SIX YOUTHFUL ENCOUNTERS WITH DEATH — JULIE CHEN
/The spirit we summoned while Ouija boarding in Kathy’s car, parked outside Chuck E. Cheese, was named “Tqoqp.” He died at age fourteen, a teenage ghost, probably while chaperoning a younger sibling in the ball pit, its fatal rainbow cascades. We asked if he was gay and the pen we’d all hooked our pinky fingers around wobbled toward 6. In hindsight that must have meant the high end of the Kinsey Scale.
“RIP JAMIE THE LEAF BUG!!!” is a YouTube video with 10 views, 3 dislikes. A shaky camera follows a hand digging a two-inch diameter hole in the ground with a plastic spork. Another set of hands spills from a Solo cup a bright green bug, its six legs crumpled at acute angles. Death comes at you sharply, precisely. As the displaced soil is sprinkled over the body, and the cup inverted as a tombstone, let’s waste time…Chasing cars…moans a one-hit-wonder, pitch-shifted to avoid copyright infringement.
The skater boys next to us dropped a Costco red velvet cake on the ground. We squatted around the bloody mess and dipped our fingers into the cream cheese frosting. Jess stood back, her crossed arms crushing her waist-length hair against her chest. This is gross and those guys are cute, she hissed.
When we started bringing hand mirrors to school, we’d flash them in the eyes of students across the quad. In the period after lunch, I’d check if my eyeliner was smudged. Inevitably it looked amateurish, terrible, so I’d wipe it away with my index knuckle.
Do you think of me, as much as I think of you? Do you embellish the past like I do? I shove it deep, let it steep, then flourish, in nostalgia. Every story I tell is a resurrection or an open casket.
Back then we could create anything out of nothing: life, death, happiness, sadness, reasons to crush, reasons to hate ourselves. Today I’m young enough to play hooky but old enough to try to spend that time “productively,” if I’m not going to be rolling around in the grass with you. I sit in the park, and my laptop dies on my kneecaps. I’ll never love again.
Julie Chen is a writer from San Jose, CA, based in Brooklyn. She was a 2019-2020 Fulbright Fellow researching a creative nonfiction project on the Chinese community in Prato, Italy. Her work is forthcoming in The Shanghai Literary Review and has been published in IDK Magazine, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Hyphen.
