Bestiary

by K-Ming Chang

  Ben said she’d let me hold the cage if I let her see my tail whenever she wanted. When I asked her why, she said, I like what it does to my hand. It behaves like it’s befriended something wild. I said she could steal it from me anytime. In her hands, my tail was potential, a hilt waiting to be drawn from me.

  Later—when we were in the classroom closet for our time-out, having flooded the bathroom and cut PE—I whispered to Ben in the dark that I might still eat her someday. Her laughter lit the dark between us, torched it to ash. When I told her to stop laughing, that it could really happen, Ben said I shouldn’t be afraid of what the tail wanted me to be. You’re becoming the species that will save you. But neither of us knew what I needed to be saved from. Neither of us knew what a beast was born to do.

  DAUGHTER

  Birthdate

  Or: Why Fathers Fail as Sources of Water

  On my brother’s birthday, my father asked if we wanted to go to the zoo. It was the same one Duck Uncle had taken us to. Our mother told us we had to go, even after my brother faked sickness by stewing vomit on the stove: He boiled water and cornstarch and an apple peel for color, then poured the pink glue of it down his shirt, pretending to gag it out of his mouth. But my mother wiped him off with a dishrag and said our father was our father: He carried us the way birds carry the sky. The sea shoulders the boat, she said. He’s the water, we’re what floats.

  Water can sink a boat too, I said, tracing a hole in the air with my finger. My brother and I finally agreed to go not because we thought our father was the sea, but because our mother begged us, and she was the only body of water we believed in.

  After my mother took the bus to work, my father drove us there with the windows down, our cheeks ripened by the wind. Our eyelashes knitted to the dust that blew in, a powder of sun-dried cowshit and dirt from the fields along the highway. Some summers, the fields caught fire and grew trees of smoke and my mother dipped bandanas in the sink to tie around our mouths, telling us to breathe careful: Our lungs could be lit up like logs.

  I fell asleep with my head rolling in my brother’s lap, his hands petting my hair along its part. He roved his palm over my face like a stethoscope, but it was his heart I could hear, accelerating as the car did. When we neared the zoo, I could hear him counting his own breaths, numbering them backward from a hundred, something he only did when my father was near.

  On our way to the bird enclosure, where the white nets were stiff as calcified wind and the parrots swore like men, my father bought me a popsicle that was supposed to resemble a pineapple but was the shape and color of a frozen booger. When we arrived at the parrots, my father pointed at a macaw with an orange band around its foot, a girl’s flower hairclip in its beak. Can you believe how red they are? How beautiful? People can only be that color if they bleed.

  I ate the popsicle stick-first, teething it to slivers, arming my tongue with quills. My father paid two dollars for us to ride in the back of a safari car that drove us along paths as twisted as arteries, past tanks full of bright fish the size of punctuation marks, past an enclosure where one of the monkeys slotted his penis through the bars and pissed at a passerby. My father and I laughed ourselves raw when we saw it, our mouths making symmetrical sounds, and all I could hear was our resemblance. He sat me on his lap so we wouldn’t have to pay for three seats, but I tried to slide off, fearing he’d feel the fist of my tail. The spineless popsicle dissolved in my palms, scrawling sugar down my arms. Wasps came to halo my elbows, stinging the sweetest parts of me. I want to go home, my brother said. He was counting his breaths again. The afternoon heat closed around us like a jaw and my father ignored him. When the safari tour ended, dropping us back off at the wrought-iron gate with the faux-wood welcome sign, my father asked if we wanted to go kite-flying. Walking us toward the parking lot, a hand welded to each of our necks, he said he knew the perfect place, the casino by the freeway with a rooftop bar where you could tie your kites to the railing and let them scoop up the air, ladle you a sky.

  No, my brother said again, stopping. We were almost to the car: I could see its one-eyed headlights, the left tire with half a dead squirrel still mashed to it, the license plate that began with the first letter of my name. My father stopped too, looked down at me as if I were the one who refused to keep walking, but I said nothing. We were passing between two parked SUVs, heading toward the far side of the lot where our car was, where our mother once stapled the seatbelt to our shirts because she didn’t trust us to be safe otherwise.

  A sunburnt station wagon passed behind us, windows bruised by the heat, the underwater voices of a family arguing inside. My father made a fist around my brother’s T-shirt collar, navy with neck-sweat, and lifted him off the ground. It was the same way he’d held my brother when we were on the mainland, before their bones had borrowed the air and flown. But here, there was no sky that could basket my brother, no string I could use to steer my father. I had no breath left in my body to blow them into kites.

  My father swung him back and forth, swung him dumb. Walk, he said, but my brother shook his head, choking inside his own shirt collar, biting his tongue until beetles of blood crawled out of his mouth. My father put him down, said, Walk. I stood behind them both, as if by staying still I could assume the shape of my shadow, flat on the asphalt, flitting beneath the cars and finding the street on my own, go home. My brother looked up, kept his face still as those ancient statues I’d seen only in textbooks, the kind missing their torsos, chipped at every angle, gutted by age into something graceful. Unsettled by the stillness of my brother’s face, my father looked down. At the crotch of my brother’s cargo shorts: a stain too dark to be sweat, a sweet rancid scent rising from his legs. He’d pissed himself, and on the asphalt I saw the lit trail of it, beginning somewhere at my own feet.

  My father’s mouth receded around his teeth. He called my brother an animal, a beast that couldn’t behave its bladder. Tapping its tip against the back of my knees, my tail orchestrated the air between my legs, a conductor’s wand waking the sound in me. My brother stood with his legs apart, straddling his piss-lake, wet everywhere below the waist. A boy newly baptized in his body. As if his water were divine, not the consequence of drinking all the bottles of 7Up my father had snuck into the park by tucking them into his waistband.

  When my brother said nothing back, my father gripped his shoulders and pinned his back to the black SUV beside us. My brother pretended to be boneless in his hands, ragdolled against the passenger door. In the heat, the windows of the SUV were warped, darkbright as bug eyes. Scanning each window, I looked for someone inside to call to, for my mother to waft in like a moon. But the rows of cars were endless as a cemetery and I couldn’t tell which direction was back toward the zoo.

  Heat began in my back teeth, igniting the wick of my tongue. A light lanterned my mouth and I named it rage. I ringed my arms around my father’s waist and dangled from him, trying to weaponize the weight of my body. My brother tried to kick back at him, but his foot flung out and kicked the side-view mirror instead, freeing our faces from it. The mirror shattered, turning our faces multifaceted as diamonds, and before its shards hit the asphalt, I saw in it how small I was, how my arms barely circled the width of my father’s waist. From another angle, it might have looked like I was trying to dance with him, dip him back in my arms.

  I let go of his waist and stood, my spine hammered straight, welded to wound. Beneath my skirt, my tail tautened between my legs, tethering me to the ground. I walked up behind my father, low and crouched, my knees hinged with a strength that was my mother’s: practiced at bending and rising, learning all the angles of prayer. My brother’s head lolled to the side as my father shook him again, spit whipping out of my brother’s mouth, sparkling in the air. Coiling his arms in, he retracted my brother to his chest, and I thought he was either going to hug him or throw him.

  I stood behind my father, standing in his sh
adow while my tail wrapped around his ankle, yanking so quick his leg buckled beneath him. He collapsed on one knee and cried out, the asphalt burning his kneecap bald, gravel gritting into it. My brother, let go, stumbled and leaned against the SUV, looking at my tail as if it might strangle his ankle too: It dangled slack between my legs again, sated. Wringing the sweat from its fur, I tucked it back into my underwear. I stepped back from my father’s kneeling body, his shadow truncated at the waist. He moaned a sound too low and gutted for even the car engines to comprehend, his lip metallic where he’d bitten it.

  He stood up halfway, cradling his skinned-open knee like a geode: Beneath the broken dullness of his skin, he was rubied with blood, pearled with tendon. Looking up at me through the black blades of his hair, he said my name, his mouth unstitched by it. It wasn’t the pain of his knee that kept him from following us: It was my face, my face that was my mother’s, my face that made the sun swivel around and witness it, my face backlit and blurred into the sky’s blue, resembling what couldn’t be touched.

  I spoke down to him: We’re going home. You will not follow us. His face was stunned flat as a run-over penny. We walked and he watched our backs, my brother’s shirt sheer with his sweat. My skin was soaked like a dress, a wet weight draped over my bones, so heavy I wanted to kneel down on the pavement.

  At the bus stop, we waited for three hundred breaths until it arrived, exhaust unspooling from its rear end. Night came sudden as a sheet thrown over a cage. My brother turned to me and said we had no money. He was looking at me between the legs instead of at my face, as if my tail would descend now and speak for me. I laughed, giddy with what I knew it could do, thinking suddenly of the monkey that had pissed through the gap in its cage, the way a rainbow had refracted through it. The bus doors opened. The driver was Asian and tired and looked down the steps at us. At my brother’s collar of thumbprints. He let us on for free.

  * * *

  _

  It was raining when we got home, and our mother was standing outside the house, wet hair like guohua, one strand striping her collarbone, the other rain-pasted to the arc of her cheek, the rest coiled around her neck. My brother and I were wet too, having walked from the nearest bus stop. The piss was rinsed from his legs, replaced by rain. I’ve been waiting, she said. She looked behind us for our father, as if he were shielded by our shadows, playing hide-and-seek with our shoulder blades.

  At home, she wrapped my brother and me both in her floral comforter, breathing onto our scalps with her mouth while the hair dryer warmed up. She asked what happened, where is he, did he leave you, never looking directly at the bruises cuffing my brother’s arms, at the way my knees migrated together, sealing my tail away from the light, her eyes.

  When my brother didn’t answer, I said that Hu Gu Po had come and taken him from us. I described what she’d looked like: a woman with striped skin, a pelt skirt that moved like oil. My mother stood up, looked at me. Her wet hair clung to her face like a shadow. She asked me what I meant, and I said Hu Gu Po had kept us from being hurt. Turning away from us both, my mother said she was going now to look for him, her hands opening and closing around nothing. I stood and gripped the back of her shirt, tugged on it so hard she bent her knees. She reached behind to unfasten my fist. When she turned back to me, I could see that her eyes were wet as fruit pits, that she was afraid of me. Okay, she said. Hao hao hao hao hao. I’m not going to look for him. But we need that car back. I said he had probably driven it away.

  But you said Hu Gu Po took him.

  I said she had, but he would come back. My mother shook her head and lifted her hand. I thought she might slap me, but instead she put it on my shoulder, steered me toward the bathroom. She said she was going to draw a bath so hot it would boil us new again. My brother shivered as he stood, his shoulders knocking against mine, and my mother undressed us both, forgetting to take off our socks. It’s like you’re my babies again, she said. Raw to everything. She buttered us with soap fat, cupped her hands to pour water over our heads. We shut our eyes and let her scrub us bright as dimes.

  In the morning, she was gone looking for him. On the sidewalk, while I waited for her to return, I watched two crows disrobe a dead squirrel, pecking away its skin and fur to untangle its intestines like a necklace.

  How my mother told the story of her search: She took the bus to the zoo, counting cows in the fields by the freeway, mistaking a cemetery for a herd of white-backed calves grazing the green, all of them missing mothers. The car was there, parked where we’d described, and for hours she avoided calling the tow truck, wanting instead to break in, to steal what was already hers, his smell still in the seats, the radio tuned to the only news she listened to, the weather, which Ama liked to say was god’s news. He’d taken the keys with him, a way of saying what belonged to him. But it didn’t matter where the keys were, where he’d gone to grow back his skin, because my mother was who I belonged to, the only place I’d ever lived, the only person who knew me before I had a name.

  While she waited for the tow truck to arrive at the parking lot, she searched the street for a rock at least the size of her hand, but could only find a small one, tapered like her ring finger. She threw it at the window. It pinged off. She picked it up again, aiming at her own face in the window’s reflection. When the car was towed back into our driveway, I found a crack in the driver’s side window, so small I thought a sparrow must have done it, flown into its own image. She never got the crack fixed, and when we drove in the daytime, the sun siphoned through it, brightened it into a scar. How she knew he was not coming back: There was a bird perched on the windshield one morning, a warbler of some kind, red-breasted as if it had been slit at the throat and was bleeding itself brighter.

  My mother beat it away with her hands, but it followed her into the house somehow, and she cornered it where the wall head-butted the ceiling. She cooed at it, then spat at it, then bruised it with the end of a broomstick, but it didn’t come down. It hovered there, beating its wings featherless against our walls. So we let it live with us, found its nests wedged behind the toilet or in the back of the oven. We never saw its mate. It pecked open all its eggs and ate the slugs of meat inside, leaving me the blue-veined shells to bury outside.

  The night we came back without our father, the tail twined itself around my thigh, clasping like a garter. I pet it to sleep before me. My tail and I were on a honeymoon: We were married now, vowing to defend each other. In his sleep, my brother tucked himself away from me, blowing silver spit-bubbles in the dark. He said my name like the name of a hurricane. Molding a moat of pillows around his body, he told me to keep my tail leashed. It’s already leashed to me, I said. It’s grown to me. But he said I didn’t know who held the other end of it. Who lived on the other end of it. A tail is two-way, he said. Like a telephone cord. Like something that plugs two things together. You don’t know what you’re being connected to. I told him he should be more grateful: Without it, without me, we wouldn’t have been able to walk away on our own. Instead of answering, he turned to the wall and wrote something on it with his spit-wet finger, a warning no one could read.

  A week later, the phone rang itself red. When I picked up, silence was on the other end. Heat radiated from the receiver, blistering my cheeks, and I had to hold it away from my face. It must have been a fire calling. But then the silence changed, became familiar, and I could imagine the mouth making it: silver-capped teeth uneven as a mountain range, a fog of cigarette smoke twined through the peaks. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t know if he knew it was me, but I hung up after counting to a hundred, let him learn my silence too: Mine was a weapon. Mine was a mercy, too. I gave him a hundred silences to translate into anything: sorry, goodbye, come back, leave, don’t, go, stay.

  DAUGHTER

  Back to Ben

  Ben’s father bought a lot in another town. He wanted to build his own house, with a porch and a yard and a
painted-white doghouse—even though, according to Ben, he was allergic to dogs and once sneezed at a beagle so hard his brains fled out of his nose as a flock of moths. The resulting hollowness of his head caused him to sell their car and furniture and buy an empty lot. No one in class believed Ben until the week she came to school with her father’s toolbox, full of nails and screws and other little silver things that looked like ear-bones. We told her that houses weren’t built. They existed like trees, grown in from the street.

  Ben walked me to the land her father had bought. It was damp and tufted with grass like an old man’s scalp. A fence as high as our foreheads split the lot from the sidewalk. Her father was unraveling the fence, rolling it up like a tongue. The land was concave, sunken in the middle, swallowing two trees that stood in the center of it. Ben’s father began the foundation by renting a bulldozer and carved a hole so deep we joked he was digging himself back to China.

  I walked an hour west on weekends to visit Ben and her family, who moved into a small shed bordering the hole. Ben’s father built the shed in two weeks, complete with a bunk bed for Ben and her brother, a dining table made of exposed plywood, and a drain in the corner for showering. Instead of a sink, they owned a bucket. Instead of a kitchen, they stacked a wall of tinned tuna and Spam, a tapestry of meats. Instead of a toilet, there was a spade by the door for us to dig our own holes.

  When it stormed, the tin roof chattered like teeth and the walls italicized themselves. Leaks veined the walls and bled rain. When I described it to my mother—bleached walls, a soil floor covered in prayer rugs, plastic-wrapped holes for windows—she said it sounded like a chicken farm, the kind she used to work for in Arkansas.