YOLK
Our dog hatched an egg one golden summer and Ba and I still believe it. It sat on its haunches
for months on end and had this terrible whimper that kept Ma up, drove her to tears. Its fur
turned white as salt and acquired this weird, fuzzy quality. We knew if we tried petting it, our
hands would pass right through and we may or may not learn what a spirit felt like.
Unfortunately, it gave a little growl whenever we neared so we didn’t dare test the theory. But we
kept observing, intrigued, mystified. Then, one day, sun dripping off leaves and everything, the
dog got up and there it was, bald as a head. Ma told us how we shouldn’t always trust our eyes,
so Ba and I soaked our tongues in the memory, swished it round our mouths ‘til we coated our
teeth in chicken fat yellow. So sweet. So heavy. We told people the story but said it was a shared
dream, thought they’d call it nonsense despite the grinning evidence. For years we did so, told
the story as our dream. The story as our past. The last thing I remember Ba telling me after he
died, I touched it long ago; inside, everything felt like you.
Field Notes from Day 7,969, a Ghost Story
I remember waking up in azure. Far above the old garden in the city I was born in then left. The
garden is full of daffodils and roses and other flowers I can’t name.
Sometimes violence crashes and leaves nothing but the ghost of unfurled golden petals.
2 layovers and 2 different planes. And we are 3 immigrants sitting in a row, taking up only 2
seats. Because I was small and fast asleep inside the crib. My mother’s body makes.
My mother says people kept vacating. The seat next to the airplane aisle. First, a man got up to
use the restroom and never returned. Second, a brunette in pink velour switched seats. Our
history kept whittling down. To an empty chair. My mother says this is a ghost story.
Someone I was told loves me is gone. All the flowers are turning into white. Lilies.
I didn’t cry during the funeral. Everyone was crying. Maybe I just didn’t. Hear myself cry.
My mother keeps telling me that I keep too much in. How all that weight can age. A woman. She
knows. She doesn’t know. That this. Is what I remember. When I was 3 my world fell apart twice
and the simultaneous separation of my family and the death of my father left a hole the size of a
pebble in my throat. Grief keeps leaking from.
The flowers have grown around stone, seeking the most nourishing soils to take root underfoot. I
remember wresting. Unresting one from its place. I could hear a California airport inside its
verdant bud. I. Didn’t know anything that small could hold so many ghosts.
It’s August 1 and my mother holds me for a long time at the same airport where we arrived 21
years back. For 2 years I will be living in the city we left. That is not the city we left. I want to
pretend that loss is only a roundtrip. Flight.
I tell her she won’t lose me like she did. Ba. She pulls me into her like breath, a surfacing from.
Some place. Not here.
The ghost inserts. Asserts itself. Into my mother. You didn’t lose Ba she says. He lost you.
Uyen P. Dang is a first-generation Vietnamese American writer from Saigon, Vietnam, where she is currently researching ghosts, cemeteries, and spiritual tourism. Her work appears in or is forthcoming in Exposition Review, X-R-A-Y, Passages North, and elsewhere. Find her at uyenpdang.com.
*Yolk was previously published in The Adroit Journal. Field Notes from Day 7,969, a Ghost Story was previously published in Sundog Lit.
