Here's the story I'm submitting to Pulsar. It's horrible, though neither fantasy nor horror.


“New Year’s Day”
short story by Phil X

I was in Chinatown the same afternoon as the boy who made all the papers. He was the one at the New Years’ Parade, who would’ve been trampled if not for the American. I spent the morning of that particular day in a restaurant that smelled vaguely of dried meat. I sat at a small, circular table, across from my cousin William. He had spent an hour telling me how I’ve been wasting my life, when he wasn’t stuffing dumplings into his mouth. Instead of listening to him talk, I watched him eat. William had a strangely meticulous way of eating his dumplings. He funneled them gingerly past his lips on the tips of his wooden chopsticks. He placed them on his tongue in one piece; one could say that he ate them like communion wafers. I nodded, drank hot tea from a small ceramic cup, and watched the pretty girls walk by the storefront window. I asked William questions about his job, the Knicks, though he had been talking about something else. He would continue droning on in his friendly patrician tone, feeling too amiable to note that I had ignored his comments. Or perhaps he knew, and just didn’t feel like making a fuss. After all, it was Chinese New Year, and his girlfriend Chelsea had made a reservation for later at a nicer restaurant on the West Side.

I poured tea out from the silver tin pot. It streamed into the cup and made a pleasant burbling sound. As the steam wafted up from the scalding dark liquid, he persisted on grandma’s arthritis, grandpa’s Alzheimer. He made some funny comments about it: Sure, they babble sometimes, he said. But that, he assured me, was the way it was with old people. Are you coming over for dinner later? he asked. I told him I’d have to see, though already I had aimed myself out the door. In the street, my face was patted by the brisk wind. Old Chinese women passed me by on both sides, with chalky stiff hair and sagging, jiggling jowels.

There was a bell that rang on top of the door of the restaurant. I didn’t hear it ringing when I first cleared the door. Or at least I didn’t know that I had heard it ringing, but it echoed in my ears ringing after I’d turned my sharp left ringing down Canal Street ringing and was a good ringing paces away. More echoes, things I hadn’t paid attention to, a river of conversation running by. Echoes, memories. The brain traps them all in invisible cages, and hides them behind a tarp like the freak-car of a circus train. For fun, it’ll let a cage open at the moment one least expects. For example, a moment like this, just walking down the street, minding my own business. My unconscious, just for fun, pulls back that tarp and lets a cage door swing open…

William sitting across from me, less than ten minutes ago. Telling me, They don’t have a lot of time left. They’re our grandparents, we’ve got to make them happy while we can. It’s strange sometimes, but don’t let it bother you. Everyone gets old, you know. That’s what happens when you get up there. Just take the subway over stop by and say hello. I have to hit the road so gung hay fah choy. That’s “Happy New Year,” something Chelsea taught me to say…

I don’t know if that boy had grandparents. I did; I used to live with them. My grandparents were kind people, but they were sick, with the kinds of illnesses no one gets better from. I got tired of watching my grandmother’s hair fall out. My grandfather had Parkinson’s, and he couldn’t control his bowels. I got tired of sifting through the crumbled ruins of Rome. I couldn’t stare at them any longer without breathing difficulties. One day, I read an ad for an apartment in Chinatown; a cheap, termite-infested closet with a thermostat that only worked in the summertime. I’ve never gone back to my grandparents’ house.

Every year, the Chinese New Year’s Day Parade brings people to the intersection of Mott and Elizabeth. The crowds that gather to watch the festivities aren’t limited to Chinese or those living in Chinatown. Following the crowds on foot, I saw faces of all ethnicities. Many of them wore clothes that suggested higher-income neighborhoods; they were the most uncomfortable navigating the dirty sidewalks. Along the edges of the curb were channels of green, fish-smelling water. I lived there long enough that I would step in them unthinkingly. But others were more squeamish, and I blew by them without sympathy. Behind me I heard their voices saying, Oh God! These streets are so filthy! But I had my head tilted up to all the signs on the stores, so as the voices got softer, I knew I was getting farther. But it also felt like I was ascending high into the air above everyone…

Fireworks exploded on the posts of the stores. They crackled and burst, crumbled into sparks. They disturbed the silence with welcome echoing smacks. I felt my feet on the ground again, and heard a low drumming sound begin to reverbate from down the block. The lion dance was beginning at the far end of the street, and the crowd became a vacuum. We were each pulled along by the other’s desire to watch the lion. We were crammed shoulder to shoulder, clenched like digits in a fist. The crowds from Elizabeth merged into our own, and when we reached the intersection, where we all wanted to end up, I felt the sidewalk give way to ice. It was right beneath my feet and I nearly slipped on it. But I was cushioned by elbows and shoulder bones, hands pressing against my back. A traffic jam with people, half-a-step’s progress every minute it seemed, but people still pushing from every direction, cursing and complaining. There was a scream clearer than all the irritated voices:

“Yan Yan! Yan Yan…!”

A woman’s voice screaming. I remember how horrible the voice sounded more than I remember the words. Where was it coming from? I tried to turn my head and see. But I could only pivot my neck; both my arms and shoulders were locked to my sides. I turned my head left, where I thought the cry erupted, and as I was thinking Where was it coming from? a big face jumped out in front of me. There were pimples of sweat all over the cracked, chafing skin of its forehead. It opened its mouth to huff an overpowering stench of ginger. The breath of the big face clapped against my own, and my eyes instantly watered. I felt the noxious air inside my nose and stomach, and I started to cough, wanted to double over and retch. But I was stuck vertical; I could only turn my head the other way. With rapture I inhaled the transient aroma of gunpowder, leftover from the strings of fireworks hanging ash-black on street columns. My coughing had produced a blanket of white wisps across my eyes. I could hear voices uttering oaths like Motherfucker, stop coughing on me! Cottony clouds everywhere. The scream sliced the air again,

“Yan Yan! Yan…!

Where was it coming from? I braved Ginger Face again, stood up on my tip-toes and stuck my head over a sea of bobbing heads. Then something dug at the back of my knee. My weight fell back down and I kissed the leathery fold of someone’s jacket armpit. I caught a nostril full of musk, came away coughing once more, but my mind was asking Where was it coming from? Where was the screaming coming from? Then finally something I could understand. A man’s voice, in English this time.

“Hey! There’s a little kid down here!”

But people still pushed with their bodies like they hadn’t been paying attention. I could feel the impatience growing stronger around me, the way one feels the ocean ebb when he’s standing up to his neck in it. The hands in my back got beligerent; the crowd began to lurch forward. A sudden, forceful push, like a great tide had swelled up at the entrance of Canal. Like a thousand new spectators had begun shoving their way into the street all at once. The woman screamed again; as I was pushed forward the faces beside me scrolled back and forth like pendulums, and while a voice in my mind still asked Where was the sound coming from? I also didn’t want to know. The man who spoke English erupted,

“Hey! Hey! Don’t step on the little kid…!”

I never saw the man who was yelling. I think I saw the woman for a moment. She was Chinese, had a face drained of all color, and eyes wide in desperation. They kept uttering things, the woman with the word of one pronounced syllable. I still don’t know what she said; it’s the tone of her voice that haunts me. They kept on yelling, their voices wailing as they receded from me, absorbed by the masses. For the crowd kept pushing towards the parade, completely indifferent. Fireworks began exploding again.

The lion that appeared later was a gaudy-looking thing shaped like a giant helmet, colored like a candy cane, and with a thin, flapping jaw. The person inside the giant head, which didn’t resemble a lion’s, swooped down on a cabbage in the street, and picked it up through the flap of the mouth. After crossing its legs a few times to the drum throb, the leaves were sprayed up into the air through the jaw of the animal. The bells that adorned the pretend lion jangled and rattled with every motion he made, and the crowd applauded generously. They didn’t try to catch any of the falling flakes of cabbage.

In the newspaper the next morning, there was a photo of the same woman. I recognized her instantly, though her face wasn’t shown. She was crying into the shoulder of a man who was beside her. While she could have been any of a thousand different mothers who had been at the parade, I was sure it was her. The article next to the photo confirmed everything. An eight-year old boy had been trampled, her son. He had been trampled to death by the New Year’s Day crowd, at the intersection of Mott and Elizabeth Street.

On the opposite page, there was the other boy, who had almost gotten trampled when a stout young American managed to pull him out of harm’s way. They posed in a photograph. The child was on the shoulder of his fateful savior, and both of them exuded a kind of stupified happiness. The boy had a bright innocence that was amazingly photogenic, and his hero would be profiled on page twenty-six. Of course, the great tragedy on the opposite page would be forever connected with this Chinese New Year. But for some strange reason which I cannot explain, whenever I think about this particular holiday, this particular year, I remember first the boy who had been saved. It isn’t until I sit and dwell on it at length that I realize there was another boy, that my brain is having fun with me. I’ve always thought of memory as a funny thing; it’ll pull something out that’s the last thing anyone wants to think of. I was supposed to tell the story of the boy who had lived. I think this story began on a much happier note…