Bestiary

by K-Ming Chang

  Agong untied all the leaves from our white birch tree and ate them, copying the squirrels. He didn’t know his own species. I’d read online that memories can be startled back into a person, then pulled out of the mouth like a magician’s scarf. My brother and I tried to scare Agong into remembering us by mimicking the sounds of war. We filled pots with pebbles, popped balloons to impersonate gunfire. Sometimes it worked, and he leapt from the bed as if boiled, fondling the imaginary gun in his waistband, calling us guizi, guizi, guizi. My mother told us to stop—she thought we could trigger another heart attack, which in Agong’s dialect sounded like heart war. Back then I thought a heart attack was when your heart grew legs like a soldier, walked out of your chest, and invaded the nearest body. I thought bowels were a breed of bird, and bowel movements were how they migrated.

  Agong claimed he once ate sparrows for an entire year, back when fullness was foreign to his body, and some of the sparrows were all bone. We took him to a monk in the neighborhood to be blessed, a former soldier who told us that the only cure for forgetting was to approach your own future like a fort. Say: Surrender.

  That night, I walked to the kitchen and touched the cleaver hanging above the sink, my face foreign in its reflection. My mother said gegu hadn’t worked for Agong because the toes she’d fed him were only marrow: The meat had quit their bones long ago, and only meat could cure a father of his forgetfulness. But my tail was as much meat and tendon as bone. If I severed it, if I fed it to Agong, maybe I could give it a purpose that wasn’t hurt. My tail behaved like a flipper, frantic between my legs, knowing what I wanted of it.

  I called Ben in the morning, told her: I have something that needs to be cleaved. In the morning the sky was milk, already mourning me. Ben met me in the yard, the 口 breathing at our feet, exhaling moths that flew toward the light inside the house, clattering against the windows, attracted to ache. Turning to me, Ben stroked the skin behind my ears where no light lived. Cleave it from me, I said, sliding the tail out of my waistband. It hummed in my hand, thinner, reshaped by Ama’s fist. I told her how Ama had used it as a leash, how I’d lost the ability to steer it. Ben said there were two definitions of cleave. I said she knew which one I meant. My brother had been right to say my tail was a liability.

  Having a body is a liability, Ben said. And I like your body. My tail went still. I used to think stillness would save me, the way some animals choose stillness so they won’t be seen as moving prey. I turned around to show her the way it dangled, almost to the floor now, its weight like an anchor. Soon it would drown me and I’d have to evacuate from my body. Standing behind me, Ben pressed her belly against my back. She combed my hair with her fingers, pulled it back from my shoulders. I pretended I was a tree and her hands in my hair were perching birds. I tried to be a place she could stay.

  What would you be without this tail, she said, reaching down to grasp it. Free, I said, but I knew it wasn’t true. It was my umbilical cord, and I’d never been freer than inside my mother’s belly, Ama’s blood braiding into me. My body multiplied by theirs. Ben nudged her nose into my neck. The 口 squinted at our feet, watching us through hyphen-shaped eyes.

  You should see what my tail did, I told her. But it wasn’t the tail I blamed for hurting him. It was me, and Ben knew, and when she stepped back from me, tugging me by the tail so that I walked backward into the house, it was tenderness that tethered me to her, a desire to be crowned by her teeth, queened by them. She pulled me into the doorway, nipped my chin. Held me by the hips so tight I’d find the forensic outline of her fingers there later. I’d place my fingers in the same place and replay the ache that was my name. She kissed me and my bladder almost unzipped itself, eager to empty, to be filled with what she could give me. I reeled the tail up from between my legs and held it between our bellies, both of us grinding hard against it. It hurt, but it was a hurt that harmonized with my hunger, with the hum of my backmost teeth. I could feel her through my tail, the fur frizzing with our friction, and I knew I couldn’t be undaughtered from it.

  Behind us, on the sofa, Agong was breathing loud as a beehive, though we still didn’t know how to smoke the sickness out of him. Maybe he would never remember our names, never fish our faces out of whatever water he’d dropped us into, but it was safer that way, safer that I couldn’t save him: He was preserved in the brine of his boyhood, before bullets, before he knew what he was capable of killing.

  When his hands have forgotten how to hold things, to make a fist, to clean a gun or wipe his own ass, we draw faces on all his fingers and say: These are your family, the ones killed in the war, your mother on your thumb and your father on your forefinger, and now they are with you every time you lift your hand, now they are walking on wind, now they can never be taken from you.

  * * *

  _

  My mother said that when Agong was a boy—I imagined it was so long ago that knees didn’t have the technology to bend—Agong helped the men drill wells into the wetlands and drag the saltwater out in buckets. Dogs and oxen ran into the bog and buckled, their bones broken into song. The deer sank so deep only their antlers jutted out of the ground like velvet saplings.

  Agong scoured our walls for salt, shucking away the plaster with his nails. When he found my mother’s salt bowl in a cabinet next to the sink, he pickled his palms in it. One night when he was asleep on the sofa, I spooned salt onto his face, his neck, his belly button. He shrilled with pain when I sprinkled his bed sores, each one as big and pink as a slice of baloney. In the morning, when my mother saw what I’d done, she propped him up in the yard and rinsed him off with the hose. I said salt would preserve him like jerky, drying his flesh to threads. But my mother said if I ever did that again she’d pickle my feet and feed them back to me.

  When he was my size, Agong sanded salt into blocks and shipped them down the river. He dreamed of tossing the blocks overboard, salting the river into a bloodstream. Agong was told not to taste the salt, but he licked every block when the crew was asleep, unable to resist their glow. As punishment for stealing, the merchants lashed both his hands until his skin ribboned off. This evening, I saw Agong crawling in the yard, hounding the soil for salt he’d buried, but the holes gave nothing back. The sofa cushions grew crowns of crystals. Salt icicles clung to the ceiling above his sleep. My mother shattered them with a broom and collected the saltcicles in buckets. We cooked with pinches of his powdered sweat. Sucking on saltshards, we preserved our mouths in the shape of his name.

  * * *

  _

  I tell Ben to bring me the letters. I live their translations, but she owns the originals. When she gets to my door, I pull her in and she licks me everywhere like a dog. My name is whatever she calls me.

  In the yard, I feed the letters one by one back into the 口, all the holes scabbing over before picking themselves open again, empty. Ben asks what I’m doing. I say I’m sending them back to Ama. I unfold a sixth sheet from my pocket, the letter creased so many times it’s tender with lines. A lace of holes where I’ve written the words and then erased them, inventing a language from friction:

  Dear Ama,

  You define a daughter  as something  done to you  at night  without your permission  I dream Agong in the window  a face I forage for resemblance  the only thing we share is  sorry you say  there’s no such thing as death  only debt  only deferring  the next life  I once thought you’d given birth to me directly  skipped my mother entirely  you conceived me by screaming  into a peach  eating around its seed planting it inside your shit  watering it into me a story like all stories  treeing out of you  all stories are about ownership  I’m mistaken:  you aren’t the tiger spirit  you’re the woman  it wears you tell me choices  are made by men  militaries

  language is not what’s said but what’s silenced Agong told me today  I could become anything by mimicking it  he lay down in the mid
dle of every road  said now I’m every way home  I pen his mouth here by punching  the page  Agong kneels in the yard  digs a birdbath  where I rinse my hands  you say a mouth  is all I wanted for you my name goes nude  maiden name meaning  what survives  is what I choose to remember

  * * *

  _

  After I feed the letters back, Ben and I stand over the holes as they breathe. The moon a bared tooth. We ask our mothers if we can sleep out in the yard tonight, and when they both say no, we do it anyway, build a tent out of blankets and brooms.

  My mother watches us out the window for an hour, then comes out with a quilt to use as our roof, the one with Ama’s denim river sutured down its center. She brings the border to her nose and breathes all the blue out of the fabric. Then she hooks the blanket over our broomsticks, hanging it above us, and the river is resurrected as our sky. Ben and I fall asleep paired like quotation marks, my mother between us, my mother the thing we speak. I couch my head on my mother’s belly and listen to her bowels fill with wing-beats. She perches her fingers in my hair and names each strand with her hands, singing a song that Agong learned from the crows, a song about camphor trees that grow to be girls.

  My mother rolls my head off her belly, reaches down for my feet and says they’re ripe enough to eat. Imagine this: I eat your foot like a fruit. I shit out its seed in some city far from here. The seed grows into a tree. You walk by the tree and know I’ve been there. You cut down the tree, count its rings, add it to how old I am. Wherever you’re going, I’m already there, a tree waiting. Massaging my mother’s feet until she sleeps, I slot my knuckles between her toes, trying to tell when they’ll be tender. At the back of her heels and calves, I know each of her tendons by note. Pluck them into music, play away their pain. She once told me that a tree’s leaves are its ears: A leaf listens to the light. I want many ears growing from my skin, a whole field to listen with. When my mother farts in her sleep, I shape the steam with my hands and release it outside as fog. I remember the story she once told me about how all mountains were once hammered out of mist, and that’s how they move, how they rise and dissolve, returning to the genealogy of the sky.

  At night, Ben climbs over my mother’s body and nestles her head in my armpit. We kiss until our tongues can’t tell themselves apart. I dream of biting off her nipple, spitting the coin of it back into her palm. Make a wish, I say, while she flings the nipple-coin into her mouth, swallows. We wake together at the same time, our names in each other’s mouths, our heat making glue of the moon, and it means we’ve come true.

  Halfway through the night, we hear chirping. At first I think it’s the sky raining teeth. Ben crawls out of our tent, one hand extended like the sound is a string she can pull on, lure in. I crawl out after her, my arm slipping down the sleeve of a hole. We are beaded with mosquitos, slapping them off each other’s thighs, our hands bright with the blood we’ve stolen back from their bellies. A laced wing is cleaved to the corner of her mouth and I lean forward, lick it off. We scan the sky and the top of the fence, but both are empty. Ben says, Listen, kneeling to the soil. It’s coming from under. The sound comes from beneath our feet, a symphony of the buried. Needling my toes into the soil, I can almost feel the fester of wings. The key around Ben’s neck is the nearest light and I reach for it. A moon docking in the dark of my throat. Reaching up, Ben plucks a strand of sound from the air, follows it back to the ground where it was planted. I hold the hem of her shirt and she steers me toward the 口 where the chirping is clearest, where the sound is ambering inside our mouths.

  In the center of the yard, I look up and see where our wet roof is angled just right for the moon to catch it and turn it into a mirror, deflecting dawn for as long as we want. Ben kneels and says this is where the 口 begins, where the soil is soft as snot and darker than the night around us. We need to dig them out, Ben says, sharpening her wrists against each other. She places my hand on the ground and I almost feel a pulse, a place to part the soil.

  We work our hands into the seam-lipped 口, squatting the way we once did when we dug shitholes in her father’s lot, imagining that if we dug deep enough we’d hit water and our shits would float up as islands we’d founded together. Our hands struggle into the soil, grabbing and emptying, adding to the mound at our backs that will soon outgrow us. It’s Ben who meets metal first, three feet below: the silver scalp of a cage-top. It’s her birdcage, the one we fed to the 口, the one she claimed not to mourn. But her hands accelerate, and I know she wants it home in her hands again, rust coating her palms like sugar.

  We work downward with our fingers, revealing the spine of each bar, the locked door. It’s dented but undigested, with only a few bars missing. We stand now, grinding our heels into the soil to uproot the cage. Ben is panting out a pearled fog. I’m dressed in my sweat. I hunt for my own hands in the dark, find them grasped around hers.

  When we lift it together, the cage disrobes its dirt. It’s full of birds. The perch in the center is crowded with some winged species, each body no bigger than a thumb, feathers moving fluent as tongues. They’re the color of the dark, a dark only our mouths can make. Ben sets down the cage and we kneel in front of it. She sockets the key into the lock and hooks the door open with her pinky. When the birds flock out, they multiply in the dark, mating with the night to become many. They fly toward the trees, branches parting like legs to let them in. They land on the roof of the shack and along the fence redheaded with rust. The birds call to one another in our voices. Ben and I agree that in the spring, we’ll cut off our hair and scatter it here so the birds can collect the strands in their beaks and build their nests out of us. We’ll let them breed in the black of our hair.

  Pursing its lips, our hole spits a flock of black sparrows. They flee the 口’s throat, threading in and out of clouds, sewing the dark whole. There are so many birds in the sky that by morning, it is still night. Ben shouts, points at a bird with a meloning belly, so big it butts out the sun. Behind us, in front of the house, the road is rearing and bucking into a river, asphalt dissolving to ink, a flood reaching our feet. We wear the river around our ankles. It rises between our legs, splitting open in birth. A tail breaches the surface, legs wading after it. Out of the riverroad  the tiger runs to us  brightwet  mouth wider than night  calling Mother mothermothermother

  For MaMa

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to my family (my Sega World team!). To my mother: You’re the best and most inventive storyteller I know, and thank you for all the laughter and the gossip.

  Thank you to my agent Julia Kardon for being my first supporter. You told me during our first phone call that we’d be team Year of the Tiger, and I’m so grateful to have you rooting for me.

  Thank you to my editors, Victory Matsui and Nicole Counts. Victory: Thank you for leading me to the tail and the holes, and for being the best reader I could possibly imagine. You asked me what my characters desired, and in writing those desires, I learned what I wanted, too.

  Nicole: Thank you for midwifing this story into the world, and for being the most incredible advocate. Your enthusiasm, generosity, and support mean everything to me. Whenever I doubt myself, I think about your comments in the margins of my manuscript.

  Thank you to everyone on the One World team for their support and brilliance: Chris Jackson, Cecil Flores, and so many others. Thank you to Dennis Ambrose for his copyediting expertise. And my deepest gratitude to Andrea Lau for designing the inside of the book, and to Michael Morris for giving me the cover of my dreams.

  Thank you to Rachel Rokicki, Claire Strickland, Jess Bonet, and the entire publicity and marketing team—your enthusiasm and creativity are an inspiration to me.

  Thank you to Mikaela Pedlow for your passion and support—I’m so grateful to the Harvill Secker team for their warm reception.

  Thank you to Deborah Sun De La Cruz and the Hamish Hamilton team
—your enthusiasm for this book has buoyed me.

  My deep gratitude to Mei Lum and the entire W.O.W. family for welcoming me and for showing me the power of storytelling and intergenerational community.

  Thank you to Rattawut Lapcharoensap for your advice, support, and for all of our conversations, literary and otherwise—you saw things in my work that I didn’t even know were there.

  Thank you to Jennifer Tseng for reading a very messy early draft and seeing so much in it. Many, many thanks to Rachel Eliza Griffiths for reading my very first essay and telling me to write a whole book. I did, and it’s all because you believed I could.

  Thank you to Marilyn Chin, whose book made this one possible. And to Maxine Hong Kingston, Jessica Hagedorn, Toni Morrison, Dorothy Allison, Larissa Lai, Helen Oyeyemi, and so many more.

  Thank you to my Agong. You deserve everything. Thank you for your smile and the way you held your hands behind your back. I miss the paper pinwheels and the garden with the tree and the chili bushes. Wherever you are, I hope your pigeons are with you and that they’ve finally made it home.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  K-MING CHANG was born in the Year of the Tiger. She is a Kundiman Fellow. Her poems have been anthologized in Ink Knows No Borders, Best New Poets 2018, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, the 2019 Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. Raised in California, she now lives in New York. Bestiary is her first novel.

  kmingchang.com

  Twitter: @k_mingchang

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