A pangolin is to an accordion as a giant anteater is to an organ, but an armadillo would not be a piano upright or grand. Do not ask, it just is.
One supposes they could ask Old Rat to explain, but she sits on the Book of Answers and (thus, logically, most naturally,) by the time (hypothetically, wishfully,) one got to [it, her, they], such an analogy would no longer be a story. One chases their tail to find the direction of their head, after all.
Another dissection: Once, my grandfather removed the tonsil of his name. He did so because his mother had renounced her own, and thus his world shifted too. Perhaps I have lied. Perhaps the truth: he determined his own to be defunct, so his mother was forced to remove hers because of his brothers, because of him. He no longer remembers their outline, but it reanimates when he rends a crab’s flesh from its shell. His name now thunder red, no gods live on this plain anymore, so I trace my own to know his old.
A silver braid severed
As though to fabricate then usurp a new tradition, my father changes his name three times, his face six. Once every other skin he has had to bear.
In the east a snake emerges from its well to find two feet sprouted from its length. It spends a lifetime hoping to pass as a dragon.
Now, in another temporality in C, I chase an endless string, the same sea I grew up in, though not the C my father removed from his mouth; you see, he heard from some doctor that two Cs could not possibly live together in the same tooth — he, too, had to reshape what his mother had gifted him. To pull a perfect bone from its root to let a pomegranate grow. Ants on roiling mountains in M think they are wild beasts, marching to descend the same canyon.
When you ask Old Rat to traverse up her ladder from earth to sky she wrings away all she has saved in one day. You could ask her why and (maybe, hopefully,) she will explain it, but it won’t make sense once she finishes climbing her deity’s last rung. Now do you understand?
Mina Wang Zhou grew up along both sides of the Pacific. Her writing has been published by Asia Art Archive and Gallery TPW.
GULLY MAGAZINE 