Hotblood
By Ginger Ko

On the day of her wedding, my great-grandmother sat with her face above a low fire encircled by stones and clipped the trimmings of her hair into the dying flames. She was weeping because she was being married off to the village loony, a young boy who had stolen into her room to eat hairs he plucked from her combs. As silent as the tan dust of plains around him, my great-grandfather snuck behind his crying bride to lift a fallen tress to his mouth that had been blown by the wind to her feet. Turning to find her betrothed behind her, my great-grandmother whipped her long braids around her neck and attacked him with her scissors.

On my grandmother's thirtieth birthday, she wrapped a fox stole around her throat and brought down around her face a black birdcage veil of Russian netting. Leading her three children through the streets, she walked in high heels to the policeman's office and demanded they arrest her husband at the opium den, for neglecting his family and shaming his wife on her birthday. The magistrate looked down at her unbound feet and the youngest child at her hand, a plump boy who was gaping his mouth to lick a street vendor's candy clenched upside-down in his fist. The magistrate balked, calling her a woman, but she shouted and kicked off her European shoes to throw them at his head. The next day, my grandfather was fined for shameful conduct and assault (by Western shoes) on a government official.

The morning before my birth, my mother struggled to reach socks at the bottom of the closet, so she could jump-rope in the living room to hasten my arrival into the world. That night she went into labor for almost twenty-four hours, hemorrhaging until her breathing dwindled, the lights of the room slowly darkening and the noises of hospital machines slowly muting until all she could remember was the time as a child she had bounced a red leather ball over the wall of the courtyard, and upon running into the outside street to find it, saw that she had struck a woman's shopping basket full of dewy cabbage. When she returned from the hospital, my father blamed my mother for the birthing of a girl, for not gestating the genitals of a boy during the plentiful months of pregnancy. Screaming in answer, my mother tore off the catheter bag of piss tied to her leg and threw it into my father's face, searing his brow with urine.

We had our first argument while pitching moving boxes into our shared apartment. We had only unpacked ashtrays and salad tongs, so when I was done throwing those at your forehead I went to the kitchen set wedged into the entryway to sit in one of the chairs still wrapped in plastic. Your own mother, she had often clenched her face to strangle her sobs while your father bent down to fleck spittle on her flinching neck while bellowing like a finery forge. So when you rushed up to my face as if I were another man, an antlered opponent, perhaps you expected me to cower against the hallway wall, ducking with distress at your displeasure—but you see, I have three generations of hotbloods in my veins, so I rose up on my toes to spit back at your maddening face and raised a hand to dig fingernails into your eyelids.

——

Ginger Ko is an occasionally-published writer living in the Midwest. She prides herself on maintaining an elusive presence on the internet.

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