*Fiction — October 20, 2022
Loquats
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Mother picks up a pair of loquats at the market: yellow, oblong jewels that pull easily off the stem. She pops one into her mouth and swallows the chestnut-sized seed. She tells me that when the seed splits open in her belly, a baby will jump out and grow into the son she’s always dreamed of having.
Supposedly, I starved him shut-eyed. When we shared house in Mother’s womb, I had the more powerful belly button, sucking down Mother’s limited nutrients like a black hole. My twin brother didn’t stand a chance.
Mother says that a daughter should be delicate but as useful as furniture, with bones strong enough to support the weight of a household. She sniffs at the yolk of belly that appears when I sit down and the thickness of my ankles, my clumsy hands that swipe a plate onto the floor, shattering it into a saw-toothed frown.
If not useful, then a daughter should at least have skin as smooth and pale as paper, Mother sighs as she picks up after me.
That afternoon, the sun is a squat, salmon-colored animal grazing on a wild blue sky. In the kitchen, Mother peels off the plastic-looking leaves from the slender stem while I chew the remaining loquat into pulp, the tartness pickling my tongue. She bakes the leaves outside in a triangle of light until the downy hair falls off. By the time the sun has shrunken into a red-jeweled pinprick, I have spat out the seed into my palm and memorized the small wrinkles in its copper flesh.
Mother stands against the countertop, haloed by the dying light. She cuts the dried leaves into confetti pieces like she’s carving up a corpse. Then she grinds them into dust with a stone pestle and spits twice into the bowl, the saliva pooling into a shallow lake. She beats the mixture with her pointer finger until tender and sprinkles it onto my skin.
My skin: tanned from the unforgiving sun and cratered like the moon, erupting in pink welts that wince and snarl when prodded. Under each welt is a person, growing underground like a fleshy turnip; when the time is right, it will bloom into little arms and legs, shifting eyeballs—a garden of Mother’s ghosts passed onto me.
There is my twin brother, of course, pushing up against my right nostril. And my father, who sprouts a slit eye on my forehead. He vanished into the flat blue of the city a few months after I was born, taking my brother’s shriveled stone body with him. Weeks after his disappearance, Mother slid open the closet door and reached inside, searching for the flap of a yellowing sneaker I had outgrown. She pulled it from underneath a moth-loved coat and shook it upside down, finding only dust and air. The wadded bills she had saved over the years long gone, stuffed into my father’s pocket.
Sometimes, when the night noises keep me awake past the loneliest hour, I wonder about the kind of man my father is. With nothing but the story of his leaving, which Mother retells whenever she drinks too much, cursing him to a slow-slicing death, I imagine he has a charming, careless smile, thick black hair, and a knack for buying losing lottery tickets. As I chew on the pale-bright moon, Mother turns toward me, her breaths fermented with sleep, the most innocent part of her. The moonlight silvers across her face, peaceful like a child’s. And I wonder why my father didn’t take me, too.
There’s also my Yeye and Nainai, whose tongues criss-cross under my chin, cupping it like a swan. Mother doesn’t like talking about Yeye and Nainai except to threaten me when I talk back or don’t do my homework. When I was your age, Mother says—her teeth glistening milky-white like her poreless skin—Yeye and Nainai would beat me with a wooden spoon if I dared to disobey. They said that daughters were like horses; they needed firm discipline, otherwise, they ran wild and forgot their place, or came home pregnant out of wedlock. She gets quiet as if waiting for the memory to play out in her mind, and then I remember that she and my father never got married.
But Mother has never hit me, although she raises her hand as if to strike me several times a week. I’ve never met Yeye and Nainai, so they may as well be dead.
Mother bites her lip in concentration. She rubs and rubs the dried loquat leaves into my skin, each finger a butter knife cleaving me open.
When she pauses for a break, she hands me a mirror.
And I see what she wants me to be: pretty as porcelain. I could bone-shatter in her palm.
Mother packs the last bits of loquat onto pulpy fingers. Tomorrow, her eyes promise me, she will do better; will make up for all the times today she made me curl inward like a tongue for being born. She scratches hangnails across a growing eyelid, a wiggling toe, a scowling mouth, killing them over and over again for me, this face only a mother could love.
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 10. View full issue & more.