Siren Queen

by Nghi Vo

The way the beautiful Black woman spoke, however, I started to wonder. If I couldn’t be ordinary, maybe I could be something better instead.

Sometimes, when the wind blew just the right way, we could hear the trains whistling to each other from the yards, shrill cries of I am here, and do not stop me. When my mother heard them, her hair blackened slightly from ash to soot and the lines on her face grew just a little less deep.

Men lived forever in their bodies, in their statues, in the words they guarded jealously and the countries they would never let you claim. The immortality of women was a sideways thing, haphazard and contained in footnotes, as muses or silent helpers. “But things are different here,” my mother always said. She had never set foot in China, would pass all her life on American soil, but she knew how different things could be. She clung to that, and so did we.

“What about being twenty-five or thirty?” I asked once, while she clipped my hair. There were probably ages beyond that, but at the age of ten, I couldn’t quite imagine it.

Luli loved Su Tong Lin, and I think I did too, but I couldn’t love her without a twisting in my stomach of mingled embarrassment and confused anger. I went home angry every time she threw herself into the ocean, stabbed herself, threw herself in front of a firing gun for her unworthy love.

It was not quite a scar, not quite a brand, but more telling than either.

She wore her glamour like a stole tossed around her shoulders, and she cast it like a net over everyone who had seen her.

To see her was to love her, and a wanting rose up in me like an ache. I wanted someone to look at me like that;

Women disappear, and even if you are famous, it can happen without a sound, without a ripple.

Sigh

have to assume that one night, when the stars were gleaming overhead, she met a devil on the road like so many of my friends did, and he offered her a spread of cards, flipping them between his pale fingers. Alcoholism, born-again reverence, madness, a quiet cottage, a noisy car wreck, a lonely house on the edge of the desert, a book she could use as a tomb, a single line etched in the boardwalk, they would have flickered by, and taking a deep breath, she would have closed her eyes and chosen.

Beautiful

That day he gave me lemon candy that tasted like sharp sunshine, and I held it in my cheek until it melted to memory.

Men will want you, girls will want to slit you up the front and wear your skin

Clothed she was shy; nude, there was a desperate bravery in her eyes, and so he took that too.

She grinned, suddenly shy. The realization that she was far more beautiful than I was was like a shower of gold over my head, heavy and gilded.

She had a lunar beauty rather than a human one, and people looking at her could drown in it, still confused by the pull of this one fat and lovely girl.

It’s hard to resent someone when you’re eating the potato dumplings they left you, but I tried.

There was always a full moon hanging over the lots on Friday night, outshining the one that hung in the sky for everyone else, and once I looked up to see a lunar face looking back at me, and laughing with a kind of cruel indifference.

“Beautiful,” she said lightly. “Make some room for Greta and Luli. Shove over, will ya?” She hadn’t been at Wolfe Studios much longer than I had been. Sometimes, the Minnesotan farm girl still came out.

Emmaline’s lips parted, and it threw fire deep in my body. She couldn’t help what she was, and I couldn’t help what I was. We were stories that should never have met, or stories that only existed because we met. I still don’t know.

The bridge to Emmaline crowned in flowers that I had given her was shaky, but I told myself it would hold my weight.

“Waverly could fool you with how pretty it was in the spring.

“I think you will work very hard to get a tenth of what other girls as talented as you will be given.

“Your tricks are beneath me, your court is a lie, and your movies are terrible,” she said contemptuously, and for a moment, I genuinely thought the world was going to end.

I already knew that being brave didn’t mean anything unless you were willing to do it again.

In a gloomy way, I liked the loneliness. Now it was a choice rather than something I felt in the empty dorm room or walking between the fires on Friday night.

we were two silent mirrors, reflecting nothing at all.

At least it wasn’t heels, I told myself. I told myself that a lot.

She nodded easily, and I noticed for the first time a dark mole right above her upper lip. It was too dark and large to be called a beauty mark, but it gave her face an irregular kind of elegance that made me very much want to kiss her.

They would be able to use at least some of Harry’s footage, though Annette’s was a lost cause. She was gone to a convalescent home, ostensibly treating her grief over Harry’s absence and incidentally her growing dependence on benzodiazepines.

“Being a writer is an inherently unlikely and rebellious thing.

“I was too much and too strange long before I came here, Emmaline.” I said it gently because in her own way, she was looking out for me. She was trying to keep me safe, even if incidentally it kept me hers and not Tara’s. “And after all, you decided I was too risky two years ago.” Emmaline sprang to her feet, hands clenched. I stepped back in surprise. “Stop it! I’m not some kind of villain!” “No, you’re not. You’re the heroine. I read the script same as you.”

She lived with three other girls in half as much space. My family had fit the four of us and a business into a building not much larger. The apartment, empty as it was, was a luxury even as it was a burden to fill up.

She was a star, and for just a moment, I would have promised her the whole world just to make her shine a little brighter.

“It must have been so quiet,” I said, and Tara stirred with a certain recognition as well. Children troubled by loneliness share a common space, some plain-walled room that is dark too long and too often.

The past rose up around us, jagged stones that would bloody our feet if we took a step wrong. The only way was forward, and I knew as she shrugged and asked us if we wanted to go downstairs for some dumplings that we had at least taken the first step.

!!

Beautiful but not pure, my mind whispered while I begged. Nothing we had done in the shadows of the Friday fires was pure. It was better than that. It was true. It was everything I was and everything I could be—was meant to be—if only I dared. It twisted inside me, hungry and vicious and clever.

What they remember is the kiss, wild and gorgeous and the very first of its kind made everlasting in silver.

They hugged each other as if there was too much light and love in their own bodies, and they could only survive by passing that light between them.