SANDRA LIN

Whale Clouds

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A few weeks before she was gone, Marget told me about the clouds, her eyes squinting at the sky.

“They take on the shape of the person you miss the most, you know. Look.”

I turned my face upwards too. The lumpy clouds billowed over the blue background, shapeless. Squeezing my eyes hard, I tried to imagine the animals or people she might be seeing, but saw nothing.

“Do you see, Annie?” she asked eagerly. “Tell me what you saw!”

“I saw nothing,” I said truthfully.

“You’re not trying hard enough.” She pointed at a cloud in the close distance. “That one over there, that’s a bear eating a fish. And that one is a butterfly. And this one—” She gasped. “That’s my grandmother!”

“It’s a cloud.” I’ve seen her grandmother before and she did not look like that. Then again, Marget was always like this—seeing yellow when everyone else saw blue.

“No it’s not! It’s a dog. My grandmother told my dad that she wishes she would be born a dog the next life so she wouldn’t have to take care of a son like him! So it must be my grandmother coming back to see me. Hi, grandma!” she yelled, elbowing me in the ribs. “Quick, say hello before she leaves.”

Cupping my hands around my mouth, I screamed at the sky too. “Hi, Marget’s grandma!” I remember the fear striking me; Marget felt different recently, after her grandmother passed a couple weeks earlier and a few months right after her dad. She was finally going to leave this town that was too small to hold anything real and go to some big city like Vancouver; I knew it.

Marget turned to me suddenly. “What do you want to be when you die?”

“I don’t know. What do you want to be, Marget?” Where do you want to stay?

She thought for a second. “I want to be a whale, Annie. That would be nice.”

* * *

Again, I was watching as Marget lie sprawled across my made bed, examining a fresh slash of red ribboning across her forearm for splinters of glass, the deep cut shimmering, almost, under the lightbulb.

“Fucking asshole,” she muttered to herself for the hundredth time. “Always drinking. He’s going to drink himself to death one day and I’m not going to be the one paying for his funeral. One day, I’ll leave and never return. I’ll go to New York or Los Angeles or maybe even Beijing or Tokyo and I’ll never come back again.”

Having heard her say the same thing so often, I offered her some ointment without commentary; she pushed it away. “Are you going to stay here for tonight?”

“You got a problem with that?” The sharpness in her eyes gave way to uncertainty for a split second, but I blinked and it was gone. Maybe I imagined it.

“No, I don’t.”

So after I forced her to sit still enough for me to bandage her arm, we crawled into bed together with the blankets cool from the air and the moon bright and high in the sky. I could see it between the blinds. Marget fell asleep almost instantly. Her features were soft in dream and she didn’t look quite as cruel.

I closed my eyes against the silkiness of her breath and imagined staying like this forever: Marget, her cheek against my shoulder, moonlight falling in bars across her face. Her body, relaxed, warm against me.

* * *

The day Marget was born was the day her mother passed away. She told me this the first time we met, hiding together in the playhouse under the twisting slide.

“How do you know?” I asked, wondering if Marget had those knowing eyes the moment she bounced out of the womb.

“My dad told me, duh. Use your brain, Annie.” She knocked hard against her own head with a fist. “That’s how you learn things. The more you use your brain, the faster it’ll unfreeze and the information will come out.”

I gaped at her, amazed. “Is that why grown-ups know so much? Because they used their brains for so long that it’s completely melted?”

Marget nodded, smiling proudly. “Exactly. See, your brain is already working better.”

Later, when my mom took me home, I asked her about that. “Is it true that your brain will be smarter if you use it more?”

Mom readjusted the strap on her ugly purse that dad got her for her birthday. I knew exactly why mom cried about it when she opened the box; it was this nasty color that reminded me of what came out of our neighbor’s constipated dog two days ago right on our doorstep. Plus the person who made the bag clearly haven’t learned their alphabet yet—one of the C’s were backwards. “Yes, why?”

Worry struck me. Will I end up brainless if it melts and starts leaking out? “So if I use my brain, it’ll also melt? How do you make your brain stay in your head?”

“That’s why you eat vegetables and less junk food. Vegetable will hold your brain inside your head so it won’t flow out of your nose and junk food does the opposite.”

That made sense. Some vegetables, like spinach, tangled together so it made a net to hold the brain in. That must be why mom got so upset when I left no room for it last night.

* * *

Marget did not stay until the funeral ended. She walked down aisle during her aunt’s speech, the heavy doors of the church slamming. The sound seemed deafening in the hushed audience.

I wanted to follow, but dad stopped me. “She’s going to want some space,” he said, and I sat back down, already planning what I was going to say to her after the ceremony.

She must be upset right now. Maybe she was secretly crying somewhere and didn’t want anyone to see; that was a very Marget thing to do. Once, I caught her crying in the playhouse when we were twelve and she pinched me so hard for seeing her cry that it left a purple bruise afterwards and I almost started crying myself.

As soon as the ceremony was over, I went to the park. Instead of seeing a huddled figure in the playhouse, I saw her at the swings, swinging while standing up, her face relaxed, lips curving softly.

I was too stunned to speak. Where were the promised tears? “What are you doing?”

“Flying!” she shouted. Then, before the swing came to a full stop, she leapt off. Marget stood up with fallen pine needles pressed into her knees and palms, grinning.

I asked, “You’re not sad?”

“Would you be sad if you were me?” She raised an eyebrow.

“Maybe not,” I admitted. It was Marget who found her dad on the ground after school. She was the one who took him to the hospital where he died after swallowing a handful of over-the-counter pills with a bottle of vodka, the glass bottle shattered against the floor. Her skin still bore marks of her time as his daughter: purple-yellow bruises, small cuts, thick scars.

“This calls for a celebration,” she declared, pulling crumpled dollar bills from the back pocket of her short jeans.

Moments later, we sat on the steps of a convenience store, holding one-liter bottles of warm orange soda. The sun was beginning to set, casting a gentle halo around Marget’s head. I found that extremely pretty.

“Cheers.” She bumped her plastic bottle against mine and began chugging, small streams of soda sometimes escaping through the corners of her mouth, leaving sticky trails of sugar tracing down her jaw and neck.

When she came up for air only to see that my bottle was still unopened, she pointed at me. “Drink, Annie,” she ordered, and I complied. We drank to the death of her father.

Halfway through my bottle, I belched and Marget laughed, letting out a burp of her own. She grinned as she swallowed her last mouthful. The sky was a chaos of pink and yellow and orange marinating the sinking sun. Marget suddenly leaned in to me, giddy, and I could smell her syrupy breath.

“I really like you, Annie.” She kissed me and I tasted the lingering sweetness on her lips for a second before she pulled away again. She stood up and stretched, tossing the empty bottle into a nearby trash can, the plastic clacking between her fingers. “It’s getting late, so I’m going to go home.” Marget looked at me and I thought her face looked flushed, but maybe that was just the sunset on her skin. “You should go home too. Don’t stay out too late.”

* * *

Marget did not leave with a bang like I’d always thought she would. She left quietly, rapping her knuckles against my bedroom window at five in the morning.

When I slid open the window and removed the netting and she did not climb in like she usually would, dread coiled at the bottom of my stomach.

“I’m leaving,” she said, her voice strangely calm. In the darkness right before dawn, I could not make out her face. Knowing her, she probably planned it that way—she would remain a small mystery in at least one way so I will think of her from time to time.

Marget didn’t have to say anything for me to understand why. After her dad died, she was free to leave; only thing keeping her here was her grandma. But now that her grandmother was gone, there was nothing left for her to hold onto. But what about me, Marget? She reached out and wiped off a tear that rolled down my cheek.

“I am going to be great. I hope you will be, too. Goodbye, Annie.” Then she was gone. What she didn’t know was that I would think of her even if she laid her intestines down bare before me and said this is everything I am made of. I did not—and still don’t—need any cause to remember her. Just Marget was enough reason.

Before the sun rises, I get out of bed, slip on a jacket, and walk outside, tracing the familiar route to the park. I almost expect to see her crouched under the slide, in the playhouse, or standing at the swings, but the sky looks the way it did when she left and she is still gone.

Making my way to the swing set, the pine needles dry and crunchy beneath my feet, I climb onto one and stand. The world looks different from up here. I start swinging, bending my knees the way I’ve seen Marget do countless times but never joined in on because my parents would never allow me to do something so dangerous if they knew. Marget was right; it does feel like flying, with the chilly wind blowing against my face. Closing my eyes, I release the chains and let my heart soar until I land painlessly in the pine needles and peeled tree bark lining the ground.

When I lift my head, the sky is brighter and a lone cloud drifts overhead. It looks like a whale. I smile to myself. I can see people in the clouds now, Marget.

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