The man beside her had been in the military, Ruby decided. There was a certain way that military men sat, with their legs shoulder width apart and their hands folded solemnly. He sat in a manner that could easily be distinguished from the man who sat directly opposite from her. That man, she decided, was an ex-con.
“So which one of us is going to begin then?” Said a young woman wearing a gawky black blouse that exposed her midriff. Everyone avoided everyone else’s gaze, and Ruby stared into her cup of coffee that was no longer hot. She had always been more of a tea person, but the motel had none. The coffee reminded her of an oil well, and she wondered drily why people even bothered with bitter things. “People drink coffee so they can mask the bad taste already in their mouth” wheezed an old woman with white hair and white eyes as if replying to her thoughts. Ruby had assumed that she was blind, but maybe she could simply see and hear other things. “Then why does stuff that smells good sometimes taste bitter. You know, like vanilla extract, or flowers?” The military man beside Ruby asked, in a voice that contained a rather curious and unnatural gentleness. As if he he’d had to practice trying to sound approachable. “And how do you know flowers are bitter?” Asked the young woman with the midriff. Around the table, everyone sat back expectantly. The military man, unfolded his hands and looked around the table cautiously, and then grudgingly. He knew that it was he who would be beginning. “I suppose I’ll tell my story first.” He said, in a stark voice that sounded like it could not belong to anyone else.
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I do not have a superstitious bone in my body, I can promise you that. But I saw her. In my memory, she is delicate, like the curly bits of frost that sometimes form at the end of branches. Sometimes if you are careful, you can smooth your fingers over them, but most of the times they fall away like little shards of broken glass. Most of the time we forget that glass is also severe, that there is an edge to it.
That is why, in my memory, I am also afraid. I had been in a little silk village on the outskirts of Saigon, and the natives had warned me against her. But as I have already said, I do not have a superstitious bone in my body. So when I was told to be wary of little girls with white dresses, I simply thought to myself why should a grown man like I be afraid of a little Vietnamese girl?
My platoon had just gotten out of the bush, and we were all tired. It was as if the Vietnamese sun bled wax and burned its hot droplets on our white skin. It was as if the Vietnamese soil was able to sense our foreignness and wished to devour us. In the bush I had seen a man bite through his own tongue as his comrades were forced to saw off on of his rotting arms. I was not in the mood for legends and wives tales. I was not in the mood for the enchanting dirt roads of the silk village or the lanterns hung up on houses. I was suspicious of anyone that was not from my platoon.
That is why I didn’t accept the silk shawl when the old woman gave it to me. I was worried that under it hid something dangerous, like a machete, or a poisonous snake. The woman looked harmless enough, but you couldn’t tell. It was a country I wasn’t used to. “For your wife, soldier” she had said wryly holding the carefully crafted silk like a child in her arms. I simply shook my head and watched as the old woman walked haltingly on. “Guess you’ll be seeing that silk girl sometime soon” one of the boys beside me said with a grin. We both laughed, neither of us believing the legend that we had been told by a drunken old man outside of a pub.
The villagers called her Song Bin Mai. The silk girl, and it was said she appeared to those that did not accept gifts of silk. But later that night I saw her. I saw her. A little girl wearing a long silk dress. The lanterns became dim in the street, and the moonlight made her skin and her dress look eggshell white. In her mouth was a black tulip, and she was nibbling on it cautiously, in the same manner that European ladies sometimes nibble at their food.
She began to walk slowly towards me, and my feet became rooted in the ground. As she came closer, the face that I once thought beautiful was contorted with malice. The tulip fell from her lips and she smiled at me. Her teeth were shaved away to sharpened points, and I became terribly afraid. My platoon men found me passed out on the ground in the moonlight. They had simply assumed I’d had too much to drunk. I didn’t tell them otherwise. They had said I had been holding a bouquet of tulips, but when one of them had tried to touch them, the fresh petals had suddenly wilted away. Tied with a silk ribbon onto a stem of the bouquet had been a note, printed in English.
Flowers are bitter, soldier. It read. To this day I will never know exactly what happened.
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The members of the table pushed their chairs back with a sigh. The story was done, tomorrow there would be another one. The military man was the first to leave, and Ruby wished that she could follow him. Instead she took the stairs up to her room. The radiator did not work, and yesterday she’d had to sleep in the cold.
She was thinking about Richard, the boy who had tried to give her a silk scarf before she had left. She had not accepted it because it had belonged to his dead mother, and because she knew that he loved her and that she could never love him. The soldier’s story had been a haunting thing, but it had also been a foreign thing. About a country Ruby had never been to and a legend she had never heard. Obviously nothing like that could happen in America. This country did not have old magic or old Gods.
But still, she had been offered silk, and she had refused it.
Ruby walked into the room with a broken radiator and welcomed herself to the familiar cold. The window was open and the breeze made the light coloured windows flair outwards, like a willow-the-wisp. Under her feet something crunched. Ruby stared down at the pile of wilted black tulip petals.
“Flowers are bitter. Ruby”
Iron Ore 