“Will it hurt?” Huawen asked while the tech busied herself adjusting the reclining chair, a metal tray clasped under her other arm.
“It will.” The tech, a woman with a soft, tired face, met Huawen’s eyes kindly.
Huawen nodded, steeling herself. “What do I do?”
The tech patted the seat. Huawen boosted herself up into it, arranging the folds of her skirt as she did so. She was not quite horizontal, her eyes staring up at the ceiling.
“Now you must remember.” The instruction was plain, the tech’s face sympathetic. “It hurts because we have to surface the foreign objects from when they were first introduced to your psyche. So you must take your mind back to the past.”
Huawen screwed her eyes shut, hands resting on her midriff. She tried to slow her breathing. To remember. But her head filled with static, as if she had stood up too quickly and the blood had drained down into the rest of her body.
The tech must have seen the struggle on her face, because she suggested, “Maybe start with something smaller. Easier to access. Lower stakes.”
Huawen nodded. She thought about something easier. About being left-handed, and how that hand had been smacked whenever she picked up a brush with it.
“Use your right hand,” her mother had said, over and over again. “Or you’ll smear the ink. It’s unnatural to use your left. You’ll be untidy. It’s for your own benefit, so use your right hand.”
“Good.” The tech’s voice intruded on her memory. “It’s beginning to show. Can you feel that?”
Huawen opened her eyes. There was a remembered ache, an echo of the shock of correction more than the pain of it. A spiny white bone was slowly emerging from the back of her left hand, sharpened point first. The skin was unbroken, but the spur nonetheless itched and burned as it slid out.
She gasped, automatically reaching over with her other hand to catch hold of the bone. It felt like a foreign object. She grunted and shuddered as she drew it out. Once it was free, the tech held out her tray. Huawen gingerly put the bone on it.
She flexed her left hand. It felt different. More alive. Lighter.
“Good,” the tech said. “And now if you’d like to try…?”
They were going for the big one. Huawen replaced her hands on her abdomen. She took a deep breath. She closed her eyes. She remembered.
The door to her bedroom opened. She could have sworn she had locked it. But there was her mother, on the threshold, holding a tray with two glasses on it. Drinks for the high school study buddies.
The glasses shattered on the floor, followed by her mother’s shocked voice. “What are you doing?”
Huawen and Yuanyuan leapt apart, breaking their kiss, but it was too late.
Yuanyuan scrambled to her feet, her face flushed, eyes wide, panicked. “I should go home,” she said.
“Wait,” Huawen said desperately, but Yuanyuan fled, sidestepping Huawen’s mother and the shards of glass on the floor.
Her mother didn’t speak at first. Then, as she bent over to pick up the shards of glass, she said, “It’s unnatural. You and…another girl. It’s wrong.” She wouldn’t look at Huawen. “You should pray. Beg God for forgiveness. Cast the temptation aside and tell the Devil to get behind you.”
Huawen was frozen. She felt peeled open, a dark wave of shame rising up inside her.
“Good.”
The tech’s voice again, bringing her back to the present. Back to the room and the procedure.
Huawen opened her eyes.When she looked down at her body, she nearly screamed.
A huge splinter of bone was sliding out from low down in her belly. It didn’t hurt so much as it felt caught on her intestines, tugging queasily as the jagged point rose between her hands.She reflexively grabbed the splinter, but couldn’t bring herself to yank it out.
“What’s wrong?” the tech asked, her eyes intent on Huawen’s.
“I can’t…I can’t…” Huawen panted. “I’m afraid.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“It feels…tangled up with my insides. Like it goes all the way back. Like it’s attached to my spine. I’m afraid that if I pull it out, I’ll eviscerate myself. Pull out my own…my own backbone.”
She thought about the marriage she was in now. Her husband. A good deacon of the church. Her mother loved him. “The son we never had,” she’d said at their wedding.
If Huawen extracted this splinter, what would she dislodge in the process? Would removing it hollow her out? Would she collapse, her spine gone? What would happen to her marriage? To her family?
But if she didn’t…her left hand trembled, the life stinging as it slowly returned. How long had the rest of her body been deadened? She was impaled on this object. It was tangled up with every facet of her life.
She tightened her fists around the splinter. She drew it out of herself, panting, then screaming, then crying.
The bone crashed down onto the metal tray.
She felt emptied out. But her back still worked. Her spine was still intact. She pushed herself off the seat. She wobbled towards the door.
The tech stopped her. She held the tray out towards Huawen, with its grisly bones. “Would you like a souvenir?”
Huawen’s hand hovered. She selected the huge splinter. Then she slowly pulled her wedding ring off and left it on the tray.
†
Years later, she had the splinter worked and carved into a new ring. One she wore on her left hand when she began to date again, women this time. There was still pain to reckon with, but her body felt newly alive, newly her own.
© 2026 Mae Tang
Mae Tang (she/her) is a bisexual Chinese Singaporean immigrant in the UK. She was shortlisted for the Hachette Children’s Novel Award 2025. Her short fiction has been published in anthologies, and she also writes poetry and romance novels.