Love Is a Souvenir

Finalist for the Tethered by Letters Journal’s 2013 Fall Literary Award

Heartbreak Grass

"There was a man who lived in my district and this man had gone South to fight the Americans and when he came back a year and a half later he had no arms, no legs, and he was blind.

I called him Uncle, like us youngsters would address our seniors. Uncle Chung was thirty-one when he returned home. A blind war veteran. I was eighteen and about to be drafted to join those destined for the South. When I saw Uncle Chung the first time I knew why many boys my age grew alarmed at being drafted into the army. Uncle Chung used to work as a machinist. He was once a big man. But the first time I saw him, limbless, he looked to me more like a freak I saw years later in the South, a country boy burned by napalm, so far gone he looked during nighttime like a glowworm, and his father would charge each neighborhood kid ten xu to come into the house to look at the human mutant."

Mother

"Mrs. Rossi said she believed that through the praying and worshipping that we keep in touch with the supernatural. She said she saw many shrines in the land and she understood that they remind us of things beyond us. But God will hear you only if you are sincere in your praying, because faith is something not seen, not touched, therefore not explicable to mortals.

It was the first time I saw her cry." 

Sugar Mule, Issue 45