edited by Hal Y. Zhang
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Child neglect, body horrorWhen Mama still isn’t back by morning, I leave our apartment on the twelfth floor and head for the elevator landing. Before I go, I check that my face is clean. I wet my fingers in the faucet and pat down the tuft of hair that sticks up in the back. I wrap a bandage around my index finger where I cut it this morning trying to clean up the broken glass.
I am not scared to be home by myself. I am ten now, a big girl. Like Mama says whenever I get nervous, “Even if your head gets chopped off, the wound is no bigger than the mouth of a bowl.” I think she means that, whatever happens, there’s no reason to panic. Anyway, I like the elevator; it is small and closed and feels like being inside a warm hug.
I hit the down button and wait. The elevator doors open with a creak. I say hello to Ahyi—auntie—our elevator operator. She nods to me. She doesn’t have to ask which floor; she knows I just like to ride the elevator up and down.
Ahyi sits on her narrow wicker stool with the fibers starting to loosen at the corners. There is a pile of newspapers in the corner, and a closed jar of hot water with tea steeping in it, leaves gone pale green-yellow, so swollen they fill half the jar, swaying like seagrass. Today she is embroidering on dark gray cloth with silvery-white thread. I see the outlines of three lotus flowers floating on a lake, and the moon above them.
On floor nine we pick up a man with a big box of fruit headed for the lobby. He’s visiting his mom, he says. I wonder what it would be like to eat the pears after taking them out of their sleeves, in the place where he is going.
Ahyi lets me press the button for the lobby. We drop him off and pick up two old women coming back from their morning shopping, yellow tarp bags bulging. They ask me where my Mama and Baba are, and Ahyi tells them I’m learning how to operate the elevator and they all laugh. I imagine what it’s like to live with them—nice, but nosy, caring about you and always getting in your way, the apartment filled with the smell of cleaning solution and mothballs.
Once I told Mama I wanted to grow up and be an elevator lady. It made Mama so angry, she yelled at me, saying that Ahyi wasn’t cut out for anything useful, and that I should learn how not to be like her. But I think Ahyi must be important; she makes sure people get to the floor they want, that they stay clear of the doors. The doors are dangerous. Mama told me that she heard of someone who got their head stuck in the elevator doors and it got chopped right off.
It happens after the old ladies get out on the sixth floor. The elevator starts going down, then there is a jolt, a weird up-side-down feeling in my stomach while we fall just a little bit, then bounce to a stop with a double bump-bump. The lights flicker.
The doors won’t open when Ahyi presses the button, but she doesn’t look worried. This is not the first time, she says, then rings the buzzer and I hear it somewhere far down, like at the bottom of a well. I am not scared either, or maybe just a little scared, but only that I might have to pee while I’m still stuck here, or from the dizzy feeling I get thinking about how we are still six floors up.
I use the time to hand Ahyi her water jar, and she sips after blowing to clear the tea leaves. Helping calms me. I am a good helper at home, too. I notice when Baba needs something even before he does. He called me his little dog, though I don’t think dogs open beer cans and change the channel and adjust the fan and move the antennae on top of the TV just right so he can watch the soccer game. When I’m helpful, he talks to me about being on the ship, about places I’ve never been to, about crooks and tough guys that I’ve never met. He protects us from all that, he says, but I think I’d like to go and see those places too and meet those people. I also know this: if I am helping him, he can’t get mad at me, not the way he does Mama.
I try to help Mama, but she does everything herself. She can take the skin off an apple with a sharp little knife, so it all comes off in one big circle thin enough it looks like actual skin. She embroiders peonies on all our pillows. Her hair is never out of sorts.
The only thing Mama can’t do is open jars. Last night she rinsed the lid under the hot water for a minute, then five minutes, and then when it still didn’t open, she slammed the jar against the counter until the glass broke and the pickled radishes splashed on the floor with chunks of glass and then she left. She didn’t come back all night and now it is the morning after she broke the jar, and I am in the elevator because I think I will see her sooner, but not if we are stuck.
At home, Baba is the one who opens jars, but he’s still at sea. This time, he has been away much longer than the other times; I heard Mama talking about it, saying the name of his ship, and his name, and dates quietly and urgently in the other room on the phone.
Now Ahyi asks me to thread a tiny needle with the fine silvery thread. My cut finger throbs when I pinch the thread, but I do it anyway.
What I really want is to live with Ahyi. I imagine that she lives in a tiny little house, with rooms as small as the elevator, and there is nowhere to hide any secrets, no room to have whispered conversations. There is only quiet and calm.
Something bangs on the outside of the elevator doors. I jump. The noise is big, like we are inside a drum.
A man’s voice is telling us he’s here to fix the elevator. He asks us to pull open the inside doors.
“You’re a strong girl,” Ahyi says, “use your muscles.”
I tiptoe to the door. The gap between the inside doors is larger than I thought, big enough to wedge the tips of my fingers in and then pull. I try three times, then the door on the left budges, just a little.
Behind it, where there should be the metal of the outer doors, there is a darkness, black as the middle of the night when I open my eyes and hear my parents talk, low and angry, when they think I’m asleep. The darkness seems to suck color out of the inside of the elevator, so everything turns gray. The moon on Ahyi’s embroidery glows. There is a warmth, and a bad smell, like a big mouth is slowly exhaling into my face.
I stop pulling at the door. It feels wrong, like I am looking through a seam to the darkness outside the world. I still sleep with a light on, even though I’m a big girl, but this is not the darkness at bedtime. It’s like there is a tiger in the darkness and it can see me, but I can’t see it. I can only feel its warmth and feel its breath.
With a creak the outer door of the elevator opens, and I see a hand and then the head of the repairman. He puts both his feet and legs into the elevator, and then jumps in, shaking the cabin. He pulls his toolbox in after him, setting it on the floor.
He wears dark gray pants and a white sleeveless shirt that needs a wash underneath a button up short sleeve. I smell sweat, beer, rotten teeth; it makes me think of Baba. He even looks like Baba, with his short buzz of hair, the deep creases around his mouth, and even the grime around his neck that Mama was always asking him to wash clean. The repairman greets us then turns and scratches the side of his neck. His thumbnail is thick and yellow, much longer than the rest of his nails, which are cut so short they look like they hurt.
He must fix something on the track, he says. The inner doors aren’t opening and closing with the outer, and it’s jammed. He pulls the outer elevator doors shut, leaving the inner open.
The Darkness is still there, but now it looks different, swirling like an oil slick, bubbling up into little points. It fills the tracks where doors run, it runs over and dribbles into the elevator cabin. I stumble back and knock against the side of the cabin, and it rings like a gong, and it feels like the car swings back and forth. I catch Ahyi’s eye—and she shakes her head at me.
I am not scared. If I get scared, maybe the elevator will fall, and we all die. If I get scared and tell someone how long Mama has been gone, maybe they’ll send me away, and then who will take care of her when she gets back? I am not scared. I am ten now, a big girl. Besides, even when your head gets chopped off, the wound is no bigger than the mouth of a bowl.
The man’s forearms shine with sweat as he digs at something in the track. He scratches at his neck again, long thumbnail grazing under the skin, and the Darkness seeps from his fingers into the line around his neck, where it runs fast across like water in a channel. His fingers come away stained with something dark and curdled like bad milk.
I gasp, but Ahyi puts a finger on her lips, and I try to swallow my surprise. Aloud she says to the repairman, “Thank you so much for coming to help us.”
I nod to her and keep quiet. He is the only one who can fix the elevator. But maybe if I told him he was hurt, or injured, he would notice too, and we would all be trapped in here forever.
We both watch the repairman, who keeps scraping something metal against the bottom of the track, and the dark clot on his hands mixes with the darkness in the tracks. The scratch on his neck is deeper now, even though he is no longer touching it, as if the darkness there has kept going, deeper into his body.
It happens suddenly when he braces his head against the inside of the elevator door.
The head tips on his neck, backwards, towards me. The man makes a sound—a gasp—then his body topples forward, and his head slides back a little more. The head falls off his shoulders, hitting his right leg on its way down before ringing on the floor and finally rolls to rest against the back left corner, facing me.
I think I hear the head gasping, but maybe it’s just the whooshing noise in my ears. I think of Baba again, passed out on the couch, lit cigarette burning a hole into his pants, something spilled on the floor. Sometimes I think he is dead when I find him like that, but he is never dead.
I look at Ahyi. In the gray light her face is different, she seems older.
“I have to help him,” I tell her, like I told Mama the last time Baba was home.
I walk toward the head.
Then it seems as if the elevator is much longer, and rows and rows of heads appear on both sides of me. Most of the heads are men, without any expression. They don’t even look real but like plastic masks. Many of them look like my Baba. There is one that looks the most like him, the time he came back from the sea and was tan and had a bruise on his cheek. Its mouth moves, and it is looking at me, trying to speak to me. I think about taking that head and fitting it to the repairman’s body. Maybe it means I can have Baba back again.
Mama told me Baba was still at sea, but I know she’s lying. He isn’t coming back. He wasn’t all bad, not really. He was nice to me and got me gifts and we laughed and had good times. Baba had a good laugh. And when he decides you’re his friend, you feel like everything is going to work out great. He was like one of those little gods we saw at the temple with four faces, three of them mad and one happy. When he was happy, Mama was happy, so I was happy.
But Baba should not take this man’s body; he can’t fix an elevator.
I walk to his head, “I’m sorry Baba,” I tell him, “this is not your body. I have to pick the right head.”
Then I am in the corner of the elevator, and there is just the repairman’s head on the floor. I pick it up with the tips of my fingers, feeling his cold rubbery ears. I look at the edge where the neck is separated from this body—there is no blood, just the line of grime, like oil, all around the wound.
I walk the head, with its squishy cheeks with the stubble, back to the body. The wound is no bigger than the mouth of a bowl, just like Mama says, and there is a spot where the head fits, like a plug into the socket, so I stick it there. But it doesn’t want to stay, and the moment I take my hands away the head almost topples again. Finally, I take the head off and lean it against the wall.
When I look over to Ahyi, she still hasn’t moved. She tilts her head at me, like she is waiting for something.
“May I borrow your needle and thread?” I ask.
She smiles.
“You will need your own,” she says. From the edge of her shirt, she pulls out a silver needle, curved like a fishing hook. She opens her other hand and shows me a spool of red thread.
The needle is heavy and cold. The eye of the needle is very small, but I thread it.
“Good girl,” says Ahyi. Then she pulls the red thread through the needle until it is doubled on itself, and ties two dead knots at the end. I walk to the head, picking it up, setting it on the body. I pick a place under the right ear to start so I am not looking at his face.
I push the needle through the skin, and I bring it back out. I pretend it is cloth. The needle catches on the darkness around the wound, and it twists around the red thread and seeps out and I get it on my fingers. Sometimes the flesh is rubbery, stretchy. Other times it is hard to push the needle through, or there are things under the skin that I only feel with the needle, both crunchy and mushy soft. The head is cold under my hands, but I am sweating.
It’s only after I wipe the sweat away with the back of my sewing hand that I realize I wiped some of the darkness on my right eye. I freeze. It tingles and burns and for a minute. My eye is full of tears, and I wait for something bad to happen, for my eye to pop out of my head. I hold my hands very still in my lap, so I don’t accidentally get more on my face again.
Eventually my eye stops watering. I blink and blink, until I can see again.
When I look up, Ahyi looks different. Older, very old even, but kind and beautiful, like a great Lady, like the statues of the goddess at the temple. She is dressed in fine clothes; her tunic is stiff with gold thread stitching; her neck and her wrists are laden with jewels.
From one of her pockets, Ahyi—the Lady—takes out a pack of tissues and gives a piece to me. I wipe at my hand and my eye. Then she gives me another piece of tissue and I wipe the man’s neck until the darkness is gone. Then the Lady gestures at me with her fingers. “Go on,” she says.
I start sewing again. When I work my way to the front of the body, I see the mouth open, the pale gray tongue, and smell a cold wet smell, but I keep going. It takes a lot of stitches to sew a neck back on, even though my stitches are not fancy.
I feel the warmth in the skin under my hands when I tie off my knot. The repairman’s eyes open. He looks at me, and his face is not like melted plastic or like my Baba’s face.
“Can you fix the elevator, please?” I ask him. “And don’t scratch your neck anymore.”
He nods. Then he gets up, coughs, pats himself as if to get used to his body, and starts working on the elevator again.
I hold out the needle for the Lady, but she shakes her head, so I work the needle’s point through the fabric at the bottom of my shirt, in and out again until it is fastened at the edge of my shirt, where it looks like a pattern, a sliver of the moon, or a silverfish. The spool of red thread I put in my pocket.
The repairman makes progress. The inside doors are moving in sync with the outside ones. The darkness is still there, but he doesn’t touch it this time. Once I see the man’s hand creeping up toward his neck, where the big scar and the row of stitches are hidden under his collar, but he moves it away before he can scratch.
He pushes the button, and this time, the elevator works. We all go down, down, down.
In the lobby the bell dings and the repairman walks out, holding his box of tools. He does not look back.
In the daylight, the Lady looks even more beautiful, and I don’t know why the security guard in the lobby doesn’t see it, why no one else sees it.
Then I hear the familiar steps, clip, clop, coming through the doors.
Mama wears a thin coat with no scarf. Her hair is messy, her face red. Her eyes go wide when she sees me, and she frowns, but when she enters the elevator and pats the back of my head where my hair stands up, her hand is gentle.
She says, “Have you come to look for me?” and her voice is sad, not angry. She smells like cigarettes.
“I want to go home,” I tell her. Mama reaches out and takes hold of my hand.
The Lady presses the button for our floor.
As the elevator doors close, I look at our joined hands, and I see a line, running up the middle of Mama’s wrist up into her shirt until it appears at the base of her neck, a lone pale gape, like the gills of a dead fish.
Then I see too, the cut on my own hand, snaking out of the bandage down my finger, curving through the meat of my palm.
I understand it now: the cut on my finger, the slice running up her arm. Her hand holds my hand, and we are the same; the sharpness of life carves us both.
I reach down and gently touch the silver needle at the edge of my shirt.
© 2025 by Shiwei Zhou
3363 words
Shiwei Zhou is a Chinese-American writer of speculative fiction; her short stories can be found in Asimov’s and khōréō. She lives in the Midwest with her family and a golden retriever named Mango.
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