Rituals

Isabella Jiang

I get home by the creep—I mean I get home like this, like a creep, thieving through mid-afternoon. It’s after school. It’s slithering I do—in a slinky skirt, I slip. I gumshoe, I pussyfoot. I prowl and delude.

You scare me, Jenny says. You scare the crap out of me.

Nebraska will swallow me whole, feet-first. Nebraska: spread-eagling me. Nebraska will take me blank-faced, point-blank, iron and sinew. He will take me like a smooth pill, swallow me and spit me out.

+

Jenny is a small fucker who likes to be told how to be. I used to be that way once too, I mean. I used to know to unscrew my spine and pick out scripture like little bones. I used to fill my mouth with dirt, the slosh of spit, taste salt and believe in gods. 

+

The school took two weeks to study me: the girl who moves to Nebraska, slips into his mouth, is swallowed, spit out. As I obsess, I turn to obsession. The other kids, they stroke my bone-black hair. One girl snips a strand and keeps it in her locket for a week. 

Every day like this—yike after yike. You scare me, Jenny says, can’t you understand they aren’t like us? Yikes, I say.

+

Jenny believes Nebraska has changed me. For the worse, she says, her birdbreath coming in white puffs through the screen.

Jenny is really Qinying Jenny, but I like it the other way. All I can think: how shameful it must be to endure a name like that. But more shameful yet to have a second name, an excuse, a flap of thin skin. I am lucky—I am Ana, An-na in the other tongue and Ana in my mother’s.

+

Before Nebraska: I used to think about it all the time. Thinking on the before: like tonguing the fallow wound at the back of your mouth. We lived slow-mouthed. Honey pink. All our cares gathered into thick milk—we offered them to the rivermouth, Huangpu Meikong Hong. I fed you a tongue and you took it. I chameleoned into cool girl, cruel girl, but by night you could count on me coming back.

It still rings in me—the quick, the proximity of ends. You could say I found it fun at the outset. I found it fun, and I found that I could smile, too, the sharp protrusions of my retainer pushing against my lips, the edges of my mouth stretching naturally around the metal maw. It hurt—all the smiling, genuine—but I found it very much worth it. At 11, I thought to myself, so, this is what it is to be happy. How very swift and easy, how clean.

And yet no—I couldn’t say I would repeat it. I couldn’t say I would ever go back. Mounting that fast ugly cycle of my youth.

Then: there was no place that loved me back enough. No song. The songs were too pretty, the songs that declared their spells. The songs that marveled at their own beauty, the gracenotes ever-flickering, ringing into dull halls. And these songs were tricksters, guttersnipes, here for the mocking—giving in for a cuddle then spitting me out. I remembered it all the time when I thought about my many tongues, my being tongue-dumb. I wanted to spurn each cliché and maxim until I was wordless. Wanting always to speak in poetry. My breath loitered at the door, at the ready, its hot feet fumbling. The feet fled. The floor gave. I talked into a wall, my mouth pressed against the plaster. My mouth plastered. 

Sorrow took me into the small hours of the night and left me there, rocking gently in a chair before a dim screen, leaning in. I kept catastrophe at the back of my mouth. I mouthed grief. I didn’t wish for tragedy, but I dreamt as though I did. I stopped myself as softly as I knew. I took Nebraska by tornado and he took me, too. 

+

If I tried, really tried, I could conjure up my family. It’s more a matter of wanting, now, I suppose.

Facial composite: the father a short, porky, submissive man, with a squinty-eyed smile always at the ready. His teeth are short, absent, or yellow. He speaks Bible and Chinese. The mother: thin-lipped, pacing the kitchen, stirring a pot of rice. She peels clementines with one sharp fingernail and offers them to the fat gods in her living room, prostrate. The dog is no dog, because it was dinner last night.

And the daughter—she books it out of there. She fuckstruts. She skips town.

+

The school studied me and I passed. I think, I will be a swallow. I will be a cud.

+

When I get home to music, I have to put cotton in my ears. It is insufferable. Particularly, particularly a drumline. It pulls at a part of me—the recklessness, the impulse. The thrust of violence.

+

Eventually, Nebraska will swaddle me in orange peels. Nebraska will take me in his crisp Midwestern tongue. I will give myself to Nebraska in a bag of milk teeth. Nebraska: a wreath of orange peels catching wind like wet birds. My swallow wings pinioned, cut; the fissure wet, cleft.

Jenny—she asks after me. Do you get it? And how are you, and how are you? I sleep easily, too easily, to be living.

+

Did I say something wrong? I walk home alone on fingertips, padding along the hot avenue, the hot street.