The Girl With No Hands

The girl with no hands actually does have hands, it’s just – they are invisible and she only makes use of them to serve herself. No really, she can sew and play the piano – just not for you. Sometimes her lovers ask to have their egos stroked but the girl with no hands will not, and cannot indulge in such behavior.  Other times interested suitors will approach her at a bar downtown and ask for her number but the girl has no hands and so she waves them away with a toss of her nubby arm.  Does she ever wish she could feel? Of course, but sometimes it’s just easier to be felt. Once, in a meeting, a male partner tried to ask her to take notes and she just glared at him until he understood. The girl with no hands is unable to flip the bird so last week when she was cat called on the street she instead told the man to “fuck OFF” and this left the entire block silent and stunned. (She was smirking, though). Overnight, a whole class of paraphernalia becomes irrelevant: gloves, nail polish, secret handshakes, sweaty handjobs…She was the only girl in her fourth-grade class who could wear short shorts to school because technically her wrists grazed the end of her ass. Her favorite sport is American soccer and her favorite film is Cool Hand Luke. I saw her play classical piano out in Washington Square Park but the last time this happened, the New Yorkers couldn’t understand how she was making sound since her hands can’t be perceived. So, she doesn’t do that anymore. Though sometimes she will sigh when she remembers the solitary joys of combing a loved one’s hair while they watch in quiet shock. An invisible rake runs through their locks and all the while, a handless musician gently plays the world’s most tender harp using just her wrists. 

The Girl Who Loves to Clean

The girl had a messy childhood. It was littered with loud noises and tons of shouting. Sometimes these were happy sounds: the scream of excitement tumbling down the staircase, or the jubilation waltzing through the front door. Other times, these would be displays of anger: hurled insults and words that crossed the rubicon and never looked back. It was in these moments when the girl would begin to clean. First, she’d wipe down all surfaces until she scrubbed away the last of the emotional debris. Then, her hand-held vacuum would zap away despair with a sharp inhale – anything could disappear at any second: dust bunnies, scraps of paper, the tornado that, at times, seized her with full force. She never felt like she had a handle on anything and for most of her young life, she was just a piece of sea kelp flailing inside a gale storm. She swore that as a grown-up, things would be different, and they are… and they’re not. These days, she has an Amazon subscription for weekly deliveries of Lysol wipes and bleach. For her birthday she asked for a $400 mop. She balks at the idea of hiring a house cleaner or splurging on a Rumba. “What are they going to do that I can’t do better?” And she’s not wrong, I suppose. I’ve seen the way she can eviscerate a red wine stain from a pair of white jeans, the way her eyes dart around the carpet, scanning for domestic tumbleweeds. She wants nothing more than to spend her Friday evenings on her hands and knees buffing the oak floors of her apartment. For this reason, her living space is cleaner than a sterilized echo chamber that’s never seen the light of day… it’s also why she doesn’t really have guests over… come to think of it, she doesn’t really have friends, it’s kind of impossible to be anything more than penpals with her. On a  Zoom call I mentioned that she didn’t have to pick up every single follicle of hair, sweep up each speck of dust within her reach, but she was too busy lint rolling the computer screen. Once she told me her wet dream was for a man to roll up his sleeves, and actually hand wash the dirty dishes. “That would be so hot,” she admitted with a wistful smile… then she was silent. We both knew she was thinking about how it would still be necessary for her to do a second wash, after the fact.

The Girl Who Can’t Stop Daydreaming

The girl who can’t stop daydreaming has already been hit by half a dozen cars and bicycles, and for this reason, she’s a pedestrian menace, especially in a city like New York. But don’t worry, miraculously, the girl has always recovered from these run ins. Last week she daydreamed about sushi in the shape of dogs. This week, she’s daydreaming about her latest crush: some long-haired earth specimen with locks as curly as a packet of ramen noodles. Given her multiple casualties, it’s truly a shock that she’s never actually bumped into anyone she knows on the street. Her gaze can only be compared to a sleepwalking butterfly. Her chin is always tilted up, she’s not looking at you. She’s staring at the sky and watching the lunchers, who sit at the rooftop restaurant like a pack of city pigeons. She’s thinking about how being inside the edifice feels like wading through the belly of a whale, how it already feels as though summer is slipping through her fingers though it’s only May. She daydreams about possibilities and make-believe scenarios, sometimes involving you but always involving her, and while she dreams about the day, the day in turn dreams about her: you can tell by the way she makes a wish on a dandelion and the seeds dance around her hair like a mortal halo. Her dream journal is more detailed and up to date than her checkbook and her ideal vacation destination is Saturn. She probably couldn’t recount for you any names from the street signs downtown, but she could be the sole author of the North American Cloud almanac. A disco ball can mesmerize her for hours, an optical illusion, for centuries. Behind her back, they call her an airhead, they say she’s a space cadet, and maybe they’re right – the left hemisphere of her brain replays her favorite dreams on a loop while the right side feels like swimming inside a lava lamp. Once she was daydreaming about what it’d be like to fly without paying attention, of course, and walked straight into a manhole. I haven’t been able to reach her ever since. 

The Girl Who Turned Into a Fish

The girl who turned into a fish has always loved water, seldom felt free. She would’ve lasted longer in a world with fewer responsibilities, more room to change. Sometimes, when she dreams of throwing it all away, she’ll walk along the river and stare over the edge of the railing into the curious world below. She’s drawn to its surface, which slinks riotously, in and out, like hills and hills of electric eels. There, buoys dance like sunken graves. In the water, a bag of Cheetos becomes a billowing goldfish. From the shore, she watches a wave slowly curl into a thunderclap. The girl has a lot on her mind: a list of unread emails entreating her to complete task after task, requests from her boss who still asks her to fax his documents for him. She is the eldest daughter and the keeper of dozens of terrible secrets… her phone is just a waiting room filled with people seeking comfort. And she listens, of course, as she always does, because if she didn’t, the world would fall apart. At least sometimes, that’s how it feels. Did I mention, the girl is tired as hell… of saying yes, of holding her tongue, of smiling sweetly. Under the surface, a pot of water softly boils on a stovetop. Last week, we took a walk on the west side highway when she pointed out to me two ships on the horizon. “From the wrong angle, doesn’t it seem like they’ll collide nose first, instead of quietly passing?” I nodded and didn’t think much more of it. Soon after, she started to wear long sea green dresses. She began each morning sipping seaweed broth and gargling with saltwater. Then one day, I read in the paper she’d gone missing. And I was worried, but not for too long: the next time I wandered along the water, a roiling sensation overtook my thoughts, like a geyser or the breathing of a whale. At the verge of the river, a pile of her glittering turquoise clothes spun in a frenzied heap – suddenly I heard an uncontrollable splash … I even thought I heard her musical laugh before I saw her swim far away, vanishing with the ocean suds into the throat of the horizon. 

The Girl Who Lived in Beijing

The girl who lived in Beijing lived in a world that knew her. She didn’t have a brother, and she didn’t have a sister, but her grandmother lived down the street from her in a 大高楼 that stood at attention like a soldier decorated by a million terracotta plates. If her world could be described by color, it would be green: the color of abundance and fortune… if by sound: the swinging and swaying of voices in her mother tongue that ricocheted off the tin roofs and cracked sidewalks. Despite all the things she could hold all at once in her hands, she still longed for things such as different worlds and currencies, though she never had to ache for stability or the idea of a singular home. Chinese was still her first language and very early on, she learned to love ancient Chinese poetry, which sometimes brought her to tears – that is, the comprehension did, not the black hole of forced translation. For lunch, the girl would bring 菠萝包 and sometimes 五花肉 to school and no one pinched their noses and no one asked her what she was eating… On the street, no one ever told the girl to go back to where she came from (which was three blocks to the left), in fact, no one ever recognized her… she never stuck out terribly in a Beijing crowd. Last week while rifling through her grandfather’s old journal she could read every word. That’s how she learned, in particular, his heaviness. If you’re wondering what her downfall was, the girl was just as restless… if not even more than you’d expect. I’m not sure if she wrote poetry, but she saw poetry in everything: water pouring into the lip of a 泡菜坛子 sealing away vegetables, air, time; and the slowness of tea leaves spilling inside a porcelain cup. If you’ve ever asked her directions on the street, you’d know she grew up speaking with a Beijing accent and the “ars” and “ers” curled in and out of her voice like the curves of a painted 西葫芦. Because she never left, there were so many things she simply did not forget: how to write her mother’s name, recounting all 24 solar months, knowing exactly when the mid-autumn festival fell each year… Of course there were more things she’d never know: the magic of the Pacific Ocean, and the formidable power behind a New York street, but with her hands, she could trace all of the 胡同 in Beijing. On some mornings, the girl would wake from a fever dream in which she was dropped like an alien inside a new world, all on her own…

The Girl Who Lives in the Sky

The girl lives a million feet in the sky, and when she feels lonely she’s almost convinced it could be nice to return. To what, to what? The girl has no idea, though when she reaches the moon, all she wants is to grow like ivy: all-consuming and wild and silent. There, she watches the earth intently: the rooftops, the edges of the clouds curling like desire, the way airplanes cut the blue air open like the belly of a fish. When she hovers just a hundred feet in the air, she’ll overhear their conversations. In midtown, the voices ricochet from mirrors constructed like tubes of lipstick…they are worried, of course, because they are tethered in the way something is always wanted, measured, expected. When she hears these words, when she feels trapped living in this pre-ordained life, she’ll slowly scale the glassy office buildings and stare inside at the board meetings and slide decks like a ghost riding an invisible elevator. Why is it easier to simply avoid the ground? Maybe because down here, they can’t help but hunt her with questions she can’t answer, or because she feels the iron molds quietly closing in, ever so tightly, around her ring finger, her belly, maybe because each day on earth is just another game show episode… once, she asked if we were happy and we answered with our credit scores, our degrees, with our spot in line for the Great American Rat Race. I watched her listen to us, but could tell she would rather be dancing with helicopters and chasing blimps. It wasn’t too long after that when she disappeared, and I must admit I do miss her… last week I even stood on the corner of Hudson street staring at the moon and there she was: floating away like a free helium balloon.  

The Girl Who Had Two Sets of Teeth

The girl who had two sets of teeth bit a man today. It’s unclear what made her snap but obviously, something had been gnawing at her for a long time. Maybe she couldn’t forget the man who bellowed at her on the street like a loudspeaker to a stray dog. Or that she’d been followed by various men dozens of times and had to duck into corner stores for safety. When she recalls the man in an Atlanta nightclub groping at her chest she feels her jaw crack from clenching. It’s not that the girl is angry… it’s that she’s over it. There’s a saying that goes, “men are from Mars and women are from Venus.” If you ask the girl, she’ll tell you that’s wrong. Women are born from the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Men are tablets of alka seltzer, they are flotsam and jetsam, they are quick to bite and slow to chew. For Halloween, she dressed up as Calypso. Her favorite flower is a vulva and her favorite exam is the Bechdel test. When I meet the girl for lunch, she tells me about her grand plan to build an underground women’s commune deep within the tectonic plates under the sea. Her teeth sparkle when she tells me about the weight-lifting rooms and the history books, and especially so when she mentions the Lazy Stephens and Donald Downers of this new world order. She even has ideas for a nine-person, all women Supreme Court – hey the girl can dream! But even I know, underneath her excitement is a layer of pain from the years of being told what to look like, and how to dress, and the advances and the ogling and the clandestine photographs taken of her and her sister while riding the train in broad daylight. Things came to a head last week when her OB-GYN referred her to a local dentist. The girl didn’t think much of it but the next time she takes a man to bed, she strips off her skirt and then his pants and feels a quivering sensation inside of her. Before she knows it something between her legs takes a hungry bite. Then his scream of shock, and a crunch that sounds like the skin of a bright red apple breaking apart.

The Girl Who Cries Every Day

The girl who cries every day was born at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in a soupy town where it is customary to weep several times a day. There, tears don’t drip down one’s face, they undulate from one’s eyes like ripples of rainwater dimpling a lake. In fact, the term “waterworks” was coined by a native ocean-being to describe the all-embodying process of crying these special tears. The girl, is of course, a water sign and this necessarily means she is deeply emotional and always feeling five different things at once. So, you can only imagine what it’s been like for her here on Earth. Her eyes are always ringed with red and never dry. People can’t seem to understand why the girl chooses to live with a perpetually flooded basement, why she prefers salt water to New York tap, how she spends hours studying the spout of the sink because it reminds her of the sea swallowing the river. Sure, she cries every day, but I wouldn’t call her a crybaby… I think she’s just a sensitive soul. I met her on the downtown A train on a stale afternoon in the middle of July… I looked over and saw a few tears snake down the girl’s cheek… she was reading a book the way sea anemones unfurl into color. See, that’s the thing about the girl, she cries because she knows that the most wonderful things in this world exist right below a thick layer of jaded indifference. That’s why the moon will make her cry, the tidepools can make her sob, the way the sun sets so suddenly you almost forget about the speed of time, how the rain here feels like a relatively dry sunny afternoon back home, how Hurricane Harbor reminds her of childhood … I tried to tell her how much she means to me, but this only got her misty-eyed (to put it mildly). When I reached over to hug her, I slipped right off her tear-slicked shoulders and into a lazy river.