Fiction from The Literary Review

Men, Women and Flowers

DUC BAN

Two men were riding on a sun-splashed street on a summer afternoon. No one knows their names, age, or where they're from. Even the writer of this story doesn't; let's just called them “a man wearing a hat” and “a bareheaded man.”
     Both of them steered onto the sidewalk and stepped into a small café under the almond tree. Inside the café, it was dim, cool, and smelling vaguely of peppermint. The proprietress was a delicate woman wearing a thin yellow silk blouse, her hair as soft as water. Her eyes were extremely black; even the most hard-to-please person on earth would not find fault with them. Beautiful and soaked in a pure sadness.
     “Hello, Sister,” the two men said, the voices latching onto each other and trembling slightly.
     The woman arched her brows and nodded, a magnanimous and somewhat noble gesture.
     The two young men sat at the table by the door.
     The bareheaded man stretched an arm across the back of his chair.
     The man wearing a hat folded his arm across his chest.
     A swarm of flies buzzed around them, then landed in a heart-shaped puddle on the table. Their many legs dipping into a liquid the color of wood. Then they stretched their wings and swooped up, sprinkling the air, and the men's pants, with tiny dots of liquid the size of pinpricks.
      “There's a smell of honey,” the man wearing a hat said, sniffing.
     “Some sort of incense,” the bareheaded man said pensively.
     A moment of deep silence.
     The young man wearing a hat shook his sleeve, writhed, then yelled: “Flies! Flies!”
     The woman laughed.
     The bareheaded man draped his entire body onto the table. He thought of the laugh of a woman from a fairy tale, a laugh he heard in his imagination when he was seventeen . . . A knight-errant chased after that laugh from the time he was a young man until his hair was gray. He died one evening as the sun was setting into the ocean. In waves, the woman's laughter lapped over him like a funereal shroud.
     The man wearing a hat shuddered suddenly. Lines appeared on his face. Two flies were casually crawling on his ringed fingers. He stood up, stomped on the floor, then stepped outside the café.
     “Can't stand this!” he fumed. Whether he was furious at the flies or something else no one knows.
     “Just like in the fairy tale,” the bareheaded man was still pensive. He appeared exactly like a sleepwalker. His eyes were wet. Tears flowed in rivulets down his slowly reddening cheeks. They were such strange kinds of tears that the flies flew off.
     The woman looked into the distance. Her succulent lips, as red as lotus flowers, stammered suddenly as she asked the young man, who was now standing right in front of her, separated by a mere hand span:
     “Do you like Raphael's painting 'Poseidon and Circe'”?
     The bareheaded man tilted his head to look through the hole in the thatch roof. He was readying himself for a flight into the sunlight and clouds.
     It is told, they later became husband and wife.
     As for the young man wearing a hat, he became a breeder of a special kind of birds that feeds only on flies.

Translated by Linh Dinh