"The Astonishing Color of After" by Emily X.R. Pan, Chapters 1–21

When he finally got the words out, his voice crawled through an ocean to get to me. It was a cold cerulean sound, far away and garbled.

When he finally got the words out, his voice crawled through an ocean to get to me. It was a cold cerulean sound, far away and garbled.

It's easier to pretend the stain is acrylic paint. Pigment, emulsion. Water soluble until it dries.

The day after it happened, we spent hours searching for a note. That was the surreal part.

If Axel were there with me, he probably would've squeezed my shoulder and asked, What color?
And I would've had to explain that I was colorless, translucent.

I wasn't frightened, even when the bird glided straight across the lawn to land on the porch, those claws tapping short trills into the wood.

The body in the casket didn't even have the jade cicada pendant I'd seen my mother wear every single day of my life.

And maybe he'd see how my mother had sliced up everything else. How even if he could wrench that arrow free, the rest of me was so punctured and torn that nothing would ever be able to suture me back together.

He'd probably been expecting a glacial blue, or maybe the dying vermilion of dusk.

In a flash like a vision of the future, I saw the distance stretching between us, unfurling like a measuring tape, until we were separated by miles and miles.

I turned my face out the window, my thumb stroking the vane of the feather.

In the empty hours the morning after the funeral, I drove to the hardware store, winging through an obscure route to avoid being seen by anyone in the neighborhood who would recognize first the car and then my face.

Each of those nights after that first appearance of the bird, when all noise upstairs had subsided, I went to stand on the porch and squint into the sky.

It was the type of summer night that should've been unbearably hot, but my every exhale sent a cloud of white billowing out in front of my face.

I think of the way his brows furrowed, like there was something wrong with me.

The stripe on the side is currently dyed mermaid green, but the rest of it is my natural color, a deep brown, exactly halfway between my mother’s thick black strands and my father’s mousy waves.

I’m tired of his doubting me, and I’m sick of the way he walks around emanating a murky Payne’s gray.

The colors of this kind of grief should be stark and piercing, with the alarmed brightness of something toxic.

“Do you want me to go?" he says, and the fissure in his voice threatens to put a matching crack in my chest.

Dad's eyebrows rise a couple millimeters, but he also looks relieved. "All right," he says warily.

There are two little girls perched on ornate wooden chairs with tall backs that stick up beyond their heads.

“They live too far away," she replied curtly.

Smells drift around the corner to meet us—a combination of incense smoke and garlicky oil.

Just as I stoop to help gather them, the next door over creaks open, pouring gauzy light everywhere.

Now we’re all sitting in the living room. Dad and me in brocade armchairs, Waipo and Waigong on a couch made of wood and cushions.

My grandmother’s thin lips are stretched in a perpetual smile, her cheeks lightly mottled, nose small and flat.

Waipo says something: the lilt of her words form a question mark in the air.

Whatever it is he's saying sets my grandmother shaking her head, her body trembling like a string yanked taut.

I'm a top teetering at the end of its spin, a squeeze of asphaltum paint sullying zinc white.

But my fingers remember—my muscles know how to draw the dark eyes, the freckle on her right cheekbone, the tilt of her eyebrows. Her face materializes out of the ink.

There's only one guest room, and when I turned in last night, my father had already taken the floor—likely feigning sleep on top of those blankets—and left me the bed.

And once he went home, his quick strokes of color would bake from raw visual into warm, delicious audio. The kites would be rendered in arpeggios.

It seeps in from the window behind the thin curtain, washing the walls in spectral beams.

Her hands roll over the keys, shaping wide arpeggios, her torso rocking to match the dark waves of the music.

I whirl around, and there on our sofa sits a dark-haired girl that is unmistakably me—but younger—grinning widely and elbowing a shorter, gangly version of Axel.

He puffs up his cheeks and puckers his lips, blowing hard just under the knuckles to produce a reedy squeal that sings out across the water.

Her deft hand spreads a batter into a perfect flat circle, mashing an egg over the top, sprinkling it with scallions.

For a brief moment, one of them seems to swing its head around to peer at me through the haze, teeth bared, claws splayed.

The image he's used as the "album cover" on this page is a photograph of Lockhart Orchard that twists my stomach, sends a nostalgic red ochre rippling through me.

My thumb hits play. The piece begins with the bass section humming low and deep, legato lines that crescendo ominously.