Grief

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)

  Sometimes she liked to treat this ghost like a son, talking to him at the tail end of night: Hello, pig-boy. I’m sorry your father wanted to eat you. She pictured a boy with hooves. She pictured a baby with ears on top of its head. Dayi wanted the pig-boy to stay. Whenever the neighbors retold the story of the murdered son, she always stopped them short of saying his name. As long as she never knew it, she could name him herself. She gave him her maiden name, a homonym for red. It was a relief to love something already dead. _ My mother said Dayi needed to get a job that would explain her gloves, so Dayi got a gig at the strip mall acupuncture parlor. She showed me her fake license, the laminated card printed with someone else’s name. When she took me to work, I sat at the reception counter with my legs crossed, my tongue greening on the guava candies I stole from the reception desk’s glass ashtray. Once, when a customer came in asking about hand jobs, she thought it meant any job you did with your hands. It’s called a strip mall for a reason, my mother said. Learn to take off everything but your gloves. _ In every version of the story, Mazu is the daughter of a fisherman. When she didn’t cry at birth, they named her Mo Niang: unmouthed maiden. Mazu taught herself to swim, held stones in her hands to practice winging through the water with carried weight. She could project herself in dreams, swimming out to save men from the mouths of storms. When she died saving her father and brother from a typhoon, she was rebuilt as a red statue. I asked Dayi if she really was the reincarnation of Mazu. She said no, we were descended from pigs: Oxen could plow and chickens could lay eggs, but hogs were born for slaughter, ferried from birth-hole to mouth-hole to shit-hole. I asked what happened to Mazu after she died, and Dayi said: America is a kind of afterlife. Looking at old photos of Dayi back on the island, I almost believed it: She stood on the beach, mouth full of light, braid heavy as an anchor. She was pregnant in almost all of them, her belly casting a shadow no body would fill. In the last photo we took of her, Dayi held a nail clipper in her mouth. She’d learned not to rely on her hands, to sew with a needle tucked between her two front teeth, tongue authoring the knot. I can do everything but wipe my own ass, she said, laughing. No one’s got a tongue long enough for that. _

• From Bestiary (2020)

  In another life, another story, a daughter who is not me says: Both. I’ll take you both. She takes her Ma and Ba, replants them in another city, becomes a truce between trees. Memories ago, when you and your brother were asleep and your father was newly home from the mainland, I took the car and drove halfway down to LA before pulling into a motel. I thought I’d finally take Ba home, but then I remembered that my house is not mine, that your father’s money paid the bills and I didn’t even know what my ba could eat anymore, if I still knew how to make sugar-hearted dates the way he liked them, with so much syrup it sealed his jaw. The sign outside the motel said NO VACANCIES, but I asked for a room anyway. The woman at the counter thought I was a whore and I let her think it. Inside, the TV’s already on: war, war, weather, news at eleven. Outside, the sun pregnant with the moon. When my mother gave birth to me, she barely had to squat. I stole myself out. The year I married and left Ma, I scoured my room clean. I took my toothbrush out of the bathroom, the one I’d used for so many years that the bristles were balding. Most nights I scrubbed my teeth with a finger: I like to feel what’s sharp in myself. I threw the toothbrush away, and that’s when I saw it in the trash, half-wrapped in toilet paper: a hair dye box with an Asian model on it, the darkest shade available. Ba’s hair had been white since I was born, and Ma said it meant his brains were made of cloud. I thought of Ma dying her hair in secret, tarring each strand until it was her shadow, refusing the softness of silver. I sat on the bathroom floor. I walked into the kitchen where Ma was rinsing bone-colored gaolicai. Her hair in pink curlers, pinned up and tumorous. She said, Eat this cabbage on your wedding night. It will fill your belly with water and leave no room for a baby. Her hands shucked the leaves, cracked the cabbage-heads like skulls. She’d saved me all the fresh leaves. The leaves that surrendered at the edges were the ones she’d feed Ba. What if I want a baby? I said, not knowing your brother was the size of a bird. She slit a leaf along its veins. Every year your child grows is another that’s subtracted from you, she said. The older your children grow, she said, the more jealous a god will become. The god will look for reasons to steal the child back: a name that’s too long, skin with no moles or scars. Maybe that’s why Ma threw me into that river: to save me from being stolen.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Cheek-rash began to spread among the local girls, until almost every one of Dayi’s schoolmates wore the same pattern of redness on their faces, necks, inner thighs. When Dayi was midwife to one of Terracotta’s bastards, she waited for the mother to fall asleep before bringing the child to her breast, pretending it was hers. The baby responded to every sound but its name, turning its head to birdcall, the telephone, rain. I was born with a red birthmark draped over my belly like lacework. Dayi called this karma, said my skin was her punishment for that day by the river. Dayi promised she’d pay to have it removed when I turned fifteen, no matter how expensive it would be. She said it was a price she’d been waiting to pay. _ Dayi was fathered by a ghost. None of us had ever met Ama’s first husband. We knew his punishment but not his crime: He was in prison for five years before he strangled himself with a shoelace, knotting it like a bow tie beneath the apple-core of his throat. My brother said the crime must have been something violent, like setting someone on fire or smuggling bombs up his sleeves. But my mother said he was just another accused Communist, that the police threw his body into a river with the shoelace still noosed around his neck, which is why no one in this family was allowed to wear anything with laces. You’ll summon his spirit through your shoes, my mother said. She was a self-appointed shoe surgeon, snipping through our sneaker laces with kitchen shears, taping them where they’d once been tied. Just in case he came to me in ghost form, I wore a pair of scissors on a string around my neck. I wanted to be the one to cut his throat free of its shoelace, the knot he pulled tight while gagging against it, his tongue exiting his mouth as steam. 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.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  A history of the hole still family. Forgive me because & I watched you with my mouth. threw you I loved drown you to life. _ I read the last letter aloud in my yard. Ben sat in front of me with her legs forked open in the soil, her hand petting the 口 . Reading aloud to the holes, I mispronounced all the silences, rewrote them with my own prayer. She’s getting ready to bury him, Ben said. She’s baiting us. My tail curled in on itself, fit in my hand like a stone. I wanted a window. I wanted to see something shatter because of me. I said I wasn’t going to let her bury anything. The bone in my tail was wincing down to a wick, preparing for me to light it. Its marrow was memory. When my mother came home from the foot spa that night, I said I was volunteering to be her weapon. She softened the knots of her hands in a bowl of hot water, said she was tired. But I said it anyway: Ama is going to hurt Agong. She turned away from the window, her face wiped of light. The sink behind her was full, the water silver with knives. You think I don’t know? she said, and I knew she was mocking me, her voice stretched out of shape over the words. Everything in my mouth sounded already wrong, gone sour. I looked down at the bruised tile floor, at her shadow grazing on mine, eating it whole. I know about the river, I said, looking up. I think it’s time to dam her. My mother’s knees must have come unscrewed: She knelt down, her back against the wall, her hands snagging in her hair when she tried to shift it out of her face. I moved forward through the dim of the kitchen, tugged down on her left ear like she always did for me when I was having a bad dream. When she jerked her head away from me, I told her she didn’t have to be afraid of Ama. While I untangled the hair from around her fingers, I imagined loosing my tail like an arrow, shortcutting it through Ama’s body, her ribs making a fist around her heart. Do you remember that story I told you? my mother said. I asked her which one, and she told me about the women who hanged themselves with their own hair when the mountains were mowed over. Once, we lived inside the ground. The sun swung like a bucket of our blood. When I asked her why they hanged themselves, she said the only way to own your body is to die inside it. I said that wasn’t true anymore.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  19 Nasir al-Bahri, who would become Bin Laden’s bodyguard, gave the fullest and most perceptive explanation of this concern: We were greatly affected by the tragedies we were witnessing and the events we were seeing: children crying, women widowed, and the high number of incidents of rape. When we went forward for jihad, we experienced a bitter reality. We saw things that were more awful than anything we had expected or had heard or seen in the media. It was as though we were like “a cat with closed eyes” that opened its eyes at these woes. 20 This was, he said, a political awakening, and the volunteers began to acquire a global sense of the ummah that transcended national boundaries: “The idea of the umma began to evolve in our minds. We realised we were a nation [ ummah ] that had a distinguished place among nations.… The issue of nationalism was put out of our minds, and we acquired a wider view than that, namely the issue of the umma.” The welfare of the ummah had always been a deeply spiritual as well as a political concern in Islam, so the plight of their fellow Muslims cut to the core of their Islamic identity. Many were ashamed that Muslim leaders had responded so inadequately to these disasters. “After all those years of humiliation, they could finally do something to help their Muslim brothers,” one respondent explained. Another said that “he would follow the news of his brothers with the deepest empathy, and he wanted to do something, anything, to help them.” One volunteer’s friend remembered that “we would often sit and talk about the slaughtering to which Muslims are subjected, and his eyes would fill with tears.” 21 The survey also found that in nearly every case, there was more sympathy for the victims than hatred for their oppressors. And despite the United States’ support for Israel, there was as yet not much anti-Americanism. “We did not go because of the Americans,” insisted Nasir al-Bahri. Some recruits longed for the glamour of a glorious martyrdom, but many were also lured by the sheer excitement of warfare, the possibility of heroism, and the comradeship of brothers-at-arms. As ever, the warrior’s transcendence of mundane circumstance seemed very much akin to the believer’s spiritual transcendence. Nasir al-Bahri remembered how they idolized the volunteers: “When we used to look at the Afghan suits that the mujahidin who returned from Afghanistan wore as they walked the streets of Jidda, Mecca or Medina, we used to feel that we were living with the generation of the triumphant companions of the Prophet, and hence looked up to them as an example.” 22 When finally the Soviets were forced to withdraw from Afghanistan in February 1989 and the Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991, the Arab-Afghans relished a heady, if inaccurate, sense of having defeated a great world power.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  They now regarded both rulers as apostates, so these dissidents withdrew from the ummah, setting up their own camp with an independent commander. They would be known as kharaji, “those who go out.” After the failure of a second arbitration, Ali was murdered by a Kharajite in 661. The trauma of this civil war marked Islamic life forever. Henceforth rival parties would draw upon these tragic events as they struggled to make sense of their Islamic vocation. From time to time, Muslims who objected to the behavior of the reigning ruler would retreat from the ummah, as the Kharajites had done, and summon all “true Muslims” to join them in a struggle ( jihad ) for higher Islamic standards. 68 The fate of Ali became for some a symbol of the structural injustice of mainstream political life, and these Muslims, who called themselves the shiah-i Ali (“Ali’s partisans”), developed a piety of principled protest, revering Ali’s male descendants as the true leaders of the ummah. But appalled by the murderous divisions that had torn the ummah apart, most Muslims decided that unity must be the first priority, even if that meant accommodating a degree of oppression and injustice. Instead of revering Ali’s descendants, they would follow the sunnah (“customary practice”) of the Prophet. As in Christianity and Judaism, radically different interpretations of the original revelation would make it impossible to speak of a pure, essentialist “Islam.” The Quran had given Muslims an historical mission: to create a just community in which all members, even the weakest and most vulnerable, would be treated with absolute respect. This would demand a constant struggle ( jihad ) with the egotism and self-interest that holds us back from the divine. Politics was therefore not a distraction from spirituality but what Christians would call a sacrament, the arena in which Muslims experienced God and that enabled the divine to function effectively in our world. Hence if state institutions did not measure up to the Quranic ideal, if their political leaders were cruel or exploitative and their community humiliated by foreign enemies, a Muslim could feel that his or her faith in life’s ultimate purpose was imperiled. For Muslims, the suffering, oppression, and exploitation that arose from the systemic violence of the state were moral issues of sacred import and could not be relegated to the profane realm . After Ali’s death, Muawiyyah moved his capital from Medina to Damascus and founded a hereditary dynasty. The Umayyads would create a regular agrarian empire, with a privileged aristocracy and an unequal distribution of wealth. Herein lay the Muslim dilemma. There was now general agreement that an absolute monarchy was far more satisfactory than a military oligarchy, where commanders inevitably competed aggressively for power—as Ali and Muawiyyah had done. The Umayyads’ Jewi sh, Christian, and Zoroastrian subjects agreed.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In this concealment he remained the true leader of the ummah, so all earthly government was illegitimate. Paradoxically, liberated from the confines of time and space, the Hidden Imam became a more vivid presence in the lives of Shiis. The myth reflected the tragic impossibility of implementing a truly equitable policy in a flawed and violent world. On the anniversary of Imam Husain’s death on the tenth ( ashura ) of the month of Muharram, Shiis would publicly mourn his murder, processing through the streets, weeping and beating their breasts to demonstrate their undying opposition to the corruption of mainstream Muslim life. But not all Shiis subscribed to Jafar’s sacred secularism. The Ismailis, who believed that Ali’s line had ended with Ismail, the Seventh Imam, remained convinced that piety must be backed up by military jihad for a just society. In the tenth century, when the Abbasid regime was in serious decline, an Ismaili leader established a rival caliphate in North Africa, and this Fatimid dynasty later spread to Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. 83 In the tenth century, the Muslim empire was beginning to fragment. Taking advantage of Fatimid weakness, the Byzantines conquered Antioch and important areas of Cilicia, while within the Dar al-Islam, Turkish generals established virtually independent states, although they continued to acknowledge the caliph as the supreme leader. In 945 the Turkish Buyid dynasty actually occupied Baghdad, and even though the caliph retained his court, the region became a province of the Buyid kingdom. Yet Islam was by no means a spent force. There had always been tension between the Quran and autocratic monarchy, and the new arrangement of independent rulers symbolically linked by their loyalty to the caliph was religiously more congenial if not politically effective. Muslim religious thought subsequently became less driven by current events and would become politically oriented again only in the modern period, when the ummah faced a new imperial threat. The Seljuk Turks from Central Asia gave fullest expression to the new order. They acknowledged the sovereignty of the caliph, but under their brilliant Persian vizier Nizam al-Mulk (r. 1063–92), they created an empire extending to Yemen in the south, the Oxus River in the east, and Syria in the west. The Seljuks were not universally popular. Some of the more radical Ismailis withdrew to mountain strongholds in what is now Lebanon, where they prepared for a jihad to replace the Seljuks with a Shii regime, occasionally undertaking suicidal missions to murder prominent members of the Seljuk establishment. Their enemies called them hashashin because they were said to use hashish to induce mystical ecstasy, and this gave us our English word assassin. 84 But most Muslims accommodated easily to Seljuk rule.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Let’s go back in there and break it to them , she said. Daddy left the next day about dawn. Mr. McBride’s truck lunged up to the house. He stepped out on the running board and left his motor going and said no to coffee when Mother asked. Daddy came out to heave his army duffel bag in the truck bed. I’d tried to zip myself up into that bag in the middle of the night. I buried myself among the flat-folded hankerchiefs and balled-up socks. I fit pretty well, too. But I’d stopped the zipper right under my chin, being basically a sissy about the dark. That’s where Daddy found me asleep in the morning. He smelled like Old Spice. His weathered face was nicked up. There were red polka dots of blood on which he’d stuck white squares of toilet paper. He squatted down with his brown leather dopp kit in one hand. Get outa there, Pokey , he said, drawing the zipper down to my belly button. God sakes, you’ll break a fella’s heart. Then Mr. McBride’s gray Chevy truck was drawing Daddy away down the mountain. His head got smaller in the window, till it was no more than a black dot, like one of those towns on the map we’d once been in such an all-fired hurry to get to. All across Texas I’d ridden behind that head. I knew every comb mark in it. Daddy’s leaving never even dimly occurred to me as possible on that trip, though Mother’s was a constant, unspoken threat. But Daddy was the guy you set your watch by. He woke in the same humor every morning, asking did you want oatmeal or eggs. And now Mr. McBride’s truck was winding him away from us in hairpin turns down the mountain. I finally stopped watching for glimpses of the truck to break through the dark spaces between trees and put my head down and ran hard down the dirt road. I kept running till the dust gave way to asphalt, even though that vehicle had long since disappeared. Back at the cabin, Mother pulled the rollers out of her hair in about three swipes of her hand and announced that she felt like a freed slave. We drove to a vast and canyonlike Denver department store where she bought what she called an honest-to-God cocktail dress, along with church dresses for Lecia and me (though we’d rather have chewed linoleum than gone to Sunday school). The place gave me vertigo. The glass cubicles were sharp-edged. They gleamed, displaying impossibly bright scarves, jeweled cigarette cases, real gold chains for the sole purpose of holding your glasses around your neck. The smell of new dye from the clothes made my eyes sting. Metal escalators meandered between floors and threatened to eat my toes off at the end. We all got fur coats. Mother’s white shirred beaver was softer all over than the inside of my arm.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Detroiter Ingrid LaFleur is the founder of Maison LaFleur and Afrotopia. Fashionista, artist, and most likely to make bank on bitcoin, she ran for mayor of Detroit in 2017 as an Afrofuturist candidate. amb. What do you like people to know about your pleasure activism? Ingrid. Fashion has definitely helped to define my pleasure activism. When my father passed away over a year ago I felt a grief I’ve never had before. After two months of being in a catatonic state, I began craving laughter and joy. I decided to wear the one thing that gives visual pleasure instantly no matter who is wearing it, sequins. I wore sequins every single day for about a month. Although my energy was low, my sequin jackets would make someone giggle, and then they would send me that good energy, which would soothe my wounds. It was, and still is, the best healing therapy I’ve experimented with. I continue to wear sequined jackets, now paired with heart-shaped red glasses, in hopes to generate more love and joy in my life and others. amb. What is your pleasure philosophy? Ingrid. I believe every moment of every day should be a pleasurable experience. If it is not, then it is time to question what is happening and why you decided to endure it. I also believe pleasure generated through our own power should resonate as far into the future as possible. If I eat something that tastes super-delicious but makes me sluggish and tired and sends me into a spiral of body shaming, then that was not a pleasurable experience, no matter how juicy and delicious it was. However, if I eat something fresh, clean, and healthy for my body then I will feel empowered and energetic simply because I have exhibited my love for self. Ultimately, love for the self is the deepest pleasure we deny ourselves. I work daily to be courageous enough to indulge in the purest pleasure of self-love. amb. How does Detroit inform and benefit from your approach to pleasure? Ingrid. Detroit taught me about pleasures derived from participating in and supporting innovative ancestrally rooted loving communities. This is a soul-satisfying pleasure that is aligned with my values without compromise. The more compromise, the less soul-satisfying. It’s tricky because addictions can blind us to this truth. amb. What are your actual daily practices of pleasure? Ingrid. I would love to create more rituals of pleasure. At the moment, because of my nomadic life, I have pleasure goals I try to maintain to help me keep clarity and that are necessary no matter where I am living—daily meditation for twenty minutes, keeping a clean kitchen (food is medicine), making the bed, and drinking a fresh green juice at the beginning of each day. Also, accomplishing work goals set for the day brings pure joy and gives me permission to play. amb. Time-travel for me: what is the most pleasurable possible future you can imagine?

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  In each course, I was learning the basic building blocks of the methodology, learning to drop in and feel myself from within, to begin to understand how I had been shaped by the circumstances of my birth, the structures of my generation. For a long time, I was still in my head, kind of imagining myself as a little ball of energy dropping down into my mysterious body. And then, slowly, I started to feel sensations below my head, below my neck. A lot of what I initially felt was pain—sensations in my back, hips, and legs that I had been overriding in order to keep up an overactive travel and work life. My knees hurt immensely—turns out I had early onset arthritis. I also began to feel my true center, my center of gravity, the center of my being. It was a place inside myself that was as vast as the ocean, that gave me the resources I needed to feel all of my feelings and still be in my dignity, to make mistakes and still be in my dignity, still be connected to other people, to stay open and present. I learned new things about pain. My pain was holding onto my past for me. In an individual, pain can be a reminder of what we have not turned to face. For me, that included memories I had seemingly displaced with my survival behavior of dissociation. I felt distinct moments of release, as I would let a memory surface in class or while being held in the hands of a somatic bodyworker. One of the reasons the Generative Somatics approach works for me is that it is concerned about somatics as a collective way of understanding trauma and pain. It isn’t about going away from the community to heal, which was the main way I had experienced healing work prior to somatics. It isn’t about being a special “healer” who is apart from community. Generative Somatics feels into how, in a collective or group, patterns of pain can indicate the mass, or intergenerational, trauma people are surviving. And how each of us has the power to help each other feel more, heal, and move toward our longings for liberation and justice together. I recall a session with Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), a Generative Somatics movement partner, where one man’s honesty about facing constant racist fear of his Black body every day opened up a floodgate of shared grief, pain, anger, and shame in the room. Afterward we were able to have political conversations that were so authentic and joyful, because we had gotten to the root of a shared pain together.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When your wife slips a finger into you do you think of it as a birth? Her mouth mentors the dark between your legs she pickles her tongue in you I am not asking because I want to know how you are loved by a woman once I kissed my girlcousin my teeth all rotted the next month flew out of my mouth as flies once I tried to teach you speech pressed your hand to the woodstove waited for you to say let me go your palm sizzling like pork the skin grew back bark your word for mother is missing here’s a story you were born cordless you cut it yourself leashed * to no one born to leave me I raised all my daughters like the dead: your dead father the first man I married died a red spy born a bastard: the son of a servant & a landlord he had night-sight born with nocturnal eyes he believed rich men should be rewritten without bodies he tied his own father to a fence flayed him with reeds years later your father arrived on my island a boat we didn’t recognize the soldiers brought guns a language Your father half of a foot gone missing in a war when he was a child on the mainland he stepped on a Japanese landmine his shin shot up speared the sky flesh fountain it made him laugh the pain the doctor puzzled his foot back together. He snuck out every day of bedrest lugged his dead foot he found a cave on the fourth day the clouds shaped like colons inside the dark a girl & her shadow eight-limbed . He assumed she came to meet a man or a moon she taught him how to make shadow puppets on the wall of the cave filtering light through fingers pasting the dark over the night in the morning he crawled home spent days practicing silhouettes nightly he climbed to the cave his shadow-tutor casting stories onto stone.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Once, at dinnertime, Jie asks what their names are. Ma locks her out of the house that night, and in the morning, Jie is curled like a stray on our doormat, one arm jammed through the mail slot like she’s been trying to fold herself into a paper daughter. Ma stands at the not-altar, holding the handkerchief in her left fist and the jade in her right. There is no god we know better than her fist. Ma never looks at the photo. She turns to the kitchen window and watches the mosquitos fatten into moons, light salting all the lines on her face. She prays to the sisters whose names I don’t know. Her prayers robbed of a god. Jie and I were born thieves. Born to orphan our sisters by birthing our mother into this country. You don’t know about gold, about grieving what you could have owned. Your grandmother’s grief has grown its own body. She raises it like another child, one she loves better than me and my sister, one that can never leave her. Today she complains she’s married to a manhole, a shaft for memories to fall down, a man who can see only the sky above him. But Ba’s smarter than she knows. The one time we got robbed, the thieves didn’t know to dig. Couldn’t find anything worth taking. Only our door was missing. We were sure they took something else from the house, but we didn’t know what to look for. How to search for an absence. When Ma stews the apricots we steal, she never asks where we get them. She knows nothing belongs to us, and that’s why she won’t let us sit on chairs until she wraps them in cheesecloth or scrubs off our skin. We can’t put pictures on the walls, if we had any, or fully unpack—she still thinks we’ll have to give everything back. Jie’s mouth is still magnetized to the word sister, but outside of her dreams she’s stopped asking for names. Jie goes to church and her English has gotten so good she’s started reading aloud the billboards outside our house. One of them is the phone number of a divorce lawyer. One is for bail bonds. One is for a casino, which tempts Ba until Ma throws her quilt basket at him, tells him to sit down or she’ll snip his balls off and sew them to his earlobes. Jie and I can’t stop imagining Ba wearing his balls like earrings, and we laugh until we piss, the stains in our laps symmetrical. _ We dig beneath so many trees we’ve given them nicknames: The one with the bent knees. The one that sways like a drunk. The one with a woman’s hips. The gold is under none of them.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Other things I don’t want to forget: The way Ama held my hand when I dreamt I was stranded in a boat, the mattress flooding with my own sweat. When I asked her what the sea was like as a child and she said here’s a story. Is it possible that she threw her daughters into a river? Maybe she thought they were on fire. Maybe she thought she was saving them. Is there a way to tell a story without sides? Parable of the Pirate: Ama’s Interlude [To be read in Ama’s voice. Suggestions: Read this aloud underwater, or speak perpendicular to a strong wind, or swallow a fork before speaking. Bleed your voice of its language, then learn a sea’s accent.] _ You tell the story like a white person. *1 Too much language. I prefer concision, *2 a story with scissor blades. Useful for what it can sever. Let’s say your great-great-grandfather stole his name. Before empires and before men and before my hips began barking at me to sit down, back when blood was sweet, we lived in houses underground. We dug into the mountain soil that was so wet you could wring rivers from it. Our doors were holes. We came home by climbing down ladders. If home is beneath your feet, it means you’re always home. We planted our shit in the ground to grow more mountains when we ran out. We didn’t aspire upward but downward: The deeper your house, the safer you were from sight, from soldiers, from grief engineered by armies. You think you dig holes in the yard because it’s your idea? Digging is the design of your body. Holes are what marrow is made of. The empire had two categories for us: cooked and raw. If you married a mainlander and let them stew their children inside you, you were cooked. If you lived in the mountains and fucked rivers, you were raw. Grandfather Isaw was yolkraw. He hard-boiled the whites of his eyes by looking directly at the sun and shooting it down. One day, men came up the mountain with pots, ready to boil all the boys in the tribe. Isaw volunteered to boil himself alive and go down the mountain to seek adventure. He fathered a dozen half-raw, half-cooked daughters. He fried you a family. He went to sea on a boat he’d stolen from a fisherman. Cut the man’s throat and speared him in the water. The blood summoned a shark, which swam off with the fisherman’s balls in its mouth. He lived as a fisherman until his boat was boarded by a fleet of pirates. My grandfather did not mind being a pirate: He liked it better than fishing, and anything was better than being on land where everyone was trying to cook him.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  It rained, rained our sweat. Our blood turned the color of mirrors and mosquitos mated with our skin. I could name every species of tree, copy the posture of their thirst. It was typhoon season when we left Yilan, and it was like the typhoon had saddled us, rode us here. Our farts took the form of wind and fled here. Arkansas was landlocked, the opposite of the island, but the weather here spoke the same sky. It was so humid, the air was white-haired with steam, and we were the ones being boiled of our knees. And the trees that grew there, they looked just like the trees in Yilan, big-hipped and knuckle-boned and mustached with birds. There’s a story where I was born. About trees that could walk. At night, they stood up on their roots and left the earth. They walked through rivers, roped up all the water, and left them dry-mouthed. They walked to the city and kneeled into the cement, planted themselves on the street. They walked to the sea and hollowed themselves into canoes, slid away on their bellies. They walked and walked. And in the morning, the trees were never where you left them. They’d be lounging on their sides, or linking arms in a circle, or gone except for one. And my sisters and I, we went searching for the other trees. We went to all the neighbors and asked what they’d seen. But the trees, they went missing. Walked off. There were these holes in the ground where the roots used to be. They went deep, so deep my ba had to paint circles around the holes with pigblood to warn kids away, keep them from falling in. One time an ox walked into one of the treeholes and broke all its legs. Each leg was pointing in a different direction: at me, at the sea, at my sister, at the trees. My ba shot it with his army pistol. In the forehead, here, where my finger is. Here. Oxen aren’t like pigs, they don’t make a sound when they die. They just fall over. Like trees. My father drove the oxen so hard, they died of being tired. Just fell over in the fields in the middle of plowing a row. And there wasn’t even any meat left on their bodies to eat. They were hip-bones and hide, a molar maybe. All we could eat were the eyes. And my sister said, I bet if we plant those eyes, we could grow a whole new ox. But animals aren’t like trees, they don’t grow back. I learned that. In Arkansas, we were the only ones of our species.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “Oh, Sir, I should have said that, for mine is the loss, mine the unspeakable misfortune now”, and through my tears I saw that his eyes too were full. He had just given me a letter to Froude, “good, kindly Froude”, who, he was sure, would help me in any way of commendation to some literary position “if I have gone, as is most likely”, and in due time Froude did help me as I shall tell in the proper place. My pen-portrait of Carlyle was ferociously attacked by a kinsman, Alexander Carlyle, who evidently believed that I had got my knowledge of Carlyle’s weakness from Froude’s revelations in 1904. But luckily for me, Sir Charles Jessel remembered a dinner in the Garrick Club given by him in 1886 or 1887, at which both Sir Richard Quain and myself were present. Jessel recalled distinctly that I had that evening told the story of Carlyle’s impotence as explaining the sadness of his married life and had then asserted that the confession came to me from Carlyle himself. At that dinner Sir Richard Quain said that he had been Mrs. Carlyle’s physician and that he would tell me later exactly what Mrs. Carlyle had confessed to him. Here is Quain’s account as he gave it me that night in a private room at the Garrick. He said: “I had been a friend of the Carlyles for years: he was a hero to me, one of the wisest and best of men: she was singularly witty and worldly-wise and pleased me even more than the sage. One evening I found her in great pain on the sofa: when I asked her where the pain was, she indicated her lower belly and I guessed at once that it must be some trouble connected with the change of life. “I begged her to go up to her bedroom and I would come in a quarter of an hour and examine her, assuring her the while that I was sure I could give her almost immediate relief. She went upstairs. In about ten minutes I asked her husband, would he come with me? He replied in his broadest Scotch accent, always a sign of emotion with him: ‘I’ll have naething to do with it. Ye must just arrange it yerselves’. “Thereupon I went upstairs and knocked at Mrs. Carlyle’s bedroom door: no reply: I tried to enter: the door was locked and unable to get an answer I went downstairs in a huff and flung out of the house. “I stayed away for a fortnight but when I went back one evening I was horrified to see how ill Mrs. Carlyle looked stretched out on the sofa, and as pale as death. ‘You’re worse?’ I asked. ‘Much worse and weaker!’ she replied. ‘You naughty obstinate creature!’ I cried.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  There had been her odd ambivalence towards the baby - Lilian’s son, yet also, of course, her murderer, whom Florence had once wished dead, so that the mother might be saved...I gazed at her again, and wished I knew some way to comfort her. She was so bleak, yet also somehow so remote; I had never embraced her, and felt squeamish about putting a hand upon her, even now. So I only stayed beside her, stroking gently at her sleeve... and at last she roused herself, and gave a kind of smile; and then I moved away.‘How I have talked,’ she said. ‘I don’t know, I’m sure, what made me speak of all this, tonight.’‘I’m glad you did,’ I said. ‘You must - you must miss her, terribly.’ She gazed blankly at me for a moment - as if missing was rather a paltry emotion, terrible too mild a term, for her great sadness - and then she nodded and looked away.‘It has been hard; I have been strange; sometimes I’ve wished that I might die, myself. I have, I know, been very poor company for you and Ralph! And I was not very kind when you first came, I think. She had been gone a little under six months then, and the idea of having another girl about the place - especially you, who I had met the very week I had found her - well! And then, your story was like hers, you had been with a gent who had thrown you out, after he’d got you in trouble - it seemed too queer. But there was a moment, when you picked up Cyril — I daresay you don’t even remember doing it - but you held Cyril in your arms, and I thought of her, who had never cradled him at all... I didn’t know whether I could stand to see you do it; or whether I could bear to see you stop. And then you spoke - and you were not like Lily then, of course. And, oh! I’ve never been gladder of anything, in all my life!’She laughed; I made some sort of sound that seemed to pass for laughter, some kind of face that could be mistaken, in that dim light, for a smile. Then she gave a terrific yawn, and rose, and shifted Cyril a little higher against her neck, and brushed her cheek across his head; and then, after a moment, she smiled and stepped wearily to the door.But before she could reach it, I called her name.I said, ‘Flo, there never was a gent who threw me out. It was a lady I was living with; but I lied, so you’d let me stay. I’m - I’ m a tom, like you.’‘You are!’

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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. While she waited for the tow truck to arrive at the parking lot, she searched the street for a rock at least the size of her hand, but could only find a small one, tapered like her ring finger. She threw it at the window. It pinged off. She picked it up again, aiming at her own face in the window’s reflection. When the car was towed back into our driveway, I found a crack in the driver’s side window, so small I thought a sparrow must have done it, flown into its own image. She never got the crack fixed, and when we drove in the daytime, the sun siphoned through it, brightened it into a scar. How she knew he was not coming back: There was a bird perched on the windshield one morning, a warbler of some kind, red-breasted as if it had been slit at the throat and was bleeding itself brighter. My mother beat it away with her hands, but it followed her into the house somehow, and she cornered it where the wall head-butted the ceiling. She cooed at it, then spat at it, then bruised it with the end of a broomstick, but it didn’t come down. It hovered there, beating its wings featherless against our walls. So we let it live with us, found its nests wedged behind the toilet or in the back of the oven. We never saw its mate. It pecked open all its eggs and ate the slugs of meat inside, leaving me the blue-veined shells to bury outside.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Sometimes I believe the snakes and I share a breed, feeding off foreign sources of heat. At night I park my stomach against Ma’s spine. Without her, my blood depletes its own heat. I whisper against her shoulders, speak mouth to marrow: I killed three snakes today. I opened their dead mouths and touched their fangs. My hands are numb up to the wrists. I’m telling no one but you. You’re the only one who knows I’ve been dying all day. I like slaughtering snakes. They die clean. We fling them into piles. No need to grieve what doesn’t bleed. My only competitors are the red-tailed hawks that snip the hens’ heads off their necks. There’s a gun leaning against the long wall of the coop for the purpose of shooting them down. In the heat, the barrel goes limp as silk, roves the house on its snakebelly. _ Ba beheaded a snake in the city where I was born. By then, he’d changed his name to a tree’s. In another country, he’d strung his mother in a tree by her thumbs. The soldiers asked him to do it. He double-tied the knot, tested the branch with his own weight. He beat her and tried to imagine the rain removing her face. Tried to imagine the body as water, able to take any shape and survive it. But all he saw was the time his mother told him to close his eyes as she walked him around the fields and placed his hands on everything he’d someday need the name of, a goat’s beard, a well, a tree with leaves like keys, the sky a door that swung open to the sun. Years later, when he was beating a woman in the street for having broken curfew, and the woman asked him why he was doing this, why there were so many men in her city, why they had shot her dog and leashed her father, Ba had said nothing. There were nights he misplaced his hands, couldn’t tell what he was beating, if it was a dog or a woman or a sack of flour mixed with sand to make it last, if what buttered the road was blood or the pulp of fruit orphaned by a tree. He began to give away his memories to the morning, bleaching them with light so that later in another country, he would remember only the color white. The White Terror: When I tell you its name, you think I mean white as in the American kind. It’s true, the Americans gave the bullets, but these are the men that spent them: your agong your agong your agong. Not even the stars were spared a curfew.