Anguli Ma by Chi Vu Page A

into view and he sees the monk resting on his side, with eyes half-closed. The reclining figure does not make eye contact, confront or challenge his observer; his self-possession invites the man to his interiority and stillness. The brown man unconsciously mirrors the monk’s composure. A gentle breeze blows through the gnarled wattle tree.
    The monk releases himself from his reclining pose and sits upright. The spell of calmness breaks, and the brown man finds himself feeling very angry.
    â€œWhat have you done? I can’t kill even a wild animal anymore.”
    The monk observes the dejected man before him, a man shaken by something arising from beneath the surface. He lowers his voice and urges the man to go further into his wretchedness, to lean into his fear.
    â€œYou are now repulsed by killing, but I ask you to do one more.”
    The brown man is enraged. What is this impostor with the shaven head doing in this barren park? Why does he trick maggots like me? What has he done to my power?
    He grabs hold of the collar of the monk’s robe, pulling him clean off the flattened vegetation.
    â€œThis time you should choose,” the monk hoarsely whispers in mid-air, “your most worthy victim.” He plants his feet on the ground. “It is not me. I know you’ve thought of that already.” The monk tilts his head down, and smiles, “It is someone much dearer to you, and much more dangerous to you.”
    The grin is so incomprehensible to the brown man that he suddenly perceives the coarse, black hairs growing on his clenched hands; the burnished cigarette stain between his fingers; the breeze teasing his hair against his cheek; his throat drying and constricting; the rotten smell of his animal innards. All this he apprehends, as the magnitude of the monk’s provocation sinks in.
    ÄÃ o
    ÄÃ o tried to fight off her tiredness. Throughout the meeting, she found that she was still shaken from the events of the night before. She was relieved that there was only a small number gathered at her house thatafternoon. She went through the procedure of drawing out the bids from the plastic container for those present at the meeting, as well as for those who had telephoned through their bid amounts beforehand.
    Con heo that day went to her friend Thảo. Thảo was out of town. Đào went into automatic mode when the meeting was over and stuffed the pooled funds into one of the cardboard boxes in her spare room, locked it, put the sateen cushions and biros back in their places, made sure that Tuyết started her practice at the old piano, expressed enthusiasm when the child played something slightly recognisable, cut some apples and placed a plate of sliced apples in front of her when she watched the tivi .
    ÄÃ o alternated between attentiveness and torpor, and she fell asleep. She began dreaming vividly. Time was flowing out of her. Her arms had less and less energy and eventually she was frozen, permanently, in a beastly form. And then the light around her withdrew into the distance and disappeared altogether without her being able to move towards it any longer. Đào found herself on the second-hand couch suddenly jerking awake.
    Her grandchild was cross-legged before the tivi with the apples barely eaten. The weight of Đào’s tiredness overcame her and she fell asleep again.
    In her second dream, Đào’s world was made up of shifting words and cardboard boxes, which seemed to rearrange themselves. What wasdistant suddenly became near, and what was near was a trick of the eye and was, in fact, distant. The shifting blocks moved in free space, and these became fingers that reached out and touched her face. The shock of this made her body jerk as she slept. Then, black animal fur, dripping with diluted blood, clogged Đào’s dream, and a sense of being out of breath. She tried to draw deeply from her lungs and, still coming up for air,