“Like the broken world it imagines, “This Delicate Stage” is hard to define: a fistful of fragments, an incomplete encyclopedia, a eulogy, incantation, dreamscape. Or a prayer for a future that, while uncertain, retains its capacity for wonder.”
—C Pam Zhang, contest judge and author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold

This Delicate Stage

by Laura Wang

Fish

Our children didn’t know what streetlights were. They knew sand, and silt, and salt water. Knew sunlight and the vagaries of clouds that hid it. Knew when afternoon’s slant meant a golden hour was the last one for playtime; soon it would be time to head home for dinner and a quiet household evening before star-watching and, finally, bed.

After the governments and corporations shattered, we picked up the pieces and built small cities with our hands. It was too hot, now, and too crowded with CO2 to light things in the old way. The oceans had crept up to our doorsteps. So we invited the ocean into our homes, made a place for it, and used it to live new, fish-lit lives.

Hurrying home at twilight, we ran past tanks of glowing fish. Their soft phosphorescence lit the footpaths and signaled the route home: left at the red fish outside the mechanic’s shop, straight on past the orange by the doctor’s office. Kaleidoscopes of yellows and blues and greens outside the community center meant we were nearly home.

Our small fish-cities looked best when the stars were out—more stars than people, for once; we’d forgotten what that ratio looked like. The soft fish-glow around us didn’t block or blur the pricks of light; we held our breath beneath those sharp incisions in the deep black of night, a near-infinite universe that only became visible now that we were on the other side of the sun and our own deadly industry. Every night we gathered—or scattered, rather; we emerged from our own homes and looked up, surrounded by one another in the silence, beneath the cold light of the past that had only just now landed on our faces.

And the fish—who had no sense of night or day, coming as they did from the dark depths of the sea—the fish kept shimmering around us. We were the only ones who didn’t glow. But you wouldn’t have known that, seeing our faces: lit up in the dark, eyes glinting, reflecting back all the light around us.

We checked the water in the tanks frequently; these creatures that crept up with the waves were used to the cool, heavy depths of the sea, not the sunlit warmth of our new atmosphere. Scientists said the fish only glowed when they were on the edge of death. This phosphorescence was a distress mechanism: our light came from the life of others. We asked, when we fed our fish, whether we were worthy.

We weren’t. But when one of them slowed and its glow dimmed, we said grace before steaming her. These were days of lentils and salt-tolerant greens; she would be the first flesh we’d eat in weeks. 

We did not know what to do with this piscine sacrifice. We did not know how to stop hurting others in order to live. So we didn’t stop. We tended to what we could, were gentle as we knew how, and tried to speak our gratitude to the sea: hello, farewell, thank you.

Myths

We gathered in the evenings to share stories. Sometimes we put on small plays, posing in costumes and homemade masks. Sometimes we spent days assembling shadow puppets and lit candles to cast long, eerie shadows on bedsheets. We shivered to see them: flat shapes, carved of wood or assembled from leaves, now transformed into large, monstrous beasts. Memory-silhouettes danced before our eyes. They stretched into shadows of half-remembered stories, telling of strange creatures that walked the earth in the time of legends.

Great bears, eight feet tall, white as the full moon, teeth sharper than rose thorns. Mice that could glide on currents of air, finger-skin stretched wide and taut, snatching moths from the sky at twilight. Living slime that slid across the rich dark soil, punching holes in green leaves.

Impossible, said the children.

Later, we saw the children playing games. They chased one another like single-horned rhinos or large flightless birds. They slowed themselves to slide across mud, trailing snail-slime behind them as they raced to cross the finish line last. They planted their feet wide and stretched their arms up tall, imagining the pull of marsh water up to mangrove leaves.

For these brief moments, these lost creatures were alive again: in the laughing bodies of our children, in the flickering shadows of the puppets, and in the memory of myths.

Winds

Every spring, we watched the wind shatter tree blossoms to shed petals on the grass beside our tents. This was the first sign. Pack, we told one another. We kept our belongings bundled from that point on. Every night, we dreamed atop pillows of our material lives. We wrapped our most precious objects in the center and wound our clothes around.

We saw the sky turn green. This was the second sign. We tidied the hollows beneath our homes. We stabbed stakes into the soil and tied down everything we could.

Enormous anvils darkened the sky. This was the third sign. We crawled into the shallow basements dug beneath our tents and waited. The rain pounded heavily outside. Brown mud oozed beneath the tarps. 

Tornado season stretched long and wide. Funnel clouds spun out frequently, unpredictably; we were taken by surprise so many times that we no longer expected anything but instability. Not surprise after all, then; simply resignation.

Every season, we stayed close to home, when we were able. Not all of us could, and so there were public dugouts for those who traveled on the road, selling repairs or objects collected from towns a several days’ walk away. Peddlers paced the cracked highways, whose never-end wavered water-like at the dry horizon. We kept an eye on the sky. When we saw green, we walked faster. When thunderheads appeared, we ran for the dugouts. We curled up into tiny spirals of ourselves. We pressed our hands to the backs of our necks and felt our pulses pound in our palms. The doors to the dugouts rattled. The sound was unbelievable. We didn’t bother to wail; the world was wailing for us.

When the tornadoes passed, we emerged: from homes, from public holes, from low ditches by the roadside. We had not moved, but the world had: the tornadoes hurled us and our belongings into new lives. There was a favorite doll, tangled in tree branches. There, a pot of soup, no longer on the stove, its red broth spattered across what was left of the sidewalk. And there, flung open, the pages of a book. We crept out into the calm. We rescued the doll and hung a hammock there. We washed the soup pot and built a hearth. We read the open pages of the book and built a library. We chose new careers out of the wind’s upheaval.

We had spent years, before, learning how to make predictions, only to ignore them. Now we had a new kind of tornado tarot: not reading tea leaves, but looking at where the detritus of our lives landed. We started anew there. Chaos has its own kind of order. Freedom means ceding to the ever-expanding set of possibilities. We stopped trying to organize our lives in advance. We responded, instead.

Clocks

We used sundials again. When we needed time, that is. Often we did not.

After lunch, let’s meet, we said. We didn’t eat lunch in the same place, or at the same pace, so sometimes we waited a while for our friends. That was okay. We felt the sun on our faces. We listened to the leaves rustle in the wind. We felt our blood carry breath through our bodies. When our friends arrived, after lunch, we were together. That was that.

When we cooked, we did not use sundials. We did not set timers. We did not put casseroles in the wood-fired oven for forty-five minutes.

We tasted. We paid attention to texture and to flavor. We stirred till lentils fell apart. We kneaded till our hands came away clean. We had many senses, after all, and a clock was not one of them.

The old measures came back: a handful of leaves. A pinch of salt. A whisper of thyme. A breath of scallion. Some of us said: but these are different for everyone. How do you make sure it’s the same, when everyone is different?

Yes, we replied. Doesn’t it taste good?

Salt

We marched through the streets together every time a baby was born. We leaked from our eyes to release our denial. We sobbed and beat our breasts and tore our clothing to shreds in a pantomime of grief. Death, in life.

We bore flames. Dug pits. Pushed rafts into the water. And oh, there was music. Wails and horns and the steady rhythm of our feet on cracked concrete. 

Every birth reminded us of who and what had been lost. Every new life reminded us of its end. We mourned in advance, so we could get on with the business of living.

Clay

We made what we could with our hands. There, by the riverbanks, we dug out the earth itself. The artists among us remembered how to shape it, though our clay was different than the porcelain of the past. Our clay was yellow-brown and crumbly. It stuck beneath our fingernails. We shaped it into bowls, into shingles, into small dolls. Over days, we watched the clay dry. We didn’t have a name for this delicate stage. Greenware, someone said, remembering. Greenware, we echoed, wondering at the seeds of the word.

Sunlight wasn’t enough. Greenware shattered easily, and the frequent rains quickly rendered our careful molding into weeping lumps of yellow earth. We needed more heat and more fortitude, so we dug a pit into the ground and placed our treasures inside. We lined the pit with wood and dead leaves. We lit a fire. We waited.

Not everything made it.

The first time we burned, we heard a loud crack. When the kiln was cool enough to touch, we dug out our clay and found everything had shattered: pot shards pierced the soft earth, dolls jigsawed into loose heads and limbs. Some of us cried; not all of us were children.

We tried again.

We dried the clay this time before we shaped it. We filtered out stones and twigs. We stirred in river water. We smoothed the sloppy earth onto plates. We waited, patiently. The breeze kissed our faces and carried with it the scent of rich earth. We smiled at the sour smell.

Our next bowls were smoother and sturdier. Our dolls were more delicate. We etched smiles into their smooth faces. And, while they dried, we built a new way to preserve them.

Why are we doing this? some of us asked. We had sore shoulders from plastering wattle onto the beehive kiln we were building on the knoll above the river. 

We have bowls still, from before, they said. We have dolls. We have roofs. We have enough to live. Why are we doing this?

We looked one another in the eyes. Our hands were caked with flaking clay.

Creation is its own reason, we replied.

Published June 27th, 2021