EXCERPT FROM HOW TO SKIN A RABBIT
by NANCY HUANG
At the butcher shop, we refrigerate our meat until it’s less slick, hardened. Anyone can tell when a thing is dead. Not everyone can tell when it’s fresh, when the death is young. We freeze meat, blowing box fans in the freezer, because moving air keeps it cold and cold keeps the deaths young as possible. Last month our porter Carlo had knee surgery and skipped work for a heartbeat. Once the anesthesia wore off, he was back in the basement the next day, woozy and uncoordinated. He kept putting the wrong date on all our labels. That April he kept writing the month of March—3/4, 3/5, 3/6, 3/10. Olive brines, pickles, cheeses, herb powders. When we stepped into the walk-in one morning, all the blue tape labels sang in his neat hand. Our racks of meat, paper bags of dry pasta, frozen stock, house-made pesto and ragu. We were a month behind but nothing was rotten, our goods pristine. It was easy, kind of, to pretend that we had stepped into a cold portal to March, that nothing bad had happened yet, that none of those women in Atlanta were ever shot. That the world was still kinder even during a global shutdown, to people who were at their places of work, just trying to survive the day. People think time travel is a science, but it’s an accident. It’s an old man forgetting what month it is, what day. It’s a brain regurgitating itself.
The shop gets a lot of fancy clientele: Williamsburg queers, Hassidic gentlemen, Europeans who never tip. All masked before entry, all either milling about the shop forever or rushing me at checkout with their plastic bags of ramps and cheese platters. I try and make myself a good employee. It’s a good service job, one of the best in the city, with healthcare and a 401K and PTO, but it’s still a service job. Simon is at the counter popping gum when I arrive, his mask pulled down to his chin. He’s wiping down the plastic separators we hang in front of our faces. As long as we’re masked up, keep behind the plastic, have the AC and air purifiers on blast, and only allow three people within the shop at a time, we can probably avoid getting COVID. We use a daily app as a symptom logger, adding to our maybe delusional sense of safety. I pull my mask up before I walk in, jingling the bell.
“Morning, Sun.” Simon remasks when I walk in. He’s leaning against the cheese counter. “Could you go downstairs and grab us a leg of lamb? Kyle’s coming in to pick up today.” I go down to the basement. We have three walk-in freezers: one for produce, one for cheeses, and the other for our cuts. There are benefits to using every part of an animal, benefits to having parts and parts and parts. Bones for stock as big as my fist, hides processed for leather bags, furs skinned for their luminosity. I put on gloves and pull open the cellar door, flick on the light. Meat hangs from the ceiling hooks, the room melting with them.
Dried, cold meat has a creamy, salty smell I’ve grown fond of. I parse through the line of flayed white fat and browned skin, stand in front of the fan to cool off. There’s Kyle’s rack of lamb in the corner with a tag on it, which I lug off its hook and bundle in my apron to carry up the stairs.
“Did you hear about the Viet guy in Texas?” I hear Simon talk to Joey at the back tables. Sound carries well in the shop. I slam the lamb on the counter and wrap it in paper. Then I go to restock the pyramid of marmalade on our jam shelf. Joey’s humming under his mask.
“Hm. Wasn’t he cut up or something?” Joey and Lena are everyone’s favorite butchers, since they have personality. Joey’s lanky and approachable. Boys who come in love to stare at him making his cuts to the tune of Kpop girl groups. Lena, our boss and head butcher, is tattooed and deadpan. Right now she’s trimming open a whole pig on the wide table, its cloven feet dangling off the side. “I heard he was cut up.”
“Cut up?”
“Like, they strangled him while he was driving the van, and they sliced his arms from his shoulder.”
“Oh, I heard they turned his body into a quadriplegic and bagged everything up.”
“It’s sick. Awful.” Joey slices into the belly while Simon detaches the head.
“You’re both wrong.” Now Lena is churning the lever of the sausage machine. “They sliced his legs in two and then filleted his arms—you know the way you would do with meat next to the ribs? They tried to cut his torso but it was too thick and they didn’t have a saw. So they bagged him up and that’s how the police found him.”
“Thank god sickos don’t have access to bone saws.” Joey held up his, splattered with rust-colored specks. “New York is lucky I’m sane.” He pantomimed sawing innocent civilians. Jumping from one foot to the other, he wiggled the saw back and forth in a puppetry of slaughter. Lena barks out a laugh.
“Yeah, for sure, you are the normal person here,” she scoffs.
Simon notices me looking, waves me over. “Zhang, did you read about this?” The marmalade’s stocked. I watch as Joey hoists the pig upside down, its fat bulging around the hook.
“I only read that it was two kids,” I shrug. I wipe down the counter. “Two white kids.” I feel a strange buzz, like my brain is two tectonic plates smashing together. Simon sees me rubbing my forehead and tosses me a wet washcloth.
“Are you hot?” He crosses his arms and squints toward the back of the room. “Is our AC “I’m fine. I run hot.” I tie my hair up quick and go back to my station. On our lunch break it’s Simon who plops down next to me on the outdoor bench and who hands me a frozen water bottle. “Hey,” he says. “I’m sorry I brought up Texas.” He has a scrape on his arm, probably from cutting meat.
“You should get a Band-Aid for that.” I point at his scar. He cups it with his hand. “It could get infected. Why are you sorry?”
“It’s not a fun topic. People who work in meat have a different sensitivity I guess?”
I lean back against the railing. Simon takes his cap off. His hair’s so messy and grassy. He pulls his mask down.
“It’s a processing thing.” His eyes crinkle. “When I’m not here I log in data sequences for researchers for my other job at NYU. The other Asian folks in the lab get together for drinks after work. It’s on everyone’s mind.”
I don’t know what to say; everyone who? I could bring up the slew of women I knew who were posting hashtags, everywhere. The times I volunteer in Chinatown and how every local says that businesses since the lockdown had dropped by fifty percent. I could bring up my sister, who lives in Chinatown, a seven-minute walk away from where another Asian woman was murdered in her apartment.
Instead I nod. None of our current hysteria feels prudent for me to comment on. I’m from a small white town. I live in Brooklyn and have always felt safe there, even at night. Once a drunk man had yelled at me to go home, and I’d assumed he was mad I was a gentrifier. I told him I was doing exactly that. There were reasonable furies and unreasonable ones. I grew up with a slew of them at my door and was still filled with fury when younger—yet, what did I have to complain about? My parents went through worse. Being from the suburbs just kind of implied that.
“Anyway. I’ll talk to Lena about the air conditioner.” Simon gets up and caps his head. He hums as he goes inside, remasking. I don’t mind wearing masks; I think it makes me less approachable. And thank god the numbers don’t lying, that masking protects. I know just as well as any other East Asian person if I ever test positive one day I’ll only be confirming everyone’s assumption. That’s the thing. They’ll never let me be ill in peace.
They can point and say, I knew it.
I knew it, we are clean.
We are clean and you are only, only alive because we cleaned you.
–
After ringing up customers constantly, helping take up hunks of lamb from the freezer, then shuffling all the groceries into their crates, I realize too late that lifting heavy carts of beets did weird things to my back. So after work I change out of my clothes—which smell thick of salt, cream, bay leaf—and chug water. I get under the covers, ignore the Viet man and his splayed, bloody limbs, curl up and close my eyes. I have an alarm that will ring in a few hours. Then I have another shift, and then another, and another. I sink into the covers and don’t turn.
His skin is purpling, even in the dark. Sickblooded, I hear him in my sleep, wheezing through his own death rattle: I drive trucks for a living. Dallas to Texarkana. I know the road like my child’s face, like my own blood. When they took my arms my hands kept driving, fingers cradling the wheel.
Even when they put me in the bag I knew every turn they pulled. When they stopped I knew exactly how far from home I was.
When I wake up he’s gone. I stare at the ceiling and think about butchery, about my grandmother growing up in Manchukuo and how she’d once seen a blade slice her son’s fingertip off his hand. How before they spoke Japanese they spoke British English and before they spoke Chinese they spoke Manchu and Tungus and before that, who knows. She still remembered her childhood Japanese, enough to recite a story about how the moon is just a rabbit who keeps losing its skin and finding it again, over and over. The way dream cycles loop us in and out of existence. My body and eyes and hands, looping and looping. Stretched to their limits.
–
To skin a rabbit, you have to break her legs first. Twist and pull bone forth, unwind her from her components. You are updating her structure. Her knees are the hardest thing in her body, knuckles shiny like buttons. Take a knife your colleague sharpened the night before. Slice around the flesh and fur there, a thin line you’ll need to cleave wider. Hack at the light pink, the dark red, the valentine underneath.
You picked her because she’s thin. Every butcher knows the fatter the hatter the harder the strip. You have to use your toughest hand. Hitch her to a line, spread wide and upside down. Point her stiff ears to the ground and make the cut now, a cut that could span the entire world, from mouth to anus, so you can wrestle her skin away. Slide metal through fur, push a hand through the cold wax of her innards. The membrane will stretch. Now you’re going to clutch at her, at her flesh, until there’s enough room to fit your whole hand. Grasping into bright meat, you really gotta rock your hand back and forth beneath her skin. Fondle and dig until you widen the gap between the surface, until the fur is loosened from her body. This is called the handbag.
You can pull the fur down once you’ve loosened the handbag enough, quick and fast, like tearing paper. It might take a couple tries. Keep tugging; it’ll sound incredible, hear that? Ungodly. Use the knife if her skin is too stubborn, but keep the fur intact; jiggle the blade between flesh and skin and pry it the way you’d levy a crowbar. She’ll dangle from the string, still and corrupted. Harder. Keep tugging; the labor here is worth the end, worth the struggle of looking into her eyes. Harder and harder. By now the pelt will drape itself over her face in a suffocating bulge over her head and neck. Slice the fur there, where tension’s the greatest.
Look past the flesh and into the fur, white as smoke. You’ve separated the meat from its coat, a body hooked by the air in suspension. Wash your hands, scrubbing under your nails. Hang the fur at the wall across the room. A thin whining will begin. Tell yourself softly that this is your job. It’s your job to watch the rabbit twitch pink, the color of spun sugar in bakery windows. Stroke her fur from across the room; wonder whether some phantom part of her, long snapped from its nerve endings, can feel it. Grasp some of its bristles; swear you can feel a twitching beneath the fur, somewhere you can’t see. When you untie her for her meat you’ll find that she bounds up out of your hands and lands on the table, skinny, stripped legs quaking. Her knubbed limbs cast in front, she’ll hop down and half-crawl, half-crab across the floor, waltz of arterial blood. Watch as her white fur falls from the wall to the floor, as her insides find her coat.
First she fits her quivering back leg in, then the other. It engulfs, handbag dry and pearly. It must feel good to have heat again. She repeels herself, nudging the white up over her chest, slickly guiding it over her limbs the way you zip up a jumpsuit. The head comes last, ears slotting into the coat. When redressed, she gleams a soft neon, almost fluorescent.
Sometimes you would stare straight at the sun and when you looked away its bright copy would live in your eye for a couple eons before fading. She’ll turn, her own red eyes fixed in place and holy.
Yes, you’ll say. You’ll grow cold and warm again. You’ll put it on, I’ll take it off. Put it on, take it off. The pattern of the tides.
You look like the color of my heart on the floor.
You look like the color of the moon’s silverware.
You a handbag, a fur coat, a flask of brandy, a tumor of eyeball, teeth, and whisker. Mashed and held together by white cornsilk. You who would come back to nuzzle my hand. You who would never let anyone send you away unless you believed they would call you back one day.
***
In New York, I was exoskeleton. Incapable of flinching. When I posted pictures on dating apps, I didn’t suck in my gut. You can’t feed hungry blood that way. You can’t live in a starving city. I knew what I was and I knew what women wanted. I knew that when a girl texted me Sunny you’re so beautiful, so big, so strong, I’d be crawling onto her skin that night, sucking the warmth from her, eating her oatmeal in the morning. Some women craved my plump health. The way my cheeks puffed out and made my mouth cloverleaf, corners furled into a perpetual smile. The way my flesh shined dewy, the way my hair was darker than a widow’s thorax. A woman got me into bed and told me she loved big girls, loved me thick, loved Asians. I swallowed, straightened, snapped: “I’ll let that slide, you racist cunt.” I schooled her the way she coveted. I sculpted the path of her hairline to her brow, told that white lady that her eyes were hideous. She put her face in my smooth hands, babbling mercy, forgiveness. I let her have it. I let her fuck me until I was hoarse, until our skins became flypaper. I let them crave me. I let them call me what they wanted.
I never thought I’d be taking pictures like this. Not in this city. I loped around different neighborhoods with a Fujifilm, ignoring traffic, catcalls, pleas. I read only fashion magazines. For lunch, ate greasy, slick bites—crackers and prosciutto and cheese and little pickles with Japanese mayonnaise cliffed on like gel. I left bars in brisk jaunts, rode a bike to my job at the butcher shop. Bought white bedsheets because I knew I could cast shadows with my posing and make these women sick with longing. I crumpled my hair into curled slips, I laid under stroboscopic lights in my room until my legs taffied on camera, longer than candy dough.
I used my room as a studio, in a tiny apartment I shared with three other young people, all models of varying ages and genders. They came to New York to become something. I came to disappear. The pictures I took here were so different from the portraits of my youth, waxy and smeared. These days, photogreased, vibratory, what my art professors would call ‘dynamic’ and ‘technically loose.’ Arrogant, I wasn’t overly concerned with their critique. Occasionally I got offered publication by art books and anthologies, tiny presses crumbling in their basements, dusty literary magazines run by stoned poets. I was withholding. I had a discerning eye, said no more than I said yes. I was not here to be an artist poser. Whatever it was, I was willing to fight to have it. I wanted to grind for it. Nothing good comes easy, and I was good.
It was at a shoot where I heard about Jellyfish, heard about her for the first time in years. I had been helping a classmate with her cosplay class project, a service I provided at a discount because Vicki was another nerdy Chinese girl from Michigan who would tell all her friends to book me. She told me she wanted to serve “high-class cunty elf fairy.” I beaded her makeup to shine turquoise, rolled rhinestones above her sockets. Vicki twisted her hair in thin loops and braids, stuffed herself into aluminum fabric, her metallic skirt bunched at the thighs in cloudy puffs. When I turned on my photo lamps, beads of light bounded everywhere in my room. Vicki glistened, dewed.
“What class is this even for?”
“Future of the Anthropocene. It’s a digital media class.”
“That you’re…modeling for?”
“Mmhmm. I was thinking of doing something crazy, like painting my face. Bauhaus Kidcore clown vibe, you know? More purples and yellows, chunky blocky patterns. This seemed more toned down.” I almost snorted. “Do I look like a fairy goddess?” She asked, clasping her hands together into a prayer position.
“You sure look holy.” Every so often the shitty AC at my window would rattle, startling us both. “Sorry for the noise.” I kept my head bowed over the camera, signaling when to shift her pose. She asked how she looked and I could only be honest.
“Like a mirror fucked a clown.”
“That’s nice, Sun.” She leaned back on my bed, thrusting her bent arm behind her head, back arched. “Which do you wanna be?”
I kept my smile hidden. I told her to keep her chin up, I wanted her face to shine. She undid the clasps on her dress, saying nothing. I turned the camera off and knelt to her level. Bodies are texts. When a woman took your glasses off your face, it meant she wanted you close, wanted you to spoon your neck down like a swan to be near her. When a woman rubbed your lip with her thumb, it meant she wanted to be bitten, sunken into. When a woman grabbed the hair at the back of your neck, it meant she wanted you to grind her down to dust, shivering and tender. I liked giving people what they wanted, putting myself where they wanted me. Vicki petaled two fingers into my mouth. She dragged her knuckle past my lip and broke eye contact, her false eyelashes shivering to the side, gems glinting like tears.
I’ve been with plenty of unsure women. I used to be an unsure woman. Confidence is something you let them borrow. You graft it into them, wear each other’s sweat afterwards. I took off my clothes, slipped the dress off her torso. I let my hair curtain over her, let my hand go under the twisted warmth of her skirt. She tensed, so I stopped and told her to look at me. We breathed together for a pulse, the AC rattling in the quiet between us. The rhinestones cast pearly light in a dozen different directions, strobing my room like a disco sphere. “Is it too cold for this?” I said. “It’s fine,” she said. I pushed her down on my bed. I stayed puddled on the floor, tonguing sap while she kept silent watch, silent and silent until she couldn’t be silent anymore.
I was an easy lay. It took nothing to get me into bed. Women knew this, particularly women like Vicki, who flitted around clubs and bars and queer Asian mixers. For us, sex was a clarifying ritual, a temporary decoding of our bodies. Being naked with another woman turned any room into an echo chamber. We rallied, fought each other over who got to be hungry and who got to be fed. I climbed Vicki and saddled her face, made cathedrals of our knotted fingers. I writhed when I came, staring at her studded eyelids, two shiny dorsals fluttering between my slick thighs like the wings of a cobalt butterfly. When she mouthed my breasts, I swear I saw my chest tattoo shimmer, the dragonfly heaving on my skin. I pictured it peeling off, fluttering in the light, flying into her mouth. Vicki swallowing it down her gullet.
“You’re such a huge cliche,” she said when I tugged my shirt back on. “I hope my professor likes getting to see dirty pictures for free.” Once again her face threw light in flux. She wiped at her upper lip and threw her hair up into a bun, snapping the elastic.
“I’m not a fucking creep,” I told her, buttoning my shorts. “I turned the camera off.”
“That’s too bad,” she said. “My friend Sophia told me you like to keep it on.”
Cold liquid slaked down my spine. I turned to face her.
“Sophia who?” I barely heard my voice when I spoke. “Sophia Chen?”
“Is it true you took those photos of her?” Vicki said. She wiggled back into her dress, slipping the straps over her shoulders. “The ones when you were kids. The famous ones?”
“How do you know Jellyfish?” The nickname slipped out of me. Jelly had talked about me. She had talked about me to Vicki Chang. “Do you know where she is? Is she in the city?”
Vicki was slipping her shoes back on. She tilted her head when she looked at me. “We met at a mixer in Chinatown. She had a lot to say about you.”
Anger now, starting in my jaw and flaring my nostrils, tightening my cheekbones into a licorice smile. “I’m sure she fucking did.”
Before Jellyfish disappeared, I took a monochrome photo of her in Detroit, the last photo of her I’d ever taken. She was wearing green sunglasses, the hair she bleached for swim season buzzed so close to her scalp you’d swear it was skin. The barest glint of teeth when she smiled.
In some lights, the color yellow can seem white. This is called white balance, color temperature. Like when you try to photograph the sun–the lens flare warps it into a void. When shooting monochrome, sunlight fades into snow blindness. It looked like the entire sky was sprouting from Jellyfish’s bleached hair, the aether of the universe contained in the punchbowl of her head.
Or spilling from it. When she was gone, I drove to the Chinatown square in Madison Heights just so I could keep an eye out for that blondeness, that skull. I thought romance meant that it would work, that I could tip the scales so that they would balance. Return is 回 in Mandarin, hui, a square drawn inside another square. Return, return, a safekeeping, a binding spell, box inside a box. I loved her for free. I’ve never done anything for free my entire life. I never will again.
author pic here
Nancy Huang is a Literary Award winner…
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