The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction by Violet Kupersmith

healthy color. I stood at the bank and stripped off my filthy clothes, trying not to think about what could be in that water. Snakes, broken glass, the shit of half a dozen villages upstream. My feet were swallowed by mud the moment I entered, and each step made a sucking sound. What I hoped were tiny fish darted around my ankles. When I was in up to the thighs, I squatted down and began to wash, cupping the water in my hands and splashing it onto my body, and when that was too slow, I completely submerged myself. I scrubbed my face, feeling the scabs of dried vomit loosen and come off my skin, and ran my fingers through the gunk in my hair until it was gone. Even though the water smelled funny and left a gritty brownish residue on every inch of me, I’d never felt cleaner in my life. It was getting chilly, though, and I wanted to get out before some aquatic creature started nibbling on my cặc, so I squelched my way back to shore. I shook myself dry like a dog, spraying droplets everywhere. My clothes were too foul to put back on so I kicked them into the river, but first I took the newspaper shoe out of my pocket and cradled it in my hands. Then I set it gently down in the water and blew it away from the shore. It looked like a tiny boat bobbing into the darkness.
    I got back in the truck, naked as the day I was born and feeling just as new. It sounds crazy, but I think that at
that
moment, if I had decided to forget the truth about Minh, the truth about what had just happened and everything I’d seen, I could’ve done it, simply by wanting it gone. Just driven off and abandoned the memories in that little corner of the delta,and twenty years later I wouldn’t even be able to remember the name of the sick boy I’d driven once, or the reason why we never made it to Dong Thap.
    I let my fingers rest on the key for a moment before turning it with a sigh that was lost in the sound of the engine coming to life. I readjusted my rearview mirror even though I could see nothing in the heavy black night behind me.
    N OW THAT YOU ’ VE heard everything, you know that I chose to keep them. The nurse with the soft curves and the pointed smile. Minh and his newspaper shoes. My own face looming above me. They’re with me still. I’ve had them stored in my head this whole time and it’s like having another shark in the back of my truck, but this time I don’t know where I’m taking it. I just keep driving and hope it won’t get restless, because I’m too scared to feed it.

THE RED VEIL

    I DON ’ T WANT TO BORE YOU with my own history, with the reasons that I joined the order and the chronicles of my meandering faith; that is not my purpose here. But some background is, I feel, necessary. I sought out Sister Emmanuel during the first year of my novitiate because I was considering leaving the convent. I didn’t want to approach Mother Superior for guidance: She was the classic Catholic nightmare, barking after naughty schoolboys with her ruler in hand. Sister Emmanuel was quiet, and from time to time I encountered her taking early morning walks around the garden of the Stations of the Cross. She was a stoop-backed woman with white hair and nut-brown skin crosshatched with wrinkles, and she was always wearing a kind smile and an enormous pair of dark, square sunglasses. I had never seen her without the glasses—she even wore them during Mass—and for this she had acquired secret nicknames like “Sister Kim Jong-il” and“the Terminator” from some of the younger nuns. But to me she seemed—then, at least—to be at peace. Contemplative. Diligent. Devout. In short, she was all that I wished to be, and was failing at being.
    I found her on a Saturday in the kitchen, preparing egg rolls to bring to the parish soup kitchen. She had her sleeves rolled up to her elbows and her hands deep in a bowl of minced meat and mushrooms and noodles. It was a bright, cold day, and the sun from the window over the sink silhouetted her