Defi’s left knee was torn out from a ski accident. Sitting in her own apartment, she waited for her friend, Han Solo, to come and help her move. When he arrived, standing in front of her front door, he looked up and down at the boxes of clothes, her laundry basket, her table and chair, and her suitcases, her orchid, her jugs of water, her jasmine 25-pound rice bag, her kettle and night table lamp, her boxes of books, a bucket, and its mop and he decided he was going to sit on the sofa. He sat there for three hours straight, not moving or lifting an inch of his athletic body. Once in a while, he would glance up to see where she was in her moving and then he would resume his gaze back at the idiot box. Even when Defi’s 70 years old mother came to help, he just sat on that sofa looking like a broken washer and dryer, the kind that spun in infinite circles, but the clothes don’t get washed, and certainly the thick blanket doesn’t ever get dried. Three months ago, he asked Defi for her hand in marriage, declaring to her how much he wanted to be her husband. She knew one day this day would come when her leg would be shattered and he would watch her struggle on her crutch, moving all of her belongings ineffectively and awkwardly into the U-Haul van. The manager of the apartment complex, at one point during the move, felt bad for her. He helped her haul three boxes of books, a handful of bags and gallimaufries, and four of her dining table chairs. He would have helped her with the table, but because it was made of stone, he said that he would need at least another man to lift it. The manager lifted his eyebrow at Han Solo and highly suggested the association, but Han Solo just sat there flipping through the different boxing channels until his gaze landed on Mike Tyson or Amir Khan, or Kell Brook.
Years later, when she stood in front of a fat man at Walgreens, waiting to purchase a box of 500 Q-tips and 24 rolls of toilet paper, she wondered, “Why didn’t he help me?” And, later when she loaded the items into her mini cooper, she asked herself, “Why didn’t I ask him more persistently to help me?” Defi, while driving away from Walgreens’ vast parking lot, grieved the stone table she had to leave behind. She thought about that poem she read once from her mother’s book about how the table, having fallen in love with the floor, would cut its legs off just to be closer to it. What did it say about her possessing four chairs, too many legs, and no table? What did it say about a man’s love for her that her table was made entirely of stone? It was the kind that she could only carry in her mind’s heart and not with her, physically.
Recommended Reading: Alien: Ali Raz How Poetry Saved My Life: Amber Dawn Convenience Store Woman : Sayaka Murata Carceral Capitalism: Jackie Wang Bonding: Maggie Siebert Split: Cathy Linh Che The River in the Belly: Fiston Mwanza Mujila Phong Nha, the Making of an American Smile: Tammy Nguyen Sorry to Disrupt the Peace: Patrick Cottrell A Bestiary: Lily Hoang
