LatinosUSA

Truyện ngắn Lê Vĩnh Tài
Translation by Nguyễn Thị Phương Trâm
Art by Đinh Trường Chinh

I’m walking home and each step falls with the dying light. I watched my shadow far away and tried to get over the next rise of the hill. It twisted and turned like the shadows of the trees or the shadow of a creature that was very colourful and rather odd looking. I’ve heard my neighbours’ stories, about the things they saw when I was not home.

Their stories will continue to be stories, it will go through one ear and out the other. O there was this beautiful woman, her untamed hair falling across her shoulders like poetry. She relishes in turning the vernacular upside down hence in this black and white world it’s impossible to avoid the hearsay?

I have faith in destiny, it’s like a vow no one dare deny. I entered my house, plastered walls of mud, cow dung and straw. In the middle of the house was a smoky stove, around the stove was where we would sit and love each other. It reserved its warmth for my mother. The dry coughs plagued her when it was too cold during winter.

I was an inexperienced little boy. While she was like a clump of red hot coal on my lap, and before I knew it, I was already a man. The two years loving her, only in dreams could the story of us be complete. My hands have unraveled the white scarf around her neck and planted on it an uncountable number of kisses, the sweetness of Christmas treats.

I would go home each afternoon, after all that was needed to be done in the field. My mother would always be there to welcome me with a warm smile, but she would not always be that welcoming. She ran out of wood once, and I came home with nothing. She said: “We won’t have steam rice tomorrow.” I promised: “I’ll get the wood first thing in the morning, as soon as there’s light.” I don’t want it to be because of me, there’s no dinner for mother and her tomorrow.

Our love was alive and burning because of the wood. I mentioned that we should think about having children. Her eyes narrowed as she replied: “What have you heard, can’t you see all those women wasting their time in the field near our house?” “No,” I said, I was just as emotionally overwhelmed and confused as the moment I took off the white scarf around her throat so long ago.

A storm came out of nowhere yesterday. The unseasonal unexpected storm whisked through the forest breaking the trees and shredded the branches. I crossed the field, ran up the hill and banged on the door, shouted: “Open the door, baby, it’s me.” Not hearing her reply I was worried, I wept.

The silence. I could only hear my footsteps, the non-stop howling of the wind. I thought I heard her voice: “Go. I beg you, just go.” I knocked again, I lowered my voice: “It okay, I’m here. Baby, you can’t leave me outside like this, it’s freezing outside.” I thought I could hear her crying, there was an echo of a whimper: “Just go little boy, you know nothing. Go, and never come back.”

I used all the force I could muster, broke the lock of the wooden door and stepped inside. It took me a while before my eyes could adjust to the darkness. Somberness. Like the stories people have told me in the field. Her scarf was undone like the top buttons of her top. An animal with horns was sucking on her left nipple, its sharp claws were digging into her flesh. It made me sick. I screamed: “Get lost,” and I tried to pull it away from her, but it threw me out through the door with a single flick of its left hand. Its right hand continued to grip tightly on her left raw red breast, sucking and pulling. Her head turned to look at me on the ground, beyond the threshold of the door, her eyes were still a lovely grey and her hair was a nestling mess thrown around her shoulders like the clouds in her poetry. Her voice was cold like Christmas Day: “You have no right to chase my owner away.” she said just before a long sigh, and it was longer than the gale in a storm.

I tried to grab a hold of the creature again. I managed to grab onto its shoulders and its skin was slippery and sticky. I couldn’t keep a hold of it. Shocked by its smell, I fell to the ground and passed out.

When I came to, my love was sitting on a chair. The hem of her dress fell softly around her and the scarf was wrapped neatly around her neck again. Her grey eyes were brilliant and the creature was gone, it had headed for the hills.

She said: “I didn’t say anything to you, baby boy, and you didn’t see anything either, right?”

I was shaking: “I don’t understand.”

“You have no obligation to understand anything. We will not speak of it again.” She was slightly shaken.

“But…”

She turned her head away from me and proceeded to sing a song in a genre that was unfamiliar to me, about a hill and a village, and a hut in the middle of a wild meadow.

“I’m going to… light a fire,” I said as I headed for the stove. I thought to myself how demons were afraid of fire. They are only rampant in the dark. The yellow flame my mother used to use years after years to warm and tend to her cough, continued to light up the bare empty room. The flame, it is my heart. And even the demons were afraid when they saw my mother’s broom. I felt reassured by the hoard of weapons. Intently she watched me, the look in my eyes exposed me, she had probably read my mind. She said: “You shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Not everything is the way it looks. Your life involves seeding, planting and harvesting the land around your home, you don’t know anything about the places I have been or festivities I have attended.”

I turned my head, I couldn’t look at her anymore.

The love we had fed the fire in my mother’s stove. When I was growing up, when I was exhausted, the floor of our home was like a soft bed of feathers. She caressed my eyelashes as they closed. “Sleep, my little boy, sleep,” she would coo quietly.

I never woke up again.

I didn’t go home today. She was crying but I couldn’t see her. She was scraping out discarded bits of glowing amber coal and burnt wood from inside the stove, and she had carefully wrapped the white scarf around her throat because winter was coming. The sound of movement made her look up, she thought it was me at the door, but soon her eyes darkened as she faced her ghosts. Perhaps at that very moment as usual the same creature was climbing the hill, and the women in the field trying to kill time caught a glimpse of it at the spine of the hill. They were rather scared hence they had told me that I should hide behind the thorny bush at the back of the house. The garden was always full of the kind of flowers she had loved, the colours of these flowers to me were even more demonic than demons themselves. I knew it was where I was able to revisit my youth, bathe in the sunlight of my childhood, but it was the last time I could ever feel warm again.

She continued to do the things she did with the demon, even when she was fully aware of the fact that like me, everyone around her knew my vengeful intent, but I will never act upon it. I dare not betray her. I knew, but those who had so much time on their hands, people who enjoy weaving all kinds of stories will never know that the demon loved her more than the way I love. She said: “It’s just wood that I’m after and you still forget. Just there, you don’t have to go far, just outside that door, you will see how good people are to each other…”

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Lê Vĩnh Tài, the poet and translator born in 1966 in Buon Ma Thuot, Daklak, Vietnam. The retired doctor is still a resident of the Western Highlands and a businessman in Buon Ma Thuot.

Nguyễn Thị Phương Trâm, the blogger, poet, and translator, was born in 1971 in Phu Nhuan, Saigon, Vietnam. The pharmacist currently lives and works in Western Sydney, Australia.