Butterfly Yellow: Part 3

Also there are two scarves, one green, one yellow, from fabric she knows is chiffon.

An exposed dress reconfigured into skin-hiding day wear. Hằng is so impressed with Co-ra’s ingenuity she mimics every one of Co-ra’s many, many steps in putting on one item after another.

I’ve got a slip and hosiery and a bra and a belt for your tiny self.

You do splendidly in a flouncy, floral summer dress that adds the illusion of a fuller figure and accentuates your waist.

How will Hằng explain she wasn’t thinking, only reacting to an image that conflicted with Bà’s many warnings still palpitating inside Hằng’s skull.

In such boots, she can stomp on almost anything, even miniature balls of spikes, and manage to retain beauty.

LeeRoy walks away, not trusting the calm. First, he was able to dodge the bullet with H, then Mr. Morgan is all diplomatic like.

“You reckon he’s telling the truth?”

Buried within such a floor must be countless bones, leaves, shapes belonging to lives that long ago drifted and flourished. Maybe not all flourished; maybe some were flung in and joined the immense burial ground at the bottom of the sea.

More than likely she will dissolve into the salt, the currents. Each hair, each vein, each morsel of flesh, of skin shredded and nibbled until she turns diaphanous.

A blankness obscures details of his present. Favorite fruit, best friend, does he dream, when did he last cry? It’s pointless to push. He won’t reveal his present self unless she waits.

An expert at waiting, she would maneuver a life beside Linh and cook and eat and talk and reminisce.

It’s exhausting, the incessant flip of emotions.

It seemed implausible after pirates and holes and worms she should be granted a meal so sublime.

Stretchy sleeves certain to incite a cyclone of questions inspired one indecipherable word from Ly-Roi: “Cool.”

At any time in any place an act of horror is being committed. At any time in any place an act of sublimity is being felt.

The other girl held her smile. So charming that when a rescue helicopter appeared a day later, with UNHCR bright and bold on its belly, a gaunt man in eyeglasses and a white shirt did not believe in the girl’s emergency.

The girls were expedited to the last-stage refugee processing camp in Bataan, Philippines, where again they were fast-tracked to fly out of Manila after four and a half months.

Dry, firm earth. So much of it that Hằng could walk for days in her new boots and never have to touch a lake, a river, an ocean. Walk for days across a land that is the opposite of a lush tropical island, a land where dust and blankness might allow her to thaw.

Maybe he means it, and the flying caterpillars could be relinquished. She tries to see his face hairless.

There, the potassium was right in the soil to yield a big fruit, and local water had plenty of salt to retain water and work up juice.

The book is waiting. He makes H turn around while he writes an inscription.

His mama insisted on that, so years from now his sentiment will still be sitting on a shelf waiting for her.

But she doesn’t have time to scold him, points to a red round bunch with a second picture of white translucent flesh.

He doesn’t sound sufficiently surprised or grateful.