Bedtime Stories
2020 Scholastics Art & Writing Awards
National Gold Medal
Illustration by Julia Cheng
Vignettes
- 月 yuè, moon.
- craters
- 天 tiān, sky
- typhoon
- 倒影 dào yǐng, reflection
- Shapeshifter
- 日 rì, sun
- supernova
- 生 shèng, life
- bedtime stories
10 | bedtime stories
The cancer crept up on us like sleep does in a bedtime story: slowly, lazily, and then all at once. One moment, Ma’s hand is lightly grazing your cheek, hushed voice lulling your eyelids shut, and the next, you’ve slipped down under and far away—drifting off to softer worlds. One moment, her eyes are blinking rapidly, her fingers striking a wistful chord that releases a flood of blurry memory you’ve long since buried—and the next, time seems to soften its hold, her eyes drifting up to meet the stars. Jun and Father stand on either side of a hollow gap—the fossilised, lost trust from a winter over fifteen years ago aching longer than any unhealed bruise.
But when the monitor hums its final note, it sucks all the air in the room with it, and the years of distance cave in on themselves, and I am suddenly thrust back in our two-bedroom apartment in downtown Scarborough, where the ceiling looms over us and the walls are too thin and I am shrinking, smaller and smaller until I am nothing. It takes me a beat too long to realise Father’s pulled us into his arms—in the white light of the moon, he looks older, smaller, lonelier—and I realise we’re mourning Ma, but also all that we’d lost over the years, the years spent searching for what could have, should have been, for what had gone wrong, for the pages in our story that had been cleaved from its spine long ago.
For a long time, I had been trying to fill in these gaps with the only other stories I knew. I was raised on myths and legends, head filled to the brim with dragons and heroes and gods. But our lives seldom end like the books—they keep writing themselves, keep beckoning us to keep turning the page, because life is the masterpiece-in-progress, the reason why gardens grow back after the thaw, why heartbreaks and growing pains are soothed and smoothed over by the slippery hands of time. Yet the stories you’re given are what make you forget the fear of growing older; they lend you the strength to forge on forward, past the great storms and past the fire. They bring us petrichor promises of something new—something sweeter. And on nights like these, when the lady on the moon smiles back at me, I remember what it is like to fly dragons through the clouds, and I am five years old again.
Father will open the front door, fresh box of bao still warm, and his sheepish, crooked smile warmer. Jun will throw me onto his shoulders, and we will tear down the stairs shrieking with laughter—and when we trip and tumble down the steps, our bright laughter giving way as our faces screw up on the verge of tears, Ma will be right behind us, sweeping us into her arms and laughing.
There, there now. Would you like to hear a story?