November
By Sophie Kalkreuth
In the morning, a grey wedge tears open on the horizon and the day leaks through slowly; particles of light, like flakes of dust blown under doorways, between shutters.
The man on a rickshaw is calling out through his megaphone, looking for old air conditioners, computers, washing machines. KONGTAO...DIANNAO...XIYIJI. Every day he collects broken appliances and sells them to a dump outside of town where the streets are lined with dismantled innards: bundles of copper wire, plastic chips, and electric cables.
I wake first and watch you open your eyes. The thin skin of your lids quivers, but your eyes are hard and glassy. The chill creeps in. It hangs on us like the tang of air laced with metal, burnt coal swept in by the wind.
I don’t see a future, you keep saying, as if time were a street marked on a map.
By afternoon, the rain begins and a dark mass of clouds bears down on the surrounding buildings, stunting the agile bodies of cranes, paused in their demolition. Through the storm of our words we hear the chorus of horns, and the relentless call to recycle: “KONGTIAO.... DIANNAO.... XIYIJI.”
As we argue you flick your hand the same way you wave away peddlers on Nanjing Road.
So now what? I want to hear you say it.
Inside, dusk falls. We cling to the last remaining shades of daylight, pacing the floors in waning, pixelated shadows. It won’t be long now. Our brittle bodies will come apart, bones unhooked, snapped off like winter twigs.
Tomorrow, the same cry in the lane: air conditioners, computers, washing machines.
Sophie Kalkreuth is a New York-based writer and editor who covers global trends in business and culture with a special interest in US - China connections. Her stories appear frequently in The Peak, Perspective, Portfolio and Palace magazine where she is the Editor-at-Large. From 2006 to 2014 Sophie was based in Shanghai and Hong Kong where she was Chief Editor at LP magazine. Her short stories and literary criticism have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Offing and Afterness: Literature from the New Transnational Asia.