WINDOWS TO THE WORLD

WINDOWS TO THE WORLD

Chloe Zhang

game board, 36 glass marbles, three glasses of water, some fresh longan fruit that grandpa picked, five months. Five months after, Grandpa carved Linxiao’s name under Chong’s. Grandpa and Kunjin stored up the desk and all the stools; they stopped playing Chinese checkers; they wrapped the wooden board and the marbles in a royal blue embroidered linen. They occasionally watched checker competitions on TV, but always fell asleep with the commentator’s deep voice. They read newspapers, listened to old songs and Chinese opera on the radio, and smoked under the longan tree; they lay the last part of all their burning cigarettes in front of those three spirit tablets. And they sat down watching the cigarette butts dropping on the floor; they said no words. Then, Kunjin moved to his grandchildren’s house in another city because of his health issue. He said that he would come back during Chinese New Year to play checkers with Grandpa and to smoke with all his brothers. My grandpa wiped the tablets with a towel and put down three lit cigarettes every day. He waited. Kunjin didn’t make it back to Grandpa’s brick house, but his spirit tablet did. That afternoon, Grandpa knelt in front of the bushes, looking for the marbles that had been there for years; he stood under the longan tree, lighting up four cigarettes in between his fingers. He slowly ran his fingertips on those four names over and over again, waiting for the cigarettes to burn into ashes, to fall on the dense roots, on the set of Chinese checkers, and on the scratched glass marbles.