I wait until they are ready, until all the noises have ceased before I open the doors and the windows, and watch silent as they spill into the night, hungrier and more dangerous than any prince combined.

in the rustle of pages

“Auntie, are you ready to come home with us?”

Li Jing looks up from the knot of lavender yarn in her hands, knitting needles ceasing their silvery chatter. The old woman smiles, head cocked. There is something subtly cat-like about the motion, a smoothness that belies the lines time has combed into her round face, a light that burns where life has waned.

“I’m sorry?” Li Jing says, voice firmer than one would expect. She fumbles for her hearing aid, finds it in a graveyard of yellowed books and colored fabrics. “What did you say?”

“We want you to live with us, auntie. So we can take care of you. Make sure you have everything you ever want.” The guest is a woman, too young by Li Jing’s count, the planes of her cinnamon face virginal, unscarred by wrinkles. She speaks both too loudly and too slowly, Li Jing thinks as she counts the faults in her visitor’s diction. Where consonants should exist, there are clumsy substitutes, ‘D’s where ‘ths’ should hold vigil. But Li Jing does not correct her, even though the gracelessness appalls. The fugue of youth is trouble enough, she reasons.

“Live with you?” Li Jing says, abrupt, when her thoughts empty enough to allow space for the present. “But this is my home. And—”

“It’s the best solution. And we’ve discussed it for weeks already, talked it over with the whole family.” The gentleness bites chunks from Li Jing’s patience. It’s a familiar softness, a delicacy of speech reserved for the invalid or the very young, a lilt that declares its recipient incapable. Arrogance, Li Jing thinks, but again says nothing.

The younger woman, barely a larvae of a thing, lowers to her knees, hands piled over Li Jing’s own. “Your husband—we don’t want you to be alone when he—you know.”

Li Jing looks to where her husband lies snoring, already more monument than man, a pleasing arrangement of dark oak and book titles, elegant calligraphy travelling his skin like a road map. The old woman allows herself a melancholy smile. The ache of loss-to-come is immutable, enormous. But there is pride too.

In the armoire beside their marital bed, sleeps a chronology of her husband’s metamorphosis: scans inventorizing the tiling on the walls of his heart, the stairwells budding in his arteries. For all of the hurt it conjures, Li Jing thinks his transformation beautiful too.