“I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah” – Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen
“YOU’LL BE SORRY! I WILL BE SURE YOU THINK OF ME EVERY SECOND, MINUTE, HOUR, DAY WEEK AND YEAR OF YOUR LIFE AND BE HAUNTED BY THE FACT THAT YOU KILLED ME!”
She tapped the crimson END button on her iPhone and tossed it on her bed. Hot salty beads dripping from her googly eyes as she paced into the bathroom and grabbed that Winnie the Pooh canister, twisting off it’s head with ferocity as if the poor rubber bear she had so loved growing up had turned into her most hated nemesis; reaching into it’s depths, extracting a pill bottle with around a hundred small dollops of white flint. She clutched the bottle, replaced the head onto the canister and went into the small kitchen of the apartment, swung the fridge door open and grabbed a green capped bottle of Watson’s water – running back into her room she slammed the door and with her back pressed against it she twisted the cap off the bottle of water, pried open the pill bottle and poured half it’s contents into the bottle. With her clammy petite hand she replaced the bottle’s cap and swished it around watching the white flint swirl and dance and jump in the fluid like particles in those snow-globes she so loved playing with as a toddler; then settle all at once becoming one with the h2o – seemingly vanished into the beverage but impenetrably having transformed it.
More hot, salty crystals dripped from the corners of her eyes as her lush lips and tender mouth puckered in a tense yet gaping pout as she contemplated the bottle and it’s poison; she reached way back into the depths of her mind and mustered up all the hatred, bitterness, anger, darkness, and destructiveness she could – nothing was going to break the spell and she wasn’t going to be dissuaded into the lies of hope and happiness again. She could taste the pain and hurt – it was sweet.
The bottle got fitted into her polka dot backpack’s mesh side compartment while she swiped the crystals off her cheeks. Grabbing her iPhone, several miscellaneous items as well as a yellowing polaroid frame with teddybears and hearts drawn around the border with black permanent marker; she growled as she huffed and weeped, stuffing her backpack with her trove of belongings.
She then swung a white hoodie with Winnie the Pooh and friends printed all over it, slipped the backpack over her shoulders. Slamming her fist against the light switch as she left the room and clicked the door locked. She held herself together like a iron maiden – she couldn’t allow herself to get sentimental.
“Nui Nui ah! Nei do na lei chui ah?” Her maternal grandmother’s beckoning pierced the tenseness of her mood as she paced across the living room to the door of the apartment.
“Ngoh chu peng you jia, tser dee way lai poh poh” she replied in her grandmother’s favored (and only understood) Shanghainese dialect.
With a glance she pondered her grandmother watching old black and white films on TV, the empty brown and cream dog bed, and the smell of mothballs and chicken noodles in the cramped apartment.
She smiled a weak smile at her grandmother before leaving her home.
“Bye-bye poh poh”.
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My paternal grandmother was Shanghainese herself, something I have in common with Gem Tang, The girl in the picture and the physical manifestation appearance wise of my character. I have been told on many a occasion that I share a resemblance to her (somewhat) and although I do not know her personally, it was after all a song of her’s that sparked something off in my mind to write this short story – that, as well as our shared Shanghainese ancestry (she has more of it than me) is something that makes me wonder if we don’t just have some sort of distant fate together.
The reference to the brown and cream dog bed was a bed that I purchased for Hanabi, a friend of a friend’s white minature American Eskimo that I cared for for two months. She changed alot for me and has left a great deal of emptiness in her absence after her owner picked her back up. She now resides in Dallas, Texas and has left a huge hole in my heart that will never be filled by anything or anyone else. 
犬神 