by K-Ming Chang
My tail had mistranslated everything I’d told it. I’d wanted Ama’s wrists, wanted to break all the bones inside them. I tried to tell this to my mother, but she was bowed over Agong. She kneeled over him and spat on his chest, slicking the burn, trying to put out the pain. My tail was curdled stiff, lagging behind me while I tried to move closer, apologize. You hurt him, my mother said, speaking to the burn on his chest, ruby with her spit.
I crawled forward to them, towing my tail behind me in the dark. It felt heavier, a moon tethered to the end of it.
* * *
—
Ama took my tail in her hands, tugged on it like a leash. I tried to keep crawling, to reach my mother huddling with her back to me, but Ama jerked me back. She could steer me with it, drag me out to the yard and bury me anywhere. When I told her to let go, she yanked back again, ripping out wisps of my fur. She sneezed, batting at the strands like dust. Pulling once on my tail, she brought me to my feet.
See, Ama said. We’re the same beast. Ama stroked my tail-tip with her thumb. Bent her head and sniffed it. She asked if I knew the story of Hu Gu Po, a story about the cost of having a body. The cost was butchery. She said there were no tigers on her island and there had never been. The story had been born somewhere else, brought over by men and stuffed into the bellies of women who didn’t want it. The women gave birth anyway, to daughters that did not resemble them.
* * *
—
When I gave birth to my first daughter, Ama said, I saw her face and it was a soldier’s. No one in her tribe had ever seen a tiger, and when Ama first heard the story, she imagined that it walked upright. She imagined its skin was made of two textures: The orange stripes were fire and the black stripes were river, canceling out into smoke. My tail twitched out of her hands, singed by the heat of her palms. I was the beast she’d imagined: tail stubbly as a beard, my shadow big as a soldier’s.
You have the blood of soldiers and slaughterers. You think you’re a different story from me? she said. I stood hunched, my tail so heavy I forgot how I’d ever been able to stand against gravity. I was tied to the stone of it. If she had thrown me in the river the way she had my mother, I would have sunk. The tail’s marrow solid as gold. I’d beach at the river bottom, live in the mud of all I’d done, eat what was thrown down to me.
My mother was watching us, pinching the dead rabbit off the carpet and lifting it in her palms, a vestigial heart, a light source. She looked between Ama and me, trying to decide who to protect Agong from. Ama spun my tail in her hand, and when I looked down at our shadow, its shape was a bridge that hyphenated us, an umbilical cord that had grown without our knowing. I wanted to sever it, to separate us, differentiate our shadows, our hungers. Slit the cord and sun-dry it, soften it into something that couldn’t solicit blood, couldn’t strike skin without hurting itself. There would be nothing for her to hold of me.
Let go, I said, but she didn’t. My bladder pricked open, leaked down my legs. Ama walked to the doorway, tugging me by the tail down the hallway and out into the backyard where the grass was rusted brown as a bloodstain.
She told me to piss here. Like the beast I was, I squatted. Her fist cinched tighter around my tail, but I no longer felt it. I could see only Ama’s face, the way she looked at me like I was a soldier she’d seen before, a soldier she’d married before, gripping my tail not because she was afraid I’d run, but because she knew I’d turn and spear it through the unlit spaces between her ribs.
It was only after I pissed that I noticed: All the soil in Ama’s yard was white. The ground looked like bone-sand, but beneath my feet it moved as dirt, wet with sweat and shadow. Ama let go of me, told me to find what she’d buried. I eyed her hands, then the soil, squinting at its bleached skin. In the corner where the chili bushes grew, I saw a row of holes like bone sockets. I walked to the holes, my tail a swinging weight. The holes were deeper than mine, dull inside, lined with gray like the sky before rain.
I sleeved my arms into the hole nearest the door and snagged my fingers on something sharp at the bottom. Ama watched behind me, silent, her shadow shawled over me. I knew she was waiting for me to find something. My fingers found an earring rolled in dirt, its clasp come loose. I felt around the bottom again and withdrew a bracelet with bone beads, then a plastic spoon, then a penny. I raked the soil with my fingers until I was slit by something: a page. Tugging it loose from the soil, I slid it out and held it with the tips of my fingers. On both sides it was blank, white as the soil.
For you to write back to me, Ama said. I dropped it back into the hole. I said I would never. She smiled, half her teeth missing, places for morning to pour into her mouth. She said the letters were meant for anyone listening, and I was the one who had been translating. I was the one who wanted to witness. I thought of everything I’d fed to the holes: Dayi’s goose, Ben’s birdcage, my tail. While Ama watched me, I thought of kidnapping the rest of her teeth, holding them hostage in my mouth. She’d have to beg me to return them to her, give her back the ability to speak.
You’ll write back. I know you will. I said no, I didn’t have the history to forgive her, and Ama said, I never wanted you to forgive me. Weren’t you reading?
Behind her, the garden hose spewed into the soil. She kneeled in the white, held out her palms. She said she must have dreamt of growing a tail just like this when she was a girl, but sometimes a wound skips a generation or two, appearing again in the body that is most ready to wield it. I said I never wanted to wield anything ever again, that I had seen Agong’s chest branded by me.
You’ll write back, Ama said. Not because you’ve forgiven me, but because I will never hate you for what you’ve done. Because I’m the only one who knows what you’re capable of. She bowed her head like a knight in a fairy tale, all parody, and at the nape of her neck, there was a cowlick the same size and shape of my mother’s. It was like seeing again a species of bird you thought went extinct: I couldn’t stop myself from cooing down at it, petting it.
With the tip of my soiled thumb, I touched the spot where her hair grew circular like my mother’s, the tip of the strand chasing its own root. I stirred the cowlick with my thumb and told her this was what my mother did before I fell asleep: She traversed my hairline with her finger, renaming my widow’s peak Papakwaka, every part of me a creation story. Ama didn’t raise her head, but I knew she was listening, the soil turning bright-wet as the whites of her eyes.
From the front doorway, my mother’s voice threaded through the house and into the yard. She called to me in a voice so like Ama’s, I thought for a moment that Ama was speaking from outside her own body. But only my mother could call to me like that, a sound worn fist-smooth, a sound I could saddle and ride, relieved for a second of my own weight while she carried me in her mouth.
* * *
_
According to Ama, the moon is the corpse of the sun. There were once two sons, double yolks that had been hard-boiled in the sea. A warrior shot down one of the sons, inventing dusk. The dead sun ascended to the bone-throne of night. The first sun grieved their separation, and we have morning, where the dead son and the living son kiss once. But one of them always sets while the other rises. Grief is their gravity.
* * *
_
My mother carried Agong to the car, his legs clacking together, glass-veined. Above us, the moon was marinating in its own silver sweat. I wondered if Agong knew what he’d given birth to. We folded him into the backseat and drove away, the dark chasing us home like a stray. If my mother was still afraid of me, she no longer looked it: She nudged me into the car with her knee. It was hot inside and my armpits were jungled with sweat. On the way home, Agong gurgled in his sleep, his tongue frothing. When we realized he was choking, we took turns holding his mouth open, scooping out the spit with two fingers. Flinging strands of it out the window. They stuck like stars to the night.
Ama didn’t speak when we carried him out. She’d walked to the kitchen and removed her curlers one by one, her hair already singed. The strands glowed orange, faded black. The colors of my tail. She bundled the little rabbit in newspaper and said she’d get rid of it. We saw her go through her drawers for a box of matches to burn it with.
I knew it was inside him, Ama said about the rabbit. We didn’t know if it had been born inside him or if it was planted in him. We didn’t know how it’d been able to breathe inside his body. I knew there was something in his body I had to save him from, Ama said again. I wanted to say that she was the one inside of him, that she didn’t know the difference between who he was and what she had done to him. Ama’s hands shook when she tried to strike the match. She dropped each one, singeing hole after hole into the carpet, charring her heels to stamp out the flames. Smoke ghouling up from the ground. Finally, my mother reached forward and took the match from Ama’s hand, striking it alive on her own callused palm. She lit the rabbit’s newspaper-shroud and I lowered its body into the sink, basketing the light in my hands. Even after we were gone, the rabbit-fetus burned. We searched for its bones in the sky, mourning that our agong was now moonless.
* * *
_
In the car, I asked my mother if Agong was really her father. In Ama’s last letter, she’d written that my mother was conceived with the river, and Agong didn’t look like a river to me, except when he wet himself, his piss souring the seat, dribbling out of his bladder like the juice of a squeezed fruit. Instead of answering, my mother lowered the window and tossed out her cigarette butts. They dotted the street like acne. She laughed and asked me to define a father. I said it was someone who didn’t have the strength to carry his own name and had to employ others to do it. She laughed again, but this laughter sounded like a recording of the last, too repetitive to be real.
I wedged Agong’s head between my knees, stroked the blank spot on his forehead where his eyebrows drifted in opposite directions, where he most resembled my mother: When she slept, the skin between her eyes pleated in two places, and she always told me to stay up by her bedside and iron it down with my fingers so she wouldn’t wake in the morning with wrinkles. But I always fell asleep beside her, and in the morning she asked if she’d aged. Yes, I said, you’re as wrinkled-up as an asshole, and then she’d laugh and roll me off the bed, saying that one day I’d have this face too.
When my mother asked if I was begging for another story, I breathed steam onto the backseat window, wrote the word yes on the forehead of night. Turning onto the highway, steering with one hand only, she said the problem with memory was that I turned all of hers into currency, bought my future with forgetting. Keep your memories, then, I said. Give me someone else’s.
_
An Abbreviated History of the River and Her Lesbian Lover (My Great-Grandmother Nawi)
A NOTE OF CAUTION: All references to water may be slightly exaggerated, but when your agong is pissing all over the backseat, every river feels literal.
A SECOND, AND MUCH BROADER, NOTE OF CAUTION: My mother always says that the story you believe depends on the body you’re in. What you believe will depend on the color of your hair, your word for god, how many times you’ve been born, your zip code, whether you have health insurance, what your first language is, and how many snakes you have known personally.
Ama’s mother was birthed from the belly of a crab. Her head rolled out in a helmet of orange shellac and her hands were toothed pinchers, capable of splitting rocks to sand. Her father—Old Guang the pirate—sucked her out of the crab’s disked stomach and spat her across the table, where she landed on clawed feet. Named Nawi, she walked sideways like a crab and ate shelled meat: beetles sucked clean, shrimp from the sea. When she turned fourteen, Nawi married a boy who had been born a beaver—he had four teeth like hinged doors—and bore thirteen children. The last one was born with a snake for a penis. Nawi stroked it, letting it learn the diameter of her wrist. Its voice filled her skull with its silk: I am your daughter and born to break you. I am your son and spine.
Nawi believed the snake would eventually loosen like milk teeth or grow into another limb, vestigial and shriveled. The snake threaded its head into the baby’s diaper, forked tongue slurring the same song, like steam escaping, like a rock striking a river and then sinking. Whenever Nawi tried to nurse the baby, the snake nibbled her breasts and nipples, seeding her skin with poison. Her milk came out burnt and bitter silver. The snake stretched out, whipping the air with its tongue.
Nawi decided to slaughter it. The snake was a bloodless white, rooted to the baby’s crotch like a radish. She brought the knife down and it cut as if through light. The snake never woke. In place of blood, smoke spiraled out of its body. It looked smaller not attached to anything, blue head tucked, tongue flickering, hungering. No scarring, no evidence of severance. The baby’s crotch was smooth as a tree stump. She tossed the snake’s body into the fire, slept with the milk-bulged baby in her arms.
The next morning, the baby was awake and batting at Nawi’s braids, yanking her scalp awake. Where the stump had been, there was now a clutch of eggs, clinging clear as rain. She tried to dab them away. By evening, a dozen more were dewed to the baby’s crotch. Only three eggs bore snakes, braiding and unbraiding. They spoke at once, a knot of song, a tangle of telling. We are your daughters. We are your sons. Stroke us and we will save you. Feed us and we will not forget you. The snakes’ mouths outnumbered her own, so she obeyed them. She fed the snakes better than any of her children, even slaughtered the pigs and split the meat among the three heads, the hooves too. The snakes’ jaws opened wide as doorways. Hunger amplified them, sweeping up their songs like seeds, planting each note deep in her ears. She woke sobbing some nights, praying to be swallowed soon.
The next month, the river receded like a hairline. At night the stars flaked off the sky as dandruff, salting the soil white. The snake-child grew up to be my Ama. Her snakes vined up the length of her legs and whisked around her waist when she walked. Ama and her snakes were saints: Shamans and priests asked to see what they’d grown from, flipping up Ama’s skirt, but the snakes bit their wrists blue.
She whistled to wake them. Ama tapped each one on the head, their eyes milk-lit. She fed them mice from the fields and rats from the gutters on both sides of the road and turtles swept out of the river by typhoons and minnows the size of her pinkies. The farmers who once wanted to dam the river, the ones who never dared to visit the indigenous township for anything other than cheap millet wine, now came in pairs to pet the snakes under her skirts.
The year Ama turned fourteen, the river railed against the fields. Typhoons tore up the fences and the hens that weren’t tied down in baskets were swallowed into the sky. Ama straddled the narrowest part of the river to piss into it. When she pissed, the snakes lunged open their mouths. The farmers said she was the one poisoning the water, turning it rancid, handcuffing the crops to the soil so they wouldn’t grow. But they wouldn’t hurt the girl who hissed piss out of a snake’s mouth.
When the river stood up again in the banks, Ama ran outside. Ama’s snakes were bobbing out the bottom of her skirt, leashing her to the river. She walked toward the water that begged to be beaten, its surface a skin, and waded in to her knees. Her leftmost snake extended itself like an arm and then doubled back, its head pointing between her legs. It entered her body and nosed its way up her asshole. The right snake looped around itself too, turning toward her body and hooking its head into her vagina. The middle snake, the one thick as her wrist, lifted itself to Ama’s lips. Opened its eyes in the dark of her mouth. Her teeth were pried apart. The snake shimmied down her throat and she couldn’t breathe until it entered her belly. All three snakes snapped off at the crotch-root, two convening in her stomach, one in her womb.
Ama pissed and shat and birthed at the same time, baby snakes streaming out of her. The rive
r hooded over her head and she opened her mouth underwater, exhaling snakes. They poured out from her mouth and anus and vagina by the dozens, writhing away from the radius of her belly. It was a new breed no one had seen before, rain-red. When the rain ended, the river returned to its socket, the shape of a spine misaligned. The mud returned to its color, but the snakes inside remained red. They browsed the water for meat. The army* discarded its prisoners here, holing the boys’ wrists to thread a wire through. When the first boy was shot, the rest fell in with him. The army saved bullets this way. Polishing their names on its tongue, the river strung through their skulls and necklaced them. Snakes erased the boys’ bodies, entering through eye sockets to eat the rubymeat of their brains.
At night, the river cleaved from its bed and heaved itself onto land, roaming as a snake. The red rain receded to a rumor, but some said the day the river was impregnated with snakes, there was a woman seen on the banks. Some said this woman had no spine, snakes for arms, teeth for eyes, adding details until she was nothing they could name.
One night when she was almost nineteen and married to Agong, her second soldierfuck, Ama went down to the banks in the dark to see if it was true, if her snakes were women at night, if the river walked itself. Ama waded in and the river didn’t budge, thick as jelly.
Ama waited for the snakes to circle her ankles, the snakes she’d birthed on her own. The moon pimpled the skin of the river. She walked back to the bank and sat in the mud, wondering where the snakes had gone, if they still loved her, if they still missed the color inside her. She closed her eyes and lay on her back, imagining all her ribs were the rungs of a raft. How bright a boat she would be.