A Midsummer Tale ~ First Place
HC Hsu
Photo Credit: Anthony Kelly
Beautiful
It was early in the evening. I was walking down the street, on the side of a big, busy road.
I was walking, and walking… and a person appeared before me, about fifty feet away.
I shouldn’t say ‘appeared,’ because the person was clearly there before I was there, and I just hadn’t noticed him.
Perception is a weird thing: often we see only what we want to see, even if we don’t know fully what we want, or even what it is we are seeing. It’s a bit like misplacing your keys and being locked out of your own house. But, we somehow seem to have learned to deal with the former, to the extent that we hardly even notice it any more.
I saw this man. He was sitting on the raised concrete partition bordering the sidewalk and a parking lot on the left, belonging to a 7-Eleven. He was wearing a T-shirt, faded blue workman jeans, and gum-sole boots. Dark, curly hair down to his neck, covering the profile of his face. He just sat there, legs apart, arms resting in between, head slightly drooped.
Cars kept coming toward and passing me, as I kept walking. As I walked closer and closer to the person, I didn’t know why, I had an urge to look at his face. A strange, and rather powerful desire. Like I had predicted something was about to happen.
And now waited ebulliently, for the proof. For the realization.
As I passed him, I looked, and saw the man’s face. Black. Gashes, criss-crossed on a flesh canvas, in varying lengths, and widths, like branding marks, where the skin had been scissored and turned inside out so that new, newer skin, grew even more thickly and heartily along the edges, merging the one into another, scar upon scar, so that eyes, nose, mouth became pushed, pulled, contorted, distorted, in every which direction, touching, where they shouldn’t, then flying apart—disappearing, beyond any recognizability whatsoever. Like a go board drawn and half-washed away in the sand, all before nightfall.
Realizing the man had turned his head toward me, I looked away. And walked on.
Then all of a sudden, I heard a voice behind me.
It was the man’s voice.
He said:
‘You are beautiful.’
*
There is a man sitting behind me writing. I feel like he is my ghost. One day I will die, and my ghost will die again.
*
Change
At the bus stop, behind me, squatting down and sitting on the imaginary line where the skyscraper meets the sidewalk, a man, in his thirties or forties, maybe younger, and wearing washed-out, frayed jeans and a short-sleeve white T-shirt with spots of brown and yellow, was speaking. Evenly, tranquilly, monotonously. Neither loud nor soft, as if he were simply having a conversation with someone, but using only one word:
Change. Change. Change. Change. Change. Change.
Just one word. Again and again. Over and over, like a mantra. Without joy or sadness, neither warm nor cold, without interest, or disinterest, just, simply, over and over again, in a single, even, regular rhythm, that is automatic and mechanical. As if it were no longer a voice, or even language, no different, from breathing, or the beating of a heart valve, or the mere grinding of gears in a machine.
Change. Change. Change.
An eternal demand.
Seats
A few months ago I was riding the bus.
It was morning, and rain was drizzling. The sky hadn’t lit up yet. Glancing at the full seats in the back, I sat down in one of the handicap seats in front. At this point, I usually close my eyes and continue my butterfly dreams of Zhuang Zhou until my destination.
Probably because of the rain and traffic, the bus kept swaying and stopping. As soon as I drifted off again I was jolted back into consciousness, uselessly trying to lap at the shallow shore of sleep that was receding farther and farther away.
The more awake, and delineated, each time, my mind became, the more and more annoyed I got. Starting with how idiotic people are as if they’re cavemen witnessing rain for the first time ‘for yet seven days’; how inefficient public transport authorities and infrastructures are on a good day, never mind in a cataclysm like a chiffon of morning mist; how I have to get up at an ungodly hour—surely an affront to nature and the heavenly way of things… from the passengers, to the bus driver, the mayor, the governor, the President, God… a grudge is born, and no one guilty in the conspiracy against peace and rest can escape being consumed by its fury…
Then a man and a woman boarded the bus.
It was an old man and an old woman, probably in their seventies at least. The man had a soft olive complexion, short white hair parted to the side, thin, outward-sloping grey brows, dark squinting eyes, thin lips, a smile brimming in his eyes instead of his lips. He didn’t look Caucasian, wearing what looked like a blue Chinese changshan, with an old plum-colored purse in his hand. The woman was white, her face more wrinkled and pale, with thinning grey-and-white hair parted in the middle down to her neck. She was in a long-sleeve green shirt and mint-colored pants, and had an oxygen mask on.
The two of them were about the same height by each other, diminutive and wan. The man slid the two bus passes he was holding in his hand through the reader, and then, with the woman on his other arm, shuffled toward the seats next to mine. They sat down. The man carefully put the bus passes back in his shirt pocket, and put his hand on the woman’s hand, lifted it and set it back down on his own leg. After a while, he raised and put his arm around her shoulder, and pulled her closer to him. The woman leaned in, then on him.
They never said a word to each other.
Suddenly I felt extremely childish, and ashamed.
I still think of that couple every now and then, especially when I feel down.
Love is not always found in sonnets and epic legends. Sometimes it’s found in the handicap seats of a city bus.
*
A branch from a tree fell, one amidst many, and can no longer grow forward, or be traced back.
*
An argument
Walking down the street this morning, I saw some people arguing on the side of the road.
A slender woman, who looked to be in her sixties, in a teal-colored dress and white heels, with shoulder-length dyed dark-brown hair and a wrinkle-lined mouth, which, making her appear as if permanently sad and sulking, seemed to wither and recede farther into but a tiny hole, opening and closing, as sounds threaded through like click-clacking beads, forming the syllables of her sentences, was trying to say something.
A younger man—bald, dressed in head-to-toe black, with a small, black-and-brown Chihuahua sitting right beside his dirt-encrusted Panama-style jungle boot, its small head cocked up and alert, eyes glinting, watching the woman, who stood about two feet away from them—cut her off.
‘Where do you get off being self-righteous?’ His voice was loud and distinct, and several passersby turned their heads to look to see what’s going on.
She got out— ‘I’m not——‘ It was a high and lilting voice, with the oooot drawn out at the end.
‘Yes, you are!‘ The young man yelled. ‘It’s my dog. It’s not for sale!’
That seemed to be the end of the argument. But, instead of both parties moving on, or at least away from each other, the man and the woman both stood in place, neither being willing to concede to the other their area of the sidewalk. The Chihuahua, also, sat still.
I was coming up to them in the middle of the sidewalk, so I stepped off onto the road, and stepped back on again as I passed them.
I walked a little ways, for a bit, and looked back. The woman had walked behind me and turned onto a cross street. I could still see her; walking briskly, her head lowered, she was wiping away her eyes with the palm of her hands. Farther back, around the corner, on the original street, the young man had sat down legs crossed on the ground, and was holding the dog in his lap, sniffing, rubbing the top of its head, and lightly burying his face into the dog’s fur, and then, slowly, and gently, he placed a small aluminum can out front, on the ground of the sidewalk.
A bus sped past me, drumming up a cloud of faintly red, strange, brick-colored dust, in its wake.
A bag of roses
At noon I went out and saw a big black plastic trash bag lying next to the dumpster; the bag was filled with roses. White, peeking out from the open bag, fresh, abundant, entangled, bright. Almost exuberant. Someone had left them there. For some reason—perhaps the occasion in which they were used was over, perhaps there were too many, perhaps someone simply didn’t want them. So there they lay, next to cardboard boxes, newspapers, ads and fliers, plastic bottles, old foodstuffs, dirty styrofoam containers, small plastic bags filled with trash, and other odds and ends by the dumpster. White, creamy, with a pale, almost imperceptible shade of yellow at the base of the petals, like a solitary soft murmur, one, criss-crossing with another, gathering, building, multiplying, until they became a mesh of rumpled, fuzzy clamor, sprouting out of a giant, black flower-shaped mouth. Blossoming, withering. I thought of taking one home, but didn’t, and left.
*
An old couple was ambling and picking flowers along the side of the road. I had been staring at them, and when we came up to each other, the old man, Indian, said hello. I mouthed a hi and averted my eyes, somewhat embarrassed. The man seemed a bit displeased, and turned to his wife in a gold-trimmed purple sarong, saying: ‘Kids today.’
*
Crying
A kid was crying in the street.
I was walking behind. The kid was a few paces in front of me, walking, while crying. There was a woman walking a few paces in front of him. Probably the mother. Neither of them turned around. I couldn’t see their faces.
Judging from the height and frame, I guessed the kid to be no more than three years old. Buzzed black hair. He didn’t try to hide his face in his arms or wipe away the tears with his hands. He was just crying. Howling. And wailing. Screaming. Almost. Without any restraint or reserve, without a care as to where he was, or anything or anyone that was around him. Just sad to the extreme, from an intolerable pain, that seemed to vibrate down to the very core of one’s being, a piercing line of steel. Then exploding into a million shards, pure sounds, borne away by the wind.
The boy walked in a steady pace behind his mother, as if the act of crying were something completely separate from the rest of his body, and the movement of his legs. In white sneakers. Tiny. And always just a few steps, behind her. The woman, neither fat nor thin, had straight, shoulder-length black hair, and wore a short black dress, and low black heels. Underneath the net of yowls and snivels, the sharp hard clicks of heels on concrete interspersed the long, more languid quashes of rubber tennis soles. The woman never turned around. I don’t know if it’d be the same if the boy were a man, or if it were the woman who was crying.
It was afternoon. There were other pedestrians on the street. No one bothered to look, or they merely tossed a quick glance over and, maybe out of politeness, re-directed their gaze elsewhere right away.
As if no one, not even the boy himself, heard these gut-wrenching, blood-curdling cries, in the middle of a street, under the bright spring sun.
Evidence
I was standing in line.
A tall man stood in front of me. I couldn’t see his face, only the back of his head, which was bald. He was thin, and his scalp enveloped a bony, sprout-shaped skull, with a fleshy protuberance slightly jutting out at the midpoint between the top of his head, and the back of his neck. There was a crease under the bulge that extended from behind the middle of his left ear to his right, curving upward. It made the back of his head look like a smiley face. But incomplete.
There was a long, extremely thin strand of red hair, glimmering under the overhead fluorescent pipe, almost transparent and invisible, gently lying across the back of his neck, touching it, but at the same time, hovering over, and above it.
Like a secret memento, a nearly imperceptible trace, unbeknownst to the one to whom it was left, or even to the one who left it, a line connecting them both, even as their backs turned, and began to separate, to move in opposite directions, never to meet again.
Like evidence, that we once were.
*
An old man sat in the front of the bus in an electric wheelchair. The wheelchair was black, with a bright orangish-red and yellow nylon sack hanging from the push handles down the back. He was wearing a black baseball cap that, on the back, read ‘Air Force’; beneath it, his scalp peeked out in the space between the fabric seam and the plastic strap. When I got up he glanced at me, nodded and lowered his head, and turned away. I got off the bus.
*
Traveling
On the bus home today, the shades were drawn down on the large bus windows. The shades were composed of hundreds and hundreds of little circular perforations. The early afternoon sunlight shone in, while the rest of the outside scenery stayed behind, flowing along, struggling to seep through the rows and rows of tiny holes, plastered against the surface of this net, as it morphed from buildings, into trees, then into masses of people, and then into a large silvery, rippling, shimmering lake. Latching on to the traveling bus. No matter what form or shape it assumed, it could only show through, visible, only, from inside, as a finely pixelated image, like a facsimile of an impressionist painting.
It’s kind of fun to see the city this way. I think people who like to travel, or wish they traveled, a lot, need to open up their eyes, and minds, more, to what is already there around them. Traveling is not going to new places. It is experiencing things in new ways.
*
I don’t like mountain laurels. The faded purple, that bubbly pungent, tryingly sweet scent, like royalty that’s been made to hide and live like commoners after the revolution, being forced to smile, it makes me sad.
*
Parallel
You get on.
You don’t see me.
You take the seat two rows in front of me.
I see your backside, the back of your head, your dark brown, somewhat frizzed and wavy hair. For some reason, I don’t tap you on the back, or your shoulder (I see you turn around—surprised, smiling, your eyes sparkling, an underwater cavernous limestone blue—‘Hey, when did you get on?’ you ask, and try to stand up as you jolt forward, your body leaving your seat, as you find a way to balance yourself and move toward me)—but I stay still, and we remain where we are.
I watch you. I don’t see your face. It’s a strange feeling, as if I were no longer me, or were somewhere else completely, or I had simply disappeared, evaporated, from here and now. It occurs to me I had never up until then, seen you. In your completeness.
In your solitude.
I wonder what you are like without me.
Yourself plus the world minus me.
It’s a strange feeling, but I feel a lightness and clarity. A bright whiteness shines through me.
I can see an outline of myself.
We ride across the water. You look out. At that moment, I see your face, reflected in the glass, translucent, overlaid with reflections of the brilliant blue rippling water, the passing trees, and the sky.
I wonder sometimes whether you are lost in your own thoughts.
‘When the sun is folded up, and the stars fall, the mountains are made to move, and the seas boil, then every soul shall understand what it has done.’ (The Quran)
HC Hsu was born in Taipei. He is the author of the short story collection Love Is Sweeter (Lethe, May 2013). Finalist for the 2013 Wendell Mayo Award and The Austin Chronicle 21st Short Story Prize, and Third Prize Winner of the 2013 Memoir essay competition, he has written for Liberty Times, Epoch Times, Words Without Borders, Two Lines, PRISM International, Renditions, Far Enough East, Cha, Pif Magazine, Big Bridge, nthposition, 100 Word Story, and many others. He has served as translator for the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China and is currently a research fellow at the Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien, Switzerland. Email: khsuhc[at]gmail.com
