Bestiary
Page 17
While she slept that night, I stole something from her suitcase, which was just the same twined-up shepi bag she’d brought from the island. I took the book. I told myself it wasn’t stealing if the thing had already been stolen once. Two acts of thievery canceled out, became something more like salvaging. I still have it, that book. You should read it to me sometime, skipping all the words you think I don’t know. I won’t know them, but I’ll pretend to, shame you for thinking me stupid, and then you’ll be so sorry you’ll read the whole book to me all over again, redacting nothing. Maybe you can tell me what those two girls are doing in that field, what they’re watching for. If they’re waiting for something to arrive or to leave. Don’t tell me how it ends yet. Tell me that it doesn’t. The cover keeps changing every time I look at it, and now the field is frazzled with animals, mountain dogs and mice and a tiger tilling the field with its tail. Under the sofa, in that dark rind of space where the mice shit and breed and eat their babies, I slide out the book I stole from her, consider feeding it page by page to your holes, erasing those two girls from the field that’s waiting to be sown with their bones. But always, I keep it, something I know she misses, an absence like a field, growing until it surrounds you. Something I know she’ll return for.
DAUGHTER
Back to Ben
The holes behaved like newborns, mouths open wide enough to swallow our hips, crying all night until the neighbors asked if we were running some kind of illegal orphanage, trafficking sound from the ground. My mother came out with a BB gun and shot them each in the mouth, but they spat the bullets back out and vacuumed the gun right out of her hands, inhaling her arms up to the elbows. My tail, too, was colicky, its stripes steel-bright with sweat. It flicked out in the night, upright between my knees. It was honing itself, rubbing against the whetstone of my bedroom wall. Only stilled when I promised to steer it like a spear, tell it who to stitch through.
Your ama is baiting us, Ben said. She’s getting ready to bury someone. I said that the holes would tell me what to do, that they were already sirening, an orchestra of mouths warning me. The only time the holes were coherent was when Ben and I touched. When we kissed in front of them, they cinched their lips and listened, opening only to say yes, yes. While night erected itself around us like a tent, we sat cross-legged on the soil and its tapestry of worms. Ben laced her legs around my waist. Her mouth so close I could see the serrations of her teeth, sawing every sound in half so that I heard it twice: my name, my name. I leaned forward, flicked her upper lip with my bottom one. We met inside our mouths. I found the seam under her tongue and undid it. With my hands around her, I felt her spine through her shirt, a ladder to thirst. All around us, the holes were full of a bright sound, jingling like a handful of nickels.
My tongue slipped into her nostril and a pebble of dried mucus dissolved on my tongue. I knew everything she’d smelled that day: sweat, the soil, me. Ben knelt and kissed my knees. She pulled my pants down as I lay back, soil gathering between the halves of my ass. My hip-bone fit in the bowl of her palm and shone. I sat up and worked her jeans down to her ankles, the waistband of her underwear biting my finger blue. When I bent my head to kiss where the elastic striped her skin, she reached down and nested her fingers in my hair. I wondered if it was possible for a tongue to turn into a fish and swim into the dark of someone, disappearing forever into that ecology of need. Ben gripped my hair, tugged me closer until my face was not my face but a place where she beached, where salt scoured my mouth of its name. I was dew-hungry. I was the sound she made grinding against my chin-bone, the holes rioting beside us, brimming with spit. The moon newly minted in the heat and pressure of our pressed-together bodies.
Later, when both of us stood in front of the bathroom mirror, we looked like we were wearing our graves, dazzling with dirt, musky with the soil we’d turned on its back. Overnight, the holes contracted into nostril-holes, breathing out a fog that was thick as whisked egg, a fog that would fly far northwest to squat on top of the Bay Bridge. The fog smelled like fucking, like us, like our sweat fermented into sweet pudding, and when it began to rise, we found the last letter sprouting out of the 口’s lips. It parted the fog, flapping like a sail in trouble, no destination visible, and through the curdled milk of the air I could only see Ben bending down to save it.
GRANDMOTHER
Letter V: In which I name you
Dear final daughter,
You married a man the opposite of your father but I need to say all men are synonyms none the word you’re looking for when your husband went to the mainland you asked if you should have followed him I followed your father to this country & now I wear a diaper once I brought a piglet into my wedding bed tucked it between my legs & let your Ba fuck that instead I wanted to be the only one inside my body the piglet gave birth later to a litter of grenades each with a girl face I pulled their pins threw them into the river one by one rending the water into rain
I see the zhongyi once a month & I pay him in memories my only currency once when you were little I said you could love your father or your mother but you had to pick one the one you love is your leash the other is a house you burn down you never told me what you chose but I know myself to fend off ash I tied the river in my hair like a ribbon I told you a lie there is no choice you have no father
but me*1 the one you call Ba is not yours I conceived you with the river*2 I mothered & fathered you both the Ba you love better than me never sired you I milked you from the mountain Papakwaka I never named you answered to a whistle the same sound summoning dogs every neighborhood bitch born stray when you were born I was dry nursed you on a bitch’s teat you slept knotting your arms so tight they never learned how to be straight. I stood you against a wall for posture but you can’t train a spine to disobey itself I am sending all these letters separately but know I wrote this one first. To my last my not-son my knot daughter. You born with your legs tied together trussed like a pig in the tissue of me birds circled your cry your namelessness: there are certain gods nameless true I didn’t name you isn’t that a form of divinity? To be known to the world by body alone? Wake
your father sleeping beside me you may think you’ll steal him someday but I let him be taken from his body I lent him this life & now he owes me a country where I’m alive today I wanted to sever his tongue skin it for the fish inside in this country you always spoke for me when the cashiers told me how much was owed you counted the money over I want to know how much you will forgive me for if I sewed his tongue to the back of his skull if I told you the truth about who fathered you when I say come take him I mean take me out of this sentence I’m running out of hands to hurt with words to make you return to me I mean I mean the river
today on the Taiwanese radio channel reports of two murders in one day big news for a shit-small island one happened on the train older woman stabbing a stranger’s child no motive second about a mother sneaking onto the elevator of a hotel throwing her baby off the rooftop garden
dozens of witnesses stuck evening traffic straddling electric scooters smoking out taxi windows that’s when they saw the falling thing a blue hospital blanket same sky shade some described it a stunned bird a baguette a piece of meteor a plastic bag even after the clean-up interviews arrest on-scene vigils candles no one would name what it was the hotel renamed itself & the mother later a prisoner in Taoyuan sentenced to labor in a candy factory photo in the papers wearing a striped uniform hairnet I turned off the broadcast before her live interview before she could say why she did it I have always known
your favorite story: Hu Gu Po you drew stripes on your skin with ink you the tiger-woman never the child commissioned to k
ill it pouring oil into its mouth until boiled from the inside-out some of us born to play predator I know you sometimes move your sleeping daughter from her mattress to yours replacing your husband’s heat with hers you put her back before morning. You just like to hear her breathing at night a daughter is a source of light among others: fireflies you used to catch in your teeth bite open drink their assfuel beast undressed of its stripes the river licking its stones like teeth in my dreams my shits are soldiers I bury them in my yard my bed I mourn my bones that believe they’re home the moon a sound & your sisters the stripes I wear. This light I lair. Now my holes are many . Gods blame me though memory. I taste torn , . brine I. I have many names
hiring a home from water, . A history of the hole still family. Forgive me because & I watched you with my mouth. threw you I loved
drown
you
to life.
* * *
_
I read the last letter aloud in my yard. Ben sat in front of me with her legs forked open in the soil, her hand petting the 口. Reading aloud to the holes, I mispronounced all the silences, rewrote them with my own prayer.
She’s getting ready to bury him, Ben said. She’s baiting us. My tail curled in on itself, fit in my hand like a stone. I wanted a window. I wanted to see something shatter because of me. I said I wasn’t going to let her bury anything. The bone in my tail was wincing down to a wick, preparing for me to light it. Its marrow was memory.
When my mother came home from the foot spa that night, I said I was volunteering to be her weapon. She softened the knots of her hands in a bowl of hot water, said she was tired. But I said it anyway: Ama is going to hurt Agong.
She turned away from the window, her face wiped of light. The sink behind her was full, the water silver with knives.
You think I don’t know? she said, and I knew she was mocking me, her voice stretched out of shape over the words. Everything in my mouth sounded already wrong, gone sour. I looked down at the bruised tile floor, at her shadow grazing on mine, eating it whole.
I know about the river, I said, looking up. I think it’s time to dam her. My mother’s knees must have come unscrewed: She knelt down, her back against the wall, her hands snagging in her hair when she tried to shift it out of her face. I moved forward through the dim of the kitchen, tugged down on her left ear like she always did for me when I was having a bad dream. When she jerked her head away from me, I told her she didn’t have to be afraid of Ama. While I untangled the hair from around her fingers, I imagined loosing my tail like an arrow, shortcutting it through Ama’s body, her ribs making a fist around her heart.
Do you remember that story I told you? my mother said. I asked her which one, and she told me about the women who hanged themselves with their own hair when the mountains were mowed over. Once, we lived inside the ground. The sun swung like a bucket of our blood. When I asked her why they hanged themselves, she said the only way to own your body is to die inside it. I said that wasn’t true anymore.
She stood up and tugged her own ear, checking to see if we were dream-speaking. Steaming her hands over the bowl of water, she said, You’re not listening. The steam opened her fists like flowers. The story about the women, she said, was a story about choice. How we had one. How we chose to be dead in our own bodies than alive without our language.
I chose you, my mother said, but it was like a channel had changed too quickly, one image unable to fade while the other overlapped it, contaminating all the colors, one story told as two. I was still thinking of the women who harnessed gravity with their hair, braids knotted to branches. The braids must still be there, still growing after the bodies were cut down. Braids vining down to the ground, growing so long they became some species of snake that strangles its prey.
When I asked what she meant by choosing, my mother said, This family. I started it to save me. I asked her why she couldn’t go back for Agong. Just for him, I said. No one else. She still called daily to ask if Agong was wearing pants, even when Ama didn’t pick up. I knew she wanted to dress him herself, to fill her clothes with his body.
I got out, my mother said, as if a family were a fire. I chose your father over my father. My father, who was not here. My father, who once bought me a popsicle at a zoo while I watched a monkey try to eat a broken bottle someone had hurtled into the enclosure. I wanted to say she’d made the wrong choice, but that would mean reversing my own body, returning to water inside her.
My mother opened the window above the sink. She was trying not to look at me, but her shadow acted as her opposite, circling me on the floor. Do you know what it means to leave something? she said. The air outside was too bright to breathe, dyed by with moon. To give birth to yourself again and again? To lock yourself out of your life?
I said we could knock. We could knock on Ama’s door, and ask her to give up Agong. I’d keep my hand over my tail as we walked in, ready to draw it like a hilt.
Reaching up, I touched my fingers to her cheek, but she shook them off like flies. I walked around her and shut the window above the sink, relieving the window of its duty to breathe.
Ma, I said, and she shook her head, said that was what she called her mother and I should never let that sound out of my mouth. Let’s go now, I said, whispering as if Ama could hear us from another city. Let’s bring him home and you’ll be happy again. You’ll be a daughter again.
My mother laughed. A daughter again? You’re the same daughter until you die, she said. Once, I asked her what happened to a body when it died. She said it became a story, and death was just another translation of it. Another time, I asked if gegu was true, if daughters really used to stir-fry their own flesh to feed their sick fathers. My mother said, It’s as true as you. She’d laughed and said I was conceived in her mouth, born between her teeth and tongue.
If she kills Agong, I said. Will you take him home then? Will you bury him in the holes I’ve made? Will he become a story? My mother stopped laughing. She sat down on the bruised tiles and folded, perching her chin on her knees.
A story? she said, looking above my head at the leak in our ceiling. I’m running out of them.
One last one, I said. A story to make Agong safe. I got down on my knees and took her feet in my hands, remembering the time my brother and I had scissored through the socks. She let me hold them, her ankle-bones smooth inside my palm, stones shaped by my worrying thumbs. With her feet cradled to my chest, my mother said she’d never told me about her toes, the lineage of their loss. What she chose. I told her I thought Hu Gu Po ate them, that Ama had weeded them from her feet. She said no, the toes were casualties. When I asked her which war, she said I wouldn’t know it by name.
If this story is supposed to sheathe me, I said, it’s too late. I’m already drawn. I’m already your best weapon. My mother said I wasn’t any kind of weapon if I didn’t know what I was forged from, what I was shaped around.
The river, I said, trying to give her a beginning. But my mother said the river was nothing like either of us: It couldn’t hold a hole. When hit with a stone or a fist or a baby, the river opened to swallow the body but sewed itself shut around it. The river is revision, my mother said, but you’re no river, so what I say is what you need to remember. Don’t delete anything from me.
*1 MISTRANSLATION? —BEN
*2 ???????????????????????????? —BEN
MOTHER
Rabbit moon (I)
Three stories, then you can live. The first: We are born stone. Papakwaka is our mountain, the nipple-peak we are weaned from. A rock cracks itself against the side of the mountain and spills two yolks, one brother and one sister. They are the only animals on the island, and the girl gets lonely. She asks her brother to marry her so she can bi
rth a family. She invents trees to be her bridesmaids. The brother refuses to marry his own sister, so the sister solicits him as a stranger, her face foreign with smeared ash. We owe our bodies to that betrayal. We are conceived from deceit.
The second: Back on the island, Ba told me the moon was pregnant with a rabbit. You and your brother are obsessed with animal births. On the Animal Planet channel, you watch shows about animals that fuck outside of their species and give birth to babies that look like neither parent, that look more like unassembled pieces, bloodied and without a blueprint. Before you were born, I had dreams of giving birth to your head before the rest of your body. I thought I’d have to sew you together with floss, puzzle your bones back together. I understand animals that eat their runts. Better to swallow them back into your body than let them be taken, buried outside of you.
You spend hours frying your eyes on a screen, sucking on suanmei and spitting the pits, impressed by 2-D animals that are 3-D where I’m born. The forest is lit by eyes, you say to the TV, which would be poetic if you weren’t wrong. That’s not a forest. It’s a jungle. You wouldn’t know the difference: A forest is a kind of growth. A jungle is hunger, a desire to dethrone light. Its only lineage is rain. Forests grow upward, fingers to the sun. Jungles grow sideways, outward, downward, whatever direction is the opposite of death. I used to think our island floated on the sea like leaves, but nothing named a country is light enough. I say our island even though you were never with me: You’re here, watching bald-assed monkeys masturbate on TV.
After the program on big cats, you and your brother decide to live nocturnally. Your brother’s learned at school that the sun is due to burn out someday, so we might as well live the darkness fully. We’re just pregaming the apocalypse, your brother says, lidding our windows with butcher paper. I’ve always wanted you to dodge the sun. Your brother is the light one, coin-bright, and you’re the rust clung to his side.