Part II • Dying for Seconds
18 • Dennis Newland
Dennis sat in a pile of cereal boxes while the others stacked food in shopping carts. Cans rattled to the ground one aisle over. In front of him, little sacks of organic coffee rustled on the shelf as his girlfriend Lisa dug through something on the other side. Dennis looked down at his arm, pulled his hand away from the sleeve of his denim jacket. It was dark and sticky with blood. He should tell somebody. He should tell somebody. He should have told them back when he still could.
A cart squeaked past, little wheels spinning, a crushed box of Cheerios wedged under the front bar. Matt stopped and grabbed a few boxes, threw them on his pile of canned goods. “You okay, dude?”
Dennis jerked his head up and down. He could still do that. Maybe he could still speak if he really had to. He hoped he didn’t have to. His jaws felt locked together. Stiff.
“That shit was close back there. I thought we were goners for sure this time.”
More jerking of his head up and down. Matt stooped and grabbed a box of Captain Crunch. “I like this stuff. Good without milk.” He glanced over at Dennis. “You think we’ll ever taste fresh milk again? Or just that Parmalat crap for however long we’ve got left?”
Dennis tried to shrug. He couldn’t tell if he succeeded.
“Ah, fuckit.” Matt threw the box in the cart, adjusted the strap he’d rigged to his shotgun, and pushed his spoils down the aisle. “Better get your head together and grab some shit,” he called over his shoulder. “You ain’t eating nothin’ of mine!”
Dennis was left alone with his sticky sleeve. A bag of coffee tumbled off the shelf across from him and landed with a sad thud on the ground, the contents spilling out in a brown avalanche. Lisa was still digging through something on the other side. He could hear her cussing about the batteries in another iPod running dry. They were going through them like packs of gum. Stupid.
He looked down at his arm.
So fucking stupid.
It was getting more and more difficult to move. He had assumed it would be like a light switch when it came, like the Incredible Hulk turning green and ripping his shirt off, some kind of instant morphing into his own permanent Mr. Hyde. But it had started with a slow paralysis, a gradual fatigue that turned into frozen limbs. He could move his wounded arm if he wanted to—he was pretty sure he could lift it up over his head if he really wanted to—but he couldn’t make himself
That’s what this was. It was the time his older brothers had buried him in the sand at Virginia Beach. Everything had been funny until he wasn’t sure if he could get out or not. They would’ve made fun of him if he had panicked and tried, but he would die if he couldn’t be sure. So Dennis would twitch and wiggle just enough to crack the sand, enough to see if he could still move, and his brothers would laugh and pack it back down, slapping the ground with the flats of their shovels, making the cool sand tight against his chest.
When the sand had been up to his neck and Dennis had realized he couldn’t move at all, he’d gotten scared. He had begged them, tears running down his face, salt in his mouth, to please dig him out. And they had laughed. Laughed until his screaming had summoned their mother from the water and their scowls had told Dennis that he would never live this down.
For the second time in his life, Dennis couldn’t move. He couldn’t lift his hand. Couldn’t even twitch his little finger.
He sat there among the cereal boxes, terrified. This time he wouldn’t cry. He couldn’t cry. He wasn’t able.
But then his head moved. It moved of its own accord. Someone else was doing it, pulling strings. And the coffee, the open bag of spilled coffee sitting across from him—Dennis couldn’t smell it anymore.
He couldn’t smell the coffee. But he could smell
19 • Chiang Xian
There was meat hanging in the window. Chickens strung up by their necks, pigs wrapped in twine with their little hooves in prayer, fish frozen mid-dive, their dull scales cracking off and fluttering to the ground like silver blossoms. The meat was rotten. The air in the tiny shop was heavy with the stench of it after being locked tight for days and days. Clouds of flies gathered and maggots squirmed. The meat had long since ceased to be appetizing.
Two chairs lay tipped over beneath the meat, old and ornate chairs of carved wood. The shop owners had used those chairs to hang their daily offerings and to adjust the signs on which prices fluctuated daily. Chiang Xhen now roamed that shop in meandering circles, bumping into tables, her inhuman and lonely grunts filling the darkened space, her young eyes occasionally falling to the fragile chairs lying on their sides, her thoughts drifting toward her parents.
The crowded city made for a strange life for a young Chinese girl. Her parents had been born in China whereas she had been born in this tiny microcosm, this span of city blocks made to look like someone else’s home.
Sure, she got out of Chinatown occasionally, but not often. Her parents took her to museums and concerts. They stood before large canvases while her mother showed Chiang how other people made brush strokes, what a hand both confident and relaxed could produce. Both of her parents stressed hours of practice. There, look at how that woman in the first chair plays violin, how her hand lays over to the side with just the edges of her fingers sliding up and down the strings.
Chiang complained after one concert that she was only ten, that it hurt her fingers to twist them that way. And when they got home that night, Chiang’s mother uncovered her own feet and pointed to them, and Chiang kept future discomforts to herself.
Her parents had been born in China and had brought much of it over with them. But it was a warped version of home, Chiang discovered. The more she talked to her friends, the more she found that her parents held in their hearts a fantasy version of their homeland. Chiang was now eleven, and had only that year discovered that dragons weren’t real. They never had been. It made her question the dinosaurs from that museum, too.
At her one-room school over a noisy restaurant, with the banging of pots and pans in the background, they learned a lot of politics. Her teacher didn’t know English. She spoke more of the news in China than she did of the city in which they lived. Chiang learned without meaning to that she was lucky to be alive. Back home, her parents may have decided to not keep her. But here, she could have all the brothers and sisters she wanted.
She didn’t argue with her teacher, didn’t mention her mother’s feet or the way her father looked at her with sadness. She had only begged for a little brother once. Her parents had yelled at one another all night, making it impossible to sleep. So whenever her teacher spoke of such things, Chiang gazed out the window at something else.
Usually, it was at the bold stripes on the flags of Little Italy, which every year her people encroached more and more. When she mentioned this to her father once—that she felt badly for the Italians—he had shrugged. Pounding a flank of meat with his wooden hammer, he had explained to her that some people care more about
