Bestiary

by K-Ming Chang

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  Ben and I nursed the yard-holes, feeding our fingers into them, searching for another letter, one that would explain what to do with the first. From inside the house, we heard Dayi call for us, and when we ran into the kitchen she was leaning on the counter. Dayi held her belly, but it looked no larger than when she first arrived to our house. We led Dayi to the sofa and propped her with pillows, patting the sweat from her neck and forehead and waiting for our mother to come home.

  Dayi moaned and bit a pillow until its seams split. Water puddled in the kitchen where Dayi had been standing at the counter. I wiped the water from the tiles, but the stain seemed to straddle the whole floor. I asked Ben if it was possible to have a phantom pregnancy, and Ben said phantoms don’t produce water.

  By the time my mother came home, Dayi was an hour into labor and we’d taken off her pants. Ben said we should have taken off all her clothes just to be sure, but I asked her: What kind of baby is born above the waist? My mother squatted between Dayi’s legs, tugging something out of her: a dark scarf of blood unknotting into a neck. It was a goose, born beak-first, gowned in slime and blood. I pet its back, licked the fudge of blood off my fingers.

  When Dayi asked to see the baby, we walked her to the backyard. My mother set the goose down between the holes, let it walk in circles around itself, wings glued down with mucus. Dayi said nothing, crouching. Then she took off her gloves and pet her goose once, head to tail, until it was red, a species no one had named yet.

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  I told Ben I’d dreamt of eating the goose. We were lying on our backs on the baseball diamond, her right hand perched on my belly, restless. Her hand hatched all our plans: When she made a fist and opened it, I knew it meant there was a fledgling idea inside it.

  In my backyard that evening, Ben and I untethered the goose from the fence. In the center of the yard, the 口 was open. Trust me, Ben said, holding the end of the leash. Ben made a clucking noise with her tongue, coaxing the goose to the center of the yard.

  Following Ben and the goose to the 口, I watched her kneel beside the hole and grip the goose in both hands, tamping its wings down. She lowered it feet-first into the hole, its wings battling her hands.

  I asked her what she was doing and she said, Birthing it. I said no, this was sacrifice, this was smothering. Ben said, All mouths require feeding. The hole sucked it out of her hands, swallowed it down. Only the leash was uneaten. Ben reeled the rope out of the hole. We stood back, toeing the soil to see if it was tame again. It hiccupped beneath our feet, then burped hot steam in our faces.

  That night, I visited the hole to see if it had finished digesting. Shoveling my hands into the hole, I groped for its gag reflex. The second letter lolled out like a tongue, wet with some other country’s rain.

  I told you it wanted meat, Ben said, as I tugged out the letter. When the 口 dilated back to the width of our heads, we reached in and pulled out fistfuls of bird bones crumbling to salt. The skeleton of Dayi’s goose-baby. One of the bones we recovered was a rib, the other a wishbone. We each held one end of the forked bone, breaking it between us.

  The bone-halves jerked in our fists after we broke them, magnetizing back together. Where they touched, the bones welded themselves, glowing. Above us, crows gathered to knit the night. Ben and I tried to break the bone again, to seduce it from symmetry, but the wishbone flew out of our fists. It hovered above our heads, growing a body around itself. Rot in reverse: The wishbone fattened into fleshcoat and feathers, feet forking from a torso. It rose to join the crows, a goose threading in and out of the flock, going home.

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  After her last stroke, the one that made her forget our names, Dayi decided to go back to the island. She said it was time for her to die on someone else’s dime. On her last night, we walked to the reservoir again, tossing the geese everything we could find in the reeds and bushes: bits of hot dog bun, fishbone, pieces of a broken Frisbee. Dayi searched the sky for a red goose, mistaking the sun for hers.

  Dayi said that feeding the geese was actually cruelty. They get too big from being fed by humans, and then they can’t migrate, she said. They could no longer fly south, or maybe they no longer needed to. They were stranded in their bodies.

  Before Dayi left, my mother said she was glad: Dayi’s useless. She’s practically a piece of furniture.

  Furniture is extremely useful, I said. Still, I wondered if one day Dayi’s legs would seam together, her skin leathering, her spine reclined like the sofa. Dayi always joked that she was becoming a goose herself, nested on our cushions, crumb-fed. When I asked if feeding her like a goose meant she’d never fly home again, she said this was already home. Here, where my mother replaced all the salt in her dishes with sugar, cooking everything so sweet we spat it back into our bowls when she wasn’t looking. Ants infested the kitchen. Dayi and I loved when the ants came. We used pieces of Scotch tape to pick them up in clots. We perforated their lines and counted the seconds it took for more ants to pour into the gaps we’d made. We liked to kill them one at a time, watching an entire lineage of ants walk over their dead, no one bothering to pick up the body or bring it home. We kept waiting for the queen to show, but we knew it was winged, somewhere above our heads and unkillable, her appetite an entire army.

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  For a month after she left, my mother wouldn’t throw out the uneaten jars of baby food we had bought her, all the red flavors: beet and apple, mixed berry, rhubarb. When she died, we sent paper lotuses to be incinerated along with her body: My mother folded each palm-sized petal at the dinner table.

  At Dayi’s cremation on the island, my aunts lifted bone fragments from a tray with chopsticks and touched them to the light, discovering that Dayi’s bones were filled with red crystal. They broke all her bones open like geodes. Even her heart was candied bright as an apple. They sent my mother a bone splinter in the mail. It shot out of the padded envelope and bounced twice on our dining table, brazen as a blade. It was the length of my forefinger, blunt on one end and forked on the other. In my fist, the bone harmonized with my heat. Sang me to my knees. My mother said we should sheathe it in a sandwich bag and pulverize it, but in the end she kept it, filling a vase with beef blood and planting the bone upright, watering it every day to grow back Dayi.

  GRANDMOTHER

  Letter II: In which the clouds are eaten

  Dear second daughter,

  When you were born you laughed instead of crying. It impressed me. I liked your honesty. I humored your helplessness, your misplaced faith in my body  I lifted you from the river  a fish in my fist  loosed you into the rainbarrel with your sisters  you were the last to girl back snakes chewed the mud  spat it back out  venom in the soil spreading to the sugarcane  sour this year  trees retracting their roots  we begin to eat the cotton  roll them into balls  our bellies full of our fists  the neighbors go to hunt the snakes but they rescind into the water  sink to the bottom pretending  to be stone

  Sometimes I dream  raking the river with my teeth  staring every fish in the fin  none are you. You  saltiest of my fishdaughters  I steered you by the tail in my rainbarrel  what substitutes touch:  water  hunger  I dreamed the clouds were calves  I killed to feed you  in the morning only cotton  swabbing my belly  I envy the river its boneless  I

  After weeks   your sisters turned back to daughterbodies not you  yearly a fish    you photosynthesize light into bone    I feed all my daughters full of cotton  my daughters so empty they shit streams of fog one day I’m home  I see your sisters standing around the barrel where you glowbone  your sisters so thin  cotton infants in their bellies  doorknob knees ghostfins  I see my eldest with her fist around you your bone  in her mouth  your sisters hunched together taking turns�
��  biting into you   scales sequinning their tongues  I beat them till they let go  too late I forgot what you looked like as a girl  I saved what they didn’t swallow  some bone  an eye-pit when your sisters shat out your ribs I returned them to the river  beat its surface blue with my hands the neighbors told me water can’t bruise  said I will never be forgiven  they saw me drop my children into the river  did I really think they would be returned to me the same  species  it’s true there was a whale in the river one summer before you were born  you head-butted my belly blue wanting to get out of me to see it no one knew how the whale squeezed itself in  but it was there I swear it was  a whale  I pet its jellyhead it mooed at me  you laughed from inside me too tickling me  on the day your sisters ate you  I asked the river to give me back a girl again instead it spat out a fish-hook at my feet  said go hook yourself  another daughter*

  * THIS IS HARDCORE. IS IT CANNIBALISM IF YOU EAT YOUR SISTER WHO’S ANOTHER SPECIES? CAN HUNGER BE INHERITED? I HOPE YOU’RE NOT PLANNING ON EATING ANYONE SOMEDAY. THOUGH IS THERE A CHOICE IN WHAT YOU HUNT—WHAT HUNTS YOU? —BEN

  DAUGHTER

  Parable of the Pirate

  On our last week of school before summer, Ben and I fed her birdcage to the holes. She said the last letter felt incomplete, and we needed to metabolize metal this time. Metal, she told me, could be melted down into water, and the holes were always thirsting. We believed there were three letters, one for each daughter my Ama had left behind. All losses come in threes, Ben said, and I thought of my mother’s three toes in the cookie tin.

  When we lowered the cage into the 口, it took an hour for the hole to heal around it. Beneath the dirt, we heard the high whine of bars being wrenched, teethed apart, scoured of rust. I was worried about the shadow-bird suffocating while it was buried so far beneath the sky, but Ben said it was worth killing what was inside. We’d already sacrificed an entire goose. I told her not to remind me: These letters had too many casualties already.

  The 口 didn’t open for four days, and I told Ben to be patient: Metal was metabolized more slowly than meat. Ben said I should tell the holes a story: They’d open their ears to listen, and then we could reach into them and search. But I said I didn’t have any stories, especially if they were about Ama. She was the voice and I was the ear. Then tell one of your ama’s stories, Ben said.

  Every other night, my mother used the new landline to call Agong, but Ama was the one who picked up. Agong’s mind had unmarried all its memories, and sometimes he called to tell us the Japanese were invading and we should all find a well to hide in. The nights Ama made him sleep on the sidewalk, he’d duck under a chili bush and slug into the soil, awaiting whatever army was morning.

  When I was the one who picked up the phone, Ama gave me marriage advice: No mainland men, she said. Agong and my father were born in neighboring provinces, and look how they were now: My husband is gone in the head and your father is gone everywhere else. She said men were synonymous with missing. Then she told me to ward off boys by holding a skinned ginger root between my knees while I slept. I stole the ginger from my mother’s cabinet. It swelled with my sweat and chafed me hairless, but I ground myself against it until my crotch burned and it prickled to piss the next day. My mother said Ama was corrupting me, but the cure worked. Boys in the neighborhood veered their bikes away from me, and even my brother said his tongue burned whenever he spoke to me.

  Other times, Ama told me about stealing the neighbor’s chickens, slaughtering and skinning and cooking them so that there was no evidence of the crime. Ama was the one who taught me the laws of ownership: It’s yours if you were the one to birth it, she said. Or the one to kill it.

  The story I told the holes was this one:

  The first time I got a fever, only months after my father left for the mainland, I wet the bed twice in one night. My mouth was hot and oven-doored, baking my tongue brittle when I tried to speak. After days of staying home with me, of swapping my bedsheets for towels and saran-wrapping my pillow to keep me from clawing out the foam, my mother called Ama. I knew she didn’t want to call, but she hadn’t been to work in a week and we were running out of grocery bags for me to vomit into. I couldn’t hear what she’d said to Ama, but after she hung up and knotted up the plastic bag of my vomit, she swiped the slime off my chin and said, I have to go to work. Feet don’t scour themselves of fungus.

  I knew she wanted me to contradict her, to tell her to stay home with me, but instead I said I wanted to see Ama. My mother stood in the doorway with the bag of vomit flopping in her arms. A leak opened in the corner of the bag and my belly drained out of it, a stew splattering her toes. She stepped through it, came to my bedside. Said I didn’t know what I wanted.

  But what I wanted was both of them beside me, their arms impersonating a bridge above me, but that would mean I was the river below them, siding with the water that had almost drowned my mother.

  Ama took a seven-hour bus, heading north to us with crates of Coca-Cola and a bag of ginger that required two seats. In our kitchen, Ama boiled Coca-Cola with slices of ginger wading inside, a Cantonese cure she learned from the other women at the factory. She held my mouth open and poured in the ginger-cola, wouldn’t let go until I swallowed. Her fingers corseting my throat. My mother watched in the doorway, waiting to intervene, but Ama left the next day. She’d sewn me a charm to put inside my pillowcase, a stuffed gourd of felt and cotton balls. My mother threw it away every morning, but I stole it out of the trash and slept with my mouth around it, a gourd I’d ripen into my daughter.

  Ben told me to keep going, that the holes were opening, listening through their throats. But the story was too long for me to speak: My throat would run out like a ribbon. Inside the house, I wrote what I remembered, folded it into squares, and fed it to the 口.

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  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Ama told me this story during my fever. I didn’t remember anything she said until days after she left, when my mother said I should delete all recollections of Ama before they invaded my neighboring memories. But this is a story I don’t want to forget. Other things I don’t want to forget: The way Ama held my hand when I dreamt I was stranded in a boat, the mattress flooding with my own sweat. When I asked her what the sea was like as a child and she said here’s a story.

  Is it possible that she threw her daughters into a river? Maybe she thought they were on fire. Maybe she thought she was saving them. Is there a way to tell a story without sides?

  Parable of the Pirate: Ama’s Interlude

  [To be read in Ama’s voice. Suggestions: Read this aloud underwater, or speak perpendicular to a strong wind, or swallow a fork before speaking. Bleed your voice of its language, then learn a sea’s accent.]

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  You tell the story like a white person.*1 Too much language. I prefer concision,*2 a story with scissor blades. Useful for what it can sever. Let’s say your great-great-grandfather stole his name. Before empires and before men and before my hips began barking at me to sit down, back when blood was sweet, we lived in houses underground. We dug into the mountain soil that was so wet you could wring rivers from it. Our doors were holes. We came home by climbing down ladders. If home is beneath your feet, it means you’re always home. We planted our shit in the ground to grow more mountains when we ran out. We didn’t aspire upward but downward: The deeper your house, the safer you were from sight, from soldiers, from grief engineered by armies. You think you dig holes in the yard because it’s your idea? Digging is the design of your body. Holes are what marrow is made of.

  The empire had two categories for us: cooked and raw. If you married a mainlander and let them stew their children inside you, you were cooked. If you lived in the mountains and fucked rivers, you were raw. Grandfather Isaw was yolkraw. He hard-boiled the whites of his eyes by looking directly at
the sun and shooting it down. One day, men came up the mountain with pots, ready to boil all the boys in the tribe. Isaw volunteered to boil himself alive and go down the mountain to seek adventure. He fathered a dozen half-raw, half-cooked daughters. He fried you a family. He went to sea on a boat he’d stolen from a fisherman. Cut the man’s throat and speared him in the water. The blood summoned a shark, which swam off with the fisherman’s balls in its mouth.

  He lived as a fisherman until his boat was boarded by a fleet of pirates. My grandfather did not mind being a pirate: He liked it better than fishing, and anything was better than being on land where everyone was trying to cook him. The pirates called him Three-Blades—and yes, of course he carried three blades, all of them different lengths, all of them named after snakes—until he killed his first merchant.

  Isaw took that merchant’s name because he liked to collect names the way other men collected wives, and because it would help him pass for Chinese. Now all the pirates called him Old Guang. Back on land, my grandmother thought he’d capsized and died, and soon resigned herself to widowhood—she never minded it, really. She didn’t love her husband any more than she loved having fungus between her toes. My aunts and uncles didn’t miss him either: Old Guang was just a fart that infiltrated the house. Before he was kidnapped, we saw him only once a moon.*3

  The captain of this pirate fleet was a Tanka man*4 named Ah Zheng, younger than my grandfather but taller, slender as a dagger. From afar, his ship looked like a mouth: The wood was sun-dyed white as a jawbone, and along the railing of the ship he’d embedded stakes of ivory that looked like teeth from a distance. The ivory stakes were a form of defense against being boarded. Most of Ah Zheng’s people had been slaughtered by the Cantonese, and piracy was vengeance—if the Cantonese called him unfit for land life, he would wield the water as a whip. He would capture all their ships, welt their hulls, melt their foreign gold and gild all his teeth in it. All his life, the shore was a father*5—he knew he would never be allowed to meet it. Fine by him. He preferred water to women.*6 He had been conceived and born at sea. Some say he could sing to fish, that they threw themselves into the boat whenever he was hungry. Some say his balls were big enough to shoot out of cannons.