When they were buried, eggshell skins curdling, torsos to the soil of earthworm carrions, light flitted out of their graves and two peacocks flew out, you said. You were frog-legged beside me then, tiny in the crockery-vined kitchenette. I dipped my brush deep into the kaolin flagon, wiggled my hands, then lifted it, dripping strings of sugar around the slim body of a painted bird on the plate, jagged talons, feathers simmering.

And when they flew out? I asked, taking the spatula from you. I levitated the agate bird, and a nasal scream lolled past our heads. A fist-wide peacock sprang up from the plate, splaying its wings out. Its legs were cinnamon colored, like a sun-seared face. I opened your hand, and the peacock wobbled onto your palm. When they circled the cypress tree and glided down the sky, when they flew out, you said, they flew southeast.

***

If I listen carefully, press my ear to the oakwood counter, your voice is still audible—you’re stirring sugared dragons to life, laughing with stevedores as you pour them wine. He’s going to die in Manchuria, Bàba tells everyone who asks about your absence. Die in the north, amidst rusted rifles and footslogging communists.

All day, Bàba stays in his study, simmering opium soot over his spiral lamp. Sometimes, when I walk by with a rake, I can see him tucking pea-shaped flakes into a ceramic bowl.

Do you remember how once, he tried to make you use his flake instead of molten sugar for your drawings? You cried for the whole afternoon, your huge owl eyes puffy as he fanned out a

garland of soot onto the plate, dipping your brush in. I bought you cups of barley tea, showed you the compendium of beer caps Yu had hoarded against the sash of the kitchenette’s windowpane, but you wouldn’t stop whining. So in the end, I sneaked you past Bàba’s study.

We tiptoed into my room and ducked under my bed. I still remember how you gasped when you fell onto a rumble of books beneath the bed—miniatures of the dynasties and cities we live within, olive book covers of cathedrals, rows of century-old characters, studded with handwritten annotations.

“Can you keep a secret?” I asked you.

***

They circled the city at midnight. A hundred thousand of them, moonlit rifles and olive-beaked hats. The air base is bombed. The coal mines. The quarter moon smolders above streets, and the heads of a few nationalist soldiers emerge from islands of tents, peering into the dark. In the morning, it is learned that Liao Yaoxiang has refused to bring his army from Shenyang, afraid that the communists would capture him midway. Lin Bao orders all supplies arriving at Changchun be cut off, but four airplanes continue zigzagging in, delivering small pounds of food each day.

Whenever I can, I stockpile jars of sugar and perform for the children in the city. I repeat the myths and fables you had fed me with; on stairwells packed with sandbags, overturned window panes, I paint the moon rabbit as it pounds rice cakes, the monkey king as it journeys to the West. And sometimes, I see the two of us again, shoulder to shoulder on old bedsheets, riffling through the books of your mother as I assure you, in whispers, that somewhere, on a beachfront balcony, in a courtyard with ivy-vined water fountains in Europe, she is reading a copy of the same book, chasing the same words with her flashlight.

***

Back then, I told you a lot of lies. Some I regret, some I still don’t know how to confess. You once told me that people lie to mask their insecurities rather than out of malice, that it’s a way of drawing a sword back rather than thrusting it out.

Perhaps that was why I lied to you about why I wanted to be a writer. Because I was thirteen, and the Earth was four billion years older.

Do you remember that one morning, a few weeks after our first encounter at the shipyards, we met again at the back door of the kitchenette? It wasn’t the first time I had seen you lingering by the dust-coated windows of the restaurant, observing Bàba as he tossed a fistful of bean sprouts into the cooking pan, oil ticking across. But it was the first time you saw me there, clad in a patchwork overall, rope-jumping with Yu on soy sauce-stained tiles.

When you saw me, you smiled. “Your Bàba got any extra bean sprouts?” You asked us, tiptoeing to keep your dirt-splotched face above the windowsill.

Your hair brimmed with blackness under the ribbons of the sun. Yu climbed past the window and landed on the rubble of bricks beside you, laughing. “You want food?” He asked, and you nodded violently.

He held his index finger up, motioning me over. I rolled my eyes and sneaked two rice balls out of the kitchen, hurrying out to the yard. You were draped in a gray tank top, frog-legged on the ground, your forehead sheened with sweat. I tossed you the rice balls, and you caught them single-handedly.

The three of us sat down against the crates and bare granite wall.

You chugged down the rice. I reached for the leather notebook in my pocket, the one my mother had left behind among her vestiges of existence, and began scribbling sentences across it. The pages gazed back at me, beige.

“You write?” You spoke up suddenly. I turned around. You studied me like a puppy would, kneeled on the ground, your pupils dilated.

“Yeah,” I said.

“You’re a writer?” You asked. I leaned backwards proudly, my elbows flared, hands knotted behind my scalp.

I crossed my arms, pretending that I was sitting before a davenport, before twisting shelves of books. “I write the unspoken words,” I proclaimed.

“The unspoken words?” You asked, leaning closer to me. You smelt of moss, potpourris of orchids and herbs.

“Things not said soon enough,” I told you, “things we forget to say.”

“So you write to erase your regrets?”

I splayed my hands out. “I never thought about it this way, but I guess so. And not my regrets—it’s this world’s regrets.”

You smiled. “That must be a lot of books.”

***

On your birthday, the first one we celebrated together, I gave you a feather pen. It was made of a peacock’s feather, green in watercolor shades with a zircon eyespot at the center.

“You know? Feathers take up sixty-percent of a peacock’s body weight,” I told you, holding the pen up to the lightbulb in your room. I sat cross-legged on the armchair in your room, cowhide upholstered in emerald lace, and you looked up at it with me.

“A cost for beauty,” you said, watching me smooth the zircon with my fingers. “These eyespots—there’re actual crystals, aren’t they?” You asked.

“I think so,” I said. “Probably why their feathers are so heavy.”

“Probably why they almost never fly,” you said.

***

Bàba wants me to marry. It’s frightening, because he never wanted this before, as if he knew that rash marriage would ruin it all, like it did to his own life. Yesterday, he told me that he has a friend whose son is a banker. Someone with a stable job, he keeps repeating, but I know he’s really saying someone whose presence can be counted on.

Now I regret letting you go to Changchun on your own. I know that I couldn’t have stopped you, with your frenzy political ideals. Remember how the neighbors are always saying that how you’re going to kill yourself one day, that you read too much and see too clearly, and even Shanghai is too small for you? I wonder if that’s why Bàba hates you so much. Because you remind him of Māmā.

Maybe if I had gone with you, insisted and tucked along with you all the way to Manchuria, I wouldn’t be swabbing the terrazzo floor and breathing into the opium-frosted doorways of the bar now. Or meeting the banker this Sunday.

Anyway, I do hope that you come back. The letters deliver so slowly. I doubt this one will reach you before the summer.

***

The soldiers at my camp say that Mao is starving Changchun so Zheng Dongguo would give in to the siege. The food in the city would only feed the population till July, one of the soldiers at my tent claims. Another says that all food has been consumed already, and the mold-sprinkled corn we’re given each day are the very last rations, reserved for the army, destined to run out in a week.

Each day, I mingle into the streets flecked with bloated carrions. I watch the underside of the sky light with citrus-yellow flecks with boys scavenging for food, and give my bread to them. I pour out avalanches of stories to the children gathering before the barbed wire, proverb-dotted fables and heroic epics, hoping that when they hear this, time would move a bit faster, and the world around them would grow flimsy and unimportant, the pounds of explosives, gunshots inaudible, and all that matter would be the twirling water-dotted sugar before their eyes, roaring, a dragon’s face emerging from the boulders.

***

I dreamt about you last night, about us, actually.

I’m getting these dreams more and more often, now that it’s almost July and you’ve been away for two months. In the dream, you and I were crouched inside a chicken’s den, and the two of us were still young, eleven or twelve years old at most. You were wearing that bowl cut you used to walk around in, your bangs long enough to drape your brow, collide with your eyelashes. And you were painting with sugar, a jewel-toned fenghuang, the moon rabbit with whitecap spots.

“Paint Qinglong,” I said, prodding you. Qinglong, the azure dragon.

“You aren’t going to get scared?”

“No.”

You nodded. The syrup swelled with water and heat, and you curled the brush between your fingers, a grit of sugared dough wedged beneath your nails. I watched you split the gold-crusted syrup as a dragon’s body arched toward you, its head emerging in a million diodes of scales.

I must have gasped out loud, because the dragon turned around and screamed at us. You and I screamed back, and you grabbed my hand, pulled me out of the den. We fell on top of each other outside, laughing.

I asked Yu about Qinglong yesterday, and he told me that it’s one of the five dragon gods. I almost don’t remember anything about the myth, but dreams are a strange thing, aren’t they? They make you remember things you thought you had forgotten, wished even.

***

The communists ward the city. Yesterday, a group of children were kneeling before one of the soldiers, begging him to let them out. The soldier fired at two of them, and the rest fled, like scattered gunpowder. Last week, I saw a toddler on the street, alone, licking gore off the throat of a dead man.

Other days, I collect corn and tree bark for the townspeople left. I sift through the mines of carcasses and watch families hang themselves on hemp cordages. A girl asked me yesterday whether the war is ever going to end. She is undersized and has elfin ears, freckled irises. I laid down on my stomach with her and began telling her about Hua Mulan, the female warrior who took her father’s place in the conscription of the army and fought against nomadic herders in the north. I stenciled

Black Mountain and Huang He onto the gravel steps, chasing the lines and rhythms of the ballad down my hippocampus.

You don’t know either, do you? She asked me when I told her that I had to leave and go back to my camp.

***

I met with the banker this afternoon. He was awfully polite, with thinly shaved hair and a citrus fragrance about him, but he talked so slowly I wanted to scream.

We shuffled along schools of stevedores today and stopped by the coffeehouse. Do you remember when it was still empty, covered in furniture ads, puddles of skim ice, we would play cops and robbers there? Now, the smell of cocoa beans flows through its chimneys, the scent of milk so thick you can swim in it.

When our lattes arrived, he asked me about you. I tried to paint the picture of a boy with a bowl-cut, the swarms of words pulsing on your tongue. A barista served us two capoochinos. Behind us, a sleet-haired old man pointed the ball of his cane at the terrazzo floor. I told the banker about your dreams, galaxies of them, and explained that you were working at the counter at Bàba’s bar to save enough money for university, where you want to study history.

After our coffees, we visited the shipyards, against the same offshore breeze that had rode down our breast bones as children. The banker led me down to the rocky shore, where a drunk docker was hobbling between nimbuses of cigarette smoke. A crowd of tousled-haired children were gathering around us. That was when I noticed an aproned lady who was sugar painting. She was drawing a butterfly smaller than my palm, its papery wings pin pricked by sugar-frosted spots. I waited for it to come alive.

***

You will not believe what I just did.

I came across a bird-boned boy feeding tree bark to his baby sister. He was kneeled beside her, his breath purring against her dark, oily bangs. I followed them as he heaved her toward a soldier on stand, begging him to let them through, so he could take his sister to a doctor.

Then subconsciously, I picked a twig up from the ground and began drawing on the puddle of blood in front of me. Above us, dusk was falling, barbed wires fading into golden dust. With the twig, I began drawing the outline of a peacock, its wings swelling into marquise-cut rubies. When I leveled the bird with my hand, it was as big as myself. It screamed, and the boy and the soldier turned around.

I grabbed the peacock by its leg. Let the boy go, I told the soldier.

The soldier was draped in an olive-green cloak, the pimples dotting his face like grit on sandpaper. He dropped his rifle onto the ground.

Let him go through, I repeated. The peacock’s wings fluttered beside me.

The soldier took three steps backward. The boy hurried past the crevice between the twines of barbed wires. When he was at least meters away from us, he turned around and studied the peacock in my hand for a long time. He squinted his tiny eyes.

Black magic, the soldier muttered.

***

Before your family flew over to Shanghai, you lived in Hainan, an island far off from where the rest of China is. It had a boundless sea of emerald, you told me once, transparent, the surface of the water thin like air.

But what you liked the best about the place was always the sea above you. The sky of stars and the milky way and the light and the darkness, the blue that altered a little every night, the distant clouds of celadon green, glazes that made nights a little less dark, made evenings flash by.

Sometimes, when the silence of the evening pecks into my ears, I would wonder what it would be like if I too grew up on the island instead of Shanghai. What was it like? Running across seething sand and feeling the bites of the sun in between your toes, listening to the click of your straw sandals against the asphalt bridge, white as slate across a skyline that had no lines? What was it like, to live in a world without me?

***

I scared five soldiers today.

Under the canopies of a fig tree, I painted a dragon from blood, its tail a belt of crimson scales, polished like a jeweler’s loupe. When it flew out of the pebbled ground, its topaz crystal eyeball was larger than my face.

The soldiers were sent running away, and I ushered a long-necked father and his four children out, along with two brothers and a young couple, hands held as they trundled past the thoroughfare and crimson bridge.

Last night, I told the soldiers at my tent about it, and they wanted to grow it into a bigger plan, something that could help us turn the table over and win this siege.

It’s almost August now, and half of the soldiers at my own camp are starving. There’re almost no living people left in Changchun, just streets after streets of corpses. I’m sorry that I’m still in Manchuria. I never thought that a siege could have lasted this long.

***

You knew so much more than I did back at school that the only thing I was more acquainted with than you were books and authors.

“What do you think Lu Xun wrote for?” You once asked me underneath at the shipyard, under matrixes of stars behind the fog, constellations of Leo and Andromeda. For a moment or so, with your frayed coat rustling against mine, it seemed to make no difference that we were standing under apatites that would one day collapse on their own gravity and bloat, only to die again.

We sat down on the ledge of the dock. “I don’t know,” I said. “But I guess a lot of writers write to be remembered.” You made a triangle with your hands and thrusted it out into the air, trying to match it with Altair, Deneb, and Vega above us.

“To be permanent, I guess,” I said. “Embalmed and passed down.”

***

I’ve always assumed that the soldiers on the other side were heartless, but I finally realized that I’m wrong today. Isn’t it funny how it’s so easy to forget that they’re human too? Sometimes, I wonder if they see me and the soldiers at my camp the same way.

This morning, I saw one of the soldiers cry. He must have been a few years my junior, with a blizzard of dandruff on his hair. He was kneeled on the ground, begging his commander to let a mother and her infant son pass through.

The soldiers at my camp have come up with a plan on how to use sugar painting now—we’re going to draw some hundred dragons and release them into the air. And while the communist soldiers are trying to figure out what’s happening, we’ll use our rifles to shoot them, though they have almost twice as many soldiers as we do.

If this works out, I’ll be home in two weeks. Can you imagine how long I have been away already?

***

Sometimes, when I write with the feather pen you gave me, splayed out on the grass on the empty university campus, beneath shadows of exhaust and the jags of skyscrapers, I would think about you again.

I would close my eyes and picture myself under a night where there are stars instead, glimmers like the peacock’s eyespot in between my hands. I would think about the things I’d tell you if you are still here, about the zircon—the closest thing I know that resembles the dazzle of your eyes.

October came and you haven’t returned. Then came November, when the siege was already over, then December.

Yesterday night, as I was looking out of my window into the blazing traffic lights beneath me, I started thinking about you. Holding a pen in between my fingers, its tip resting on the last page of my blue leather notebook, ink in drizzles across the page, I recalled what you had said a long time ago in Bàba’s kitchenette.

Perhaps, we don’t write to be remembered, but write to remember instead.

Lying in bed last night, I thought about what you’d said for a long, long time.

Renee Chen is an Asian-American writer currently residing in Taipei, Taiwan. She has written short stories for trampset, JMWW, and Cosmic Double, the latter of which nominated her for Best Small Fictions. Her short story collection, The Un-Inquired, is published by Querencia Press.