Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang

Author:K-Ming Chang [Chang, K-Ming]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

An Abbreviated List of All the Ways the Hsia Family Attempts to Revive Anita

Together, Abu and Vivian rattle me, picking up each of my limbs like a different instrument they don’t know how to play, and when Vivian asks if I’m dead, if my organs are now balls of wool, Abu slaps her and says, Where is it, the red thread, the one she must have been holding, did it slip from her fist, did she try to dream without it? Did she let go on purpose? Who or what was she trying to follow?

They open all the windows in the house to fill me with light, coax me back into the body. Her blood’s out, Abu says. She’s full of thread. Abu slits the pad of my forefinger with the blade of a scissor and pulls out a thread of my blood, tugging and tugging until it’s as long as the hallway, then curses and says, It’s too much. She knots the thread close to my finger, clots the blood, trims the length. The thread is wet, which means it’s recent, which means I am not too lost in my dream that I can’t be reeled back with a fishline. Vivian slings me onto the sofa, trying to wake me with her fists, the flat of her hand, a bag of frozen dumplings smacked against my cheek, a pinky soaked in boiling water, an entire handful of salt poured into my mouth, then sugar, then oil, no swallow. Abu visits a bait-and-tackle store, purchasing a spool of fishing line, transparent and thicker than any thread. She bends a paper clip into a hook and ties it to one end, then lowers the line into my mouth while Vivian props it open. The wire hook wades into my belly. Abu waits for a tug on the other end. She and Vivian sit beside my mattress, the two of them like that the entire day, fishing inside me, waiting for me to wake, thrashing.

At the end of the day, when Vivian is asleep beside my thread-stuffed body, when Abu is leaned over me, still cursing, saying I am too selfish to dream, dreaming should always be on behalf of someone else, dreaming should be performed for the dead only, she feels a tug at the end of her line. Jerking awake, Vivian watches as Abu unreels the hook from me, lifting it out of my mouth, and snagged on the end of the paper-clip hook is a lank petal—No, a peel, Vivian says, a rind of some kind, silk on one side and velvet flesh on the other. Vivian licks it with the tip of her tongue: A banana peel, she says, so sweet so sweet, and Abu leans back against the bedroom wall, kneels. I know, Abu says to the ceiling, though all that lives there is a stain in the shape of a fist, opening its fingers every morning. I know what kind of ghost this is, she says.

Abu preserves the banana rind in a jar until it shrivels.

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