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.
