by K-Ming Chang
It was summer and some girls went missing from our street, starting with Michelle Dong in the blue house – see the fence electrified to fry raccoons – and continuing with three sisters from the Lao family, who lived on an empty lot in silver tents that from afar looked like spaceships, though no aliens would ever want to stay here, not since Uncle Sima (the younger) got drunk and shot out the last streetlamp. There isn’t enough light to land. The first girl was found sleeping in the baseball dugout at the old middle school, and when they asked how she had lived all those months alone, she said she’d been eating fruit off the trees, though the trees in our city bore nothing, not counting the time one of the Hsieh brothers hung a dead stray dog from the lowest branch of a birch tree, the bald tree on the Li property, and we all knew it was because the Li sister, not the youngest one who became a nun in Taiwan, but the middle one, who fell into an empty swimming pool when she was a child, leaving her without a memory, a past with herself subtracted, eloped with a different boy, a better one who owned his own Honda and later became an orthodontist.
But no one paid any attention until one of the Xiao sisters disappeared. Not because we knew her mother, who wrote obituaries for the World Journal and was frequently bribed to redact divorces and suicides and secret children, not because we knew her brothers and the blades of their backs as they sheathed into us in the backseat, not because she was pretty or religious or had money, though there were rumors that her father had buried a stolen solid-gold Buddha in their backyard, and many of us had snuck into her yard at night to dig for it, uprooting nothing but dog skeletons and a live umbilical cord, writhing into a knot around our wrists and hissing full of steam.
It was because of what she left behind. We couldn’t decide if it meant something terrible had happened to her, something worse than the time Sylvia Na draped herself in gasoline and ran down our street, match between her teeth, worse than the time our cousins got drunk and drove their cars into the classroom of the elementary school, shutting it down for weeks, worse than the time grandpa Gao hid in the bushes by the cemetery and shot a man he believed was Japanese. Or it meant something else entirely, something that was worse: that she was the first of us to leave, that she knew better than the rest of us, who left and then came back, who left and called home every night to apologize. One of the Xiao aunties said that her disappeared niece was born without an umbilical cord and that was why she had none of her mother’s blood, why she could not be reeled back to any body, why she could not be reined to any beginning.
What she left behind: her shoebox of silkworms. We all knew about her box of worms, how she carried them everywhere when we were girls, cradling the box to her belly like a baby, airholes constellating the lid. Crouched on the street, she pulled off the lid and let us look inside one at a time, at the silkworms fat as opals and the babies brown as seeds, tiny as the peony seeds our mothers planted but aborted with forks when the stems grew in crooked. And even though some of us pretended to be bored, joking that we could impale the worms on hooks and go fishing instead, we all watched as the worms needled through a leaf, nibbling a lineage of holes, forging their fullness with the boldness of soldiers. Then she told us each to find a leaf, and some of us found dried ones in the gutter, broad and crackled as our grandmothers’ palms, and she told us those leaves would kill the babies, that they have to be given something green and tender as our own tongues. So we went from tree to tree looking for living leaves, fresh ones, veined, but every tree was balding and the best we could find was grass, and even that was brown, brittle as toothpicks, and when we gave up, came back with our hands fisted around nothing, she lidded the box and told us to follow her.
We followed her down to the creek where plastic bags impersonated girls’ skirts, a creek where our brothers once caught a fish with an earring in its belly, all of us fighting for it, all of us wanting to wear its blood. We followed her along the splayed leg of the creek until it bent like a broken bone, and there, she said, there, pointing to a concrete wall, was a sapling that leaned up against the cement like it was injured, and on all its branches, green leaves like earrings. We ran to it, stroked the trunk smooth as a knuckle, and when we looked over the wall we saw her yard, the soil where her father had buried a solid-gold god, though all the nights we went digging for it, on our knees and elbowing away the moon, none of us ever thought about asking her where it was buried, if it was even real, or if it was just a story like all the stories we knew, truncated from the root of its truth.
She guided our fingers to the earring-leaves, told us to tug on them hard, the way our mothers tugged our ears to pull us from our dreams of drowning. And then we each lay down our leaves, watched as the worms conglomerated like beads, constricting like a necklace around all that green, and when we stood up we bowed our heads like this was a burial. She shut the lid slowly, as if the box were a casket and we the witnesses of her hunger, mouths multiplying in the dark she cradled, worms metabolizing the leaves of our loss, and we looked at our feet, we hummed, we mourned to become.
K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow and a Lambda Literary Award finalist in lesbian poetry. Her debut novel BESTIARY is forthcoming from One World / Random House in September 2020. She lives in New York.