Dog’s Rothko by Sara Grace

And the sun and the sun and the sun! And the wet grass, wet on the nose, scent of dew and worm and no yes no yes, another! Meat, meat in the bread, fire on the meat. Somewhere in…
And the sun and the sun and the sun! And the wet grass, wet on the nose, scent of dew and worm and no yes no yes, another! Meat, meat in the bread, fire on the meat. Somewhere in…
My mother never ripened. When she was young, they bit into her and stopped the natural ripening process. After they’d spit her out, she stayed green until she began to rot. At the end of her life she was…
Peterborough, New Hampshire We get lost and it’s my fault. I think I know a shortcut. Mary knows only the long way around. I have an appointment for a man to look into my mouth and tell me my…
“The fuck you take your gloves off again?” you growled, never letting up, the oldest. Brother trip, our third in two years, anywhere there’d be northern lights. We hiked out of the frozen Alaskan woods—the black-dark, wraith rider intimidation…
Zones of your brain affected: frontal, temporal, parietal. The doctor points at them in turn on the scan of your brain. Those traitorous parts, shrivelling out of existence, threatening to take pieces of you with them. I look from…
Is your mom a mail-order bride? I was once asked by a classmate in fourth grade while we sat at our desks making fake nails out of Elmer’s glue squeezed into the hollow of our plastic rulers. No, of…
She says go like this and bares her teeth at me, lips pulled back. All the other girls lean in to see inside my mouth, too close. I smell the leather of their shoes, but I don’t flinch. Jagged,…
Snap Not when your mother makes you go to the dance. You tell her you’re sick. Really sick this time. See? You’ve broken out in hives. Not when she slathers you in calamine lotion & stuffs you into tights…
When Ford made love to Calla, she felt something in him fight. It wasn’t against her ugliness. That matter was settled business, though Calla, in her youth, had held onto the idea that she was a winter-apple sort of…
Dau used to live in the apartment below me. He had skin so dry it fell like leaves on a windy day, so much he pixelated his floor with tiny fog-colored flakes, each thin and flappy as a plastic…
When I revisited “A Line of Wings” to write this essay, the first thought that came to mind was that it was, ultimately, a story about storytelling. I grew up with the stories my mother told me about Vietnam, and my birth city of Saigon, now formally called Ho Chi Minh City. I learned about storytelling directly from her—about its inconsistencies, tangents, interruptions. Despite being digressive and fragmented, her stories were always rich with language and images, full of talking animals and folklore and histories that seemed more believable to me than anything I grew up reading about Vietnam. She never spoke of the war, or not the kind that exists in history books, but each and every story contained something of a catastrophe. And so I drafted this piece as if I was listening to my mother and someone was listening to me, structuring it like oral memory.
I returned to Saigon last fall to study its war-era apartment buildings, and I’m still there. Some of the research made it into “A Line of Wings,” but mostly as setting, minor details. Situated in a city known for its never-ending development, I started telling Dau’s story as part of another piece about a Vietnamese ghost family that was animating yet aging an apartment block, cracking and eroding it to the point of being earmarked for demolition. Outside my apartment windows, I can see high-rises and cranes spearing the sky, each surrounded by shophouses, marketplaces, and religious buildings that have been around for decades, some for more than a century. I can see homes that have been preserved by generations of family, saturated in generations of memory. Each year, more and more edifices are bulldozed into oblivion. And I struggled to keep Dau inside that story when it seemed more than the past was at stake, to write as though the lost or the dead were the source of hurt or harm. So I dug Dau out, and gave him his own story.
“Dau” or Đâu in Vietnamese, depending on context, can mean either “where” or “hurt.” These two meanings kept collapsing on each other on my walks around Saigon, where I saw countless empty lots and rubble where there might have once been a family home or shelter—or that’s what I want to believe. That something had existed there, that it mattered. And it was reaching for us. I wanted to foreground a character who was disappearing but unable to disappear, who came from annihilated and annihilating histories, who left parts of themselves that may or may never be found. A character who straddled the boundary between here and not-here—like war, like grief. Since arriving in Saigon, I’ve been sitting on the idea that grief comes from realizing that we live with what is no longer “there,” grief that is as much our own as it is our ancestors’. So I began to talk about Dau. Perhaps writing about him was a kind of reaching back.
UYEN PHUONG DANG is a Vietnamese-American writer born in Saigon, Vietnam. Her short fictions have appeared and are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, X-R-A-Y, Passages North, and elsewhere. She is currently back in Saigon, researching Vietnamese gods and ghosts. Follow her on Instagram @ueyndang_ and Twitter @_uyendang.