Filial Filet

By J. Y. Zhang

You open the patio door for the first time in years and you see it:
Girlthing 3000, new and shiny, the model for families in grieving,
customizable down to the mole and follicle.
Girlthing 3000, in plaid and pigtails, wearing your old family vacation pullover,
turning its head to you when you call it your dead name— 

One summer, years ago, your father taught you how to gut a fish.
He took a quick knife to its soft pink belly, and made red rivers down its skin.
Crimson spilled from crippled gills; thick globs dribbled from blubber lips.
The mouth opened and closed as its body spasmed in the sink.
He told you, the fish is dead, stop crying, the fish is dead
but you wouldn't believe him.

It sits on the chair that was your once-chair.
Girlthing 3000 IDs you as itself, calls you by that name.
Girl-thing, daughter-thing, dead-thing in the dead-house.

​In the sink, the fish-body twitched

​and twitched.

When it speaks, its voice is your once-voice
that bright pre-testosterone lilt— 

What was it that dad said?
Muscle contractions; dead neurons firing; a simulacrum of life.
But it’s dead and gone—dead and gone.

When it looks at you, its eyes are still your eyes— 

He knew what he had to do to convince you:
once more he drove the paring knife into the fish scalp,
asked you to look into its pale, dead eyes.

Still your father’s child,
you take the butcher’s knife out of the kitchen drawer.
You look your former-self in the eye and raise your hands— 
 
It is easy to bring down the knife—easy to kill what is already dead.

---

Sunset Years

By J. Y. Zhang

The fat grasshopper
               hop
                              hop
                                             hopping against a cling wrap ceiling.
 
姥爷 (grandfather) catches one more, stretches plastic film over the tin,
stands the second can next to the first and says
      来 (Come)
            孙女 (dearest child)
                  来看看 (come and see), there are two of them now.
 
Young eyes to old hands. I whisper: 他的爱人 ？(is that his lover?)
 
He laughs a bellyful, cigarette smoke wisping up from his yellow teeth,
the summer night black but for his embers, and a dim halo of light.
 
是啊,  他的爱人。(Yes, his lover.)
真会说。(Aren’t you clever with words?)
 
When I was six, 姥爷 walked the wide fields of our backyard
plucking away at wild grass to find me the perfect grasshopper,
his cigarette a firefly in the fields, 姥姥 (grandmother) scolding him
as he washed out the dirt beneath his nails with a smile.
 
When I was twelve, he spread sunflower seeds across our deck, called 盈盈 (me)
to no answer as the squirrels scurried past each afternoon,
still turning his head, as though i would come,
still laying down new seeds each morning
when i was too busy to spare a moment.
 
I am twenty-one, and it’s been years since my grandfather’s been hale.
I am twenty-one, and home for the summer.
 
The 英语 (years) between us make it difficult.
 
After sundown, our yard is a field of black.
I ask him if he would like to go search for grasshoppers again.
姥爷 (g̶r̶a̶n̶d̶father) laughs a little and says
                                  等姥爷身体好点儿再说 (When the weather is better.）

---

And Again

By J. Y. Zhang

Because you can still open the window
               and smell the damp earth after rain.
Because you can still lay down your head
               and watch the ghost in the curtains.
 
The heart may be an old rag,
But the night carries on:
a bright chill, a harvest moon
              and you.
 
So wring out the worn fabric.
Set it out to dry.
 
In the morning it will still be that rag;
dirty and damp and blunt in the hands.
 
Still—walk onto the yellow grass
                                                                 of a yard possessed by light
and begin the day again.

---

Staying Behind

By J. Y. Zhang

In the village where the sun never sets,
our children slaughter our animals, name by name.
The water we drink is foul—by sixteen we have all grown blind.
 
In the morning we change the bandages
on the children’s sun-flayed skin
but leave ours untouched.
 
At night, when the solar flares quiet,
we ask them to take our weathered hands
and guide us to the cornfield again.
 
They will point to the ash-hazed sky,
searching as we once did.
 
They will ask us to tell them about the starship,
curious as we once were
 
We tell them our mothers’ stories:
how we tore skyscrapers apart for the hull,
how cold it was, the night half of us
left for the stars.
 
And though we do not know
how many years have passed,
we will take their hands and
promise them:
 
one day they will return for us.

---

​J. Y. Zhang codes by day, writes by night, and doom-scrolls Reddit in the hours between. Their fiction has previously appeared in Heartlines Spec. They grew up by the Detroit River, among grasshoppers.