Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 4 - 7 2018 | Page 305
Keep Moving (Or you'll get overwhelmed)
West Island School, Tan. Joelle - 17
“ there is no such thing as the impossible; only things that people don’t believe in.”
H
e remembers his home, the way it always smelled like a strange combination of clean laundry
and whatever air freshener his mother used that week. He remembers his mother, small and
wiry though she was, getting up at the crack of dawn to ensure they have hot food to bring
to school and ironed clothes to wear. His mother was a miracle, one who single-handedly raised three
children and somehow earned enough money to keep the household running. She was a riptide unto
herself, and he always associates her with that Shakespearean quote: ‘she be little, but she be fierce’.
He remembers his sister’s fierce protectiveness, a furnace to contrast their mother’s riptide. His sister
was a nerd, without a doubt, but she wasn’t bullied in school like those nerds on TV. She was the kind
of nerd to carry whole series of hard-covered books, and if anyone tried to give her grief over the way
she was, she was the kind of person to fling them into the locker (because dang it, she carried whole
series of Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings , and that wasn’t even counting all her AP textbooks).
He remembers his older brother, who made him the better person he is today. His brother, who would
go out and cause all sorts of problems and make his mother cry as she had to bail him out again and
again, and who would also relentlessly mock and tease him. But he knows his brother never means it
because late at night, in their shared bedroom, he would whisper to his younger brother ‘ don’t be like
me ’. And he is a better person because he now knows what not to do and how to shrug insults off and
to stay calm even though all he wants to do is strangle them like his older brother sometimes does.
They make him a better person through their combined presence; his mother – an unstoppable bolt of
lightning, his sister – the furnace which scorched anything in her way, and his brother – the hurricane
who left only chaos in his wake. He is the tsunami, obliterating anything in his path, leaving behind
chaos and despairing families, where he will not let himself be held back by mere ordinary precautions.
It is because of them that he makes it out of the school before its inevitable collapse, that he doesn’t gag
and sob over the corpses that he finds, that he straightens and keeps walking with nothing else but his
backpack. It is their voices who encourage him as he makes his way across the now barren landscape,
occasionally meeting someone rocking on the ground as they attempt to find comfort in the action.
He walks and ignores the tears that occasionally stream down his face, unable to differentiate between
the tears and raindrops that fall from the sky. He ignores the small voice in his brain telling him that his
umbrella doesn’t have holes in it.
He has started out with over five hundred in his wallet, but now has three hundred because he has been
raised right and he’s been paying for the food he takes even though there is no one there to receive it.
Sometimes he wonders if they got out of that disaster. If his mother managed to claw her way out of
the wreckage, if his sister had clambered her way into sunlight, if his brother had tumbled out of the
ruins just in time. If they are doing what he’s doing and heading for the place his mother always croons
to them about, the place where she and her husband met and got married in a whirlwind romance that
lasted longer than anyone had any right to guess. The address is written down on a scrap of paper that
he carries around with him absolutely everywhere he goes, but most of it is gibberish or in symbols that
he doesn’t recognise, and the only word he does recognise is ‘west’.
So he walks and walks and walks to the only direction he knows of – the west.