Excerpt from Cecilia by K-Ming Chang, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
Cecilia

I saw Cecilia again when I turned twenty-four and switched jobs for the third time that year. In the laundry room of the chiropractor's office, I folded four types of towels and three sizes of gowns, my fingers sidling along seams and clawing the lint screen clean. The towels, which were stored in white laminate cabinets and laid out on the examination tables, had to be folded into fourths and rolled thick as thighs. The fraying ones were retired to a metal shelf along the back wall, a columbarium for cloth. I mourned them all: the aging towels were the easiest to fold, to flatten. They were softer and thinner and hung like pigskin over my forearm, clinging directly to my meat, nursing on my heat. They didn't get lumpy or beady when I tucked them, and their pleats never pickled into permanence, never stiffened into ridges.

The laundry room was a windowless space at the back of the clinic, painted pink and white like pork belly. I only ever saw the chiropractor and the receptionist when they entered to use the employee toilet in the closet next to the dryer. The chiropractor's peeing was astonishingly loud, almost symphonic, resonating inside the walls and harmonizing with the retching of the washer. His stream was so insistent, so unflagging, that I sometimes imagined it siphoned directly into the pipes at the back of the washer. It was his piss that filled the machine, battering the glass window, seasoning the sheets. That would solve the mystery of the sheets on the gyrating table, which yellowed too quickly even when I bleached them in the sink, turning the insides of my wrists translucent. The gyrating table was my name for the uncanny contraption in treatment room two, the largest of the rooms. Once or twice the chiropractor had attempted to demonstrate its function to me, even inviting me to try it out myself. It was like a dentist's chair, slanted at a forty-five-degree angle, its cushions made of foam and green pleather, except you were supposed to lie on it face down, and once you were cupped to its cutting-board surface, it began to rotate and twist and tip and rock and hum and sometimes even shudder. The chiropractor turned it on with a remote control and explained to me that its movements were expertly calibrated, allowing him to deliver the correct amounts of pressure to targeted areas without straining himself or distorting his own spine—but when it was empty, whirring without any body, it looked to me like a severed tongue, a fish flailing to speak. It wriggled in the dark like antennae, trying to tune in to a language it had lost. When I sprayed it down after appointments, patting its glossy flank to soothe it, convincing it not to buck anyone, I squinted at its stillness and imagined what word it wanted to say.

Unlike the chiropractor, the receptionist peed so discreetly that I found myself inching toward the door after she locked it, perching my ear against the thin plywood, listening for the rattle of her bladder. But I never heard anything, not even the shriek of her zipper or the applause of the toilet seat lowering, not even the sound of the faucet fidgeting. I imagined that her pee was like the rain in movies, a shimmering sheet so embedded in the scene that you could no longer distinguish its rhythm from the voices in the foreground, the faces feathering the screen. A rain like bestial breathing. A few times I became so entranced I forgot to flee, and when she opened the door, I was standing there with my ears flexed like wings. I pretended I'd been waiting for the bathroom myself, but I could tell she didn't believe it, and she avoided speaking to me except to let me know when a patient had left. She began turning on the faucet while she pissed, and the sounds were unsortable, threading together into the weather. When it was time to address me, she knocked on the laundry room door, competing with the sound of towels fistfighting in the dryer, and said, Get the room. This was my cue to wipe down the tables and replace the towels and gather the soiled laundry.

Excerpted from Cecilia by K-Ming Chang. Copyright © 2024 by K-Ming Chang. Excerpted by permission of Coffee House Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.