White Flower Oil

By Wisteria Deng

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Father lives in a dragon’s dungeon. Curtains down, air-conditioning blasting at full force. In his dungeon floats the smell of white flower oil – an herbal ointment with menthol, wintergreen, peppermint, lavender and eucalyptus; for mosquito itch, excessive scratch, or a painful stitch.

I walk into the room and there he is, half-buried in ancient books and business letters, one of his tails hanging down from the step stool, face covered in green scales, sniffing a tiny vial of the ointment while repeating the same lines on the phone: “Listen to me, listen to me, listen to me,” like the chime of a broken bell, a forbidden prayer, a hypnotic spell.

I walk into the room and there he is, soaking himself in a white flower oil bath. “Fucking mosquitos.” He slaps his arm as if to smash a phantom insect-sized. He slaps his arm as if to smash his daughter. He slaps his daughter as if to smash himself. He slaps the daughter who just opened the door, the daughter he has killed, the daughter who has escaped, the daughter that disappears with him. “Fucking mosquitos.”

Each time a daughter leaves him, he loses a tail.

I walk into the room and the dragon dies. Spread out on the floor translucent green scales. Hospital air stuffed with menthol, the worst-tempered sibling from the white flower family. Nurses patched him up. Where tubes once ran through, each hole now covered with a Band-Aid. I leaned into his body and smelled the patchwork on his forearm, a jolt. A tail flaps. A tail slaps me from inside the mirror.

I walk into the room and there he is, speaking in a coded tongue with mother. Someone has reported something to somewhere.

I walk into the room he isn’t there. He enrolls in a top university of the country studying political science. In three months, he will grow his first tail and become a Red Guard, beating professors on the street and tearing down relics of houses from dynasties ago. In three months, he will become a Red Guard and watch the vexing red flood taking over this country, knowing that he is a drop, a significant drop. In three months, he will become a Red Guard and watch the doctor he had beaten days ago hang himself with hospital bed sheets, feet dangling above the operating table. In twenty years, his daughter is born in that hospital.

Each time his daughter comes to life, he loses a tail.

I walk into the room and he isn’t there. He is holding an “educational camp” for students who made it out of Tian’anmen alive. He tries to save the few that can be saved. He stands by the tropical shore he has been banished to, watching another red flood taking over and how each drop of blood believes in something magnificent.

I walk into the room and he is about to leave. Packing up five pink shirts and two bouncy tails, he is heading to Hong Kong for his early retirement, because someone has reported something to somewhere and he is no longer a drop of the flood. He speaks to mother in a coded tongue. Could it be the mayor’s cousin whose red pocket I didn’t accept? Do you hate me for living in this jungle? Fucking mosquitos. My scales keep falling off. Rub me some white flower oil over them bumps. I got a new bottle.

I walk into the room and he has just left. The room is still shrouded in the smell of menthol and wintergreen. A static street at the heart of Beijing. There stuck a dying dragon. The ambulance screams its siren without shifting an inch. Drivers from other vehicles roll down the window, stare at the swirling blue light, suck teeth and spit out a gum chewed for hours, before rolling the window back up and turning the radio on. It is a competition now, between the one siren and hundred radio stations broadcasting inside tightly shut metal cells. After half an hour in traffic, the ambulance driver declares his defeat and turns off the siren. Honks from other cars seem to have stopped too. The whole world is left with my mother’s muffled cry. In a different country, I struggle with a broken faucet to wash an apple and water splashes all over my school uniform. My next class is in fifteen minutes. If I finish this apple in five, there would be enough time for a nap. I go on scheming about my nap as the reckless stream of water attacks the smooth skin of a flaming red apple. When I turn off the faucet, my world falls silent too.

I walk into the room and I’m outside Penn Station. Thanksgiving in New York City. An ambulance cut into the fullness like a scalpel. All was still except one silver sport car. Before the ambulance could blast another round of siren, someone on the street shouted, from the bottom of his lung, “Hey asshole! Watch out! It’s a fucking ambulance!” On that ambulance sits a daughter holding her father’s hand, and that father will stay with her for years longer.

I walk into the room and he has been gone for thirteen years. The smell of menthol and wintergreen pierces my throat.

I walk into the room and wintergreen dies in the heat of an endless jungle summer. His peppermint plant is eaten up by the mischievous daughter, the one he could not kill. Lavender leaks out of his pillow, no longer summoned to guard his sleep, too frail to chase away old ghosts – white phantoms swaying midair, shadows above an operating table. Now only the menthol remains, a kind of cruelty, tailing me all the way from the hospital.

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Wisteria Deng is a mental health practitioner, writer and daughter. She runs a theater non-profit and delivers trauma-informed psychotherapy to sexual gender minorities and patients nearing the end of life. Wisteria graduated from the University of Michigan and is currently a Clinical Psychology Fellow at Yale New Haven Hospital. She is the winner of the Granader Family Prize for Excellence in Writing and the Fischer Prize Honorable Mention. She has also received multiple fellowships at Brooklyn Poets, Hudson Valley Writers Center, GrubStreet, Kundiman, Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and Fine Arts Work Center. Wisteria is the finalist of the Nowhere Spring Travel Writing Prize, Slippery Elm Prose Prize, New Millennium Writing Award, the Disquiet Literary Program, among others. Her work has appeared in the Bangalore Review, Voice and Verse, Club Rambutan, Laurel Moon, Runestone, and elsewhere. Her forthcoming poetry chapbook, Goodbye Eurydice, is a finalist in the Finishing Line Press Chapbook Contest. Wisteria splits her time between New Haven and New York City.