On the 38 Rapid Geary, the Children Know

It's as though you're back on the bus, on the way to fourth grade. It feels

more like home. The bus is a throwback too, its driver a man in your father’s

green uni and don’t-you-dare vibes, like those around your parents’ dinner

table. Over the din of Toishanese and clatter of mahjong tiles is the muffled but

unmistakable thumping of hard soles before a sharp slam of the front door and

then silence, and you just know your father kicked someone out again. A

grandfather or an uncle, once a good egg like you with a mother suffering back

pain from years of hotel cleaning. All that bending! All that scrubbing!

Now, decades later, your own mother, gray and alone, is heating her pad

at the stove when she hears the phone ringing on her futon. Who can it be? The

last time her phone rang this late your father went overboard while kicking a

homeless man off his bus. As she approaches the futon, her phone rings again,

sharper this time, and she drops her pad and grabs a handrail as the room

lurches to a stop, racing her heart, which knows that all the beef mai-fun soup

and sorrow in Chinatown won’t bring anyone back.

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KENTON K. YEE has placed short fiction and poetry in Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, RHINO, Cincinnati Review, Quarterly West, Puerto del Sol, LIT, Los Angeles Review, Hobart, PANK, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and other journals. A theoretical physicist, he writes from Northern California.

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