The lights are dimmed in the sports bar that my friends and I sit in. We’re at my typical booth—to the right of the door, in the far corner, where I can look out at patrons and remain undetected. I love this table, and I love the solitude. It is separated from other tables and gives…
They do put the hand back together. It takes all night. We start in the plastic waiting room chairs and as it grows later, we sprawl on the carpet, sneak sips of Spotted Cow, and try to stay awake. Mel offers the receptionist a beer, which sends her into a very vowel-forward “Oh no I…
What you really need right nowis that hong shao rou recipe.Not the one in the Times your bougie budsMartha Stewarted the shit out ofblowing half their take homes at the Ferry Building.No, the one you need is the one your Ma sharedthat time you fought in New May Wahthat time she showed youthe difference between dark and light soy…
Fifteen / 1996 / Secret Church Camp Bunk PartyThere was a misunderstanding—it was James who was invited, not Robert James, but he showed up anyway and people liked him enough not to make a fuss as he stood in the corner of the bunkhouse that smelled like cedarwood and cheap vodka. There were only eight of them, including him,…
I was twenty-two the first time it happened. My father slapped me so hard that I bit my cheek open and a thin trickle of blood spilled over my tongue while he stood there, jaw locked, holding the pearl in his hand. He looked at it, not me, his eyes only for the smear of light…
Bodies… we all have one. They are literally a part of each of us! (Yes, we went there.) We should, as the idiom goes, “know them like the backs of our hands.” And yet, the truth is that our bodies hold a whole mess of mysteries, and quite a few of them, we take for granted every single day. Let’s take a look at five baffling body enigmas:The Body Part:…
Dear lovely reader,There’s a weighing scale in the locker room of my gym that haunts us all. Throughout the years, I’ve seenpeople step on it and start crying. At the end of a sweat-drenched cardio session, someone will stumble onto it, their eyebrows furrowed at the unmoved number, then limp right back to the treadmill.Gathered…
A monster grew out there in the tobacco.
Delmae had seen it. Shapeless as night. Well, heard it. A howl like a coyote—no, a screech like a bobcat. Or was that the feral tabby who liked to hang around out back for the chicken heads Mama unzipped from their bodies, for supper?
Well, no matter. Delmae sensed it. Knew it was there. It lived in small touches against the earth, and when it reached out, the universe touched back. The sway of the tobacco leaves when there was no wind. The sudden flight of crows when there were no men in the fields. The patchy death of rotting grass underfoot when there was no drought.
When her Mama thought she was asleep along with her brothers and sisters, Delmae would tuck her small frame into the sill of their bedroom window and stare out at the endless rows of shivering tobacco. A whole farmhouse between her and that monster. Still she sensed it.
Its eyes would not be sparks of fire, she decided. They would be blue, like hers. Like those’n on the doll she wanted from the general store in town but that her Mama said they were too poor to afford. Blue was a fierce color, and one day, Delmae was determined to find a pair of blue eyes that could stare back as hard as she stared out.
She asked her Pa one morning, when dawn was just a whisper over the fields. This was their ritual. Or rather, hers. As the eldest girl, she’d wake up early enough to pack sandwiches for Pa and Mama and her siblings. Shuffling white bread like playing cards didn’t take long, but she knew if she came alive before everyone else, she’d get a moment with Pa, just the two of them, before he left for work. Before his limbs were heavy, before his back was hunched, before his skin was sweat. Before his temper was short.
“Pa,” she’d start, little fingers curling back the tin lid on the S.P.A.M. can like she was pulling the covers off of Mama, who did not like to rise early at all. (She never understood why—if Mama never got up early enough, she never got to kiss Pa goodbye for the day.) “Did you know there’s a monster living out there? In the fields?”
Her Pa was doing up the laces on his work boots, the big ones he used to crush monsters in the house, mostly fiddlebacks. “Is that the truth?” he grunted. Somedays he worked in the fields, somedays with the gas-n-electric company, somedays with the mines. The more hours he worked, the fewer hours he spent in the house with Delmae and Mama. The mines were the worst. On those days, her Pa came home looking something scary.
“Uh huh. I know it. And it knows I know. It waits out there, watching us. I think it was here before us and we just gone and moved in on it. It ate the chickens last Christmas—”
“That was a fox,” her Pa shot, voice gruff. “They get hungry in the cold.”
Delmae peered at him over the kitchen counter, which was almost too tall for her. She didn’t tell anyone, but she hid a small crate in the cabinets; she’d pull it out to stand on whenever folks was on the other side of the kitchen, unable to see.
“No, it’s a monster! A big one, too. Not ugly, though. Like a shadow, you know. Or a big dog. Like the Jeffersons’ dog down the way, Bullet, I’d bet they be friends—”
“A fox, Delmae,” her Pa said, voice sterner this time. No room for arguing.
“But Mama said when we close our eyes at night, all sorts of things come out of the dark and that’s why we gotta stay in bed, why we gotta go to bed early, sometimes even before you come home at night—”
“Don’t listen to your Mama. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Lets her mind get away from her, is all.” His eyes—blue, like Delmae’s, but darker, or maybe, she thought, washed with the wrong color somehow, like a poisonous sock in the laundry bin—studied his work shirt where Mama had stitched up a hole. Not well enough, apparently. His brow grew low and wrinkly over his eyes and Delmae knew she had only a little more time.
“It’s real though. I’m not just making things up, I’m too big for that now. I’m not the baby, no matter what the boys say. I bet I could even help you start planting next season. Then I’ll show you. It’ll be out there, I swear it.”
Her Pa only shook his head. He already seemed worn out today, or maybe that was just her imagination. Her brothers were always teasing her for an imagination. Said they didn’t know where she got it from on account of they couldn’t much afford any books.
“Oh!” Delmae explained. “Maybe it’s waiting out there cause it’s hungry!” The revelation sung through her veins stronger than the church choir on Sundays. That had to be it. “Hey Pa,” she said, unfolding newsprint to wrap the sandwiches in. “How come we can have fields and animals but we can’t buy a doll?”
Her Pa stood then, towering in the room like a statue that had been sized all wrong for its garden. Silent as concrete, he stalked toward her and grabbed two newsprint-wrapped S.P.A.M. sandwiches off the counter without a word.
Then he was gone.
Delmae looked down at the remains of her sandwich operation, cheeks singing with warmth but not any kind of warmth that reminded her of a pleasing choir.
Every morning, she cut a single can of S.P.A.M. into eleven slices for eleven lunches: Two sandwiches each to the three boys and Pa for their long school and work days; one each to Delmae and her little sister; and one to her Mama, but Mama always ended up giving hers away to their crotchety neighbor down in the holler, Ms. Lacey, even though that tough old woman always said she didn’t want one but took it anyway. Delmae’s brothers always joked that their Pa and Mama stopped having kids when they got two girls in a row because Pa didn’t want the boys to be equally matched. Equally matched was too much the same as outnumbered.
Every morning, she cut the slimy chunk of S.P.A.M., jiggly and as lifeless as an un-beating heart, into eleven slices, each slice so thin that if she held it up to the window, she could see the sun rise over the fields through it. She’d slice, layer the meat gently into a pocket of white bread eleven times, and play her favorite game: Imagining what the S.P.A.M. letters really stood for. Sunlight Paraded All Morning. Supper Probably Ain’t Much.
Someday Pa Answers Me.
This morning, she looked at the chunk of S.P.A.M. and thought for a minute. And instead of cutting the rest into the remaining nine veiny slices, she made ten, twelve slices total.
One extra slice for the monster growing in the tobacco.
He was probably starving.
A monster grew in the air that summer.
Delmae could smell it. Something fowl baked in the air quicker than cornbread batter crusted in a hot oiled skillet.
A little after noon, every time she came back from delivering a S.P.A.M. sandwich to the monster in the tobacco (her new favorite habit), she caught a whiff of something sour decaying in the humid June air.
Her three older brothers left for school in the mornings, after Pa left for work. She was old enough for learning, too, and had even gone a spell in the school house in town. But then her baby sister’d cried her way into life and her Mama had needed more help than her own two hands from God could provide. So Delmae’d left school; after all, whatever husband she ended up fetching would have gone to enough school for the both of them. Maybe even to high school. Delmae liked to imagine what it might be like to rifle through an entire room of books she’d have in her future big house with her future husband who would spend so much time off at work in town that he’d never bother her while she spent all day reading.
Delmae had been right, of course. Not that her older brothers or Pa listened to her long enough to even entertain the ideas she was spewing. Sometimes Mama would give her an ear, but only in the golden hour of the afternoons, when Pa and the boys were gone and the littlest girl was deep in her nap. Only when Mama’d slept her full twelve hours and had a cup of coffee in her, maybe coffee with a little splash of something else stronger and more sour than whatever Delmae was smelling outside. Those afternoon hours were Delmae’s and Mama’s, their own special time when it felt like the entire earth could spin around two tiny lives.
Anyway. Delmae was always right. There was most certainly a beast in the tobacco and he was most certainly hungry.
As usual that morning, she upturned a can of S.P.A.M. and let the pink stuff drop onto a plate with a sound that reminded her of Pa’s boots sticking in the mud by the creek. And as usual in the early morning quiet and empty of the kitchen, she bullied that S.P.A.M. into twelve slices. She was particularly proud of them this morning, even though the only taste that ever came through was the white bread; they were so thin, they reminded her of the fragile pages of the Bibles in church.
They didn’t go to church much anymore; that was one thing she noticed her folks agreed on. Pa didn’t seem to have the time or energy when Sunday was the only rest day he got, and even then, he spent it out on the farm. Mama didn’t have the patience. Whenever someone approached them on one of the rare occasions Mama took Delmae into town for an errand, they’d always wonder when Mama was gonna bring the children back to services. They were missed.
Mama would just stare at them, the plow lines on her face getting deeper as her features sunk into the same look she often threw Pa when she thought no one was looking, like when he tracked mud through the house or when he came home late and decided to sleep on the sofa. Delmae saw everything, of course.
Delmae didn’t like the soft-spoken preacher much, anyway. No one did. If folks were either S.P.A.M. or white bread, that man was definitely the whitest and blandest of breads. Awful lot of folks caught up on their napping, especially on summer Sundays when the church was hot and the preacher man was prisoner to one of his mumbling, droning sermons.
Eight slices for the boys.
Sir Preacher Always Mutters.
Three slices for the girls.
An extra slice.
No one saw Delmae slip out of the kitchen and into the tobacco fields around lunchtime.
The tobacco was much taller than she. She wasn’t positive why just yet, but this lunchtime charity of hers was best kept secret. There wasn’t much left to be personal in a small farmhouse with seven people. And that didn’t even include the chickens! This was hers. No one else’s. Besides, the boys wouldn’t like knowing their sandwiches were thinner, and Mama told her to never wander out into the fields, especially alone.
You’ll get lost.
Will not! Pa doesn’t get lost.
Your Pa’s never not lost, sugar. But Mama usually murmured that last part like the preacher mumbled. There are monsters out there, Mama’d try again.
Ha! Delmae giggled to herself as she stalked through the tobacco, small hands gripping a small plate with a small sandwich. Silly Mama. That kind of reasoning was like butter on crusty cornbread to Delmae; the more someone slathered it around, the more she wanted. Truth was, her stuffy school teacher was probably glad he didn’t have to handle her curiosity anymore. She had approximately fourteen phenomenal questions in her brain every hour. Monsters, for sure. If only Mama knew.
So when the tobacco leaves enveloped her small frame in a cocoon of smells that reminded her of Pa, letting her disappear from the outside world for a moment, it was for sure a sign from the universe. She was meant to be out here; the forces at work would keep her from being spotted and getting in trouble. She loved learning about the universe and the planets and what lurked in the shadows of the oceans. She’d spend hours at the library in town when she could, but it was only ever open when cranky old Ms. Lacey felt well enough to make the trek in from deep in the holler and open it up.
Delmae stopped in a specific clearing in the tobacco, the plants stamped down under tiny footprints here. Noontime sunlight streaked through the leaves, but it still felt cooler this deep in. It was nice to be small sometimes. No one would be able to see her from the farmhouse, and this far out in the fields, the noises of the world calmed just a little bit. No chicken squawks, no dogs panting, no static radio nonsense blaring from Mama’s bedroom. Quiet.
She set the plate on the ground, like she had many times before.
“This batch turned out real nice,” she said into the silence. The tobacco swayed in front of her as the wind whispered through. Silence. Delmae noticed there weren’t any little critters running around in the underbrush out here anymore, not since she’d discovered the monster. No field mice or rabbits. Not even a barn snake. Like they all knew they’d shifted from animals to prey right quick.
Not for the first time, Delmae pondered one of her favorite questions. Did this monster like little girls?
“We even had some jarred onions I forgot Mama pickled a while back. I threw a couple of those on there, too.”
Silence.
This is usually how it went. Delmae would talk, offer the sandwich, talk some more, and then leave. The sandwich would always be gone when she came back for the plate in the late afternoon. She pondered what kind of monster this one might be, but as she never saw the creature, that was hard. If not a monster, then what? She swore she saw flashes of lightning bug-yellow eyes at night when she stared out from the bedroom window, but he was no dog or bear or coyote. This monster was…new.
Delmae dared to ask a question she’d never be able to in church. “Are you a god?”
The stillness answered back. Then a low rumble sounded. A growl? A hungry stomach? She very much wanted to know more about this monster. Where had he come from? Grown up? Did he have a Pa and a Mama and siblings and absolutely no time and space to do things on his own so he’d run off and now here he was…More importantly, would he be good at her game?
Saints Ponder Ancient Meaning.
Yes, this monster out in the tobacco felt ancient.
Seeing they were done for the day and knowing he wouldn’t eat the sandwich until she left, she gave a small wave and made her way back to the house.
At the bottom of the back porch steps, Delmae immediately knew something was wrong.
She took a few steps into the house and let the answer claim her senses. The sour smell wasn’t from her monster, or from the fields. Not the outside world. The foul odor was coming from inside the house.
It was then she realized there was still untouched coffee burning on the stovetop. Mama had not come down to the kitchen today.
A monster grew in Pa.
At least, that’s what Delmae guessed, because Mama spent more and more time in bed on account of not wanting to deal with your Pa today, sugar.
The days got hotter, the nights grew longer, and Pa came back later. He got home in entirely new days sometimes; Delmae heard midnight chime on the old grandfather clock in the den about the same time the front screen door banged open and closed. She was usually up, sitting at her bedroom window sill, watching for her monster. Monsters liked to come out in the spooks’ hour, of course. She knew this from books in the library. They loved the time between midnight and three in the morning, so she learned to love it, too. Hoping she’d spot the dark mass of a creature brushing sandwich crumbs from his fur…
Tonight, another late night, Pa did what he always did when he finally stumbled home from work or town or wherever he had been: Pa wound the grandfather clock in the den. Delmae knew it; heard it. He loved that thing more than Mama’s biscuits (ridiculous), more than his children (shameful), and certainly more than Jesus and church (understandable). He’d wind it and wind it only to fiddle with it some more, his calloused hands, dirt caked under the fingernails, for once gentle.
She started to understand why Mama always got a twisted-up lemon look on her face when she caught Pa doing that, caressing the clock’s hands and pieces with such love and care it was like he’d married them. But what was the point of a gosh dang clock that couldn’t keep time? A clock that went bad every single day and had to be made un-bad? A more preposterous idea than the idea of a monster living out in the tobacco, if you asked her.
From her place in the kitchen one morning, Delmae watched her Pa wind the grandfather clock. He’d actually come home early enough yesterday to go to bed before it needed to be wound, even had supper with her and the boys (Mama was asleep), although it was just corn soup and stale bread croutons. Slice after slice of S.P.A.M. fell to the plate as her Pa busied himself with the clock; she was ready to stash the slices and bread into the breadbox in case he turned around and saw how many sandwiches she was making.
But she lost count of her slices when a ghost floated down the steps, the floorboards creaking even beneath a willowy frame. Mama was up. Out of bed. In the morning. Delmae almost shaved off her thumb as her eyes followed her Mama as best they could from the kitchen. She was in her dressing robe, hair not done, but still. She was alive in a whole new part of the day. Her Mama approached Pa at the clock. Delmae didn’t know what was wrong, but she knew something was off between them, like they had pasty clumps in their buttermilk. Were they getting back to being friends again?
Her Mama and Pa sunk into a terse, whispered conversation. That didn’t sound like being friends again.
Signs Point Against Maybe.
“Why didn’t you come down to supper last night?”
Delmae couldn’t quite see their faces, but that was Pa. Pa always started with questions.
“Why did you make it to supper last night?” Definitely Mama. Silence. “What happened, Charles?”
“What was always going to happen. They’ve lost too many men in the mines this season so they sent us home. Folks is starting to pay too much attention. That mine’ll close. The money’ll move to anothern, a smaller town further away with better mountains and poorer men. Men ever more desperate than us.”
“There are no poorer men. We’re it—”
“Is that the truth?” A hacking cough out of Pa. Delmae’s oldest brother told her it was the mines. Apparently, mine monsters were mostly made of coal dust and crawled into your lungs so they could hitch a ride out of their caves since they were trapped down there, sometimes for centuries. She didn’t believe that nonsense. Not really. It was silly. Mostly. Honestly, why would a monster ever have to get un-trapped? A monster was the trap.
Her Pa was speaking again, and Delmae’s ears went hot when she heard her name.
“Del’s old enough to work now. And I don’t just mean around the house. She can join the boys in the field maybe, or go in town—”
“Honestly, Charles. Del ain’t even got proper clothes to leave the house. You’d know that if you spent any time with her. She needs new shoes.”
“She can wear the one’s she’s got for now just fine.”
Delmae wiggled her free toes on the cold kitchen title. Thank goodness she didn’t have to wear shoes in the house. Her middle toes were longer than the others, and were starting to permanently curl in and under in her worn Mary Janes. They didn’t hurt. Much. She couldn’t run in them, mind you. And sometimes her ankles started to smart because she kept walking on her heels to keep her toes lifted off the ground and free of the pressure—
Did her monster out in the tobacco have shoes? What if his feet were cold? Bruised and broken? If her Pa couldn’t even get his baby girl new shoes, who was taking care of her monster?
Just then, her stomach rumbled. She was pretty used to the feeling by now, but for some reason, her gut grumbled louder than her folks’ argument this time. If she was hungry, then surely her monster was, too. She sliced faster, only half paying attention now.
“She cannot wear those old things anymore. They’re gonna cripple her feet. You think she’ll dance well enough to get any attention from boys with those feet?”
Boys! Delmae wanted to snort. What boys? Pure trouble. She didn’t have time for boys, not for their silliness. Not that she saw many boys anymore since Mama took her out of school. Slice. The boys in class had stared too long at her dusty shoes and crooked teeth, and not nearly long enough at her blue eyes or the tiny bow of twine she braided her hair with. Slice. It was twine she secretly clipped from her Mama’s best and only hat one day, with her older brother’s knife. That hat lived at the back of the closet, anyway. Boys were stupid. Slice.
Stupid People Anger Me.
“That just means she’s growing, which means she’s old enough to start some real work. It’d be good for her.”
“It ain’t good for you, why would it be good for her—” Her Mama’s voice caught in a strange gurgle of a sound then, strangled and short, the way the barn dogs choked on the bones of the chicken scraps they got a hold of after supper.
Then Delmae heard a wheezing gasp, like her Mama’d come up for air after swimming through a deep, dark well.
In the next instant, erratic boot-stomping echoed toward the kitchen. “Better than wasting away around here, learning your example, sleeping all hours of the day—”
Delmae didn’t look up in time. Her Pa and Mama barreled around the corner into the kitchen and she didn’t even have half a second to squirrel away the evidence of the extra sandwich. There were twelve slivers of delicate heart-pink S.P.A.M. in front of her, twenty-four pieces of white bread.
Her parents halted in surprise. Pa’s face was flushed with red anger. Mama’s eyes were sunken in pools of purple, baggy exhaustion, and a red patchy painting was forming around her neck. Silly Mama. Her neck always got like that when she insisted on sleeping with her goose-feather pillow. (Delmae didn’t know why her Mama didn’t just get rid of that pillow when it gave her so much trouble.)
Her folks were silent, staring. At the fact that Delmae was up this early making sandwiches and had likely overheard them, or at the extra sandwich? Oh lord, she hoped the first. Worst case, she’d just say Mama was bringing an extra sandwich to Ms. Lacey, who was only ever not so cranky when she had a little something to eat, and she needed something to snack on after all if she was going to make the trek to keep the library open for Delmae—
Mama’s eyes went to Pa and then followed his gaze, which was fixated on Delmae’s small hands hovering above smaller sandwiches. Her folks glowered at the slices of S.P.A.M., thinner than a top layer of delicate skin. Delmae’d read once that their outside layer of skin was already dead anyway, always dying and replenishing.
Pa turned and fumed out, stomps echoing to the front door.
Mama stayed a moment longer, the sadness in her eyes losing the fight to tiredness. Her Mama never seemed to be able to win the fight against her enemy of exhaustion. Without a word, she left her daughter alone again in the kitchen.
Delmae brought the rest of the sandwiches to life. She gave extra care to the twelfth. Even spread a little bit of the mustard they had left in the jar on top of the S.P.A.M.
Were they really that poor, she thought, as she left a sandwich out in the tobacco fields that day. How could she be poor if she still had something to share?
Sure enough, supper was quiet that night. As she and her siblings came to the table, Delmae stared at the food Mama placed in front of them when it was clear Pa wasn’t making it home.
Soggy Peas and Macaroni.
Yes, she thought. Oh yes. The monster outside might have been hungry, but the heartbeats inside the house were poor in all the wrong ways.
A monster was not an easy thing to hide, as it turned out.
Delmae made a mistake. As with all mistakes, this one started with a storm.
One August night, late summer heat and a lonely front of cool air mixed worse than old skillet grease and the chilly water from the kitchen faucet. And soon, when the moon was high but shadowed behind the clouds, the atmosphere gave birth to a locomotive.
The sky screamed at midnight, and suddenly the world was awake. Still half dazed with sleep and barely out of a dream, Delmae sprinted after her older brothers through the house. The walls shrieked around them as the old farmhouse bent and shook and swayed in the gathering winds. Picture frames fell and cracked. The few pieces of china they had shivered from the cabinets and shattered. Delmae’s sister, the little one, was crying up a storm of her own but then the baby was in their Mama’s arms and Mama was trying to sing a lullaby over the sound of the train coming right down from heaven—
“The cellar, out back!”
Delmae saw Pa shout the words before she ever heard them, and suddenly hands and elbows met ribs and everyone was shoving and clawing their way out of the house, speeding like the devil for the cellar out back. Near the tobacco fields. Her ears rung and her head felt like it was overflowing with cotton, and she could barely think straight. The fields! Her Monster—he was out there alone and he must be confused and frightened and lord he was probably so hungry, late-night storms always made her crave milk and some sweet cinnamon dumplings—
Outside, a mass of black hovered on the horizon, spinning in some kind of odd, slow-tempo dance. The tobacco wouldn’t be any kind of shield for her monster.
Mama shouted over the horn section of winds, at their eldest. “Go check on Ms. Lacey!”
Pa whirled on their Mama, the lose skin of his face catching and slipping around on his cheek bones like an old sheet. “Are you insane? Don’t send him out there—”
But Delmae’s big brother went sprinting in the opposite direction, toward the road, without even his shoes on.
Pa was so distracted he didn’t see Delmae slip back into the house.
The foundation of the house shook and nails popped and she was sure her world was vibrating but maybe that was just her brain knocking against her skull. She made it to the kitchen, to the stack of sandwiches she’d already made last night ahead of time, when she knew folks was asleep and she wouldn’t run into Pa.
But Pa found her this time, a newspaper-wrapped sandwich in her armpit, her feet pointed toward the back kitchen door where he was now standing.
“What the hell’re you doing, girl? Get your ass out into the cellar.”
Her eyes went wide with what she knew had to be guilt, hair swirling all around her head and looking mighty tangled and pitiful. She didn’t move. In fact, she did him one better. She shook her head.
Her Pa broke for a moment, his record scratching. “What?” A pause. The locomotive screamed closer. “Did you just tell me no, girl?”
“I have to feed the monster,” she finally shouted. “The monster, the one in the field. The one I told you about.”
“The monster—” His head tilted and he suddenly looked like he might vomit. “Stop being silly and put your goddamn shoes on.” It was only then that she noticed her Pa had carried her shoes out with him, from the house, like he’d actually been thinking about her.
“But my monster—”
“There’s no monster! You’re spewing nonsense and we don’t got time for this bullshit so put your goddamn shoes on—”
The back screen door cracked right off his hinges. Something cracked in Pa, too. Understanding passed over his face as he fully heard what she’d said. Delmae had read about the calm in the eye of tropical storms. She just didn’t think she’d ever live long enough or go far enough to see one up close.
“You’re leaving our food out there in the fields? For what, the animals? Teaching all them wild creatures to come back and make a mess…You’re just leaving it out there.” Pa always started with questions but now none of his questions sounded like questions anymore.
She gave the smallest of nods.
“You’re leaving our food, my goddamn food that I goddamn paid for, out there for the vermin of the world?”
She thought it was the house at first, but no, it was her own bones trembling under her skin this time as her Pa approached her. It happened too fast for her to see it coming. One of her shoes hit her in the side of the face. Pa’s left hand was empty, her right shoe in his other.
“Answer me, girl!”
She didn’t budge. Just clutched the sandwich tighter, squished that single slice of S.P.A.M. into an even thinner version of itself.
“Fuckin rat—”
Her right shoe smacked into her temple and for a breath her world flashed white in the overwhelming darkness.
“If you can waste my money, my food, Jesus Christ knows you don’t need any goddamn new shoes, you spoiled bitch.”
She blinked, thinking of her monster, who survived all alone out there in the tobacco fields, who’d probably survived a long time before she ever came along.
Soon Pa Apologizes More.
She said, “Those didn’t even fit right anyhow.”
That did it.
Her Pa lunged after her, murder in his blue eyes that were not really blue anymore, but dark as the mass of air and earth and debris and chaos churning out there in the midnight.
Delmae was already in motion. She fled into the living room, heart pounding in time with the thunder outside. Her Pa’s heavy boots plowed behind her and when she hopped over a fallen coatrack, she finally had an idea, not for her Mama or her siblings or even for her monster but for herself. She did the only thing could think of.
Pa raced behind her. She got to that ancient grandfather clock in the den, that ghost of a thing that’d somehow managed to stay upright through all this hell.
And she got behind it and pushed.
It crashed to the floor in such a cacophony of sound that she almost forgot about the storm outside. Then her Pa tripped over it where she’d pushed it into his path and crushed whatever of the precious thing was left. His face hit the floorboards, nose first, and she heard crunching and cursing before she tore the hell out of the house and into the backyard.
She didn’t have much time. Her Pa would come after her. But she didn’t run toward the cellar, where her Mama and her brothers were waiting.
No, Delmae didn’t desert her monster. She dove into the tobacco fields, sandwich tucked in her arm like she might have cradled that doll from the general store in town. Sprinting through the thick stalks, she thought only of her monster, of feeding him, making sure he stayed alive. A minute later, when she heard Pa follow her into the tobacco, his loud cursing an angry battle cry, she smiled. Just as he was supposed to do.
She was doing this for her family, she told herself. For her sister and her brothers and her monster out here. Most especially for her Mama. The winds spun and the locomotive chugged faster and the world went dark as the inside of a coffin. Most especially for Mama, who deserved all the peace and quiet Delmae could find for her, who probably never got to have a monster all her own to look after, her own private little thing she could nurture until it either grew scary enough to not have to hide from anything anymore, or happy enough that it didn’t want to.
A sandwich for her monster, a single slice of something to keep it fighting. The world cracked open above and around her. A man’s strangled cry tore across the back of her mind.
Save Pa and Mama.
She plunged to her knees, sandwich in the dirt, wrapped her arms over her head.
Save Pa and Mama.
She stayed small, unseen, something she’d practiced for a long, long time.
Save Pa and Mama.
Then Delmae’s head went quiet. The air pressure lifted like the heavens were taking a much-needed breath. The humid air of August cocooned around her again. A bird whistled a tune. She stood, knees shaking, eyes jumping from a felled tree to their overturned truck to the farmhouse which was leaning into the ground like it was drunk. And the fields—
The tobacco fields were completely flattered around her, and not just where she stood. For as far as they reached, as far as she could see. The sandwich was gone. Her monster was gone, too, his hiding place no longer a dark spot in the world.
And so was her Pa. Vanished where she had no doubt he had just been before, behind her, ready to put his hands around her neck.
Her Mama surfaced from the cellar then, a daisy fighting its way out of the earth. She looked around just once, just long enough to see her daughter standing there alone in the leveled field. Only Delmae. No one else. A question appeared on her Mama’s face, the littlest girl clutched to her Mama’s breast so she didn’t get sucked away.
Delmae answered the question with a smile.
A proud smile, really. After all, she was good at some things. Had a lot to be proud of, most certainly.
A monster grew in her.
When I first received my copy of A Tide Should Be Able to Rise Despite Its Moon by Jessica Bell, I was taken aback by its lightness—its thin pages, unadorned vocabulary, occasional playfulness, and digestible plethora of one-page poems. Despite that, Bell packs so much feeling, admission, and sincerity in the conciseness of this collection without dancing around the messages she desires to communicate. Threading motherhood and everyday life with the string of struggle on a personal and larger level, the character of the boy becomes central, often directly modeled after Bell’s own son, who inspired her to write this assemblage of poetry, her first in almost a decade. As the boy becomes the mother’s world, so too, does the larger world fluctuate to introduce moments of uncertainty and reflection that pervade this collection of untitled poems.
That intersection of boy and world emerges from the very beginning. The first poem opens with a peaceful image of nature as a one-line stanza: “A breath of earth hides in shallow water.” But then, the breath can’t hide for long, as Bell writes in the following stanza, “A small boy disrupts its peace as he plucks it / from its bed of black sand / to use as a skipping stone.” Already the boy acts as a force of change. As the skipping stone skids across the body of water, the presence of the mother and father introduces itself later in the poem, but not in the physical sense. In fact, Bell writes, “It lands next to a shell / that shimmers with the dreams / of the boy’s mother and father. // They dreamed he would live in the colours / of a rainbow, and smile. // The boy looks up. // The clouds part.” The connection between boy and world and an accompanying shift reappears in the clouds’ response, but in this final moment of innocence, the uncertainty of the dreams sunken in the water (though it shimmers) lasts beyond the end of the poem. This poem sets up the rest of the book well by encompassing what Bell seeks to explore: the seemingly small, in-between moments of life that hold in their gravity the uprooting of change and the lessons that follow.
Take, for example, the poem on page 30, a poem where the boy is not present, but his attitude and perspective are. Bell begins by writing, “Yucca leaf shadows / spread like fingers / across the balcony. // They yearn for sunshine / and stretch their limbs / toward the scorching light.” With the personification of the yucca leaf shadows, a sense of childlike curiosity exists in the way they grow on the balcony and tend toward the light. Bell eventually establishes tension in the second half of the poem when she writes, “In summer the balcony drowns in shadows, / but not human ones. / In winter it longs to be stroked again, / with their feather-like souls. // Sometimes, / I try to cast mine. // But the trees seem confused, / and the dragon flowers hide.” The speaker shows the same attitude of curiosity when she, too, seeks to cast her shadow as if it were a game, almost a tug-of-war with the yucca leaf shadows. This game, however, fades away due to a lesson remembered in the last stanza: “Humans and nature / are not great collaborators.” Such is an example of how Bell sustains the voice of experience amidst change.
For poems like the aforementioned, risk abounds in the absence of the son, and the poem may feel disconnected from the rest of the collection. Even with the noticeable, sporadic detachment of a select few poems (like one that focuses on writing after drinking red wine), vulnerability blankets each piece. Bell achieves this through simple, clear language that spotlights her reflections and emotions. The potency of this vulnerability and the structure of some of the poems contribute to the feeling that we readers embody the role of a close friend. The simplicity and clarity of the language never wavers, which left me wondering about missed opportunities for experimentation with more complex language and sentence structures to mirror the intricate reflections lying underneath the surface of each moment. This language, then, can lean toward being too safe, familiar—even occasionally cliché—but this simultaneously nurtures the vulnerability and the reality of motherhood and sheer humanity that is the backbone of Bell and this book. After all, who can deny the love evident in the following lines of the poem on page 49: “He turns to face the window, / pressing his cheek / to my breast. / His baby smell a memory. / Or perhaps…not just yet.”
A Tide Should Be Able to Rise Despite Its Moon fully displays a mother’s honest love as it contends with her growing son, a changing world, and her shifting attitudes and beliefs. While the language left me wanting, this collection of poems still proves resonant in its weaving of themes and emotions, which brings me to a reflection on the book’s front cover. The boy, the sun, and the tidal waves are not as separate as I initially thought. All three rise and fall in one way or another, and they keep doing so as time passes, highlighting a type of change that is more patient, alluding to the little moments that build this change. In the poem on page 41, Bell understands this fact when she writes, “How long does it take / to live in the moment? // One second.” The following question might be, “Do we ourselves understand this?”
This past baseball season has not been the best for fans of either of Chicago’s two major league teams. The new documentary The Saint of Second Chances reminded me of another White Sox season, which did not end well: 1979. That season saw the end of era for both owner and fan’s connection to the team and was the last one played in the classic Comiskey Park before it was torn down. For a while now, the concept of ego death is something that I have been working on in therapy and I feel the topic is portrayed rather well in this baseball documentary. The documentary deals with the legacy of the Veeck family, their relationship to the sport and most importantly their connection to the fans and each other.
The hook for most viewers will be the seventies Chicago White Sox era, when Michael Veeck worked for his father Bill Veeck. Bill was the last of an old breed of owners, who could operate a team without their own financial independence. It also meant that Bill had to think outside of the box and make every dollar stretch to run the team. He could not compete with free agency salaries for big money players so the White Sox had to fill the stadium with promotions. One promotion which filled the seats but turned out to be a historic blight on baseball was Disco Demolition Night.
Many people have reflected back on the night when Steve Dahl, a local stock jock blew up a crate of disco albums and his young, mainly male fans stormed the field and destroyed both a double header and the stadium. The people who packed the stands this night were not baseball fans but listeners of a rock station. When you hear the announcer Harry Caray say “This is a sad day for baseball”, that statement is underscored by owner Bill Veeck on the field pleading with thousands of young adults and kids running past him in disorderly conduct.
Recently, that night has been looked through the lens of a book burning that had white youths destroying and the words & work of black, latin & queer artists of the time and demanding that this music not be played on radio station airwaves. Dahl is not in the documentary except for archival footage but would go on to talk about the event for decades throughout his long standing radio career and write a book about it. Mike Veeck does reflect back on that night, as he was head of promotions for the team. He also reflects on how it affected his father’s career in baseball, how his father sold the team afterwards and how the stadium was torn down to then be rebuilt.
The remainder of the documentary is about Mike Veeck being lost, facing his demons, finding new opportunities with a newly formed baseball league. The documentary focuses on the clarity he finds by focusing on his family, creating a fan community & the love of the game before his preconceived career goals.
I recently read The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang, the first of an epic grimdark fantasy series that follows main character Rin. I picked up and finished the book in one day. The world that Kuang created, the characters, and the way its plot draws on real life events from twentieth century China made it an undeniable page-turner for me. Kuang is a Marshall Scholar, Chinese-English translator and an award-winning author. Outside of the Poppy War Trilogy, she’s also written Babel and Yellowface, both of which made the New York Times bestseller list.
In The Poppy War, we follow war-orphan Rin who is desperate to escape a fate of being married off by her relatives. To do so, she focuses on acing the Keju—the Empire-wide test to find the most talented youth to learn at the Academies. She does so, and is expectant for her new life, but finds herself facing many more challenges than she anticipated at Sinegard, the most elite military school in Nikan. This book explores things like colorism, class, and war in nuanced ways that made me think and learn a lot. Rin herself is an extremely intriguing main character who brings nuance to the idea of a “hero” in literature and whose thirst for power may be her downfall—or the thing that saves everyone she cares about.
I’ve waited so long for Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones’ debut, The Hurricane Book! Part history, part lyric memoir, it tells of the history of Puerto Rico and the lives on one family through six hurricanes. It is INTENSE. Acevedo-Quiñones echoes the stark reality of Puerto Rico’s struggles under colonial oppression with the ebb and flow of her own family history. On every page her family seems to grow in scale and importance, their personal stories and small quirks overriding cold facts to form a new kind of living, breathing history.
This book is not for the feint of heart. You’ll probably weep— I certainly did. It’s full of pain, betrayal, and pinprick moments of hope. The language is stunning. It’s a personal and political history seared with a loving anger that stays with you long after you’ve put the book down.
I discovered Cynthia Pelayo’s horror collection Lotería just in time for spooky season, but I’ll enjoy re-reading this book year round!
Each chapter features a short story, poem, or flash fiction piece based on a card from the Mexican game lotería. As someone who plays lotería with my family every year on Christmas Eve, I was so excited to see how Pelayo would connect each iconic card to her retelling of Latine folklore.
The connections between card and myth ranged from clear to subtle, with some taking me completely by surprise. For instance, the flash piece “La Dama” (“The Lady”) is a retelling of the tale of La Llorona, a wailing woman whose spirit wanders the earth at night in search of children to replace her children she drowned. On the other hand, there is no umbrella in the short story “El Paraguas” (“The Umbrella”); the connection between narrative and card may only be evident to Spanish speakers who can pick up on Pelayo’s clever wordplay. As for the wildly creative retellings, consider “La Luna” (“The Moon”), which blends Guaraní creation legends with imagining the President of Argentina as an employer of werewolf bodyguards.
With a total of fifty-four chapters, Lotería is an impressive feat, showcasing Pelayo’s dedication to crafting a mosaic of unnerving tales that pay homage to the rich tradition of horror retellings within folklore.
Chloe, what inspired you to write this book?
Immortal Longings is my adult debut. So there were a lot of big thoughts I was having about what is it that makes an adult concept different to a young adult concept. I had to make a conscious decision to make the switch. My instinct growing up and writing books was always to go for young adult, because it was what I was reading. It was the type of genre categorization that I knew best. Whereas when the idea for Immortal Longings first struck, it was the first concept I worked with that I knew that didn’t really fit into that coming-of-age story arc. There was nothing about it that felt like a teenage story anymore. I think that was because I came up with the idea when I was in my senior year of college. It was still the midst of Covid. So, I had come back on campus because doing zoom school was horrifying and bland. And the time zone was terrible; I didn’t go to class. My professors let me skip class because my professors were like “oh you’re in New Zealand.” And it also meant I was not learning a single thing. So, I came back for senior year and during winter break I was alone in my school housing apartment because everyone went home for the holidays. It gave me the idea of working with a very dense city setting, I guess because I was so isolated. Thinking about what it means to live with people literally breathing down your neck, that presence of breathing down your neck at any point. It was that feeling that first came to me as a story idea.
I had always been very inspired by the Kowloon Walled City that was torn down in Hong Kong in the 1990s. I had always wanted to work with some sort of fantastical story to do with that. I had originally been playing with a portal fantasy that didn’t work and then some other fantasy in YA that didn’t work, and I threw them out. Finally, for this I was thinking what if I made an adult setting because I am exploring a dense city setting and the bad aspects that come with it if there is a system ruling over it and the very human things that come with trying to survive in a place. That just kind of erupted into the world and then that joined up with the fact that I had debuted into YA with Romeo and Juliet and I had taken a Shakespeare class sophomore year, where I really, really loved studying Antony and Cleopatra. I thought there’s something very meta about using the two star-crossed lovers of Shakespeare tragedy cannon, but Antony and Cleopatra are so firmly adult. They are about power and obsession and grappling with the sort of the tug and pull of love. So, there was a lot of like, “ooh, I am going to make this so that the books are in conversation with each other just like how Shakespeare’s plays are in conversation with each other.”
Very early on in the book when you’re describing the setting it’s as if the setting is its own character. I found it fascinating that you built the city where it is so tight and there’s suffering, but there’s no relief because there’s not enough oxygen to create relief.
Given that San-Er was kind of based on the Kowloon Walled City, it is the exact same kind of thing, because there is no space for civil unrest, it is another arm of an oppressive system that just kind of goes “well, that’s too bad.”
What was it like to grapple with an inspiration that is so unruly that critics can’t even decide what it is about.
I think I decided I wanted to pluck out the character study between Antony and Cleopatra first and foremost. People can’t even agree if it is a tragedy. Is it historical? There are so many aspects about it. Shakespeare is doing so much in the play. It’s not like Romeo and Juliet where the themes are blatant. I was fascinated by comparison essays I was reading about Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra. That led to an idea of meta type engagement as well, because I was reading an essay about how Antony and Cleopatra are essentially the adult versions of Romeo and Juliet but, as what happens when you reach adulthood, things suddenly become so much more complicated, right? Not that children’s lives aren’t complicated, but in a way, your coming of age is very much funneled down into one simple sort of self-discovery type goal. Whereas you reach adulthood and it’s suddenly about nation, it’s about interpersonal relationships, it’s about everyone around you. So, it was the characters of the play that fascinated me the most.
Not to say I don’t love the intertwining of history as well. Like I really love the rise of the Roman Empire, which is why there are kind of bits and pieces that find their way into the world building of Immortal Longings. Whenever I pitch it, it’s the 90s of Hong Kong meets the rise of the Roman Empire. People are like, “what does that look like?” Well, we’ll see! You know so history made its way in through those aspects, but as far as the inspiration of Antony and Cleopatra is concerned, it gravitates towards the interpersonal relationship between Antony and Cleopatra or how the other characters, it’s not in the play so much, but Octavia the wife he left behind and his relationship with Augustus and then Octavian and Cleopatra’s serving woman and all those little character interactions are my favorite parts of the play. When I wanted to adapt it, it was like “how do I make those little characters feel like the source material but plucked in a completely new environment?” to kind explore, like, what would they become if you completely merged that around.
Talk to me about your writing process. Are you the kind of writer who is like “okay, I’ve gone through the entire play, I’ve outlined exactly how it’s going to line up with my new plot and then I sit down.” Do you sit down and let the characters come to you?
A bit of both, I think. I’m a very chaotic writer, but I’m also very orderly. By that I mean, before I get into a first draft, I have everything very organized. My planning document for Immortal Longings is 20 pages long, because it’s the outline of the play, outline of my story, outline of every inspirational subtext that I’ve got going on, and then it’s basically the outline of everything I want to have happen in the further series. But then I’ll write the book, I’ll get everything into its base shape, and then I throw it all out. I need to do it first just to see what works and what doesn’t. Because when I visualize it as an outline, sure it works, it kind of makes sense to lay it all out, but the magic I love about writing is that sometimes things just work and sometimes they don’t. You don’t know what that will be until you do it. I don’t really discover what the story is trying to say until I’ve done it once, and I see that things are not corresponding as they need to. And I kind of rip it up and do a second draft. And that second draft tends to be what I’m trying to say, and then the further drafts I’ll clean it up, and so on and so forth. But I need that chaotic tearing a book apart stage most times, sometimes there’s a structured book, and I don’t tear it apart that much, but I find that’s rarer than not.
How much of that first draft do you actually end up keeping?
I tend to start fresh. I open a new document, but I’ll put the old one next to it. So, I will pull lines and paragraphs. Because the writing is still there. But I need the new document, so I don’t feel married to the old structure. Because I found that if I keep that old document in and edit within it, I will kind of wimp out sometimes and just let the things sit in their old structure. But if I open a new document, I can be like well these chapter orders don’t work at all. So, I’ll tear it apart and start again.
Your word-by-word writing is extraordinary, it’s lucious, it pulls you in. Is that something that comes through in the first draft and you know your voice immediately?
I do think my word by word tends to mostly come in the first draft. I think partially because I have been writing for so long now that it is a bit easier to get what I want to say out there into the sentence level form. When I was first setting out when I was much, much younger there was kind of a discrepancy between what I saw in my head and what eventually I put on the paper because I just wasn’t as practiced yet in describing the things that I saw in my head. But now that I’ve been doing it for so long, I think, the first go at it gets a bit close. There will be bits where there are just pieces missing, where I’m like “that doesn’t sound quite right but let me just put it down first.” So, when I do the second draft migration I tend to go back, I’ve got a fresh pair of eyes, because of the first draft. I’ll never go back and edit the first draft, I’ll either do it all again and I’ll go back. So, by the time it’s the second draft it’s probably been a few months since I’ve seen it and I can see what I was saying there now and I can kind of adjust the words slightly. But I would say that most of my wording, if I am keeping it, probably remains as is.
You mesh so many genres in this story, you have historical geo-politics to fantasy to monarchy systems to sci-fi. Did all of those ideas come together in outlining?
I’m a cross genre writer. Even with my young adult books I have always been doing that. So, with These Violent Delights I originally pitched that as just a historical and it was later on that I was talking to my agent and she was like “no, we can cross this as fantasy, you have a monster rampaging the city.” And I was like, “yeah, yeah, you’re right.” These Violent Delights is historical sci-fi, and then Foul Lady Fortune, even more so, is a historical sci-fi thriller, which, I found that when you throw too many genres at people, their eyes kind of glaze over. So, we were like “yes, this is YA fantasy” to kind of tidy things up. It is kind of the same with Immortal Longings. It is pitched as my kind of official adult fantasy debut, but there is so much about it that is, it feels different than what you expect when you say, “I’m picking up a fantasy novel.” I knew from the get-go that I wanted the world to feel like something 90s inspired, there was technology, but there is not technology that we recognize for our modern day. There is a magic system of sorts, but it’s not magic, it’s genetic. It’s something just that is part of their world. So fantasy is kind of just the little slot that it falls into because it has the sort of archetypes.
So much of your work is deeply tied to what makes someone them. How does identity exist in this world? And what was it like to explore identity when you can literally discard your body?
To me it was this investigation into how different people value their identity as it ties to personhood. It’s a reflection of our world where people don’t jump around, you just have one body, but I still think that sort of spectrum exists and is reflective of how people perceive themselves. Some people think of their mind as who they are, and they don’t care about outer perception. Other people are very very sensitive to external perception.
What do you think you would do if you could jump bodies?
I don’t know if I would. I might be a Calla. I might be somebody who is really stuck to myself. If I had to, would jump into any random man in the street, I just want to see what it was like.
Do you think you would choose a stranger over someone you knew?
If it’s someone I knew, I’d be controlling them, and that’s weird. A stranger, they never have to know.
How did the transition to adult feel for you as a writer, versus your preliminary work? Did it feel easier? Was it harder? Was it unexpected?
On a craft level, I wrote the book in my usual voice. So, I don’t think it was particularly harder than any of the other manuscripts that came before it. But on an emotional level, it was hard, because I had a lot of self-doubt. Because I switched to adult and since I was still writing it at 21, it gave me a huge, crippling sense of imposter syndrome. But I was just really, really going through on a personal level, like, am I enough of an adult? Do I know how to do my taxes? Which led to this new step in my career, where I was like “oh god, am I going to be able to do the adult genre?” So, I just had to do it; I just had to take the dive. I knew the story couldn’t be young adult, it just wouldn’t work, that kind of atmosphere is not something that feels like a teenager would care about it. I think it’s something very many adults care about more. So, I need my audience to be adult. Otherwise, it was a lot of fun getting that freedom to write for adults. I love writing for young adults, but there’s always a little box that I kind of refuse to step out of, because there are certain things that I don’t think are as interesting to teenagers. When you write for an adult sphere, and you can get a bit more morbid. The same way that growing up kind of unlocks a box for you to think of the world a different way. It was a lot of fun but also very scary.
Want to read what we thought of Immortal Longings? Check out Marizel Malan’s review.
*SPOILER ALERT* The following review contains plot details about Immortal Longings.
Once a year, the streets in the kingdom of Talin are bathed in blood and flashing lights as eighty-eight of its citizens fight for glory, riches, and a chance to appear before the king. While King Kasa lives lavishly, never leaving his castle, those living in the kingdom’s capital twin cities, San-Er, have to make do with the dismal conditions around them. For those outside the cities, life is not much better. And so, for many, the annual bloodbath is their only chance at a better life.
Chloe Gong’s makes her adult fantasy debut with Immortal Longings, in which we see the start of a love story inspired by Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra blooming in this everyone-for-themselves environment. The first book in a trilogy, Immortal Longings builds an incredible world in which readers squeeze among clustered buildings, run from opponents, and jump from body to body alongside the characters. Gong’s Antony takes the form of exiled aristocrat Anton Makusa, who strikes up a contentious yet compelling relationship with treacherous princess Calla Tuoleimi, herself an evocation of the Ancient Egyptian queen. Though worlds apart in motivation, the two must come together and do all they can to ensure their own survival, a goal further complicated by the presence of Calla’s cousin, August Shenzi. While neither Anton nor Calla truly trust August—or one another—the three of them form a tentative alliance. Their victory is dependent on their fighting skills and the power of their qi, which allows their consciousness to jump from their own body to another’s, roaming around with a different face while keeping their mind as their own. As one might expect, it’s not long before their team falls apart.
What I admired so much about the Immortal Longings universe, and the interactions between these three characters, was how the author created a narrative in which the readers could easily insert themselves. Chloe Gong describes each environment so well it felt as though I was sitting next to the characters: jumping with Anton between bodies, scheming to overthrow the King alongside August, and trying to keep my identity a secret just as much as Calla. I could clearly imagine the bustling market stalls, the close-pressed apartment buildings, the overcrowded, clinical yet uncaring atmosphere of the hospital Anton visits, and Calla’s sparse apartment that serves as a reminder she is still on the run. As the omniscient narrator shifts their focus from one character to another, Gong highlights that even the best-laid plans can fall apart when you encounter something that matters to you as much, if not more, than your initial cause.
Alongside this, the novel also beautifully focuses on the disconnect people can often feel with their own bodies. In Talin, jumping from one body to another is not uncommon; even though the practice is technically illegal, those with a powerful qi will always take advantage of its possibilities. Some, like Anton, abandon their birth bodies forever, while others never jump, like Calla, even though she does not feel like herself in the body she’s inhabited her entire life. As readers learn more about the process of jumping, the power one needs to either possess or lack, and how easy it is to be invaded, we see how physical bodies are meaningless to some and vital to others, and how a spiritual body can hold far more value. The novel demonstrates that a birth body can be just as foreign as a stranger’s body, and that many people prefer to choose the body they live in rather than keep what they were assigned. Calla herself thinks about people who were born in bodies of a sex or gender that is not truly their own. The act of jumping can relieve them of the pain—both emotional and physical—they experience in their birth bodies. Though brief, Calla’s thoughts remind us how many people in the world outside the book are stuck in bodies that do not truly feel like their own.
Though I was slightly disappointed that Calla was willing to compromise what she fought for in order to keep Anton in her life, I admired how determined she was to stay true to her herself while allowing her guilt and isolation to recede enough for love to become an option. Calla truly falls in love with Anton but knows that if she doesn’t kill the King, nothing will change. While their love distracts her from her task a bit, she remains steadfast in her belief that she is the only one who can truly bring change to the twin cities. And even as we root for her and Anton’s love story to end in anything but blood and flames, Chloe Gong has made us long for a better life for the citizens of Talin, the same life many long for in the real world too.
With elements of historical fiction, an incredibly strong and independent female main character, and supernatural abilities linked to the origin of the universe, this is the perfect read for those who adore their fantasy and historical fiction told from the perspective of the underdogs. While the romantic relationship takes a backseat in this story—even if it does influence Calla’s choices somewhat—I found it incredible how the novel focused on the strength of individuals, their reliance on their identity and physical body, and the difference an unexpected friendship can make. There is no doubt that I will be gifting myself multiple copies of this book, recommending it to anyone who will listen, and anxiously awaiting the second and third books while re-reading the first. In my opinion, Chloe Gong has achieved something often missing when writing a series: the creation of a world and characters so awe inspiring, you never want to leave the pages.
For more on Chloe Gong’s work, read Dani Hedlund’s interview with the author.