Simple Recipes Read Free Page A

flavors in his mouth. My mother takes her glasses off, the
     lenses fogged, and lays them on the table. She eats with her head bowed down, as if in prayer.
    Lifting a stem of cauliflower to his lips, my brother sighs deeply. He chews, and then his facechanges. I have a sudden picture of him drowning, his hair waving like grass. He coughs, spitting the mouthful back onto his
     plate. Another cough. He reaches for his throat, choking.
    My father slams his chopsticks down on the table. In a single movement, he reaches across, grabbing my brother by the shoulder.
     “I have tried,” he is saying. “I don’t know what kind of son you are. To be so ungrateful,” His other hand sweeps by me and
     bruises into my brother’s face.
    My mother flinches. My brother’s face is red and his mouth is open. His eyes are wet.
    Still coughing, he grabs a fork, tines aimed at my father, and then in an unthinking moment, he heaves it at him. It strikes
     my father in the chest and drops.
    “I hate you! You’re just an asshole, you’re just a fucking asshole chink!” My brother holds his plate in his hands. He smashes
     it down and his food scatters across the table. He is coughing and spitting. “I wish you weren’t my father! I wish you were
     dead.”
    My father’s hand falls again. This time pounding downwards. I close my eyes. All I can hear is someone screaming. There is
     a loud voice. I stand awkwardly, my hands covering my eyes.
    “Go to your room,” my father says, his voice shaking.
    And I think he is talking to me so I remove my hands.
    But he is looking at my brother. And my brother is looking at him, his small chest heaving.
    A few minutes later, my mother begins clearing the table, face weary as she scrapes the dishes one by one over the garbage.
    I move away from my chair, past my mother, onto the carpet, and up the stairs.
    Outside my brother’s bedroom, I crouch against the wall. When I step forward and look, I see my father holding the bamboo
     pole between his hands. The pole is smooth. The long grains, fine as hair, are pulled together, at intervals, jointed. My
     brother is lying on the floor, as if thrown down and dragged there. My father raises the pole into the air.
    I want to cry out. I want to move into the room between them, but I can’t.
    It is like a tree falling, beginning to move, a slow arc through the air.
    The bamboo drops silently. It rips the skin on my brother’s back. I cannot hear any sound. A line of blood edges quickly across
     his body.
    The pole rises and again comes down. I am afraid of bones breaking.
    My father lifts his arms once more.
    On the floor, my brother cries into the carpet, pawing at the ground. His knees folded into his chest,the crown of his head burrowing down. His back is hunched over and I can see his spine, little bumps on his skin.
    The bamboo smashes into bone and the scene in my mind bursts into a million white pieces.
    My mother picks me up off the floor, pulling me across the hall, into my bedroom, into bed. Everything is wet, the sheets,
     my hands, her body, my face, and she soothes me with words I cannot understand because all I can hear is screaming. She rubs
     her cool hands against my forehead. “Stop,” she says, “Please stop,” but I feel loose, deranged, as if everything in the known
     world is ending right here.
    In the morning, I wake up to the sound of oil in the pan and the smell of French toast. I can hear my mother bustling around,
     putting dishes in the cupboards.
    No one says anything when my brother doesn’t come down for breakfast. My father piles French toast and syrup onto a plate
     and my mother pours a glass of milk. She takes everything upstairs to my brother’s bedroom.
    As always, I follow my father around the kitchen. I track his footprints, follow behind him and hide in the shadow of his
     body. Every so often, he reaches down and ruffles my hair with his hands. We cast a spell, I think. The way we move in circles,
     how he