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在线翻译:
szdaily -> Budding Writers -> 
Nothing gold can stay (I)
    2016-09-28  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

    Mandy Chen

    The pillow had a snake-like quality. After a night’s ruffling it seemed justified to wind itself around my neck, and I screamed a bit. It loosened and I left the bed.

    I owned two pairs of pajamas. The one with grey stripes that I had on for the night I hated. I slipped out of the stripes feeling trapped, feeling like a stripping snake trapped in bars. Now the bars shredded and the full-length mirror stuck to the back of my door grew full of nakedness.

    I didn’t bother slipping into new skin. Mom could be out. If not I didn’t mind her looking.

    The living room would have minded, but it too reeked of infertility. Emptiness was a smell and I heard its deep invisible vibration turn over the kitchen. I broke in, wrecking emptiness. Mom forbade me to drink refrigerated milk.

    I took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator. The liquid gushed, splitting my guts. Needling sourly tentacles drilled holes in my tongue, rendering the ring in my ears needling and surreal. I gulped.

    The sound — a hoot — now retreated to a distance. In search of its origin I traced my way back to the bed. The pillow had given up on being snake-like and lay seemingly innocent; only the steadfast vibration betrayed hoarding and in a swoop I swept it clean of its captive. A lit screen: FRIEND 001.

    “Hello.”

    “They’re playing ‘Midnight in Paris’ at LT. You have 20 minutes.”

    A pause. “Sure,” I said.

    Friend 001 was Abigail. Abigail hung up. Now the room was quiet and I could hear the telly a bass radiance evacuating the living room.

    Fifty-six killed in Paris, protests taking over the city. I walked in, gathering my skins. Cushions scattered about the wooden floor. Beyond me voices chimed. I pressed the remote control.

    The sofa felt as shriveled as it looked. It took but five minutes to get to Loser’s Theater. I noticed a stain on the side of the sofa, where I propped up my feet. It was still wet. What mom used to say, nothing gold could stay but it was different with wine. But so could time.

    And so I would lay dead on my couch and count un deux trois quatre cinq, fifty-eight ninety-five sixty, then one again, counting death until the bell. And it occurred to me.

    I walked back and forth out on the couch, into my room where I would find my stock of white T-shirts. Skins, plain ones, arrayed in parcels but I took them out and apart and took a sharpie. Across one of them I scribbled, HARVARD BOY.

    Then I threw it on with my jeans. Then I left, slamming the door behind me like mom would, leaping down 15 flights of stairs in one breath. I left a Harvard boy without a baggage.

    I was starting to run. Only a troop of ants around the corner of the apartment building got in my way. I stopped, stooping. Tiny many-legged particles piled up into a sea of red sand.

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