Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question in life is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end. Camus knows too much about the gun, the knife, the noose. Given so much time, the ‘impossible’ becomes possible, the possible becomes probable, and the probable virtually certain; Robbins only had to wait, time itself performs miracles.
There is only one serious question, and that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself. Answer me that and I will ease your mind about the beginning and end of time, answer me that and I will reveal to you the purpose of the moon.
I don’t know a thing about love.
There is a loneliness in this world so great that I can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock. People so tired, mutilated, either by love or lack thereof. I’ve seen people in shambles, worn out from begging on their knees, reaching out a hand in the darkness, not knowing for certain if someone else is there. Love doesn’t ask to be excused. It fades away without warning. There is nothing you can do to save it, to make it breathe the way it did. Death is not a problem, it’s a promise, a purpose. What is life without a purpose? What is purpose without love?
“Kohana, my dulcet, my walking waxing moon!” I feel Juniper’s voice like an unshakable absence. Like most of my insides crawled out of my mouth and went west. She smells like affection without conditions, love potion number 9, a heady concoction—it all goes straight to my head.
“You came, you kept your promise.” I turn to face her and it’s like being thrown off a cliff. A trust fall. She has my heart in her teeth, still-beating, fresh from my ribcage. I don’t care if she isn’t gentle. I want her to ravage me. “Sneaking out wasn’t too terrible a task, I hope?” I only come alive when Juniper is around to look at me, to pay attention to me, to colour me in. I am already a lamb half-slaughtered, a holy sacrifice put on the altar of some sick love god. A new face, a different story, the same mess of me. I never learn my lesson, I feel her in my heartbeat.
“It’s easy when your father is never home and your mother has to turn in early so she can make it to her 6 A.M. class.” It takes everything in me not to babble like an idiot drunk on sonnets and love songs. Juniper is a natural wonder, a tiny, unforgettable fern climbing the inside wall of an ancient well. My love for her shatters daily routine, chases away boredom; when I’m with her, each day becomes an adventure. Dreams could not invent anything more intoxicating. “My mother loves her gifted high school students. Teaches music. Plays any instrument you could think of.”
“What about you?” she asks as we walk down a garden path laid down in a herringbone pattern, our hands dangerously close, flirting with death. Pastel shades are favored here, peonies and old roses scenting the air, all whimsy and sumptuous. Sweet alyssum plants blur the lines where the path ends and begins, the sweet honey fragrance of the tiny flowers flirting with our senses. “Can you play?”
To my left is a bird feeder. We keep it filled with water to serve thirsty birds and to catch reflections of the surrounding flowers. “I wouldn’t know what to do if you put me in front of a piano, no.” I snort, proud of my musical ineptitude. My talents lie elsewhere, I refuse to live under my mother’s shadow.
It’s twilight and this place is our sanctuary, silent, untouched, a whisper between star-crossed lovers. Pillowy shrubs and perennials spill over moss-covered rain barrels. Wispy foliage and delicate flowers grow against benches; the love-in-a-mist create an airy effect, wispy accents. Pastel shades are favored here, peonies and old roses scenting the air sumptuous sensuality. The poppies reseed freely.
“Sounds lonely.”
“Not really. It could be worse. A deadbeat dad and a mom that hates me? I was spared. My mother, she loves me, but she’s overbearing about it. Like she’s making up for him not being there. She still makes my lunches and tucks me in at night. Always wants to know where I’m going. Can’t stop thinking about me for a second.”
My mother wants me to stay home. My outside activities are watched over. I understand; if girls run through the streets in happy groups as boys do, they attract attention. Striding along, singing, talking, and laughing loudly or eating an apple—these are provocations, and they will be insulted or followed or approached, but I don’t want to be the well-bred girl my mother wished for.
I am as aggressive as all the boys in my neighborhood. I conquer them with brusque authority, a proud frankness. Don’t treat boys like companions, Kohana. My mother insists I should carefully avoid giving the impression that I’m taking the initiative, because men “do not like ‘tomboys,’ or ‘bluestockings,’ or ‘thinking women.’” Too much audacity, culture, intelligence, or character frightens them.
My mother wanted to raise a girl but instead raised a fist.
Juniper and I sit beneath a massively thick, millennium-old tree. It’s a wild looking thing, stoic, suspended in time, a vivid expression of the natural world’s enduring beauty. Here, under the twisted, tortured trunk of this tree, we continue our weekly rendezvous, delighting in each other’s love of philosophy. It’s riveting and romantic, I know. Last week we discussed why beauty is associated with morality. Next week I plan to discuss whether or not computers have the ability to be creative. Juniper has the floor tonight.
In her hands is a book, or should I say grimoire; it looks full of secrets and sorcery, a witch’s sacred code stained black with a leather strap riveted around it to keep it closed. “Let’s talk about women and myth.”
This one is a no brainier. “Men parade their satisfaction of feeling they are kings of creation,” I say so fast that I almost cut Juniper off. My words were on the tip of my tongue like they had been waiting ages to be spoken. Bullets forgotten in the chamber of a smoking gun.
Juniper is impressed with the speed, the conviction with which I give my response. Roses bloom from my cheeks. I am a yielding thing, all beating heart, all throat gone dry, all open arms for her. I struggle to keep it together. “Women have only won what men have been willing to concede to them. They take nothing, they receive nothing.” But I contest male sovereignty. In couples such as Varuna—Mitra, Uranus—Zeus, Sun—Moon, Day—Night, no feminine element is involved at the outset. Neither in Good—Evil, auspicious and inauspicious, left and right, God and Lucifer. “Men found ammunition in the legends of Eve and Pandora.”
The only vulnerable part of Achilles’ body was the part a woman held.
Juniper thrums her fingers against her book, a mile-wide smirk on her face. “Created after Adam, Eve is second to him. This is what the Genesis story symbolizes, where Eve appears as if drawn from Adam’s ‘supernumerary’ bone, in Bossuet’s words. Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself. She is not considered an autonomous being.”
“God perfected the human being when he created Eve,” is my counterpoint. I wave my hand dismissively. “You’re right, Eve was not formed at the same time as Adam. She was not made from a different substance or from the same clay Adam was modeled from: she was drawn from the first male’s flank. Even her birth was not autonomous. God did not spontaneously choose to create her for herself and to be directly worshiped in turn, he destined her for man. He gave her to Adam to save him from loneliness. Her spouse is her origin and her finality. She is his compliment. Privileged prey.”
No man would consent to being a woman, but all want there to be women. Men assert arrogantly and naively that their presence in the world is an inevitable fact and a right, and women are a simple—but fortunate—accident.
I want to be hostile. The praying mantis and the spider, gorged on love, crushing their partners and gobbling them up. Monstrous and stuffed, the queen termite reigning over her servile males. I am a wildcat. A tigress, a lioness, a panther.
“Men would like to emerge, like Athena, into the adult world, armed from head to toe, invulnerable.” Juniper holds my hands while speaking her gospel. “Being conceived and born is the curse weighing on his destiny, the blemish of his being. And it is the warning of his death. Mother Earth engulfs the bones of its children within it. Women—the Parcae and the Moirai—weave human destiny, but they also cut the threads. In most folk representations, Death is a woman, and women mourn the dead because death is their work. I know a girl who thinks she’s as strong as any man. Very pretty, with a boy’s toughness, exuberance of life, initiative.”
I am an arch. I want to devote to Juniper each beat of my heart, each drop of my blood, the very marrow in my bones. If I couldn’t see her and love her every minute of my life, I would rather die. Juniper seduces me like a man in a world without men. If I don’t marry her, if I don’t give her a normal and respectable life, I’ll go mad.
“You have the face of darkness, Kohana.” Juniper tucks some of my hair behind my ear, caressing my cheek with her soft, soft hand. My skin ignites under her touch, I am all wildfire for her. She brushes the tips of her fingers against my lips, familiarizing herself with their texture, tracing the line of them. “You are chaos, where everything comes from and must return to one day. At the heart of the sea, it is night. You are dreaded by ancient navigators. It is night in the bowels of the earth.”
Her hand makes its way down my neck, over my heart. She leans in, so close her hand on my chest is mine, the butterflies in her stomach are my own. I don’t know any other way to love, except as one loves certain obscure things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
“Man is threatened with being engulfed in this night,” she whispers against my skin. I tingle with anticipation and excitement. My mouth trembles, begging to be kissed. “The reverse of fertility, and it horrifies him. He aspires to the sky, to light, to sunny heights, to the pure and crystal clear cold of blue, and underfoot is a moist, hot, and dark gulf ready to swallow him. Many legends have the hero falling and forever lost in maternal darkness: a cave, an abyss, hell.”
Juniper speaks and I am Delilah and Judith, Aspasia and Lucretia, Pandora and Athena, both Eve and the Virgin Mary. I am an idol, a servant, a source of life, the power of darkness, a contradiction unto myself. I am man’s prey, his downfall, everything he is not and wants to have, his negation and his raison d’être. It’s always difficult to describe a myth. It doesn’t lend itself to being grasped or defined. I haunt everyone who tries. I doom men to death.
Juniper does not kiss me. When I open my eyes I am alone. I am alone and I am spoiling harvests, devastating gardens, killing seeds. I am alone and fruit falls at the sight of me; I am killing the bees. I touch wine and it turns to vinegar. The milk in my hands goes sour. I take a step forward and spring violin strings.
I am both in a forest and the forest. My body: wishing stars and the moody moon. My body: sunlight and rich earth. From me grows wildflowers, the florist’s proud rose. I transform into the nymphs, dryads, mermaids, water sprites, and fairies haunting the countryside, the woods, lakes, seas, and moors.
A grey, damp sky steals in, a burgling fog crawling towards me, a hundred million kinds of grey swirling together in the sky with the stars close behind, lying in wait. As I venture deeper into the forest, the shadows intensify. The trees tower more ominously overhead, mist twisting and dancing around them. I step on small, moldy bones stacked in neat piles as if mimicking a stone pathway. Green leaves turn black. Branches once straight and smooth are now knotted, gnarled. Briers no longer bear fruit, but poison.
“But she was just…” My voice trails off in horror. In front of me is a cold, sweaty corpse strung up by its neck and arms, dangling like a broken marionette, flies eating the waste that has since come out of it as its insides are digested by bacteria. With my hand still on top of my mouth, I examine the corpse from different angles. My eyes, afraid of what they might find, see no sign of injury, no wound to place blame.
The skin is bluish-purple, glistening as if covered in a thin layer of sweat. The doughy, swollen face and bulging eyes aren’t enough to hide the corpse’s identity. “Juniper?” I whisper, my eyes blurring with tears. I feel dizzy—another step and who knows where I’ll land.
Desperate to do anything else but stare at her, I bring my gaze further in. There are other bodies hanging from trees, most skeletons with nothing more than tattered cloth and scraps of wispy hair clinging to them. Rotting corpses smell like any other rotting mammal. Rancid meat and decomposing bowels. Wet garbage bags full of feces and curdled milk left out in the sun for too long. Too many smells at once. Too many kicks to the back of the throat. I’m running out of breath.
“Is she yours?” comes a new voice. The trees prickle as a woman hobbles into view, her throat swallowed by a heavy, black coat trimmed in fur, her white hair strangled back into a savagely-tight chignon. Her eyes fall on me like an old, fat crow scavenging the edges of roads for a maggot-infested meal. “You’ve been unusually quiet,” she growls, her grin full. She has all her teeth—sharp, leonine, yellow. Her breath is rancid. It smells like used diapers breaking down into fluids.
“Am I ugly? Is there something on my face? Bah! As if a human would understand true beauty.” Her voice cracks with amusement, her head inclining faintly, her thin, pale lips curling into a smile. Every movement she makes, though pronounced, takes some effort.
“What do you mean by ‘human’?” I demand, all bravery, all backbone. The old woman cackles. Her laughter shakes the marrow in my bones, makes me humble.
“Human. H-U-M-A-N, hoo-man!” She’s boisterous, slapping her big belly and resting the brunt of her weight on her other foot. “A sly one, you. You’ve been trouble from the moment you were born. If your hag of a mother won’t straighten you out, someone’s gotta do it.”
I just lost a friend, and now this ugly woman is talking about my mother. What right does she have? “If you hurt a single hair on Juniper’s head—!”
“Me? Hurt her?” says the old woman with a venomous sneer. She reaches into her dirty coat and pulls out a cigarillo, chomping on its end, spitting, and rolling it over between her lips. “If you want to know the truth, she killed herself.”
From every side, I hear crying, but I don’t see anyone else around. “Ah, listen to them wail! Music to my ears. The most beautiful sound.” She lays her head on its side as if considering what words will get the best reaction out of me. “Those are the bushes and trees of the forest. They are only able to speak when you skin them.”
To demonstrate, she breaks off a branch belonging to the nearest tree, causing it to yell out in pain. Rubbing salt in its wounds, she takes the cigarillo out of her mouth and uses its branch to pick her teeth. “From human to tree! Doesn’t it just tickle you, my little suckling calf! They are plants that speak, in another monstrous hybrid that makes no sense.”
The old woman pauses, crooking an eyebrow so long she’s tied it into a messy braid along her brow bone. “Anyway, you don’t seem all too sad about your little friend.” Her voice changes timbre, rising to an interested tenor. “Why’s that, I wonder?”
If I weren’t still in shock, I’d speak out against the insinuation of her comment. She cackles with renewed amusement when I don’t. “It’s because deep down, deep deep down, you’re like me. Like us! I’ve got to cut away at all that innocence—snip, snip! Like a chef that forgot to cut the fat off a prime rib.” She pinches her thick nose, extinguishing her cigarillo on the tree’s bark. I hadn’t even seen her light it. “You think I don’t know why you followed that girl into my forest? She had pretty breasts and knew her poetry by heart! You’ll have to forgive me, my clumsy gazelle. I love to tease and ridicule the lovestruck.”
I bite my lip and stare straight ahead but my cheeks are still on fire. I can’t believe this hag made me blush.
“Oh, stop that,” she snaps, her already-wrinkled face scrunching up in disgust. “Your youth smells awful! Chubby babies and fluffy puppies. I want to vomit everything in my stomach.”
“Well, that’s one thing we have in common.” Like a cobra I spit venom at her eyes with blinding accuracy. “People will wonder what happened to Juniper, you frigid bitch!”
“So? Let them wonder! You care too much. Maybe she was stabbed eighty times with an ice pick and then slashed at the neck. It’s not like she had any family, it’s not like she’ll be missed.”
“I’ll miss her.”
“Well aren’t you a pretty little liar. Not bad. You believe magic is a rainbow after a storm, skipping off into the sunset after a day of hard work, the first kiss you have with that girl you’ve been swooning over for so many months. It is not. Magic is tooth and fang and claw, all edges. Knives and chainsaws, girl. The sword at your neck, your last words, your dying breath. Juniper was your doom. You know my name, girl.”
Wren, the oldest, cruelest tree in a forest so secret not even birds know about it. She’s deeper than secrets, more secret than depth, as ambiguous as she is hideous.
I’ve heard the stories.
Anyone who knows anything about magic has.
Wren is a walking contradiction, ruthless and vile but also beneficent and kind. The kindhearted, noble, virtuous, and heroic people that meet her receive her gifts, her counsel. Anyone who possesses a loving and honorable heart can overcome even the worst evil. “The Wren, who not only possesses a hunger for human flesh…” With my hands curled against my chest, I recite lines from one of the tales my mother read me: The Wicked Witch of the Wilds. “But the capacity to consume enough food for twelve in one sitting.”
Wren knows things no one else could guess, so she can help people and, depending on if she’s the wise woman or the monster, her help may come at the price of an impossible task, with death as the punishment for failure.
“Ah, now the cogs are turning,” she says, amused at my misfortune. I exchange nervous glances between Wren and her hut’s fence made up of the bones of those she has eaten, topped with their skulls.
“You’ve read the books. You know how this goes.” Wren’s expression softens at the sight of my tears. Her braided eyebrows crease together gently, the back of her withered hand brushing against my cheek. “Every step hereafter will be a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you’ll trade for power, for the opposite of weakness, which is not strength, but hardness. I am a trap, but so is everything. Pick your price. I am freedom and I will eat your heart.”
My body feels it deep in the guts when something strange is about to happen, so my stomach quivers. I shove my hands in my pockets to stop them from shaking so much, but that just makes the shaking worse. I laugh, in an attempt to loosen up, to relax. I feel my laughter sharp against my spine like a saw.
It’s frustrating. I know so much about magic but can’t do it myself. And, truthfully, I’m frustrated at my being frustrated. Humans lack the aptitude for magic, there’s nothing I can do about her, about this. I’m defenseless. A sitting duck. I can’t stand it.
“Those stories aren’t about me.” I snatch my power back by the neck. I refuse to be dealt a bad hand. Wren might very well sink her teeth into me, but that doesn’t mean I should just lay down and give up. “They’re about Sylvias, or Rheas, or Anaises,” I continue, with stern authority. “I’m not a protagonist in your story.”
Wren grins wider and wider, until the sides of her mouth meet somewhere behind her ears. All my fingers and toes go numb, my body shaking as if I have been drenched in freezing buckets of water. Her expression is the opposite of what I wanted. If outtalking her isn’t an option, then what other option do I have? I should just rip my heart out of my chest and be done with it.
“The Sylvias and Rheas and Anaises, they were just appetizers. Whatever made you put the forbidden fruit into your sinews. Be proud, you reek of Man’s First Disobedience. The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten!” Wren pauses, sniffing the air with long, snorting breaths like a hound. “Is it an apple? A fig? A peach? A pomegranate or something completely different? Your ambrosial smell can madden an empty stomach to action. I know the rules, though. You are not worth the temptation, Kohana Outtaike.”
I am shaking, all over, every cell vibrating with the weight of her words, so heavy, like a reckoning I can feel in my knees, in my shoulders. “H-how do you know my name?”
“Kohana, Kohana, Kohana. My, what a black, soft name. Black as bibles! Like a body pillow and sherpa cover I want to cuddle with all night long. Yours is a name that hugs back.”
No.
My name is an ambush predator.
My name strikes, it grabs with its teeth. It shuts off blood flow to the heart and brain. It shoves prey down its throat towards its bottomless stomach. Wren is wrong. My name crushes and breaks bones like a boa constrictor. My father named me. I was born to be brutal.
“You’ve been very careless, Kohana. You traded pinky promises for declarations of war, the power of friendship for brute military force. It’s all your own fault. Two mothers and neither of us could save you, can you believe it?”
“Shut up!” I scream, my words penetrating like armor-piercing bullets. “I’ve been on my best behavior. I’ve done everything I was told. I don’t do or say anything that might be upsetting to others regardless of my opinions, which I’m supposed to keep to myself anyway. The word ‘no’ doesn’t exist in my vocabulary because I’m supposed to take care of others’ needs before my own.” Anything else would be selfish and inconsiderate. “I do all this without faltering, all of it, in an immaculate outfit, with a smile on my face that never betrays how I feel inside. I’ve been good. So good!”
“Good does not mean right, and you did everything wrong. Girls must care only for unicorns, bubble gum, rainbows and ribbons. They must sweep their hearts clean of anything but dollies and husbands and wedding rings.” Wren sounds like my father. He believes housekeeping and cooking ability are essentials in any true home. That I exist to build up and maintain my future husband’s ego. That I shouldn’t talk unless my future husband wants me to—then don’t I dare disappoint him, not ever.
“Even if, by some miracle,I’d marry someone when I’m all grown up, it definitely won’t be to a man. I don’t want to pretend to be his mother for the rest of his life, ensuring he’s fed, washed, well-dressed and his things organized. I hate housework. I don’t want children.”
Men love danger and I am the most dangerous plaything. If Sleeping Beauty is to be awakened, she must be sleeping. If there is a captive princess, there must be ogres and dragons. Conquering, to them, is more fascinating than rescuing or giving. I am my own benefactor, my own liberator. I redeem myself.
A husband will try to conquer me in vain. Sleeping Beauty might wake up with displeasure, she might not recognize her Prince Charming in the one who awakens her, she might not smile. A man wants to give and here I am taking. This is no longer a game, it is a question of self-defense. Life or death. Prepare yourself.
“Fair enough,” Wren says, her voice crooning, sibilant, her breath sawing back and forth. She takes my face in her hands, squishing my cheeks together. Wren smiles, but beneath her smile is something else, the smile of a carnivore. This is her true smile, the smile of all evil stepmothers and wicked witches. She strokes my face, kisses my forehead like my mother would. “You want an archrival.”
“An enemy?” I pry her hands from my face and take a few steps back. I need to make sure I heard her correctly. “Why would I want that? Why would anyone want that?” I want friends, I almost blurt out, but I swallow the words down. They taste bitter. Sour as onions stepped in seawater.
“An enemy will repay evil for evil and reviling for reviling, girl!” Her dry lips crack as she grins at me again. “But an archrival, a real, proper archrival, will never stop, never give in, and forget how it all started in the first place. You want for a creature of moods. A wolf, a thief, an emperor! They will rise against you, my supreme creature, understanding there is little hope to conquer you, but being unable to stand aside. An opponent to the despotic power of the All Creator that can be admired for their struggle but is supposed to finally lose because of their deeds. Supposedly, were you not so weak.”
I laugh. I laugh in Wren’s face. I level a stare at her. In Wren’s world, fear has no place. Only strength respects strength. “You don’t know anything about me.” I bare my teeth. Dig my feet down into the twilit earth. I devour the moon.
Wren gives a generous shrug, as if to demur. You don’t know what I know. She leans down so our faces stand as close as secrets. “I see your story in every line, in every curve and crack, in every detail of your face, unmistakably apparent. The same painful realization. The same stupid message in every stupid bend and in every stupid stitch.”
I scowl so deeply the trees curve away from me, desperate to escape my displeasure. My stare is a fire with its own storm-force winds, five-thousand fists wrapped in barbed wire, broken noses, split lips, guts and gore and spit.
“The wolf, it will always start out loving you,” Wren continues, unperturbed. “You can’t get into the real meat of hatred and eternal enmity without love and betrayal. The all-obliterating, all-annihilating passion of archrivals, that comes from attachment. Fear not, girl. I will prepare you, best as I can. You come here with your roots planted in Life, but the earth is a grave, and life a bitter combat. You will never be the industrious honeybee or the mother hen.”
Wren sparks something so profound in me my mouth moves automatic and words spill out, all voice, no thought. “I am the praying mantis, the spider.”
“That is precisely it, girl. Take it from me, I ate all my husbands!” Her mutter of amusement blossoms into an enormous belly laugh, deep, hearty, her head thrown back in the midst of happy tears. A hint of a smile dances across my lips. She apologizes for nothing, I admire her sick, her nasty. Wren is all I aspire to be, unwilling to hang on a husband’s arm like a slug. To love is to devour.
“On our wedding day I am gentler than a breeze, the moon among young foliage. There I am like the fresh butterfly unfolding its newborn wings, like a lanky doe, like a flower that doesn’t even know it is beautiful. They think my womb a warm, peaceful haven and then boom! Here comes Wren, the rank octopus, the carnivorous plant, the abyss of convulsive darkness swallowing their supposed strength. Cinderella was always a witch. And you, my blushing cabaret—are you angel or devil? Lying embellishes you with glittering reflections, coquetry is your intoxicating perfume. You are magic. You were always capable.”
The forest disappears, and in my hands is a black leather grimoire, terrible and forbidden, full of apocalypses and monster gods.
The yew, that dark, twisted, enigmatic tree of legend looms over me; despite extreme damage and decay, splitting open at the trunk, it continues to thrive, sinister, stubborn. Wren is brave, having survived hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and humans, and yet manages to retain her verdant stature. I promise to visit her every night.
★
★
A daughter is a special doll to be kept in a glass cabinet. An automatic girl the master of the house brings out to entertain at the table with charming words, to be polished up with powder and elaborate costumes. Pull the lever in her heart and she dispenses love. Pose her arms and legs and she exhibits grace, then put her away in her cabinet again.
My father doesn’t love me. He likes to see me dressed in all white, knife in hand, hair pulled back under a net. You’ve a surgeon’s hands, Kohana. My fingers, too long, too nimble. My skin, too soft, not a single blemish on them.
My hands were built for delicate work. They’re not a heavy labourer’s hands. This, I think, disappoints him the most. My hands hunt, stab, slash. They tease out tissues, caress vessels, and nimbly knot thread as fine as human hair, not a single movement wasted. My hands perform well-choreographed ballet. This is not enough. I am not what he wanted.
My fingertips should be flattened and ironed by the touch of hot silver dishes and copper serving pans, a heavy callous sitting at the base of my forefinger from holding my chopping knife with a golfer’s grip. I should have asbestos hands. Leather knuckles. I should be able to look at my hands and remember what each scar is from. That was the oven, this was when I was doing oysters, this was when I nearly lost three fingers.
I have hands that hold people together until my fingers go numb and my arms quiver.
My father’s hands can cut an onion so fast your eyes don’t have a chance to tear up. They’re stained from working with beats because he forgets to put gloves on. His are battered and torn and scorched and stabbed but still gentle enough to not crush delicate herbs. They are a testament to the torturous work he endures, a symbol of his incredible work ethic. My hands know people’s lives are at stake, each step blended seamlessly with the next. My father doesn’t introduce me to his friends or business acquaintances.
I’m Kai-liang Hsü’s daughter. The internationally renowned, multi-Michelin starred chef Kai-liang Hsü’s daughter, and I can’t even make an omelet.
My father was burning, and my mother put out the fire. He was walking on water and she took his arm, he sunk. A man who wants to hurt you is better than a woman who wants to help you, Kohana. My father thinks he’s a god. He wants to be God. The last time he was home, years and years ago, I watched him place his hand on my mother’s stomach in the same manner a lion holds his paw spread out on a piece of meat he has won. He vaguely sniffed her face, like a lion, tearing at the meat he holds between his paws, who stops to lick it.
He lords over his kitchen with an iron fist.
My father thinks every war is beautiful, whatever its aims. To him, force is always admirable, whatever it serves. I am not surprised to see the battlefield he has nurtured, the soldiers his line cooks have turned into because they must.
In one ear is my mother: Kohana don’t do this. I taught you to please, you must try to please. Stand up straight, don’t walk like a duck, be graceful, strenuous exercise is banned, you are forbidden to fight—
In the other, my father: Learn to take blows, to deride pain, to hold back tears. Undertake. Invent. Dare. Fight back. The universe has a totally different face from what it has for girls. Revolt against the given.
“You.” There is no longer any place on earth for magic: my father alone is king. Nature is originally bad, but powerless when countered with grace; the earth will only get his bones. “What are you doing here? Get out, get out, get out, Kohana.” If I wish to overcome the original stain of myself my only option is to bow before God, beaten and trampled underfoot. When he brought forth the world from nothing, God foresaw the Fall and the Redemption.
“Go back to your books about space exploration, your moon and stars, your astrophysics, but do not busy yourself with my affairs. The only thing your prattle about traveling to other worlds does is delay the inevitability of humanity’s end, just a little. The gall of you to refuse my legacy, my life’s work, for that.”
My father’s wrath is reserved for all that oppose him. “I told you I never wanted to see you in my kitchen again unless you intend to make yourself useful.” You are useless as you are.
When a boy revolts against his father or against the world, he imposes himself on the world, he goes beyond them. But affirming myself, imposing myself, it is unspeakable, repugnant. My heart is full of revolt. I can only destroy, there is despair in my rage. Destruction will come by flames; I will yet again destroy the earth.
My body burns electric. I try to call out to my father, but all that comes out of my mouth is fire and geometry. I vaporize into infinite particles, each cell of me, briefly, fully sentient and screaming. When you’re hungry, really hungry, your whole body is a mouth. You blister all over. Your sister tongue is teeth. I remember billions of years traveling in the shrieking dark. I remember a feast of worlds before the big bang. I am immortal, indestructible, a mutable manifestation of hate and fury and want.
I open my jaw as wide as light-years and bite into whatever fits inside my mouth. Star-juice runs down my chin. I can’t hear the screaming of planets suddenly freezing in the void, careening in the release of gravity’s hand brake. What spills from my lips into my palms—blood, my body bent in half and backwards—are all the words I’ve swallowed: a constant quiet, dying of famine.
I ache all over.