Ma collects birth stories as lozenges and swallows them when she is tired. Not of her own, because she was born between the fingers of rice paddies, quickly and flush with shame, but of me. I was a citizen of misfortune, she said, my blood more cautious of where to forget than how to exchange oxygen, which is why I came out crying and blue. I was born on Friday the thirteenth, even though she tried to trade an extra day for a bone or a left ventricle. She signed my citizenship papers with a green pen, the furthest color from red, and named me something small enough to erase. Ai, the sound of an exit wound. 爱 (ai), as in love, how an exhale leaves a mouth and burns into annoyance. Ai, she says, when the bills arrive or when the water heater breaks, when Baba comes home after midnight, until I hear myself in her anger, in the flickering hallway lights and the shoebox room where she sleeps. Sometimes, after slipping a story between her teeth, Ma tells me she wishes I were never born. That her pulse was hers to keep. Or that I was born instead on a different day, one swelling with auspicious red, bludgeoning her cranium, darkening the windowsill, curling into her fist like a strand of hair. That my name was a name she could be proud of, and not something she carried like a semicolon; independent clauses linked by negotiations, however; therefore.
“Love ; Sigh” is the first-place winner of The SmokeLong Grand Micro Contest 2025.
