Terminal
Lucy Zhang
Grandma hates cats. She’s on her ninth life and has spit in death’s face eight times. Five of those times, death ignored the glob of saliva and tried to hold her back from returning. She thinks cats are too tricky. Always skirting death instead of facing it head-on and winning. A deceptive, selfish species that’ll amount to nothing even with all nine lives, Grandma swears. She is an overachiever who only takes a break during the first few years of her life while her several-month-old body poses a physical limitation. Grandma has racked up so much equity that she had to build a whole system to self-manage her different bank and brokerage accounts accumulated over the centuries. Most of it, she tells me, is wise investments of the cash she once earned with a sesame oil business from her first life, which, although modest and completely reliant on a handful of employees manning the expeller press and manually filtering the crude oil, saw extreme success thanks to Grandma’s marketing. Her sesame oil solved every problem from female beauty insecurities to male heat imbalances to children’s brain development. The sesame oil company is a big corporation today. It’s run by a bunch of “idiot men who don’t know rancid seeds from fresh.” Grandma refuses to buy their products. She never fails to remind me that the only two reasons the company makes money today are: one, the effort she put into the original brand and reputation; and two, idiot consumers.
I own two cats: one is missing an eye and the other a leg. I picked them up from a shelter spontaneously. Or maybe not so spontaneously? The apartment had felt lonely, and I refused to introduce other forms of life that I couldn’t keep up with — I wanted life, but not too much life. Grandma has always been healthy, still hiking and out-arguing young, white doctors who try to convince her to take their prescriptions instead of her thousand-year ginseng tea. I doubt she would have escaped death all those centuries without her impeccable vigor. If my cats could skirt past death too, then I’d take Grandma’s word for it: cats were tricksters that transcended physical limitations, and maybe I too could trick death because I knew I didn’t possess Grandma’s spirit and strength to plow past it.
“Oh it’s easy,” Grandma tries to convince me. “As long as you believe you’re worth another life and you’ve got a bit of forearm strength, you can push death aside.”
“I don’t think I’d be able to do that,” I worry.
“It’s those cats. They’re going to mislead you into your grave. The one with the missing eye is especially nefarious. Since it can only see half the world, it’ll make up the other half and convince you of its truth.”
“Who knows, it could be true,” I mutter. Grandma hears me. Her hearing is too good for her age.
“Never true,” she insists loudly, her spit hitting my hand. “Not in this decade or century or the previous or the one before that.”
I’m sure her words contain some merit given her significantly more stacked resume in life experience, but she’s also the kind of woman who will hike alone through the mountains despite news reports of several women getting hacked to death by vegetable cleavers because they thought it was okay to roam the rural farm roads at night.
“I won’t get rid of my cats,” I tell her because I know what she’s getting at and don’t need her pressing me again. “I’ll just die, and that’s that. No need to circle back again.” Even I think I sound decisive and confident and a tiny bit cool when I say that.
Grandma shakes her head. “Young people these days give up too soon. Back in my day, I biked three hours in the snow while pregnant to get back from work. Being pregnant is worse than death, you know. And here you are knocking at death’s door before you’ve toughened up with any real hardship.”
I nod. “You’re right, Grandma. I can’t compare to you. You should take it easy the next time you spit on death. Your next grandchild will be thankful.”
Grandma glares at my two cats resting in their respective donut beds. I distract her with an article on formal suit versus sports coat fashion etiquette. She believes men’s professional fashion is the next most lucrative market because “they think dropping big money is the solution to poor sense.” I still think she should invest her efforts in something more stable like funeral houses. Spruce the ceremonies up with well-marketed multicultural rituals since people these days are so enthused by “ethnic” gadgets and traditions. I’ll sign up as a customer so my cats can mourn me in their trickster ways.
