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.

Page 64 of 170 · 20 per page

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  He faced the house, closed his eyes, and he put his hand on the rolled-up cuff of Asher’s shirt. He wanted to bathe in it for five seconds, the future he might be having if it weren’t for everything. He’d have broken up with Charlie, sure, and Charlie would be coked up in some downtown condo by now, and Yale would have this house, and he and Asher would be together. He was sure. Asher would be lighting the grill in the backyard. Fiona and Nico and Terrence were on their way over for dinner. Julian was hanging out on the porch with a drink, fresh from rehearsal. Asher said, “Are you okay?” Yale opened his eyes and nodded. — They walked east to right below Belmont Harbor, and then they walked through the park on the path. They talked about Richard, whose solo show was coming up that summer at a gallery in the Loop. “Who ever thought Richard would get an actual show?” Asher said. “I thought it was all an excuse to meet models.” They talked about where in New York Asher would live (Chelsea) and when he was leaving (two weeks) and how often he’d get back to Chicago (occasionally, mostly for work). They talked about Yale’s rib, about the stupid bottle of Imodium that had broken it, about how he didn’t care and he’d do it all again. Yale told him about Bill leaving the most important artist out of Nico’s great- aunt’s show, the guy she loved her whole life. “It was the whole point,” Yale said. “It was the point of everything.” Asher told him he shouldn’t be the one holding power of attorney for Yale anymore. “You need someone who can be at the hospital right away. If I’m in New York, I can’t make decisions for you. You should ask Fiona. I’ll draw up the papers.” Yale might have protested that it took just as long to drive from Madison as to fly from New York, and he might have said he couldn’t bear to do that to her, but Asher was right. And there was no one else left, no one he trusted as much. “She’ll be done with college by the time you get sick. You have a lot more time.” Yale said, “I used to worry about Reagan pressing the button, you know? And asteroids, all that. And then I had this realization. If you had to choose when, in the timeline of the earth, you got to live—wouldn’t you choose the end? You haven’t missed anything, then. You die in 1920, you miss rock and roll. You die in 1600, you miss Mozart.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Real flight involved no leashes or strings. Birds did not come with girls tied to them, girls reeling them down, girls the opposite of the sky. My father called from the mainland every week with nothing to say. When we picked up, he was twelve hours ahead in the day, answering from our future. We pulled the phone toward our mother, yanking the spiral cord straight. My father’s roommate—another cousin whose name we didn’t know—sometimes talked to us instead. He complained that my father never spoke, that silence had shrunk his throat to the width of a string. This worried my mother, but comforted me: It meant I could reel him back to me. I knotted the phone cord around my wrist, tugged his voice taut like a kite-string, but I couldn’t pull him back into the sky I could see. _ Meng Jiang Nu grew at the rate of a tree and could be fed only soil, silt, water, insecticide in the form of vinegar. The two families took turns watering her, but she never grew more than an inch per year. By the time she was a girl, her mothers and fathers were dead. She outlived the second generation of the family, then the third, each generation leaving a written set of instructions for the care of the gourd girl: Keep her buried waist-deep in soil at all times. Turn her face to the sun. Stimulate her roots by stroking them. Water her. Prune her hair twice a week. If you see moss on her skin, beat it off with a broom. Meng Jiang Nu was planted in a trench dug between the Meng and Jiang courtyards. Her body was hollow, and the neighborhood boys liked to sneak onto the estate. They carved her a pair of earholes and shouted into them, heard their own names echo back. They dared one another to cut her down, bring her home, plant themselves in her body. In Jiangsu, my mother said, where my ba was born, there were daughtertrees. When a daughter was born, every family planted a camphor tree outside their home. Its branches grew parallel to her bones. Sometimes the tree grew scales down its trunk and sprouted a single jellied eye, like a fish, and sometimes the tree had a mouth in the center of the trunk, where birds were born, except these birds had no feathers, just skin, flightless as fists. When the matchmaker walked by your house and saw that the tree had grown to the width of a waist, she knew it was time for your daughter to be married away. The daughtertree was cut down, chiseled into trunks to carry her clothes and bedding. When my mother was born, Agong tried planting a camphor tree outside the military village where they lived, but the soil there was incestuous with the sea and too salty.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  At night, I consulted the cookie tin in the closet, my ears magnetized to the toes rattling inside. The toes were butting over territory, acting like they belonged to enemy bodies. I knocked on the lid with my fist and they fired out, bulleting through the lid. One of them flew in and out of my mouth, threading my spit, teasing my teeth to bite it. Before my father came home, my mother spent her nights with me. We watched episodes of Desperate Housewives on the sofa that rose like a loaf of bread when it met our body heat. I dubbed the dialogue in Chinese and my mother spat five-spice peanuts at all the blondes onscreen. I asked her which of the wives she’d want to marry and she said Gaby: She wore cheetah-print, meaning she must be related to Hu Gu Po. A shared history of hunger. At night, my dreams collaged the plots of Desperate Housewives and Hu Gu Po: In this one, Gaby and her landscaper make love in the master bedroom while Gaby’s husband is away at work. But the landscaper’s penis grows a crown of canine teeth when he’s inside her, his palms serrating into paws. Gaby hemorrhages and dies. The landscaper tries to swallow his paws, but it’s too late. Her husband comes home and discovers a tiger pacing his master bedroom, trying to nudge the window open with its muzzle. On the floor is his wife, a lawn mower circling her body, scalping away the carpet. When I recounted this dream to my mother, she deleted every recorded episode. We’d liked Gaby because she was the only wife with our hair. She had the biggest closet, bigger than our bedroom. There was a crack in the TV screen letting the light out of every scene, striping the image onscreen, queering her face into mine. I wanted to surf Gaby’s skin with my tongue, stroke her sweat until it lifted from her skin, wings of crystallized salt. Instead, I licked the screen when her face came on, tasted my blood on her teeth. _ I knew a story: In some dynasty, when a father was sick, a daughter cut a piece of her own thigh to stir-fry and feed back to her father. Some daughters even donated their knees. Gegu: to cure what came before you. My father pinched the meat above my knee and said: If I was ever sick, would you give me this? He said he’d need that piece of me. It was the second day he was home and we were in the kitchen. My father spent hours filling the sink and then draining it, scribbling his name on the surface. I told him the water would never remember it. He stepped back, palming his rib cage, pretending to cough out his own fist.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  *1 MISTRANSLATION? —BEN*2 ???????????????????????????? —BENMOTHERRabbit moon (I) [image file=image_rsrc1SC.jpg] Three stories, then you can live. The first: We are born stone. Papakwaka is our mountain, the nipple-peak we are weaned from. A rock cracks itself against the side of the mountain and spills two yolks, one brother and one sister. They are the only animals on the island, and the girl gets lonely. She asks her brother to marry her so she can birth a family. She invents trees to be her bridesmaids. The brother refuses to marry his own sister, so the sister solicits him as a stranger, her face foreign with smeared ash. We owe our bodies to that betrayal. We are conceived from deceit. The second: Back on the island, Ba told me the moon was pregnant with a rabbit. You and your brother are obsessed with animal births. On the Animal Planet channel, you watch shows about animals that fuck outside of their species and give birth to babies that look like neither parent, that look more like unassembled pieces, bloodied and without a blueprint. Before you were born, I had dreams of giving birth to your head before the rest of your body. I thought I’d have to sew you together with floss, puzzle your bones back together. I understand animals that eat their runts. Better to swallow them back into your body than let them be taken, buried outside of you. You spend hours frying your eyes on a screen, sucking on suanmei and spitting the pits, impressed by 2-D animals that are 3-D where I’m born. The forest is lit by eyes, you say to the TV, which would be poetic if you weren’t wrong. That’s not a forest. It’s a jungle. You wouldn’t know the difference: A forest is a kind of growth. A jungle is hunger, a desire to dethrone light. Its only lineage is rain. Forests grow upward, fingers to the sun. Jungles grow sideways, outward, downward, whatever direction is the opposite of death. I used to think our island floated on the sea like leaves, but nothing named a country is light enough. I say our island even though you were never with me: You’re here, watching bald-assed monkeys masturbate on TV. After the program on big cats, you and your brother decide to live nocturnally. Your brother’s learned at school that the sun is due to burn out someday, so we might as well live the darkness fully. We’re just pregaming the apocalypse, your brother says, lidding our windows with butcher paper. I’ve always wanted you to dodge the sun. Your brother is the light one, coin-bright, and you’re the rust clung to his side.

• From The Art of Memoir

  Strangely, readers “believe” what’s rendered with physical clarity. I once had a reader say, “I knew when you put in that old can of Babbo cleanser you were telling the God’s honest truth.” A guy I played a kissing game with in junior high was stunned that thirty years later, I evoked his red shirt with a tiny sea horse embroidered on front. “You’re some kinda witch if you remember that,” he said. Again, in instants of hyperarousal, focus narrows; sense memories from these states may sometimes stay brighter in recollection than others. Anybody juiced on adrenaline and the stress hormone cortisol—not unlike Angelou being scared in front of the church—registers sense impressions more intensely than in more typical time. Going back to the aforementioned kissing game, I can still distinctly feel myself inside the curved arms of the boy I’d so long had a crush on. Almost forty years later, I can still smell his Juicy Fruit gum. I put my hands up, almost to protect myself from standing too close, and my fingertips had the sea-horse outline imprinted on them. Of course, physical details, however convincing, actually prove zip in terms of truth. Surely I misremember all kinds of stuff. Maybe the boy I kissed was chewing Bazooka Joe or Dubble Bubble, say. But I think in this case the specific memory—even if wrong—is permissible, because readers understand the flaws of memory and allow for them. Noncarnal people may have to stretch to become memorable describers. We all start off sketching a character lightly—hair and eyes and weight like a driver’s license—and a less thoughtful writer may fail to sully the page with that person’s physical presence again, as if such a generic memory blurt makes an eternal impression. (As a kid, I was so revved up and anxious and hyper-vigilant that I studied people as if with a magnifying glass. Stimuli others barely register can still come across very loud to me.) A haunting sense of place should ripple off any good memoir once the cover’s closed, and you may reopen the front again as you would a gate to another land. Anybody with crisp recall can get half decent at describing stuff with practice. Hilary Mantel explains her own confidence in her memories as growing from their vivid

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  So, while the Women’s Cooperative Guild made it their cause to unionise the home-workers of East London, I made it mine to fatten up Florence, with breakfasts and lunches, with sandwich teas, with dinners and suppers and biscuits and milk. I had not much success with this, to start with - for, though I took to haunting the meat stalls of the Whitechapel Market, buying faggots and sausages, rabbits and tripe, and bagfuls of those scraps of flesh we had used to call, in Whitstable, ‘bits and ears’, I was really rather an indifferent cook, and was as liable to burn the meat, or leave it bloody, as make it savoury; Florence and Ralph did not notice, I think, because they were used to nothing better. But then, one day at the end of August, I saw that the oyster season had started up, and I bought a barrel of natives and an oyster knife; and as I put the blade to the hinge, it was as if I turned a key which unlocked all my mother’s oyster-parlour recipes, and sent them flooding to my finger-ends. I dished up an oyster-pie - and Florence put aside the paper she was writing on, to eat it, then picked at the crust that was left in the bowl, with her fork. The next night I served oyster-fritters, the next night oyster-soup. I made grilled oysters, and pickled oysters; and oysters rolled in flour and stewed in cream.When I passed a plate of this last dish to Florence, she smiled; and when she had tasted it, she sighed. She took a piece of bread-and-butter, and folded it to mop the sauce with; and the bread left cream upon her lips, that she licked at with her tongue, then wiped with her fingers. I remembered another time, in another parlour, when I had served another girl an oyster-supper, and accidentally wooed her; and as I was thinking of this, Florence lifted a spoonful of fish, and sighed again.‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I really think, that if there were one dish, and one dish only, that had to be served in paradise, that dish would be oysters - don’t you think so, Nance?’She had never called me ‘Nance’ before; and I had never, in all the months that I had lived with her then, known her say anything so fanciful.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  In her house there was only her. When we’d pulled away, I’d looked through the back windshield, holding Agong’s head in my lap like a fruit I couldn’t figure out how to fit in my mouth. Ama watched me from the dark of her doorway, her knees blurring into each other. Her mouth was pitted from her face, a hole where she once had a name. She welded her left hand to the doorframe, held the dark open for us to exit through. The night was the same throat-dark as the inside of her house, and leaving felt like being swallowed, like symmetry: The farther we drove, the lower down we lived in her throat. We didn’t know if she was waiting for us to leave or to come back, only that she stood there longer than I looked, that the road startled like skin when we backed onto it. Even after we left, I found her face in a palm tree, a run-over dog, cows scabbing over a field, the dark bracketing our car, my mother in the rearview mirror, teething on her tongue to keep herself awake, one hand hooking out the window. Her fingers undoing the button of the moon. With my sleeve, I dabbed at the window like a wound, tried to wipe away Ama’s resemblance to the night. She let us go because years ago she’d tried to sever herself from her daughters, and not even the river could cut through them. She let us go, knowing she was with us in the car and in our yard, a fishline threaded through our spines. When I was home, I walked between my yard-holes, knowing Ama was on the other end of them. I fed my hands to the 口, imagined that Ama was doing the same on her end, our hands touching halfway between her city and mine, knotting at the wrist-root. This was the only way we could see each other, with our hands alone: without our full bodies to hurt each other, without words to want from each other. In the holes, a reforested dark. In a month, a tree would grow from the 口, a subterranean sapling just beginning to breach ground, touch night. The tree would have bark thick as buckles, a hollow trunk. It would grow to her height, dress in her shadow, a tree narrating her absence. In a month, when the tree braided out of the hole, born from no seed but my hands, I would water it. * Fact: The Nationalists confiscated my grandmother’s land a second time. Watakushi, she said again and again. It is mine. It is mine. She claims her land in a language that’s not hers. She lines up her Is like a fence: IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII. The I doesn’t indicate a presence but an absence, the place where a body has been redacted from the sentence.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ah Zheng didn’t know much about pain: He had never lost a tooth or bled or been sore from saddling waves. Some said he was clear-blooded like a fish, and that was why no one could ever tell if he was wounded. But Ah Zheng knew pleasure. So he stood behind Old Guang, close enough to bite his shoulder, and held Old Guang’s penis in one hand, moving in a rhythm that mimicked the ship. Old Guang ejaculated into the sea. The relief came like a blade. Ah Zheng tucked Old Guang back into bed, and they slept in the shape of spears until morning. In the morning, the whole top deck of the ship was coated in crabs. Crabs of every color and size sequined the ship, filling it a foot deep. The first man to step out on the deck had gotten his big toe pinched off, and his shouts woke the whole ship. When Old Guang climbed up from the captain’s cabin, the crabs parted for him. He stepped onto the deck and crabs scrambled away, clearing a path. Old Guang repelled the crabs like magnets, all except one: the biggest of them all, the only crab that was an ordinary orange. It was the size of an infant, so fat its legs trembled. Old Guang reached out to touch it, and it immediately collapsed and retracted its legs, dead. All the other crabs had collapsed too. The other pirates were frightened: Did they follow us here? Where were they all hiding? They kicked each crab back into the sea—thousands of them—too terrified to think of eating the meat. Meanwhile, Old Guang kept the body of the big orange crab, which was already starting to smell of decay. Ah Zheng humored him, but reminded Old Guang that eating the crab could make him sick. Old Guang nodded, but secretly he disagreed. He recognized the crab. In dying, the crab had spoken its name.*12 Back on land, his wife and children had gotten an omen of their own: The evening before my grandfather returned home after years of piracy, it rained. The rain was rancid and full of guts, liquefied fish. The next morning, while everything was still damp and smeared, Old Guang arrived at our door, stained to the knees with mud. He didn’t speak for weeks, and he had brought nothing with him: no boat, no brother, no cutlass or evidence of his piracy. Nothing but a silk pouch, dark with blood, and inside it, a spoiled crab. The meatiest crab his wife had ever seen. The only thing he said to her, before resuming another week of silence, was Cook it for me on a full moon night. She obeyed. She could do nothing else: Old Guang would not eat or speak or come to bed.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  At the end of the meal, Duck Uncle said he’d been waiting to surprise us. I made an investment, he said. He signaled for the waiter, who nodded and walked back into the kitchen. Four waiters wheeled out a fish tank. The tank was at least as tall as me, the water a dyed-blue that was almost opaque. There was nothing inside the tank except for a floating red ribbon, flickering. A dragonfish, my mother said, and when I leaned closer to the glass I saw that it was a fish, that the ribbon spooled and unspooled on its own, an eye sewn on like a bead. It costs 10,000 dollars, Duck Uncle said, but I got it for half that. I’d heard of dragonfish in big hotels on the mainland, where my father had gone. They were smuggled out of rivers. The shinier their scales, the more luck it would deliver its owner. The dragonfish was the length of my arm, whipping from one end of the tank to the other. After Duck Uncle went bankrupt in the recession, he returned the fish tank. He bagged the dragonfish and took it home, releasing it into his toilet. Said he’d flush it back out to the sea, but we knew the salt would kill it. My brother and I scooped it out of his toilet with a bucket and slid it into our filled kitchen sink, watching it try to lasso itself. Let’s sell it for 10,000 dollars, my brother said. My mother said the fish was a fake. She’d known it wasn’t real the moment the light hit it: The scales were painted on, probably with nail polish. She butchered it the night he left, scraping the shell of pigment from its skin, and then we could see its real scales underneath, a color like smog. The night before Duck Uncle left, we saw my mother straddling the stump of the eucalyptus tree she’d felled in his yard. She said the stars were fish. But they’re not moving, we said. Because they want to be caught, my mother said. She raised her hook-finger to the sky and we waited all night for it to lure something. Near morning, a plane came to unzip the dark. It flew low, tailing light. It’s on fire, I said, and thought of Duck Uncle inside it. If we slit open the plane’s belly like a fish, he would spill out all shiny and scarfed in guts. I thought it was unfair that she was the only one being the bait, so I stuck my tongue out at the sky and wriggled it like a worm, luring all the lost.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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. The first time I saw him install a water hose, I asked him what he was holding and he said a snake just to scare me. At school, when the teacher told us the snake was temptation and Eve was evil, I thought of my father cradling that green hose, feeding bushes that weren’t his, shucking petals off a flower and licking them like stamps to press onto my cheeks. When he turned the hose on, water sprang from its mouth and that was a miracle. I remember him whipping my brother with that hose, its metal mouth striking between my brother’s rolled- back eyes. I remember him saying, I’m sorry, but this is the only way you’ll grow. _ My mother got a job at a company that manufactured photocopiers. In the mornings, she drove west to a building so tall it sanded the sky smooth. All day, she sat at a desk and answered customer calls with an accent. The only reason you haven’t been fired is because you’re a minority, said the woman from marketing. When they promoted her to receptionist, my mother had official access to the black-and-white photocopier, where she made copies of handwritten notices to be circulated around the office: Please refrain from using air fresheners. Please refrain from bringing food with nuts or shellfish into the communal kitchen. Please do not flush menstrual products down the toilet. Menstrual, which she spelled minstrel.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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. Most about revenge: stories the boy who grows his foot back twice as large & clawed & your father never made love to the shadow-girl tried once but the girl was cave rock it hurt to enter her one week a rockslide down the mountain he crawled toward the cave saw its mouth gated by boulders he tackled each stone by the time light broke in morning & no one inside when he spoke her name what he thought was her name: his echo never noticed that before. He danced his shadows along the walls she never answered his hands with her own: When your father told me this story I revised the ending one day the shadow-girl waiting with an oil lamp. She threw it at the entrance to enter the cave he must walk through burn the body that brought him to me when your father met me he shadowed me for days heeled like a bitch broke an umbrella in my fist I said make me a new one he folded it from newspaper oiled so the water leapt off it handle carved from the body of his warpistol he kissed me beneath my skin wasn’t even raining the sun a bullet through us both * WHAT IF YOUR TAIL IS SOME KIND OF REGROWN UMBILICAL CORD? WHAT IF YOU’RE BEING FED THROUGH IT? I KNOW CORDS DON’T USUALLY GROW OUT OF THE ASS, BUT IF I WERE AN UMBILICAL CORD, I’D WANT TO COME BACK AND AVENGE BEING CUT. WHAT ARE UMBILICAL CORDS FOR, ANYWAY? THEY HYPHENATE TWO BODIES. DO YOU SPEAK THROUGH IT LIKE A TELEPHONE CORD? DOES IT CARRY MEMORY FROM THE MOTHER TO THE BABY? —BENGRANDMOTHERLetter [ ]: In which I am the driver [image file=image_rsrc1SC.jpg] Dear [ ] daughter, Jiejie, girl I gave to this country,

• From Bestiary (2020)

  On Sundays, there were tent-sermons and cheese sandwiches. There were buckets of lemonade and the American missionaries’ children, named for the shade they became in the sun: The tallest son was Terracotta, the twins were called Blood, the little blonde girl was Rosewater. Of all the missionary children, Terracotta most resembled his color and went sparrow hunting with Dayi and her cousins, even brought along his own pocket of stones. Dayi and Terracotta shucked off the tail feathers, tore off wings that wore no meat, and grilled the torsos on abandoned sections of chicken wire heated by the sun. Cooked on wire, the sparrows’ meat blackened in a grid pattern, but it tasted better that way: They could pretend they were eating something bred in captivity, something caged to collect fat. Dayi and Terracotta could pretend they shared a word for hunger. Once, he kissed her. They were waist-deep in a river, snakes perming around their ankles. Terracotta taught her to skip stones, but Dayi preferred throwing them in deep, watching the snakes scatter in rings. She liked the way things sank. When he kissed her in the middle of the river, she thought of Jesus walking on water, the river cooling to glass around their bodies. Along the banks, black reeds fringed the water like eyelashes, thick and blinking in the wind. He bent her against the mudbank, buttoned his mouth to her breast. He pinned her by the palms like Jesus, but the holes in her appeared elsewhere. She thought of taking off her gloves, turning him the color of gunshot. She thought: If this is not divinity, then it must be death. After that night by the river, Dayi checked her belly hourly, tapping it like a melon, not sure what she was listening for. The rest of that summer, Terracotta spent more hours with his father in the churchyard, building birdhouses everyone thought were bird traps. When the priests realized the locals had been stealing eggs and hatchlings from the nests and eating them, they dismantled each house. Terracotta grew two feet in one summer. In another year, he would grow a beard. 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. _

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Jie and I climb the trees and pretend to be monkeys, swinging to steal the neighbor’s apricots like we’re Sun Wukong thieving a peach of immortality from the garden of gods. He was punished for this, but we can’t remember what the punishment was, so we swallow our apricots whole and without mercy. We shit the pits out, and they rattle the pipes of our toilet when we flush. Ma can’t stand us dirty when we come in from the yard, but she’s the kind who calls the sky a stain, who tries to bleach a bruise. Two months ago the church people got a toilet installed for us. When we first used it, we squatted on top with our feet on the seat. It was Jie who told us we were doing it wrong: Our asses were supposed to go inside the halo. Don’t laugh—there was a time you didn’t know how to do this either, when I told you that the toilet is an ear that the sea hears through, and even now I sometimes see you with your head inside the bowl, conversing with another country. _ A boy at the Old Colonial Diner teaches Jie how to make a metal detector out of a radio, a broomstick, cardboard, copper wire. I won’t tell you all the details, in case you try to build one yourself. In return for the lesson, Jie lets him finger her in the back of the diner. Jie washes dishes at the sink while he stands behind, three of his fingers spidering around inside her. His nails snag on her pubic hair and she hisses, twists the faucet hotter, scalds off her calluses. We use the metal detector in the yard behind the house to search for the gold. Jie holds the broomstick and I hold the radio. The copper wire wraps around both ends of the broomstick and the radio is taped to one end, the hair-clump of extra wire dragging on the ground like a tail. Jie switches the radio to AM and the morning news sounds like someone getting strangled, all static, a sound like the sea muffled inside our mouths.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ben told me about the weather in which she was fermented: I was conceived during a sandstorm, she said. In Ningxia where she was born, sand formed a pelt over the sky and no one could see for months. They wore wet scarves around their mouths and the sand flayed away their front teeth, their eyelashes. I asked her how she’d known who was who, and Ben answered by closing her eyes and reaching out both arms. We walk like this. She kneaded my cheek, inventing dimples. Her touch could name me better than language. I wanted to say I understood about the sand in her belly: There was also a hunger in me that was more than a body’s. Do you think we’ll get sick, I said, from touching those feathers? In the beginning of the year, when the TV repeated warnings of the Asian bird flu, the teachers had shown up to school wearing face masks with whirring fans. There are so many of you here, we don’t want to get sick. Species could share diseases, they told us, and SARS came from bats and other winged things. When birds and people get too close, they said, one of them gets sick. Ben said she was immune to the bird flu. Her grandmother had died from it and she had been exposed, which meant I was exposed now too. She said I could run away if I wanted to, but instead I stayed and asked her what the symptoms were. It began slow, she told me: First you grew feathers out of your armpits. It would be itchy. Then your lips protruded into a beak and you would only be able to eat sand, seeds, and fingernails. The last symptom was flight. It was safer for your close family members to release you where there was only sky, no telephone wires to get electrocuted on, no windows to mistake for mothers. At a crosswalk, I looked at her before the lights changed. Ben wore her FOB dot on the upper right arm, a vaccine scar the size and shape of my thumbprint. The scar opaled her skin, changing shades depending on the time of day, the season, and where she stood in relation to light. My mother had one too, on her left arm, and I liked the way it puckered like a nipple when it was cold. My mother’s FOB dot was lake-shaped, waiting to be entered. I wanted one too, wanted to dig the scar out of Ben’s arm and swallow its pearl.

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

  “I have no right to complain, I suppose,” she said. “I have a scholarship, a flat. I don’t know what I would be doing if I was still in Kenya. Still, I don’t care for Germany so much. You know, the Germans like to think of themselves as very liberal when it comes to Africans, but if you scratch the surface you see they still have the attitudes of their childhood. In German fairy tales, black people are always the goblins. Such things one doesn’t forget so easily. Sometimes I try to imagine what it must have been like for the Old Man, leaving home for the first time. Whether he felt that same loneliness …” The Old Man. That’s what Auma called our father. It sounded right to me, somehow, at once familiar and distant, an elemental force that isn’t fully understood. In my apartment, Auma held up the picture of him that sat on my bookshelf, a studio portrait that my mother had saved. “He looks so innocent, doesn’t he? So young.” She held the picture next to my face. “You have the same mouth.” I told her she should lie down and get some rest while I went to my office for a few hours of work. She shook her head. “I’m not tired. Let me go with you.” “You’ll feel better if you take a nap.” She said, “Agh, Barack! I see you’re bossy like the Old Man as well. And you only met him once? It must be in the blood.” I laughed, but she didn’t; instead, her eyes wandered over my face as if it were a puzzle to solve, another piece to a problem that, beneath the exuberant chatter, nagged at her heart. I gave her a tour of the South Side that afternoon, the same drive I had taken in my first days in Chicago, only with some of my own memories now. When we stopped by my office, Angela, Mona, and Shirley happened to be there. They asked Auma all about Kenya and how she braided her hair and how come she talked so pretty, like the queen of England, and the four of them enjoyed themselves thoroughly talking about me and all my strange habits. “They seem very fond of you,” Auma said afterward. “They remind me of our aunties back home.” She rolled down the window and stuck her face into the wind, watching Michigan Avenue pass by: the gutted remains of the old Roseland Theatre, a garage full of rusted cars. “Are you doing this for them, Barack?” she asked, turning back to me. “This organizing business, I mean?” I shrugged. “For them. For me.” That same expression of puzzlement, and fear, returned to Auma’s face. “I don’t like politics much,” she said. “Why’s that?” “I don’t know. People always end up disappointed.”

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My last night living in that house, I took the bag of cabbage out of the refrigerator and slept with my body cleaved to it, cradling its cold. I slipped it under the belly of my nightgown and kissed it, imagined it was growing inside me into you, my not-yet daughter, my slaughter. _ This isn’t the story I promised you. I know. My toes were a toll I paid for this body. You think they were thieved by Hu Gu Po, the tiger who inhabits us like our own bones. Sometimes I want to pluck the rest of my toes like grapes, suck the sweet from their skins. Jie once said I’d better keep my toes and be buried whole or I won’t be allowed into the afterlife, but I don’t believe bodies are born as wholes. We aren’t born anything but holes, throats and anuses and pores: ways of being entered and left. Here’s a lesson about light. In your language, they say life is extinguished. But that assumes our bodies are made of light, and light is always limited. We are sacks of dark, and the dark resists direction, resists capture: When I open the tin where I keep my toes, the dark doesn’t leave in a beam. Light can be measured and spent, a number printed on the backs of lightbulb boxes, but the dark has no quantity. I measure it in memories, in myths. You and I beneath the sheets, your feet feathering in my mouth, flocking out by morning. _ I’m fifteen, a daughter, all knees. First summer in Arkansas and a storm steals leaves off the trees. Arkansas looks like our island, same rain, air so thick we can spoon it into our mouths. We need names here. We try to find them in other things, in the trees, in electric fences, in cow patties coined by our feet. The summer we arrive to the farms, the chickens lay eggs the size of pearls. Everyone needs something new to blame: The rain like diarrhea, brown and sizzling. The unspiced sky, the river too arthritic to bend, the paved roads cracking like lips. The new chinks in town with their bowlegged daughters. What you know: We work first at the chicken farm, scraping shit off the walls with a pallet knife, beheading snakes with rakes. The soil’s made of snakes, so many snakes we eat snake meat for months before the church folk find out and bring us cans of luncheon loaf, boneless bricks of pink. Ma doesn’t trust meat without bones, without organs. All meat in America comes from some species of animal that doesn’t shit or speak or eat. Must be people-meat, Jie says.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  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. One night, when I/Jie went to her bedside and asked who I/she was, Ma took out her fist from under the pillow and punched me/her in the throat, that tender cage where our thirsts perch. She said, You sound different in pain. It’s true: Jie wails like some wounded animal. I go silent, as if the wound is an ear that will eavesdrop on me.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  It would be this way through the rest of college, and then when Claire moved to another city—Fiona always knew she would—and visited twice a year. But at Christmastime she announced she’d be spending the summer in Colorado. She came home for a week in June and then Fiona drove her to O’Hare, and when Fiona started getting out of the car to circle around and hug her, Claire said, “They’ll start honking.” And she quickly kissed her mother’s cheek. And that was it. That was all. The girl shook her head. “I mean, she looks a little like Valeria.” The guy said, “Is she Czech?” Fiona said no, told them she had a little girl. The guy said, “Let me get Kate. She knows all the kids that come in.” And then this Kate was standing there, tall and British, peering at the photograph. Kate said, “I couldn’t say for sure.” “She’s older now,” Fiona said. “She looks like that actress from American Hustle.” There was a man waiting behind them to buy a stack of paperbacks, and so they stepped away, further into the store. Serge took the photo, held it by the edges. “She must miss you.” Fiona didn’t know how to answer that. Serge said, “You’ll stay for Richard’s show, okay? His friends mean so much to him.” “I’ll try.” “No, no, promise!” Serge smiled, a smile so suddenly dazzling that it must have let him waltz through his entire life making demands like that. “I think I’ll have overstayed my welcome by that point.” “So we kick you out and get you a hotel! Promise.” “Okay,” Fiona said, “I promise.” She wasn’t sure she meant it, but it didn’t hurt to say. Another nine days away from the resale shop was too long, but in nine days she’d either have found Claire or would still be looking—and could she go home in either case? Before they left, Fiona grabbed an English book of Paris history just so she wouldn’t walk out empty-handed, the staff feeling sad for her. The mustachioed bookseller was ranting to a customer about American DVD players. Something about the frames per second. “Americans don’t even care!” he said. “That’s why I moved to Paris.” He threw his hands in the air. Fiona stopped herself from laughing. It couldn’t be true, could it? That someone would uproot as easily as that? Everyone she’d ever known to leave America had done it for solid reasons: job, romance, politics. To study, like Nora. Claire and Kurt had fled the reach of the Hosanna Collective—although she’d considered the possibility that Claire was running from her, from some perceived childhood trauma. But what if it was nothing more than a lark? First the commune, then Paris, next a sheep farm in Bulgaria? What if Fiona had simply failed, as distracted as she was in those early years of Claire’s life, to tether her daughter tightly enough to the world? The guy looked at the price.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My father called from the mainland every week with nothing to say. When we picked up, he was twelve hours ahead in the day, answering from our future. We pulled the phone toward our mother, yanking the spiral cord straight. My father’s roommate—another cousin whose name we didn’t know—sometimes talked to us instead. He complained that my father never spoke, that silence had shrunk his throat to the width of a string. This worried my mother, but comforted me: It meant I could reel him back to me. I knotted the phone cord around my wrist, tugged his voice taut like a kite-string, but I couldn’t pull him back into the sky I could see. _ Meng Jiang Nu grew at the rate of a tree and could be fed only soil, silt, water, insecticide in the form of vinegar. The two families took turns watering her, but she never grew more than an inch per year. By the time she was a girl, her mothers and fathers were dead. She outlived the second generation of the family, then the third, each generation leaving a written set of instructions for the care of the gourd girl: Keep her buried waist-deep in soil at all times. Turn her face to the sun. Stimulate her roots by stroking them. Water her. Prune her hair twice a week. If you see moss on her skin, beat it off with a broom. Meng Jiang Nu was planted in a trench dug between the Meng and Jiang courtyards. Her body was hollow, and the neighborhood boys liked to sneak onto the estate. They carved her a pair of earholes and shouted into them, heard their own names echo back. They dared one another to cut her down, bring her home, plant themselves in her body.