The Woman of Kherson Taylen Huang

There is a woman who spends her time wandering the streets at all hours of the day, hands in her pockets, my brother told me. Sometimes she sifted through them, feeling their contents, and nodded to herself, seemingly reassured by their presence. Other times she scooped up whatever was inside and held it up towards her face in cupped hands, sneaking peeks at it through the gap between her thumbs, and exhaled a tiny sigh of relief that sent her loose, chin-length curls fluttering.

You knew this because you watched her closely between drying dishes and scribbling down orders each day from the restaurant where you worked. Otherwise, she blended in well with the tan-themed scenery in her beige-brown attire and patent shoes—one size too big, which made her walk with a slight shuffle.

More often than not, she could be found pacing by the patisserie’s windows, gazing at the golden scones and ruby-studded pastries, drawn to the decadent display like a hungry child. Occasionally she sat at one of the tiny round tables under the shade of the red umbrella. It was too small for the tanned young couples who were regulars. Sometimes the manager would come out to chat with her about mundane things like the weather and the stock market. She would merely nod, never uttering a word, only breaking into a rare smile at the mention of the man’s granddaughter. You speculated that she had probably lost a child of her own. Why lost? Why not had?

You never wondered about the practical things. You know: How did she make a living? Where did she live? Did she have a family? Friends? If so, why weren’t they with her?

You cared more about her gait, her expression, her nose, and her coordinates throughout the day. It’s kind of on the bigger side, a bit curved—aquiline, I believe they call it—and slightly crooked, like it’s been broken before. Her nose, I mean. By now, I am so intimately familiar with these details that I feel like I’ve met her, albeit carelessly—a family friend who I maybe met at a reunion two or three years ago, exchanged four words with, and realized that our shared qualities did not extend past five adjectives.

Most importantly, you wanted to know what precious treasure lay in those pockets of hers. Definitely something small, or at least flat, because her pockets didn’t bulge. Not sharp because she could hold it in her bare hands. Relatively malleable because you sometimes caught her kneading it absentmindedly with her fingers as she gazed up at the sky, contemplating something or maybe just looking at the clouds.

It always rained after she did this, you told me. A light rain, no longer than five minutes—like tiny silverfish that darted down from the gray ocean overhead, tickling necks and sticking to car windows. If you stuck your tongue out and happened to catch one, it would taste exactly like the salted fish from the seafood market around the corner.

That’s just regular rain, I protested. All rain comes from the sea. No, this is different—it’s bloodier.

I said you were crazy. You didn’t argue, just looked at me with laughing eyes, as if I were the one being ridiculous. We were like that a lot: you making outrageous assertions in a calm fashion, me halfheartedly trying to refute your claims, giving up when I saw that glint surfacing in your eyes. Not your typical sibling dynamics. You liked to joke that our personalities were accidentally inverted in the womb. I’d point out that we weren’t even in the womb at the same time, and we would fall back into the same pattern.

But back to the woman.

If you care so much about what’s in her pockets, why don’t you just ask her? I didn’t understand why anyone would dedicate so much of their time and energy to ruminating over such a simple problem, one that they could resolve within minutes. Plus, you had a habit of striking up conversations with random strangers you met—the lady at the convenience store, the bushy-eyebrowed birdwatcher at the local park who would mulishly wait for hours on end without spotting even a sparrow, and even the unattended eight-month-old at the barber who had yet to utter his first word (and whose mother was convinced you were trying to kidnap her son when she returned from her dye job).

It’s less fun that way, you said, frowning as if I had said something offensive. A moment later, you confessed that you thought the object(s) were personal. Like how some people keep a photo of their deceased loved one in their wallet? I asked.

Yeah … something like that. Your eyes had already drifted elsewhere, to a foreign land in your mind that only you could access.

Two days later after that conversation, you burst through the door of our rented apartment, your breaths ragged and your chest heaving. She—seeds—I s-saw them! you said, one hand still resting on the doorknob. Your body trembled with the effort it had taken to run the block home plus the two flights of stairs. We stood like that for five full minutes at least, you recovering from the exertion, me bewildered by your words, and that was when I realized how poor your health was. A news report was blaring on the radio, a man’s staticky voice describing a military occupation someplace faraway. Neither of us paid it any attention.

I saw what was in her pockets, you said. Your panting had diminished to a high-pitched, raspy croak that came from your throat when I least expected it, like the whine of a boiling kettle. Berry seeds. But she never plants them.

It was inevitable that you were there with her when the bombs fell in Kherson. Trailing her, as you liked to call it, as if you were a spy in a detective novel.

When I think about the bombing, I imagine the sky painted with napalm, the soldiers’ eyes, dark and cold like the sea—but never the explosion itself. You had just put down a greasy rag, gazing out the window out of habit to see if she was still sitting at that tiny round table, even though your shift was already over and the stream of consumers had thinned. I often think: had she never existed, would they have bombed our town?

In my mind, she became the source of the tragedy. Not a spiteful condemnation, but a matter of fact. It was true that she was the reason you were re-wiping already-shiny tables and not at home, safe in the musty cellar that we shared with our neighbors. It was true, therefore, that she was the reason you were fractured into the same indistinguishable pieces that she became, sparing the authorities from using two extra body bags.

Strangely, it does not bring back terrible memories for me to visit the scene. In fact, it has almost become routine for me to stroll past the galleria on the weekends, arm-in-arm with my fiancé, but usually alone because he does not understand the history of the place. Today, the main street is riddled with thousands of gaping holes, hungry gray mouths open in permanent, toothless yawns, and the sight stops me in my tracks. It does not make sense. How could such a wild and reckless cataclysm create such small and perfectly circular scars, like mere cigarette burns? When I stoop down for a closer look, however, they are merely crushed berries. Hundreds of them, crowding out the fissured ground with their angry, bitter color, the ink of their juice seeping into the cracks of the pavement.

She said that when the soldiers came, she would ask them to fill their pockets with berry seeds so that when they died, the berries could grow, providing rich fruit for the people. It was the very least they could do, she said, for killing a town of people and themselves in the process.