Beyond the Lake

池塘里水满了,

雨也停了。

Outside the attap hut, the rain spills like tea over the mouth of a cup. First, a light trickle over the lip of the lake, then a relentless outpouring through the kintsugi fissures in its sides.

田边的稀泥里

到处是泥鳅

The earthworms accosted the mud, dragging their lyre-limp bodies across the denuded soil, listening to the world changing above them.

天天我等着你,

等着你捉泥鳅

Every day, I would follow my brother out into the fields, watching our breaths rise against the slate-grey convexity of the sky, the pebble clouds and roiling waves of wind, turning topsoil over with our bare hands to build mud castles from the waste of the land.

大哥哥,好不好?

等着你捉泥鳅

We’d plunge our hands deep into the gnarled limbs of trees and catch appleseed from the ribs of their bark, turn our faces to the clouds, jaws agape, and catch a string of pearls between our teeth. The rain would fall like the tears of a widow who knew far too much then nothing at all — nothing mattered then.

天天我等着你,

等着你捉泥鳅

When my brother passed, we moved into the mahogany-walled apartments that reached so high, I believed they were Man’s attempt to be one with the sky. We stopped running into the rain, choosing instead to draw the curtains — the world knew too much then frighteningly little.

大哥哥,好不好?

咱们去捉泥鳅

They told me it’ll get better and sometimes, I don’t know which tragedy they are referring to. Sometimes, watching the clothes dry in the fish-bowl eye of the washing machine, I can almost believe their lie. So then, why do I feel so sad, like a girl wanting to move on when all the world has done is end?

Sher Ting is a Singaporean-Chinese writer. She is a 2021 Writeability Fellow with Writers Victoria and a 2023 Kenyon Review Winter Workshop participant. She is a 2021/2022 Pushcart and Best of The Net nominee with work published/forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Salt Hill, Colorado Review, AAWW, OSU The Journal, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, Bodies of Separation, is published with Cathexis Northwest Press and second chapbook, The Long-Lasting Grief of Foxes, is forthcoming with CLASH! Books. She tweets at @sherttt and writes at sherting.com.