Cloud Bristle

By Carrie Chang

Inspired by Virginia Woolfs The Waves, Cloud Bristle is a cacophony of voices strung together like jetsam pearls glimmering in a set of fake teeth. Linda, Lucy, Lucinda, and Dorrie are four women on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Caught in the thrum of the moment in the paranoia-hungry monastery of Chinatown, they share their herstory of escapades and concomitant joy. Each tells her individual story in the Society of Fire of Light, designed to filter out an existential angst-ridden world filled with sexual boredom and brutality. As virtual nobodies wrapped in delicious anonymity, they seek refuge in the precepts of muted desire and the Tao sheds light on their predicament as specimens of the second sex.

Lucinda lusts after another womans flower, only to find that shes gained a universal creed of self-possession, transcending jealousy for absurd aesthetics. Linda taps into the wellspring of the comical gods, tuning into Yabba dabba doo at will, chasing the evil spirits away.

In this darkly woven comedy rapt with poison pen and raucous threads of scintillating beauty, the female voice is scattered like pollen throughout the text at intervals with a magnificent joy in the tradition of the talk story. Coloratura turning into brazen operatic feats of bravura leaves the reader dying for more oxygen in this illuminated text of desire.

Cloud Bristle floats out the door into the square of the city, where dazzling words find their aegis under the accordion sun.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524590208

Carrie Chang

Carrie Chang was born in 1970, in Syracuse, New York. She attended Stanford University, UC-Berkeley and New York University, obtaining her B.A., and M.J. and M.F.A. in English and journalism and creative writing, respectively. She worked as an Asian American journalist in the arts/political field for almost a decade, creating her own magazine, “Monolid,” and lives as a writer/poet in the Bay Area. Her favorite pastimes include swimming and painting.

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Cloud-Bristle

Carrie Chang

Copyright © 2017 by Carrie Chang.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2017903610

ISBN:      Hardcover            978-1-5245-9022-2

               Softcover              978-1-5245-9021-5

               eBook                   978-1-5245-9020-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 03/08/2017

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(

dedicated to my mother Fu-yi,

who taught me the meaning of being a visionary of color)

What I remember was the mother-of-pearl lace wending under random pieces of musty bric-a-brac, brash green silk, crushed into toques of maybilly weather, jetsam particles of beige fabric rising up into a come-hither cloud; the scent of sea-cucumber searing the nostrils with an illusory color of jade and pu-erh. The amorphous shape of peach-faced women dancing half-kettle in the background, with their generous hair glistening in fey bristles around a single chopstick. The red and green doors opening and shutting as if their house were a miniature milk-box of an exotic hue, sound and clean, and full of radiant lights.

It’s not everyday that you can see the fleshly mesdames of C-town say their chou in their imperial, earthy way, toss a coin to see the rain fall in intervals of good measure. The blue eyes of the ruggy shitzu with all their power could not contain the mysteries of the universe—-of good-will and depressive Oz, some tad of gentility to be detected on the dark fingertips of the kinder-folk of that stranger bailiwick, where the sere fog seethes with a dubious sheen of mystical lining. Some will to nothingness, say you, in the gestures of the old humbling men who are bicycling along the park with zennish wheels of discontent; the winning hour left for the tortoises in the sewers to guess at their best whim.

Out on Mercy St. where the crinoline sunshine is shining with its hothouse after-effects, and the silly-hatted people move en masse in circular motion like waves of static history, the sounds of spring, with its motley confetti, are flooding the streets like coins in the juke-box machine: dingo tunes, and nuclear jams, the vituperative eye-ball sirens which call into question the erratica of the human soul. One moves here and there and pauses before the ethnic well-be-shadows and leaves a trace of that immortality. These are the self-righteous colors of the purple sunrise, now confessional with a hint of invisible anime, goof-ball gizmo only too plain for show.

I’m going to drag you out, and show you the world! Real-time! a voice coming from the temple conjoins to lead the way to my suffering. In the wuthering, plane trees, the scope of sad birds and easterly pine-cones glitters with a lost revulsion. There’s no contesting the fact that I’ve wandered into nouveau territory, some Eastward Township that’s bones-a-plenty, a stoic people dancing merrily into the heavily-drawn curtains of some young girl’s drawing. Quadrilles later, in pink-and-green clouds of old patina, there are dark circles under their rude eyes, their sub-gum rice boiled to pulsating perfection. The day has not yet started, and already, there are sted marks on their bodies, like bold creases in the silk, or cursory folds in the floating origami.

As I child, I would fold those birds out of pastel, or trefoil paper, praying all the while for the good fairy to come and take me to Aambaland; ancient moorings of crystalline eyes, and squashed beaks haunted me in my dreams, as I meditated on those creases, isolating the wings with all the solitary charms of a young well-wisher. Little did I know, how the birds would sit in later years on my desk as a reminder of my humanity.

*****

The middle-aged women in The Society of Fire and Light possessed a reality of bright concussions, speaking in florid tongues of the mother earth; fighting off servile images for what seemed like an eternity, they held their chopsticks like power-tools and dove into their rice with the mad gluttony of the ages. Some simplicity in their cozened form, left them reeling into inopportune, red mists. Of ablutions, and cataract explosions. Those fragrant nightmares that are juxtaposed with blue-pearl fingers, and yellow-fire feet.

I tell you, your lives are but a scant-a-penny, a Chiang-Kai-Shek dollar in the barrel, a bag-man hooted as he walked by, leering, and making wild gesticulations. There were considerations to think about, like how the Asian women got there to the temple first place, and why they ran away from their homes, and where the men were. I could have sworn that there was some lovely splash of rain-water on their splotchy brown faces, high-lighting their hair and skin, which were aging in the September light, but looked highly invincible in any regard.

Like piss in the pot, is what Lucy Tsing called the ornamental language of the Chinese tribe, and often went mute for days, because she hated the sound of it the utter fakery of it. She would sit stoic, and unkempt, with cloud-bristles in her hair, moy, and dreaming of the next day and the next, as if pages were days. The rude whistle of the royal shitzu caused her to erupt with pain in the stomach, as if she were about to burst with child. But how could that be, when she was already forty-five, and old as the roily thumb-prints on the oak trees, where the origami birds could not hide.

Gratitude, that is something I have not thought of, she confessed, looking a bit embarrassed, and tight-in-the-chest, her rambo pupils shifting darkly in a ray of wracked, blue webs, as if she were continuing her dialogue with God. Rain shifting on either pupil, made her appear quite comical to her sisters, who thought her quite the ninny, the society flunkoid with the all the caked hypocritical makeup on her face to boot. Lucy Tsing was quite beautiful, but disturbed. Everyone in C-town knew that.

Someone comes along and calls you someone in a Russian novel, and sooner or later you disappear into magic thin air, unbeknownst to your suggested tribe. There was reason to be scared of the Lucy, and the women who ruled the Society, tossed up their mahjongg cubes dispiritedly and thought of her with bad joss. Lucy was too lovely, and had lived a horrible life, been an ocean bride with six fingers on one hand, with the chis ring gleaming just a bit too tightly on the perverse index; she had eaten so little in her life-time that her almond-colored body was just a cipher in the sun, a fairytale worm of a woman who woke up at sunrise looking inhospitable and ruffled with credo knots of wooly, unkempt hair overflowing into her knees.