Land of Milk and Honey

by C Pam Zhang

I pictured myself devouring the night sky as it hung in thick chocolate patches above the mountain, smog-free and luscious, rarer than anything on earth.

Those meals of yolk and sudden juice, of larks’ bones crunching in the molars like the detonation of a small star, a black hole that swallows and makes irrelevant, infinitesimal, what came before, and what came after. The tongue is not the brain, that fizzing, keening, forever dissatisfied thing. The tongue speaks the transporting language of pleasure.

I had no intelligence to offer her cool and brilliant brain, I who did not know what I thought until I tasted it. I had only this new-old hunger, this ache in the gut, this faith, inarticulate, in a next bite, and a next, and a next: bitter with flour or chewy with peel and pith, thick as love and alive with good decay.

When I learned to smoke behind a restaurant, my breath curling toward an inconsolable sky, I learned what it means to live by the tongue, dumb beast, obedient to neither time nor money, past nor future, loyal to a now worth living.