Flash fiction by Huina Zheng 

What we share

To him, the most romantic kind of love was a couple with white hair still standing side by side, watching the sun sink into the sea. We had only been living together for three months, yet we had already begun imagining the texture of our love: I thought of sails pitched against open water while he pictured a long, unbroken horizon. I told him he was wrong. How many couples ended up walking into the grave of marriage? How many spouses truly shared life with each other instead of bitterness? He always met my pessimism with a smile. He liked my edges; I liked the way he gave. When I came home from work and stayed up late studying for the graduate entrance exam, he would make me a cup of warm milk. Even when we had nothing, he still believed that being together was enough to make us happy. At twenty-three, we had both just graduated from college. He rented a tiny stall to repair phones; I worked as a clerk at a foreign trade company. We shared the same insecurity, only from opposite directions. Years ago, his parents had sewn all their savings into the lining of their pants and left for Guangzhou to make a living. His grandmother in the countryside forced him to stay behind. His body was left with an emptiness that could never be filled, his parents forever somewhere beyond reach. In my family, after my brother died of leukemia, my parents turned the living room into a courtroom of mutual accusations. My mother spent most of her days lying in bed, sobbing. My heart learned what it meant to feel distance at close range. We were both afraid of being abandoned. He tried carefully to please me; I planned to leave the moment he showed any sign of growing tired of me. When I had a fever, he stayed up with me through the night, poured warm water for me, checked my temperature. I clung to his gentleness. It was a hunger my body had learned to live with. He said when I was angry, I was like a cactus, bristling with sharp spines. After long hours repairing phones, his fingers always carried a sticky residue that never quite washed off. A film made of glue and sweat. Once, he brought home a pair of diagonal cutters, the blades sharp, gleaming with the cold light of a rodent’s teeth. He asked me to lie down and said he would help trim away the spines that had risen up. When the cutters closed, they made a faint sound, like fingernails being clipped. I imagined the nameless resentment that roamed beneath my skin being cut away, stripped off with precision. I wondered whether my mother had once wanted to pass something like it on as well. Whenever I was home, she would complain to me. About her headaches, her insomnia, the loudspeakers downstairs, the mold on the ceiling, every moment she felt she had been wronged. My comfort turned her into a black hole, draining me of hope. At night, I slept with my back to him, curled up like a baby. The spines along my back kept growing, sharper than before. He asked what was wrong. I said I was just tired. He asked if I had been losing sleep again, if I was having trouble breathing, and suggested we go running or hiking. His care settled in the details. I wanted to say that all I needed was a warm embrace, but my body didn’t know how to ask. He wrapped his arms around me from behind. I told him to be careful of my spines. He said it was fine. The spines pressed into his chest, like bamboo shoots searching for a place to take root between stones. Through pajamas, I could feel his body heat. I told him I loved him, that I wouldn’t leave him, using my words like a pledge to fill the emptiness in his chest. He said we would last forever. So we lay there, holding each other. Waiting for seas to dry and rocks to crumble. Waiting for our bodies to learn each other. Waiting for the future we cannot escape.