I looked again at the squirming being in my hand. It had a pinkish tint, little black lidless eyes, and a fan of feathery external gills on either side of its head. It did not look appetizing. But this girl had saved the only family I had ever known from a Raid. I owed her everything. So I picked the creature up by its tail, closed my eyes, said a tiny internal prayer that I would not throw up, whispered, “My apologies and my gratitude, tiny beast.” Then I improvised a toast—“To the Mother of Oceans!”—and swallowed it whole.
Liza must have seen the look of misgiving on my face as I swallowed. “It will be okay,” she told me. “I asked her first. The animals are coming back from everything we’ve done to them — but we have to be in our bodies differently. Swallow and breathe through your nose, so you can gain hold of the rest of your body and cross time. You can go get your leg, Lilly — and your son.”
I thought about legs. I pictured lilies. Your son, she’d said again. Maybe I’d misunderstood; maybe she was talking about the sun. If she could help me get these children to safety, I would be happy ending up anywhere under the sun.
I thought as hard as I could not to think about the taste of the axolotl, but instead about the taste of eggs. As if the word itself had gotten inside me.
Ethnography 4
Like so many others — maybe more than seventy-five thousand — my father was promised citizenship after the war. For years and years after he returned, he built and worked a ranch. Then, one day, his neighbors had a secret meeting and held a secret vote. In a group, they came to his door and knocked. My mother asked them in, and they came, though they looked uneasy. Eventually, it became clear why: the neighbors wanted my father out.
Before he had this land, my father had been a vaquero for a wealthy rancher in the next county. He had a good working relationship with a wealthy white rancher nearby, and he enlisted his advice and help. My father took the matter to court; the judge permitted the legal case to proceed — but the case dragged on for years. It was said that the Office of Surveyor of General Claims would sometimes take up to fifty years to process claims or finish the permissions for trials. My father lost all his money, and the ranch itself, in his effort to argue for his own rights. Rights that had been given to him by so-called law. Government promises. After that, my mother had a stroke — or she just stopped wanting to live, I’ve never been sure. She had to get a job as a maid; maybe she just worked herself to death. After he lost everything, my father started doing dangerous mining work. He lasted two small hungry exhausted years.
In our last days on my father’s ranch, there is one day I will never forget. My father was on horseback, tracking down a stray calf. My mother was drying dishes at the kitchen window, smiling, humming some little tune. My brothers were in the barn, probably shoveling hay or shit. I was at the kitchen table, eating a hard-boiled egg. I was a kid, so what did I know, but for a moment, it felt like we were real. Do you know what I mean? Like we could be a father, a mother, a son, my brothers laughing and cutting up in the barn, all of us making a life, near animals and land. It seemed so simple. Like a dream anyone could walk into and just… rest.
For the rest of my life, I dreamed about that egg.
Portal
Cruces 5
We rode the waters to and from her like tides.
Back and forth and back and forth to the island, where she rose up and up. The pedestal was too wide for scaffolding, so after the iron frame was erected, some of us dangled from ropes and swung about inside, joining the pieces of her body. Endora was highly skilled at riveting. David was the most artful and efficient. I was quite delicately skilled with my hammer in hard-to-mold places — her nose, her eyes, her ears. We swarmed over steam-driven cranes and derricks like a swarm of human ants, conspiring and recombining, joining her body together.
Under our breath, we blessed the things we touched and made. From our different bodies and mouths and languages, blessings fell like flowers from our lips onto the ground and into the copper of her and into the water, every single day and night. Some of the blessings were for family members: May my mother or grandmother live through the night. May my husband be safe. May my brothers and sister find enough to eat. May this boy or this girl survive while they are held in the hands of others. Some were for the materials or the tools or the ropes and pulleys, or for the weather that surrounded and buffeted us: May this wood and plaster hold and carry us and all of our labor ever upward. May this steam-driven crane move her mighty neck and shoulders in the rhythm of our labor. May this storm pass us by without injury. And some of the blessings were malformed, half-thought, missing parts: May no one discover my fears, my secrets; may my family members not be deported; may the desires growing inside my body never be taken from me. May swirls of opium smoke comfort our suffering; may the laugh of an ample woman help me to breathe full in the chest; may this ache under my belly where my very sex seethes meet an equal want; may my desire be whetted without punishment or shame.
Because underneath our labor was our hunger.
We were men and women and humans and children of all different kinds. We were driven by our embodied existences: the need to eat, to shelter, to fuck, to work, to protect other bodies. We the body were driven to earn the money, since money was the only path to everything we needed: food and electricity and heat and blankets and medicine. Our bodies labored to the point of fatigue, so deep that we moved as if in a trance, like sleepwalkers.
It was our sweat that made her come. Our fucking burst open our fatigue and bred lust; our lust combusted into children. Some men loved women and the women loved the men back. Some men loved other men; some women, other women. There was a free flow of physical demand in the spaces we worked, in the workshops and warehouses and alleys and docks. Some of the children who worked among us had parents and others did not. Certain jobs were served best by small hands; others required a delicate touch. Some bodies did heavy work and some bodies bent and curled, tracing the shapes of the details we crafted. Some of us washed and cleaned and swept, carving an endless S in our backs. We worked together in waves and weaves, and when we went home at night, we were just ourselves again, apart from the work.
No one who worked to build her body died.
The girl slept on a blanket under Endora’s bed for many nights in a row. One night, after everyone else was asleep, the girl came to me. “You love David Chen,” she said, standing over my cot in the room I shared with John Joseph, Endora, and David. I could hear a symphony of soft snoring around me. But she was awake, and she meant for me to understand that she could see me. “You love him more than you’ve ever loved anything in your life. You desire him unto death.”
Her voice made my body tremble.
I looked across the room to where David lay sleeping. I had chosen a bed as far away from his as possible, but also one that would give me a good view of his back, so that I could watch over him as whatever voices and bodies and suffering moved through him in his sleep.
I do desire David unto death, god help me. His body, a color between white and wheat. His hair, the color of night. His torso, between muscle and some otherworldly fluid, its heavy grace apparent every time he moved in his sleep. When the sheet fell away, and I could see the glistening marks on his back, I thought of hundreds of feathers or wings. As if David were turning into a great crane. I wanted to crawl onto his cot and cup his body with my body, like a double parenthesis, something held inside another, where no one anywhere could find us. I want to push my cock into him I want to tendril my arm around to his waist to the velvet pulse of his cock I want to hold him and work the desire out of him in a rush. I want to put my face at the back of his neck I want him to violently throw me off him and then push my legs up until it feels like they will snap from my hips I want him to shove into me, sweet suction sweet thrust.