The Membranes
Ari Larissa Heinrich's translation of Chi Ta-wei's The Membranes
, a classic of queer speculative fiction originally published in Taiwan in 1995, is out this week from Columbia University Press. In the excerpt below, the protagonist, Momo, reflects on her unusual origin story.
Momo brushed her yellow bedroom wallpaper with her fingers. Then she bit gently into a hothouse peach, sweet juice oozing from pink skin so delicate it would bruise if you blew on it. Had she perceived the yellow paper through direct exposure to her subcutaneous neural network? Was it her taste buds that detected peach sweetness? She would never know. An impenetrable barrier existed between her body and the material world.