In Josephine Wu’s “The Wound,” Second Aunt’s wound is both emblematic of all the trouble in her life and a source of strange connection and comfort. The wound thrives on sad stories, but can Second Aunt? Wu’s new story perfectly straddles the strange and the profound.
The night that Second Aunt developed the wound, she was meeting Nine Dog’s father for the first time in a dive bar downtown after work. It was summer, and they met through a dating app for divorcees. He was at least twenty years older than her. He said he was a belly surgeon and could make her skinnier, could heal the knot of scars decorating her stomach after the miscarriage. How did you know I had a miscarriage? Second Aunt had asked, and Nine Dog’s father said, Of course I know, I’m a belly surgeon. Because he knew, Second Aunt let him take her back to his apartment and open up her body like a watermelon. When she left in the morning, she rode the train back even though it was faster to ask Nine Dog’s father to drive. She sat in front of a man who was on the phone loudly complaining about the failing state of train engines. Second Aunt listened absentmindedly, picking at her chapped lips and coming up with counterarguments in her head, before she realized that her stomach was bleeding. Below her belly button, where all her wrinkles and scars twisted together, another wound had appeared. It looked like a bruise, blotchy and gray. She thought about last night, how Nine Dog’s father grabbed her stomach so hard that she felt his fingers scooping out her organs. His pinky nail looped under her breasts, leaving red indents like a rash.
When she arrived home, Second Aunt ducked into her bedroom to avoid greeting her roommate. Second Aunt lived in a single room that sat above a laundromat, though she thought it hardly counted as a laundromat: There was only one washer and dryer, but somehow they would always be running, a loyal line of customers diligently waiting their turn to do the laundry, even if that meant coming to the laundromat late at night. Sometimes, Second Aunt would listen to the whoosh of the machines at night when she was trying to fall asleep, counting the number of revolutions it took before the load would finish.
After coming back from the train station, she pulled up her shirt and examined the wound on her stomach. She could tell that the wound was not simply a bruise; it had an opening that seemed to instinctively widen at any physical contact. It didn’t hurt to touch the insides of the hole. Instead, all she felt was her own flesh, soft and wet, wrapping around the bone of her finger. Initially, Second Aunt thought to clean the wound with a saltwater poultice. At the touch of the salt, though, the wound sealed itself shut like a fist, hardhearted to the outside. No salt, she noted. The next day, the wound yawned open again, slightly agape. This time, Second Aunt poked her finger into the hole once again, waiting for the wound to close around it. When she pulled out her finger, it was wet. It’s a mouth, she realized.
For the first few weeks, the only things it could take were liquid: water, milk, apple juice, melted butter. She could tell the wound was hungry when it pulsed open and closed below her belly button, causing her stomach to growl, as if its hunger could be displaced. Second Aunt worked in an office two blocks away from the apartment where she typed up reports regarding the types of plants around the entrances of metro stations. Scarce, fenced-in soil plots lined the sidewalks near the city’s metro stations, a retrospective decision hurriedly urged by the transit director at the behest of climate protestors. It was Second Aunt’s responsibility to tally up the daylilies and potted plants that decorated the otherwise plain soil plots. A proliferation of weeds has encroached upon the Brassica species situated on the sidewalk adjacent to Station #7, she wrote as she spooned vanilla yogurt to the wound. It had grown to enjoy slightly more solid foods, but only if they were unflavored and low in sugar (this she discerned by observing how quickly it absorbed low-fat hummus while it remained shut at the prospect of peanut butter). Immediate attention is necessary.
She wondered if the wound was Nine Dog’s father’s fault. She continued to see him casually, although nothing ever felt too casual because she only had the time and energy to see one person at a time. He was sweet, even though she discovered he was not a belly surgeon so much as he was a masseur. He confessed his true occupation over dinner at a Japanese restaurant that was owned by Chinese immigrants, which meant the sushi was cheaper and made with tuna that was tinted with red food dye. “I’m not actually a belly surgeon,” he admitted, teasing the tuna flesh through his lips. His gums looked like they were bleeding. “And I have a son.”
Second Aunt placed her chopsticks down on the table. She was not entirely surprised—he paled at the sight of blood, and the unkempt appearance of his house suggested a youthful energy that he himself did not possess—but she felt obligated to express disapproval of his dishonesty. “You didn’t have to lie,” she frowned. “You didn’t think I’d date you if I knew you gave massages?”
“It wasn’t that,” he replied hastily, as if that were the lesser crime. “It’s my son.” He claimed he recognized her miscarriage immediately, given all his years as a masseur. “I’ve learned to identify the shape of loss. The first time I touched you, I already knew,” he said. “I was worried you wouldn’t want to date someone with a child. That it would remind you of what you lost.”
“That was thoughtful of you,” Second Aunt said after a pause, even though she didn’t think it was thoughtful at all. She wondered if she should tell him about the wound on her stomach. So far, it had shut itself at any touch that was not her own. She knew that, to Nine Dog’s father, it just looked like another small bruise in the darkness, another disfigurement. Second Aunt pressed her palm to her stomach, and the wound fluttered awake through the cotton of her shirt. No, this is my one good thing, she thought.
* * *
Second Aunt had divorced her husband even though no physical abuse had ever occurred, which was the only valid reason—if even—to divorce your husband, according to her parents. Chinese people don’t divorce, her mother chastised over the phone. What did he do to you? Second Aunt didn’t have a good answer to that. There was only one instance that might have counted as abuse: Husband had slammed the steering wheel so hard his hand ricocheted and struck the bone above her eyebrow. She couldn’t remember what they had been arguing about, just that the highway seared past them like a rocket because Husband liked to accelerate when he was angry. When she touched the wound above her eyebrow, she realized a small cut had formed from the metal of Husband’s wedding band. Husband pulled over on the shoulder of the road and began to cry. He didn’t mean to hurt her and would understand if she divorced him, he said, which was a far cry from two years ago when he said he would bury a bullet in his brain if she left.
Second Aunt didn’t divorce him even though he left a scar above her eyebrow. Back then, she let these things go.
* * *
Second Aunt’s first impression of Nine Dog: he was sixteen years old and always hungry. Second Aunt had come to drop off flowers at Nine Dog’s father’s house that morning and ended up staying for longer than intended after he took off her shirt and made her feel desired. By the time she was about to leave, his son sauntered through the front door from the afternoon school bus, loudly proclaiming his craving for potstickers and a bag of potato chips. “Who are you,” Nine Dog said with the tactless sort of tone that teenagers often take when confronted by strangers. “Are you my dad’s girlfriend?”
“Well,” Second Aunt began. They had never actually labeled each other. For her, there was no such thing as girlfriend/boyfriend. It was either wife/husband or nothing at all.
“It’s complicated?” Nine Dog asked.
Second Aunt turned around, searching for his father. She heard the shower turn on and frowned. “We’re just good friends,” she said evasively.
“I don’t care that he’s dating if that’s what you’re worried about,” he said, sitting down at the kitchen countertop. “We’re not even talking right now.” He stared at her expectantly, waiting for her to probe further.
Nine Dog reminded her of herself during The Good Old Days of Husband. When she first met Husband, it was at a zoo and she was famished. She noticed him because he was about to throw away his nearly full bottle of soda. After stopping him with a brash shout, she shared all the little stories of her life, from her schoolgirl crushes to the mean teachers at the school, because he had a kind face. By the end of the day, they were dating. She smiled at the memory. “Why not?” she allowed herself to ask Nine Dog.
“Because I’m going back to China,” Nine Dog declared, puffing out his chest. “He’s angry at me because he thinks I’m wasting his sacrifice”—he drew the word out sarcastically, flecks of spit pooling at his lips—“which I never asked for, by the way. I think I would have grown up just fine in China. Who said he had to come here?”
“What would you even do there?” Second Aunt asked. She began heating up the pan on the stovetop to warm up some frozen potstickers for Nine Dog and the wound, which had grown little tooth stumps on its inside, like shards of glass. The wound would certainly be hungry by now. “There’s not much for a teenager to do, from what I remember.”
“I dunno. Teach English? Join the navy? I don’t care, I just wanna go. Learn about my culture and shit.”
She laughed. “Do you even know Mandarin?”
“A little Canto,” he said defensively. “I can go to Guangzhou—people still speak Cantonese. You’re overthinking it.”
“I wish you the best of luck.” Second Aunt shrugged.
Later that night, Second Aunt asked Nine Dog’s father if he would let his son go to China alone. “You would at least go with him, right? He can’t survive by himself.”
“I won’t. I told him, I came all this way for you. He’s ungrateful. He doesn’t know anything. He’ll grow out of it.” They were lying on his bed, the comforter pebble-white. It was like his ex-wife took all the remnants of color with her when she left. “I don’t even know if he’s serious.”
“He sounded pretty serious,” Second Aunt said. Nine Dog’s father rubbed her stomach. He was much more gentle than Husband—at least, more gentle than The Sad End Days of Husband—although maybe that was only because they weren’t married yet. Men treat their wives much worse when they realize marriage takes away the only leverage women have.
“How can you do that to your own father? I came all this way for you,” he repeated, as if Nine Dog was listening.
I came all this way for you. Second Aunt remembered: a year after she married Husband, he asked her to move to America. Husband had just been granted candidacy as a PhD student at MIT. He promised a beautiful house where they could raise their future son. What if it’s a daughter, she had joked, patting her growing belly, and he pulled her into his arms with a laugh. It’s a son, he said.
They didn’t have enough time to find out. The baby died quietly on the way to Boston.
* * *
“I used to be a nanny before I started working for the metro,” Second Aunt told them one night. It was a family dinner at Nine Dog’s father’s home. Nine Dog and his father still weren’t speaking, but they at least ate in proximity to each other, Nine Dog on the couch facing the television, his father at the granite kitchen counter with Second Aunt. “I took care of all these beautiful white babies in enormous houses. I think I’ve raised a village at this point.”
“Why did you switch jobs?” asked Nine Dog’s father. His son stared sullenly at the black TV screen, though Second Aunt could tell he was listening by the tilt of his head.
“I always took care of babies. The mothers never needed me by the time their children grew into toddlers, so I never got to see anyone get older. It was a little sad,” she said. In other words: I have never raised a girl to share the same pain as me.
“Well, you didn’t really know them, did you? They weren’t your own kids,” Nine Dog’s father said. “I would be grateful for that, at least.”
“I suppose so,” Second Aunt said. She looked at Nine Dog, who remained silent, his head bent down as if in prayer. Hunched over his dinner plate, he began to cry, his shoulders moving up and down in quiet grief. His father faced away, not yet noticing. She thought about her body crouched over the plane toilet bowl: how grief moves suddenly, and without notice.
* * *
Second Aunt tried to teach the wound how to speak by telling it stories. Once, my father grew a peach tree on his farm. It died by the time winter came, but we gave the village its first peaches. Once, I opened all the lids to the rice cookers in my neighborhood while they were steaming and spoiled everyone’s dinner. Once, I thought I was having a heart attack, but I was just falling in love with my ex-husband. While it never spoke, the wound seemed to feed on the stories. With each anecdote, it grew into the shape of a palm-sized continent that sutured her scars and wrinkles into a tapestry. It craved absolute honesty. Once, Second Aunt tried a half-lie, tried telling it a semi-truthful and overly dramatized happy story because she feared that all her sad memories would overwhelm the wound with grief, and it bled the entire night like a period. Second Aunt had to affix a pad on her sweater until the wound forgave her for lying. It was always hungry, like Nine Dog, and demanded to be fed, like a child.
The night Nine Dog found out about the wound, his father was away on a business trip. Second Aunt didn’t know that masseurs could have business trips, but Nine Dog’s father said that a client hired him for a cruise down in Miami for the weekend., Second Aunt wondered idly if he was flying to see a mistress, if the whole business trip was merely a pretense. But he asked if she wanted to come, and she said no because she didn’t like planes. “Then can you please stay over and watch my son? I’m worried he’s going to fly to China one of these days without me knowing. He hasn’t grown out of this phase yet,” he said. He kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll miss you.”
Second Aunt thought Nine Dog was sleeping by the time she pulled up her shirt and sat in front of the bathroom mirror. By now, the wound had turned into the color of her nipples and stretched slightly above her belly button. While it still ate some things, it devoured stories even more. She stroked the wound to find its opening in her stomach. “Let me tell you about the time I met my ex-husband,” she began, nursing its mouth open with her fingers.
“Hello? Who are you talking to?” The door—which no longer had a lock after Nine Dog bolted himself inside after an attempt to float to China in the bathtub—swung open, yielding Nine Dog with a baseball bat hooked over his shoulder.
Second Aunt froze, her shirt still tucked under the wire of her bra. “What are you doing?”
“I heard some talking, so I thought someone else was here—what are you doing?”
Second Aunt began to laugh before hesitating as Nine Dog stared at the wound on her stomach, his eyes like light bulbs. She remembered the way he cried on the couch, his body a stone. “Let me show you something. Put down the bat.”
Nine Dog knelt before her. Gently, she took his hand. It was bonier than she expected. Pressing his palm to her stomach, she whispered, “Tell it a sad story.”
“What do you mean? Are you pregnant?”
She shook her head. “Just tell it a sad story,” she said.
* * *
Back when I had a mom, she used to go to church every Sunday because they served free food after service. Before America, she had never drunk milk or orange juice, had never worn pretty dresses. She always told me I was lucky. When she met my dad, they were both in college, broke as hell, but they fell in love fast. They held hands at church, scandalizing the old Korean moms, and he gave her a massage every night. That’s how he became a masseur: because it was something that made his wife so happy. They promised each other that nothing would change, that they wouldn’t be like those other couples where everything shatters once they have a kid. Then I came along like a bullet, and then the arguing started, and then there was no more arguing at all. My dad would close up his face like a clam. He never hit my mom or me, but sometimes I could tell he was holding the anger back in his fist, and I wondered if it would one day well up inside of him and explode. But that happened to my mom instead; she was holding everything in until she wasn’t. She always said she missed her family in China and that the only thing here for her was me. Not even my dad. Just me. I didn’t think she would actually do anything about it, but one day she was just gone. She left for China, my dad guessed. He called her a bitch. She didn’t take anything except for her passport, so sometimes I think she’s gonna come back. Or I’ll just find her there. That’s why I’m gonna make a paper boat and sail all the way to China, or I’m gonna fly myself there with a kite if I have to, and then I’m gonna find her. My dad told me to move on, but I can’t. That’s the saddest thing about me, I guess. My mom chose China over me, and I didn’t even realize until it was too late.
* * *
The wound’s mouth whimpered open underneath Nine Dog’s palm. He flinched but kept his hand against her stomach. “This is my secret,” Second Aunt said. “I have an opening inside me. It keeps wanting more.”
Nine Dog didn’t move. “It feeds on sad stories?” he asked.
“I think so. It’s gotten bigger and bigger. I don’t know what it is, but…” She swallowed the lump in her throat. She didn’t know how to tell him that the last thing that moved in her belly was dead.
“I’ve always wanted to be an older brother,” Nine Dog grinned, his eyes creased into half-moons. He seemed to understand not to ask, although Second Aunt knew he didn’t need to. “I guess I’m not exactly an older brother, but this is something. It has a mouth and everything, so it counts as a baby.” He leaned into her stomach. “Treat me like I’m your go-go.” Instead of pronouncing it with a closed o, he said it like gau, like the Cantonese word for nine or dog.
“Your pronunciation is so bad, you’re calling yourself Nine Dog.” Second Aunt laughed, tears of mirth sweeping under her eyelids.
He huffed. “Maybe I’ll be Nine Dog. Just to her, though,” he said, gesturing toward the wound.
Her, she mused. The wound thrummed in approval, pulsing like a heartbeat underneath Nine Dog’s palm.
* * *
It became a routine: every Friday, Second Aunt would pick Nine Dog up from school so they could walk over to the convenience store together. She bought him sodas in exchange for sadness. It was an unfair trade, both of them knew, but he didn’t seem to mind. After all, Nine Dog never had a shortage of sad stories. For teenagers like him, everything that wasn’t happy was sad. “I got a B on my math test today,” he would tell the wound. “Noelle Kim cheated on her boyfriend. I saw her sticking her tongue down our homeroom teacher’s throat. The church is closing down because people haven’t been tithing enough—not that I care. The cafeteria food sucks. I’m gonna go to China.”
Is it possible to be happy from so much sadness? Second Aunt wondered. She had never imagined that she would find happiness after The Plane Incident, and maybe this wasn’t happiness but it at least felt akin to it, the warmth in her stomach that was as small as a peach pit, real as a stone.
* * *
The almost-happiness died as fast as it had grown. Nine Dog ended up leaving the next month. By then, it was the end of autumn, and all the trees had shed their leaves, reaching out of the cracked soil like skeleton hands. Trees are newly leafless, Second Aunt wrote in her weekly report. There is limited activity related to tree maintenance due to dormancy. Unable to prevent seasonal processes. He had secured a dishwasher job at a restaurant with the help of the American embassy. “I’m gonna find my mom and bring her back,” he told Second Aunt before he left. She had driven him to the airport because his father refused to say goodbye. She still couldn’t believe it, not even when he shrugged on the strap of his duffel bag to enter through the airport doors. “Or maybe I’ll just stay there.”
“She left you,” Second Aunt said. She wanted to say, I have not left you. I deserve you more. The wound deserves you more. She knew it was futile, though. What had drawn them together in the first place was their grief, not their futures. While she was satisfied wallowing in the edges of her sadness, he had always planned to confront it, however haphazard and unformed his ideas were. Still, she asked, “Why do you have to go?”
“I have to. She’s my mother,” he replied.
After he left, Second Aunt didn’t know whether to break up with his father or not. He no longer rubbed Second Aunt’s stomach after dinner, and he replaced his white comforter with a thin white throw blanket. His house was too bare and empty to warrant living near the noisy train station.
Meanwhile, the wound shrank in Nine Dog’s absence. It had devoured his desperation, his grief at the thought of never visiting China, but it had never anticipated the obvious consequence: his departure. The wound paled into the color of sand, nearly blending into Second Aunt’s skin. It seemed to cry by withering its mouth into a wrinkle. It refused yogurt, porridge, and water. Its teeth fell out like leaves in autumn. “Don’t be sad,” she begged, gripping the skin of her stomach. “Your brother will come back soon.” The wound shrank even more, as if it could feel the lie in her veins. Second Aunt was used to sadness, but she didn’t know how to handle the grief of a thing that was borne from grief.
“There is only one thing I have left to give,” she whispered, her throat hoarse. “My saddest story.”
* * *
I met Husband at the zoo two hours away from the village. Thought he was skinny as paper. He had a soft-looking face. We began dating. I enrolled in medical school. One of four women. Had sex before marriage. Twice. Spoiled, but in love. The Good Old Days of Husband. I wanted to finish school. Husband wanted to get married. I threatened to leave. The almost-gun incident. We married. I dropped out. Then, the incidents leading up to The Sad End Days of Husband: the car incident, the bleeding on the side of a highway incident. The mall incident, the party incident, the church incident. The forgiving. The pregnancy. The PhD. Husband asked to move to America. We dreamt of a white-picket fence and a lake in the backyard. I secretly prayed for Daughter. We never found out because of The Plane Incident. The blood in the steel bowl of the 24×48 inch lavatory. The blaming. The divorce. The numbness. The sorrow. The saddest story: how all that remains is a wound.
Josephine Wu is a writer based in New York City. She has been published in diode, Hobart, and Sine Theta Magazine. Besides receiving two Best of the Net nominations, she was also a Lannan Fellow for Poetics and Social Practice. She previously served as the Editor-in-Chief of The Anthem, Georgetown’s oldest literary arts magazine. Her work can be found at josephinewu.carrd.co.