Free End of East, The by Jen Sookfong Lee

thrust upward, rip open the sky. His picture of my mother is light, smooth, floral in its homage. “My love,” I imagine him saying, “you are all the earth to me.”
    I trace the lines with my fingers, feeling the marks my father made in the paper. The light cast by the side lamp shines yellow, and the forty-year-old paper is a soft, pliable gold. This is so much about them and their beginning, I think . Lives framed by love—think of that. I can’t imagine anything more tragic.
    I look up from the sketchbook and listen for the sounds of my mother lurking outside my door. Nothing. The confinement of my bedroom walls keeps the voices at bay—both my mother’s and those girly voices from the past, the ones that rise and drop with the sounds of tinkling earrings and the smacking of lipsticked mouths. Even though silence unnerves me, the echo of sounds that have come and gone is worse. Sometimes, silence is better.

    I hold the book in my hands, wishing one of my sisters would come barging in so that we could turn these pages together and both be embarrassed by our parents’ young, naked love. But they all left, gradually, one after the other. Somehow, it never occurred to me that, in the end, I would be the only one still here.
    The clouds overhead make it a grey evening, and the ocean sounds weak, as if it has lost its purpose for being. Hundreds of people mill about the port as they wait for their cruises to Alaska or Mexico. Vancouver is a kind of oceanside attraction, a pretty place on the way to somewhere else.
    I can hear the sounds of Penny’s wedding behind me: the shouts of my drunken uncle, the tinkling of chopsticks against rice bowls, the giggling of my sister and her other bridesmaids. My mother comes out to see what I’m doing, takes one look at me and hurries back into the hotel ballroom. I’m alone except for the old man in a dirty apron squatting in the corner—and he silently smokes Marlboros, one after the other. It’s a nice view from this balcony, a hotel builder’s dream. The cruise ships sit, massive, like bloated whales, white on grey-black water. I look down at my bridesmaid dress; the big skirt reminds me of a porcelain doll one of my childhood friends kept propped up on her dresser. I feel almost as stiff, but not quite so virginal. I laugh to myself (the smoky old man doesn’t seem to notice); Matt would find this whole charade screamingly funny.
    On our last day together, he pulled me toward him on our unmade bed. The harsh afternoon light pushed its way through half-closed blinds. His eyes were shadowed, but his mouth remained flesh pink, his teeth bright. He licked his lips, his tongue flicking in and out like a small lizard tasting the air for
the next fly. He moved out of the dark, back into the light. Black, white. Black, white. My hand lay flat on his chest—graphic, tattoo-like, a dark stain.
    “Small breasts,” he said, “are the most sensitive.”
    He preferred the daylight, and it made me want to hide; I don’t like seeing myself naked, watching my own breasts move up and down, my thighs open wide. Everything with him was revealed: the fleshiness, the soft give and take of skin, the glitter of sweat, shades of pink, peach and brown. And he talked, his voice absurd against the sound of our bodies coming together, the slapping of fornication. Like an actor raising his voice above the crowd, Matt made sure I could hear him, and he spoke clearly, slowly—a little public speaking.
    It was the feeling of his body on mine that made me wish these moments could last and last—the feeling of him holding me completely. My hands, my face, everything. I could look up and see nothing but him, count the differences between his features and mine. I could forget that I was naked, sweaty, thin; I could forget that I existed at all.
    Afterward, he stroked my breasts and looked up at the ceiling. “When we’re together, everything goes away. I don’t have to think when I’m with