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

The chiropractor walked into the laundry room, and I shook out the gown and fiddled with the strings, pretending to be pleating it. When I stepped away, my lips lurked in its folds. But the chiropractor didn't look at me, just headed straight to the bathroom. He flicked the switch, and the light lagged a few seconds before limping in. I saw his shadow coloring in the crack under the door. His piss trumpeted into the toilet, louder than I'd ever heard it. Then it thinned into a hiss, managing a few percussive beats before tapering into silence.

Cecilia was the one who first told me: Boys hold their dicks when they pee, isn't that gross? We were thirteen and sitting on the curb together, waiting for the city bus. Whenever it arrived, jerking toward us, we made a game of seeing how long we could stay seated before its wheels severed our knees. Cecilia could wait the longest, the bus lunging toward her, the soles of her feet stapled to the street. I would watch the street while she watched the sky, refusing to move until the bus poured its shadow over her head. Then she would retract her legs and roll backward, bouncing up from the pavement.

When she told me this fact, I was so horrified that I didn't believe her. Haven't you noticed, she said, that you can never see a man's hands when he pees? That they're always in front, like they're watering something? Guess what they're holding. With a jolt, I realized this was true. My brother peed with the door open, the only one in our family of women, and from behind, I'd never once seen his hands. He was never holding a book in front of him, or holding a phone to his ear, or simply allowing his hands to slack off at his sides.

It seemed so impossible that I stopped watching the street. If this were true, it had to happen often, boys touching their penises. I'd never once touched myself while peeing, or even while not peeing. The idea hadn't even occurred to me, touching. Underwear touched you. Toilet paper touched you, brief as a bee. But the directness of a hand was different. I thought everyone went their entire lives never directly touching the places they peed from, and when Cecilia repeated what she'd said, I still couldn't believe it. They touch it every time? I said. Cecilia looked at the sky and laughed and said they had to. To direct it. The fact that it was a necessary and casual utility—like holding back your hair to drink from a water fountain— shocked me more than anything. It seemed grotesque and barbaric, designed purely to disgust me. But beneath my disgust was a constant awe, the kind Cecilia must have felt when she found a dead squirrel on our street, its flesh freed from the bone by a family of crows.

That is the worst thing I have ever heard, I said to Cecilia. That means they touch it every few hours! She smiled at me and reined in her legs, and I realized too late that the bus was lurching toward us. But we were linked at the elbows, and she pulled me up with her. We boarded the bus together, and I looked at the hands of every man inside it. Seven. Some were tall or old or ghosts. I looked at their hands for some visible evidence of savagery, moles or scales or knuckles poking out like horns. I waited for their hands to be let off their arms, free to sneak inside any skin.

Inside this bus, Cecilia and I were careful to touch very little. Our mothers warned us about the infectiousness of death. Even a safety railing or a bus strap could sicken us, so we pretended to be taxidermy, stiff and leaning against each other. I kept counting hands as they entered and exited, as they touched windows and green plastic seats and nostrils filled with moss and jean pockets and earlobes. There wasn't skin between anything. The sky slipped and exposed the moon, and I wished Cecilia hadn't told me the thing she knew. I wanted to know what was safe to look at.

When I got home, I sat down on the toilet. I listened to my piss prattle in the pipes, repeating her name. I didn't touch anything but the toilet paper knotting in my sweaty fist, the bar of soap made of dog's drool, the faucet spraying spittle, the frayed towel Ama mended once in a while. I was reassured by ritual. I inscribed my borders clearly. It didn't matter if Cecilia was telling the truth, I decided, as long as I could inventory my touch, as long as I didn't slip from my silhouette.

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.