Gloria
Gloria Gao was the first girl I ever hurt. I punched her in the face for calling my family a bunch of dirty mainlanders. I was Taiwanese like her too, but just half, on my mother’s side, which meant the other half of my family must be made up of organ sellers, gutter spitters, and serial gamblers. It was true I had an uncle who stabbed another man twice during a card game in the basement of a pet store; it was true my grandfather won my grandmother in a game of mahjong, along with a flute that he demonstrated how to play by prodding the mouth-tip into his ass and farting into it.
Gloria was a church girl. She thought she was better than us because she had dime-sized nipples and an almost-new navy Honda. She prayed every day, and her tongue must have been tuned into the right frequency, because hers always came true. She prayed for her own pocket-radio when she was nine and the next day they were growing from the sycamores like silver-skinned fruit, batteries falling out of the sky in a gunmetal rain. Then there was the time she prayed for the moles on her nose to be evicted from her skin, and the next day they fled her face as horseflies.
My grandfather went to the temple twice in his life. Once to pray for the lottery numbers to arrive as the number of birds in the sky. Once to pray I’d be born a boy. Both prayers were returned to sender. After he died, we pickled his ashes in a jar of rice vinegar and left him there as a lantern.
Gloria Gao wore a jade cross and skirts with overlapping layers like the bell of a tulip, and she was so thin I could see her bones go stealth beneath her skin. She had a mouth like a Ming Dynasty poem, weaned off cream and perfectly circular, and when she prayed—which was all the time, wherever she was—she lowered her head and muttered, forcing us all to watch her fold. The neighborhood girls and I joked to her once that she probably kneeled more than a prostitute. There were things we did to bend her faith like a fishbone, like stealing the side-view mirrors off her Honda while she was at church or sending her a text that read 666 every day for a month, but she remained above us all, a self-appointed saint. She was pristine as an apple and we all wanted to skin her.
I’ve never seen the inside of a church, but I imagine it’s swollen with light—nothing like the temple where I went once to visit my grandfather. His name was pasted to the wall for the first one hundred days after death. Inside the temple, it was dark and damp, like the inside of a plum, a pit pulsing down my throat. I couldn’t look at his name, the one he gave me, the one I didn’t say, the one Gloria called dirty. In the back of the room was a Buddha sitting cross-legged, shoulders slumped, face shedding gold paint, a chipped nose that reminded me of the time I punched Gloria, the sap of blood on my knuckles, the sweet. Her bottom lip unzipped against my fist. Her knees ducked to the street. Take this, take this from me, I wanted to say. Pray for me to stop. I’ll answer to my name in your mouth.
Gloria got a chaste boyfriend, a church boy. The neighborhood girls and I planted thirty-one dollars in his pocket, along with a note urging him to get it in and bring us proof when he did. God designed you to do this, we wrote, and he obeyed, bringing us her underwear dangling from his maw like a dog. We were disappointed by the plainness of them, no lace waistband to tattle on, no little satin bow, not even a pattern of cherries or hearts. They looked unworn, the kind of white that meant her mother owned a washing machine and didn’t scrub the family’s underwear in the sink with a stone shaped like a fist, the way our mothers did. We knew then that we would never dirty her.
I saw her alone once, in the parking lot of the church. It was true I was following her, true that I thought of kidnapping her family’s beagle so that I’d see her again on her knees, searching for something. But I knew she was the kind to leash her losses and walk them down the street like shining beasts, so I left the dog alone. In the parking lot of the church, I saw her sit in the driver’s seat of her almost-new Honda, put her hands on the wheel, and go nowhere. It was dark and no one knew where she was. The light was on in her backseat. I wanted to wear that light, so I knocked on the car window. She rolled it down and told me to go away, but instead I got in beside her, told her it was dangerous to sit in an unlocked car. Her glovebox was open and inside I could see the sweet beads of a rosary, and something that glistened behind it—a gun. She saw me looking and said it was for protection, that when her father first came to America he worked on a farm and shot pigs and strung them up, unbuttoning their skin. I told her there weren’t any pigs here. I didn’t know her mouth was capable of making that word, pig, and I pulled it from the air like a pin.
That night, she tried to teach me the word of God. She asked if I had ever felt his love. But all I could think about was her father with a pig slung across his shoulders, the satin shawl of its blood. In the backseat, she saddled my face, came in my mouth, knotted my wrists with ribbons of salt. I saw her nipples and they were ordinary, not currency, no faces minted into them. I hated how perfectly plotted her spine was, her symmetrical shadow, how she rummaged light from the whites of my eyes, how faithful I was to the taste of her.
K-Ming Chang (@k_mingchang) is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and the winner of a 2019 Pushcart Prize in poetry. Her debut novel Bestiary is forthcoming from One World/Random House in September 2020. She is located at kmingchang.com.