Assistant Editor Lily Davenport: I’m fascinated by the movement of Catherine Niu’s flash story: how an expansive meditation on love and life after death unfurls from the gorily compelling opening image. Niu isn’t afraid to go big, but even at the piece’s most cosmic moments, she doesn’t lose touch with the fine-grained details of a breakup’s aftermath; Southwest Airlines looms just as large as the books of the dead.
Swamp
At the docks, after you were gone, I watched a fisherman gut a small gator gar with a serrated sandwich knife. The belly opened and the gar squirmed, the hot wood of the dock turning red, the fisherman’s nails dripping as the gar slipped in and out of his hands. Then the tail and fins, not good meat, sawed off and discarded back into the swamp. Then the toothed snout sawed off and discarded too—the body, still flopping, sawed into thirds. The fisherman, cross-legged on the dock once again, tossed his line out, one fine swing, checked it with a gentle tug, the gar shuddering in pieces beside the wet knife. A gator gar was especially hard to kill, he told me, took a lot of damage before going down, it was the way it was.
Each time love ends I am unprepared. How setting it free from its meat, from each one of the years, takes a killer. My hands glisten, gutting it. Isn’t it me on the dock, sawing the snout off the face, and also the tail, and the fins, slicing the belly, aiming a swift, desperate line toward the good meat, lighting a fire under the silent flailing of a body that doesn’t know how to die?
There are ancient writings, tomes and legends, about how to help the dying along, filled with travel routes, the necessary spells. In one book, an army gathers on the steppe before a walled city, in a vast plain. How will it end? A tiredness rises out of the book. Its pages break, keep breaking in my hands. I write on them, pieces the size of a breath, a third of meat. I used the last of the oil. I underline library books. Am I still the companion on your Southwest Airlines Companion Pass?
I remember fearing the end of childhood as if I already knew that one day I would be standing here, hungry, alone, desiring only something that had risen and walked away long ago in sudden daylight. They say the books of the dead are inconsistent in terms of content and order, but the gist is pretty much the same: the dead enters the underworld, gets resurrected, travels across the sky to stand judgment before a panel of gods. They say outer space sounds like popcorn. I am not willing to let you go.
Can I do this—resolve us—if I tell the story just right, if the spell can move in?
There are spells for the preservation of different body parts. There is a ritual for the opening of the mouth. There are always deflated kingdoms on the ground. Here is one, and here, I think so. Places I still suffer and so cannot stop believing in.
Catherine Niu is a writer from Marietta, GA. Her fiction and essays can be found in AGNI, Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere, and her poetry has been exhibited in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and The Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.
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