How to Pronounce Knife - Souvankham Thammavongsa Page 0,33

the flea market and fitting high and loose like a flag around the hips? Maybe it was just that she was a mother and all mothers were embarrassing. Maybe it was just something to say to put more distance between them.

“You know,” she said, turning around to face her daughter. That’s what that person was back there—her daughter. But a stranger might have been more kind. “You won’t understand this now, but some day, when you’re a mother yourself, you’ll remember what you just said to me and you’ll hate yourself for having said it. You don’t know what it’s like to give birth, to have your body bust open like that. And then to have to clean and bathe and feed that life—just a bunch of cries and burps and shit to attend to. And I did it on my own! You just don’t know!” Her daughter stared out the window as if there was something off in the distance. She went on, “But let me say this to you. And you, you remember it! You remember it! No one really wants to be a mother. But you can’t know this for sure until you are one.” She turned forward again, started the car, pulled the seat belt over her left shoulder and clicked it into place too, securing herself. Then she checked her side and rear-view mirrors and waited for a clearing.

EEK. EEK. EEK. There was a knock on the glass, a figure standing outside beside the car. She couldn’t see who it was. For a moment, she imagined it was her daughter. But when she lowered the window, a different face appeared. A man in a police uniform. He said, “Ma’am, this is not a parking space. I’m going to have to write you a ticket if you don’t move along now. You hear?”

She apologized and started the engine. It was four-fifteen and she still had not seen her daughter. Had she already passed by? Eek. Eek. Eek. It was hard to tell now what was happening inside the car and out. The blur, the wet, the rain, the sobbing.

Ewwrrrkk

THE SUMMER I TURNED EIGHT, my great-grandmother showed me her boobs. Mine were just growing in, and they were sore and sensitive. They weren’t large enough to fill a bra yet, but you could see them poking out from underneath my pink unicorn T-shirt. My brother’s friends called them mosquito bites.

My great-grandmother lived in a house with my aunt and uncle and cousins. The two of us were alone in the kitchen; everyone else was outside, in the backyard. She always carried a basket filled with her tobacco supplies. I watched as she took out a plastic bag, reached in to retrieve a wad of dry tobacco leaves, and rolled it into a bubble gum–sized ball, which she then tucked underneath the right corner of her upper lip. Every so often she’d spit red into an empty tin can. If you didn’t know what it was, you’d think she was spitting blood. The smell was as sharp as days-old urine. You always knew when she was in the room. It didn’t bother me, though, and after a while I didn’t even notice the smell.

She spit into her tin can, pointed at my chest, and said, “You know, you have yourself some little titties.” Just like that. No being shy or subtle about it. “You should be wearing a bra.” She then took off the cotton shirt she was wearing, one she had made herself. “Nothing fits this body or supports it like it used to. They don’t make clothes for people like me. Think I won’t live long enough to spend my money, I guess.”

She dug into her home-stitched bra and pulled out her bare breasts. They looked like eggplants—not new fresh ones you buy from the supermarket, but ones that had been left in the fridge for some time.

She said, “When I was younger, all the boys liked me because of these. They all wanted to cop a feel. You’ll see for yourself soon enough.”

I asked her where the nipples were and she pointed to the dark lobes at the very bottom.

I thought of all the breasts I had seen up until then. My mother’s were small, with large protruding nipples like pink buttons. “They used to be bigger, you know,” she told me once. “You and your brother did that. Sucked all the milk out of me.” And last summer, when my brother let me hang