The Monsoon Bride by Michelle Aung Thin

Author:Michelle Aung Thin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC019000, FIC014000
ISBN: 9781921921100
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2011-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

Rain

On that first night, the first night of the rioting, Jonathan woke abruptly. He had been dreaming of plums, the yellow plums his mother used to put out for show in a blue bowl. Something of their sweet perfume, their sticky softness stayed with him so that he was adrift in the velvet darkness of the tropical night, the click of a gecko connected with the suppleness of flesh, the salt licked from his fingers with the brine of another’s skin, the rush and gurgle of his own body with the steady rise and fall of breathing beside him. Her back curving away from him, and beneath, the swelling of her buttocks and the bud of her anus, smooth thighs parted to a bent knee, still smelling, still smeared with his semen. He touched his tongue to his teeth and raised himself from the bedclothes. He would wake her with his fingers, with his mouth.

Beneath him, she slept on, her legs extending down the bed in an echo of his own sleeping shape, her face half-turned from him, half in shadow, and the way her arms were thrown about her head, like a child, touched him so that he felt a tenderness for her. She slept with abandon. She had abandoned herself to him. But even as he gathered his body across hers, he heard the scrape of a foot at the door. It was unmistakable, Khit Tin, padding closer on bare feet. Bringing tea—no doubt as an appeasement for his absence, but Jonathan also suspected prurience. He had learned to listen for the sly chink of cup against sugar bowl on a tray held in steady hands. Khit Tin’s Burmese way of creeping about like a spy when there was a woman in the apartment, on his face a blameless expression so like insolence.

Jonathan sat upright, his body tight with rage at Khit Tin’s incursion. Behaviour that would ordinarily irritate him tonight had consequences beyond himself alone. His servant must not see Winsome. Silently, Jonathan eased himself from the bed and moved towards the door, his body taut. He found the handle and turned it quickly, flinging the door open to surprise Khit Tin, perhaps even to upset his tray of tea things.

There was no dim shape looming from the darkness. It was not morning; it was not even dawn. There was no Khit Tin with his tray. The narrow hallway opened out onto the sodium-blue light of the empty living room. The air was cool on his face. He was thirsty. He moved through the hall to the kitchen to find some water.

The little kitchen was close and hot; the window overlooking the back of the building, with its mess of servants’ lean-tos and cooking huts, was shut tight, insects thudding softly against the glass slats. The electric light did not work. Instead, he had to search for matches, a candle. He found tumblers too; a tray, a cloth to line it, a steel jug, which he positioned beneath the ceramic chatty before opening the spigot.

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