Because Jenny only hired Taiwanese girls, I lied about my father, my mainland surname. I said I’d taken the name Zhang to blend in and she believed me. Don’t ever think you have to be like those dogs, she told me, though she loved dogs and owned two mutts both named Daughter. She opened the store every day with Daughter and Daughter lapping at her radish-calves, foaming pink all over her feet. We tossed boxes and Styrofoam peanuts to the dogs, tasking their teeth with cardboard feasts. Jenny’s Dollar Store sold most things legally, like thumb-sized flashlights and box macaroni and house slippers (cotton) and outdoor slippers (plastic) and rattan furniture and lighters, but she also sold New Year’s firecrackers shipped from her nephew in Miaoli, hidden in a suitcase half-full of Styrofoam-stuffed pineapple cakes. In the spring, she sold Daughter’s yearly litters, puppies the size of my fist with eyes slicked shut and no teeth yet and blood-mucus purpling their fur. Jenny kept the litter in a laundry basket so cramped that a couple of the puppies suffocated to death beneath a squirming quilt of siblings.
What should I do with them, I said about the two dead puppies. Jenny looked at me from the canned food aisle, her full-face visor always lowered over her face in the afternoon, even though the windows of the store were too dusty to breathe light and I wasn’t allowed to wipe them with anything but wads of newspaper. Throw them in the dumpster, she said, so I knotted each of them into a separate plastic bag – it seemed disrespectful to bag them together – and swung them into the dumpster we shared with the Shanghainese restaurant next door. The only thing mainlanders want is money, Jenny said about the restaurant, though I once saw her steal empty cans of wanglaoji out of their side of the dumpster to trade for quarters at the recycling center.
Jenny had worked this strip mall since I was little kid, and I used to watch her smoke while squatting on the sidewalk, her visor trapping the smoke and corralling it close to her face, blurring her away. Back then, Jenny was a teenager and there was a laundry next door where my Abu folded clothes until late, tucking in the sleeves, surrendering the waist. I would sit on top of the washing machine as it bounced my bones and marvel at how Abu could fold a dress so delicately that when you unfurled it, there wasn’t a single crease in it, no sign that it had once been any shape but standing.
I don’t know how this bitch keeps getting pregnant, Jenny said, pointing at the dog with two blonde spots on its ass. When she left the store for her sidewalk smoke break, I flipped Daughter and Daughter onto their backs and saw that only one of the Daughters was a bitch. The Daughter that was a boy stood up and licked my wrist, his tongue thin as a whip. One of his ears was torn and I touched it with my thumb, the serrated edge of the wound, the curdled veins. He shied and spat, swinging a rope of spit at me, barking once, and Jenny stuck her head back into the store to say I shouldn’t touch her daughters. With her visor down, I couldn’t see her face, only the smoke bruising her shield of dim plastic, fogging her features. She was joking, but I wondered if she’d heard about me, the dyke, the damned, the one who was once caught naked in a creek bed, a girl on my breath.
Read the rest in SING THE TRUTH: THE KWELI JOURNAL SHORT STORY COLLECTION
Contributor Notes
K-Ming Chang / 張欣明 is a Kundiman fellow and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her debut novel BESTIARY is forthcoming from One World / Random House on September 29, 2020. Her poems have been anthologized in Ink Knows No Borders, Best New Poets 2018, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, and the 2019 Pushcart Prize Anthology. More of her work is located at kmingchang.com.
