Untitled - ScholarWorks Home - California State University, Northridge
Untitled - ScholarWorks Home - California State University, Northridge
Untitled - ScholarWorks Home - California State University, Northridge
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was his family's summer home. As you pull up, you see the woman who lives<br />
in what used to be the parlor. She is sitting on a towel on the front lawn. She<br />
never wears anything besides a turquoise robe with a pattern of a dragon on<br />
the back and is hugely fat. Her hair is always dirty and her fingertips have<br />
spots of old, ruby-frost nail polish. When she tells you that she used to whore<br />
and that she was very successful at it, you learn more about men in that single<br />
moment than everything you have ever known before. Now she's left "the<br />
life" for her boyfriend, a guy who used to be a cook with the navy. He is tall<br />
and thin, covered in tattoos. He looks more like a pirate than a sailor, and you<br />
suspect from the designs on his arms that the turquoise robe she wears was a<br />
gift from him- something he likes to see her in because it reminds him of other<br />
places. They are a nice couple, and he enjoys making large meals. One night<br />
in the communal kitchen, he will show you how to make shrimp scampi, but it<br />
will turn your stomach because shrimp are very sweet when they swim.<br />
You walk around the outside perimeter of the house and enter your<br />
room from a door at the back, picking up a letter that has been slipped under<br />
the door. Your room is long and narrow. It used to be a laundry room. There<br />
is a double bed at one end and a dresser and a table at the other. The room is<br />
like the Polish pilot's landing strip- so short but oh so wide. The first thing<br />
you see when you enter is a small sink below several pipes that have been sev<br />
ered and capped off. There are three red candles on the table where you write.<br />
Why is your handwriting slanting the wrong way; why have you gone<br />
to the ends of the earth, when are you coming back, the letter asks. Your hand<br />
writing is slanting the wrong way because you met a Chinese woman at the<br />
waterfront who sold you a jade bracelet. She buttered your hand and squeezed<br />
it on your wrist, warning you never to gain another pound or else it would<br />
never come off. It is a pale, foamy green, the color of the sea. You do not<br />
know why you have gone to the ends of the earth or when you are coming<br />
back.<br />
Everything is turned on its ass here, they like to say. The people are<br />
backwards. They drive on the wrong side of the road. The water runs down<br />
the drain counter clock-wise. A bunch of celery is as long as your entire arm.<br />
On the beach, there is a boy giving hang-gliding lessons, and he is exactly like<br />
a boy you knew in eleventh grade, only his hair is parted on the wrong side.<br />
You've never been able to adjust to the time change. You wake up<br />
throughout the night, unable to stop the sensation of the day. You feel as if<br />
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