The Glass Wife
The woman I love is made of glass. She enters me slowly, assimilating to my temperature, coiling pleasure around her finger like a filament at our center. Surrender illuminates the room, recruiting the slick of the moon. She moves inside me with effort, and I love to watch her labor, to feel her hand tremble with its own helpless desire to reach deep inside my dark and make a fist around my sloppy, panting heart. To be my cruel and tender tether, pinning me to the bed. I shiver at the breach, awed by the mutability of our materials, her glass the truest form of my flesh, like the bell-song of wetness between my legs, like desire purified of its need to be seen. I keep my eyes shut, knowing that I can never find her among the sheets, knowing that we meet only because she comes to me. She fills me the way light fills a sky, patient at first, then with the headlong hunger of a sun pouring out its morning, bloodying the brim of my vision. Gilding my mouth with its spill.
I love to watch the sunset through her stomach, the colors more violent and alive when they pass through the pane of her, when they swim through the window of her skin and spray across my face. Every landscape is magnified through the lens of her emptiness. I’m the color of the future, she likes to say to me, When you look through my belly, you can glimpse that other world.
What other world? I ask her. The one that’s coming, she says. The one that is always almost here. Waiting to be opened like a window. All glass is a portal, even that glass you keep on the nightstand. Your transport for thirst. Every time its brim nudges open your lips, you sip from the sun I come from.
In the daytime, birds fly into her belly, knocking themselves numb, and she scoops them into her palms and weeps over their pulverized skulls. In front of the mirror, she plasters herself with bumper stickers, using a laundry marker to scrawl snakes around her arms, anything to scare birds away, to remind the sky that she lives under its skin, a piece of shrapnel from another world. At night, she sprawls on the bed with a map and circles the tallest buildings, accusing them of interrupting the migration of birds, causing mass death. They must pay, she says. These windows are my sisters, and they have been complicit in slaughter. They allow themselves to be used and used, to be invisible, to be framed in perfect stillness. One day they will finally speak, form bodies of their own. One day they will finally leave behind their flattened lives, their brutal utility.
With my finger, I trace the platter of her bare back, that celestial pedestal I bend to kiss and steam with my lips, remembering the rare times when it rained in my childhood and I would sit by the kitchen window as my mother washed the dishes or lit the stove. I’d forge the path of raindrops with my fingertip, pretending that I was gravity’s ambassador, my fist a planet that all water wrapped around, that all skies crumpled to kiss.
When we kiss, her skull fogs with my breath. Her thoughts are flocks of circling birds, shredding the steam with their wings, determined to remind me: though she is glass, existing to be gazed through, she refuses to be vacant. She refuses to be the worst kind of window, passive and unobtrusive, never allowing dust or bird-shit to obscure the viewer’s pleasure. I aspire to be stained, she says, though her decals and doodles are whisked away by the rain. I aspire to be opaque. Do not mistake me for nothing.
The first time we met, I’d mistaken her for the exit of the dollar store, walking right into her. She stood with her hands on her hips and opened her mouth, fluorescent light slotting into her throat like a bouquet into the flute of a vase, illuminating her silhouette briefly. I would punish myself later for not memorizing the full shape of her, for not realizing that she’d chosen to show herself to me, that her face was faceted, throwing its brightness at me like a fleet of knives, forcing me to squint, forcing me to look away as she laughed. Her laughter was like a window rattling in a storm and I was afraid she might shatter before me, shards of her embedding in my flesh, encrusting me in crystalline armor. But she did not allow herself the privilege of breaking. She guarded her wholeness like it was her only belonging.
I apologized. She laughed and said at least I was not a pigeon. Later she confessed she was unused to being invisible. Before this, she was sand. She’d enjoyed the discrete pieces of herself, the sense of being a body made of other bodies, of hemming entire continents. My life as sand was fluid. I could move as a river does, folding around those I loved, changing direction and fleeing when I needed to. But as a single body, I must spend my entire existence in pursuit of safety. I must walk this world with one obsession: to remain whole, though how is it possible? What difference does any of our choices make?
Plunged into cold water, her shape was solidified forever. No matter how she screamed and fought in that water, wrestling and thrashing, she could not resist her destiny: to be the window that others look through, framing their dominion, midwifing their vision. Isn’t that the purpose of a woman? she asks me. To clear obstacles for others? To labor invisibly so that others may dream, gazing out at an infinite landscape with intact wonder? Isn’t this why every loose grain of us was gathered? The best a window can hope for, she says, is to be a widow. She has fulfilled all expectations of duty. She has served for the required years, and now her time has been returned. What I want is a life restored. Even if loss is the price. Isn’t it always? We all must grieve to be.
I apologize for all the times I took pleasure in her transparency, filling her like a TV screen with the dimensions of my fantasies. All the times I posed her at the peak of a mountain and took a photo through her throat, thrilled by the funnel of colors that were trapped in her glass, kaleidoscopic and bloody. All the times I forgot to thank her for washing the dishes or clearing the table, pretending that our bowls were levitating on their own, that the plates stacked themselves, her glass arms texturing the air like sequins of heat. All the times she made the bed for me, and I didn’t bother to find her face among the sheets, to reach out and run my fingers down her cheeks like rain. She laughs, and this time it is the sound of the sea shattering at my feet. The silence of birds fleeing the earth, battering into her glass, decorating her chest with a sash of burst livers.
Her laughter is a light, not the kind that barges through her but the kind she makes of herself, her own syrupy core, her own molten mourning. The solitude she seeks is not with me. My meat is a cloak thrown over her need, my shadow fleshy as a hand over her mouth.
This time she will leave me, and I will sit in the kitchen alone and face the window, feeling the rain on my face, knowing that she has taken the windowpane with her, that what I look through now is the hole of her hunger. The world will shrink to fit inside, punished for all the lives it confines. Waiting to enter and die.
© 2024 K-Ming Chang
About the Author
K-Ming Chang (kmingchang.com) is a Lambda Literary Award winner, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and an O. Henry Prize Winner. She is the author of the New York Times Book Review Editors’ choice novel Bestiary (One World/Random House, 2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the Otherwise Award. In 2021, her chapbook Bone House was published by Bull City Press. Her story collection Gods Of Want (One World/Random House) won a Lambda Literary Award, and her books have been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Korean, German, Turkish, and other languages. Her latest books are Organ Meats (One World, 2023) and a novella titled Cecilia (Coffee House Press, 2024). Her next two books, a horror novel and short story collection, are forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.