Sticky Rice

tonight, just me and my daughter, tucked into a dim booth at a chop suey joint on Wardour Street in Soho, the air thick with the breath of sticky rice rising from the bowls, green tea sharp enough to cut the haze and remind you you’re still breathing. sweet-and-sour pools on the plate, glossy and slow.

she laughs across from me, mouth full of new love, some boy with soft hands and a softer heart, and I nod, half lost in the bitter tea, half lost in the ghosts that always slide into the empty seat between us.

this is how it played out, then.

1976, my mother’s parade of men marching through our little flat like they held the lease on her heart. each one an expert with the chopsticks, and each one, coming and going, left the faint echo of his voice in my head.

Saul first, when I was seven — skinny, black polo-neck, sliding pineapple chunks across the plate like he was offering something forbidden. “Use a dab of rice, kid, it’s the glue,” he’d say, smelling of soy and quiet failure, walking everywhere because cars were for people with futures.

then Eric, a mechanic, grease under his nails, banging the sticks together like he was tuning a carburettor, balancing pork on the tips in defiance of gravity and good sense — funny bastard, kept me laughing while mom sighed behind the bedroom door.

Noel rolled in next; I was nine and already tired. he sang Sinatra in a cracked voice on the drive home in his red pickup, working the sticks smooth as the lies he told himself. never funny, but the songs carried us.

and finally Harry, the chef, the goddamn maestro — ginger hit the air and the world stopped spinning for a second. “Be one with it, boy, inhale the divine,” he’d say, showing me how to pinch, how to lift, how to own the bowl. then one summer he went back to Cape Town, back to a wife who never knew we existed.

tonight, my girl works the sticks like she was born holding them, laughing at her own clumsy heart, grains of rice clinging to her fingers. and I sit here chewing memory along with the rice, sweet and sour, like everything else that ever mattered.

she lifts the rice clean,
four good men in her fingers
and not one of them knows.