Moth Stories by Leonora Liow

Author:Leonora Liow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ethos Books
Published: 2019-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

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But how can she? Does she think she can get away with it?

This reality freezes her with terror. In the first place how did these rumours begin, these rumours that Mrs. Fernando is fending off like a bullfighter executing passes?

With a flower.

The perfect whorls had floated down from the bauhinia that grew near the kindergarten: little pink tongues, arching backward to reveal delicate white throats. How often did this happen? Hardly ever. Or perhaps very often, just that she never noticed. And then the little form had come running toward it, pink cheeked, squealing. The little fists would have caught it but for a sudden gust of breeze that lifted it and placed it by the splayed sheaf of Salimah’s broom. She looked up and beheld a crestfallen face, plump arms suddenly willed to stillness. And then she had stooped, picked it up, stretched it out and placed it in a small and tentative palm, receiving in return a delighted smile beyond any treasure on earth.

The kindergarten from which the child had emerged was just beyond the hedges, on the other side of the compound. It was for Salimah a daily source of assurance—its distant squeals at break time, at games, the singsong of rhyme recitals sailing over the hedges as though to prove that however bad you thought things were, life was there, vigorous, sustained, thriving. She took this as a promise that that other life was carrying on in just such a way. Its laughter would become that other laughter, their biscuits and snacks, those biscuits and snacks. Some days this would go well, and Salimah would feel herself floating with happiness; at other times she would remember that she had no way of knowing. And would never. These times the vice clamps so hard she can hardly breathe, and it is the most she can do to get on furiously with the task at hand: tidying, dusting, crocheting yet another vest, hairband, purse, pouch. One day, Nenek had said, You will have your own, and you will understand love.

And little Salimah would envision that destination, One Day, as the end of a line, the house up the road, a straight road called Time.

But time has been very far from straight. Time billowed out of the path of her life, spooled out of its bobbin and made untidy loops all over the place. Time gave her a husband and made her a mother. Then time stopped dead in its tracks, then re-started again like a malfunctioning toy, jerking, convulsing. Stopping. Her husband coming home ashen-faced. His family’s accusing looks. Her family’s sad-eyed shame of their story. And her Hani who would never know a mother’s love.

And now, thinking back to that day of a little girl’s delighted squeals at a wind-blown flower, catching the whispers here amongst themselves like the susurration of poisonous leaves, she knows the taste of fear: had someone seen her give the child the flower? The child’s mother?— Where did you pick

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