She Is a Haunting

by Trang Thanh Tran

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

there’s a power in never being known because no one can use you against you.

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

That weekend, my mouth is barbed wire: knotted and bleeding where I bit too hard, the color of rust staining the tissue I dab over lip balm. I’d slept and woken again, frozen in the space of my own bed.

Rather than an exorcism in this house, there will be a haunting.

Anger is a fire. Anger is adrenaline. It’s kept me going for so long, burning for so long, with ambition, with pettiness. I’ll show you had become a mantra throughout high school. Bullies, racists, useless guidance counselors: I’ll show you.

My dad—or me—turning into a white woman ranks high on my list of fears right now,

ruined and ethereal,

You don’t feel, but you’re certainly crying.

Quietly burning in want and to be wanted.

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. Unwashed linen, comforting and earthy, as close to home as I’ll get. I squeeze my eyes shut until I’m dreaming.

It’s always easier to think a girl has motive than for a man to take responsibility.

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

Does the sky not know we are hurting? How can it not hear the tenor of my scream?

:(

“Ba thương con,” he says, and my heart swells until it breaks and bleeds around my still-warm organs.

Ba looks at me one last time, then closes the door.

Our bodies recover, but nothing is the same.