How to Pronounce Knife - Souvankham Thammavongsa Page 0,28

and then the next, until she started all over again.

I rushed over to the swings, hopped on the seat of one, and pumped my legs so I shot myself high into the air. My mother sat on a park bench alone, in her blue winter coat, facing me. She was not far. I called to her to pay attention to me, to see how high I was going all by myself, but her head was turned away, her eyes focused on something else.

I stopped swinging and turned to see what she was looking at, the swing slowly coming to a halt. A man had run out of an apartment building in his boxers and a white T-shirt. He seemed flustered, in a hurry, as though he had not planned to be outside in the cold dressed like that.

A woman dressed in a pantsuit had followed him out. Heels tapping on the sidewalk like a pencil on a table.

The man glanced behind him, stopped, and screamed, “It’s over. We’re finished!” When the woman tried to embrace him, he refused, batting away her arms.

I walked over to where my mother was and stood right in front of her, blocking her view of the couple. I said, “Let’s go home.” She looked up at me and there were tears in her eyes. “It’s snowing,” she said and glanced away. She said it once, like that. In a small clear voice. It’s snowing. But the way she said it made it seem like it was not about snow at all. Something that I can’t ever know about her. Then my mother looked up at me again and said, “I never have to worry about you, do I.” I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure if it was really a question.

Soon after, sometime in the night when I was asleep, she walked out the door with a suitcase. My father saw her leave, he told me. And he did nothing.

ALL THIS WAS YEARS AGO, but I can still feel the sadness of that time, waiting for her to come back. I know now what I couldn’t have known then—she wouldn’t just be gone, she’d stay gone. I don’t think about why she left. It doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is that she did. What more is there to think about than that?

Often, I dream of seeing her face, still young like she was then, and although I can’t remember the sound of my mother’s voice, she is always trying to tell me something, her lips wrapped around shapes I can’t hear. The dream might last only a few seconds, but that’s all it takes, really, to undo the time that has passed and has been put between us. I wake from these dreams raw, a child still, though I am forty-five now, and grieve the loss of her again and again.

My father did not grieve. He had done all of this life’s grieving when he became a refugee. To lose your love, to be abandoned by your wife was a thing of luxury even—it meant you were alive.

THE OTHER NIGHT, I saw an image of the Earth on the evening news. I had seen it many times before, and although my mother was not there, I spoke to her anyway as if she was. “See? It really is round. Now we know for sure.” I said it out loud again, and even though it disappeared, I knew what I said had become a sound in the world.

Afterwards, I went to the bathroom mirror and stared at the back of my mouth. I opened my mouth wide, saw the hot, wet, pink flesh, and the dark centre where my voice came out of, and I laughed, loud and wild. The sound went into the air vent, and I imagined people living in the building wondering to themselves where a sound like that came from, what could make a woman laugh like that at this hour of the night.

The School Bus Driver

THE SCHOOL BUS DRIVER was named Jai. It rhymed with chai. He was looking at his wife’s breasts in a photograph. They were tight and perky in the white spandex top she wore. Below that, her bikini bottom was just a patch of cloth in the front, held up by thin strings tied into a small bow. She was sitting on the white sheets of an unmade hotel bed and looking straight at the camera, her knees tucked underneath her. The school bus driver thought his