In Retrograde

(Here’s another creative writing piece because I guess I would rather fabricate an entire storyline than talk about my week. The following work is loosely inspired by the historical figure Qin Shi Huang.)

In Retrograde

When his walls were inlaid with copper, when his floors were polished with silver, when his roofs were tipped in gold, that was when his robes sunk into lead, pulling bone into tissue. It was then the emperor understood that the luxuries he amassed were not meant for a mere mortal to hold.

And yet these were the gifts he inherited through his war and rule. The life he stole, the life he preserved, the life to be continued. He had torn the mandate of heaven out from the skies himself, climbed the highest, jagged peak in the Middle Kingdom to receive this right. Every citizen wrote with his calligraphy, exchanged goods with his currency, crossed mountains and valleys with his roads. He was already a god in everything but name.

From beyond the grave // etched memories and sharp waves // sweeping me away

Death was blood in his mouth, coughed up from his throat, tasted in the air of a corpse. Even before he knew war he was already living it. Once, he was a little boy watching torn-up, spit-out soldiers come home. He watched them lie down in grass fields while thinking about razed ones. Human life was too fleeting, civilization too fragile. The heart was a wound of the mind.

With every passing day, his strength withered a little more, leaving his legs weak and his arms brittle. The joints between his muscles stiffening; one day he would be stuck, unable to do anything but fade. And then the palace of peace he built with red and raw hands — the copper, silver, gold — would crumple back to dirt.

Colored mercury // orbiting you lovingly // or is it poison?

When he first saw mercury, it was yet another metal, not too different from the endless riches he already held. But then, upon closer examination, there was the teardrop shape of it, the ever-shifting luster, like morning dew tipping forward a blade of grass. It was liquid freeform, yet the surface was brimming with a tension just on the edge of bursting. It was ethereal. It was eternity.

The next week, his physician presented him with an elixir of mercury, just as he had ordered. The pill burned his throat when he swallowed it down, but even as his limbs grew heavy, even heavier than before, his veins were pulsing with something precious, something divine.

What makes a thing dead // floating in the in-between // is it just sleeping?

He is asleep. He is rarely awake now, his pounding head unable to bear the vertigo of consciousness. He is barely breathing. But in the splendor of his dreams, there is no pain anymore, only the celestial city above him where spirits spin fate, weaving colored mercury into the fabric of the sky.

There, he sees his desire reflected in the surface’s sheen; there lies his promise and his relief. So, from the earth, he stretches his arms out. Longer, longer, longer, until he is stretched so thin that his marrow becomes thread and his bones become needles. With his spindled fingers, he shakes the beaded cords, shakes the trembling dew drops until they are freed in a burst of rain.

The heavens darken. He tilts his head back, parts his lips. Dark orbs pool on his tongue, and he finally realizes it — why the taste of mercury is so haunting.

Death is blood in his mouth, and immortality is too.