Fearful Attachments

by Lily Chang

The head of a rat was on the cement steps. There was no body. Ants swarmed around the rat’s dull eye, across its grease-slicked fur, creating movement in something so still, so dead. I was seven, about to leave the house to go to school. I had swung open the back door to see a small, dark object in my path. Pulsing, clicking, indistinct. Then, it was clear: the head, severed, was a mouth, howling quick-moving insects into my nightmares for years to come.

Mornings were always discomforting. Most nights, a tiger disguised as a loving grandmother nibbled my limbs in the darkness, even if my entire body was tucked within the covers. If I slept at all, it was only a couple of hours. Before long, I’d hear the crackly, jolly tune of my Winnie the Pooh alarm clock. A part of me would prepare for school in the morning. The other remained smothered in the bleak hours of dawn. Under my mom’s chiding, I ate my eggs, my piece of toast, but they tasted like cardboard.

That morning, the ants ballooned out of an unwanted head, and suddenly I had no body, there was no preparing for school, I was only the bleakness. The bleakness couldn’t understand the carcass as a gift from the domestic shorthair under our care in the backyard. The torn head was doom. The harbinger of death was a tiger disguised as a sweet, playful, soft-furred cat.

The cat had not been ours. She came with the bungalow my parents were renting in California. Cats chose houses, not people, the landlord had told us. To my surprise, my parents didn’t object. None of us caught her name, English being as foreign to us as we were to our neighbours, so we called her “kitty.” I kept my distance, at first. Her claws and incisors could strip meat from my bones. Like my first day at the Montessori school, I stayed in the periphery. I watched as children and adults, whose pale faces and light-coloured hair I’d only seen before through a screen, leapt and gestured in the playground. Distortions vibrated from their mouths. Gurgles that popped next to my ears. Their eyes wanted something from me, but I couldn’t deliver. I didn’t want to stand on the sidelines, but I couldn’t join them either. Their colours and movements thumped and radiated freely. I was small, still, and dead.

But I observed. Kitty ate the tuna around the rice. She chased and pounced on the thin branches I’d sweep on the ground. Her belly fur was a shade lighter than the rest of her, and only the sun could touch her there. The backyard, the first we’d ever had, with its sword-like grass, one thick tree, a yellowed jacuzzi, chipped white trellis, and small garage, was good at hiding her, but she was good at finding me, whenever I beckoned. Once, she used her voice to guide me to her. She had been trapped in the garage for hours. When I released her, her fervent bunting against my legs was proof of our magic, a special understanding.

My maternal grandmother, who lives in Taiwan, gave me magic firecracker kisses louder than my mother’s or my aunts’. The memories of her arms around my small body, her warmth under the covers as we slept, and the folds of her black prayer robes hiding my face are the quickest to surface when I think of love. Her grimace and sharp tones as I refused her money giving or insisted that I carry my own backpack on our walk home from school—I could never win. Loss is how I love her. She died each time I woke up in my bed to find her gone. Her disappearance shocked like betrayal. To avoid my crying, she sneaked back at dawn to her own house in Jinshan, where my grandfather resented her frequent absence. The end of each visit from our apartment in the city to their home in the rural town full of noise and movement was the bleakness of morning returning. After we immigrated, every tearful parting at the airport was a rehearsal for her future demise. I wrote letters to her in a language I’ve now lost. The logograms are bubbly, unfamiliar, but I remember the laments: I wondered if she cried into her pillow as I did, felt the distance between us as a cavern hollowing our beds. As a child, I often made loud, firecracker promises in front of my parents: when my grandmother died, I would end my life. If we could not see one another, we were not alive.

I twist the dial and the memory of my first day at the Montessori school crackles into a clear broadcast. Months have passed. I’m sitting with my classmates; they catch everything I say. The girls hold my hands, the boys giggle when I show them my shorts under my skirt. We put our palms to our eyes to feel our lashes flutter and caress. When I stand, I am taller than everyone. The math curriculum is two grades behind what I studied in Taiwan, so the teachers ask me to guide my peers. During silent reading, I whisper the words to the child I’m helping. The words, no longer distortions, are mine, but I can lend them if I must.

In my play with kitty, I would put my palms against the fence encircling the backyard, mimicking her sharpening of her claws. The fence would hurt me, lodging tiny splinters into my skin. I would forget, so the violence would reoccur. Each time, the burning shocked like betrayal. In those moments, the magic thinned, tiger tail peeking from under the disguise, and I feared my head was about to be torn, severed and abandoned in the hour that felt as though the sun, despite having risen everyday before, might finally fail to rise.

My head did not tear from my neck, but a column in the new house my parents bought in British Columbia pushed its edges into my forehead. We’d never had columns before. The collision was a time jump, play to pain, magic to vigilance. I was running, and then my back was on the floor. This fire across my head—a shriek dulling my ears—what did it look like? Without a body, the head drifted to a mirror. The gash, red-pink-purple meat pressed and hollowed into black, was a mouth, sucking the blood from my face, pulling me into the dark bottomlessness. The inside of my head was the doom I’d been anticipating. To see the unseeable was to die.

At school, the thread woven in my forehead was an exclamation mark, inciting my classmates to crowd around me and gape. Expected to explain, my words reverted to distortions. I’d never pronounced “column” before. The language is a tiger disguised as an empowering, validating, creative tool. An emphasis on the wrong syllable or an absent article distorts the retelling of an experience, and the teeth begin mashing my insides. If my listener does not recoil from the ants, does not feel the sear in their forehead, I was never there. To be seen is to be alive. Despite my mom’s warning, I let my classmates touch the stitches, the grime from their fingers prickling my wound. Their eyes wanted something from me, so I had to deliver.

There is a body now. Crackly, not yet connected, but coming back. The exclamation mark has shrunken to a colon; the splinters, indistinguishable from the lines in my palms. English both saved/s and destroyed/s. The grandmother was always a tiger; to survive, she has had to keep her claws and incisors sharp. Loss is how she loves me. The firecracker kisses are gone, for now. Not either/or. If there is no provable certainty to finality, there can be a return. The sun may not rise, but the hope that it will, that possibility of the brightness of day even within the bleakness of dawn, comforts me.