by K-Ming Chang
We got in trouble with the other teacher for never using plurals. When I said that Chinese words have no plural forms, she said, Then how do you know if it’s one thing or many? I said, One thing is always many. Ben got in trouble for not capitalizing the names of countries and people. When the teacher asked her why she’d chosen a boy name, she said, I liked Ben because it’s already short for something. This way, none of you can abbreviate me further. In class, she asked questions like, How long ago was the sea salted? I was the only one who answered: So long ago, Nuwa was the one who did it. Because otherwise the sea would go bad like milk. Salt is what preserves it. She misremembered idioms: I’ve got butterflies in my bladder. Or: A bird in the hand is worth more in the soup.
We misspelled all the words in our essays on purpose, baiting our teachers so we’d get a time-out together. We wrote: Baba’s a good sky and mama’s a good kook We be leave in rein carnation We were born hear so you cant depart us. All our essays were returned red: IMPROVE YOUR GRAMMAR. IMPROVE YOUR SPELLING. IMPLORE YOUR GODS. WE’LL SHOW YOU A SENTENCE.
I mimicked the way all of Ben’s sentences ended with -er, a purr that made me feel feline, foreign to myself. Her accent was an axe: mother abbreviated to moth, country to cunt. There was a game where the teacher pointed at pictures of objects on a projector screen and asked us for their names—apple, bus, cat, doctor—but Ben had her own vocabulary, made mostly of the sounds different bird flocks produced when they passed over the parking lot. The sound they make, Ben told me, depended on the density of the flock and whether or not they were native to the weather here. She could hear any sound once and continue the strand of it, threading the sound through her left ear and pulling it out of her mouth. At noon, she walked up to me and stole my reduced-lunch hot dog bun, ripping it into confetti-sized pieces and feeding it to the crows. They walked up to the bench and pecked at her ankles, opening their beaks as if to name her.
Ben’s favorite animal was an anteater, which she pronounced auntie tear. My favorite animal was a white tiger because I was born in the year of the tiger, and because I assumed anything born white must have a better chance at life. I was right: White tigers had a longer life span in captivity. In our school library, which was just an extra shelf in the back corner of the classroom, we memorized whole pages of the National Geographic encyclopedia, mispronouncing the genus of our species. We pronounced the Ho in Homo not like home but like hostage.
The Big Cats spread was our favorite: We wanted flashlight eyes that turned on at night. We went to the bathroom and shut off the lights, foraging for our faces in the dark. In the dark, she made a fist around my braid and presented it back to me like a bouquet. When I told her my favorite animal was the tiger, Ben told me that tigers in myths were always men. What animals are women? I asked, and she named everything with wings: cranes, phoenixes, geese. I knew from my mother’s stories that snakes were also women, shucking off their skins beneath the meat of the moon.
Whenever we ditched, Ben and I compared our breasts in the restroom. There were three tin-walled stalls and a faucet that never stopped drooling. The tile floor had potholes of piss. We stood on the toilets like they were islands we were native to, each of us balanced on one side of the seat rim, steering each other’s arms. We lifted our shirts. We believed our nipples would someday open into eyes. Bras were blindfolds that our mothers wore to protect their eye-nipples from constant light. My nipples were darker and hers were hairier: hairs I wanted to make a career out of counting. I thought I could blink my nipples like eyes, squinting or dilating them depending on her distance from me.
My tail turned copper with sweat and knotted against my lower back whenever she came near. I was afraid to show her its length, in case she pulled on it like a lever by accident, transforming me into Hu Gu Po. I’d bite off her breasts, scoop them clean like grapefruits and flush away the skins.
One day in the restroom, I asked her if she knew the story of Hu Gu Po. We stood on the toilet seat, holding the hooks of each other’s arms. I wanted to ask if she saw a resemblance between the story and me, but Ben said no, she’d never heard it. It’s about a tiger spirit, I said, who wants to be a woman. But to keep her body, she eats only what she can kill. She shells toes and calls them peanuts. My mother said it was the only story she wanted me to own. My inheritance was hurt. Sounds like your ancestors had a foot fetish, Ben said. I laughed and called her a birdshit, shouldering her off the toilet seat until she stumbled in, displacing water in arcs. She climbed out of the toilet bowl, walking out of the stall and shimmying her legs to dry them. When I called her back into the stall, hopping down from the toilet seat to say sorry, she smiled and said, Watch me, dipping both her hands into the toilet bowl and flinging fistfuls of gem-hard drops at me. Turning my face away, I gripped the wall and laughed, wiping my cheeks with my sleeve. Surrender, she said, as the toilet bowl boiled over with our laughter.
* * *
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On the next show-and-tell day, Ben brought a birdcage to class and posed it in the center of her desk until our teacher, a bleached-out woman with freckled legs, told Ben to put it away. To the back of the classroom, she said. Don’t distract the other students. But Ben was the distraction: She sat behind me, fiddling with her lips as if she couldn’t figure out how to unbutton them. Her hair knotted itself to any object within reach: the chair, her pencil, my hands. When it was her turn to show and tell, Ben carried the cage from the back of the classroom, holding it high over her head as if she were going to crown herself with it. The cage was rusted and doorless, but its damage made it dearer to her. She said it had been owned by her great-grandmother, born a beast-keeper of the royal zoo, so skilled at taming animals that she could make a giraffe bow down and lick her eyelids. Since then, every daughter in the family was born with a key growing in her mouth like a milk tooth.
Ben’s great-grandmother wore keys everywhere on her body: dangling from her ears, sheathed in her nostrils, darned to her skirt. In the royal zoo, there were millions of cages with one bird each, southern seabirds with glass beaks, desert birds with two sets of eyelids, a thousand breeds of songless sparrows. One summer, the animals remembered their past lives and began to behave outside of their assigned species. The royal fish tried walking out of their rivers and died writhing in the mud. The dogs teethed off their tails and jumped from roofs, believing themselves winged. The snakes forgot they were cold-blooded and stayed in the shade until their blood iced over. The canaries plucked themselves bald and converted to carnivores. Ben’s great-grandmother was accused of poisoning the animals, of surgically swapping their minds. As punishment, each of her limbs was tied to a different horse, tearing her apart when they ran. The soldiers collected her limbs in a sack, but when they tried to toss it into a nearby river, the sack began to shiver. When they opened it, hundreds of birds funneled out, bright as razors, cutting the sky to pieces.
On the baseball diamond at recess, Ben pulled me away into the dugout and showed me the key to the cage door: It was the silver pendant around her neck. Ben stepped closer until the key was against my chest, teething into my left breast. She said she’d been born with the key, a silver milk tooth jutting from her mouth. It tore her mother during birth, snagging on the placenta and causing her mother to hemorrhage. To this day, she said, the hospital still stands inside a flood. When Ben stepped back, the key swinging in the air between us, I thought about slipping my tail out. I wasn’t born with it, I would say, but it’s my name.
* * *
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One afternoon, we ran from our older brothers and their foam-pellet guns. They shut off every light in the house, chasing us through the kitchen and into the yard and back into the kitchen, where we rifled the drawers for a knife to threaten them back. Ben’s brother had too-large hands with fingers that curled naturally, adapted for pulling triggers and professional nose-picking. The two boys retreated temporarily to my brother’s ro
om, saying that when they came back out, we’d better be hidden or already dead. There was nowhere that could fit both our bodies except behind the sofa, where we wouldn’t last. I kissed her before our deaths, pretended the dark was not man-made, pretended our brothers’ guns shot real bullets, not jelly-tipped shafts I could catch midair. I wanted permanent damage, a war where one side was the other’s shadow, one body was the other’s blade.
We kissed, my tongue serenading her teeth. She put her palm on the back of my neck and I was sweating a dress. My hands honeymooned on her hips. The key around her neck nudged me just below the collarbone, but I didn’t pull away. Between our chests, the key heated until I thought it would weld itself into a new shape, a hinge between our bodies.
Ben’s ribs parted against mine, releasing her heart into my hands, a fistful of feathers. My throat a perch for her teeth. Then I heard the sound of our brothers reloading on the other side of the sofa, squinting to separate our bodies from the dark. We kept our eyes closed, her mouth on my shoulder now. Tomorrow there would be a bruise, a dark spot on the ball of my shoulder, and I’d think for a second that my skin was of another species, that I was finally turning into what my tail wanted me to be. But then I’d remember yesterday, which was today, which was her mouth making my shoulder lift like a wing. Our brothers took aim, still squinting, unable to tell if there was one body or two. We let them. We were silent when the foam bullets bounced off our thighs and bellies.
Ben fell to her side and pretended to bleed out of her mouth, her tongue twitching in the dark like a severed lizard tail. The inside of my mouth felt sore, spoken for. It was a lie, letting them believe we could die, but we did it because it was fun to watch them be sorry later. They mourned us by throwing their pellets one by one down the garbage disposal while we rolled over onto our bellies and laughed with all the blood in us. We laughed until we pissed ourselves warm and had to line our underwear with paper towels.
I wanted to taste everything native to her. I held her spit in my mouth, wondered if this was what the teacher meant by exchanging bodily fluids. We’d just begun seventh grade sex education, which mostly meant our teacher explained that the adhesive “wings” of a Maxi pad were not literal wings and could not equip us with flight. The teacher told us to develop a platonic relationship with our bodies. On the list of illicit fluids that could be exchanged, bartered: semen, vaginal discharge, blood. But there was nothing about what we’d done. In the animal encyclopedia Ben and I memorized, every hierarchy had a name. Every violence a vocabulary. Somewhere, there was a name for our exchange, in a language that was kept from us.
* * *
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I brought Ben to my backyard where the holes breathed, introducing her to each mouth I’d made with my hands.
I invented a role for each hole. This one spits watermelon seeds, I said, pointing at the hole to our right. This one tells secrets, I said, pointing to the hole on our left. I still watered the holes once a week with the backyard hose, as if water alone could heal them.
Have you tried feeding them? Ben asked. I said I had, but she said maybe it wasn’t the right kind of prey. Maybe they wanted to hunt for themselves. I told her to forget about them the way I had: I’d learned to live around them, to skirt around the borders of their throats without being swallowed. Ben looked at me, a smudge of mud on her nose-bridge, and said, Every hole corresponds to something missing. We just need to find what’s gone. Whenever there was something she wanted to solve, she fingered the key around her neck, pretended to unlock her mouth with it. She gripped the pendant-key in her teeth and suckled on it, thinking. I slid the key from between her teeth, replaced it with my finger, flinching when I felt her teeth. She looked at me without blinking, her mouth-O symmetrical to the holes. Waiting for her teeth to cleave me, I imagined my finger severed inside her mouth, twirling like a stem. Ben shut her eyes, her breath burning circles on the back of my hand. Her teeth clasped around my knuckle and then released, skimming the skin so lightly it reminded me of the time a wasp landed on my finger and sipped at my sweat. I’d been so afraid of moving, of baiting its sting, that I didn’t breathe. Coaxing my finger into a hook, I twisted it slow as a key until she opened for me.
* * *
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The next day, Ben thanked me for showing her the holes in my yard and said there was something she still hadn’t shown me yet. It was taco day at school, and we’d both poured the ground beef out of their neon shells and down our pants, laughing as the minced meat sagged our underwear. We ran up to the lunch chaperones and said we’d pooped ourselves, flashing our meat stains. They panicked and escorted us to the bathroom, excused us from our next class, and left us together while they scoured the lost and found for clean pants.
When they left, Ben pushed me into the bathroom stall and told me to sit down and wait. I squatted on the toilet seat until she returned carrying the cage. She tugged me out of the stall by my wrist. In front of the finger-smeared mirror, she lifted the birdcage with both hands.
The mirror above the sink reflected the birdcage between us, fluorescent light flattening our faces. I was too busy watching Ben’s face in the mirror to see it: a shape in the center of the birdcage, a shadow without a body. The shadow was standing on the perch in the center, moving in a familiar rhythm, slight and fast and songlike. A bird. When it opened its wings, I turned my head from the mirror to look up at the ceiling, to see what bird was casting its shadow down on the cage. But there was no body, just the bird-shadow, and I could see only its reflection. I looked at the cage directly, then at its image, trying to align them in my mind. But the cage in the mirror carried more.
Ben guessed the shadow-bird was some kind of ghost, left behind by a bird that had died in it. I told her I was always suspicious of shadows: Mine left me at night to grow its own body. I looked at the shadow-bird again in the mirror, trying to imagine a pigeon or a sparrow, but I decided its species was its own. Ben said she’d tried installing birdfeeders and bottle-caps full of water, but the shadow-bird didn’t hunger or thirst or grow. It never tried to leave. For the rest of the hour, while our classmates dissolved in the heat outside, we stood side by side. Not facing each other, just watching the shadow-bird in the mirror. Not naming it either. Though in my mind, I had already given it many names: Mouth with wings. Night in a body.
Setting the cage down in the sink, Ben turned on the faucet and the water gathered black at the bottom of the cage. I turned to Ben and looked her in the mouth, said I had something to show her too. It was something I couldn’t name either. It was the sum of my body and its predecessors. Ben let the water run out of words. I pulled her by the wrists back into the stall and turned around, sloughing off my pants.
Silent, Ben reached down. Touched the knotted tip of my tail as if it were a bird that would startle. Lifted it to her nose and stroked it once across her face, as if she could tell its species by scent. What is it? I asked her. Ben dropped my tail, watched it hang. Teethed her pendant-key.
Tigers are natural predators, Ben said. When I asked how she defined a predator, she said, Something that eats other things for a living. But wasn’t that everything? Ben said I should look at the food chain, but the only chain I’d memorized was the pendant-string around her neck: I lived inside its radius. Cats and birds are natural enemies, Ben said, pointing at me and then herself.
Do you mean we’re enemies? Shaking her head, she said we were many species, many bodies. But what am I becoming? I said. I wondered if she’d ever feared I’d hurt her, if she knew how I’d once tried hunting my father. If I ate her someday, she had to forgive me. Ben said she couldn’t forgive anyone if she didn’t have a body.
Can bodies cross into other bodies? Ben said I was always asking the wrong questions. I told her I knew about evolution and finches, knew all the concepts we were taught, but she said my tail wasn’t shaped like a line: It was shaped like a life, circling itself,
growing backward from tip to root. The sinks outside were overflowing, flooding us to the ankles, water-rings coiling like snakes. Ben said it didn’t take generations to change, to adapt to a new predator or environment. Sometimes one body could do it. She talked like a scientist of survival. I told her that there was no evolutionary line between tigers and people, and if there was, it still meant I was moving backward.
There’s no such thing as forward or backward, she said, her finger circling in the air. There was no such thing as progress, just accumulation: A long time ago, she told me, when a man died of exhaustion while building the Great Wall, the man behind him just bricked his body into the wall and kept going. That’s why it’s studded with skulls, she said. Why it’s shaped like a spine. It’s a burial ground, not a building. I asked her if this story was meant to comfort me.
She told me not to worry. We’re not alive. We’re just between deaths right now. She laughed and reached around for my tail: It thrummed like an antenna, broadcasting her touch all over my body.
If we stayed in here, she said, and the water kept outgrowing us, what do you think would happen? I told her we’d drown, but Ben said I was wrong. We’d grow gills, she said.
Holding open the stall door, she walked me to the sinks, water receding around us. It listened to her feet when she told it to leave. She turned off the faucet, her cage bobbing in the sink. The pendant-key punctuated the center of her chest. Lifting the cage with both hands, she offered it to me. If she unlocked it, I wondered, would the shadow-bird leave? Would we see it flee?