Two Travelers

Beatrice Han

I. The Road 

You lost your stomach three days into the journey. The tarry black tip emerged from a puckered opening at your abdomen, quivered, and slipped out as neatly as a coin through a slot machine. You were nonplussed. You had, after all, been dispensing good advice, about Hermès scarves, and inferior fabrics, and the seemly shape of womanhood. The organ made damp gurgling noises against the gravel, then emitted a thin yellow film of bile. That’s the end of eating, you observed. Won’t this do wonderful things for my waistline? A spray of fresh datura was already clotting at your wound. Another minute, then the abandoned organ shook with new life, and crept slowly forward. 

II. The Hospital 

It had been the remnants of your pancreas first, after the surgery. It ruptured the stitches from your incision line as it was birthed, trailing small white clouds of jasmine amongst the fraying surgical thread. Then it was the left lobe of the lung, the right atria, both kidneys, the superior stretch of the intestines. The doctors, made timid by disgust, suggested cremation. You’d laughed, then unfurled the protruding knobs of your spine until they were stacked neatly on top of each other, straight and still. The head surgeon shrank from you, and shrank further when you snapped: Wasn’t this what we wanted—emptying of the excess self? Then, scathing: This is for my daughter. At your discharge you gathered the membranous compartments trailing at your feet like a bride gathers a gown, stepping lightly, with delicacy. 

III. Home 

You were particular about the flowers. You attended with care to the great blooms of lily, the ripe swells of orchid, the trails of winding japonica. You believed that what you clothe yourself with should be a joy to others. Your husband was, at first, reassured by your conviction. He had been made magnanimous by the fantasy of care, and more significantly of dependency, and could ignore with varying success that your body seized and shook and occasionally split apart to expel a new glob of flesh. It was your ease, in the end, that ruined him. It drew the hysteric out. You’d looked at the violence he threatened and closed the door of your home behind you. Through the window, you saw him open his mouth wide in delirious convulsion, tremble, and weep. 

IV. Coda 

You and I are on the road. Still the grassy slate field, the burnt ochre cliff, the small creature yammering into the tenuous stillness. You take note of it. You say, at last, you can go. You are going to be alone now, you and the flowers. You are going to take a match to your everted body, to the bilious fluid and globs of fat and necrotized viscera, and you are not going to look at your own discontent, the discontent that will seethe and gibber and one day all at once awake in you as the magnolia and clematis and chrysanthemum burst with lunatic conviction through the soft glottal tissues of your throat while you cry out: Come back! I am your mother. Come back.

Beatrice Han is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania double majoring in Biochemistry and Health & Societies. They write to process their lived experiences with family illness, generational trauma, and queerness.