2026 Memory Fiction Prize Winner
I.
Here is the girl. She is in the water. A cold, dark blue. A body weightless, unmoored. Pitched back and forth by the current.
Here is the girl. Her head bobbing, just above the waves. Black hair pooling around her ears, like seaweed. She is flat on her stomach, kicking with thin legs, thin arms. Every time she pulls her arm down beneath the surface, she watches as it disappears. Into the blackness below. The air is salt on her tongue. The sky above holds nothing but the sun. Hanging at its highest point. Streaks of light in her vision. Almost noon.
Here is the girl. She is swimming. Towards the sun. Nothing else to aim for. It is a point in space a billion miles away. And all around her a vast and endless sea.
***
You are looking for God, somewhere in the crook of your mother’s elbow. With heavy eyelids, you run your fingers down the arm that holds you. The skin is warm and soft, supple and weathered. Down the length of your mother’s arm your fingertips crest a small hill; it is firm to the touch, made of hardened, scarred skin. You trace its outline: the shape of a bone. And a stinging swat on your knuckles brings you back into this world.
Are you listening, con? Your mother asks. There is annoyance in her voice.
You shake your head; you are barely awake. So instead your mother grasps your shoulders, rocks you back and forth a little bit. Refuses to let you fall asleep.
You need to listen to me, con, she says. What I am telling you is important.
This is not something you will understand until many years later, until it is too late. So for now you grumble your complaints with your chin tucked into your chest, until another smack to the head silences them.
Dừng lại, she says. Hold your tongue when I am speaking to you. Tears springing to your eyes now. Rolling down to your chin. Taste of salt on the way.
You hold your hand to the back of the skull, where the skin is still smarting. Your mother sighs. Pulls your wrist down, replaces your hand with her own, rubs the pain off like smoothing a stone.
Why don’t you want to learn, daughter? she asks, her voice quieter. Less harsh this time. This is the history of the world I am telling you.
You shrug your shoulders, staring ahead. The room has a glow; yellowing, from lamplight. The walls of your bedroom are still white, but in five years you will insist on repainting them yellow as well, even though your mother tells you time and again that will make them hideous. Later, you realize that her resistance is why you want it so strongly.
The twin bed you sit in is hardly big enough for the two of you, even at this age. Your mother curls around you like a fish hook. You close your eyes and lie very still. You hold the water on the inside of your eyelids. You slow your breath until it is soft and even, and your mother thinks you are asleep. Her hands migrate from the back of your skull down through the folds of your hair. It leads down to the small of your back. The day after your mother dies, you will chop it to just above your shoulders with cheap plastic safety scissors.
Listen to me, she murmurs, after a while. You feel her voice against the back of your neck; a steady vibration. Why won’t you listen to me.
***
Is this a dream? the girl wonders. It is like a dream, how slowly her arms pull themselves through the waves. How the current presses back against her skin. Resists displacement. As if she is suspended in time rather than water.
It must be a dream, thinks the girl, because there is nothing to remember. Was there a boat? Was she a voyager? Had she leaned against the rail, drifted off, fell overboard? She finds nothing around her but the water. She might have been born in the waves. For all she knows. A faceless mother, floating on her back, drifting away, far from here.
The water is cold. Rises up through her rib-cage, makes her breaths short and quick. She gulps down air with her mouth wide open. It must be a dream, thinks the girl, because though her arms feel heavy in the waves, there is no fatigue. The current holds her steady; lifts her up with the crest of a wave, pulls her back as it recedes. In fact there is no way to know whether her efforts mean anything at all. Whether she is making any progress at all or is fully at the mercy of the tides.
It must be a dream, the girl thinks, but she must know for certain. A dream is like water. You cannot grasp it in your hands. Cannot feel it on your fingertips. So she drags a nail into her forearm. Until there is red mixed with the blue. But now a flash of white. Stinging pain. All too real. And so the girl realizes she is alive. She is in the water.
Above, the sun holds its spot in the sky. Holds its gaze on her forehead. The heat spreading across her skin, the sweat pooling on her brow. Falling towards her lips. Onto her tongue. It doesn’t matter. All of it is salt. The brine lapping at her tongue with each wave. Wicking the moisture clean out.
The girl is hungry now, so hungry. She does not remember the taste of food on her tongue. How long has it been since she has eaten? Since she has begun swimming?
Her stomach aches through her spine. It is all she feels — not the cool grasp of the sea, not the salt on her breath. She feels acutely the sensation of the energy leaving her body. The cost of putting her limbs in motion.
Suddenly above her head there is sound and movement. Something else alive in the sea. A school of flying fish swimming across the sky. A dozen silver bullets with translucent wings.
With a great leap the girl reaches up from the water. Plucks one of the bullets from the sky. The rest of the pack scatter wildly, in all directions. Chasing the wind. The unlucky one flutters desperately in her hand. Another body twisting and thrashing in vain. With her other hand she pulls the fish’s wings from its body. She sinks her teeth into its wriggling flesh. The taste of moonlight fills her mouth. Sweet and clean. Drinks down the blood to cool her parched throat.
Still, the single fish is not enough to fill the space inside of her. As soon as the girl chokes down the last of the bones it is as though she has eaten nothing at all. And so she swims onward. The hunger growing swollen in her belly. The sun in the same spot in the sky.
After another lifetime or so there is movement again. This time from below. A chance encounter; the girl dipping her head into the water to hide for a moment from the sun. Spots a dark shadow beneath her feet. With one hand she thrusts downward and snatches wildly into the depths. When she pulls her hand back above the surface there is a sea snake held tight in her grasp. The rough scales digging indents into her palms.
The trapped sea-snake hisses at her. Shows her its fangs. But the girl holds it aloft, out of the water. Kicks with her legs to keep her body afloat. Her hand a vice grip around the snake. Peels her lips back. Opens her jaw. Yet before they close the sea snake speaks to her; a high, crisp tone.
A serpent’s blood is venom, you know, it says.
Then I will swallow only the flesh and spit back the blood, replies the girl. Her voice comes out a dull rasp. Nearly inhuman.
It takes a thousand years to bite through my scales, says the sea snake.
The girl replies, I have a thousand years to spare. I will wait for the salt to erode your skin.
The sea snake considers for a moment.
And finally it says: I know a place where hunger does not exist. A paradise where wild rice grows alongside fresh water. And there is land; real dirt you can rest your head upon.
There is no land, the girl replies. The world is the sea below and the sun above.
For you, perhaps, says the sea snake. But swim fast enough to catch the sun and you can reach what lies beyond it. And I will take you there, if you spare my life.
And in the snake-eyes the girl sees that this is the truth. And so she lowers the serpent back into the water, holds tight. And off they go. Towards the sun. Faster than the waves at last.
***
You know your brother is the favorite as soon as he is born. He possesses an ability you will never have: the ability to lie still, take in the world as it comes. Even from the moment of his birth he barely cries, even as his red, smooth, skin is exposed to the air for the first time, even as your mother cradles him in her arms, the femur-shaped scar on her arm just visible below the sleeve of a dressing gown. Later you learn that a newborn that does not cry indicates danger; that this is the reason your mother stays in the hospital overnight, why your father takes you to the Pizza Hut across the street for hours, him pacing across from the salad bar, you blowing his pocket change on the claw machine out front. This is one of the few memories you will have of your father. He is a tall, dark, smell of aftershave, a distant silhouette across the room.
Until your brother is old enough to sleep in his own room, he sleeps in yours, in a pullout bed underneath your own. The walls are yellow. Tonight your mother is telling the story again. She is on the bed below you, holding your brother. When she reaches the part with the sea snake once more, your brother gasps in surprise. Eyes just about bulging from his skull. It seems like performance, the absurdity of it, but what aggravates you the most is the fact that you know that it is not. Your mother plays off the energy — waving her hands in the air for effect, her voice loud, exaggerated, dramatic. And you listen above, curled in your thin, white sheets. Your eyes are closed, trying in vain to find sleep. Your mother raises a hand high and shapes it into the head of a snake, snatches on your brother’s ear and pulls; he jerks his head back, squealing in delight, and he and your mother fall over each other, the laughter bouncing off of the walls.
When it subsides, your brother asks whether sea snakes are real.
Of course, your mother laughs. Everything I tell you is real.
Even how they talk? your brother asks.
Especially that, your mother replies. But this was long ago. Since then they have learned to hold their tongues. For their own sake.
She pauses for a moment, and then she is pulling up the sleeve on her right arm. Leading the femur-shaped scar into the light. Turning it to your brother’s hungry gaze.
This is where this comes from, she says to him. When I was your sister’s age, I fought a great, big snake. With sharp teeth. Like steak knives.
And she is grabbing at his ears, his hair again, and they are laughing and falling over one another, and there is too much light in the room for you to sleep.
***
II.
What the girl feels first is sand. How it lies underneath her body. How its packed surface presses against her chest, her cheek. Hard and unyielding. Compresses her inhalations short and shallow. Her eyes remain closed, even though she has long since stopped moving, long since her body has stopped being battered by the icy waves. She has kept them closed since the moment they had set off. She is not sure if she can bear to open them. If she can dare to believe that what she feels on her skin is real.
In her hand the snake shifts just slightly, as if to test if the hand holding it is still living. The girl, in response, reaffirms her grip. As if the scales against her palms are the only thing anchoring her to this world.
Where are we? asks the girl.
The snake hisses its annoyance. We are where I said I would take you, it says. Don’t you feel the earth underneath your chin?
With her free hand the girl reaches down. Pulls a wad of clump from beneath her, runs her fingers across it. But just as soon as she feels the texture on her skin does the soil dissolve; it floats upwards like steam evaporating, first in large fragments, then fading into sediment until the girl feels nothing but the grooves on her finger-tips rubbing together. The girl opens her eyes, and finds what the snake has said is true. But only just.
The island is small and dying. The earth is a hollow, sickly brown. Here and there the girl can see dead trees reaching towards the sky branches thin and black, their leaves shrunken and hollow. The dirt around them is cracked like split skin. Besides them an indent in the earth forms a puddle. The water is thick and clouded; a layer of black, oily liquid lies in suspension on top of it. The girl can smell it from here; an odor pungent and burnt.
Next to here there are a dozen or so crab shells, facing upwards. Bleached by the sun. The girl reaches out and turns one over. It is empty, filled with nothing but more sand, more grit.
What is this? the girl asks. The anger flooding her chest. This is no paradise. You lied.
That is the nature of snakes, the snake says, opening its mouth wide. To split its tongue in two.
The girl’s tongue rises to retort, but it is a scream of pain rather than words that escapes her mouth. The snake has plunged its fangs into her arm; sliced two half-moons deep into her skin. Her hand opens, and the snake wriggles itself free from her grasp. The girl leaps to her feet, makes a desperate lunge. But this time she is too slow; the snake, just outside her reach, dives into the sea-foam, and it is gone.
The girl sits back on the ground. Catches her breath. Blood dripping down her arm. She watches the dirt as it evaporates into the sky. She tilts her head back to follow its path into the air, and finds she can no longer see where the sun is. Instead black dots cover the sky. There are flies. Thousands of them. Their buzz growing louder as they fly close, down towards her face. Then distant again as they return to the air. They circle overhead. They do not land.
***
Near the end you spend most of your time taking your mother to the hospital. She insists on driving herself, no matter how hard you try to convince her otherwise.
Why not? she says. You’ll have plenty of time to drive yourself when I’m gone.
And so it goes this way, for weeks. The drive down the little two-way highway divided only by thin yellow paint strips; the white and blue blurs of flowers and crosses that periodically dot the side of the road. Your mother’s beaten-down Honda Accord; the car you learned to drive in. The same faded gray on the outside as the old suede seats. Cigarette smoke, more memory than sensation, burrowed somewhere deep within the crevices from the last time she smoked, many years ago.
You’ve taken time off from school to come home to care for her. Last week, when you flew back, it snowed so much in Boston that your flight was delayed by several hours, and you watched out the wide airport windows as the flurries chased each other through the wind, picking at your fingernails. You wish that your brother was here, not for his presence but for the fact that it would mean yours would no longer be required; that you could still be sitting in your apartment reading Glissant for your seminar, while he and your mother would eat catfish soup and laugh about the army food, the picture of him in his dress blues framed on the mantelpiece besides the cross. But you are here, and he is not, and you know, in your bones, that this is a task you are unquestionably inadequate for.
Once you get inside the hospital you don’t speak much. The doctors do most of the talking; give their prognoses in cold, filtered air. Scent of cotton swabs. Rubbing alcohol. Your mother also doesn’t speak much, asks very few questions. The doctors are unfailingly professional. Your mother’s body is wasting away, as if something eats at her bones, her marrow from the inside.
It all seems to go quick; far too quick, you think, for something like this. Sometimes, on your way out you catch glimpses of you and your mothers’ reflections on the polished windows and surfaces you pass by, your bodies curved from the uneven light. In the reflection of the linoleum tiles, your mother’s figure appears warped, impossibly frail; hunched forward like a plant forgotten in a dark room, reaching towards distant light. You want to run back to the doctors in their clean white lab coats and shake them by their lapels; scream at them to do something, anything to stop this, her withering before your eyes. You are stopped only by the thought of what your mother would say. How she would snatch your wrist midsentence, wrench you backwards, her grip strong as ever. Hiss in your ear: You think I raised you to behave like this?
While your mother drives the both of you home, you sit very still. As if this could make the time go slower. You hear bits and pieces of the world as it passes by — something about the plants in her garden, a girl from your old high school that died, new kinds of pesticides in the food. You wish — childishly, foolishly — that this moment can last forever, that the highway in front of you can stretch beyond the horizon indefinitely. As if, given enough time, you could bottle this moment, the way your mother never fails to save the leftover fish sauce after every meal. As if you could place it, in a sealed glass container, gently in the back of the fridge, waiting for the time to be right to taste it once more.
Are you listening, con? your mother says. You are back in the car again.
Yes, má, you say. Of course.
Your mother tsks her teeth. Always somewhere else, she says. Where do you go, girl?
I’m here, you say back. Tell me.
Your mother sighs.
I was telling you about the first time I was in a hospital in the US, she says. I told your brother this already, a long time ago.
With one arm she rolls back the sleeve on her right arm, just enough.
When I came off the boat, from the refugee camp, she says, they had to vaccinate me. Back then, they shot you with a needle so big, it was more like a gun.
Did it hurt? you ask. Before you can stop yourself.
Your mother laughs. It is like the sun rising.
Oh, I cried, she says. I cried so much.
***
The girl sits on the bank. Watching the waves breaking themselves to foam upon the shore. Dozens of times. The dirt falling away. A single grain at a time. Minutes pass. Then in a second it has been years. And soon the girl realizes that very little of the island remains. Time has eaten the rest of it away.
The hunger the girl feels threatens to swallow her whole.
There is nothing to eat on this island. She knows this for sure; she has scoured every inch of it. The dead rice-shoots fall to powder in her mouth; the empty crab shells are too brittle to break with her teeth. Even the water is no good. She cannot drink it without swallowing some of the oily black substance; no matter how hard she tries, each cupped handful contains it. It coats the back of her throat. Makes her retch the water back up. She watches the sand drink it up instead.
Her mind is slipping now. She scarcely remembers the waves, or the salt, or the sun. Her mind is hunger. She swallows saliva; the ghost of food travelling down her throat, into her belly. She imagines the snake, its barbed, hooked, fangs. Sees it sink them into the skin on her shoulder. The sweetest sensation there is, all crimson and light. The sun falling, finally, over the distant horizon.
She sleeps, and when she does, she dreams only of smoke.
***
Your mother has not screamed at you in some years. When she does, it’s the same as it always has been. Vietnamese does not have tenses; there is no delineation between the past and the present. So when she’s yelling, when she’s calling you words you barely remember the meaning of, all your sins are lined up beside one another, the way they have always existed, just now visible in the light. And you’re straining to understand and by the time you do she’s on to the next word, and so you fail even in understanding your transgression, and it’s like you are seven years old again, and your face hot with tears and shame.
They’ve told you that a caretaking facility is the best choice at this stage for her. The problem now is not just her body but her mind. On the good days she’s all there, lucid as ever, telling you how to pull the stains out of the sheets properly, reminding you to sit with your back straight. But the good days are rarer now; some days, she tells you the same story twice in the same meal. Sometimes, she no longer recognizes your face. When this happens, she doesn’t say anything to you, but you can see it in her expression, clear as running water. She shuffles away, into another room, until the next time she will recognize you again.
What happens if you’re not home, and she forgets she’s left the stove running? the doctor tells you. Her body is failing her. We can improve her quality of life, extend the time she has left. Their words are thick and cloying, like cough syrup. They stick in the back of your throat.
One afternoon, you catch her wandering the house, calling out your brother’s name, again and again. When you stop her, she asks why he doesn’t answer.
Is he in his room, with his headphones on? she asks. Go get your brother, she says to you. I have to ask him something.
You tell her that he isn’t here anymore. What is it? you ask.
No, no, she says. You don’t understand.
You break the news to her in the waiting room, the same room that you’ve sat in for all the rest of the appointments. You don’t look at her face. You listen to the rising and falling of her chest, the wheezing uneven. When you tell her, you pull her hand in with both of your own. She doesn’t cut her nails anymore; when you watch her hands, you see the buildup of dirt underneath her overgrown cuticles. But even now, she knows exactly where to cut you most deeply.
What will you eat? she asks. Do you even eat Vietnamese food anymore?
Of course, Mom, you reply, even though this is untrue.
You tell yourself it’s because you hardly have time to cook for yourself these days, that there’s no Vietnamese supermarkets by your apartment to buy rau ram, or banana roots for the chicken salad. You don’t tell her that you don’t go to the restaurants in Little Saigon because they speak to you in Vietnamese, and when you respond in English their eyes betray what they think of you. You don’t tell her that two months ago, you got so homesick you drove all the way out to the Lee’s in Dorchester for just a banh mi, and you didn’t know how to ask them in Vietnamese to take off the head cheese so you pulled it out of the bread with two fingers while you ate it in the car, the pink rectangle of gristle and flesh taunting you from the crumb-strewn wax paper unfolded across your dashboard.
Instead you just say: yes, ma. And nod your head while she goes on, for miles. And when you get home she insists on cooking, without your help. You watch from across the kitchen as she rinses the rice: fills the metal bowl halfway with cold water from the tap, swirls the little white grains around clockwise with her fingers until the water turns cloudy, pours it out and swirls it around and then refills it again, and again, and again, until the water runs clear at last.
***
When the girl wakes once more, she finds that her fingernail has fallen off.
At first, she does not notice; it’s just a small, clear thing, lying in the sand. Might mistake it for a scale of some kind. But when she sees it, she touches her index finger to her thumb, like a reflex. And it is then that she feels the sting of bare, tender flesh.
She cannot bear to look at it, so with her foot she sweeps the sand over top. To bury it. But she knows it isn’t gone, that what is hidden is more real than what lies on the surface. So instead she makes to leave; climbs to her feet. She is so weak that when she rises and all the blood rises to her head, her vision becomes static, and she sways, momentarily, on the spot, like the crest and fall of a wave. The blood from her arm dripping, dripping, onto the sand.
If she falls to the earth, she knows she will not get up again.
She stumbles towards the center of the island, over the uneven terrain. Around her, so much sand has risen into the sky that it seems to outnumber the air. Mixing with the black dots of the swarming flies. The little pinpricks of earth stinging her face, eyes, her thumb. When she makes it to the pool of water, she kneels. She looks down and cannot quite make out her figure in the black oil-water; cannot see how thin and emaciated she has become. Her breaths are colorless.
The girl lays on the ground once more. Presses her cheek on the sand. The odor is of decaying things. She closes her eyes, and behind her, she does not see the first speck of green that emerges from the earth.
***
The last day, you are awoken early in the morning by your mother, hysterical. She’s at the door of your childhood bedroom, pounding on it.
There’s a snake in the garage, she says. Go get your brother. I can’t find him. Tell him to go kill it.
When you look into the garage for yourself, you find that there is nothing alive in there. Instead, in the corner, there is a bundle of black, coiled cords that, in halfway shadow, might resemble something different.
When you return, your mother isn’t where you left her. It takes you a while to find her; you check the kitchen first, the living room, the yard. You find her in the last place you check, in her room. She is asleep again. Underneath the blankets she looks impossibly small. For as long as you dare, you stand in the doorway. Watch the slow rise and fall of her chest.
You have tried all the angles to justify it to yourself; that the hospice facility will take better care of her than you, that you have a life to get back to as well, that soon she will not remember your name, let alone your betrayal. None of it clears the hollow feeling in your stomach, your chest. You wish to hold on to your mother but each time, she slips away farther, like so many grains of sand falling through your fingers. There is fluid built up in her lungs now. Her breath is mostly wheezes. She can no longer eat solid food without vomiting it back up, so instead you feed her meal shakes. Hold her chin in your hands and tip her head back to swallow, the artificial vanilla scent filling your head, making you nauseous. Most of the time, she vomits this back up too.
Your mother’s countenance at this point has become almost childlike. You have to force her to eat, to drink, to sleep. She barely comprehends where she is, and her mind fills the gaps with fear and anger. You have put off this moment for as long as you could, but now there is no choice.
At two o’clock, you go back into the room. There are hints of light coming through the blinds. The window lies slightly ajar, and there is a breeze coming through. You sit on the edge of the bed and grasp her shoulder, as gently as you can.
Ma, you say. Wake up.
Her eyes flutter, half-open, then close again. Her cheek is pressed to the pillow. You shake her shoulder again, and this time her eyes open for good.
What is it? she says. Her voice is hoarse. Rough, like sand.
We’re going on a trip, you tell her. I’ve packed your things for you already. We’ll take your car. I’ll drive.
She studies your face. Takes a moment to respond. To your surprise, she nods.
Okay, con, she says. When do we leave?
We should go soon, you say. Your voice is cracking. You press your mouth together to stop it from trembling, and feel a drop of water roll down your cheek. The moisture settling on atop your lips. The taste of salt.
Tell me something, your mother says. Before I go. I want to hear a story.
Okay, you say. You begin by talking about an island; the sand falling upward, the pool of oil-water.
No, no, your mother says. She tuts. Start at the beginning.
So you do. You tell her about the water, and the salt, and the sun. You tell her about the girl. While you do, your mother sits up, her back against the bed frame. She holds your wrist in her hand. Her grip is strong.
When you tell the story, you leave out the hunger, and the pain, and the sorrow. When you tell her about the snake, you leave out the lie. She deserves a good version of the story, you think. But when you do, your mother stops you, her eyes sharp and gleaming.
No, no, she tells you. Tell me the ugly parts, too. That’s what makes it a story.
So you tell her about the wound. The blood, and the flies. The finger–nail underneath the sand. The girl laying on the beach. Her eyes closed.
Do you remember how it ends? your mother asks. You always fell asleep before I got there.
I remember, you say, and the girl opens her eyes. Where the nail was buried she now sees green shoots, with small round leaves over top. She watches as it grows, rises high above the sand, through the cloud of black flies. Your mother places her arm underneath the sand, and before your eyes you watch as her fingers grow into long brown roots, reaching towards the earth. The blood drops transforming the sand into patches of soil, chasing the oil from the water. Grass-shoots sprouting, covering the island. Above her a sky so brilliant you almost cannot stand it. The grass grows so high that you can scarcely see it anymore. Your mother’s body. She is turning. From this world to the next. ⧫