your hot curry breath’s got me in such a tither, ready to inhale and gulp you up—my new oxygen let us tiptoe through our floral saffron lawn float in our pool of chicken vindaloo on garlic naan floaties and even when this crimson spice bath begins to rub us wrong, i’ll peel your flaky rice-grain skin dig in so deep we become embedded in each other and we’ll construct our home with a paneer veneer cover our couches with crisp samosa cushions and sure our roof leaks yogurt sauce from time to …
iii. When we arrived, my mother was already dead. The smell was antiseptic and my senses were overwhelmed by the acrid and the fluorescent, the sound of sneaker friction against worn floors, the collaborative din of life-supporting machines. I carried a box of new ballet slippers, tokens to carry me into summer camp. She was covered by a thin white sheet, face turned toward us, hollow human shell without the mother force thrumming things along. iii./v. The look of death is shared. Our unique …
Strands of hay whirl away from the truck, wafting out, down, and over all things, lifted by the breeze from the rocking motion of the truck on the uneven road, wafting down to lay a golden carpet on the concrete, strand by strand rolling past beneath my wheels, the late fall light slanting through the cloud still in the air. I am encased in a world of gold dust and threads, thinking of all those who’d urge me pull out, speed up, and hurry past the steady truck driver …
We couldn’t find the labyrinth, which was maddening because I’d been there before and was convinced we were in the right place. Much of what I’d remembered seemed to have been drained or extracted from the scene. There was no more outrageous, biblical sea foam that had once claimed so much of the beach. The dozens of painstakingly stacked cairns previous wanderers had constructed for those after them had been disassembled or washed away. Most disconcerting was the total disappearance of the …
It was the pants that caught my eye on the way to meet an old friend. Suspended in the boutique window, the fine wool drape's exquisite softness was meant to draw the attention of a certain type of man. I knew a man of this sort, though I hadn’t thought of him since college. I saw him there, a ghost through the window, his pale hands. How carefully he’d drape the pants over the back of the chair. How much he valued these things, his clothes, from the attention, the honor, really, that he paid …
I swirled a bottle of guava kombucha touched my ear to the mouth to hear it sing to hear the bubbles tinkle and poke like a million grains of jasmine rice being emptied into a jar, mingled with the sea shells and salt from my tearful breaths bursting from behind brittle ribs hell-bound, burdened from breaking hearts and stereotypes about beautiful women —because Mama says it is good to be brave. Eliana Chow is an American-born Chinese writer and editor from Pennsylvania, currently living …