JY Tan
Issue 1: RISE, July 2023
She waters the purple wolfsbane and points at it and calls it a nightmare. You wake in the middle of the night to see her drinking black bile from your cup. You return home to see her on the home-phone and feel nothing but static. And you hear nothing but static. Her mouth is dark matter. Her hips are a coffin. She’s calling the funeral director, calling your estranged brother, calling your dead aunt. She’s calling all the hospitals and churches in the world and leaves no word for you. Some mornings you wake up with her lying on your chest like a clingy dog. Dried drool all over your white shirt. You hate her because she steals your painkillers, holds up photo frames of people whom you promised to forget and laughs. She laughs, the kind of laugh you let out when telephone lines are breaking and roosters have forgotten how to sing. You hate her because of how she leaves handprints all over your bathroom floor, over your pillows and bath-towels. How she likes to strip you against your bedroom wall, exposing cellulite and pustule, skin and vein, all while never looking you in the eye. And you cannot blame her for it if you can barely tell between her and your own shadow. You cannot blame her when despite everything, she puts her hand on your forehead like a mother, wakes you up for breakfast, buys you fruits fresh from the market to cut up into neat little slices. The sun is never up when she’s around, but she slaps your clock face-down and cleans up after your fatigue. She arrives when your bones call once every 3 weeks, then returns home to make a nest in your heart. On one of your walks alone, you end up by a river and see her sitting on the ashy rocks with broken glass in her hands. You ask doesn't it hurt? To which she does not respond. Silence washes the night out. You want to take her by the neck, throw her into water. But back at home, new peonies are blooming and your houseplants seem to be breathing again. The flickering lights almost feel like heartbeats.
JY Tan is a student from Singapore. Her work appears in Salamander, Lunch Ticket and Rust + Moth among other journals. She also edits for Body Without Organs (on hiatus). She enjoys learning about love languages, and creating Spotify playlists. Visit her at jy tan.