When I come home, I do not come home.
I do not step over the worn threshold of our side door, the sizzling sound of oil and my mother’s voice soaring as I walk across laminate tiles placed slightly askew, with years of dirt caked by my mother’s busy feet pacing the surface over and over again.
I do not come home. I step into a carcass of memory, checking into a hotel she worked the night shift at when I was a child, a Holiday Inn next to the hospital, a place she labored while I slept in my cradle—and when I cry, I see her wiping down the bathroom sink with disinfectant soaked cloth, the sharp scent of bleach mingling with the Eagle oil on her skin, I see her count down until she’s home with us, I see a young woman, I see someone I never knew, I see a fiction.
I do not come home. I, breath musty under my mask, tell the hospital front desk I am here to see her, that she is dying and the nurses have told me the occupancy rules don’t apply, but am not believed and hear them call the ICU anyway, who tell them what I told them, and am let into a world of sterile white and clean
clean
clean
the sharp scent of bleach mingling with nothing, and I walk until I see my mother.
And watch her die.
I do not come home. I nestle into a story my mother tells me, of the banyan that could restore life and its keeper Cuội who instructed his wife to water it in his absence, but suffered when the wife forgot and instead urinated on the tree’s roots in a panic, and the banyan grew
grew
grew
wildly, bursting
until Cuội took an axe to tame its bestial branches, and it ascended, floating until the banyan settled on the moon.
I do not come home.
I am on the moon, flexing my fingers against contours of rock, searching for the banyan’s roots, looking for a carcass of memory, of warped tree roots that I dig
dig
dig
into with bleeding fingertips, until a fissure opens between moon and banyan, a cradle of my own making, and I lie.
Here
I rest in the contours of my mother’s voice.
Here
I do not watch my mother die.
Hien Nguyen (she/her) is a Best of the Net nominated speculative fiction writer from the Midwest. She writes about Vietnamese monsters and mythology. Hien’s debut, a young adult speculative novel titled Twin Tides, comes out December 9, 2025.