The Beautiful Anthology Read Online Free Page A

over a rice field from a platform in the trees on a night with no moon. I know he gave it to me, the way lovers do, as a gift. “Not beautiful, but cute, and a very nice person,” he told me drifting off to sleep one night. He sounded like a man who had recently revaluated his priorities and was pleased with the new order. Or maybe he was impressed at his ability to achieve accuracy in English. He repeated himself: “Not beautiful, but cute, and a very nice person.” He kissed me.
    I accepted this description easily. Unlike compliments earned in my show-horse stage, it felt like it would last. If he didn’t think I was beautiful, that no longer mattered.
    He seemed to me so sweet, so pure: the foot, the heroin, the methadone, the moonlit rice fields, the Mercurochrome, the monastery. A picturesque vista.
    And I thought he was a very nice, too, above-average decent. But really, how could I know? Upon first acquaintance with a beautiful person, the existence of any virtue besides it seems such a bounteous gift. Kindness! Wow! And she’s so down-to- earth ! And he’s really funny . And then there’s the way beauty affects the taste buds, makes things seem deliriously sweet even if around the core is bitterness.
    Or, at least, it creates delirium for a while. It’s the shock of discovery that gives beauty such power. You can reveal it again and again, of course; it’s a living thing, ever changing, moving into something new. But you can also become accustomed. The balance between Ghan and I shifted. Having started out ashamed, I became almost proud of, certainly I drew confidence from, not being the beautiful one in our pair.
    I stayed in Pai longer than I would have otherwise, but not long enough for Ghan’s foot to heal completely. Given the offer, I decided to leave with an Australian girl named Vanessa for a less-discovered little town on the Mekong River farther east. Ghan was crestfallen the day I departed. Pouty. He met my eyes only when I roughed out my travel plans and estimated that I might be able to come back around Easter, a word that meant nothing to him. “The beginning of the hot season,” I translated. I saw hope flicker.
    I did think of him around then. I was in Bangkok. But I didn’t have time to get all the way up to Pai before heading off to Kathmandu. I’ve thought of him many times since, but I spent Easter in Nepal.

M. J. FIEVRE
    THE OTHER PAPA
    Jeweled chopsticks and flowered pins lie scattered on the vanity top. Mother’s hair is up in an elaborate bun with languorous permed curls dangling along the sides of her face. Sitting on the bed, Papa watches her as she clasps her pearl necklace closed.
    Papa is too far to hold me, too close to ignore, and when I reach over to him, bouncing the mattress, he takes my hand – just for a second or two. Then he lets go.
    “My sister is visiting tonight,” Mother says.
    I’m holding a bottle of perfume found on the night table. I douse Papa’s Le Troisième Homme on my wrist and neck, the underside of my arms, rubbing in my father’s musky scent like a salve.
    “I don’t want to see anyone,” Papa says.
    He is whispering. His nightly theatrics have ravaged his vocal chords. He’s been yelling again – a mean, volatile storm.
    “But it’s Mom’s birthday,” I say.
    A faint smile reveals a dimple in Mother’s right cheek. “It is, isn’t it?” she says.
    Usually, Papa enjoys parties. He gets swept up in the festivity, becomes animated, involved, telling funny anecdotes, invariably getting the biggest laughs of the evening. But he’s the Other Papa today. I can tell he’s suddenly in one of his moods. His eyebrows join together in a frown line across his forehead. His thin face is stern, lips latched tight.
    You see, one day my father is normal, calm, quiet, in control, reliable; the next he becomes a wild-eyed stranger, screaming so loud that my ears sting.
    Mother says he has mood swings.
    One of Mother’s hairs falls out of her