I had a bad dream you were in it. Now she is gone the mother only sees her in dreams they are full of killed children but she doesn’t care she just wants to see her, dead or –. What am I wearing? La La asks. The hair I think looks too light is sticking out under the earth and the skin too shines white against warped dirt. Do you see the other children? Yes. Are there many of them. Yes. How many? She counts them all in her head. The way she goes to where they are taken. The way she pushes the dirt their past aside the direction he sped their future. She examines their legs the markings (what’s left) to see if any are La La. I’m not sure, she lies. Now that La La is gone the mother has become the mother she always wanted to be. The mother always there. The child always present in her mind. In every breath a mother first.
She can feel La La’s body vibrating inside her skin inside a fleshy skirt inside the fatty fleshy spread the labia limp wilted lettuce. No pleasure. She sees La La’s head under black hair with writing on it. She tries to push the hair apart to read what he wrote. She knows it is him put it there. Her fingers become Xs to cut the hair off.  
There is that time La La cuts her own hair. She cuts the leftside only. The childhair, the floss. The dollhair her mother finds hid in the pillowcase on the floor. La La lies with her leftside down so her mother can’t see the whole time she gets walloped for ruining her only doll. 
When she wakes up, which she tries not to, the flat fills the mother’s ears with La La’s voice. The sounds of La La when she is five or six. The Hong Kong English she sings in her corner of the bigger room practicing losing her accent. Shhh, her mother says. Only now she does not say it.
Back then her mother does not know how to be a mother. She is young and has a poor life and La La isn’t a wanted child. Loud as speakers. Tuned meat. Ten Thousand Things between lips tweezing.
In her dream the mother doesn’t look like a woman. She is more strong than that and more than a man. She stays La La by her side. Stays alone. No people. The world stays a threat. Stays harming where what’s took stays writhes. 
No more men, she says after it happens, she blames them all. It’d be a fine shame to get rid of all them men, La La says, where’d we get our allowance? In her dream the mother squats in a gunite no man can dig until her flesh scathes against the shelter of it. I should have had a son, she spreads. Her dream makes La La one. And they remain there, in that dream she’s still having, the two of them, together always, the men.