Home

I thought about my parents' careful house, the stillness and the silence as the three of us crept along the dusted furniture and the vacuumed carpets - as though we did not so much occupy the space as move within it like stealthy lodgers. If you left a glass on the kitchen counter for more than five seconds my mother would whisk it away, wiping up the wet ring on the Formica with a furious sweep of her sponge. Covering out tracks, removing evidence of ourselves. It seemed to me we apologized for our very existence in the very way we lived, bowing and ducking as though to escape the notice of some vengeful god. It wasn't life that was lived there, but eternal penitence.

~Katherine Min, excerpt from Secondhand World

Beauty

I wondered what being beautiful had done for my mother other than give her no direction in which to gaze but into her own reflection. The state of being beautiful was indiscriminate; it was there for peasants and kings. You couldn't reclaim it for yourself. You could hide it under chador or veil, but it would be there still, more enticing for its secrecy.

The state of being unbeautiful was a more exacting affair. If a man found you attractive, you knew it must be so, that he must have looked hard and long to see something within you and was not just another wistful aesthete panting after loveliness.

I was suddenly glad I wasn't beautiful, that I didn't suffer my mother's misfortunes of vanity, her disappointment in how far beauty could get you, which was, in truth, not as far as one might imagine.

~Katherine Min, excerpt from Secondhand World

Limerick for the Narcissist

Scrupulous, the work of an arrogant loner.

He becomes vulnerable to all sorts of murmur,

Apprehensively seeking a crowd

To approve him being allowed

To be considered his own intellect's owner.