Because Jenny only hired Taiwanese girls, I lied about my father, my mainland surname. I said I’d taken the name Zhang to blend in and she believed me. Don’t ever think you have to be like those dogs, she told me, though she loved dogs and owned two mutts both named Daughter. She opened the store every day with Daughter and Daughter lapping at her radish-calves, foaming pink all over her feet. We tossed boxes and Styrofoam peanuts to the dogs, tasking their teeth with cardboard feasts. Jenny’s Dollar Store sold most things legally, like thumb-sized flashlights and box macaroni and house slippers (cotton) and outdoor slippers (plastic) and rattan furniture and lighters, but she also sold New Year’s firecrackers shipped from her nephew in Miaoli, hidden in a suitcase half-full of Styrofoam-stuffed pineapple cakes. In the spring, she sold Daughter’s yearly litters, puppies the size of my fist with eyes slicked shut and no teeth yet and blood-mucus purpling their fur. Jenny kept the litter in a laundry basket so cramped that a couple of the puppies suffocated to death beneath a squirming quilt of siblings.
What should I do with them, I said about the two dead puppies. Jenny looked at me from the canned food aisle, her full-face visor always lowered over her face in the afternoon, even though the windows of the store were too dusty to breathe light and I wasn’t allowed to wipe them with anything but wads of newspaper. Throw them in the dumpster, she said, so I knotted each of them into a separate plastic bag – it seemed disrespectful to bag them together – and swung them into the dumpster we shared with the Shanghainese restaurant next door. The only thing mainlanders want is money, Jenny said about the restaurant, though I once saw her steal empty cans of wanglaoji out of their side of the dumpster to trade for quarters at the recycling center.
Jenny had worked this strip mall since I was little kid, and I used to watch her smoke while squatting on the sidewalk, her visor trapping the smoke and corralling it close to her face, blurring her away. Back then, Jenny was a teenager and there was a laundry next door where my Abu folded clothes until late, tucking in the sleeves, surrendering the waist. I would sit on top of the washing machine as it bounced my bones and marvel at how Abu could fold a dress so delicately that when you unfurled it, there wasn’t a single crease in it, no sign that it had once been any shape but standing.
I don’t know how this bitch keeps getting pregnant, Jenny said, pointing at the dog with two blonde spots on its ass. When she left the store for her sidewalk smoke break, I flipped Daughter and Daughter onto their backs and saw that only one of the Daughters was a bitch. The Daughter that was a boy stood up and licked my wrist, his tongue thin as a whip. One of his ears was torn and I touched it with my thumb, the serrated edge of the wound, the curdled veins. He shied and spat, swinging a rope of spit at me, barking once, and Jenny stuck her head back into the store to say I shouldn’t touch her daughters. With her visor down, I couldn’t see her face, only the smoke bruising her shield of dim plastic, fogging her features. She was joking, but I wondered if she’d heard about me, the dyke, the damned, the one who was once caught naked in a creek bed, a girl on my breath.
Jenny told me to come early in the next morning to hang a new banner she’d ordered from Taobao. It was a plastic tarp, blistered by heat, with a pixelated stock-photo image of an ocean wave. WATER SOLD HERE, it said, THE BEST TASTE IN TOWN. When the water store in the strip mall went out of business last month – there were rumors that the water caused hallucinations and induced two women to stab each other in the shoulders – Jenny decided to fill up 5-gallon jugs with her hose at home and sell the water at the store. The best taste in town? Water tastes like nothing, I said, climbing down the rusted ladder. Jenny was leaned against the concrete column, Daughter and Daughter wedged between her calves, her visor already lowered even though it was dim, the sky sputtering on like a stove. Don’t make fun of me, dog ass, she told me. All water has a taste. Back in Taiwan, she told me, she lived next to an old abandoned prison with wishbone-shaped river behind it and the water tasted like blood, not the rusty old kind of blood, but the kind so fresh it feigns being sweet. She told me the Nationalists used to build prisons next to rivers because it made it easy to get rid of bodies: the prisoners were shot on the banks so they’d fold into the water and be recycled out to sea. Easy, she said. Practical, that’s what those people are. You didn’t even waste bullets, she told me. String all the prisoners together and shoot just one of them. Then they’ll all fall into the water and drown. Nothing wasted. This was how Jenny justified selling expired cans of soup and boxes of frozen pizzas that the dogs gnawed through.
There will always be someone, Jenny said, who will eat anything. You wouldn’t believe where my mouth has been, she told me. Or maybe you would, she said, laughing, and I walked behind the counter, opening the register even though I knew it was empty. Because her face was visored, I looked at her neck instead, the purple vein that rivered through it. She wasn’t any lighter-skinned than me, despite always dueling the sun, and her arms were laddered with dark scars, a pattern I recognized: my Abu had those scars from years as a cane-cutter, all those blade-edged cane leaves snipping her skin to coils of ribbon.
Jenny shouldered boxes out of the storage room. She claimed never to need help, but her lungs filled with smog whenever she bent. She coughed into a mug behind the counter, full of honey-thick phlegm. When I pried open one of the boxes, it was crammed full of costume boas, neon feathers snowing onto the floor, the dogs leaping to snag them mid-air. She tugged one out and untangled it, telling me to hang them on the back wall where we sold packaged ping-pong sets. All the boas smelled like smoke and some of the feathers were charred at the edges, ash-silver. I got them at a fire sale, she said. A factory blew up. I joked to her that they were phoenix feathers, but I didn’t think she understood. Turning toward the back wall, I whisked one around my wrist, flirting with flight, even though I knew the feathers were synthetic and had never been part of any sky’s lineage. Outside the store, Jenny was talking to a teenage girl about firecrackers. Daughter and Daughter circled my legs, barking up at me like I was some bird they were hunting down from a branch, and I laughed, lassoing the Daughters close with my boa, feeding them feathers and forgetting about flight.
It was the only thing I ever stole from her. When it was time for me to close the store, I coiled one up, yellow and glittered, and shuttled it into my purse. At home, Abu was asleep with her face down in a real estate exam prep book, red-dyed sunflower seed shells littered in a blooded halo around her head. That’s where the wealth is, she always said. Land. That’s the business we need to break into. When everything else is gone, that’s all that will be left. I reminded her that her family had once lost land after the Nationalists took it away, that there was nothing permanent about dirt, but she waved both her hands at me and spat a red shell into her palm and said yes, yes, but it’s different here.
When I woke her up, tickling her cheek with a stray yellow feather from my balding boa, Abu said without lifting her head, I don’t like you working for Jenny. Their histories were twinned, symmetrical as wings – Jenny came to LA the same year as my mother, on the same China Airlines flight but in opposite aisles – but unlike Abu, Jenny had her own store, plus a firecracker supplier, and though Jenny had no husband or daughters, even my mother conceded that dogs were probably preferable. I pinched the red shells off the pages of her book and cupped them in my palms, each seed still glowing with my mother’s spit, bright as a lit matchhead. Go to bed, I told her. I saw that the corners of her textbook pages were folded neatly, each dog-ear symmetrical, and remembered how precisely she re-pleated pants at the laundromat, sealing each crease with steam. Let me study, she said. Don’t turn off the lights, she said. Ok, I said, draping the boa around her neck. This thing is tickling me, she said, shrugging. At least it’ll keep me awake.
Back when Ahma was alive and we shared our yard with her chickens, before we buried her ashes in an abandoned lot, Abu was the one who sent me out to snatch a hen for slaughter. They fled my boneless fists, and I always came home with only feathers. Abu laughed at me for chasing the chickens, my knees rolled in a salty batter of mud and scabs. Finally, she told me that the only way to catch a chicken was to forget about outrunning it: don’t try to grab at it from behind, just sneak up close. Swing your shadow over it. Straddle it and it will squat for you, thinking you’re a rooster trying to mount it. It worked, and when the hens squatted below me I plucked them up, passive as stones, and later I convinced the neighbor girl to play Catch a Chicken with me. You be the hen, I said, I’ll be me. She got on her hands and knees and I squatted over her, tickling her belly until she flipped over, laughing until laces of spit criss-crossed the air and lashed me. Ahma watched from the kitchen window and threw open the door, told me to get my melon-ass back inside. You’re not a rooster, she told me. She said to Abu, your girl. Someday she’ll do something unnatural with her shadow.
I told Jenny this story on a slow day. The back of my shirt was mirrored with sweat and I avoided looking at the back wall where the boas were. I’d tried to take a color too common for her to notice its absence, all those yellow and orange boas swinging from the rack like limp necks, twisted dead by my hands. Jenny laughed at the story, smoking behind the counter with me. She was using the tip dish as an ash tray, since no one gave us any tips anyway. You’re a rooster for sure, she said, a real cock, and I looked at the two of us on the TV screen’s security footage, my silhouette small as a thumb, smearing hers into shadow. I gotta get better cameras, she said, I can’t even see my own face. I tried to remember if I’d turned my back to the camera before wadding the boa into my purse.
Jenny turned to me on her stool. Her bleached-copper hair touched her shoulder blades, glittered faux-gold in the fluorescence, and there were two moles on her chin so close together it looked like they were either fusing or splitting apart. I wanted to reach out and decide with my thumbnail, delivering the mole into two, mother and daughter. Around her neck was something new, a pewter crucifix on a chain, dead against her chest as if nailed there. Jenny saw me looking and smiled with one side of her mouth, hiding the hole on the right side where she was missing a molar. I decided to go to church, she said, laughing. I told her that my mother used to go to church in Taiwan just because the missionaries gave out free bags of rice at the end of the sermon. Are you trying to convert me? I asked her. Jenny laughed again and said, You an aborigine too? Then you know. When the missionaries came, they gave us bibles. Then they caught us ripping out the pages to use as toilet paper. Whipped us for it. I nodded and said I’d heard the story before. When my mother told it, it was a story about how our people couldn’t read, how they were so pig-brained, they smeared shit all over the good book, god’s word. The way Jenny told it, it was about practicality, how our people believed the only language worth knowing was the body, how holes are what make us holy.
The pewter crucifix looked blue-black in the light, bruised. I reached out and pressed my thumb against it, pinning it in place, and Jenny flinched away. Her heat hustled up through the medal, singeing my thumb. The pendant swung between us, a hollow man with holes in his wrists or his palms depending on what version of the story you believed. Depending on your definition of punishment. On the pad of my thumb, silver dust. I licked it off: bitter as blood, buoyant on my tongue. Not real pewter, but some kind of painted tin disrobing its color, revealing a duller gray beneath. Jenny stared at me, the cross at her neck rising up and down with her breath. One hand braced on the counter, one hand in a fist beside her. I wish I had known what was on my face when I touched my pulse to her pendant. What was beneath my face, that paint. Sorry, I said, and stood up from my stool. But the word lodged itself into silence and didn’t loosen.
Jenny turned her back to me and pretended to be looking at the TV screen, though there was no one in the store but us. The girl would come back later, the one asking for firecrackers, and Jenny would wave her away. But you promised me, the girl would say. Go away, Jenny said. I had never once seen her turn away a customer, not even the time a man came in asking to buy Daughter and Daughter, saying they were the right kind of dog for fighting. Look at these teeth, the man had said, prying one of the Daughters’ mouths open, gripping its gums. Daughter whined, bucked its head, tongue tamped back by the man’s gold-ringed thumb. Jenny didn’t chase that man away, just asked him if he wouldn’t rather buy a puppy and raise it on hunger, not like these spoiled Daughters who have never once fought for anything? Later, Jenny spat on the sidewalk and said to me: Dogfighting? I’m a barbarian, but not that kind of barbarian.
But that day, after turning the firecracker girl away, Jenny walked into the store room and claimed to be sorting things, her chest pebbled with sweat even though she was barely moving. My thumb was still wet from when I’d licked it, the dime-colored stain still there, metallic. Always my love took the form of rust. One winter, a girl. It was back when the Wangs were always fighting next door and Abu opened the door so we could eavesdrop better, pretending to be airing out the stink of frying fish. Wang Taitai was accusing her husband of stealing the cash she kept in her pillowcase and Mr. Wang was calling his wife a bucket of rice-worms. The Wangs had a daughter who came back from college, a girl my mother always compared me to – she wore her skirts knee-length and her skin was estranged from the sun – and Wang Taitai begged me to pick her up from the airport because her husband had driven away in their Subaru. So I picked her up in the morning, her black hair bordering on blue in the sunlight. On the car ride home she asked how my mother was, if I ever graduated, if her father was home, if he, if he. When she was done talking, I asked her if she remembered that time we played Catch a Chicken in our yard. I had kissed the back of her neck, licked along her hairline. She straddled me in the mud and fed a worm up my nostril and I laughed, snorting it in, coughing until she reached down my throat and tugged it free, slick with me.
Without turning her head, she nodded. Yes. Then she reached out her hand, still not looking at me, and rested it in my lap. It bounced against my thigh as I pulled onto the off-ramp, and then it opened like a wing to fold over my knee. When I pulled up to her house, squat and heat-warped like all the houses on this street, she lifted her hand from my lap and left. She turned back and looked at me once through the passenger window, and I knew it was because it was tinted: she couldn’t see my face but I could see hers. I backed up the car ten feet, in front of my own home now, and before I unbuckled I saw a stain on the passenger seat. I bent my head to it: blood. A bright wing of it on the fake leather. I spat on it, rubbing at it with my sleeve, measured it against my palm like evidence of my own sacrifice. Then, before I conceded that it would be permanent, I licked it once, tugging the blood onto my tongue.
At the end of the day, when I’d finished wiping Jenny’s windows twice with wadded-up newspaper, I knocked on the door of the storage room and asked if it was time to lock up. You can go home, Jenny said through the door. The rustle of plastic, then something metal and hollow falling to the ground, harmonizing with the silence. Ok, I said, but didn’t leave. I waited until Jenny opened the door, one of the costume wigs from inventory squatting on her head, a yellow like the boa I’d stolen, a canary singing its prophecy. I laughed, stepping back. Jenny looked at me and nodded to the door, Daughter and Daughter darting between her legs, fur oiled in this light.
I said you can go, she said, but pulled the door open wider, stepping back to let me in. I entered. Jenny shut the door. We stood facing each other, one of the Daughters nudging its wet snout against my knee. I pushed Daughter away with my foot, stepped closer. Jenny brought her hand to her throat, but the crucifix wasn’t there. I looked at the floor, wondering if it had fallen off somewhere, if that was the hollow sound I’d heard earlier, and then Jenny placed her palms on my cheeks and lifted my head. Turn off the lights, she said to me, her face so close I almost crossed my eyes. She was taller than me, and I looked at the converged moles on her chin, wanting to bite them off like salted pearls and roll them in my mouth. Reaching behind me, I flicked off the lights. Our teeth were the only light to see by. Daughter and Daughter camouflaged with the dark, the white spots on their rumps rippling and conjoining like constellations.
Her hands beneath my shirt, roaming the rungs of my back, the nick on my hip where a rooster spurred me. There’d been a rooster one summer, bought on Craigslist by Abu, and the rooster had hurled itself at me every time I went out to catch a hen. There can’t be two roosters in a flock, Ahma had joked, one of you has to go. Jenny’s thumb snagged on the scar, digging at it as if she wanted to flip it like a coin. My mouth on her neck, the basket of her breast, the beading of her nipples. There were neon feathers scattered on the floor like the aftermath of a slaughter, and I reached down to grab a handful, stuffing them into her mouth. She chewed them in the dark as I touched her, spitting them into flight. With my tongue, I wrote over the scars on her arms, the calligraphy of cane leaves.
We left late that night, and in the morning, when I came late, the store was locked, no one inside. I pressed my face to the windows, knocked, realized I didn’t know Jenny’s phone number or where she lived. I thought she inhabited the store the way grief inhabited a body. I thought she was born there. She had called me last night by my Tayal name, Savi, Savi, Savi, and I wondered what inside me still answered to that sound, how to name this need that preceded me. I sat on the sidewalk with nothing to smoke, listening for the whine of Daughter and Daughter when they used to nudge my fists open, seeking something sweet.
It was two days before the store opened again, and when I drove by, I saw Jenny inside with a customer, the windows lacy with dust now that I wasn’t wiping them. She turned her head and saw my car outside the store, idling, my windows rolled up. In the empty seat beside me, the stain was already almost gone. Abu, after all her years working at the laundry, would tell me that spit really was the best way to get rid of a fresh stain, but she didn’t know about an old one. She didn’t know what to do with something that had always been there, a birthmark, an island, Jenny’s story about the bible, each page already stained with our names.
I drove away. Jenny recycled rumors about me later, about how I’d stolen from her and that’s why she fired me, yes, who steals something as cheap as that, so tacky, so typical, and I didn’t go back. At home, Abu gave up studying for her real estate exam and decided instead on becoming a landscaper. She told me all kinds of facts, like how overwatering a plant prevented it from staking its roots deep enough: all of its roots bobbed to the surface, shallow, denied by the dirt. Who knew, my mother said, You could kill a thing by giving it everything.
Sometimes I drove through the parking lot, windows down in case she wanted to see me, remembering when we would stand together on the sidewalk and the Daughters would lay down behind us like our shadows but full of blood, knotting themselves together in sleep, undone by our touch.
Contributor Notes
K-Ming Chang / 張欣明 is a Kundiman fellow and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her debut novel BESTIARY is forthcoming from One World / Random House on September 29, 2020. Her poems have been anthologized in Ink Knows No Borders, Best New Poets 2018, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, and the 2019 Pushcart Prize Anthology. More of her work is located at kmingchang.com.
