Ma once told me I should never lose a single grain of rice. I asked her why, but Ma didn’t answer. Heading to the market every week for rice after the war, in the middle of the night, I reasoned that it was probably because the old market lady would only let any one house get five kilos a week. It wasn’t all that much for the ten people in ours. We had hunger family us.
That early morning, like always, the elderly lady weighed precisely five kilos. The rice was musty and stale, but there was a food shortage, so no one really complained. Ba, for one, inhaled the rice then chased it down with a mouthful of beer. My brothers liked to douse the rice in fish sauce, turn it into soup, and let the salt shred their tongues numb.
I could hear the woman’s hands. Her bones struck like chopsticks on a metal pot, wrists clacking over and over like popped oil. I held out the bag, a large pillowcase Ma had fashioned for me, for her to pour the rice into. Over the years, more than a dozen stains showed across the fabric, yellowed to the color of bean curd. Despite its look, it was quite sturdy. Strong, like you, Ma said when she first gave it to me. When the old woman finished pouring, my scrawny shoulders drooped from the weight, bag bulging like a melon.
The sky was lightening into liver gray when I started back home. There were dead leaves and puddles all over the place, and I took great care not to wet the sandals I made from tires Ba tossed last year, complaining about how they were crusted in dog shit. I only had the one pair. Yet I must have walked a bit too single-mindedly, because the next thing I knew, the bag had caught on some tree branches. Starved of flowers, I couldn’t tell what kind of tree it was, but the branches were long and serrated like fishbones. Things got quiet, almost creepily quiet. I lifted the bag to my eyes and stared somewhat intently at it for a while. But nothing looked different, so I started home again. The clouds seemed to thicken as I walked.

Back at our little wooden house, my brothers and sisters were still fast asleep, their loud snores gunning the silence. Waiting for my siblings to wake, I propped the rice in a corner of the kitchen, relieved myself, and watered the plants ornamenting the decrepit bookshelf Ba had scavenged somewhere during one of his trips to the city trying to sell pineapples. But even when the sun rose and peached the sky, the chorus of roosters parting the morning like a curtain, everyone continued to slumber. And Ma was nowhere to be found, which was nothing unusual. She’d been away from home constantly to get things we needed beyond the rice I brought home, but, still, I experienced this as a sort of deprivation. Tired of waiting, I boiled water to cook up the same breakfast as always: rice, gourd, chayote, and beet greens. As I held the bag to fill a stove pot, I glanced down and there, just north of the bottom, was a hole. Tiny as a tomato seed.

The path to the market was bare of green, chapped, and colored like a cockroach. But the next time I went, a handful of flowers unlike any I’d ever seen before seemed to have sprouted over the week. They were a warm egg-yolk color, a hair of firecracker red running across each petal. It was like seeing sunshine in the middle of the night. After only a minute, I forgot about them completely. As I kept walking down the shiny, wet path, I caught a glimpse of myself in a puddle. With the moon cuffed around my head, I could see my eyes and nose were sort of smaller. My mouth opened less widely, the crooked rims of my teeth one millimeter shorter. I felt lighter, too, as if a bone was simply plucked out. For the longest time I watched myself in the water, so stagnant it looked like gelatin.

Gravity seeped into the bag like rain each week, opening the hole wide as a wing. I remembered to cap it with a palm whenever I went out, but a grain or two flecked the earth at every step, leaving a path of shucked-off teeth behind me, hollow and pearly. Staring at them, I could feel sadness well inside my throat like water rising in a lake.
Week after week, thousands of buds wriggled out of the ground, each one putting forth bright yellow blossoms into the night, filling the air with a smell so sweet my nostrils stung even after I got home. The more they sprouted, the more I shrank, and the more I shrank, the more the night expanded into something thick and huge, guzzling everything clean like hot noodle soup, leaving a porcelain black, almost iridescent. Eventually the path mutated into a forest, stripping away the whole sky with a bone-hard scrub of green and yellow and red.
It was no longer possible to tell whether I was human, a ghost, or something else. In fact, because I had shrunk so much, whenever my siblings exhaled near me, I coursed round and round the room like wind. We shared a rain-spattered mattress, so this happened quite often, but even so, nobody paid the slightest bit of mind. At some point, I started to wonder if I was shrinking out of their world as well.

Of course, I no longer went to the market. Returning one morning earlier that year, cradling the rice to my belly like a baby, I found Ma at home. I hadn’t seen her in so long. With black hair swishing over her bird shoulders, large soy sauce eyes, and a glow over her skin subsidized by sun, she looked younger than before. Unable to hold her gaze, I stared at her knees, because they were right there. From her knees down, her legs looked brittle as toothpicks. I remember when I first learned to walk, her knees two fist-sized nubs I focused all my attention on as I rose and rose. That was all I could think about. The cicadas kept trilling outside. The sound sank into my gut. Then she walked over and gently took the weight from me. It’s nothing to worry, she murmured, as if to herself. When I looked up, I realized she wasn’t looking at me anymore. She was staring out the window, light nudging the world into life. At different moments, her pupils grew larger and smaller. Her eyes were glistening like a wet leaf.

How I ended up inside Ma is still a mystery to me.
I knew it was her, in some unknowable way. By then, nothing about me remained: no stomach, body, nothing. I was probably tinier than dust, maybe even a particle, but what that made me was beyond my level of understanding. Not that I cared at that point.
It was a Tuesday in February. Outside, the night was pulsing. Or maybe that was Ma; it was hard to tell. Her days had become prodigiously tiring, so I could hear her breathing in and out, heavily, in the depths of sleep. Inside my mother, her breath manifested as a strong wind that rushed in and blew me around her body. It didn’t take very long.
Everything smelled of fresh earth, and I was struck by how Ma was warm and cold at the same time, every edge both bladed and indefinably soft, like grass. I traveled around her for the longest time, so long I lost track of time entirely. I started contemplating the difference between Ma and me, if the short period I seemed to be alive was myth or memory. I started to wonder if I had always been right here, inside Ma.
As soon as these thoughts crossed my mind, a sweet smell filled the space. In the next instant I could see a steady, faint light, which got brighter and brighter. There was something inside, I felt. It had its own shape. When I got closer, I saw: it was a golden flower, a single line of red running through it like a slit thumb. From where I was deep inside Ma’s body, it seemed exactly the height of a girl. For some reason, it reminded me of sunshine in the night.