K-Ming chang
mina
She was half white and said that being with me made her feel more Chinese. The only time I ever spoke Chinese around her was when I was ordering for us at the dimsum parlor on the top floor of a mall in Flushing, where the waiters wore suit vests and the carpet was duck-blood red and there was a plastic chandelier that combed our hair with light, hers long, mine butch. Her hair was that color I could never name, a spectrum like the sky between afternoon and night, sometimes light and sometimes black, almost blonde when she turned her head away from me. She alchemized depending on her distance from me: from a block away she looked like a woman, but up close there was something boneless about her, her face amorphous and jelly-coated like one of those underwater creatures that latches onto the bellies of other things and lives forever clinging.
At the dimsum restaurant, I ordered in Fujianese, which I explained to Mina wasn’t the same as Mandarin or Cantonese. She said, I know, you don’t need to tell me that. The hargow ruptured when I plucked it up with my chopsticks, and I watched the skin shiver open, flashing the pink curve of the shrimp like a stiffened nipple. Before Mina, I didn’t know nipples could be pink. I sucked on its firm meat, gold grease. Mina said that she used to come here with her grandma, but she could never come alone after her grandma died. Because I don’t know how to order, and then I felt bad about it, Mina said. I told her that it didn’t matter what language she ordered in. It only matters whether you’re a customer or a server, eating or working. Whether you’re sitting here in the chandelier-lit room or if you’re in the kitchen making the food. So we’re the same, I said, because we’re both sitting here on a Sunday afternoon, getting served. Language doesn’t cinch the distance between anything.
Mina smiled at me and drank her chrysanthemum tea, swallowing the gold grit at the bottom of her cup. I’ve never thought about it like that, she said. You’re right. But I knew that she wouldn’t come back here alone. The carts carouseled around us, and I pointed at the bamboo baskets instead of saying their names. Otherwise, I knew, she would mouth whatever I said, gnawing the word in silence, and I would be unable to look at her mouth that night—when my nipple was clasped inside it, I would think about the words she mouthed unconsciously like an infant, the soundless way she said my name.
I pointed at a saran-wrapped bowl of tofu brains, silken clots inside a ginger broth. Mina laughed when I told her what the name meant, telling me that they really did look like brains, the curdled lumps, the pus-colored fluid. When she swallowed, I watched the mole in the center of her neck, the size of a fly, and almost reached across the table to swat it away. That night, Mina invited me back to her apartment in a building with an elevator and engraved nameplates on all the mailboxes. Her parents lived in a ground-floor unit, except they were gone, Mina said, at their winter house. I’d heard of summer houses in TV shows, but I’d never heard of a winter house. I’d assumed it was somewhere warmer, but the winter house was located somewhere in the mountains “up north.” Mina cycled her hands in the air whenever I asked her about it. It’s technically a beach house, she said. It was December and I wanted to ask why they were at a beach house in the middle of winter, but I figured that if I ever owned some piece of the sea, I would want to see it all the time. I thought of the first time I went to the beach with my cousins and my brothers and my aunts, when my mother drove us all the way east to Santa Cruz and drove along cliffs that rose like hackles above the water.
I remember looking to my left, looking down the cliff at the water below us, the waves foaming like rabies, and all I could thinking of was the stray dog that sometimes came to the door of the duplex and sat in the shade beneath my mother’s stolen lawn chair, panting for hours before nosing out into the heat. My mother always butted its head with a broomstick, but I told her it was just trying to get cool. Inside, we were never allowed to turn on the air conditioning. There are monks, my mother told us, who can endure things like a million stabs in the back. They can also tow a car with their teeth and a single rope. You know how? They do it with their minds. They lift above their bodies. When you get hot, do that too. My brothers and cousins and I sat panting in the dark, the windows shut to shun the sun, fanning each other with spam catalogues, scouring each other with wet towels. We sweated until the carpet turned to mold from the moisture in our bodies. My brothers passed out a few times a day, and we took turns pricking their palms and cheeks with sewing needles, but not even that could wake them. My mother kept saying to lift from our bodies, to remember those monks who could sit still while self-immolating.
Years later, I learned to lift from myself. In bed with Mina, I sometimes felt like I was suspended in a jelly above our bodies, like the flakes of chrysanthemum in the golden pudding I’d ordered off a cart. I felt nothing when she kneaded my left breast, when her tongue wrote along the lines of my ribs, when her lips flicked against mine. I tried to remember to make sounds, to shut my eyes, but once in a while, Mina would rise from between my legs, spit on her chin, and ask me if this was good. Yes, I said, yes, but I was lifted. I felt everything peripherally, every touch translated into static, and even when she fastened bruises to the space between my breasts, even when I tacked my teeth to the flesh of my arm and tongued the mole on her throat, flicking it like a bead, I felt nothing like the heat of all those summers in the duplex back home, the heat that made the stray dog seize and die in front of our door, that kind of heat that settles in the belly like a stone.
Once, I bit her neck too hard and rubied my teeth. Mina yelped and reared back, and it was the only time I returned to my body, when I saw her clasp a hand to her neck, when I saw us cleave apart. Then she laughed, joking to me that she wasn’t her namesake: Mina, like the character in Dracula. She asked me if I’d read it, and I’d said yes, though I’d only ever read the dollar store abridged version, the kind with illustrations. I remember the black-and-white sketch of Mina in a gown with a knifed-open neckline, Dracula’s shadow poured over her, the arch of her neck like a skinned fish. My mother saw me looking at the picture for too long and snagged the book from my hands, placing it back on the revolving stand by the Dollar Tree checkout. We’re here for powdered milk only, she said, and detergent. Nothing dirty.
In the mornings, I woke up before Mina and wandered her apartment. There was a piano in her living room, across from her front door, and I sat down at the gilded bench and placed my fingers on the lid. I spread my hands the way I’d seen in movie scenes, bowed my head, and spidered my fingers along the keys, so lightly that no one would hear me. But I always ended up moving my fingers as if I were typing, which I used to do at my job at the Chinese doctor’s, entering appointment times into the beat-up Dell laptop. After the piano, I looked at her bookshelves full of art books with minimalist photos of single chairs in rooms of light, and I thought about the lawn chair that the stray dog hid under, and how after I never forgave the chair for its inadequate shade. Then I lay down on her hardwood floor and pressed my ear to the boards, listening to Mina’s parents in the apartment below us. They were early risers, but I heard only shards of their voices, and reconstructing their dialogue was like trying to puzzle together a broken vase, each piece too transparent to see the edges. And unlike my neighbors back home, they never hacked into the sink or beaded their own spit into a necklace or smacked flies off the walls with their bare hands or shouted at each other. That was the best part of the duplex: my mother and I could eavesdrop on the neighbors, could tell when one of them was crying because the shower would run for hours. But I couldn’t hear anything below me, and I remembered that Mina said they owned some kind of gallery. I thought of her parents as pieces of art, hanging themselves on the walls at night, quiet as any color.
I didn’t like to watch Mina wake up, so I locked myself in her bathroom and sat on the toilet looking at my bare feet. Mina slept while chewing her hair, a bouquet of it in her mouth like cud, and when I tried to shimmy the strands out of her mouth, she clenched her teeth harder, as if around a bit. There were some nights I held her hair like reins, tugged her head back, making her bare her backmost teeth. After the first time we slept together, she sucked on my fingers and mumbled, do you feel that, on the roof of my mouth? I said I didn’t feel anything. Mina explained that after she lost all her baby teeth, her adult teeth grew in incorrectly, studding the roof of her mouth instead of growing into a semi-circular smile. An oral surgeon had to uproot them one by one and resew them into curved rows. The ones he broke he replaced with ceramics. Imagine, Mina said, opening her mouth wide, tipping her head back so that my fingers slid down her throat like skinned fruit, entering the lightless parts of her. My teeth on the roof, Mina said. It would’ve been beautiful if I hadn’t spent years chewing my own tongue.
I didn’t like the way she looked with her hair bridling her face, her teeth gnashing the hay-colored ends of her hair, the way the strands darkened when she swayed her head from side to side. She looked white in some photos and Chinese in others. White people are like chickens, my mother always said, they can change color after birth. Their feathers are different shades depending on how old they are, what light is clawing their backs, how much they’ve eaten.
Mina knocked on my bathroom door, asking if I was in there and okay. She thought it was a ritual of mine, meditation on the toilet, and when I came out, she smiled at me. I wondered which were ceramic and which were real. I realized I was bare chested, and Mina tugged me forward, pressed herself against me, wedging a sheath of my hair in her mouth and biting down on it, tugging. Outside her windows, which were washed once a week professionally, the sky was tender as a scraped tongue. Mina didn’t work, but she got dressed with me, stood behind me in front of the bathroom mirror as if she were my shadow. I worked six-and-a-half days a week at a cell phone repair and accessory store in Flushing for a man who claimed to be my second cousin, showing me a smudged photo of our great-grandfather in Nanjing before he was lit on fire by the Japanese, but sometimes I wondered if he was lying, if he’d found some random image online and pretended to recognize me the day I walked by the store. He was the one who handed me a glossed advertisement for iPhone repairs. I have a Samsung, I told him, and he nodded, taking back the ad, and said that Koreans were very innovative and industrious. I stared at him for a second, and he said I should know, my father is Korean, that’s why my surname is Jin, it’s the character for Kim. I later learned he was lying, but by then I’d worked for him for seven months. His father—I learned this from a woman in the food court who was Jin laoban’s neighbor—was an ex-PLA soldier who played mahjong professionally in the mall basement.
I said goodbye to Mina on the stoop of her building, and she laughed and said she felt like a housewife, seeing me off like this. She always watched me until I turned a corner at the end of the street, as if we really were actors in an old movie, the kind Jin told me he used to pirate back when he lived in the mainland. Jin told me that before he opened a cell phone store, he used to sell DVDs at the subway station, except he was tired of the cops coming after him. Everyone’s got a broken phone, he said, and I realized it was true. The screen of my phone was splintered into an elaborate lace pattern, like the surface of a frozen lake, and the light slipped through, blurring Mina’s name when she called me, which was twice a day.
Jin told me to turn it off, but he didn’t mind when I took calls behind the counter. We didn’t have many customers, besides teenagers who liked to finger the dangling cell phone star-heart-apple charms and rhinestoned cases that hung from a rack outside the store, touching them until the rhinestones and glitter were fleeced off. I wondered how he could afford to pay rent in the mall, if maybe his father was funding him or someone else, but I didn’t ask. My mother always said that you can tell when something is a money laundering operation when they pay you too much and the windows are tinted, and both were true of Jin’s store. Once in a while, I saw him disassembling someone’s phone and inserting batteries the size of earrings, or sometimes a woman came in wanting to buy one of those disposable pre-paid phones that made me wonder what they were running from, but most of the time, Jin smoked with his feet propped up on the glass counter—the display case was full of phones, but just the shells, all of the metal innards missing—and I sat on my phone, listening to my screen crackle, not answering Mina when she called.
Jin tried to give me advice about women, about Mina. He said he knew I was a dyke from the beginning, when he saw me wandering around the mall, following that woman around. I turned my head from him, afraid he could read my face the way he could read the leaks in a screen and tell exactly how it was cracked—whether it was dropped on a smooth or uneven surface, deliberately thrown or trampled, vaulted out of a pocket—and asked how he knew I was following anyone. Jin laughed and said it was obvious: I walked too close, pretending not to be watching her, but my eyes skipped like stones across her skin.
You’re worse than a man, Jin said, a real pervert. He said I should go to a facial mapper, the one on the third floor of the mall. They’ll say you have the face of a predator, he said. I didn’t remember the face of the woman I followed that day. It became a habit when I first came to the city, following women around the mall, trying to look only at the neutral parts of her body, shoulders, heels, elbows. Sometimes the women had children, boyfriends on their cell phones, red plastic shopping bags. When Jin asked me why I’d been following random women, I said it was a childhood habit, that when I was little I was so afraid of being alone that I clotted to the nearest person, regardless of whether they were related to me, and sometimes it took them hours to realize I was no one’s daughter or niece or cousin, and by then I might be in another strip mall’s parking lot, another city. That’s dangerous, Jin said. You could have been kidnapped and had all your organs stolen. He said he’d seen it in the news, two teenage girls in Guangzhou who went to get a manicure and ended up missing, their bodies discovered later, discarded in a park with all their organs scooped out. So you think I’m a predator, but also at risk of being preyed on for my healthy young organs? You have to choose one. Jin laughed, his cigarette shimmying up and down in his mouth, and said I could be both. Maybe you go both ways, he said, and once a week asked me come back with him to his apartment.
The advice he gave to me about Mina was this: you’re only with her because she makes you think it’s possible. What’s possible, I said. Jin scraped his heels against the glass countertop, coaxing ash into the Wanglaoji can he used as his ashtray, and said she makes you think it’s possible to be like her. I told her that he hadn’t even seen her or met her, so how would he know what she’s like? Jin laughed, which sounded like a can crumpling in his fist, and said he already knew what she was like. She changes in the light, he told me. She doesn’t move, because the world moves around her. She’s like a stone in a big fucking river. And all you do is part for her. Jin widened his legs on the counter, baring the crotch of his gray jeans, and I told him to shut his damn legs, this was a mall. He laughed, teeth-tugging another cigarette out of his crushed pack. Be careful, he said, she’ll ask you to teach her Chinese.
Why not? I said, as if I hadn’t already taught Mina the words for what she ate. Other things like yes, no, want, try, goodbye. It lit my bones like little buildings, teaching her a language—it made me feel like her architect, like it was my hands that wrenched out and rearranged all those teeth that used to take root on the roof of her mouth. It’s bad, Jin said, because she’ll say everything wrong, and then she’ll punish you. All women are like that, he said, they’re only here to hurt you. I turned away from Jin, from the dirty fluorescent light above his head that looked like it was showering him with piss. You’re such a man, I said to him. It was very Confucian, I told him, to think that women existed to sip something out of you. And you’re not? Jin said. You’re more of a man than me. I said nothing, looking instead at the sim card rack across from me, fragile as the bones of an ear. I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that my mouth belonged to different wants, but he was bending over the disassembled ribs of a phone, no longer speaking. I used to think that Jin somehow inherited the tendencies of the phones he handled, an ability to go blank as a screen, and I never saw anyone attempt to touch him awake.
* * *
After work, when Mina texted to ask if she could meet me at work and take me home, I told her to wait for me in the basement of a mall across the street. I wanted to shuttle her away from Jin, as if he were the one who used to follow random women, as if he might see something beneath the lampshade of her hair that had been invisible to me. When I met her in the food court, Mina was wearing rubber-soled boots that reminded me of the Discovery Channel show Jin and I used to watch during the slow hours, the two of us propped over his phone, gazing down at groups of white men preparing to climb Mt. Everest. Shots of their wives whimpering over their departure, and dramatic reenactments of being stranded in ice storms, frozen alive, their bones glassing on screen. Mina reached for my hand when I stepped off the escalator, but I swerved it into my pocket. She looked at me. You wouldn’t do that if we were somewhere else, she said, and I knew she meant I wouldn’t do that if we were eating on her street or at that Italian restaurant she liked, the one where they served you dishes of oil clear and green as molten emeralds. I tried to smile at her, but Mina was watching me, gnawing on a sheaf of her hair again, and I wanted to wrestle it out of her jaw. I turned away, led her to a table in the corner near the elevators. Mina only ate one or two meals a day—she said she had the digestion of a snake—and I could only afford to eat when she paid for me, so I sat with her at the table, beside a man and his toddler daughter, and unscrewed the thermos of blue-black tea that Jin gave me. Drink this every day, he told me, and your psychopathic stalker tendencies will decrease. It’s for the kidneys.
I asked Mina if she’d painted today. Sometimes she helped her mother with her paintings, mostly flowering the skies or patterning light on water, though I never saw what she worked on. Mina said she’d spent the day applying for jobs in galleries, that there was one she was excited about, owned by a woman in Shanghai. That’s where my mother is from, Mina said, and I leaned back in surprise. Mina never talked about where her mother was from: she spoke about her family as abstractly as a fire, commenting only on their distance from her. They’re home, she’d say to me, or they’re away at their house.
Let’s go home, Mina said. She never asked me if I had somewhere else to go;I told her that I used to rent a room from a Taiwanese family named Lin, that I moved out because their nephews from Kinmen were going to move into my room, but it was really because I’d brought a girl back to the room once. I shared a wall and a bathroom with their youngest daughter’s room, and she must have heard or seen something in the morning, though all I did was sleep beside the woman I’d brought in. The next week, when I was told to move out, Mr. Lin said to me before I left: Does your mother know what you’re doing? She’s dead, I’d answered, which wasn’t true, but I liked the look on face, like there was a lure in his throat that he was forced to swallow.
At her apartment, Mina asked if we could go back to the dimsum place the next week and this time she’d order. I’ve been practicing, she said. She pointed at the mirror on the back of her door, the wishbone-shaped crack I’d traced with my tongue one time when she hadn’t been looking, and told me she’d been sitting in front of it, mouthing along to her Mandarin podcast: They say it’s good for you to see your own mouth when you’re learning a language, Mina said. It brings you back to your infantile state, like mouthing for the nipple. That’s our first word. Mina said that in all languages, nipples are etymology. That’s why the word for mother is so similar across all languages. Our first word is thirst. I sat down on her bed and said, okay, let’s hear it, and Mina pointed at my face and said shrimp, but with the wrong tone, so that it sounded like down. I obeyed, kneeling between her legs, nipping at the inner seam of her jeans, nosing at her until she leaned back on her elbows, clutching my head between her knees, smothering me.
I loved her best when I couldn’t breathe, when her fingers were holstered in my throat or when my nose was jellied shut. When she was asleep, I got up naked and went to her bathroom and sat on the toilet like I always did, but tonight there was a painting on the wall across from the toilet, a painting of a woman’s naked back. Her spine was raised and scaled like a fish. The woman had nape-length black hair, and in the fluorescence of the bathroom, her skin had a light-slimed texture that made me want to lick her to the hips. In the morning, when Mina knocked on the door, I’d been staring at it for hours. Insomnia, I said to her when I opened the door, but Mina just nodded. She smiled and said, that’s my father’s painting.
Who is it, I asked her, the fish-woman. Mina said it was a portrait of her mother, the only portrait her father ever painted. She told me he was an abstract artist, and I’d pretended to understand what that meant.
I looked at the painting again, this time with morning light bruising the wall, and I hoped she wouldn’t ask me if I liked it. The boniness of the woman, the back of her head, the glitter of scales—it felt cliché to me, the image of a reptilian creature, her facelessness, the surface of the canvas pleated like water. I wanted to say that my mother would hate it, this portrait of a ghost, but instead I told Mina that it reminded me of being submerged in water. That’s poetic, Mina said, and you’re lying.
Mina ran the sink, bending over it, but there was something about the way she held herself at a hinge, as if there was a wound in her side she was trying not to fold, that told me not to say anything more. That wasn’t a lie, I wanted to tell her, I really did feel like I was submerged when I saw it, and whenever I’m here, it’s like I have to hold my breath before I cross the threshold, and I think I like it, the deprivation of being with you. But I said nothing, and at work, I could only think about the woman in the painting with her back turned, the scales of her spine, how I wanted to unshingle her skin and suck on the round of her shoulders, and how I almost dreamt of it last night, Mina’s mother straddling my lap, her nipple in my mouth like the tip of a flute, what Mina said about all language being birthed from the same hunger.
At work, Jin was spinning a quarter on the glass counter, the iridescent shell of a phone lighting his wrists. He used to have a separate counter with a curtain drawn in front of it – a surgery room, he joked, because no one wants to see you take something apart if they’re paying you to fix it—but he now seemed to be gutting phones for some purpose other than fixing them. Jin said I was looking better with my hair growing out, now that it was almost at my nape, and I said I didn’t remember the last time I’d trimmed it: being with Mina had an amnesiac effect on me, and I no longer remembered how I met her. The longer we lived together, I said, the more I forgot the words to things, like what to say when you answer a phone, or how to describe the sky. The more she asked me to teach her—numbers one-to-ten in Mandarin, how many days after birth you waited before cutting a baby’s hair so that its soul doesn’t flee its body, what the texture of a woodear mushroom is like—like an earlobe clasped between the teeth—the more I forgot, my memories holed in strange places, drained of faces. I told Jin I didn’t sleep anymore, that I wondered whether one day I’d wake up without a past, and what that would be like, if I would feel like a phantom or an infant, if it would be like trying to stand without a skeleton, or if it was like my mother said about enlightenment, like living lifted.
Jin laughed at me and said that was what it meant to become an American, to forget, but then he stopped laughing and looked at me with a screwdriver tucked behind his ear and told me this was becoming serious. Listen, Jin said, I know you hate when I talk about women, but listen: I used to be in love with someone. She was beautiful, even though she had the voice of a turkey. She used to buy this really expensive horse oil to put on her face, imported from Japan, and she’d apply it all over her face three times a day. She looked like an oil slick. One night, I felt her crouching over me in my sleep. Her fingers were in my mouth. I thought she wanted me to do something, like suck on them, but she just stared at me in the dark and wiggled her fingers around. One time, when she was asleep, I saw a fish come out of her mouth. It just slipped out like something from a sleeve. A whole fish, raw, dead, on our bed. She was looking for something inside my mouth, but I wasn’t sure what. Remember what I said about guarding your torso, being careful? I think she’s like that, your woman. She carves things out of your mind.
I told Jin that his story was a lie and that Mina was not some kind of melon-baller for memories, scooping them out of my skull. Fine, Jin said, but he told me to start writing things down when I was around her, in case I needed a record to remember, in case my memories started to cake over and crumble.
That night, locked in Mina’s bathroom, I thought about what Jin said. I tried to dredge my memories, like what my mother’s face resembled, what my cousins’ knucklebones looked like, but all I could see was the scaled fish-spine of the woman in the hanging painting. And I remembered that once, in bed together, Mina said she was afraid of when we’d break up because she knew I had nowhere to go.
I looked up at the painting, then unhooked it from the wall and turned it around so that its face was smothered against the wall. I didn’t want to look at her anymore, the bones of the fish-woman, even though I felt bad propping her like that, as if I where cornering her there with my knees. I didn’t want her to have nowhere to go.
In the bathroom, I could hear Mina snoring, the choir of hunger in her belly, her face fabricated by shadows, freckled and shallow-mouthed. I looked at the back of the painting and decided I would stand up and try to leave. Dressing in the dark of the bedroom, I felt her breath dewing my shoulders, my shins. I left, shutting the door as loudly as I could, hoping that somehow she would wake up and try to stop me. You’re her dog, Jin once joked to me, and you’re going to heel.
I walked two miles in the dark, the moon deep in the sky like a stab wound, and then I was at the apartment building where Jin lived on the seventh floor, his door stapled with the calligraphy fish painting he’d commissioned to invite money through his threshold. I realized I’d left behind my coat, Mina’s hand-me-down to me. I knocked, and Jin answered the door immediately. He was dressed the same as when he went to work, t-shirt and fading jeans, a pair of plastic slippers like my mother wore, jelly-heeled and polka-dotted.
Mina? he asked me, but I told him I didn’t want to talk about her anymore. I described the painting to him, how I couldn’t look at it anymore, how I hated the way Mina slept, as if she were fluent in it, as if she knew that the surface of her sleep was porous and she could breach it any time, she was never afraid of it glassing over and locking her into her dreams. Jin sat cross-legged on his futon, the only furniture in his room. He told me once that he’d learned how to be minimalist from a Japanese etiquette course, but I thought he was the type who disliked owning things, who felt weighted by wants. On his kitchen counter were a teakettle and bottles of Zhenjiang vinegar.
Jin asked if I wanted to sit next to him. I said that I wasn’t here to sit next to him, I was here because I needed to see that there was someone else still awake, and Jin said yes, sit next to me. When I crouched on the floor across from him, two yards away, my back cold against his concrete wall, he said, it kind of turns me on that you look like a little boy. That probably makes me a criminal.
Yes, it does, I told him. I didn’t move from the wall, and Jin didn’t move either. Instead he lay down in the dark, mummifying himself with three blankets as if I wasn’t there, and told me that it was better if I quit my job and went somewhere else. You shouldn’t work for me, he said. I don’t have a soul. When he was a baby, he explained, he was born with no hair at all, no lid on top of his head that could seal his soul inside his body. It fled when he was six months old, and he stopped crying after that. His mother could never get him to cry again, not even when he was hungry or hurt, and they realized it was because his soul had fled. Did you ever summon it back? I asked Jin, but he didn’t answer. I thought he’d fallen asleep, but then he was standing up from his futon, walking toward me, and I tilted my head back against the wall. He was still wearing his jeans, the ones with the nickel-sized holes in the knees, and I wondered if he’d been waiting for me.
What do you want to do, Jin said, whispering above me. I reached out into the dark, hooking my hand around his calf. Turn around, I said to him. Jin looked down at me, eyes salt-bright, and turned around. Take off your shirt, I said, I want to see your back. Jin took his shirt off, furling the fabric up his back, and then I could see his spine, the knob at his neck, the shadows raking his hips. I’d always thought his skin was untextured as a slab of tofu, but that night I saw the tiling, the shine. Stay like that, I said to Jin, just let me look. Through his double-paned window, the moon made a stool of his back, stepping on him to get in. In the dark, as he breathed for me, I watched the light sliming his skin, licking alive the scales of his spine.
K-Ming Chang / 張欣明 is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation Five Under Thirty-Five honoree. She is the author of the debut novel Bestiary (One World, 2020). Her short story collection, Resident Aliens, is forthcoming from One World. More of her work can be found at kmingchang.com.