Cracked
Everything I touch ends up dead: the succulent that required only a bit of water dried up by the window sill, the dog I had for two whole months bit a squirrel and had to be put down for rabies, the data pipelining project I recently joined was deemed an unnecessary expense and canceled. This is why I tell my cat and dog-owning friends I can’t have pets, why I tell my parents that planting a vegetable garden won’t engage me with the zen of nature (unless that zen includes death). I tell them there is not enough room in the apartment: where a TV is supposed to go are two work desks and the tangle of wires and power chords underneath them, all in a room doubling as the kitchen – my husband and I eat our meals at our desks too, typing, slurping, hunching our necks forward, and there is no room for a pot of soil or litter box.
My parents send me dried bird’s nests, produced from a swallow’s solidified saliva. I am supposed to boil them until the white gelatinous strands soften and drink it as soup. They say it will help the baby’s appetite and digestion, it will keep my skin and the baby’s skin clear – like the smooth white bathtub I scrubbed down with bleach after watching blood trickle down my leg and flow into the drain, supposedly a common occurrence when the fertilized egg attaches to the lining of the uterus, just one more blood sacrifice my body demands only to expel. My parents advocate for watermelon too. My mom claims that’s what she ate to ensure I had good skin. Good skin is important, I realize, and if my child has bad skin, it is my fault.
Provided we both stay alive, of course. My husband, Li Jun, or John, his English name that I use because more than I dislike being wrong, I dislike when he points out I am wrong whenever I butcher his native name with my deteriorated Chinese that I stopped learning in eighth grade, flinches whenever I hold the tip of the knife on the cutting board and pump the knife handle up and down too quickly – because, from his position where he sits on a squeaky office chair, it looks like I’m cutting my fingers off. It has gotten worse, now that I am pregnant. I can see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows when I crack through a salmon steak’s bones with the butcher’s knife.
I think he’s afraid I’ll run out of blood.
I am always thinking about death these days. On our weekly trip to Costco, I pick up a three-pound container of cherries and consider them fruit stripped of their tree-bearing opportunity. I walk up and down the poultry aisle, between organic and conventional frozen chicken tenderloins, wondering if eating the chicken that lived a theoretically happier life would make its death more meaningful. John picks up a gallon of milk because he thinks it’s easier for me to drink my protein, even though we are both lactose intolerant, even though I hate the taste of milk, of freeloading off another mother to nourish a life I can’t one-hundred percent guarantee.
We park the car and load the groceries into our reusable shopping bags and cardboard boxes. The watermelon takes up one entire bag. I insist on carrying it. It’s just one thing, I tell John. And there are straps I can hook over my shoulder so it’s not like I need much arm strength.
I waddle with the twenty-some pound watermelon pulling down on my right shoulder, my feet shuffling to the right in a diagonal before I straighten up my direction again, a sawtooth trajectory. We climb the single flight of stairs to our apartment floor. John reaches the door first and holds it open. I smell the goji berries and sesame oil from the unwashed dishes in the kitchen. Maybe it’s the scent that throws me off balance, or the sunlight blinding my right eye for the split second I lift one foot to take another step, and instead of moving forward, my body tilts back and the bag with the watermelon follows, a cataclysmic shifting of my center of balance until we fall together.
I let go of the watermelon and catch myself with my hands and legs before I can scrape my body across all of the stairs and greet the ground. The watermelon tumbles out of the bag and rolls until it splatters on the bottom floor, its juices leaking to the expansion strip connecting two squares of asphalt. I see only one continuous, jagged split through the hard green exterior, but chunks of red fruit break off and stain the ground – I can’t help but wonder if this is how a human head would crack open – and I imagine ants will visit soon. The scrapes on my hands and knees begin to bleed, but I’ve prevented my stomach from hitting the stair edges. John ushers me into the apartment to treat my wounds, to make an appointment with our obstetrician-gynecologist to check on the baby, to WeChat his parents for traditional Chinese medical advice.
My hands sting as I hold an alcohol pad to the cuts. Red continues to surface. I know the blood will eventually clot and I’ve suffered worse injuries, like the time I scraped a whole sheet of skin off my knee while running from wasps, but for the baby, I should stop the blood. I ask John if he’ll clean up the broken watermelon and if he’ll buy a new one. You know, for the baby’s skin.
He says sure, and I think: the watermelon was already dead. As soon as it was plucked from its vines before its seeds could darken, still white specks, soft, nearly translucent, infertile. It couldn’t have died twice when it rolled down the stairs and revealed its insides to the world.
Lucy Zhang is a writer, software engineer, and anime fan. Her work has appeared in The West Review, Maudlin House, Parentheses Journal, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. She is an assistant fiction editor for Pithead Chapel and can be found at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.
More by Lucy Zhang How do I get unlost on my own
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