Magpie Season
Stella Lei & Ai Li Feng
Runner-Up
Your grandmother dies with a cigarette between her fingers, smoking like the barrel of a gun. It was expected. Your mother had explained the cancer diagnosis years ago, and you’d imagined your grandmother’s lungs soundlessly collapsing, forming a cavity where breath belonged. In your childhood, your mother had forbidden you from accompanying your grandmother while she smoked, but you still shadowed her, listening for the scratch of her lighter. The moment when smoke emerged from her mouth entranced you—sometimes you wanted to reach into her throat and touch all her organs just to ascertain they were there. You thought maybe she was empty except for her bones, that the smoke moved through her body, then left her the way a bullet leaves the chamber.
She’s a brute woman, your mother always said. Brute, but never brutal. A slower breed of violence. You know that your mother hated your grandmother, despite hosting her in your house, but she never said why. You wonder if that was what drew you to her: you had wanted to understand your mother’s anger, but now it’s all you have left. “You try to keep her from me out of spite,” your grandmother had said. “Secondhand smoke, you know that’s bullshit.”
Your mother’s knuckles had whitened into a row of teeth. “Angela, go to your room.”
Now, you are barely eighteen, driving alone to the funeral. Your mother hadn’t moved from the window when you slid her keys off the counter and opened the door. “What the fuck, Mom?” you said when you realized she didn’t intend to leave. Something echoed within your chest as you spoke, dull and hard.
You steady your palms against the wheel of her Prius, but a few blocks before the service, you swerve into the parking lot of a 7-11, struggling to breathe. You slip inside and scan the wall behind the cashier, eyes stinging. You had hoped, illogically, that you would see the brand of Chinese cigarettes your grandmother imported by the carton, that they’d appear and something inside you would settle into recognition. Instead, the packs stare at you, each as foreign as the next. You settle on Montego’s, because they’re cheap and you like the smooth blankness of the box, the brand emblazoned on a field of white. After a few tries, you light up in the back alley, coughing as smoke sways from your lips, and you pause as if to search it for a shape, some sign. It’s the opposite of what you witnessed with your grandmother, the easy way smoke spooled in and out of her—it feels stuck, as if there’s too much organ and sinew for it to thread through your body. You stub out the first cigarette and take another between your lips. The taste lingers in your mouth the entire drive home.
When you return, your mother has ossified in the state you left her in. You can’t bring yourself to apologize, so you enter the kitchen to prepare dinner. She joins you, your bodies flush against the stove but never touching. When she burns herself, she flinches away from the stovetop and to the sink, where she turns her hands methodically beneath the faucet as if resetting a clock. Eventually, her voice adds bones to the musculature of the water’s murmur, a hard edge.
She tells you about the fig tree winding its branches through her childhood home’s backyard. How hard she tried to grow green figs in her shitty one-room apartment when she immigrated. “I couldn’t afford that tree,” she says. “When I got pregnant, I didn’t know what to do. I went to the hospital. I had no insurance. I spent weeks paying off that visit.” Her hands cup the water, and it pools in her palms before overflowing back into the sink. “I got an abortion. I didn’t tell your grandmother for months. I was so afraid, but all she wanted to know was whether it was a boy.” She lifts her arm to examine the blistering. “I said it was, just to hurt her.”
The burn puckers her skin into a raised field of red, and she dries her hands carefully. “When you were born, she told me that I was also a second child. That she’d disposed of my older sister. You know about the one-child policy, right?”
Smoke rises from the stove, but neither of you move to turn it off. “She said I would always be my mother’s daughter.”
You sit alone for hours that night, imagining your grandmother’s body as a cavity. Breath coiling down her spine and settling at its base. It’s an image you haven’t harbored since you were a child, but now you struggle to picture your grandmother as anything but empty, even as you recall the space she made for you within her.
Months later, you go to college in a city where the streets reek of smoke and the buildings stifle any trace of wind. Your girlfriend’s cigarettes of choice are Marlboro Gold’s, and you smoke them together in the park while families with their children walk past. Above you, magpies swerve across the sky like unbound arrows. In these moments, you return to your mother’s voice, the red welt of her skin beneath water. You inhale, and you imagine the baby slowly losing its ability to breathe, the stumbling of its condemned chest. The smoke leaves your lips like an exorcism. It stings your eyes on its way up.
You and your girlfriend never speak of the future, as if you are afraid of what will arise if you consider it. The weeks unspool themselves quietly, on your campus, at the grocery store, in the park. Her hands are soft and uncalloused against your face. Every Sunday, you step outside to call your mother, smoke still curled within your lungs, making your voice hoarse and new. At home, you kiss your girlfriend, and you imagine trees drooping with the weight of figs, a dead end.
Stella Lei‘s work appears in CRAFT, Four Way Review, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, Best New Poets, and the Pushcart Prize, as well as selected for the Granum Foundation Prize and Wigleaf Top 50 longlists. Her work has also received support from the Sundress Academy for the Arts through their writers’ residency program. Her debut prose chapbook, Inheritances of Hunger, was published by River Glass Books in 2022. You can find more of her work at stellaleiwrites.weebly.com.
Ai Li Feng was born in Jiangxi but grew up in rural New England. She is dreaming of persimmon trees.