AN EXCERPT FROM HOW TO SKIN A RABBIT
by NANCY JIE
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.
nancy jie <黄洁> grew up in Shanghai and near Detroit. Her novel-in-progress was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s Writer Fellowship and the UK Queer Fiction Prize. In addition, nancy jie is a Voices/VONA, Watering Hole, Sewanee, Tin House, Lambda, and Vermont Studio Center fellow. She has a poetry MFA from NYU. Currently, she is traveling abroad to write a compendium of the world’s cemeteries.
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