Rita Hypnarowski
"Come on, Lane. Let's move." You put your hand on Cha Ching's shoulder once more, to get him to shift so Ken can pull you down the aisle. You do not resist Ken pulling you away. That's not the same as wanting him to pull you away. When he locks down with a couple of blinks and toggles his brain into sleep mode, that perturbed look stays on his face and flashes white under the last of the路 sn-eetlights. The bus chugs into an oily sJick of night. You pull a pin from your hair to dean the kelp from your teeth. There is nothing else to do. It is nice, actually, to sit and stare into moving darkness; it reminds you of when you were young, driving home from Ken's and passing your exit, and passing another exit, and going out of the way in order to just keep moving. And if you turned off, the road in front of you would simply cease to exist, and how comforting that was, like you could flick the world on and off with your eyes. Your dosing schedule comes and goes. You decide not to rake your piUs for once. Predictably, your myelin sheaths Let loose and your legs shake. You still them. You remember your mother, how thin her l~gs were that you'd slide through when you tried to sit in her lap, and twenty years Later when she came to your wedding she'd finally started to shrink so you were bigger than her for the first time in your life and only then did you feel like an adult, and she'd said that it was good that you were bigger, had grown into a white woman's wider birthing hips, which of course you never used ... and never will. You pass the night waiting to come up on Tianjin, her hometown. But the journey of a thousand miles is full of detours, and the bus swings in a circle co avoid a chemical spill in a river. lt would seem you would eventually have to cross it, but nothing outside makes sense. A spangled dawn lights up naked toddlers splashing in the gutter, their dirty water spraying the crumbli ng asphalt. Your hand finds your throat as you try to catch their faces. Then older children press into the road, bouncing their knapsacks on their kn.ees as they march to school. Ken twists his back to hold them in view, the way he must have when he was six after his parents told him to leave his infant sister in a rice paddy and not come back for her, and when he told his grandparents they came back for her but she was already cold, like a tissued rock, and then his grandparents sold their home and took Ken out of this country and to Seattle where people didn't do such things, and where Ken had to breathe into a paper bag whenever he saw a baby Chinese girl, until well after you met him, and then he woke up one morning and it didn't seem to bother him anymore, or else you don't know him at all, and he isn't eaten away by outwardness, his eyes empty, d1e world nearly wasted on him. You will yourself out of your mind and back into your body, because the bus driver lets you off at a village, Zai Tsu, three kilometers short of Liuzan. Winter 路Spring 2009
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