Category: Uncategorized
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Colette
Ecole Française Colette on Ho Xuan Huong Avenue in Saigon is a massive two-story adobe structure. It is painted orange and has green wooden shutters. Beyond the green metal arched gates, the courtyard is covered in pea gravel. There is a bust of some unknown man’s head on a stone pillar in the middle of…
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Chalk It Up
Suzanne is the rich girl. She arrives to the school and gets picked up in a chauffeured big black car. Her dresses are always chic and immaculate, the envy of the other girls in the class. Her hair is stylishly cropped in the latest Parisian trend. The thirty-six little girls in the class sit dutifully…
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Hygiene Lessons: Beyond the ABCs
In Saigon, Vietnam, I attended a French kindergarten named Croix Rouge which literally translates to Red Cross. The teachers, both French and Vietnamese taught in French. But mainly we played. I don’t really remember much of my kindergarten year, I’m assuming because it was not memorable, neither positive or negative. I do however, recall my…
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Uncle
Vietnamese men should not be giving American women pedicures, should not be stooped over strangers’ feet. Should not look so subservient as they politely caress and rub disgusting, calloused, gnarled, misshapen feet of women who have the luxury and ability to pay to be touched. I think I detect the smell of cheap alcohol as…
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Hello World!
Noodles, like snakes, crawling out of Noogie’s head bone. Wish I had Medusa’s power of turning people into stone. Of making their eyes unblinking. To trap their visage into an eternal frozen smile, their stone cold lips chapped. Lip balm ain’t gonna do a dang thing.
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Hippos Don’t Moo
There’s a little grey cloud of woe that wraps me in its arms Il pleure dans mon coeur comme il pleut sur la ville It should really be Il pleur sur ma tete comme il pleure dans mon coeur It sucks to be me always drenched in dank clothes, limp hair pelted by acid raindrops…
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I Stayed Home
I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t stayed home how to open a vial of morphine take off the seal, leave the stopper insert the tiny syringe into the tiny hole in the top of the vial, perfect fit! hospice lady said I was lucky pharmacy sent the fancy vial hold it upside down draw…
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No Pushing
I Peed Myself? Had my cute red A-line dress on, with the snap buttons that run the length of it down the front. We had come from Carr’s bridal shower, where my present was the best ever! Very clever. I made a bikini for her and a jockstrap for Chip out of real coconuts and…
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Little Dolly
You look like a Japanese doll, your round face and China chop hairdo with bangs. You are told you were adopted, that one day, your real Japanese mother will come for you. You are given a name, Mishiro Yotonai. You get lost in a department store in Tokyo, staring at the magic of a huge…
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My Impossibly Smart Weebie
The LOML (love of my life), POSSLQ (Person of opposite sex sharing living quarters), YANG, TWIN from different mothers, Phil, was capable of ANYTHING! He buzzed through all the New York Times crossword puzzle compilation books in record time. He built a barn with his bare chucklesome oversized hands. He played the trumpet, his embouchure…