Subtraction
Written by Cong Rong
Translated from the Chinese by Jami Proctor Xu
Narrated by Jami Proctor Xu
China
Rain submerges my city
Buildings enveloped with thunder and lighting
always remind me of a man closing a window in the rain
Rainstorms, fire alarms, shutting the doors and windows tight,
being cut off from the rest of the world
I begin deleting the contacts in my cell phone
The first one I delete is a chairman
His Yang-boosting liquor is
going on the market with great fanfare
The second one I delete is an advertiser
At a banquet he says he used to be a poet, too
The third one I delete is the mother of a child star
That child’s smiling face is more blank than an adult’s
Out of 1,000 calls, I’ve deleted 900
Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and call relatives who’ve died
I haven’t deleted the QQ of my younger sister who died many years ago
The TV anchor holds the microphone anxiously reporting to the police
Every block has people who are missing
I just want to keep one friend in each city
I pause a few times over the phone number for Wang,
the head of the funeral parlor, and decide to keep it