by K-Ming Chang
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The first week my father was home, my tail grew a bone of its own. A bruise trellised up my spine. At night, my mother followed him into the man-made dark of his room—he taped butcher paper on all the windows because perverts could be watching. At night: the sound of her jaw locking up her teeth. That wasn’t the sound I turned my head from: It was the symmetry of my father’s silence, the way sex didn’t sound like two bodies added together but the subtraction of one from the other.
At night, I consulted the cookie tin in the closet, my ears magnetized to the toes rattling inside. The toes were butting over territory, acting like they belonged to enemy bodies. I knocked on the lid with my fist and they fired out, bulleting through the lid. One of them flew in and out of my mouth, threading my spit, teasing my teeth to bite it.
Before my father came home, my mother spent her nights with me. We watched episodes of Desperate Housewives on the sofa that rose like a loaf of bread when it met our body heat. I dubbed the dialogue in Chinese and my mother spat five-spice peanuts at all the blondes onscreen. I asked her which of the wives she’d want to marry and she said Gaby: She wore cheetah-print, meaning she must be related to Hu Gu Po. A shared history of hunger.
At night, my dreams collaged the plots of Desperate Housewives and Hu Gu Po: In this one, Gaby and her landscaper make love in the master bedroom while Gaby’s husband is away at work. But the landscaper’s penis grows a crown of canine teeth when he’s inside her, his palms serrating into paws. Gaby hemorrhages and dies. The landscaper tries to swallow his paws, but it’s too late. Her husband comes home and discovers a tiger pacing his master bedroom, trying to nudge the window open with its muzzle. On the floor is his wife, a lawn mower circling her body, scalping away the carpet. When I recounted this dream to my mother, she deleted every recorded episode. We’d liked Gaby because she was the only wife with our hair. She had the biggest closet, bigger than our bedroom. There was a crack in the TV screen letting the light out of every scene, striping the image onscreen, queering her face into mine. I wanted to surf Gaby’s skin with my tongue, stroke her sweat until it lifted from her skin, wings of crystallized salt. Instead, I licked the screen when her face came on, tasted my blood on her teeth.
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I knew a story: In some dynasty, when a father was sick, a daughter cut a piece of her own thigh to stir-fry and feed back to her father. Some daughters even donated their knees. Gegu: to cure what came before you. My father pinched the meat above my knee and said: If I was ever sick, would you give me this? He said he’d need that piece of me. It was the second day he was home and we were in the kitchen. My father spent hours filling the sink and then draining it, scribbling his name on the surface. I told him the water would never remember it. He stepped back, palming his rib cage, pretending to cough out his own fist.
I’m dying, he said, performing a wound in his side, and instead of offering my bare calf, I ran from the kitchen and into the living room, left him to paddle around in his own pretend blood. Between my buttocks, my tail burned like a fuse, heat clawing up to the root, a pain pinned to my lower back. I bent forward, hunching until my palms were pressed to the hardwood and I was on all fours, my tail flicking between my legs. I could hear my father in the kitchen behind me, standing with his back to me, and I got to my feet, watched the back of his neck where his veins were alive as snakes. My mother once told me that snakes were the severed fingers of a god who lived on the moon, a god who snipped off her own fingers and littered them on earth as self-punishment for trying to steal the sun. Every snake, I thought, must be roaming for blood, seeking the hand it was severed from. When I looked at my father, my tail unfurled like a whip and patrolled the air, licking my legs forward. It butted between my knees and sang and begged: Fasten my maw to his neck, unspool his veins with my teeth. Bury his hands in the yard for pickpocketing my mother from me.
Instead, I considered how best to cook my knees and cure him. His blood may have been made of snakes, but saving him was still my story. When he turned around and saw me kneading my knees, crouching low enough to tongue my shadow off the floor, he smiled and asked if I was praying. Tired-lines gathered in a stanza above his eyebrows. Sweat sheening his skin like an oil spill. In the back of his mouth, his molars were silver-capped, cupping the light inside them, and I looked away. Remembered how he once untangled my kite-string when it got noosed around a tree: He told me that cutting the line wouldn’t save the kite. It would only flee me. So he climbed the tree instead, unsnagging the string from the bark until I could finally tug it back, easing the kite out of the sky’s fist.
Running to the bathroom, I sat on the toilet and let my tail dangle into the bowl, its ache receding as the water stroked it. In the mirror above the sink, a shadow striped my face into halves, and my tail curled around my thigh like a hand, choking me above the knee. It wouldn’t release my leg until I promised to let it hunt for me, hurt for me.
DAUGHTER
Bestiary
My brother and the other older boys swung their bats at the crows that clotted the sky and clung to the backstop fence. I watched the game every day and walked in circles around the baseball field, measuring the radius of my appetite, daring the sunlight to lash my skin into stripes. My tail would learn like a lightning rod, absorbing the heat of those boys’ hands, and then it would detach into a baseball bat. Belong in my hands as a weapon. Today, one of the crows gripped the side of the batting cage with one foot, its left wing pimpled and pink. Neck plucked clean as my pinky. One of the boys pivoted to swing. The crow shivered and groomed itself, the sun mirrored on its one good wing. Standing on the sidelines, I shouted to warn it away from the fence.
But the bat struck too fast and the crow crumpled like a fist, dented the dirt. The boy twirled his bat like a baton and ran a lap around the bases, wiping the blood off on home plate. My tail ticked back and forth across the border of my spine, synced with my pulse, eager to intervene. To bound into the diamond and eat the boys, their severed feet flopping alive in the field, flaccid as fish. The teachers would have to burn the corpses and call my mother, who’d strap me to a pole by my limbs and harvest me for my marrow, distill me to tigerwine. I turned away, willed myself still.
When the sky bruised into night, I turned back and saw the crow splayed on its back in the dirt, flat as its shadow. Someone had erected a fence of feathers around the crow, enforcing a perimeter around the body.
It was Ben, Ben of the blacktop tarring our knees, Ben of the drought-drugged city, Ben of the monkey bars where she swung like a bell, Ben of the bowl-haircut, Ben of the sun that puckered above us like an asshole. It was the girl from Ningxia, the one who’d come halfway through the year and could spit a watermelon seed so far it skipped the sea and planted in another country. She came out of the batting cage wearing a helmet. In her palm, a perched plum. She bit it to bone, spat the pit at my feet. It was a fossil I’d unbury later, dating it back to today: the birth of my thirst. In her other hand, she held a feather like an unsheathed knife. She had what my mother would call radish ankles, thick-boned and dirt-coated, as if she’d been yanked from the soil in the last hour, birthed into the air by her hair. Beneath my skirt, my tail moved like a compass hand and tautened in her direction. I shut my legs so she wouldn’t see.
When she took off her baseball helmet, her short hair was glazed to her neck with sweat. Her eyebrows were so straight they hyphenated her forehead, and I wanted to draw a line with my finger to connect them. I did the math: She was 1.5 shades lighter than me and two inches closer to the sun. One of her eyes was single-creased and the other double-creased, what my mother called dragon-phoenix eyes: One eye saw everything farther away than it was, and the other saw everything close-up. I was both far across the field and close enough to be baked by her breath. I wanted to be what she saw of me: many-bodied, standing everywhere like a field, so that at every mo
ment, every step, she arrived at me.
Ben squatted in the sand and her skirt rose sunward. I looked at the cursive of hair on her calves, then at my own blank skin. She speared more feathers around the crow’s body. When I asked her what she was trying to do, she said, Keeping the sun out of its wound. I told her it was dead already and she said, 再看一遍.
I looked at Ben’s shadow, trying to avoid looking directly at her face, at the four moles traversing up her chin to her lower lip. Around her neck, Ben wore a chain with something silver dangling. The pendant ducked down under the neckline of her shirt, and my eyes kept trying to breach that border.
The bird between us was missing feathers, blood moating around it, its heart lying beside its body. I looked for a wound in the crow’s breast, a hole from which the heart had popped out like a button, but there was none. The heart in the sand was the size of my thumb and beating itself blue. I didn’t know a heart could beat outside of its body, but Ben didn’t seem surprised. We watched it pump nothing, its skin crimping, the force of each beat rolling the heart farther away from the body.
Ben kneeled close. I thought she might lick it up from the sand and swallow it. Instead she said, We have to put it back inside. I asked her how: There wasn’t any hole to nudge it into. She said, We’ll feed it back to her. Her fingers were already unhinging the beak. Plucking the heart with my thumb and forefinger, I rolled it between my fingers, a berry of blood, sun-spoiled. Ben told me to hurry up, the bird was open, so I wedged the berry-heart between the blades of its beak. We waited for it to wake. The crow jerked in the sand, gagging once before the heart descended into its dark. Ben cupped it in her hands and walked to the sycamore in front of the trailers where we sat for class. But the bird was trying to open its wings like switchblades, lashing at her hands, and she had to let go before we reached the tree. The crow flew backward, tailfirst instead of headfirst: Ben must have been rewinding the sky like a TV screen, playing its flight in reverse.
That was the first day we walked home together. Ben lived on the other limb of the city where there was no landfill, where there were still empty lots and fields for sale. Our city was in a permanent state of puberty, new buildings and schools and parks and landfills peaking like pimples before fading flat again, the streets scarred by their shadows. I didn’t tell her I was south of where I was supposed to be. I was supposed to be home and not on the sidewalk where our shadows touched shoulder-bones. Around her neck, the pendant swung loose and she tucked it back inside her shirt. While she walked, I thought about stealing it, jerking the pendant off its string and sucking it till my mouth silvered. I wanted to own something the same temperature as her skin, a talisman of her touch.
Every block I stopped to look at her. She wore the cityscape like a crown, the buildings sprung from her skull. When we got to the end of the block, Ben squatted to the pavement. She coughed and sand trumpeted out of her mouth, spraying the sidewalk gold. When she stood up, I asked if she’d swallowed sand from the baseball diamond. Laughing, she shook her head and said there was a sandstorm inside her belly, and once in a while the sand passed through her bowels and scoured her insides clean as glass.
Ben told me about the weather in which she was fermented: I was conceived during a sandstorm, she said. In Ningxia where she was born, sand formed a pelt over the sky and no one could see for months. They wore wet scarves around their mouths and the sand flayed away their front teeth, their eyelashes. I asked her how she’d known who was who, and Ben answered by closing her eyes and reaching out both arms. We walk like this. She kneaded my cheek, inventing dimples. Her touch could name me better than language. I wanted to say I understood about the sand in her belly: There was also a hunger in me that was more than a body’s.
Do you think we’ll get sick, I said, from touching those feathers? In the beginning of the year, when the TV repeated warnings of the Asian bird flu, the teachers had shown up to school wearing face masks with whirring fans. There are so many of you here, we don’t want to get sick. Species could share diseases, they told us, and SARS came from bats and other winged things. When birds and people get too close, they said, one of them gets sick.
Ben said she was immune to the bird flu. Her grandmother had died from it and she had been exposed, which meant I was exposed now too. She said I could run away if I wanted to, but instead I stayed and asked her what the symptoms were.
It began slow, she told me: First you grew feathers out of your armpits. It would be itchy. Then your lips protruded into a beak and you would only be able to eat sand, seeds, and fingernails. The last symptom was flight. It was safer for your close family members to release you where there was only sky, no telephone wires to get electrocuted on, no windows to mistake for mothers.
At a crosswalk, I looked at her before the lights changed. Ben wore her FOB dot on the upper right arm, a vaccine scar the size and shape of my thumbprint. The scar opaled her skin, changing shades depending on the time of day, the season, and where she stood in relation to light. My mother had one too, on her left arm, and I liked the way it puckered like a nipple when it was cold. My mother’s FOB dot was lake-shaped, waiting to be entered. I wanted one too, wanted to dig the scar out of Ben’s arm and swallow its pearl.
We stopped on the sidewalk between an acupuncture clinic and a seafood store with a sign that said it was selling shrimp that you had to fish yourself from a kiddie pool. Ben nodded up at an apartment building that had been painted white and was now yellowing like teeth. She went up the stairs without looking at me, her hand skimming rust off the railing. Halfway up, she turned to look down at me. My grandmother, she said from above, is not really dead. Her grandmother, I’d later learn, was in Ningxia raising camels to scam tourists, charging a hundred dollars per ride. Her family sounded as slant-teethed as mine. I thought of all the stories I could tell her about my own grandmother, my ama who owned a severed head and could stitch a chicken’s head back on with a sewing machine. Ben would know how to tilt my words, listen to them at an angle. Her teeth came out only at night, like the stars, and her smile stung like a fistful of salt flung at your eyes.
It took me two hours to walk home by myself. The city described itself differently in the dark, the streets liquefying beneath me. I got lost and circled my own house twice before recognizing my mother’s head in the kitchen window. My mother asked if I knew there were men in the world. Yes, I said, and went to bed before she could describe all my deaths. In the dark, I allowed myself to remember Ben’s face, her breath like a moth beating my cheek. I wanted to lick the back of her sun-mothered neck. In the dark, I could touch myself anywhere and pretend my hand was her hand. I could pretend my sounds were coming from outside, originating with the owls.
The next morning, before I tucked my tail into my underwear, I let it rest in my hand like a hilt. It looked different to me, honed, whittled around its bone. Ben came to school early, leaning against the backstop to wait for me. She said hello in a dialect I didn’t know and I answered in English. I bent to drink from the water fountain in the dugout, swallowing slow so she’d have to watch me, water collecting in the fountain like a birdbath, my tongue flitting in and out of the stream.
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We spent every day with our shoulder blades unsheathed, our T-shirts knotted up to show our belly buttons, our elbows rubbing like flint when we walked down the hallways side by side, skin sparked with tanbark-burns from wrestling on the playground. We licked each other down to wicks. We ditched ESL together. In history class, instead of memorizing the order of the presidents, we played fuck/marry/kill with the Founding Fathers and decided to kill all of them. We squatted in the baseball diamond and read books below our recommended age level. The Madeline books were my favorite because I liked to pretend I was a French orphan who ate bread and butter for breakfast in a cathedral full of fatherless girls, where the only boy owned a guillotine. I told Ben I related to the gu
illotine the most: I, too, was a direct descendant of gravity, born from women who belonged inside their countries the way blades belonged inside a body. The Madeline girls all wore black bows in their hair, so I tied one in mine, though it was the same color as my hair and therefore invisible.
In the first book, Madeline falls into a river and gets saved by a dog. She adopts the dog and names her Genevieve. My mother looked at the pictures in every book I hid behind the toilet at home, tearing out pages she said I was too young to understand. For example, she said, I was too young to know what a river means, what shape it can slur into. She tore out the page where Genevieve saves Madeline from the water, gripping the girl’s neck in her mouth: It was the scene I reenacted with Ben on the playground. She flailed on her back in the gravel, pretending to drown, while I flipped her over and nipped her sweat-plated neck, my teeth tenderizing the bone there. I dragged her to the tanbark shore, panting through my nose, feeling her pulse ripen sweet in my mouth as a pear.
Ben’s favorite books were paperback romances she stole from the teacher’s purse, but she pronounced breast like beast and neither of us understood how a nipple could be pink, unless it was raw or diseased: Like pink eye, I said. Pink nipple. It’s contagious. We both swore never to rub our nipples after reading, in case we exhibited symptoms of salmonella. We guessed that the women in these books had not been properly cooked inside their mothers before birth.
Our teacher told us grammar was the god of language, but Ben was her own deity. We only listened to the assistant teacher, Mrs. Kersaint, who was Haitian and taught us songs in French and Creole and let us stripe our arms with chalk instead of copying sentences for a full hour. Mrs. Kersaint wrote our lessons in red marker on the birdshit-stained window instead of on the blackboard. She said we should always face outside, learn in the direction of the trees. Ben and I asked her all of our questions: Why is water both a noun and a verb? How do we know what tense we’re in? What counts as a pronoun? In our dialects, all pronouns shared the same sound. A tree and a girl were summoned the same way. In this language, Mrs. Kersaint said, trees are assigned to different countries, bodies to different ways of being buried.