AUDIO
Read by Sam Grinsell
It is always a Wednesday, the middle of the week. I always sit on the left side of your sofa, you on the right. The evening begins with a glass of red (you say it relaxes you more than white does), small talks, gentle glances. When the sunlight finally knows its time and fade out of sight, the famous and important buildings of the city (including the one that is shaped like a Chinese knife) in turn wear their neon costumes. In December, they even wear Santa Clauses, fat and jolly. Inside, you employ your lips, arms, eyes, pour me with words or touches, convince me your little girl is much loved.
Maybe repetition is good, we are always in the same setting. But I can pretend your sofa is a wooden bench in Paris. I have never been to Paris. Old people stroll slowly past us. They are the layering of years and isolation. How they lean on each other, how their flat shoes make no sound. Their slowness is annoying! We laugh. We can admire the swans in the river. Two of them touch their foreheads and form the shape of a perfect heart. I point and shout. Such a cliché, you respond. Sometimes it rains, and we must run.
Next time, after sex, when I am sitting on your sofa, and you are drying my hair with your turquoise bath towel (a gift from a client you defended successfully, you told me once), I can pretend we are on a beach. Maybe in Fiji. You have just given me a swimming lesson, as if you really know how to swim. As if I know. Both of us are exhausted but happy. Very happy. Sea water is our shells, little crabs are aroused. I stare at some men’s penises and wonder at their different hues. I wonder how they look in darkened rooms or in space possessed by books and mirrors. I laugh at the naked women; their breasts hang loosely. You tell me not to be childish, or mean (you don’t know whether I am really the former or the latter), that my breasts are only budding, that in fact one can say they do not exist. Suddenly it rains again, and we run.
I can pretend we are in a Japanese restaurant, when next time we have the same lobster spaghetti for dinner on your sofa. You look at me, sideways, while I am eating. And I look at you, too. Not one sad smile is exchanged. You say ‘A-ri-ga-to’, the only Japanese phrase you know, to the waiter (i.e., the stout floor lamp by the sofa) when we leave the restaurant. We are indeed in Japan. Stepping outside, I tell you your accent is funny and that it makes me laugh. But your accent is not an umbrella! It rains.
Told you, I have good imagination. If only memories can create rain.
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AUDIO
Read by Sam Grinsell
I wait for your calls which come at unexpected hours. Other times, I may drink wine. I admit it: I chose the cheapest bottle in the supermarket today. I didn’t know what to pick. The vegetarian beers you left in the fridge were pathetic. I guess I must have grown three years since you left; the cashier didn’t ask my age.
How can I eat all the pears you bought me? Now they are so soft, best for toothless grannies. I shall not touch the bananas. They don’t look healthy, at all. And stacked microwaved meals in the freezer are like cold cases. You taught me how to make coffee, but the coffee I make is either too bitter or like water.
I hang your blue shirts everywhere in the flat. Yes, even the checked ‘tablecloth’ shirt. I hide those I don’t like. It’s a lie that clothes smell of people. I can’t smell you when I press the sleeves upon my nose. Environmentally-friendly washing powder is all.
Now that no one competes with me for the use of the bathroom sink, I no longer want to brush my teeth elaborately. I only do those many steps to annoy you.
I would pay to smell your after-meal burps. I would pay to hear your ten o’clock snores.
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AUDIO
Read by Sam Grinsell
I have been trapped in this boat for nights. How many? The eternal moon, much praised by poets and romantics, may know but I have lost count.
Old husbands’ tale: when you smell brewed oolong, steamed shrimps or egg yolk in a mooncake, in a shrilling storm, in the open sea, you are hallucinating. Cow-head and horse-face are going to get you.
But apart from the sea and more sea, I smell nothing else. Salt is my every drop of saliva, my sweat, my skin. The fish I had caught are now dead; their corpses, dishevelled, shine dully together. Their eyes are careless: they have no agony.
I do see myself walking home with the day’s dead catch. The door to our brick house is only several steps away—I can almost touch it! How white the walls are, on the outside. My father painted them for the previous Lunar New Year. But I cannot see the inside. It is dark like a swallowed night except for a pale speck. My mother is still warming the stove, cooking rice, waiting for me.
I want to go home.
_____________________________
AUDIO
Read by Sam Grinsell
Somewhere, tonight, two strangers. If not tonight, the next few nights. His low moan is like his voice on the phone, only more manly. Her ungentle touch. Love sprouts? Is this really love? What they do not know they could not tell us. And what they could not tell startles little.
Afterwards, all was peaceful. And ‘love’ was not mentioned.
Afterwards, ‘love’ was not mentioned. And all was peaceful.
