Longing

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 Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  I agreed and took out my lighter. As I pulled at the flame, our great-aunt hooted and spoke rapidly to Auma. “She wants to know where the fire comes from.” I handed Dorsila the lighter and showed her how it worked as she continued to speak. Auma explained, “She says that things are changing so fast it makes her head spin. She says that the first time she saw television, she assumed the people inside the box could also see her. She thought they were very rude, because when she spoke to them they never answered back.” Dorsila chuckled at herself good-humoredly, while Zeituni went into the cooking hut. A few minutes later, Zeituni came out with a mug in her hand. I asked her what had happened to Sayid and Bernard. “They’re asleep,” she said, handing me the cup. “Here. Drink this.” I took a sniff of the steaming green liquid. It smelled like a swamp. “What is it?” “It’s made from a plant that grows here. Trust me … it will firm up your stomach in a jiffy.” I took a tentative first sip. The brew tasted as bad as it looked, but Zeituni stood over me until I had gulped down the last drop. “That is your grandfather’s recipe,” she said. “I told you he was a herbalist.” I took another puff from my cigarette and turned to Auma. “Ask Granny to tell me more about him,” I said. “Our grandfather, I mean. Roy says that he actually grew up in Kendu, then moved to Alego on his own.” Granny nodded to Auma’s translation. “Does she know why he left Kendu?” Granny shrugged. “She says that originally his people came from this land,” Auma said. I asked Granny to start from the beginning. How did our great-grandfather Obama come to live in Kendu? Where did our grandfather work? Why did the Old Man’s mother leave? As she started to answer, I felt the wind lift, then die. A row of high clouds crossed over the hills. And under the fanning shade of the mango tree, as hands wove black curls into even rows, I heard all our voices begin to run together, the sound of three generations tumbling over each other like the currents of a slow-moving stream, my questions like rocks roiling the water, the breaks in memory separating the currents, but always the voices returning to that single course, a single story …. First there was Miwiru. It’s not known who came before. Miwiru sired Sigoma, Sigoma sired Owiny, Owiny sired Kisodhi, Kisodhi sired Ogelo, Ogelo sired Otondi, Otondi sired Obongo, Obongo sired Okoth, and Okoth sired Opiyo. The women who bore them, their names are forgotten, for that was the way of our people.

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

  Semi-Quietism is the label given to the Francois Fénelon’s theology of pure love, condemned by Rome. Fénelon picked up the notion of not willing salvation from the writing of Saint Francis de Sales. Francis’s focus is on love rather than intellect. He develops an Augustinian psychology of love as the desire for union with God. He raises new and un-Augustinian questions, however, when he suggests that the higher forms of love involve a holy indifference to anything but God’s will. “Pure love,” for Fénelon, meant loving God without the selfish desire to find happiness in God. To condemn the aspiration for such pure love is to insist, with Augustine and Aquinas, that the desire to find happiness in God as one’s ultimate goal is not only necessary but morally right and essential. The appeal of pure love theology is a symptom of a key challenge posed to Catholic theology by modernity, with its denial of inherent teleology in nature—so that pursuing the goal of ultimate fulfillment, which is the essence of medieval Christian ethics, comes to seem selfish. m Suggested Reading de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God. John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle. Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle. , [he Life of Teresa of Jesus. PDF created by Rajesh Arya - Gujarat 125 From Vatican | to Vatican Il Lecture 35 Sa The First Vatican Council is famous as the council which defined the pope as infallible. The Second Vatican Council is famous as the council in which the church opened itself in a new to the modern world. Council (1870), grew out of a new exercise of the pope’s responsibility to determine Catholic teaching. In the papal bull /neffabilis Deus in 1854, Pope Pius IX defined the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The doctrine teaches that from the very beginning of her existence Mary was free from the guilt of original sin. The view of Thomas Aquinas, that she was cleansed in the womb after being conceived in sin like the rest of us, was thereby rejected. ik doctrine of papal infallibility, as defined by the First Vatican The Immaculate Conception was not a new doctrine but it was newly defined as doctrine. The pope has no authority to make new doctrines. In fact Pius insisted that there is no such thing as new doctrines of the Catholic church. To define a doctrine is to declare that it is henceforth a doctrine to be held by all the faithful. What is new about Ineffabilis Deus is that a doctrine was defined by the pope rather than by an ecumenical council. Pius’s pronouncement includes an account of how he consulted other bishops and consulting the faithful, and defined the doctrine in response to their joyous request that he do so.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The shilling was nothing compared to the pleasure of having you here among us all.’‘Shall we see you here again, Nan?’ her friend with the tattoo called then. I nodded: ‘I hope so.’‘But you must sing us a proper song next time, on your own, in all your gentleman’s toggery.’‘Oh yes, you must!’I made no answer, only smiled, and took a step away from them; then I thought of something, and beckoned to Jenny again.‘That picture,’ I said quietly when she was close. ‘Do you think - would Mrs Swindles mind - do you think that I might have it, for myself?’ She put her hand to her pocket at once, and drew out the creased and faded photograph, and passed it to me.‘You take it,’ she said; then she could not help but ask, a little wonderingly, ‘But have you none of your own? I should’ve thought...’‘Between you and me,’ I said, ‘I left the business rather fast. I lost a lot of stuff, and never cared to think of it till now. This, however — ’ I gazed down at the photo. ‘Well, it won’t hurt me, will it, to have this little reminder?’‘I hope it won’t, indeed,’ she answered kindly. Then she looked past me, to Florence and the others. ‘Your girl is awaiting for you,’ she said with a smile. I put the picture in the pocket of my coat.‘So she is,’ I said absently. ‘So she is.’I joined my friends; we picked our way across the crowded room, and hauled ourselves up the treacherous staircase into the aching cold of the February night. Outside The Frigate the road was dark and quiet; from Cable Street, however, came a distant row. Like us, the customers of all the other publics and gin palaces of the East End were beginning to make their tipsy journeys home.‘Is there never trouble,’ I said as we started to walk, ‘between women at the Boy and local people, or roughs?’Annie turned her collar up against the cold, then took Miss Raymond’s arm. ‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘Sometimes. Once some boys dressed a pig in a bonnet, and tipped it down the cellar stairs...’‘No!’‘Yes,’ said Nora. ‘And once a woman got her head broken, in a fight.’‘But this was over a girl,’ said Florence, yawning, ‘and it was the girl’s husband who hit her...’‘The truth is,’ Annie went on, ‘there is such a mix round these parts, what with Jews and Lascars, Germans and Poles, socialists, anarchists, salvationists... The people are surprised at nothing.’Even as she spoke, however, two fellows came out of a house at the end of the street and, seeing us - seeing Annie and Miss Raymond arm-in-arm, and Ruth with her hand in Nora’s pocket, and Florence and I bumping shoulders - gave a mutter, and a sneer.

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

  Other would-be martyrs cited the ekstasis of battle that gives life meaning and purpose, a feeling that is close to religious exaltation, as we have seen. In fact, it is said, the Hamas rank-and-file lived not for “politics, nor ideology, nor religion ... but rather an ecstatic camaraderie in the face of death ‘on the path of Allah.’ ” 94 Life under occupation held little attraction for many of the volunteers; their bleak life in Gaza’s refugee camps made the possibility of a blissful hereafter and a glorious reputation here on earth powerfully alluring. But then all communities throughout history have praised the warrior who gives his life for his people. Palestinians also honor those who are killed involuntarily in the conflict with Israel; they too are shahid, because as the ahadith made clear, any untimely death was a “witness” to both human finitude and the nation’s plight. 95 It further complicates the question of faith and terrorism that the suicide killer has been revered as a hero in other religious traditions as well. In the story of Samson, the judge who died pulling the Temple of Dagon down upon the Philistine chieftains, the biblical author does not agonize over his motives but simply celebrates his courage. 96 Samson “heroically hath finished a life heroic,” the devout Puritan John Milton likewise concluded in Samson Agonistes: 97 Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise or blame; nothing but well and fair, And what may quiet us in a death so noble. 98 Far from inspiring horror, Samson’s end left those who witnessed it with a sense of “peace and consolation ... and calm of mind, all passion spent.” 99 Not coincidentally, Israel calls its nuclear capacity “the Samson Option,” regarding a strike that would inevitably result in the destruction of the nation to be an honorable duty and a possibility that the Jewish state has freely chosen. 100 The anthropologist Talal Asad has suggested that the suicide bomber is simply acting out this same appalling scenario on a smaller scale and can therefore “be seen to belong to the modern Western tradition of armed conflict for the defense of the free political community. To save the tradition (or to found its state) in confronting a dangerous enemy, it may be necessary to act without being bound by ordinary moral constraints.” 101 We are absolutely right to condemn the suicide bomber’s targeting of innocent civilians and mourn his victims.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  As you approach eight years old, you play with the girls too. It’s no longer acceptable to play with boys all the time, your mother tells you. Or maybe you just understand by watching everyone else. You hate Barbie, but My Little Pony is alright. House is better. You like the sensuality of playing with girls. The way it feels to brush and braid each other’s hair. To giggle nonstop. The way it feels to make friendship bracelets and beaded jewelry. The way you can feel each strand, each bead against your tiny fingers. You can feel. You love the precision and concentration girls can engage in, creating entire role-play worlds together with nothing but some stuffed animals and the great outdoors. Your best friend and you dig a huge, deep hole just east of the kickball field. You work on it every day at recess, for weeks. You two have decided you are digging to Australia, not China, because it seems more accurately on the other side of the world. The hole gets filled up by the custodians one weekend, but you don’t care. You have found a friend who shares your secret desire: escape. You write love notes to your friends, give them cards and chocolates on Valentine’s Day. You love playing hand games at recess, relish the feeling of lungs full of song, punctuated by hand slapping. In your own way, you try to tell. Wonder if it’s happening to them too. Look sideways at everyone’s father during slumber parties. When you play house, you are the husband. You tell Leah you could make her pregnant so she can give birth to a Cabbage Patch doll, and she says okay. You tell her to lie down. You lie down too, with the soles of your feet touching the soles of Leah’s, heads pointing in opposite directions. You place your foot on top of her vagina and rub her through her clothes, just once or twice. “That’s where babies come from,” you say. She nods like she already knows. It doesn’t feel good or bad. Just factual. A reenactment. She passes the Cabbage Patch doll between her legs. You always understand exactly what is happening to you, even when you don’t know the words to tell. It’s hard to talk about pleasure when most of your life before leaving home at seventeen is a careful balancing act: hide the trauma, hide the truth, learn how to pass in the world as a “normal” kid, a kid who isn’t being tortured at home. Make your escape plan. Aim your compass at a distant destination: something called “college.” Act accordingly. Believe your father’s shame is your own. Act accordingly. Survive. Survive. Survive.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I calculate that the road trip from Arkansas to California is four days total if we don’t pee. Jie and Ba and Ma and I are going to do it in three. Four is a bad omen to begin on. Our new city is east of LA, where some cousin of a cousin of a cousin has promised Ma a job at a skirt factory. Ba will be a fry cook. When the river here gets thick in the middle, he fries us a pyre of riverfish, blackening the bones till they’re strands of our hair. After three years, we paid off our debts—half in labor, half in gold—to the missionaries who did our papers, who bought our plane tickets and rented us the house that’s so thick with mice we call them the carpet, who convinced the Sunday school to let Jie stay even after she began taking money with her mouth. She told me she was blowing boys in the woods, and for years I imagined she was blowing them up, shearing open their bellies and burying dynamite inside, necklaces of boymeat dangling from the trees. The Sunday school teacher called to tell Ma about Jie’s carnal appetite, but Ma misheard penis as peanuts and said no, Jie doesn’t have allergies. We pack in the dark, take the moon with us. Leave the frying pan with its bottom scarred like a palm. The doorknobs we sold for nickels. Take the bucket we used to shower with, threading water through one another’s bones, going to bed wet as newborns. Ma stewed riverfish in our leftover bathwater. We taste of what has touched us. Ma tells us not to take everything, as if we own more than these bodies. Ba spends the rest of the gold on a used car, domestic, painted the purple of a bruised knee. Jie drives, and the ghostboy who taught her is standing on our driveway the entire time we load up. He’s the same sand color all over, his hair matching his lips. The boy tries to kiss her goodbye, just like the pastor did, but Jie veers her face away and the kiss sprawls dead on her neck. The morning we leave, the sun sags in the sky like a scrotum. The car has a dent in the passenger door that looks human-shaped. Jie spends a whole minute petting the wheel like she’s taming it. Ma is shotgun. Ba and I sit in the backseat, windows down, suitcases trunked, a Spanish song on the radio that we all somehow know the chorus to.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  You try to sing along to the radio, but there’s only static on. Your brother once convinced you that static is an alien language spoken by the moonborn, so you listen as if it means something. You bob up and down in the backseat like a buoy. A warning: The water ahead will wreck me. Keep away. The only thing that keeps my hands on the wheel: If I don’t look at the city ahead, if I watch your face in the rearview mirror instead, I can pretend I’m driving toward you, you: the only home that owns me. Look-look, you say, you sing sweet as toothache: Here’s the city, the honeydew moon above it, waiting for us to bash it open and begin. DAUGHTERRabbit moon (II) [image file=image_rsrc1SC.jpg] When my brother propped his penis in his palm and peed out the door, wetting a mile of highway with rain, my mother said he must have the bladder of a horse. I asked how she knew about the anatomies of horses and she said she knew what it is to be ridden. We rode up the highway to a city of factories: concrete buildings converted into showrooms, the upper windows blacked out, headless mannequins haunting the sidewalks. We circled twice around Ama’s block. Hers was a house sitting on its haunches, afraid to stand all the way up. Its pelt of paint was perpetually wet, and all kinds of creatures got stuck to the sides of the house: squirrels, pigeons, a collage of flies. Our mother drove with her elbows while she smoked out the window, spitting into the cup holder. When she spoke of her father now, he was no longer our agong, just her ba, which meant he belonged to her and not to us. Our blood was borrowed. When we reached Ama’s driveway, the moon was not yet nailed in the sky. Ama always said the moon was the corpse of the sun, meaning every night is a funeral. During our week as nocturnal animals, my brother and I had trained our eyes to adjust to any density of dark, and now neither of us tripped on Ama’s root-risen driveway. Our mother didn’t ring the doorbell, which had been taped over. She pounded on the door. When no one answered, she told my brother to get the flashlight from the glove box. She went up to the front window, the flashlight flaccid-looking in her hands. Her arm coiled back. My brother grabbed her wrist, but the flashlight was already through the glass. We waited for the alarm, waited to run like she wasn’t our mother and the night didn’t know us, but there was no sound except for a neighbor’s dog, barking like we’d come just to kill it.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  The “hero” narrative associated with a “quest” borrows from the Bible. Galahad and Jesus have similar attributes and associations. The hero must be pure in heart. The hero must face temptations. The hero must discover what no one else can find. In the religious context of the Europeans, the quest becomes more and more the territory of the special person. Not just anyone can decide to go looking for the Holy Grail. Not just anyone can perform a true vision quest. Only people like Jesus or Galahad may be “good enough” to take this epic journey. I highlight this tendency in Western spirituality not as a definitive statement about the European experience in myth, but as a point of comparison to Native American concepts of a “quest.” Like Europeans, Native communities could interpret the quest as a specialized endeavor. Some nations understood it as a shamanic quest, although not with the same emphasis on the nobility of such a person. However, far more Native nations understood the quest to be something almost every person could pursue. This is significant because it changes the way we think about a “quest.” To capture the Native American understanding of a vision quest, it is necessary to let go of some of the European interpretations attached to that term. Even more importantly, unless we can separate Galahad and Jesus in our minds, we may miss the Native perspective on who Jesus was, what he experienced, and what he taught as a Native messiah. To understand the Native American concept of a sacred quest, we can pick up where the Western scholars have left off: from Gilgamesh to Frodo, the quest is the process, defined by every culture, by which human beings search for the holy. The object of that search may be God, or wisdom, or a Holy Grail. Each religious tradition sets the destination for those who believe, and each tradition creates a roadmap for how to get there. Some quests require physical endurance, some require mental concentration. Some can last for days, some for a lifetime. The definitions are as varied as the destinations. As the ancient idea of the quest spread around the world different communities developed their own understanding of not only how the quest should be undertaken, but who could attempt it. In some cultures the quest increasingly became the realm of religious specialists and the type of person who practiced the vision quest narrowed: sha-mans, mystics, saints, knights of valor. In Native America, however, the door remained much more open. Prior to 1492, the vision quest was a threshold accessible to millions of Native people. While there are variations on the theme of a quest in the many different traditions of Native America, there are some basic elements that are constant and appear over and over again. First, there is a time of preparation. The quest is intentional. It is a planned movement toward the sacred. Therefore, the person must be ready for this journey.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  After I fed Ama’s parable to the 口, its mouth unbuttoned. The hole hummed, spitting pebbles like teeth, and when I pressed my ear to it, I could hear static like a radio, punctuated by the sound of Dayi’s voice. Bits of words, none born whole. I wondered if this was her mouth now, if I had tuned in to the frequency of ghost speech. Beneath us there was a pipeline of voices, intersecting where we stood. Calling down into the hole, I told Dayi that I missed her, that sometimes I felt her fingers pinning words to my tongue, her breath guitaring the strands of my hair. In the morning, I found two letters flapping loose around the yard, spat out by the 口, and I chased them down, my tail perked for the hunt. Pinning them down with my feet, I took the letters home and soaked them in the bathroom sink. In the water, the words thrashed like fish, stilling only when I said them aloud.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Agong scoured our walls for salt, shucking away the plaster with his nails. When he found my mother’s salt bowl in a cabinet next to the sink, he pickled his palms in it. One night when he was asleep on the sofa, I spooned salt onto his face, his neck, his belly button. He shrilled with pain when I sprinkled his bed sores, each one as big and pink as a slice of baloney. In the morning, when my mother saw what I’d done, she propped him up in the yard and rinsed him off with the hose. I said salt would preserve him like jerky, drying his flesh to threads. But my mother said if I ever did that again she’d pickle my feet and feed them back to me. When he was my size, Agong sanded salt into blocks and shipped them down the river. He dreamed of tossing the blocks overboard, salting the river into a bloodstream. Agong was told not to taste the salt, but he licked every block when the crew was asleep, unable to resist their glow. As punishment for stealing, the merchants lashed both his hands until his skin ribboned off. This evening, I saw Agong crawling in the yard, hounding the soil for salt he’d buried, but the holes gave nothing back. The sofa cushions grew crowns of crystals. Salt icicles clung to the ceiling above his sleep. My mother shattered them with a broom and collected the saltcicles in buckets. We cooked with pinches of his powdered sweat. Sucking on saltshards, we preserved our mouths in the shape of his name. _ I tell Ben to bring me the letters. I live their translations, but she owns the originals. When she gets to my door, I pull her in and she licks me everywhere like a dog. My name is whatever she calls me. In the yard, I feed the letters one by one back into the 口, all the holes scabbing over before picking themselves open again, empty. Ben asks what I’m doing. I say I’m sending them back to Ama. I unfold a sixth sheet from my pocket, the letter creased so many times it’s tender with lines. A lace of holes where I’ve written the words and then erased them, inventing a language from friction: Dear Ama,

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Only my wrist heard her words, and in bed I tried to replay them, dialing my hand in the dark between my legs, waiting for her voice to come out of me. _ Weeks before his visa expired, my father decided to work a few years at a cousin’s slot machine factory in Jiangsu, where he’d examine and approve the machines before they were sent to Macau. My father had learned most of his English playing Texas Hold ’Em with college kids at the park after dark: Hit me. Raise. Stay. Stay. At night, he renamed all the constellations after card suits, pointing out a spade in the sky, a club, then a heart, telling us stories of his biggest wins. Money’s like the moon, he said. By morning they’re both gone. The night my father left for the airport, we ate a whole fried fish, a broth so thin it evaporated on our tongues before we could swallow, vegetables boiled translucent, ghostly. We ate with our elbows on the table and didn’t speak. We let our knives narrate. My mother caught crickets in the backyard and panfried them with sesame oil. Bent over the table, my father packed his stomach like a suitcase, folding pieces of pork in half before sealing them into his mouth. The fish was for good luck . He’d carry the luck in his body and shit out its bones in another country. When my mother ran out of dish soap, when she didn’t want to pay for water, she spat directly on the dishes. Erased his hunger from every plate. Packing for the mainland, my father folded his steam-ironed white shirts in symmetrical stacks. He took one of the fake-leather belts he wore and left the other one dangling on a hook in the closet, tame without his hands around it. He packed gifts for all his cousins, Band-Aids with cartoon characters printed on them, boxes of Cheerios, disposable dusters. My brother and I sat on his suitcase so he could jimmy the zipper, and the second before it shut, I saw a white sheet sliding out from between two shirts. It was a piece of paper with drawn-on eyes, a half-finished kite. When we drove him to the airport, I counted the hours his flight would take, calculated that he would land the hour I woke. I didn’t sleep that night, telling myself that as long as I never woke, he would never land: our father forever midflight. That night, flying my kite in the rain, I saw the paper shrivel into a fist before falling. From the sky, my father said we’d make a new one, a kite so large we could strap it to our backs and leave the country. I lost the kite that night, stayed out till morning to watch it reappear, as if light could undo any loss. It was years before I realized that kites were only puppetry and could only fake their flight.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  Covered up like a Biblical virgin, all Jackie O shades and glimmering veils and robes, she’s still somehow ripe with curves and supple secrets under the shapeless drapery. She moves between me and the burial ground and rasps, “Acaro,’ the first word she’s said out loud to me since that fateful day backstage two decades ago. Her voice seems abraded by incinerated bones, as brittle as the papery husk of dead moth’s wings. Nothing like her usual velvet butterfly voice. She mimes pulling a swollen acarid from her scalp and flicking it away. But she can’t get rid of me so easily. Such careless removal leaves the tick partly embedded and contaminates the host. Ticks require gasoline and fire. Only hellish conflagration removes us. I snap her: click. She grabs my camera. I don’t resist her. We’re never this close, and I smell her skin, though I’ve barely noticed the dank, whale breath smell of this Mexican town that the few off-season tourists gripe about. Fingers under their noses, they flee north, where the sand is infested with fleas, but they prefer bites to this unholy stench. Sucking waves lick at our feet, leaving green-tinged foam on the hissing sand. Seaweed litters the dingy shore in gnat-plagued The Strangler Fig 89 mounds. A crow-like bird caws on the sodden mass, a masticated- looking clump. Three turkey buzzards peck at a fish carcass — the fishermen here gut their dorado and huachinango immediately and dump the carrion on the sand. The buzzards pause to look up at her, then return to their grisly work. Their beaks click click click on dorsal bone. The smell of her overpowers the ocean brine and decomposing sea plants, the fetid jungle and mulching cemetery. But instead of wanting to pinch my nose, I yearn to chew her odor like cud. Beneath the yeast of her lurks a spice that tingles on the tongue. She pops open the catch and yanks out the film, then shoves it all back at me. Her fingers brush my hands. I’m never privileged to touch her. But Pve seen the goose bumps that rise on her lovers’ skin. Hers isn’t the warm maggot touch I would expect in this tropical germ whorehouse, but is the icy touch of a princess asleep for centuries on her crystal pallet. My sense of her is always only of sight. So today, with smell and touch, I’m satiated, as with the sex I only have with her photo collage and my own hand, a découpage tryst. “You shouldn’t have folléwed me here.” Her voice grates like a rusted lock. poe I don’t mind that she’s destroyed my morning’s work. It’s not like I could sell these photos of her looking like a war widow, unrecognizable in her weeds. I stuff the exposed negs into the darkness of my bag, where I'll save them for my experiments later.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Back in Arkansas we had no faucet, just a hose dangling from the side of the house. Not the kind of hose you know: bigger, bitten by field mice, holes too small for us to see. At night, Jie and I hosed each other down in the dark. Chased each other around the yard even though Ma said someone would see us naked and turn us to salt. But we ran anyway, circling each other until the sky turned over like a bowl and cupped us to the ground. The stars were dandruff and we brushed them off our shoulders. This is what Jie taught me, but please don’t ever learn it: It’s a trick where you hug the hose nozzle in your throat and shotgun the water straight into your belly without swallowing. She said that’s how the people here drink, without needing a mouth, without a way to stop. _ Deeper into my life, I meet a man who says he drove from Texas to LA by himself, back when he’d been in the country for a year and stole a car from outside a Cracker Barrel. He later drove back for his mother, but he couldn’t remember the route he first took, the one where he passed a casino with two stone dragons by the door. He’d won two hands of blackjack and spent it on his first room in the city: a floor above the butcher’s, a building between a church and the restaurant where Ba fried every genre of meat. When the man says he undressed me in the parking lot of a motel, I try to recall myself, the girl I prayed inside, the boy I mistook for an engine. I have no alibi for that night, no other body I could have been in. You know the man. I’m sorry for not saying he’s your father: I wanted you to meet him as I did. I knew his touch before his name. He marries me, but it’s Jie who’s been in my bed the longest: When we shared the mattress, I heard her saddle her wrists every night. Her breath belonging to the back of my neck. She moaned a moat around us both. On our honeymoon in the suburb south of our city, I see my husband’s face in the dark and remember. Jie and I once learned to sound the same. In Arkansas, we used to test Ma by walking to her bedside in the dark, asking, Who am I? Ma always guessed wrong, always named the absent one. We laughed and said she’d never learn to floss apart our voices, tell her daughters apart.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  While she slept that night, I stole something from her suitcase, which was just the same twined-up shepi bag she’d brought from the island. I took the book. I told myself it wasn’t stealing if the thing had already been stolen once. Two acts of thievery canceled out, became something more like salvaging. I still have it, that book. You should read it to me sometime, skipping all the words you think I don’t know. I won’t know them, but I’ll pretend to, shame you for thinking me stupid, and then you’ll be so sorry you’ll read the whole book to me all over again, redacting nothing. Maybe you can tell me what those two girls are doing in that field, what they’re watching for. If they’re waiting for something to arrive or to leave. Don’t tell me how it ends yet. Tell me that it doesn’t. The cover keeps changing every time I look at it, and now the field is frazzled with animals, mountain dogs and mice and a tiger tilling the field with its tail. Under the sofa, in that dark rind of space where the mice shit and breed and eat their babies, I slide out the book I stole from her, consider feeding it page by page to your holes, erasing those two girls from the field that’s waiting to be sown with their bones. But always, I keep it, something I know she misses, an absence like a field, growing until it surrounds you. Something I know she’ll return for. DAUGHTERBack to Ben [image file=image_rsrc1SC.jpg] The holes behaved like newborns, mouths open wide enough to swallow our hips, crying all night until the neighbors asked if we were running some kind of illegal orphanage, trafficking sound from the ground. My mother came out with a BB gun and shot them each in the mouth, but they spat the bullets back out and vacuumed the gun right out of her hands, inhaling her arms up to the elbows. My tail, too, was colicky, its stripes steel-bright with sweat. It flicked out in the night, upright between my knees. It was honing itself, rubbing against the whetstone of my bedroom wall. Only stilled when I promised to steer it like a spear, tell it who to stitch through.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  You should read it to me sometime, skipping all the words you think I don’t know. I won’t know them, but I’ll pretend to, shame you for thinking me stupid, and then you’ll be so sorry you’ll read the whole book to me all over again, redacting nothing. Maybe you can tell me what those two girls are doing in that field, what they’re watching for. If they’re waiting for something to arrive or to leave. Don’t tell me how it ends yet. Tell me that it doesn’t. The cover keeps changing every time I look at it, and now the field is frazzled with animals, mountain dogs and mice and a tiger tilling the field with its tail. Under the sofa, in that dark rind of space where the mice shit and breed and eat their babies, I slide out the book I stole from her, consider feeding it page by page to your holes, erasing those two girls from the field that’s waiting to be sown with their bones. But always, I keep it, something I know she misses, an absence like a field, growing until it surrounds you. Something I know she’ll return for. DAUGHTER Back to Ben The holes behaved like newborns, mouths open wide enough to swallow our hips, crying all night until the neighbors asked if we were running some kind of illegal orphanage, trafficking sound from the ground. My mother came out with a BB gun and shot them each in the mouth, but they spat the bullets back out and vacuumed the gun right out of her hands, inhaling her arms up to the elbows. My tail, too, was colicky, its stripes steel-bright with sweat. It flicked out in the night, upright between my knees. It was honing itself, rubbing against the whetstone of my bedroom wall. Only stilled when I promised to steer it like a spear, tell it who to stitch through. Your ama is baiting us, Ben said. She’s getting ready to bury someone. I said that the holes would tell me what to do, that they were already sirening, an orchestra of mouths warning me. The only time the holes were coherent was when Ben and I touched. When we kissed in front of them, they cinched their lips and listened, opening only to say yes, yes. While night erected itself around us like a tent, we sat cross- legged on the soil and its tapestry of worms. Ben laced her legs around my waist. Her mouth so close I could see the serrations of her teeth, sawing every sound in half so that I heard it twice: my name, my name. I leaned forward, flicked her upper lip with my bottom one. We met inside our mouths. I found the seam under her tongue and undid it. With my hands around her, I felt her spine through her shirt, a ladder to thirst.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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. Work that wrung all the water from his body. I came second, a daughter shaped like floodwater, and by then he was coming home late every day, shimmying off his sweat, watering the carpet until it grew past my ankles. I ducked under the kitchen table, fleeing the radius of his rain, trimming the carpet down with a pair of eyebrow scissors. When he left the room to shower for hours, spending so long in the bathroom I wondered if he’d become water and gone down the drain too, I crawled where he’d rained all over the floor, touching my tongue to his sweat, divining where his body had been based on taste. He’d been at the beach, I told my brother, and he’d kidnapped all the salt from the sea, holding it hostage here. After work, my father irrigated our apartment building’s shared courtyard, scooping trenches too straight to be veins. When it rains, he said, the water won’t flood. It’ll be outsourced. I asked him how he knew where the water had to go, and he pointed at a pack of bushes with finger-shaped flowers. Water follows want, he said. If the body is really mostly water, I asked, then how come it can burn? My father said something about parts and sums: how water is a part and the body is the sum, but I didn’t want to do the math and ran back inside.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  I have determined to reply simply and without ambiguity, and I judge that I owe that work to God and the Church, nor at the age to which I have arrived, do I fear either exile or other dangers." On August 23 of the same year, Calvin expressed his gratification with this answer and wrote: "I entreat you to discharge, as soon as you can, the debt which you acknowledge you owe to God and the Church." He adds with undue severity: "If this warning, like a cock crowing rather late and out of season, do not awaken you, all will cry out with justice that you are a sluggard. Farewell, most distinguished sir, whom I venerate from the heart." In another letter of Aug. 3, 1557, he complains of the silence of three years and apologizes for the severity of his last letter, but urges him again to come out, like a man, and to refute the charge of slavish timidity. "I do not think," he says, "you need to be reminded by many words, how necessary it is for you to hasten to wipe out this blot from your character." He proposes that Melanchthon should induce the Lutheran princes to convene a peaceful conference of both parties at Strassburg, or Tübingen, or Heidelberg, or Frankfurt, and attend the conference in person with some pious, upright, and moderate men. "If you class me," he concludes, "in the number of such men, no necessity, however pressing, will prevent me from putting up this as my chief vow, that before the Lord gather us into his heavenly kingdom I may yet be permitted to enjoy on earth, a most delightful interview with you, and feel some alleviation of my grief by deploring along with you the evils which we cannot remedy." In his last extant letter to Melanchthon, dated Nov. 19, 1558, Calvin alludes once more to the eucharistic controversy, but in a very gentle spirit, assuring him that he will never allow anything to alienate his mind "from that holy friendship and respect which I have vowed to you .... Whatever may happen, let us cultivate with sincerity a fraternal affection towards each other, the ties of which no wiles of Satan shall ever burst asunder."

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Why hide such a pretty face?” Cecily found this hilarious, or at least pretended to. She laughed with the desperate air of someone who didn’t want the conversation to turn uninteresting lest you leave her alone with no one to talk to. Yale spotted Gloria, Charlie’s reporter with all the earrings, and waved her over. “Gloria went to Northwestern,” he said, and the two women started talking, and within a minute Yale and Julian were making their escape. “Bathroom,” Julian whispered right behind Yale’s ear, and it didn’t sound like such a bad idea. There was a lot of beer in his bladder. The bathroom was empty. Julian, instead of heading into one of the two stalls, splashed water on his face and then stood there as if he expected to chat. He twisted his forelock. When Julian went bald someday, he’d have to find something else to do with his hands. Yale said, “That woman is not exactly my boss, but she’s not not my boss.” “She didn’t seem so bad.” Part of Julian’s beauty was the way he looked at you. If you stared at the ground, you’d find that Julian had ducked down and was catching your eye from below, as if to pull you back up again. He would rub his fingers along his own ear and blush at you, and that was oddly beautiful as well. Yale headed into a stall. No urinals here, thankfully. Julian’s voice: “Have you ever seen a snake dancer?” “A charmer? With a basket?” “No. Usually they’re women, like belly dancers, but they let a python crawl all over them when they’re dancing. Anyway, Club Baths is bringing in a guy, like this bodybuilder guy, who does snake dancing.” Yale laughed as he zipped his fly. “What could possibly go wrong?” “You’re no fun!” “Sorry. That’s probably the safest thing going on there.” Yale came out and washed his hands. Julian looked in the mirror. “You wouldn’t mind if they all closed.” “Honestly, Julian—yeah, I think it might be for the best. For a while. I don’t blame them for everything the way some people do, but they sure as hell haven’t helped. And it’s not about shame or regression or anything else. It’s just, like, if there were a salmonella outbreak at a restaurant, you wouldn’t keep eating there, right?” Julian shook his head. He didn’t seem inclined to leave the bathroom. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about. I’ve heard more condom propaganda there than anywhere else. You’re just parroting Charlie.” “Charlie’s right about some stuff.” “But Yale. After they cure this thing, there won’t be any place left to go.”

• 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. _ Whenever Dayi fell asleep, my brother and I played our game: Whoever could fit the largest thing in her nostril without waking her was the winner. The first time, we shimmied a bobby pin into her nose before she snorted awake, oinking.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I was the woman choosing between sides, between side-wounds: Ama and my mother, related by blade. I filmed the back of my mother’s head jutting into the frame, her commentary when the love interest committed suicide ( I never liked that actress because she has my eyes ), the oil on her hands like sunlight. I wanted to set them on fire, to turn her hands into light-bouquets and capture the smoke onscreen. My mother said, You’ll never be able to sell any of that, and I said I didn’t want to sell her. There was a scene near the end where my mother turned her head to look back at the camera, her face outliving the screen behind her, brighter. She held herself still as if posing for a photo. Behind her, credits ribboning down the black like names of the dead, cueing us to continue. I rewatched the footage later and saw that all the actors were blurred or out of frame, no storyline salvageable. Everything off-focus except my mother’s face, the light speaking what I can’t subtitle, clarifying for the audience: She’s the only one I’ve been watching. _ After I fed Ama’s parable to the 口 , its mouth unbuttoned. The hole hummed, spitting pebbles like teeth, and when I pressed my ear to it, I could hear static like a radio, punctuated by the sound of Dayi’s voice. Bits of words, none born whole. I wondered if this was her mouth now, if I had tuned in to the frequency of ghost speech. Beneath us there was a pipeline of voices, intersecting where we stood. Calling down into the hole, I told Dayi that I missed her, that sometimes I felt her fingers pinning words to my tongue, her breath guitaring the strands of my hair. In the morning, I found two letters flapping loose around the yard, spat out by the 口 , and I chased them down, my tail perked for the hunt. Pinning them down with my feet, I took the letters home and soaked them in the bathroom sink. In the water, the words thrashed like fish, stilling only when I said them aloud. *1 Ok, what Ama really said here was foreigner, but I think we know she really means white person, white devil, gwailo, baigui, etc. Substitute your own culturally appropriate term here. *2 See the irony yet? *3 Ama really said once a month, but I thought moon would sound more old-timey. *4 Ama used a slur here—I prefer not to write it. *5 What is Ama trying to say about my father? *6 More on this soon! *7 I don’t know what an ordinary hog looks like, so please feel free to imagine this for me. *8 Is this a “that’s what he said” joke? Good one, Ama. *9 I wish I hadn’t just learned the Mandarin word for semen, but here we go. And yes, this story is being told in Mandarin.