Lindsay Li

Late Summer

after Mark Wunderlich


In late summer, Beijing blurs outside
our car window. As we speed past the flurry of
bikers racing across Chang’an Avenue’s ten lanes,

Beijing prospers with gleaming glass towers, snack
vendors calling out their wares on the street,
hawthorn berries in full ripeness bunching like

rubies on a headpiece. Yet when Dad steps
on the brakes in front of the old hospital,
the tired green foliage outside the building

is still the only source of color punctuating
the suddenly gray landscape. Inside, at the end
of the hallway, third floor, there’s a room I once knew.

Whether or not the smog of my memory clouded the view
out the single window, I couldn’t say. My mother and
younger brother didn’t share my view, but I always thought

the place felt too sterile, maybe because my grandfather had been
dying on the hospital bed. At eleven I thought it was
just like the canopy bed I spent years dreaming which never

came to fruition, without flowery curtains and thick mattresses—
without any similarity at all. Maybe the yellow couch didn’t
bounce so he wouldn’t hear the squeaking and remember

he is a man who could no longer move.
His last words were not to me but they were
about me. Take care of your sister, he said

to a four-year-old boy whose sister barely paid
her grandfather attention while he was still around.
The hospital goes by, ricocheting me back

to the car. Beside me, a nine-year-old brother
has already forgotten those last words. Somewhere
beneath my feet, familiar ashes burrow in the earth.

Lindsay Li is a Chinese American writer based in the Bay Area. In her free time, she attempts to unite history with the coming future, goes down Wikipedia rabbit holes, and writes anything that comes to mind.