A woman sits by herself on an island and opens her mouth. Onyx teeth.

In the dark, the hollow screams of a child locked in a bathroom echo in the bones of my sister at the club with her friends who still feel just as trapped. 

In the countryside of central Vietnam, a small and dark worm tunnels into the ground.

Its bodily segments morphs into calves, shoulders, and other appendages as it eventually grows into the form of a young boy. As he grows he continues to burrow deeper into the lonely earth until he reaches a body of water. Slowly, the level of water rises. It pools above his ankles, and the aqua vacuum plunges his body down.

The rotting cavity on the floor in bà nội’s bathroom that we once mistook for a footbath
tunneled to the dangerous slits of a storm drain in a Costco parking lot.
If I walked too far ahead and fell in, the woman from below would hang me by my toenails,
my mother warns.

My mother is worn.
She used to hum to us as she washed our new, surprised small bodies and taught us to not let them be touched. Ribbons of water molecules ensnare us. She was still small and surprised in this new body of land. 

We are looking up from the bottom of a small circular pond lined by a rim of stones. The young boy hovers from above, and his nostrils playfully flare like two black suns. From even higher above, he releases the handle of a bucket, and its circular shadow expands until our stone frame seems to fill with darkness. But he catches the bucket on its way down, and the skylight returns. He repeats this gesture over and over, each time letting the bucket fall deeper down, grasping and releasing and holding and abandoning this forbidden lever of an invisible slot machine.

Our eyes become dazed from the flickering of light that floods the well as he and the bucket repeat this desperate choreograph of togetherness and sudden separation.

One day, my young and mischievous father accidentally falls inside a well. He finds a knowing solitude. Beneath him, the Pacific Ocean rises.

In a corner of the bathroom, flecks of mold embroider the ceiling. Across the island sky, a flock of black birds disintegrate into dust that pepper the sky. A woman opens her mouth and sets her lungs ablaze.

Sing to be an amphibian.
Singe to be an American.

The difference between a scream and a song is a generation.

A little over a year ago, my stay-at-home mom downloaded this social media karaoke app. She uses the small bathroom in our house for its acoustic properties, and will stand there in the cramped dark to record tragic folk songs or hearty nationalistic anthems. Though she does not have friends as a natural consequence of war/displacement/etc., her online fanbase showers her with views and virtual flowers every time she uploads a piece. Once, a fan asked for vocal advice. She told him that his voice was not miserable enough. That made me think about the reserve of sadness that she must be pulling from. On her solitary afternoons and evenings when my siblings and I avoid our childhood home and my dad drinks at an uncle's house, she will spend hours perfecting her craft and living her popstar dream.

I find myself moved by the way her singing spirit converts a shabby bathroom into a studio. She reminds me that I possess the drive to survive and create in this awfully isolating country. I attribute my DIY instincts to her.

I wrote this piece about my family and how we exist in relation to pipes and bodies of water.