Guttural by Michelle Zhu
Managing Editor Zoa Coudret on this week’s bonus piece: I love a story untethered by time and place. This checks both of those boxes without losing connection to the visceral experiences at its core. Michelle Zhu’s smooth, biting prose is unforgettable.
Guttural
You have a reoccurring dream of a decrepit old woman, knotted and aged, hunched over her great desk in a study lined with shelves. She no doubt has a terrible face. The eye of your dream creeps closer and closer to her back, until you know her face is about to fill your whole vision. She has something to tell you. You are a child, and you fight to wake yourself up before this ever happens. Your eyes land on your bookshelf lit by a nightlight in your bedroom.
Déjà vu happens much more frequently when you’re young, so you startle a little at the memory when you are a young adult, squeezing your legs around his body in your childhood bed. You don’t know what has brought you back. You remember the secret face as you edge towards orgasm, but it is lost, and you frown into the sweaty mattress sheet. At night your boyfriend is beside you and you want him to touch you while he thinks you are asleep. You remain wet.
You are in your grandparents’ apartment overseas when you lay beside your mother in the hot humid room atop a bamboo mat. The ceiling fan spins silently. You covet your mother’s breasts, want to know what full round breasts will look like once your flat chest swells. What is their shape that forms the outline against her sleeping shirt? Under the covers you try to peer underneath.
Your sister has fallen asleep while the television was on, and you run her heavy limp hand over your chest, trying to see what it will feel like to be touched by someone else. Nothing rises in your body. Nothing, still, when you make an appointment with yourself at night in your bed to try masturbating to a pop song about sex. You are impossible to penetrate.
In the deep recesses of your grandparents’ lacquer hutch, you find medicine. Your parents have brought these over from the United States in cheap abundance. Bottles, vials, capsules, syringes, blood monitors. The chalky tablets that your mother split the night before you flew over. You pull boxes out, looking for something alchemical, something that you will know by smell.
In Love in the Time of Cholera Florentino and Fermina finally make love a lifetime after they first meet, when their skin is drooping with a sour odor and they are no longer proud. You have hope there is still a consummation waiting for you, even after you become pregnant.
There is a cricket on the shelf, a short-lived pet that your family bought while out at the market. You fear it, its alien face and droppings, and you distance yourself, goad yourself, by twisting the string its cage hangs on and letting it spin out around and around in a blur. Fear into spectacle. The next day it has disappeared, been disposed of.
You never knew what it would be like to give birth before you do, and it’s not like anything you’ve ever seen. You let out a guttural noise when your child comes out. In the loose days after, it slowly dawns on you that something has left you that you never realized you could lose.
You rummage through the heavy shelves in the wood paneled sitting room of your parent’s house. There are books and books, medical volumes and manuals. Other kinds of manuals: history books, biographies, novels. You are looking for your father’s hardbound dissertation from his doctorate, where you find, in the acknowledgments, a line written for your mother and yourself, a baby just born.
Birth, sex, that damp smell. After your first child, your mind never turns to sex. Instead, you think of your mother aging, the draining of light. You distract yourself with your child’s quickly plumping and lengthening body as you store up food, clothes, toys, and soon, books, and haul her along to your parents’ home.
The smell of wood and resin, of shelving, is always there. You find your mother slumped over her desk, her head pressed on a writing notebook, but the pages are empty, she has written nothing.
What’s that screaming? Your daughter is asleep.
It comes from your mouth.
Michelle is a child of Chinese immigrants. Her work appears in Longleaf Review and was a finalist in Salt Hill Journal’s 2022 Arthur Flowers Flash Fiction Prize. She lives in western Massachusetts and is at work on her first collection of stories. Find her on Instagram @michzhu.
If you would like to tip the author, you may do so via Venmo: @michellezhu
