by Cathy Lue-W

Faris Mohammed, digital photograph, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

The Shape of Hope

Cathy Lue-W | Mar 2025 | Issue 43

You wish not to leave the hospital. Alone in a new country, you have nowhere else to go. When you smile at your child, it is your first betrayal. Secretly, you withhold your love from her to devote it to another—the dream that you blindly followed across the ocean because you believed its promises. It gave you nothing except everything to give to your child. Only one thought you keep for yourself: the day of your child’s birth is the day that the American dream spurns you.

You send your child overseas to your parents’ care. Motherhood, you’d heard throughout your girlhood, would complete you. But it only leaves you forever groping, wanting, needing. In a stranger’s basement, you board with two other immigrants, each of you penned by a wooden stall too small for a horse. All that you sense of each other is how your work flavors your sweat—with soap, with sauce, with soil. You work multiple jobs that you balance as clumsily as the cracked dishes that get you fired. With the money, you save to one day earn your child back from your parents’ care.

At the airport, you finally reach out again. Your child hides behind the flight attendant’s legs, swinging from the vines of her arms. You ask whether she remembers you. Your child does not react; after you spent every second that you could replaying your moments together. This is not the first time you have been spurned. Love begins to take on the texture of obligation.

Already, you dream of old age, the day that you will not need to tire another finger. The day that you will not be able to. You dream, more than this, about love, to justify your obligations. You dream of moving forward soon from this locked span of time. It doesn’t resemble what you thought, these milestones turned ruptures. The skin of drudgery sheathes the present from the crowning future. You dream for your child to grow up quickly. You watch her resuscitate your own hope. Hope—your most precious possession—you pass on. The ultimate act of love you mistake it for.

One day, you wake to an empty house. You learn something about the shape of hope. It was once your most prized possession. Really, it turns out to be just a bowl, a hunger, a vacuum. It once sustained your every breath, every step, every waking day. Really, it has not let you forgive the things missing from your life for their absence. Almost with a vengeance, it drove you to want and take. Your greatest fear became being taken from. All the more, the hunger growled.

What could your child do but flee in fear? You thought that you were following her toward your dreams in this country. But you were pushing her beyond your reach.

Only one person you wish to talk to now. To tell her that her story of success masks one of ruin. To tell her not to weaponize the future to redress old wrongs. To tell her to free her child from the legacy of her past before she loses her. But she, the woman who you used to be, will be too far away by then.

Cathy Lue-W was selected by Bread Loaf as a Donald Axinn Scholar and by Lighthouse Lit Fest as a finalist for the Emerging Writer Fellowship. Her short fiction has appeared in Huizache. When not writing or working, Cathy is chasing her husky, Gogo, who is always on the go.