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Chapter 2
- Red Hen Press
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Unending Nora 16 Chapter 2 The San Gabriels rose in the eastern sky with an unsettling sharpness. They were a familiar sight, reliable witnesses to Nora’s growing up in the Valley, yet, on her seventh afternoon walking, she found the crags and deep pockets of shadow that clung to the mountain range daunting. At the same time, the fact that the mountains had always been so close and yet she had no memory of ever setting foot in them seemed regrettable. She thought she might have traveled to the mountains as a child, for a family outing, and she marveled at the way events and feelings could disappear without a trace. Why did her mind settle on such peculiar objects for its musings in the first place, and how could the complicated facts of her past lay for so long hidden from her? For no apparent reason, the heat had finally caught up with her. Her body had begun to sweat profusely and to tremble, making her conscious of how her hands hung at her sides like a monster’s claws, or bones off a corpse, stiffening into casts of hideous deformity . She tried to reassure herself with the scenery, rationalizing that if she could not make the pain go away she could still pick the objects of her attention, like apples from a tree. Or she could choose to walk away. She was looking around her for something that might allay her increasing discomfort when her attention was drawn outward by the feeling that she was being watched, and her panic instantly shifted. She was more aware of being stared at than most; she knew what it was like to be regarded as a foreigner, Julie Shigekuni 17 a cripple, someone to despise. She knew how not to notice, or at least pretend not to. Even so, this was the second time in two days that she had become the object of attention, and it was not self-consciousness or fear that made her turn to look, but sudden curiosity as to how she might appear in someone else’s eyes. She didn’t see anyone right away, noticed first a planter of red impatiens that hung over a shaded porch, then a three-step stoop not commonly found on the west coast leading to a nondescript brown house that guided her eye to its focus: the dark man bent over himself. Shaded by the overhang, he wore a green tee-shirt with cap sleeves that pulled tightly against his upper arms, and though he sat several yards away, she could feel his eyes fix on her. “Hey,” he said, thrusting his chin out in her direction. Having been recognized, she was suddenly too embarrassed to speak, let alone stare back. She had wanted to see his face close up, but as punishment she turned away, creating in her mind as she walked a picture of what surrounded him. The bright red flowers, a screen door framed in cracking wood. The five books whose bindings she could not read, stacked beside him instead of open on his lap because he’d put them aside to wait for her. He’d take them and her inside, pressing the pages flat for her to see. In her mind’s eye, she could see the books clearly. But what had he looked like? By the time she arrived back at her apartment she wondered whether perhaps the stranger had not existed at all. Had she invented him out of a perverse imagination? It was then that her greatest fear asserted itself: that neither her presence nor absence made a difference to anyone. But the stranger had been real. She knew this because she had deduced at once that he was exactly the type of person her mother and friends would label as dangerous. The dark skinned stranger with the kind smile practiced as a deception. He’d be poorly educated, have little money; most likely he wouldn’t even be Christian. And so it was with mounting anticipation that she retraced the route she’d taken home. Striding up the three-step stoop, she watched through the torn screen as the [18.234.165.107] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:28 GMT) Unending Nora 18 stranger took shape out of the darkness. Brown skin, tight teeshirt with a yellowed-V across the chest, smooth, muscular legs. As he approached, a slight breeze escaped from the house and a dense, bitter...