Tammy Ho Lai-Ming and Reid Mitchell
Reid Mitchell: Since Tammy Ho now lives in London and I live in Quanzhou, China, we communicate through email and through Windows Live Messenger. Sometimes as we are chatting away, one of which will flag some exchange as possible material for a collaboration. I’m pretty sure that this time it was Tammy.
I had recently moved into my apartment at Huaqiao University, which does have a balcony which attracts a beetle or two a day to come by and die. Maybe they fly up here; maybe the winds blow them. I just crunch them carelessly now, but my first few weeks I actually tried flipping them over and sending them on their way. They preferred to stay and die.
Whenever a beetle enters literature, it is likely that Kafka will soon be mentioned. But when we were writing this, I had also been reading Ovid, in order to write a review for CHA of Phoebe Tsang’s CONTENTS OF A MERMAID’S PURSE, which are full of metamorphoses. I knew we could get away with Daphne, but Paolo was as close as I was willing to get to using the name Apollo.
Many readers assume that lines we give to women are written by Tammy and lines spoken by men are mine. That’s not always the case, but this time it is. Or maybe I just want to claim authorship of Paolo’s final boast.
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REVERSE METAMORPHOSIS
PAOLO: Yesterday I went out on my balcony and there was a flipped over beetle trying to right itself. I flipped it over with a sheet of paper and it went on its way. Just now, I saw another one in the same spot.
DAPHNE: Perhaps today is yesterday, and it's the same beetle. Perhaps we had this conversation yesterday.
PAOLO: You didn’t phone yesterday. See, my cell phone keeps tracks of calls.
DAPHNE: Sorry. My mother, my uncle...you know.
PAOLO: Perhaps I am that beetle. And I hope someone will flip me over.
DAPHNE: Yes, and you mistrust the help you receive from anybody else, even me, and you manfully flip yourself on your back once again, pleading, with your feeble legs, one more time for kindness.
PAOLO: And maybe I’m just hoping you go ahead and squash me.
DAPHNE: What if it is your lover? She has been gone for weeks. You have heard nothing from her. It is not a beetle that lies there, it is a daffodil-coloured butterfly, her wings dotted, like the freckles on my face and back.
PAOLO: No. Without me, my lover turns back into a caterpillar.
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Tammy Ho Lai-Ming and Reid Mitchell have been writing together for several years. Their creative works have previously been published in Admit 2, Barrow Street, Caffeine Destiny, Diagram, Fringe, Ghoti, Rhythm Poetry Magazine, Poetry Super Highway, and elsewhere. They are both passionately involved in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal .