EATING PUSSY

Her name was Pussy, but the rumor was she didn’t have one. One of the boys, who was named Dunkin because that’s what his parents first saw when they got to America, a Dunkin Donuts, said that all she had was a bush down there, a burning biblical bush like the one Moses saw, and we wanted it on fire. We all laughed about her FOB name, Pussy, though our names were things like Penny, Pity, and Purity. Mine was the worst, Pity, and there wasn’t even a good excuse for it, because my parents learned English at school in Taipei, their classroom docked in the shadow of an American military base where GIs parted the skirts of schoolgirls, revealing a red theater of thighs. My brother’s name was Pride, but my friends said he didn’t have any. He used to turn tricks behind the Taste of Jiangnan dumpster and spend all the money on Yu Gi Oh cards, battling all the boys at lunch for a holographic one, though I said if you want something shiny, I’ll buy you a roll of tinfoil and skirt you in it, I’ll punch you in the face and flick on all the light-switches inside you.

Pussy had eyes far apart like a frog, reminding me of those stories my mother told me about how Taipei used to be a swamp, and she and her twelve sisters, six full and six half, used to wade around in the mud looking for frogs to eat. They tore down hot metal fences and grilled the frogs on them, sucking the meat off, scrapping over the eyes. Prey eyes, that’s what they’re called, when your eyes are on the side of your face and not screwed into the front. In school, we learned that’s because prey animals have to see their surroundings to see when to flee, but predators only have to look forward, spotlighting what they want to eat. We looked at Pussy with all of our light. I imagined eating her eyes one at a time, first her left and then her right, the pupils like sugared stones, swallow and you’ll sink. Even after my mother left Taipei and her house that sank at a slant, she walked around like the ground would filter the meat off her bones, spit her ribs to the surface. She walked high-kneed and prancing, and my father said, that’s abu for you, living like the land’s still mud. She didn’t trust concrete or asphalt, claimed that this whole city was built on a sand-filled bay, that soon the sea would avenge itself, flooding out even the sun.

Pussy started eighth grade with us, but the rumor was she had been held back for three grades, and that was why she was so much taller than all of us, her denim skirts bleached white where her hips butted out. She carried her hipbones like holstered pistols. Once or twice I brushed by her in the bathroom just to feel those bones like a pestle, grinding me into glass sugar. Pussy was so big, she was the only one allowed to play four-square with the boys during recess, while we were cornered into doing shit like rhymes and jump-rope, which was only fun when one of us knotted the rope around our necks and got sent to the suicide-prevention-and-anti-drug-use counselor, a blondewoman with breasts like stone fruits, firm and blonde-furred. I watched from the shade, staring at Pussy as she rolled up her sleeves and secured them to her forearms with rubber bands, lifting her arms like they were oars. Sometimes she hit the ball so hard it burst on the asphalt, bleeding rubber-pulp and shimmering ribbons of silver air. When she missed a serve, she ran headfirst into the boy who served it to her, ramming like a hammerhead shark, which despite being a predator, carried its eyes studded to the sides of its head. Pussy headbutted Dunkin once, who vomited blood into his palms and was sent to the school nurse, who was just a teacher wearing a white coat, and who made Dunkin swallow an entire jar of cottonballs to staunch the hole in his stomach.

Pussy walked home alone. I avoided the bus too, mostly because by the time I boarded after detention for not participating in a collaborative game during recess, which was all Pussy’s fault, the only seats left on the bus were the ones in the back, and everyone knew that if you sat there, the boy next to you would hammer his hand into your crotch or make you hold his dick. I never knew what to do with one of those. One time I held it kinda like a screwdriver and twisted in counter-clockwise to loosen, just like baba taught me when we re-hinged the door. I thought it might fall off if I did it hard enough, but the boy screamed and the bus driver made me get off at the next stop. That heat haunted my hand, even after I hosed off my palm, and my mother asked why I took a frozen chicken thigh to bed, gripping it cold in my fist.

I walked home behind Pussy, always a block behind, and begged her in my head to turn around, just once. I rehearsed what I would do: wave, maybe, but with both hands, or ask her for her name even though I knew what it was, I pouched it in my mouth, I chewed it like a petal. Or maybe I’d fall flat like her shadow, let her drag me home by the hair, let her chain me to her bedpost and sleep nightly at her feet. Anything. But she never looked back when she walked, or even looked side to side, which made me think I was right, she had prey eyes that could see all around her, while all I could see was her, and with eyes like that, she could see in front of her and behind her and ahead of her and beneath her all at once, the past and the future, the sky and her own asshole. I wondered if she could see what my mother saw, that beneath this street was a swamp pearled with meat, and we were soon going to sink. Pussy walked heavily, her shoes with rubber bands around them to keep the soles from being skinned away completely, and I wanted to get on my knees, pluck the bands with my tongue.

Mrs. Ng said we were going to have a grade-wide talent show, and that we were allowed to enter in teams. The winner would get a year of free lunch, even though we were all on free lunch anyway, but there would also be a handmade plastic trophy. My name had never been carved into anything. When I said my name was Pity, people always replied Pretty? That’s nice. No, not Pretty, I said, not even when I dyed my hair ash-blonde with the box-dye I shoplifted from Daiso. It didn’t work on my hair, my mother the cosmetologist said, because I had to bleach it first. You can’t dye something dark. It’s like trying to paint on the nightsky. You’ve got to turn it light first, then the sun will show. Next time, she said, let me do it, but I was afraid of bleach, had smelled it under our sink, the big jug. I once saw a story on TV about a woman who drank a whole gallon of bleach but didn’t even die, just vomited so hard her stomach flipped inside out and flew out of her mouth like a parachute.

At recess, I tapped on Pussy’s back while she stood in the four-square line. Her shoulder-blades were broad as cafeteria trays, the ones we stole for mud-sliding down the hill and into the trash creek behind school. Pussy turned around, and the wind shifted, all the heat cleaved to her back. I asked if she wanted to be my talent show partner. I don’t have a talent, Pussy said, before I even finished the question. Up close, I realized that her eyes moved one at a time, that she could swivel one to glare down at me and focus the other on the four-square square court. There were rumors she’d had her period since third-grade, and that she’d already gotten pregnant once but aborted it by sliding extra-hard onto home base during P.E., knocking it out of her like a nickel. But her voice was higher than mine, high as a hawk’s, and there was pale fuzz on her cheeks like a baby. I thought for a while, looking up at her, trying to remember if I had any talents, besides the ability to hold a pack of Yu Gi Oh cards at the Taiwanese stationery store and sense with my thumbs whether there was a holographic card inside. My brother brought me along like his shine-sniffing dog.

My talent is I can eat anything, I told Pussy. Desperately, I knelt in front of her and fisted the tanbark, filling my mouth with blonde splinters and swallowing. It hurt, but I tried to be like the monks my mother watched on TV, the men who could helicopter their minds, hovering above hurt, while their bodies below were crosslegged inside fires or beneath freezing waterfalls, their asses pincushioned with arm-length needles. I held my breath while she watched me, praying not to vomit blood like Dunkin, and when I was finished, on my knees and dog-panting, Pussy clapped her hands. Nice, she said, that’s so fucking cool. But she said she didn’t understand how that was a two-person performance. I could just stand on stage with jars of needles, screws, and nail-clippings and just eat handfuls of each for the audience below me, then swallow the spotlight too. I said I didn’t know, I just wanted her to be my witness, to see what I was willing to stomach for her, the tanbark threading through my intestines.

Pussy smiled at me, her hair flailing in the air, and then she said I know, I know. You can eat me. I stared up at her and said I didn’t know if I could do that. Didn’t you say, she said, you can eat anything? She said if I was truly talented, I’d be able to regurgitate what I’d swallowed whole and unharmed. Do it, she said, so I punched myself in the belly, gagging up the tanbark, my tongue scraped clean of taste. I hunched over, this time unable to stand again, and she said, see, I knew you could do it. Meet me at the trash creek after school, we can rehearse before Friday.

After school, I climbed over the chain-link fence and waded through the ankle-deep mud all the way to the bed of the trash creek, where one time we found the body of a dead coyote, inside of which was the body of a dead rabbit, inside of which were the bodies of an entire litter of living baby rabbits, which we set loose behind the dumpster. We visited that litter every night, until one day they disappeared and there were bloodstains, which we pretended were our shadows.

Pussy stood inside the trash creek, plucking up candy wrappers on the surface, reflective as mirrors, and licking the stickiness off them. I told her she would get sick from doing that, that her babies would be born with extra limbs or double hearts, but she waded toward me, sloshing through the mud, and called me a pussy. She laughed at that, pointing at herself, and I laughed too. Then her face slackened into seriousness, and she said it was time. All you have to do, she said, is eat me. Then you can throw me up somewhere backstage, after. I said okay, afraid to tell her I’d never done this before, that one time I accidentally swallowed the bone of a chicken drumstick while laughing too hard at dinner, and when it passed through my bowels the pain was like birthing, but that was the largest prey I’d ever consumed. Pussy smiled at me, her front teeth missing, and behind them was another row of teeth. I flinched, and she smiled wider, saying that if I didn’t want to do it that’s okay, she would just find another partner or do a solo performance, like squeezing four-square balls between her knees and breaking out the air inside them.

I told her to kneel in front of me. Behind her, in the trash creek, a raccoon ran across the clogged surface of the water, a glass bottle in its jaws, god of want. I looked down at her, the first time she had ever been beneath me, and I wondered if she ever prayed, and to what. I realized there was a bald spot scraped into her scalp, a place where light perched, and I wanted to touch it, to thumb the tender coin of her skin. But instead I pressed my lips to it, opening my mouth wide as I could, crowning open around her skull, a backwards birth, and swallowed until my lips touched mud, and she was gone, disappeared into the depths of me, her head pressing against my pelvis, nudging me open, letting light inside. I fell onto my back in the mud, laced to the bank, and pushed her out wailing, her face blank as a bullet, wound-wet and waiting to be named.

✦✦✦

HOMOPHONE

NiNi told me her dream was to fuck a woman named after every month of the year. She said she was already halfway there. The ones she remembered were January (named after a blonde actress, but her roots were blue), July (she had hooves like a horse and liked to be held by the hips), June (July’s sister, who was allergic to light and had honeycombed bones), and August (NiNi was disappointed to learn that August’s real name was Autumn, and that August changed it because it was difficult for her grandparents to say or spell, the silent n like a suckled knuckle). NiNi was still waiting for a May or an April. Those should be easy, she said to me, kneeling between my legs, her chin glistening like flypaper, one of my pubic hairs stuck to it. An hour ago, my nipple surfed her tongue. She tried to bite open the collar of my shirt, saying she’d seen it in a movie, but all she did was break a tooth, a canine plateaued into a sugar cube. NiNi wore her brother’s boxer shorts, green plaid, the waistband so loose that she had to walk and shimmy at the same time, which looked to me like she was perpetually wading toward me, her hips ripping open a lake. I tugged the boxers down to her knees, shelved her ankles on my shoulders, fucked her with one of her sixteen strap-ons, some plastic, glass, ceramic, stone. When she first showed me her strap-ons, hanging in holsters, dangling from her shower rod, they looked to me like lit-up ornaments, all the Christmas trees I grew up seeing on TV and in illustrated books. My mother always told me that Christmas was chunjie for Americans, that they spent the day celebrating the birth of some boy, and I said that sounded Chinese to me, to love a son so much that you name a day after him.

I asked NiNi why she chose me. It was Sunday and the Chinese Baptist Church next door to her apartment was singing something in cursive, all the windows mosaicked with women’s faces. Every morning after we fucked, I awoke to church bells, the sound as saltwhite as her eyes when she rolled them back, when I entered her again and again, when my spit sutured her fingers into silver lace, when she sucked a rusted dime into my neck. NiNi laughed when she saw me flinch at the bells, telling me what her mother told her: girls who are easily scared by sounds have committed something bad in their past lives; that’s why they startle so easily in this one. Residual guilt, inherited without a name. They await punishment, ducking from the sky like a knife. What are you afraid of, NiNi asked me. I said I didn’t know. I told her I didn’t remember my past lives, did she. NiNi said yes, I remember them all: first I was the sun, but then someone shot me down. Then I was someone’s son, and that’s why in this life, I steal my brother’s underwear. Because it belonged to me first. I watched NiNi cut her hair in the sink, scissor it blunt at the neck, her bangs bleached white by my sweat. She saw me standing behind her, renting heat from her silhouette, naked from the waist-up, my appendix scar unknotting into thread, and said she chose me because my name was Mei. It sounds like May, she said, what’s that called again? A homophone, I said, and she laughed. Yes, NiNi said, that’s you. Homo. Phone. She rinsed her hair down the sink like weeds, and I licked the back of her neck, the live wiring of her veins. I felt her in the jaw, in the way my mouth opened to say stop, saw, awe. I knew you were a month of mine, NiNi said to me, when I met you at the temple, not reading the words of the Heart Sutra, mouthing along to the dust, and I remember thinking, you don’t know the words to anyone.

I lead NiNi to bed, lugging myself on top of her, loitering my lips on her hips. I wanted to tell her I didn’t remember what I was praying for, only that I couldn’t read the words to the sutra they nuns had unfolded on my lap, and I remembered looking up, looking for anything I could say, and that was when I saw her, NiNi, standing beside the bell with the bronze cranes crowding it, a bell that was never rung because, according to rumor, it was too heavy, an artifact of the tenth century, and in this temple of nuns-only, no one had the upper body strength to swing it into sound. That was when NiNi crouched and grasped the knotted rope like a wick, as if she was going to light it, and pumped her arm back and forth, battering the bell into sound, butchered music.

For a second, I’d wondered if only I could see her, if she was appearing to me like those dogs of myth, the reincarnated souls of everyone you’ve ever helped in a past life, and she was coming to repay me or to punish me for not remembering. In her car that night, NiNi recited the calendar of her conquests, the out-of-order months, the women she converted with her drawerful of dicks. I rolled down the window, fiddling with the seatbelt she told me was unreliable, unbuckling itself every time she turned right. The wind outside was gunning toward me, and I knew I didn’t have the skin to listen anymore, didn’t own a name that could outlast her mouth. I was another of her months, a chronological want, nothing like love. NiNi drove me to her shared apartment, showing me the bathtowel curtains hanging from the ceiling that separated her from a family of seven, six sons and a daughter who ran away. To where, I asked, but NiNi said she never heard. I thought about years ago when I was a runaway, when the nuns let me sleep in the backroom behind the Buddha, the place where they kept a second Buddha, a substitute statue, unpainted and hollow, the hole between its shoulder blades where I hid my roll of dollar bills and pretended it was an offering and not something I’d steal back later. I thought about the runaway daughter when we were lying in bed together, when NiNi was asleep, when I spent hours listening for the moment when she’d wake and say, you can go now, the bells are ringing, can’t you hear, and I’d say yes, I can hear it’s morning, my mouth is still full of you, it’s like a song I swallowed all the words to, thank you. NiNi would shut the door after me, the door scarred with someone else’s surname, and I would wonder if she’d come back to the temple and find me, or call me again, or if I’d walk past her building and climb up its walls and impersonate her window, translating all her light for her, fingering it flat, hammering out her nights. But for now, I wondered: where did daughters go when they disappeared, and what would NiNi do after she finished fucking every month, what came after touch. She was asleep, but I turned toward her, her boxers sogged around her ankles, hemmed in sweat, her nose knighted by the moonlight. I wrote my name with my tongue between her shoulder blades, transcribed it the way it was given and not the way she wanted it, Mei, trimmed of any synonym for spring, silvering each stroke with my licked thumb, respelling my name into stay.

K-Ming Chang/張欣明 is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the debut novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. More of her writing can be found online at kmingchang.com.