Blood and Soap by Linh Dinh

Author:Linh Dinh [Dinh, Linh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60980-176-2
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2011-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

13

You are often hunched over in an armchair to confide sweet nothings to the side of a face. In this sense, you resemble a bassoon. Though you expect the most extravagant praises for the most trivial accomplishments, you shun and despise those who view you favorably.

As sunlight slants down on another late afternoon, you are strumming on a guitar, eating shepherd’s pie, and sipping rum-laced coffee. Always bitterly exuberant, you see life as a pink spathe swathing a yellow spadix. Tonight, standing in a musty hallway, you will speak your penultimate line with some dignity.

You are often seen in profile at the top of a stairs, listening to a distant music. Your hair is bouffant in the front, flat in the back. Your best view is three-quarter. A minute or two after midnight, champagne will spill from your fragrant mouth.

As you bend down to retrieve a long lost favor, someone seizes you by the shoulder. You are such a master at aestheticizing your crimes that even your victims are grateful to be included in the horrible photographs.

Inducing doubt and self-hatred in all those you come into contact with, you are a cancer and a pig. When a stream of your indulgent reveries is nixed by an unpleasant, ghastly image, you let out a high C and touch yourself immodestly.

“A straight line is easy enough,” you hear in a dream, “but it is not possible to draw a perfect circle.” You smirk at this provocation. Waking up, you work all night on an endless piece of paper, drawing circle after circle, each one wobbly, ouloid, squarish, rectangular, some are outright triangles.

Trying to peel away your fingers, someone pleads, “Let go of me!” but you are already beyond discretion. Like every other human being, you crave a single moment of absolute exposure. Today will be your day. Your veins will pop out.

Overhearing “Where I come from, people don’t …” you punch the speaker, a blind, elderly immigrant, in the face, knocking two teeth out, before you yourself are knocked unconscious by a blunt instrument from behind. Waking up days later, you are told by a lugubrious dog that he, too, has often slept through the best parts.

In the men’s room of a small town bus terminal, you discover your oil portrait in a trash can. You cut the canvas out, then stuff your folded face into your back pocket. Later, you notice with irritation that where your nose should be is a clay pipe, and your mouth is just a hole.

You cannot understand the story of a youth who falls in love with his own reflection in a spring. Where you are, water does not reflect. Nothing reflects. One’s view of oneself is made up entirely of other people’s verbal slanders.

Told by your employer to buy a new shirt, you respond, “To buy a new shirt is to assume that I have at least two more years to live. Such pre-sumptuousness cannot go unpunished. What’s more, there would be this outlandish incongruity between a brand new shirt and my already worn-out body.

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