Are carrots, childless, known for their fertility? Thought the daughter as her mother drove them into Chinatown from downtown Las Vegas. The mother-daughter pair arrived at Orchid, the Vietnamese restaurant, dressed both fashionably and casually. Her mother in leggings with holes big enough to insert a water bottle, a miniature trash can, and maybe two iPhones, but it was hard to say from the distance. Before entering, the daughter took out her binoculars and scanned the vicinity like a haddock before realizing it must swim in a bed of cream and a Vietnamese version of angel hair pasta. Infinity is a pair of breeding birds whose facial expressions look less worse than a pair of torn jeans, but everyone must know that her mother’s love for her must be infinite. The host, who had an unfriendly face, eyed the fashionable mother up and down. Her mother was seventy years old—looking sexier and mightier than Lucy Liu in her mid-twenties—had everyone eyeing her with envy. Life is short and a restaurant knows how to use salt, fish, and sugar wisely. They both arrived at the restaurant, famished and disoriented, especially her daughter who had lost most of her menstrual blood and appeared paler than a snowstorm.
“You look greener than kohlrabi,” her mother exclaimed as they sat down. Snowstorm was a better description, thought the daughter.
The server named Thu, a recently graduated nursing student from UNLV, greeted them politely and kindly.
Too starved to gaze at the menu, the mother skipped the sunbathing and went straight to radiation from the sun by quickly ordering sweet and sour catfish soup and shrimp sautéed red in bacon. Meanwhile, the mother removed her sunglasses and flashed glances at the host.
“Are you the owner?” the mother asked from afar, but the host, unfriendly as she was, shrugged her shoulders and muttered, “My face cream is killing the restaurant industry.”
Her mother was restless from loneliness. Her lover was a heroin addict and to distract herself from the pain of secondhand addictions, she bought Michael Kors purses every other day and every other day she returned the items she bought the day before. Her mother loved the defects of transaction. It gave her something to do with her long vacant empty days. Her mother just wanted human contact. Her mother did not retire well.
When the food arrived, the daughter took out her binoculars to examine the macroworld of her food’s inaudible invisibility. Her mother stacked rice and catfish on her plates and her extreme attentive care made them both eat too fast. The daughter wanted to eat slow, but her mother was relentless. Stacking and stacking. And, there was only two of them. Rice did not have legs and neither did the soup. And, in seconds, they ate everything. Including the corn pudding served like mint rice paddies or candies. After the meal, she felt her chest tighten from poor digestion.
“I’m treating you to this meal,” insisted her mother who was jobless and financially compromised. She didn’t know how to respond—she didn’t want to fight with her mother and so she let her take the bill, almost against her will. Meanwhile, a family of cockroaches donned in matching cummerbunds the color of bok choy were waiting outside of the restaurant in hopes of starting their mariachi band. They planned on converting the mismatched, broken chopsticks into musical instruments worthy of stage fright. They planned on calling their band: Greener Than Kohlrabi. After the meal, the daughter was rosy like a pair of torn pink jeans. Her blood stopped overflowing and she discovered in one of her Google files that kohlrabi was a type of cabbage engorged with bloated stems. If kohlrabi were on its menstrual cycle, does that make her a rabbit who couldn’t tell a pregnant carrot from a barren one? A day later, the daughter was whacked by a semi, which was transporting cabbages from California into the heart of the Midwest.