Hannah Yang
1. THE DISPATCHVocabulary Lesson
It’s too late to back out now. Already her son sits at the kitchen counter, legs swinging from the barstool, waiting for her. His index cards, all the words his teacher has assigned for this week’s vocabulary quiz, sprawl in front of him like a dissected dictionary.
Look at him. Twelve years old, starting to get used to the heft of a teenager’s body. Sweat soaks an uneven stripe down the back of his purple t-shirt; the cheap electric fan on the windowsill can’t keep away the July heat. He sits with his shoulders hunched, his head bent, hair falling into his eyes. He won’t let her cut it. He doesn’t need her often anymore, not for haircuts, not for anything.
It wasn’t always like this. Once, he was an extension of her own body, experiencing what she experienced, consuming what she consumed. When he got his first splinter she felt it in her own palm. When he danced along to the radio she found herself swaying too. At what point did they split into separate bodies, separate worlds?
Maybe it was the first time she caught him in a lie, that day he claimed to be going to the library to study when really he was going to the movies with an American girl from his orchestra class. Or maybe it was his first day of kindergarten, when he came home excited to tell her about everything he’d learned but did so, for the first time, in English, babbling about Play-Doh and monkey bars, trailing foreign phrases into her home like burrs in his sneakers.
No, if she’s being honest, it started even earlier than that. One morning in the second trimester of her pregnancy, she woke up craving flaming hot Cheetos, a thing she’d only tasted once before, her first year in the United States. She had hated the taste then, the synthetic sting of it, like swallowing orange paint. That morning, she put a hand against the curve of her belly and marveled that this thing inside her could have taste buds so different from her own. She promised herself she would write to her parents to ask for their recipes, so that she could raise this child on real food instead of processed American junk. Then she drove out in search of those flaming hot Cheetos. She tried two Safeways and even a Trader Joe’s before she found them at a gas station convenience store and wolfed down the entire bag in her car.
She watches him as he rubs his knuckles against his mouth, concentrating. For a moment she considers making up some excuse. He doesn’t really need her to do this. There are better ways she could spend this hour: restocking the fridge, prepping dinner, watching her teledramas.
Still, she sits down on the barstool next to him. He asks if she’s ready. She nods.
He points to the first index card.
“Adamantine,” he says, enunciating the foreign syllables for her slowly, patiently, like a hand extended toward her in the dark. In her own language, he explains, “It means unbreakable. Unyielding.”
“Adamantine,” she repeats, an echo and an answer.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYA MacBook Air
A cup of decaf black coffee
A printed, spiral-bound first-draft manuscript
Books of all kinds
A letter from a friend
A half-filled leather journal
Post-It notes (blue, yellow, green)
3. BIOGRAPHYHannah Yang is a speculative fiction writer. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Analog Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, The Dark Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, and more. She has a BA from Yale University and lives in Colorado. Follow her work at hannahyang.com or on Twitter at @hannahxyang.