OCEAN TEU

Valentine

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Valentine has eight eyes like a spider, blinking across their cheekbones, their forehead. Each eye is the size of a silver dime, dark and set into their skull. When Val was born Mama wrapped a black silk scarf around their face, covering up all but two of their eyes.

Now Val’s face is a myth: plastered on posters, underlined by the words Valentine “Spider-Eyes” Zhao, Thief, Wanted, Dead or Alive. Whenever they come across one of these posters they tear it down and fold it into a paper moth, wings curved and angular. They nestle the moths into the crooks of tree branches, in the cracks in brick walls, before jumping onto their horse and riding off.

Mama and Baba didn’t care that Val wasn’t a boy or a girl. In China people might have whispered about them or left a severed chicken head on their doorstep, but in America, Mama and Baba let Val shear their hair to their ears with a butcher knife and wear the linen clothes their brothers’ had outgrown. Mama still made Val wear the scarf around their face. Being Chinese already made them outsiders, and they had heard about people burned at the stake, about flesh torn, cleavers cutting through bone.

There was a story Mama used to tell Valentine about a Chinese goddess named Jing Wei, who drowned in the Eastern Sea and transformed into a crow. Mama would hook her thumbs together, spread her fingers into wings, and fly the shadow across the wall. Sometimes Val imagined themself as the drowning girl, other times they imagined themself as the sea, swallowing daughters like stars.

Valentine was first caught stealing when they were 11. The sheriff dragged them into the forest, tying them to a willow tree and stripping off their clothes. He ripped off the silk scarf covering their face, grimacing as he shone a flashlight into each of their eyes. He shone the flashlight between their legs, sneering, I knew it was a girl, eight eyes and all. That was when Val began to think of their body as a stranger, a ghost. Once they left home, they stopped wearing the silk scarf. They bound their chest flat with cotton bandages and let their hair grow in a shag down their back. To be an outlaw was to be an outsider.

In 1871, a shootout between two rival Chinese gangs ended with a White saloon owner shot and dead. A White mob swarmed town, slaughtering any Chinese person they could find. Valentine was asleep in their family’s cabin when they were woken by the sharp ring of gunshots. Their parents and brothers were out in town. Val would only see them later: all five of them, face down in the town square, bullets lodged in their skulls. That night, Valentine stole the neighbor’s horse, tore off their mother’s black scarf from their face, and took the back route out of town.

In the past seven years they have ridden across the West over thirty times, stealing enough money to buy boats and boats to bring all their aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents to America if they wanted to. Valentine remembers the first time they saw their own face on a poster, eight eyes glinting in the mugshot, and all they could think was: I look just like my mother.

Now, Val rides back toward their hometown for the first time in seven years. They wear a soot-black mens coat over a lace fringed dress. A silver-boned corset encircles their waist. A silk tie is knotted around their throat, their mother’s pearls strung over it. A shadow of coal is smeared over their upper lip in the shape of a mustache.

This time Val robbed a bank a hundred miles back, making off with $10,000 and eight pounds of gold. They were barely out of the town before the sheriff was charging out the door of the station, a pack of men on horses behind him, spit flying from their clenched teeth.

Valentine has been on the run for two days. Blue mountains rise around them. They dig the spur of their boots into their horse’s underbelly, gripping the reins as they jolt forward. For three days and nights, Valentine rides, suede hat shading their eyes, gun holstered at their hip. As they get closer to home, the mountains turn to crooked rivers to forests humming with cicadas to foothills steeped in purple light. As dawn breaks on the fourth morning, Val begins to recognize the land, the dips in the ground, the way it opens in front of them like a mother tongue.

After she turned into a crow, Jing Wei spent the rest of her life flying back and forth from the Western Mountains dropping sticks and rocks into the Eastern Sea, trying to fill it up so no one else would have to face the same fate as her. She flew West to East, East to West, West to East, calling out her own name: Jing Wei, Jing Wei, Jing Wei.

Valentine slits their eyes at the sky, but there are no crows, only blue.

Val arrives in town at midnight. It’s the same as they remember. Rows of flat wooden buildings, parting in the middle for the dirt road. They dismount their horse and tie it to the beam of a hotel. Thistle climbs from the cracks in the cement. Lizards sleep under the unturned stones. Val passes the square, now empty, where they saw Mama and Baba and their brothers for the last time. Valentine turns onto the side road that leads to the edge of town.

The door to their family’s cabin is ajar. Moonlight catches on the jagged edges of the windows. The roof has caved in, leaving a hole that opens to the sky. Val steps into the house. The same sepia portraits of their grandparents are pinned to the wall. The bed that they shared with their brothers is draped in moth-eaten sheets, fluttering like a ghost. The box of family photographs sits on the kitchen floor. They crouch over the box, shuffling through the photographs and holding them up to the light.

The sound of hooves and reins whipping echoes through the streets. Val stays craned over the box of photographs. The ground shakes. Val picks up a picture of their mother. In the photo, Ma cups a moth in her palm, her lips parted, the edges of her mouth downturned like the petals of an orchid. Horses whinny outside, coming to a halt a hundred feet from the door. A pair of footsteps approach the cabin.

Valentine Zhao, a voice says from outside the door. Valentine turns, dropping the photograph. The sheriff has his gun directed through the door of the cabin, pointed at Valentine’s chest. Val raises their hands above their head. Around them, the cicadas make small clicks in the dark.

Valentine doesn’t pay attention as the sheriff cocks the gun, or as his finger touches the trigger, moments from being pulled. Instead, Valentine is looking toward the sky, tilting their head, hair falling behind them, bending their neck backward until their eight eyes point straight toward the stars.

Valentine’s hair turns first, slivering into a river of black feathers. It ripples down their spine, over each arm, each finger. Their feet stretch into talons. The bones of their face curve into a beak. Their eight eyes blink through feathers. Their body bows into itself, curling into something smaller, darker. As the sheriff pulls the trigger and the bullet braids through the air, Valentine has already left the ground, airborne and barrelling toward the sky.

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