Blood and Spit

Two women are playing badminton with a severely splintered shuttlecock. The light is dim, beads of sweat rise to soak my shirt.

I stumble across a makeshift barricade of barbed wire and iron and am forced to turn back. The shuttlecock traces a parabola through the air, then skitters on the floor next to my foot.

Hordes of insects are driven from stinking sewers by unseasonable rain, and they appear through the gaps in the pavement to suck pedestrian blood. The street is stained with betel nut spit, blotches like birthmarks in the shapes of continents.

Everyone’s umbrella is at my eye level, so I’m ducking and dodging, wet from sweat and rain, trying to dart past monks and betel-nut-chewing men and women three abreast proceeding down the street.

I’m relieved when I duck through the entrance to my work and breathe conditioned air. The eyes of the security guards glance off my shining forehead.

I review my notes for my lesson. Two students, face to face, hide their armies of tanks from each other. One student asks a question about the past, the other replies.

You get it right: boom! The enemy tank explodes. The students laugh as they blow each other’s armies to pieces. No smell of cordite, no blood, no smoking metal. Ink and cut paper. Blood and betel nut spit. The Past Simple. The Past Tense.

Who did you visit last weekend? Who did you talk with last night? What time did you arrive home last Saturday? When did you first see the sea? How did you come to be here today?