The Hundred-Year Flood by Matthew Salesses Page B

back. When she moved her mouth over his skin, she left cold, wet spots where her breath had been. She kissed his neck, he called her name, and she pulled him on top of her, locking her legs around the small of his back.
     
    Afterward, they lay naked, staring out at the rain-scratched sky, hoping the storm would last. He traced a finger down her thigh, and she shuddered and said again, “Tell me something about you that no one else knows.”
    He opened his palm as if to wave hello. And then he knew what he could tell her.
    “I heard my fortune once,” he said, “after my Korean friend translated my birth mom’s last words. My dad had said it was a name: Kang Seul Peum . But what it meant was ‘river of sorrow.’”
    He had left his friend with the words shattering in his lungs. “There was this restaurant in Chinatown someone had told me about, where a woman told the future. One look and you believed her. That woman said the break in my life line meant an early death or a coma, and my love line was so deep, I would never let anyone go.” He brought Katka’s fingers to his sternum.
    “See these five scars on my chest? After the fortune-telling, I called my mom, remembering when I was six and almost died. Chicken pox and pneumonia. I had thought of my dad as saving me. A priest had come to say the last rites, and my dad stopped him. I guess I thought of it like adoption, a second time he kept me alive. But Mom said she was the one who made him go in that day, that Dad had thought I was a goner.”
    They made love again. The ghost stomped around in other rooms. He could hear it banging in his kitchen, but he didn’t care.

VI
    In the morning, Tee worked up the nerve to stop by the Globe. He’d been skipping his shifts. A man with horse teeth sat at Ynez’s desk. The expats in Prague changed weekly.
    “Tee,” the man said—he was Irish.
    “Do I know you?”
    “I’ve heard of you. There aren’t many Asians in Prague who come in here.”
    “I’m American.”
    The man winked. “Didn’t know the word Asian would ruffle your feathers.”
    “Maybe you could take a message?” Tee had wanted to apologize to Ynez, but now he didn’t know how. What message could he possibly leave?
    “I heard you were with that artist the night he got beat,” the man continued as if Tee hadn’t spoken. “You and that big oafish lad who comes into the café, Rockefeller. Countrymen of yours, wasn’t it? I hear that artist is plotting against you lads.”
    Later, Tee called back on his cell.
    “You should talk to Ynez,” a new voice said.
    “I want to.”
    “Except she doesn’t want to talk to you. She quit two days ago.”
    A cruel trick.
    Tee wondered what Ynez had said when she left. He should have felt better to know that she was moving on.
     
    After he hung up, he studied the objects in his dresser drawer: the blue thimble and the piece of the statue from Vyšehrad, the pewter Golem from the house in Malešice, the husk of the rocket from Old Town Square, the Pilsner and Budvar and Staropramen and Gambrinus and Krušovice coasters, two shot glasses, a few matchbooks, pencils and pens, stray buttons, an empty photo frame, a crumbling brick, a rabbit’s foot from God knows where. Was this what he filled his container with? Or was it simple proof of where he’d been?
    He spread the objects out on his bed. He remembered the shavings from his uncle’s beard, the ash and bone in the urn. He remembered the Easter after he was accepted to Boston College, when his aunt had told him about her freshman year, the first time any of the adults in his family had ever talked openly about sex. Suddenly she had touched her cheek and said sex was all an act—she still dyed her hair every month, for men—and as she turned toward the living room, he was aware of a vulnerability he had never known before, in anyone. “All of this wanting and wanting,” she’d said, nearly crying. “All of this not knowing what you want.” At