My grandmother has no nail on her right thumb. The tip of the finger looks like a valley filled in with flesh. The flesh grows sideways, downward, crooked, every way except the way it should. I once asked her what happened to it. She said she forgot. But my mother says Grandmother remembers perfectly well. It’s just that someone else was involved in that story too, and she doesn’t like talking about it. The cracks beneath my mother’s fingernails are dye vats. Today they hold spinach green from lunch, flour white from this morning’s steamed buns, soy-sauce brown from tonight’s braised pork. She washes her hands dozens of times a day, but the colors seem rooted in the flesh itself. Barely scrubbed away before they return. My mother says it’s because she does too much housework. I know it’s because her nails are tasting food on behalf of the body she keeps hungry. My nails never grow long. The moment a white edge appears, I bite it off, leaving the nails pitted and uneven like something rats have chewed through. Grandmother only smiles at the sight of our hands. The wrinkles on her face look like the crumpled flesh where her thumbnail should have been.

My mother believes the women in our family are born with hands meant for something. I think she has finally accepted the ugliness of her own. She even blames Grandmother’s scavenging on her hands. Every time Grandmother comes home, she is carrying something, dragging it, hugging it, balancing it against her shoulder. Once she hauled home a wine-red sofa that squeaked from inside.

My mother shot me a look. I fetched a cage and held it against a tear in the sofa lining while my mother beat the cushions with a broom. Two rats, huge as kittens, burst out and ran straight into the trap.

Grandma lifted the cage with her nail-less thumb and grinned through the gap where her front teeth used to be. “Perfect,” she said. “Lunch for Coal.” She stepped over red stools and blue plastic boxes and carried the rats to the balcony, where the black stray dog she had brought home last month lay sleeping.

Sometimes Grandmother takes me treasure hunting through the streets. She picks up everything she thinks is useful: broken branches, plastic bottles, one-yuan coins, cardboard boxes, candy wrappers children leave behind in the park. Whenever she drags these things home, my mother waits until she falls asleep, then secretly packs up the worthless pieces and drives half an hour away to throw them into some distant dumpster. At night, Grandmother wakes to the sound of cats crying in heat and can’t sleep properly, so during the day she keeps nodding off instead, her head dipping and jerking up again like a fishing float on water. Whenever this happens, I slip her arm over my shoulder and guide her slowly back to her room, one tiny step at a time. My brother, half a head taller than me, only lowers his head and scrolls on his phone. Everything Grandmother brings home becomes my responsibility. I flatten cans beneath my shoes, tie stacks of cardboard together, separate out the things that can’t be sold and stuff them into garbage bags. My brother only needs to study well. My mother says daughters should understand their mothers. One day, when I become a mother too, I’ll understand how hard life is for women. As for her son, she believes she fulfilled her duty to her husband’s family the day he was born. When Grandmother wakes and sees the balcony piled higher with her “treasures,” she smiles. Wrinkles burst from the corners of her eyes like dried marigold petals opening in sunlight. I find myself wishing for more flowers to bloom across her face.

The afternoon Grandmother brought home the red sofa, she said it had spirit in it and deserved to belong to someone in need. We dragged it through the neighborhood, past the cheung fun shop where she ate breakfast every morning because the rice noodle rolls tasted “like home,” past the milk tea store she always called robbery. We dragged it through the whole neighborhood. Grandmother kept saying, “Not here. Not suitable.”

At last, we reached a bus stop lined with parked scooters and shared bikes.

“Here,” she said.

Under the sunlight, the sofa’s red leather showed deep cracks and yellow stains. Grandmother said people waiting for the bus could sit comfortably now instead of standing.

“No one’s going to sit there,” I told her.

“They will,” Grandmother said.

Then she told me about the year my mother’s stomach swelled. Not the swelling of fullness, she said, but hard swelling, drum swelling. A stomach you could knock on like wood. Back then, there was barely enough food to eat, let alone money for medicine. So Grandmother began collecting discarded medicinal dregs from other people’s homes. Whatever herbs people threw away after boiling, she gathered back up, dumped into a pot, added water, and boiled again. And again. My mother survived.

Grandmother sat down on the red sofa and told me to sit too. I lied and said I wasn’t tired, that standing would help me lose weight. People drifted into the bus stop one by one. They glanced at the red sofa, then chose to stand a few steps away instead. Grandmother waved at a middle-aged woman, motioning for her to come sit. The woman shook her head, blew her nose into a tissue, and tossed the crumpled paper into the bushes behind her. A child finished a lollipop and dropped the stick beside the bus stop sign. A man crushed out his cigarette beneath his shoe, leaving behind a black mark.

December wind scraped across my skin. I shivered and asked Grandmother what we were waiting for.

“For someone to sit,” she said.

“No one’s going to sit there.”

Grandmother said nothing. After a while, she murmured, “I’ve waited longer than this before.”

“What were you waiting for?”

She didn’t answer. She only licked her cracked lips while the thumb without a nail moved slowly across her mouth.

By the time the streetlights flickered on, Grandmother finally stood up. We walked home together. In her hand, she carried a doll someone had thrown away. Half its hair had been ripped out, and someone had drawn a mustache across its face with blue pen.

My mother frowned the moment she saw it.

“This can’t be thrown away,” Grandmother said. “Wash it clean, and it’ll become beautiful again. At night, if it stays beside me, I’ll sleep peacefully.”

On Grandmother’s bed already sat a teddy bear missing one arm, a dog with one ear gone, and a dinosaur without legs.

Later that night, the cats outside began crying again, shrill as infants. I pushed open Grandmother’s door and found her awake. She wasn’t sleeping on the bed. Instead, she had curled herself onto the floor between the bed and wardrobe atop a layer of old clothes, folded tightly into herself like a hedgehog. Around her were piles of things: cardboard boxes, pillows, bulging bags of clothing.

She says sleeping this way feels safer. My mother says it’s a habit left over from fleeing war. Grandmother ran twice in her life. Once from the Japanese soldiers. She carried a swaddled baby on her back, held a three-year-old daughter in her arms, and dragged an eight-year-old son through the mountains for a month. The second time was during the one-child policy years. When the family-planning officials came to take my mother for a forced abortion, Grandmother grabbed my mother with one hand and me with the other and hid in the mountains for three months. At night she wrapped herself in a raincoat and slept crouched inside bushes, too frightened to stretch out her legs. Grandmother said she didn’t straighten her legs once during those three months. After that, she never slept stretched out again.

According to my mother’s brother, Grandmother lost her thumbnail because she lost someone at the docks when she was young. “Who?” I asked. He never answered. Grandmother stubbornly believes that once the nail grows back, she’ll find that person again. She rubs ginger juice onto the thumb, soaks it in herbal medicine. Years pass. Then decades. The nail never returns. My uncle says that was when Grandmother began collecting things. As if holding something in her hands could fill the empty space that person left behind.

Grandmother leaned against the cabinet, staring toward the window. Yellow streetlight cut her face into strips of brightness and shadow. Outside, the cats screamed louder and louder. She turned to look at me, and for a moment I saw a flicker of light pass through her clouded eyes. A beetle landed in her white hair and crawled deeper inside it.

“When I lost him,” she said softly, “there was crying like this too.”

“Who?” I asked. She didn’t answer. She only used the thumb without a nail to flick the beetle from her hair. It buzzed upward toward the window, slammed hard into the glass, and fell onto the floor.

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Huina Zheng holds an M.A. with Distinction in English Studies and works as a college essay coach. Her creative work has been published in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal, and other literary journals. She has received multiple honors, including nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. She lives in Guangzhou, China, with her family.