Jie Wang
In the middle of the desert where it used to be New New America, stands a colossal corn—at least its lower part is corn, with its golden grains and green leaves. After it touches the sky, it slowly grows into a metal column.
One day a pigeon flies into the desert and shades herself under the corn’s gigantic leaves. “Where does this thing come from?” she says. She has been alone for so long that she has formed the habit of talking to herself.
“I am not a ‘thing’,” the corn says.
The pigeon is startled. “You can talk?”
“Yes. I used to be a man. I worked hard for too long, so I became like this.”
“Oh, that makes sense.”
“Where are you from?”
“I’m from New New China, which is now a different kind of wasteland. I used to be a woman. I travelled all around the world, so I became a pigeon.”
“That is logical.”
“Why do you grow metal?”
“Because it lasts longer.”
“Why are you so tall?”
“Because I want to reach space.”
“Why do you want to reach space?”
“Because the future is there.”
“I don’t understand. There’s nothing in space.”
“I can build things there.” Then he starts describing his vision with a lot of tech words, and the pigeon thinks he is speaking a pidgin language. She is not interested in space, so she dives towards the earth.
“How deep are your roots?” she asks.
“Very deep.”
“Are you digging gold?” She looks at the embarrassing but unembarrassed shine of his golden grains.
“Not just gold.”
“But you did dig up a lot of gold!”
“Do you want some? I can give you some.”
“Oh … thanks.” She pecks off a few golden grains, and buries them in different spots, whose locations she will later forget.
“What is the gold for? There is not much to buy here,” she says.
“It is my fuel. I also have a powerful underground engine. Do you want to see it?”
“Yes.” So he opens a door on his cob into a lit glass lift. She hops in and it goes underground. She sees his enormous roots stretching and bending like the bowels of a great beast, getting thinner and thinner as they dig deeper, and eventually as thin as hair. At the roots of the hair is a boy, breathing slowly, sleeping, sending electric pulses up through his hair that gradually thickens into the roots, the stem, the cob, and the metal column that reaches into space.
The electric pulses coming out of the boy’s head constantly change colours like the skin of a dreaming octopus. The pigeon hasn’t seen so many colours for a long time. Beneath the boy there is nothing but darkness, so she concludes that the boy must be the engine. She presses a button and the lift goes up.
After she is out, the space corn asks, “Have you seen my engine? It’s impressive, isn’t it?”
“I saw a boy.”
“A boy? What boy?”
“A boy at the roots of your roots. I suppose he is your engine.”
“No, my engine is literally an engine–I never use metaphors. It’s very sophisticated technology, not some boy.”
“Can you see what’s going on underground?”
“No, I can’t, but I get signals.”
“Yeah … one can be a Kafka’s castle to themselves.”
He falls silent, as if thinking about something. Drop by drop the night also falls, making his silence bare and unbearable, so she says in a downcast voice, “This is the time space feels palpable, because the night sky is just as dark and cold. It’s like … space has leaked into the air we breathe.”
He is not replying. For a moment she thinks he is dead. She touches him, and feels the electric pulses. “The man is dictated by the boy in him,” she says to herself, “and after the boy and the man and I die, the thing will still be here.” She moves closer to him, wraps one of his leaves around herself, and falls asleep.
JIE WANG loves words and animals, writes very short stories, has been published in Best Small Fictions 2024 among others.