How to Make Halo-Halo Last Longer Than a Day, and: The Pepper King Returns
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How to Make Halo-Halo Last Longer Than a Day
Singapore
Elephant ear plants—as big as a car door—press to the ground. Press, shimmy, press to the ground as they wait for afternoon rains. Press, shimmy, press. At lunchtime, a little girl who ran away from her own birthday party, lost and looking for her parents, ran right to my table. She asked me how to get back to her party and told me unbidden, she has no favorite color. None at all. In giant ceramic containers, aranda orchids give up five petals in a tired wave at us. Turns out, after walking all over the Plaza Singapura—past the perfume counters and the free hand massage stations and the tea shops—her party was in the back corner of our same restaurant, and even though their kid was missing for almost half an hour, the parents didn't say thank you. Even frowned a bit when I brought her back. My mother and I decided to have halo-halo for dessert after a gorgeous morning at the orchid gardens and now this drama of the missing birthday girl and well—what's better than ice-cold kaong sinking in halo-halo? Halo-halo is surely the coldest thing in this whole country—cold as a toucan in the arctic with a mouth full of guava. Now watch it chip and chip its fruitbeak into the side of a glacier, fresh broke and calved into the sea. What falls into the sea, scooped up and sugared with cream, is almost like the first bite of halo-halo. Almost. You have to try it yourself to see. Maybe the girl who has no favorite color will grow to love the colorless, clear kaong in a bowl of halo-halo too—and maybe years later, when someone asks her about her favorite color as she is riding a bus on her way to school and she'd rather look out the window, she will finally answer: The color of ice. Ice, she will say. My favorite color is ice. [End Page 61]
The Pepper King Returns
He listens to the tock of two clocks—neither are synched. The Pepper King
does not know how to walk on ice:his boots slide with every fourth step or so.
He is used to fine sand and root sledge,full of rock salt and shell piece. The soles
of his feet are as thick as stale ends of bread.They will laugh at him, but when he returns
home he will prepare such a fine soup, his sonwill wake from his rabbit dreams and ask for
an umbrella. It sometimes rains indoorsand his child knows this. The child will learn
the songs of ice and snow. The Pepper Kingfinds it natural to name his knives. One for slicing
the delicate skin of tomato, a jagged onefor dark meats, still another to debone a fine
and flakey fish. When the Pepper King serveshis son winter soup full of potatoes and cumin,
the boy will eat and eat and clink his spoonuntil you hear something like bells. The snow [End Page 62]
yeasts itself in banks and slopes againstthe boards of his house. The Pepper King never
knew the rising of his breath in the pineapple fields—such a sweet and silent thanksgiving. [End Page 63]
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Lucky Fish. Honors include a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the nea. She is the poetry editor for Orion magazine, and her book of illustrated nature essays is forthcoming from Milkweed. During 2016–17, she is the Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.
