There are two geometric points on a Möbius band. They are female. They are she and I. 

“My Möbius ring is as rusty as time.” I look at my hand. 

“You should take it off,” she says.

“I can’t. It was welded on my finger. Over the years my weight fluctuates, it shrinks and swells with my finger. It infects me.”

“Infects?” 

“Yes. I am ring-wormed.”

“Then you need to chop your finger off.”

“It would hurt.”

“Hurt more than this?” 

“More than this.”

On my marathon wedding day, my dress was so heavy that I could not breathe, my makeup was so thick that my skin could not breathe. But the roses were nice, so many roses of so many colours, bone white, parchment yellow, seafoam green, steel blue, thistle purple… roses of namarupa. He gave me a Möbius wedding band. It has a twist. 

“Ring around the rosie, a pocketful of posies,” I sing.

“Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,” she sings.

The second time I was considering a wedding, I wanted my ex and me cross-dressed. The third and last time I was considering a wedding, I wanted the music to be played on rubber chickens. 

“Three blind mice, three blind mice, see how they run, see how they run,” I sing. 

“They all ran after the farmer’s wife, who cut off their tails with a carving knife,” she sings. 

Once upon a time, I was in a toxic womb, blind as the three mice, blind as Milton. But I started even before that. I started as an atom, a quark. I retain not only the memory of being a monkey, being in the ocean, but also being in the universe, in emptiness. 

“I have this recurrent vision: a thick iron tightrope running through one end of the universe to the other. I found it disturbing,” I say. 

“I found it disturbing to be on the tube everyday starting from Canons Park, passing Queensway, White City, London Bridge, Charing Cross, Burnt Oak, Cockfosters, Warren Street, Baker Street, Bond Street, to Piccadilly Circus, to and fro, up and down, like Nu Wa bites her own snake tail.” 

“You are Sisyphus.” 

“We are all Sisyphus,” she says, “but it’s not necessarily a curse.” 

“I found comfort in the shape of a circle. It is the shape of mother. But my mother is a tightrope. She will snap at any minute and snap my head off. So I have to find comfort in other women.” 

“But when you are with a woman, you are often talking about men.” 

“I talk about all sorts of things. I digress, meander, stray,” I say. “According to science, men are systematizers, women are empathizers, and women are better at language than men. On average I mean. I am no architect. I struggle to find a structure of these words.” 

“The world is already full of systems.” 

“The world is a prison, whose bars are made of straight nerves.”

“Here we go round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush,” I sing. 

“Here we go round the mulberry bush, so early in the morning,” she sings. 

“I want to return home, like Odysseus, but I have no Penelope waiting for me,” I say. 

“If Homer had been a woman, what would he have written?”

“If the history of literature had been written by women, would meandering have been the norm?” 

“Dream on, dream on,” she says.

“I dreamt of having sex with Achilles last night. Then he turned into an arrow. The Iliad is an arrow. The Odyssey is a Möbius band, with twists and return. Look at the A in Achilles, the O in Odysseus, who says English is not a pictographic language?” 

“How’s the sex?” 

“An arrow always falls. An arrow is unsustainable. Achilles’s fate is death. Achilles was killed by an arrow. If eternity has a shape, it must be a circle. If eternity has width, has both temporal and spatial dimensions, it will twist itself to return. It will become a Möbius band,” I say. “But remember, or forget, that this is not the realm of physics.” 

“Georgie Porgie pudding and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry,” she sings.

“London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady,” I sing. 

“Eve is falling down,” she says, “she has been falling for a long time, in our collective dream.” 

“Eve’s fall is bespoken in the fall of words, words about women. Pejoration of her, pejoration of her names, look at the history of ‘mistress’, ‘governess’, ‘spinster’.” 

“The Fates are spinsters.” 

“Maybe from the vantage point of the Fates, history is a circle. A circle is the perfect shape, like the lip of a Grecian urn, a Chinese jar,” I say. “A Möbius band is imperfect, but immensely more interesting. I want to return. If I cannot return home, I will return further.”

“You’ve gone round the twist.” 

“In ancient China, death was called returning. What’s beyond death?” I ask.

“In Journey to the West, the Monkey King drew a circle around his master to protect him from the demons, but he stepped outside the circle and got captured by the demons.”

“In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.”

“Goosey, goosey, gander, whither dost thou wander?” she sings.

“Upstairs and downstairs, and in my lady’s chamber,” I sing. 

My lady’s chamber is her womb and my tomb. On top of it, on earth, a circle of people, mostly men, men of letters, wearing black cloaks and Noh masks, walking slowly around the stake at which I am being burnt to death. The smoke rises to heaven so the gods can enjoy it. But the dome of heaven is my conceiving belly curve. I am standing outside their circle, watching me being burnt alive, when I hear her sing:

“There I met a woman, who wouldn’t say her prayers; I took her by her left leg, and threw her down the stairs.” 

“I don’t know if it has to be this way,” I say, “for me it’s a simple matter. When I was little, before my home turned into a madhouse, my mother used to teach me ancient Chinese poems every night. We both like one poem in particular. It’s about withered vines on an old tree, crows at dusk, a lean horse on an ancient road, the setting sun and a homesick person.”

“‘Autumn Thoughts.’” 

“Yes. Those few lines were woven into my nerves like vines. I cherish them. Then one day I want to write something that can reincarnate a few lines, resurrect a few dead writers, and hope a few lines of mine can be woven into some child’s nerves, a toy for him or her to play with, a demo game.”

“So you are a mother, too.” 

“Or these metaphors can be imagined in other ways. The beloved lines can be the tentacles of an octopus or a jellyfish, entangled with the fishnet of innocent nerves.” 

“One little, two little, three little Indians,” she sings.

“Three little, two little, one little Indians,” I sing.

“I remember the anxiety of playing musical chairs at kindergarten. I can still feel the anxiety now when I’m thinking of it. It’s like participating in some religious ritual I don’t understand,” I say. “Sometimes I feel you are my kindergarten teacher.” 

“Have you found the comfort you were looking for?” 

“I don’t know. One summer evening, when I was a kid, I was playing with my friend outside. Then somehow I found that my mother went to the department store. I panicked. Usually my mother would take me if she wanted to go to the store. I ran to the store as fast as an arrow. When I couldn’t find her there, I cried under a streetlamp. My friend tried to console me, but I was inconsolable. Then my mother returned. At that moment, I felt happiness.” 

“You were a horse, running on an abandoned merry-go-round.” 

“I was a fetus, sleeping in an anglerfish’s belly, in the deep, deep sea.” 

Jie Wang, born in China and living in the UK, is interested in the interaction between literature and science. She received a BSc in Ecology from Peking University and a Certificate in Creative Writing from the University of Sheffield. Her works have been published in “literally stories,” “TERSE. Journal,” “Ligeia,” “Bewildering Stories,” “The Metaworker,” “Fleas on the Dog,” and “Writers Resist.” Her email address is jiewang2014@gmail.com.