Sushi Girl

By Carrie Chang

In “Sushi Girl,” the art of sibling rivalry becomes intertwined with sushi smorgasbord, as the Su sis-ters find themselves on the verge of a nervous breakdown, living with hilarity and neurotic break-neck speed in racy Manhattan. Fueled by jealous adoration of each other, the sisters are like “scis-sor-paper-stone,” pretty sibling girls who often competed with each other and cancelled each other out, wearing their flashy Gucci belts and morphant mosquito pearls, who ate plenty of sushi in the Village from time to time in their rambling 30’s and experienced the horror of not knowing who they were; they were partying so hard, they forgot everything and anything. “We’re not even Japa-nese,” they laughed, thinking about the desperate way they ate their pickanniny share of sushi fish, and sang, “Come on, it’s the Village Hour,” and went sniggering in the daft happenstance rain to-gether, prancing a pied past Prince and Essex and all those green twinkling troubadour signs in the city that made everyone who was everyone quite giddy to be sure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664141841

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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Copyright © 2020 by Carrie Chang.

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 Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 11/05/2020

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Dedication

To the Hays, who ate their sushi joyously!

************

Sushi blix blox blix!

Scurrilous white beads of sibilant rice on a sly bastion of circle hope, a sanctum of hi-ho pride, grown particular to the fishy squishy of jeweled bodies in the quadrant of the precious sandman hour, silly candied fish of tumescent happiness in the bending cosmos, like those lolling pleasures of the splendiferous days under the foolish rainbow arc, once upon a time when anyone who was anyone felt that everything was oddly blurred with strange confusions; these were those numerous sea urchin glittering in the shy taupe hand like forever happenstance clouds, singing sushi blix blox blix, a piper of utterance and utmost joy!

Sandy Su was a lovely fish monger who daily pooh-poohed the taste of reality some, and gathered mystic ener from her secret innermost senses, from snarfing the belle-rose of California and goofy Spider Rolls—acknowledging that there was something most incredible about the frilly bosom of the waking universe, and her levantine features, like surly caliphs scrawled on a puritan white egg. She knew her stupendous life was a daily breather—-a death-defying somersault into the reaches of deathly outer-space, of course. Why else would she sit there on the edge of her royal green drawing chair in the passing nights and pour triple dollops of soy sauce onto her luscious, monster egg tart, her petite tamago, which were a constable yellow, lullaby yellow, and spongey spoo as some magic flat cakes were, made by the crooning blue-haired women who were slowly eking out a living on Elm St. by the lonely neighborhood river winding around the soft, aching trees.

Only on Elm St, do you see the shiny trefoil of desiccate trees fizzling with sad grief, and sanctimonious wizardry, the huffle of the late day from the mystic smoke coming from the abacus-shaped houses which promise such deep shelter from the upcoming storm, a quick fix for that inveterate sorrow. Some good isolated rumors of those piecemeal struggles to be a hip and unique personae—-filled up with the prowess of better tomorrow come from eating sushi, no matter what country you may come from. Little itty bitty sushi puzzle pieces which certainly miffed, the monotonous rolls sold in the square plastic containers at your local grocery store for a pittance royale! The little wasabi wab giving you so much to contemplate about the westry world and its brigand, outgoing ways.

That was before you entered the Sepia Lounge, where wastrels would come and go, dreaming of an augustan twitch, auguring for the Monday or Tuesday when the hyper signals in their lolloday head would go off and they would crave their little nigiri sushi for an hour or two, just like them to long for some sour fish flesh to cure them of their selfish petty squabbles. There was that free life in the merry junction to think of, the way the weary witness of the super-man world seemed so indefensible in those terms, wiser-than-thou remarks of a brand new lunacy in which the soldered memories of those native indignant peoples would be forgotten in the muck of the magical, I-dunno moment. The scrum of new century thinking, thinking non-racist, razzle-dazzle thoughts, hyper-aesthetic kind of glow-in-the-dark lingua franca leading to curly, kinky hair! The vital spark of 1999 upon their wintry brow!

That was the cusp of her hereditary slush—slinging good sushi all day, and dreaming of the lapidary moon in the red blue sky way above her head. Sandy harbored no uncertain emotions that the raw succulent fish of the brimming ocean would somehow bring her into the arms of old sleeping beauty, and that slapdash keyhole imagination of the past; Lord knows she had waited for many spendthrift years in the weepy, creepy ghettoes of Manhattan for her sailing ship to come in! No dwarfing the way things were, she was an Anastasia-Prufrock artist who had lost her set of silver sterling spoons many, many years and many laughing moons ago, shuffling in the grim boughs of drifting clean white snow, and chewing on her ebi shrimp like a gullible child who was born in the screwy hurricane of previous upset dynasties.

No stranger to the dim moralities of the future, she had clung to the precepts of her lost, fantasy people on the run, and the fraught idylls of someday, choosing to trace the juicy patterns of a shaky parabola in her quiet journey down Ave. A in her over-sized black trench coat, like a bright Lego canvassing through the Village with two lonely legs walking about in pure unequivocal form. The sadistic sorcerer of the city cursing her for her waking head-thrum, and this chunky onomatopoeia en masse.

She knew the whole damn world resembled a tiny princess sequin, she was always so tired of being a no-show non-conformist in the blurred, disjointed years. She admittedly regretted not showing up for things, and being trés comfortable in her rosy down blankets sometimes in her queen bed at home, ignoring the seedy clock with its insidious rotating numbers. How the virtual shyness erupted in her athwart face when she met her man years later in a bar! She was used to comprehending the incontrovertible meaning of the bored smiles of strangers talking to each other in the movies that it made no difference to her what they meant at all. Not at all. It was just like a strange crucible—-to witness those couples in the snow whose fruity, fun-colored scarves wrapped all the way around their celestial, huggable bodies like so much fleurs en fleur, an incorrigible reality of the senses. Of course, she could feel it was true—The final struggle to liberate herself from all those florid apprehensions now ensued in the impossible, devastating winters, in a fast blizzard, leaving her to brave the unkind reflection in the wavy betelnut puddles plashed on the imperial sidewalks of those talk-about-me generations that made you cry.

And what of the psychedelic disco shops in the fair, metropole city where the Beast raged, and she could feel a sad tremor aching inside? They brought to mind the depressed person she used to be, a quasi-angel of the 21th century who could feel the royal alphabet twisted underneath her rumplestilskin dress, who partied so much that her pretty head was simple crayon blue without speaking deeper words of history—- She was an otherworldly artist who was set, who was sunny as hell and kept buying things, and saying hi to people on the street and soon found that she’d befriended a hundred people and bought the whole Tudor house up to her utter dismay, sushi girl; she understood that Dalloway kind of thing, quietly lying in bed, stretching out her thin, inebriate arms like Virginia Woolf and baying to the stray, incandescent light and asking what’s this about, being treated like a molecule? These people were so perverse. Those people she knew in her youth were so mean to her, and now she was about to experience therapy in a small jade-colored room discussing the Big Man and the meaning of the next life of course…..

That way there would be no pain. Absolutely none. Like finagling through the shiny fluted fish fins in the wet, konku sand and looking everywhere for those belated memories, or plying words of umber on a slumpy winter’s day. Sandy knew her regret would come from idyllic thinking, the subtle entrancement of buying too many things, living with the chubby paste of cold fish in her clever mouth; best pearl tooth a-shimmer with this bad-ass variety of glamorous kitsch, the risible duty of being an Asian woman in the throes of it—-some necessary forgetfulness, of course. Some forgetfulness of time, experience, and false honor—-the peer pressure to seek beyond the deliverance of the Ivory curtain, and gather respect from the foundry of the sky overhead, where the caw of traffic would muck up her poor heart again. Subtly exotic, to say the least.

There again, she’d find her fresh call to be one of the immutable ones that her grandma had accused her of being, of warping the far, unknowable past. Sushi girl. She’d gotten used to the musical nickname after years of wandering the edge of the Village and eating the stuff on the fast run and wearing her pink woolen mittens on her starved hands, now covered with chintzy white rice which bounced—-in the past, it had been a highly suggestible thing to eat sushi by yourself when you were lonely or repressed and refused to seriously kow-tow—-when your good confidence flagged as low as your polished, lamp-lit shoes, and when your eyes appeared somewhat dervish-like. What gives, she thought, flagellating herself in the bough of the evening, dreaming of the men she’d forsaken in a life-time, and the bingo cafes she’d indulged in, attempting to wreak havoc on the tarny cheek bones. Lord knows the tupor blush was wearing rather thin.

************

Those lozenges of light, drifting in the corner cafe at noon, a scintilla of partout gold on her baptismal forehead. The sound of an oboe could be heard precisely at that very moment at the Ceci Cela café on Spring Street, its floating invisible calyx broken into fragmented notes of explosive innocent blue color, the skyline fierce with sighs of divisive emotions, and reality bent into a million shapes.

An incalculable bliss erupted on Sandy’s face, a penchant for the soft blurbed light suffused in the room. In her hand she held a silver round teaspoon with which she stirred the tepid cup of coffee round and round until it became a maelstrom of discontents. Voila, another afternoon of ceaseless lounging, of quaint vicissitudes, puckish sentiments bursting at the seams of her every inch movement, her pondering soliloquy in suspended time in the burgeoning city. Her quiet ensemble face, a genteel distillation of everything she had once seen or known in a previous unquiet life, the idle clock ticking with its roving charm of mere forgetfulness, and her smile wan and worldly as the young girl she was once known to be, drifting, drifting into those afterthoughts of romance and consternation, the sweet willows of quiescent wonder washing over her in a bourny sea of white cap and wave.

On the table before her were the flat universalis of damp seaweed curls and Fumiyaki, edible wheels which bore the banal resemblance of those shaved octopus-heads in the rad behemoth light, making sand-castles scream in the high cum-electric air. There was very little to say except that the chefs had left their patch of old glory on her dining plate, where each and every element of life would be greeted with some mystic tic of the belittled dozens. Little sushi signal wave patterns of orange, red, and yellow, splotches, really, of candid indifference to the way the world had treated her in the ’90’s, when all the melees of society had been so very brutish and spree. As if god had pulled a trick on her. She hadn’t an inkling of how to eat them, these petit rice puzzles, which were drowning with the green play-dough hint of the sticky wasabi balls, brought