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

The door to treatment room two was open. It was the largest room and had its own gravity, holding the gyrating table in its orbit, and I braced myself for that giant tongue, that half-born word. The room was dimmed to let me know it was dirty, and I entered so quickly that for several steps, for a handful of feathered seconds, I didn't notice there was someone still inside. I walked toward the cabinet where the bottles of cleaner were kept, the neon liquid sloshing like the acid in my belly. Only when I began to kneel did I see the bright piping of a gown, a hem I had flipped in the right direction, a slight heat still wafting from it.

My head jerked up, and I saw her standing directly in front of the spine model, the table tilted behind her, slick and poised to speak. Her diamonded gown was glowing, so dew-clean that the hallway light clung to her front, and I climbed the lattice of its pattern before reaching her face.

It was a face I had dusted off in my memory so frequently that seeing it now, in the present, made me wonder if this one was a bootleg, if the original had been destroyed to keep me from corrupting it. Her long hair was loose, which was unusual for patients, who were asked to arrive with their hair tied back so the chiropractor could traverse the full territory of their spines. She wore her gown unknotted, the strings limp at her sides like desiccated insect limbs. Her posture seemed perfect to me, not at all like the stance of someone who needed to see a chiropractor, who experienced gravity. A shadow clogged the doorway, and I glanced behind me to see if it was the receptionist or the chiropractor, telling me to hurry up or leave.

When I turned back around, she had taken a step closer to me. Her legs and feet were bare, the gown bunching at her sides, and I tried not to imagine what she looked like from behind. Though she was technically facing me, I felt her true gaze was pointing behind her. The opening in her gown was a flickering eyelid. I looked at the wall behind her, avoiding her face, knowing that it had changed since I last saw her. I didn't want to look at it now, to reinstate the years between us. I wanted to turn and flee. I wanted the intimacy of distance, to be far enough away to see her entire surface.

You remember me, she said. She didn't say her name. Because I didn't know how to answer, I stepped back toward the door and said I was sorry, I'd leave her to undress. When you leave, I told her, you can leave the door cracked. The lobby is straight ahead.

Cecilia didn't move. Though the room was sapped of light, her shadow lapped at the floor, licking up my ankles. From where did her shadow summon its water?

She tilted her head, an unfamiliar motion. Cecilia's movements were never minor, and this slight angling was so foreign that for a second I was comforted, wondering if I'd mistaken someone else for her.

But then she approached me. The spine model shifted into view as she stepped forward, which gave me the strange impression that she'd left her bones behind. That her spine was standing in its previous place, fully assembled, and only the sheet of her skin dangled in front of me.

It was her face. Her narrow chin, which I'd envied. Glistening as if I'd licked it. Even in this dim, I could see the canopy of her lashes, trapping any light that tried to reach her eyes. Because they could not reflect anything, her eyes were quiet as an animal's, turned inward, preoccupied with the darkness inside her own skull. She still had the mole underneath her left eye, protruding slightly like a nipple, which she'd tried to scrape off with her mother's As Seen on TV vegetable peeler and which had grown back identical, though she'd claimed it came back larger, fat enough to nurse on. I could see the color of her nipples through the gown. I ducked my head. Patients weren't required to remove their underwear. The more I looked at her nipples, the more they widened like rings of displaced water, seeping across the front of her gown until I wondered if she was bleeding.

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.