Invention

On an island, an open road where an animal has been crushed by something larger than itself. It is mangled by four o'clock light, soul sour-sweet, intestines flattened and raked by the sun, eyes still watchful, savage. This landscape of Taiwan looks like a body black and blue. On its coastline mussels have cracked their faces on rocks, clouds are collapsing onto tiny houses. And just now a monsoon has begun. It reminds me of a story my father told me: He once made the earth not in seven days but in one. His steely joints wielded lava and water and mercy in great ionic perfection. He began the world, hammering the length of trees, trees like a war of families, trees which fumbled for grand gesture. The world began in an explosion of fever and rain. He said, Tina, your body came out floating. I was born in the middle of monsoon season, palm trees tearing the tin roofs. Now as I wander to the center of the island no one will speak to me. My dialect left somewhere in his pocket, in a nursery book, a language of childsplay. Everything unfurls in pictures: soil is washed from the soles of feet, a woman runs toward her weeping son, chicken bones float in a pot full of dirty water. I return to the animal on the road. When I stoop to look at it it smells of trash, rotting vegetation, the pitiful tongue. Its claws are curled tight to its heart; eyes open eyes open. When the world began in the small factory of my father's imagination he never spoke of this gnarled concoction of bone and blood that is nothing like wonder but just the opposite, something simply ravaged. He too would die soon after the making of the world. I would go on waking, sexing, mimicking enemies. I would go on coaxed by gravity and hard science.