Beixi Li

Family Injured, Boy Killed During Street Collapse.

The Wall Street Journal headline opens into death as words on paper tell the story of poverty and helplessness. Through the rubbage of the street you can still see remains of furniture, a broken chair leg, a lamp shade crushed and misshapen.

“Mommy, what are you doing?” He hugs a blanket close and she blinks the lights of the computer screen out of her eyes.

“Honey, what are you doing out of bed?” She swivels the chairs around and straightens her stiff  form, trying to clear the image out of her mind.

He reaches up and as she scoops him up, lays his head sleepily on her shoulder. The blanket trails near the floor and she tucks it between his curled hands under eyes that are already drifting closed.

“I couldn’t fall asleep,” comes out broken midst yawn.

Superheroes leap off the walls and the nightlight illuminates crumpled blankets on the child size bed.

At the store, they had walked down the aisle two, five, ten times looking at the white, golden, mahogany bed frames. Deliberated whether shelves were necessary, whether drawers underneath would be useful.

And the sales woman had smiled, impatient yet understanding and they sheepishly pointed at the one that now holds spider man sheets.

He fidgets as she stretches out the covers and suddenly both eyes are wide again and she smiles inwardly before sitting down and leaning against the headboard. He curls into her a little tighter and her hands play with the soft brown strands, sweeping them away from eyes that wait patiently.

The cracked and broken street swims before her eyes again and she can see in her mind the picture of a little boy looking up from similar cracks many years ago.

 

 

 

PhD student with an accent, he had stood there and looked at their aspiring faces, their confident stances, swallowed hard and put his soul into his lectures twice a week for a semester.

She had sat in ergonomic chairs, stayed awake for him, and learned management operations with a class of 80 who knew that they wanted to make money when they left that LEED certified building—and they would all go on to do it.

Last day of class he stood up there and asked what family was. Wearing a blue fleece half zip and dress pants, he looked expectantly at the students and they were embarrassed to answer.

Looking down he throws up the picture on the screen of a little boy looking through the cracked undergrounds of a street. She looked and looked and the perspective was so skewed she couldn’t understand what was going on. What existed below a street? Cement, earth, clay, but no, people did with furniture and a family.

“My grandfather used to be a reverend and I would always play soccer against one of my best friends right in the courtyard of the church. Whoever won would always get a little monetary prize and I made it so that I won every time. He was always furious and I always thought it was hilarious.”

He looks back at the screen, at the little boy looking up through broken concrete with big eyes, and then turns slowly back to us, “Then, one day, I went to his house for dinner and that picture you see, that’s where he lived. The road had caved in and there was a hole in the ground under the street and that’s where his family had made their home.”

The slide flips and night time Korea is illuminated by the lights of skyrise buildings, captured to show others. The laser hovers on the tallest buildings.

“That’s where I worked.”

The red dot jumps to a squat blue building on the side of the mountain.

“That’s where the President of Korea lived.”

He red dot jumps and disappears. He turns back and says wryly, “Literally, I stood above the president.”

She allows herself a laugh and the sound is echoed out of the students around her, their ambitions were increasing.

“But then I came back to teach .”

 

 

The bed creaked as she shifted her weight and pulled the covers up tighter.

“Jake, what do you think family is?”

He leans his head back and his nose wrinkles in distaste. Mommy I don’t want to think right now, can’t you just tell me a story?

But obediently, he chirps, “Cookies, hugs, you, me, dad!”

 

She laughs and can hear the laugh echoed through that classroom from so long ago. Surrounding the screen with all the words that Professor Chu had wanted to share one last time before they all left.

 

“Family is the ends, not the means.”

 

They had clapped and clapped and the girls swallowed hard and the boys looked up and away.

 

20 years later they were spread out over the world. Some had managed to remember and had families. Some had silent flats in downtown Manhattan. She had the bed with spider man protecting its inhabitant who was falling asleep by her side.

 

“There was once this family, made of cookies and hugs…”