Dallas Jones tweeted. The fear washed my wrinkles in goosebumps. I Know What You Did Last Summer now as predictable as rain. I am my brother maxing out his credit card. American Psycho is being remade. I am my father wondering about the vote. Idiocracy now a prophetic tale. I am my mother cleaning dishes for different reasons. Lord of the Rings lives on forever. I am the door to other lives. I scrolled.
we didn’t even know we were in a rickshaw-type town, but it was a good thing we were, being out of time & money & the rickshaw seeming quicker than walking & like a pay-what-you-can type operation. we were already confused on so many levels – in a real uncertain bind, our heads bouncing along the ground behind us. we didn’t even notice the astronaut when we climbed aboard & about sat on him – as little as he was. but he said he didn’t mind the company, that he was just riding around for the ride of it & that is when he told us about being an astronaut & all. he looked more like a tree-topper to us. he didn’t have a suit on or boots or a patch or one of those hats they tend to wear, but he went right into telling us about being the only composer to ever see the sunrise from the outside of a spaceship on the other side of the moon – about how he had been sent to space on a singular mission to write a symphony about what it feels like up there, an opera about what it looks like up there, a fugue about what it is up there & that in a roundabout way was why he was here on this rickshaw; or, at least, that is what we think he might have said, the rickshaw being a bumpy, noisy ride & us not really hearing well to begin with & worrying about when we should jump off on account of us forgetting just where our stop was or if these things even had stops or what it was we truly owed.
Grandma spoke to ghosts and refused her dentures. She’d shit herself and call us thieves. She said her dying was taking forever and that Grandpa stopped loving her, and both those things were true, but only because Grandpa was dead. At sundown, she’d turn werewolf. She’d call me Donald and flash her gums. I’d go to the garage, disturb Grandpa’s tools, taste corrosion; thumb old magazines, and smell decay. I’d sit amongst rot (avoiding the rot in Grandma’s brain) and tie knots in Grandpa’s sewing kit just to feel closure.Grandma’s mouth puckered like an asshole. She’d eventually miss Mass, but never her coffee.
Julia starts noticing David when he kills the fish in their bio classroom. The class finds it on the floor when they come in, stranded in a too-shallow puddle of water, tiny mouth open in a last desperate gasp. Like everyone else, David wears an expression of puzzled sorrow, his pale eyes wide with sympathy, but nobody besides Julia notices the spots of water on his sleeves. The thin trapdoor of his smile, flickering in and out of existence.So Julia starts noticing other things, too. She registers the curve of his lips, the cupid’s bow as pronounced as those of the girls in Renaissance paintings. She wonders what it might taste like. Rust or moss, maybe, blooming in dark secret places where no one looks.One evening she sees him walking into the field behind their houses. The slim rifle, straight path into the woods, and then a shot. Venison on the neighbors’ table for dinner. He sees her seeing him. On the path between their properties, into the narrow space between their bodies, he says, “I can teach you, if you want.”It’s that sliver of a pause, that hesitation before if you want, that decides her. Because for a second, before he thought to add those words, he didn’t even consider that she might not want it. And in that second she was ready for anything. She wants to live in that second. She wants to pull that second over her like a cloak and walk so far in it that she can’t find her way back home.___The next day, in the forest, David stands very close to her. He has to, in order to show her how to hold and load the rifle. There’s a metallic odor seeping from his skin, as though he’s chewed up a bunch of rounds, gritted them to dust between his teeth, digested them and turned them into sweat.“Man, you’ve never even held a gun before,” he says in wonder. “What planet did you come from?”“Some sheltered girl planet, I guess,” Julia replies, and then feels like an idiot.But he doesn’t seem to mind the distinction she’s drawn between the two of them. “Make sure you’ve got it pointed away from your head. That’s the first thing you need to learn.” He’s grinning, his teeth small and chipped in the crescent moon of his smile. He teaches her the anatomy of the rifle, demonstrating with his rough woodblock hands: “This is the action. This is the safety. This is the trigger…” He makes her recite every part until she’s got it memorized as well as the topography of her own skin. Only then will he let her hold it. He says: “Only ever point the rifle at things you are willing to destroy.”She nods seriously. She thinks of aiming it at every tree on her property, at her house, at her mother’s car. Into the open cavern of her own skull.___When he lets her start shooting, he stands next to her, as though he can guide her shots just by his presence. She misses and misses until finally she doesn’t. It’s a rabbit, small and delicate when it was making its way across the grass, but when she picks the body up it’s ugly, heavy, waterlogged with death. Nothingness spreads through her. It’s after her first kill that she learns what David tastes like. Not rust, or moss, or even metal. He tastes like what you might find at the bottom of a pond. Like something that was once green but slowly turning liquid, falling apart to rot. She doesn’t hate it. There’s none of that artificial bubblegum flavor she’s tasted on other boys, no chemical chapstick taste, no spearmint mouthwash. It’s realer than life. As real as death. It draws her in, makes her reach out for more, and he pulls away too soon—smiling, knowing. He teaches her how to bring down deer. They’re fast and shy, but a single buck can feed a family for months. Their slim bodies, so elegant in life, lose all their grace at the moment of the bullet’s impact, and what was once a whole animal splinters into a collection of fractures: spasms, synapses blindly firing, intricate circuitry torn apart. Every kill earns her a kiss. The loamy warmth, the taste of decay, is addictive. The nothingness spreads through her like poison or wine. They go to the forest more and more. They take turns, passing the rifle back and forth between them: a deer for Julia, a fox for David. Julia’s mother doesn’t notice her absence because she doesn’t notice anything anymore. Except the TV, and her cans of beer, and cigarettes that she smokes with fingers that grow increasingly thin and whittled down, like brittle sticks of wood. David doesn’t talk about his family, but she knows that he knows about hers. He pulls her close as they hunt frogs in the ponds, not wasting bullets but crouching low to the ground and trapping them in coffee cans, listening to the frantic thump of their bodies, the sound like wet beating hearts. “Should we name them?” he asks. “What’s the point? We’re killing them anyway.”She can tell he’s not fooled by her casual tone. A twinge of disdain crosses his face. “You mean, you could never kill anything with a name.”___In the evening the fields turn leaden gray like the skin of her parents. Like her mother with her fingers that will soon be the same size as her cigarettes. Like her father dying sunk full of morphine, painkiller rushing silver through his veins, hospital walls closing in around him like an artificial womb. They stop by the edge of the forest. The wheat is as tall as it will ever be. David is by her side, the cool pale of his eyes reflecting the sky. There aren’t any deer here, just a neighbor’s cat, not even thirty feet away. “See her?” Julia asks. She is the one holding the rifle.“Yes.”The cat doesn’t notice them. Her name is Luna, Julia remembers. Luna or Lulu, something like that. Her tabby pattern blends in with her surroundings, melts her into them like a stripe of paint blurring into a stone-colored background. She slinks through the wheat thinking herself unseen. “Lulu,” David whispers, soft as a thought. Soon she will disappear into the woods. Only a few more steps until she’s in; only a few more seconds left for Julia to make a shot. “Your turn,” David says.The feeling of her own heart beating is what makes her raise the rifle to her shoulder. She aims, stares down the barrel. She thinks about how they both have hearts, her and David, her and Lulu, her and all the things she’s killed. How everything with a heart is fair game. The trigger like a bone under her finger, and then the crack, the nothingness blossoming outward from a central point.The two of them stand motionless in the algal gloom, in the murky raucous dark. David smiles. And although it’s ostensibly an expression of openness, of transparency and warmth, something about it makes her think of a trap twisting shut.
The land holds its own weather for Shome Dasgupta’s collection, Atchafalaya Darling (Belle Point Press, 2024). The rhythms of Cajun country make themselves known in the richness of the waters, the sly grace of the fauna, and the down-to-earth sensuality of the cuisine. Ghosts step between the living, and memories breathe in the wind. Dasgupta addresses longing, grief and struggle, all the while infusing the stories with enchantment for the region. There is music to be heard for those who know how to listen. I spoke to Shome about the book.Rebecca Gransden: We begin at the end. The collection opens with “A Familiar Frottoir,” a story that addresses the end of life. There is talk of ghosts, and many of the leitmotifs that recur throughout the collection are introduced here. Did the idea for the collection start with a conceptual framework or did its assemblage occur in a more spontaneous manner?Shome Dasgupta: “A Familiar Frottoir” was the last story I had written for the collection—I had no clue where it was going to go or how the narrative would journey. It started off with an image of a character “shucking” pistachios—I was obsessed with that wording mainly because we live in a state where shucking oysters is a common way of dining. The ghost didn’t appear until she actually appeared—meaning, I didn’t know that this was the way the plot was heading. I don’t think I had a strong idea of any kind of thread that would travel through each of these stories other than that they all take place in the Cajun South. Other than that, it was just fun to see any commonalities or themes because I think they were all unintentional. The way the story collection started off—I had an idea of writing one story about small-town Louisiana, a musician, who goes through the obstacles of alcoholism, but one where the character was able to overcome it, or at least cope with it. It was a story I wanted to write with the utmost sincerity—although I’m no musician at all, not even close, I am now living in sobriety after having gone through some very dark times in my life. I wanted to write it for myself while at the same time, hopefully being able to share this experience with others who might find some light in the words. I love writing about Louisiana, particularly Cajun culture because it’s what I know most about, where I’ve been immersed all my life. So after writing “By The Pond Back Home,” I became really excited about writing another one about the region. I just wanted to have fun, and diving into this collection was very much that kind of experience.RG: The stories are in touch with the forces of nature, with the elements a constant presence. This manifests in a multiplicity of ways, but I was particularly struck by the repeated use of bodies of water. What draws you to these places and what is their significance when it comes to Atchafalaya Darling?SD: Symbolically and physically, water is both destructive and nurturing—it’s a push and pull, a constant search for harmony. The Gulf Coast is especially storm-ridden—hurricanes, flooding, thunderstorms so it’s hard not to write about this area without including those destructive forces. While at the same time, the peaceful and soothing characteristics of bodies of water are as much apparent—wildlife, all of it—there’s some kind of reconciliation taking place, I feel like, a constant rebirth. The Atchafalaya is vast—seemingly endless or romantically infinite, but by creating an experience or a story taking place on the basin, I wanted to make such a world small and intimate, covering both the rough and calm aspects of that particular environment.RG: Many of the stories evoke the character of the folktale. Have folktales and myths influenced your writing, and if so, in what way do you incorporate that influence into your work?SD: I would like to think so—such styles of writing certainly influenced my reading early on in my childhood. That, plus the concept of oral storytelling, whether fictional or otherwise, always magnetized my interest. I don’t know if it was intentional or not, going into these stories, to create such a tone, but I’m really happy to see that it was apparent, at least a bit, the way Cajun folklore and universal tales, regardless of language and culture, kind of seeped into these words. I love magical realism, and I think it would be a part of the same Venn Diagram—I think my first pieces of writing prose, I was seeking to emulate such a world, and I’m sure my love for such a style influences all that I write. Sometimes, I find myself trying hard not to go that route. Like literally, I could write a sentence like, “she sat down in the chair,” and almost always, my next line would want to be something like, “one that was born from rock, carved by rabbit teeth right as the horizon tilted and blended into the eyes of a mother who had fallen from the sky while fishing for stars.” It’s almost natural for me to go beyond realism so I like trying to ground my words—whether it’s poetry, nonfiction, or fiction, and if anything, sprinkle them with a bit of fantastical, perhaps, which hopefully created another depth or layering.RG: A defining characteristic of the stories is the embracement of the simple gestures of life. Foodstuffs feature prominently, mostly uncomplicated dishes or edibles that hold significance in some way. What part does food play in the collection? SD: Oh gosh—one of the hardest aspects of writing about the Deep South is to not include its cuisine. It really is difficult, at least for me, to capture this area without using food as a character in itself. Its presence is a way of life—a tradition stemming from homes to cities to regions. I told myself to go with it instead of going against it. It’s just more fun to do so—I love, love Cajun food, so why tuck it away when it can be a driving force to show what it’s like to live here in Louisiana. I’m obsessed with the color of crawfish, the spices, and while it’s not specific to this culture, but definitely prominent, bread pudding plays a role in “A Familiar Frottoir” in that even though the character’s house is burning down, he’s more concerned in baking his dessert. RG: A raccoon scurried over the fence as the sun came down—its twilight creating a frame of faded solace, one that neither of them knew the importance of in that moment together.The presence of animals dominates the stories in a subtle way. They appear unobtrusively, seemingly engaged in their doings away from the human world for the most part. These encounters can be fleeting, or from a distance, but seem somehow cosmically preordained. Your use of the owl and of frogs particularly stands out, but there are many more examples. In some instances the animal presences, for me, take on the quality of signs, of shepherds, perhaps guides, and evoke the symbolism of fable and folk myth. How did you decide upon your approach to the animal imagery included in the collection? Has your experience with animals influenced your rendering of them?SD: There was an owl in our garage, and my mother pointed and said, “Look, that’s your Dida.” My grandmother had passed away only a couple of weeks before this visitor arrived at our home. I think about that moment often, and how it guided me to approach and look at the animals around us in a very different way. Whether on the physical level, metaphorical, or spiritual level, and to be constantly surrounded by wildlife or any animal of any sort, it not only nourishes me, personally, but also my writing. Especially in Louisiana–whether it’s roadkill or a soaring heron I feel connected to them, or I guess, I’m searching for a connection to them, and they become characters, whether intentionally or otherwise, to become distractions, symbols, friends, or to add to setting and scenery. Dead or alive, there’s so much power there, and history, too. I love birds, especially—I’m obsessed, though I don’t know much about them, but it’s to the point that I have three tattoos: an owl for my Dida, a peacock for India, and a pelican for Louisiana and my grandfather or Dadu, and I’m constantly thinking about what will be next. Perhaps, a future drafted story will help me to figure that out.RG: Turnip nodded at Margaret and pulled down his baseball cap, a ragged and torn faded blue hat, one that he had received as a gift while he was in high school from Margaret when they were first starting to date. Though Turnip had stopped wearing it for a long time, when his tours became larger and larger, Margaret kept it under his pillow for the nights, weeks, months he was away.Objects take on weight. Seemingly innocuous everyday items are imbued with significance, sometimes in light of the history they invoke, the memories they trigger, or by the manner in which they change hands, for instance inherited, gifted or stolen. When thinking about story, how do you make use of objects?SD: I think—I think that any object can become a character in a story, and because of that, it can provide context, significance, obstacles, and comfort through just its presence. Such is the instance with the baseball cap—symbolic, perhaps, of their love when they became more than just friends. A cap, perhaps, that represents Turnip before his faults and afflictions which makes Margaret give him a chance, an open door to come back to a time when their relationship was true and stable. I’m a hoarder myself—I keep everything and anything, however small or large, and however seemingly insignificant because somewhere inside of me, I will look at these objects to bring an emotion or a memory, one worth feeling or remembering. In one of my drawers, there’s a paperclip. It was used to hold together a letter sent to me, and I lost that letter much to my sadness, but that paperclip—that particular one, among millions upon millions upon millions, takes me to a state of mind that I don’t want to forget. It becomes a friend to me, something living—giving breath, and I think that’s the same with what I’m trying to do with including such objects in my stories.RG:Outside, the frogs were loud—almost as if they were generating energy for the rest of the world.Song, tone, rhythm and music flow through the collection. A frog chorus opens ways to memories, muddy banks sing the song of the waters, and chimes resonate like an evocation. Musicians appear as conduits for strong forces, from the creative to the addictive. What part does music play in the collection?SD: Thank you so much for such kind comments—for this question, and for all of these questions. They’re so thoughtful, and I’m truly humbled from such care and generosity, and I’m so happy to see that you were able to find some rhythm and tone in these stories. I think I’m controlled by language and sound more so than anything else, and I try my best to bring such volumes to my words, which have this power over me than the other way around—much like music. Growing up here in Lafayette, watching local bands play was a large part of sharing time with my friends, and many of my friends were musicians themselves—absolutely so talented, and it kind of gave me some insight into this really, really nuanced world within a world within a world. Also, particularly, in addition to indie rock or pop or hip hop, there’s a music born from heritage and tradition, such as zydeco or Cajun music—dancing, too. I was definitely trying to reveal the importance of such a culture here in the Deep South. Much like you mentioned, there’s also the naturality of music—through frogs or birds or the wind, a constant surrounding us, and it was nice to attempt to blend the different forms of music that can be heard, whether created intentionally or unintentionally. Likewise, I try to emulate such sounds in the writing itself, to emulate or mirror what’s actually taking place in a story—maybe it’s choppy, maybe it tends to produce a certain rhythm, and ideally, or hopefully, it can be heard even though there isn’t any music actually being played.RG: The neighbor looked up at the sky to see a flock of birds making their way past a lowered sun—he squinted his eyes and nodded his head, whispering words to himself as if he was having a conversation with a ghost.There is an elliptical quality to the collection, a sense the themes ebb and flow as the passing of seasons. The common ups and downs of life become infused with profundity, and seemingly inconsequential trivialities take their place as part of a play on the grandest scale. What is your approach to repetition?SD: Oh I so love, love repetition on every level of writing, whether it’s repeated words, sentences, characters, narratives, themes—however unintentional, I think I rely on it way too much. It’s more natural for me to write that way, which in turn, guides me to those kinds of rhythms I’m seeking. Narratively, I laugh at myself sometimes, thinking that I’ve only ever drafted just one story throughout my writing endeavors, conceptually—just told in different ways. On the word level, especially—I remember listening to Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach: Knee Play 5,” and how it made me mesmerized or hypnotized, and it’s definitely an influence in my writing, whether it’s poetry or fiction or prose. I think, also, such a style relates to all that you’ve mentioned before—nature, environment, objects, symbols, animals, and they all relate to these circular or elliptical patterns of life replicated in these stories. I’m a huge fan of echoes.RG: What have these stories revealed to you?SD: I’m kind of laughing at myself because taking part in this interview has revealed so much more to me when it comes to these stories—aspects I haven’t really thought about before. Again, truly, thank you so much for such insightful questions and for taking the time to share such thoughts about both the subtle or larger elements of these stories. It was such a pleasure to think about these questions. I just wanted to write and have fun and not focus too much on all the usual components of a story—I didn’t think much about what’s at stake, but more so, setting and character and dialogue were my main areas of concentration, along with language and image. What that would create, I wasn’t sure, but I had such a great experience drafting this collection while not thinking about anything else other than just writing. I hope that makes sense, and I hope all of these responses make some kind of understandable meaning, and thanks again for your time and for reading Atchafalaya Darling. I’m so grateful for this opportunity.
We look at houses with acreage and discuss their merits, knowing we can’t leave our jobs in the city. Talk like we have a second life to live. We stand in an open field, dark like it never is at home. The Milky Way appears as a band of light in the sky.
On tiger nights she wants sex as soon as she gets home. Even if you’re right in the middle of making dinner, no matter if the sauce is just setting up or the souffle must come out of the oven. “Who makes souffles anymore?” she asks. What can you say? This is a woman who’s been tending big cats all day, mucking out their habitat while they pace back and forth in their holding cells, running dry tongues over four-inch incisors as they ogle a pallet of deer-legs thawing in the sun. On the days when she’s on capybara duty, or wrangling the giant tortoises, it isn’t like this. Those nights, she pours the wine and does the dishes. Afterwards you watch bingeworthy television in matching flannel and then make a tidy sort of love before washing up and going to bed. Tiger nights are different. It’s not that you mind, so much. Who would? But there’s something about the brightness of her eyes as she tears off your clothes, the way she doesn’t care when a glass on the nightstand, knocked by a wild elbow, shatters across the hardwood, an event that the next frantic, sweaty, minutes will utterly erase from memory, so that when you rise to retrieve a washcloth you step deeply onto a curled shard from the glass’s rim, which enters your foot and breaks into several pieces inside the wound. It’s a week working with tweezers for an hour a day before you can draw it out. When you do what follows is a pulse of oozy pink. You carry the shard in your palm into the bedroom to show her, but she’s already asleep. You limp to the bedside on your infected foot and lean close to watch the twitching of her lips.
Catfishing happens at night and the bait smells like blood and cheese. We fished for what felt like hours in a cloud of mosquitoes, and we only caught one fish. We pulled it to the floor of the boat, and I couldn’t believe it actually looked like a cat. It fought hard, flailing wildly. The man called it a beastly motherfucker, his foul language thrilling my sister Ellen and me. “You know catfish got tastebuds all over their bodies?” he said. “They’re just swimmin’ tongues. You lick one and he’s lickin’ you right back.”“Gross!” we screamed. “Why would you lick a catfish?” He laughed. “Knowin’ that, why wouldn’t you?”When the fish finally succumbed, we laid it in a cooler full of ice, its glassy eyes cold and detached. The man promised us fried catfish sandwiches the next day, which I’d never had and didn’t know I wanted until right then. To eat this very fish would be primitive in a way for which, at age ten, I didn’t possess words or experience. Every fish I’d ever eaten had come from a blue Styrofoam tray, wrapped in layers of plastic that encased a dozen different smells, all of them factory and none of them sea.We slept in the car, something I don’t think was planned because there was only one blanket. The man made do with a thick canvas coat, putting the driver's seat down as far as it would go and resting his hat over his face. Ellen and I curled up in the backseat and held hands all night, the way otters do to keep from floating apart. She couldn’t sleep so I whispered to her everything I knew about dogs, making friends, black holes, puberty, Christmas, Egyptian mummies, different types of candy, and kissing.In the morning, we sat up and saw two deer, a mother and a baby. The man told us to be still, don’t make a sound. The pair walked past the rear window, their soft dappled fur nearly brushing the glass. On the way home, the man dropped us at a Wendy’s and said he was going to find a payphone. “Let’s get your mom on the line,” he said. I was happy to have a break from the car. The smell of the catfish was beginning to leak in from the trunk. Even on ice it was starting to spoil. He handed me a twenty-dollar bill. “That’s ten each,” he said. “More than enough, but don’t spend it all.” Wendy’s had recently launched a ninety-nine cent menu. We ordered modestly, just a burger and small fries each, and a Frosty to share. We didn’t want to get into more trouble. Then we went outside and looked for the man, for his car, and found neither. We stayed there for hours, spending the rest of the money. First, Ellen was thirsty, so I bought her a soda. Then she was hungry, so I bought her some chicken nuggets. Then she was scared, so I bought us both another Frosty. On our table grew a mountain of sweating yellow cups, cardboard boxes, and greasy wrappers. We somehow knew not to draw attention to ourselves, sitting out of view of the employees and moving tables every half hour. Each time I ordered more food, I told the cashier, “My mom said to buy this”, but the employees didn’t care. They weren’t thinking about us at all. We quietly sang Bruce Springsteen songs, avoiding eye contact during “I’m On Fire.” Hey little girl is your daddy home, did he go and leave you all alone mmmm-hmmm.“Darlington County” felt better, full of references to things like union connections and World Trade Centers, things we didn’t understand but flew off our tongues with less self-awareness. I told Ellen the man was coming back, of course he was, he probably had trouble finding a phone. She gulped and nodded. I looked out the wide windows to see if there was somewhere else to go, but everything outside held much more uncertainty than the Wendy’s booth. There, in the plastic refuge, we were safe.I told Ellen that Dave Thomas was a real person and he named Wendy’s for his daughter, also real. I wasn’t sure if she really looked like the grinning, freckled girl who stared up at us from our pile of trash. She was almost certainly never left behind at a Wendy’s, or anywhere for that matter. She was loved. I told Ellen everything I knew about leprechauns, monkeys, Garbage Pail Kids, dreams, Hawaii, Helen Keller, bras, weddings, and secret diaries with locks and tiny keys. We spoke about the doe and the fawn we’d seen when we woke up that morning, walking past the car, oblivious to our presence. We named them after ourselves.We ran out of things to talk about and began to eat whatever was left, picking at the smooth edge of a hamburger bun, the skin of a baked potato. Ellen ran her tongue around the inside of a fry box and I was jealous I’d never thought to do that.Then she whimpered. Our eyes met; her mouth twisted terribly. She had an accident – too much stress, too much grease. I took her into the bathroom, which smelled of lemon disinfectant and urine, and in the stall, I helped her remove her shoes, socks, and pants. We threw her underwear into the trash and buried them. The stink of feces persisted, filling the tight space. Ellen cried hot tears while I wiped her legs with wet paper towels oozing with electric blue soap that rubbed her skin until it stung. I removed my own shoes, socks, and pants and gave my underwear to her. I was fine without them, but she would not be. She needed them to feel safe, a thin shield against the world. It was getting dark when the man came back. I watched his wiry frame move across the parking lot, silhouetted against an astonishing pink and purple sunset. He walked with purpose until we locked eyes through the glass, and then he hesitated. I suppose there are things in life that feel right in the moment but will grate at your being over time, leaving you porous. You become a sieve, unable to hold anything for any amount of time without remembering the awful things you did. Maybe he came back because he didn’t want to be a sieve for the rest of his life and leaving two young girls at a Wendy’s will do that to you. He saw us through that window and knew he was nothing but fucked. Many years later, I entered this Wendy’s into Mapquest and found it was over two hundred miles from home. To get to the catfishing lake, we had gone up and over the Rocky Mountains, passing several ski resorts. On the drive, in each direction, when we approached Hot Sulphur Springs, the car filled with the stench of rotten eggs, and both times, Ellen opened her eyes and asked who farted. We’d laughed on the way there, but no one laughed on the way back. The man raged as he drove, telling us how our mom had tricked him, said she had an emergency and could he take us for a night. He said she begged and cried, and having no kids of his own, he didn’t know what to do with children, didn’t know how much attention we required. He said he’d do anything for her, move mountains, drain the widest river. He kept referring to her littlerendezvous, which I made a note to look up later, but I couldn’t find it in the dictionary because it’s not spelled how it sounds. Over and over, he said he should have known. He never stopped talking, comparing her to all sorts of animals: snake, dog, cow, pig. He used other words too: bitch, whore, liar. He called her a fucking slut and then apologized for swearing. I dozed off with Ellen’s head in my lap and woke to see a roadside sign with reflective white letters that said Denver 87 miles. Ellen snored loudly, the seatbelt tight under her chin. The man was still talking circles, though quieter, hissing to himself. It was darkest night by the time we got home. Our unwashed hair absorbed the smell of oil and the char of beef hung on our coats. He dropped us at the end of our cul-de-sac, told us to go up to our own house and ring the bell. We climbed from his car, bedraggled and drowsy, and before we slammed the door, his last words came floating out.“I didn’t touch you. I didn’t touch neither of you. You be sure to let her know. I ain’t going down for something I didn’t do.”I woke up in my own bedroom, the cheap blinds no match for the bright Colorado sun. I rolled over and faced my sister, searching for the night in her hot morning breath.
In my mouth, your name is silt and sweet freshwater, like the stream that bounded you and yours into that space the rest of the village didn’t dare cross. Yong’en—Yong—En—Yongen. 永 for forever and 恩 for a kindness. It must have meant my kindness; you have never been kind to me, my Yongen. When we were girls you would organize the other kids so that as soon as my attention flagged, they would peel away from me–your long hair and shrill laughter flickering on the wind at the front of the pack. It was a shock every time, a reminder of my own freakishness. Proof of your own belonging. We understood each other in this way, marginal from each other. At the end of the day, we were the two who would sling our patchy knapsacks over our shoulders and trudge the long way down a longer dirt road back to the nothing and nowhere place we came from. You would kick every stray scrap of metal you found, just to see how far it could skitter. Yongen, have you ever loved me as I love you? I love you. I love you like I love the solid handle of an axe in my hands, the surety of its useful violence. I love you the way I love the chick we raised into meat, enough to slit your throat myself. I know now that your mother hired me not because of my inherent talent—although I have learned quickly what is expected of me—but for my unique ability to shoulder a necessary cruelty. Yours, and then later, mine. *We all wondered about the pigs your family kept, away from the rest of the animals. The day your grandmother died, some upperclassman asshole paid off the funeral home to tell him if anyone showed up. And, of course, no one did. What supposedly were her ashes were interred in the community shrine and we dutifully visited every Zhongyuan with our fragrant joss and tacky paper bills that came in stacks, plasticked together straight from the city. We mourned. I stopped trimming the ragged edges of my hair in solidarity with you, close enough to be considered a familiar person by now. Your mother spoke idly about her at dinner, each of us drinking the rich, steaming pork bone broth that fed us that winter. When we got in a childish spat–a pillow fight–we spilled your grandmother’s hair all over the ground. Still speckled pepper and not entirely grey. When your mother hurried into the room, sewing kit in hand and sterner than she’d ever been, I finally understood the peculiarities of your family. Your spirits were stubborn, sticky. Leave anything of the body unused and the soul would never rest, doomed to wander the earth, unaware. Your mother startled at night, when you were too deep in sleep to notice and I was in the kitchen, sharpening her tools. She clutched at my sleeve often, paranoid that she had not done enough, that something of her mother was left behind, her essence congealed in a leftover morsel of her body like meat fibres stuck between her teeth. To leave anything behind was anathema to her–unfilial, ungrateful. She would have eaten clay had it been baked with her mother’s leftover blood, gobbled it down like soup tofu, its dark red delicacy. * I abruptly remembered the first time I had stepped foot on your family’s land—your mother was teaching you how best to butcher: she had your small hand encompassed in hers, fingers wrapped around a wicked blade. One cut, Yongen, she said, and you twisted your face inelegantly, like you were about to cry. But you didn’t flinch when you made the fatal slash. Your mother took the now-dead animal from your hands and drained its thick, dark blood from the clean cut you made so well. That night, we tossed the sweet chicken meat with mala spices, peppercorn and fresh onion; we fried the skin and licked crispy fat off our lips. When we picked the bones clean, we tossed them back into the already steaming broth, meant to last the week. You could never handle your spice, so I carefully scraped all that gritty red off your food, poured just enough soy sauce over to salt it well, and you ate what I fed you. Your mother offered me a job and a place to stay the next day. It was my job to scrub the bleeding basin clean—not a drop left over, she said, and I instinctively knew she meant it literally. I rubbed the little plastic tub until my fingertips hurt and wrinkled, rinsed it out half a dozen times so the water ran out clean and clear as a spring when I was done, and your mother gave me a chicken bone still bursting with marinated flavour to suckle on as reward. Afterward, she told me to chew hard until the pieces splintered under my molars. Swallow. *How did we end up here, Yongen? The branch, splitting you open. The dirt road with its skid marks like regret. I’d fallen beside you, but I was intact, miraculously. Your soft mouth, open in a scream. *“Did your mother make you eat after lao lao’s funeral?” I asked you, my teeth against your skin. You opened your mouth and moaned, low and long. “Don’t make me say it,” you panted, grasping onto my arm. “That’s so fucked up.” “What about Xiao Lu? When he drowned in the river that year?” Your cousin, pearly eyed and dimple-cheeked. Fat rolls still on his chubby arms. It was a strange year. All our crops flooded too, that fatal river overflowing with fresh rain, but our table was plentiful that spring. We feasted. 五花肉 bubbled in wine and dark soy, a rust coloured marinate that swallowed the gritty pieces of rock sugar greedily. A broth so thick and freshsweet it warmed me up inside out for the whole evening.“Don’t,” you said again, but I could see it in your eyes. Saliva flecked your lips. I wondered if you were thinking of that abundance again. Or if you were only scared. *You blinked, one fat tear rolling over your cheek. “You’ll take care of me?” you asked. “After?” I imagined your mother dutifully stuffing her own mother’s hair in that pillow. I imagined myself winding your long hair into braids, bundling branches with it, ready to burn. Carefully, I rubbed my way up your spine. You watched me with wide eyes, your lips parted. Through the blotchy red and your pinked eyes, I thought there was the beginning of some flush suffusing your face. I had left your hair half cleansed; some of it fell across your lips and left behind easy strings of crimson, your own blood streaking your mouth. My fingers found what I was looking for. The branch was thick, twisted, its surface ribbed where it pushed its way into you. The edges of you around it all soft. Skin taut. Slippery with more fluid. I leaned into you and you pulled me in close, your other hand winding in the waist of my shirt. “Please,” you told me, and for the first time, it wasn’t some form of denial, so I hugged you tender and started working you open. I fucked you before I ever kissed you, Yongen. The branch primed you for it, introduced the notion of being open to your body, at once so soft and yet so unyielding, but I was the one who pulled you apart. You clung to me as I eased the tip of my finger into you, crooked so I could find the right angle. Your lips moved soundlessly, your eyes fluttering shut. I slipped in one, then two, rocking slow enough to ease you into it. Your skin was stubborn. Even with the ragged edge, you tore so slowly. “Trust me,” I said, even marred and terrified, you answered me automatically with a soft sound, a nod. I would be grateful to you, Yongen. I would leave no trace behind.
