There are thirteen words I know in Chinese before I know them in English. Shu niu hu tu long she ma yang hou ji gou zhu — middle school races to say them as fast as possible. No tones because they slow you down. Middle school Chinese was always in portable classrooms. Only in retrospect comes the othering, and I can already hear accusations of overthinking.

A twenty-three-year-old writer is sitting in her St. Louis apartment on a winter night when she begins to feel unusually cold. She repeatedly takes her own temperature with a green plastic thermometer.

Whether he met his fate in the mountains, or the mountains became a route of escape, the secret of what happened to the missing man is now forever guarded by the Devils.

Avoiding white-clad men, even those without knives. Advancing anarchy. Apologizing sometimes unnecessarily.

Violence was a family tradition. My father, his father, his father’s father.

Haunted, some might call it. I say, At home. The past is here, ripe and palpable, reaching out to us. Hoping we reach back.