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Thursday, November 7, 2024

Ducklings

For days this story has been haunting me. On the way to and from work on the metro I am looking at my reflection halved by the opening doors at every stop, wondering how to begin. It is a story that evokes my father’s voice. I can only imagine how he would pause, how his face would crumble with emotion, how he’d then become flustered at the inescapable vulnerability of aging.  It’s imagining him in this way that makes me obsessed, because I too, am becoming this person. Or I too, always was this person, and now I see it in our family—we are always on the verge of tears.

I am at work on the 9th floor of a building in Shanghai overlooking a maze of windows and pinprick people making wordless conversations stories down in the grass. In an instant of longing to delete myself from the country, my father sends me a message. In Los Angeles, it’s 10pm, and I imagine him hunched at the glow of his laptop and the curtainless window in his room that overlooks the pitch dark backyard lawn. The message is a photo: his right foot forward on a dirt path, a few patches of crabgrass framing the edge. At the tip of his hiking shoe–a friendly, fat brown rabbit. We agree through a few exchanges–someone’s lost pet. He admits he felt conflicted about leaving it there, exposed, but that he did. It reminds him of something else.

“Last time I thought I was saving ducklings, and I was the cause of all their demise,” he writes. I stand up at my desk and think of ‘demise.’ A word I hardly used over the past decade in this country, although some moments recalled felt more than applicable.  In reading it, in imagining his voice, it feels like handling a blade with wet hands.

“One year there were ducklings walking all around the cul-de-sac,” he writes. “I’ve never seen anything like it before. The mama duck was not too far behind.” He begins to type more. I imagine him plinking away at his phone with two fingers, etching out clear and correctly-spelled words.

“I was worried for their safety, so I came up with this plan to capture them and bring them to Tri-City Park where they have a man-made lake.” It makes sense. This is a man who roosts in an empty nest with a once-stray cat on his lap. So he captures the ducklings, he writes, but their mother flies off.

I am older and can sense the story, but there is a private ghost–a teenage voice from our old days of screams and door-slams. And she would say: “Are you dumb? Why would you make that mistake?” But imagining his face, I don’t reply.  Instead I imagine.

He is in the driveway, panicked. The cat carrier under his arm. Or maybe he’s lined a cardboard box with a rag towel we’d use to polish the cars. Driving on the freeway, making reassuring animal coos, peeking into the box while swerving to merge lanes. The ducklings bopping and squeaking around in the car. At a red light he taps his foot, clears his throat, the sunset is being poured. He catches a glimpse of the lake from the freeway and then pulls around to park. He struggles with the box. He talks to them. He approaches a mallard and his hen. Tips the box’s edge onto the bank, watching ducklings bubble out and make a beeline for the strange open waters. Motherless togetherness. Running toward the hen and her mallard. It’s a breath-holding moment, as they seem to paddle away into the sunset, evaporating like the end of a film.  He could have been safe, had he turned around. The biblical, mythological implications of not looking back. But he stays. And the mallard and the hen fly off, leaving that handful of small, soft tokens to darkening waters. He watches from across the pond, his eyes widening. Then the osprey dive down. One by one with their piercing yellow eyes, white heads and claws extended. Snatching bodies, each by each. Tufts of young feathers float down as fallen leaves. Too far away to hear a cry. The pond is still. The word of the day is ‘demise.’

 “There was nothing I could do,” he writes. A sentence as heavy as bricks. A sentence overwritten by history. How many times and by who has this been written? Outside, the campus quad is empty. My window is painted in droplets. Someone’s phone in the next row is ringing.

He explains what  I know but didn’t say. That he was wrong. That they could have been safe, there in the cul-de-sac. The cul-de-sac isn’t the worst place to be. Of course, there are always red tails gliding from lamppost to lamppost. Of course there are always cars, and cruel children. Coyotes, too. “When ducks bear young, they find a water source,” he writes, textbook distant. Half epiphany. Half reminder. “In this case, one of our neighbors has a pool. Once the mother duck flies away, it never returns.” I imagine him Googling these questions. I imagine the sunset in the curtainless window and his cat laying on the quilt in peace, asleep. What is it about the idea of never returning?

“Hopefully the owner is looking for it, because it won’t last very long outside,” he writes, about the rabbit in the photo that I am staring at while it rains. “I think that was the best that I could do.”

***
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Charlotte San Juan
Charlotte San Juan
Charlotte San Juan is a Shanghai-based writer and grappler who grew up in Southern California. She is the former poetry editor of California-based lit mag East Jasmine Review and currently works for a Sino-US joint-venture university. Some of her previous work can be found in Cha: An Asian Literary Magazine, and The Fem Literary Magazine.
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