AMY WANG

2022 Prose Contest Finalist

Ama

---

There is a grove behind my house in which things do not grow so much as crawl towards the nearest light. Even the plants cannot tell the difference between the sun and camphor; when I was twelve, I left my flashlight buried in the dirt for a week, and when I came back the bushes had devoured the batteries until there was not even a glow left behind. Ama says that it is because I spent too long playing hide and seek in the trees as a child that I now find myself following streetlights, dizzy firetrucks, every bitter flash of white against the skyline. Ama says that she had an aunt once, who did the same thing, and now she is just another soft-spoiled fruit, withering in the dirt. Annie, Ama says, her name was Annie. She married a white man but when it came time for them to leave it turns out he wasn’t even serious about marrying her in the first place. So he left her and she had to slit her own throat, from jaw to jaw in a little red smile. When I ask Ama why Auntie Annie didn’t just use a bullet like the people in movies do, she draws the cleaver from the stack of kitchen knives and chops watermelon rinds into dust. To pulverize your own brain like you pulverize fruit is to commit a sin, Ama says. When I ask Ama why Auntie Annie married the white man in the first place, Ama tells me it was because she did not know the meaning of pride. Ama tells me it is best to marry a man without a shadow. Only then can you be the only thing standing behind him, Ama says. 

* * *

Ama tells me that if a man ever offers to buy the sum of my organs, I should kick him in the shins and run away. It’s bad to sell your body, she tells me. Your body is the only thing you have to keep to yourself. When I ask her how she knows this she spits on the sidewalk and tells me to rub her back, which is pit-scarred from shrapnel. When I run my fingers over Ama’s spine, I can still feel little rough edges underneath her skin, like half-moons peeking out behind the curves of her bones.

* * *

Once, I brought home a box of croissants from the nice white lady across the street. When Ama saw it, she made me bury them in the soil of our backyard. The two of us watched the leaves eat them, tearing apart each buttery layer until the ground was littered with crumbs. Ama says it is better to be hungry and prideful than well-fed and shamed. Ama says that if I become like her aunt, living off of the mercies of mei guo ren, I’ll become a soft-spoiled fruit too, a mandarin dripping thick juice into the sidewalk. Ama says not even the meanest white man would want to marry a smashed orange. Too sticky, Ama tells me. Even the mailman would not take if you offered. Ama says lots of things, but I don’t listen to all of them. Most of what she says is only half-real, anyways, like a story split into crosshairs, each branch only partially true. 

When I do listen, she makes me sit down in the kitchen and wash her hair. Usually, this happens at night before bed, with the rice-wash bucket from the day before. As the milky water splashes all over us she tells me the stories her aunt told her before she died. According to Ama, Auntie Annie was smart before she fell in love with the white man. She had a good mind, Ama tells me. Also why she didn’t want to use a gun. Such pretty brains, too much of a waste to shoot. Whenever Ama tells stories of Auntie Annie, I always wonder where her own place is in them. When I ask, Ama tells me I am too young to understand and changes the subject. 

That night, when the two of us are in the bathroom, Ama tells me the moon will steal my hair if I don’t dry it before bed. You would not be such a pretty little girl if you had no ponytail, Ama says. Ama tells me that if I find buttons I should bring them home and put them in a plastic bag so that she can add them to my shirts. We will have to button your jackets all the way up to your forehead in order to hide your scalp if you aren’t careful. 

* * *

Ama doesn’t love me, but she likes me enough to let me trade chores for three meals a day and the spare-room bed. When I was younger I used to ask why she kept me if she wasn’t willing to raise me for free, and Ama spat into her palm and showed me the phlegm, sticky white against her red skin. Having a child around saps the pain out of my head, Ama said. A cat would be better but in America, you can’t let them keep house on their own when you’re out. 

Ama is too young to be a mother, so I believe her when she says that I am not hers. When I ask where she found me, Ama says she picked me up on the street corner one morning when she was buying youtiao after she watched a Hallmark movie about a nice white couple doing the same thing to a stray dog. You had such small eyes, Ama reminisces. Like little buttons in your head. Ama says that even though we aren’t from the same blood, she looks out for me because she likes the karma it gives her. Later, I ask her if she and Auntie Annie were from the same blood too. Ama does not ever look sad, but her eyebrows darken into the closest approximation of anger that someone with a face as stiff as hers can muster. Not from the same blood, Ama tells me. She lost that blood when she left me behind. 

* * *

As Ama gets older, her stories change, as all stories cut from their roots do. Sometimes, when she talks about Auntie Annie slitting her throat, Auntie Annie ends up living. The doctor stitched her throat back together, Ama tells me. Sometimes, the story ends after Auntie Annie’s husband comes back to her. Sometimes, Auntie Annie turns into a swan, and the doctor plucks out all her feathers, making a cape of them. Sometimes, Ama calls Auntie Annie jiejie before she starts all over again. 

When Ama tells me the last rendition, we are sitting in the grove, feet propped up on the roots of an orange tree. Both of our hands are sticky with the freshness of a half-ripe mandarin. She was a good jiejie, Auntie Annie says. She would have been a good mother to you if she had lived. 

* * *

Sometimes, Ama takes out her old photo album and shows me the family she has back home. No matter how carefully I try to, I cannot find anyone who resembles her description of Auntie Annie. None of the faces resemble Ama either, but she says that’s a good thing. Ama tells me that she has no mother, but her father was a wastrel and a drunk. A very bad man, Ama says. Some years, he drank so much I could not even buy a toothbrush. That is why my teeth rattle so much in my head. Ama opens her mouth and spits a tooth on her palm; we observe it together and find speckles on each side, like dice. 

Because her bones are so soft, the doctor tells Ama to make sure her body has enough calcium. Ama understands that as an order to eat milky things, which usually means ice cream. When we go out to buy Ben and Jerry’s, Ama makes me hold her hand. So you don’t lose yourself like she did, Ama tells me. Her fingers are tight on mine every time we pass a boy my age, as if she is afraid their gravity will pull me out of her orbit. 

* * *

After I tell Ama I like girls instead of boys, she goes three days without saying a word. Finally, she sits me down at the kitchen table and makes me prick my fingers on her sewing needles. The two of us stare at the little red crescents bleeding their way through the tablecloth. Maybe it’s better this way, she says after a long pause. You don’t have to worry about breaking your own heart. You just have to worry about breaking mine.

Previously published in Sine Theta

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