Six Days
After weeks of anticipation, Chung’s mother dropped his sister off at Rock Springs campgrounds outside Junction City. His sister, Jordan, would spend six days counseling twelve-year-olds at D.A.R.E. camp. Chung breathed relief when his mother returned alone. Chung loved and sometimes feared his sister. Often felt her impulses, the direction of her anger, before they surfaced. Sensed in every moment that she and his mother were a breath away from a fight. And so, though he loved Jordan, he greeted these days with hope. With release.
That first day, spent by her trip out of county and back, Chung’s mother ordered Pizza Hut, two grease-licked cheese personals and a fat two-liter of Diet Pepsi for her and Code Red for him.
Chung ate slowly—let the mozzarella dissolve over his tongue. He and his mother extended, seasoned every moment with all the fat that they could. They watched the Viggo Mortensen flicks and the Matthew McConaugheys and the Christian Bales. Chung’s mother knew nothing, he supposed, about the secret well these faces fed in him. She believed it was his kindness that allowed her to revel in them when her daughter never stomached them. What joy he recognized in his mother, to shower herself so keenly in the things she loved. The indulgences her daughter denied her when she was near.
“Don’t waste the crusts,” his mother said as Chung stood over their open-mouthed trash can. “Buddy,” his mother chirped at their tawny little shih tzu. “Buddy wants some crusts, doesn’t he? Don’t you, baby boy, baby, baby?”
The voice his mother used. It reminded him of his earliest days, before her affection was muddied by all the years—his father’s fights, the separation, his sister’s fights, their inability to be apart. Just emancipate yourself. Leave Chung and Buddy and me alone. We’ll be better off without you.
This Mother could be hateful. His other mother, the sweet-voiced one he remembered as That Mother, existed in the sparse memories of his youngest years—big gaping-mouth laughs and singing Aretha Franklin and playing detective. When they still lived on the farm and her husband had more sober moments than not. Before the money dried up and the crops died and she snuck them into the city while her husband was in rehab.
A snap of her fingers brought Chung back to This Mother. How suddenly she shifted voices from baby, baby boy to selfish, stupid girl. She and Jordan’s last hours-long fight two weeks before had switched on a dime. It started with his mother doing the grocery shopping, which Jordan usually took care of. Their bank account was always hundreds of dollars negative, a kindness their banker allowed, but it loomed over his sister more than any of them. If Chung’s mother was left to do the shopping, she would come home with a $300 ticket and more junk food than staples. Birthdays and holidays went the same: hundreds of dollars they didn’t have spent on gifts they didn’t need. Two weeks ago, their mother did the shopping while Jordan was at a friend’s house. She came home to a counter full of Ruffles and Ritz crackers and Cheez Whiz and soda. No bread. No milk. No fruit or vegetables or a whisper of nutrition. It drove Jordan over the edge.
“They’re about to close our cable account. The rent is overdue.”
“You’re trying to starve us,” was his mother’s response. “All you ever get is crap.”
Somehow, it ended how all of their fights did:
Jordan shouting, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t.”
And his mother insisting, “You’re going to get Chung taken away. That’s what you want. You’re gonna land your little brother in foster care.”
Often, Chung felt sorry for his sister, how though she had as much a role in starting any fight they had, she never bore their mother’s words with the necessary forgetfulness.
How much he had forgotten, Chung realized, looking down the throat of the trash.
“Chung,” his mother called, that edge just restrained. “Toss them.” She rolled her arm in mimicry, like the time—how had he forgotten?—that she took their GameCube and hurled it. Like a pro. A shot-putter without the wind-up. He loved her but he also feared her.
“Chung, you’re getting that look.” She drew up her hand, ran it in a line down her face.
“I’m fine.” He tossed the crusts, and Buddy swooped down.
“Good, good baby boy,” his mother purred.
That second day, they made root beer floats and ate Cheez Whiz and watched through Lord of the Rings, as they had done and would do over and over all their years, always trudging toward Mordor and getting stranded in their descent.
Chung had shaken off the anxiety of the previous day. Discarded unwanted memories, tried his best to value their brief reprieve.
When they had finished LOTR, Chung’s mother loaded Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In her younger years, his mother could break through three boards with one kick, splinter ribs with her fist. That Mother had been a fourth degree black belt, a Tae Kwon Do master, a teacher. She and Chung’s father owned a school for two years when Chung was four and five years old. They would spar and jump over the other’s back to split wood amid a roaring audience of children, Chung and his sister among them. Those were the days when they could tussle in public and forget the source of their aches outside of the school. When visits by the police had yet to become routine.
Chung’s mother fell asleep halfway into the movie. She had taken her medication—a growing cocktail of clonazepam and Pristiq and pain relievers meant to dampen all those years of sparring, the shock of all those boards. Chung stayed with her through her snores, through the movie’s end and longer, feeling Buddy’s hot breath against his hand and reveling, for once, in their silence.
On the third day, Chung’s friend Kaleb called their landline. Asked, “Can I come over?” Chung knew it was better not to ask, his friend calling in the same manner his sister called her friends when she needed to get away, only Kaleb lived three hundred paces away, in the even shittier apartments across Fairway Drive.
“Yeah. Bring some trunks. We can swim.”
Chung’s mother was an hour-deep into Reign of Fire, one of those blessed features offering both McConaughey and Bale, and though she overheard Chung’s conversation, she didn’t forbid him coming, as she often did. She had been friends with Kaleb’s mother when they first moved, but after a year she ended up yet another bridge burned. Kaleb’s mother could only stomach so many you’re a bad influence gripes. Chung’s mother could only look past so many if you had stayed married gibes.
At the pool, Chung and Kaleb wore clingy swim trunks, both having grown since the summer before. Both without money for new pairs.
Chung knew there was never a right time to ask what was wrong, so he and his friend treaded water, took turns holding their breath, played a sad, simple game of Marco Polo.
Eventually, others came. The twin eight-year-olds from building C. The geezer from building A. The drunk, who had once touched his sister’s ass in the damp, subterrestrial laundry room the complex shared. Chung and Kaleb sat on the side of the pool, felt the coarse lip of its side, pedaled their feet. It was summer, ripe and sunbaked, and they were two preteen boys on the cusp of their first year of high school. Still, all Kaleb wanted to talk about was his mom.
“She’s always staying out late like that’s better than bringing her dipshit boyfriends home. She’s always stealing my cigs, man.”
Kaleb’s mother worked two minimum-wage jobs—never enough for the four of them. Kaleb had two jobs, worked the maximum possible hours by skipping class—never enough. His two younger sisters spent their summer days alone. “It just ain’t right, man.”
Chung listened but had no advice to offer. Never did. He watched the twins cannonball over and over, before he heard Kaleb snicker beside him. He followed his friend’s stare.
Chung’s mother, in her forty-nine-year-old body, in her over-washed bikini, shuffled across the pavement in bitten-through flip flops. Each step showed her years, Chung thought, and then he coughed, ashamed. His stomach soured. He focused on a leaf listing across the water.
“Get it, get it,” Kaleb said, extending a high-five his mother’s way.
His mother smiled closed-lipped and tied up her hair, prickle-haired underarms pale and untouched by the sun. She waved to another neighbor, the thirty-something mechanic from their building. The only neighbor who, though he had to have heard the many fights between his mother and sister, never knocked on their door. He smiled but didn’t wave. Took the spot furthest from them.
Chung’s mother shifted her swimsuit. As she stood and made her journey toward their neighbor, Chung looked away.
Chung and Kaleb stayed longer than anyone else. Wore their excursion on their burnt skin and chapped lips. By sunset, Chung and his friend needed hydration. Chung headed back to his building. His mother had spent only an hour in the pool, her brief flirtation with their neighbor vague and harmless. Chung was thankful. He tensed at the thought of the neighbor’s rejection, her humbling. He found himself suddenly aware of all his mother’s vulnerabilities, spots too sore for even his sister to wield.
Chung found Buddy sleeping on the couch, which was also Chung’s mother’s bed. Heard the air conditioner chugging away—the only noise, he thought, with the TV black. Dead. It took him a second to catch the other tone, soft and hidden. Chung didn’t move. Knew, in a sense, that some shift had occurred in his absence. He crept to the flimsy screen separating his sister’s room from the living room. He peered, knowing now, as the air conditioner sputtered off, that other pitch emanated from in there. The curve of his mother’s back, prostrate, startled him.
She curled on his sister’s bed and didn’t weep, exactly, but stifled a noise that eked out. Like the laggard breaths of a kitten Chung’s mother had tried to save, back in their farm days. It was one day into this world and, for all his mother’s index-finger compressions and puffs of half-breath, it passed. Poor thing. No hope of life. When Chung wanted to cry, knew how pointless that desire was, he remembered that little black kitten and how his tears had felt then. Weeping through memory. Hurting through ghosts.
He tiptoed back to the door. Forgot the soda he had promised his friend and, once back at the pool and chest-deep in the water, closed his eyes, formed his mouth, strained his muscles, tried his best to call forth a specter better fit to mend them.
“You good?” Kaleb called. Chung softened, drifted.
Open. Open. Open.
No ghost came.
Day Four. His mother tired of the grainy texture and busted speakers of their hundred-pound TV. “What do you think?” she asked Chung, fingering the newspaper listings. Immediately, Chung spotted Kung Fu Hustle, that martial-arts film with the rubbery CGI and smooth choreography, as Kaleb had put it. Kaleb was an expert at appearing older than he was—buying cigarettes and full-timing and getting into R-rated movies. Sometimes, Chung envied him.
“I’ve heard it’s good.” It had been out for six weeks, and Chung was sure it would drop off the theaters any week now.
“You heard it was good? From who?”
Chung saw how he might lose her.
“It was one of Jordan’s friends. She mentioned on the last bus ride before summer that it was the best movie she’s seen in years.”
Chung’s mother nodded. “Fine, fine,” she said, laying out a plate of Cheez Whiz for Buddy. They fanned their faces in the quick, baking descent to the car and blasted the AC on the five-minute drive to Salina Central Mall.
Because it was a Thursday matinee, and because the movie was in the death crawl of its last theatrical showings, Chung and his mother found only a half-dozen other viewers peppered throughout the room. They had gotten the fixings: buttered popcorn, infant-sized drinks, and Laffy Taffy, which paired wonderfully with the salty popcorn.
Chung and his mother gleefully watched the preview teasing Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams’ chemistry in Red Eye. All that promise wrapped up in one pressurized cabin. Cillian’s frigid eyes. His velvety Cork drawl. That thrill buoyed Chung into Kung Fu Hustle’s opening music, propellant brass and a writhing string rally.
The hundredfold, suit-clad Axe Gang and their suave leader, Brother Sum, terrorize a city. At their casino, Brother Sum and his thugs chant, hustle, throw their axes in the air. They are insurmountable foes that—as a title card reads—only spare the poorest tenements from their wrath.
Chung pricked at these first violences. For all their adventure film watching, the orange-washed Chinese Western style of Stephen Chow felt unmatched. He observed his mother from his periphery, braced himself against her anger at the film’s gore. The moment never came. She didn’t frown or lean in to admonish Chung. No. She laughed as the story poured through Pigsty Alley, a gray, crowded apartment building owned by a sly, silk-pajamaed landlord and his rollered-hair and nightgown-wearing wife.
The landlady. It wasn’t that she shared physical qualities with Chung’s mother. But her bent posture, her cigarette-parted lips and furrowed brow, her threats to her tenants to ration water, burn down a store for late rent. Chung held back his laughs and cringed as she slapped a bare-assed buffoon and leveled her husband.
Again, Chung waited for his mother’s dissatisfaction, her insistence that they leave right then and there. She simply watched the film, and so he, finally, did too.
Enter Sing, played by Chow, a sleazebag who fakes his way into the Axe Gang and accidentally rallies them against Pigsty Alley, only to discover that three tenants—a tailor, a baker, a laborer—are kung fu masters. Defeated, Sum hires two gray-clad zither-playing assassins. Easy, quick, they finish off the laborer. Wound the others in a masterful action scene filled with music-wrought daggers and a well-timed revelation: The landlord and landlady are also kung fu masters. The landlady’s ability comes from her endless lung capacity and glass-shattering screams.
As she defeats the zither players, shreds them to their dainties, she and her husband decide enough is enough. They have a message for the Axe Gang: Stop fucking around.
They appear as by magic in Brother Sum’s car, landlady in back, arms wrapped around Sum and his accomplice. Cigarette aloft, eyes fierce, rollers ominous, she gestures toward Sum. No more playing. Clenches her fists, cracks her knuckles. She brushes her thumb across her nose, all ferocity, power.
Chung watched all of this with exhilaration, but, against his desires, his bladder pounded. He exited the theater, relieved himself and, on his return, saw his mother’s silhouette. Paused. Every part of her blue-lined shadow shook, unnerved. He didn’t know if he should take his seat. He glanced at the other moviegoers. Maybe he had missed something. No. Every other eye proved dry. So he took a seat two rows back and lingered for—he didn’t know what. For her to calm? For her to look for him? By now, the landlady and landlord faced down a new, enigmatic foe: the Beast, a toad-like martial artist fresh out of prison. The landlady continued her fighting, strong and quick and tireless, and finally Chung understood, he thought. Her fifty-year-old body still thrived, fought, charmed. It had been too much, seeing what might have awaited her if things had gone differently.
When his mother had stilled, he retrieved his seat next to her. Waited for her acknowledgement. It didn’t come. The film ended. Chung followed his mother out of the theater. They didn’t speak. Chung tensed, worried, felt guilt for his suggestion, sadness that it had hurt her in a way he hadn’t anticipated.
When she turned on the car and turned off the radio, Chung braced himself.
His mother leaned over to him, eyes sharp, mouth pressed close. He thought of the farm, of their games, of her smile to steady him. No. She waved her fingers, raised an eyebrow. She cracked her knuckles. Thumbed her nose.
Chung hesitated.
His mother smiled. Laughed. When they were halfway towards home, Chung noticed his mother’s silenced phone alight, call incoming.
His sister.
He didn’t say anything.
On their walk toward the apartment, she began her dance—smooth, natural. Hips in motion, hair bouncing. Chung, following, rallied the groove too. Kicked his feet up the stairs. Swayed his shoulders, axe in hand.
Chung and his mother entered their apartment and pulled up the blinds. His mother grabbed their boom box and popped in Aretha. Belted. Snapped. Picked up a cheesy-faced Buddy and held him to the sun.
Chung threw off his shoes and grabbed pizza and pop and Cheez Whiz and crackers.
He could curse himself for all the ways he had shrunk her down, entertained that This Mother and That Mother were two discrete identities and not one person embodying both, but for now he focused on the music, the salt and sugar coating his mouth. He summoned up the light. Closed off that gate that made him vessel, not man.
He wished, in a way, that his sister could be here, that this diversion was possible in her presence. He knew better than to hope.
And so he writhed. Though they didn’t know the Hustle, they threw up their fists, wielded their axes. Rolled. Dipped. Chanted. They slicked their skin with sweat, kicked and blocked and soared.
Chloe Chun Seim’s work has appeared in LitMag, Free State Review, Potomac Review, and Fractured Lit, among others. She is the winner of the 2021 Anton Chekov Flash Fiction Award. Her illustrated novel-in-stories, Churn, won the 2022 George Garrett Prize for Fiction and will be published by Texas Review Press in Fall 2023. She holds an MFA from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.