1. Elastic Band
She found a thick blue elastic band, frayed and crumbling around the edges, wrapped around a jar of hairclips. It had once wound around the gai-lan stem from Chinatown. She was six. The wet scent of the vegetables and soy filled the produce stalls. She trailed along her mother’s skirts, balancing the grocery bag on the handles of their banana seat bike. She looped the elastic around her hair, pulling it into a low ponytail. It snapped.
2. Hair
She found short fragments of hair everywhere–on the floor, in the bathtub, on the bed, between the car seats. One strand of hair was not the same colour—a long, black hair, uncut, the way it was when she was twenty-one. She held it up to the sunlight, a sliver catching the light. A man’s voice called her name in Chinese, someone she hadn’t thought of in years. He had stroked her hair. They had shared their first kiss. She traced his face and tried to answer, but she swallowed the sound. The language tasted foreign on her tongue.
3. Drawing
She found an old drawing of a stick figure of a child with her parents. An old birthday card she drew for her baba. She was nine. She wondered when she stopped drawing. She had held the pastel between her fingers. The oil had smudged on her palm. She stared longer. The stick figure trembled. She tried to grasp onto her parents’ smiles, but the lines slipped from her touch. Her pastel moved faster, in a frenzy, filling the empty space. The figure now held a degree, a stiff piece of rectangular paper in her hand.
4. Book
She found an old Chinese picture book collecting dust on the shelf. A mischievous monkey holding a golden rod leapt across the page, frozen midair. The pages are yellowed and brittle. She was twelve. She sat in the library and slipped into the fantastical worlds when no one was watching. She had traced the characters with her fingers to remember their shapes. She opened the book. The ink stirred. The characters reordered themselves, flattening into numbers and equations. The monkey’s rod became black iron.
5. Watch
She found the analog sports watch she had worn. She didn’t remember when she stopped wearing it. The rubber strap still fits, like a shackle of time, rugged on her skin. The hands were frozen at 3:17, the time when the battery died. Then, she heard the faint ticking. The long hand moved backward. The walls rippled, the shelves blurred and faded, washed with fresh paint and bleach. She ripped off the watch. The hair, book, drawing, and elastic band vanished. Only the scent of gai-lan lingered faintly in the air.
~
Wanying Zhang is a Chinese-Canadian writer of speculative fiction based in Montréal. Since she was young, she has dabbled in mixing potions and writing stories fusing elements of Asian and European fairy tales, folklore, and science fantasy. She is a flash fiction winner of the 61st issue of Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter, received a silver honorable mention in Writers of the Future contest. She is also recently a finalist in Fractured Lit’s 2025 Flash Fiction contest and shortlisted in their Gods and Monsters Challenge. Her work has been published or upcoming in Every Day Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, Literally Stories, Metastellar, Tiny Molecules, and NewMyths. Currently a college professor with too many degrees, she sprinkles the magic of chemistry for future generations.