Even though it is her second trip up the Balik Pulau hill, Sanhui still turns into the wrong lane. She does not understand why her father chose to live so high above, in the middle of nowhere. But she made a promise to visit him at least three times a year.
After twists and turns, she finally reaches Lotus Garden, where the buildings are adorned in earthy tones and overhanging gable roofs. The sunlight falls on the shoulder of a large golden Guanyin Pusa statue, which meditates on top of a gigantic lotus flower with her eyes closed. The fallen leaves whistle a relaxing, serene tune that can easily soothe one’s soul. No wonder her father invested his retirement funds to secure a unit in this tranquil sanctuary, away from Ayer Itam’s hustles at the foothills.…
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Getting them into bed is easy. Once there, many get the wrong idea.
“It’s not that kind of club,” Nemo chides, grabbing her hands before they snake below his waistband.
Pouting, the USO girl toys with the filmy mosquito net draping the bed. “I’ll be very quiet.”
“I’m sure you will,” he purrs, playing along. “But first, sleep. It’s part of the experience.” Nemo hands her a NightCap elixir. “Be a good girl. Take your medicine.”
Giggling, she downs the cocktail, flops onto the bed, and drifts off in seconds, nostrils quivering with whistling snores.
He’d like to join her, but Nemo does not sleep, not yet. Rubbing his gritty eyes, he pulls the gauzy fabric closed, watches the black dots of her nightmares swirl into the net, then leaves to find another sleeper.…
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Today, Aloysius O’Leary picked the wrong pocket. From the tippy-top of the Ferris wheel at the St. Louis World’s Fair, he watched blue-coated coppers weave around fairgoers at the crossroads of Skinker and Ceylon.
With over fifteen-hundred structures and tens of thousands of people, he thought they’d never nab him or his accomplice. No problems all week, but if separated, they’d meet at the Ferris wheel.
Not only could Gertrude pick pockets, but she could steal pearls from a woman’s neck and stickpins from a man’s tie. She was also a wisenheimer, selfish, plain-looking, too tall, but gosh dang-it, he was falling for the dame.
His mishap had occurred on the Pike. The man in a frock coat and silk hat looked like he ate diamonds and shat twenty-four-karat gold-nuggets.…
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In a small town, the weary figure of a man walking his dog, chain lead strung slackly between the man’s right hand and the dog who follows a good dozen feet behind him, a dog so aged, overweight, and arthritic it’s a miracle of sorts that it can move at all. Links of the chain drag on the sidewalk. The man wears an ancient army coat with a fur-lined hood and what seem to be ancient fur-lined bedroom slippers on his feet. He never turns his head to regard the dog’s progress or to assess its well-being but in essence ignores it. Soon it will rain, the man says to himself, it will be good for the corn, although the fields outside of town are vast panes of white ice in the last light of late afternoon, with no farmer here giving corn seed a thought for another eight weeks at least.…
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Jane,
I’ve been thinking of you lately. I’m sorry our relationship ended as it did. We were so sympatico, always in the same orbit, my sun to your moon. Remember when we walked the Plaza that April day? We stopped for ice cream, some of the chocolate dripping down your chin. I wiped it off with my sleeve so your white dress wouldn’t smear. Pretty gallant, huh? We laughed about your job as a hairdresser and the weird people you’d meet, that dude with a mohawk and nose rings, the chick with seven colors of hair like a mood ring gone psycho, the grandma with blue hair and perm ringlets so tight her brain was starved for thought. Are you still working there (I can’t imagine why)?…
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A weathered penny lay in a blue transparent case on a well-organized shelf, surrounded by books and little knick-knacks. Its edges were worn, its engravings almost erased by years of hardship. This coin was once proudly minted in 1873 with a flying eagle printed on one side.
The coin’s journey began by passing from hand to hand, pocket to pocket, its shiny surface dulled by countless dealings with machines. One dark day the life of the penny took a tragic turn. It was a cold winter evening when its owner dropped it out of their pocket on New York City Street—forgotten and kicked around by bike wheels, bottoms of shoes, and dog paws.
Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months as the penny lay among the dirt and filth of the ground.…
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Kalpana was sweating.
She could feel a bead of moisture trickle slowly down her lower back as she watched all the
other kids in her class scribbling furiously, filling up their papers with glorious tales of what they did on their summer vacations.
Her own paper lay on her desk, a pristine white canvas untouched by ink.
What could I possibly write about, she fretted, her panic increasing by the second as she watched the timer on the board count down. Kalpana could tell that Mrs. Campbell was the kind of
teacher who would make them all share what they had written, which would be pretty hard to do with nothing but empty space on her paper.
Not for the first time, Kalpana cursed her family’s rotten luck.…
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