火

By Daniel Liu

Prose Winner of the Inaugural Surging Tide Summer Contest
​Selected by Angie Sijun Lou

It was the summer that dead things came back to life. When his mother’s bridal gown surrendered to the smoke in Jing’s backyard, he wound up the film camera beneath his thumb and shot me in front of the fire. White lace folded in the heat. Midnight grasshoppers sang in the undergrowth. He took another picture, this time of the scalloped sweetheart neckline alone crumpling into the breeze. Jing promised me that what he was doing wasn’t wrong, that what remained of his mother’s charmeuse satin in the thick air was about creation, not vengeance, that if he could make new art from this burning garment then it was worth it, and I believed him because he had a toothy grin that unwrapped itself over neat rows of lawn, because I was a boy with too few friends, because I was seventeen.

When his mother was seventeen, she had bought the dress in a thrift store in Sunset Park. She told me this once over a pitcher of sweet tea with ginger, that it had been a soft ochre before it was dry-cleaned and renewed and worn on her wedding day. Her voice was shrill and unbearable, the kind that wilted peonies and scared away dogs, unlike her son’s, which was careful and earthly.

Jing smiled brightly at the pyre. The reason he set fire to her wedding dress was not that he hated his mother but instead, he told me, because he was determined to make art. On the stark white walls of his bedroom upstairs, there were dozens of sets of photographs, each having an image entrapping an object and another image with its smoldering remains.

Sometimes they were his own, a childhood train, a novel he had never read. Three of the sets were objects of mine, a deflated soccer ball, a pair of white socks, a copy of a magazine. Since I always ended up witnessing the fiery ritual anyway and didn’t have much besides the object itself to lose, I thought it might as well have been something of mine that he burned, something that I had a memory of. But memory didn’t work in this way. Memory created its own hurts and contours, its own body. I imagined Jing’s mother knew this, always threatening to break his 35mm SLR camera. I imagined she was afraid of what it could capture: her fingers around a green bottle, the purple marks I had seen before on Jing.

On the trimmed grass, he stretched his long arms and turned his head toward me. His dimples were in full display, despite how the only light remaining was from inside the house, now that the gasoline-stained liturgy had gone out. His hands fell to his sides. The heavy heads of the flowers in his mother’s garden beds arched back into the soil it stemmed from. Everything was heavier when it was alive.

I followed him as he took a seat on the patio floor right next to the garden table and chair. From his pocket, he pulled out the lighter he had used on the wedding dress and also a pack of Marlboros that we had stolen from the gas station by a Buddhist temple his mother frequented. I didn’t smoke, only he did, but I took one anyway, because I was seventeen, and lit the white tip. He looked at me disparagingly. Sorry, I said. That I grabbed one. That I can’t do more to help you.

He didn’t move. Instead, he pointed out gently that I had lit the wrong end. I gave the lighter back to him and tossed the failed attempt to the ground and crushed it under my shoe. The shadows we made looked bruised, hazy by the bamboo shades that separated what was outside and the warm house, too amorphous to be ours.

He closed his fist around the pocket lighter, strangled the plastic. He brought his knees up to his chin. There was a mole there, and I had joked before that his mole was like a navigational star, and that if he followed it, maybe it would take him to his real mother. He had kept a stone face then and I didn’t really understand the gravity of what I said, only speaking what had crossed my mind. I had never seen him cry, but I imagined on that night that he did, even going as far as to think about his mother crying too on the other side of his always-locked bedroom door, two wails an inch apart and still full of distance. The day after, when he picked me up in his gray sedan, I told him the part where I felt guilty and where I was sorry, and he smiled it off and gripped the steering wheel tighter, the faux leather already coming off.

Now on the cold stone floor, where he sat in front of me, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and held it loosely, and I placed my hand on his torso where there was a tattoo of an animal, or an idea, or a man. He didn’t care for permanent things, he had told me this before. He had expected things to fall apart. But there, on the flagstone paving, he admitted to this one attempt at perseverance, something he made that no one could ever take away from him, something that would always stay and could not stop loving him, could not throw plates at him, could not die in an accident, could not become a cut-out space on a family portrait, could not change, could not break, could not leave him, even if this permanent thing was on his own skin.

He climbed over me and kissed my forehead. It was the end of June, and I didn’t know a name for myself then, only a brief mindless word the world had associated with me, but now, with him renaming me, releasing me, I could answer him calling out to me. He stepped back and let his hand hover over the shutter release of his camera. This time, as he shot me, there was no fire involved, only a bright flash.

***

That spring, I didn’t cry and spent the morning talking to his mother. I let her yell at me and scream and kneel and weep and do all the things you do when there’s nobody to blame for all the stifling smoke burying your desires in a sweetened mess of ash. When he was cremated, his mother gave me his photos. How the soft reds blended into the landscape, the grainy details making out the figures of all the things we owned, or thought we owned, or had cared for. How all his pictures ended in a soft pile of embers.

And maybe he was right. That making something needed the past to burn up and fade into nothing and he understood this in his art, that all memory was just the aftermath, the great quivering silhouette of a wave crashing into the shore, the briefest division of time that we could have spent on this earth.

But the fire remembered too, didn’t it? Tracing all the things it destroyed, or created. My lips in the picture hung like a body, spelled out empty, or vessel, or all the things I couldn’t keep dead.

---

Daniel Liu is an American writer. The author of COMRADE (fifth wheel press 2022), his work appears in The Adroit Journal and Diode. He has received awards from the Pulitzer Center, YoungArts, the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, Columbia College Chicago, Bennington College, the Adroit Prizes for Poetry and Prose, and others. You can find his work at daniel-liu.carrd.co

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