Monica Wang
1. THE DISPATCHThe Sunset Witch
A witch comes at sunset to take children away, my mother tells me. She stopped reading to me before I could remember, but this story she tells without needing a book. The moral, she says, is that I must listen to her, I must draw the curtains before sunset, so neatly not a single edge glows with red-gold light, and I must keep them closed 'til morning. Otherwise the witch will see me and drag me through the window by my hair or eyes.
I don't know if this is real. The neighborhood kids stop playing outside before sunset, but my mother leaves the other windows—one in the kitchen, one in the bathroom, none in the bedroom—alone, and light gets in through the metal bars. All the windows are barred in this city; I don't believe it's to keep people out. The window I have to cover up is the one that looks out onto the balcony, or what I call a balcony but is really a ledge for plants, just like what I call my room is really a tatami mat, grey but cool in summer, in the living room.
When the afternoon light gets in, my mother gets headaches. When she gets headaches I don't get dinner, but from her bed she can't see if I'm wearing the right expression or test if I'll close the curtains before she speaks. I don't always pass her tests.
* * *
My mother tells me I should mop the floors and eat the crackers over the kitchen sink before she returns. The crackers are from Before, when we lived across the world in a house with a garden. When she sees me reading the paper sleeve, she says time doesn't matter and the crackers last forever. This sounds almost like magic.
After my mother goes out, I drip cold water over my eyes and the marks on my legs.
I open the curtains.
The witch floats above, not far away, looking like a photo negative of the space around her. Below us the neighborhood sinks in orange-gold light, the same orange-gold colour-with-edges that has swallowed the photos left in our family album. My mother says this happens when people pull film into sunlight before it can curl up safely. All my memories from Before are this color.
The street is so quiet I wonder if the witch has paused time. She might have been waiting for centuries. Even the asphalt has aged to sand. When she reaches for me, I stretch out my hand and already I feel less cold than when I opened the window long, long ago, or a second ago. The witch takes my hand in the shadow of hers and pulls me out.
We fly over a city of apartments all alike until I forget which one is home. Streets and buildings pass in streaks of light, but I feel like I'm only floating.
In the distance, too far to run to, are tall rows of buildings like dominos or tombstones. My mother showed me tombstones on grave-clearing day only the year before, in the mountain with nothing but tombstones and the fruit we left at four of them. When we land I walk across bare ground toward the bones of giant metal beasts—no, a small playground, with a metal slide, swings, and a jungle gym smaller and lonelier than anything in all this space. The metal leaves my hands smelling like blood, but the witch plays fair, or not too fair because she slows down when I can’t catch her, and we play for many years before the last light is gone. When she takes me back by the same route, the air whips around us instead of hanging still.
Behind the closed curtains I think about the witch’s face while my memory of it fades to orange-red. I shiver harder, knowing my mother says I can’t play outside or let anyone come over.
* * *
The witch comes again when the sun is setting and I'm alone. She doesn't drag me by the hair this time or the next. We play in the emptiness between homes, and I can't remember if either of us says anything. Maybe when we play she tells me stories; maybe when we float I reach for her shadows, more tightly each time.
One night I look out the window until my mother comes home. One night I don't spread out my math books in an arc. I haven't cleaned the floors, and the curtains are open. My mother's face is shut tight. She smells like frying oil after work, and I know she hates it. She hates being tired and hates being old. I know when she picks up something metal, a coat hanger or ruler or ladle, she doesn't think about it being metal, and she doesn't hate me, not now or Before.
When she steps forward I step back, though I know it makes her angrier. I take another step, and another. I try to cover my legs, sides, face. I step back—
—and I'm falling, because I didn't close the window before sunset, because I hid away two of the Before photographs, because I wanted the witch to come, because. The black sky rolls above me and I tilt my head back, looking for the witch. The air is cold but I know that when I land the ground will be like sand. Like magic. Orange-red light seeps through my eyelids.
Falling takes a long time, or no time at all. When it stops I will get up from the ground. I will walk to the playground and this time I will be the one waiting. I will ask the witch to go with me, After, and I will tell her—
2. BUREAU INVENTORYAntique writing slope / box, a gift
Lamy Scala fountain pen, a gift and my favorite pen
Laptop
Mugs, gifts from Düsseldorf, Hamburg, and Hannover. Two for tea, one for a dried leaf bouquet, one for pens
A fingerless glove, reduced in circumstances to wrist rest
Pointe shoes because I don't want them touching the dirty floor (???)
Toilet paper roll phone holder
Oranges because they're cheap and I can eat 22 in one sitting
Notebooks (but no books, because they go on the floor)
3. BIOGRAPHYMonica Wang has writing in Electric Lit, Ruminate, Southword, Augur Magazine, and PULP Literature, among other publications. In 2019 she was accepted to the Tin House spring intensive; in 2020 her flash won The Sunlight Press's fiction contest; in 2021 she received scholarship offers to two creative writing MA programs. Born in Taichung, Taiwan, she grew up in Taipei and Vancouver, Canada, and spent the past four years in Germany and the Netherlands. She is now working on her first novel at the University of Exeter.