by Kelsey Liu.
“We were all warriors,” he says, late one night in bed.
His great-great-great-grandfather fought in sixteen wars and single-handedly won at least seven. In victory, he gouged out the eyes of every surviving enemy boy over the age of twelve, and he forced every enemy wife to grind up the bones of her slaughtered husband.
His great-great-grandfather strangled twenty-seven anacondas in the lush and deadly jungles of Nepal. He feasted on their roasted bodies and drank the poison from their fangs, which seeped into his bones. Instead of destroying him, the venom made him indestructible.
His great-grandfather went high in the mountains, where he trained his heart to beat only three times per minute and his lungs to need only five breaths in an hour. He ate nothing for four years and drank only twice a week, from snow melted in the cup of his palms. When he was ready, he went down to the ocean and made a raft from trees he ripped out of the ground with his bare hands. It carried him halfway to Africa. He swam the rest of the way there. In Ethiopia, he assembled an army of thirty-two feral lions and together they conquered all the lands touching the Nile.
His grandfather killed a man and started a revolution. When the nine nation army came for his head, he laughed and decapitated an entire cavalry regiment. He ground the infantry into the dust. He hurt none of the horses.
His father slew forty man-eating tigers in a week and mounted their heads on pikes.
“Really?”
“Yes,” he says, kissing your nose. “And he braided their tails together and wore them as a cloak.”
“Sounds cozy.”
“It was magnificent.”
“What did you do?”
He crawled to the center of the burning earth and met a blind dragon there. They wrestled and he won. He harvested the scales of its front legs, boiled them in a soup, and fed it to at least seventy-nine corrupt government officials, killing each and every single one of them.
“And then what happened? To all of you?”
And then his great-great-great-grandfather met a woman.
His great-great-grandfather did the same. So did his great-grandfather. His grandfather met a man, but he had a woman on the side so that was alright. His father met his mother on the subway.
“And I met you.”
And so they all settled down.
He kisses you, says good night, rolls over, and goes to sleep.
You briefly wonder if you locked the door.
When you were a kid, you used to sit in the front seat of your father’s car and lay your coloring book on the dashboard. With every jerk of the wheel, your crayons rolled and got stuck under the windshield, and you leaned forward and strained against the seatbelt because there was only fearlessness and an absolute trust that you were young enough to survive anything.
And now these days you sit at red lights and watch the intersection stream with cross-wiring cars and you think there is nothing, nothing, literally nothing really stopping you from flooring the gas.
You spent your whole life working towards finding some kind of freedom but instead you tied yourself down to a boy with a history of domesticity. You love him anyways because he has such a beautiful mouth.
“Do you ever think about hunting leopards in Sri Lanka?” you ask him one day while he finishes ironing your dress shirt.
“No,” he says. “They’re a classified IUCN endangered species.” He presses the shirt into your hands. “Hurry up, or you’ll be late to work.”
These days, he only tames your coffeemaker in the morning and your cooking pans at night. Once a week, he braves the mountains of laundry on your bedroom floor. He sits on his haunches and carefully sorts out the whites from the blacks from the coloreds and you want to tell him to fuck the clothes.
They enslave us.
And he sighs and kisses the corner of your mouth in exasperation. He points out that you need clothes to keep your job and you want to tell him to fuck the job.
It enslaves you too.
Well, he says, it also provides the rent money. Now hurry up, or you’ll be late for work.
You take the elevator to the fifteenth floor of a building deep in the smoke of the city. The walls are practically windows because the architect had a thing about panoramic views, never mind the fact that glass makes it that much easier for an attorney to bring in a sledgehammer and smash the comfortable work environment into thousands of irredeemable pieces.
At six o’clock you drive home in the beige SUV that you and he picked out together. It has a five-star safety rating but Ford didn’t account for the utter unreliability of human weakness.
He has dinner waiting for you on the table.
And you’re tired, but not because of the paperwork.
You eat and it’s delicious. He helps wipe off your mascara, your foundation. He pulls your camisole over your head and kisses the skin on your inner arm.
He leads you to bed, and somewhere in the ocean men are drilling a hole to the center of the earth, and one day they’re going to drill so deep they’ll meet the sister of the dragon he killed and she’ll want revenge.
You should go help them, you say, because you don’t understand why he wants to stay here.
Why anyone would choose this.
He squeezes your hip. “I do,” he swears. “I do.”
He kisses you on the mouth.
And tenderly, tenderly, you close the cage door.