Bestiary Read online

  Jie finds and adds two more bullets to our metal shitpile. We’ve never seen the gold ourselves, and neither of us says it, but we know there is nothing here. The radio’s still tuned in to the soil’s soprano, the static louder where we’ve dug up nothing but the dark. Jie throws down the broomstick, stomps on it with both feet. It breaks easy as bone. I hope there’s really nothing to find, Jie says, though I disagree. I think it’s better to have something to lose, even if the gold’s now archived with the bones and the bullets. But Jie says the gold is better off buried, womb-safe, our lives spent waiting for its birth. Jie and I rebury everything we find. It feels like we’ve disturbed a cemetery, rifling through lives that aren’t ours to remember. I keep the blank dog tag and promise to carve it a name worth carrying home.

  * * *

  _

  We find Ba in the bedroom, bellydown on the mattress, his face so glossed with spit he looks candied. While he’s asleep, Jie says, we should detect for metals in his body. Maybe the gold is still buried inside him. Maybe he forgot to shit it out after he got off the boat. I hover the broomstick over his belly and hands and head and hips and feet. I remember the first time he showed us the shrapnel. His back embroidered with bits of bullets, some of them showing, most of them shelled in his skin. We tapped on them in his sleep to test if they hurt, but he never stirred. He was scaled into some hybrid species, armored against Ma.

  When I wave the broomstick, scanning him from head to ass and back up again, Ba’s whole body sings. Wires smoking, the radio rides every note, high and low, transcribing the bullets under his skin into a song he wakes to. He opens his eyes and the shrapnel magnetizes, lifts him to our hands. I think about bringing the broomstick down on Ba’s body, beating him soft as peach meat, parsing through his bird-shy bones to find whatever gold is still bobbing in his belly. But there’s nothing inside him we can spend, not unless grief is a currency.

  * * *

  _

  Ma’s started throwing things out the window, searching for the gold inside our home. We remove all the windowpanes so she can’t keep beating them with her fists, bruising the sky behind them. Now the rain doesn’t know to keep out. Floods are so sudden we never know if it’s coming from inside or outside our bodies, if it’s raining or if we’re wetting ourselves.

  The one thing Ma never throws is the three-legged card table in the kitchen, set up with a single photo of my half-sisters still on the island, plus a handkerchief with a bloodstain aged brunette and a piece of white jade the size of my thumb. I thought it was an altar, but Jie says altars are for the dead, and the sisters are as alive as the flies that feast on our boogers when we sleep. One of them might be married now, or at least pregnant. One is still being raised by my aunts. You’ve never met your great-aunts because they die faster than I can remember their names: A typhoon tore out the oldest one’s legs, so she had to be piggybacked all day, and your youngest great-aunt picked chilies until her hands wore the seeds and singed the skin of everyone she touched.

  In the photo on the card table, Ma is pregnant with Jie and holding two babies like they’re grenades with the pins pulled out. She’s waiting for this picture to be taken so she can throw them far out of frame. There’s a third girl in a white dress standing in front of her. The photo’s too water-wrinkled to see any of their faces, and the oldest girl is out of focus, a streak like a tree. Ma never acknowledges the photo or the table, which makes their presence even more a punishment. Once, at dinnertime, Jie asks what their names are. Ma locks her out of the house that night, and in the morning, Jie is curled like a stray on our doormat, one arm jammed through the mail slot like she’s been trying to fold herself into a paper daughter.

  Ma stands at the not-altar, holding the handkerchief in her left fist and the jade in her right. There is no god we know better than her fist. Ma never looks at the photo. She turns to the kitchen window and watches the mosquitos fatten into moons, light salting all the lines on her face. She prays to the sisters whose names I don’t know. Her prayers robbed of a god.

  Jie and I were born thieves. Born to orphan our sisters by birthing our mother into this country. You don’t know about gold, about grieving what you could have owned. Your grandmother’s grief has grown its own body. She raises it like another child, one she loves better than me and my sister, one that can never leave her.

  Today she complains she’s married to a manhole, a shaft for memories to fall down, a man who can see only the sky above him. But Ba’s smarter than she knows. The one time we got robbed, the thieves didn’t know to dig. Couldn’t find anything worth taking. Only our door was missing. We were sure they took something else from the house, but we didn’t know what to look for. How to search for an absence.

  When Ma stews the apricots we steal, she never asks where we get them. She knows nothing belongs to us, and that’s why she won’t let us sit on chairs until she wraps them in cheesecloth or scrubs off our skin. We can’t put pictures on the walls, if we had any, or fully unpack—she still thinks we’ll have to give everything back. Jie’s mouth is still magnetized to the word sister, but outside of her dreams she’s stopped asking for names. Jie goes to church and her English has gotten so good she’s started reading aloud the billboards outside our house. One of them is the phone number of a divorce lawyer. One is for bail bonds. One is for a casino, which tempts Ba until Ma throws her quilt basket at him, tells him to sit down or she’ll snip his balls off and sew them to his earlobes. Jie and I can’t stop imagining Ba wearing his balls like earrings, and we laugh until we piss, the stains in our laps symmetrical.

  * * *

  _

  We dig beneath so many trees we’ve given them nicknames: The one with the bent knees. The one that sways like a drunk. The one with a woman’s hips. The gold is under none of them. It’s the earthquake that finally wounds a way to the gold: I sleep through it, but Jie claims it felt like the whole earth was operating on itself, scraping back its own skin, rearranging its organs.

  On our porch, one of the floorboards splits open and shakes off its scab of moss. Light spits from it and we flock to the crack like moths. Underneath the porch is a finger of gold, bedazzled with flies and reclined on a sheet of butcher paper. Ma dances on the kitchen table for a whole hour, her feet forgoing gravity. She stacks the gold on the not-altar, directly to the left of the photo so flat and dull in its frame. The gold is too exposed, like looking directly at someone’s bones. We are all looking at it now, the gold and the photo, our eyes alternating between the glow and its shadow, the payment and the cost.

  DAUGHTER

  Hu Gu Po (I)

  California, a generation later

  Mothers ago, there was a tiger spirit who wanted to live inside a woman. One night when the moon was as brown as a nipple, the tiger spirit braided itself into a rope of light and lowered itself into a woman’s mouth, rappeling down her throat and taking the name of Hu Gu Po. But the price of having a body is hunger. Hu Gu Po could remain a tenant in the woman’s body as long as she hunted. When she smelled the sweat-seasoned toes of children, her belly hardened into a beetle of need and scuttled out of her throat, a scout in search of salt. Craving their toes, she climbed into the children’s bedrooms at night. With her teeth, she unscrewed the toes of sleeping daughters and sucked the knuckles clean of meat, renaming them peanuts.

  Every morning, Hu Gu Po walked through the market and appraised the fish dragged in from the river, their bodies like oiled opals. A fisherman’s wife, smelling something that scarred the air with its smoke, turned to Hu Gu Po and asked what she was eating.

  Peanuts, Hu Gu Po said, shucking nut-bones with her teeth.

  The fisherman’s wife asked if Hu Gu Po might be willing to share.

  Hu Gu Po laughed. How much would you pay for one?

  The fisherman’s wife named a price.

  Slipping the skin off another nut, Hu Gu Po said, That’s not enough fo
r me to make a living. She laughed, her black braid unraveling to ash, charring the air.

  The next morning, every child in the village woke with a toe subtracted from each foot. On each of their pillows was a five-cent coin, rusted dark as a blood spot.

  The fisherman’s wife had no children, but when she heard what had happened, she remembered the woman in the market cleaving peanut shells with her teeth. When she opened her door, there was a skin pouch lying in her doorway. She slit open the pouch and it spilled dozens of toes, deboned and dusted with salt.

  * * *

  _

  My mother lifted the bedsheet over us both when she told me this story, crouching down over my feet, grasping them in her fists, and ferrying them to her mouth. My toes squirmed like minnows in her maw, swimming against the current of her spit. In the dark, I watched the geography of her face rearranging: the mountain range of moles on her forehead, the hook of her lip lowering when she fished up a story. She let go of my feet when I begged her not to eat them, but one night she concluded the story by biting down on my big toe. Her teeth encircled it like a tiara, resting on the skin rather than breaking it, but I could feel her trembling, her jaw reined back by something I couldn’t see. In the morning, my toe wore a ringlet of white where the blood didn’t return again for months.

  Some nights, I woke to my mother’s finger foraging around in my ear, nicking out the earwax with her hooked pinky nail. She liked to joke she was digging for gold. She lifted the canoe of her pinky nail, loaded with my grit, and brought it to her mouth. I yanked at her wrist and said, No, no, no no no. But she ate it anyway, laughing when I said it was gross. I used to eat my earwax when I was hungry, she said. My ears were always so clean. That’s why I can hear everything. My mother said if I let the earwax live inside me, it would eventually grow beetle legs and scuttle into my brain, nesting there like shrapnel. She said she was saving me by eating my ear canals clean, allowing the sun to tunnel into my skull and keep all my memories lit.

  * * *

  _

  In the bedroom I shared with my brother, our mother told us stories about Arkansas/the rain, her sister/my aunt, her ma/my ama, her ba/my agong. How my grandfather buried two gold bars that an earthquake gave back, and how they spent the gold to get to LA. I was born from breakage: My mother left Ama and Agong in LA and moved six hours north, planting my brother and me in soil unsalted by memories. She summarized her life in slashes, everything a choice: Leave/Stay. Mother/Daughter. Love/Live.

  She told me the history of her hands: Her first job was working in a chicken barn with her Jiejie. There were no windows, and the chicks were born with their eyes blank as buttonholes. No need to see, no light to learn by. It was her job to rake up the sawdust every week and add a new layer. Sawdust doesn’t settle: It got into her eyes and her ears and her nostrils and her anus. Her shits were sugared with sawdust and she bled to pass them. It even sanded down the walls of her womb, and that’s why it hurt to birth me. My mother said the sawdust had nowhere to go but into her body. When she raked the floors, it rose around her like ash. Like being awake for your own cremation. She kicked at the hens until her sister said it would break all the eggs inside them and they’d never lay another one whole.

  One time my mother kicked a board out of the barn wall so the sawdust could find its way out. One of the eyeless hens escaped through the slot and fled to the woods, and she lied and said a raccoon tore a board off the barn.

  I told my ma it didn’t matter how many hens ran away, she said. I said we could bury all the eggs and the birds would grow back. Later that summer, my mother and her sister saw the missing hen rising out of the woods, flossing through the trees as it flew, clearing over the roof of the barn. My mother said she always suspected chickens were pretending they couldn’t fly, their wings tucked away like weapons. She said the escaped hen must have fucked a red-tailed hawk and founded its own species. She saw the hen-hawks pecking at the feet of trees, fringing the forest behind the house, shaggy and big as dogs. She saw a whole flock of them take down a snake, pin it to the soil. I thought only gods could create new species, I said. Then we must have been gods, she said. I imagined her hen flying above California, glossed like a plane and pregnant, looking for a place to lay us.

  My mother said hens ate their own eggs if they were left alone with them too long. I used to wake when the sky was still a shut eyelid, she said. If she out-slept the sun, there were no eggs left to collect. My mother opened her mouth, guided my fingers so deep down her throat I felt the hilt of a feather and plucked it out. She coughed as I cleaned off its scabbard of spit. I asked her what it did. All voices have wings, she said, that’s how they travel. I told her this was a regular chicken feather, flightless, but she said it’s easy to assimilate into the air. You just have to believe your bones hollow, no marrow no mother no memory.

  * * *

  _

  My mother always wore white socks with throats of lace, and when I asked her why, she said, My feet are hibernating. When I asked my brother, he said she probably had fish fins instead of feet, and to find out we snipped a hole through her socks while she was sleeping. We slit her socks along the sole, parting them to show the stone pads of her feet. On her left foot, the three littlest toes were gone. No wound, no scars or sign of stitching, just stumps with rings like a tree. Sleeves of space where three toes might have grown up, been given names. My brother and I ran back to bed and hid the scissors under our mattress. In the morning, our mother was wearing a new pair of socks.

  Where did they go? we asked, and our mother refused to answer. I asked if she’d been preyed on by Hu Gu Po and she said not everything was a story. Weeks later, we found an assortment cookie tin behind the other cookie tin that held my birth certificate and her sewing kit, both of them in the pantry where our mother kept inedible things: blankets, batteries, retired knives, a titanium baseball bat. There was a cartoon bear indented into the lid of the tin, and the blue paint had been battered off.

  Inside it were hardened rings of ash and in the center, brown stones. At first we thought they were chrysalises of some kind, bark-covered tubes rattling as if something inside were trying to hatch. But there were nails still growing from them, caramelizing in the tin’s body heat.

  We had found her toes. They hummed as if they owned our hearts, and we thought there was still a chance they could be sewn back on. When we showed her, she said, I don’t want them back. My brother and I held a ceremony to bury the toes, even writing a eulogy: Here lie the toes of our mother. May the soil eat them and shit them out as beautiful trees that smell like our feet.

  When our mother found out, she whipped us with a wet sock and asked us to show her the spot, watching us dig them back up. Untrimmed for a week, the toenails had grown six inches long, enamel swords with worms pierced alive on them. She returned the toes to the cookie tin, neutered their nails with a file, and taped the tin shut, saying she would need them later. When I asked her what she needed them for, she said all losses have lifetimes, always longer than we think, and her toes would someday find another source of blood, a new mouth to metabolize them.

  DAUGHTER

  Girl in Gourd

  California, still

  I was born with a gourd-shaped head: My mother kneaded it back into a sphere while my bones were still milk. The left side of my head still wears her handprint. My mother joked that if she’d ever dropped me, I would have split open into symmetrical bowls, spilling a head full of black seeds.

  Every night, I sat cross-legged on the floor while she sat in a chair above me, holding my head between her knees and squeezing my skull into a shape that could sit in her palm. Her fingers fattened the strands of my hair with horse-oil cream. When her knee-bones ground against my temples and milked tears from me, she lapped them off my face like a cat and said she was almost done. She had to make sure my head was round enough to remember who loved me, sturdy enough
to carry the stories she was going to crown me with.

  Eventually the gourd juice emptied out of me: I pissed twice as much as my brother, a spray so forceful my mother said I alone could have ended the California drought if only I knew how to aim. I was always sweating, my skin shifting like sheets of sea. My mother had to wring me out twice a day like a towel. Back before we lived in a house, I slept on a mattress at night, between my mother and father, my brother on a fold-out futon in the farthest corner of the room. Every night, a puddle flared around me like a skirt, wetting the whole mattress and waking my mother, who dreamed a typhoon had torn me from her tit. My mother feared my veins were full of salt, that my bones produced water instead of blood. To prove that I bled, she punctured one of my veins with a boiled sewing needle. The blood corkscrewed out, confirming its color on her hands.

  I was conceived at night during a rainstorm, which was why I was born with too much water inside me: The rain had collected in my mother’s body like a gutter, and I was born from her rupture. After my birth, she begged my father not to touch her on the few nights it rained, afraid of what weather his body would bring.

  * * *

  _

  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.