To promote the release of our special multiethnic issue this June, we are posting little bits of all the stories included in this mega-issue. Today, we present you with Lao-American poet, short story writer, playwright, and essayist, Bryan Thao Worra. An NEA Fellow in literature, his work appears internationally in numerous anthologies, magazines and newspapers. His tale follows a painter, a Hmong of Laos resettled in Arkham, and the secrets hidden in her apartment:
A Model Apartment
By Bryan Thao Worra
Yam zoo ntshai tsam tau me.
Yam phem ntshai tsam los ze.
Something good, you fear you’ll get too little.
Something bad, you fear it will come too close.
– Ancient Hmong proverb
I.
The elders believe the tragedy that befell Kazoua Vue in New England was avoidable. As incontrovertible evidence of this position, they repeat the ancient Hmong folktales and modern news stories of those who live too far from their families and the horrific fates those foolish people meet.
Her funeral was conducted with singular quietude in her hometown of Milwaukee. Few of the gentle young painter’s remaining family wished to discuss the details, an understandable position given the disquieting nature of it all. But a reasonably consistent picture of the events in Arkham emerged for those who pried deep enough into the dark matter.
At the behest of her family, the last of her effects are scheduled for a discrete incineration next week in a remote corner of the city. After this, none will speak of her, and it will be as if she had never been.
Arkham is one of those changeless places of Earth – a quiet, almost-mythic city in New England. The sleepy Miskatonic river cuts through the centre of the city directly to the coldest fathoms of the Atlantic, if one follows far enough.
It is home to Miskatonic University, which over the years, weathered innumerable bizarre incidents and scandals, survived devastating fires, even the great flood of 1980 that swept away so many of Arkham’s oldest architectural fixtures.
It was here that fabled figures like the alleged hag Keziah Mason had fled during the frenzied witch-hunts of old. Those of a scientific mindset may recall that the tragic Pabodie Expedition to Antarctica had its beginnings in Arkham’s shining halls.
Morbid turn-of-the-century painter Richard Upton Pickman, best known for “The Lesson,” and his ghastly “Ghoul Feeding”, often visited Arkham in his early years when he wasn’t in Boston. This was well before he became an enigmatic recluse who went the way of Ambrose Bierce and Frederico Garcia Lorca.
Kazoua always had an unnatural, almost unhealthy attraction to Pickman’s work. It could have been worse. She could have been ogling Warhol, or even Kadinsky or that hack Pollack.
The Multiethnic issue will be online June 1, 2010. Mark your calendars!