Excerpt
The Elsewhere Express
Welcome AboardDearest Guest,
Thank you for choosing the Elsewhere Express. We hope that you had a pleasant boarding experience and find your accommodations to your liking. As you begin your journey, we would like to remind you that while we do our best to ensure your utmost comfort and safety, you must remain mindful of your personal belongings. We cannot be responsible for any valuables, baggage, or souls that are lost.
On behalf of the crew, welcome aboard.
Sincerely yours,
The Conductor
Your Itinerary
Meet the Passengers
“Who can board the Elsewhere Express?”
Frequently Asked Questions
The Elsewhere Express
Passenger Handbook
Hiraya Sia
(hee-rah-yah)
Some names are heavier than others. But the tiny premature girl had been weighed before being given one, so her official weight on record was only four and a half pounds.
Despite her small size, or perhaps because of it, she charmed the hospital’s entire neonatal intensive care unit. Mary Beth, a nurse on the night shift, enjoyed humming an old, nameless lullaby to her, a song Mary Beth’s mother had sung to her, and that Mary Beth had sung to her daughter. It scented the air with sugared almonds and vanilla, and flowed into the girl like warm milk, carrying a wordless wish that every heart, no matter how small, could understand.
Live. Breathe. Be.
The girl did her best not to disappoint the voice that filled her evenings. Its song was her whole world and she wanted to keep it close. When she learned how to move her tiny fingers, she held the lullaby singer’s calloused hand as tightly as she could. Mary Beth had never felt a more stubborn grip. This girl, the nurse thought, would need someone to teach her how to let things go.
The girl’s strength proved useful on the day of her baptism, when, upon receiving her name, she was made to carry the full weight of her parents’ hopes. Unlike most people who spent their lives searching for meaning, the girl was given a premade one, no assembly required. In her name was a single simple instruction: Save your brother’s life. If, on the off chance, she ever forgot her purpose, her name reminded her exactly why she had been conceived.
Her father, Dr. Jason Sia, a linguistics professor, had come up with the idea to call her Hiraya, an ancient Tagalog word commonly translated as “imagination.” Its actual meaning was more complex. Hiraya was the power of the mind to bring that which did not exist into being. The professor could not think of a name that suited his new daughter more. Hiraya was a desperate wish. A dream come true. The one chance he and his wife Cristina had to save their eldest child’s life.
Their son, Jace Sia, was meant to be an only child, but his blood disorder, thalassemia major, had other plans. He had received over seventy blood transfusions before he turned four, and unless his parents found a genetically matched bone marrow donor for him, he was going to need more.
Hiraya did not disappoint them. Growing up, she joked that her name was just a nicer way of saying that she had been born for spare parts. Her parents did not appreciate her humor, even as they kept chips, cookies, and soda out of her reach. Her mother packed her lunch box with apples, whole-grain crackers, and low-fat cheese, along with little notes on pink Post-its reminding her not to trade any of her snacks for candy. After all, it was prudent to be prepared in case Jace ever required a piece of her liver. Or any other part of herself he happened to need more than she did.
But Hiraya didn’t mind: Jace was an excellent cookie thief and giggled as much as she did when they gobbled them up in her closet in the middle of the night. Their crumb-filled laughter fed the old lullaby that had taken root inside her, making it bear new melodies like fruit. When Hiraya learned how to spell, she gave her songs words and wrote them down to keep herself from bursting. Some songs smelled like springtime, others, like fresh bread. Her favorite ones coated her tongue with clover honey. Each song, though distinct, ferried the same wish.
Live. Breathe. Be.
Jason and Cristina weren’t too worried about the hours Hiraya spent setting the wish to music, playing her glittery sticker-covered guitar, and filling purple notebooks with songs. She was young and had plenty of time to find a real dream like her brother’s. There was no doubt that Jace was going to make an excellent oncologist, but music was far too slippery and big a dream for their daughter’s small hands. Hiraya would need to learn that the only place her songs would lead her was the corner of nowhere and disappointment. Jason and Cristina were thankful that they had no such concerns about Jace.
That is, until the night all their dreams tumbled out of his cold, limp hands.
Quentin Chen Philips Jr.
The day after his father, Quentin Philips Sr., killed himself, a thirteen-year-old Quentin Jr. insisted that everyone start calling him “Q.” His mother, Connie Chen Philips, did not need another reason to cry. Lying to everyone about her husband’s death was hard enough. Lying to herself that it had been an accident was harder. Sparing his mother from having to say her late husband’s name each time she called her only child down to dinner was the sole comfort Q could give her.
But he could not do anything about his eyes.
Though Q inherited most of his features from his mother, his irises resembled his father’s, borrowing their somber palette from an overcast sky. Q hated that they stood out from the rest of his face and made him look like a mistake. When Quentin Sr. died, however, Q discovered that gray eyes had their uses—they camouflaged his dark days and most shades of sadness. But while he was reticent about his pain, Q made sure that his clients’ portraits told the whole truth. His father’s suicide had blindsided him and Q refused to let anyone lie to him ever again. He was particularly wary of smiles.
Smiles were the easiest of deceptions and the prettiest of open wounds. Quentin Sr. had worn a bright and gummy one every day of his life until the morning he didn’t. Q’s paintings were the opposite, revealing everything his clients tried their best to hide. Considering how much they paid him, Q did his best to give them their money’s worth no matter how much or loudly they complained. At the end of the day, their portrait’s appraised value trumped their pride. After all, scarcity drives prices up, and there was nothing more limited than the time Q had left to paint.
Q stood at the doorway of his home studio, surveying the room with what remained of his sight. His degenerative eye disease had shrunk his tunnel of vision to the size of a pinhole, but his home was a place where memory was the only walking stick he required.
He was going to miss this place and the way it smelled of sharpened pencils, paint, and sunshine. He had bought the apartment because of its large windows and had sold it for the same reason. Feeling the sun on his skin without seeing its light turned his blood cold on the warmest of days. The studio was chillier now that it was empty.
His tools and supplies had already been donated, and his business manager had picked up all the paintings for his final collection, save one. Q strode over to the small painting resting on an easel in the middle of his studio, navigating the paint-splattered, scuffed wooden floors like someone with perfect vision. Q might have gotten more when he sold his apartment if he had worked over a drop cloth, but he was always in too much of a hurry to paint to bother covering his hardwood floor.
And his sessions with the sole subject of his final collection never lasted long—this was the biggest challenge when trying to paint a woman who existed only in his dreams. When he woke up, only fragments of her remained: The corner of a lip. The tip of a nose. The shadow in the well of a collarbone.
No matter how hard Q tried to remember her, he could not collect enough details to assemble her face. The song that wafted through his dreams, the same melody that had filled his nights since he was a young boy, however, was unforgettable. It kept him company while he slept and leaked into his days, its message a record on repeat.
Live. Breathe. Be.
Trying to live by the peace it prescribed, though, proved to be difficult. Painting through his window of vision was like trying to build a seashore one grain of sand at a time. But as the imaginary woman was the last sitter he would ever have, he promised to show up for her for as long as she showed up for him.
Speck by speck, he captured what he could, and in those moments, with all his focus and energy flowing through the tip of his paintbrush, he couldn’t let his anger boil over. Being angry all the time was tiring. Still, he preferred being furious about losing his sight to mourning the loss of his dreams. Tears choked you. Rage kept you breathing. Anger needed air to fan its flames.
Q ran his fingertips over his final painting. It was meant to capture the woman’s left eye, but he had run out of time to finish it. All he could do was trust his manager’s word that even if the piece wasn’t done, it was good enough. His show was opening this evening and he needed to deliver its missing piece. It would be a shame not to include the painting since it fit the collection’s theme perfectly.
