The Corpse of America Is Buried in Upstate New York
The house across the street is holding a garage sale, and I open the front door so my cat can people-watch through the screen while I wash the dishes, while the sun weeps through the kitchen window and reveals my skin to be all pinks and blues. The evangelicals say the apocalypse is today. So I cut my mother’s bangs when she asks me to, because her hair stylist is too afraid. And I go to the pharmacy to get my flu shot, but my insurance won’t cover it. And I forget to eat lunch while my mother remembers to fill her shrines with fruit. One day, maybe they’ll go hungry, too. The world is ending and there’s a beaver in the Hannaford parking lot and a spider shell on the window pane and my mother, gutting an orange, filling the peel with cooking oil, and lighting it on fire. Outside, the garage sale goes up in flames and smells like cigarettes, and I remember my grandfather. The neighbor’s son hops a burning fence to save a blue jay. His father is gentle with both of them, just this once. He saves them both. Just this once. Then he scorches his son with “How long do you need me to hold your fucking hand?” and his son hops a fence again, searching for another blue jay. His father stands leaning over the railing of their back porch, merging with charred earth and orange sky, and wonders why he didn’t hop the fence with him. Then the son is gone and the father is gone and the earth and sky are gone and do you notice how night never looks as dark as it should anymore? How the rain hits the roof in a different rhythm than it did before? It’s past midnight and the neighborhood is still smoking but I’m still standing at the kitchen sink, the water running so I forget how the rain doesn’t sound anymore, how it’s supposed to sound, the lights off so I remember how I’m just shades of pink and blue. Do I not have plum skin? Does it not bruise easily? Yes, I do, and yes, it does. So today, as the last fruit in the country, I feed myself to Quan Âm at my mother’s altar. Knife aimed at the stone, I beg my mother, “I don’t want to have to be a daughter.” She ripens. “You don’t have to be a daughter.”
Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin (they/them) is a queer and trans, biracial, Vietnamese unamerican diaspora writer based in Boston, MA. Their work revolves around the intersection of dreaming/fantasizing/futurizing and grieving, and focuses on topics of care, diaspora, transness, ecology, empire, and intergenerational histories. The Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Xenolithic Edges Literary, Kyla-Yến’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions, and appears in The Offing, fifth wheel press, DISCOUNT GUILLOTINE, and other publications. You can visit Kyla-Yến’s author page at kylayenhuynhgiffin.com, and find them on Instagram @yenshrine.