by Sui Wang
1
I would strongly recommend talking about your friend’s death anywhere but in a sky wheel cable car. For one, you’re in the air. And the air is thin. Being thin, it doesn’t know how to hold anything—wet or weighty. For two, there are rules about this sort of thing: there’s no reason to bring it up before or after, and the actual ride itself is too brief to even begin, but too long to change the subject once you’ve started. We were above the city swaying like a drunk chandelier, which felt wrong. Grief, I thought, should be more horizontal. More sidewalk-based. You don’t build such suspense around it, the dead don’t flirt. It definitely doesn’t take you on a ride. And when you are on a ride, usually, you don’t cry. So instead I said, “where is that moon, anyway?”
Later, when we lurched toward earth, I realized grief isn’t horizontal or vertical. It’s orbital. You loop around it, nauseous, while strangers take photos of your wet face.
2
“Now that we’ve found love, what are we gonna do about it?” She slices seven cucumbers as I douse my past in summer Michigan lake. “The lake smells like eucalyptus,” she says. She’s never been to California. I say it’s like wet rope and old hotel shampoo that never quite washes out. In front of her, there’s fictional intensity passed down from our childhood: cinnamon, crayon sticks, and very loud songs. A few very quiet funerals. How rain drops shimmered on my black suit. How black went along with it. My aunt spoke in small sobs as the young tombstone got soaked for the first time. It kissed the freshly carved name, before my aunt put hers beside it.
Now I’m drying my hair on the porch, lake water still cooling the back of my knees. Her fingers brush the back of my neck, and for a second, I’m sixteen again: her mouth sticky with stolen wine. She is pouring vinegar into a translucent bowl, beneath an absolutely clear sky. “I think it’s going to storm,” she says. Maybe that’s what we’ll do about it.
3
Before my father stopped calling, I loved maps. I’d study them in bed, triangulate where I might one day spend my honeymoon or become a monk: Virgin (UT), Boring (OR), a town named Hope. Now I keep receipts. The little thermal ghosts of where we’ve been, what we meant to buy. Thin records of small intentions. You can’t fold a receipt like a country, but you can forget it. By default, you discard them. The thing about stopping, if you’re the one waiting, is that it’s hard to tell when it ended—was it when you still expected the call, or when it finally never came?
After my father stopped calling, I started to answer spam calls from where he lives. I once asked a spammer what Idaho is like, do they have yogurt of a certain brand, the one with the foil top that made a sound when you peeled it back. He said yes, yes, of course, and offered to refinance my home. I don’t own a home. One spammer has a Spanish-speaking baby babbling in the background. She was trying to convince me I’d won a prepaid funeral plan. I told her I wasn’t ready to die, but I wouldn’t mind planning ahead. She said it comes with a velvet pouch for my teeth. So I can smile after. She asked for my zip code, I gave her a river my father meant to take me on a birthday. We had traced the route with a blue pen that bled through four states.
4
I didn’t mean I was lonely, exactly. I meant I had no witnesses. In legal terms, a witness is someone who sees the event and can confirm it took place. A witness takes the stand, places a hand on the Bible, swears to recall things exactly as they happened. Without one, the bailiff yawns.
No one saw me walk back home with the fish balloon I won at the fair. Its helium heart bobbed beside me, a silver-iridescent thing grinning with cartoonish friendship. No one saw it when the balloon caught on a nail and exhaled like a sad lung all the way down the block. It became a piece of trash, flailing with other broken things. The wind puffed up its brokenness. It kept rising, even as I tried to hold it down. Now it rests flat on the street, like gum, petals, baby socks. Things people won’t pick up again. It was the only gift I received. And no one saw it go.
Sui Wang is a writer of poetry and prose, and a PhD researcher living bicoastally. She has studied with the Sackett Street Writers Workshop and The Non-School in New York. Her poems and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in HAD, Yalobusha Review, Pile Press, Contemporary Verse 2, and The Inflectionist Review. She was a finalist for the 2025 Yellowwood Poetry Prize and the 7th Sine Theta Writing Contest, and is a 2025 Brooklyn Poets Summer Fellow.
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