Butterfly Yellow by Thanhha Lai

Author:Thanhha Lai [Thanhha Lai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

Memories on the Tongue

The lumbering brown giant walks into the stable, snorts for Hằng to get off. She would have done so without prompting.

“Never again,” she grumbles. “Never will I sit so high from earth.”

Hằng knows to remove the saddle and pad, then walk the horse just long enough to dry slabs of muscle. She tries to stay ahead of its head, ahead of gigantic rubbery nostrils nubbing for treats in her neck, armpit, shirt pocket. Finding nothing, it snorts at her and turns away. Her brother has managed to spoil all the horses, not just his beloved one.

As she walks toward the garden her legs curve out and re-meet as if she’s still straddling a horse. Finally she understands why movie cowboys lumber around like they’re holding a barrel between their legs.

She goes toward the task she understands well, cantaloupes. It’s odd that their soil still doesn’t need watering, but her one plot does. Maybe vegetables drink a lot more. She eats baby leaves on everything but the towering tomatoes. If not for this plot of greens, she’s certain her insides would have clogged up, protesting the mounds of meat constantly on the table. After harvest she yearns to sauté mature greens with oil and garlic. But that will require the bravery to ask Ông Mó-gần for the use of his pan and stove. It might be calmer to keep devouring everything raw.

Long, thin leaves smelling and tasting of ginger have reached arm’s length. Underneath the soil, the world’s best medicine is growing, thrilling her as she throws feed to the chickens.

Chores done, Hằng waits on the porch for Ông Mó-gần. But he’s probably spying on the boys. In her pocket sits the little notebook heavy with stories, now at 184, of which her brother has heard three. For each telling, she calculates out five sentences. It torments her brain, this squeezing of English.

Every sentence forces her to contemplate subject-predicate agreement, matching tenses (remembering the tense is determined by the first word in a verb phrase), transitive verbs needing a direct object, or intransitive verbs requiring none, or irregular verbs that can’t add -ed for past tense, then the pronoun must match the noun, then ridiculous articles “a, an, the” (if dismissed the meaning would remain unaltered), dangling modifiers, gerunds that can be subjects or objects, then parts of speech that require dizzying costume changes. After all that, she must pronounce the whole scheme and hope her brother can understand.

Fifteen blood-pricking sentences so far. In return her brother has kept silent while staring at his round bread and matching salty round meat. Such brutal throat-scratching food.

From the list she practices a story about bedtime, calculating each grammar rule as if doing mental math. Yet the first attempt always comes out awkward.

“Bà and I talk you night every before sleeps.”

No, should be “talked.” There’s an annoying little word that must tag along with the verb: “of.” They spoke more than one night, so “nights.” She remembers now, in English the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.