Blue Light by Huina Zheng

Mei bought these silkworms on Taobao. She said a silkworm’s life cycle lasted four to six weeks, and by the time this batch spun their silk, her body would more or less be properly conditioned again too. But what she bought were not ordinary silkworms. They were advertised as “colored silkworms.” In the online shop photos they looked beautiful, bright red and green, but when they arrived, they looked nothing like the pictures. They lay sluggishly inside a Wing Wah mooncake tin, the one I had lent her, like specimens soaked in formalin for three days. Their bluish gray skin was covered in irregular dark spots, as if someone had stabbed them with pencil tips, or as if they had some kind of skin disease. Some had strange lumpy growths rising from their backs. Me said these were called “dragon horn silkworms,” a rare breed whose silk came out golden yellow. But when I looked at those bumps, all I could think of were the scabs left after squeezing pimples. Mei said the cocoons could sell for a good price, but when she poured them into the mooncake tin, three were already dead. The rest writhed weakly, as if barely clinging to life. Mei said she had consulted Baidu and planned to shine blue light on them to stimulate their growth.

“Even though the flashlight gives off white light,” she said, “I wrapped it in blue cellophane, so the light turns blue.”

Every evening, when I pushed my little paint chipped snack cart home, I would see her on the dim balcony shining the flashlight into the mooncake tin, chewing gum, the sound of her chewing like raindrops tapping against my back. Five days passed, and another eight died. The survivors looked even more listless, curled up with a layer of white powder coating their skin, as if they were growing mold. I asked if she had demanded compensation from the seller. She said she had bought the cheapest kind, the ones without any “live arrival guarantee.” When she said that, I realized that since coming to stay with me, she had never paid a single yuan toward food expenses.

She was the younger sister of my ex-girlfriend, the only girlfriend I had ever had. Three weeks ago, she knocked on my door. When I opened it, I thought it was my landlord again, coming to demand rent, but instead there stood a woman I had never met before, broad shouldered and thick backed, half a head taller than me. After introducing herself, she said she needed a temporary place to stay. She explained that after her seventh failed IVF attempt, the doctor had advised her to recuperate first, and her mother-in-law had sent her back to her family home. But her sister had already emigrated with their parents, to that beautiful country we all knew without naming. She looked nothing like her slender sister, but there was something in her eyes that made me take her in.

“How did you find my address?” I asked. Over the past three years, I had moved four times.

She told me that if you truly wanted to find someone, you always could. Her sister had told her that although my hair was short, my feelings were long, and that if she was ever in trouble, she could come to me. I could not understand why, if her sister trusted me so much, she had left me saying that the man with the hairy chest gave her a sense of “security” I could never provide.

Mei claimed she wanted to recover her health, but the way she lived said otherwise. She said the body should be treated like weeds, because weeds had the strongest vitality. The moment she stepped into my apartment, she rummaged through my snack cart, tore open a packet of vegetarian beef strips, and stuffed them into her mouth. I told her that despite the meaty flavor, the stuff was not meat. It was not even soy. Just flour, chili, and MSG made in some illegal little workshop.

“It’s fine,” Mei said, chili oil glistening at the corners of her mouth. “I’m not picky about food. My sister’s the opposite. She checks ingredient labels on everything. Preservatives this, GMOs that.” She finished one packet of vegetarian beef and tore open another. “But after emigrating, she gained twenty kilos and started losing tons of hair.”

“Did the doctors figure out why?” I asked.

Mei smiled, revealing teeth stained red with artificial coloring. “Her new hair growing out is dry yellow, like autumn grass.”

The silkworms lay motionless inside the mooncake tin like forgotten pills, white and bluish gray, some already turning black. I curled up on the sofa scrolling through my phone, watching from the corner of my eye as she shone the flashlight on one silkworm, then another. I took a packet of “vegetarian grilled lamb ribs” from my cart, tore it open, and sprinkled the red seasoning powder over the mulberry leaves.

“There are antibiotics in this stuff,” I said. “People found ofloxacin and ciprofloxacin in spicy strips. They kill bacteria.”

Mei aimed the flashlight’s blue glow at the powder. Tiny flecks glittered under the light like crushed pills. “That’s why children nowadays keep getting fatter,” she said. “Because they consume too many drugs.”

I told her no, they got fat because these snacks were too high in calories.

“But they aren’t sick, are they?”

I admitted they were not.

Mei said that once the silkworms spun their silk, she would pull out the golden threads and sew a little pouch.

“What for?” I asked.

“To hold mugwort,” she said. “You hang it over your stomach to warm the womb.”

I said nothing. She lifted her shirt, and the blue light fell across her lower abdomen. Her mouth made a da, da, da sound, like a very slow rhythm being tapped out. I could not tell whether she was counting silkworms or imitating the sound of them chewing mulberry leaves. The dark brown skin under the blue light turned bruised purple, like an old contusion spreading downward from her navel. I pressed it lightly with my fingertips. Beneath the skin were hard little knots like pebbles embedded in flesh. When I pressed them, they did not move. They stayed fixed in place. She said they were marks left by injections.

“Ten minutes every day,” she said. “The silkworms grow faster, and my endometrium grows faster too.”

I thought the light had no warmth, and therefore no vitality either. So my hand reached underneath and wrapped around the flashlight. I tried to pass my body heat into it, though I did not know whether it would work. My little finger brushed against the fleshy base of her thumb. The flesh there was thick and warm. Our hands stayed stacked together like that.

She looked at me with her single lidded eyes, and I looked back as her eyes curved into crescents, just like her sister’s. When I first saw her, I told her she had nothing in common with her sister. She curled her lip and said, “Good. Then you won’t mistake me for her.” I nodded along, and she added, “But I don’t like women, so don’t fall in love with me.”

I wanted to tell her not to worry. She was not my type. She was the sort of person you could tell at a glance was not to be messed with. I preferred delicate girls who made me want to protect them. She was strong enough to replace a giant water jug with ease.

The weather grew hotter, like sitting inside a sauna. I bought a whole box of popsicles from the wholesale market and stuffed them into the freezer. After school, crowds of children would gather around my snack cart.

“When the spicy strips make your eyes water, licking a popsicle feels amazing,” they told me. They handed me money with teeth already beginning to darken.

“Remember to brush after eating,” I always reminded them. But I would still ask, “Want another pack of shrimp chips?”

When I got home, I locked the cart in the stairwell. Since Mei moved in, she had visibly filled out. Her sausage-like fingers wrapped around the flashlight as she shone it over the silkworms, making little clicking sounds with her tongue.

That afternoon, the wind from the fan licked at our skin like a dog’s tongue, and cicadas screamed outside the balcony so loudly my eardrums hurt. Mei sat on the floor staring down at the mooncake tin. Out of that whole pile of silkworms, only ten cocoons were produced in the end. Yellowish green, the color of thick mucus during a cold. She said her body was ready now, ready for embryo transfer, and no amount of noise would affect her anymore.

“You mean those pupae?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “And the noise won’t disturb them either.”

She carried the mooncake tin into the kitchen. Water boiled in the pot, bubbling clouds of steam into the air. She picked up the pupae one by one and dropped them into the pot. The water rolled violently while the cocoons floated and sank at the surface. Again her mouth made that da da da sound, as if counting.

“You took such good care of them,” I said. “And now you’re just boiling them?”

“There’s no choice,” she said. “Otherwise the pupae turn into moths, chew through the cocoons, and the silk breaks.”

She scooped the cocoons out and placed them on a plate. Using chopsticks, she picked one up, blew on it, and peeled it open. Inside was a boiled pupa, yellow brown and curled up like one of her fingers. She popped it into her mouth and chewed.

“Protein,” she said. “Can’t waste it.”

She peeled open another cocoon, pried open my mouth with her fingers, and stuffed it inside. “My sister says protein is good for your skin. You should eat more.”

“Is her skin still that smooth?” I asked.

But she did not answer. Her fingers lingered at the edge of my mouth, rubbing softly against my lips. Goosebumps rose along my arms. Her face moved closer and closer. When her lips touched mine, I pushed the pupa to the edge of my lips with my tongue. She bit down, took it into her mouth, and chewed. I watched her mouth moving, making wet smacking sounds. Then her hand lifted my nightdress, like peeling open a cocoon, and slid up the inside of my thigh. A moan slipped from between my lips.

Outside the window, the cicadas were still screaming, as if the knew. As if they knew.

Huina Zheng

Image by Michel Bertolotti from Pixabay – Yellow silkworm pupa