Haw Flakes and Dried Squid, by Elissa C. Huang

Haw Flakes and Dried Squid

Elissa C. Huang

Haw Flakes and Dried Squid Elissa C. Huang

Editor-in-Chief

Leslie Jill Patterson Fiction Editor

Katie Cortese Managing Editors

Jasmine V. Bailey Nancy Dinan Meghan E. Giles Jennifer Popa Jessica Smith

Fiction Trifecta

2019

Associate Editors: Timilehin Alake, Jasmine Bailey, Caleb Braun, Emma Brousseau, Nathaniel Brown, William Brown, Jennifer Buentello, Andrew Gillis, Jacob Hall, Katherine Jackson, Maeve Kirk, Jesse Lawhead, Brook McClurg, William Littlejohn-Oram, Zachary Ostraff, D Patterson, Matthew Porto, Catherine Ragsdale, Sara Ryan, Kate Simonian, Peter Vertacnik, and Valerie Wayson.

Copyright © 2020 Iron Horse Literary Review. All rights reserved.

Iron Horse Literary Review is a national journal of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction.

IHLR publishes four print issues and two electronic issues per year, at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, through the support of the TTU President’s Office, Provost’s Office, Graduate College, College of Arts & Sciences, and English Department.

HAW FLAKES AND DRIED SQUID

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he sat in the hallway sobbing, knees to chest, the sounds of sex coming from Room 429 behind her. “I thought he liked me,” she gasped. She began to cry the ugly cry, with snot and drool, making noises that made me embarrassed for her. Francis hadn’t meant to hurt her, of course. We were all getting a taste of uninhibited freedom, sent to the motherland by our parents in the hopes that we’d reconnect with our Taiwanese roots and culture. But most of all, they wanted to stop us from Bad American Behavior, exactly like what was happening in 429. As if we were inherently incapable of discovering our bodies, surrounded by a force field that kept us chaste. Shields down, we conducted our own sexual symphony that summer—the sound of skin smacking skin, tongues whipping and teeth gnashing, moans and whispered lies—bodies colliding with urgency and chaos.

“Of course he likes you,” I promised, handing her a tissue.

But Jeanette didn’t bother to wipe the streams of mascara from her cheeks. She let her nose rip, tooting like a sad trombone. Her tears pooled her eye makeup into wet dark circles, which made her kind of adorable, in a panda bear sort of way.

“Don’t you think I’m prettier?” she asked. “What’s he see in her?”

I shrugged. The entire thing was so out of my league. “Uh, she’s got long legs?” I suggested.

A tall Asian woman was something of an anomaly, and Cate was practically WNBA-tall. Everyone loved her; she smiled a lot and was stinking rich, perhaps not two mutually exclusive things.

She walked like a person accustomed to getting her way, shoulders

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back, a pronounced sway to her hips. She was insatiable and devoured the guys, one after another, spitting out their bones gleefully when she was done with them. Francis was her male counterpart, matching her conquests in number and speed. Cate had a boyfriend back at home— most of us did, Jeanette and myself included. But on the other side of the world, with no daily reminders of them, we might as well have been on Saturn.

My dalliance with Stan had been a social experiment. We hooked up on days when our parents worked late, and he’d read me poetry afterward. I hated poetry. He was needy and had a thing for bookish Asians.

Whether we liked him back mattered less to him than the slant of our eyes and the strength of our hair. He said we had “good” hair for pulling on in the bedroom. My father walked in on us during a hirsute tryst and stopped speaking to me for almost a full week. When he did finally break his silence, he gave me three economy-sized cans of industrial-strength bug spray along with my traveling papers and a passport that had DRUG TRAFFICKING IS PUNISHABLE BY DEATH stamped in bold red-block letters. He stated flatly, “The island heat makes the mosquitoes in Taiwan vicious and impervious to most repellents. Give Ah-Ma all of your cash when you land. She’ll exchange it for you.”

Then he cooked beef noodle soup for dinner. I imagined a slow death by mosquito bite as I slurped my soup with mild trepidation.

The groans and squeaks from 429 grew louder, so I pulled Jeanette to her feet and guided her back to her room. We passed by Francis’s roommates in the common area, each trying to hit it with some poor uninterested girls. They giggled obligingly at the boys’ wisecracks, but twisted their hair around their fingers as they leaned away. Jeanette

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gave me a hug, and I felt her body shudder like a hiccup. “Thanks, Mary. You’re so sweet. I wish I liked girls, too,” she said, pecking me on the cheek and rubbing my head like a pet. I had told Francis I wasn’t into dudes when his hand landed heavy on my thigh one evening; once that got out, I became a den mother for the discarded and lovesick girls in my dormitory, doling out comfort like pamphlets at a rally. I felt bad for Jeanette, but she would have gotten over it in a few days if the door to 429 hadn’t opened ominously right then.

It was as if all the elements of that summer—the humidity, the horniness, the heartbreaks—all converged in that moment. Cate slinked out with only a T-shirt on, flipping her hair to the side nonchalantly. She padded barefoot down the long hallway to her room, her feet slapping against the cool tile, seemingly oblivious to the wake of drama she left behind her. I noticed then that a cockroach, probably the size of a half dollar, scaled mechanically along the door frame, its slick and dark mahogany wings flicking open impatiently, preparing for flight. Momentarily distracted, I missed grabbing Jeanette’s arm, and she whipped around with such force that she cut a new air current and, with both arms out like a battering ram, charged into Francis’s room, slamming the door behind her. I could hear the muffled shouts, her accusations, his protests. People began popping their heads out of their rooms; the girls stopped twirling their hair, and the boys stopped mid-punchline. Everyone paused to listen.

The roach leaped off the edge and slowly carried its heavy body through the air. Like a kamikaze pilot, it deliberately dove into people’s faces, eliciting screams of horror, which only made it charge angrily into strands of hair, hissing in ears, attacking arms and legs, driving

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people back into their rooms. I froze, unsure of whether to walk deliberately into this nightmarish roach encounter and help Francis or just to let him have it. In the end, he came out shirtless, his scrawny chest clawed with red marks. His face looked splotchy. Jeanette must have gotten him a few times. Good for her. He spotted me and nodded toward the stairwell. As I ducked and ran through the flying roach’s domain to follow him, I stole a peek at Jeanette through his half-open door, on the ground just as I had found her earlier, sobbing again, knees to chest.

Nobody was more surprised than Francis at being ordained the Don Juan of Taiwan. He knew when he returned home, some rich suburb of Detroit, he’d go back to being an average kid with average grades, one who stood in the midnight line for video game releases and jerked off to an abundance of amateur porn. If anything, incidents like the one with Jeanette only served to build his reputation. Francis wasn’t that deep, and he knew he had a good thing going that summer, so he went full throttle. “Mayor,” he said as we swung ourselves down the stairwell, “Cate is so goddamned flexible.” About Jeanette, he shrugged: “I dunno.” He called me Mayor because my uniform those days consisted of my dad’s old suit vests, and he and I would have never been friends back in the States, which was exactly why we were friends here.

We paused momentarily on a landing. He pointed up at the velvetdark night sky, visible through the open beams, punctuated by little specks of bright. “Let’s go up instead,” he said. I shook my head no.

Back at home, the city drowned out the darkness with its emanating glow, keeping us in a perpetual twilight. I tried to remember the last time I saw stars. “You see thousands of lights every night, Mary, better than

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stars,” my mother had said, her fingertips dragging along my scalp as she gently wove my hair into braids. When I had protested that the grids of fluorescent lighting felt cold, she sighed dismissively: “We’re all made up of stardust. You, me, even your father. Stars are nothing but energy and gas. Ordinary passing for extraordinary.” We sat under the bridge, cars rattling the metal of the structure above us, gazing up at the formidable buildings that stretched so high they made me feel small. In my recollection, I was afraid to lean back; I was afraid to pull forward. She was a skittish ghost who could dart away with any sudden movement, and all I wanted was to keep feeling her hands intertwined in my hair.

Francis and I finally stopped on the tenth floor. It was a quiet floor, less wild than ours. We perched on the ledge of the balcony, practicing smoke rings, dangling our legs over. I got vertigo in the pit of my stomach as I looked down on the tiny steps below us, watching the girl with a rainbow caterpillar tattoo feeding dumplings to the nightly strays, their coats mangy and flea-ridden. I straddled a leg back over to safety.

Francis kept both legs over. It put a good scare into the counselors below, who waved their arms, shouting in Mandarin, “Crazy American kids! Go back inside!” One of them, Danny, was counting the flights up. We sucked down our smokes quickly. He couldn’t do anything to us really, but his lectures were long enough to be punishment, especially to Francis, who couldn’t speak a lick of Taiwanese or Mandarin, but could speak all the Romance languages with aplomb. Danny would wait for me to translate, which made it take even longer.

All the counselors were just college kids; they got free tuition in exchange for babysitting students their age. They’d discipline us in weary

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voices; most of them just wanted to practice their English with us.

They chose names like Jesse and Joey, DJ and Danny, after the Tanners of San Francisco, which had been dubbed into syndication there.

Nobody picked Kimmy, though. The hard K was a tough sell. Danny was my favorite. Unlike the others, he didn’t care about making friends with us. The first night I arrived, I discovered a gray tarantula the size of my palm hanging on a sundress in my closet, camouflaged by the pattern. Ever the joker, Danny stabbed it with my wooden sword from weapons class and waved the spider skewer victoriously in my face, a maniacal grin on his, before warning me to sleep with one eye open. He would have been the type of friend I would have made back in the States—if he didn’t live here.

“Hurry up,” Francis urged. Danny had entered the building and was probably waiting for the elevator to hunt us down. I estimated that we had about a minute to get out of there. I gazed over the campus track, which was pressed up against the seaport and a mostly empty road.

When the morning mountain fog rolled in across the field, it was as if we were living on the edge of the world. Forty seconds left.

“Okay, Mayor. Stop fucking around. I’m parched. Let’s go.” As he swung back over, one of his flip-flops fell off, narrowly missing caterpillar girl.

“Francis, you dick!” she shouted up.

We made it back into the stairwell just as the elevator dinged and the doors opened.

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F

rancis seemed to have an endless supply of money wired to him from his folks, and he was generous. My Ah-Ma lived nearby in Taipei. Following my dad’s directions, I handed her my cash to exchange, and she promptly confiscated it all. She told me that if I needed money, all I had to do was phone her and she’d send it with my uncle. I couldn’t ever figure out how to make the payphone dial out, punching all those numbers like a secret code, so I went into survival mode, making fast friends with the loose-pocketed big drinkers like Francis. The only leverage I had over everyone was my vocabulary. I collected words. Words and phrases, to be more specific. Back in the States, I took all the chinks, gooks, and ching-chongs that were spat out at me, consumed them, letting them dissolve in the pit of my stomach, volleying back nothing. Here, I collected words to do with basic survival: money, food, directions. Useful words. In the end, with Francis’s cash

and my words, we got by okay that summer. Words used to diminish didn’t have a place here, where everyone looked like me.

We sauntered into the 7-Eleven on our nightly mission for booze, smokes, and snacks. Upon seeing Francis with his one flip-flop and bare chest, the cashier pointed at the universal NO SHOES, NO SHIRT, NO SERVICE graphic but waved us to go ahead. The locals were probably counting down the days till we all left.

I loved to walk the aisles of 7-Eleven. My father would be dismayed to know that this was my favorite thing about the homeland. Taiwanese 7-Elevens were an epicurean adventure, unlike the Slurpee-driven franchise in America. They were like space-age hubs of flavor—a bodega fused with foodie umami and a sense of humor. Taro and matcha Kit Kats. Thousand-year-old eggs and ramen. A place where you could get chicken feet, pay your bills, and call a cab.

“What the shit is this? Where the fucking cheeseburger Cheetos at?”

Francis rummaged through the snack racks desperately. He craved those neon orange curls of sodium and puffed air like crack. The cashier followed us on the security screens while watching a music video on his phone. I nudged Francis out of the aisle.

“Go get the drinks. I’ll look for them,” I promised. I stared at the haw flakes and dried squid standing obstinately next to the Sno Balls and beef jerky. Which one of these things doesn’t belong here? they seemed to ask mockingly. The cashier focused his attention on Francis, who hoisted a case of Taiwan Beer out of the cooler, dropped it to the ground with a thud, and kicked it to the checkout. No cheeseburger twists to be found, I grabbed a few rolls of the pressed haw berry discs, some shrimp crackers, and a pack of Lotte Black Black, the Red Bull

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of gum. It was a great hangover cure, like dunking your eyeballs in a vat of iced coffee. Making sure that my back was to the camera, I stuffed the stash under my shirt. The bags crinkled audibly.

Growing up, I didn’t know there was anything strange about the food I ate. I caught on quickly, though. When it came to cafeteria bartering, my goods had no stock. My poor father tried to pack me what he thought was an American lunch by spreading peanut butter on a ham sandwich. When I told him about jelly, he wrinkled his nose and said ham had more protein and nutritional value. I took to tossing out my lunches when I got to school to spare his feelings. Once home, I’d try not to wolf down my dinner, but I think he might have known anyway.

The cashier waited patiently as Francis fumbled through his NT, trying to do the conversion in his head. The cashier eyed my chest suspiciously. I motioned toward the cigarettes. “A pack of the Yves Saint Laurents, please.” There was no translating YSL into Taiwanese. Designer cigarettes, another 7-Eleven discovery. I had read that Yves Saint Laurent’s partner and doctor hid his terminal brain cancer diagnosis from him out of compassion. Some people might like knowing the truth, but me, I thought it was just about the most loving gesture in the world—bearing the weight of reality for someone else. My mother worshiped the deity of Truth; my father, the temple of Denial. He and I often pretended she was just out on the longest grocery store run in all of history.

“What’s under your jacket?” the cashier demanded in crisp Mandarin, holding the smokes hostage.

On the shelf behind him, a plastic lucky cat statue pawed at the air.

They were all over the place, at every store we went to, along with jolly

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Buddha statues and bills taped to the walls for prosperity. I wondered if any of that stuff worked.

The cat’s eyes rolled back and forth, left to right. Like an Asian Cheshire Cat or something. It creeped me out, made me dizzy. I held on to the counter to catch myself.

“Shit! You feel that, Mayor?”

The cashier hid below the counter so quickly, it was like a big vacuum had sucked him into the ground. Francis clutched my arm and yanked me down. The Lotte Black Black fell out first. My shirt was vomiting up my five-fingered discount to comic effect. I noticed then that all the things on the racks, like those damn cat’s eyes, were also swaying back and forth, left to right. It was like when you stood up too quickly and couldn’t quite focus or like the moment you realize you’ve had one too many drinks because the room is spinning. The effect was subtle enough that you weren’t quite sure if it was you or the world. Once the ground stopped rolling, the cashier waited a few beats before slowly rising. His face was a mask of calm as I tossed my dropped snacks on the counter and reminded him of the YSLs. He bagged everything begrudgingly and resumed waiting for Francis to pay, as if we had just experienced a small blip in the system.

“Not the big one,” the cashier stated matter-of-factly. His eyes got wide, and he gestured with his hands. “Always waiting. For the big one.”

Francis was stuck. He seemed rattled.

Sometimes, a girl’s just gotta take over. I took his wallet out of his hand, swiftly counted the exact bills and change, and thanked the guy.

“You coming?” I called out from the doorway, bag in hand.

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T

he lobby was a mob of people milling about, some with wet soapy hair, some in PJs, others in only towels. I heard snippets of conversations, mostly the where-were-you-when-it-happened variety. Counselors were on their cellphones and walkie talkies.

Above the din, DJ waved her hand at me. She weaved through the crowd and shoved a piece of paper into my hand. “Your father called.”

I looked at the line for the payphones and guessed it would be at least an hour before I could get in. Francis motioned toward the elevators, but Danny swiftly intercepted us.

“Elevators aren’t working. But stairs are!” That Danny, a real comedian. We went back outside.

Our tin can beer tower was erected far quicker than we anticipated.

The other students cleared the rest of the alcohol out of the 7-Eleven, and we threw an impromptu street party. Our simple tower soon turned into a castle, complete with turrets and bridges. Stevens (not Steven, as he made a point to tell everyone, like his name wasn’t a mistake) was a bonafide prick with nerd tendencies. Like Francis, he was enjoying his semi-stud status. He was gushing on and on about tectonic plates and the seafloor spreading, the theory of continental drift and the earth’s fault lines. It was a total bore, him spouting off like some Nat Geo storm chaser, but everyone else was glued to his words, Francis included.

“When it happens to us, all of California could be underwater. It could just. Fall. Off.” I let about twenty minutes of this garbage slide by while the phone line grew and snaked out the front door before I could take no more.

“Good riddance. Never liked the beach!” I snorted.

Everyone turned to look at me.

“That’s messed up, yo,” one of the girls reproached.

“Yeah, my grandma lives in LA,” Stevens pointed out.

“Everyone’s gotta die sometime.”

“Gawd, just take a Prozac,” he deadpanned, garnering a few snickers.

I wanted to jab this fool in the eyes. Something about his face inspired a slow rage in me. Maybe it was the three whiskers that fought for prominence on his otherwise baby-smooth jawline. Or the way his collar popped up and his pants hung low. Maybe it was how his smile was just a crook away from a contemptuous sneer. It was no different from the smug posturing I saw in Francis, in Cate, even Jeanette. It was a quality, a naiveté, that allowed one to be definitively self-assured with nothing to back it. He carefully placed his empty can on top of the castle, going for height over stability. I wanted to demolish that confidence, put an insidious crack in the foundation that would shatter his whole veneer.

“When she dies, how she dies. Who cares?”

“I will.”

“You’ll feel the shock of loss,” I conceded, “but then you’ll see that the world won’t stop. You won’t stop. The repetitiveness will seem like a joke. The minutia of each moment, just to get to the next one. It’s relentless, time. And each day, the weight of the truth, of your very existence, will feel heavier and heavier until the sadness becomes unbearable. You’ll see how little any of it matters. We keep spiraling around even if there’s no ground underneath us. I mean, shit. You’re

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like a little lab mouse running around trying to figure out the maze when it’s not about the maze, or even the fucking cheese.”

“Yeah? What’s it about then, Einstein?”

“Don’t be the mouse.”

I downed the last of my beer and tossed the can at the base of the castle, knocking down one side. Francis gave me a wary look and set it back up with a terse, “Not cool, Mayor.”

Stevens made a gesture like I was mental and continued, seemingly nonplussed. “Some earthquakes can move entire cities, shift the Earth’s axis. They can even shorten the day! Think about it. We could be. In. Tomorrow.”

I wished then that we could go back to before this conversation, that we could rewind time to the good parts and fast forward through the bad. Instead, I rolled my eyes and went to stand in line for the phone.

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M

ary. You okay?” I didn’t realize there was a fiber optic sound specific to being on the other side of the world. My father sounded as if he were talking into a tin can on a string.

“I’m fine, Dad. It was nothing. Everyone’s making it out to be something bigger than it was. You’d think nothing ever happened in their lives.”

“It’s a big deal, Mary.”

“You could barely feel it.”

“You felt them? They were twenty-five miles off the coast!”

“They? Who’s they? Everything okay, Dad? Are you eating? You have to remember to eat.”

“The missiles. I’m reading in the papers that the missiles are being fired daily now. Another military test from China. It’s intimidation, really. They should not be doing these things.”

“Missiles? I’m talking about an earthquake. What missiles?”

“Earthquake? There was an earthquake?”

We were having two completely different conversations, as per usual.

I redirected my attention to my father’s words.

“Well. Earthquakes are to be expected,” he said. After all, the island’s on a fault line—” “Et tu, Papa?”

“—but what I’m talking about is very important. The election is next week, Mary. You need to keep your wits about you. When you get in a cab, listen to the music. If the driver is listening to a Taiwanese song, speak in Taiwanese. If it’s in Mandarin, speak in Mandarin. This is very important. Do you follow? I don’t know what I was thinking!

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You’re completely unprepared, and I—well, do you want to come home?”

“Dad. You’re not making any sense. I’ll be home soon. Have you heard from Mom?” “Mom? Of course not. What kind of question is that?”

“You’re just acting weird, Dad.” Beep. Beep. Booooop! A woman’s voice came on, speaking in rapidfire Mandarin.

“Shit. Dad! I need to refill my card. I’ll call you back—” The woman’s voice got louder. My dad shouted over her.

“Remember, Mary! Don’t say anything to anyone! And if there’s another earthquake, you must—” Booooop! The long hang-up tone sounded exactly like the tone when the phone was dialing out. I stood there for a minute, trying to figure out if I was reconnecting or disconnecting or what.

“Hello? Hello? Dad?” The woman answered me crossly in Mandarin, using words that were beyond the scope of my vocabulary. Behind me, there was a collective sigh of impatience. I pretended my father and I were still talking, nodding and saying things like, “Uh-huh, yeah, okay, Dad. I understand.

Love you, too. Tell Mom I called. Yeah, okay. Bye.” I’m pretty sure the woman was unleashing obscenities at this point, but I kept going until all I heard was the beep, beep, booooop.

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I

hadn’t seen my mother in years, so I had no idea how to feel about her anymore. She’d pop up now and then on the phone, always talking about some grant she was going to get soon, always soon. My father would scribble something in the checkbook and have it off in the mail the next day or, on rarer occasions, drag me out to a Western Union in the middle of the night to wire her money. He was always off after talking to her, more so than usual.

She messed his whole shit up, his whole equilibrium.

The last time I saw her, I skipped school to see her show. She was in some warehouse in Brooklyn, sitting in a tiny wooden box with two doorways cut out on either side but no windows. A slot in front, like a mail slot, for donations. They’d land in a pile on the floor at her feet. The performance was entitled Enemy. Men and women— but mostly men—would file in and do things like spit in her face, slap her, squeeze her breasts, yell profanities at her. One guy must have pissed on the money, or her, because it stunk like the subway on a summer day when I went in. I had touched her face, wanting to cry, wishing she could be the kind of mother who baked me cookies and tucked me in at night, but loving her still.

“Why, Mama?”

She looked through me, as if I was transparent, as if I had never happened. She wasn’t supposed to talk, but she whispered to me, “My Mary. I have to do this. It’s who I am. I’m making a statement, don’t you see?”

I didn’t see. I really didn’t. I kissed her on the lips then, a small something to counteract all the venom being directed at her. Minha

mãe, ma mère, mi madre. I learned those from Francis, his Euro boarding school life teaching him about a world so far away from the homeland, so far from that box in Brooklyn.

I had a recurring dream where I’d pull her out and we’d hose all the people in line. The force of the water would be so strong, it would blast their clothes off, leaving them naked. We’d point and laugh at their loose skin and saggy bellies. It would be a companion piece entitled Reflection. Afterward, we’d go get fancy ice cream. Something with salt or lavender or basil. Shit like that. There were thousands of small variations on this dream. Sometimes the flavors changed; sometimes the people in line changed. But it was always ice cream—and always us laughing at them, humiliating them instead.

At the close of the show, a man had entered alone. He wore a long trench coat; his tie hung loose around his neck. He was very drunk.

His eyes were red and shiny and wet, and he had something blunt and heavy in his hand. I saw him enter, his face in shadow. I saw the box shake: one, two, three times. I heard him grunt from the effort. Four, five, six. I tried to scream for help, but nothing came out. Seven, eight, nine. I ran in, my body too small to block him. I yanked his arm back, and he caught me on the chin, knocking my glasses off my face. Seeing me finally, he looked shocked and embarrassed, mumbled something unintelligible and ran off, dropping the blunt and heavy thing, leaving my mother, once formidable in my eyes, now a pulpy mess of flesh. Her eyes were closed, as if in sleep.

“Wake up, Mama,” I whispered. “He’s gone.”

The hospital molded and stitched her back up, but she still refused to speak. When they called my father to come get me, I handed him my

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glasses, broken in two pieces. He put them gingerly into his pocket and hugged me tightly, so tightly I couldn’t breathe. The nurses gave him mounds of paperwork, lines to sign and date with a pen that had no ink. He gave me cab fare and told me to go straight home. I evaded sleep, forcing myself to stay awake so I’d stop dreaming. When I think of her, I think of her there, trying to absorb the hatred of the world.

But for whom, I never knew.

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I

was straddling the ledge with my headphones on, trying to figure out where the sky ended and the sea began, when Francis crept up on me so stealth-like I almost fell over. With a gasp, I caught myself, my fingernails clawing for something solid and finding the wall to my right.

“Hey, kid. Everything kosher?”

I didn’t answer him. A slower reaction and I would have been a kiwi, the bird with no wings, not the fruit. He put his arms around me to pull me down. He looked so concerned, so worried. I held on to him, my thumbs pressing into his forearms, and we stood locked together like puzzle pieces. He looked at me as if he knew something about me that I didn’t.

“Where’s Cate?” I said in a small voice.

He shrugged with one shoulder and pulled me in. Our mouths crashed into each other with such force, I was sure someone would chip a tooth. He tasted sour and ashy, slightly metallic and warm. I’m not sure who pulled away first, but I know that we both acted as if it didn’t happen. Another blip in the system. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it.

“Let’s go into the city. I feel like I’m suffocating,” I said. For being so close to the ocean, the air was unexpectedly still that night.

“Whatever you want, boss.”

I couldn’t look at him. I didn’t want to see the way he was looking at me then. I didn’t want to see any more stars in the sky.

Sneaking out was a joke. The counselor who was supposed to patrol the gates was busy flirting and goofing off with the other night

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owls. He may even have looked our way, but deliberately turned away as if to say, “Yeah, we’re cool. See ya in the morning.” I stepped into Francis’s cupped hands, and he vaulted me over the concrete wall, ungracefully giving my butt one final push over the top before attempting to launch himself over. It was comical, watching him from the other side.

I saw a sliver of his hair, heard a grunt, the sound of his sneakers scuffling against the vertical climb, trying to get a grip. Finally, seeing his fingertips over the top, I grabbed one of his hands and yanked him over. We landed hard on the ground in a tangle of limbs, cursing like pirates. The amount of noise we made was ridiculous; 007, we were not.

It seemed as if the cab was waiting for us, and hopping into the back, we didn’t even have to speak. “Taipei?” the driver asked, and all we had to do was nod. I rolled my window down. The cabs all had air conditioning, but it’s like there was an unofficial rule against turning it on. I let the hot breeze take my breath away and fan against my cheeks. The backs of my thighs, already sticky with sweat, were plastered to the vinyl, and I tried to peel them off discreetly. The driver gave me a stern look in the rearview mirror, and I wondered if my tank top was too sheer, too loose. I crossed my arms and shrunk down in my seat a little.

He was an older man, about my father’s age. His eyes were bloodshot, and the inside of the cab smelled like he was on the tail end of a long shift. Turning up the radio to some sleepy pop station, he drove silently along the dark roads. We were in the refrain of a lethargic song comparing a former lover to the taste of bitter coffee when an animated male voice came on. The announcer spit his words out angrily in Taiwanese, as if they were chili peppers, punctuating the air with his

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political rhetoric. The cabbie slapped the dashboard with his hand, rattling the silk and jade tassel that hung from the mirror.

Then: three seconds of dead air before another song began. I noticed the driver’s hand had a red mark on it that looked like a Rorschach ink blot. I took a test like that once. All of the pictures had looked like frog legs and rib cages to me, but I lied and said I saw the sun, swans, and trees. I must have passed because they didn’t call me back for more tests like some of the other kids. Francis nudged me out of my reverie.

“I said, Do you know what I used to do?” the driver was questioning me in Taiwanese.

I shook my head no.

“Ah, so you understand! I thought you were just another rich Chinese kid from America.” He laughed heartily, and I chuckled meekly. Poor Francis strained his brain trying to be in on the joke, not getting that he was it.

“No, I understand you. A little. My dad is Taiwanese.”

“Not bad, not bad. Did you understand what the man just said on the radio, then?”

“A little.”

“Good. My heart is lifted knowing some of you younger generation people can speak it. Here, the kids don’t speak so much anymore. My daughter, she understands but answers in Mandarin. Taiwanese isn’t allowed in school.”

“Hmm.” I tried to keep my answers noncommittal, heeding my dad’s warnings.

“I was a professor. Does that seem strange to you? I have three degrees! Three! But it’s safer for me to be a cab driver. It’s not safe to

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have knowledge. They like the uneducated. The uneducated can be oppressed.” On the visor, his identification card was faded; the details of his face, blurred. His face was unsmiling and serious, like a mug shot.

I could make out that his last name was Hsu. “That’s too bad,” I spoke carefully. Something about him made me melancholy. I wanted very much to smooth the furrow in his brow.

“Tell me more.”

Mr. Hsu launched into a tirade then, using words I had never been taught. Not bad words, just not everyday words. I could make out the general gist, things about the ruling political party, the Chinese KMT, and the opposition, the Taiwanese DDP, corruption and lies, greed, and lots of talk about money. I think he may have said something about being put in jail, men being rounded up at secret meetings. Or maybe I just watched one too many movies and filled in the blanks that way.

I liked the sound of his voice; it made me feel like I was listening to a sermon.

As the lights of the city grew closer, I remembered my father’s words about staying neutral but didn’t heed his advice. I asked Mr. Hsu about the missiles.

“Pah!” he pounded the steering wheel with such force that the cab swerved a little.

The speedometer crept up as the words came flying out of his mouth. I was barely listening anymore. But I wanted more air, more speed. Fast, fast, faster still. Building after building with bars on the windows zipped by. I wondered if they were keeping out the bad or preventing the good from leaving.

“Independence. Freedom. You understand what it means to be free?” he demanded.

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I nodded. Francis looked uneasy.

“It means freedom to think, to speak your mind. It means they are afraid. Because the ones who have been silent for so long are finally speaking up. And they are scared of what we have to say. You understand?”

Taipei seemed to loom all around us suddenly, enclosing us in a wall of high rises, bright street signs, and activity.

“Tell him we can get out here,” Francis piped up. “We’ll take the subway the rest of the way.”

“You,” he pointed back at Francis, spoke in English, leaning hard on the brakes. “Out. That side.”

Francis rifled through his wallet as he peered through the window at the meter, which had not been turned on. I hoped it wouldn’t be a problem as I asked how much: “Gui kho?” I heard the squeal of tires on asphalt just before we were bumped from behind. We all rocked forward slightly from the tap. A car door slammed shut, and the driver of the other car, also about my father’s age, began swearing in Mandarin. He rapped on our driver’s window, super heated. Mr. Hsu rolled down the window, gesturing toward the curb, saying that the man should have gone around him. I looked through the back window. The other guy was a cab driver, too. His fare was in the back, checking her teeth in her shiny compact and reapplying her lipstick.

The other cabbie was shouting, louder and louder now. A few men on the street stopped and watched. Mr. Hsu turned up the volume on the radio, drowning him out, another sad love song about an umbrella and standing in the rain. My heart pounded out a quickening beat against my chest as he slowly rolled up his window. I knew I should move but couldn’t propel myself. The man outside banged on the door Elissa C. Huang

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with his forearms then, and Francis yelped in a voice much higher than I had ever heard before. “What the fuck, man?” Francis tossed a wad of cash over the divider and tried to urge me out the door as Mr. Hsu picked the money off the seat.

Onlookers were now flapping their arms in exasperation and yelling out to nobody in particular. It was unclear whose side they were on.

Mr. Hsu barked at me, “Young lady! See how they treat us? Like second class citizens. Remember this!”

I wracked my brain, trying to think of something reassuring to say, something to calm the mood. My father’s words echoed in my head: “Keep your wits about you.” But my wits were long gone. I sat there like a bump on a log as Mr. Hsu radioed for backup.

I turned around in my seat as the other cabbie went back to his car and pulled a brick—a brick? who the hell carries a brick around?—from under his seat. Francis reached around me, opened the door, and shoved me out just as the brick smashed through the driver’s-side window. Mr. Hsu tried to gun it then, and we spilled onto the sidewalk, but the other guy had reinforcements. Cab drivers from his company showed up with sticks in hand. A wall of men blocked Mr. Hsu’s exit.

People were gathering in distinct groups, a standoff. Mr. Hsu had touched an invisible nerve, pushed a button. Maybe it was the music.

I peered over the hood, kneeling on the ground like I was praying, as three men dragged him out of his seat and began to pummel him. His body went limp, and my insides fluttered with fear. The other cab was empty, and some other men were rocking it back and forth, maybe the people Mr. Hsu called for. The lipstick lady vanished. Men began to climb over our cab, trampling my hands. Francis was huddled by the

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back tire, arms overhead like a turtle retreating into its shell. A mob formed around our driver. Some were pushing to help him, some were pushing to get a piece of him. I stood and tried to find my voice, to call for help, but I couldn’t get past the Hhhh that petered out into the air.

I could smell the aggression swelling around us, growing exponentially, but my body was pinned in place as if my stillness made me invisible, allowed me to pretend this wasn’t real. A man held another man by the back of his collar. He pulled back his elbow sharply, hitting me square on the bridge of my nose. I sneezed. Blood sprayed onto my bare arms.

I tipped my head back, tasting the salt and iron running down the back of my throat. It jump-started me out of my daze.

“They’re going to kill him! We have to do something!” I hissed to Francis, pulling him roughly to his feet as men pushed past me.

But maybe I didn’t say it out loud; maybe I only thought it. I saw the brick then, lifted up in triumph, before it came smashing down on Mr. Hsu’s head. The blood rolled out onto the street, an expanding pool around his body. “Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck!” Francis screeched then. He ran clumsily, leaving me behind. Car windows and doors were being bashed and kicked. I heard a gunshot and ducked. A woman running past finally yelled at me, asking if I was deaf or just dumb. As she swatted at me to move, to get away, I saw Mr. Hsu’s inkblot hand on the ground, the pads of his fingertips massaging the bumpy asphalt feebly.

Reaching, holding on.

The woman finally stopped herding me once we were a few blocks away; she muttered something angrily before spitting on the ground and disappearing into an alley. Police in riot gear, batons in hand, swarmed past and around me. I was moving upstream when it would

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have been so much easier to let the current carry me back. Behind me, sirens. Glass breaking. Yelling. I kept walking until I couldn’t hear the chaos anymore, until the regular city noise swallowed it up. People seemed to be moving along as if nothing was happening, but an unseen ripple moved along the city. There were more whispers, more veiled looks I didn’t understand. The night market, usually bustling with activity, was eerily quiet.

That hand. That pool of blood, flat and dark. The specks of red that looked like moths.

What do you see, Mary?

I see the sun. I see swans.

Good. Very good.

There were mornings I couldn’t get out of bed—It’ll get better I promise—and my father would call me out of school. He yanked the blinds up one morning with false cheer and announced that we were going to the Cape to see the monarch butterflies migrating south. We drove to the sea in silence, he and I. He let me drive even though I was a few months short of testing for my license. The clouds were long and wispy, stretching out like arms across the bluest sky. The roads were empty at dawn, with only the occasional tractor-trailer coasting alongside us, sleepy drivers veering slightly out of lane before righting themselves again.

We sat on a blanket while chewing on shredded strings of sweet and spicy dried squid, waiting as high tide subsided and the waves moved farther away. After the morning sun warmed their wings, the monarchs overtook the sky en masse, first a few tiny dots of color in the air, then suddenly a blaze of orange and black darkening the sky. They’ll fly over

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2,000 miles, this generation. They’re different from the others. Isn’t it amazing, Mary? I heard the awe in his voice, but if I had listened closer, I would have heard what he was really saying. She’s not coming back. I should have listened to my father. I should have kept my mouth shut.

I should have stayed in school that day. I wondered who would tell Mr. Hsu’s daughter and if she would cry in Mandarin or Taiwanese.

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I

found Francis standing outside the karaoke place that we knew, in the lively district of Ximending, looking pale and faint. “Mary, I—” he offered.

“Forget it, it’s nothing,” I cut him off. Angry words hung in the air but went unspoken. I wasn’t even sure why his cowardice made me so mad; it was hardly a surprise. We should have tried to return to campus then, but my mind was foggy.

As we wove through the dark and dingy hallways, we were led to a corner room with ripped vinyl couches. A projection screen was on one wall, and four or five enormous binders of songs were on the coffee table in the middle. “This one is in English,” the woman who led us to the room said. I ordered an obscene amount of alcohol. “Will there be others?” she asked doubtfully. We nodded yes and she left us alone.

“You think he’s okay?” he choked out.

I chugged a beer, then another. For me, the answer was somewhere in the bottom of the can. My hands shook as I tried unsuccessfully to light a YSL. Cancer and mercy. Mercy and cancer. I cursed and threw the lighter against the wall.

Finally, I managed, “Put something on the screen.”

Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell” blasted from the walls. An accompanying music video with Asian actors popped up while a bouncy dot hopped from word to word, highlighting the lyrics in hot pink. The video made no sense. It looked like a home video. A girl wearing fishnets and a short skirt slapped a boy with eyeliner, then she angrily swept the contents atop her vanity to the ground and wept.

Next she was dancing with her girlfriends in a club and strip-teasing for some horny businessmen. In the next clip, she was crying again.

I looked over at Francis. I thought he was laughing at first, but really, he was hysterical. I shifted closer to him and he put his head in my lap, blubbering unabashedly. He was real Francis then. So I said, “I should feel something, shouldn’t I? Why don’t I feel anything?” And he looked at me with such pity, it made me want the old Francis back. Things got blurry after that. We drank until we were dizzy, and then we drank some more. It all seemed like a wordless dream. At one point, he pulled up my shirt and nuzzled my chest like a newborn. I passed out with my hand down his pants. Two pathetic strangers, I thought. We somehow made it back before breakfast. My feet were raw with blisters, so we must have walked all night, fueled with drunken stupidity.

In the week that followed, everyone was talking. About the murdered cabbie in Taipei, the earthquake, the missiles, the election. A feeling of dread pervaded the air even though everyone carried on with smiles on their faces. Danny told me not to worry, that this was how it always was, that things would settle down again soon. He circled a few touristy places on the map that I should visit before I returned to the States and gave me his cousin’s phone number should I need a guide.

I knocked on Francis’s door to show him the map, but his room stayed dark. I smoked alone on the balcony, watching the boats as they came in. Determined to stay up through dawn, I was losing the battle to sleep when a neon green praying mantis landed on me, tickling my forearm. Its head rotated slowly, its eyes scanning all around. I led it to the ledge with my fingers and it stepped off in a quick march. As the

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sun streaked across the sky, I put my head down and slept outside, my skin sticky with heat.

The next morning, Jeanette, sweet panda bear pet, tripped me hard, knocking me to the ground, and called me a whore. She hooked arms and walked off with Cate, the two united in an unlikely alliance. I found out later that Francis told people we did it the night of the riot. The lie secured his legendary status. “Fait accompli,” I could hear him say. All the girls acted like I was a leper and a traitor. The last week of the program, someone slashed my dresses and slapped their bloody menstrual pads to my closet walls. I waited until everyone was asleep so I could shower undisturbed, checking the stalls first. Girls are cool with each other until they’re not, and I had violated some holy grail of sisterhood.

On the last day, when everyone was hugging and kissing each other with promises of keeping in touch, I sat alone in my room. I told my Ah-Ma the wrong day for pickup so I could hoof it to her place solo.

Francis knocked on my door before he was shuttled to the airport, but I waited until he gave up. He slid a note underneath, with a single word written on it: Sorry. When his footsteps were out of earshot, I held the note by a corner and set it on fire before stomping it out on the balcony. A word like that had no place here.

One of the strays died on the steps of the school the day Francis left. Caterpillar girl found him when she saw the other strays licking at his lifeless body. Everyone stepped around it, but the girl cried so hard they needed to move her. The school was mostly cleared out by then, the doors and windows shuttered. As I walked through the empty hallways, I climbed up up up through the stairwell until I reached the top.

I waited for the stars to come, and the darkness to swallow me whole.

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W

hen my mother first left, I haunted art openings and galleries, spoken word poetry readings and coffeehouses, in the hopes of seeing her. As the days got darker, I wandered to where the sex workers gathered on the corners and vagrants lined up for hot meals, looking but hoping that I wouldn’t find her. My father never said much, only that she had always been too sensitive for this world. That she was an idealist, unable to adapt. He was so in love with the idea of her. I guess we both were for a long time.

Buried between sports and classified was an article in the arts section about a Chinese avante garde artist in Philly. She was tired of the systematic breakdowns in the government, and thought she could make a change—she even added an “e” to the end of her name, going from Chang to Change. For her final performance, she poured a can of gasoline over her head, quietly and without disturbance, and set fire to herself. It was the only way she knew how to get people to listen to her, to pay attention. Her suicide was her way of saving the world. She mailed out her mission statement to a few people in the area, but nobody opened it in time to save her. I wondered how sad she must have been, that even the physical pain of her flesh burning was less than the pain she felt living in this world.

As I read the article, I thought of my mother. I wondered if she would ever do something like that. Maybe she already had. I even wondered for a split second if it was her. But the universe answered my question with another late-night call from my mom, asking my father if she could come see me. He didn’t answer for me, passed me the phone like it weighed a ton. His shoulders seemed stooped

in defeat and I noticed, for the first time, that he was losing his hair, that his eyebrows were gray.

“I miss you, baby,” she had said. “I miss your warm breath on my skin when you sleep next to me. You were always such a peaceful sleeper, a light breather. So delicate. I’d wake you with kisses on your fingers and toes. Do you remember that?”

I did.

She kept going on like that for a few minutes, painting all of my memories for me in a warm glow, and then when I didn’t say yes, it got to be too much for her, and she asked me to put my dad back on. I must have looked really fucked up because he hung up on her without saying goodbye.

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T

he day before I was to board the plane back to the US, I got sick. I felt like utter shit, like my body shut down and was attacking itself. My grandmother took me to a clinic and they gave me a baggie full of suspicious-looking pills. I had no idea what they were, but I lined them up assembly line-like and took them all. My AhMa had the same long, even fingers as my father. They were beautiful hands, the type of hands that should have slipped into a pair of elegant evening gloves. As she wrung a cool, wet cloth to put on my forehead, she said to me, “It was never a good match. Sometimes people just don’t line up. Magnets both attract and repel.” She spoke about my mother’s mother, who I never met, but always heard such terrifying stories about. Scalding my mother’s skin with oil, flogging her with her cane. “A woman like that, who never knew maternal love, what hope does she ever have?” my Ah-Ma clucked. And what about me, I thought, before letting sleep take over.

I woke to the sound of my Ah-Ma cooking, the clanking of pots and pans being put away, and began to pack my bags. I mentally prepared for the plane ride back knowing it would be nothing short of hellish. There was a pounding behind my eyes, so I closed them and curled up on the tatami mat again. Ah-Ma’s house smelled like incense and freshly lacquered wood. Our old house had paneled walls that looked like wood. Maybe it was the style then, but it felt chilly and dark, like we were living in a coffin.

My only memory I kept from this house—I don’t know if I imagined it so much that I think it’s true—is of the three of us, in a triple piggy back. My mother on my father’s back, and me launching myself

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on top of my mother’s back. We lumbered around my room like that, my mother sandwiched between us two, me clinging on as my father spun us around. He lurched sideways and I fell first, backwards onto their bed. My mother let go and crashed on top of me and rolled away before catching my father with her legs. All of it was in slow motion in my mind, and I liked to rewind and replay that moment. A knot of limbs, laughter.

Before I felt it, I heard my grandmother shouting from the other room, telling me to get down. But I was already on the ground. A low rumble, like a stampede approaching, growing louder. I heard the picture frames from the ancestral alter hit the floor, plates smashing. My room’s walls were bare. A small crack crept along the floor to the ceiling and began to open.

Outside, people were screaming, car alarms and horns were going off, dogs were barking steadily. With the walls shaking around me, and my head already spinning, I took long deep breaths and braced myself.

I imagined my father on the other side of the world, his side of the earth so flat, so still. I wondered if I’d fall through and if he would catch me. The quake paused momentarily. I waited. I waited for the aftershocks to come, maybe each one stronger than the next. Or maybe they’d never come and all would be still again, leaving us to pick up the pieces from the ground and carry on.

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ELISSA C. HUANG received her MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she was awarded the John Golden Playwriting Prize and the Goldberg Prize in Playwriting. Her screenplays have placed in the top six percent of the Academy Nicholl Fellowships and advanced to the second rounds of both the Austin Film Festival Screenplay & Television Competition and the Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab Prize. Her novella was a short list finalist, and her short stories have been semi-finalists in the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. Her work has been published in Cheat River Review and Hyphen Magazine.

About “Haw Flakes and Dried Squid,” Huang writes that she’s always been interested in the idea of a homecoming story: “As a first generation Taiwanese-American, I’m drawn to examining the sacred spaces where different cultures intersect. To me, there is a dialogue that exists in the in-between, the shifts and transitions. I was compelled to tell this story because I wanted to delve into the feeling of disconnect—not being tied to a motherland, not having a sense of place or history—and couple it with the narrative of a young woman grappling with language and loss while she drifts into adulthood. Despite being a stranger in her parents’ homeland, there is a level of familiarity that surrounds her, that frees her. Through her journey, I wanted to show that within the most painful experiences, even the most tenuous thread of love can be an awesome and powerful force, both tethering us and propelling us forward.

Elissa C. Huang

Iron Horse Literary Review would like to thank its supporters, without whose generous help we could not publish Iron Horse successfully. In particular, we would like to thank our benefactors and equestrian donors. If you would like to join our network of friends, please contact us at ihlr.mail@gmail.com for information on the various levels of support.

Benefactors ($300) Wendell Aycock Lon and Carol Baugh Beverly and George Cox Sam Dragga Madonne Miner Gordon Weaver Equestrian ($3,000 and above) Charles and Patricia Patterson TTU English Department, Chair Brian Still TTU College of Arts & Sciences, Dean Brent Lindquist TTU Graduate School, Dean Mark Sheridan TTU Provost’s Office, Provost Michael Galyean TTU President’s Office, President Lawrence Schovanec