Quiet As They Come by Angie Chau

Author:Angie Chau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: IG Publishing
Published: 2010-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

TAPS

Kim Le hovered with her ear to the bathroom door, listened to the sounds of bristles scraping against teeth, water swishing in his mouth, the urgency of piss splattering against the toilet bowl. Her hands in a funnel, she heard the squeak of the paper roll every three-quarter turn, the rumbling of pipes as he turned on the faucet, the rush of water when he cranked up the tap. Her cheek against the wall, she heard the swiping of a hand beneath the spout and then the hollowed clicking of fingernails against stainless steel. Together, they waited for the water to warm. Kim knew her husband Duc was an impatient man. She wondered if their roles were reversed, had she been the one locked up, whether he would have waited for her.

Pressing her weight against the grain of wood, she heard the tap-tap-tapping furious against the faucet. She pictured his trigger finger and wondered if it sometimes itched for the rattle of a machine gun. Wondered what he had suffered at the hands of his captors. Wanted to ask him if he had ever killed a man. And then she’d look at his hands and wonder what they were capable of. Since his arrival from Vietnam, she’d catch herself studying them, the veined brown muscles, nails cut to flesh, the thick blunt fingers, buttoning up a shirt, buttering bread, clenched into the tight fists of sleep. After two nights in the same bed his hands had yet to touch her.

After a decade of waiting, telling herself Duc was the love of her life, thinking if not for herself for the kids, praying that once he got here everything would be better, after ten long years, her husband had finally arrived, and Kim was living with a stranger.

Duc had been locked up as a prisoner of war. He’d been in the central highlands. She expected it to change a man. But she didn’t expect what she got.

Kim readied herself to sharpen her ears, train her eyes. On the other side, he switched on the overhead fan. She pressed her ear even harder against the door. The whirring blades drowned out his movements. Outside the traffic horns blared. She shrugged her shoulders then shuffled away in her slippers.

At the kitchen sink washing plates, she cursed the fan, its camouflage effect, its ability to snuff out any bridge between how he could go from flossing teeth to tearing down her sun-flowered shower curtain. How he could go from relieving himself to then slamming the toilet lid with such hatred she’d find it fractured in two. How he could go from brewing ginger tea to the sobbing cries she now heard slipping through the static murmur of the vents.

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.