Finger K-Ming Chang
We hear on TV that if you find a finger in your bowl of chili at Wendy's,
you can sue them and live on that money forever. We debate whose finger to
sever, how we will split the money, but in the end, only one girl is
willing: Gao XiaoCai, whose mother needs surgery to remove her spleen
because it is hardening. What is the spleen, we ask XiaoCai, but she
doesn't know either, can only make two fists and say this is inside her.
We ask her which finger she wants to sacrifice, and she says her ring one,
since she doesn't want to marry anyway. Her mother says men are worse than
spleens because they can't be surgically removed from inside you. That's
fine, we say, though we pity that finger, crying as we hold it down on her
mother's cutting board and bring the cleaver down blunt. Though we tied a
knot around her finger the night before, choking off the blood so it will
turn dead and white as a radish, XiaoCai still screams, and we are still
sorry when the cleaver doesn't go through all the way, just sort of lodges
in the bone, and by the time we wrestle the blade up again, her bone
flaking like snow, XiaoCai is unconscious and her mother is awake, chasing
us out. Her finger is only severed partway, and now it has an extra hinge
in it, and though we think she looks cooler this way, like those ghosts
with hands as long as their arms that can eat a tree with one fist, her
mother is upset because now XiaoCai is unmarriageable. XiaoCai says she
has to drink a bag of pig's blood every day because of bloodloss, and
because we are sorry, we buy her jumbo-bags at the Dahua and watch her
sip, her wrists bulging full, shattering her bracelets and scattering the
bone beads we scramble to pluck off the street. We will find another thing
to amputate, maybe a toe because who needs those. XiaoCai says she has an
uncle without toes and maybe we can ask him for advice. He must live in a
house beneath his own acre of sky—rain whenever he wants it, the sun
dinging like a concierge bell—but XiaoCai says no, this
uncle lives in his Subaru. We tell her we don't believe that, but XiaoCai
brings us to the Burger King parking lot and asks him to show us his feet.
It's true, he says, I lost my toes, but not inside a stew—during the
revolution, I was sent to Qinghai to herd cattle and all the women said,
remember to sleep with your feet buried in coal, and I forgot, and my toes
purpled like grapes and were plucked off clean by the cold. But I kept my
teeth, he says, smiling, and they are turrets of gold. Every part of him
is gilded: skin described by sweat, hands rubied with callouses. We tell
him he should have kept all his toes in a baggie and tucked them into a
cheeseburger and then he'd be so rich, his bones would be re-released in
gold, and he laughs and says they burned his toes, converted them to coals.
We ask if he has collected them back yet. No, he says, and asks us why we
want them. We say we are going to spoon them to our mouths and scream and
sue, and then we will pay to evict XiaoCai's mother's spleen, and we will
buy pink houses that look like sliced cake, and holographic skirts, and a
new Subaru that can go underwater like a submarine and resurface him
anywhere he wants. He laughs again. He says: does a finger cost so much
here? When I was little, he says, little girls didn't roam the streets
looking for coal-toes, didn't hijack cleavers either. What do they do,
then, we ask, and he says they used to fly kites. Kites with faces on them
to scare ghosts away, kites with our faces. Back then, he tells us, he had
a sister just like us, except one time she got her kite tangled in a power
line, and when she tried to tug it down, she got electrocuted. They tried
to take her home, but no one could touch her without snagging themselves
in her light, and by the time she stopped shaking, she was dead. We had to
carry her home without touching her, muffled in wool, he says. How much
money did you get, we ask, for her whole body like that? We think it must
be a lot, but he turns away from us, putting his hands on the wheel even
though we are going nowhere. Nothing, he says, nothing. That's when
XiaoCai gets the idea to dig up a dead body and steal the fingers off
that, and this way none of our blood has to be replaced with a pig's. We
agree, and all week we dig beneath power lines for electrocuted girls, but
we only find soda cans, pigeon bones, gravel. XiaoCai's mother's belly
turns green because the spleen is now a honeydew melon, and though XiaoCai
begs us to finish severing her finger, we see the way it hinges, knuckling
like a tree beneath another country's wind, and we cannot fell it.
XiaoCai's uncle follows us in his car as we walk to Dahua for pig's blood,
as we plot which bodies to rob, always our own. He scrolls down his
window. His car stalls behind us, shuddering still, and the window
breathes steam. Freeze, he says, you'll freeze. He runs out toward us,
kneeling, taking each of our feet one at a time and cupping them in his
palms, buttering us in his breath, and we ask him to go back in the car,
aren't you cold out here, don't spend all your blood on us. But he kneels,
holding our feet to his lips like a microphone, saying again and again,
someday you will be worth more than this. You will be worth more than what
you've lost.
K-Ming Chang is the author of BESTIARY, a novel. She is a recent National Book Foundation
5 Under 35 Honoree.
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