Strip mall triptych

I. My whole family works the strip mall. My cousins at the laundromat, my aunt at the sex shop, me and my mom at the Dollar Tree, my grandmother at the water store. Except my grandmother got fired for drinking straight from the spout, and one of the customers, the guy who fills his passenger seat with empty milk jugs and lugs enough water home to flush his toilet for a week, caught her with her mouth married to a fat stream. My mother tried to defend it, saying that the water we get at home is toxic, since we share a duplex with a foot spa and our pipes are plowed by fungus and toenail clippings, but the boss said it was unacceptable and highly unsanitary to drink from the freshwater machine, to contaminate it with spit. The story we should have used is this: my grandmother’s hometown was the last on her entire island to get running water, so she hoards it inside herself. She carries the source. The boss would’ve bent for a sob story like that. The problem is, my grandmother’s hometown is in the ass-cleft of a mountain, and no one could get the water to go uphill, not even by lashing rivers to their backs. My grandmother’s got an inherited skill: all the water she drinks, she can pump back up her throat and return clean and unwrinkled. She taught me how, years ago: contract your belly like you’re giving birth, miscarry your thirst. Condense your want into a word, and water will emerge from your mouth like milk. Problem is, my mother says, no one wants to pay for water that’s steeped inside a stomach. They only want it sterile, stripped of any history.  

II. I learned years later that my friends didn’t know what a water store is. You know, I said, it’s where you get water you can drink. Why not just turn on the tap, they said, and I told them that you’ll get worms from that. Years ago, my cousin at the laundromat said that aging was caused by the loss of collagen. The way to stop aging, she told me, was to drink your own bathwater in order to recover the skin cells you’d scrubbed off. Every night she drank buckets of it, except she was sipping our cells too, since we all used the same bathwater. I gambled away my chance to bathe first when we played mahjong on Lunar New Year, and so I bathed last. Flecks of shit and rafts of eyelashes weaved between my knees. I even found an entire braid of hair coiled at the bottom of the plastic tub like a snake, though I couldn’t tell whose head it had abandoned. One time I even fished out a floating tooth, a hollow molar with a silver cap, and my mother said I had to give it back, since the silver was still worth something. Every night I searched for a loss I could pawn, parts of us to assemble and sell whole. My mother lost her wedding ring in the water and it took a week before we realized my cousin had swallowed it and shat it out. But you see, she said, squatting over a sheet of newspaper, plucking the ring out with a pair of bone chopsticks, do you see a wrinkle on me? All day I iron at the laundromat, I fold and fold, and I know someday my face will inherit all those seams and pleats. I know how to make a shirt shirk its shape or surrender its shoulders or lose its buttons like baby teeth. All those pretty things I don’t own. But my skin doesn’t listen to me or my bones. It’s already waiting to be worn by someone else. In my next life I’ll be a butter stick, my mother said, something we never eat.

III. The strip mall has a ghost and it lives in the sex shop. My aunt hangs the dildos along the back wall, some plastic, some glass, some ceramic. She says, it turns out anything can be severed into a penis. She kneads the dumpling dough in one fist, shows me how to clasp the sheets over the thumb of meat. You know, when you were a baby, she tells me, you used to eat only the skins. You spat the pork out into my palm even though that’s the best part. A girl who eats only the skins of things, who spits. No wonder you’re lesbian, she said, you do things the opposite. She teaches me how to pound the pleats out of the meat, how to season the water with anise, how to inhale the steam to sterilize your mouth. The first time I am entered by something, I’m on my back in the backseat of another girl’s Pontiac, and her fingers are sheathed inside me like wings. I imagine them opening, splaying me wide as light, the strip mall shrinking small as the freckles on her spine. I am shawled in her sweat, borrowing her salt, and I will recognize its taste in the pork my aunt rolls back and forth in her palms, the sodium of her touch. That same summer, the dildos sprout wings and flock out over the parking lot, consolidating on the asphalt, pecking at flecks of broken windshield like it’s birdseed. My aunt will blame the strip mall ghost for releasing the dildos, but I will know it’s her. All those hours she manned the counter alone, she was knitting wings for each of them, naming each dildo after the daughters she lost, some inside of her, some outside of her. I have seen the way my aunt wagers her hands on what she loves, how she drops each dumpling like a bird from its nest, testing to see if it will buoy in the water or if she will have to reach into the heat and surface it, thumbing it open, securing it to a sky.

Kite-fighting

FeiFei is the one who teaches us flight. How to burn holes into the kite’s skin with a cigarette butt so the wind threads through. FeiFei lights a cigarette, coats the string in powdered glass and rice glue. She takes us out to the abandoned lot behind the apartment building and shows us how to feed our kite to the mouth-sized sky. When I ask her if kites bleed, if they feel pain, she laughs and says not to worry: kites are too hollow for hurt. The point of fighting, she says, is to fly. To stay in the sky longer than shangdi. Keep the line taut so it cuts clean, she tells me. If it goes slack, the kite will sway. She steers the body of the kite like a blade. She told me once that our cousin caught his kite in a power line and got electrocuted when he tried to tug it down. That’s why we don’t have electricity sometimes, she said. Because his ghost forbids the light from fondling our bones. The thing you need to learn, she tells me, is how to lose. Sometimes, she says, it’s necessary to cut your own kite loose. Sometimes a crow mistakes your kite for a mate and fucks it full of holes. Or sometimes the kite coasts like smoke into a tree and you have to sever it clean. Every night when I call my mother in another country, when she tells me it’ll be soon, soon she’ll send for me, I tell her about the kites, FeiFei’s next fight, how one day I’ll open my window and the sky will release a new species, flocks and flocks of kites in every color, and I will reach out and snip each one free, send them all to California. I tell her to keep watch, wait. Someday the kites will gather above the salon where she works all day with six pairs of scissors and so many strangers. They will come, I say. They will carry the sky to you.  

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K-Ming Chang / 張欣明 is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Her debut novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House, 2020) was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Her short story collection, RESIDENT ALIENS, is forthcoming from One World. More of her writing can be found at kmingchang.com.