Excerpts from SEGMENTS - A prose memory

Prologue

You may wonder how the youngest in the family could bear witness to what had come before and passed beyond. Simply, because she was the last and had watched alongside the mother as the father dropped into deathless memory. With that witnessing, she, the unexpected sixth child, became the mother's constant companion, her burden and her distraction....

So it is the youngest became the ear of the family, the eye of their common existence, the tongue through which the mother spoke, the rhyme to their mother's reason, and a story became a lifetime.

Rice

"Girls are like mice, they eat your rice and run away." Lifting the hinged lid, the mother dipped the small corn can with the torn label inside the rice box. "It's a Chinese saying."

Rice rattled in the pot.

"It means girls eat your food, grow up, get married and leave. They don't carry on the family name, their sons belong to another clan." Putting the pot on the sink, the mother raised her hands, palms up. "You get nothing from them."

She looked at her youngest child, "get the little chair." The child's favorite chair, once red, had been worn to a rusty brown by her sisters, just one arm remained, and only a single petal of the rose decal still decorated the chairback.

"It's time you learned how to wash rice." The mother added water to the pot, circled her hand in the liquid. The scraped rice colored the water white. While tilting the pot with one hand, she kept the grains from spilling out with the other. She refilled it with water. "Now you try."

Standing on the chair, the child pushed her hand around the pot bottom, swirling the water.

The mother nodded, "when the water is cloudy, pour it out like I did. When the water is clear, the rice is washed." At the table, the mother swiftly cut pork into slices, the cleaver flush against curled knuckles.

"When I grow up, I'll stay home and take care of you."

The chopping stopped, the mother looked at her last daughter.

"I won't be a mouse." The child braced the rim of the tilted pan bottom against the sink. "I'll take care of you when I grow up."

The cleaver rested on the cutting board. "No, I want you to have your own life, your own family."

Slowly, the child strained the water with her fingers. A few grains floated free.
 
 

Prologue and Rice, excerpts from SEGMENTS.  Copyright 1996 by Lum Franco.  All rights reserved.


SEGMENTS
by 
Lum Franco
Paperback, 127 pages, $12
 

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Lum Franco
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