Fiction Friday: “If”

Joining Mondays of Love and Wednesdays of Sex as a (hopefully) weekly post is… Fiction Fridays!

I’m getting more serious about my writing and intend to get my MFA in Creative Writing. I have to come up with around 25 pages of fiction to submit as part of my application(s), so Fiction Fridays are going to be my personal weekly deadline for getting my butt in gear.

A friend also suggested that I serialize my fiction since I’m lucky enough to have some readers out there. This way I can see what interests you guys (if anything does); I can maybe get some feedback as well as some encouragement (fingers crossed); and it forces me to stop procrastinating. Thank you, everyone, for indulging me and helping me out—and I truly mean that!

So without further ado… Fiction Friday. This is the piece I’m working on to submit as my application.

“If”

It came down to choices.

Lalee learned that young. If her mother had married a successful businessman like her first boyfriend instead of a struggling musician; if the both of them hadn’t decided to move to the city of Philadelphia in the United States of America with three children under the age of three; if they hadn’t settled in a sleepy suburb filled with racist Christians; if they’d kept the Volvo instead of trading it in for the Toyota; if they’d stayed in Korea. If they’d stayed in Korea. If only they’d stayed in Korea.

Things would be different.

Lalee was surprised when she saw the nearly baroque letters etched into the back of this boy she was semi-dating and had just slept with for the first time. “If.” Since they were both naked, she felt almost obligated to trace the two black letters with her finger and ask him about it.

He turned his head, floppy hair falling in front of his hooded eyes, and he sighed, like he’d rehearsed it a hundred times before, “It’s my favorite poem. By Rudyard Kipling. ‘If.’ Do you know it?”

“He wrote Rikki Tikki Tavi, didn’t he?” As a child, Lalee was fascinated by this story set in a savage India that pitted a heroic mongoose against a vicious snake.

His second sigh was heavy, Shakespearean-like, as he ignored her literary contribution, which Lalee found rather insulting since she was the one who got an almost-Ivy league degree in English, after all, while he went to a state school whose name Lalee couldn’t even bother to remember. “It changed my life when I read this poem. This way I always keep it with me.”

Lalee looked at him curiously, not sure whether to believe his seriousness or take it for what she thought it was: A young hipster’s midnight show of sensitivity, intelligence and vulnerability in one single swoop of two curving black letters, sitting slightly off center between girlishly narrow shoulder blades. Two letters designed to impress the opposite sex and get them to shed their damp thongs. Then again, they’d already had sex. “Recite it. I want to hear it,” she demanded, wanting devotional proof.

He obliged, again with an air of fatigue belonging to one of the Rolling Stones playing “Start Me Up” for the eighteen-thousandth time, not a 26-year-old who’d only had two jobs since he graduated from the nameless state school. Lalee thought she might actually hate this guy. Why did she even sleep with him?

He recited the poem. And Lalee was impressed. Whether by Kipling’s words or the fact that this lad mag writer remembered them, well enough to recite them like a proud schoolboy who’d just learned the Pledge of Allegiance by heart, Lalee couldn’t deny the power of poetry falling from a young man’s lips and she felt herself soften, her hatred giving way to compassion and something akin to love. She could even ignore the imbalance of the off-kilter words on her lover’s back, though it went against every fiber of her Asian Virgo nature.

If only she’d gone with her first instinct.

Category : Advice, Dating & Relationships, Fiction Friday, Love & Sex, Writing
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