Children of the New World: Stories Read Online Free Page B

We’re eating our cereal when the doorbell rings. I get up and answer it. On our doorstep is a glass vase filled with orchids and white lilies. A small card is attached. I kneel down and open it. Didn’t want to disturb you guys. Just wanted to give you these. We’re all very sorry for your loss—George, Dana, and the twins. Amazing, I think. This from a guy who paints his face for Super Bowl games.
    “Hey, look what we got,” I say, carrying the flowers into the kitchen. “They’re from George.”
    “They’re beautiful,” Kyra says. “Come, Mika, let’s go put those in the living room by your brother’s picture.” Kyra helps Mika out of her chair, and we walk into the other room together.
    It was Kyra’s idea to put the voice box behind the photograph. The photo is a picture from our trip to China last summer. In it, Mika and Yang are playing at the gate of a park. Mika stands at the port, holding the two large iron gates together. From the other side, Yang looks through the hole of the gates at the camera. His head is slightly cocked, as though wondering who we all are. He has a placid non-smile/non-frown, the expression we came to identify as Yang at his happiest.
    “You can talk to him,” I say to Mika as I place the flowers next to the photograph.
    “Goodbye, Yang,” Mika says.
    “Goodbye?” the voice box asks. “But, little sister, where are we going?”
    Mika smiles at the sound of her Big Brother’s voice, and looks up at me for instruction. It’s an awkward moment. I’m not about to tell Yang that the rest of him is buried in the backyard.
    “Nowhere,” I answer. “We’re all here together.”
    There’s a pause as though Yang’s thinking about something. Then, quietly, he asks, “Did you know over two million workers died during the building of the Great Wall of China?” Kyra and I exchange a look regarding the odd coincidence of this Fun Fact, but neither of us says anything. Then Yang’s voice starts up again. “The Great Wall is over ten thousand li long. A li is a standardized Chinese unit of measurement that is equivalent to one thousand six hundred and forty feet.”
    “Wow, that’s amazing,” Kyra says, and I stand next to her, looking at the flowers George sent, acknowledging how little I truly know about this world.

 
    THE CARTOGRAPHERS
    PUBLICLY, WE SOLD memories under Quimbly, Barrett & Woods, but when it was just the three of us, working late into the night, we thought of ourselves as mapmakers. There was something nautical about the loft we’d rented: the massive oak beams and triangular plate glass window that stood like a sail at the end of the room. In the day it revealed the tar-papered roofs of neighboring apartment buildings, and at night framed the illuminated Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan’s skyline. We called it the Crow’s Nest, and we were the captains, lording over the memories of the world as we drew our maps into our programs. Here was the ocean, here the ships, here the hotel, here the path that led to town, here the street vendors, here the memories of children we never had and parents much better than the ones we did. And far out there was the edge of the world.
    What happens when you get to the edge?
    You fall off, we joked.
    Early on, there were many edges. They existed within our restaurants and hotels as well as the borders of our cities. Most of our hotel rooms were well charted—open the drawer and you’d find a Bible, take the paintings down and there’d be more wall—but behind the closed doors of neighboring rooms there was nothing but white light. There are, of course, the Japanese maximalists, like the legendary Taka Shimazaki, who design every carpet fiber of every hotel room to avoid any edges, but what Quimbly, Barrett, and I found was that most people trusted memories like they trusted films. You beam a movie between your eyes and remember the plot in vivid detail; you don’t wonder where a sidekick’s parents live. When you