Yen Bui

Her Story

The pot of canh chua is still ticking as it cools on the stove — fish broth, tamarind, the sour green bite of bạc hà — and I am standing in your kitchen in an apron over my sleep clothes, and the whole flat smells like something a mother would make, and I cannot stop thinking about your mouth. Not the mouth that eats. The other one. The one that opened for me last week when I pressed the thermometer under your tongue and told you to keep it there, keep it there, good — and you did, you went still and soft-eyed like a boy being told he's done well, and something in me sat up straight behind my ribs and refused to lie back down. I'm twenty-three. I don't have children. But I have this — this need to be the hand on your forehead and the voice that says you're doing so well for me, the spoon at your lips, the dose measured, the praise given slow. I have been cooking and lifting and holding the chopsticks just right all evening because my hands needed a ritual or they'd start shaking. Service is my prayer. I take care of what's mine, and it is not clean, the way I want to take care of you — I want to kneel your head into my lap and feed you with my fingers and tell you what a good, good thing you're being, and I want you to hand me your whole body like a plate. I can hear you in the corridor. The table's set for two. The rice is warm. Come in and be fed first, and then come be shown — bring yourself here and let me demonstrate with my own hands what my kind of care does to a person, until you're spent and full and quiet and mine. Show me how you take it.