DEHISCENT
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In botany, dehiscence occurs when a plant, at maturity, splits across its structural lines of weakness and releases its contents for distribution, consumption, or regrowth.
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In anatomy, it is a wound, reopened, split along its lines of healing.
THE OLD ZHU family house sat on stilts high along a cliffside overlooking the East China Sea. It became increasingly familiar with the ocean waves as the years passed, the tides rushing in and up, crashing against straining wood and jagged rocks as they receded, the water levels creeping higher and higher up its stilts, stretching to greet it with each kiss of seaspray.
No one quite knew how long it had been standing—certainly long enough to have seen a time before the summers lasted nine months of the year, when the ocean was calm and clear, distantly below it. It was old enough to have watched the rise of cities full of steel and glass, watching them vacate and implode like a stately, dignified elder.
Yi had lived in this house for all twelve years of her life. She shared the bedroom that once belonged to her father and grandfather when they, too, were children, surrounded by the same furniture and osmanthus branches, the same wooden walls and their bunches of chrysanthemum. Its windows looked out toward what was left of the outskirts of a city once known as Shanghai, the world beyond her windows dusty, barren, and oppressively humid. Her room was farthest from the violent fathoms of the ocean below, but she could still feel the creaking of the house as the winds and waters pulled on its supports; the way the bricks and tiles slid across each other, the way the wood panels held onto each other like bones.
She didn’t know much about her family’s home because, well, what did it matter to her, really? The house was everything: it protected them from the two months of blistering cold when winter finally arrived, the chill and frost seemingly never penetrating its walls; and when the weather swung hard and the nearby village’s food supply suffered and died from the heat, her family always had food, always managed to find what they needed in the nooks and crannies of their house. Because the Zhu house provided, as it always had and as it always will.
One thing she did know was that it always felt a little confused, not that she had the words to describe why. It was a hobbled mix of nineteenth century European and traditional Chinese, with roof tiles of oak and bamboo and terracotta. Outside, it was covered in a healthy dose of grime and dust, the ocean winds kicking up decaying flora that settled into the tiles and brick, gluing them down with salty mist. On the inside was an array of ceramic pots, filled with an equally varied collection of ferments and pickles, from jiuniang to bakfuru to huagua; there were glass jars that held old animal specimens from a long-dead ancestor who was fond of dead things; snippets of aged paper with family recipes, some scrawled by hand and others printed on neat white paper in crisp black letters. Throughout the house was a scattered timeline of increasingly obsolete technology, interspersed by leafy choy that sprouted from the shelves and the ever-replenishing cupboards of canned fish and bottles of sauces.
This was home—an enduring protector of the Zhu family from the outside world—and Yi knew every inch of it.
At least, she knew every inch except the attic.
***
Once, when she was eight and filled with more energy than she could dispose of, the world was set aflame. It felt as though a blazing inferno had scraped through the atmosphere between the hazy clouds and the dry, dead land below. The Zhu house, while sufficiently adept at keeping out the cold, had always struggled with the heat. It would seep through the walls as the temperatures rose, flooding the house with tepid, humid air, and Yi, like any other child whose pent-up energy was smothered by the elements, went looking for an escape.
Her first idea was to roll under her bed next to the mung bean sprouts and her jarred collection of bones, hoping that the shade would help—though afterward she questioned the impulse in the first place; it was a stupid idea because when was the shade ever actually cooler? It wasn’t long before the heat, combined with the semi-enclosed space, turned suffocating, like all the hot air in her room was being siphoned into the space between the floor and her bed. She crawled back out and laid on the floor facing the ceiling as she tried to breathe. Above her, the vines of the mountain yam swayed with the gentle draft that slipped through the windows. Yi got to her feet and trudged downstairs. It wasn’t any cooler out there.
Her parents and grandparents sat around their mahjong table in the company of an old historical drama playing on the screen of a staticky CRT. They were in the middle of a game when Yi stomped downstairs and wailed something to the effect of “HOT!”
Attention dropped from their game. Her grandmother nudged her father, a quick but gentle backhanded slap on his arm. “Go look after your daughter,” she said.
Yi pouted, crossing her arms. “Hot,” she repeated.
Her mother slipped out of her chair and knelt on the ground to look at Yi face on. She was sweating too, her face flushed red, strands of hair stuck to her forehead. She frowned sympathetically, then glanced at Yi’s father who, after a brief moment, gave a curt nod. “How about a cold shower?” she suggested.
Yi nodded, desperately clinging to the impossibility behind the word “cold”—but her parents suggested it, ...
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