Bestiary

by K-Ming Chang

  I call every week and tell Ma to put Ba on the phone. I pretend to take out the trash so you won’t hear my voice, though the city is landfill anyway, and taking out the trash mostly means flinging it out the window. When you hear me speak to Ba, you look at me like you’re watching TV in a language you don’t speak. You move your mouth in sync with mine, trying to match the words to a preexisting key, but there are certain sorrows I’ve severed from you. This is all of them: When Ba calls me by my Jie’s name, or my mother’s name, even though Ma is right beside him, waiting for him to misspeak so she can whip him with the phone cord. When I was still a girlsapling, Ba made whips for the oxen he steered through the fields in summer, drying the cowhide on our laundry line. The whips were made of the same skin they scarred. That’s when I learned: The best thing for breaking skin is skin.

  Ma says she’s started taking Ba to some doctor. The kind that asks you to swallow a bead and measures how long it takes for it to come out the other end, diagnosing you based on the speed of your shit. I’m a better doctor, I tell Ma. I tell her to send him to me, or I’ll drive down myself and take him home—you’re not the only one who has thought of this. Ma says no, she won’t let him go, and I say, That’s exactly how you’re killing him. Ma says, Killing him? and you wouldn’t know, you aren’t listening, but that question is what tethers us. It’s not that she’s ashamed of having tried to kill us. It’s that she failed, changed her mind, which means she wanted us despite what we made her: a mother.

  You’ve moved on from jungles. Now you’re all about domesticated animals. Dog-grooming shows, cats caught on home video, rodents that require complex surgery on their raisin brains. You think I don’t know about your tail, but from the day it was born I watched it outgrow you. I saw it that first day when you walked into the kitchen and there was a shadow on the floor, a shadow too slim to match any of your limbs. Even when the tail’s hidden, I can see where the light bends its head to groom it.

  I tell you the moon is a rabbit. That’s a myth from the mainlander side of you, my ba’s side. Your father’s side, too. I thought I’d married someone the opposite of Ba, a man who drives himself like a plow, a man I could steer anywhere. Now I wake in my bed alone and the sun hits my body like a fist.

  What do you feel with Ben? Is she someone so literate in need, she makes your body a language for it?

  You don’t remember, but he cried sometimes, cried when he belted the breath out of us, and later I found him asleep with his head in the toilet bowl. Be Papakwaka, I told him. Be harder. Be my rock-brother and I’ll be your stone-wife.

  Remember that gumball machine outside the Ranch 99 where he skinned fish? Remember how you only wanted the green ones, the ones you said would taste like our planet, and when you got the red one, you cried? Your father fed it more quarters, but the next one was white, then yellow, then pink, then white again. The gumballs stained your palms like a crime scene, and still you asked for green. He went inside the store and exchanged half a day’s wage for more quarters, kept feeding the machine until you got your green, your planet to suck soft, to embalm in spit. This is the man I want you to remember, the one who committed himself to your hunger: his hands cradling quarters, your green mouth glowing go like a stoplight. Don’t tell me when to stop. Here’s the third story, the one you need to believe. There was a god sent to earth, looking for disciples. He walked the forest—not jungle—and told all the animals that he was starving. The snakes volunteered to steal him an egg. The birds left to hunt him a mouse. The fox skulked off to rob a neighboring chicken farm in Arkansas. Only the rabbit offered itself. It leapt straight into the starving man’s cooking fire, inviting teeth to its meat. To commemorate the rabbit, the god hung the rabbit’s bones in the sky. And that is the moon. That’s how we know all sources of light begin as sacrifice.

  Your father, born year of the rabbit, hated that story. He thought no god was owed flesh or fidelity. But he still expected both of me. The year we were married I asked him to get baptized. Ma says our tribe used to have as many deities as trees, and that having many gods only multiplies your losses, diversifies your debts. The moon was our priest that night. I filled a kiddie pool with water from a park fountain. He said he wanted to be baptized in his own spit. I said no man can fit inside his own mouth. Get in.

  On the third day, your brother removes the paper from the windows. You decide that being nocturnal is lonely, and when you check the mirror, your eyes aren’t glowing. When your brother rips away the paper, I see you in the light for the first time in days, and your skin is no closer to being bone. When you go outside to feed your yard-holes, I drag you home by your calf. You bite my hand but I stay holding you. You’ll need more than teeth to be free of me.

  * * *

  _

  The last time I talked to Ba in person was after my wedding. My belly was filling with your brother, but I wouldn’t know for another month. I wanted Ba to live with me, in a new city with my new husband. Ma said: Either leave him or take us both. I said I’d take them both: I’d let Ma beat your brother out of me if it meant Ba would get to witness the birth, bring the baby its first breath. That’s what I said, but I should have known that when I speak something, it’s no longer mine. It’s the air now, breathed in by everybody, exhaled as nothing.

  The week I moved out, Ma was in the kitchen rinsing Ba’s pants in the sink. She said if he shit himself again she’d feed him his own stain. I toweled between his butt cheeks. He hadn’t showered in months since Ma stopped helping him. I stood him over the sink, washed him everywhere below the waist. His penis looked like a boiled prawn.

  Ma took my hands off him. She said, If he can’t do it himself, he doesn’t deserve to be clean, and then she scrubbed my hands so raw they hurt to hold air and your brother inside me asked to leave. Your brother was the one who kicked my skin into a sky, a constellation of bruises on my belly; you were the one who didn’t move, who wanted to stay inside me, who kept your eyes closed for days, not yet committed to your body or this world, still waiting to see if you could be returned. And look now: You want me to go back.

  Ma said, Take us both or no one, and I chose no one, which means I chose myself. Daily, I see myself like I’m on TV: I leave LA in your father’s car. A rabbit jumps into the starving man’s fire and saves him and becomes the moon. But everyone always forgets the rabbit’s sacrifice means nothing. The starving man was not starving at all: He was not even a man. He was a god. Hunger was the weather he invented. The rabbit died for a fraudulent want. When I left, Ba was still standing over the sink. So still he might have been praying. Or waiting.

  In another life, another story, a daughter who is not me says: Both. I’ll take you both. She takes her Ma and Ba, replants them in another city, becomes a truce between trees. Memories ago, when you and your brother were asleep and your father was newly home from the mainland, I took the car and drove halfway down to LA before pulling into a motel. I thought I’d finally take Ba home, but then I remembered that my house is not mine, that your father’s money paid the bills and I didn’t even know what my ba could eat anymore, if I still knew how to make sugar-hearted dates the way he liked them, with so much syrup it sealed his jaw. The sign outside the motel said NO VACANCIES, but I asked for a room anyway. The woman at the counter thought I was a whore and I let her think it. Inside, the TV’s already on: war, war, weather, news at eleven. Outside, the sun pregnant with the moon. When my mother gave birth to me, she barely had to squat. I stole myself out. The year I married and left Ma, I scoured my room clean. I took my toothbrush out of the bathroom, the one I’d used for so many years that the bristles were balding. Most nights I scrubbed my teeth with a finger: I like to feel what’s sharp in myself.

  I threw the toothbrush away, and that’s when I saw it in the trash, half-wrapped in toilet paper: a hair dye box with an Asian model on it, the darkest shade available. Ba’s hair had been white since I was born,
and Ma said it meant his brains were made of cloud. I thought of Ma dying her hair in secret, tarring each strand until it was her shadow, refusing the softness of silver.

  I sat on the bathroom floor. I walked into the kitchen where Ma was rinsing bone-colored gaolicai. Her hair in pink curlers, pinned up and tumorous. She said, Eat this cabbage on your wedding night. It will fill your belly with water and leave no room for a baby. Her hands shucked the leaves, cracked the cabbage-heads like skulls. She’d saved me all the fresh leaves. The leaves that surrendered at the edges were the ones she’d feed Ba. What if I want a baby? I said, not knowing your brother was the size of a bird. She slit a leaf along its veins.

  Every year your child grows is another that’s subtracted from you, she said. The older your children grow, she said, the more jealous a god will become. The god will look for reasons to steal the child back: a name that’s too long, skin with no moles or scars. Maybe that’s why Ma threw me into that river: to save me from being stolen.

  My last night living in that house, I took the bag of cabbage out of the refrigerator and slept with my body cleaved to it, cradling its cold. I slipped it under the belly of my nightgown and kissed it, imagined it was growing inside me into you, my not-yet daughter, my slaughter.

  * * *

  _

  This isn’t the story I promised you. I know. My toes were a toll I paid for this body. You think they were thieved by Hu Gu Po, the tiger who inhabits us like our own bones. Sometimes I want to pluck the rest of my toes like grapes, suck the sweet from their skins. Jie once said I’d better keep my toes and be buried whole or I won’t be allowed into the afterlife, but I don’t believe bodies are born as wholes. We aren’t born anything but holes, throats and anuses and pores: ways of being entered and left.

  Here’s a lesson about light. In your language, they say life is extinguished. But that assumes our bodies are made of light, and light is always limited. We are sacks of dark, and the dark resists direction, resists capture: When I open the tin where I keep my toes, the dark doesn’t leave in a beam. Light can be measured and spent, a number printed on the backs of lightbulb boxes, but the dark has no quantity. I measure it in memories, in myths. You and I beneath the sheets, your feet feathering in my mouth, flocking out by morning.

  * * *

  _

  I’m fifteen, a daughter, all knees. First summer in Arkansas and a storm steals leaves off the trees. Arkansas looks like our island, same rain, air so thick we can spoon it into our mouths. We need names here. We try to find them in other things, in the trees, in electric fences, in cow patties coined by our feet.

  The summer we arrive to the farms, the chickens lay eggs the size of pearls. Everyone needs something new to blame: The rain like diarrhea, brown and sizzling. The unspiced sky, the river too arthritic to bend, the paved roads cracking like lips. The new chinks in town with their bowlegged daughters.

  What you know: We work first at the chicken farm, scraping shit off the walls with a pallet knife, beheading snakes with rakes. The soil’s made of snakes, so many snakes we eat snake meat for months before the church folk find out and bring us cans of luncheon loaf, boneless bricks of pink. Ma doesn’t trust meat without bones, without organs. All meat in America comes from some species of animal that doesn’t shit or speak or eat. Must be people-meat, Jie says.

  The snakes are smart: They wake up before the sky and tunnel down through the soil and into the coops. We spend mornings wading through shit-crusted hens, whacking off snake heads with rakes. When they strike at us, we shove the rake-pole down their throats. Their mouths are our windows and we look inside for the weather: wet. Ma says that snakes become women at night, especially if they’re white, so I fling the white ones into the trees, where they dangle like nooses. We pray to all the names multiplying inside the trees like rings, the names of everyone hanged here, everyone who paid their lives to this land so that we never have to.

  Sometimes I believe the snakes and I share a breed, feeding off foreign sources of heat. At night I park my stomach against Ma’s spine. Without her, my blood depletes its own heat. I whisper against her shoulders, speak mouth to marrow: I killed three snakes today. I opened their dead mouths and touched their fangs. My hands are numb up to the wrists. I’m telling no one but you. You’re the only one who knows I’ve been dying all day.

  I like slaughtering snakes. They die clean. We fling them into piles. No need to grieve what doesn’t bleed. My only competitors are the red-tailed hawks that snip the hens’ heads off their necks. There’s a gun leaning against the long wall of the coop for the purpose of shooting them down. In the heat, the barrel goes limp as silk, roves the house on its snakebelly.

  * * *

  _

  Ba beheaded a snake in the city where I was born. By then, he’d changed his name to a tree’s. In another country, he’d strung his mother in a tree by her thumbs. The soldiers asked him to do it. He double-tied the knot, tested the branch with his own weight. He beat her and tried to imagine the rain removing her face. Tried to imagine the body as water, able to take any shape and survive it. But all he saw was the time his mother told him to close his eyes as she walked him around the fields and placed his hands on everything he’d someday need the name of, a goat’s beard, a well, a tree with leaves like keys, the sky a door that swung open to the sun.

  Years later, when he was beating a woman in the street for having broken curfew, and the woman asked him why he was doing this, why there were so many men in her city, why they had shot her dog and leashed her father, Ba had said nothing. There were nights he misplaced his hands, couldn’t tell what he was beating, if it was a dog or a woman or a sack of flour mixed with sand to make it last, if what buttered the road was blood or the pulp of fruit orphaned by a tree.

  He began to give away his memories to the morning, bleaching them with light so that later in another country, he would remember only the color white. The White Terror: When I tell you its name, you think I mean white as in the American kind. It’s true, the Americans gave the bullets, but these are the men that spent them: your agong your agong your agong.

  Not even the stars were spared a curfew. Someone once told me if the moon stayed out too long, the soldiers would shoot it down by morning. Ba ran away from his post for months at a time, selling coconuts on a mountain road. He emptied the coconut of water and meat, placed two bars of gold inside, hid it at the bottom of his stack. One day, there was a snake slung across the road. He cleaved its head off, slung the body around his neck. By the time you were born, Ba could only tell one piece of the story at a time before he forgot it was about him. The first day, he would say, I was a soldier. On the second day, he would say, I was a snake.

  Once, you stole the phone from my hands. You spoke into it, to him: Agong, tell me the story about the snake. And he said,   I slung a mother  my neck. They strung up my snake in the branches. They beat it  sticks. I killed a mother in the middle of the road. I took her head  home. The mother was so long  it died.    wanted to go back home but I was afraid   it still dying.  I sent letters to the snake   the sea shut off   and I   never arrived

  * * *

  _

  The toes, my toes, I know. You’re still waiting for me to explain my feet. You’re asking what this has to do with saving Agong. This story was meant to show you: The ones we should save are already dead. Before he was your agong, he was my ba. Before he was my ba, he was a soldier. When you’re a soldier, nothing comes before or after. Don’t think I forgive him. Forgiveness is surgery, and I don’t have the hand or the eye. I can’t see him as Ma must have seen him: his gun first, then his hands. I hear only the way his hands shake when he holds the phone, when he has to prop it against a wall and speak to me like I’m standing there, like I never left, like his shadow is mine.

  Second summer in Arkansas, we try renewing our papers. We go all the wa
y to Little Rock, where the governor lives in a house so big it doesn’t fit in our bus window when we pass it. At the immigration office they ask for name, birthdate, country of origin. Ma doesn’t know her birthdate or ours. She only knows the weather on the days we were born. Jie and I are rain. Ma answers rain, rain, rain to all three questions. She doesn’t know when the day was, so she describes it: The day I was born it was raining red snakes. The day I was born three other people were born. Ma explains that there is only one day and it lives like a body, getting up before us and falling asleep when we do, putting on the sky like a skirt. There aren’t many, or if there are, it’s the same day dressed as different countries.

  The paper people say no, no. Ask how we got here. There’s a man in the corner wearing a uniform, handcuffs hanging from his hip. The cuffs bared like teeth. Silver mouths that circle into smiles. Ma herds us out of the office and we take the bus out of the city, back to the chicken farm, and I still don’t know what day I’m born. Later, the missionaries assigned a birthday to me and Jie, the day we were baptized, the only time we wore white when nobody had died.

  In the summer we sleep in different corners of the house to keep cool. Ma in the bedroom alone. The shotgun’s shadow stalking the walls. I sleep on the porch outside, bury myself in tarps to keep mosquitos out. Jie is a dog curled behind the front door.

  Near morning when I hear the gun go off. Light limping down from the sky. My spit purifies to glass in my throat. I wake and think the gunshot flew out from my dreams, but I can’t remember what I’ve been aiming at, if I have hands. I check for a gun and find my fist.