She Is a Haunting

by Trang Thanh Tran

To the angry girls, to the ones figuring it out: you are always enough

That hurt, and secret, I’ve pressed into a stone in the pit of my stomach. Your dad betraying you is one of the worst feelings in the world.

I just never know whether the memory will warm me up or break me in two.

Neither of us has the language or time to figure it out yet, and there’s a power in never being known because no one can use you against you.

I imagine the hydrangea blooms under a bright moon, passing the house’s eyes and spying on me. Mistaking my silent mouth as a pot to fill, reaching in and planting another friend.

Flowers grow. Little by little. I wonder if I’m growing when kept still.

Here I’m cut too sharp. Here I’m a wound.

This house is tickled whenever a body’s split between rooms, quartered or halved in easy numbers to keep track of. A thousand births here but never quite like this. Her head enters the parlor, then the first third of her neck. Her middle slides in after, and finally the part that latches to the torso. She walks this way after a feeding. It took years, but she finally brought ones who will stay. Pliable meat and soft minds, tucked safely in its hold. Eardrums are too easily ruptured, and so this house must be patient. The two young ones won’t die for a while yet. She is tedious work, but necessary. It is becoming more beautiful, after all, and a house must be clever when it has no feet or hands of its own.

“Just because you feel lucky to be alive and fed doesn’t mean you can’t be angry.”

I’m lost for words over the million little ways we can still hurt for family we hardly know.

Years later, when the boy-turned-old-man died, he arrived to a bowl of maggots in the underworld. Eating, but never full like his mother, father, and siblings. There might not be a hell for houses, but this house never lets a scrap go to waste.

there’s so many words to convey closeness, but why did no one teach me to say I love you when it’s hard?

Maybe this is how the word crush was invented: hope blossoming wild under the constant threat of being caved in.

She’s embarrassed, of course, but no one can blame themselves for where a mother decides to lay her eggs.

They teach us boys want and girls are the ones who are wanted, but what about people like me? Quietly burning in want and to be wanted.

This house has good bones. Soil is vacated for better feed, walls are unburdened with memory, and floorboards abandon their old arches for new footfall. It buzzes in anticipation, gathering itself so tall its nails rise—certain to catch a toe or three. Please let it be three. There are lonely years to make up for. Its love is abundant, wrapped in flower and vine so it won’t spill in the road from which the guests have begun to arrive. This house has good bones. Come, and see.

I am the only one he has ever hit. He is the only one who truly knows me. I carry the burden of being the first child, and it sinks me into the soil.

Home. What a wonderful word that means I don’t have to be alone anymore.

Married at seventeen, dead at twenty: there’s a nursery rhyme somewhere, a warning for girls who follow.

“All houses have a little death in them, given time,”

I am equal parts tormented and euphoric. The former for coming out in a haunted house and the latter for my mom accepting me.

Slowly, Ba turns around. The fire rises, but he doesn’t make a sound. Why is Đà Lạt not raining? Why does it not pour, as Ba says it does in July? Does the sky not know we are hurting? How can it not hear the tenor of my scream? His eyes are surprised because maybe even he doesn’t believe what he’s done. Yet they are still soft, writhing in some other pain, and it’s the same as the day at the pier. He spreads his arms. Ba is a burning house, the doors open to me. “Come with me, Jade.” My dad leaving, my dad asking for me, my dad reaching for me. That was always the dream, wasn’t it? To be wanted and taken along. I’d always wanted a second chance to not let him down when he needed me, but this isn’t what I imagined.