Organ Meats

wedge a thumb between the knot and her skin, but I tell her it has to fit us snug as a bloodline or else we can t be synonyms.

The third thing is that we must learn to bite, even though our teeth are crooked and easily uprooted. We practice biting our own arms first, leaving purple perforated circles, and then we move on to biting shoulders, which requires our jaws to unhinge wider. I bit my cousin Vivian while she slept, kneeling in front of her mattress and gouging my teeth into her shoulder and gnawing the sphere of meat, imagining that Rainie had called me to fetch it, to bring it back to her whole, a tennis ball of bone, except we do not answer to names. When I bit her, Vivian flopped like a fish and landed outside her dreams, gasping, and I had to return her blood in a bottle. Rainie and I practice stretching our jaws, widening them enough for a crow to fly in and roost, and when our mothers see us sitting on the sofa, gaping at nothing, drool draping our chins, they leap at us and ask if we ve become melon-headed.

When Rainie and I feel that we have properly committed to our new species, we walk the streets as a dogpack, our shadows tailing us. When our knees are sore and bleeding and gravel-crusted from crawling, we decide that we will be two-legged dogs. We sit in the shade of a bald sycamore tree, its trunk like a drunk woman hooked over the fence of an abandoned lot, and in the corner of the lot are dogs sleeping in knots, panting loud in the heat, tongues chugging like conveyor belts. We bark at them, whine, but they don t recognize us, probably because we wear collars made of red thread, which mean we own our blood and they do not. When we lean on the fence, they leap up and foam white at the mouth, frolicking in their own snow. But they never come close enough for us to know. Rainie thinks the empty lot is full of dumped Styrofoam and exploding sofa stuffi

fiction, stretching the bounds of reality and blurring the lines between human girls and wild dogs. San Francisco Chronicle, 25 Highly Anticipated Books to Put on Your Radar this Fall

A haunting and feverish exploration of a very complex (and somewhat disturbing) friendship, I read this book wide eyed with such wonder. Certainly one of the most inventive and visceral novelists I ve encountered in quite some time . . . I am now a devoted fan. Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

One of our most enchanting storytellers today . . . From every first sentence, she has you hooked. Literary Hub

Chang is singular amongst us all. . . . [She] not only accomplishes narrative reinvention in her writing she builds upon what feels achievable on the page. Chang shows us different ways of being. Bryan Washington for Electric Literature