Archive of Our Own ^beta

With lily pollen still smudged over his wrists, with the cuffs of his funeral suit unbuttoned, Pigsy tugs hard on Sandy's sleeves. "C'mon, let's go deck a few jaws. Let's make some chumps bleed." 

The art of the brawl begins to escape Sandy, slowly, irresistibly.

—

…

—

The routine is a fixed one, one that has settled into its unchanging monotone over the past silent year. Push his heavy body out of bed, place the falling blanket back on the mattress, stare into the mirror through foggy eyes at the mess his beard has become. Wear a tank top for decency’s sake before putting the stevedore uniform on, feel the small fishing boat rock under his feet, feel landsick once stepping out of the boat and onto the docks. Take a green pill or two to alleviate the phenomena of the turning stomach, swallow it down with a few gulps of water from a crumpling plastic bottle. Feel beads of stray water trickle down his beard, clumping the orange hairs together. Crush the bottle in his grip, throw the flattened bottle away in a nearby recycling bin like a lawful citizen. He is a lawful citizen nowadays, nothing like the monsters he and Pigsy used to sing about. The road is only crossed when the light shines green, all music is kept quiet past seven in the evening, and the fishing boat is legally anchored to the ports of D-H Shipping Co. only with the explicit and genuine blessings of the port operator. 

His dry blue palms, callused over every bump, looks covered in crusted detergent — complete with artificial sapphire-hue dye. 

His unsanitary hands no longer feed street cats hiding in the alleyways.

Living where his work is makes commuting a near-nonexistent act, and although the ship horns of cargo vessels departing at night at times startle him awake, lost sleep is a loss he is willing to undergo. He is a frequent dreamer, as uncharacteristic as that seems, with nearly every night being colored by multiple exhilarating episodes of phantasmagoria that gives a bad name to restful slumber.

His dreams have frequent visitors.

Last briefly-interrupted night, he remembered in his as-brief dream he had left behind a near-empty bottle of three-in-one body wash in Tang’s shoddy flat, something thickly man-scented that Tang despised. Something with Cedar Sandalwood or Mountain Ice printed on the matte label, nothing like the feminine green apple and rosewater that wasn’t so rudely intrusive to the nose. Regardless of Tang’s distaste for the bottle’s placement in his mildewed restroom, both Pigsy and Sandy got plenty of use out of the wash whenever they had to scrub away post-combat blood and sweat from their thick skins.

A public bathhouse would not welcome blood-soaked miscreants and their crinkled paper money. The pipes of the underground fighting ring’s open showers were terribly unreliable. Using Pigsy’s restroom would mean an inevitable confrontation with Pigsy’s mother, for Pigsy had yet to move out back then. Sandy did not have a restroom, much less a house. Thus, Tang’s restroom it was.

Both Pigsy and Sandy got plenty of use out of the restroom, in general. 

Last night, he remembered the way Pigsy would chastise Tang for the mildew coating the shower curtains, only to be yelled at in turn about flecks of half-dry blood crowding like birthday confetti around the shower drain’s rim.

“Here’s what my mother said about shower curtains. Vinegar or bleach. Then ya gotta rinse the everlovin’ hell out of ‘em.”

Sandy smells lilies, and needs to get to work.

Work is simple. Work is lifting cargo onto ships, and although he is still learning how to operate the cranes and pulleys, his colleagues were in-part thrilled and in-part shocked out of their sane minds to see that Sandy could lift with his bare body the weight to rival heavy machinery. Sharpness of mind allows the body to evade needless exertion, or so the saying goes, but Sandy has found that it is difficult to make this body of his feel overexerted. Veins run like rivers on a map over his bicep, forearm, the back of his hand, he is a freak of nature with a form that bulges at every exposed and hidden surface. The clothes he wears are constantly stained with sweat and nobody bats an eye, sweat belongs like a uniform on a monster of violence and athleticism, more so than the stevedore attire and safety vest themselves.

Just another day of sweating away at the port of D-H Shipping Co.

Walking across the concrete ground, Sandy opens his mouth to let some of the onshore wind settle on his tongue; the fleeting flavor of maritime sand does not wake him up, but the sheer speed of ocean gust could perhaps give him the illusion that he was flying if he closed his eyes — like a comic superhero, a red cape regally rippling behind him like a proud flag against the sky.

A dark-haired girl stares at him from afar, like him and his open mouth are of great interest to her — or are unacceptably nonsensical even to her young mind. She wears a shimmering dress made of pearly white silk, dragons artfully embroidered into its surface by spools of fine golden thread; it is a dead giveaway that she comes from money. Big money. Yet under that dress are a pair of children’s tracksuit pants with threads of polyester rising from the sanded knees, and below the fraying pair of pants are a pair of sneakers with dirt-caked midsoles and cracked brand logos peeling like dry skin.

Unlike most children, she shows not an ounce of intimidation towards Sandy’s towering form. Instead, she makes a beeline towards him as a gargantuan gantry crane horizontally transports a red container in the misty background, she is the central figure of a landscape painting, she is growing larger and larger as the distance closes.

She barely reaches the height of his knees. 

“Who are you?” The girl asks, chin lifted high enough to stretch the skin of her neck. She is missing her left eyetooth.

“I’m just a stevedore,” Sandy responds.

The girl nods sagely.

“Pleasure to meet you, Steve.”

“What? No.”

“My name is Ao Mei. I am here because school is on vacation and my parents brought me. My parents work here sometimes, you see.”

The mixture of “upper-class moneybags” and “squeaky-voiced elementary schooler” that forms her tone of voice is exhausting to hear, and he nearly pinches the bridge of his nose in a visible gesture of fatigue. He thinks better of it; this is a child the length of his shin. A baby, in comparison to him. It is no fault of hers if she is surrounded by people who speak like fictional aristocrats; kids absorb things like sponges, the good and the bad. “Okay. Who are your parents? Maybe I’ve worked with them before. Or for them, judging by. Uh.”

“You’re pretty cool.”

“Wait, where are your parents? Who’s watching you?”

“Mm. Time’s up.” Tapping her wrist — despite the absence of a wristwatch — the girl, Mei, smiles up at him politely. “See you next time!”

With the kind of agility only available to featherweight children, she rapidly skitters away like a small bug. Sandy watches her disappear behind the sea fog and an orange high-capacity forklift, and that’s that.

—

So he lives in a cheap fishing boat nowadays. Old and barnacled, with a rusting anchor.

The aqua-blue van, his old abode, he exchanged one-sided goodbyes with at the used vehicle center, in exchange for money to get him off the ground. New ground. He said goodbye to the driver’s seat best adjusted to suit his absurd body size. He said goodbye to the knuckle and hoof marks littering the upholstery, the shotgun’s seat belt that wouldn’t easily comply when pulled. The backrest’s cushion that over time molded itself to the shape of Tang’s napping body, the cupholders with scratched-up edges courtesy of Pigsy repeatedly forcing in thermoses full of broth. The speakers of crunchy quality, the radio dial that Pigsy and Tang would constantly fight over, with Tang stretching his arm out from the backseat area. Rock, Podcast, Rock, Podcast, Yer tasteless, Your taste makes my ears hurt. 

The van is what Sandy calls his first big purchase, made not long before he made himself fully independent from the dusty house of his parents. Tang, upon hearing Sandy’s declaration that this would be the day he selects his vehicular companion and abode, offered to be the “sorely needed watchful pair of eyes” that would prevent him from making a bad purchase or being wooed by some swindler of a salesman full of dishonest ambitions. “Two pairs,” Pigsy muttered as he flicked the rim of Tang’s glasses, which sent Tang off on a tirade about how utterly dated and uninspired the four-eyes jokes were; they would never be blessed with a renaissance. From there ensued comments of Tang being a “stuck-up smartass,” of Pigsy being “a relentless bully,” so on and so forth. Commonplace, inane banter.

The trip to the used car dealer’s was meant to be an endeavor undertaken by Sandy and Tang — so naturally, Pigsy invited himself over to restore the Law of Three they all once found to be oh-so-critical. Shaking his head at any vehicle with cloth seat covers, Pigsy explained that the shotgun seat would definitely belong to a cat one day, that it would not be long before Sandy took occasionally feeding street cats in alleyways to the next inevitable step. There was a cat aficionado boiling red-hot beneath that blue chest and it was going to erupt, sooner or later. Sandy needed leather coverings, not cloth sheets that fur could and would be embedded into: “Like transplanted rice seedlings,” Tang supplied, food everpresent in his mind. 

Rice. Rice could be eaten by cats, oddly enough, though it was not much good for them when above small quantities. Back when the majority of meals for street cats were sourced not from his own pocket but from Pigsy’s mother — meaning, all the way back in high school — he would be led around her kitchen and refrigerator, permitted to take whatever leftovers that lay around after her day’s worth of hard work. The self-set standard of complete and utter politeness altered his every shift of muscle to be awkward and tense, to scream a lack of belonging in her realm. He needed to be inscrutable in front of her, he would not forgive himself if he made a single overstep, he did not know how to behave around real mothers.

“Don’t bother with the onions,” She said, watching Sandy with a look he interpreted as disguised discomfort at the time. “Or scallions. Or leeks. Anythin’ in that category.”

“How come, Ms. Zhu?”

“‘Cause they’ll give the cats stomach trouble, that’s what. You should never be hurtin’ what yer feedin’.”

“Oh. I understand.”

“Just take the meat n’ fish bits. It’s safe. Cats are gonna love ‘em every time.”

Another piece of critical knowledge she imparted to him: cats do not mesh well with lilies, lilies are to be kept away from cats at all costs. Lilies are lethal to cats. Any and every part of the lily will kill a cat, even the meager dust of its pollen. 

Cats do not mesh well with death, with funeral flowers. The cropped piece of a lush lily field, transported next to her open casket to coat it white, was toxic to cats.

Even after running away with his figurative tail between his legs, Sandy has thought on multiple occasions about finally adopting a cat. He likes cats, and he knows what cats like. Yet he has never made the move to put the thought to action, because Sandy understands better than anyone else that it takes far more than just raw knowledge to raise properly a needy animal. He turns on his new phone to read pieces of advice such as “having a pet forces you to get your shit together” and “don’t adopt a pet if you aren’t in the headspace to take care of another life,” living in uneasy coexistence on internet forums, and mutters the latter opinion to himself over and over again.

Sandy still carries lily pollen on his body. He is not fit to raise a cat.

—

The girl is back. Mei is back. He should at least show the kindness of calling her by name, even in his head. The courtesy of names towards a child is the bare minimum, regardless of whether or not she would know of it. Mei stares at him with hands politely placed over her stomach, shoes still dirt-caked, wearing a new fluorescent windbreaker, observing him intently, saying things like “You are very strong” and “You have a lot of muscles” as though they are profound conclusions to draw rather than statements of beyond-simple observation.

“I am,” He nods in acknowledgement of her conclusions, with a forklift hoisted over his shoulder — something went wrong with its wheels, possibly the entrance of debris, he must remove it from the area lest it block the way of other vehicles. “And you should probably go somewhere safer, Mei. There are a lot of heavy-duty vehic- uhm, cars, moving around here.”

Her right eyebrow shoots up in doubt, while the left shoots down in suspicion. “Did you just try to dumb down vocabulary for me?”

“...Heavy-duty vehicles. There are a lot of heavy-duty vehicles around here, and I think it is unsafe for you to be standing in the way. Your parents would want you safe, too. Say,” Sandy begins to look around, in search for the singular or plural parent that must be just within sight. “Could you point to me where your parents are? I don’t know what they look like.”

Mei begins to whistle, arms crossed tight to her chest, eyes fixed to the nearby gulls pecking at a half-empty bag of abandoned chips. “Seagulls are such nasty birds. They must have attacked one of the dockworkers until they gave up the chips.”

“Mei.”

“Yes, Steve?”

“Your parents. Or at least one of them. They must be close enough to keep an eye on you, right?”

Mei whistles again, some off-key theme song from a long-running superhero cartoon, something Sandy often watched in his own childhood.

Quieter than commonly possible, Sandy gently places the forklift down away from the travel path, where no other vehicles or workers would have to maneuver around the obstacle. He then squats down to level Mei with an interrogative stare, to which she puffs her cheeks into two balloons, drums them to an irregular beat, lets the air escape with a fwoo, picks up the beat again by drumming her scalp, before flicking her bangs a couple of times for good measure.

Once she runs out of things to do, she finally gives in with a lengthy, purposefully drawn-out sigh.

"I'm supposed to be waiting in my mother's office. But I snuck out."

Sandy matches her sigh with one of his own, running his palm down his beard. Like some sagely adult, like the kind of person who knows better and habitually makes correct decisions. "That’s not good at all, that’s irresponsible. I’ll have to bring you back and—"

Two seconds total; that is all it takes for Mei to whip a ballpoint pen out of the pocket of her windbreaker, press its clicker, and point the sharp tip towards Sandy as if she were wielding a knife and not a pen with a cartoon dragon printed over its exterior. 

With knees bent into a fighting stance, she hisses: "SHHHHH! SNITCHES GET STITCHES!"

And just like that, with the tug of a single block, the hole-riddled jenga tower comes crumbling down. The faulty aristocratic inflection goes flying out the window, to be swallowed then spat up by the gulls. 

Five meters away, a seagull spits up a piece of vinyl, hacking, squawking. 

With a calloused index, Sandy slowly pushes the pen to the side, to where the ballpoint would not be aiming for his fluorescent safety vest; the green pen feels incredibly thin and breakable against his thick fingertip. “This is only our second time meeting, and suddenly you’re okay with pulling a pen on me.”

“Don’t underestimate me. I was always okay with pulling a pen on you.”

“I thought you were one of those fancy and polite kids.”

“I got tired of it.”

“Okay. That was quick.”

“Besides, you’re a cool dude. You like it better when people are cool, right?” 

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Pulling a pen on people isn’t cool though. That’s mean. Only villains do that.”

“M’kay.” Mei pockets the pen, without clicking the tip back in. “You’re the cool-expert.”

“It’s also not cool to sneak out of your parents’ office.” 

Her brows furrow rapidly. “Bleh.”

“Why do you think I’m so cool, anyway?”

She puzzles him greatly. She trots up to this towering stranger with eyes of admiration and sees not a threat but a figure of absolute “cool.” A “cool-expert,” some kind of honed master of coolness. Rank One Cool-Meister Ninety-Nine, or whatever other bill that fits. 

Simply, as if the answer does not require an ounce of thought, she supplies her response: “Because you’re strong. You’re like a superhero.”

Raw strength does not make a savior.

He does not have the heart to break that to her, yet. This is only their second meeting.

—

There is a kind of youth Sandy is now barred entry from, the bad kind of youth he misses nonetheless. It is in the way a recovering alcoholic smacks their lips at the thought of a drink despite deliberately distancing themself from it, maybe; Sandy wouldn’t know. He has never been a chronic alcoholic, despite the variety of his troubles. 

Memories that take place in front of small television boxes are fond ones. Flashing pixels on a screen gathering together to form the scene of a violent superhero cartoon — a punch here, a kick there, a flying tooth way over there. Flying tooth rolling across the dirt to land its bloodied self next to a dandelion patch, where the sway of yellow petals can periodically obscure the cracks in the enamel. In front of the eye-searing screen, he and Pigsy would sit crunched together over square cushions to laugh and cheer at every punch and subsequent spray of blood, until Tang one day joined the fray and dramatically rolled his eyes to disguise poorly his blood-induced nausea. Within the display of brutal heroics, violence was not the thing to be idolized — or so he said. And perhaps because they had ceased to be teenagers then, Pigsy only scoffed a comment of mild annoyance before quietly switching channels to a peaceful cooking show without further argument. 

But before Tang ever entered their lives, before they ever managed to claw their way out of the hellhole named high school and begin looking for their own future homes, Pigsy’s mother would come into Pigsy’s small room holding a small platter of fruit for them to snack on while they raved about their little show. Every time, Sandy would attempt to stand up from where he was sitting, mortified by the idea of comfortably sitting down like he owned the place while Ms. Zhu was standing on her two feet and bad knees, all while giving him things. As Sandy tried to rise to his feet, Pigsy would grab his forearm in an attempt to keep him sitting on the floor — to no avail of course, the futility made apparent by how comically Pigsy was dragged upwards as Sandy stood up, nevermind the hoof still curled over his limb. The gap between their physical strength had always been insurmountable, in both youth and adulthood.

A confession, a confession Sandy never managed to make before Ms. Zhu reached her grave; for the first several years Sandy had known Ms. Zhu, he had nothing but trouble believing that she genuinely liked — much less tolerated — him and his company. It wasn’t so out of this world to think that a woman as kind as her would grin and bear his presence out of the goodness of her heart, because Sandy had to admit; he had been pitiable, albeit in a highly unfavorable way. It was not the kind of pity expected from passersby witnessing a stray kitten, but rather a belicose dog ceaseless in its growls — and the passersby may pause to witness its bared gums and wonder what the fuck it was that went wrong in that thing’s life, but in a slightly sad way. And maybe a placating bone or two would be bowled at the dog, maybe a small platter of fruit would be served through the open door. Only once in his early-to-mid twenties did Sandy finally understand that this was a rather deplorable insult to Ms. Zhu’s character, that this false registration of pity was no more than an extension of self-pity. But before that realization ever set in, when he and Pigsy were still high-school students with their behinds planted to the television room’s cushions, Sandy would hesitantly chew on an expertly cut cube of cantaloupe as if he were gnawing on raw rubber. He would then quietly admit to Pigsy — eyes fixed to a console game with a pixelated character falling to its death — that he was worried, that he feared he was imposing on what may just be politeness, that he was unsure of whether or not Pigsy’s mother truly liked him back. 

This inquiry was packaged in as flat a tone as possible, vulnerabilities tied behind the uvula to let it wither without ever seeing the light of day. Delivered in the most masculinely nonchalant way manageable through the beading rain of cold sweat, as emotionally immature as he was. A jighead sent out to fish a casual reassurance and nothing more, though he desired something deeper, something more foundational to dispel his doubts. Reassurance of one love from another love.

And Pigsy, like the annoying and emotionally evasive teenage boys they both were, teased: “What, ya got a crush on my mom or somethin’?”

Sandy stared at Pigsy, intensely. “No, I don’t.”

Pigsy stared back.

There was a young mustache shaved like a poorly mowed lawn above Pigsy’s upper lip.

It was pink.

And nothing happened. 

—

Sandy and Pigsy were usually on the same page. Tang, on the other hand, stood out like a sore thumb.

Tang was annoying.

Nothing personal. Nothing ill in their history. Just passing sentiments. 

Tang was in possession of the uncanny ability to ruin Sandy with a sentence or two, despite possessing whatever the antonym of talent was in regards to physical combat. Featherweight and boney as if he were underfed (no, he just had near-supernatural metabolism), he could still knock the air out of Sandy without so much as casting him a glance. He could be, yes, in the middle of flipping through an assigned reading he would end up skimming anyways, and he would say something out of the blue that would alter Sandy forever, but not himself, because every profound thought was so obvious to him, always. Like that time when Sandy was high not on adrenaline but on the memory of it, bubbling up about his newest haul at the underground fighting ring, about the amount of sweat-speckled money he earned despite being only a newcomer brawler. “Just imagine the kind of living I could make if I worked up the ladder, a rung at a time.” Sandy grinned, going through an elaborate handshake and a series of claps with an equally excited Pigsy, who matched his gestures perfectly beat for beat. “Imagine what’s gonna happen once I move past being just an amateur fighter.” Left nostril blocked with a cotton stub to cease a nosebleed, his own laughter rang nasally in his ears. 

With a somewhat childish expectation of endorsement, Sandy looked to Tang — wishing for what, maybe compliments on an illegal job well done. Tang gave him none. He deliberately kept his eyes away from the sight of the broken nose and the split lip, his glasses housing only the reflection of printed text. 

“You’re not an ‘amateur’ fighter, Sandy.” Tang said. “An amateur, etymologically, means someone who does things out of love.”

“You’re not doing this out of love.”

Then he flipped a dog-eared page of his book, as if he had not just violently emptied Sandy’s head of all coherent thought. 

There was a reflex embedded into Sandy back then, before he ever let himself realize just how terrifyingly correct Tang could be — the reflex to respond with a rude and rumbly “smartass” every time Tang unintentionally left him high and dry. Only when soaking himself in Tang's shower later in the day would the proper comeback belatedly rise to mind, something about Tang's audacious hypocrisy in challenging Sandy's passion for the brawl when Tang barred himself from his own passions, stuck in the cage of a lucrative major for a safety net he never learned to love. Comparative literature was the choice of starving artists, Tang’s parents had said: so there Tang had been, dozing off over papers on pharmaceutical science instead of doting on the contents of Journey to the West as he loved to do. Like a damned conformist, all while linking arms with two of the biggest art-rebels around the city.

Both Sandy and Pigsy had somehow indoctrinated themselves into the starving school of avant-garde-art-rebellion-ism, long before they ever had the pleasure of knowing Tang. So of course it was only natural that Tang, a serial crammer who studied not out of passion but for a numbingly average future, would constantly be at odds with art-rebels such as themselves.

He figured this ought to be a cause for gratitude, that being at odds was at all within the realm of his interactions with Tang; Sandy did not exactly know many people that were unafraid of the prospect of getting on his nerves. It came with the looks. Of being built like a monster of violence and athleticism. 

“Aren’t you afraid of me?” Sandy once asked, out of the blue. “I could break you with a shove.”

And Tang, sensing the gravity buried within the unceremonious tone, would respond with just the right amount of levity: “I’m afraid of what you can do to other people, not to me.”

“...Smartass.”

“When you become a bona fide adult, you'll finally get rid of that potty mouth of yours, I'm sure.”

“We’re the same age.”

“Okay, correction: when you become a well-adjusted adult.”

“Wiseguy.” 

Their half-bitter and half-friendly disputes persisted all the way until the very day Sandy made his grand exit out of Tang’s front door, blossoming irreversibly within those final two hours of night into a climax of strife. It started with Pigsy’s limp body bloodying Tang’s sheets, then with Sandy crying salty cascades into his veiny forearms while curled up into a pathetic ball; he hesitates to linger on what he must have looked like to the sole witness of his absolute low. It ended with Sandy trying to leave the rest of them in the dust, with Tang somehow intuiting that Sandy’s exit out the front door may be a permanent one. Tripping over his bare boney feet, Tang scrambled his way over to the front door and slammed each hand onto either side of the doorframe with the peeling paint, attempting with his thin body to substitute the presence of an entire metallic door — at the face of a giant determined to force his way through it. Cold sweat bleached pallor into the skin of Tang's face, accentuating the indigo shade cast over his sunken yet bulging eyes; chest rising and falling like the athlete he had never been, Tang breathed and breathed and coarsely breathed with increasingly laborious effort, and.

Sandy does not recall the specific words that left Tang’s mouth, the begging, the pleading, the spindly fingers clenched tight around the doorframe, the hunched and tensed deltoids. There must have been words coming out of Tang’s mouth, audible ones, because Tang’s jaw and lips were moving at furious speeds to deliver what Sandy assumes was a desperate presentation on why Sandy must remain bound inside this shoddy flat of his. But the liquid pressure of hot blood pounded in Sandy’s ears a little too hard that night, and all beautiful sound failed to penetrate. All Sandy knew was that all beautiful sound was ceasing to be beautiful, from the cheers of eighty-people crowds to freshly burned CDs containing his and Pigsy’s art-rock, and maybe even Tang’s pleas for Sandy to stay: because how beautiful was it that he was wanted, despite not being good for their healths, wanted, like junk food. 

Sandy’s exit was a vicissitude long time coming, really. To all reasonable eyes he was objectively a delinquent, objectively a horrid influence — and had Sandy prioritized Pigsy’s well-being over keeping themselves united even over shrapnel-decked paths, he would have diverged from Pigsy’s rocky road a good while ago. Had he been grateful enough to Pigsy’s mother for her innumerable agapic favors, he would not have repaid his debts with the kind of wrongdoings that doomed the people within his sphere to mirror them. He was junk food rotting Pigsy’s teeth, then Tang’s, and he did not leave them for years because for years they made him feel that perhaps the globe truly was spinning with altruistic intentions. In this otherwise punitive world, they were what made Sandy confident he could endure the purgatorial ordeal of waking up to another glaring morning. Because he would wake up, know exactly the people to call, know exactly the spot to head to in order to be himself and still remain loved in the aftermath. It was the gentlest promise the world had ever made to him: you aren’t over yet. You can still keep going. Look; you’ve got friends to talk to, just like a real person.

For the first and final time, Sandy and Tang’s dispute was forcibly concluded via the employment of a physical solution; Sandy pushed Tang out of his way as easily as one may brush aside a balled-up piece of tissue, removed him from the doorframe in a way that wouldn’t bruise the body, and that was that. A stand-out victory for Sandy, because of course there was no way Tang could ever physically overpower Sandy, no way he could be the sturdy gate to keep Sandy caged in the apartment unit with the dying incandescent lights.

He called the act of finally being able to leave them courage.

It probably wasn’t. 

—

Tang was a saving grace. And not just for all the times he wrapped their wounds with bandages either, laying down the differences between ibuprofen and acetaminophen and which one they should preferably be using. He was a sorely needed third opinion from within the box, for two people who had made an entire lifestyle outside of it. And secretly, Sandy hopes that he and Pigsy helped save Tang from his steadfast attachment to respectability, if only a little. 

He wouldn’t call Tang austere, no, but that used to be the type of man afraid to climb chain-link fences and even more afraid to be caught loitering in deserted lots full of dirt dust no one was putting to use anyways. He hated humid crowds yet craved inclusion like a morning meal, would whine at the volume of Sandy and Pigsy’s performances but would gladly watch from the quieter backstage area. Corners of his lips downturned and chin creased like a walnut shell, Tang caviled ceaselessly about the ear-shattering shrieks of adjacent audience members until Pigsy finally shoved a clipboard into his hands, appointing Tang as a strawman manager to earn him backstage-lounging rights. Only then did Tang’s complaints become replaced with a satisfied smile, his petulant glare towards Pigsy melting into a fond glance. This meant something. About growing love for that which did not have a reserved spot in the mainstream. About love in general. 

An episode of life he still calls upon fondly, though its flavor is now acrid. The three of them walking across uneven asphalt on a spring day placed within a wet spell, cumulonimbus clouds carpeting the sky above like discarded piles of vacuum-cleaner waste. The hefty rain left pools to collect within the cracks and downward dips of the darkened asphalt. Tang, having forgotten to wear his rain boots, tip-toed around the pools and balanced on elevated concrete rims bordering the road to best avoid soaking his socks and sneakers — thus, taking an incredible blow to his walking speed. 

The first thing to go wrong was the clear umbrella tilting out of Tang’s grip amidst the struggle to maintain balance; the second thing to go wrong was Pigsy having enough of Tang’s terrible tempo and elbowing him first into flailing, then into losing balance. Tang’s left sneaker, somehow kept alive until then, walked the plank in that moment and drowned valiantly in dirt water. In that moment the sad shoe joined its brethren, Sandy and Pigsy’s own kicks, in Davy Jones’ locker. A warrior’s death. 

The third thing to go right was Tang letting the umbrella roll on the ground, a somewhat maddened grin on his face before he began kicking water at Pigsy in retaliation — then at Sandy, for being guilty by association. For not stopping Pigsy, death, death to both of you, off with your heads. Laughter and laughter, soundwaves eaten into quiet by raindrops, bouncing off of the half-closed shutters of the spare-parts store to their left. The small lot at the side of the store had a lineup of bicycle carcasses, bodies rusted and wheels removed. The removed wheels were piled close by like firewood, spokes bent out of shape like malleable copper wire. Pigsy said in passing he would love to make installation art out of them.

That evening, around five-thirty, three drenched bodies crowded Tang’s mildewed restroom, fighting over who would get to wash their dirtied skin and clothes first — until they came to a consensus on the basis of the restroom being Tang’s property. As the showerhead rained over Tang’s head with inconsistent water pressure, Sandy and Pigsy found themselves falling into a fit of laughter once again as Tang grew comically weighed down by the rising mass of his soaked scarf and sweatpants. 

“Hey, champ, maybe you could, woah, wash you n’ yer clothes separately? Ain't that an innovative thought!” Pigsy cackled, lounging on the closed toilet lid like some theater’s audience seated in an auditorium chair. In scandalized response, Tang quickly gathered his hands over his chest and his shirt, grown translucent and clingy to skin with water — yet there were theatrics and deliberate humor to be found in the way he opted not to reach for the shower curtains, instead letting the scene play out like a part of a skit.

“Only if you two stop treating a toilet bowl like front-row seating! Seriously, why are the two of you still in here?!”

Tang’s round glasses sat next to the faucet on the yellowing sink, lenses growing foggy from the accumulation of steam. The smell of packaged food wafted in from the small living room, the distinct flare of Sichuan-pepper oil diffusing through the indoor moisture. 

Even the minute details remain scorchingly vivid to this day, as if the flow of time itself could not erode the granular surface of memory. 

Tang was a saving grace.

Sandy hopes they saved him, too.

—

The self-control it takes not to spit up his energy drink all over his neon safety vest is astronomical; the purple plastic comb — merciless at the face of all obstructions — continues paving new paths through Sandy’s salt-clumped mane, inflicting unparalleled agony to his unprepared scalp. 

“My mama combs my hair all the time.” With a hefty grunt, Mei forces another stroke of the comb through Sandy’s hair — a commendable achievement, considering the arm strength of the average child. She noticeably calls her mother “Mama” in favor of “Mother” now, the title having switched with the drop of the aristocratic facade. “It’s why my hair isn’t all stuck like this. Does nobody comb your hair? Does your mama comb your hair? Are you too much of an adult for your mama or baba to comb your hair?”

This situation is not Sandy’s fault; Sandy did not ask a small girl to undertake the labor of combing his hair, bunched together by crystalized salt after tackling ocean winds so salty they might as well be seasoned. No, the little girl in question snuck up on him during his break, comb positioned high behind his head like a knife ready to strike, and his coworkers traitorously uttered not a warning word as the girl went in for the finisher. Assassination. Because apparently, running into each other well over seven times did not spare him from anything. If anything, it made Mei even more enthused about messing with him, by virtue of increasing familiarity.

“Well — you see, Mei,” He is yet to be well-versed in the art of remaining honest without being a wet blanket, “Some people choose not to keep… having a mom? I probably am too old for a mom to brush my hair anyways, but that’s besides the point.”

“Oh,” Mei’s busy comb pauses for a moment against his scalp, before it resumes movement. “I understand. MK doesn’t have a mom, and he doesn’t really want one either. He mainly just likes his dad.”

“Ouch, it feels like you’re going to pull out all of my hair — who is MK?” It has been a good while since Sandy’s body last felt a significant amount of physical pain, but Mei’s comb-wizardry somehow invokes the art of inflicting it — miraculously. Sandy does not know if this is the result of his mellowing out immensely over the past year, or if this is simply the first time in forever he’s felt pain without the pain-killing properties of mid-fight endorphins roaring through his organs.

“MK is my best friend,” Mei is sliding something thin through the base of his hair, Sandy can feel it, “I met him, like, two months ago? I think? He says he doesn’t know his age, but he looks about the same as me or younger. I think he’s younger. I’m bigger.”

“Huh. Does MK’s dad know his age?”

“Nope. Not even his dad. He says MK just turned up out of nowhere one day. He was supposed to keep MK for just a day. And then two days. And then a week. He says it’s been about a year now.” Click. A plastic hair clip fastens itself near Sandy’s scalp. It pulls at his roots. “He’s funny. He’s all weird about being called MK’s dad.”

“That clip hurts. Weird how?”

Click. The hair clip is removed. “Weird in a lot of ways. He buys MK toys and tucks him into bed and everything. But he’s, uh, angry all the time? Super loud. And whenever I call him MK’s dad, he acts like his whole body’s begun to itch. Like he’s allergic to it. I’m allergic to pollen.”

“...I’m not sure if he sounds like a very good father. I mean, if he is one. A father.”

“Well, MK loves him a lot. And when he yells, I yell back. It’s like a game of who can be louder. And the food he makes for us is killer. So I think he’s pretty okay.”

“I guess I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions. You’re the one who actually met him, so I trust your judgment.”

“You need to use better soap, by the way.” The comb falls to Sandy’s side with a click-clack, settling on top of the crate he had been using in place of a chair. It is the larger crate behind his own that provides Mei her current access to his hair, giving her the necessary boost in height that allows her to pull apart the salt-clumps with her own ten fingers. “Salt, salt, salt. Ocean spray everywhere. In a few minutes, I’m going to find a ghost ship buried inside all the orange.”

A tiny palm comes into Sandy's peripheral view, open stiff to display what lies atop it: wavy orange hair, rolled into the kind of ball that could have been ejected from a grown cat’s stomach. Most of the strands that make up the ball possess an odd crisp of sodium-chloride nature. “Look,” she says, “All yours.”

Sandy pinches the orange ball, carefully. Like he does not know whether this mass of keratin has pain receptors, and needs first to test lest he hurt. 

“Don’t sniff it, by the way.” The small fingers close over the hairball, both the hand and hair retreating outside of Sandy’s scope of vision. “It doesn’t smell very good.”

Hours later in the day, Sandy takes a sniff of his own hair and realizes he smells terribly of salt spray, sweat, bad cologne, and raw soap. He realizes he deeply despises the way he smells: overpowering and overly masculine, as if a tried-and-true requirement of engineered masculinity were to smell unbearable to anyone who steps within a meter’s range. An hour of his free evening is sacrificed to walking to the nearest supermarket, wandering up and down the limits of the bath supply isle like a man marooned on flotsam, before finally taking from the display a jasmine-scented shampoo — scented like it belongs in Tang’s restroom, in Tang’s shower caddy. The one placed far away from Sandy and Pigsy’s three-in-one ambrette, the quarantined men’s soaps. 

Two days later, Mei buries her nose into Sandy’s scalp as would a bloodhound, perched over the spacious seating of his right shoulder. She proudly declares to have identified a new, more enjoyable fragrance buried between the initial salt and sweat: something that smells pleasantly of floral tea. 

—

If he placed his palm over Mei's head, then pressed downwards with all of his strength into the concrete ground, what he would be left with is a crimson and viscous stain of girl-viscera.

This is not a thought had with ill intent, it is simply a truth that flashes by every so often — a warning, there to remind that any small animal is as fragile as a raw egg when handled by his calloused hands. To avoid cracking a raw egg is not natural and habitual practice, but a task requiring constant and manual alterations of the body’s output. Completely flattening a little girl is an extreme that would necessitate intention, yes, but the horrific potential of unintentionally dislocating a shoulder or breaking a thin arm is always only a step away from realization. So too is the potential of making her cry, in not a burst of physical exertion but of anger let loose. Sandy is prone to the act of causing harm — whether it be physical or emotional — so much so he could say he defaults to it, whenever he stops having the sense to gauge the consequence of his every action. It was a predisposition that first trickled down from above, then bled into those closest to him: a most unfortunate mirroring that inevitably occurred via years of sharing the same stale air. Cyclically contaminating each other, exacerbating each behavioral infection like a ping and pong of viral symptoms. 

For example, Pigsy. Ms. Zhu’s death put an itch into his fists that begged to be scratched til raw and red — already a failing of Sandy’s making. Grief was not a thing to be beaten into paste, or washed away in showers of sweat and blood and adrenaline. Perhaps if they had enough corroded bicycle carcasses nearby, Pigsy could have broken one hollow body after another until enough exhaustion had been built up to cushion the aimless anger into dullness — or something relatively, comparably, comfortable. But where they were was the Zhu family home, arranged exactly the way Pigsy’s mother had last left it and not an inch astray, with only the addition of powdery dust and the sacrilege of rotting food waste left on the kitchen counter. Ms. Zhu, in life, preferred her home windows dressed with thick curtains, for she had trouble sleeping with even a minimal amount of light leaking in through the glass panes. What the thickness of the curtains also achieved was the insulation of sound; later than eight p.m., by which all curtains would be draped across the windows in full, neither external sight nor external sound could disturb the peace kept caged within the home.

Yes, like that. It had been kept exactly like that. The curtains were still closed, not because it was night at that moment, but because night was the last time Ms. Zhu had inhabited those grounds. Her habitat. Their habitat. Then, the habitat of a singular he. 

With the scent of funeral lilies still lingering on his person, Pigsy was unable to shift even an inch of the draped curtains out of place, much less dare to even minutely damage any of his mother’s prized furniture. The only three things within the house placed not by his mother were the three people in funeral suits, and thus, via a rather simple yet brutal process of elimination, people became the only things Pigsy could afford to damage.

Sandy still remembers the scene like a flickering film reel in grainy technicolor, how Pigsy grabbed Tang by his scarf, pulled him close in a way that spoke nothing of intimacy and everything of aggression all too familiar to Sandy, because Tang had dared to wear his usual red scarf over his black funeral suit after they had gotten in the car ride home, what the fuck is wrong with you, what the hell are you doing, motherfucker, take it off. This was not done strictly to castigate the sin of wearing a red scarf, if at all, no. This was because Tang had always been eerily level-headed at the face of death, as if he knew better about death than the rest of them too. As if death too were another field of humanities he could outpace them in. So there Tang stood, with only a closed mouth and a tragic expression, feeling sorry not for his wrinkling scarf nor his manhandled self but for Pigsy: a mess of a man tragic enough to yell at a best friend as he would at an opponent, as Sandy would at an opponent. Yelling at Tang to be rid of that habit, of trying to be above death too. 

Or, for another example, Tang. His dropping out of graduate school was a long time coming, really; stuck studying intensively for that safety net he never learned to love, strangling his starving-artist nature into croaking moans until foam began to bubble from nature’s lips, even his durations of cramming growing shorter and shorter — before it became near nil, afflicted with an inability to call upon willpower at the face of an unloved field of study. Tang was concealing his transcript from his mother with the kind of desperation that only confirmed all suspicion of his piss-poor performance, he could not yell at his mother or tell her not to meddle but he could yell at Pigsy and Sandy — because Tang was desperately safe with his two best friends, and security had a knack for bringing out the ugliest parts in people. You will not leave me even if my mouth is a terror. I am hideous yet secure.

If only Pigsy and Sandy hadn’t kept intruding. If only they did not walk through Tang’s front door so often, dripping blood like a pair of leaky faucets, inflicting nausea upon him yet seeking treatment from him all the while, wanting, desiring, intruding, intruding again with the rusting spare keys Tang himself handed them as a promise of trust. Backstabbers. I wouldn’t feel so exhausted if I could just focus, for once, without you two walking in with a broken nose or a dislocated jaw. I lose hours of sleep on days when I have to deal with the aftermath of whatever the hell the two of you got into. I lose months of my life to your reckless behaviors. There are still two dried droplets of your split-lip blood on page thirty-two of my medical chemistry textbook. This is why I am doing terribly. This is why I can’t focus on studying for exams. This is why I don’t have the time to participate in research. This is why my life is going downhill. 

But what would you two know about studying for a test, the need for focus, anything.

Singing your drunk guts out on a Wednesday night like you have no fucking life, as if Thursday isn’t hanging over your heads like it does for the rest of us.

There was a fuse lit then, towards Tang’s smartassery which often toed the line of belittlement: years of intentional rebellion, of the long fight to live doing what they loved, reduced in a moment to a simple matter of inadequacy. Their mechanical ventures with audio equipment and diesel engines, their well-loved tool boxes and oil-stained gloves, seasoned pans and mint-condition tea sets, made to be nothing by a desk-bound pushover who did not even know how to drive or build his own fucking bookshelf.

Sandy was about to retaliate. He certainly was—at least for a few seconds, until he recognized Tang’s outburst as a replica of one of his own, his most shameful moments absorbed and mimicked through prolonged proximity and exposure.

Hours later, Tang hiccuped his way through an apology that sounded far closer to a plea than a product of rationality — he did not mean a word of it, he was sleep-deprived and pissy and burning the hell out as every effort in life suddenly went awry. In dire need of something external to attribute his failures to, he had shifted all focus from the fact that he was an ill fit for his undesired field of study and had instead resorted to pointing fingers at the only people promising the longevity of his sanity. 

Months later, Tang dropped out of graduate school, and the fuse was lit all over again — a gust upon still-sparking firewood — and that time, Sandy did not have the generous sense to reflect his way through Tang’s onslaught of offenses. The day of the fight is a blur, yet another product of selective memory, and Sandy cannot say confidently what venomous word came out of whom, who finally snapped at Tang’s smartassery, the burden of blame, look at you pretending you’re all better than us, so what if you went to some prestigious university, you fucking burned-out dropout. All that work just to turn yourself into a miserable jobless little shit who can’t even do what he loves. How the fuck were you ever gonna stomach medicine when you can’t even stomach the sight of blood, you incompetent fuck, you inept fuck.  

It could have been Pigsy, or it could have been him. It could have been both of them combined.

It was probably mostly him.

“You say that while standing in my house, bloating my water bill, getting treated by my first-aid equipment?! Get out, both of you, leave me alone!” 

Tang pointed sharply to the door with tears welling in his eyes, chin creased, arms stiff with helpless rage and the pitiable cleverness of knowing he was utterly incapable of pushing them out — as incapable as he was of keeping them in. 

After having the front door shut on them and meeting the frigid air of the open apartment hallway, Pigsy and Sandy shifted their crosshairs towards one another, spitting words like “You made Tang cry” and “He started it” and “You sorry piece of shit” to shift blame between themselves like a hot potato. Hands tucked into their armpits to shield against the cold, turning into sources of noise pollution in the night of a residential area, sounding like utter nuisances to Tang’s poor neighbors, like idiots.

It was a bitter, brutal, idiotic night, remaining since to fester as a mutually unaddressed matter. Sandy thinks ripping off the metaphorical band-aid would reveal a yellow-green mold, fostered into flourishing by loving each other even whilst their characters were in decay. He believes that somewhere along the line, in their closeness of body and mind, the three of them became one big organ in spirit: locked together by a web-like network of blood vessels, like they were pumping the same blood and sharing the same infections. Sandy hopes the removal of his infectious nature freshened their bloods, if only a little.

—

Or maybe, everyone is turbulent during their Terrible Twenties. Maybe both Pigsy and Tang were by nature a little dickish and unsteady too, no horrid influence required. 

Sandy doesn't want to think about it right now. He gravitates towards keeping his memories of their characters as nice and pretty as can be, as one might sanctify a buried loved one.

—

Within the recesses of his mind exists a six-month-old memory, blurred in its corners but pathetic with unrelenting surety. Six months since the Great Escape, since the Bullshit he labels a sacrificial endeavor and fears examining in further detail. The night of shame began with some of his fellow dockworkers inviting him out for a cheap drink at a local food cart, and a following acceptance of said invitation, motivated by the crushing loneliness of the first six months of the rest of his life. With at least twenty coworkers mingling at the gathering site by ten p.m., Sandy sat on one of the myriad blue plastic stools stationed by the cart and accepted a meat skewer, then a drink, and then another drink, and then another drink, and then.

A secret, a secret that nobody tells you until you are old enough. The world tells you a drink is the heart’s miracle cure, that it scrubs the sediment of sentiment, that it is a terrible thing to rely on a drink to combat your burdens. The world does not tell you that a drink taken in a fit of sadness will only feed the emotion that has already settled within the stomach, that it is like sprinkling sugar over a rotting tooth. A difference of venom and antivenom, squeezed from the same snake. 

This is how the rest of the story goes: people flush away one at a time, the crowd thinning with every passing hour. They begin their drunken marches to taxis or public transport and wave their goodbyes, thanks for an awesome night, see you again at work. An inebriated Sandy is left to walk himself back to the docks, to the fishing boat, and nobody worries for his safety. He is big. He is strong. He is monstrous. If anyone somehow works up the nerve to mug him, he will tear them into halves. Or so they believe. 

If Sandy were a wiser man, he would have begun his own drunken march home in favor of lingering by the thinning traces of society, trying to somehow bask in the long-dissipated accumulation of body heat in the area. The street lights began to blink helplessly, it was two in the morning yet he stayed, deliberating the existence of lingering body heat, staring at the sky, clear, dark, too dark, very different from the night of the Great Escape. Sandy had escaped during the kind of night where the sky grows thick with cold perspiration, so cloudy that the dark sky looks far brighter than it ought to. He had left with his tensed foot nearly bending the gas pedal out of shape, crying into his tangled facial hair, crying, crying a little more, as the sight through the windshield blurred wetly to mimic the view of a rainy day. The clear night sky and the fact that he was currently too drunk to drive upset him further so he moved, finally, thoughts astray, death-row walking towards light pollution, mind abuzz and television snow crackling behind his loose eyelids. One inexperienced step at a time, one step, two step, one step, one step, wobbly step, toddler step. No mother for a finish line.

Close to three o’ clock, Sandy found himself opening the door of a phone booth located in the vacant middle of who-knows-where, before shutting himself in the too-small box of metal and glass that he could only fit in through lowering his head and rounding his shoulders. Inside the left pocket of his tracksuit pants were lint, a strip of new wintermint gum wrapped in foil, and two coins stained with unpretty oxidation. Both coins were sent rattling down the coin slot — for what, he had wondered at the time, his own aimless action registering a breath too late. 

For what was a voiced thought, the kind intentionally spoken aloud in the mind to drown out the malformed background chatter. The pathetic kind, the last ditch effort to artificially alter your own thinking.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Within long-term memory was a sequence of numbers as easy to recite as the order of days in the week, because for its disuse he had never saved it to his old abandoned cellphone. It was always the brain’s burden and not the machine’s to keep track of the second number, the landline number. Home number. Different from the number of a mobile phone, saved to software then never reviewed again.

Click.

Click.

For what, he again tried to think, as muscle memory shifted his fingertip across the keypad. 

He knew what.

He was lonely.

The first six months of the rest of his life were killing him nice and slow. He was only going to get killed better as more months broke into his history.

The dial tone picked up, making way for uniformly-timed yet discordant stretches of noise akin to bubbling water, persisting for at least a minute before they were abruptly disrupted.

He almost didn’t want it to end. Out of anticipation. Out of fear.

Click.

Like the sound of an opening vault.

Then, a high-pitched voice, thick with sleep and annoyance.

“...Who in the world calls at three in the morning?” Tang’s voice, full of landline static and still as honest as ever, left him awash with petrification. Gentle and pleasant to the ear, even through white noise and irritation. The quality of audio was something to be expected from the poorest of speakers, the ones most comically paired with peaking microphones. Sandy could hear the old bedsheets ruffle, the very same that he last saw crusted with Pigsy’s drying blood. Sandy could hear the metallic frame of Tang’s round glasses, likely worn before picking up the call, click against the plastic body of Tang’s bedside landline phone. “I swear, if this is another insurance advert with a timezone miscalculation—”

He still isn’t all too sure how Tang knew, what gave him away, because until the end Sandy could not work up the courage to utter a single word. But a shuddering sigh of involuntary nature, tinted only with the slightest hint of a voice, was enough to make Tang’s breath hitch.

“...Sandy?”

Tang simply knew things. Many things. Always had.

A smartass.

Something clattered from behind the receiver, rapidly shifting out of place. Frozen to his small spot in the phone booth, Sandy stood still with his mouth still hanging halfway open, his folded arm locked stiff as it kept the handset pressed hard to his ear. Hard enough to leave a mark over skin. 

“Sandy, oh, oh no, oh gods no, Sandy, where in the world are you? Where have you been all this time?”

Through crackling pleas, the hoarse sounds identified as beautiful both then and before, Sandy was reminded of why he had left in the first place. Junk food. Oceanic love, its abyssal volume. Big enough to leave.

His heart began a sprint, each launch of foot from ground an earth-shattering beat, out to kill the body it inhabited. 

"Sandy, Sandy, Pigsy misses you. Where are you, the car center said you sold our van, they said they dismantled it for parts because we didn’t use it gently enough and there were dents everywhere. Pigsy is taking care of a child now and he’s stressed out of his mind and I feel awful for them both. I feel awful, so often. Pigsy doesn’t talk about you often but I can tell he’s thinking about you all the time, whenever I start talking about you first he always has something to add to it. I talk about your street cats a lot. I think the cats miss you too. No, don’t hang up, please, don’t leave. My mother says she wants me to cut my hair, nobody will hire me with hair like this. But you always said it looked better long, right? Sandy?"

The sheer amount of consecutive “Sandy”s sorrowfully bursting through the breaking speaker reminded him of the lyrics he used to write in anadiplosis. Don’t hang up, Sandy, Sandy, stay. Pigsy would then sing them, artfully, every word he wrote in that flawless voice.

“Don’t you want to talk to Pigsy, too? Don’t you miss him? I know you've loved him for years longer than I have, I know you want to, I know you want, Sandy, you must want,”

What he wanted was to be junk food for no longer, to slot back into place as if he had never left, as if he had always been a better person. As if he had been a wonderful friend and influence from day one, hugging those most important to him with a pair of arms that knew exactly how to gauge its perverse strength. But in the middle of the night he had left with not a word of goodbye spared, because Tang could not stop him and Pigsy was too busy being unconscious to do anything at all; what a perfect opportunity. What an underhanded and repulsive thing to do — especially to Pigsy, left to wake up to a raging headache and Tang having become the unwilling bearer of bad news.

And maybe he wanted people, too. But he was no longer allowed to want people, just as he was no longer allowed to want cats.

“Please, if you hang up now I won't be able to tell Pigsy that you called, it'd kill him to know you called me but not him, I'll have to keep a secret forever, oh gods, please.” 

In came a mad thought, made solid in his head only through lax security in the mind: if the sight of my face ends up repulsing you that’s fine, just love me from the neck down.

“Sandy, talk to me, stay, say anything, anything at all—” 

Click.

Either Sandy hung up first in a desperate last ditch effort for movement, or the call time paid for by two meager coins finally came to its destined end. This is where the memory blurs most heavily — likely because Sandy does not want to know whether the former or the latter is the truth — running, running again to be as away as he can be. He instead elected to remember the foul alcoholic smell of his own breath, collecting with each anxious huff and puff behind hands cupped tight over his mouth and nose. He elected to remember the handset dangling by its armored cord, barely skirting the floor of the booth, like a hanged man.

—

“You should really look into being a hero,” Mei says, arms spread out horizontally to display proudly the whole of her wingspan. Today, she has tied the sleeves of her windbreaker around her neck, letting the body of the jacket flutter behind her like a cape every time coastal wind brushes by. “Beating up bad guys would be a… whatchamacallit… a cakewalk for you.”

Sandy lets out a small grunt, hoisting several boxes at once over his shoulder. “I don’t really do the ‘beating up’ thing anymore.”

“So you used to do the ‘beating up’ thing?”

“...Maybe. Yes.” 

“How much?”

“A lot. That’s a bad thing, by the way.”

“I think beating up bad guys is a different thing though.” Mei places a finger over her upper lip, brows furrowed in deliberation, a gesture right out of a cartoon. “Like, beating up a supervillain is gonna stop the supervillain from doing bad things. It would protect good people. So beating up a supervillain is actually a good thing, unlike, say, beating up a kitten. Beating up a kitten would be a bad thing.”

“A really bad thing.”

“Yuh-huh. A super-duper-uber bad thing.”

“You know, Mei, it’s pretty dangerous for you to be here. Look at all these boxes I am holding — what if I accidentally drop them on you?”

With a psh and a dismissive wave of her small hand, Mei deliberately turns her back to Sandy and begins to walk in circles, trying to make her windbreaker-cape catch the wind. “You’re too strong to drop them. C’mon, you’re Steve! Strongest dude at the docks! Those cubes probably feel like feathers to you!” 

As dirty a move as it was, this was exactly why Sandy never corrected and would never correct Mei on her mistaken perception of his name. If, sometime in the near future, Mei decided to come clean to her bigshot parents about her frequent escapades away from the office space, his existence would surely take up a noticeable portion of whatever tale she decided to recount. I swung back and forth from Sandy’s arm. Sandy let me try on his safety vest, it was as big as a blanket. Sandy let me run towards an anchorage where mooring lines were tied. Sandy didn’t shoo me away hard enough from the danger zone while holding a bunch of heavy cargo. Sandy told me to go back to where I’m supposed to be but didn’t actually try to take me back because he was stuck working. 

There was no question about it; he would be fired. Immediately. 

The anonymity provided by the unplanned sobriquet of “Steve” was a blessing in disguise. 

“But really,” Mei huffed, “Why are you working here and not as, like, a bigger thing? Like a superhero? You could have been one, back when you were still okay with beating up bad guys.”

Yes, why was he working here, of all places? In his hands was strength towering to the point of the abject, and at some point of his life he had wished to be just like the colorful superheroes on the convex television screen — as all children fiercely desired. The romance of being the savior of the day, the showers of praise, so on and so forth: but mostly, the powers. Flight, telepathy, lasers, and classic old superstrength. Sandy has been in possession of that last one since the early stages of puberty, when his voice began to crack and the meat beneath his skin began to bloat towards unsightly volumes.

He still remembers the day his strength saved him once and for all, sending him up on a high that made him feel like he could do anything, making him believe that violence could in fact be the one multi-tool to solve it all. He felt like he could conquer supervillains and underground rings, and no matter how many others scowled at his monstrous form he knew that the power coiled behind his fists were utilitarian. And just like any other ignorant child, he wanted to save the rest of the world too the way he had saved himself, wanted to be a hero, once upon a time, once upon a time. 

Then, with all the predictability of growth, the lowdown of reality grew more and more detailed and surgical with each passing year. So, like all other realistic adults, Sandy set out on a search for money-making jobs. And once the world’s air grew thick with the suffocating aroma of funeral lilies, Sandy set out on a search for respectable money-making jobs. Ones that did not require split knuckles and bet money, ones that came after not only acknowledging reality but being tamed by it.

  Then why did he choose to work here in particular, at the shipyard of D-H Shipping Co.? It was that the port operator was kind, that the wild suggestion of a fishing-boat abode was given serious consideration and then the go-ahead. Because he could practically see the silver platter glitter beneath the offer, screaming at him that he would not find an option as half as good elsewhere.

And he had loved the waters ever since he was a boy. 

“There are two reasons,” Sandy lays the boxes down over a stack of sturdy shipment, “Why I didn’t become a hero.”

“I’m listening.”

“One, my strength isn’t the heroic kind of strength. I used my strength to get into messy fights and win them. And since I shouldn’t dumb things down to you, I’m going to tell it to you straight — I did it because it got me money, but also because it made me feel like I was stronger than everyone I was fighting. A hero uses their strength for good things — like selflessly saving others — and I’ve only ever used my strength to help myself and keep others down.” 

Predator of apex predators, if such a thing is real. Because targeting the strong was fair, better than the sheer spinelessness of cherry-picking cowards gunning strictly for the weak. Two years ago, he would have thought that title to be artful, too: Predator of apex predators. What a moniker. What a nom de guerre. What an immature thought in retrospect, utterly lacking in substance in its surplus of hollow flare. Fuck the top of the food chain, fuck whatever art there is to be found in that cheap costume of a title. He wants to descend from his tall chair, one rung at a time.

You damned aquatic demon. You king shark, mythical megalodon. And he childishly thinks, no, I want to be a humpback whale. I want a big tail to put between megalodons and fragile breakable people.

“That sounds wrong. I don’t think that’s right, Steve.”

“Does it?

Mei begins scratching at her chin in a near-cartoonish manner, appearing to struggle to come up with some magical counterargument that would render Sandy’s claim null once and for all. Her body is a lens to the workings of her brain, every shift of limbs and twitch of facial muscles an indicator of racing thought. It is endearing to him, this ceaseless activity of hers — even in silence. 

“Two,” He takes a deep breath, for courage, to taste the piscine air. "I really love this shipyard, Mei. I really love the ocean."

There occurs a pause in motion, as Mei lowers her hand and lets it hang by her side, eyes fixing to Sandy instead of some far-off container crane; the motion then resumes, as her hand comes to pat the highest spot of his body she can reach without strain.

Pat, pat. A patch of heat, the size of a girl’s palm, rests over the wrinkled cloth of his work pants.

The windbreaker cape flutters behind Mei, mildly, like the waters at neap tide.

"I'm sure the ocean loves you back."

—

He recalls Tang being shocked, upon first learning about the great dirty laundry of his blood family. Which was funny, because no half-decent parent would let their child violently punch their way through twenty-odd years of their life without making an intervention during the first one or two. The matters of his family were, in the worst of ways, tediously predictable.

Here was the deal, made dry and brief for easier digestion: two parents, unafraid to hurt their one child. The child fears his parents, as weak little things dropped unprepared into this world often might. Small and prepubescent, the child considers his fate a fixed one — until one teenage day the masculinity pours into him like a miracle potion, and indignation and muscle mass somehow begin to rival the fear in magnitude. 

Age fifteen, Sandy managed to overcome the psychological parent-child barrier and swung a cypress kitchen chair into his father’s side in retaliation. He would love to say it was a calculated move, a product of strategy to make the man understand that violence was weighty and consequential. It was not a calculated move, not in the slightest. He was fed up and he exploded and he revelled at the sight of wooden pieces bursting in all directions like a firework of lumber. Ligneous signal flares to a new year, new start, just for him. 

He never left the house with a homemade bruise ever again. 

People who parrot that violence is not a solution have never seen how quickly violence can solve problems. 

Sandy perhaps had those very same people to thank, for teaching him they expect that not his last but first resort will be violence that puts his build to proper use. He followed the labels pasted onto him, and look where that got him. Somewhere better.

“That joke is made in shit taste,” Pigsy once commented. 

Sandy needs to downplay the severity a bit when putting it into words, lest he go mad. 

The year Sandy was first invited to Pigsy’s house was also the year his father finally blew up outside of the insulated domestic cube, deprived of an outlet that could remain away from the watchful eyes of strangers. From a domestic nuisance to a public nuisance he went, and thus he was inevitably put behind bars. A blessing, because Sandy would not have to deal with the man for a good few years. A curse, because the breadwinner of the family disappeared overnight. 

“Gods, so then what did you do?” Tang asked, the furrow between his brows deepening.

Sandy, peeling one of the endless tangerines from Tang’s pockets with his inconveniently thick fingertips, answered in a casual tone that failed to match his effortful hand movements. “Part-time jobs, especially ones that required lifting and carrying supplies. My bosses were ecstatic when they saw what I could do. It wasn’t too difficult to be paid extra.”

“And your mother? Did she do anything?”

A slip. Sandy’s thumb went past the albedo and straight into the flesh of the tangerine, forming a wet, orange crater. With almost deliberate nonchalance, he tossed the broken tangerine back to Tang, gesturing for him and his small hands to do the rest of the precise peeling. 

“Mom was prone to spectating.”

Watching, always, never lifting a finger, both before and after.

He still remembers the day he repeated Ms. Zhu’s words to his mother, only a few days after he had first heard them from Ms. Zhu — You shouldn’t be hurting what you are feeding. A real mother’s words. He remembers searching for a shift in her expression, as if those words would trigger some grand enlightenment that would change the woman she is for the better. With delicate fingers, she counted the number of bills in his paycheck, and left the kitchen table and its two unbroken chairs. 

“Does Pigsy know this?” Tang tossed the immaculately peeled tangerine back to Sandy, marred only where Sandy had made his error and nowhere else. As Sandy handily caught the tangerine in his wide palm, Tang somewhat guiltily wiped the juice residue on his fingers on the hem of his ochre shorts.

“Yeah, he's aware.”

“And Pigsy’s mother?”

“Nope.” 

A confession, the second confession Sandy never managed to make before Ms.Zhu nestled herself in funeral lilies, as white as a freshly made bed; he wanted Ms. Zhu to expose everything about him without him needing to say a word. Sandy was strong. Sandy was powerful. Sandy could shatter chairs without breaking a sweat. Never in his life was Sandy going to genuflect before weakness. Sandy was a coward. He wanted to be known and consoled and loved by a mother without the necessary trial of vulnerability.

When Ms. Zhu would prepare fruit platters with a fruit knife too small for him to suggest handling in her place, Sandy would sit upright next to the cushion she sat on and keep his curled fingers pressed over his knees. With every offer to help denied, he could do nothing but station himself with stiff politeness, quietly bearing witness as the red skin of the in-season apple came apart in a flawless coil. 

He wanted her to breach his privacy, to unearth everything in spite of his efforts of concealment. He wanted her to discover his wounds despite resistance so that she would comfort him, without him ever having to ask for it, like a child. He wanted her to read him like an open book, like she was the one who authored him in blood. As if every superscript in the text of his life led to a footnote detailing her, her, her. 

Peel me open. Please peel me open, with one of your fruit knives. Shave the scabrous skin away and behold the fibrous flesh beneath.

“Why are you telling me this now? Wait, no, that sounds terrible — I’m beyond glad you trust me enough to tell me all this, just, what’s the occasion? As in, why now in particular? Ah, I should have worded it differently — ”

“Don’t worry, I get what you mean. Calm down.”

“Sorry…” 

“I do have an occasion. I’m planning to get out, for good. You know how I’ve been saving for a van to live in?”

Here was the game plan: Sandy had an upcoming championship match, a big fight against a big boxer who had nearly the ratio of wins to losses to match Sandy’s own. It meant an opponent that was nearly the monster that he was; it meant the drawing of a massive crowd, and by extension, a massive collection of bet money. Sandy, as a competitor, was not allowed to bet on his own matches. To circumvent this obstacle, Sandy would provide Pigsy and Tang the vast majority of his own savings, so that they may bet it all on Sandy’s victory for a massive payout. Sandy would then portion the payout of the bet and the prize money: the greatest amount being allocated to the van budget, then a lesser yet still sizable amount being set aside as payment for Pigsy and Tang’s critical roles in this scheme. As for the remainder, Sandy would leave with his mother, so that they would never have to find each other again. 

The day before the match, Sandy, Pigsy, and Tang sat in a conspiratorial triangle on the floor of Tang’s apartment, rehearsing the game plan, counting cash, an unpleasant humidity about the air, the stakes of the coming endeavor squeezing sweat out of Tang’s palms like a juicer. Paper bills of varying color littered the flooring unevenly to paint a vague mimicry of mismatched tiles, sometimes spread into a fan’s shape after being thumbed through, sometimes slightly darkened from the moisture of Tang’s hands. 

The buzz of nerves too much to mask, Tang eyed Pigsy, then Sandy, back to Pigsy, left-diagonal to right-diagonal, still sitting yet unable to sit still, “This is… this is a lot of money to be risking on a bet, guys.”

“And ya think Sandy doesn’t know that? What’s yer point?”  

“Wouldn't it be safer if Sandy just, you know, lost on purpose? Like, if we bet on your opponent instead, Sandy, then you could throw the match. You’d be without the prize money for the match itself, but you’ll get to have more control over whether you get your planned returns for the bet—” 

“There he goes again, our student of efficiency n’ practicality.” Pigsy clicked his tongue in blatant disapproval, and immediately, visibly, Tang shriveled into himself. “It’s about a man’s pride, ya wouldn’t get it. Y’ain’t exactly the type to.” 

Tang’s jaw stiffened.

“Tang, this is how I’m going to earn my independence.” Sandy leveled Tang with his own grave stare, “I don’t want to mark this kind of occasion with being knocked down. I don’t want to look back at this life-altering match and feel like a weaselly loser who doesn’t deserve what he got, I want to feel like a proud victor who earned his prize. My victory is meant to represent triumph.”

With his crossed arms and hunched shoulders elevating his scarf up to his lower lip, Tang buried his nose into the raised fabric to further conceal what Sandy was quite certain was an expression of shame. “Ugh, you artists and your symbolisms and narratives and masculine pride…” 

It was about as good as an explicit surrender.

Sandy smiled.

“Besides, I don’t want my best friends betting on my opponent instead of me, even if it’s for a trick. I’d fight better knowing you guys have placed your faith in my victory, privately and officially.”

Almost indignantly, Tang mumbled into his scarf. “You have my full support…”

On the day of the big match, the life-changer, the turning point, Sandy walked into the ring with his head held high, spine raised, shoulders open, all the necessary body language indicative of a confident man. He was carrying the weight of his friends’ support and the majority of his savings on his back; it was the good kind of weight, the kind that didn’t crush you underneath it but added acceleration to your movements. Scanning his eyes across the roaring crowd that had gathered in this rather stuffy underground arena, Sandy spotted Pigsy and Tang pressed close to the chain-link fence surrounding the Octagon, a prepping staff member nudging away with a minutely scarlet mop their hooves and fingers from anxiously clawing at the metallic netting. 

Everything was dark, save for the Octagon with each square meter lit three times over by the numerous spotlights installed above. The staff member exited the stage with their minutely scarlet mop and bucket, Sandy could see his opponent’s bulky silhouette slowly formulate out of the darkness beyond the opposite fence, the crowd was cheering, the commentators were saying something through the loudspeaker that rang like an indecipherable feedback loop in Sandy’s ears. An unprofessional-looking referee made their way onto the stage with a stained pair of sneakers and a pair of rounded shoulders, Sandy winced at the activation of colorful strobe lights racing by the corner of his eye, Tang and Pigsy were moving like broken puppets trying to figure out how to cheer for Sandy without giving away they were in cahoots, oh, there he was, bathed in the lights, Sandy could see his opponent clearly now, a muscular man in his weight class, a demon with orange fur biting an ugly blue mouthguard that clashed terribly with the shade of his coarse coat, donning a pair of shorts far too small and tight for the thick musculature of his lower body, Sandy had nothing to fear, he would come out victorious, just like always.

When did “always” begin? 

How did he ever figure out he would “always” win? 

When did he even start fighting like this? Why did he even start fighting like this? 

He had never even been sent to a proper gym, how did he ever pick this up? 

The specific sequence of events after those questions arose are somewhat a blur, as is the case with events he faces with too high a heart rate, with a head full of blood. The strategies he thought to employ in the moment, the way he sought to read his opponent’s habits and weaknesses, finding where the other man’s balance could fail and going in for a takedown, not much of that data remains. Right hook, butterfly guard, an attempt at a triangle choke, who remembered the little details anymore? What he knew was that his own questions had greatly upset his stomach, as if his inquiries were not innocuous enough in origin. 

He remembers feelings. He remembers the inertia of his swinging fists, he remembers the quiet crack of something caving in under the heavy pressure of his knuckles. He remembers the sheer significance of this match finally settling in his lower abdomen like a squirming ball of bait, no longer feeling like some faraway concept; he remembers that registration of significance transmuting into desperation, because he wanted, needed, he needed the win, the money, the freedom. 

One hit. I'm getting my fucking van.

One hit. Heavy as blasts of a shotgun.

Reel back the elbow. Rotate your torso for momentum. Make it land. Make it stun.

One hit. Sounds of a starting pistol marking a new life.

One hit. Scarlet coats pearly white enamel rows. 

Motherfucker, eat shit. Eat some more.

I don’t know you as a person. You should eat shit anyway. 

I want my van. My van won't be the ugly shade of your silicone mouthguard. It will be like the ocean.

I want to be free.

One hit. He takes a knee to the side and he toughs it out like a champion. 

He's built for this. He's good at this. It feels great to excel.

All of his classmates through middle and high school had said he was good at this.

They had never even seen him throw a single punch.

He had been moved by their goddamn faith.

Would Mei still look upon him with admiration glittering in her eyes, the morning sea's sundog crown like a halo behind her small head, had she seen him back then?

His victory came in the form of a rude awakening, a stupor he was slapped out of, a tumble off of a bed after a restless night's sporadic episodes of sleep. The referee broke up the fight, declaring a TKO; his opponent with the ugly mouthpiece was helped out of the Octagon by a man who seemed to be his coach, or someone close enough to the role. The sweat from Sandy’s scalp streamed down the slope of his face to collect at the sharp tip of his nose into a heavy droplet, then dripped onto the canvas cover of the ground beneath when Pigsy congratulated him with a rough yet jovial slap on the back. 

Plip.

“For once, I’m glad this ain’t some formally regulated match that yer involved in. Woulda had to wait another ten minutes or more to congratulate ya, if it were!” The heavy droplet of sweat, shattered over the light-gray canvas, mingled with the smudges of scarlet vaguely arranged into the shape of footprints. The crowd had retreated either to collect their earnings or to mourn their losses — or to complain to the oddsmaker — blurring the background noise into the sound of an extended crash, stretching for minutes beyond the moment of true impact. The staff member from earlier was back with their mop and a fraying towel and a fresh bucket, now nudging all three of them away from the Octagon so that they could do their job and scrub the canvas of splatters. A previously missing warmth spread within Sandy’s chest like a starchy web as Pigsy began wiping his sweaty blue torso with a cooling towel, boasting of the world-class meal Sandy would be treated to for his victory. 

Sandy looked to Tang.

Tang forced his eyes to stay on Sandy’s swelling and bleeding face, like he needed to do his duty as a friend; he smiled with the curvature of his mouth all crooked and unsightly, the betting voucher in his hands crumpled to the point where its creases showed the white of naked paper. 

“Good job,” Tang croaked, his throat bobbing as he swallowed something down, “I am so proud of you.” 

—

When Ms. Zhu died, when the pollen of funeral lilies tinted their wrists and fingertips a repulsive false gold, Pigsy looked to Sandy once again with expectation burning in his eyes — as if Sandy held the answer to cure what ailed him, as if Sandy could defeat an ailment, too. So, who is the villain in this story? Who do we need to beat this time for our happy ending?

The villain was time itself. Everyone grows old. Everyone grows sick. And you can’t take a knuckle to the seconds that tick by, you can’t wave your fist at the timer counting down to zero. 

You’re fucked, and all you can do is to swallow that bitter pill like it’s a cure in itself.

—

It is the next morning when Mei, adorned with the proudest smile, comes dashing towards Sandy with her nimble little feet — each swift step a bounce as she expertly weaves her way through all vehicular and humanoid obstacles, waving her small hand in rapid arcs through the air, carving a path through the fog.

“I figured it out, I figured it out! No, you don’t use your strength just to fight! Guess what else you do!”

It takes a few moments for Sandy’s brain to catch up, their first exchange of the day being entirely reliant on the precise words they shared on the day previous. In those few moments Sandy expends for the sake of better recollection, Mei manages to squash the energy she is buzzing with if only to put on the persona of some showhost, eagerly waiting for her contestant to name the answer behind her imaginary cue card. 

“What Steve does with his big, big muscles for four-gazillion points. Steve, your answer?” The pitch of her young voice has been artificially lowered by several whole steps, leaving her intonation clunky. Sandy would have laughed if he could not tell she was giving him her best performance right now: not an attempt to be funny, a genuine performance. Today too she tied the sleeves of her windbreaker around her neck, but this time, it was not to costume herself in a hero’s cape. No, today the emphasis was on the sleeves themselves, left with enough length after their knot to fall down her torso like a necktie. Mei has clearly thought this through; Sandy tastefully keeps his eyes away from her costume-breaking sneakers.

“Well gee, Mei, I have no idea.” He plays up his cluelessness just a tad, shifting his right shoulder to let the crate held atop it rest a bit more comfortably. Mei focuses her gaze on the crate for some reason, eyes shaped into half-moon smiles, full of intent, as if the pattern of corrugation and peeled paint are endlessly fascinating to her. Sandy feels — or is perhaps even ambushed by the feeling — truly, for the first time, how exceptional every brickwork composing the world looks to small children, how novelty is not yet a luxury in high demand and low supply. He is struck dumb by the thought that he too looks exceptional in Mei’s eyes, as if in that moment, he could live up to what he is believed to be just by the crutch that the belief exists.

The salty air of the port is thick with humidity. Mei’s voice is thick with the joy of having the upper hand, viscous and sweet as honey itself, as she reveals an answer she treats as the most obvious thing in the world:

“Just look at you, right now, you’re using your strength to lift cargo so that people’s carts don’t crash into them! You’re helping all of us!”

For some reason, it makes Sandy’s lower lip stiffen, throat tighten, choking him with unshed tears. The picture being painted is a silly one: Sandy, this blue demon of freshwater and masculinity, now with his emotions at the complete mercy of a child who could not hope to overpower him in any other way. At risk of sobbing his eyes out in front of the little girl who sees his bloated muscles and unsightly popping veins and sees a protector.

—

In retrospect, Sandy would not call his life a terrible one; he does not want to discount the lasting impact of the many happy episodes, and the good people who were there to pen those episodes into his life. Years ago, his springs were bruised petals that had come into contact with a greasy thumb. Summer caught the surface of a fluorescent safety vest and forced its glare upon the eyes. The flock of migratory autumn birds flying in the formation of a spearhead skewered him through with the thought of leaving home. Winter was the stripped bushes and vacant nests made of greying twigs, and a stuttering space heater he couldn’t even kick into operation for fear of being burned.

He knew things had changed — because rainy autumns, for a time, no longer drenched him in its characteristic melancholy, but reminded him of Pigsy’s mischievous cackles and Tang’s tossing his umbrella to the side of the street. Winters meant an invitation from Pigsy and Ms. Zhu to their home, where bowls of warm and soupy foods waited to heat him from the stomach to the heart, making the confused organ beat a little quicker. When rapidly pumping red blood made his blue skin blush with violet heat, Pigsy would offer to take Sandy’s outer layer and hang it in the closet of his room, next to Pigsy’s own coats and jackets as if it belonged there. On mornings after heavy snow, Tang, who often heard cicadas in the midst of winter’s golden apricity, would swear up and down that he was not just hearing things, that those insects so symbolic of summer greens were crying from naked trees and glittering snow yet to be marred by footprints. And Sandy, with hearty food warming his belly and talks of a summer bug, would feel as if even his malfunctioning heater could not force the cold into his bones.

Life was good, because Pigsy would gently take hold of his pierced ears and slip repurposed fish hooks through the fragile flesh’s small openings, gently, gently, with all the focused artistry of garnishing a prized dish. Then as Pigsy’s hooves brushed past his earlobe one last time, as Pigsy kicked off a discussion about the artistic irony of using fish hooks as earrings on Sandy, for an intoxicating moment Sandy would feel infinitely desirable — just like a prized dish. Pigsy would then pat him harshly on the shoulder, breaking the spell; they would once again touch each other in ways entirely appropriate for two men with only friendly feelings between them. Because in the eyes of many, boys were not meant to hug each other, and men were not made to hug each other. And Sandy would be left with an unbalanced set of earrings and a fantasy of one day walking onto the stage with wrinkled lapels, as if they were balled up in someone’s grip merely moments ago backstage. 

For their earliest years, there were only handshakes, never hand-holds, no outright hugs — just a single arm of Sandy’s slung loosely over Pigsy’s shoulder as they walked side by side down the tight sidewalk, with Pigsy’s shorter height barring him from mirroring even that measured presentation of casual affection. Only with Tang’s addition did physical contact mystify itself no more, becoming common, average, proper. Sandy still recalls with the vividness of fire the very moment Tang jumped for joy after receiving his notice of acceptance into graduate school, pulling Pigsy into a full-body hug with a strength normally unknown to his thin limbs. Five steps away did Sandy stand, at the perfect distance to capture in the camera of his mind the sight of both their bodies and how they pressed against each other, how shirt fabric and the fat underneath wrinkled and folded: and suddenly, something clicked, as quiet yet all-consuming as a philosopher’s epiphany. Suddenly he saw the world in a higher resolution, and once more, he came awash with the feeling that maybe life really was that good, so good, it would be silly to continue envying fully-realized characters in a Saturday’s superhero cartoon. 

They were so fun, all of them. They were so fun together, and any one of them could testify to that with confidence. Sandy recalls he and Pigsy once tried to teach Tang how to box, as a part of some joke-hero-training routine. We’re going to be a hero-trio, dude. Hey, that rhymes. When demonstrating how to hit the basic one-two combo, Sandy equipped boxing mitts for Pigsy to strike, while Pigsy deliberately threw his softer punches at the practice partner who wouldn’t be budging or bruising regardless of his output. When it was Tang’s turn to punch, Sandy switched from mitts to paddles, and Sandy to this day is willing to bet hard cash that he could see Tang’s ego bruise in real time, somehow indignant at the beginner treatment despite very much being an honest-to-goodness beginner. Confronted with Tang’s cartoonishly dynamic pouting, Pigsy was made helpless as his mentor persona all but crumbled — falling into a fit of choked cackles he failed to contain, trying to rein in the sounds, glancing at Tang's terrible posture and misplaced feet, breaking all over again, rinse and repeat. This sound of poorly held-back laughter, Sandy archived to his mind’s library right within the category of Pigsy’s music: right where it belonged. 

Once Pigsy pointed a shaking hoof to the studio’s wall mirror, once Tang looked at the mirror and finally got a good once-over at himself, Tang raised a white flag to the comedy of it all, chortling next to where Pigsy had collapsed to his knees. And maybe none of this would have been so hilarious to any outsider looking in, just the sight of Tang’s petulance and godawful posture — but to them, it was the funniest thing in the world, because it happened among the three of them, and that made even a newspaper rolling by like tumbleweed humorous sometimes.

Maybe in another life, another world, where every good memory did not spoil itself in the cesspool of context, Sandy would be sitting alongside his friends — right now, right at this moment — laughing at the memories in a full guffaw, as his favorite people in the world shook with laughter too against either side of his shoulders. He can only dream of a reality where every good memory did not sour itself, spoiling in the context of departure and terrible influence. Of junk food. Of a scrapped van. Of lilies.

When Sandy carried a bloodied Pigsy back to Tang’s apartment that fateful day, when he curled into that pathetic ball against a browning corner of the room, he vaguely recalls from those hours muttering things like “We should have stuck to music, fuck, we should have stuck to music,” and thinking things like Dear Mother, I’m tired.

I’m tired of smelling lilies.

I wish I had been better to you and your boy. Would I still be smelling lilies if I were?

Will I ever get to raise a cat? 

He wonders if he was good to his street cats at the very least, if that is a memory that he can consider unspoiled — but no, he removed himself without warning from their lives too, and he knew better than to cruelly assume that cats did not miss their long-time companions. And he misses the cats in turn, the way they’d bump their heads against his squatted legs and the folded skin by his knee pits, the way they’d try to bite playfully at his thick fingers or scale the back of his dirt-brown jacket, the way their vertical pupils would widen somewhat when he came into view. The vertical slits of cats’ pupils, he realizes, remind him of Mei’s near-reptilian pupils, both vertical and endlessly expressive when zeroing in on whatever they deem deserving of their attention.

It is funny how both she and the cats think nothing of treating him like a cat tree to climb. Plush, steady, inoffensive furniture. Not a chance in the world that it could point a pen or claw back, that it could be a threat. 

It is funny how they align, these fresh and unspoiled observations. It is funny enough to get him through another day.

One foggy day in the past month, Mei glowed with lighthouse wattage as she spilled all strings of words to her heart’s content. “I used to like stir-fried noodles more than I liked noodle soup. But now, all I want is noodle soup. I’ll even eat bok choy if it’s in noodle soup. I used to like playing on the seesaw more, but now, I go to the monkey bars first. Because they are both MK things. I like those things because they are MK.”

It is funny how, despite the many lovely things that have been spoiled, he was able to find them lovely in the first place thanks to his friends.

—

“Today is our last day together.” Mei says out of the blue. 

The coarse fabric of Sandy’s work gloves settle especially uncomfortably around the joints of his fingers today.

Sandy misses the appropriate timing to respond. If he says anything now, it will be a second too late, off-rhythm, and the poor pacing will betray his emotions.

“My school semester starts soon, so my parents and I have to go back home, and, well,” she continues, as if the silence never existed. “Home's pretty far from here.”

“I'll mi — have a fun semester, Mei.” 

“I'll miss you too, Steve.” 

She hugs a single leg of Sandy’s, as thick as a tree trunk; the endeavor takes her entire body to complete.

“When we meet again, you should tell me how you exercise. Maybe I'll be old enough to follow your routine. Maybe I'll be as buff as you, when we meet again.”

Sandy hopes, selfishly, that when Mei is “old enough,” she will have forgotten all about this. He hopes that this current Mei, small of stature and sparkly of eyes, is at the age where most memories made will fail to persist into adulthood. As much as Sandy wishes to remember Mei and the rare joy she brought to his life, he cannot wish for the opposite; Sandy, or “Steve,” is a memory best left behind for a growing child like her.

How old is she right now, exactly? Which grade of elementary school is Mei returning to? Sandy realizes he never even asked Mei her age, that the depth of his knowledge of her person is terribly shallow. He does not know her favorite color (he naturally assumed it was green), he does not know her favorite food (he naturally assumed it was noodles), he does not know her favorite pastime (he naturally assumed she likes running around in playgrounds and mud). 

“Maybe my hands will get big enough to play thumb wrestling with you.”

What fears did she carry? Where did her unrelenting fascination with strength and ruggedness stem from? Did it also stem from fear? Out of distaste for the source of that aristocratic facade she thought was “uncool”? He knows nowhere near enough about her, and failed to realize it until their farewell was at hand. He has been self-centered, too occupied with his own mind and body to scrutinize anything that wasn’t himself: a terrible adult through and through, not that he has ever not been one.

He is leaving her with a fake name she cannot even track him down with. 

It is actually a good thing that he never dug too deep into her, Sandy wants to believe. As much as Sandy wants to have faith that he is no longer the terrible influence he was up until a year ago, he is still best kept away from cats and children, if only as a precaution. Her inexplicable attachment towards him would have only grown stronger had he given her occasion to open her heart to him, this faux grownup who left her with a convenient misunderstanding so that he could lower his chances of being fired. Once again, he proves to be a memory best left to the past.

He wants to believe this is different from the night of the Great Escape.

What he wants and believes are two separate matters.

“Maybe I’ll even be a superhero by the time we meet again,” Mei shuffles to the edge of the concrete, where ocean meets port. “It’d be fun if we could be superheroes together.” The waters are calm here, as if somehow intimidated into docility by towering boxships and gantry cranes. As if. The ocean always is and always will be immune to every man-made titan. The waters are more grey than blue today, Sandy notes, the sky still overcast and the surrounding air fuzzy with coastal fog. On his face must be an expression that matches the way the weather feels. When was the last time this port had been sunny and free of fog for an entire day, the skies clear from the moment Sandy opened his eyes to another morning? He always seems to be describing this air with a quality of humidity and desaturation, whenever he stops to breathe and paint the landscape with his words. There is perhaps a talent within him, to constantly apply with his verbiage dreariness even to that which he loves.

Mei peers over the ground to observe the water, glances at Sandy, then back at the water. With hands on her shoulders, then her waist, then her knees, she begins a series of stretches she executes with practiced ease. “Hup, hup.” Stretching her fingers straight, she leans down to touch the tip of her dirty sneakers, making sure to keep her knees straight all the while. “Steve,” she speaks with a voice thickened from a head made full of blood by gravity, “I know you said you shouldn’t be a superhero.”

“Mhm.”

“I still think you should be one.”

“...Mei, you should stand back up straight, you’re going red in the face.”

“Okey-dokey.” And straight back up she stands, face glowing with a flush as red as a stoplight. “Don’t change the subject. Hey, Steve?”

“Mhm?” 

“I can’t swim.” 

Mei’s dragon-print socks and dirt-caked sneakers go flying off to the side as she breaks into a running start, as she leaps off of the edge of the concrete—

— for a few seconds, Sandy swears he sees her suspended in time, mid-motion, arms spread like a pair of wings in the air —

— to barrel into the vast ocean with an all-disrupting splash. 

Her tiny body sinks all too quickly into whitewater surging upwards and the liquid abyss below; in an instant, she disappears beneath the barrier of seafoam and teal-grey saltwater.

She is underwater.

She can’t swim and she is under frigid morning ocean water.

She is small and helpless and is going to seize up and drown.

Sandy swears his world just ended.

Every square centimeter of his tight, dehydrated skin shrivels and sparks with pins and needles, like he can feel the disgusting detailing of thin hair and dust on every pore; he feels each rapid thump of his sprinting heart at the tip of his fingers, twitching in tandem with every rush of blood through the area. He tries to throw off his work boots, fails, his panicked twitching fingers fail to pinch the ribbon of his shoestrings, he claws at the criss-cross of his shoestrings and tears their fibers apart, throws the boots to the side, the stiff material of the soles going clunk-clunk as it twice bounces lifelessly across the flat concrete.

Why did she do that? Why the hell did she do that? She does not float back up to break the ocean's surface, and he can feel them — the ghosts of ten million child-sized hands pressing against his neck, leaving not a square centimeter of leathery skin exposed, closing in, closing in. She is killing him. She is killing him in a way completely irrelevant to strength; he could almost hate her for it, the confidence with which she decided to kill herself.

A much, much louder splash bursts from the ocean — louder than that caused by the dive of a small girl, and a watery chill quickly envelops Sandy starting from the tip of his bare toes all the way to the top of his spinning head. Air knocked into the water by his plunge bubbles rapidly past his ears and eyes, like a translucent curtain of foam obstructing his senses — before it finally retreats from even the farthest corners of his vision, making way for the scenery of a thalassic void, framed towards the top by the desaturated bellies of cargo vessels. 

Deep, deep down below, reflecting meager amounts of light are Mei’s two round eyes, fixed to Sandy’s form with a steady calm unbelonging to a drowning child unable to swim; blurred ripples of caustics dance across her body, her torso still enough for Sandy to read the caustics’ movements like projections on a screen. A miniscule bubble escapes her right nostril to float up and cling momentarily to the corner of her eye, like some reversed version of a tear — a happy dew of air in a blue world. 

She does not flail with a panicked survival drive.

She is as unperturbed as the ocean itself.

Tranquil at the face of every man-made titan.

He feels sudden equanimity envelop him like a cradle, mirroring Mei’s own composure. There is no immediate, lethal danger, no timer of a bomb ticking down wickedly. It is just him, Mei, the cold ocean water, the shadow of mooring lines, and the keel of ships in its periphery. Sandy begins to swim downwards at a diagonal angle, towards where Mei stays submerged without sinking any deeper, treading water with her small legs. Her arm is made slower than usual as she pushes against liquid resistance, raising her hand at Sandy in offering, for him to take: directing his way like an underwater lighthouse. Ever so bright with the wattage her presence carried. It only takes a few more seconds for Sandy to reach her, to take her by the hand; a smile that reaches her eyes curves her tightly sealed lips into a lively parabola, and despite the fact that neither of them can speak — much less open their airways — he still thinks he can hear her full-bellied laughter resound in his head with aquatic reverberation: ha, ha, ha. 

Tricked ya.

Once Sandy’s fingers wrap around Mei’s delicate palm, it takes almost no time at all for them to swim back up towards the light, hand in hand; they breach the surface and drink in the open air with nowhere near enough desperate need for people who have been underwater for the length of time they were. It only takes all of five seconds for Mei to catch her breath, and although she starts to giggle with unburdened lungs, Sandy still feels great displeasure towards the idea of letting Mei tread water next to him — especially not when the echoes of initial panic drum within him, irrationally so. He thus comes up with the rather oddly pictured idea of lying on his back over the water, like a humanoid raft, and lifts Mei to seat her over his torso. “Upsy-daisy,” she chants as she is lifted and placed without resistance.

Lying horizontally like this, Sandy’s eyelashes feel weighed down by droplets clinging to every hair. It reminds him of the heavy cling of mascara, from back when Pigsy sorted through Ms. Zhu’s expired beauty products to use as their stage makeup. Makeup with an excuse to be found on a face like his. He is not quite sure why he is reminded of this now, as Mei adjusts herself to the center of his torso.

She drags her wet windbreaker off of herself with a fight, and drapes the item over Sandy’s thigh, as if that will help the fabric get enough sun to dry. Sandy does not complain. “Steve?”

“Mhm?” 

“I’m actually a really good swimmer. I’m a dragon, the water is kinda my thing.”

He could have almost hated her for it, the way she nearly killed him — juggling his anxious heart in her scheming hands — only to behave afterwards with utter nonchalance about the matter. Yet he finds that anger and hatred are foreign to him at this moment, entirely back-burnered as tension bleeds out like a threat to his health. If one could be not saved but crushed by relief, this would be it: the precise sensation. 

“That was uncool of you to do,” he manages to mutter. I thought I was going to fish you out looking as blue as I do, he does not say. The gruesome thought haunts him enough as mere imagination — to verbalize it would give further substance to the visual coagulating within his head, making it even harder to stomach.

“I wanted you to save me,” Mei pats him over his fluorescent vest in place of an apology, “Like a hero would. I knew you would dive to save me, because I know you. It wouldn’t have worked this well if you knew I could swim.”

“...Just don’t do it again.”

“Okay. But you are still my superhero. Even if you don’t need to save me after today. I’ve made you a superhero with this, it’s my parting gift.”

“Is that how this works?”

“Starting’s always the hardest part. I cut the opening ribbons for you, so you’ll do totally fine from here on out.” 

The massive surface area of Sandy’s torso gives Mei enough room to stretch her legs without dipping her toes into the water; she all but lounges, as if he were a spacious lifeboat and not another body. Comfort, utter comfort is what he sees when he inclines his head to get a better look at Mei.

At this moment, Sandy finds he quite likes what his absurd body can do. 

He truly likes his body.

This is, maybe, a first.

The thought strikes him dumb.

“Steve?” 

“Mhm?”

“You’ve loved the water ever since you were a little boy.”

“Mhm.”

“And I’ve loved the water ever since I was a little girl.”

“You still are a little girl.”

“I think it’s ‘cause the water is good to us. We are good in the water.”

As if to contradict her own words, Mei shudders violently as soon as she finishes speaking; it is a wonder, really, that the chill of being drenched from head to toe did not get to her sooner. He is but a second away from asking her if she is okay when she falls weightlessly over him, promoting him from lifeboat to mattress, and Sandy quickly guesses that she is seeking to warm herself, latching onto Sandy like a barnacle this way.

She burrows her head into Sandy’s wet beard, proving him wrong.

Gripping a lock of his jasmine-scented hair, she digs her head into his chin farther, as if she is trying to bury herself in the mess of orange, as if she somehow misses a person who is still present.

“We’ll see each other again.” Her voice carries an aftertaste of sorrow, sorrow Sandy has yet to learn to associate with the girl named Mei. Sundog, neon windbreaker, lighthouse-wattage Mei. “Today won’t be our last day together, that’s stupid and dumb, actually.”

She will be yet another person for Sandy to miss; she will be yet another Pigsy, yet another Tang, yet another Ms. Zhu. He could survive this, as he had survived the past year, for he had miraculously survived the acclimatization despite his bemoaning how the rest of his life will kill him nice and slow. He will survive missing a child only known to him for the duration of her school break. 

But he finds he wants to live, not just survive. It is the reason behind his art, his street cats, his familiarity with the six strings of his bass guitar. It is why he could not let himself part with his best and only friends for years and years. He was looking to open the elevated window on the walls of his life, trying to let in a little sun.

He still fully intends on letting themselves part ways here. But, if by some whim of fate. If destiny somehow does make their paths cross once again in this long walk of life,

Would it be the right thing to get to know her properly then, if such a thing happens?

May he take that as a sign?

“Fingers crossed,” Sandy says, maneuvering one hand to blanket Mei’s back, to keep her warm.

“Stay strong. Stay a superhero. Or I’ll be miles ahead of you by the time we meet again.” 

“...I will. You keep growing strong too, Mei. The good kind of strong. Not the kind I warned you against.”

“You’re so lecture-y. Like MK’s weird uncle.” Sandy feels his wet beard minutely rustle at the huff of breath Mei lets out. “All you’re missing are a pair of glasses.”

There is a hot patch developing over his neck where Mei has buried her head, collecting droplets of something too scalding to be sea spray. Sandy does not address it, and neither does Mei; he can hear her voice strain with the effort to hide the lump in her throat, and Sandy still isn’t wise enough to know if this is a vulnerability to confront or let stay hidden.

“But don’t worry. Even if you nag, you’re still cool. You’re still one of the coolest people I’ll ever get to meet.” He hears her take a deep breath before she pushes herself up from where she lies, to meet Sandy’s stare with eyes sparkling with the remnant of tears and intent, before delivering her next words as if reading something prewritten: “I want to play with you tomorrow, and tomorrow’s tomorrow, and tomorrow’s tomorrow’s tomorrow. I’m so proud that we’re friends.”

As if she were taking out from a treasure chest a set of words that had made her the happiest to hear, once upon a time. 

“See you next time, Steve.”

So he makes the decision, in turn, to respond with words he knows will make her the happiest to hear — even if they may be false, even if there is no concrete truth of the future he is able to offer her at this moment. Because carried by what may be mere probability is, by nature of possibilities, a sizable hope.

“See you next time, Mei.” 

Because maybe, a part of Sandy hopes those words will sow the seeds of destiny.

Still floating with his back to the cool water, Sandy stares up at that same old fuzzy sky. The coastal fog still does not clear, the sun’s rays do not shine through any crack of the thick carpet of clouds. But there are seagulls in the sky freely cruising through the mist in circles, surely a touch livelier from having stolen from some poor passerby’s bag of chips. The voices of other dockworkers begin sounding from the elevated platform of the port above, having commuted from their individual places of residence. One of Sandy’s colleagues finally peers over the edge and into the water to spot Sandy floating like flotsam and Mei riding like a passenger, having followed the trail of their tossed shoes like breadcrumbs; he eyeballs Sandy’s size and weight for but a second or two, then runs off after leaving behind the message that he will bring more people to help them back up to the concrete. With a snort, Mei lies down over his body once more, already judging it will be a while before an adequate number of people gather — might as well make myself comfortable, might as well watch those stupid gulls with you. This is nice, we should do this again sometime. 

Sandy smells the petrichor in humid air; he smells ocean salt, he smells the polyester of windbreakers and safety vests. 

For the first time in ages, he dares to look forward to what his future could hold.

For just a few moments, he does not smell lilies. 

—

...

—

The routine is a fixed one. 

This rare morning, a lifesaving amount of sun comes through the window of his fishing boat.

It is, once again, enough to get him through another day.