Bestiary

by K-Ming Chang

You’ve never been to a funeral, but this is what it looks like: four of us in the backyard, digging where our shadows have died.

I see the way you wear your hands without worry, but someday they’ll bury something. Someday this story will open like a switchblade. Your hands will plot their own holes, and when they do, I won’t come and rescue you.

He’s all sold out of memories.

When the church wives come to give us dishes of sugar cubes and a jar of piss-dark honey, my ma tells them that Orientals don’t sweeten tea. Don’t sweeten anything. We prefer salt and sour and bitter, the active ingredients in blood and semen and bile. Flavors from the body.

In wartime, land is measured by the bones it can bury. A house is worth only the bomb that banishes it. Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning. Even Ma misreads the slogans on the back of American coins: IN GOLD WE TRUST. That’s why she thinks we’re compatible with this country. She still believes we can buy its trust.

Ma donated her three daughters to her parents and birthed two new ones with Ba. I’m the second of the new ones. We’re the two she kept, brought here, and beat.

You think burial is about finalizing what’s died. But burial is beginning: To grow anything, you must first dig a grave for its seed. Be ready to name what’s born.

But there’s nothing inside him we can spend, not unless grief is a currency.

Jie and I were born thieves. Born to orphan our sisters by birthing our mother into this country.

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.

I remembered watching families in restaurants fighting to pay a bill, and maybe that was what Meng and Jiang were fighting over: a bill they were too proud to let the other take. To say a daughter is a debt they could afford to pay.

We can never be clean enough for this country, she said.

We didn’t blame our mother for her lies: We loved them into littler truths.

You’re my mother, I said, and you’re supposed to prepare me for any future. But who, she said, can prepare you for the past?

My mother was ready for work before the sky chose a color to dress in.

But it didn’t matter where the keys were, where he’d gone to grow back his skin, because my mother was who I belonged to, the only place I’d ever lived, the only person who knew me before I had a name.

Ben said I shouldn’t talk about other people’s fathers when my own was a myth, a story gone so sour that nobody wanted to tell it.

It was easier to want her living when she was dead. We wanted one more day of missing her. We wanted it back, our grief—we wanted it real—but grief was just another thing we lost, another thing she took from us.

When I asked her why they hanged themselves, she said the only way to own your body is to die inside it. I said that wasn’t true anymore.

Only the rabbit offered itself. It leapt straight into the starving man’s cooking fire, inviting teeth to its meat. To commemorate the rabbit, the god hung the rabbit’s bones in the sky. And that is the moon. That’s how we know all sources of light begin as sacrifice. Your father, born year of the rabbit, hated that story. He thought no god was owed flesh or fidelity. But he still expected both of me. The year we were married I asked him to get baptized. Ma says our tribe used to have as many deities as trees, and that having many gods only multiplies your losses, diversifies your debts. The moon was our priest that night.

You decide that being nocturnal is lonely, and when you check the mirror, your eyes aren’t glowing.

But everyone always forgets the rabbit’s sacrifice means nothing. The starving man was not starving at all: He was not even a man. He was a god. Hunger was the weather he invented. The rabbit died for a fraudulent want. When I left, Ba was still standing over the sink. So still he might have been praying. Or waiting.

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.

Someone once told me if the moon stayed out too long, the soldiers would shoot it down by morning.

This story was meant to show you: The ones we should save are already dead.

Ba isn’t hers. Isn’t mine. He’s shaped like my love for him, a river with many tributaries, digressions, points of departure.

I tell you all houses are made of skin: Once you’ve left one, it stitches shut again. You say if it’s skin, it is always open. It’s made of holes, hairs, pores. It’s my own body I’m returning to.

She’d planted pieces of her past inside the wall, waiting for the house to grow a future worth staying for.

she thought of water as the best of all mothers. Water had none of its own wants: It served only the thirst of others. Ama knew being needed was a kind of divinity, and she was tired of being that good, that god. When she dropped my mother into the river last, Ama thought: I am returning her to the river that will raise her better, raise her like a flood I will run from.

we said the ash was made of corpses, the air carrying bones on its tongue.