Layered House
by Lucy Zhang
We lived in houses made from paper. Walls were folded in layers and layers until the translucent fibers grew opaque and water would not percolate to the other side. Yet, no matter how many layers we built, we heard every sound through them: the cockroaches crawling, the wind lifting flaps of ruffled corners, the songs of old Auntie Mei who lived on the edge of town and slept outside so she could watch the stars and sing with the coyotes. We were ok with hearing Auntie Mei through the paper walls, her delicate tunes serenading us to sleep. Auntie Mei didn’t own a paper house like us. She lived in a plot of vacant land and would disappear during the day and return at night to sleep on the dirt that she claimed was soft enough to cushion her bony buttocks. Everyone liked Auntie Mei despite her quirks, and we especially liked to hear her sing.
Once a year, the men would set fire to our houses, burning them to the ground while we slept inside. Those of us who survived would carry on the next generation as child bearers. Dying was supposedly a painless experience, and some even preferred incineration because Auntie Mei’s lullabies were said to sound fuller and deeper once you became ash and smoke, drifting off to merge with the stars.
I had only heard Auntie Mei sing once before. I’d survived a burning because I’d been out in the woods relieving my stomach from bad berries when the men began throwing torches at houses and Auntie Mei began to sing. The lyrics were silly children’s songs—little pine tree, green leaves and new shoots, fed by the sun and rain, grow up quickly. I was already grown up though, and felt like I’d failed some expectation—my body grown but not grown, an old tree stunted at the height of a bush. Trees didn’t fare well anyway. We shredded them up, turned them into paper, sliced and glued them into walls, then burned them with our bodies that stank of sulfur and copper.
Most of us would rather live in paper houses than in the wild where wolves could bite through our necks and drag us away. We figured the only reason Auntie Mei hadn’t been dragged away yet was because she was too old, too stringy for hungry wolves in search of meals for their families. We all knew it was better to burn than to be devoured by nighttime monsters. But the men never bothered Auntie Mei since she was from before we dwelled within paper, and her voice provided us a comfort the men could never match.
The sun hadn’t fully set when the scent of smoke tickled my nose. It’d only been several days after I rebuilt the house so I didn’t expect it to go up in flame so soon. I lay on my bed, trying to sleep to the crackling and growing heat. The house would crumble and the fire would strike my limbs. Auntie Mei’s voice resonated through the fibers and the gaps I’d left between walls. I was easily bothered and impatient, which was problematic since building paper houses required precision and delicacy. Instead, I built my houses so they’d be easy to rip apart, paranoid I’d be trapped by vengeful, dead trees.
If you were a good resident, a proper citizen, you’d lay motionless and wait for the walls to come down on you like heavy blankets molding to your form as they disintegrated to ash.
Auntie Mei kept singing about the damn pine tree needing to grow up faster, and I couldn’t understand why you’d force a tree to grow when it clearly had limits and constraints like water, sunlight, and genetic lineage. The men would not notice much if I snuck out. Collapsed paper and collapsed women looked all the same. I dug my fingers through the large gaps in the walls—large enough the starved coyotes could slip through—and tore down the paper so I could howl over Auntie Mei’s lies.
Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Apex Magazine, Split Lip Magazine, CRAFT, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks HOLLOWED (Thirty West Publishing) and ABSORPTION (Harbor Review). Find her at