Abandon
'I think you would have been quite beautiful when you were young.'
Your words are a blue haze rocking into the night at a sidewalk restaurant. I look over your shoulder for room to laugh. You, three years my junior, stealing glances at bare legs brushing past and beer in the glass: a moving reflection of career and jokes, in a world where living means overlooking others from a heightened plane of safety.
At my smile you recoil for a moment before opening up to an embrace that would elude me forever. We are supposed to be friends, for you have never met someone whose soul mirrors yours and who already lives at the other end of the world. I sit before you and crack a peanut.
'You haven't met too many people in your life,' I say.
'That has nothing to do with it.'
Your phone rings. Requests. Reproach. Mistakes scorching down a roll of film, unfolding in a non-existent space. Another barrier to cross while you dream yourself into being a man. Silence cracks across the table, lengthening the time we spend with each other in smirk and qualms. Nothing reigns besides your fear of failure. You shake your head. I put two fingers to my lips.
'Say something to distract me,' you ask.
'It won't be any difference from what you'd say to yourself, or some things you don't put into words.'
'You, a person of many words,' say. 'Shall we dance, then?'
The Drama Boat
None of us can fight the combustion: not my boss, a soft-spoken man with cunning defenses; not my colleagues who could bring the house down after too much alcohol and a bit of pole dance; not the old lady cleaner who comes in everyday to break her back clearing someone else's trash; not me, who has problem co-existing with more than a few people at a time and is always on the run.
Jack clenches the bottle of gasoline in his hand. I remember his Australian accent.
'Calm down, mate,' I say, 'you want to go home and row down Albert Park Lake.'
'We aren't making a movie here,' he says, pointing to the camera gear around our office. 'You guys should have let me.'
The last syllable of Jack’s last word forms a magic ring in the air and for a moment our eyes are burst. When we look again, Jack is drinking up the liquid in a perfect frenzy that no amount of rehearsal or drama studies―which Jack claims to have wasted his early adult life in―could have produced. We can almost hear the lung smash and stomach stove inside him. Jack with no air to dream of lakes anymore.
Then he bends over, rolls off the chair and falls onto the floor.
'What did you do?' someone turns to my boss.
'I told him he'd have to pay if he wanted to be on board, and it's a lot to pay,' he says.
Nicolette Wong is a fiction writer from Hong Kong. Her writing finds its way around the world and she blogs at Meditations in an Emergency. She is in the editorial teams of Negative Suck and Dark Chaos. |
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