Pot boiling. Vegetables chopped. Rice cooking. Meat marinated. Stream drifts outward from the mosquito screen of the cracked open window of our single room unit nestled in a stray corner of Chinatown, Toronto.
Newspaper crinkles under my fingers, ink seeping into the skin in dark smudges as I kneel to smooth out the folds across the low sitting dining table you picked up from someone else’s yard across the street. Once the soup simmers, I lower the pot I nicked from the alley I usually cut across to the market onto the newspaper.
The headline—about some man trying to turn his own child into the police because of demonic possession and something about cults you’d talked about at dinner last week before launching into your usual complaints about your lazy coworkers at the restaurant—is already bleeding from the condensation dripping down the side of the pot, the words blending together like wisps of smoke hovering above rippling water.
Outside comes the rickety clicks of your rusty bicycle squealing to a stop beneath our home, the clinking of chains wrapped around its body barely held together.
Then, stomping up the stairs.
Then, the turn of the bolt of the door.
What I anticipate then, as the door opens:
You, standing in worn jeans and a stained white polo thrice discounted, the wrinkles in the corner of your eyes from smiles you almost never gave me except before our marriage and shortly after. But I know what you wanted was the dowry that paid for our trip across the waters and not the bride who was awaiting your kiss.
What is actually there when the door opens:
You, with a genuine smile that terrifies rather than relieves me.
You, with flowers in your hands, white roses without the thorns, but I can still see them, the spikes, their ghostly presence beneath the pink and purple tissue and plastic.
You, in a black suit I didn’t know you owned because I was so used to the polo you always wore, only washed during the weekends and sometimes bleached, always by my hands.
You, with an expensive bottle of wine you bring out from behind your back, that I would later realize isn’t for me at all, that I would later discover that you didn’t allow me to touch or taste a single drop, and I would have to sneak a mouthful of in my tooth brush cup and dilute it with water so you wouldn’t notice anything amiss about the smell nor amount remaining as you laid slumbering.
You, walking past me and me noticing the sweetness wafting from you is not from the flowers but from the scent of a woman’s perfume flooding the seams of the suit she no doubt bought you.
This is the first time, but it wouldn’t be the last.
As you place everything down in a corner, I stare at the alter I’ve set for the kitchen deity who’s to return before the new year to report each family’s activities to the Jade Emperor, who would then present the family with either a reward or a punishment based on their behaviour.
So why am I the only one being punished?
This is the fourth year the kitchen deity has failed to report your transgressions, and so I will have to take care to report them myself if the gods refuse to listen.
Twenty-five but still being ID’ed as I sit waiting at the bar Emily asked me to meet her at just on the outskirts of Chinatown on Queen. It’s 9 p.m. You won’t be home until 2 a.m., and I know your work ends at 11 p.m.
Emily doesn’t get ID’ed even though she’s three years younger than me, five years younger than you. She just came from work herself at a restaurant near yours, but usually the two of us come to this same bar after my English lessons at the local group she volunteers at.
She drags me up in a hug, and she smells of mint and harsh lemon dish detergent and cinnamon, nothing like the orange and spice and floral I smelt on you. This isn’t something I’m used to, still, as Emily lets go and sits down, drawing up her blonde hair in a high ponytail.
Emily waves the bartender over, and they share a smile that belonged to lovers without ever looking one another in the eye, but the two of them have never spoken outside of taking and delivering orders, almost as if intentional, because the bartender speaks to everyone else.
“What are your new year’s goals?” Emily asks when the bartender places down her sweating gin on ice, their fingers brushing above the floating slice of lime so subtle yet intentional it looks practiced. For a moment, I almost thought her question was directed at the bartender instead of me until she continues without waiting for my answer.
“Oh right, you celebrate a different new year, don’t you?”
I think about the kitchen deity’s alter at home, the faceless effigy that rests there because Mother never told me what the kitchen god is meant to look like. “Yes, based on the Lunar calendar, usually in February.”
It would be too complicated to explain further because sometimes I myself couldn’t even understand the context of each dedicated day, so I don’t elaborate further even though Emily waits, peeking at me over the rim of her glass with lowered lashes as she sips her drink.
“What are your new year’s goals?” I ask her when my grapefruit juice, non-alcoholic, arrives.
She taps her long, French manicured nails on the wooden bar and hums while watching the bartender speak to an older man, his hand resting gently across the man’s splayed out fingers before the bartender moves onto a slightly younger woman in her forties and does the same. I can’t hear what they’re saying over the loud R&B of the bar.
“Immortality, maybe,” Emily muses.
“Immortality?” I ask.
“Have you heard about Dracula?” she asks, resting a hand on the back of mine as if mirroring the bartender just steps away on the other side of the bar.
I shake my head.
She tells me about “sexy” vampires and their endless lives and about how she’d love to be one, but also how she’d love to have her blood sucked by one. And then she demonstrates by gingerly picking up the lime in her gin and making a show of sucking on flesh. I wince because I can only imagine how sour the juice must be on her tongue.
Emily laughs at my grimace before dropping the lime back into her now empty glass. I don’t recall when she had finished her drink.
At night, I see you smearing honey over the paper effigy of the kitchen deity, slathering honey where his mouth should’ve been—so much honey the paper barely holds, drenched, melting, beneath the honey, hoping to sweeten the deity’s report to the Jade Emperor. I imagine a gap opening and swallowing your finger.
Sweat glistens along your hairline, thick, lustrous, whereas mine has been falling in clumps, bald spots glistening under the kitchen lights flickering, and I can tell by the way you stare down at me from above that you’re disgusted with what I’ve become even though it was all for you.
Mother told me sometimes the kitchen deity is represented with his wife and sometimes with his two wives in his images, and sometimes I wonder if that is what you’re trying to do, become a deity, become like the deity, or use the deity as justification for your infidelity.
When you’re finished, you’re still cradling the withered roses in your arms and clutching onto the wine bottle as if your fingers were a noose around a neck, as you stumbled back towards the bed. But I’m turned around now, facing the wall, pretending to be asleep so you’d never know I was ever awake.
Today, Emily is drinking whiskey.
“Your gods won’t listen?” she asks after her first sip.
“No . . . no,” I say. “That’s not quite it. The deity won’t . . . speak.”
“Won’t speak?”
“Yes.”
“To who? You?”
I think about how to phrase my explanation. “ . . . to his boss, I suppose.”
Emily looks at me, amused, and at the other side of the bar, the bartender too, though speaking to another customer, eyes curled into smile, impossible to see where his gaze is directed, and yet, it feels as though his pupils are parked in the corners, in our direction, beneath his lids. He is tapping a single finger, against the table, as though speaking in code. But then the rhythm slows, evens, like the lazy ticking of a metronome, as if attempting hypnosis. My eyes glue to the rise and fall of his finger.
I think Emily might drop the topic, switch to another, given my silence, as she usually does, for her interest is often fleeting and momentaneous—instead, she surprises me with her next words, drawing my gaze away from the bartender’s slender fingers.
“Then what about . . . you worship a different god?” she suggests.
“A different god?” I tap the glass of my grapefruit juice with the tip of my nail in the same rhythm as the bartender.
“Yes.”
Emily looks around with a secret held between her teeth and lower lip.
She doesn’t tell me what this god’s name is, only offers me a hand drawn picture—the god’s face is angry but beautiful and from his forehead are horns like oxen, and behind supple lips, teeth like a serpent. This god resembles more so a demon than a god, but I know there are benevolent gods who can look like this, at least from the descriptions I’d been told growing up. I’d also been told the colour red is one of fortune, of prosperity, of celebration. Surely a god with a face and body as red as this could not be harmful.
Emily folds the picture of the god into a small, neat square and places it in my hand. That is when I notice the bartender has stopped tapping his finger, and my own halted as well, and he is now looking in our direction, directly for the first time, with an open-eyed, elegant, on the cusp of arrogant, smile.
Tonight, I’m using the hearth in the living room because the flames there are so much more inviting than the electric stove that only glows red without the alluring fire.
I withdraw the image of the god Emily handed me and begin to fold a paper effigy in his likeness to replace the kitchen deity’s on the first day of the forthcoming new year. But the kitchen deity is not the only I will rid of from this home.
This year, I will send a different god to whisper your transgressions.
I nudge the flames with poker before lighting incense and candles. The flames in the hearth sound like firecrackers, and it reminds me of when I was younger—of how I would hold the roll of firecrackers, like scarlet bullet belts, light them with the burning tip of a stick of incense and watch as they exploded in my hands without throwing them a safe distance away. The firecracker pellets would rebound off my body without wounding, threaten to jump into my eyes, singe my skin, but never did even though sometimes I wished it would. Always, there was ringing in my ears as I watched the crackle of light leaping from my very fingertips. Ah, what it was like to hold and control uncontrollable light, like a snake waiting to bite off the hand of its owner as the light grew closer and closer, until there was nothing left but smoke.
You come home then, while I’m crouched in front of the hearth still, and on your back is a small sheep skinned, still bleeding, crimson soaking the shoulders of your suit, grey instead of black today, dripping downwards onto the carpet and onto your leather dress shoes.
This is how you’ve maintained the little wealth you have—sacrificed sheep every year, but on top of the one you’d buy at the market, you would also sacrifice the one you had bound to your home. I look down at my own hands and imagine tuffs of white fur sheered again, too close to the skin beneath, pores gapping in pain, dribbling blood.
You drop the sheep by my feet. “That . . . Amelia.”
“Emily. Her name is Emily,” I say.
“Right. That Emery.”
“Emi—”
“Elise.”
I hold my tongue and glare into the hearth, eyes downcast so you don’t notice.
“You should stop seeing her.”
But I’m unsure who said these words as you walk out of the room.
Today, Emily is drinking wine, the exact same one as the one you have been drinking, the same bottle you have almost finished, even though you have never drunk the wine before in front of me.
I take a sip from her glass, the taste heady and intoxicating without water diluting its texture and richness.
“666,” she says, taking her glass back from my hands. She drinks from the exact same spot my lips touch. “Do you know what it represents?”
The bartender is in front of both of us today, wordless, but his hands rest lightly on the back of both of ours, his eyes elsewhere.
Mother always told me the number six and eight are lucky—six for smoothness and eight for fortune, while four is unlucky. Father and Mother had gotten married on the sixth of June, leaving their home for the ceremony at 8:08 a.m.
“Yes,” I say. “I do.”
Emily looks at me, skeptical for a moment, expression wavering with a single twitch of her left eye before all hesitance smooths, escapes from her face. “I see.” Her free hand curls in onto itself as her gaze flicks towards the bartender who meets her glance, before her eyes dart back to me as she repeats again. “I see.”
The bartender lifts his hand from Emily’s and something hums within me as my ears warm at our continued contact, then he takes the glass of wine, drinking from the exact same spot Emily and I had. A silent sigh escapes my lips, and I clamp my mouth shut when I realize.
Before I leave, Emily kisses me on the cheek and hands me another neatly folded square—this time, a recipe.
The bartender looks at me as he downs the remainder of the wine.
Before I slit your throat the same way butchers do the sheep you bought, I’d wanted you to beg me to spare you, as if I am the kitchen god himself, this new god as well, for mercy, for forgiveness, but I know even if you’re apologetic, even though you aren’t, you won’t apologize—your pride would never allow it. It is better to let you go in silence.
If I feed you to the red god, will he offer the abundance that only you seem to enjoy?
The photo of Emily’s god, now mine, is pasted on the worn brick above the hearth with melted red wax. Above it, I’ve set the new paper effigy, ready to be burnt.
Behind me, you lay, feet bloated, the swelling of blood raising your purple and blue veins, reddening skin, collecting blood beneath, waiting to burst where they’re bound tight by rope, yet they never do until I begin to slice at your ankles, just beneath the rope.
I wait until both your hands and feet are detached, blood pooling around you, before I strip you of your white suit jacket and matching slacks speckled with scarlet.
I remember being yelled at by my grandmother when I was young, for wearing white on my birthday.
Before I peel the white shirt and delicates underneath off your body, I can’t help but marvel at the sight of you adorned in white—
—the colour of death suits you so well.
I am careful in your skinning and the carving of the muscle resting under, filleting you the way Grandmother used to white river fish, and imagine what it would be like to steam you until your skin puckers, until your muscle is tender yet firm, to rest you like a steak upon a platter of neatly arranged vegetables to serve to the god.
I am meticulous in my dismboweling and deboning when your sinew has been cleared. It is what you’ve always requested of me when I cook pork, when I cook chicken, the butcher with the lamb. Unlike my family, you never wanted to see the skeleton, only wanted the tender remaining flesh.
Surely this god would forgive me for having just a single taste . . .
I sucked on your bones, where the blood still clings on before placing pieces of you into the pot in the hearth. And I taste you again when your flesh is tender and cooked, but there is still the sourness of your sin even after all the chicken stock, sugar, and soy sauce I’ve dumped into making your unmaking.
I pick up the row of firecrackers next to me, hold it up in front of me, light it with a stick of burning incense and watch, unblinking, as the pellets leap into the hearth, into the pot, feel as they rebound against my face and body, almost hitting my eye. And when the last pellet bursts, I serve you to the god with honey slathered across my lips, and I take the same stick of incense, hold it up to the paper effigy of the red god waiting above, and burn—
