Lucy Zhang
Our deaths are chosen for us the moment we’re born, while our parents hold our bodies to the sun and ask the gods for our ends. It’s an elaborate ceremony. Our parents crush Snowflake Crisps into milk powder studded with the greens and reds of pistachios and jujubes. They filter and dust the sweet white flakes onto our lumpy, shapeless faces so the gods can peer into our fledgling souls and formulate an expiration window.
Our burial grounds are prepared the moment we’re born——empty spaces lined up in rows from earliest deaths to latest deaths. Mine is between the graves of one of my sister’s friends and a retired man who used to puff rice with a popcorn cannon. The time until my death is neither long nor short, neither blessed nor cursed. But my sister possesses the blessings of the sun. Her gravestone is at the tail end of the queue in the dense forests of the mountains. Gravestones require significant labor, and even though all families participate in carving and polishing and transporting them, most children won’t have gravestones ready until their teens. Those who die before their teens are first left to sleep below a mound of dirt like the gap of a missing tooth.
Our ages are expressed in how much time we have left. I am five. Five years left. My sister is fifty. Fifty years left. She has coddled me since I was a baby and told me I didn’t need to work or earn money. She’d do all that. She had the time for it. She owns a jewelry store with a team of craftsmen who weld and shape gold into bracelets and necklaces. The craftsmen work uninterrupted back-to-back twelve-hour shifts to ensure no one steals gold during breaks.
Only those with long lifespans can afford to build capital and open businesses. People like me who live too short to properly learn a trade but too long to spend a proper life with an unbridled recklessness tend to prefer working the orchards. We gravitate toward mindless activities in constant need of labor, spent soaking in the sun and the many shades of orange that dance across persimmon tree leaves. I tell my sister I am content to live like this, but she doesn’t believe me. As a child, I used to pine about visiting the cities connected by vehicles that levitated over tracks using magnetic forces. Now, I laugh at persimmons that resemble misshapen body parts, call a day’s work done when I’ve sweat through my T-shirt, return home hours before my sister, and spend my time lining up overripe persimmons to dry along the windowsill and shaping flaky pastries filled with lotus seed paste. My niece and nephew love to eat them when my sister isn’t watching. She thinks sweets will form stones in her children’s stomachs. Bezoars are a problem of the long lived.
Our parents both died young. They had my older sister and me early, convinced they needed to leave a mark beyond their headstones. All I remember as a toddler is the constant scent of burnt flowers and cedar drifting through our home, a practice my family believed would attract blessings to extend my life expectancy. There has not been a single case of anyone postponing their death date. We stopped with the burning nonsense three years ago, after I told my sister that the scent caused my migraines.
I suspect my sister ate up all the blessings meant to be shared with me. Her children’s gravestones are even farther out than hers. But she spends more time and money trying to sign me up for annual expeditions into cities than on raising her kids.
“They have plenty of time,” she says.
“They have the potential to do so much,” I reply.
I’ve taught them to dance at our annual ceremonies for the dead, to sweep the tombs of their grandparents and properly place mantou and apples at the stones’ feet, to pour Maotai in a row of tiny glasses without spilling, to kowtow deeply and slowly so they have time to formulate their prayers and so my parents have time to take them in.
My sister’s children are smarter than I am. They attend a school that teaches skills and has them hone them over years of practice and apprenticeships, while I attended school only long enough to learn to read and write and then began working to make the most of the energy left in my body.
My sister’s children love the orchards where I work, but even more than the orchards, they love the neighboring coops where geese and chicken cluck and squawk whenever they get too close. They haven’t seen me twist the heads off chickens yet. I do that after they go back to school for evening study sessions. An orange glow illuminates my hands as I work to finish before the sun disappears. There are enough chickens that the kids hardly notice that some get wrung and sold as dinner. I even leave a few eggs to hatch so they have a steady supply of chicks to whom they can feed worms they dig up from the soil. They used to dig with their hands, but after they smeared their homework assignments with mud, my sister refused to let them near the animals unless they wore gloves. Her kids don’t wear gloves. Instead, I make sure they wash away any evidence before they go home, scraping deep under their fingernails to rinse off the grime.
“Do you feel that you’ve accomplished enough?” my sister asks me during our evening tea. “That you can leave satisfied with what you’ve done?”
I’ve been brewing ginger root tea, grown from rhizomes I tossed into a clay pot of earth. My sister prefers it over my pu-erh tea, which she claims tastes like moldy wine.
“You say that like I’m going to fall over any moment. I still have five years. That’s a long time,” I say.
I distract her with questions about her business——the annoying lady who keeps asking her to remold a bracelet for free, the young, handsome craftsman whom all the ladies demand as their jewelsmith, the fluctuating price of gold due to the discovery of a new gold ore cluster. She tells me about the metallogenic belt and the potential for deep-seated gold ores with bismuth. It will be years until they finish digging a mine through the main fracture plane and granite. Its completion is scheduled for long after I die.
*
During the summer, my sister’s children leave for their apprenticeships. They’ve decided to follow in my sister’s footsteps into the jewelry industry, the only consistently lucrative occupation in a village like ours. I have begun to harvest the strawberry fields. The benefit of dying at my age is that my back still fully bends and I easily pick the strawberries that hug the ground.
My sister probes me to take the first scheduled outbound trip of this week to the city where she’s convinced I’ll find my first love, build a family, and achieve fulfillment. “And because there are absolutely no good single men here, all vegetables with ginkgo nuts for brains,” she adds. I refuse. I’d rather use the money to buy her kids tickets so they can travel whenever they want, a suggestion my sister waves off because “they can buy their own after they’ve got their act together.”
I lug home a crate of strawberries that have fallen off the plant, unfit for selling but perfectly fine to eat. My sister sits at the table, scrutinizing microscopic stones under the light with a pair of tweezers. I put a pot of milk, crushed almonds, and gelatin to boil and let it set until it hardens. Then I slice away the mushy bits of strawberries and their leaves, my fingers cushioning the underside of the berry, catching the blade as it moves through the fruit. We like strawberry almond tofu because it requires no chewing and our teeth have been thinning like limestone worn down by wind. She and I eat from the same bowl, each holding different-sized spoons, a more ladle-like one for her so she can scoop up the sweet soup and a sharp one for me so I can pick out the berries.
“I’m going to clean the graves,” I tell her after we’ve emptied the bowl.
“Again?” she asks.
“All the loose dust makes them dirty.” And I enjoy the stretch of a walk from my stone to hers. Despite the number of treks I’ve made, I always lose my breath. I always finish the journey in under a day, though, the distance never longer than what my legs can travel.
She sighs. From across the table, she pulls my hands away from the bowl, and my fingers leave ghost imprints on the porcelain sides. Then she places a slip of paper in my palms. I stare at the rectangular ticket and feel the edge where punctured holes write out its number. “You should at least consider it,” she says.
*
Although our deaths are chosen for us, our births are not. Our births are neither blessings nor curses, but rather a sequence of random occurrences through which we manifest from the shell created to contain us. We are empty jars filled over time with milky nougat, dried berries, and sesame seeds. My sister filled her shell quickly, her body circulating with blessings and energy only days after she learned to cry. I, on the other hand, remained doll-like until a full year after my birth, at which point my parents had nearly given up on me. But the moment I latched onto a soul, I became livelier than my sister——climbing trees and chasing red foxes who’d try to steal the meat we were curing on clothespins outside. People always assumed I was the one with a later death date since it seemed that I had so much life to spend.
As I head toward the stones with a rag and broom, I turn around to watch the sun rise over the town and the sole road that leads through the gates. I can see the road wind left and right until it fades into the twilight, farther than any amount of distance we can travel. Then I continue hiking up the mountain, curving through the forest. A few new blank slates pad the tail end of the cluster. My sister and her children’s gravestones appear much closer from here.
*
My story is partially inspired by Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life.” It’s also inspired by a recent trip I made to rural China where I visited the graves of my grandparents-in-law who passed several years ago during a time we weren’t able to travel.
Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Apex Magazine, Split Lip Magazine, CRAFT, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks Hollowed (Thirty West Publishing) and Absorption (Harbor Review). Find her at https://lucyzhang.tech or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.