Lit
Page 14
Up close, he hadn’t looked anything like her father after all. She was unsure if she was disappointed or relieved. It had been a long time since she’d undressed a man’s body. It had been a long time since she’d thought of her father. The proximity of those thoughts unsettled her.
It was the way she could smell the whale musk lingering on his skin. It was the look of floodlights lighting up the beach like a crime scene. It was how the diggers lifted the bodies dusted in the fine sand like icing sugar.
Kim drives, hard, so the wind stings her eyes. She opens the window, inhales the scent of trees and soil. She lets the wind blow away the salt. Absolve her from the mass stranding, the knots of people, the questions. She doesn’t care that the team will wake up to find her gone. At least she left her keys. At least she wrote a note this time.
After an hour, she drives her car off-road into a gulley. She covers the hood and bonnet with branches and leaves. She unscrews the number plates, tucks them into her backpack and walks into the bush. At nightfall, she makes camp and builds a fire, staring into its embers until sleep overcomes her. After a day, she guesses that the reporters and crowds have left. Nothing left to save but a pile of charred bodies. She doesn’t want to return. Not yet. On the third day, she nears the end of her rations. She will have to hunt the rest with Rutherford.
***
Hunting had come surprisingly easy to her, just like sloughing off China and slipping into a New Zealand skin had been easy. She had picked Kim. The Cantonese in Hong Kong told her it sounded like gold—golden name, golden future. That childish sentiment turns her stomach now.
Back then, Kim had stayed away from people and big cities. She took jobs where she could be alone. Lost amongst Marlborough orchards, she picked fruit for eight dollars an hour. The televisions of the campgrounds she stayed at always seemed to play hunting shows on repeat. Men hauling wild boar, deer, and chamois with their hands. Survivors. Self-sufficient. Uncomplicated.
She had heard that they sometimes gave basic gun training to conservation volunteers. She remembers the ranger, in his thick backcountry accent, saying that rabbits, possums, and cats were responsible for decimating New Zealand’s native birds. This is how she would help this country, she thought then, ridding the islands of unwanted pests. She joined culling missions, sometimes even getting helicoptered in, to do battle against the encroachment of the foreign. Naive, she now calls it.
It began with something called spotlighting, sounding like an innocuous campground game played with torches and firelight. Really, it was four-wheeling the backlands with lights mounted on overhead racks, flooding the night with deceptively warm beams as if they were holding a midwinter party and would drink beer or dance late into the evening.
Except they were like a troop, gun-slinging with a kill list. The spotlights illuminated warm-blooded, rapid-hearted things scurrying the scrubland after dark. They shot at them, standing from the backs of trucks. In truth, she had wanted to know what guns and killing felt like. What the taking of a life meant. Is that what had happened then? Soldiers—country kids really—standing in rank, shooting at other unarmed kids?
But cats and rabbits are not people, Kim.
***
Now, she must catch one of those furred creatures for food. Rutherford runs ahead, sometimes looking back, burrowing at ponga stubs, trying to sniff them out. They watch soft-nosed rabbits picking up the scent of human and dog.
Kim aims. On her out breath, she shoots. Each time, Rutherford disappears into the undergrowth and returns with them, limp in his mouth. He never pierces their small bodies with his teeth, never tosses or tears at them. He lays them at her feet, whole.
Kim makes small cuts into the hind legs and in one rip the entire pelt slips off. A white membrane separates the connective tissue. She turns it on its spine and splits it upwards in the middle with a small flick. She cracks the ribcage to reveal the innards. The heart is the size of a walnut. Ribbons of nude intestines fill her palm. A liver purple and warm. Rutherford eats them from her hands.
---
PREMONITIONS
On Sundays Ba cooked chicken,
choosing jewel-coloured birds from the weekend market,
brought them home, live and feathered
with amber eyes and emerald tails.
I chased them—buk-bukking—from room to room.
Ba taught me to gut them over our dirt floor,
red blood dripping into brown earth.
Ba the craftsman, only in reverse,
pulling apart instead of putting together,
naming every organ.
I understood then, that Ba knew everything.
He sliced lobed lungs,
oblongs laced in a filigree of blue veins.
Excavated livers, gizzards, the heart
with confidence.
Used a spoon to scrape out threads of viscera,
unearthed yellow ovaries,
small marbles
twin suns glowing in the ribcage.
Still-warm, Ba dropped them into my seven-year-old
palms
Later, I recognised my own twin suns
a rotating galaxy of a million eggs
that went entirely unused.
---
The next morning, Rutherford is missing. Kim calls into the bush but only insects and wind replies. The five rabbits she’d strung up between the trees are missing, the cord ripped. They were just high enough for Rutherford to reach. If he jumped, he could have torn the rabbits down. Kim finds gnawed bones on the ground.
She circles for hours, yelling her throat raw. She feels as if she’s back at the beach when he ran away, thundering desperately towards the whales. She remembers hitting him in the snout when he refused to leave them. How she had coiled the leash around his legs so that he would stop thrashing, rolling his great grey body in towels and heaving him to her chest. She remembers the stones she threw at him on the first day. She remembers jerking his leash with outsiders watching.
Kim waits, not daring to leave camp unless Rutherford returns to find her gone. She rekindles the embers and makes her last packet of instant tomato soup as night falls.
***
Two days pass. Kim is running out of water. She has run out of food. She will need something bigger than rabbits. Wild boar. Or a deer. But she has only one round of bullets left. She heads downhill to find water. She hopes she can find her next meal. She hopes to find Rutherford more.
She lurches in circles through trees that look the same. Her knees crack and she feels old. She will not cry. This is her home. She will find her way out. She will find Rutherford.
Finally, there is a stream. She sups like an animal, plunging her whole face into the rush. She drinks until her stomach is bloated and her shirt darkened from spilt water. She feels ready. Ready to take herself a deer.
She imagines the hunt over and over again. She will melt into the bush, become invisible, rooted like the tendrils of ferns that will sprout from her head and bush frogs that will nestle in the crevices of her thighs. She will be so still that the deer will not smell her.
It happens quicker than she had imagined. A young doe stepping into the clearing. A whoosh of the bullet and it is floored, thudding into the undergrowth just like that.
She must bring the body back herself. She lies on her back for hours, the gun beside her, staring through the tangled foliage which begins to swim and sway. She watches the sun pass overhead until it is late afternoon and her clothes are soaked through.
She needs to collect the carcass. She needs to skin the deer. On the hunting shows, they called it dressing the kill. As if this act of bones and hides and tendons is like dressing up for a party. Her father would have known how to halve and quarter an animal.
It is larger than she imagined. The shot had pierced an artery, making it messy. She remembers now how they said blood contaminates. She must skin it and drain it or the meat will spoil. She recites names. Shank. Rump. Backstr
ap. Words that used to drift like incantations from the campground televisions of her first years here. She racks her head, trying hard to think of other words.
---
NAMING
Ba, the physicist, who knew everything
about anatomy and galaxies and plants,
didn’t know the names they called him.
Like dog. Pig.
They were all called beasts.
I wasn’t called Kim
when I reported Ba,
who hadn’t actually burned a portrait
just forced it to the back of his cupboard.
How I jabbed the air with a book.
scarf around my throat like an idiot.
Ba’s head shaved in hideous clumps.
They did the same for others
who wore lipstick, or played with birds,
read poetry or styled their hair loose.
Ba sent west on packed trains,
somewhere in the loess plains of Gansu.
I waited for the trains to bring him back.
There were no homecoming trains.
I grew to 175 cm. I graduated nursing school.
There were no homecoming trains.
I left for Hong Kong.
There were no homecoming trains.
---
Kim stands, unmoving for a long time. Unwilling to break the skin of inertia. Finally, she heaves the animal so the legs point up. She has no rope to hoist it above ground. She slits just above the anus, careful not to rupture the guts. It could poison her if the contents spilled over the meat. Her hands shake. The organs are still warm.
The skinning must be fast. The longer the body is insulated, the quicker bacteria develops. She must cool the body right away. But her hands slip. The pelt is musky. It does not skin easily like a rabbit. It is nothing like a rabbit.
Her father would know what to do with deer entrails. Oblong shapes, coils, lozenges. Slabs of purple, like afterbirth. Gelatinous, glutinous tendons. Shank. Rump. Backstrap. James would know what to do. Hands that could slice whale blubber splitting skin down to bone.
James—like her father—were people who knew the truth of things with certainty. His words run through her head, “The social organisation of whales is strong. When something terrible happens, the rest of the group won’t leave. They don’t abandon family.” Kim, on the other hand, knows that she knows nothing.
Kim looks down at the mess of splayed out limbs and the belly full of still-warm organs. She talks herself through the topography of muscle. Shank. Rump. Backstrap. The muzzle wet, bloody. Using the names, she guides her knife. She dips her hands in wrist deep. The tideline of blood washes up her forearms, reaches past her elbows. She pulls everything out, scattering the warm mess around the deer carcass. She hopes the smell will lure Rutherford back to her through the maze of foliage, like organ talismans.
All that is left is the hollow cavity of the ribcage, like a shell curving inwards. She sits down, then eases backwards, wrapping herself inside. The bones seem to reach around shoulders, now bare. She covers the skins over her in a spongy warmth. All alone, she has succeeded in dressing the deer. The deer are invaders. Just like herself, they do not belong here. In the undergrowth far from the sea, Kim waits.
‘Gutting’ was first published in the online journal, Hainamana (2020).
Ting. J. Yiu (姚敏婷) was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to Auckland with her family when she was eleven. She holds BAs in both English Literature and Human Geography from the University of Otago, and an MA in Transnational Creative Writing from Stockholm University. She writes poetry, literary fiction and creative non-fiction. Her works have appeared in a variety of publications and online journals. Ting has been teaching creative writing since 2018, and, in 2019 founded The Writers’ Collective where she leads writing workshops and holds seminars on creativity and craft. She is currently working on a short story collection and a polyphonic novel about the Chinese diaspora.
Acknowledgements
This book was put together first and foremost for teachers and students, to ripple out from schools into the world, and in this regard I would like to thank teachers Susana Carryer and Chris (Kit) Willett for their advice right at the beginning. This wouldn’t be as well ordered or as interesting without them.
The unfortunate destination of so many kiwi short story collections and literary journals is the upper floors and the shut cupboards in libraries. But there they are well preserved and cared for by librarians, waiting for someone like me to request a towering stack of them. Thank you to all librarians in New Zealand for this service and especially the staff at Hamilton Central Library who brought out stack after stack of books to my small research table, helped me use the scanner, and let me take precious items to other floors (librarians have a strong rebellious streak. I recommend having one on your side when the zombies arrive!).
Thank you to established writer Alison Wong who couldn’t herself be in the collection but championed and directed me to some wonderful emerging authors.
Also thank you to Christine Dale and Jenny Nagle at OneTree House. Publishing Aotearoa New Zealand books is done on a dollar in the rain, on a Sunday at midnight, in clothes that need mending while the cat needs feeding; in other words, it isn’t easy; people aren’t even that grateful, but it is a wonderful thing. This opportunity, and the many you have given me over my career, are precious things.
Finally thank you especially to our writers, all of them so generous with their time and talents. And thank you too to you, the reader. We are in a relationship, us writers and you – nau te rourou, naku te rourou, ka ora te manuhiri.
Elizabeth Kirkby-Mcleod