Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 2020complete | Page 639

collect the wind through small rectangles and how to collect the roaring and the meek wind while ordering
the cars to run faster and faster around in circles until they were just a blur in the peripheral vision and their
roars a ringing in your ear as they grew louder and sharper and softer and dimmer.
Twenty was when I met the ocean again.
Twenty, was when I strode down the road, stomping on the quaking and shivering blades of green beneath
my sole, was when I ripped out the dancing flowers from their beds where they slept, where I suddenly
bumped into a familiar figure halfway down the road.
It was her.
The ocean which I have not seen since I was twelve, the young girl that I neglected to see, and the young
mother I once loved all wrapped up in one.
It was a figure that was achingly familiar, yet painfully foreign.
I stopped in my tracks.
The figure in front of me smiled tiredly. Gone was the light and clear girl that splashed around in the
summer, or the gentle and soft mother that sang softly during under the gentle caress of the sun's beams.
No.
The figure before me was one that was filled with harsh lines. Scratches and split lines tore through her
figure, and soil and plastic bags and straws and cans and all sort of things shifted in her body when she
moved, no longer gracefully like she once did in a summer long ago, but moving instead with all the
crankiness and rustiness of an elderly man struggling to his feet.
There was this sort of grimness to her face, a sort of resignation, that settled reluctantly in the lines of her
face.
I stared.
I stared at her, mouth agape, half in horror and half in shock, at the worn out and sluggish figure in front of
me. Surely, this isn’t -
I reached out, carefully trying to avoid the sharp bits and pieces of sharp, yellowed plastic sticking out from
her body, reaching out, with trembling hands, half with the care of a well-meaning friend, half with the
yearning of a child, looking for a long-lost friend.
Then she disintegrated the millisecond before I could reach her, into fragments and droplets and molecules
of sand and water and buckets and buckets of oil and plastic and metal and chemicals and algae, leaving
behind nothing but a putrid smell and a heart that ached.
I let out a soundless gasp, fingers outstretched, and I turned abruptly - where did she go?
And there she was, in the corner of my eyes, and in the shadows of the alley, a sad, forlorn figure, looking
mournfully at me, hands wrapping around her own figure protectively, shards of plastic and metal impaling
her pale, harsh figure, and I ran towards her, wanting to save her from whatever doom she is facing, but she
faded away again.
Over the next few days, she appeared again and again and disappeared just as quickly as she appeared.
In the corner of my room on the building of glass I made, staring mournfully at me over the grunts and
mutters of the suits and ties in my room, and I stared at her helplessly, absently fiddling at the plastic hanging
down my neck, fingers itching to soothe the pain somehow, but not really knowing how, and she’d
disappear again.