The Night I Brought Wrath Home

Written by Zanchao Hao

I found Wrath at a carnival. Her name was Eleanor. Her tears had dried and formed pallid streaks against her cheeks, like chalk stripes above a festering peach, by the time I knelt and cupped her hands in mine. I whispered something—the same words of encouragement I once used on my Amelie, probably—and managed to nudge her off the concrete driveway before the bleating procession trampled her. She refused to be carried.

Under the fleece trimmings of her denim jacket, Wrath wore a blue cotton dress—ironed, spotless, and buttoned tightly up to the neck—falling just below her knees. She also wore a little maroon belt, scaled but not quite snakeskin, which she kept pulling back into position every few minutes. The only other possessions she had on her were an expired carousel ticket, a wad of old paper towels, and a candy wrapper, which I tossed to her great disapproval. Maybe she liked how it reflected the fairy lights around us, I don’t know. Maybe she had scribbled poems inside it. Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown it away. Then again, it was only a candy wrapper.

I asked Wrath where she lived. At a similar age, the best answer my Amelie would’ve come up with was probably “pointy purple roof”. I had painted those tiles atop the old house a shade of warm lavender after being told the soft tinge might have a calming effect on children. Her mother had strongly objected to it, but I didn’t care—I wanted my Amelie to have this; I wanted her, after even decades, to recall a place she could grin, point to, and say ‘look at that, that’s home.’ On that note, there was a certain sweetness in “pointy purple roof.” I wonder if the house’s current owner kept it. Maybe—if they have the same dreams I once had.

Wrath recited her address near perfectly and made up in rigorously detailed descriptions what little she couldn’t—down to the elephant-shaped moss over her doorsteps and the rhythm of the grasshoppers’ chirping in the undergrowth behind her bedroom window—so much so that for a good second I thought of her home as my own. Her words carried with them the natural fluidity indicative of a developed mind, yet when I probed further, they retreated into the polite detachment of measured responses.

“What’re you doing out all by yourself?” I had ventured to ask, “Where’re your parents?”

She had given me a quizzical look, as if stating the obvious before saying it, “The air’s earthier tonight. I’ve got permission.”

The air was cigarettes and gasoline, and ethanol and sweat, rotting.

She hated my prods at conversation. By the time we passed the third graffiti-crossed bus sign, I had finally given up trying.I suppose she was what early adolescence would be like for my Amelie, if she were still around. That thought didn’t lessen anything.

As I wove across the streets and pushed through passersby who only had eyes for fireworks, I began to wonder what exactly my problem was. Getting Wrath off the road was one thing—taking her the whole way home seemed a bit much. I bore her no obligations. She did not like me, nor I her, on that matter; she was nothing like my Amelie. My Amelie could make you smile with just her gaze, whereas hers would make you wince. Her poor parents.

The polluted grey had turned fully black by the time we boarded the Ferris wheel. It was my fault,I’d mistaken its queue for the bus line, and after thirty minutes of dawdling, and only then finding out, I decided it was safer to pretend I meant to. I think she knew, though.

The compartment was small, the seat handles smelled of rust, and the galvanized floorboards creaked as the thousand-ton arm hoisted us into the sky. I liked Ferris wheels—mainly because my Amelie adored them—and on this particular night, when the entire city unveiled its glows in their full scorching nakedness, I could almost step onto that skybridge of whites, reds, yellows, and greens. What a fall that would make—a hundred-thousand blinding lights rising to catch you, leaving the same way you came. Squirming into sure hands. I was fantasizing about all the romantic ways to go out when Wrath’s voice dragged me back to my seat.

“The merry-go-round is better,” she sniffed, pulling her oversized belt up again. Her voice was unexpectedly candid, yet that only made it more condescending, “Much better.”

I blinked twice before my furrowing brows reached me, “What? How so?”

My voice must’ve betrayed my indignation as she whirled and stared me down with large, accusing eyes—as if I had wronged her—before turning back. She tapped the plastic pane; it made a swishy sound, like a wobbling vinyl. She clicked her tongue, “This is too lofty.”

We stayed silent for the remainder of the ride. My flaring anger had snuffed out rather quickly—one of my rare talents, though some preferred to call that meekness—and left me staring at her turned back. Was this the first piece of her own mind she divulged to me? Was she finally opening up to me? How many others has she given her pieces to? It took my daughter a while to accept, and finally cling to me, too, so no worries, right? Worry? What am I worrying about?

Wrath turned as our rusted box ground to a stop. I smiled at her, hopeful. She frowned.

***

The village clock tower, cloaked in evening haze, struck eleven-thirty as the rattling bus spat us out. Wrath watched the weary vehicle clank into the distance and went off before me. In that regard, she made a good child, always walking ahead of you. Old town lay dormant, and while reds and purples still lit up the night sky beyond the horizon line of charcoal-silhouetted houses, the only sound that broke the rhythm of our footsteps was the shingling of the distant gas station store’s doorbell. It was a warm autumn night, with a breeze barely strong enough to shake off old leaves. Wrath sneezed. I felt in my pockets for a handkerchief, but stopped when she unwrapped one battered tissue from her wad. I wondered how long she’d had them.

There were five cops huddled in a circle beside the fueling pumps as we approached. I knew that  by the radios buckled to their belts, their ridiculously uptight collars—buckled not out of necessity but of habit—and the shades they wore even at night, or maybe just under the gas station’s lights. They pranced, hooting hyenas all, around a takeout box—one of those plastic ones large enough to fit a whole rotisserie chicken inside. Wrath spotted its contents first and took off, ignoring my shouts, to get a better look. The cops saw her, glanced at each other for approximately three seconds, burst out laughing, and shuffled to make one more spot. Their language was more than foul.

There was one grey mouse inside the box. Then one cop nudged it, and a massive centipede, as thick as my thumb, skittered out. It must’ve grown up drinking out of gas station puddles or something, because it was moving all over the place—wriggling and squirming and kicking its several dozen pairs of legs. The mouse, like me, grew dead still. The cops nudged the box again, and the myriapod went into a frenzied thrashing. The cops began chanting. Their language was more than foul—it was frothing. A fleck of spit fell onto Wrath’s cheeks, but she was way too enthralled by her tiny gladiators in the plastic colosseum to heed it. I stared in horror as she started chanting along.

Out of the slew of noises I made to signal their attention, it was my final, desperate, unreserved ‘HEY’ that finally got them to look up from their little torture chamber. One of them glanced down at Wrath, then up at me. He held out his palms, “Hey, man, she, uh, came by herself.”

I peered down at Wrath,at her half-frozen, twisted little grin and the spit bubble on her right cheek,and fury flared up in my throat. Her face had paled,whether it was from her previous excitement or my shout, I didn’t know. I reached for her left arm. “We’re leaving.”

That seemed to put the words back on her tongue as she slapped my hand away. “Gimme a break, dumbass!” she snarled, “let someone else be your dead kid!”

The howling night, finally stilled. The unease settling on the cops’ faces grew tangible, just like the tensing muscles in their jaws and the perspiration forming on their brows. For three seconds, I simply stood there, paralyzed. Then I took Wrath by her wrist and dragged her away. None of them followed me. No questions were asked. I happened to glance back on the seventh step. The mouse was dead. Wrapped lazily around it was half a centipede.

I walked Wrath to her house, watched as she climbed the stairs to her door. She knocked, not high enough for the handle, and a few moments later, a butler in a red tailcoat answered. He had a skeletal face but a stern gaze so sharp it could bite. Before vanishing inside, Wrath halted, back still turned. Then, starting again just as briskly as she had stopped, she disappeared into the gloom within. The butler peered at me for a while longer before silently shutting the door. It was a nice house—decorative columns and creeping vines in all the right places. There was a patch of moss on the lowest doorstep. It was shaped like an elephant. I walked off, mulling over its shape. I wouldn’t see it again for another fifty-two years—by then, it would be shaped like a house, I’d be wearing glasses with lenses thicker than the pills I’d be taking, and I’d be visiting a girl who wears a belt too big for her own good.

My clock read one-twenty-two by the time I crashed onto my couch. I stared at the cardboard boxes, layered atop one another,  filling up even the walkways of the apartment. There weren’t a lot. Inside the better half of the whole lot, cushioned inside infested blankets and nestled between dusty photo albums, were her keepsakes. I tossed a coin to see if I should feed them to the hearth. It landed on heads. I imagined opening a package and retrieving from it the framed picture of her inside a purple Ferris wheel. I imagined placing it inside the bottommost shelf of my bedside counter. I imagined sleep.

And the world came crashing.