the time for mercy. Sook Yee thought of every little slight she’d endured in her two years living in this house. The snide remarks about her upbringing, the schools she had gone to, the amount of make-up she put on. Her choice to be a lawyer was a lazy and dirty one, driven by money, not like Kathy, who was a teacher, whipping the next generation into shape. Sook Yee had kept quiet for Pa’s sake, but she had kept track of all it, stacking them inside herself like a nest of insect eggs. Now they were hatching into a single-minded plague of resentment.

Sook Yee’s spider had driven Kathy’s to the edge of the block. Reasonable adults would call the spiders back, force the struggling creatures back into their mouths. Kathy’s eyes had a pleading look to them, as if she was expecting to be spared.

Sook Yee pulled her lips into a grim smile.

Her spider tore Kathy’s apart. Leg by leg, and then the head, vindictive in its orderliness. Adults could be so much more vicious than children. The gathered relatives let out an collective exhalation: Whether of shock or relief or pleasure, it was hard to tell.

Kathy lowered her head. Her shoulders shook, but she said nothing. She could not say anything. Sook Yee looked at John, who gave her a small thumbs up. "Harsh but true," he mouthed. The little bastard.

It was Pa who caught her attention. The old man was shaking his head, looking unusually haggard and ancient. Instinctively, Sook Yee headed towards him, but he walked away, a stooped and solitary figure pushing through the crowd of his relatives without a word.

The next day Sook Yee brought Pa his breakfast, as usual. It was the last day of the funeral, when the body would be brought to the crematorium. Pa’s study felt dim, airless. He hadn’t spoken much or shown himself since the fight yesterday, and he didn’t turn around when Sook Yee put the tray on the table. "Pa," she said softly, "time to eat."

Pa continued to stare out of the window. His voice was like corrugated cardboard, rough and hollow. "You don’t have to do this anymore. You’ve won."

"It wasn’t really about that."

Pa’s eyes were red-rimmed when he turned to look at her. "Why are you fighting John’s battles for him?"

"He’s my husband. His battles are my battles, too."

He let out a gusty sigh. "Just because you’re married, doesn’t mean that you lose yourself as a person. What happens when one of you dies?"

Pa had spent his life quiet, biting down on his arguments and carving out a space for himself where he could calm his anxious spiders. Now he sat in the dark, alone, hemmed in by the collected shelves of his individuality. The sadness in his eyes could drown armies.

"I’m sorry," Sook Yee said.

"I would never have kept John’s inheritance from him. Despite what he thinks." He looked down at the tray. "Can you take this to Kathy? I don’t think she’s eaten since yesterday."

Never argue with an adult. Sook Yee’s feet were as leaden as her chest as she made her way down to the basement, where Kathy’s room was. She wanted to feel like Neil Armstrong or Jacques Piccard, but she felt more like a passenger on the deck of the Titanic. In her two years living in this house she had almost never come down here, never trodden in her sister-in-law’s private domain. She had no idea what to expect.

She reminded herself that Kathy’s spider was dead and she could not hurt Sook Yee now. She had been forced into silence for the next few weeks.

Silent during the last days of her mother’s funeral. Now that it had become reality the wrongness of it all was beginning to sink in. The look on Pa’s face. The fact that John was unruffled by all this. What had she done?

Sook Yee found the door to her room unlocked. "Sis," she said softly as she pushed the door in, "I’ve brought breakfast."

Kathy lay on her bed in her darkened room. It was as cramped as the rest of the house, thickly lined wall-to-wall with cupboards and cabinets. Sook Yee put the breakfast tray down on the desk and drew back the shades. Grey dawn sun streamed into the room, casting its weak light over glass-protected shelves of trophies and certificates, tacky ceramic figurines, and framed pictures. A decorative plate said "Happy Birthday To A Beloved Daughter". Sook Yee scanned the shelves. There had to be dozens of pictures, a hundred even. A entire childhood was contained in the musty confines of Kathy’s cabinets.

Some of them caught Sook Yee’s eye. A picture of young Pa and his wife, in wedding dress, perched on the old sofa in the house’s living room, stiff-backed for posterity. Bubble-cheeked little Kathy and her mother posed sternly in front of the old piano in one of the study rooms. Kathy grew bigger in successive birthday cake pictures, while the house’s tiled kitchen remained unchanged around her. Out in the garden, on one of the ugly chairs, a toddler John sat astride his older sister’s rigid knees. Each picture that followed was a picture of Kathy and John as the latter grew taller and the former grew thinner. And then one of Sook Yee and John in their own wedding finery, in the living room, holding the tea ceremony.

Kathy remained on her bed, unmoving. "Sis," Sook Yee said again, but she was met by a silence larger than houses. She was too afraid to go over and touch her sister-in-law, to shake her out of her stupor, to make that connection. Instead she just stood, waiting, while around her the sealed, curved lips of a life past smiled silently down at her, like rictuses.

Originally published by Fireside Fiction in October 2015

I hate it when it’s kids. I hate it when a new saint is wheeled in and it’s an eight-year-old hollowed out by their sanctity and turned monstrous with growths. I hate it when I know outside there are parents with heads bowed and throats tight and when I’m in here in this mortuary with its scorched walls and smell of formaldehyde. I hate it because I know how they feel and I know they don’t deserve it. I didn’t deserve it either, when it happened to me.

It’s mostly kids who get called to sainthood. Nobody knows why; we’ve had so many in our little nowhere town that our nurseries and schoolrooms are nearly empty. I passed the park the other day and it was like a graveyard. How many miracles can one town stomach?