By Annie Trinh
Featured Art: “Vessel” by Byron Armacost
This is you: a thirty-year-old mother who had a miscarriage, a wife whose husband left her, a daughter who steps into a medicine shop and looks at the walls of herbs. You press your fingers against glass jars, hoping to find a solution for a successful birth. A bag of maca. A bundle of chasteberries. A box of cinnamon. You take these medicines to the owner, asking if these plants will help with fertility or make your body strong enough to handle carrying a child. And this is your savior: a Vietnamese woman in her seventies who has wrinkles around her eyes and tells stories of her survival through the Indochina and Vietnam Wars. A mother who understands the importance of obtaining children. A sister who sees your pain as you push the herbs in her direction, wondering how much you need. Your savior tells you that you don’t need these herbs—they won’t help, and she goes into the back room and then comes out with a wooden box. Your savior opens it up and snuggled within the purple cloth are twelve large eggs. Brown and spotted with freckles. You place an egg into your palm, cradling it as if it is ready to sleep. Soft heartbeats thump against your fingers.
Eat these duck fetuses, your savior says, and it will help you get what you want.
You show the eggs to your mother: a young girl who escaped the Vietnam War and traveled by boat. A daughter who, before she left, saw a fog of orange dust raining down on her country. A mom who had too many miscarriages and has jars and jars of her unborn children. Jar #1 born in 1964, shaped like a fish with buldging eyes. Jar #2 born in 1966, a container of blood. Jar #3 born in 1968, a fetus with a body, but no head. You are child #4, a miracle—this is what she calls you as she places the egg beside your cold milk. And this is your medicine: every lunch, you watch as your mother boils the egg, the water’s hot bubbles burning the animal inside. You take the end of your spoon, crack it open, and then peel the layers off. Inside, the head is cooked beside the yolk, eyes closed, beak opened, and you add condiments. A pinch of salt. A dash of pepper. A couple drops of lemon. And you eat the fetus. The sourness. The bitterness. The hint of spiciness. You crunch. You bite. You pull out a small bone, its feather follicles still intact. You place it beside your dish, swirling the eggshell, mixing the broth while the birds sing outside. You drink it, letting the savory flavors simmer into your veins, overtaking your body.
Your current obsession is fetuses: a stillborn calf for zinc, an unborn piglet for protein, a fresh kid from the farm for iron. You buy all the baby animals and dig your fork into the medium-rare meat as the pink fluid leaks. You eat them three times a day along with medicine. Every time you’ve finished, your body yearns for more. It feels different: it becomes stronger. Your skin tightens, younger, and you can see your hair follicles—they thicken and darken, like a crow’s feather. Your menstrual period finally comes for the first time in three months. You lie on the bed, holding your stomach as you try to stand the pain. And sometimes, birds surround you as you walk outside. Quail. Ravens. Cardinals. They look at you as they spread their wings. Sometimes you wish you were free and could fly like them. And this is your hope. Maybe you’ll have children this time. One girl and one boy, possibly twins. Maybe you will be able to protect the family line and be free from this pressure. No more deaths. No more contaminated children. No more fears from your family or their eyes cast down at you, shaking your body, questioning the heavens and how Americans destroy, use herbicides on their land—and you know that it’s not your family’s fault for caring, but you sat on the bathroom floor, crying while your husband wrapped his arms around your body before he left.
You grabbed his wrist, asking him to stay.
I’m sorry. He shook off your hand. I can’t take it anymore. I’m sorry.
Today is your last day. A plate of stir-fried beef. A bowl of rice. A dish of sweet and sour soup. A scoop of tofu mixed with sugarcane for dessert. And your egg: you, gulping down the fetus and devouring the body whole. Your mother is excited. She says she can see the difference compared to two weeks ago. She says you look healthy. Body is thicker. And you look strong. Strong enough this time to carry a baby. And your mother is right—maybe for once the child can survive—and you can feel like you’ve done your job for this family and finally be free from her demands. Then your mother gives you the phone, tells you to call your husband to let him know the problem is solved.
You remain quiet, flinging the eggshells.
You have started to wonder if this will work or what happens if this pregnancy fails again.
But your mother kneels down to you, grabs your face, and you look at her—hair in a messy bun while her dark circles stain under her eyes. She tells you that it needs to work. That things will get better. That your husband will come back, and your father and mother won’t have to worry. That you will be free from your family’s eyes, they’ll stop asking, stop begging.
Please have a child, she says. Remember, without you this family won’t exist.
Now this is you. A swelling body. A glowing complexion. A child finally in your stomach that will pass on the language, the culture, the family blood. But you grit your teeth while glancing at the bathroom mirror, listening to the muffled voices from the living room. Your face scrunches, your fingernails dig into the tiles, and a sharp pain runs through your back. You know this pain too well. You’ve experienced this so many times before. And you hold your stomach as blood drips down your leg. Below you a tiny crow sobs between your feet, flapping its wings to dry the feathers from the plasma. You grab a towel, picking it up and removing all the blood from its body. The bird flutters its feathers as it cries—its beak poking at your skin, claws digging. You tell it to be quiet, shushing while opening the window. But your mother comes in. Her eyes widen at the blood. She grabs your shoulders, asking if you took the medicine correctly. Then collapses and says that this family’s body is broken. It can’t work anymore. Your mom hugs her legs in a fetal position as she hides her face. And you tell her it’s not your fault. But all she does is stare at the crow, biting her lips as she keeps repeating the words, it needs to work, it needs to work.
She buries her eyes into your shoulder as you wrap your arms around her and try to find the words. You want to tell her many things: that you’re tired of this and it won’t work, that the chemical will be forever in your body, in the bodies of future generations, if those generations even come into existence. But you don’t tell her that. Instead, her cheeks taste like salt when you kiss her, and you say that you will try again. Your mother takes in deep breaths, whimpering while you watch the crow flap its already dried wings and jump through the windowpane, disappearing. And this is what you imagine: a daughter whose wings spread, a woman becoming light, a mother’s claws curling as she soars, the wind telling it to come back home, come back to the forest. You fly with the birds, and you keep gliding, gliding as the breeze rustles against your feathers until your body melts with the sky, above the toxic orange cumulus clouds, and over the snow-topped mountains, toward the horizon.
Annie Trinh is an MFA fiction candidate at the University of Kansas. A VONA and Kundiman fellow, she has been published in the Joyland, Passages North, Oyster River Pages, and elsewhere.
Originally appeared in NOR 29.
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