A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Douglas Westerbeke
- Language: English
- Genre: Magical Realism
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 4.79 MB
- Price: Free
A Marketplace
The paper is clean and white—she hasn’t drawn her rst line—so when the drop
of blood falls and makes its little red mark on the page, she freezes. Her pencil
hovers in her hand. Her heart, like it always does, gives her chest an extra kick.
She drops the pencil. Hand, like a reex, goes to her nose. She feels the wetness
creeping through her sinuses, tastes the brine in the back of her throat. It’s a
trickle now, no more than a nosebleed, but in moments it will be much worse—
and here, of all places, just as she’d sat down.
It’s too soon. It’s bad luck. She’d hoped to sleep in a real bed tonight, not
hammocks or hard ground, and in the morning have a bath, a proper bath in
warm water, with soap. She’d hoped to add more entries to her book, like tinder
or flint or paper—but how to draw a piece of paper on a piece of paper so that
others will look at it and say, “Oh, I see. A piece of paper.”
She’d hoped to try the food. Look at this market—taro preserves, steamed
crab claws, curried prawns wrapped in sheets of bean curd. No, this will have to
wait, too, for another time and another market. The list of things she won’t do is
even longer than that—what list isn’t?—but there’s no time to dwell. The bath
can wait. She’ll nd a bed somewhere else. The list is gone. Now is the time to
get the hell out.
But the marketplace is alive, the people friendly, and the river right there, a
shiny tearstain through the green, clogged with colorful skis and shing boats
that can whisk her away, no eort at all. This is Siam, a watery part of the world,
all jungle, seasons measured by rainfall. She knew as soon as she set foot here that
rivers would be her mode of escape.
That old man, selling sh—such a kindly face, weather-beaten, but a glint in
his eye still. He will help. Quickly, she slings her bag over her shoulder and
cradles her book in the crook of her arm.
She picks up her walking stick, as tall as
she is, and moves through blue hairs of incense smoke and burning charcoal. She
moves past shmongers and cloth merchants and tables made of bamboo. The
old man smokes a long, thin opium pipe, surrounded by racks of dried sh,
dried squid, and dried octopus—anything that was once wet now hangs dry, the
old man perched among the racks like a caged bird. She doesn’t know the local
language, but the French have colonies to the north and the British have
inuence to the south.
“Please,” she asks in her accented English, “a boat? Do you know where I
might nd a boat? I need a boat.”
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