#i’m already making pork with dumplings and cabbage tonight and i’m so excited i hope i don’t fuck it up

[unbound-space-trash]

finally found and ordered a copy of the czech cookbook my mum has so that I’ll be able to try out more recipes

[chirrutbaze]

hi gosh i am really excited because you know that short story contest thing i was talking about??? i am a Winner!! :D and so is kari over at @puppyofwerewolfs​, who is a super awesome human being and whose short story was really, really excellent!!

also: huge HUGE HUGE shout-out to @egregiousderp​ , who has been so awesome and encouraging!!! thanks a million for your continued support!! :DDD

and thanks to everyone who’s supported my fanfiction!! all your kind feedback has made me more confident in my original writing :)

anway, without further ado! (hit read-more to read more :))

The ghosts of my mother’s past dance along the walls.

They do not bother me. I can’t recognize them. They don’t know me. They only came at night, after all, when I am fast asleep. The ghosts sway in the glare of the midnight TV screen as I curl up under a thick blanket.

My mother’s ghosts do not bother her, either; she knows they are dead. They only serve as a reminder of a past, a world, that she has escaped. They can’t touch her here.

(This is America, the TV man blares. Land of the free, home of the brave! Tomb of the red-white-and-blue, in which the ugly bloodstain of her past has been laid to rest.)

Tonight, we celebrate the ghosts. They cling to the edges of photographs as we roll skins of dough into disks. We stuff them in comfortable silence -- wet cabbage and soft pork and sticky soy sauce; it all smells like heaven -- and the ghosts peek out from around their corners. Waiting. Staring. Hoping or condemning -- it is difficult to say.

“Fold them like this,” my mother says. Her fingers move so quickly that I can’t follow her, her lump of dough and meat disappearing into a golden ingot. “This is a Chinese coin, see?”

“It’s a dumpling,” I say stupidly. My fingers are coated in flour dust. My dumplings look like they were pinched to death.

My mother continues as if she had not heard me. “These coins are different than the ones -- from, you know, the museums? The disks with holes in them?”

I drench a dumpling skin in water, but the edges mush together and start to dissolve.

Something in me aches. I think the ghosts are laughing.

“Mom, I --”

“Hmm?” my mother hums. She lays yet another perfectly folded dumpling on the tray with care, looking at it with an expression I can’t place. She seems happy, but her eyebrows are pinched together. I don’t know what that means.

So I try to distract her. “These dumplings look like the ones in the movie we saw. The one about the 1920s in China.”

Her fingers falter. The dumpling is folded slightly off; the corners of the triangle don’t match up. It is ruined, and I almost feel sorry. “I…” She sweeps her failure into the nearby trash can, dust raining from her hands. Her eyebrows pinch even closer, and my ache grows. “Google it?”

“Okay,” I say. A skin slips through my fingers, but I catch it before it hits the ground. “So, ten more dumplings to go.”

My mother does not hesitate in responding -- she knows the answer to this one. “Ten more, then you can toss them in the pot?”

“Yeah.”

We fold the rest in silence, and the ghosts creep back into their photographs, empty eyes winking. My mother’s grandmother, my mother’s great-aunt, my mother’s family that dates back hundreds of years -- they cast judgement from above the kitchen clock.

I like that clock. I picked it out from a dollar store years ago because it was shaped like a panda, and the arms of the clock were bamboo shoots. My mother thought it was silly, but my dad let me buy it. He even let me tape it to the wall myself.

A plop, plop, plop drags me out of my thoughts. I almost want to laugh -- the uniformity of the dumplings is evident even in how they enter the boiling water. My mother must be proud that everything is going perfectly.

“Ten minutes?” she says.

I keep folding dumplings, wrapping each one with as much care as I can take. My fingers are clumsy, though. They aren’t used to this work -- skilled and rapid. They feel silly even trying.

“Hey, this one’s not bad,” I say, holding it up. It droops into a frown between my fingertips.

My mom takes it from me and places it on the tray. It looks sad next to its perfectly-shaped brethren, like a Terracotta Warrior with a missing face.

“Doesn’t he look cute next to his friends?” she says.

“I’ll just make more,” I say, hurrying to pick up a new skin. The ache sinks deeper by the second, and I’m starting to recognize its familiar leer.

“Shouldn’t I finish them?” A little bit of a smile shines through as my mother nods at my lumpy dumpling. I can’t help it -- it makes me feel worse.

“Half the meat’s left.” I hold up the bowl for her to see, but she isn’t paying attention anymore.

So I surrender -- I set it down, leave her at it, and wash off my hands. There’s nothing left for me to do. I settle on the couch and open Facebook, browsing through the photos. Surprisingly, there’s nothing for today. I’d thought my friends would want to post something nice with their families at least for today… but evidently not.

A few gratuitous portraits here and there, smiling up at me with perfect skin and perfect hair. Perfect poses. Perfect captions and perfect friends, with enough likes to buy a bottle of happiness.

I think about the picture I have in my phone, the one I took when my mom wasn’t looking. There’s flour dust all over the counter (she’d never want me to document a mess, especially in her house) and the dumplings are lined up in even rows. It’s from the first round, and so half of them are my monstrosities.

I huff a half-hearted laugh, but I don’t tap the blue button. I shutdown my phone instead.

“What are you doing?” my mother calls from the kitchen.

I peep over the couch and try to smile. “Nothing.”

“Why don’t you put on a movie?”

“Sure.” I get up to pull the DVD from the cabinet. “I like the one with the bandits we were talking about earlier.”

“Why not?” my mother chuckles. It echoes in the emptiness. I don’t think she heard me. I stand up to look over at her, hard at work; the tray of dumplings is already half-full.

I slide the disc into the player -- it eats it as I snatch my hand back. Somehow, it always manages to catch me off guard.

My heart is pounding.

“Ready?” my mother calls over, again. This time, she’s holding up a platter of dumplings, a tired smile tugging at her eyes. Her lips are pressed thin.

She scoops a couple into a bowl for me, carrying it over to the living room for me. She flicks off the light switch on her way over.

I look in the porcelain bowl and inhale the salty-sweet fumes. The dumplings are swimming in soy sauce and oil, just the way I like it, and smell of labor and tradition.

I wonder if my friends’ houses smell like this all the time. It only smells like tradition at this time of the year, to my mother’s preference -- there’s only so much she can take before the ghosts rattle their frames.

The living room is swathed blue with the opening scene, and the cushion next to me sinks with the weight of my mother and her ghosts. They’d reappeared after recognizing the words floating in front of them.

My mother looks tired, and I can see shadows edging along, close to the fading tiles. “Haven’t we seen this five times before?”

“No,” I reply, “this is the seventh.”

She leans against me, a bowl of her own in her hands. Leaning over, I realize with confusion that there’s only rice.

She notices, and ruffles my hair good-naturedly. Her hand is warm from cooking, and there’s probably flour in my hair now, but I still can’t wrap my mind around why she wouldn’t want to eat the dumplings she worked so hard on. We had put ten in the pot to boil, at least. And there were five in my bowl now -- six to start with.

Where had the other four gone?

“You’re not eating dumplings.”

“Well, rice is much healthier, isn’t it?” Her mouth smiles, glimmering in the glow of the TV. I can’t tell if her eyes are smiling.

“No,” I tell her. “You worked hard on the dumplings. Eat one.”

She shakes her head firmly. No.

The stream onscreen gurgles, sweeping away the evidence of the bandits’ misdeeds. The water washes away my mother’s face, too. It’s as blank as the day she put up the family photos, acknowledging the ghosts that lived within.

They’re crawling across the ceiling to reach her, now. They feed off the light of the TV screen, thriving in its hot-white glare.

“Mom,” I say. I don’t even bother with turning down the volume. “Mom. Why won’t you eat? It’s the Lunar New Year.”

A ghostly dark claw creeps over her shoulder and she is visibly pained. The emptiness of her face has twisted, like a white linen sheet, into a gruesome mask.

Her fingers are shivering. They are tree branches about to collapse.

“I…” The bowl trembles in her grasp. “I don’t want to go back.”

“Back where? To China?” I prompt, heart skipping a beat. I want to hear about this -- she never talks about her past. Never. That’s why the ghosts have to stay near.

“Yes,” she agrees, setting the bowl aside. She holds my cold hand in her warm ones. Bandits twirl in her eyes as the ghosts tug at her hair. “I was not happy there. Your grandparents sacrificed much to bring our family here --”

“I know this already.” I squeeze her hands, wanting desperately to hear a new story. “Tell me about you?”

She looks away. “It was a nasty time. Awful. Dreadful for us, because the Red Party...” The word hangs in the air, tainted. “They, ah… Your grandfather was a doctor. And. They hated anyone with money. Anyone associated with Western culture. Anyone who disagreed with them.”

“Like you?” I offer.

A ghost plays with her lips, placing its see-through hands over her mouth. I imagine it’s grinning.

“I didn’t know.” She hadn’t heard me. “I was a simple child. I played with mud. I listened to street stories. I got lost in flower markets. There was nothing to bother me.”

“Then why are you upset?”

My mother shakes her head. The lines of her face seem to sink in deeper. “I had friends there. And cousins, lots of them.”

I don’t have any cousins.

“I went fishing and swimming with them. They, ah,” she laughs nervously; it’s more of a titter than anything, “they dared me to touch worms. It sounds silly now, but… I had so much fun those summers. We played pretend, like Soldiers, and used our fingers as crab bait…”

My throat constricts.

“I loved those days, those summers,” my mother whispers. Her voice is cracking, and her facade is crumbling. I realize, belatedly, that the ghosts aren’t trying to take her apart.

They offer her the years that have fallen from her mask, and try desperately to smooth out the wrinkles on her brow. Clinging to her shirt, wailing in tune to the movie, scratching at the photographs --

They are trying to put my mother back together.

My voice is small, forced. “Mom?”

The silence is unbearable, which is why it must stretch like a cat -- without care, arching in its glory. I hate it. I ache with silence.

Finally, she speaks:

“I loved them. But I never want to go back.”

Each word a chipping of her heart, each syllable a tear of the sinews.

The ghosts shudder.

The air is still, and the only noise is the cheering of the townspeople in the movie. I want to turn the TV off -- their joy is inappropriate -- but I am paralyzed. My hands are still being held captive, and the ghosts are watching me with wide, wide eyes.

I don’t know what to say.

“It’ll be okay,” I tell her. It is strange that I should be the one to comfort my own mother, and in my confusion I take my hands back.

Betrayal flashes across my mother’s face, and I am crushed by the utter hurt that I have unwittingly evoked.

The full force of what she has confessed hits me like a train. My bones not longer ache; they shatter. I want to cry, to scream, to run away, to hide under the blankets -- I am so sorry. What can I say? I am so sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed. “I --”

Something crashes to the floor.

My mother rushes to her feet and the ghosts are dispersed. They flee to the kitchen, fraying at the edges, rushing away from the light of the TV -- I finally put that on pause.

No.

I shutdown the TV and follow my mother back into the kitchen. She is staring at something on the ground, not even crouched to take a better look.

“The clock,” she says simply.

The panda is in pieces on the hard tile, smiling unnervingly up at me. The bamboo shoot arms are twisted and useless.

My mother picks up a piece of it, flipping it over. Pressing a finger to the tape, she says slowly, “Not sticky enough.”

My face burns. This is my fault -- I was the one who put the panda clock up all those years ago. I want to crawl back to the couch and bury myself in heavy blankets and empty ghosts.

Everything is my fault today. I shouldn’t have asked for dumplings. I shouldn’t have asked for stories. I shouldn’t have asked for the panda clock.

“It’s okay,” my mother says, echoing my own words.

My throat constricts.

She takes me in her arms as hot tears slip down my face. I don’t have time to will them away, and that somehow makes it worse.

“Shh,” she whispers. My mother holds me close, her gaze on the ghosts watching from the photographs. “It’ll be okay.”

This feels just as wrong as me comforting my mother. I don’t know what to do.

I cling to her shirt, thoughts racing and flashing and falling apart, and watch the ghosts crawl back into their frame.