Spring 2009

Luo

by Ching-In Chen

I was a kitten with fangs born in a treehouse.
       My mother did not want me.
       She cut strips of cloth, made up of recycled rice, and stuck pins through them and into the roots of the tree.
       She prayed for the monsoon to come and take me. But I wouldn’t leave. The rains came and begged me to escape with them (the next town over had a swimming pool).
       I looked over at the shimmering witch with translucent full breasts and wanted my breakfast.
       The rains came again, this time with a neon light which illuminated the basement where I crouched behind the clam chowder cans. When they found me, they shouted and ordered me away.
       But when I wouldn’t come, cried and cried. Why don’t you love me? they pleaded in a pitiful voice that sounded like my sweet-voiced mother.
       So I did. I took a step forward towards that sunny voice, into the faucet of water which bathed me clean. I smelled like tulips and a shiny coin. The rains, giddy, swept me up the steps, past my mother humming under the fireflies, past the large sodden boots that belonged to no one into the tinkly night away from that dusty, mothy house.
       I looked back one more time and saw that glow around my mother as she stood in the doorway without regret.
       The rains held me with one gust and uplift, setting me on a branch of driftwood as we made our way past the wreckage of cars, drowning cows, waterlogged laptops from the cornerstone coffeehouse, other snatched babies.
       I begged for them to slow down because I was dizzy with colors, but the rains kept going, like they hadn’t heard me.
       Miles of miles of disaster.
       Then, we arrived in Queens. The rains set us up in the 2nd floor of a watermelon vendor. The room smelled of burnt seeds and wrecked rind. The watermelon vendor sobbed as she sliced in the melon’s bellies, praying for a child, but when she saw me, she blessed the rains and bundled me up into a cloak of fruit peel and paid the rains for my delivery.