How to Pronounce Knife Read online

  To Mom and Dad and John, for being here

  Books by Souvankham Thammavongsa

  Fiction

  How to Pronounce Knife (2020)

  Poetry

  Small Arguments (2003)

  Found (2007)

  Light (2013)

  Cluster (2019)

  Contents

  How to Pronounce Knife

  Paris

  Slingshot

  Randy Travis

  Mani Pedi

  Chick-A-Chee!

  The Universe Would Be So Cruel

  Edge of the World

  The School Bus Driver

  You Are So Embarrassing

  Ewwrrrkk

  The Gas Station

  A Far Distant Thing

  Picking Worms

  Acknowledgements

  More Praise For

  How to Pronounce Knife

  ‘Reading Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife is like finding, at last, a part of you that you had lost and had been searching for all this time. Not since the stories of Edward P. Jones have I encountered such a unified and yet wide-ranging vision—both geographically and emotionally—that captures the spirit of not only a community but of the greater world— then, now, the future. This is a book full of powerful resilience, great journeys, and above all else: fierce, heart-wrenching love’

  Paul Yoon, author of Snow Hunters

  ‘How to Pronounce Knife is a book of unusual ferocity and grace. Souvankham Thammavongsa carefully unpacks the aches and aspirations of immigrant and refugee life in tight, commanding prose; and these subtle yet shattering stories glow with empathy, humour, and wisdom’

  Mia Alvar, author of In the Country

  ‘How to Pronounce Knife is a masterful collection, written with so much veracity, you’ll swear every word is true. Thammavongsa’s prose is spare, the images she evokes so crystalline, they require no embellishment. Here is life, rendered with precision and insight. Instantly recognizable. She offers sharp sensory details, piercing imagery, endings that will punch you in the gut and leave you yearning for more’

  Sharon Bala, author of The Boat People

  ‘Sharp and elegant…. Thammavongsa’s brief stories pack a punch, punctuated by direct prose that’s full of acute observations…. This is a potent collection’

  Publishers Weekly

  How to Pronounce Knife

  The note had been typed out, folded over two times, and pinned to the child’s chest. It could not be missed. And as she did with all the other notes that went home with the child, her mother removed the pin and threw it away. If the contents were important, a phone call would be made to the home. And there had been no such call.

  The family lived in a small apartment with two rooms. On the wall of the main room was a tiny painting with a brown bend at the centre. That brown bend was supposed to be a bridge, and the blots of red and orange brushed in around it were supposed to be trees. The child’s father had painted this, but he didn’t paint anymore. When he came home from work, the first thing he always did was kick off his shoes. Then he’d hand over a newspaper to the child, who unfolded sheets on the floor, forming a square, and around that square they sat down to have dinner.

  For dinner, it was cabbage and chitterlings. The butcher either threw the stuff away or had it out on display for cheap, so the child’s mother bought bags and bags from him and put them in the fridge. There were so many ways to cook these: in a broth with ginger and noodles, grilled over charcoal fire, stewed with fresh dill, or the way the child liked them best—baked in the oven with lemongrass and salt. When she took these dishes to school, other children would tease her about the smell. She shot back, “You wouldn’t know a good thing even if five hundred pounds of it came and sat on your face!”

  When they all sat down for dinner, the child thought of the notes her mother threw away, and about bringing one to her father. There had been so many last week, maybe it was important. She listened as her father worried about his pay and his friends and how they were all making their living here in this new country. He said his friends, who were educated and had great jobs in Laos, now found themselves picking worms or being managed by pimple-faced teenagers. They’d had to begin all over again, as if the life they led before didn’t count.

  The child got up, found the note in the garbage, and brought it to her father.

  He waved the note away. “Later.” He said this in Lao. Then, as if remembering something important, he added, “Don’t speak Lao and don’t tell anyone you are Lao. It’s no good to tell people where you’re from.” The child looked at the centre of her father’s chest, where, on this T-shirt, four letters stood side by side: LAOS.

  A few days after that, there was some commotion in the classroom. All the girls showed up wearing different variations of pink, and the boys had on dark suits and little knotted ties. Miss Choi, the grade one teacher, was wearing a purple dress dotted with a print of tiny white flowers and shoes with little heels. The child looked down at her green jogging suit. The green was dark, like the green of broccoli, and the fabric at the knees was a few shades lighter and kept their shape even when she was standing straight up. In this scene of pink and sparkles and matching purses and black bow ties and pressed collars, she saw she was not like the others.

  Miss Choi, always scanning the room for something out of place, noticed the green that the child was wearing and her eyes widened. She came running over and said, “Joy. Did you get your parents to read the note we sent home with you?”

  “No,” she lied, looking at the floor where her blue shoes fitted themselves inside the space of a small square tile. She didn’t want to lie, but there was no point in embarrassing her parents. The day went as planned. And in the class photo, the child was seated a little off to the side, with the grade and year sign placed in front of her. The sign was always right in the middle of these photos, but the photographer had to do something to hide the dirt on the child’s shoes. Above that sign, she smiled.

  When her mother came to get her after school, she asked why all the other children were dressed up this way, but the child didn’t tell her. She lied, saying in Lao, “I don’t know. Look at them, all fancy. It’s just an ordinary day.”

  The child came home with a book. It was for her to read on her own, for practice. The book the child was given had pictures and a few words. The pictures were supposed to explain what was going on with the words, but there was this one word that didn’t have a picture. It was there on the page by itself, and when she pronounced each letter, the word didn’t sound like anything real. She didn’t know how to pronounce it.

  After dinner, the three of them sat down together on the bare floor, watching television side by side. From behind, the child knew she looked like her father. Her hair had been cut short in the shape of a bowl. The child’s shoulders drooped and her spine bent like there was some weight she was carrying there, like she knew what a day of hard work was all about. Before long the television pictures changed into vertical stripes the colour of a rainbow, and her parents would soon go to bed. Most nights, the child followed, but tonight she was bothered by what she didn’t know and wanted to know it. She opened the book and went looking for that word. The one that didn’t sound like anything she knew.

  That one.

  It was her last chance before her father went to sleep. He was the only one in their home who knew how to read. She brought the book to him and pointed to the word, asked what it was. He leaned over it and said, “Kah-nnn-eye-ffff. It’s kahneyff.” That’s what it was, what it sounded like to him.

  The next day, Miss Choi gathered the whole class together to sit around the green carpet at the front of the room. S
he did this when she wanted to get someone to read out loud. Sometimes a student would volunteer and sometimes she would point at someone, but on this day Miss Choi looked around and found the child.

  “Joy, you haven’t read yet. Why don’t you get your book and read for us.”

  The child started reading and everything went along just fine until she got to that word. It was only five letters, but there might as well have been twenty there. She said it the way her father had told her, but she knew it was wrong because Miss Choi would not turn the page. Instead, she pointed to the word and tapped at the page as if by doing so the correct sound would spill out. But the child didn’t know how to pronounce it. Tap. Tap. Tap. Finally, a yellow-haired girl in the class called out, “It’s knife! The k is silent,” and rolled her eyes as if there was nothing easier in the world to know.

  This girl had blue eyes and freckles dotted around her nose. This girl’s mother was always seen in the parking lot after school honking in a big shiny black car with a V and a W holding each other inside a circle. Her mother owned a black fur coat and walked in heels like it was Picture Day every day. This girl was like everyone else in the class, reading loud and clear, winning prizes. The child was the only one not to have won one yet. On this very day, Miss Choi added a red yo-yo to the sack. Had the child known what that word was, that red yo-yo would have been hers, but now it would remain locked in the top drawer of Miss Choi’s desk.

  Later that night, the child looks over at her father during dinner. How he picks up each grain of rice with his chopsticks, not dropping a single one. How he eats, clearing away everything in his bowl. How small and shrunken he seems.

  The child does not tell him the k in knife is silent. She doesn’t tell him about being in the principal’s office, about being told of rules and how things are the way they are. It was just a letter, she was told, but that single letter, out there alone, and in the front, was why she was in the office in the first place. She doesn’t tell how she had insisted the letter k was not silent. It couldn’t be, and she had argued and argued, “It’s in the front! The first one! It should have a sound!” and then she screamed as if they had taken some important thing away. She never gave up on what her father said, on that first sound there. And none of them, with all their lifetimes of reading and good education, could explain it.

  As she watches her father eat his dinner, she thinks of what else he doesn’t know. What else she would have to find out for herself. She wants to tell her father that some letters, even though they are there, we do not say them, but she decides now is not the time to say such a thing. Instead she tells her father only that she had won something.

  At the end of the school day, Miss Choi was waiting for her by the door. She asked the child to follow her to the front desk, where she unlocked the top drawer and pulled out the red velvet sack. “Pick one,” she said. And the child reached inside and grabbed at the first thing her fingers touched. It was a puzzle with an airplane in the sky.

  When she shows her father the prize, he is delighted because, in some way, he has won it too. They take the prize, all the little pieces of it, and start forming the edge, the blue sky, the other pieces, the middle. The whole picture, they fill those in later.

  Paris

  The sky was black like the middle of an eye. Red revved the engine, impatient, having to wait for the truck to warm up. She never failed to make her morning shift on time. The truck was an old thing. A thing she had seen on someone’s front lawn, a For Sale sign taped to the windshield, handwritten in black marker. The make was nothing special. They call it a pickup truck, but she never picked anything up in it, just herself. It might have been the colour that drew Red to the truck. And the thought of that big red truck in the parking lot at the plant. It would be the best-looking thing there, and it would belong to her. She wanted that.

  Red worked at the plant like most of the others in town. It was her job to pluck the feathers, make sure the chickens were smooth when they left her. By the time the chickens got to her, they were already dead, their eyes closed tight like they were sleeping. It was almost like what happened in the next room didn’t happen at all. Sometimes she could swear she heard the chickens— that sudden desperate flap of wing, as if flight could really take place there.

  Before Red backed out onto the road, she looked at herself in the rear-view mirror. It didn’t show her whole face, just the eyes. She lifted herself up from the driver’s seat, turned her head to the right, studied the outline of her profile, and tried to imagine her face with a different nose. How maybe if her nose was different, things would be different at the plant too. Especially with Tommy. Tommy was her boss, her supervisor, married with two young boys. He was nice to her. Gave her more shifts than anyone else and complimented her work.

  “You did good, Red. Keep it up. We’ve got plans for you.”

  What those plans were, she never knew. Just that they had them for her. Sometimes Tommy would buy her a cola from the machine or sit at her table during her lunch breaks. It wasn’t how he behaved with the other girls who worked for him. There was no interest in her body. He didn’t notice what was there, didn’t lean in close or whisper anything. They talked. Mostly about his boys and how he was planning a trip to Paris with his wife for Valentine’s Day.

  Tommy’s wife, Nicole, had a nose Red wished she could have. It was a thin nose that stuck out from her face and pointed upward. Everyone who worked in the front office had that kind of nose.

  Nicole always came to the plant’s annual Christmas party wearing something fashionable, in fabric no one else’s clothes were made out of. The material fit tightly around her curves, smoothed out and pressed, not a wrinkle in sight. At these parties, Nicole always stood the whole time in a group with the other wives whose husbands ran or owned the company. This was the one occasion in the year their wives were seen, brought out for show. Sometimes one of them would come over to say hello to a couple of people who worked on the line. They would introduce themselves, shake a few hands, and then go back to stand in a corner with the other wives, as if they’d done some great charity work by breaking away from their huddle. Nicole never came over.

  Every year at the party they served fried chicken. It never bothered Red that the pieces she ate could have been from one of those dead chickens that came to her to get plucked. Cut up into pieces like that, there wasn’t a face to think of. And every year, she looked forward to this party, wore her best clothes to it: a pair of jeans, a blue-and-white checkered shirt, and thick black boots from Canadian Tire. Her clothes weren’t fancy like what some of the other girls wore, and they didn’t show much, but there wasn’t much Red wanted to show.

  A few years ago, one of the girls who worked on the line got a nose job. Her glasses didn’t have to be held up with an elastic band at the back of the head anymore. The girl got her hair done after that, every week. She already had a small, thin body. “Cute” was what Tommy called it. Soon, she started getting more shifts and, eventually, a job in the front office. The front office! In this town, a girl either worked at the chicken plant or the Boobie Bungalow. At least at the Boobie Bungalow you could make some quick cash and get the hell out of town, never look back, or you could get someone who could love you just long enough to take you away. Any man you met there was single or on his way to being single. At the plant, most of the men were married, and if they weren’t they would be eventually, to someone who didn’t work there.

  Red knew, for her, it was going to be the chicken plant. She didn’t have much in the chest area, and couldn’t dance to music even if it had a beat. The way men never looked at her gave her the sense that the Boobie Bungalow wasn’t going to be an option for her. At the plant, you made enough money to pay for what you needed. But the big things in life, the things that could make you happy, well, you just never made enough to get all that.

  About two years back, the girl who worked in the front office had stood with Tommy’s wife and the other wives at the company
Christmas party as if she was now one of them. All their noses looked the same, sticking out in the air like that. The wives didn’t talk to the girl or include her in their conversations. When the group laughed together, her laughter came a few seconds behind.

  But the girl doesn’t work in the front office anymore. Something about Nicole and the other wives not liking her there, working with their husbands. She was asked to take her old job on the line again. She quit after that, on account of having been someplace better.

  After the front office job became available again, all the women who worked on the line did what they could to get it. Some started by getting themselves nose jobs. Where they found a surgeon was something Red didn’t know. No facility around here to support that kind of thing. Maybe that’s why everyone’s nose looked different: some were slightly bent, didn’t heal properly, or scarred badly. One girl, when she talked, her nose moved in every direction that her upper lip moved. It was like her nose was attached to that lip. Most of the girls at the plant started to come to work with their hair curled and pressed and wearing heels and office clothes. They’d change into their work gear, the plastic shower cap and the matching white plastic pullover, then change right back when their shift was over. They looked so glamorous. But all of this was for nothing. None of them got the job. It was given to a girl just out of high school whose father worked in the front office.

  Red drove her truck into the plant’s parking lot and pulled up to a spot near the entrance. There was one closer, but it was reserved for those who worked in the front office. She didn’t want to park where she did and imagined the day when she’d see her big red truck up there. She turned off the ignition and got out and walked to the entrance.

  Somboun was standing outside alone, smoking. When he saw her coming, he dropped his cigarette and put it out with his shoe. Then he blew into his palm to check his breath and yelled out, “Hey, Dang!” Dang was what people who knew Red called her. It means red in Lao. It wasn’t her real name, just a nickname she got because her nose was always red from the cold. She hated that he called her by a nickname. It made things feel intimate between them in a way she didn’t want. The way he said “Dang,” it was like a light in him had been turned on and now she had to be responsible for what he could see about himself.