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墨書 Inktalez
Chapter 2: The Bitterness and Loss of Unrequited Love
The sound of blood droplets hitting the ground echoed in my ears for three days. The trajectory of that drop fell like a rusty pendulum, carving seventy-two uneven indentations into my retina. At this moment, I curled up on the apartment's bay window, the pearl necklace around my neck heated from being rubbed repeatedly—seventeen tears slipped through my mother's fingers as she took her last breath, each one wrapped in the lingering scent of disinfectant from the prenatal check-up report.
"Miss Qing Yu, there's a merger meeting at ten." Zhou Yi's knock on the door was as precise as the frayed thread of his cuff, gratingly orderly. In the mirror, my lips, stained with lipstick, cracked like a dried riverbed. For the twelfth time, I felt Lin Yichen's platinum cufflink dig into the hidden pocket of my bra, its metallic edge pressing against my heart like a sharpened knife, still smeared with jasmine powder shaken off by Su Ya at last night's celebration.
As the elevator doors opened on the twenty-sixth floor, Su Ya's South Sea gold earrings sparkled with fragmented light. The way she tiptoed to adjust Lin Yichen's tie perfectly mirrored a moment captured in a yellowed photo album where my mother tied a noose around my father's neck. As her chiffon sleeves slipped down, those fresh bruises were so vivid they could almost bleed, reminiscent of the peach that shattered when my mother fell.
Suddenly, Lin Yichen grasped her nape and pressed his lips against hers in a deep kiss by the floor-to-ceiling window. Sunlight filtered through her trembling eyelashes, casting spiderweb-like shadows on the carpet; each thread precisely replicated the blood web that spread beneath my mother. As I stepped back, I knocked over a coffee cup that spilled heart-shaped stains. Just as Su Ya's fingertips were about to touch the documents, Lin Yichen bound her wrist with a blood-stained bandage.
"Be careful of infection." His voice was laced with honeyed poison, coaxing like a fawn caught in a trap. The chill from his Italian leather shoes pressed against my instep overlapped with the dull pain of toes crushed beneath a morgue's gurney. I counted the blood spots seeping from Su Ya's bandage and suddenly realized they matched exactly with the data on my mother's prenatal report.
The fluorescent lights in the convenience store began to flicker at two in the morning. As soju mixed with painkillers slid down my throat, the mirrored shelves shattered into fragments reminiscent of that night when my mother fell—her white dress blooming in a puddle while seventeen pearls reflected Lin Yichen’s jasmine scent as he took me back to the Lin family home; each petal concealed jagged edges of a torn prenatal report.
"Whiskey is better for pain relief." Zhou Yi’s shadow suddenly engulfed the entire mirror. When he snatched the bottle away, his calloused hand split open, droplets of blood landing on the barcode label; those numbers twisted into flames consuming my mother’s belongings in an incinerator. Amidst the crunching sound of military boots crushing ice shards, I heard the metallic echo of bullets being chambered in his holster—much like the sound of my mother’s pearl necklace snapping as she bit through its thread.
When morning light pierced through the curtains, I found myself clutching Zhou Yi's dog tag. The metal edge inscribed with "LYC" was obscured by bloodstains and suddenly resonated strangely with Lin Yichen's cufflink. Deep within my vanity drawer lay my mother's prenatal report curled into an arc resembling her falling white dress; nestled between its pages was a dead fetus ultrasound report that bore an uncanny resemblance to the pattern on the medicine box Su Ya handed me this morning.
Su Ya reappeared in the president's office, her neck adorned with purple hickeys like decaying mandrakes. She slid the medicine box into Lin Yichen’s suit pocket with an ease that resembled that of a married couple. The hospital logo embossed on the back of the contraceptive pill instruction sheet stung my eyes painfully—last week when I woke up from surgery at that hospital, a bronze cross hovered above me where it was nailed to my uterus.
Lin Yichen suddenly raised his hand and brushed against Su Ya's collarbone; jasmine powder fell from his fingertips onto my desk. As he turned away, the arc of his suit flared out perfectly overlapping with the air stirred by the white cloth that once covered my mother's body being wheeled away. I pressed down on the cufflink digging painfully into me and suddenly heard a faint crack—the sound of the seventeenth pearl on my necklace bursting apart echoed like a mournful cry curling up from within that prenatal report in an incinerator.
As Zhou Yi’s military boots echoed down the hallway, I felt new serrated marks etched into the back of my dog tag. Those uneven grooves formed numbers that matched exactly with the time of my mother’s fall. Outside the floor-to-ceiling window, clouds suddenly loomed low; in the glass reflection, Su Ya’s figure retouching her makeup gradually morphed into my mother’s finger painted with vermilion as she pressed one last pearl into my bleeding heart.
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