Wash your hands before you start; wash your nails too. Pull back your hair. Don’t talk, don’t say even a word. Stand here between the other women, stand in this shed, don’t worry about the mud at your feet. Look. This is how to twist off the head. Here. This is how to pull down the legs. This is how to use your thumbs to pry off the shells. This is how you do it, not too hard, not too soft, not too slow. Like this, the owner says. Quick, quick.
This is how after the first hours, you can no longer feel your fingers. This is how after the first days, the fungus begins to grow beneath your nail. This is how the cut happens, how the infection spreads. This is how you behave when the owner comes behind you. This is how you smile. This is how, after a month, you hide your black thumb so it doesn’t show. This is how you pretend you are still young even though your fingers have become shriveled and old. This is how you reach down into the ice and pull another one out. This is how you won’t get behind.
When you use the bathroom behind the building, you see. This is where everything comes from. These brown streams that smell of sewer. Without mud, the lotus cannot survive. Your mother had once told you that. But where, you wonder, did all the flowers go?
This is the way the owner tells you to get back to work, to stop daydreaming, the trucks are here. This is the way the men come and pour the buckets out on the ice. Pouring the buckets out proudly in front of the women like they are pouring a feast for them to eat. Only no one is allowed to eat.
This is the night. This is the bus to the bunker without windows where you eat your bowl of rice and sleep beside the women on the thin woven mats. Curled up too. Feet to feet. This is the bus waiting in the morning to take you back again.
This is the Department of America, a woman on the bus beside you says, drawing a big circle in the air. This is where all these shrimps go. To the all-you-can-eat buffets. To the fancy dinner parties. To the ten-dollar bag of frozen food the wife can make easy for her husband.
This is how your thumb throbs in the night. This is how you try to sleep with it inside your mouth. This is how you try not to let anyone hear your cry. This is how you know where all the cold, dead things go. This is how you know.
