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| Photo by Bankim Desai on Unsplash |
Huina Zheng's Filament is the winner of Issue 8's Editor's Choice Prize, awarded to the piece that best represents the spirit of the issue. Filament accomplishes much within its short, grotesque form as a psychologically strange and culturally resonant piece that speaks to our broader interest in the strangeness of the human condition and the unstable boundaries between the psychological and the physical. I especially loved how it carves out an unsettling metaphor for the ways ideology reproduces itself within the family and society and and how it may be crushed before it acquires a voice.
Read Zheng's short fiction below:
Filament
My mother says my husband is an only son, so I have to give his family a son. Don’t bring up equality with her. I cannot let his line end, or he will find a younger woman to bear him a son. My sister had two C-sections. Both daughters. The doctor said another pregnancy would risk rupture. She said her body was like a capsule, filled with other people’s expectations. She could not control what it held, only answer for it when it was wrong. Something sealed inside her, waiting to be used.
My mother makes her living raising silkworms. The worms know nothing of survival. They are plump, soft, white. Day after day they chew through mulberry leaves, leaving behind black pellets like moles scattered across green skin. They spin silk and wrap themselves into coffins. As if something inside them might grow wings. As if darkness could turn into sky. My mother never lets them become moths. To her, that is not emergence. It is betrayal. She throws the cocoons into boiling water and leaves them there for five minutes, killing whatever in them believes in flight. Their value, she says, is the silk. As for the boiled pupae? They are protein, feed. For some people, a delicacy.
On Xiaohongshu, “welcoming a baby boy” is a trending topic. Under posts announcing the birth of sons, people comment: sharing the good luck, I want a boy too. Later, if they do have a son, they go back to the same post and comment again. As if something has to be returned. My mother-in-law, who does not know how to shop on Taobao, relayed this method to me, said it works, told me to change my username to “kneeling, praying for a son in my womb.”
We open these posts. We type, repost, save, like. Something passes through our bodies. Something leaves us. It drifts in the air, slips into our nostrils when we breathe, leaps from our mouths when we speak. It laughs, then lowers its head, almost shy. It blurs the sound of what we once said. I don’t want it to make a home in me. So I press my left palm against my abdomen. In my right hand, I raise the pregnancy test like a wand and begin to murmur. Low, then under my breath, then hoarse, then sharp. It is driven into my uterus, thrashing, searching for a way out. It pushes downward, trying to force itself through my vagina. For the first time, I smile at it. I press harder. It folds back, forced to retrace its path upward. Through my body. Past my chest, my throat. I open my mouth. It comes out of me at last, no longer invisible but silk, filament by filament, blood-bright. It does not laugh anymore. I will never let it learn how to speak.
Huina Zheng holds an M.A. with Distinction in English Studies and works as a college essay coach. Her creative work has been published in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal, and other literary journals. She has received multiple honors, including nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. She lives in Guangzhou, China, with her family.
