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She Is a Battleground

May 20, 2017/in Flash Prose, Flash Prose, Summer-Fall 2017 / by Nancy Au

[fiction]

Twelve-year-old butter boys face the old Chinese woman they call Baboochka. Imagine: the eighty-year-old woman on their apartment’s shared front stoop, the silver moon caught in her tousled hair, her yellow sweater vest, her milky-white Velcro E-Z Steppers. She jostles grocery bags from one hip to the other as she digs in her pockets for keys. She grumbles about the checker at the vegetable market pocketing her change, about her arthritic fingers too weak to open jars but too strong for the wet lettuce bag, about the bus driver that did not hear her call out for a stop. And now, the butter boys on her stoop who whistle for sesame candy, beg to see inside her bags, throw dirty leaves in her hair when she refuses.

The old woman knows that in two years the boys will become teenage fools: lanky legs, smelling, soiled underpants, an erection when someone taps their shoulder or sloshes in a puddle or fires a gun. It doesn’t take much. The fools will come home from school and find the old woman weaving long green blades of grass into her house slippers like laces, her purse filled with acorns, resting against her stockinged feet. The fools will laugh and point their sticky fingers at Baboochka, some so close they leave fingerprints on her eyeglasses.

And the old woman will choose to fight back. In her own true myth, she is not a corny grandmother, soft like a pillow. She is not Mother Dear. She is not Lady Khorosho, just waiting to become a ghost. She does not weep and cry and mumble. No.

She is a battleground. Lui yun is her real name, she will tell the fools, Go and puk gai. She is a person. She is sex. She is useful poison. She is a survivor of wars. She is a dream. She is a sarcastic beast. She is the skeleton key who understands little criminals. She will yank the fools’ earlobes with joy, grab handfuls of shirt and rip them a new hemline.

And the arrogant snots will call her mad, crazy, a shithead, a starry buttock, a whore. But the old woman will laugh and laugh, howl like a bolshy dame. The sound, quick, scratching, the sweetest noise you’ve ever heard. Like an ancient drug, with chipped teeth like tin bells, a tongue like a rake, a fighting drive to live, a horror heart in woolly slippers.

 

Nancy Au

Nancy Au is a queer bisexual writer, artist, and teacher living in Oakland, California. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, The Pinch, Beloit Fiction Journal, Hermeneutic Chaos Journal, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Word Riot, Liminal Stories, Foglifter, Forge Literary Magazine, and Midnight Breakfast, among others. She was awarded the Spring Creek Project residency, which is dedicated to artists and writers inspired by nature and science. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University, teaches creative and science writing at California State University Stanislaus, and is cofounder of The Escapery.

“She is a Battleground” is a Best Small Fictions 2018 winner, selected by Aimee Bender. Congratulations to Nancy Au!

https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png 0 0 Vicki Miller https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Vicki Miller2017-05-20 10:44:332019-01-27 16:27:24She Is a Battleground

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Friday Lunch Blog

Friday Lunch! A serving of contemporary essays published every Friday.

Today’s course:

The Night I Want to Remember

December 16, 2022/in 2023ws-migration, Blog / Sanaz Tamjidi
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From Paper to the Page

November 18, 2022/in 2023ws-migration, Blog / Annie Bartos
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Confessions of a Birthday Person

November 4, 2022/in 2023ws-migration, Blog / Meghan McGuire
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Midnight Snack

A destination for all your late night obsessions.

Tonight’s bites:

Mending the Heart and Slowing Down: Reintroducing Myself to Mexican Cooking

October 7, 2022/in Midnight Snack / Megan Vasquez
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The Worth of a Billionaire’s Words

September 23, 2022/in Midnight Snack / Kirby Chen Mages
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Abyssinia

August 26, 2022/in Midnight Snack / JP Goggin
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Amuse-Bouche

Little bites every Monday to whet your appetite!

Today’s plate:

Still Life

October 31, 2022/in Amuse-Bouche / Daniel J. Rortvedt
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Litdish: Writing About Grief: An Interview with Jenn Koiter

October 24, 2022/in Amuse-Bouche / Interviewed by Gail Vannelli
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Dawn from Buffy Learns About Climate Change

October 10, 2022/in Amuse-Bouche / Alyson Mosquera Dutemple
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School Lunch

An occasional Wednesday series dishing up today’s best youth writers.

Today’s slice:

I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

May 12, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Brendan Nurczyk
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A Communal Announcement

April 28, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Isabella Dail
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Seventeen

April 14, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Abigail E. Calimaran
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Word From the Editor

Our contributors are diverse and the topics they share through their art vary, but their work embodies this mission. They explore climate change, family, relationships, poverty, immigration, human rights, gun control, among others topics. Some of these works represent the mission by showing pain or hardship, other times humor or shock, but they all carry in them a vision for a brighter world.

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