Free The Binding Chair by Kathryn Harrison Page A

curled into the damp wall of her husband’s lust.
    Shoes that had been squeezed and bitten and licked, whose linings had been wet with tears and with wine and with semen. Shoes that had been wiped and mended and perfumed and carefully put away.
    From the small purse hanging around her neck, May withdrew the knife she used to groom her feet, and with it she cut up all of her grandmother’s sleeping shoes. She used its sharp point to rip out characters for life and for happiness. She ground little pearls under her own wooden heels, crushed bells until they were silent. When she was through cutting and destroying, she squatted over the heap of torn fabric and glinting gold threads and urinated on it. Then she refastened her trousers, picked up the wet red silk and replaced it in the drawer, feeling how heavy and warm her defilement had made it, like something recently killed. May closed the drawer, crying as she did so without noise, because it was long ago that she had forgotten how to cry out loud.
    On her way back through the courtyard, she paused again at Chu’en’s door, but she reminded herself that she couldn’t stand the sight of her mother after she had been smoking, the terrible stupidity in her eyes, and she returned to Ahng-wah, now eating onions in the shed. She climbed on his back, wrapped her legs around his waist, and tucked her feet into his belt. Reaching over his shoulder, she held her jade beads out and let them swing before his eyes on their string.
    “It’s fourteen miles more to Shanghai,” May said. “We must continue to travel by night, but I’ll give you all of these and more if we arrive safely.” As they left, she tore down the military citation that hung on the outer door, the one proclaiming her father’s home that of a man of glorious deeds.
    A HNG-WAH, WHO WAS three times the size of May, had a large, irregularly shaped mole on the back of his thick neck. As they made their uncomfortable way toward the city, creeping not along roads but on paths near roads, all of May’s distaste for him centered on that blemish. The gardener was a coarse man, and the mole, too, was coarse. He smelled of onions and of perspiration, and it seemed to May’s nose, just inches from the mole, that it was this brown and black blot which released the unpleasant odor. With her arms and legs aching, stretched across Ahng-wah’s broad back, the mole too seemed to stretch wider and wider; it made her eyes ache as well.
    Peering around the gardener’s shoulder, May looked everywhere for a wheelbarrow they might steal, chastising herself for running away too quickly to plan, but all the houses and farms they passed in the dark were guarded by dogs, and Ahng-wah was frightened of dogs; May could feel his body stiffen under her as they came within earshot of barking. In fact, the gardener was frightened of all animals, and of the noises they made. The whinny of a horse or the rustle of a nocturnal rodent moving through the grass would make him quicken his lumbering pace.
    On the third night, made even more clumsy than usual by the sounds of some local skirmish, the eye-smarting smell of campfires, Ahng-wah fell as he was carrying May. He tripped on a root and plunged heavily forward on to his hands, pitching her over his head. As May reached out to break her own fall, the string of the purse in which she had safeguarded her jewels and her knife broke, and the little silk bag fell out of her reach. Ahng-wah snatched it up.
    “That’s it,” he said, scowling at her maliciously. For, naturally, just as she detested him, so did he detest her. As he walked, Ahng-wah had come to regard May as the literal burden of his greed, a chafing weight not only on his sullen back but on his soul. And just as she thought he stank and mentally recoiled from the body that she was forced to hold, so did May offend Ahng-wah’s nose. With her legs open against his damp, filthy shirt, she smelled to him like a whore: a confusing