Dear Fox, Trick Me Again

Death circles me like a shoal of sardines. I eat, I sleep, I look

outside the window and imagine where I might fall, a banal business. I

picture death on the cardiogram, a thick, solid string that curbs the heart. With it I can knit a sweater, hang myself, or play cat’s cradle. I’m clear-headed enough to know what I shouldn’t do. Still, why

exist at all? What makes a seagull a seagull, why is it not a goldfish? A

seagull is a creature that flies between the ocean and the sky and

snatches French fries from the pier. But what do we call a seagull that

doesn’t fly, with no particular interest in French fries? Does essence

precede existence, then? I do everything as I should, like a child at the

center of the stage forced to perform, thinking, Mama, I don’t

understand. If the first stage of language development is signaled by the word

“Mama,” the second stage must be, “I don’t understand.” Why is blue

the only wavelength absorbed by the atmosphere. Why is the moon lit by

the sun. If a hamster grows bigger than an elephant, is it still accurate to

call them so. Mama, do you understand? I don’t understand.*

Nine months ago, a cruel winter. I had a fever. The lab was so

bright it chilled my spines. It was dark outside. Bundles of optical fibers

on top of each other, unable to breathe under the weight. The handsaw

made an awful noise cutting aluminum. Mechanical oil and burnt acrylic. Nausea and fear. “Anything…I can do…” I was afraid that the cutters would cut

open my squashy body. They looked at me, looked at each other, then pretended not to

hear anything. Born for the land, they stood on all fours, their robust

bodies firmly held together by bones. The flying debris from the cutter

sickened me—contempt must have smelled like microplastic. Voices

filled the room like a fog. I only overheard snippets of their

conversations, tossed to me like a dirty coin: “What is a mollusk doing in an engineering lab?”

“Don’t know.”

I would have struck back if I had a skeleton. Everything around

me belonged to land creatures and I belonged to the mushy darkness. I

plunged out of the door, the mist held out its ice-cold tentacles to takethose voices off my heart, even though I still pictured the cogs in the

lab, jealous of their persistence, their air-tight lockstep all year round. *

The elephant paced back and forth on the wooden floor, almost

stomping on the wiggly creatures in the corners while protecting them

from the light, strong enough to melt them. A steady, gentle breath. Ears

flapping like wings. I crammed my body in the elephant’s cave and the cave is

wordless. Should be content. At least I could stay in the cave, instead of

getting fumbled around by the other land animals like a piece of clay. No

one was obliged to offer me their love simply because I was wronged, except for the elephant, even when my wants confused her. The elephant

was the guaranteed supplier of physical shelter, I reminded myself;

expect nothing else. The next day, I would have to pass through the red warning signs, the ultrared scanner, the ultraviolet sterilization machine, the police dogs, getting inspected like the cargo at Customs to gain admission to the

Vertebrata phylum again. My sticky body disappeared inside the batch- made school uniform, my eight tentacles struggled to coordinate two

shoes, tangled up with the tentacular shoelaces. No one would lovemarine animals as equals. Not the land mammals, not the reptiles, not

even the amphibians. X. handed me the heavily packaged gift: “Happy birthday, Miss

Octopus. Promise you won’t open it until you leave me.”

*

Marine animals have no future, I thought, staring at my mushy

body in the mirror. They’ve just banned marine animals from the school. Marine animals have no future. I turned around and looked at W. after a long pause: “Marine

animals have no future. The world is land mammals’ now.”

“Screw that!” With W., I ignored curfews, fed stray cats, skipped class to write

poems in the ruins. Blue stripes on her back like that of a tiger, two

golden fish around her ears. Whereas I—covered in gluey membrane

and squishy muscles, often mistaken for compost. “Why overfish? Why pollute the ocean? Why is it always

freshwater flowing out of faucets?” W. said. “Maybe coexistence is bullshit. We’ll never become beasts. More

like, a feast,” I said.“But you have nine brains and such a unique nervous system. You

can camouflage. You write poems no one else can write.”

“I would love to trade those poems for food, to be honest,” I said. “I want to go back to the day I was born. The world seemed less cruel

then.”

“Well, go find the folks with four palm lines on each hand. They

will steal your time by patting on your—oh wait, you don’t have a

shoulder. On top of dependency on seawater, we’re cursed with linear

time,” she said. “Except in nostalgia.” She fell into a pensive mood, which was rare. The dust in the

ruins dampened the skin, the exhaust fan fully cloaked by green vines. If

the products of the industrial revolution were taken over by nature, maybe I could climb on top of the Himalayas to meet my esteemed

ancestors. I could sense a pane of glass growing thicker between me and

W. as she evaded my gaze, as if she were in the middle of a conversation

with the spiderwebs in the corner. She didn’t care for the past or the

future, this I knew. The now was what mattered, when everything was

still within reach.“Go to the streets, then. Fight. Start a revolution.” The waves subsided, my senses fell back into the depths of the

ocean like shells on a full tide—

W. stood on top of the observatory. Side-eyes, laughs, and

murmurs filled the field of gravity, a black hole trying to suck her down. The murmurs grew into a clamor, “I thought she’s a tiger?” “Is she?”

“Why is she siding with the leftovers?” “Why does she wear earrings like

that?"

I wondered if her spirit would be drained alongside the moisture

in her body, if she would be dried until crisp. Earlier that day, I had

heard half in a dream from the News Broadcast, the voice obscured by sea

foams and sodium chloride: “Near Shanghai, fisherman Luo discovered a large quantity of

exceptionally tender wild shrimp. Its taste has not failed to captivate any

species, marine animals included. High-end restaurants began buying it

up in bulk, as prices shot through the roof. In honor of Mr. Luo, its first

discoverer, marine biologists officially named it Luo's shrimp

(Macrobrachium rosenbergii). Now nicknamed ‘tiger of the sea’ not only for

its beautiful stripes but also for its nutritious flesh, rich in protein and...”No. Where W. used to be was now replaced by the bloodthirsty beasts. The noise persisted. Someone started to scream. My voice was spent. Someone cried so close to me that tears drenched my collars. “Hey, why are you crying? What’s sad? Why don’t you eat with us?”

someone said. No! “What’s on your mind, professor?” W. said beside me. Shocked me awake. The ruins submerged in the grass, check. The

footpath we made, check. The damp air, check. It wasn’t too late. “Don’t do it, please,” I said. “…right.”

*

The elephants trumpeted and rumbled—the old, the frail, the sick, the dying. Ferrying between the living and the dead. On an ordinary

afternoon, all the elephants disappeared from town. I stared blankly into

the empty room, at the withered plant on a dressing table. All withering

things invited gratuitous metaphors.I saw a trail of wet tentacle in the living room, all the way to the

bedroom, to the rims of the bathtub. The culprit opened bottles and the

cyan-blue faucet with a quick wiggle, ignoring my reflection in the

mirror. I ignored it too, the way I pretended to not notice the stairs

before tripping over them, an excuse to break what was already broken. Someone upstairs was playing the song “Summer” from Kikujiro. It

was always that song, always summer, even as it slipped into the season

of apathy. The apathetic wind was about to arrive. I waited for the

apathetic sun to warm the apathetic air. X. and I ghosted each other

while expecting the other person to text first. Love always brings hate, the way cars always bring accidents, and I was a poorly designed

crossroad. I glided over X.’s luminous red fur; she flinched. “What is beauty for you?” I asked unprompted. “…Thresholds.” The rain persisted, dense, light, seeping into the depths of time

even my tentacles couldn’t reach. Grief arrived without warning, a briny

tide breaching all permission, climbing up our nerves and spitting out

petals of red. I hate myself for loving you past all cure, I hate myself for punishingyou for your coldness, I hate myself for refusing myself the right to love you because

my desire goes unanswered, I hate myself for always hurting the ones I love the most. Time cannot be undone. I looked into her eyes one last time and all

the things I said or didn’t say, nameable or not, it all became real, something I could reach out and touch. You know, X. is never going to love me again. I texted W. 666, she texted back. I decided to write my “final” last words to X.:

Dear Fox, Hey, did you know our love pulls us apart? You’ll never let me study your

amber eyes as carefully and quietly as I did that evening. I won’t recognize them

anymore. Hey, did you know that I deleted you from my contact list? Maybe tomorrow

I’ll add you back. Maybe I never will. I’d rather wait for the mammoth keychain I

ordered from Taobao for 1.5 yuan than wait for you to come back. Hey, did you know that you’ll stop thinking of me, and I you, and maybe I’ll

end up becoming someone you would despise? I’m too clumsy and I’m done trying

because it will only make you hate me more. This world doesn’t allow love in the first

place, let alone across species.I’m sorry that the time you loved me equals the time you’ll hate me. I’m sorry. But at the very least, at the very end, a secret: I didn’t know who I really was;

neither did you. We knew each other through floating debris in the river of time. Perhaps you happened to miss the version of me that would have made you happy—

bad luck—and met the version that made you sad instead. But maybe we don’t have

to know each other in full; maybe it’s enough to parse out which pieces of us were real. Yours, (:◎)≡

*

Now, I hear elephants wailing from the savannah, screechy like

footsteps on a basketball court. Too clear, too close. I hear their

heartbeats, their quickened breath, their coarse skin rubbing up on itself

when they move. “Are you mad? Get down from there!” she says. The plant on the dressing desk gets watered. The sun is reflected

onto the wall by the newly polished wooden floor, outlining the

elephant’s silhouette. She brings me the mammoth keychain.I watch her eyes, two frosty lakes shrouded in a thick mist. She used

to cry as much as I do. Was her girlhood as boring as her adulthood? Did

she have a girlhood at all? Why is she in such panic and anxiety, why is a

mammal crying invisible tears I’ve only seen in the ocean?

The cheap music of the Candy Crush game she’s playing pushes

me away again. I curse her apathy. She sits there, silent, leaning against

the purple window seat. I won’t talk to her about life and death; she

won’t understand the Ship of Theseus or the myth of Sisyphus. “Why

are you trying to prove ‘class’ is real when it isn’t?” she used to say. “I

just want to feel good. That would be enough.”

“What do you like about these internet short-dramas? What’s the

plot?” I ask instead. “Rebirth, time travel, revenge. Life is not good but it’s all good

things in there,” she rarely speaks so much these days, her bland tone not

quite containing her plastic joy. I’m supposed to feel sick, thinking of

what W. would reply if I told her about this, tacky,,, But I want her to be happy. I want everyone I love to be happy. The first day the mammoth arrives at my home, I open X.’s

birthday gift. It’s a children’s book by Shen Shixi:Dear Fox, Trick Me Again