Fidelity - fiction by Lucy Zhang

I left our husband’s body where I found it: in front of the redwood desk, head slumped over a stack of papers and a dried ballpoint pen.

I made tea by squeezing the milky sap from poppies into water.

Our husband drank tea during the day like he drank wine at night, constantly inhaling liquid with millisecond breaks to click his tongue or puff a cigarette. Poison is an investment in time, ingredients, tenacity, and faith. I used it sparingly, especially when a sprinkling’s difference turned medicine into poison.
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I left the body where I found it only because there was nowhere else to put it, and because I knew little about the art of concealment. Someone would discover him anyway—whether it be the butler or maids or my sisters. I believed there was less suspicion in the painfully obvious. Certainly, my sisters would never rat me out, as they disliked our husband equally, though they only voiced it in secret, while we gathered in the kitchen at night to raid the leftovers and drink tea from earthenware jugs, pretending we were savages. My sisters complained more skillfully than even the gardener who yelled at the sun for its warmth and the clouds for their dreariness. 

“Can you imagine, he lifted my skirt in the middle of mourning,” my younger sister said. “I couldn’t even get up this morning, I had to ask for the maids to powder my face since the rouge was so horribly far away,” my elder sister countered. She slept in the largest room where you could host a sword dancing performance without shattering the mirror and splintering the shelves. This was not because our husband favored her, so she claimed, but because she moved in first and had the best pick of rooms. We were still in the middle of mourning our husband’s father who’d been trampled by a horse, so they say. The horses feared that entire family to the point they’d act dead whenever our husband or his father neared. If anything, our father-in-law likely trampled the horse with his cane for snorting too loudly and later died from tripping in horse poop.
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​Our husband liked skin. My younger sister still feels soft to touch, like the year’s first snow when it covers the European-styled buildings and streetcars. My elder sister resembles the frozen surface of Jingpo Lake, a mirror surrounded by rime, leading to an icefall preserved in pure, white shards. Our husband alternated between them regularly. He visited me only when both my sisters were occupied with their menstrual cycles or out on their trips to the night market where you could buy coats made from sika deer fur.

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When it was only us two, he refused to touch me unless I turned into a red-crowned crane, a body I disliked because of how clumsy and clunky it felt when I could not stretch my full wingspan, and because the sky barricaded by the window seemed eons further as a bird. At my strongest, I could cross oceans. Instead, our husband brought raccoon dogs and red foxes and gray wolves that I’d fight off with my beak, leaving my room’s carpet bloody and matted with fur and the occasional feather. The animal got bigger with each visit, but my skills also improved as I learned to target creatures’ vitals or temporarily blind them with my partially folded wings.
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Our husband would watch quietly, motionless while sitting on my bed, and even when the wolf turned on him, his arms remained limp as I swooped in to stab the creature’s neck mid-pounce. “I trust you to save me. How majestic,” he’d say as he wiped my beak with a checkered, satin handkerchief and I waited for the signal to revert to human form. “You become more beautiful every time,” he’d speak into my hair as I reoriented myself with the room and brushed my hands over my arms, skin tender from the plucked and discarded feathers. Going from human to bird to human again doesn’t come naturally: you’ve got to will your body into restructuring, like smashing a sculpted clay figure into a ball only to reshape its guts into another life form. I’d fall asleep in his lap despite the smokey scent of a fresh gunshot into the animal’s body—insurance in case I spared the creature, and wake up the next morning clothed in my gown, dry and clean as though it’d been any other night.
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My younger sister was a spot-billed duck, and my elder sister was a vulture. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care that our husband never asked my sisters to show their bird forms. Killing is much more tiring than making love, and my body would quake for weeks afterward while their bodies recovered within a day to partake in drinking and eating lamb skewers while flirting with the big-shouldered and round-bellied North-easterners. Nevertheless, my sisters despised our husband who provided only enough allowance money to buy freshly roasted sweet potatoes on the streets. In turn, they’d steal precious jade fish statues and antique calligraphy brushes from the dining room and trade them for coins to buy beer. “You’ve not seen a more frugal husband,” my elder sister lamented despite her secret wheat business that made money off poor harvests and hungry mouths. “He won’t notice if a few more gold bands go missing,” my younger sister shrugged.
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​So I left our husband’s body as I had done with the wolf and the fox and the raccoon dog. I maneuvered the gun from his pocket and aimed it at his heart as insurance—because poisoned tea travels slowly, the way I once crossed rivers and mountains by following the clouds.

​About Lucy Zhang

Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Find her at https://lucyzhang.tech or on Instagram @Dango_Ramen.