[Editors’ note: This miCRo is the first after our summer break last month. We’re glad to be back!]
Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: To match the heat of summer, here’s a sultry hybrid piece by Lucy Zhang—but Zhang uses unexpected language to evoke what the speaker’s sexual needs are: engineering manuals, business-speak, and cuisine. While others have written about sensuality in the figurative language of food (see Lauren Osborn’s “Ortolan” from this series for another masterful example), I haven’t seen an approach that mentions rich soup with rice noodles and enoki mushrooms, snake soup, Yuba wraps, or roast duck, all dishes that make the mouth water, but far from clichéd. No whipped cream or cherry stems here, just the “mechanics of the body.”
To hear Lucy read this piece, click below:
How to make me orgasm
Be soft, like you’re coaxing a sparrow off a bridge rail.
Patient, like the wife who’d carry food across the bridge to the scholar studying for his imperial exams. She’d fill clay pots separately with chicken soup, rice noodles, strips of enoki mushroom. She’d pour a thick layer of oil over the soup to insulate it from the cold, her fingers slick with grease—slippery enough to glide and disappear as ghosts do.
If it takes too long, there might be something wrong with how you think. Step back, look at the big-picture questions. Are you triggering properly? Is the power supply on? Do you understand the schematic? Did you build it correctly? Did you mix up the pins for V+ and V-? Is the input impedance high enough? Is the output button on the function generator green (is it outputting a signal)? Did you build it correctly?
Hold enough conviction. Don’t adjust your movements before they’ve registered with nerve endings. This is how restaurant butchers operate: unlatch a crate, lock their grip around a snake, slap it onto the ground. Auntie says snake soup is a delicacy, good for the skin, clean and clear with big chunks of snake meat and a few pieces of star anise, ginger, and wood ear. Tough enough you must strain your jaw to rip meat from bone. Soft enough to emasculate fibers into pulp. Snakes don’t thwack against the ground like eels do, like whips striking tile. They grip, shifting their belly scales to alter friction, rippling over hands and elbows. You’ve got to catch it by surprise. Try again if you fail.
Read the room for mutual energy investments. We are full of fatigue: tired bodies heaving Amazon deliveries up the stairs, clasping our knuckles together, wondering why our faces seem dull and the mini plums from the neighbor’s tree seem dull and the crystal-studded butterfly clip from waipo seems dull.
Be gentle. Not everyone likes things rough. When you get down to the mechanics of the body, you’ll find it’s built on knobs and cranks wrapping organs floating in mucus. A Yuba wrap of a body, rolled with pork and water chestnuts, sealed with starch, fried as a roll that threatens to unravel until it becomes scarves of bean-curd sheets and flaking filling. We wonder how the wife carried so much food to the scholar, how she must’ve held the pots like babies whose skulls might dissolve in vinegar.
Close your eyes. When they’re open, I’m reminded of the head left on the plate of roast duck, its bill opened wide enough to see down its throat, eyes bulging against the crisped skin. You know not to project humans into ducks—the only way we’ve still been able to eat meat. Close off the other senses. Count our breaths if you can hear them. Our breaths stagger, teeth on a cutter, gears overlapping and splitting until we part. You hear better with your eyes closed.
Lucy Zhang writes, codes and watches anime. Her work was selected for Best Microfiction 2021 and Best Small Fictions 2021, and was longlisted in the Wigleaf Top 50. She edits for Barren Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, and Pithead Chapel. Find her at kowaretasekai.wordpress.com or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.
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