“All the Chinese Food in the World” by Sue Mell (fiction ’16)
An excerpt from “All the Chinese Food in the World” by Sue Mell (fiction ’16) published by Cleaver Magazine.
All the Chinese Food in the World
I’m always sad when the gig ends. Three grueling weeks with a showroom crew I only see each spring and fall, preparing for the home textile market. I’ll especially miss the Flower Marys—a jubilant self-named group of gay men who fashion stunning floral arrangements. Peggy, Mary, Louise. Men whose real names I never learned or have long since forgotten. Over time, a musician among them will marry the showroom designer. Others vanish into illness, addiction. The displays shrink, the crew downsize with budget cuts. But this warm spring evening, in the early aughts, it’s all still in place, and I’ve got one night left in New York, where old friends, commercial photographers soon to be forced from the city by hostile buyout, have graciously lent me their tiny West Village apartment while they’re out of town.
Bags packed, rooms tidied, I’m caught in familiar disjunction between east and west coast. “Pick up,” I say, over-ordering Chinese from the place on Bethune, though it’s blocks away.
At Bleecker, a yellow cab slows; the driver stares rolling past. Exhaust trailed by a faint scent of honeysuckle. Violet dusk dissolves the thin wedge of playground ahead, memory slip-sliding into overlay as I cross the street—this neighborhood the stomping ground of my early adulthood. I was forged here, but it’s no longer my home.
[…continue reading “All the Chinese Food in the World” at Cleaver Magazine.]
