Outside, we play House. My cousin Mandy, my cousin Yangyang, and me. We invite our neighbor Xiaocai to join us in the yard, which is nothing more than a tilted kumquat tree and yellowed weeds. It is morning, and my aunts have left for the factory. Their departures describe them perfectly: Cold-Blooded Ayi—so named because her blood is cold and can
only be heated to a human temperature with the consumption of soups, period dramas after work, and killing a particularly acrobatic fly on the first try—insists on kissing Mandy on the cheek before she leaves, and today she pins the kiss with such force that a blood vessel breaks. Aunt Elizabeth, Yangyang’s mother, never kisses anyone or anything, not even the rim of her cup when she drinks. Instead, she tilts the water into her mouth so that it unfurls like a ribbon into her throat. When Aunt Elizabeth leaves for the factory, she slips out the door silently, and Yangyang says she used to wake up early and wait by the door, hoping to catch her mother mid-flight, but she would always fall asleep on the threshold. By the time she woke, her mother was gone. “My mother has been gone since I was born,” Yangyang says. “Even when I was inside her, she was absent. What carried me was a basket of light. I will try my best not to burden her in this life.”
Aunt Elizabeth insists this isn’t her house, this is Ama’s house, and she lives here temporarily until she can get back on her feet and leave. Cold-Blooded Ayi scoffs and says, What feet, you’ve barely got a spine, and Aunt Elizabeth says she never meant to stay so long. Cold-Blooded Ayi rolls her eyes, but I can tell she is relieved not to live alone in Ama’s house. “What this house needs is a man,” Cold-Blooded Ayi says. “Don’t you know the saying? Three women together produces one soap opera.”
But she loves soap operas, especially when the emperor is forced to choose between his mother and his beloved concubine. When he chooses the concubine, Cold-Blooded Ayi throws her slippers at the TV and says, “Never happens! A man is first come, first served. He loves whoever served him first.” When he chooses his mother, Cold-Blooded Ayi flings an orange peel at the TV and says, “Never happens! A man can’t fuck his mother, and he always follows his prick.”
Aunt Elizabeth hates soap operas and shuts them off mid-episode, insisting that they’ll give us girls nightmares, what with all the ritual suicides and the incessant sobbing, but Cold-Blooded Ayi says it’s better to be heartbroken by a man on TV than one in real life, and Mandy says she agrees. All the soap opera storylines are so cyclical and repetitive, I plug my ears with wads of tissue paper to avoid living the same day over and over again. Every season, they kill off the characters one by one so that the actors can come back
reborn, this time playing their own descendants. What’s the point in dying just to return to the same story? At night, I pose this question to ghosts. What’s the point of having a daughter if she’s going to be fed to the same life?
Cold-Blooded Ayi and Aunt Elizabeth say one day, when we have husbands
ourselves, we’ll understand what they mean, and we’ll know men can’t help what they want, any more than animals can control their desires. It’s up to us to be civilized, to take care of them. All they want is sex and food. Give it to them, or you only have yourself to blame when they stray.
“What kind of animal?” Yangyang always wants to know. Taking care of a crab is different from a snake is different from a chicken is different from an eagle. But in their lack of specificity is the full spectrum of possibility, the scroll of unending death. There is nothing more terrifying to me than the omission of detail.
At night, Aunt Elizabeth and Cold-Blooded Ayi take turns coming to my bedside. As if they know I’m empty, they siphon their secrets into me: “I love my sister, you know that,” Cold-Blooded Ayi says. “And it’s her business, but all her failed marriages, you know it’s because she never gives enough, and her daughter is just the same, you know how Yangyang is, so cold and withholding, we all know where she gets that from, now it’s too late for her, no one wants a woman with a child, weighed down, and she knows it, and she takes it out on me, she barely speaks to me, why is she trying to punish me, to blame me for her own mistakes, I try to be kind to her, I try to give her honest advice, I tell her when something’s broken it’s your duty to stay and fix it, but all she wants to do is run away, run away from this house, do you ever feel the same way, do you ever just think one day, I’m going to run headlong into traffic and finally own nothing and belong to nothing, not even time? Do you ever just want to kill? But you only have yourself to kill?”
Other nights, Aunt Elizabeth comes to my bedside and says, “You know I’m not a gossip, I don’t pry into other people’s business, but I wonder sometimes, what happened to my sister, what happened to that child I used to know who would kill her littermates just to wrestle the nipple into her own mouth, who would grow at the cost of starving everything else around her, so selfish and merciless? These days we’re the same, exhausted, and her exhaustion exhausts me. She doesn’t even fight me anymore. I wonder sometimes, is it worse to die or to accept your life? But it doesn’t matter now. If you suffer in this life, you will be rewarded in the next.”
Hearing this, I shiver. In my next life, will I remember this one? Is it a mercy or a curse to forget, to begin every day blank?
Because I want to feel included, because every morning is like a new episode of a soap opera, lacking continuity, every doorway leading back to the same room, I listen. I covet everything they confide in me, even as I know they didn’t birth me. I’m not their daughter; I dangle from them diagonally, a useless appendage. Like that fleshy pendulum at the back of my throat, that pink pearl of meat with no purpose except to form a drop that never falls. I once plunged a pair of scissors into my mouth and tried to snip it off, clutching the orb gently between my blades, but just as I was about to sever it, Mandy came and yanked the scissors from my hands. All I did was nick it, spraying the roof of my mouth with blood. “What are you trying to do?” she said.
“Testing what parts of me I can live without,” I said. Our aunts would approve; they say deprivation is our strength. Though Mandy believed she triumphed over me that day, I swallowed my blood with glee. At least when I bleed, something of me runs free.
*
In the meantime, we must rehearse for having husbands. That’s what we do in the yard with Xiaocai. I feel a deep relief stepping out of the house. Out of the house, we are all equally exiled. Out of the house, there are no mirrors, no reminders that my face is not my own, that there is something that enters me at night and tracks mud into my mouth.
But Mandy wants to play House outside. I want to tell her she lacks imagination, but it’s my own mind that’s dammed. In the shadow of the kumquat tree, Mandy stands with her hands on her hips and puts us each in our place. To play House, there must be a Father, a Mother, a Son, a Daughter, and a Pet. Sometimes there can be another daughter, called a Sister, or another son, called a Brother.
Xiaocai sits cross-legged in Mandy’s shadow, and Yangyang circles the trunk aimlessly, but I am afraid to come near the roots of the tree, which writhe in the heat like the tentacles of a beast. I am afraid it will wrap its limbs around my waist and yank me into the dirt, absorb me into the trunk of the tree, take for its nourishment another nameless something.
Mandy says she’ll be the Father, and Xiaocai the Mother, and Yangyang the Daughter because she’s the littlest, and I am the Pet, which is sometimes a dog, sometimes a fish, sometimes a tortoise. I ask why I’m always the animal, and Mandy says it’s because I don’t speak and I don’t remember when I’m hit.
Xiaocai rises from the dirt. She’s the same age as me, wedged between two brothers, the same way I’m shelved between Mandy and Yangyang, but unlike me, she always protests. She says, I want to play another game. I want to make things out of mud. She produces a comic book from her waistband, the pages sticking together like a sick dog’s ears. It’s about Wonder Woman, she explains, who was formed from clay, molded by her mother’s hands, and animated by a slap of lightning. The lightning routed through her clay body like an artery, charging her limbs and heart, giving her life.
Even Mandy is impressed. She says we are the same miracle. No human men were involved in our making. We, too, were fathered bloodlessly. We were threaded to life by a cord of light. We are simultaneously earth and flesh, sewn to the sky and to our mothers.
But when she says this, coldness courses through me.
Where is my mother? Mandy has Cold-Blooded Ayi, who kisses her cheeks and tells her never to get married and have children, that it will indebt her every day of her life. Yangyang has Aunt Elizabeth, who says nothing at all, but whose bone-bright eyes riot against her own silence. What about mine?
“You ask the same thing every day,” Mandy says. “You’re like one of those pathetic little girls who cries when she gets dropped off at school. Your mother is home. At your house. This is Ama’s house. You only live here with us during the summers. Every summer. Lucky you. I have to share a room with Yangyang all year, and you get to go home all to your own. Out of all of us, you’re the only one with a real House. A Father, a Mother, a Brother. All
you’re missing is the Pet. You can be the Pet. You’re as dumb as one.”
Where is my House? Mandy says I come from one, but I don’t remember where it is or how I got here. I come to this house every summer, but I don’t remember any other summers, only the colors of the bruises we accrued, the seasons of their healing, gasping green to fertile purple. And I don’t remember the house I came from, the one she claims is mine. It must be true, then: Some people are made of mud, not blood. I am clay the way a mountain is clay. Solid all the way through, housing a silence so saturated it makes me gag.
Mandy sighs. She claps her hands at us and says the game must begin or we won’t get to the births of our babies. When Xiaocai says she’ll only play if she’s the Father, Mandy relents and rolls her eyes again. We stand together in a cluster beneath Ama’s kumquat tree, which wishes it had not outlived her. Beneath the branches, Yangyang officiates the wedding that will allow Mandy and Xiaocai to marry and begin their real life together. Mandy pushes me to the soil and says I’m the Pet, I have to be on all fours, I have to watch from my knees. Animals are incapable of saying no. I am startled by the anarchic heat of her hands. Mine are always cold. Cold hands, warm heart, my aunts always say.
Xiaocai and Mandy become husband and wife, father and mother. They kiss their foreheads together, sealing their sweat. For a brief moment, witnessing their union, I am shattered by panic. I look at my hands. I feel the contours of my face, plunging my fingers into my mouth, reassuring myself that it is human. “Good kitty,” Mandy says to me, and I realize that I don’t know whether a cat’s mouth feels any different from mine.
I kneel in the soil, looking up at Xiaocai and Yangyang and Mandy, human members of a family, and all I can do is mew uselessly, gnaw my tongue, drool a silver wool. I clap to celebrate their wedding, but my palms smack together and pry apart soundlessly, like earthworms severed in half, another game Mandy taught us to play, insisting that the earthworms would grow back whole, regenerating their original length when we buried them back in the mud. But I always suspected otherwise. I always knew they were dead even before we bit into their jelly bellies and spat them out like the tongues of beasts. What killed them was surfacing.
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From Needlemouth by K-Ming Chang. Used with permission of the publisher, Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2026 by K-Ming Chang.