I have yet to write anything that I like from start to finish, but in every story I write there are some parts that I really like. Here are some of them from this term’s short fiction and mythology classes:

From Dumplings:

 

I like how the hardwood floor feels under my feet. High heels make my calves look great but usually by midday I am walking with pain. Grandma has told me about her grandma’s feet, broken and bounded, sore on rainy days and deformed. I have seen pictures of the bound feet. Sometimes when I take the high heels off, I half expect to see four toes on each of my feet curl under and flatten against the foot like dough. 

From Bonnie:

 

Tony’s profile indicated that he was a Caucasian male, 6’2, 29 years old, dark and handsome with curls in his soft brown hair. He loved to cook, took morning runs with his golden retriever, enjoyed the occasional red wine and was passionate about reading and writing poetry. Tony was looking for someone to spend the rest of his life with but he wouldn’t mind making some friends along the way. It seemed odd that he’d show interest in Bonnie considering her honest but nevertheless boring profile: Female, Asian Canadian, my hair is dark brown and straight. My eyes are brown as well. I work as a cashier in Safeway and I am an English student in the community college. I am 23, 5’3, 105lb. I enjoy watching Saturday Night Live, Late Night with Connan O’Brien, Ugly Betty and Iron Chef. I am looking for a partner. Bonnie shuddered a little after reading about herself. She felt as if she had misrepresented who she really was but couldn’t figure out how to do herself justice. She chose one of the only recent photos of herself. It was really a photo of her mom, but Bonnie was captured in the corner. Her father was taking a picture of her mother and the arranged flowers she had put together. Bonnie was sitting in a corner and noticing shadows of leaves waving on the coffee table. She had a gentle, natural smile in that photo which she really liked. But after cropping herself out of the photo and blowing that part up, her face became a blur and it seemed almost as if she were missing a few teeth. Bonnie paid a hundred forty three dollars and fifty-six cents to have her unexciting information and unclear photo put up on an online dating website for three months. It was an impulsive thing she did after downing an entire bottle of cheap red wine on a Friday night. Bonnie forgot about it the next morning.

                Thirty-six days after her drunken attempt to seek love in the cyber world, Bonnie got an email from Tony. The subject was Hi, there, not unlike other junk mails Bonnie had received in the past but opened anyways hoping it was a personal email. This time, it was a personal email and not one that asked Bonnie if she’d like to enlarge her penis. Tony saw Bonnie’s profile and was intrigued. Intrigued? Bonnie raised her eyebrow. He also loved Saturday Night Live, Late Night with Connan O’Brien, and his favorite Iron Chef was Mario Batali because he enjoyed Italian cuisine. I like Masaharu Morimoto and the host Alton Brown. Bonnie smiled and thought. Tony wanted to know more about Bonnie if she didn’t mind. Bonnie didn’t mind. Tony sounded funny, charming, courteous and appropriately curious of Bonnie’s life. He had been the only person who had shown any interest in Bonnie for a long time, not counting the creepy old man who came to her cash register everyday to buy one banana with pennies.

               Bonnie didn’t write Tony back right away. She went to work the next day thinking about what to tell Tony.More about Bonnie, more about Bonnie… What else can she tell this man about herself? She was certainly not going to tell him about her fascination with fat girls or the fact that she suspected she was asexual. Could she tell him about how she always gave out extra pennies to her customers just to see if the company would catch on? (The company didn’t catch on, but Bonnie was too timid to take the next step of her experiment: giving out extra nickels). She thought about telling Tony about her parents, but somehow she couldn’t think of anything to say about them other than his depression and her alcoholism, which didn’t seem quite appropriate. It had slipped Bonnie’s mind that she was a fabulous singer, she could make everything grow and bloom, she could always tell when someone was upset and that she had never been beaten in a game of chess. Bonnie spent her entire day in a space of “what would Tony think”, it was almost as if her every thought and every action was filtered through a Tony lens. 

From The Widowed:

 

Catherine came for a visit. Boy, does she look like you. For a moment when I opened the door I thought someone was playing a cruel joke on me. You never left. But it was Catherine, not you. Her dark red hair looked brown under the shadows of the roof, and yours always had a red tint to it under the sun. Remember how you’d make the same outfits for Catherine and you when she was a little girl? You’d put her hair in pigtails and yours, too. Sure, I didn’t always notice it right away, but it was darn cute.

Catherine is not you, though. I know when I look into her eyes. They are like cold sapphires, not like yours. The blue in your eyes was the color of a warm autumn sky. She doesn’t smile anymore after you left. I think she visits me out of duty. I should tell her not to bother. Just let me rot.

“Hey, Kitty cat. How are you?” I greeted her warmly.

“I brought groceries.” She pushed through me to get in the house.

“How’s Ben?” I followed her to the kitchen.

“He’s good.” She put down the grocery bags and gave me a forced kiss on the forehead. 

“And Jake?” I haven’t seen or heard from our son since you left, Joanie.

“He’s good. Busy as usual. Martha’s due in three weeks,” Catherine said. I wondered if she took pleasure in stinging me like this.

I don’t remember what I said after that. I felt really tired, Joanie. I went upstairs, undo the button on my pants and lied down in bed again. Downstairs, Catherine was cooking something. I could hear her opening and closing the fridge. I could hear the sizzle in the pan. Also I heard the leaves outside our window. And in the distance from the playground, some kids were laughing and hollering. What did you hear when you slipped away, Joanie?

The doctor said you were gone at approximately five in the afternoon. I found the pill bottle in the recycling bin. I imagined you took handfuls of pills until the bottle was empty, walked yourself outside, took a deep breath of the cool autumn air, placed the bottle in the blue bin and went back upstairs to lie down. Five in the afternoon. 

From Water: 

 

Something was wrong with Peter. He couldn’t remember when was the first time it happened but he remembered it was when he was working. He sat in front of his computer as the screen saver came on and the tropical fish took over crawling on the screen. They swam from and to all four sides of the screen and disappeared behind them as if they had gone to a different place, a place Peter couldn’t see. He stared at the fish and felt strange as they disappeared and reappeared.

Peter was a journalist working for the H magazine. He was working on a piece about drowning. He remembered drowning once as a child. He was five, fell in the pool at home when no one was watching him. His parents later told him he was in the water for three minutes and they thought he wasn’t going to make it when they fished his little blue body out of the water.

                Annoyed with the fish, Peter jerked the mouse and stared at the blue screen. He felt calmer looking at the neatly lined up icons on his computer. This was when Peter leaned back, reached over for his glass of water and saw it in his glass. It floated leisurely in the water and stared at Peter teasingly. It had a round yellow body with purple dots glimmering at Peter. Its eyes, glazed with a thin membrane, looked straight at Peter. Peter stared back, blinked twice, and rubbed his eyes. It was still there.

                “Come on, Pete. Aren’t you gonna say hello to your old friend?” It opened its mouth that stretched from one end of its “face” to the other. 

—–

 

“I am home.” Peter murmured as he walked in his dark apartment. When Tina was still with him, she’d be home first. The lights would be on, there would be some faint noises from the TV, something would be cooking in the kitchen and Tina’s face would pop out from one room or another to greet Peter with a warm smile.

                “Meow…” Sassy poked its head from behind the curtains then walked to rub her head against Peter’s leg. Peter and Tina found Sassy in a cardboard box one night when they were walking home in the rain from a party. The pattering rain muted Sassy’s almost inaudible meowing. If Peter didn’t stop to throw up, they would’ve missed her. A pair of bright green eyes stared at Peter as he emptied his stomach. He squatted down to peer in the box and saw a wet, black kitten reaching its paw out at him.

                “Tina! Tina! Come here!” Peter sobered up.

                “What? I don’t want to, you stink!”

                “No, come here. Look!” Peter held Sassy up in his palms. “She’s precious…” Peter lightly rubbed his chin on Sassy’s head.

                “Don’t! It’s dirty!” Tina shrieked.

                Tina complained about his decision to adopt Sassy. She even asked her friends if they’d like to take Sassy off their hands, but Peter insisted on keeping Sassy. He believed that he was meant to find Sassy that night.

                “Why else would I throw up right then and there? I don’t ever throw up!” Peter argued. Tina just rolled her eyes at him. But eventually Sassy grew on Tina, too. Peter would find Sassy sitting on Tina’s stomach at times as Tina stroked her head and whispered to her. Now Peter wondered if Sassy knew that Tina had fallen out of love with him before he did.

From Frog:

I visit her every time I go back to China. Or rather, her gravestone. Isn’t it interesting how gravestones are more for the ones alive than the ones with their names carved on them? We are funny creatures. We need external things, tangible things. I need to stand in front of the stone where her ashes lie beneath to be with her. And when I am there, she’s everywhere. The wind that blows on my face. The big lotus leaves that float atop water. The trees. The pebbles. The clouds. And when it starts to rain, I ask, “are you crying?”

I was ten when we met. The peculiarity didn’t escape me. I called her daughter, Ah yee-Auntie, but I was told to call her Popo-Grandma. I already had two Grandmothers in Taiwan. She was third but I didn’t have the heart to deny an old woman. Plus, I didn’t feel the need to fend for my other two Grandmothers. They were alive and well. My mother on the other hand. Her title needed preservation.

She was a small woman. Five feet at the most. Her hair grey and wiry. Wrinkles ran wild on her face with the exception of the ones above her upper lip. They stood straight and widened when she smiled at me. She always smiled at me. She wore a big grey blouse of a scratchy, silky material that old women are so fond of. Her midsection was round on top of short legs. Her wide forehead, large mouth, round body and glazed eyes reminded me of a frog, one that breathed slow with exhaustion.

It was in her apartment where I first met her. The place where Ah Yee grew up. It was always just the two of them and now I was ascending the dark, narrow stone stairs to meet her. There were three thin doors to each level, three households. Some of them had the doors open and I could see the small TV’s flashing as I past by. A woman sat outside on a stool feeding yellow porridge to a boy with snot running into his mouth. Then there we stood, in front of a rusty, criss-crossing steel door. Ah yee, who I had just met a few weeks prior, banged on the door. After two minutes, the dull green wooden door inside opened and an old woman stood behind the steel door. The lights were off in the apartment. Everything seemed mysterious and odd.

She smiled at us. Ah Yee spoke to her in a louder, harsher voice than she would with me, at least for now.

“Popo hao.” I greeted her as Dad instructed- “say, hello, Popo.”

She nodded, stared at me and pulled some candy out from her pockets. The candy felt warm in my palms, I was scared to eat it.

———–

Popo wasn’t a good cook but she loved cooking for me. One of her specialities was red bean paste bun. It was red bean paste wrapped in dough and steamed until the dough was cooked. They usually came out unsuccessful. The dough instead of white and fluffy, was half grey, half transparent, showing its bellyful of red bean paste. Popo’d pile the buns in a plate and present them to me in the morning. She’d sat beside me and watch me eat them with a frog like smile that stretched on her face. I was both annoyed and delighted.

One afternoon she ran in my room.

“Come! I have something to show you!” She had a sheepish smile on. Popo could be playful at times. I wondered if Ah Yee knew.

She grabbed my arm and pulled me to her room. Inside her room, she opened a drawer where she kept her towels. I thought she was going to show me another tin box when she pulled the entire drawer out.

“Look.” She whispered and lifted the top towel off.

There in the drawer slept about eight new born mice. They were pink, hairless and their eyes closed by thin lids that showed their black eyes. It reminded me of Popo’s red bean paste buns.  

Popo put her finger next to one baby mouse and it clung onto her. I tried to decide if it was cute when Popo mashed the little mouse with her thumb and index finger. She did the same with the rest of the pack and laughed at my stunned face.

“We marinate them in alcohol, but it’s too healthy. I don’t need it and your Dad won’t drink.” She explained with mice goo on her fingers.

———

I went to the market with her to pick out the fattest frogs. They breathed in bamboo baskets. Their skin wet and a green so dark it was almost black. She talked in measurements I didn’t understand with the woman who sold frogs, fish, shrimps and clams. I stared at the kid poking at an open clam and smiled when the clam closed on his finger and made him cry. Ah Yee tucked at me. She had a plastic bag weighed down by the fat frogs breathing inside. It felt as if we were pet shopping, bringing home these live frogs.

She hacked the heads off first. With their legs pushing, first fast and violent, then slow, then a dull twitch, she peeled their skin off. What was underneath the dotted, dark green skin was smooth, slimy, bluish grey and almost sheer. Ah Yee used a lot of ginger and rice wine to make this dish because the frogs had a strange fishy smell to them. I tried to ignore the smell but failed. The sight of Ah Yee and Popo sucking on the little frog legs that looked oddly like our own legs made me queasy.

———

Three years after we moved to Canada, I came back to visit Popo one summer. She looked the same. No one knew how old she was. She had lost her birth certificate and didn’t know what year she was born. She looked around seventy when I first met her, she looked about seventy when I visited her again. Ah Yee didn’t come back to China that summer. It was just Dad and I. We drove to her old apartment to pick her up. Dad let me out of the car first. I stood on the crowded, colorful street of people, vendors, bikers, cars, buses, beggars and saw Popo in her grey blouse across the street. Our eyes met. She still looked enchanted in a crazy kind of way.

We met on the island in the middle of the street, grabbed each other’s hands and cried. I was seventeen, learning English and listened to Janet Jackson and Lauryn Hill. She was old, still missing two front teeth, marinated baby mice in alcohol and had a past she wouldn’t discuss. But there we were, standing in the middle of the street holding each other. Me and this crazy old woman.

That was the last time I saw her.

———-

I visit Popo’s gravestone every time I go back to China. Dad and I would wake up early in the morning and prepare a bag full of paper money, and incense to burn for Popo. Ah Yee usually sleeps through the visits. One time we went on a sunny day. We walked up the wide stairs, counted the rows of gravestones to where Popo was. I looked at Popo’s picture and whispered hello to her. Dad tried to light the incense when the wind blew off his lighter. He tried again. Blew off again. And again, and again. I smirked at Popo’s picture.

“Hey, hey.” Dad said. “Come on. Don’t be difficult.” Then he lighted the incense.

“Here, flip the basin over. Let’s give Popo some spending money,” Dad said to me.

I flipped the copper basin over and to our surprise, underneath the basin sat a huge frog. It was fat, and shimmering green. It stared at us for a long minute, then slowly, half jumped, half dragged itself away. A small frog followed her.

 -_-_-_-_-_-_-_-

Hopefully by the end of next term I will have stories I feel confident enough to share in their entireties.