Her Culture Bi-Monthy Magazine August/September 2015 | Page 70

WOMEN, Women cook, they say, while she ineffectively scrapes burnt egg off the bottom of the pan. "Where are the eggs?" her husband says. "I burnt the eggs," she whispers. There is a silence, foretelling all doom. The husband screeches with the rage of a thousand suns. Three days later, he is found dead of malnourishment, slumped against the stove with a carton of eggs in his hand. Unopened. His wife is nowhere to be found. ... Women clean, they say, while she wonders whether vacuuming the bugs that have accumulated in her room is inhumane. She decides that it is. The world, after all, is an ecosystem, and must nurture even the most repulsive of creatures. … Women are stupid, they say, while she watches a teenage boy in class pick up an electric drill and begin to drill holes through the - school purchased - table. They all back away slowly, hoping to avoid being given amateur lobotomies. Maybe he will not see them. The electric drill is also school purchased. The teacher seems less concerned with the money and more concerned with the wielder of the tool, but he, too, backs away. … Women love children, they say, as she holds the excreting, bawling, potato-esque infant an arms length from her body. "Yes, he's very cute," she says to the demon's mother, "Yes, I would love to hold him more, but I just have to go now." She runs for the doors, the ominous, high-pitched shrieks fading behind her. by Sherty Huang 70