Gods of Want: Stories

by K-Ming Chang

I told her the officers would test if she was truly American by feeding her strawberry soft serve and timing her digestion. I said that’s why it’s called passing a test—because they catch what passes out of your body.

I had an aunt who gave me the lingerie catalog because there were coupons printed in it, though none of us would ever wear underwear with jewels or lace, because jewels and lace need to be worn on the outside so that everyone knows you can afford them.

I wanted to tell her that some people don’t need to get closer to death. They are born inside it and will never leave.

I ask my daughter how you even become a lesbian and she says, first, I have to reject the male gaze.

I’m killing myself because you are a bad daughter-in-law and what will my son think when he finds out I’ve killed myself because of you how bad he will feel how much he will regret marrying you choosing you you bitch. I said, If you can say all that while hanging yourself, you’re going to live.

That’s what marriage is, motherhood, except the man doesn’t do you the courtesy of growing up.

I can’t even pray her dead, because the gods don’t have her listed in any directory.

Everything has a debt, the nun-girl said. Every death is a payment.

Our mother said retirement was an American idea, that our grandmother on the island worked in an infant-formula factory until the day her bones got recalled and she was dissolved into a flock of white crows.

You have to swallow what will happen, she said. You have to hold all possibilities hostage in your belly.

I thought of the story about the woman who turned to salt when she looked back at a city. The moral was either you shouldn’t look back or you shouldn’t be a woman.

Our boss told us we should come tomorrow wearing shorter skirts. Sex and food are symmetrical appetites, he said. The people want to be fed.

The water had no nostalgia, no desire to witness anything but its own rise, its erasure of everything named.

It was Sunday, and the Taiwanese First Presbyterian Church choir next door to her apartment was singing something in cursive, all the windows mosaicked with women’s faces.

Girls who are easily scared by sounds have committed something bad in their past lives.

The girls chased them back, chased the boys with branches found on the street, threatening to shove them up their butts until the branches broke inside them and quilled the insides of their bladders, which was not anatomically correct, and nobody cared, and I was the one who kept changing sides, who kept going back and forth between being a girl and being a boy, who decided finally on being a shadow.

King means husband, queen means wife, spade is the shovel she buries him with.

I have a son already, it’s just that my son is my daughter. We pray to a god who is a girl in some countries and a boy in others.

To woo the moon, you first have to threaten to gouge it out of the sky. This can be done with chopsticks, a fork, tongs, anything with an end. When the moon begins to fold itself in fear, you reach your hand out and make a fist around it—quick—the way you catch a knife as it falls—

My aunts said it was unfair for some people to own a language that could not be sold to others, a language as private as the blood inside our bodies.

Some mothers are fishhooks—they’re shaped to raise you, raise you out of the water for slaughter.

I have a cousin who’s a cloud. One time, her son put his hands around her neck and all he could wring out was rain.