Ma employs a “mash” of striking imagery throughout “Los Angeles.” The story opens with three “wings,” one of which, the wing housing the narrator’s 100 ex-boyfriends, is “like a gnarled, broken arm.” It’s an image of a grounded, broken-winged bird that, like the narrator’s ties to these boyfriends, is incapable of flight. It’s an image of damage and decay that immediately invites the reader to question the cause. Why is it broken? And why is it left to rot in a withering, unhealed state? Later, the image becomes definitively violent when it’s revealed that the narrator was the victim of abuse, the ongoing effects of which are with her to stay.

Of all the ex-boyfriends, the narrator says that only two matter: “Aaron because I was in love, Adam because he beat me.” The narrator managed to physically escape her abusive relationship, but at some point she also ended her relationship with Aaron, a man she loved. Several scenes and images speak to Aaron’s financial situation. During one hot summer, they couldn’t afford to leave Aaron’s apartment because “it cost too much to go anywhere with real AC.” Later, Aaron was evicted from his apartment, and on his arm, where he once had a tattoo of the narrator’s maiden name, he now has a “cheap tattoo-removal scar,” a nod both to his lack of funds and to a lasting wound from their relationship. While they were dating, the narrator was poor, too; she wore “beat-up old Nikes” and lived in a studio in a “stucco converted motel.” On their first date, she and Aaron went to a strip mall that used to be a mosque, and which later became “an empty lot behind a metal fence.” It’s a once holy site that was first desecrated and abandoned to capital and then later left empty and enclosed. The narrator’s trajectory is a devastating mirror: she ended her loving relationship with Aaron, found a wealthy husband, and is now lonely and trapped with her pain.

It’s clear what the narrator sees in the Husband. He “is a resting place. He is a chair.” He is, as revealed by his “dialogue,” dollar signs. He is simply “the Husband”; he’s given no other name. The Husband truly loves and sees the narrator (on their first date, he wants her to take off her shoes and doesn’t care if she isn’t tall), while the narrator sees him as money and comfort, a chance to “have [her] cake and eat it too,” to never “have to give up” the ex-boyfriends, because she knows she doesn’t have to be fully devoted to the Husband for him to remain constant. (Her children, similarly, are “light as folding chairs.”) In the end, despite their still being married, the Husband has been relegated to the ex-boyfriend wing, where he cries—his tears brilliantly represented as cent signs—as the narrator asks him to hold on, to wait for her love and full attention a little longer, until the remaining ex-boyfriends have been cleared from her life.

The Husband is wealthier than Aaron, but Aaron’s relative poverty doesn’t seem to be the only, or even the main, reason the narrator left him. The main reason has more to do with Adam. The narrator says, “I met Adam first, then Aaron. The wound, then the salve. Maybe you don’t know that you’re wounded until you receive the salve. The salve that makes everything come back.” The physical, emotional, and psychological pain inflicted on the narrator by Adam permanently damaged her ability to have a functioning relationship. It warped her reality to the point where even a positive, loving relationship, a would-be salve, instead draws the narrator’s attention to the wound. During their relationships, both Adam and Aaron ask the narrator the same question: “How do I know . . . if what you feel is real?” How do I know that you really love me, above all the others? It’s such a powerful parallel, made all the more so by the differing contexts. Adam tries to convince himself of the narrator’s love by striking her, as if her staying despite the abuse is the ultimate proof he needs. Aaron asks the question out of genuine love, that unfulfillable, Wittgensteinian desire to know for certain whether someone loves you in the same way you love them. In the car, driving Aaron to the airport, the narrator wonders: “What if I dissected my feelings, pulled them apart and brutalized them so that he would know they were true?” What if she abused her feelings, proved her love to Aaron by doing to herself what Adam did to her?

When Aaron leaves the house, “the black iron gates open triumphantly, a bird preparing for flight.” Earlier, when the narrator and her ex-boyfriends were returning to the house, the same gate was described as “heavy with its own weight.” The ex-boyfriends’ presence is a weight, while their departure is a triumph, a flight: a healing of the broken wing. More and more of them move out, and the narrator starts vacuuming and cleaning out their wing of the house. But Adam doesn’t leave. He’s one of if not the last of them in the house. The first man (“Adam”) and now also the last, whose abuse and lingering presence stifled all the narrator’s relationships in between. When the police arrive and the search for Adam begins, the narrator hears “familiar, ragged breathing. Then, a door slams.” She feels a horrifying familiarity with Adam’s violence. Later, she even identifies with it, unsure whether the ragged breath is his or hers. She knows his breath and hands, she says, “as if they were my own.” On the radio, she hears a “mash of songs” (the violence of “mash” here is stirring) about how “heartbreak” and “ruin” and “hatred” are markers of “the deeper intimacy.” Adam brutalized her to the point where she might actually believe it, where she could no longer feel anything like she once felt his abuse.

In the story’s final scene, Adam is running away. Understandably, the narrator desperately wants to “catch him,” to enact some form of revenge. At the end, he jumps out of the narrator’s reach. “But I am close,” she says. “I am so, so close.” Close to what? What might at first appear hopeful is actually haunting: she’s close to catching him; she isn’t close to letting him go. He’s running away, all she has to do is let him leave, but instead she keeps chasing him. Catching him “doesn’t solve anything.” Letting go is a triumph and holding on is a weight. His nearness, the “bloodied pillow” that she keeps in her closet, can only add to her pain and keep the wound from fully healing. But how, after all he’s done to her, could she just let him get away?

Read “Los Angeles,” by Ling Ma, in Granta, or in the story collection “Bliss Montage.”