They Will Melt Away Anyway

Fiction by Yiru Zhang

I once stood alone in the woods at night and saw the blue light reflected off the snow, so bright it almost outshone the moon. Then I saw my father, who, in the woods illuminated by the glow of the snow, took out a flashlight, a pair of binoculars, and a blanket from his car. I watched him climb a tree and disappear into the deer blind, where he told me that he was going to spend the night.
 
So far away was his voice, as if he was talking to me from another planet.
 
That was the first time I hunted with my father. In October, when I put on my boots for the first snow in Michigan, he would always go hunting by himself, leaving my mother and me at home. In October there were maple leaves everywhere, so red I thought they would never leave me alone. Then the maple leaves would fall. They vanished in the empty field covered with snow.
 
My mother never wanted me to go hunting with my father. She said the last time she fired a gun was twenty years ago. I had seen her photos when she was younger. In the picture, she wore a white woolen hat, holding a pink pistol.
 
"Too noisy," now, when she spoke of hunting, she always said, "and too cruel."
 
Each year, on November 15, when the firearm season in Michigan began, my father would put his rifle in the backseat, and my mother, who always said that the thought of my father bringing down a deer caused her a headache, would start to complain about having to eat venison.
 
"But it's much better than what they are selling in Meijer," my father said when he took out a piece of frozen ground venison in the shape of hamburger from the fridge.
 
Venison filled our fridge, smelling sweet and slightly sour.
 
My father once told me about how he shot down a male deer. He said it was large, almost elegant. Later, he hung its head in our basement. Sometimes I passed by that giant head at night. Its eyes glimmered in the dark, as if it was watching me, and consoling me.
 

 
My father's father and mother bought our property located near the center of Michigan. Shortly after they built the cottage there, they passed away. My father and mother used to drive along the interstate highways, passing by maple trees, birch trees, and cornfields, all the way from our home in Kalamazoo to the Mackinaw Island. On these trips in the summer days, we would spend a night in the cottage on the property, and in the winter, we would go there to cut down a pine tree. We used to tie the pine tree to my father's truck and then head home before the blizzard arrived. Our home used to smell like a pine tree.
 
That night, when I went hunting with my father for the first time, he climbed down from the deer blind eventually, saying that he would spend the night with my mother and me. But it was because he could not find deer from there. In front of the cottage, my father and I built a fire pit out of stones, and we threw logs into the bonfire. It was quiet around—only my father's footsteps.
 
After we set the fire, my mother walked out of the cottage. She put on a blanket and sat down.
 
The next day, my father hung a shooting target on a trunk and set a row of ceramic plates for me to shoot at. When I pressed the trigger of his rifle, the blow to my shoulder made me stagger. It hurt me so that I wanted to cry out. But I didn't. This was what my father was proud about me. I never cried out as my mother did. I never made a sound. When my mother smashed all the ceramic plates, I did not make a sound either, and when they started to fight again like they always did in the past few years, I was looking at the snowshoe hares whose hind feet are wide and soft. So wide and so soft, I thought, preventing them from sinking in the snow when hopping at the sound of my father's gunshot.
 
I still have that target with me, right under my bed. When I slept, the sound of snowshoe hares hopping flew under my pillow. I did not know why they fought that time. I did not know why my mother screamed or why my father shot at the sky. I didn't ask them. And I still remembered that, after my father shot his gun, snow started to fall from the top of trees, making a small, crispy sound, as if someone was clapping secretly.
 
 
 
In May, the last bit of snow melted away. Groups of spiders came out, hanging in front of the mirror. Their legs were slender. When they crawled, I felt as if they were floating in the air. Sometimes, I mistook them for shadows. Or fluff.
 
It was at that time when my father started drinking again. When the hunting season ended, my mother and I often went out at night, looked for my drunk father, and carried him home. He talked a lot when he was drunk. He would murmur or giggle. Sometimes he would howl aloud. Then he would throw up. I would usually help him sit up, then take a basin and squat in front of him for his vomit. Then he would fall asleep. After my father stopped trying to teach me how to hunt, these were the only moments that I was ever close to him. I touched his forehead and covered him with a blanket.
 
On the days following his drinking, my father would remain quiet. Even if my mother smashed all his whiskey bottles in the garage, he still remained quiet. During that spring, our garage always smelled like a cellar. The smell of the broken bottles wandered ghostlily.
 
One time, I saw a spider crawling in the garage. I reached out and squeezed it.
 
 
 
My mother once had a dreamy wedding. That happened before I was born. She sometimes listened to the music played at that wedding. "Listen," she said to me. "My wedding at the age of twenty-four." One year after her wedding, she divorced her first husband. She told me that the fancier the wedding is, the easier the divorce will be, and that's why she and my father did not have a wedding.
 
"If I was still in high school," my mother used to tell my father, "you were the kind of kid I hated the most."
 
My father only got married once. Most of the time he was alone. Each day, he drove a truck with a ladder, climbed onto a different roof, and installed another TV satellite that looked much like a lonely moon. The job became tough when it got cold. Before my mother left him, he told me that he once went to a house where forty people lived and that none of them spoke English. He never spent holidays with us because holidays were when he could earn the most, and because after the death of his father and mother, he and his only sister stopped seeing each other anyway.
 
"Taking care of sick parents and dealing with the inheritance," he once said to me, "was the easiest way for siblings to break up."
 
Before he started to drink, he often picked me up from school. When we passed the town's cemetery, he would stop and say hello to his mom and dad buried there. And then he would drive away. The sun fell behind us.
 
"Mommy!" When my mother and I carried my drunk, unconscious father to his bed, he cried out with his eyes closed.
 
"What?" my mother asked.
 
"Mommy," he murmured.
 
He rolled over and fell asleep.
 

 
Soon after separating from my father, my mother met her boyfriend. Her boyfriend wore a baseball cap that was never taken off, and I wondered if it was because he did not have much hair left. That summer, my mother's boyfriend moved in with us. At night I could hear them laughing on the balcony.
 
"You guys are cheesy," my mother's friend said to her and her boyfriend at a party one time.
 
My mother smiled and leaned against him. He caressed her forehead.
 
"Snowshoe hares," my mother's boyfriend once said as he sat down beside me, "have longer ears and wider feet than cottontails." I was sitting in the backyard, looking at a brown rabbit in the grass.
 
"This is a baby snowshoe hare," he continued. "A baby cottontail can't open its eyes, but a snowshoe can jump with eyes wide open as soon as it is born."
 
He patted me on the shoulder. I thought he was trying to be friendly. When I asked him if he liked hunting, he said that he would never kill.
 
My mother's boyfriend always prayed before meals. He went to church every Sunday, though my mother never went with him. She said that she too believed in God, but she didn't need to do anything to prove it. I once saw my mother's boyfriend kneeling in the living room alone at night when my mother was in the bathroom throwing up, and that somehow reminded me of my father. Unlike my father, my mother would refuse help when she was drunk. Leaving my father made her happy, she told me, and she only drank when she was happy.
 
She said that she did not need help when she was happy.
 
I looked at my mother. She was sleeping on the bathroom floor. Her feet hanging on the toilet, elegant as a deer.
 

 
I still saw my father a lot after my parents' divorce. One time, our satellite TV broke down, and my mother called for my father. He climbed on the roof and fixed it. I thought they would say something to each other or argue again like they used to, but they didn't.
 
Every weekend, my father would take me to his cottage where he prepared me a sleeping bag. It was summer then. The grass had grown higher than my head. When I was walking in the grass, I felt as if I had drowned.
 
"Turn around," my father said.
 
I turned around for his anti-mosquito spray.
 
When my father was building the fire pit out of stone like he did in the last winter, I walked around in the poplar grove, picking up fallen branches from the mossy ground. The winter snow had broken the branches like it broke my father and mother's marriage. I stepped over the fallen trunks, throwing branches into the burning fire. Fungus covered poplar trunks.
 
"This will drive away mosquitoes," my father said as he looked at the smoke filling the woods. "Let's clean up the ground for our winter hunting."
 
Under a poplar tree, I lay on a folding chair and closed my eyes. Orange and yellow light appeared in my vision as if I was looking at the sun from underneath the water.
 
That day, before sleeping, my father told me that he would no longer get drunk again. "I'll only drink a little," he said, "only two bottles of beer a day." He promised that he no longer needed me to worry for him.
 
When he was talking, I wrapped myself up in his sleeping bag. The ground felt hard beneath me.
 
That summer, he often took me to Lake Michigan, the lake as blue as the ocean. Later in that year, the grand lake would freeze again. When I could walk on the snow piling on the lake at the end of the year, my father would be drunk once again. He would smash his whiskey bottles in front of me, promising that he would quit drinking this time. And I would believe in him just like my mother used to believe in him. He would go hunting as usual and put down his gun and run back to the car as if someone was calling him and take out his whiskey. He would drink in the blizzard. He would sleep in the back seat with the car doors open. And he would call me the next day. He would sob on the phone. At that time, I would drive alone to the property where we used to burn the poplar branches together. I would find him in the car, help him sit up, pack up his clothes, and take him to the alcohol treatment center. He would say goodbye to me there, and such a farewell would happen over and over again. Until that time, I still won't give up on him.
 
"Your father," my mother had said while lying in her boyfriend's arms, shaking her head to me. "Your father."
 
"He promised to me that he'd quit drinking," I said.
 
It started to snow again in early October. The snow would not melt until the April of the following year. Sometimes, in May, you could still see the snow remaining in the woods from the highway. In early October, when it started to snow again, my mother's boyfriend left us. I did not see him leaving. If I were there when he left, I thought, he would pat my shoulder like he did when he was sitting in the backyard with me. But I was not there when he left. I returned home that afternoon, my mother sitting on the ground crying. She wrapped her head with a towel. Her toothbrush and floss were scattered on the floor. I thought I should say something to her, but she refused to look up from her towel. So I walked over, walked down the stairs, and closed my bedroom door without making a sound.
 

 
A few months before the hunting season, my father began scouting his property. He would take a camera and wander in the woods whenever he was off work. Sometimes, I went with him. Sometimes, I carried a water bottle, a loaf of bread, and a navigator for him.
 
When the maple leaves turned red again, he found a male deer with grand antlers.
 
"This is the biggest deer I have ever seen." My father squatted in the grass to take a picture of the deer.
 
I looked at its picture. It reminded me of the one that stared at me with its glimmering eyes in our basement.
 
Before the hunting season started, we often stayed in the deer blind on the tree together, looking for the deer, or looking for nothing. I loved spending weekends with my father. If it weren’t my last year of high school, I would move out of my mother's place. I wanted to be a cashier, a carpenter, or a repairman like my father. I didn't want to go to a community college to study interior design and work in the post office sorting out letters like my mother had done for all her life. When she was at home, she always put tablecloths, table runners, and placemats on our dining table. She always put red napkins under the plates and in the glasses. But we never ate at the table. Every evening, she would sit in front of her laptop and eat frozen food and play web games, while I would stay in my room in the basement alone.
 
After my father and I drove around the property, we walked in the woods, looking for the territory of the male deer. We knew that it would appear in the grass in the morning and travel to the oak groves in the evening. It would sometimes hide in the bushes, its antlers appearing and disappearing. When we were walking in the woods, my father asked me about my mother. He asked me if she still had problems falling asleep and if she would still wake up at four in the morning. I said yes. I said that she was even more anxious than before. She would gasp to calm herself down. She would tell me that her back, her legs, and her heart were all aching. She would always feel nausea in her stomach. She would squeeze my hands and claim that I didn't care about her and that I was becoming like all those men that hurt her in her life.
 
My father put the camera back in his bag. He took the water bottle from me and told me that he was sorry to hear that.
 
We drove along the birch trees on our way back. In the darkness, the trees looked like dark green beasts chasing us. I wanted to tell him that I too would become like my mother. I wanted to tell him that I would only be more anxious than her. I would catch the spiders and pull out their legs one by one because I felt alone. I would open the refrigerator and take out the frozen orange and hold it in the palm of my hand to calm myself down. Every night, when my mother was weeping, I would listen to her. I would pee every five minutes on those nights that I couldn't fall asleep. I really could. Even if I hadn't had any liquid for ten hours, I could still pee every five minutes because I felt nervous. I would keep stuffing sweet potatoes and corn into my mouth. I would not know how to stop eating. I would feel my stomach swelling. I would chew so hard that my cheeks became numb. Until then, I would keep eating.
 
"You are not like your mother. You never yell. I'm happy that you are not like your mother," my father said when he parked in front of his cottage.
 

 
The firearm season opened on November 15. At four-thirty in the morning, my father and I got up and walked a long way in the woods to the male deer’s territory. We followed the deer's trail and reached the big beech where we had seen it around before.
 
It was snowing all the way. Under the gray sky, we became two small black spots.
 
When we were walking, a rabbit flashed past us. It was a cottontail. In winter, its fur was still dusty brown. It reminded me of my mother's boyfriend who used to tell me the difference between a cottontail and a snowshoe. He must be praying for me somewhere, I thought. Then I started to think of my mother. I started to think about the fireplace that my mother lit up at home. In winter, she always sat there throwing paper and logs into the fireplace. She always watched the flames rising and falling and rising again.
 
Besides the beech tree, we saw the deer that we were looking for. It was dead already. It had several gunshots. Some were near its stomach and some were near its heart. Such a huge deer, I thought. Its head was already cut off.
 
"It shouldn't be left here." My father looked at it and knelt to touch its fur.
 
"Will we take its body away?" I said.
 
"No.” He stood up. “There will be animals coming to eat it."
 
He took out his pistol.
 
"Let's go home," he said. "Come over here."
 
I walked to his side.
 
He did something to his pistol.
 
"Did you get it?" He asked me.
 
"No," I said.
 
"I did something to my pistol and it can't fire now. I did the same thing to your mother's pistol as well."
 
My mother left home with her pink pistol on an evening two months later. When she left, I was sitting in our living room illuminated by the fireplace. I looked out the window and saw my mother outside. She was wearing a white woolen hat. She grew smaller and smaller until she finally became a white dot. I watched her leaving and began to think of my father. He started hunting and stopped and started each year again just like he picked up drinking and quit only to pick it back up over and over again. Then I began to think of my mother. She said that her whole life was ruined by men, including me. And finally I began to think of that pink pistol that couldn’t fire anymore because my father wanted it to be so. These memories piled up like the snow on Lake Michigan, and I knew that they would melt away anyway. Then I heard a knocking. I walked over to open the door. My mother covered her face with her hands. She handed the pink pistol to me. She told me that she hadn't used this pistol for more than twenty years and it was already broken. She said she would throw it away the next day. She asked me about my father. She said that there was something wrong with our satellite TV. She asked me if I could ask my father to come here to fix it the next day.

Yiru Zhang

Yiru Zhang has works published or forthcoming in Boston Review, The Florida Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and other venues. In her native Chinese, she has works published in Taiwan and Hong Kong Literature, Youth, and elsewhere. She works as a literary reporter, and translates American short stories into Chinese as well. ​