Vestigial Structures

yong-yu huang

     “The last time I saw her,” my brother says, “she looked like half an angel.” 

He whispers this to me while we fidget in our seats during mass, yellow light trickling in through the dirty windows. Ahead of us, rows and rows of bowed heads, the priest in white at the very front of the room. His voice swells, the ringing timbre of it disproportionate to his slight figure. He speaks about renewal and new bodies. Arms thrown out towards the congregation, as if offering us his own for the taking. 

“Fresh starts,” the priest says, “for the new year.” The crowd murmurs in approval, a low rumble of Amens. 

We bow our heads, and my brother takes the chance to slip out of church. I think about the first time he snuck out to smoke with the other boys––how there had been not one, but two empty seats in our pew that Sunday, and how I knew, even as my father and I sat alone there, that nobody was paying any attention to the absence of my brother. That the only thing in their minds was the blue car that had revved out of our driveway earlier that week, our mother in the shotgun seat.

My father had pretended not to notice either of these things: the absence of my brother or my mother, and I sat next to him, staring at the way my face stretched in the dull reflection of my leather shoes, the features long and distorted. I thought about all of the things that I had stepped on in the past week, before I almost slipped on the waxed tiles of the nave that morning. Spilled milk, the slush from the spring thaw, damp fliers that the local Scout troop had left on our porch. I liked that about spring––the way everything melted and soaked into each other. The ground soft and still cool to the touch, small patches of yellow flowers peeking from under the patches of brittle grass. 

That day, I wondered if this was all a punishment for me not wiping my feet on the sidewalk outside the church before entering, like how my mother always taught me.

***

Weeks later, I shuffle into the aisle for communion. Outside the window, I can see my brother sprinting across the street to join the copse of lanky boys. The gap he leaves behind is quickly swallowed by the throngs of people, all of them smelling of starched collars and floral perfume. 

I cup my hands for cubes of half-stale bread, down the flimsy paper cup of dark juice in one go. It’s the kind that my father brings home from the corner store, some bargain mix of plums and grapes that leaves my teeth feeling slick and filmy. I sneak an extra piece of bread to mop up the taste. For a second, I consider whether it's a sin, or at least something bordering it: taking a little bit more just so I could sponge up the saccharine taste on my tongue. But I figure that nobody will care, not when the boys are smoking underneath the sycamores across the street. 

Not when everyone was still whispering about how we had been pulling into the parking lot with only three people, the rattling exhaust pipe of the beat-up sedan scraping on the asphalt behind us.

After the service, my brother tracks mud all the way back to our pew. His clothes are steeped in the scent of tobacco, sickly-sweet, and I tell myself that it’s only another kind of incense. Prayer slipping into the lung, curled between the ribs. It reminds me of the anti-smoking ads on the back covers of the magazines our mother used to buy. At home, our shelves crammed with volumes of glossy sheaves. Pages of bombshell blondes and bright dresses that she would cut out and paste on the pale expanse of the fridge. 

Before she left, sometimes my brother and I would reminisce about when we still sang in the kid’s choir, our pipe-cleaner halos wobbling underneath the stage lights. In that dream, the choir director tells us to smile more, pokes our cheeks when we don’t. 

“What kind of angels don’t smile?” she croons at us. She adjusts my halo and brushes specks of dust from my bed-sheet robes; we open our mouths like good children. The mother I remember in my mind’s eye hefts the family camera in her hands and snaps pictures from the front row. 

“She was a good mother,” I say to myself in the bathroom mirror once we get home from church. “It wasn’t a sin to want more.” 

I change the inflection of my voice until it sounds less like a question. More like a chant I could tuck under my tongue, dense and heavy in my mouth. Something that would live there forever. 

***

When the snow sluices from the fields around town, I step on a bird’s wing. I don’t see it until the ground feels at once too brittle and too soft––even for soil that the frost had leached out of. I can tell that it’s already been dead for a while, its limbs stiffening in the grass. I leave it there and keep walking. In school, I stare at the life cycle diagram on my teacher’s wall. How everything has an end. My teacher claps her hands together and tells us that we will be watching a documentary about birds today: their lives and habits. A boy in the back of the room asks, snickering, if we will be learning about bird sex. 

“You will be learning about their mating cycles, yes,” she says, her lips pursed. 

We watch montages of hummingbirds and speckled eggs, impossibly small and nestled in beds of soft leaves. Ninety percent of the world’s aviary species are monogamous, the narrator tells us. 

When the projector flickers off at the end, my teacher reminds us to not touch hatchlings if we find any that have fallen out of their nests. 

“If you do, their mothers won’t recognize them. They’ll be left behind, and we don’t want that, do we?” The class shakes our heads mutely. 

That night, I sit on the porch and tell my brother about it. He nods along, his feet propped up on the railing. It’s a long stretch, even for him, and he struggles to keep the dirty soles of his sneakers on the whitewashed wood. A spark of red pulses at the end of his cigarette. He doesn’t smoke inside the house––she had never let our father smoke indoors, and for some reason, my brother followed suit. 

“But it’s not true, is it?” he demands. “Mothers leave their children for all sorts of reasons. It’d be silly not to save a baby bird just because the mother might leave it.”

“I know. But just in case.”

My brother stares at the cigarette ash trailing from his fingers. “Just in case,” he agrees. 

We listen to our father snore inside the house. He has taken to falling asleep on the couch, still dressed in his work clothes, and we take turns covering him up with the faded plaid blanket our mother kept in the cupboard. 

“Half an angel,” my brother says, breaking the silence. He repeats himself from all those weeks ago, says it again to test the words on his tongue. As if to see whether some kind of divine light will strike him down for calling her that. I hum softly, unsure of what to say; in the end, I don’t say anything, but I know he’s thinking about the same thing I am. He leaves unsaid the fact that people never see angels nowadays: invisible to the eye, and had always been, even in the days the Bible was written. How that night, our mother was half an angel because the oily darkness of night smeared half her features into something inscrutable. My brother doesn’t say that the side we could see in the dim porchlight had been pulled back in a sneer, the skin twisted like molten glass. Her eyes flinty as she screamed at the three of us, and above her, the moths circling her head. Shadows dappling our faces in a flickering pattern of lace. 

“God, I never could stand you. I knew marrying you was the wrong choice. Keep it, keep all of it––God, I don’t need any of this,” she had screamed. 

She had said God over and over and nobody ever appeared; I felt almost sorry for her. Deep down, I had known she was unhappy here in this little stretch of a town. We had all known it, could tell it from the fliers she kept on the mantelpiece, colorful pictures of massive townhouses, white picket fences, backyards big enough to hold a menagerie of animals. 

I felt sorry for the moths too, their papery bodies darting near the naked lightbulb swinging in the breeze, such a short distance from heaven. In that moment, they were the closest thing to God. 

***

She throws a hand towards everything. The house with the faded shutters and a third of the mortgage left. The Yamaha piano from a summer yard sale, years and years ago. Us, knobbly-kneed and shivering in the winter night. How heavy it feels against our limbs, tendrils of cold already soaking into our chests. A Mustang in the driveway––the newest model, blue paint slick and shining even in the dark. The same one my mother had clipped out of a magazine almost a year ago and used as a bookmark in her Bible. 

Inside it, a man in a red coat sits behind the wheel. From a distance, he resembles the slick-haired car salesman in every catalog, picture-perfect and sharp in all the right places. His elbow dangles out the open window, and I watch it swing lazily. He is not wearing gloves, the pale, spider-like fingers gleaming in the dark. 

I hear my brother’s breath catch in his throat when she steps towards the car. She kisses the man in red on the mouth, and then it is my father’s turn for a strangled sound to be ripped out of him, the rattling of a bird crumpled against concrete. 

All of this resembles a scene from the movies my mother always likes to watch––the ones where the heroine drives off into the sunset with the love of her life and the convertible top down. Their mouths crowing into the dimming sky. 

We watch the sleek car disappear down the street, a blue speck in the distance, and then nothing. My father slams the door that he always told us to be careful with, and it never closes quite right after that, creaking like the hollow belly of a dog.

Later that night, I sneak downstairs to use the toilet, and the floorboards feel grimy under my feet, like an animal unsure of its own skin. My father snores on the couch in the living room, a late rerun of The Twilight Zone still playing on the grainy television. Someone’s mouth peeling into a scream. I flip the switch on in the bathroom.

***

In this episode, the earth is too close to the sun, and the heat is driving everyone insane. A woman paints the star over and over again, runs out of water to clean her brush in. There is never enough of it anymore, and the agony of it is palpable, even in monochrome. Everything bleeding into the next––no clean edges in black and white. 

Everyone moves north. Everyone leaves.  Her paintings melt and she believes that she might be melting too. In the end, she realizes that the Earth is hurtling away from the sun, that all of humanity is freezing to death. Their faces dusted with flakes of white, like asbestos or the loosened teeth of a ghost.

I wonder if that would be the worst way to die––to mistake cold for fever, the passive for the all-consuming. The Earth slips into the next Ice Age, and I cannot stop thinking about how the roles are reversed, how the Earth is abandoning the sun and not the other way around. Our mother doesn’t believe in the Ice Age or in painting. She likes what is smooth to the touch: things like the blue plates stacked delicately atop each other, the geometric patterns on the bathroom tile, or the soft skin of our cheeks as babies. 

The pale soap by the bathroom sink smells like her, the sharp tang of lemon too sweet to be any kind of natural. I retch into the sink, scrub the inside of my mouth until I taste blood. Then I turn on the tap until the porcelain gleamed bone-white.  

Last year, my mother and I spent an entire afternoon flipping through a catalog full of light fixtures, marveling at the long, bronzed limbs that arched like wings across double-spread pages. She told me about how she had always wanted to get light fixtures for her bathrooms. She said that it would transform the space, believed that the addition of anything shiny and gilded would make everything better. Always addition and never subtraction.

“It’s cruel to borrow from the digits ahead,” she told us. Our mother didn’t believe in taking things away when there was already so little. 

***

At the end of every month, the catalogs and magazines come like clockwork. Screen-printed families smile at us from our front step. Nobody touches them, and soon, they are scattered all over the front yard like hail. My brother and I gather fistfuls of crinkling advertisements, the color already leaching from the cheap paper. We line the rubbish bins around the house with them.

The two of us stay up later and later, and neither of us mention how that might be a problem. Instead, we sit on the porch and slap the mosquitoes from our ankles, little pinpricks of red blooming on our palms. When we were younger, our mother had slathered us in a thick ointment to ward off the mosquitoes, the yellow slick of it pungent with the thick sweetness of lemongrass and citronella. Our bodies greasy everywhere an animal’s thirst might seek out, from behind our ears all the way to the arch of our feet. After school, we would peel off our socks, inspect the yellow stains on the thick white cotton.

My brother swears when he flattens one against his cheek. He lights a cigarette. If she had stayed, I think, he might have less of a dirty mouth. 

“You could try eating some soap,” I suggest, wrinkling my nose at the smell. 

He exhales smoke in my face. “There are worse ways that I could be coping, you know,” he says, grinning. Then, he points the tip at me. “And how are you coping?”

I am silent for a long while. I’m doing fine, I want to say. Did you know that I would consider angel wings and bird wings homologous structures? I learned that in biology last week. I want to yell it in an empty field, until a whole cloud of birds rises like thick smog towards the milky eye of the moon.  I want someone other than my brother and his stupid cigarettes to know, someplace other than this tiny town my mother wanted to get out of so desperately to hear about the uncanny resemblance between the divine and the avian. 

“I don’t know,” I admit at last. 

My brother laughs too loudly in the dark. “Good. If you did, I’d be worried.”

***

The mornings, wet and petrichorical. The birds slamming against the windows, their beaks scratching a hundred little comets into the surface. One day, our father makes us keep the porch lights on at night so they can see where they are going. 

“I’m tired of cleaning up after accidents,” he says at breakfast. The next morning, we wake up to dozens of dead moths outside the front door and the incandescent bulbs dangling, still burning bright. I stare long and hard at the miniature graveyard scattered across our front porch, think of nights devoid of any light but the artificial stars that dotted the faces of the few houses on this road. Then I sweep them up, dump them in the trash can unceremoniously. They rattle against the thin metal like a tin of candy. 

At church, all the other mothers smile beatifically at their children, press softened candies into their hands after tantrums in the aisle. They speak softly, dressed in soft floral prints and short heels. I can’t tell if the strings of pearls resting against their collarbones are real, or if the arms their husbands drape across their shoulders are anything but the extension of their own desire. My father drapes his worn gray coat over the empty seat next to him and fixes his eyes on the priest. After the Easter service, we walk to the parking lot, my brother and I straggling behind. Suddenly, our father stops dead in front of the car, his knuckles bone-white around his keys. 

She is standing there, dressed in dark salmon just like the models in the pages she used to flip through while she waited for dinner to cook. For a second, I’m glad that she’s gotten what she always dreamed of, and then my eyes drift behind her. The Mustang and the man with his arm slung over the half-open window are parked a little further away. 

Our mother’s palms are facing up, extended towards my brother and I. 

“I just wanted to say sorry,” she says and then pauses, unsure. “I still love the two of you. A mother never stops loving her children, you know.” 

I bite my tongue. I think of birds and planets hurtling towards the vast expanse of space––anything that’s not the tightness in my throat. My brother is braver than me. He swears at her, and then he is crying. 

She just stands there, her hands still reaching towards us. My father pulls the two of us back towards the car, a hand tight around each of our elbows. His palm clammy against my skin, gripping tight enough to bruise.

“You don’t get to say anything,” my brother yells. “Not when you left us.” 

He points at the Mustang and the man inside it. I can see his fingers drumming on the steering wheel, thick features drawn in impatience. 

“Come on, we’re going to be late,” he calls to our mother, and she purples, her eyes frantic. They dart from him to us, and then back again. 

My brother and I slide into the backseat of the car, and I press my face against his shoulder. He smells of cigarettes and not lemons. Outside, our parents are limned against the bright sun, their faces taut with fury. All around us, the other families lean against their cars and watch. Their children squat close to the ground, mouths still sticky with juice.

Yong-Yu Huang is a Taiwanese writer living in Malaysia. Her work has been previously published or is forthcoming in Kissing Dynamite, Sine Theta Magazine, and Hominum Journal, among others. She has been recognized by Princeton University, the Kenyon Review, and the Georgetown Literary Festival. In her free time, she can be found humming the Doctor Who theme song.