Gods of Want Read online

  Copyright © 2022 by K-Ming Chang

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  One World and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The following stories were originally published in different form: “Mandarin Speakers” in DREGINALD, “The Chorus of Dead Cousins” in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, “Meals for Mourners” in Nashville Review, “Eating Pussy” and “Homophone” in New Delta Review, “Auntland” in Sine Theta Magazine, “Dykes” in Sinister Wisdom, and “Nine-Headed Birds” in VIDA Review.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Chang, K-Ming, author.

  Title: Gods of want : stories / by K-Ming Chang.

  Description: New York : One World, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021019321 (print) | LCCN 2021019322 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593241585 (hardcover ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780593241592 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3603.H35733 G63 2022 (print) | LCC PS3603.H35733 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021019321

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021019322

  Ebook ISBN 9780593241592

  oneworldlit.com

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Grace Han

  Cover art: Pictures from History/Bridgeman Images

  ep_prh_6.0_140374771_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Mothers

  Auntland

  The Chorus of Dead Cousins

  Xífù

  Mandarin Speakers

  Anchor

  The La-La Store

  Myths

  Nüwa

  Eating Pussy

  Nine-Headed Birds

  Dykes

  Episodes of Hoarders

  Homophone

  Moths

  Resident Aliens

  Virginia Slims

  Mariela

  Meals for Mourners

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By K-Ming Chang

  About the Author

  MOTHERS

  Auntland

  I had an aunt who went to the dentist and asked to get her tongue pulled. We only do teeth, the dentist said, but did it anyway. She took her tongue home in a jar and flushed it down the toilet and years later a fisherman in Half Moon Bay made the evening news, waving my aunt’s tongue like a flag at the end of his pole. The police are still looking for the body it belonged to. I had an aunt who worked at the Oriental Buffet and stole us a live crab, which my other aunt boiled alive, and when I tried to crack the legs with my teeth the way they did, one of my molars fractured into five and my other aunt, not that other aunt but this other other aunt, spent the rest of the night tweezing tooth-shrapnel out of my gums. I had an aunt who told me not to get braces because it would set off the metal detector at airports and trigger the German shepherds to run out and tackle me and the agents would confiscate my teeth and replace them with rubber bullets and interrogate my mouth with their tongues. I had an aunt who took me to Great America while my mother was at an immigration interview. This aunt refused to get on a roller coaster even though that’s what we paid for. When I told her to get on, she said, The only time I’ll get off the ground is if I’m on an airplane or become an angel. And I told her she’d never become an angel because I saw her kiss a woman that time we were at Walmart buying four-ply toilet paper for my mother, who was in the throes of stress diarrhea, induced partially by her upcoming immigration interview and partially because I told her the officers would test if she was truly American by feeding her strawberry soft serve and timing her digestion. I said that’s why it’s called passing a test—because they catch what passes out of your body. If it’s liquid, they don’t let you into the country. So my mother went out and bought two half-gallons of Breyers vanilla to train her body to convert milk into bone and not brown silk. Anyway, my aunt locked me in the parked car, which I said was illegal in America—you can’t even lock dogs in the car—and she walked up to the woman who had been following us while we shopped, a woman I’d recognized from the temple where we prayed to save my grandfather’s polygamist soul, and kissed her. Kissed her so hard, my own lips shriveled like salted slugs. I had an aunt who gave me the lingerie catalog because there were coupons printed in it, though none of us would ever wear underwear with jewels or lace, because jewels and lace need to be worn on the outside so that everyone knows you can afford them. I cut the bottom halves off the women for no reason. At school we watched an Oprah interview where a white woman tells Oprah how she stopped her attacker: by peeing on him. I had an aunt who peed on me one time we shared a mattress. She’d been in the country five months and when I woke up she was trying to shroud the stain with a towel. She said she’d dreamed of being back on the island, peeing onto the roots of a camphor tree that didn’t grow unless it was given water directly from a body. I imagined I was that tree: I grew because my aunts were watering me. I had an aunt who cut my hair for years, until she got early-onset something, some disease named after a man, and then she went around cutting people’s earlobes on purpose, sneaking up behind them with her scissors and shearing off the tips like bits of shrubbery, and for years every time I sensed something behind me, a pigeon or the gym teacher or rain, I assumed it was her. I covered my ears in my sleep, could never hear in my dreams. I had an aunt who swathed cellophane candy wrappers around the heads of flashlights and shined the beams onto my ceiling before I fell asleep, telling me it was the northern lights, and when I asked her what even caused the northern lights, she said it was the sky having bad breath. The sky spitting its stars like teeth. When night is the color of all my aunts letting down their hair, I remember I have another aunt who got all her teeth bashed in on a bus. She doesn’t remember the man who did it, just woke up at the end of the line with the bus driver slapping her awake, telling her she better learn some English, so she did. I had an aunt who said chewing orchid petals is the only sure form of birth control. I had another aunt who said dying is the only sure form of birth control. I had an aunt who wanted to name her daughter Dog because that’s what Americans love most of all, dogs, and how many movies are there about American dogs that must find their way home to their families? And how many of those dogs die, percentage-wise? And can’t a name give her the odds she’ll need? I had an aunt who saw me kiss a girl in the booth of a Burger King and said, I knew it. I knew you were supposed to be born a son. I had an aunt who pulled me out of my mother by a jellied ankle and said, Of course she’s born backward, everyone in this family is. I had an aunt whose baby died in its sleep so soundlessly, she didn’t believe in its death. She dressed it, rocked it, petted its head, not letting us take the body away, until one night we tricked her, replacing the baby with a Costco frozen baked potato. She mothered the potato instead, wrapped it in a blanket, pretended it was safe in the custody of her touch. I had an aunt who died in a drunk-driving accident, in a sober-driving accident, in a suicide, in a typhoon, in the middle of the day while blow-drying her hair, in the evening while opening a window, in the morning while hiking to the family grave, in an attempt to get away from her husband, in an attempt to get away from her father, in an
attempt to leave the country, in an attempt to get into another one, in an attempt to get her nose done, in an attempt to love a son, in an attempt to outrun a river, in an attempt to reincarnate as rain. I had an aunt who cracked an egg on my forehead when I made fun of her accent. I had an aunt who did my hair before school every morning, marinating my braid in egg yolk and butter, saying I’d smell like an American. I had an aunt who wiped her ass with her birth certificate and another one who failed her immigration test because she named Colonel Sanders as a founding father. I had an aunt who made sausage out of wild squirrels she shot in her yard, and when I said those squirrels probably had diseases, she held me to the chair until I ate every link. I had an aunt who stood outside the bathroom and listened to me shit, saying she could divine the shape of my future based on how my shit fell: whether it sank right away, whether it floated like petals or sang in the water or became a fish. I had an aunt who never married and told me men are magpies: They want anything that shines. What shines: blood, a bruise like an eye patch, a lake, salt, a window, dew, sweat on a girl’s collarbone, my aunts pledging allegiance to the moon. I had an aunt who massaged my elbows when I cried and said the heart is a hinge, to live it must bend. I had an aunt who said I should carry a rock in my palm until it’s the same temperature as my body, and then I should talk to the rock as if she is inside it. She says we should all learn to listen through other skins. I had an aunt who said home is the temperature of an armpit. I had an aunt who never let me turn on the heat, because if we don’t pay for the sun’s light or warmth we shouldn’t pay for heat or electricity, so she tucked my hands under her armpits and pretended she was a hen and I was the egg, swaddled in wings, swimming inside a shell of light, waiting to break to birth to sing.

  The Chorus of Dead Cousins

  I warned my wife about them. They volunteered as our bridesmaids and came dressed in nets, fishhooks in their eyes, alive. They glued thorns into all the flower arrangements and stepped on my wife’s dress until it tore, baring her ass, and then they used the veil to run around outside and catch hairy moths in its gauze. They knotted my tie into a noose and hung it from the church ceiling like a chandelier, but I didn’t know how to kick them out once they were there. They brought gifts, fistfuls of worms and a downed telephone pole. They ate the cake and told us it was dry and asphalt-like. They farted in the minister’s face and shattered a stained-glass window depicting a nativity scene and said it was our fault Mary was beheaded and baby Jesus was crushed into an anthill of sand. They stole the cutlery, and I later found all the salad forks stabbed into the trees along the street, sap rusting on the trunks. When the ceremony moved outside, some of them attempted to straddle clouds and deliver a speech, but then it started to rain, a rain that fell thick as unpinned hair, tangling everywhere.

  My wife said she’d never known I had so many dead family members, that when I’d mentioned my cousins she’d thought I meant a few, and I said you should see how many are still living. My mother always used to joke: In this family, it’s one in the ground and a dozen more dangling from the trees, waiting to be plucked. It’s one buried and a hundred more begging to be born.

  It was only a week after the wedding that my wife threatened to leave me, claiming that the chorus of dead cousins was straining her sleep, dicing her dreams fine with their fingers like pocketknives. It was true they were intrusive, carving out our windows and replacing them with panes of molten sugar that the raccoons came to lick at night, waking us with the drumbeat of their tongues. It was true that they liked to get into bed with us, six of their bodies sardined between us, and that most of my cousins kicked under the sheets as if trying to surface from sleep. We woke with black shins and rubber ribs. Sometimes I woke up with my lungs hung upside down in my chest, and my cousins were in the closet laughing as I tried to breathe while doing a headstand. But still, I told my wife, they were family, they didn’t have bodies to go back to, and so she let me keep kitty-litter boxes in the corner of the room so they wouldn’t wet our bed, and she let me teach them how to change our lightbulbs so at least they were helpful: Because they could ascend and descend at will, it was easy for them to reach the ceiling.

  For a while I thought I had finally tamed them, and though they occasionally chased the mailman or tore out our plumbing, unrolling a flood as proudly as a flag, they knew not to do anything truly deranged, like removing their entrails and playing lasso-the-cowboy with them, or trying to flush one another down the toilet, or plucking daddy longlegs off our walls and training them to wrestle each other. I was proud of their restraint and of how well they dressed in death, sewing their own skirts from grass clippings and stolen curtains, and at least now they were odorless and clean, not like when they were living and smelled like gasoline and wet knives and lotto scratchers.

  Then one day my wife got up and looked in the mirror and saw that one of the dead cousins had swapped all her teeth for the red-dyed shells of melon seeds. Okay, I said finally, I’ll get rid of them.

  We need an exterminator, my wife said, but all the ones I called were men who said they didn’t deal with what was already dead. I explained that I didn’t need them killed, I just needed them to go on vacation for a little while, to stalk another surname for a month or two, to reincarnate maybe. My call was cut off when the chorus of dead cousins severed the phone service by becoming brooms of wind, sweeping out all the telephone lines on our street.

  That night in bed, with the chorus of dead cousins dog-curled at our feet, my wife said what we needed was an evacuation. She was always speaking in the vocabulary of storms, of evacuations and casualties and degrees of damage. She had the spine of a storm too: There was a stillness to her center, but her limbs churned the air, choreographing wreckage wherever she went. At night I liked to wake up and watch her wrestle with her own skin, snaking all over the bed, navigating the night into her mouth and eating it.

  My wife is a professional storm chaser. When we met, there was a card pinned to her sleeve that said Severe-Weather Photographer. I told her that was a white-woman thing to do, chasing storms on purpose. We were in the lobby of a dentist’s office and she was thumbing through a copy of National Geographic, an issue on the Tornado Alley of the Midwest, and without asking my name she turned to me and showed me the page with her photograph printed on it.

  My photograph didn’t make the cover, she said, but they paid me eighty bucks. I looked down at the page, her wrists a silver frame. The photograph was a full page, and splayed across it was a tornado like a ringlet of black hair, almost too intentionally arranged. It tapered down to the width of a single hair, and at the base of it, in the distance, was a thumbprint-sized town. The tornado was either leaving it or heading toward it, but it was impossible to tell which, and already it seemed implausible that anyone had ever been born there, born in a city that could be distilled into a disaster.

  I looked away from the woman’s hands, the fluorescence of that photograph. I didn’t remember seeing a sky in it, but there had to be a sky for there to be a storm: There had to be an origin for ruin. I was suddenly jealous of that tornado, the way it tangoed on the page, the way her hand ran down its length like a spine. The photo was taken from the perspective of someone who loved it, and I wanted to be captured that way, to be chased from my body.

  Have you ever been near something like this? she asked. A typhoon, I told her, when I was little in Taiwan and all my cousins were still living. My ama was perpetually breathless and lived with only one lung, and my agong was a former soldier who slept with his gun, until one night we heard it go off in his mouth. My mother sent me to the island when I was four so she could stay in California and make money. She said she would send for me in a year, but the years bred like cicadas and outnumbered my memories, and by the time I was ten I no longer remembered her face and had to look at my own in the water of the well and circle the parts of me that were hers.

  The year my mother sent for me, with no more mo
ney than when she sent me away, one of my cousins jumped into the well and had to be pulled out by her hair the next morning. She was in training to be a hairdresser, and she liked to use me as practice, clamping my head between her knees until I cried. Always, when she released me, I was a new species, my hair sculpted into antlers or siphoned into braids or cut short as a boy’s, which made my ama cry but seduced me into spending weeks looking down at myself in the well, wanting to jump just to get closer to that girl in the water.

  The typhoons came in herds every summer, but there was only one I remembered, the one that had my name. It was August and the bulls were being manufactured into oxen. The cousins did this by tying the bull’s balls together and using a meat mallet to mash them. This was the only way to tame them. I knew how to plug my ears with mud so that I wouldn’t hear the moaning of those bulls. When the typhoon came, it rained hands, little hands and big hands, soft hands and callused hands, and the sea’s waves were hands too, woman-hands that plucked the roof off Ama’s house and reached in and confiscated her, tucking her into the back pocket of the sky.

  That’s not a typhoon, the woman in the waiting room said, that’s a tsunami. I told her she hadn’t heard the point of the story. There was something about that tornado photograph that made me offer my losses, and I thought she might bare hers too. But instead she looked down at her lap—for a photographer, she had surprising difficulty looking directly at anything—and said, I bet I’ve captured every kind of disaster. She bent her head, baring her nape. I thought of the way mother cats carried their kittens by biting their napes and swinging them around, and I wanted to know what my teeth would do to that tender estate.