Fear

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Bestiary (2020)

  Taking my hand, she looked at the dirt loitering under my nails, the soil packed into the lines of my palm. She said I’d gone too deep: Digging was surgery and I’d forgotten to numb the body. Never bury anything, she said, unless you want the dead to spend it. She began to tell me a story about the time her father buried gold in their yard in Arkansas, but I told her this was different: We weren’t burying anything. We were doing the opposite: birthing. She stared out at the yard, the soup of our labor, the holes gulping water and breeding more of their mouths. I knew what she was reaching for before I could rename it: My brother and I had seen our father make the same movement, the Snake’s throat necklaced by his hands. My mother swung the Snake. I dodged its tin mouth, hot and hissing. She was the only one who could bring the Snake to life, loaning it her blood. The Snake missed my buttocks and rang against my shoulder-bone. My father liked to begin softly until our skins adjusted, and then he flung the Snake around like light, aiming to land on everything. If our father treated pain like a plural, our mother was singular. Where is she? my brother and I used to ask when she beached inside herself and didn’t speak for hours, shoring somewhere she didn’t know us. In a memory, I said. In another life, something had warned her away from water, and we had disbelieved her, filling the yard and reminding her lungs of their holes. When the Snake reared its head and bit my lower back, above the crack of my ass, I went down on my knees. My brother was somewhere in the mud playing dead, pretending to be a belly-up fish. She whipped the Snake through the air, lassoing it around the sun before lashing my back. Hunching to make a bunker of my bones, I prayed to swap skins with the water I stood in. She called me by her own name, beat herself out of me. I knew the words to arrest her hands: When I called her Ama, the Snake stopped flexing its spine. Its silver mouth had flung off and become the sun somewhere. Ama, I said again. My mother dropped the Snake and said, That isn’t me. I said, IknowIknowIknow. Snaking my arms around her waist, I beached my lips on her belly button, kissed her hard as a fist. Named her my prey. _ After she fed me to the Snake, there was a scab above my butt cheeks where the Snake’s silver head nipped me.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When my mother heard a man in our room, she swiped the vase off her bedside table and ran to us. Boxed into the doorway of our bedroom, with her bathrobe fanned open like pale wings, she was more of a moth than our mother. He turned to her. She threw the vase at him and it shattered on the far wall, glass salting the carpet. Later, she claimed she hadn’t seen his face. She thought he was a predator come to skin us in our sleep. When the vase missed him, it struck her own shadow off the wall. We waited to clean the glass in the daylight, all of us on our knees, weeding for glass. I plucked up a piece and my thumb cut open, dripping an ellipses of blood on the carpet that didn’t end for days, not even when my mother slathered mud on it and sucked it bloodless and knotted a string at the base of my thumb. Our father hierarchized the house: his dishes in the sink stacked on top of ours, his slippers lined up closest to the door, his place at the table facing the window, ours facing the walls. In my sleep, I sucked my thumbs to the bone, and now my father glazed them in gingerroot to sting my mouth awake. If it hurts, it’s helping, he said. The pool hall where he once played every Saturday was now a park with platter-sized ponds and overfed ducks building their nests in water fountains. Whenever we went, he told me not to touch the ducks. The mother will smell that the child’s been touched by another animal, and then she won’t want to feed it anymore. When I asked why, he said that touch is territory. A hand is owned by what it holds. A hand is a whole country. Before bed, I touched my armpit, my ass-crack, my peanut-toes, my tail. The belly button that was pecked into my skin by a bird. I touched them all twice. Named each part of me a citizen of the night. _ The first week my father was home, my tail grew a bone of its own. A bruise trellised up my spine. At night, my mother followed him into the man-made dark of his room—he taped butcher paper on all the windows because perverts could be watching. At night: the sound of her jaw locking up her teeth. That wasn’t the sound I turned my head from: It was the symmetry of my father’s silence, the way sex didn’t sound like two bodies added together but the subtraction of one from the other.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When my brother didn’t answer, I said that Hu Gu Po had come and taken him from us. I described what she’d looked like: a woman with striped skin, a pelt skirt that moved like oil. My mother stood up, looked at me. Her wet hair clung to her face like a shadow. She asked me what I meant, and I said Hu Gu Po had kept us from being hurt. Turning away from us both, my mother said she was going now to look for him, her hands opening and closing around nothing. I stood and gripped the back of her shirt, tugged on it so hard she bent her knees. She reached behind to unfasten my fist. When she turned back to me, I could see that her eyes were wet as fruit pits, that she was afraid of me. Okay, she said. Hao hao hao hao hao. I’m not going to look for him. But we need that car back. I said he had probably driven it away. But you said Hu Gu Po took him. I said she had, but he would come back. My mother shook her head and lifted her hand. I thought she might slap me, but instead she put it on my shoulder, steered me toward the bathroom. She said she was going to draw a bath so hot it would boil us new again. My brother shivered as he stood, his shoulders knocking against mine, and my mother undressed us both, forgetting to take off our socks. It’s like you’re my babies again, she said. Raw to everything. She buttered us with soap fat, cupped her hands to pour water over our heads. We shut our eyes and let her scrub us bright as dimes. In the morning, she was gone looking for him. On the sidewalk, while I waited for her to return, I watched two crows disrobe a dead squirrel, pecking away its skin and fur to untangle its intestines like a necklace. How my mother told the story of her search: She took the bus to the zoo, counting cows in the fields by the freeway, mistaking a cemetery for a herd of white-backed calves grazing the green, all of them missing mothers. The car was there, parked where we’d described, and for hours she avoided calling the tow truck, wanting instead to break in, to steal what was already hers, his smell still in the seats, the radio tuned to the only news she listened to, the weather, which Ama liked to say was god’s news. He’d taken the keys with him, a way of saying what belonged to him. But it didn’t matter where the keys were, where he’d gone to grow back his skin, because my mother was who I belonged to, the only place I’d ever lived, the only person who knew me before I had a name.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Dayi called him my Red father, and I translated his image literally: a man with a red beard, a pyre made of red logs, a sky scraped red by smoke, a river slit like a vein, Dayi on our sofa the first day we took her home, shelling red-dyed watermelon seeds with her teeth, telling me she once saw a girl die like a melon, a girl who was reported to the police as Red, who ran away into the mountains and drank an entire river until her belly unbuttoned. _ After school, Ben walked home with me to meet Dayi. When I’d told Ben about Dayi’s ability to summon red, she asked me for proof. I said I hadn’t seen it yet, but it had to be true. She spent every morning dressing her hands like wounds, wrapping them in gauze before putting on gloves. Ben and I stood on the sofa, watching Dayi in the kitchen. She was dicing something red into something redder. Then her legs let go of their bones. She fell forward, cracking her forehead on the counter as she came down. Blood sashing across her whole torso. I tried to shout, but my voice calcified in my mouth. Ben and I ran to Dayi’s body, holding her head off the floor and pinching her cheeks. My mother drove her to the emergency room, and Dayi refused to undress. The doctor let her keep her clothes on under the gown, and the nurse cut a slit in her long sleeve to draw her blood. They better not ask me to shit into anything, Dayi said. I shit for no one. The doctors said it was a stroke. She was transferred to a room where machines charted her brainwaves into mountain ranges. There were bags of fluid feeding the veins in her arms. She was discharged early, given a warning: No high-stress activities. No sodium. When the doctor asked if we had a history of heart disease, my mother said no, we have no history, just stories, just a long record of surviving our countries. Dayi’s left side was paralyzed for a week after. She could only walk in circles, turn corners. Her dead thumb slumped forward, and I liked to flick it back and forth with my tongue. Our word for stroke meant the middle wind. When the school called, asking why I had missed so many days, I said, My aunt suffered two winds. At home, Dayi still refused to take off her clothes when my mother tried bathing her, so my brother and I dragged her into the backyard, hosing her down with all her clothes on. Her clothes so cheap the color slid right off the cloth.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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 blood. 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.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I kneeled to follow him, but my hands dawdled too long in the dirt. My brother was elbow-deep now and sleeved in soil, but I couldn’t go farther than a fist down. Spit on the ground to soften it, he said. I mimicked his mouth, spitting a syllable of saliva into the hole. My brother had learned to spit from my father: tongue recoiling in the mouth, flinging the spit like a whip. Our mother always slapped my brother for it. One time he’d spat in a temple, a coin of spit faceup on the prayer stool, and everybody had turned to look at it. Learn to swallow it, she said. She trained her throat to swallow twice an hour while she slept, and she sometimes wore a bandanna as a muzzle. We’d never seen her drool before, her pillow clean in the mornings. After we spat in the soil, digging felt too much like burrowing into each other’s mouths. We took a break to play with the Snake, the water hose christened by our father. Unspooling its length, we pretended it was alive, fat with blood and a spine. We dared each other to jump over its body, to touch its toothless mouth. We laced it around our necks and pretended we were being strangled. My mother told us never to turn on the Snake because we were in a drought: If we spent too much water we’d get fined. But we thought if water came from the sky it should be free. We socketed the Snake’s mouth into the holes and fed them water until they flooded. The soil boiled into a stew around our ankles. When the water was deep enough to hide a fist in, we danced in it. Grass spun like compass needles on the water. We let the water run until our mother was home. The Snake’s body was wiring water directly from the sea. We mistook our sweat for its salt. Laughing, we beckoned our mother out of the screen door and into the yard, her feet lighting the water like fish. She stepped into one of our holes and whipped forward into the water, landing on her belly. The mud made a fist and dove down her throat. She thrashed like something stolen from the deep and released into the shallows, gasping through the gill-slit of her mouth. We laughed, thinking she was performing as a fish. She wanted us to hook our fingers into her mouth and tug her free of the mud. Her limbs slashed the water, scarring its surface. When the water backlashed against her face, her chest, we realized she was drowning.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  She told me to fear holes because of what might enter them, but I was more afraid of what would exit. Once, she lectured me for days on the importance of not letting men enter my room. But there’s one living in my room! I said. My mother said that brothers weren’t men until they were married, and my own brother would never get married because he wasn’t allowed to love a woman more than his mother. I heard that, my brother said. And I’ve already decided not to love anyone. That way it’s fair for everyone. The rest of her speech was this: Tampons are American propaganda. The string hangs out of you like a grenade pin. When you pull it out, a period of martial law begins in your body. _ The next morning I was the same. Gowned inside a girl. My skin still my skin. Maybe I needed to wait to be shaped: My mother always said the moon wasn’t whitened in a day. I meant to sew all the yard-holes closed, but they bred behind my back: I couldn’t guess what was fucking them. That night, I heard a humming in my sleep. A voice dislocating the dark. My tail humped the mattress and I made a fist around it, strangled it into silence. The humming sounded like my own, but when I rose, it led me away from myself. It was early in the night and the sky was bad-breathed, freckled with stars like white bacteria on a tongue. Since growing my tail, my night-seeing had improved: My eyes homed to heat. I could always see the shapes of faces but never mouths. I could see the shapes of bodies but not their distance from me. I kneeled in the soil, skating my ear above one of the holes. It had my teeth. It was breathing bullets of heat. The hole whistled at me like a man. I got up from my knees. Flaring open like skirts, the holes mouthed words that hadn’t yet given birth to their meanings. I looked inside the nearest one and slipped my hands into it. After a minute, the hole loosened around my wrist and gagged my fist back out. When the holes were silent again, steam stealing out of their lips, I went back into the house, following my hands like lanterns. They were clean to the wrist, no evidence of what they entered. In the morning, I told my brother about the holes and their breathing. He asked me to show him and we went together into the yard. They smell so bad, I said. Because of the landfill, my brother said. Because they’re bodies, I said. My brother bent to examine each of them, the deepest as long as our legs. In the center of the middle row, one of the holes was squared off and looked more like a window, like the word for mouth: 口

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When I shoved the scab aside with my fingernails, there was a hole beneath, deep as my finger and bloodless as a glove socket. I slid my forefinger in, trying to diagnose what kind of hole it was. I named every hole-species I knew: wells; wombs; wounds; spots in the wall where my brother stuck his pencil through, thinking the walls would scab on their own, and when they didn’t, he sealed them with his boogers and let them petrify into stone; lakes; seas, which meant most of the world was a hole, which meant I was native to holes, animal burrows, anuses, atlases. Twirling my finger inside the hole above my ass, I decided that it must be the beginning of a fault-line, a seismic shift of my spine. I considered telling my mother, but she always said holes were dangerous and led only to disappearance. They’re the number-one leading cause of loss. But I told her the holes in our yard were parallel to her throat, same depth and degree of darkness. Consider them a tribute to you, I said, the day after all the floodwater evaporated from the yard. But she watched them as if they were birth-holes, as if I were the midwife of some disaster. I watched her in the yard, checking them one by one like animal traps. When she began kicking soil back into the holes, I went outside to stop her, grabbing at her ankles. She wriggled her foot away, sat down hard on the soil, and said: Before digging a hole, you need to know whose hands you own. Your Ama, she said, has the stamina of a river when it comes to discipline. She said she’d tried to be the mud, what hems the river in, but she couldn’t redirect a woman like that . Remember, she said. I’m your mother, she said, but you made me first. You needed me first, and now I’m shaped like your thirst. Standing by the kitchen window and looking out at the holes with me, she said I should be prepared for when Ama comes in the night to eat our toes. Where will she come from? I said, and she pointed at the holes. I laughed and said no woman could fit through a hole that size. If Ama ever lumbered out like a tree, I said, we’d fell her together, cleave the woman from the tiger inside her. When I asked her for a practice axe, one I could learn to wield against Hu Gu Po, she refused. You’re my mother, I said, and you’re supposed to prepare me for any future. But who, she said, can prepare you for the past? The Walking Trees: An Oral Story in the Voice of My Mother What I remember about Arkansas is the weather. Same as the island. We saved all that money to fly, and in the end we arrived at the place we left.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Eventually the gourd juice emptied out of me: I pissed twice as much as my brother, a spray so forceful my mother said I alone could have ended the California drought if only I knew how to aim. I was always sweating, my skin shifting like sheets of sea. My mother had to wring me out twice a day like a towel. Back before we lived in a house, I slept on a mattress at night, between my mother and father, my brother on a fold-out futon in the farthest corner of the room. Every night, a puddle flared around me like a skirt, wetting the whole mattress and waking my mother, who dreamed a typhoon had torn me from her tit. My mother feared my veins were full of salt, that my bones produced water instead of blood. To prove that I bled, she punctured one of my veins with a boiled sewing needle. The blood corkscrewed out, confirming its color on her hands. I was conceived at night during a rainstorm, which was why I was born with too much water inside me: The rain had collected in my mother’s body like a gutter, and I was born from her rupture. After my birth, she begged my father not to touch her on the few nights it rained, afraid of what weather his body would bring. _ My father, god of water, could make anything grow. Before my brother and I were born, he went to school to major in rain. His favorite things were irrigation systems and trenches and hoses—all the ways water could immigrate. What he knew about thirst was to outsource it. Irrigation is surgery. Like threading veins through a body, he said, and demonstrated with his arms how to shovel through anything, how to break up the dirt that’s well-versed in thirst. When my mother said, I want this world waterless, he laughed and said she was prejudiced against rivers, alive or dry, because she’d nearly been drowned in one. But he wasn’t afraid of rivers. He ran them. Back then, he used to tell my mother: I’ll be a god syringing rivers into deserts, injecting lakes into droughtland, seducing salt out of seawater. Then my brother was born and he dropped out of school, taking a job moving two-by-fours at a construction site.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  DAUGHTERHu Gu Po (IV) [image file=image_rsrc1SC.jpg] The cost of being fatherless: Shut off notices from the water company (hang up, bathe with baking soda). Shut off notices from the electricity company (ignore: the house will starve itself dark). No exterminator (kill the ants with duct tape, termites with vinegar, rats with our hands). No calls from my father for two weeks, then months, then the trees started growing new beards. The fall my father stopped sending money or answering calls, my mother bought us plane tickets to the mainland, said she’d either bring him home or kill him there: She hadn’t decided which would punish him more. We got our passport photos taken in the living room of a Shanghainese man my father once bribed for a faster visa. The man told me to show my ears in the photo, tucking my hair back with one broad thumb. His hands were like my father’s: bruised nailbeds, knuckles loose as screws. I felt guilty for summoning my father through some other man’s body. We packed in the dark, my mother cursing my father’s cousins, their factory, my father, who must be dead, my father, who must have forgotten us, my father, who hadn’t called back, my father, who must have fished himself another family, another woman whose knees he prayed between. My brother begged her to turn on the lights, but she didn’t want us to see her face, its increasing resemblance to fear. I pretended we lived underground and had lightbulb-heads and were packing for our first trip to the surface. On the plane, I slept with my head leaning against my mother’s and woke with the sun running like a yolk across the window. Buildings toothpicked the sky. It was so humid I could gargle the air and spit it. In our hotel room, my brother and I slept on the floor, my mother on the skin-colored bed. The sheets were so thin they let light into our dreams. Our shadows sharked across the floor. The first night in Jiangsu, I dreamed my mother was kneeling over me, one of her hands balled inside my mouth and the other pressed over my nose, caging my breath in my chest. I woke believing that my tongue had dried into a cricket and leapt out of my mouth, and I crawled to every dust-clotted corner of the room searching for it.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I stood one day at a coffee-stall in the mouth of an alley off Berwick Street, and watched the entrance to one of these houses. There was, I saw, a constant flow of men and women over its threshold, and no one paid the slightest heed to any of them save the leering old woman who sat in a chair at the door, taking their coins - and her alertness lasted only until she had palmed her pennies and handed her customers their key. I believe a pantomime horse could have sashayed over that step with a harlot’s hand upon its bridle and - so long as the horse had its coin at the ready - no one would have stopped their business to turn and look ...A few days later, therefore, I put my costume in a bag, presented myself at the house, and asked for a room. The old woman looked me over and grinned, quite mirthlessly; then, when I gave her my shilling, she thrust a key at me, and nodded me into the darkened passageway behind her. The key was sticky; the handle of my chamber was sticky; indeed, the house was entirely horrible - damp and stinking, and with walls as thin as paper, so that, unpacking my bag and straightening my costume, I heard all the business from the rooms above, below, and on either side of it - all the grunts and slaps and giggles, and pounding mattresses.I changed very quickly, growing all the time, with every grunt and titter, less certain and less brave. But when I gazed at myself - there was a looking-glass, with a crack across it, and blood in the crack - when I gazed at myself at last, I smiled, and knew my plan was a good one. I had borrowed a flat-iron from my landlady’s kitchen, and pressed the suit free of all its creases; I had given my hair a trim with a pair of sewing-shears - now I smoothed it flat with spittle. I left my dress and purse upon a chair, went out upon the landing, and locked the door behind me - my new dark heart, all the time, beating fast as a clock. As I had expected, the old bawd on the step barely raised her eyes as I went past her; and so, a little hesitantly, I began the walk down Berwick Street. With every glance that came my way, I flinched; at any moment I expected the cry to be let up: ‘A girl! There is a girl, here, in boy’s clothing!’ But the glances did not settle on me: they only slithered past me, to the girls behind.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  But he landed on the ground, hard, his wind gone, and they flipped him over, his ribcage on the backpack, his cheek against the asphalt, a knee in his back. There were so many voices around him shouting. They yanked his arms behind him and they tightened something around his wrists, and he couldn’t move at all, couldn’t breathe well, but still they knelt on him. He heard Asher’s voice, but he couldn’t tell how far away it was. “Why are you doing that to him? Sir! Sir! Why are you doing that!” “He resisted.” “He didn’t resist! Sir, he did not resist!” He opened his eyes to a horse hoof and the brown fur above it, close enough that he might have stuck out his tongue and licked it. He closed his eyes again. He felt a shoe on his head, holding him to the street. He felt the Imodium bottle in the backpack, ramming into his left lower ribs way too hard. He felt something snap there. A searing, liquid pain. “Sir, this is unnecessary! Sir, he did not resist!” He wanted them to hurry up. He wanted to be in the wagon with Fiona already. He wanted to be home with an ice pack already. He wanted to know his bowels would hold out. He wanted Asher to keep shouting, wanted to keep hearing his voice. He went back to the kiss in his mind. He could live there a long time. It was warm there, and good. F 2015 rom the bedroom, Fiona Skyped her therapist. Elena’s image kept freezing but the sound would continue, so it seemed as if entire sentences came from her closed lips, or serious questions came from a mouth open in laughter. Elena said, “Waiting for anything is hard. And this is a lot of stressors.” It was three days since she’d knocked on Claire’s door, and she’d heard nothing. “I feel so foolish sitting here,” she said. “And for making Cecily come, when maybe we never even get to meet our granddaughter.” “Has Cecily seen Kurt again?” Elena was frozen now with her head down, her black curls filling the screen. “I don’t think so. I’m not prying. She took a day trip with her friend, the one she’s staying with.” “And you’re connecting with old friends too.” “I’m underfoot. And I’m just supposed to hang out six more days now till Richard’s opening?” Julian would be back then, at least. He’d had to fly to London but would return on Monday just in time. “If Claire hasn’t called by then, I’m leaving right afterward.” “Just like that?” “Well. I could—I could slip a letter under her door first. That wouldn’t be such a violation, would it?” “I think that’s a solid plan.” “I ruined things by going over there.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  In the morning, we took a taxi to the brim of the city, where my father and his two cousins managed the slot-machine factory. Clouds mopping up the sky’s spilled light. We drove down a half-paved street with apartment buildings so tall I thought they’d been built from the sky down. My father was the rain that day. We watched from the taxi as my mother entered each apartment building on the street, repeating my father’s name until someone told us he had left. The slot-machine manufacturer had halted production months ago, and most of the workers had been deported from the city at night, carrying nothing but their teeth. They guessed my father had gone home to the city where he was born, a city west of every named body of water. We took the overnight train to Anhui. My brother and I wanted to go home, our boogers black after two hours of walking outside and breathing. We asked why the boys who begged outside the hotels all had the same parts of their bodies missing: a left hand or both feet or tongues. I mistook this for kinship, believing that somehow all the boys without feet found one another by holding up their hurts and pairing their pains. But my mother told me it was because gangs would buy children and injure them the same way, assembling them in teams to go out and earn pity with their new bodies. They knocked on the windows of taxis until the drivers cursed them away. My mother gave them nothing. She shut the door on one of the boys’ fingers, his hand purpling in the hinge. His fingernail fell off and landed in her lap and my mother flicked it away. I plucked it from the seat crack and tossed it out the window like a coin I could wish with. My mother slapped my hand and said not to touch those boys’ fingernails because they were dirty and we didn’t know what they’d been touching. I reminded her that she touched feet for a living; toenails were her terrain. She gripped my pinky and yanked the nail clean off its bed of skin, so fast I didn’t bleed, the pain a bright bead, rolling back and forth on my tongue until I couldn’t taste anything else. Don’t compare us to them, she said. When another of the boys wedged his wrist through the window slit and offered his palm, my mother spat in it. _ We found my father in a top-floor apartment, where my mother knocked on the door so long her knuckles split one by one. He answered. It was blue-hot in the apartment, and my father was bare-legged: I’d never before seen his kneecaps, the hair on his thighs.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When our mother found out, she whipped us with a wet sock and asked us to show her the spot, watching us dig them back up. Untrimmed for a week, the toenails had grown six inches long, enamel swords with worms pierced alive on them. She returned the toes to the cookie tin, neutered their nails with a file, and taped the tin shut, saying she would need them later. When I asked her what she needed them for, she said all losses have lifetimes, always longer than we think, and her toes would someday find another source of blood, a new mouth to metabolize them. DAUGHTERGirl in Gourd [image file=image_rsrc1SC.jpg] California, stillI was born with a gourd-shaped head: My mother kneaded it back into a sphere while my bones were still milk. The left side of my head still wears her handprint. My mother joked that if she’d ever dropped me, I would have split open into symmetrical bowls, spilling a head full of black seeds. Every night, I sat cross-legged on the floor while she sat in a chair above me, holding my head between her knees and squeezing my skull into a shape that could sit in her palm. Her fingers fattened the strands of my hair with horse-oil cream. When her knee-bones ground against my temples and milked tears from me, she lapped them off my face like a cat and said she was almost done. She had to make sure my head was round enough to remember who loved me, sturdy enough to carry the stories she was going to crown me with. Eventually the gourd juice emptied out of me: I pissed twice as much as my brother, a spray so forceful my mother said I alone could have ended the California drought if only I knew how to aim. I was always sweating, my skin shifting like sheets of sea. My mother had to wring me out twice a day like a towel. Back before we lived in a house, I slept on a mattress at night, between my mother and father, my brother on a fold-out futon in the farthest corner of the room. Every night, a puddle flared around me like a skirt, wetting the whole mattress and waking my mother, who dreamed a typhoon had torn me from her tit. My mother feared my veins were full of salt, that my bones produced water instead of blood. To prove that I bled, she punctured one of my veins with a boiled sewing needle. The blood corkscrewed out, confirming its color on her hands. I was conceived at night during a rainstorm, which was why I was born with too much water inside me: The rain had collected in my mother’s body like a gutter, and I was born from her rupture. After my birth, she begged my father not to touch her on the few nights it rained, afraid of what weather his body would bring. _

• From Bestiary (2020)

  On our maps, we pencil the line from Arkansas to LA: It’s straight all the way across, no excuse to get lost. Still, we get lost. In Arizona, we drive in circles around the same three cities until Ma lets us stop at a motel to ask directions. The heat mirages our morning: the sun a severed head, the sky bleeding out from it. By the time we park at another motel, we’ve hallucinated a vulture plucking at a baby’s rib cage (Ma), a Tayal spear wearing a pink wig (Jie), a military of small men dressed in furry purple vests (Ba), and a shark with toddler legs (me). At the motel, we fall asleep side by side by side by side on the queen bed with camouflage sheets. _ Thirst thorns my throat. When I cough myself awake, I leave the bed and walk alone to the ice machine in the hall, shoveling jewels of it into my mouth with my bare hands, choking on the cold. I feel an urge to find the car and pet its muzzle, to confirm we’ve got a way to leave. The parking lot looks like an iced-over lake and I’m afraid to step onto it. Our eggplant car is still there, still hot to the touch like a fever. The car parked beside it—too close—is also bruise-purple, but unlike ours there’s no dent in the side, no piss-jars on the dashboard, no pigeon pancaked on the windshield. The bumper’s been brushed like teeth and the moon reads me the license plate. TEXAS. I should say: My sister doesn’t star in this part of the story, but I need you to know I can see her always, see her face in the reflection of the window like it’s the moon she’s become. But I don’t listen when the moon shakes its head, tells me to turn back. I go closer to the car. At first I think I hear the engine revving, but there’s no one in the front seat. Then I look to the backseat and there’s a boy on his back, mouth open, brandishing his tongue and snoring so loud, I think it’s the sky making that sound. I step back from the car when I see him wake up. He’s Chinese. The car and his beardlessness and his eyes halving open like seeds. He swings out of the backseat. Asks my name. Asks in guoyu: _______________? I tell it. I speak with Ma’s accent, wince at how millet-whipped and field-born it sounds next to his, how full of oxshit my mouth is. He asks if I’m alone. He slides his hand into his pocket and I duck, but he takes out a cigarette. I say my name. I say no. He asks if I am Chinese. I say we’re speaking Chinese. He laughs and his teeth are bastard stars, brighter than anything the night owns, no lineage to their light.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I was washing Ma’s pants in the sink and found notes in the pockets, notes she must have stolen from the houses. Some were written on receipts, on napkins, on pink perfumed cards, on orange peels. I wondered why she took what was worth nothing to us, notes we couldn’t read, addressed to anyone but us. If I asked, I knew she’d strike me into silence. Say I shouldn’t go through other people’s pockets. Never put your hands where they aren’t getting paid. When the notes dried, I balled them together into a paper onion and put it back in her pocket. Imagined her taking the bus out to another house in the hills, hands in her pockets the whole ride west, the noteball hot and pulsing in her palm, pumping like an organ that keeps her alive until she’s home. _ At the mannequin factory, Jie is part of the arm team: She’s the one who counts the number of fingers on each arm before passing it on to the surgical team. The day after a heat wave, Jie and the other girls walk into the factory and see that all the mannequins have melted together into one body, some linked at the hips, others glued elbow-to-elbow. The girls have to spend three days with handsaws to divide the mannequins from one another, and even after that, most are unidentifiable by the standards of their manual. Jie drags them to the dumpster one by one. One of the mannequins has a belly like it’s pregnant: The head of another mannequin has fused to its stomach. When Jie saws the belly open, she finds a single bullet in its center. We have nothing to shoot it from, so we decide to bury it beneath Ma’s chili shrubs. I am supposed to be watering them and haven’t, so all the chilies are pale as finger-bones. After we bury the bullet, the chilies grow fat as udders. I pick them for Ma, but she says they’ve gone bad. I say they can’t be bad, I just picked them. I pluck the fattest of the chilies and de-stem it with my teeth: She’s right. They taste like rust, like menstrual blood, ripe with shed death. _

• From Bestiary (2020)

  It was almost day when he decided to break the only street-facing window, glass fluttering down in gowns. He left his shoes on the lawn and he swung through the window, landing on the carpet inside. The shards shucked the skin off his feet. He went to our room first, the bedroom walls furring with so many flies I always woke with my mouth full of their eggs. My brother wet our mattress nightly, dreaming he was a gardener hosing down a field of flowers thorned with tongues, all of them licking his penis till it bled. When my mother heard a man in our room, she swiped the vase off her bedside table and ran to us. Boxed into the doorway of our bedroom, with her bathrobe fanned open like pale wings, she was more of a moth than our mother. He turned to her. She threw the vase at him and it shattered on the far wall, glass salting the carpet. Later, she claimed she hadn’t seen his face. She thought he was a predator come to skin us in our sleep. When the vase missed him, it struck her own shadow off the wall. We waited to clean the glass in the daylight, all of us on our knees, weeding for glass. I plucked up a piece and my thumb cut open, dripping an ellipses of blood on the carpet that didn’t end for days, not even when my mother slathered mud on it and sucked it bloodless and knotted a string at the base of my thumb. Our father hierarchized the house: his dishes in the sink stacked on top of ours, his slippers lined up closest to the door, his place at the table facing the window, ours facing the walls. In my sleep, I sucked my thumbs to the bone, and now my father glazed them in gingerroot to sting my mouth awake. If it hurts, it’s helping, he said. The pool hall where he once played every Saturday was now a park with platter-sized ponds and overfed ducks building their nests in water fountains. Whenever we went, he told me not to touch the ducks. The mother will smell that the child’s been touched by another animal, and then she won’t want to feed it anymore. When I asked why, he said that touch is territory. A hand is owned by what it holds. A hand is a whole country. Before bed, I touched my armpit, my ass-crack, my peanut-toes, my tail. The belly button that was pecked into my skin by a bird. I touched them all twice. Named each part of me a citizen of the night. _ The first week my father was home, my tail grew a bone of its own. A bruise trellised up my spine.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Oh my God, you should have seen the look on your face!” If that doesn’t happen I’m hoping he will at least pull me aside and say, “Look, I have orders from above to just give you loads of shit and make you miserable so you’ll leave. I don’t want to do it, but it’s my job, and I have to. I know it sucks, and I’m sorry.” But neither of those things happen. As far as I can tell, Trotsky really, sincerely means everything he says. Never in my life have I had someone turn on me so completely. The abuse continues when I start my new secretarial job on the podcast. Whatever I do, I’m falling short. Trotsky wants to know, what is my marketing plan? My marketing plan is to make a great podcast and over time it will build an audience. No! We’re marketing people. We need to do marketing! We need to create an email campaign and send spam to thousands of people urging them to click on a link and subscribe to the podcast. If enough people do that, we can trick Apple into thinking that we have a huge audience, and Apple will put our podcast near the top of its ratings. Numbers: We need them! How many listeners will we have in six months, and in a year? Where will the podcast rank in the iTunes Store? How soon will we get into the top ten? At what point can I promise that this will be the number-one business podcast in the entire world? These are projections that I need to make, and once I make them, I have to hit them—or else! As far as my career at HubSpot goes, everything is riding on the podcast. “It’s a very simple situation,” Trotsky says. “If the podcast succeeds, you keep your job.” “And if it doesn’t, then what? I get fired?” Trotsky scowls. “Just make sure it’s a success,” he says. Left unspoken is how we will define success. My guess is success is whatever Trotsky and Cranium decide it will be, and no matter what I do, I will never achieve it. Meanwhile, Trotsky rides me. Constantly. Why haven’t I scheduled meetings with a dozen different people across the marketing department to get them on board with the podcast? Why have I not solicited their help? So I do have those meetings. The question then becomes, Why didn’t I do that sooner? When is our deadline? When do we go live? Why can’t we start sooner? Do I not realize that I am now a project manager, responsible for every step of this project? Why have I not sent Trotsky a full report on my progress, in writing? Why have I not created a full podcast marketing campaign document and shared it via Google Docs with everyone in the marketing department so they can read the marketing plan and add comments?