HAVE I EVER
SLUT SLUT
FILTHY SLUT
Ronnie’s ears rang. Mom was crying now too. You Do This To These People Who Took You In And Care For You, Mom sobbed. I Don’t Know You At All. I Don’t Know Any Of You.
YOU’RE NOT NICE GIRLS
NO DAUGHTERS OF MINE
WHEN MINI AND Caroline came into the kitchen, Ronnie was sitting on the floor. Her hand was bleeding and swollen, but otherwise she was fine, her face calm, her back straight. She looked up at us. “We have to go reverse the spell. We have to send her back. I made her hate us. I’m sorry. She’s going to kill us.”
“Oh, no,” said Caroline.
Mini’s head turned to look at Caroline, then the rest of her body followed. She slapped Caroline neatly across the face. You I Don’t Like So Much Either, Mom said, using Mini’s mouth to speak. I Know What You Think About At Night, During The Day, All Day. You Can’t Fool Me. I Tried And Tried—
Mini covered her mouth, and then Mom switched to Caroline. —And Tried To Make You Good. But Ronnie Showed Me It Was All Useless. You Are All Worthless. Caroline shook her head until Mom left, and we pulled Ronnie up and ran out to the car together, gripping one another’s hands the whole way.
We drove, or just Mini drove, but we were rearing forward in our seats, and it was as though we were all driving, strenuously, horsewhippingly, like there was an away to get to, as if what we were trying to escape was behind us and not inside of us. We were screaming and shouting louder and louder until Mini was suddenly seized again. We saw it and we waited. Mini’s jaw unhinged, and we only didn’t scream because this had happened many times—certainly we didn’t like it when it happened to us, but that way at least we didn’t have to look at it, the way that it was only skin holding the moving parts of her skull together, skin becoming liquid like glass in heat, and then her mouth opened beyond everything we knew to be possible, and the words that came out—oh, the words. Mini began to speak and then we did, we did scream, even though we should have been used to it by now.
DRIVE SAFE
DRIVE SAFE
DO YOU WANT TO DIE BEFORE I TEACH YOU EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW
The car veered, a tree loomed, and we were garlanded in glass, and a branch insinuated itself into Mini’s ribs and encircled her heart, and Ronnie sprang forth and broke against the tree, and in the backseat Caroline was marveling at how her brain became unmoored and seesawed forward into the jagged coastline of the front of her skull and back again, until she was no longer herself, and it was all so mortifying that we could have just died, and we did, we did die, we watched every second of it happen until we realized that we were back on the road, driving, and all of the preceding was just a little movie that Mom had played inside of our heads.
“Stop,” said Ronnie. “Stop the car.”
“No way,” said Mini. “That’s what she wants.”
Mom sobs again. I Killed Myself For Love. I Killed Myself For You, she said. I Came Back For Girls Who Wanted Parents But You Already Had Parents.
“Mini, listen to me,” said Ronnie. “I said it because it seemed like a thing to say, and it would have been nice to have, but there is no way to reverse the spell, is there?”
“We can try it. We can go back to the parking lot and do everything but backward.”
“We can change the words. We have to try,” Caroline said.
“Mom,” said Ronnie. “If you’re still here, I want to tell you that I want you. I’m the one who needs a mother. You saw.”
“Ronnie,” said Caroline, “what are you talking about?”
From Mini, Mom said, You Girls Lie To One Another. All The Things You Don’t Tell Your Friends.
Ronnie thought she already sounded less angry. Just sad and a little petulant. Maybe showing all of them their deaths by car crash got it out of her system.
“The thing I’m doing,” said Ronnie, “that’s a thing they would kick me out of the family for doing. I need my real family. I need you.” She didn’t want to say the rest out loud, so she waited. She felt Mom open up her head, take one cautious step inside with one foot and then the other. Ronnie knew that she didn’t want to be this way or do those things anymore. Ronnie knew that she couldn’t find a way to stop or escape Alex’s gaze from across the room when everyone else was watching TV. Stop looking at me. If you could stop looking at me for just one second, then I could stop too.
Mom, while we’re speaking honestly, I don’t think you’re any of our mothers. I don’t think you’re Korean. I don’t even think you come from any country on this planet.
(Don’t tell me either way.)
But I don’t care. I need your help, Mom. Please, are you still there? I’ll be your daughter. I love your strength. I’m not scared anymore. You can sleep inside my bone marrow, and you can eat my thoughts for dinner, and I promise, I promise I’ll always listen to you. Just make me good.
They didn’t see Ronnie for a few months. Mini did see Alex at a concert pretty soon after everything that happened. He had a black eye and his arm in a sling. She hid behind a pillar until he passed out of sight. Mini, at least, had sort of figured it out. First she wondered why Ronnie had never told them, but then, immediately, she wondered how Ronnie could do such a thing. She wondered how Alex could do such a thing. Her thoughts shuttled back and forth between both of those stops and would not rest on one, so she made herself stop thinking about it.
As for Mini and Caroline, their hair grew out or they got haircuts, and everything was different, and Caroline’s parents had allowed her to quit ballet and Mini’s parents were still leaving her alone too much but she grew to like it. And when they were around, they weren’t so bad. These days they could even be in the same room without screaming at each other. There was another meet-up for Korean adoptees. They decided to go. School had started up again, and Mini and Caroline were on the wane. Mini and Caroline thought, maybe, bringing it all back full circle would help? But they knew it wouldn’t be the same without Ronnie. Mini and Caroline saw us first before we saw them. They saw us emerge from a crowd of people, people that even Caroline hadn’t befriended already. They saw our skin and hair, skin and eyes, hair and teeth. The way we seemed to exist in more dimensions than other people did. How something was going on with us—something was shakin’ it—on the fourth, fifth, and possibly sixth dimensions. Space and time and space-time and skin and hair and teeth. You can’t say “pretty” to describe us. You can’t say “beautiful.” You can, however, look upon us and know true terror. The Halversons know. All of our friends and admirers know. Who are we? We are Ronnie and someone standing behind her, with hands on my shoulders, a voice in her ear, and sometimes we are someone standing inside her, with feet in her shoes, moving her around. We are Ronnie and we are her mom and we are every magazine clipping on how to charm and beautify, the tickle of a mascara wand on a tear duct, the burn of a waxed armpit. We watched Mini and Caroline, observed how shocked they were. Afraid, too. Ronnie could tell that they would not come up to her first. No? she said to her mother. No, she said. For a moment Ronnie considered rebellion. She rejected the idea. Those girls were from the bad old days. Look at her now. She would never go back. Mom was pushing us away from them. She was telling Ronnie to let them go. Ronnie watched Mini and Caroline recede. The tables, the tables of food and the chairs on either side of them, rushed toward us as their two skinny figures pinned and blurred. We both felt a moment of regret. She once loved them too, you know. Then her mother turned our head and we walked away.
Ramadan Red White and Blue
Mohja Kahf
Ramadan in the West
’ll put hair on your chest
No sleeping in, fool
Boss here won’t invest
in your Ramadan slouch
It’s not your limp-wrist
Saudi-soft Ramadan
It’s Ramadan, Shaker school
It’s Medina-meets-Sparta
Get your Abu Dharr on
No clat
ch of women kin
cooking fancy-frill food
No shopping till dawn
No diners closed days
so temptation’s removed
Your dumbed-down Muslimland
shortcuts don’t play
This is Ramadan, USA—
hardcore and hungry,
the old Prophet way
My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears
Mohja Kahf
My grandmother puts her feet in the sink
of the bathroom at Sears
to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer,
wudu,
because she has to pray in the store or miss
the mandatory prayer time for Muslims
She does it with great poise, balancing
herself with one plump matronly arm
against the automated hot-air hand dryer,
after having removed her support knee-highs
and laid them aside, folded in thirds,
and given me her purse and her packages to hold
so she can accomplish this august ritual
and get back to the ritual of shopping for housewares
Respectable Sears matrons shake their heads and frown
as they notice what my grandmother is doing,
an affront to American porcelain,
a contamination of American Standards
by something foreign and unhygienic
requiring civic action and possible use of disinfectant spray
They fluster about and flutter their hands and I can see
a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom
My grandmother, though she speaks no English,
catches their meaning and her look in the mirror says,
I have washed my feet over Iznik tile in Istanbul
with water from the world’s ancient irrigation systems
I have washed my feet in the bathhouses of Damascus
over painted bowls imported from China
among the best families of Aleppo
And if you Americans knew anything
about civilization and cleanliness,
you’d make wider washbins, anyway
My grandmother knows one culture—the right one,
as do these matrons of the Middle West. For them,
my grandmother might as well have been squatting
in the mud over a rusty tin in vaguely tropical squalor,
Mexican or Middle Eastern, it doesn’t matter which,
when she lifts her well-groomed foot and puts it over the
edge.
“You can’t do that,” one of the women protests,
turning to me, “Tell her she can’t do that.”
“We wash our feet five times a day,”
my grandmother declares hotly in Arabic.
“My feet are cleaner than their sink.
Worried about their sink, are they? I
should worry about my feet!”
My grandmother nudges me, “Go on, tell them.”
Standing between the door and the mirror, I can see
at multiple angles, my grandmother and the other
shoppers,
all of them decent and good-hearted women, diligent
in cleanliness, grooming, and decorum
Even now my grandmother, not to be rushed,
is delicately drying her pumps with tissues from her purse
For my grandmother always wears well-turned pumps
that match her purse, I think in case someone
from one of the best families of Aleppo
should run into her—here, in front of the Kenmore display
I smile at the Midwestern women
as if my grandmother has just said something lovely about
them
and shrug at my grandmother as if they
had just apologized through me
No one is fooled, but I
hold the door open for everyone
and we all emerge on the sales floor
and lose ourselves in the great common ground
of housewares on markdown.
The Place Where I Live Is Different Because I Live There
Wendy Xu
On Friday all anybody did was talk
about waffles. When other people want
a thing I want it a lot too. Other people
wanted to save kittens from trees
while the trees maybe wanted
some saving also from the dark sort
of rain that fills a gutter. That shook out
some people from beds trying
to be happy. That caused a train full
of complicated ideas to stop near
my house which was great. I pay
attention to things that push
back. I muster up the energy to sit
through very important presentations.
One way to be amazed is to be
less amazing and then pay
attention. Don’t ask any questions
about waffle-science. Believe that there
was only ever one kitten whimpering
in the tree and how great
are you. Admire how things wait
to push up through
the earth until the earth
is beautiful enough. I think
about painting my house. Then
I think about other houses.
Sit Bones
Sharlene Teo
–Lady in the blue top. Over there. Stack your shoulder over your wrist, the yoga teacher said. She was in her forties, English, with a helmet of chestnut-brown hair and Madonna biceps.
Chloe in the light-blue top tried to picture her body as a pile of rocks, rumbling into place. But that wasn’t quite right. To “stack” reminded her of pancakes. The high-beamed studio was hot. The skylight burned her skin. Because her hair was black it attracted even more heat. Her left wrist hurt. She checked her alignment in the mirror. She wobbled all wrong. To her left posed a compact, half-Asian woman of indeterminate age, bathed in sunlight and maintaining a perfect side plank. The woman’s gaze in the mirror was blameless and blank. They locked eyes for a moment but Chloe was the one to wince, to look away first.
ASHTANGA YOGA WAS one of two new routines Chloe adopted in her new life. The other was intensive therapy. Her old life in Singapore was a sullied thing to be talked out of, shucked and discarded. Less than a year ago she had fallen in love with her first serious boyfriend, a man two decades her senior named Alvin, or Ah Bock or Chicken Chok, depending who you asked. They met at a bus stop. 165 was taking forever. He stared at her for ages, with a bare-bulb intensity that would have been frightening coming from anyone else. But Alvin was handsome in just that sad and storied way that allowed him to get away with it. He looked younger than thirty-eight. He reminded her of Crouching Tiger–era Chang Chen, all sinewy and graceful. He asked for her number. She was so taken aback by his directness that she gave it to him straightaway.
That year, Chloe went from knowing demurely little to learning lots about men, firsthand, with an anthropological accuracy. Unlike the puppyish amateur boys in her junior college, Alvin was measured and patient. He drove her around in an unwashed Subaru with drink-carton boxes strewn across the back seat. He wooed her with long conversations on rooftop car parks and walks around the sloping neighborhood where she lived. Dalvey Estate was all sleepy bungalows and tall metal gates shielding immaculate gardens. Some houses even had their own security guards because ministers lived there.
Alvin told her about growing up so poor that his parents often left him alone for days with nothing to eat but a squashed packet of white bread. And long-ago things she didn’t consider before then. Like how the Internet was a skill to him, not a habit. And how he used to meet his friends at the A&W drive-in at Dunearn Road just to chat shit, but that had shut down long ago, and this city was changing faster than he could even think. It was getting stuffed
to the brim with ang moh expats and PRC and Bangladeshi immigrants and he didn’t like that. His fingers circled the back of her neck as he spoke, sending electric tickles down her limbs that lingered for days afterward.
She was almost nineteen and had been with nobody before then. She wondered how other girls in relationships had the self-control, the decorum not to just relent. Religion was a big factor. But she had never been particularly devout. Within the stuffy metallic confines of the Subaru, things progressed quickly, entirely of Chloe’s own volition. It stank of shoes and mothballs in there, but she didn’t mind. They tried everything but, and then the whole works.
–It’s always the quiet ones, he said to her.
The car juddered like a filthy cannon. She developed a crick in her neck from straining against the car door, trying not to fall off the slope of the seat. As a bonding experience, her mother brought her for a monthly manicure and pedicure. Subtle French tips to keep within school restrictions. Chloe’s demure hands looked small and unlikely around Alvin’s cock. She had expected a penis to be cruder close up, but instead she was surprised by the grotesque vulnerability of it, its neutral taste, her lack of disgust. He made her feel grown-up yet sensually silly and more comfortable in her own body.
Some weekends he drove to Malaysia. Mostly he was bound for KL, other times Ipoh. The trips always left him exhausted and slightly irate. He handled the import and export of packet drinks. Chrysanthemum tea, lemon barley, red longan.
–Just one of those nothing businesses you fall into, he muttered sadly into her neck. I’ll bore you to death if we talk about it. All these long hours for small rewards. Everyone trying to shortchange each other.
Alvin wanted to move into vending machines, not drinks. The long-term plan was to go from packet drinks into big machines. He was vague about how and when. His teeth were straight and yellowed. He smoked like a chimney and his breath smelled the same, but she didn’t mind. She kissed him with cannibalistic vigor. One time she dislodged a piece of food from his back tooth and ate it. It tasted like morning. It was impossible for him to disgust her.
–Sometimes I wish I was born twenty years earlier, on the same day as you, she told him one evening. So that I could spend more time with you and get all your references. And be totally alike.
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