INHERITANCE — K-MING CHANG
/All my life, my grandmother was cuffed by light. Around her wrist was a jade bangle the color of smoke. She smoked three cigarettes a day, a substitute for every meal, and told me it sapped the hurt from her head. When she lifted her hands to speak, the jade turned varicose-veined, bulging with blood-rope, and under direct sunlight, the stone went soft as steak fat. When I touched the bangle with my pinky, it was the same temperature as my grandmother’s forehead, perpetually feverish: this was because, according to my mother, there was infected shrapnel enshrined in the fat of her left calf. My grandmother never showed me her legs, even when I begged. She told me she had radish calves, the kind that are newly uprooted from the soil and boiled bitterless. If you saw my legs, she said, you'd eat them from me. I didn't learn what shrapnel was until years later when I was watching a movie at school about World War II. In the movie, a soldier's head explodes, and I later learned that the director blew up watermelons for reference. A watermelon has about the same density and water content as the average human head, the director said. When I told this to my grandmother, she laughed and said it was true, that when I was asleep she'd cleave my head into wedges of sweet, seedless dreams. When she laughed, her teeth rattled in her mouth like dice. She spat them into my palm, and they always landed on light. She always told me that when she died, we couldn't let anyone steal the bangle off her wrist. She said it was Grade A jade, flawless and certificated, and that she had to be buried with it. There were some people, she claimed, who would sever her hand to get it. When she died, the bracelet had to be removed for cremation. They gave us the shattered pieces in a plastic baggie, and my mother said the bangle could no longer be sold, except as pebbles and salt, because all beautiful things lose their worth when they break. In front of the cremation tray, my mother and I stand three feet apart, the way we always do for photos—my grandmother used to stand between us, spinning her wrist so that the bangle would catch the flash and redirect it, our faces overexposed into bone. With long chopsticks, we pluck the leftover pieces of bone off the tray. Among the ash are nickeled bits, dull-skinned beneath fluorescent lighting. The shrapnel, my mother says. The things her skin never said to me. My mother says it’s ironic, that what survives is what she wanted to hide. I hold the throbbing silver between my chopsticks and lift it to my mouth, swallow. Inside my belly, the shrapnel nestles like a seed, grows me into a tree of clean meat.
K-Ming Chang / 张欣明 is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Her debut novel Bestiary (One World/Random House, 2020) was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. More of her work can be found at kmingchang.com.
