Category: Fiction

She asked if she could show him something on her phone and moved over to sit next to him. He didn’t seem uncomfortable with wisps of her red hair touching his shoulder, or her light green jeans rubbing against his black ones as she made herself comfortable in the booth.

It was an image of one her paintings, a portrait of a middle-aged Black woman on a park bench. It looked like late afternoon – the subject cast a long shadow on an asphalt walkway. The woman’s expression seemed to show both strength and sadness; weariness and defiance.

 Out of the taxi and into the bitter early morning air we got. As I stood there watching the group head into the flat, a horrible realisation hit me. I only had a couple of fags left. The garage was only a five-minute walk from Mary’s, so I set off down the road, and, as I did do, I contemplated doing a runner. ‘This night is going to end in tears’, I thought. They usually do. But the lure of a session was, once again, and regrettably, too much.

“Ready?” Ba ducks out of the garage, and Pai’s stomach clenches. Four weeks before he heads off to college, which means Ba wants to go driving with him every Saturday morning.

Because the one time Pai went alone, he crunched the side of the vehicle into a concrete pillar in an underground parking lot.

Traveling all of two miles an hour.

“I don’t think—” he starts.

“You just need practice.”

To describe the first days after he got his braces as dreadful was a gross understatement. The discomfort his dentist had cautioned him of turned out to be excruciating pain. He was constantly famished, but the bland, watery congee and foul-smelling soups prepared by his mother made him lose his appetite. He stopped talking to her, citing pain as pretext. Instead of spending time with his parents in the living room as he usually did, he retreated to his room, brooding.

“How much is she going to pay me?” Susan finally asked through gritted teeth, still staring at her dimeless four dollars.

“Why nothing! My word.” Mrs. Peck’s face turned red. “Mrs. Oliver is a personal friend of mine; one I am proud to count. It would be an insult to ask her for money. She’s in need and I promised to help her. Selfish girl. I already pay you four dollars a week. Look in your hands.”