All We Know of Heaven

[ 002 ] genesis

FOURTEEN YEARS AGO

⋄ ⋄ ⋄

TRINITY CITY

⋄ ⋄ ⋄

FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE, Sloane would have to carry the weight of the ugly truth that every misfortune that'd ever befallen them had been her own fault.

In her fever dreams, it haunts her: the coffin marked with her older brother's name, the ashes of her father's restaurant the day they lost everything, the blood on the bathroom floor, the brains in the sink, the shards of bone she'd stepped on when she'd found the body in the bathtub with the barrel of the gun still jammed in his mouth, her mother's scream a canned echo in her head, the cruel hands, every bruise blooming like crushed violets on her skin from her mother's wrath. Your fault, your fault, your fault—an echoing mantra plaguing the inside the chapel of her skull. Everything she touches turns to rot and dies. How could anything bear to remain good in her hands? Her hands, that were made to ravage, to rip and rend the world to pieces the way it had ruined her. How could anyone bear to stay?

In the ides of the summer this wound would've been unimaginable, a landmine lying await quietly. Sloane sat tucked up in the furthest corner of her father's restaurant, by the round table pressed up against the blue wall right before the plastic sheets separating the doorway to the steaming kitchen where Sloane and her siblings, Phoenix and Silene, helped Auntie Lin peel long beans while their father managed both the kitchen and the counter. Sweat stuck strands of her ink-dark hair to her gleaming forehead, plastering her blue singlet to her back. It was a new shirt, the first item of clothing that wasn't a hand-me-down that Phoenix had outgrown or something that their father had dug out of another family's recycling bin, and new possessions came rare as gold.

Phoenix was older, albeit, he would not grow much older. In the back of her mind now, Phoenix is a fossilised image, forever thirteen, this tawny-limbed boy with a gap-toothed grin and black hair shaven close to his scalp like a bitter gourd, a memory immortalised in crystallised amber growing cloudier and cloudier each year. Some day, his face will dissolve into a smudge, and that is Sloane's first fear.

Silene was younger, albeit, she would not stay much younger, and Sloane hates this. Back then, she didn't care. Silene was always the pretty one, the girl all the Aunties crooned and fussed over, and Sloane was the ugly one. Pretty girls were obedient and docile and demure. Ugly girls were loudmouthed and cutting and explosive. Sloane wasn't so cynical back then, but she had her own way of twisting the world around like flesh pinched and bruised between two harsh fingers.

At the time, Sloane created things rather than destroyed them, and Auntie Lin still called Sloane 心肝—the heart, the core of the human body, the centre of feeling, and the liver, another essential organ you couldn't live without—as if she were the personification of her own vitals, grown and cut from her body, even though Auntie Lin was just their neighbour who came down to help out at her father's restaurant because she didn't have children of her own, and so, became something of their foster grandmother. Once, she'd told them that the reason why she didn't deny familial ties with them whenever anyone questioned her about it was because every brood of children needed a woman in their life, and because their mother had been sick for so long and hardly left the bedroom to remember her children, Auntie Lin stood supplanting a memory.

It didn't matter that it was mainly because Auntie Lin pitied their father, who had to juggle running a semi-successful restaurant on the corner of Chinatown, while caring for a sick wife and raising three equally demanding children with little time for anything else. Auntie Lin had one of those hearts you felt outside of her skin. To be a part of her was to be so loved you didn't need to question your place in the world.