Sam
As a child, Sam can see beauty in everything.
She can spend an hour admiring the spiral of a snail’s shell. Each morning, she and her stuffed animal, Rabbit, say hello to the buttery yellow dandelions growing between the cracks in the sidewalk. At night, the streetlamps form pools of silver on the ground. She runs her hands across the metal bars striping their apartment door and feels the music of them humming through her fingers. The crack on the bedroom ceiling is in the shape of a star. And when her mother makes curtains for the windows out of old bedsheets, Sam watches in awe, admires the handsewn flowers dancing in the wind as if the fabric itself is a meadow.
To her, their apartment is big. It has a tidy bathroom and working lights, a bedroom she gets to share with her mother, a carpet where she stages stories between Rabbit and a set of plastic horses, a kitchen that can turn out hot meals, and a refrigerator that her mother somehow manages to keep perpetually stocked. Her mother cooks late at night, making braised beef rolls and fluffy buns and eggs scrambled with tomatoes, transforming leftovers into fried rice, packaging portions of food into the freezer for the week. No one can stretch out a dollar like her mother. A five-pound sack of flour costs the same as a loaf of bread and can make noodles and scallion pancakes for weeks. Ground chicken can go farther when combined with eggs and cabbage and wrapped into dumplings by the pound. Watermelon rinds can be pickled, softened, and stir-fried. Freezing portions of stew made with chuck steak bought on Mondays—the Manager’s Special packages that are about to expire—can save you thirty dollars a month. Seventy-five cents can get an entire bag of squash from their Mexican neighbor’s backyard garden.
Sam loves falling asleep with the smell of good food filling their home. She loves how talented her mother is at everything she does. Sometimes she feels like her heart will burst from these thousands of small joys in her world, and every day, she looks forward to each of them because they are all she’s ever known, because this is what a perfect life looks like.
So, when Sam first learns about alchemy, she sees only what it should be: a beautiful thing, an endless possibility.
* * *
Sam’s mother works at Mandarin Palace Chinese Food on 4th and Normandie. When Sam gets out of school, she has no friends to be with and no students who ask her to hang out, so she just takes the Metro past the YMCA and the Odyssey Theatre to the restaurant, where she sits in a chair in the corner and does her homework while waiting for her mother to finish. The other workers in the restaurant breeze past her without a second glance. In the summer, Sam spends long days sweating alone in the restaurant’s supply closet, savoring the wind from the oscillating fan, crushing fortune cookies into dust in their plastic packages. No one ever checks in on her or asks how she’s doing. It is her talent, she supposes, the ability to disappear.
One hot afternoon, right after the start of seventh grade, she witnesses her mother taking orders from two men wearing pins in the shape of a golden fox on the lapels of their suits. Mr. Hayes, the restaurant’s owner, comes over in a nervous rush to assure them that their meal is comped. Sam sits at the corner table beside theirs, unnoticed by everyone, abandoning her homework to steal glances at their beautiful Oxford shoes. In a setting as plain as this, the men look almost unreal, the fabric of their suits fine and rich, their hair sleek and perfect, cuffs glinting like jewels in the light. The only other time she ever sees people this well-dressed is when the bus passes by the Odyssey Theatre and she glimpses its patrons in their finery, all waiting eagerly for the doors to open. Now she turns her eyes down, her heart hammering at the shimmer of these men, wondering what it’s like to be so worthy of attention.
They’re talking in low voices.
“Will Taylor’s gotten an attribution?” one of them asks.
The other man nods as he picks up a fork. “Constantine,” he replies.
“Ah,” says the first man. “An elementalist, then?”
“A very good one. Word is that Diamond’s taking him with her when she goes to Oxford to negotiate a new deal.”
“Her son seems young for that.”
The other man toys idly with his fork. “He’s talented enough that they’re making an exception.”
“Should we be concerned?”
“You don’t think we have enough good talent in Lumines?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
The man turns his wrist slightly.
Sam blinks. She could have sworn he was holding a fork in his hand, but it is a spoon now.
As he uses it to stir a glittering white powder into his coffee, Sam tries to convince herself that the spoon had always been a spoon. If she were a duller child, perhaps she would have done so successfully. But her mind is as bright as quicksilver, her memory so flawless that she can memorize a book just by skimming the pages. So as much as she tries to believe otherwise, she knows what she saw. The spoon had been a fork.
When her mother returns with their orders, they change topics mid-sentence, complimenting the look of their food and the cheap silver earrings her mother wears. But her mother smiles in the way she does when customers yell at her—strained and meek, her eyes down. She murmurs, “Thank you,” to them. Only when she steps away again do they continue their original conversation. Sam, innocent and wholly ignored, listens on, too young to understand why a man’s praise would scare her mother.
“Does Reed know Will’s going?”
“Not yet.”
“You should tell him. Better he hears it from us than the winged lion.”
The second man grimaces. “And why do I have to do it?”
The first man shrugs. “You’re good at it.”
“Bullshit. I deserve a promotion.”
“Patience. Alchemy is the science of changing something into something more desirable, isn’t it? So transform yourself. Make yourself better. The rest will follow.”
The other scowls at the advice. And as Sam puzzles over their exchange, they move smoothly on to complaining about the traffic.
* * *
Late in the afternoon, her mother comes into the restaurant closet to find Sam gluing broken fortune cookies to the floor out of boredom, a dreamy smile on her face, still marveling over the apparent magic she had witnessed, the small beauty of forks transforming seamlessly into spoons.
If Sam were older, she would have noticed the way her mother’s lips were pulled thin and red, the fragile skin chapped from a day so busy she hadn’t drunk a single drop of water. She’d have seen the slight tremor in her mother’s arms from hoisting giant platters for the business lunch parties that had filled the restaurant earlier that day, would have spotted the burns on her mother’s wrist from being scalded by buffet trays.
But at this age, Sam only knows to look for the light in her mother’s eyes, whether they are bright and well rested or weighed down with the exhaustion of half-moon shadows. She knows her mother’s hair is an indication of how much time she’s had during the day to maintain it—whether it is still slicked neatly back in a long braid, or whether it looks like it does in this moment: loosened and messy, black locks hanging limply on either side of her face, frizz haloed under artificial light like the back of a startled cat.
So Sam sees the exhaustion, but not the temper, and her young heart blooms, happy that her mother is here and they can finally go home.
Her mother scowls, first at her, then at the mess on the floor in the closet that belongs to her boss. Her hand clutches a plastic bag of leftovers, old rice and garlic chicken that hasn’t sold for two days.
Sam finally notices her mother’s temper, but it’s too late now. “Clean this up,” she says while yanking Sam to her feet so hard that her shoulder pops. Sam yelps. “Before he sees.”
But the boss does see. And ten minutes later, her mother is standing before Hayes with Sam hiding behind her legs, biting back tears and nursing a throbbing shoulder, while he tells her mother how lucky she is that he allows her fucking mongrel to stay there during her shifts. As he cuts her paycheck by forty dollars for the sticky patches that the glue leaves on the closet floor.
After they come home, Sam’s mother sends her to stand in the corner for an hour as punishment, while she heads into the kitchen to stir-fry the leftover rice with garlic and eggs, to dice up the chicken and wrap it into wontons with cabbage and scallions. Sam’s stomach growls, anticipating dinner.
At last, her mother finishes cooking and calls her over to the dinner table. They eat in silence. Sam’s shoulder is still sore. She switches hands to hold her chopsticks and worries over the right thing to say to improve her mother’s mood.
Finally, she murmurs in a timid voice, “I’m sorry, Mama.”
Her mother doesn’t look up. “Do you know why he was angry?”
“Because I made a mess,” she replies.
“Because he was scared.”
“Why was he scared?” she asks.
“Because when customers eat there, they expect to see it clean.”
Sam hangs her head and feels the tears welling again in her eyes. She thinks of the two well-dressed men and their comped meal, recalls the pained shape of her mother’s smile.
“Do you know why I was angry?” her mother asks now.
Sam stares at the wall behind her mother’s head, afraid to answer incorrectly, committing this conversation to memory so she won’t make the same mistakes again. Shame weighs down her breath. She is every child who has ever desperately ached to please their parents, but can never succeed. Her mother always works so hard, and yet Sam always manages to make her life more difficult.
“Because you could have lost your job,” Sam finally guesses.
“Because you were eavesdropping on those two customers,” her mother says. “I don’t like you listening in on people.”
Sam says nothing, but she notices the urgency beneath the sternness. Something about those men bothered her mother, although she doesn’t have the guts to ask what it is.
Her mother stares at her. Then she adds softly, “I’m sorry I pulled your arm today.”
And this time Sam sees all the signs of her mother’s remorse—the relaxing of her knotted brows, the lowering of her eyelids, the forward slouch of her shoulders that pulls the bones of her clavicle into sharp relief. When Sam is older, she will understand that her mother didn’t mean to hurt her on this day, but it doesn’t really matter, because she did it anyway.
“Mind your own business,” her mother says, “and stay out of others’. Your grades are the only thing I want you to worry about.”
“Yes, Mama,” Sam replies.
“College will be here before you know it. So keep your head down and work hard. Reach for the stars, okay?”
They are the first English phrases her mother ever learned: work hard, reach for the stars, the words of a mother who wants her daughter to be able to escape the life she had, the advice of someone who has seen darker times and is trying to follow the light out. It is the only thing that matters. School, degree, job, money, freedom. There is always, always hope, if you work hard.
Reach for the stars!
Sam has always thought it a curious phrase. It doesn’t say you can have them. Only that you can try.
“Promise me,” her mother says now.
Sam nods. Her mother takes her hand, presses it to her lips, and tells her to eat a second helping of rice.
That night, Sam lies in bed and stares at the crack on the ceiling. She thinks again about her mother’s reaction to the two men in the restaurant, fantasizes over how the fork had become a spoon. Maybe her mother had seen it happen too. Was that why she’d seemed frightened?
Alchemy is the science of changing something into something more desirable.
But what does that even mean? What is alchemy? What is more desirable? Sam struggles to understand the concept, because she has never imagined more for her life, has never thought to want anything different. Still, the phrase sticks with her, the words gradually bending her mind, as words tend to do.
She recalls the regret in her mother’s eyes, how exhausted she always looks at the restaurant. Perhaps it would be more desirable, Sam supposes, if her mother didn’t have to work so hard. If they had more money, so that they could paint over the star-shaped crack in the ceiling. Maybe new curtains would be better than old bedsheets stitched with hand-sewn flowers. Maybe they could use a bigger apartment, without bars on their door. And then she starts thinking that maybe it would be more desirable to have a better stuffed animal than Rabbit, and to have nicer toys than her plastic horses, and to read books that are new and aren’t missing their covers, and to wear clothes that aren’t made by her mother from old fabrics. Maybe it would be nice if she could be noticed more, if she could look as rich and elegant and important as those men in the restaurant. Maybe she could be a better child, one that her mother deserves.
More desirable. For the first time in her life, Sam wonders if there can be alternatives, if there is something better out there than what she currently has, if there can be a greater version of herself than what she currently is. For the first time in her life, she feels a curious pang for something she can’t quite describe. A growing tide of want, a yearning for something bigger, grander. A win. Making it. The ambition for more.
Everything can be more beautiful. And because it has the potential to be more beautiful later, everything suddenly feels less beautiful now.
80 percent of the universe is made up of dark matter, a substance we cannot see, detect, or affect. Yet we know that it’s there in the way it influences everything from the rotation of our galaxies to the formation of stars. So it goes with the soul. We can scientifically measure all the substance of a human body, but what gives it life? What animates us, adds that glint in our eyes? Alchemy, therefore, is a branch in the study of dark matter and, by extension, merely one path on the road of science as it strives to unravel the mysteries of all life.
The Substance of Nothingby Dr. Peter Lawrence Taylor, Ph.D., 1987
Ari
The first thing Ari notices about Sam—not her eyes, bright and wide; not her hair, straight as a sheet of dark water—is that no one else seems to notice her.
He wouldn’t know what that’s like. His entire life, eyes have followed him—even back in Surat, Gujarat, of which his memories are sparse and blurry. Even here, in middle school, which is a block-long stretch of concrete buildings behind chain-link fencing, right across from an abandoned apartment complex and three miles from the Shrine Auditorium, which hosts assorted celebrities on the weekends. Sometimes he hears other students gossiping about him—why’s he so shy, does he speak English—and sometimes boys shove him, laughing, teeth white and threatening, trying to make him react. He just hunches up against his backpack and tries to disappear. Every morning, a black car drops him off a block from school and he turns the corner to see Sam by the gate. He always notices her immediately, his gaze snapping onto her the instant she steps off the school bus and heads into the main hall. She has a particular knack for staying out of the other kids’ way, as if she can predict when they might bump into her, and he finds himself envious of how easily others ignore her, how she can become invisible. He can’t for the life of him understand it. To him, she is the most obvious person in the building. He can’t not look at her.
On the first day of seventh grade, Ari glances up from the doodles in his notebook to see her arrive right as the bell rings. She hesitates at the front of the room, her eyes scanning the space for a seat farthest from the teacher, then aims for the empty chair beside him. As she passes by, he catches a whiff of cooked food—scrambled eggs, chives—on her clothes, mixed with the scent of the wind. A kid nearby snickers, mutters that someone must have shit on their shoes, but no one else looks in her direction.
She throws her backpack down and settles in her chair. There is nothing particularly remarkable about her—her black hair is pulled up in a thick ponytail, her face is small, the bridge of her nose is dusted with freckles. But her eyes are luminous, taking in the room as if memorizing it.
He whispers, “Hi.”
Her wide eyes turn to him in surprise, and he feels a sudden urge to draw her.
“Hi,” she whispers back.
“I’m Ari.”
“I’m Sam.”
Then the teacher arrives in a rush, calling out hellos, and she looks away from him, but he finds himself lingering on her just a beat longer, his heart fluttering, wanting for the first time for someone to notice him more.
* * *
If Ari concentrates, he can pull forward threads of his childhood memories from back in Gujarat: roads crowded with cars and motorbikes, rickshaws jostling along in a line, street stall vendors shouting at passersby, humid heat reflecting off the asphalt. Sunlight filtering through the dagger-shaped leaves of neem trees lining the avenues. Tin sheet roofs against a backdrop of gleaming skyscrapers, narrow alleys with strings of laundry hanging overhead, the air pungent with smoke and sewage and spices and damp walls crumbling to dust.
Shy boy, aunties and uncles would cluck at him as he followed his mother to the river to wash the laundry, to the vegetable stalls to buy brinjal and garlic and okra, to the temple to make an offering of bananas and mangoes. And he would hide in the folds of her sari and turn his eyes down, study the grass until the attention diverted from him.
He was fortunate, in some ways; poor but not untouchable, and not born a girl. His sister, Kriti, was frequently harassed by men; a classmate went missing when she was thirteen; another neighborhood girl’s body was found on the riverbank. Still, as he grew, people watched him with interest, and he felt the discomfort of it stamped into his skin.
Those eyes, they would say. That hair.
He would run away when he wanted to escape the gazes that liked to linger on his large, dark eyes, the hands that liked to brush the gleaming curls of his black hair and the curve of his cheeks. People had a tendency to touch him; he didn’t understand why. As a child, he was still wholly innocent to the concept of attraction, what pulls one human to another. The attention only made him fret over himself—had he said something wrong, done something embarrassing, looked unkempt? Over time, he learned to keep his distance. Many of his memories from that era are of the flip-flop of his slippers through dusty streets, the world flying by around him. He loved to run, relished the feeling of warm wind through his hair. The only times he would walk were with his uncle, because sometimes his uncle would stop to buy cigarettes and give Ari ninety rupees for an ice cream bar at the nearby Kwality Wall’s stand.
It was on one of these errands that Ari saw the man sitting at an open-air café across the street, hair stirring under the ceiling fans as he clinked cups of foamy chai with the store owner. Indian, light-skinned, with a loud laugh and a well-starched suit that signaled wealth. Ari’s curiosity stirred. Perhaps he was a diamond dealer.
Ari looked away for a moment to buy his ice cream bar. When he glanced again in the man’s direction, the man was staring straight at him. Ari quickly turned his eyes down and tried to tame his rising anxiety. Had the man noticed Ari staring? Had Ari offended him?
After a minute, the stranger rose from his seat and crossed the street to approach him. Ari’s gaze darted to his uncle, quietly seeking help, but his uncle was in the middle of a joke with the clerk, their laughter as rapid as their words.
The stranger knelt to his level. He had an odd appearance—an older gentleman with streaks of salt in his tidy beard, but with eyes that seemed to belong to someone younger. Now that he was close, Ari could smell a whiff of cologne—sandalwood, lavender, amber, luxurious scents unfamiliar to him. A pin in the shape of a golden fox gleamed on his lapel, tempting the eye.
“People stare at you,” the man said. His Gujarati had a hint of a foreign accent.
Ari chewed on his ice cream bar’s wooden stick and said nothing back.
“Do you know why?”
Ari didn’t, not really. His legs twitched, longing to run.
“It’s because you have a strong soul.” The man reached out to tap Ari’s chest, and Ari recoiled, his skin tingling, the touch like a hot iron through his shirt. “Everyone is drawn to a strong soul. It pulls, and people notice. Some like to call it charisma. You’re a little one, though.”
It sounded like criticism, and out of instinct, Ari straightened, trying to make himself look bigger. The man laughed.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
Ari shook his head again. His heart thudded in his chest.
“No?” The man studied him. “Where do you live?”
Ari looked again toward his uncle.
“A little lamb. Don’t be afraid.” The man reached out his hand then and scooped up a handful of mulch from the bed of a nearby tree. Ari couldn’t help but suck in his breath—dirt soiling the man’s fine hands, wood chips leaving splinters in his skin.
But when the man’s hand returned to Ari, the mulch was gone, and in its place was a new ice cream bar, whole and untouched.
Ari stared at the ice cream and felt a ripple in the air, like the timeline of his life was shifting. Where had it come from? Where did the mulch go?
At last, he spoke. “Who are you?” he asked quietly.
The man looked as if nothing strange had happened. He just gave him a knowing smile. “Prometheus,” he said. “I’ll see you again.” Then he rose and walked down the street, his hands in his pockets.
When his uncle returned to him, Ari was still holding the new ice cream bar. His uncle slapped him on the back, asking him why he hadn’t eaten it yet, joking that he would if Ari didn’t want it. Ari didn’t dare mention the stranger’s odd name. Prometheus, wasn’t that an ancient Western god? He wasn’t sure; he’d only heard it once in a movie. His uncle would look at him like he was crazy. So Ari kept holding the ice cream bar without eating it, not even when melted vanilla began to drip from a crack in the chocolate shell. At last, his uncle snatched the treat from him and ate it in several bites. Ari watched him, wondering if it would crumble back into dirt in his uncle’s mouth, whether he would make a face and spit it out and hit Ari for playing a trick on him. But his uncle relished it like it was real ice cream, and by the time they arrived home, Ari thought that perhaps he had misunderstood what he’d seen. Perhaps he’d been so surprised by the stranger that he hadn’t eaten his treat. Obviously the man hadn’t just created it out of mulch from the street. And the more Ari thought about it, the better he felt. An impossibility, spun from his imagination. Maybe the man hadn’t been real at all.
But when Ari woke the next morning, he heard the man’s voice coming from the sitting room of his home, with the foreign accent and loud laugh.
Copyright © 2025 by Xiwei Lu
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