Night (continued)

Every child is a shadow. Like any mother who is a sun, she cast her children from her until one, then two, and finally five shadows lined the earth beside her against the sky, as time furrowed nine years of days into her forehead.

Shadows have neither mouths nor gender. They make no sound and never leave the earth. But if a shadow does leave, it becomes a shade, and only visits at night, or behind closed eyes. The mother of a shadow? She bleeds and cries and when there isn’t food or a roof or shoes, if bombs fall and barren earth disputes with a loud sky over who, who is to rise, who is to be left behind when the guns shut their spitting maws: the mother of a shadow gives her shadows mouths and ears and empty tummies and feet to run with, and beds beneath someone else’s roof.

That is where she ended up keeping three of her shadows: beneath someone else’s roof.

They grew names. They grew into real boys: no escaping, like Peter Pan’s tried. They had sisters who stayed up nights, sometimes, wondering what it must be like to go to sleep in a dorm every night. They had a father who may as well have been a shade; every bit of daylight they saw, he saw just night, since he lived on the dark side of the planet. They were shades to him, still ripples, cast like stones into a pond. They sunk when they walked up the gangplank to the ocean liner destined for Los Angeles, and he never had to look or listen again because, as shadows, they had no mouths, no ears. He didn’t have to fear them: hunger pangs, eyes silent as night fell, the clutch of small fingers into his palm. They had a father with nothing at all to fear from them.

What are their names? Does it matter? They are no longer boys; one is now a shade himself. They have names and voices and eyebrows and pent-up memories, like a locked chest with the key dropped down a well. If they speak their own names, or their brother’s, it’s only because silence so long can only be interrupted by a bellow. Raise fist against the sky, father: where were your ears when our mouths asked for food? Where was your shoulder and strong back? Where are you buried, now, still silent?

Joe was his father: extra women, strapping children, until he rebuked the name and reclaimed the initials of his grandfather, in the Chinese tradition. Joe could pass as white, though, and married a white, and his white children with the Chinese surname must surely still surprise any who cross paths: the blond Wangs. His own guilt must be strong to so tightly claim the mantle of Christ; isn’t it said those who protest the most, are the most defensive, have the greatest fear? What were those nights like, the oldest foreign boy who might have just passed if it weren’t for his name and his foreign looking brothers?