Bestiary by K-Ming Chang

Author:K-Ming Chang [Chang, K-Ming]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

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I told Ben I’d dreamt of eating the goose. We were lying on our backs on the baseball diamond, her right hand perched on my belly, restless. Her hand hatched all our plans: When she made a fist and opened it, I knew it meant there was a fledgling idea inside it.

In my backyard that evening, Ben and I untethered the goose from the fence. In the center of the yard, the 口 was open. Trust me, Ben said, holding the end of the leash. Ben made a clucking noise with her tongue, coaxing the goose to the center of the yard.

Following Ben and the goose to the 口, I watched her kneel beside the hole and grip the goose in both hands, tamping its wings down. She lowered it feet-first into the hole, its wings battling her hands.

I asked her what she was doing and she said, Birthing it. I said no, this was sacrifice, this was smothering. Ben said, All mouths require feeding. The hole sucked it out of her hands, swallowed it down. Only the leash was uneaten. Ben reeled the rope out of the hole. We stood back, toeing the soil to see if it was tame again. It hiccupped beneath our feet, then burped hot steam in our faces.

That night, I visited the hole to see if it had finished digesting. Shoveling my hands into the hole, I groped for its gag reflex. The second letter lolled out like a tongue, wet with some other country’s rain.

I told you it wanted meat, Ben said, as I tugged out the letter. When the 口 dilated back to the width of our heads, we reached in and pulled out fistfuls of bird bones crumbling to salt. The skeleton of Dayi’s goose-baby. One of the bones we recovered was a rib, the other a wishbone. We each held one end of the forked bone, breaking it between us.

The bone-halves jerked in our fists after we broke them, magnetizing back together. Where they touched, the bones welded themselves, glowing. Above us, crows gathered to knit the night. Ben and I tried to break the bone again, to seduce it from symmetry, but the wishbone flew out of our fists. It hovered above our heads, growing a body around itself. Rot in reverse: The wishbone fattened into fleshcoat and feathers, feet forking from a torso. It rose to join the crows, a goose threading in and out of the flock, going home.

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