Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness by Jennifer Tseng

Author:Jennifer Tseng
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa
Published: 2015-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

It was an unusually mild spring. This made summer seem nearer still and caused one to wonder if the rapidly warming globe was not yet another bomb busy ticking. Maria celebrated her fifth birthday in the back garden with four friends. In years past it had always been too chilly. I sat at the round glass table with its white cloth, its chocolate cake and pink candles, watching the children as each one in turn, in a manner reflecting her temperament, swung the bamboo stick at the rabbit-shaped piñata. Charlotte fairly stroked the rabbit’s hindquarter while Sophia (my heart quickening each time a child shouted her name) clutched the stick in terror and did not so much as tap it. Ella swung happily but ineffectively at it several times. Josie, in her zeal, let go of the stick and it went flying into the air behind her and had to be chased down by the party’s hostess. It was Maria who gored the rabbit’s neck; then its stomach burst open and all the peppermints gushed out onto the grass. The little girls looked like rabbits scampering to retrieve them.

After her fifth birthday, I began to suffer from the fear that not only would I die before Maria, I would die without her.

Nightly, I began to hope, more ardently than I had ever hoped for anything, that when I was on my deathbed I would be able to recall perfectly the many hours I’d spent alternating between reading a novel in translation by book light and watching her sleep. Under the minute light, I studied her—the way she turned her right wrist in sleep, the way her lips pursed to a point and her eyebrows lifted slightly as if in amazement—for proof that she was the same child who’d been brought to me five years prior in the narrow hospital room whose only lit feature was a steel stink, the same child who’d known me in the dark, without features, and without a name.

Only the prospect of memory relieved my fear of dying without her. If not Maria, then the memory of Maria. Nothing and no one were equal to that. If one’s beloved can’t be at one’s side, it must be easier to die in the presence of a benevolent stranger, easier to weaken in the face of one who has never known your strength, to relinquish while pressing the palm of one whom you’ve never held onto. To accept someone as they die requires either deep love or immense distance.

Conversely, I felt an aversion to the thought of the young man attending my death, which caused me to further doubt my already dubious motivations. Perhaps I was no different than the filthy old men of the world who chased after young girls as after fountains of youth, that red-cheeked nubility so incompatible with deathbeds. Being reminded that he was not my child nor could he take her place disturbed me. I did not like staring into 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.