by K-Ming Chang
Jie runs barefoot onto the porch, takes me by the armpits. Ba’s got the gun, she says. We thread out of the house. A second gunshot guts the clouds. We run to the backyard and he’s there, panting and pantsless, bleeding sweat everywhere, bullets bucking the air. Backfire makes him stumble, knees grieving to the ground. Ama’s there too, her hands reining in his shoulders. Give it back, she says. Agong lowers it to the trees. I haven’t seen him stand straight in months. He lifts his left hand to the sky, pointing or saluting.
We try to see what he’s pointing at, but the sky speaks nothing, not a bird. Clouds cockroaching across the sky. I anticipate holes in the blue, but there’s no wound. Ba shakes the sweat off his upper lip and says, They’re coming, they’re coming.
In his hands, the shotgun is boneless. Ma bites the ball of his shoulder, tells him the war, both, are behind him. Ba looks behind him, at her. His eyes are seedless, white. He says, Where are the planes? I spot a wounded bird in the corner of the sky, shedding blood, flying in circles with one wing wrenched out. Ma says, You got them all, you got them. But Ba’s eyes are years behind, stalled on the same sky: back when warplanes had anuses that dilated open and shat dung-bombs, spraying a diarrhea that scarred your skin.
Ba ba ba ba ba, I say. He turns and sees Jie and me, shoulder-to-shoulder like soldiers. Hems of our nightgowns baptized in mud. He raises the gun at me. He has no daughters. He’s a boy counting Japanese bombs from the roof of his house, so many they outnumber rain. He’s the boy who hid in a well for three days, the sky as big as the hole he came down. No, Ma says, and grabs the gun-barrel. Tugs it down toward the ground. Ba fires once and sees a soldier in front of him burst into birds.
Jie shouts. I eat my spit. The light scatters to salt. Don’t move in this part of the story. Watch. I’m waiting for the bullet to birth its hole in me. I want to know what it feels like, to be a soldier like Ba, to die like one. Did you see that? He smiled when he fired, all his teeth. Have you ever seen him smile like that? Don’t answer me. You aren’t even born yet and you already know he never has. I wait for the bullet to reach into me and flip me inside-out. But the bullet’s gone slant into the soil, the shotgun knocked diagonal by Ma’s hands.
Look down now at this choreography of shadows: The bullets nose-diving into my toes. Ma pulling me back into the house by my armpits. Ba crouching in the dirt with his hands leafed over his head. See my left foot before Ma wraps it in newspaper, the same way a butcher wraps her best cut.
There are days between the wound and the fever in my spine, but I don’t know how many. I rip the sheets to sleep. I smell rot in my foot, sour and sizzling. My brain spit-roasting in my skull, a hand reaching in to spin it. One night I wake believing my hands are torches, lit to the wrist. I limp into the backyard to run them under the hose. Ba’s been put to sleep on the kitchen floor.
In a week my skin’s still a stove, so Ma says, We have to amputate before it spreads. Jie boils the knives. You choose the night. The night before the amputation, I dream that Ma fills a bucket with hose-water and carries me outside like a bride. Ma washes my infected foot in the water, praying over it. Kissing the bark of my heel. You say it’s not a dream, but it has to be: When I wake, it’s back to blades. Ma’s knife is guiding the light into me.
Ma’s hand hot on my ankle, pinning my foot to the cutting board. The infection in two of my neighboring toes, three rotten in total. My blood on the board looks fake, a staged slaughter. Dousing my foot in rice wine, she wraps it in a cotton shirt. Fills a jam jar with a brine of salt and rice vinegar, seals my three toes inside. They float for the first few days, then shrink to the size of bullets and sink.
Ba sees my toes swimming in the jar on our windowsill and says, Those fish are dead. You’re listening hard now. You ask if this is why I tread lightly on my left foot, rely on the right. I hid the jar from Ba, grateful there’s one memory I can keep him from cannibalizing.
While I’m frying in a fever, I sheathe a cleaver in a sock. Sleep with it between my breasts, arm myself for a war that happened before I was born. Still waiting for Ba to return. You remind me we used to share a bed, and you never saw me sleep with a blade.
It’s time to bring him back, you say. I don’t recognize that voice in you. We’re in the kitchen. The holes you’ve dug in my yard are mouths again, spitting at our window.
Your ama once taught me, I say, there are two categories for everything. Yours and not yours. Everything that’s mine is already here.
Ama’s wrong, you say, and I laugh at the way your mouth can shape any sound certain as stone. You forget she’s been my mother longer than your grandmother. You forget I’ve had her blood longer.
He’s not yours or Ama’s or mine. He just needs to be shown home. You tell me you know how to end things now. You say all this with a tail tucked in your pants, a tail that tapers into a blade.
You take my car keys out of my best knock-off purse on the counter. You give them to me. You say Ben has a key around her neck. She’s an emergency exit. You are clutching my wrists, moving me out the door. Since when have you been tall enough to unlock it? How long have you been my height? You are telling me to unlock the car and I do. You buckle your brother into the backseat. I grip the wheel so hard you ask if I’m strangling it. I remember the hens we killed at the chicken farm, their necks in our hands, quick wrist, their bodies reliving their deaths, pecking the mud without their heads.
When I turn the key like a blade inside a body, when I thread the car onto the highway and head south, I remember what you said: Ba isn’t hers. Isn’t mine. He’s shaped like my love for him, a river with many tributaries, digressions, points of departure.
In the backseat, you lean forward and put your hands on my shoulders, steering me. I tell you all houses are made of skin: Once you’ve left one, it stitches shut again. You say if it’s skin, it is always open. It’s made of holes, hairs, pores. It’s my own body I’m returning to.
An hour in, your brother says he needs to pee. I say, Do it out the window. I’m not stopping. Your brother hunches, holds his bladder like it’s a bomb. I hear the door rattle open, the air outside climbing onto our laps. Your brother peeing through the crack in the door, ribbons of piss fluttering around us. Framing our flight in gold.
His piss hits a windshield behind us and the man honks, swerves. You tell me to accelerate, press the pedal to mud, take us to the woman who birthed me who birthed you. The car shrinks to the size of your mouth. The radio has your voice in it and I remember the Dolly Parton song that was playing the time Jie and I ditched work to drive downtown. I asked Jie to translate the lyrics and she sang about sewing a coat of tongues, when all I wanted was to never know a needle again, to never be the girl at the factory who falls asleep and runs her thumb through the machine, stitching herself to what will be sold.
You try to sing along to the radio, but there’s only static on. Your brother once convinced you that static is an alien language spoken by the moonborn, so you listen as if it means something. You bob up and down in the backseat like a buoy. A warning: The water ahead will wreck me. Keep away. The only thing that keeps my hands on the wheel: If I don’t look at the city ahead, if I watch your face in the rearview mirror instead, I can pretend I’m driving toward you, you: the only home that owns me. Look-look, you say, you sing sweet as toothache: Here’s the city, the honeydew moon above it, waiting for us to bash it open and begin.
DAUGHTER
Rabbit moon (II)
When my brother propped his penis in his palm and peed out the door, wetting a mile of highway with rain, my mother said he must have the bladder of a horse. I asked how she knew about the anatomies of horses and she said she knew what it is to be ridden. We rode up the highway to a city of factories: concrete buildings converted into showrooms, the upper windows blacked out, headless mannequins haunting the sidewalks. We circled twice around Ama’s block. Hers was a house sitti
ng on its haunches, afraid to stand all the way up. Its pelt of paint was perpetually wet, and all kinds of creatures got stuck to the sides of the house: squirrels, pigeons, a collage of flies.
Our mother drove with her elbows while she smoked out the window, spitting into the cup holder. When she spoke of her father now, he was no longer our agong, just her ba, which meant he belonged to her and not to us. Our blood was borrowed.
When we reached Ama’s driveway, the moon was not yet nailed in the sky. Ama always said the moon was the corpse of the sun, meaning every night is a funeral. During our week as nocturnal animals, my brother and I had trained our eyes to adjust to any density of dark, and now neither of us tripped on Ama’s root-risen driveway. Our mother didn’t ring the doorbell, which had been taped over. She pounded on the door. When no one answered, she told my brother to get the flashlight from the glove box.
She went up to the front window, the flashlight flaccid-looking in her hands. Her arm coiled back. My brother grabbed her wrist, but the flashlight was already through the glass. We waited for the alarm, waited to run like she wasn’t our mother and the night didn’t know us, but there was no sound except for a neighbor’s dog, barking like we’d come just to kill it.
I could see my mother squinting back and forth between me and the window, calculating if she could toss me in too, but then all the lights in the house opened their eyes. The hole in the window filled with Ama’s face. She stood looking out at us, our faces reflected next to hers in the glass. Barefoot and bathrobed, hair in pink curlers, her face was narrower than my mother’s, cheekbones hanging their shadows. She looked at us through the hole in the window as if we were the weather forecast, expected. The air had tattled on us, and now she darted her tongue in and out of her mouth, licking at our evaporated sweat, tasting the hard kernels of rain inside our veins. The knife in her left fist was upright, like some flower she had just picked for us.
My brother walked back to the car and started it, a sound we thought was far away in someone else’s night. Let’s go home, he said, and my mother didn’t turn her head. Ama opened the door, beckoned us in with her blade. The night beat us inside, stars sprinkling themselves like salt all over her carpet.
I’d slit a hole in my skirt for the tail to slide out, a knife to draw on her throat before she could use her own. Tapping at the root of my tail, I told it to get ready.
My mother shouldered past Ama. We followed her to the left, my brother running back to join us, the car still running. We went down the hall so narrow we walked sideways, comical as crabs. There was a smell like singed hair, Ama’s curlers filling with smoke. All the walls were exposed brick, rough and dark as scabs. My mother told me that one summer, Ama had asked Agong to paint the interior a color closer to the sky, any color but white. Agong went to the store for paint and came back with a hammer instead. Ama threw the hammer at him, its silver head gouging the brick wall behind him. Now, as we walked toward Agong, my mother petted each wall as we passed it, trying to find that old injury, that hole in the brick where she used to hide cigarettes, coins, a highway map. She’d planted pieces of her past inside the wall, waiting for the house to grow a future worth staying for.
We stopped before the bedroom door, Ama behind my left shoulder, walking so close to my tail that I wanted to turn and bind her wrists together with it. We could smell Agong behind the bedroom door, a mulch of shit and sweat. Our mother opened the door and the smell coiled back, hit like a fist.
The window was barricaded with a dresser, and a chair in the corner kept only three of its limbs. There were no mirrors—fengshuibuhao—but something had shattered, and there were crumbs of glass in the carpet, burrowing into our feet as we neared the bed. What I thought was slicked-back hair was a bruise spanning his scalp. The liverspots on his hands were the size of quarters and I wanted to pluck them off one by one, spend them on new skin for him. Agong’s mouth was all movement. His tongue worming through the skin of his cheek.
My mother got on her knees beside the bed, pressing her forehead to the mattress, and when she lifted her forehead it was bright with blood. The mattress was ripe with it. I squinted at his chest to see if something still lived in it. My brother’s hand was damp inside mine, though I couldn’t remember when I’d reached out for it. Hold your breath, my brother said. He once told me it was important to hold your breath around dying people. That way, the sick person had more air for themselves. But I didn’t think Agong had lungs anymore: His chest was bowled, carrying a soup of sweat. My tail clenched around my thigh when I saw his neck, mottled with moles, so thin I wanted to pluck it with my fingers, make music of this silence.
When my mother stood up, her eyes arrowed through everything again: the dresser in front of the window, Ama in the doorway with her hands sprouting a knife, the chair’s bruised knees, my brother and I holding hands. She lifted Agong off the bed, bridal-style, his bones propped in her arms. The skin below his chin was so loose it flapped when he swallowed, and I wanted to iron it down, pleat him smooth. Ama said, Don’t touch him. My mother cradled Agong closer.
In a dialect I’d never heard before, Ama spat a word at the walls, making the paint shine the same as her teeth. I stepped forward between my mother and Ama, palm pressed to my sheathed tail, legs apart. Ama didn’t look at me, but I knew how to hinge her, how to latch my tail around her leg and bring her to her knees.
Kneeling with Agong in her arms, my mother arranged his limbs on the carpet beside the bed. Careful, there’s glass, I said, though no one was listening. Ama said, I had to do it, flitting her hand through the air, touching the curlers at her forehead. There is something inside of him, eating him.
Ama’s hands were canyoned with calluses, carved out by some river she’d reined in her hands. Turning to me, she kneeled as if to pray. The deeper the lines in your palm, she told me, the farther from home you’ll die. She said my hands are antonyms. My right hand is inherited from my mother and my left one is descended from Ama. Neither was mine. But Ama didn’t know my third hand, my tail, honed for this night.
Parting the dark, Ama leaned closer and said, There’s something inside him. I hear it in his body at night, running around in his veins, impersonating his blood. Ama showed us the sound with her wrists, circling them so that I could hear her bones graveling.
My brother crawled forward to pillow his fingers against Agong’s pulse. In the dark I couldn’t see my hands move, couldn’t tell what was a shadow and what was a body. My brother said, Agong’s blood is still inside him. My mother said, Find the light, the light. I walked my hands along the walls until I found a switch. Light trickled from the bare bulb and down the walls, thick as nosebleed, but it was only enough for us to see the outline of him.
Agong’s legs forked apart. He moaned and Ama said, You see, he doesn’t want you to see him like this. My mother said, Find where he’s bleeding, but all we could find was blood fossilized into stains on his unbuttoned shirt. His pajamas were white cotton, translucent at the knees. My mother opened his shirt farther and tapped on the base of his throat in some kind of Morse code, trying to pick up a signal from his body. Agong answered by shifting his legs into a broader V and bending them, bracing to give birth.
Cupping Agong’s skull in her palms, my mother bent her head to kiss it, to tongue his eyelids open. Ama pointed down at his legs, her other hand worrying her hair curlers. Look, look. The crotch of Agong’s pajamas tore open. A white flicker between his legs, a light turned on and off inside him. Agong widened his legs again, mouth ripening around a shout.
My brother thought Agong was shitting himself, but no shit was bone-white. The torn cloth at his crotch widened into a coin-slot, then a mouth. From between his legs, he pushed out a fist of light, punching through the seams of the dark. It was a rabbit, robed in mucus. So thin-skinned we could see the grape of its heart. None of us dared to touch its eyelids, beating like moths in the dark of his b
lood. The rabbit was tongue-slack in my mother’s hand, hind legs gummed to its torso, no mouth, not breathing. I thought it must be a premature moon, stillborn. There was no sky small enough to use it. Agong shivered, blood tendriling out of his anus. He moved his wrist to his mouth and sucked the skin silver, watching us as if we were abstract patterns of light on the wall, no meaning to our shapes. No difference between a daughter and her shadow.
My mother stood up, pinned her back to the wall. Her hands were short-circuiting, closing around something in the air that wasn’t there. My brother backed toward the doorway where the dark ruptured, bled out into the hall. I came closer, wanting to see the rabbit’s knotted-up face, wanting to name its resemblance to something. But Ama moved before me, kneeling beside Agong and holding the knife upright again, bringing the blade up to his face, magnifying it. My fur slicked back, sleeking my tail into a fletched arrow, my whole body tensed like a bow.
We have to open him, Ama said. There could be more inside him. She posed the blade over his belly. Curling my fingers and toes into claws, I leapt toward the light of it. Agong turned his head side to side, the way my brother did in his sleep, saying no to something I couldn’t see. All I could see was the knife lowering to swim into his belly. My night vision brightened Ama’s silhouette, tracing her shape in salt. I stood over her, my tail whipping forward between my knees to knock the knife from her hands.
Her hands streaked silver against the dark as she moved them away, dodging me without looking. I tried to recoil my tail, rescind it from the air, but it only knew to move forward, lashing Agong in the chest. He made a sound that soured all my spit, a cry like an infant’s, his ribs flinching beneath the skin. Where my tail had raked him, a stripe of skin reared up on his chest, a dark jelly of blood beneath it. He arched his back, pressing the burn on his chest to the dark. My mother kneeled in front of me, caging her body over his, blocking him from me.