Female Dog
BY K-MING CHANG
There’s a new word going around, and if you aren’t careful, you might catch it. Mimi caught it last week and now she won’t stop humping everything in the classroom. The teacher locked her in the timeout closet, but she just impregnates the contents: the broom gives birth to a litter of little straw wigs, the chalk-sticks mate with moisture to become bone-white mud, and a single sponge has proliferated into several hundred. No one will tell me what the word is. It’s very bad, Chialan says, so bad that if anyone hears you say it, you’ll be scolded, maybe even beaten. That doesn’t seem like much of a punishment to me, but I understand the severity of the word’s symptoms. To avoid catching the word, we whisper around it: The word means female dog, Chialan says when I beg.
The word is female dog? I always say.
No, she says, rolling her eyes, leaning in again: The word means female dog. In truth, I understood her fine the first time, but I am enamored with the sensation of Chialan’s breath against my cheek, the way her syllables steam my pores, the way my sweat shimmies out like silver worms, desperate to burrow inside the intricate canals of her ears. I would like to be digested by Chialan’s ears, to become one of the terrible words Chialan knows but won’t share. I would like to be shut up forever in the cellar of her sinuses. Chialan is the keeper of obscenity, and she’s the one who taught me the word ass, which means both donkey and butt. It’s a word men like to shout at us, with a few attachments, and it’s a word our mothers don’t like us to repeat. My favorite food is the ass of a pig, and Chialan’s favorite food is the breast and bones of a pigeon. Chialan is special because she can make lanyards, not the ordinary cubic ones with flat sides and two colors, but complicated twisting lanyards, ones that resemble living limbs or gnarled spines, lanyards woven with strands of pure light, lanyards made of human hair. Those are especially powerful, she says, because they can be used to curse people. I tell her we’re already cursed.
Chialan was cursed from birth to be forgotten by her mother, who inherited early-onset dementia from her own mother, who was concussed as a child by her father. I was cursed to be remembered too often, remembered even before I was born; my grandmother recalled me while she was pregnant with my mother, my face invading her most precious memories, which were few. If she were being generous, maybe only two. One was the time she and her cousins stole a watermelon from a neighbor’s field and smashed it open with bats, the flesh hard as coral but still sweet, chipping their teeth. But now when she remembers it, all her cousins’ faces are replaced with mine, and the melon is a face too, the melon has pores like my own, the melon has my haircut, and when she smashes it open with her bat, my brains bumble out like knotted rope, wet and frayed. You ruined it for me, my grandmother says, I had one happy memory and you bled all over it. The one instance in my life when I had no one to take care of, only something to destroy with my teeth, and you’ve gone and stolen that from me. Thanks to your presence infecting my memory, I no longer have a life when I wasn’t a mother.
But maybe it’s easier to undo a curse when it’s inside the body of a lanyard, when it is as passive and dead as human hair, when it can be incinerated or drowned or flushed down the toilet. The other girls barter for Chialan’s lanyards, and they’re entitled enough to solicit her labor for free. They bring Chialan long locks of their hair and say, can you just start it for me? If you just start it, I can finish it. Chialan will obey, and the girls will feign ignorance, standing over Chialan with the started lanyard in their hands, acting like they don’t know how to proceed, until at last, Chialan is so frustrated she snatches the lanyard back and finishes it herself, yanking the locks taut, knotting it off. I tell Chialan she’s being exploited. She looks at me very seriously and says, I just can’t stand when people ruin my beginning. I can’t stand something soiled before it’s started. It’s just so unfair, I could kill myself.
Chialan likes me because I have never asked anything of her, except that she reveal to me the word. The curiosity weighs on me as heavily as a pregnancy; I cannot bear to carry the question of it any longer. Every day I ask her to tell me, please tell me the word, the bad one, the one that will get us into so much trouble, the one that means female dog, please, just tell me, I can’t stand being the only one who doesn’t know. But Chialan refuses. She teases me, leaning in to whisper, snagging me on the hook of hope, but she releases me always. Catching the word is extremely dangerous, Chialan says. We can’t play.
Every day, more and more girls are catching it: my neighbor Alice started chasing cars and was flattened by one, her intestines spelling the horizon. Her mother knelt in the street and clawed the girl off the asphalt, one fistful of flesh at a time, leaving behind only the bones, the perfect skeleton arranged on the road, splayed out like a map of calcified rivers, somehow intact despite being run over. Then there was our classmate whose name I can’t remember, only that she was teased for her crooked teeth, mismatched as if they’d been harvested from the mouths of different species, one shark tooth, one feline canine, the rest of them dog. Being part dog already, she was overly affectionate toward men and was found dead one day in the downstairs bathroom, along with a suicide note naming the betrayer of her unconditional devotion. Chialan alone had no sympathy for the girl. No love should be unconditional, Chialan says, the conditions should be written very clearly. When the conditions are battered, you should flee.
For example, I love you because you are cursed like me, but in an opposite way. And because you require nothing of me. You love me because I know the word, but I don’t let you catch it, and secretly you adore me for protecting you, for being the only one in the world who is willing to. You may beg me day after day to reveal the word to you, you may say it’s a mercy, catching it already, better sooner than later, better now when you have the whole rest of your life to get used to it, to adjust yourself to the symptoms, to build your life around your emergent desire to chase your own tail in circles, but in fact you cling to me because you know I’ll never expose you to it. You may beg, but I’ll never let you be anything else. You are all I exist. Do you understand me? I mean to say, you’re the only thing of me in this world. Here on earth, there exists nothing of me except you.
I consider this a new strategy of Chialan’s, her insistence that my true desire is to be withheld from the word. But what is the need that gnaws at me, that wraps its tongue around my ankle and yanks me into the tender and snug caress of her throat? It’s more than a curiosity; it’s a hunger to know, to gain entry into the world where everyone waits for me, where I may at last relinquish all responsibility for my own life. It’s too much work to be free. Chialan claims it’s the only work that excites her, the only kind of labor that fills instead of drains her, but I don’t believe her. If I caught the word, I could do anything in service of my sickness.
Today, I caught a girl drinking out of the toilet. The worst toilet, too. The girls’ downstairs bathroom, right next to the science room. The sewage pipes are leaky and the water is contaminated with formaldehyde from the fetal pigs we splay open. The girl was on her knees, head helmeted in the dingy bowl, her tongue lapping the water desperately, the sound of ribbons lashed tight by Chialan’s fingers, satin against satin, knot against knot, frictionless music.
When the girl heard my approach, she raised her head in shame, then ducked it to the water again, helpless to her dirtied thirst. She wanted to stop, and she could feel me watching her, aghast, and she could smell the same smell, the unmistakable sweetness of shit and clotted toilet paper like a field of fetid flowers, and yet she could not budge from the bowl. Her tongue darting out of the water, then in, then out. Like Chialan’s lanyards: over and under, over and under. Repeat the pattern. Under and over, over and under. Repeat the pattern, but opposite. Over and under, under and over. All I could see was the rug of her hair, shimmering and shifting over the chasm of her skull, dark hair matted with mud and twigs and dead flies. She must have been rolling around outside on the field, where the other girls who had also caught the word were frequently seen fetching sticks and sniffing for places to shit and piss.
I sensed that the girl wanted me to leave. She was mortified to be seen. She couldn’t bear the presence of me, so I turned and walked out of the bathroom.
Later that day, I think about telling Chialan what I saw, adding it to the mental log of symptoms, but something prevents me from telling her. Instead, I ask Chialan how she manages to know the word without catching it. When the whispers first began to contaminate our nostrils like pollen, Chialan was among the first to hear about it. But she tells me she must have very powerful nose hairs, thick enough to trap the word so that the worst of it can’t enter her. I’ve developed a strong immune system, Chialan says, when have you even seen me with a cold? It’s true I’ve never even seen Chialan sniffle, but I interpret this more as an unwillingness to ever show herself vulnerable rather than a sign of immunity. I once caught Chialan masking a cough by running to a tree hollow and depositing the sound inside its trunk, rerouting it to the earth, contaminating the core of the world.
There is much talk of whether it’s contagious, whether it can be transmitted from girl to girl by spread of symptoms alone, even if they never knew the word to begin with. There’s evidence that it’s true; when my neighbor’s flesh was cremated, the smoke alone infected several others in my neighborhood, and now a pack of them frolics in the abandoned lot at the end of the street, despite the sign that says trespassers will be shot, and when I see the grass rustling, I know it’s because they’re playing. I wouldn’t mind being one of them, except that they don’t stand anymore, just scurry around on their hands and knees, and they can’t reach anything above two feet. Shards of glass have embedded in their knee caps and palms, and whenever they run, it’s a symphony of crunch. They never go home anymore, and when one of them gets hit by a car, no one stops driving. Sometimes, someone will drag the girl out of the road, slopping her off to the side, but only because they don’t want to damage or dirty their vehicles. I wouldn’t mind living the life of a dog if I didn’t have to die like one.
My neighbor has given up on grief. She leaves the skeleton in the road, now a pile of chalk dust, and when cars drive across it, they drag white tails of smoke through the night. My neighbor has recommitted herself to a new life of breeding: she goes out at night with a giant white net attached to a pole, raw steak with sleeping pills plugged inside, and a BB gun. She captures the strays that play in the lot and brings them home and breeds them with pedigree bloodlines, producing litters and litters of puppies. They sell very well, more profitable than her old secretary job, and now there are fliers all over the neighborhood, advertising the puppies of various colors, sizes, and personalities.
When Chialan hears about my neighbor’s machinations, she looks up from her lanyard with such a look of distress that I think she must have ruined her handiwork — over and under, under and over — but Chialan never makes a mistake, unlike me. My lanyards are lumpy in all the places where I’ve lost the pattern, skipped a stitch.
It’s hopeless, Chialan says, it’s hopeless. She keeps repeating that word, hopeless, and she tells me it’s getting close, it’s nearly time, she has to hurry now. I ask her what she means, but Chialan shakes her head. She works all through recess and all through class, and though she looks very focused on the lesson, her chin raised and her posture impeccably upright, I can see her fingers working furiously beneath her desk, repeating the pattern, weaving the locks of black hair that must have come from her own head. The hair seems to grow longer as she braids it, though it isn’t attached to a scalp anymore. It lengthens as she continues her work, until the lanyard reaches all the way to her feet. By the end of the day, it’s coiled around her legs like a mythical snake of the jungle, one of those animals that can slide an entire person inside its stomach and digest it slowly over a decade.
Two days later, with her fingers whirring nonstop, she completes the lanyard. It is so long that she has to wind it on a spool the size of a tire, which keeps her from moving freely about the yard. She sits on her spool and keeps weaving, her fingers tenacious and blurring. I tell her to stop. I tell her to tell me the word. I try to coax her from her work by playing our game of evasion. I guess the word again and again. I say every word I know. Time. Cheese. Night. Greed. Me. But Chialan won’t be lured from her work, and she stares straight ahead, blank-faced as her fingers thread the strands in and out and in. It is as if all her blood has been rerouted to her hands and there is none left to animate her eyes, to inflate her tongue. I feel utterly abandoned, but Chialan slows down on the third day. By now, the lanyard is so long that she leaves the spool at home, and when she walks three miles to school, the strand of it trails behind her like the piss of an incontinent dog. She must have worked continuously, not even pausing to urinate, and her bladder is a hard dome beneath her belly. I want to puncture it for her, but she won’t let me. She continues to weave, though now she has time to talk to me. She says she’s nearing the end.
What end? I say. Who is this lanyard for? It’s too long for a keychain, a bracelet, or a curse. At last, Chialan looks directly at me. Her eyes are bloodshot from braiding all night, and her fingers are at last exhausted, flitting in the air like dying flies.
She says, the time has come. I always promised myself I would never let you catch the word, but here’s the truth: the word has consumed me. Every day I don’t spread it, every day I protect you from it, it eats me from the inside, it drills into the tissue of my brain, it flares out through my veins. It has me entirely. You’re the only one who hasn’t seen. Because you’re so unwilling to lose me. That’s the condition of your love. You love me through a powerful denial, and I thank you for it. But it’s time for you to learn you’ve loved a delusion. You want me to shield you, but I have already failed you.
I stare at Chialan in confusion. At last, she sighs and sets down the lanyard. Do you recognize this? Chialan says.
I watch as Chialan gets on her hands and knees. She turns and shows her back to me. She bends her head, lowering it to the pavement, and laps at a puddle sheened with oil, an island of dog shit bobbing in the center of it. And like the prick of a needle deflating my bladder, I remember the time I needed to piss and ran into the bathroom and saw the girl drinking from the toilet, saw the startled way she glanced up before turning away in shame, ducking her head once more, and the gleam of her hair is so familiar now, like a recalled future, spreading in all directions.
You’ve caught the word, I say, same as everyone else. You’ve had it this whole time.
Everyone could see it but you, Chialan says, and I thank you for your delusion. For the way you see me. You think I’m a turret around the word, that I’d never let you in or let the word out, but in fact, I ceded a long time ago. I let the word have me. But you, heeling like a dog, made me feel so human. Now things are different. Now the word is spreading beyond my imagination. Now I do things like drink out of the toilet. I cannot be the one who gives it to you. It cannot be me. If you must catch it, it will not be from me. It’s selfish, maybe, but I would never forgive myself. So you must do me a favor.
Chialan stands up and picks up the end of the lanyard from the pavement. With deft and decisive fingers, she conducts the concluding knot.
I have been working these past few days on my leash, she says, you must put it on me.
I stare at her in confusion. I tell her I don’t understand.
She says, don’t you remember the girls in your neighborhood? Run over by cars, or worse, taken by your neighbor? That’s what happens to the ones without a leash.
I tell her it’s not so bad. I tell her the strays have started to fling themselves in front of cars to avoid being captured, and even as I say it, I know how cruel I sound.
Chialan shakes her head with sadness. There are tears in her eyes, rich and opaque as blood. Put me on the leash, she says, handing the end of the lanyard to me. I want it to be you, she says, in fact, I made it out of your hair, not mine. I plucked some strands from your scalp while you were asleep in class and grew it in a jar at home so that I would have enough. I knew I would only be able to stand weaving day after day and night after night if I knew I was touching you through these strands.
I finished it last night, Chialan says, I had to weave through all my dreams. The leash is so long, it can circle the circumference of the world. I can go anywhere on this planet even while I’m knotted to something.
I stare at her in surprise. What’s the point of a leash that long? If a leash is so long that you can go anywhere in the world, isn’t that the same as not being on a leash? Isn’t the point of a leash to restrict movement?
It does, she says, it restricts movement. Because I know it’s there. It doesn’t matter where I go. I know I’m leashed. That knowledge is more powerful than anything physical, don’t you see? It’s worse than a short leash, some little thing yanking on me. This is a leash that makes me think I’m free. But like any leash, it won’t let me go. It keeps me. What does it matter the length of the leash, she says, when the world is built for your confinement?
The other end, Chialan says, is knotted to a tree in the empty lot where the strays play. So that when I have to return to my tether, I’ll get to visit you. The best I can be in this world, she says, is you. Live well for me. But it’s time. You must do it. You must put the leash on me. You must understand what I am. What I will never allow you to become.
Where will you go? I say, once I’ve leashed you?
Far away, she says. But she says it with heaviness. However I live with this leash on me, I don’t want you to see it. I didn’t want you to see me then, in the bathroom, and I don’t want you to see me now.
I tell her I won’t do it. I tell her I refuse. I say, tell me the word so that I might catch it too, and then we can each be leashed, or maybe we can join the strays in the lot, or maybe we can chase my neighbor and eat her alive. But Chialan just shakes her head. She says, you must never catch it. Those are the conditions of my love: that I might spare you.
When it’s your time, she says, when you’ve caught the word, I’ll grieve. You won’t know it, but I’ll grieve. And I’ll think, at the very least, you didn’t catch it from me. I can go to my death knowing that.
She says her mother caught it a long time ago, long before Chialan was born, and that was why her mother’s memory was so holey, why she frequently forgot her name and where she lived, and once in a while she would return to the site of her future grave with a mouthful of pulpy puppies. Other times, her belly was a big green melon Chialan and her sisters smashed open with bats, scooping out with their hands the flesh of the broken halves. Get it out of me, get it all out of me, scoop me empty, her mother called out, again and again. I don’t want to be like her, Chialan says, and there’s only way. Spare me my fate. Leash me so I can leave.
So I take the knotted end from her. With as much tenderness as I can muster, I loop the leash of my hair around her neck and make a crooked knot, incomparable to the kinds she can make, knots as small as fleas, knots with elegant knees. But I do it, despite the twanging in my bones, despite the riot in my spine. Chialan keeps her eyes closed, and when I’m finished, she opens them and sighs. Her breath as musky as smoke. I want her to whisper to me one last time, whisper the one word that will make us the same. And yet I know what she says is true: I want to be spared. The knowledge of the leash is not something I can bear, no more than I can carry in my belly a shattered melon.
I never see Chialan again. She takes my hands, flips them over, and kisses each palm like she’s blessing it with a coin. Twin coins of molten gold. I make fists around them. When I let go, she goes.
She collapses to her hands and knees and runs toward the school gate, leaping over it in one limitless bound. How have I never noticed the true shape of her spine? How painful must it have been for her to be upright, to pretend this whole time she could stand like me? My belly aches, teeming with bitter black seeds. I shut my eyes, unable to bear the sight, wanting so badly to remember her as I have always known her, before the word started going around. Before the word caught her. Maybe she can still outrun it. Maybe it isn’t too late. I have to hope. I have to pray.
I listen to the sound of her leash lashing the ground, the sound of it unreeling from the spool of the tree, her leash that can loop around the world, the longest leash ever made. The weight of it must be tremendous. I wonder if it can save her. I trail the taut length of it, a high-wire at neck level, running my hand along its strained tendon, until at last, I reach the tree where she’s tethered herself. There is a hollow at the base of it, a slit for seeds, and I get on my hands and knees and press my ear to the echoing emptiness. I hear her voice inside the trunk, ringing all the way to the tips of the leaves, a spurt of sour green, and though I want it to be the word, I know it’s nothing. There is nothing left of me here.
