On paydays we eat at Hometown Buffet. Mama dresses older to get the senior discount: scab-colored sweater, wool scarf that camouflages the scars on her throat, a broomstick for a cane. She does all this after saying that the white lady at the counter can never tell our age—half of us get the youth discount, and the lady hands us all kids’ trays, the ones with walled-off compartments for the entrée and side dish and dessert. My brothers and I strategize beforehand, sketching diagrams of the buffet on our palms and circling our territories with laundry markers: First brother gets entrées, Second and Third and Fourth and Fifth brothers get appetizers, side dishes, salads, and breads, and Sixth brother gets drinks, where he mixes Coke and lemonade into a dark amber mix that Mama calls a thirsty man’s piss. I man the soft-serve machine. We know the soft serve will make us shit a watery stew, that we’ll go home and crowd our only bathroom, bumping asses while all trying to squat over the same toilet bowl. But we eat it anyway, chocolate and vanilla braided together, the two colors slurring to a flesh hue in our bowls. I think it’s miraculous, that you can lift a silver lever and make the cream unravel endlessly, an engineered infinity. No one telling me to stop. At home, Mama told me to stop biting my noodles in the middle because it would sever my life short. I make them long for a reason, she said. After that, I imagined that the noodles in my mouth were alive, that if I bit one it would burst like a vein, bleed me onto my plate. I started swallowing my noodles whole, tilting my head back to gulp like a fish, until one of my middle brothers told me to stop because it was slutty.
At the buffet, the only table we can fit around is the big one in the center of the crust-carpeted dining room, so everyone watches us eat. My brothers’ mouths are heavy machinery, their teeth threshing meat from bone, their tongues endless as conveyor belts.
First brother loves watching the man with an arm-sized knife slice a glazed ham: gloves up to his elbows, the knife a table saw. I want a knife like that, he says, and when we ask him what he’d use it for, he says, I’m going to live in the wild and eat only what I kill. He is always packing his schoolbag to run away, taking the emergency flashlight from under Mama’s bed, Ziploc bags full of raw rice, rope he braided from dental floss, and the Peter Rabbit–printed blanket he shares with Second brother. But he always changes his mind within a few hours, and by that time Mama has already told us to lock all the doors and shut the windows and pin the curtains closed. Sometimes she’ll leave him a plate of fish outside the door with no chopsticks and say, Let him eat like a dog. I fall asleep waiting by the door and wake to the scrape of his nails against the plate, a pitch higher than prayer. I don’t yet know how to name the shame of that sound. I can only wait silently on the other side of his hunger. When Mama finally lets him back in, it’s morning and the sky is buttered with clouds. First brother puts everything back in the order he took them, beginning with the flashlight he tucks back under the bed: I see him check the batteries, clicking it on and off as if testing to make sure it’ll last till the next time he leaves.
The flashlight is the only thing Baba ever bought for himself. He saw it in a TV ad: a flashlight with a clock embedded in its side that shows military time. Mama asked what the point of the clock was, but Baba could never give a good reason. Maybe when it’s dark, I said, you’ll need the clock to know how close you are to morning. First brother laughed and said, Just look at the sky. I snuck a box of matches into his backpack—a second source of light—so that he’d never have to see by the light of something stolen.
The flashlight requires twice the batteries and is twice as heavy, the silver barrel so wide around I can’t hold it in one hand. Once, Baba found a handprint on the wall. A glowing grease stain that stank of the leftover chicken Mama kept in the fridge. A carcass we all thieved from, kneading the meat between our fingers until it was the temperature of our own flesh. Baba made us all place our hands on the stain, though we already knew whose it matched: First brother was born with hands the size of skillets, too big for his body. Mama always said this meant he’d grow up to be a gambler or a thief. The larger the hands, the greater your gains. The greater your losses. When First brother’s hand matched the stain, Baba took the flashlight out from under the bed and beat him till the batteries flew out. The first time he left, First brother flicked on the flashlight and shined it into my face, watching as I winced away. I just wanted to check if it was broken, he said.
When the buffet begins to close and we are the last family left, Mama bags our bones. She plucks the gnawed-over drumsticks and harp-shaped wings off our plates, wraps them in napkins, and folds them away in her purse. Later she’ll sit in front of the TV and suck the marrow out the way I never learned how, her face white-lit by the soap opera she already knows the end of. Her teeth bungling the bones. When she falls asleep with chicken bones piled like a pyre on her chest, my brothers and I carry her up the stairs. I hold her head. There are seven of us in total, not enough limbs to go around, so two of my brothers walk alongside us as we carry her swinging body.
We love our mother most when she’s weightless, divided between our hands. When each of us holds a separate piece of her and thinks we still have time to trade. I know the stories about the miscarriages before us, First brother knows the ones about the zippered scar on her neck, Second brother knows where the gold is kept, Third brother knows why she won’t say the word funeral, Fourth brother knows exactly whose face is in her newspaper clippings, Fifth brother knows why she keeps the cabinet under the sink locked, and none of us know what exactly Sixth brother knows. To know everything all at once would drown us, so we tread at the level of fact: who, what, when.
Who:
Our mother, forty-nine days after giving birth to me, got a phone call saying that her mother was dead. The last thing Ama had said to her: Six sons are a winning streak. You can stop now. I broke the streak and Ama had a stroke.
What:
My mother put me down in the crib and didn’t touch me for two days, even when I cried. I was the crime scene. The weapon she didn’t know she was carrying. My aunts said I was Ama reincarnated, that her soul had climbed up my spine like a vine, that I lived with two people in my body. They sent phone numbers of shamans to consult over FaceTime, but none of them could confirm who I was.
When:
On the third day, when I was nearly dead, my mother breastfed me. I buttoned my lips to her breast as she wept. Now I eat only salty things, fermented bean sauce and salted duck egg, my mouth acquiring its taste for mourning.
The year Second brother lost his memories, Baba gave birth to salt. Baba stayed in the hospital for three days while they cut three salt-stones out of him. The doctor told him to lower his sodium intake, no soy sauce for at least a month. Mama kept the pink-clear stones in a tin can and rattled them once a day, saying it would scare the salt-ghosts away. We asked her what a salt-ghost was and she said it was the spirit of every executed prisoner who was dumped in a river and siphoned back into the sea. My brothers and I took turns cupping the stones in our palms. They were the color of raw salmon and jagged, too sharp for me to hold. I imagined they were still warm from his body, that if I slid one into my mouth it would dissolve and rebuild itself into a diamond inside me.
Mama boiled Coca-Cola with ginger, spooned it hot into Baba’s mouth. She said the sugar would cancel out all the salt in his body, and for a whole year she cooked only sweet things, dates stuffed with rice cake, sticky rice with red bean, guava slices rolled in chili-sugar. Second brother bought cans of Coke from the high school vending machine and brought them home for Mama to boil. At school, his classmates’ favorite game was to ask what he was holding: Coke, Second brother said, pronouncing it like cock. His classmates asked again and again. Cock-drinker, they called him. At home, when he asked me what it meant, I told him that a cock-drinker was someone who swallowed chickens. In elementary school, there was a woman who visited every classroom on Easter with a basket of sun-bleached chicks, letting us cup their throbbing bodies in our palms. When I told Mama I wanted one of my own, she ladled chicken-rice stew into my bowl, more marrow than meat, and said, That’s what a chick grows up to be. In my mouth, the rice swelled and thickened into a second tongue. Eat everything off the bone and maybe you’ll birth a chick of your own. That night, when I squatted on the toilet, I imagined I was laying an egg, an animal I could save.
Baba started a fistfight with all the salt in his body. He punched his belly and crotch to break the salt-boulders inside him into digestible pebbles. The pain made him miss three whole days of studying. He was going to be a physicist, he told us, though he was the oldest person in his class and this was his third time going back to school. He tried to teach us all the principles of physics, like a body in motion stays in motion. He liked to demonstrate all his lessons: Once, he held Second brother by his shirt collar and rolled him down our hardwood staircase. Second brother’s body kept going even after his head bounced off the bottom stair. He slid across our newly waxed floor and ricocheted off the far wall. Then he was still, a shadow outlining no body. A body at rest stays at rest, Baba said. Second brother didn’t wake up until dinner. He said he’d dreamed of swimming in a sea made of sugarwater instead of saltwater, that he gave up swimming halfway and started drinking, the sweetness of the water clotting to sap in his belly. We asked him where he’d been swimming and he said he forgot.
After the car accident on his nineteenth birthday, the first thing Second brother remembered was the time Baba bowled him down the stairs. A body in motion stays in motion. When he hit the other car head-on, his body kept moving forward and punched through the windshield. He lolled out like a tongue. The paramedics extracted him from the glass but kept the shard in his belly intact: If they pulled it from him, he’d bleed out in minutes. What was killing him was the same thing keeping him alive.
In the hospital, Second brother ate sweet things: Jell-O cups, instant hot chocolate, over-sugared coffee. Fig Newtons from the vending machine. Baba recognized Newton but asked us what fig meant. It’s a fruit, I said, and Baba said, Did you know an apple discovered gravity? He told me the story of Newton asleep under an apple tree, how a falling fruit knocked him out of his head and made him famous. At the end of the story, Baba rapped the top of my skull with his closed fist and said, That’s gravity. For years I thought gravity was when you were knocked in the head. What happened to your brother? my classmates would ask, after Second brother went back to school with a bandage swathed around his forehead and jaw. Gravity, I said, and they looked at me like I’d been hit too.
Mama slept in a plastic chair by the bed, upright all night. Sometimes we thought Second brother was faking what he forgot, that he really just wanted to stay in the hospital for as long as possible, where the nurses called him handsome and sponged him clean, where the morphine was free. We tried to trick him into remembering: Cock-drinker, we said, chanting around his bed. What’s that in your mouth? Cock! But he always looked at us without recognizing, his pupils dilated to dimes. The day we left the hospital, we lifted him into the car and his legs felt hollow as bells. On the drive home, I pressed my palms to his eyes so that he wouldn’t see the road he’d sped on, the other car coming. I made a night inside his mind. His first day home, he climbed up our stairs with both hands on the railing, wouldn’t let go even when he got to the top. Let go, I said. Instead, he walked backward, all the way down, still holding on.
The story my brothers tell but won’t believe: The night Baba left one island for another one, the army patrolled the skin of the shore. No ship could dock safely, so Baba had to swim out to meet it. He had never swum farther than the width of a river, the one that nosed through his city at the speed of concrete. He swam like a dog, paddling his arms, sloshing water into his eyes and mouth until he was salt-sick, gagging.
When he reached the boat, a repurposed British warship, the crew said there was no more room aboard. Baba said he had gold. They threw him a rope, dragged him in. Out of his anus, Baba unraveled a gold-and-pearl necklace. It had been his mother’s. The deck was so crowded he walked across bodies to find a spot. Everyone had chosen something different to take: sacks of rare-bred oranges, copies of ancient novels, children. One woman even clung to her favorite goat, its little body bleating with so much grief that another passenger threatened to tear its throat open with her teeth.
Baba claimed that when he got to the island, he only ate three grains of rice at a time to save money. I didn’t shit for a decade, he said. He even ate the spines of sea urchins boiled translucent, puncturing his belly from the inside. I thought of my father as a balloon with holes. You could blow all you wanted, but it would never become a shape. Baba never cast a shadow. My brothers and I made him stand outside in the sun, posing him in every position like a mannequin, but still he never left behind an outline. I left my body at sea, he joked. For a year before he left his hometown, Baba learned how to swim away from soldiers. His mother stood on the riverbank, impersonating a man, her arm aimed like a rifle. If I can see you, you’re dead, she said, so Baba held his breath and went deep, his mother’s voice following him under like a bullet.
The doctor said Baba’s body was full of stuck things: salt that wouldn’t dissolve into his blood, shit that clogged his gut-pipes like leaves in a gutter. When Third brother became a surgeon, Baba became his first patient. In half a lifetime, the salt-stones in Baba’s groin expanded into an entire formation, a quarry, a salt-canyon. We all went to the hospital the day of his second surgery, Third brother in his white mask and blue gloves, scrubs, shiny black shoes that made his feet look like dung beetles. Baba was wheeled into the operating room, and Fourth brother was flirting with a nurse in the waiting room. I was the only one who saw:
Third brother, when he was still in medical school, would practice using the scalpel on himself. I once saw him make a diagonal cut on his kneecap and peel the skin back, exposing the bone. It was the whitest thing I’d ever seen, whiter than salt or sugar, so white I didn’t know how the body could bear its own purity. His hands shook inside their skin. He stitched his skin back into place and wore long pants for three months.
Third and Fourth brothers are twins, and even Mama couldn’t tell them apart the first few years. Fourth brother dropped out of Mama when she was already back from the hospital, having delivered brother three soundlessly. She walked through the door and he fell out of her like rain. Fourth brother went to medical school too, but then he dropped out and became a waiter after his girlfriend got pregnant.
Mama had been a waitress all her life, even back on the island, where there was no such thing as tipping. The first time she waited in America, at an Applebee’s in a neighboring city, another waiter asked her, How much did he tip you? And Mama joked, No, he didn’t even touch me. After Fourth brother became a waiter, Mama refused to speak to him, even over the phone, even after Fourth brother’s baby was born so early it crumbled in his fist like paper, its heart too small to carry blood for the whole body. Mama said Fourth brother had soured her heart, that she could have had two doctors for sons but now only had one. Fourth brother sent Mama a whole crate of bitter melons, Mama’s favorite, but she wouldn’t even look at them.
When the bitter melon didn’t un-silence her, Fourth brother sent her a potted orchid made out of plastic. Mama set it on fire in the backyard, the sour smell of singed plastic stalking us into the house.
We heard that after her baby died, Fourth brother’s girlfriend stopped eating or drinking, pissing or shitting. Fourth brother kept a collection of syringes to inject fluids into her veins, which turned purple and branched into bruises.
When Second brother said it was better anyway because they couldn’t afford to support a family, we all said it was the car accident that turned him cruel. I imagined that his brain was like a bruised apple, a soft black spot breeding itself bigger and bigger until it became the whole fruit.
One night, Fourth brother came to our door after dinner. He sat with his back to the door until it was nearly morning. Mama finally let him in, and that’s when we saw his left hand dangling from his arm like an ornament. When Third brother examined it, he said the bones were broken to breadcrumbs. Mama didn’t ask, so we did: Fourth brother said his girlfriend had done it last night with a meat mallet. She was crying while she did it, and he’d been in bed, asleep until the first blow bit into his wrist. The blood was birthed everywhere, soaking through the mattress, and he stayed lying down. He held still while she brought the mallet down harder and harder. Then she put the mallet in the sink and sat down on the ground. Her baby had been smaller than a palm.
Fourth brother went to the ER, but he fled the room as soon as the doctor left to prepare the molding for his cast. When I’m a doctor, he used to say to me, I’ll treat everyone for free. I asked him how he’d pay for his life, and he said, I’ll sell my organs, one by one, until I’m empty. I imagined him operating on himself, sorting organs into buckets and sewing himself up with nothing but air as his insides. He’d blow away with my breath. I’d be the one who freed him.
Fourth brother passed out when we dragged him through our doorway. Later I’d say he got hit by a car, a story to match Second brother’s. It was easier to consolidate injuries that way. Third brother carried him bridal-style to the sofa in our living room, then faked a cast out of cardboard and duct tape. A smell serrated the air, almost bloody, full of garlic: bitter melon soup, a pot of it, my mother stirring and stirring. She broke open the crate and skinned each melon, slitting their pimpled bodies lengthwise. In the pot, the melon-flesh boiled into velvet, the steam erasing her face. My brothers and I ladled gluey melon into bowls, the china pattern faded into bone white, the soup cooling as we sat at the table and waited for Fourth brother to wake. I was the one who snuck sips of soup until Mama saw and slapped my wrist. The melons had rotted in the crate, too syrupy and sweet at the edges, but I swallowed anyway. We ate through the rot, ate our tongues too, didn’t notice until morning when we lisped the same way, none of us able to pray.
Before Mama’s throat was slit, she was a singer. Ama sang to Mama in the womb, curving her head down all the way to her belly button, cupping her hands around her mouth like a megaphone. My mother came out of the womb singing: She didn’t cry, just hit a high C until even the doctor applauded. Fifth brother says this is a lie because Mama wasn’t born in a hospital, because islanders still crawled around like monkeys back then, because that’s what we were before the Dutch and the Japanese and the general and everyone else: All we did was eat and grow fur the color of pork floss. But I know the singing was true. Mama could sing so high only the dogs heard and came bounding, all of them howling at her door until her father came back with his old pistol and shot each barking bitch in the throat.
Mama sang on the way to school and back, and all the dogs that followed her bus into the city got flattened to patties. Her voice tore silk, watered soil into silt, made the petals weep off an orchid. It made the sun shy. It made the moon mourn. On the beach when she sang, the waves lined up at her feet. Boats sank because the water gave up holding the weight of anything else, too busy listening to my mother, the whole sea on hiatus.
Fifth brother says this is dogshit and I should stop before Mama hears: She doesn’t like to be reminded of the way the world once listened to her, all the leaves on the trees blushing into ears. Fifth brother confesses to me that he sings too, that he writes lyrics on the wall with his finger while our brothers sleep, whispering to nothing: In the city / I was born a night / No one could fall asleep to / In the city / I was born a boy / No one knew was two.
Two of what? I asked, but he said he hadn’t decided yet. I said when he was finished writing, we’d sing a duet together. He held my wrist like a microphone and sang into my fist. In the kitchen, we danced breast-to-breast, so close I thought there were two of myself, his blood chiming in my chest.
Fifth brother says Mama met a lot of famous singers in Taipei, even Teresa Teng. They sang a duet together on TV, and Mama looked at the studio’s ceiling the whole time. She imagined her tongue taking flight from her mouth, a recurring nightmare she always had before performing. Her tongue flitted out, thin as a moth’s wing, leaving her unable to name its loss.
Fifth brother says there’s a photo of our mother and Teresa Teng somewhere, but neither of us asks Mama about it. She wears her scarves even in the shower: checkered wool ones, polka-dotted cotton ones, infinity scarves in colors that scratch at your eyes, yellow and green and pink. Mama always says, The best way to hide something is to draw attention to it. One time she hid a bruise by painting her whole face like a skull. It wasn’t even Halloween. Baba laughed for two days and said she’d always been a creative woman, able to stage a play out of any pain, make a character out of an injury.
The summer my mother developed vocal nodules, before a doctor slit her throat open to remove the scar tissue, Ama sang at her last funeral. She knew a song for every kind of death. Songs for men who died at war. Songs for women who killed themselves when their men didn’t return. Songs for babies who died in the womb. Songs for boys in motorcycle accidents. Songs for girls in basements, buried along abandoned roads, in fields. Songs for triads. Songs for schoolteachers. Songs for exterminators who died from inhaling their own poisons. She was an inventory of grief. She knew every kind of killed, every breed of burial. But people didn’t hire professional mourners anymore. Her last funeral was for a man who’d jumped onto a subway track. Ama said she was better at grief than anybody, that she could sing a sadness more real than any widow’s. It’s not a real funeral if you don’t hire a wailer, Ama said. Her songs began shallow in the chest, breathy like the beginning of a sob, and then the verses stacked into full shrieks, the lyrics linking into a sky ladder. That’s the way Ama would say it. She believed in heaven the way she believed in hands. Years later she found herself sneaking into strangers’ funerals, local ones she’d read the announcements for, and when she arrived she was always the oldest person in the room, even older than the body cremated.
In a news report on the death of professional mourning, the majority reported that hiring mourners was redundant. Why burden someone else’s body with your own grief? It was invasive, presumptuous for a stranger to stage your sadness. It’s performative, the interviewees said. Before I was born, Ama watched the report on TV and called Mama about it, her teeth halving peanut shells, producing their own static: Everything is a performance. Sometimes you need to rehearse your grief so that you come out of it alive. Sometimes you need someone to show you that you can.
At the end of her last semester in music school, Mama’s throat went rigid as bone. Nothing could move through it, out of it. The doctors said she had scars on her vocal cords from using it incorrectly. Mama never thought of her voice as something to use, to wield: She thought of it as a guest, something that was housed in her, a ghost flown into her belly. It was a haunting she welcomed, the way her voice felt both foreign-born and native to her body.
The doctor asked if she’d ever had invasive surgery before. Mama said she didn’t know what he meant by invasion. The same summer she lost her voice, she’d bent over for a boy in the city who told her she sounded like a swan. Mama didn’t know what a swan sounded like. She saw them painted on the music boxes they sold in gift shops, but on the island there were only geese that bit your ass. When she went under, Mama’s last prayer was that the surgeon slit open her throat but never stitch it back up, leaving her open as a window, the wind scraping through her wick-thin cords. A way she could sing without having to.
Sixth brother was born a fish. Mama says this, but the story lacks proof, the way most do, so we let it stay that way, suspended in the air without ever swallowing it. If Sixth brother had been born a fish, then Mama would have put him in a fish tank instead of the drawer, and he would have outgrown it in a day. He was always growing. There were days when he woke two inches taller, three. One week it was a whole foot. He outgrew Baba by the time he was twelve and I was eleven, but Baba was always hunched anyway, in pain from the salt passing through his bladder. It was also the year Mama stopped being a waitress and started a restaurant with three of my aunts, the Little Shanghai, though none of us had ever been to Shanghai and we were all pretty sure it wasn’t little.
My brothers were dishwashers, waiters, cooks, hosts. Even my surgeon brother came at closing time to help stack the chairs on tables and cut new pieces of tablecloth, which was just butcher paper we’d spray-painted gold. Second brother wasn’t allowed to count the money. Fourth brother wasn’t allowed to flirt with customers. First brother had run away for real this time, though years later some of us swore we’d found his face in the newspaper photo of an investment banker in Macau. We’d argue about the mole on the face in the photo: Had it been over his left eyebrow or the right? None of us had thought to take pictures of him. None of us thought we’d forget his face so thoroughly we’d clip out a picture from the newspaper and pass the thin square back and forth between us so many times that our fingers turned black, a rubbed-off night. Everything we did that day was stained.
Sixth brother’s first girlfriend has red fingers. She eats Hot Cheetos for every meal, sometimes dipping them in XO sauce or wrapping them in leftover slices of bread. She leaves red fingerprints everywhere, on the walls of our restaurant and on my brother’s skin, his neck, his collar, his fly. The red powder clings to the grooves of her palms, dyes her nails, glitters her lips. My brother, I don’t know which one, makes a joke that if we pantsed Sixth brother, there’d be red fingerprints up and down his dick, a red tongue-print. Worth the burn, they all say. I pretend to laugh, but I feel like a struck match. I want to set all their spines on fire. Swallow them bottom to top.
Her fingers flit like flames over the customers’ plates. We call her Melon because she’s round-headed, sweet-bellied. She’s only two years older, sixteen when I turn fourteen, but she likes to stroke my cheeks like I’m her child. She comes every day after school to waitress at our restaurant, where Mama pays her below minimum wage and compensates by giving out unsolicited advice about her sons: Be careful around my second one. Marry the third one. Pray for my first.
Melon confesses to me that she can never tell my brothers apart, and when I tell them this, they laugh together. After that, the younger ones take turns tricking her: Fifth brother kisses her in the walk-in refrigerator. Fourth brother gives her a bouquet of fake daisies. Fifth brother kisses her again, on the cheek this time, out on the floor where my mother says no touching, no speaking Chinese too loudly to one another, because the customers will think we’re bad-mouthing them, no throwing dishes to one another like Frisbees, no running. Every time Melon gets kissed, I look down at the dishes I’m washing and twist the faucet hotter. When my hands emerge from the water quilted with burns, I consider it my punishment. I betrayed her to my brothers, sold them her secret for nothing.
Melon and I take breaks in the parking lot outside the restaurant. She wears a white shirt buttoned up all the way, her collar snug as a bracelet. She has a strong neck, corded and thick, and for a second I wonder if my hands would fit around it. Then I need somewhere new to look, so I look at her mouth, which makes me sweat. I am damp everywhere from wok steam, a heat I mistake for my own. I’m tall enough to wash dishes now, and when my arms ache, Melon massages my wrists until the pulse nearly pounces out of me. In the parking lot, the streetlamp lights only half her face, and I want to drag the sun back out and train it on her like a spotlight. I want to see her wholly in the light or in the dark, unshared by anything. At night when I close my eyes, when the darkness I impose is total, I allow myself to think of her mouth. I circle its shape in my mind, not mine, not mine.
Melon is teaching me to smoke. In the parking lot she lights a cigarette, wincing like it’s her own fingertip. She brings it to my lips, but I won’t open my mouth. Trust me, she says, but I don’t know how to say it isn’t her I don’t trust. I only know how to control my mouth like a cage, opening it to let something out. Never in. When she finally coaxes me into opening by tickling my chin, I won’t breathe in. She laughs and says, Stop holding your breath, but that only makes me laugh.
What does a boy feel like? I ask her. She turns her face out toward the street. The streetlight shaves away the angles of her face. Like this, she says, and presses the lit end of her cigarette into my palm. I don’t flinch or cry out. I keep my hands still, the ash hardening to armor. The one time I burned myself in the kitchen, sloshing oil from the wok onto my forearms, Sixth brother strapped a bag of frozen shrimp to each arm. Keep your arms above your head, he said. The hurt will flow down to your feet and exit your body. When I locked myself in the bathroom to cry, Sixth brother knocked on the door with his elbow, his hands carrying a still-hot pot. Do you need me to amputate you? he asked, trying to make me laugh. I said it wouldn’t matter anyway: Pain outlives the body. I told him about phantom limbs, how a feeling can be attached to nothing, how memory is meat. He didn’t believe me.
When she can’t get me to smoke, Melon and I play our embarrassing-story game. The rules are one: Tell an embarrassing story. Melon always reuses the same stories, but I never mind. They’re a little different every time, and my own private game is to trace what’s changed and guess why. Today she tells me yesterday’s: One time I used a stick of imitation crab as a tampon. Then I put it back in the bag. When we had hotpot that night, my brother asked why he tasted blood in the broth. I said something must have died in it. The difference is that there’s a brother in the story when I know she doesn’t have one. I think she knows my brothers have been tricking her. I think she’s sampling them, testing the temperature of their mouths, the weight of their hands on her waist, their eyes always watching her, even when she isn’t there. She takes their eyes with her, carries them home and into our parking lot. Flips them like coins. Juggles them invisibly. I feel them even now, eyes like pebbles in my pockets.
When Sixth brother and I were too young to know our bodies, Mama bathed us together in the sink. She stirred up bubbles with dish soap, whisking the water frothy with her hands, folding boats made of newspaper. Sixth brother played the wind, blowing into the black-and-white sail, and I was the sea, churning my hands below the surface to make the water wave. We hadn’t seen the ocean yet, but it was instinct: the air and water both moving, above and below, sometimes in tandem and sometimes opposite, the waves pulling back like reins. When the boat was too soaked to remember its shape, it sank, and my brother cried. I watched the paper dissolve, black ink spooling into the water and across it, spanning the sink like a new skin. I didn’t cry. I knew it wasn’t a real boat, a real sea. I knew not to mourn what had never been born.
Back then, Mama was worried that I never cried: She nearly starved me because I didn’t cry for milk. She slept with me balanced on her belly, until Baba complained and she put me back in the drawer buffered with blankets, the same one my brothers were raised from, the same one I used to dream was a boat full of holes, though my brothers say there’s no way, I would’ve been too young to remember my dreams. I asked them if they remembered when I was born and they said, Of course. I wanted to say I remembered their births too, but that was impossible. They had happened behind me, beyond me. And still I felt like I’d been witness to their beginning, that I’d birthed them myself or been born into each of them. Sometimes I saw my own mouth grinning around Second brother’s teeth or grew a nose parallel with Third brother’s, and each time I forgot it was because we all shared a common denominator, and not because I had sprung from them alone, my father-mothers, my brothers.
The embarrassing story I tell Melon is this: When I was born, I became my grandmother, but without the voice, the ability to make a history out of hurt. When I turned ten, Mama said it was time to expel Ama from my body. But I didn’t get why Ama had to leave me. There are certain things you can’t grow up to be, Mama said. You can’t grow up to be someone else. I said, What about myself? and Mama said, You can’t be that either. I wanted to ask, Then what?
What:
I tell Melon I once believed a life could be written like a lyric, beginning to end.
Who:
Melon shakes her head and says I think too much about music when I should be thinking about meat. We spend the evening snipping the skin off raw chickens, parsing tendon from fat from talon. She says the hens are impossibly ripe in this country, bigger than our heads, and I say it’s because they’ve mutated, bred to outweigh what their bones can support.
When:
The first time Melon kisses me, she tugs me behind someone’s parked car, a minivan with a dog in it. I watch the dog pawing the window, its tongue pulsing against the glass like the overcrowded fish at the grocery store, their scaled bodies thudding against the tank as they try to swim away from their kin. Afterward, when we return to the restaurant, Melon hums the rest of the day, a blank sound no one can name. I begin to suspect that Melon has stolen my breath and is singing with it.
Where: in the parking lot, again. Again
again.
Mama says every song begins as breath, every hole knows how to sing. The mouth, the anus. All of it is wind in the body. After Ama had her stroke and died, after her ashes were sent to California in a cardboard box and Mama ordered an urn and lid online, after I was born with Ama lodged in the shaft of my throat, a canary warning me of myself, Mama sang to us.
It was an old mourning song, the kind with lyrics that could not be written, only steeped in the body and poured out through the mouth. After her surgery, Mama’s voice was metallic, flint striking stone. It entered the kitchen like a light source. It burned us fleshless, listening like that. We were bone to bone.
The song ended and we were all smoke. Because Mama didn’t want to pay the cemetery to swallow Ama’s ashes, she kept the urn in her closet for years. We told her it was bad luck, but she said we could never delineate ourselves from the dead. Then she moved Ama’s urn to the drawer under the sink. In the kitchen, we stood in a row and bowed three times to it. I asked Sixth brother if he remembered when we were both small enough to fit in that sink, to get clean in it. He said nothing, but the silence was its own body. It fit between us. It was our secret sibling. Mama shut the cabinet door under the sink and we went back to breathing. In the throat-dark of her urn, Ama’s ashes sang back. The cabinet began to leak song, a frantic beat like wings flapping, but when Mama opened the door there was nothing. At night we listened to the song for hours, counting the notes until we fell asleep, the night noised by wings, a heartbeat under the sink. But eventually we gave up trying to measure the lifespan of that sound. We let it outlive us. We let it tell us our names.