Gods of Want by K-Ming Chang

Author:K-Ming Chang [Chang, K-Ming]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

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Ail didn’t come to work the next morning. I did the work of two, slicing fish so fast and without feeling that I almost served someone a sliver of my thumb. The next day, when I decided I’d leave work early to search for her, a customer—his bald head the same color as a pearl—said there’d been a girl seen lingering outside the casinos without going in, and when the security guard asked her what she was doing, she asked for the way to the sea. They’d pointed downward at the ground, and I remembered that all the casinos built private aquifers beneath themselves, that all the water here was owned. But I didn’t know whether groundwater was saltwater or fresh, if the sea rose out of the ground like sweat.

You wouldn’t believe it, the man said. He was looking at my breasts, eyeing the left one and then the right as if trying to decide which was ripe. Tell me, I said, and he finally looked at my mouth. She stripped, he said. Completely. She laid on the ground naked and the security guard had to pry her from the marble, except that her body was completely stuck. Like a magnet. They just couldn’t lift her. The man said I should tuck my hair behind my ears because my ears were dainty, like petals he wanted to put in his mouth. I walked out of the restaurant without taking his order, and then I was on the street, realizing that I’d forgotten to ask the man which casino he’d been at, where he’d seen the girl, the one like me, the one who took off my shirt one shoulder before the other, kissing my bones in an order unknown to me: the heel, the ankle, the shoulder blade, the chin, the kneecap, the ball of the shoulder, the collarbone, the shin, the shin again. Back then, I shut my eyes and tried to figure out why she was doing this, why she was touching me out of order, but now I knew: She was making a place of me. She was mapping me into a city that couldn’t be found.

I didn’t find her that day. Everyone was a tourist, and the windows of the hotels were too bright. I could only see my own reflection in them, my face rupturing like water. Ail once said you could know everything about a person by asking them about their first memory of water. Real water, she said, from a sky or a sea, not a sink. Mine: Once, when I was ten, my father and I moved west to California for a month. It rained when we arrived, and I was surprised that it was nothing like the automated mouth of a fountain: It was top-to-bottom, birth-to-burial, following the same gravity as our grief. My father and I lived in a house with a bald backyard, and he bought us a goat from a flea market. The goat was

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