Mingwei Yeoh
I started hating the word wait when Lou Gramm started singing it nonstop, his honey tenor fried to scraps by the radio. After that it was my mother who said it, right before she shuffled to the dumpsters behind the Kmart, emerging ten years older, plastic baggy clasped between our palms until we fused. Then it was the church boy I tried to kiss, though I’d pinched my eyes tight like a virgin, like Big Sister had told me to do if I ever wanted to kiss a church boy. They will act holy, but this is really just their way of knotting you around their dick, tight like a string, until you can never leave.
I said, I’m no string, I won’t get tied, but Big Sister said, We all slip out as strings. That’s what the umbilical cord is, our body as a Chinese sausage, before we grow into our bones.
I said, What if I was scooped out, like the flesh of a watermelon? I had bigger-than-normal fists, and that’s how I knew I’d pounded myself out of there, rising from my mother’s stomach on my own two legs. Big Sister bit down on my meaty knuckles until I yelped. She said, Dumbass, watermelon is red too.
Lou Gramm sang of a girl who would make him feel alive again. In his world, he had already found her, belting out his joy like passionfruit, the sweet so strong it turned to a throat-ripping tang. On hot nights I lay in bed thinking about his supernova woman and pictured her kissing life into my lungs the same way, inflating my organs like bellows, until I grew even bigger than 3rd Uncle’s beer belly.
Whenever our mother and four uncles left the house hollowed out, left us bathing in blue light and wax-melt alfredo from a pouch, Big Sister liked to talk about virgins. She compared them to mice. They’re all kind of squinty-eyed. They can’t see well. That’s why they’re the most popular with boys.
I asked her how virgins could stay so popular when the boys polluted them as soon as they got their hands on one. She said, That’s because being a virgin takes work. Like a job or a dream—like uncles slinging tires and mothers in Kmart backrooms. After it happened, she explained, the girls who committed to staying virgins locked themselves in the bathroom and reached way up inside themselves, anchoring their uteruses like balloons. Then they used nail clippers or razor blades or their own fingers to slash and dice themselves, weakening the muscle so it wept nonstop. Real virgins never stop bleeding, Big Sister said. That’s how you reversed the process, how you juiced your bones and skinnied into sausage.
I asked her why she didn’t choose virginity for a career path and she said it was because of her anemia. But it didn’t matter anyway. It’s in our biology to be pigeons, hounding them for seeds. Visit the park any day of the week.
Big Sister emptied the trash cans at the Chinatown park on Mondays through Saturdays. Sometimes I left school early to stand by the playground and watch her scrape and peck the dirt, using the nose that was our mother’s only pride, the one she’d pinched until Big Sister wailed, forcing a talon out of baby clay. At the park, I watched Big Sister rummage gravel and nudge her face in the sugar-dust of shit.
Tonight, she looked a little colder, her skin a little yellower. Before she took another bite of pasta, I asked if there was an opposite procedure to the virgin one, a way to suck all the blood back inside you until your moisture was the size of a marble, and the rest of you breathed dry as the air. You know what I mean? To simultaneously kiss every boy and touch none of them, sliding between their eyelashes and across their pores, thin as a whistle.
I thought she might sink her teeth into my thigh or my cheek, eat me up completely. But this time she took my wrist and held it up to the crackled light from the TV. She squinted as though the desert-dead geometry of my skin were prism glass, fracturing the rays into sand. Then she said, You could never be a virgin. Your hands are too big to fit up there. She dropped me and poked her alfredo like clot-jelly. What she meant was I don’t know. What she meant was I was a dog, I was Lou Gramm sucking on enlightenment like hard candy, mincing my voice from throat to gut. I hugged her until we both peeled into the syrup of nighttime, breaking this bird-bone house on our ankles.
Mingwei Yeoh is a writer from Minnesota and a student at Harvard College. She is a 2024 YoungArts Winner with Distinction, a 2024 U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts, and an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. She was shortlisted for the 2024 Fractured Literary Micro Prize, and her other work has been featured/is forthcoming in Monkeybicycle, Gone Lawn, and Bending Genres.