Your mother spends every evening working on her machine.

It looks like no other machine you’ve seen. A hunk of metal on the ground, with wires stringing each section to the next. Like the inside of a giant robot’s belly, if someone cut it open to expose the raw gape of its innards.

She’s been constructing it, piece by piece, for as long as you can remember. Your first memories of her are of her hunched over her worktable. Her dark bangs falling into her face. Her strong, callused fingers, shaping the metal.

Ever since you started elementary school, this has been your normal routine: she picks you up from school, she feeds you dinner, and she gets back to the worktable. It’s such an ordinary part of your life that you don’t think to question it. It’s only after you visit a friend’s house one day, when you’re in third grade, that you realize not everyone’s mother is building a machine in the living room.

“What’s it for?” you ask her, for the first time.

She pauses in her work, looks up at you. “Nothing yet,” she says. “It’ll be years before it actually works.”

“But what will it be for, then?”

“Maybe it will be a flying machine,” she says. “Like your very own private plane. So you can fly to anywhere you’d like, Bird-girl.”

You can tell that’s not really what it’s for. But you like it when she calls you Bird-girl, a nickname from when you were little that she uses more and more rarely now, and so you let the half-truth slide.

“If you’re interested in it, I could use some help,” she says. It’s the first time she’s offered to let you participate in her work.

She rummages through her tools, picks out a flashlight. You take it. Shine it onto the glowing wires, so your mother can see.

---

It’s always been just the two of you. You’ve grown around each other, two of the few Asian people in your Colorado town, like two vines circling the same tree. Always a little different from everyone else, a little bit set apart.

You’ve never met your father, or your grandparents, or any other members of your family. There’s some kind of pain around that subject calcified deep inside your mother, one you’ve learned not to prod too hard.

Your classmates at school whisper behind your back about the fact that you don’t know who your dad is, but you don’t mind it. You and your mother are enough for each other. You furrow your eyebrows the same way when you get angry. You poke your tongue out the same way when you’re focusing. And, like her, you’re drawn to machines and mechanisms, to the act of making things with your hands.

When you turn twelve, she starts letting you help with the actual construction of the machine, instead of just holding things for her, on evenings when you don’t have too much homework. She still doesn’t tell you what it’s all for, but she talks you through how each individual component works. You become well-versed in metalworking and soldering and wiring.

“Careful there,” she says, when your hand slips as you’re a tightening a screw. “You don’t want to strip it.”

You correct the angle. “Why? What would happen if I did?”

There’s a bigger question peeking out the curtain behind that smaller one. One you’ve tiptoed in carefully, sidewise, in the hopes you’ll trick her into giving you a real answer.

“Well,” she says, “that would make it hard to extract if we need to change this part later.”

“I know that,” you say impatiently, “but what would that mean for the machine?”

She looks at you with open amusement now. “I can’t tell you what the machine’s going to do,” she says. “But it’s for you. Everything I’m building is for you.”

That answer bewilders you. “For me?”

She nods. “I wish I could tell you more. But I can’t. Not yet.”

“Why not?”

She gives you a summer-bright smile. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

What an awful thing to say. Those five words gutter in your chest.

Her smile softens, a bit, into something sadder. “You know, I always hated it when my mother said that to me.”

You resent her even more for saying this. If she’d really hated it when her mother said that to her, she wouldn’t be parroting those same words to you now. But before you can voice this protest, she’s already turned back to the worktable, her hands wrangling metal.

---

You’re in ninth grade biology class, learning about the difference between meiosis and mitosis, when your teacher gets a call from the fire department.

The fire department isn’t exactly sure what happened, except that it was probably the fault of whatever your mother was building. Faulty wiring led to a spark, spark led to flame, and flame tore through most of the living room before the firefighters extinguished it.

You come home to find everything charred. Your favorite couch, the leather one you always sit on when you watch your mother work, burned beyond repair.

The machine, a dark husk in the living room. Your mother, stone-mouthed and stoic beside it. She looks like she’s listening to something, as though the machine will tell her the answers if she listens hard enough.

---

The cleanup process is long and grueling. You and your mother drag your favorite couch outside for disposal. You help your mother look up the number for a smoke damage inspector.

Later, you catch your mother kissing the smoke damage inspector in the guest bedroom. The inspector is beautiful, a woman with red hair and nacreous fingernails.

You’ve never kissed anyone. You can’t imagine what it would feel like, the wet suck of it, the atavistic need to fuse yourself to another person.

They whisper something to each other that you cannot hear. Your mother laughs, a full-throated sound you rarely hear.

It’s been years since your mother has mentioned dating anyone. She’s never met anyone she’s interested in through her job at the local mechanic shop, and whenever she’s done with her shifts, she’s either too busy with the machine or too busy taking care of you. Perhaps those two types of busyness amount to the same thing, in a way. It’s the only definitive thing she’s ever told you about the machine, after all: that it’s for you, all of it is for you.

It’s strange, now, to see her finding a happiness so separate from you. You’re fascinated and repulsed, in equal parts.

When your mother catches you watching, she closes the door.

---

In the following weeks your mother starts anew, exhuming the wreck of the machine, salvaging what she can.

You never see the redheaded smoke inspector again. You’re not sure what happened, but ever since the day you caught them kissing, your mother has been restless, almost resentful. She draws up a new blueprint. She stops eating, picking listlessly at the microwave meals you offer her. You’re woken up by the sharp hum of soldering at night.

Her frantic frenzy is so large that it spills out of her and onto you. Your best friend is having her fifteenth birthday party this weekend, the first high school party you’ve ever been invited to, but your mother makes you stay home to help her rebuild everything. You stand in the corner, scowling in protest, texting your friend to apologize for flaking.

Your mother snaps her fingers in front of your face. “Get off your phone. I need you to focus.”

“Why are we even doing this?” you say, trying to irritate her the way she’s irritating you. “I don’t even like engineering.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says, without looking up. “You love engineering. To deny that is only sabotaging yourself.”

You feel your throat close up. “Why do you always think you know me better than I do? It’s so annoying.”

“You’re young. You know nothing,” she says dismissively, like that should be obvious. “Now help me with this.”

You grab the circuit board she’s handing you. “I hate you,” you mutter under your breath.

“Yeah, well,” she says, meeting your eyes now, “sometimes I hate you, too.”

You reel back. You can’t believe she’d say that. It rings of truth.

But then again, in the moment you said it, you meant it, too.

She presses on. “I had to drop out of college to raise you. I had to leave all my friends behind. And now I spend all my free time building this for you. You have no idea how much I’ve given up. You have no idea the person I could’ve been.”

She’s only rarely mentioned her life before you. Sometimes you forget that she was a whole person before you came tearing into her life. A whole person who probably had bigger dreams, before they narrowed to a specific point: you.

Your mother: strong, stoic, stubborn, self-sacrificing. You: the same way, twenty-one years younger.

For the first time, those similarities terrify you. You don’t want to end up like her, alone and unloved, devoted to a machine you can’t even tell your own daughter about.

---

Senior year, you choose a college far away from home. A liberal arts school on the East Coast, full of other young intellectuals trying to figure out who they are. With a thousand miles between you and your mother, perhaps you’ll finally be able to dismantle the similarities between the two of you.

You have no specific plans for your life after leaving home, just vague, big dreams. You want to build interesting projects for cutting-edge companies. You want to meet cute boys, or perhaps cute girls, and learn the ways their bodies fuse to yours. You want to regurgitate a better version of yourself, glistening and fully formed.

Your mother helps you move into your new dormitory. There are sheets to wash and dry, photos to hang on the wall. You attend the freshman orientation together, sitting in a packed auditorium full of other eighteen-year-olds and their anxious families, watching the dean boast his way through a PowerPoint presentation about how successful all the alumni are.

“You’d better enjoy it,” your mother says under her breath, her voice surprisingly vicious. “All of this. While you can.”

You laugh it off. “Right. Because I was planning to be miserable all the way through college.”

“No, seriously,” she says, gripping your hand in hers. “Listen to me, Bird-girl.”

The old nickname is jarring, rusty from disuse. For a moment, you almost think she might say something tender and sentimental, the way mothers do in movies when their children leave for college.

Instead, she speaks a knife-flash of a sentence. “You’ve always been ungrateful for everything you’ve been given. It makes me want to shake you.”

This is just the latest cut, out of many. Over the years, all the cuts have coalesced into one abstract sense of pain when you talk to your mother, even though you can’t remember them all individually anymore.

She keeps talking, but you tune her out. You watch as a cute boy sits down a few seats away from you, wearing an orange beanie and a casual smile. Maybe after the orientation ends, you’ll ask his name.

---

You sign up for classes that interest you: art history, cell biology, music theory. You cast your net wide. And yet, at the end of your sophomore year, you can’t help also signing up for an introductory mechanical engineering class.

In your dorm room, when you have free time, you draw out what you can remember of your mother’s schematics and try to match it up to the chapters in your textbook. It becomes a pet project, your own private hobby.

One night, you wake up to find the boy you’ve been dating, a bioengineering major, staring at your half-recreated blueprints on the desk.

You can’t explain the sudden panic you feel when you see him looking at them. “What are you doing? It’s the middle of the night.”

He looks up at you with an awed smile, then traces his finger over your schematics. “What does this do?”

“I don’t know,” you tell him, trying to make it sound like it isn’t a big deal.

“But how’d you come up with it?”

You walk over to him. “It’s not even mine. It’s my mom’s.”

“I’ve never really seen anything like it,” he says. “It’s marvelous. You really have no idea what it does? Do you mind if I take a closer look later?”

You don’t like the way he’s prodding. You have a strange impulse to be protective of your childhood, to defend it from the eyes of others.

“Go back to bed,” you say, folding the blueprints away. Stupid of you, to bring an engineering major home. You’re already thinking of ways to break up with him in the morning as you pull him back to your twin bed, already memorizing the curve of his elbow, the dark curl of his hair against your pillow, teaching yourself how to say goodbye.

---

In your senior year of college, you try to surprise your mother by coming home for spring break. A small peace offering, to make up for the fact that it’s been months since you last called home.

You unlock the front door, and there it is. The machine, completed. Tall and egg-shaped, just big enough to hold a single person, with an open door and a switchboard. You know the schematics well enough to know that it’s finished.

Your mother sits beside it, like she’s been expecting you.

She looks older than you’d remembered. She’s forty-two now, which is younger than most of your friends’ parents, so for most of your life you’ve been used to thinking of her as young. Now her hair is turning gray at the temples, her eyes tired in a way you don’t recognize.

“It’s done?” you say.

“I just finished it,” your mother says. “I stayed up all night putting on the finishing touches.”

You have the urge to take her out to dinner, to celebrate somehow. But it’s such a momentous occasion, there’s no appropriate way to commemorate it. The building of this machine has defined your mother for as long as you can remember.

“Will you finally tell me what it does now?” you ask her.

“You can find out firsthand,” she says. “Get in.”

“You expect me to test it without even knowing what it’s for?”

“You know what it’s for,” she says. “It’s for you.”

There’s no point rehashing an argument you’ve been having since you were a child. Better to get it over with as quickly as possible.

You climb into the machine. The metal clasps snug around your skin, a closed fist.

Your mother seems unusually pensive today. When she speaks again, it feels more like she’s talking to herself than to you. “You know the schematics,” she mutters. “You’ll be all right. You’ll find joy in it even, sometimes.”

“Find joy in what?” you say, as the door closes in front of you.

She ignores this question. “But there’s a rule you’ll need to follow, and that rule is this: you can’t break the cycle, or else our life will collapse. You have to do things the way they’ve been done.”

You’re worried now. “What cycle?”

“You’ll understand, soon enough. Trust me, I’ve tried breaking that rule, and we barely survived it. I know you’re going to try it too, but I still have to warn you.”

“Mom,” you say in exasperation. You hate when she’s like this.

“I don’t know how we got stuck doing this,” she says. “Maybe our biological mother was a terrible parent, and we were willing to do anything to escape it. Maybe that’s why we chose this instead.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I wish I could tell you more. But that’s not how this part goes.”

Her mouth opens again, briefly, like she’s about to say something else. Then she thinks better of it.

She flips a switch.

You’re sent away.

---

You’re still standing in the living room of the house you grew up in. But you’re alone this time, your mother nowhere to be seen.

And the house is different from what it was a second ago. No char marks stain the walls. The countertops are clean and new. Your favorite leather sofa squats against the wall, whole again.

The objects in the living room have changed, too. There’s an old landline telephone on the table, even though you haven’t had a landline in almost a decade. And most jarring of all, there’s no machine in the corner.

You take a step toward it and realize your body is different now too, your limbs a tad longer, your center of gravity slightly off.

You hurry to the living room mirror. The features looking back are similar to yours, but not quite the same. Almost exactly the way your mother looked when she was your age.

Upstairs, a baby wails.

You stumble up the staircase. You find the source of the crying coming from a crib inside your bedroom, a crib you only vaguely remember.

You can’t believe any human could be so small. Her head could fit in the palm of your hand.

The baby looks up at you. Reaches out her arms.

You pick her up.

Once she’s out of the crib, her cries fade into contented gurgles. Her arms swing wildly. The way she moves, she looks just like a bird.