June Lit: Excerpt from "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" by Ocean Vuong

June 3, 2019

Ocean Vuong's extraordinary debut novel is a letter from a son to his illiterate mother. A story about love, aging, death, race, class and masculinity, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous will draw readers in with its gorgeous prose and unexpected form. We are so pleased to be able to share this excerpt with you. 

-- Jung Yun, Fiction Editor

 

Inside a single-use life, there are no second chances. That’s a lie but we live it. We live anyway. That’s a lie but the boy opens his eyes. The room a gray-blue smear. There’s music coming through the walls. Chopin, the only thing she listens to. The boy climbs out of bed and the corners of the room tilt on an axis, like a ship. But he knows this too is a trick he’s making of himself. In the hallway, where the spilled lamp reveals a black mess of broken vinyl 45s, he looks for her. In her room, the covers on the bed are pulled off, the pink lace comforter piled on the floor. The night-light, only half­way in its socket, flickers and flickers. The piano drips its little notes, like rain dreaming itself whole. He makes his way to the living room. The record player by the loveseat skips as it spins a record long driven to its end, the static intensifying as he ap­proaches. But Chopin goes on, somewhere beyond reach. He fol­lows it, head tilted for the source. And there, on the kitchen table, beside the gallon of milk on its side, the liquid coming down in white strings like a tablecloth in a nightmare, a red eye winking. The stereo she bought at Goodwill, the one that fits in her apron pocket as she works, the one she slides under her pillowcase during rainstorms, the Nocturnes growing louder after each thunder­clap. It sits in the pool of milk, as if the music was composed for it alone. In the boy’s single-use body, anything’s possible. So he cov­ers the eye with his finger, to make sure he’s still real, then he takes the radio. The music in his hands dripping milk, he opens the front door. It is summer. The strays beyond the railroad are bark­ing, which means something, a rabbit or possum, has just slipped out of its life and into the world. The piano notes seep through the boy’s chest as he makes his way to the backyard. Because some­thing in him knew she’d be there. That she was waiting. Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their chil­dren belong to someone else.

Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their chil­dren belong to someone else.

Sure enough, there she is, standing at the far end of the little chain-link yard, beside a flattened basketball, her back to him. Her shoulders are narrower than he remembers from hours ago, when she tucked him into bed, her eyes glazed and pink. Her nightgown, made from an oversized T-shirt, is torn in the back, exposing her shoulder blade, white as a halved apple. A cigarette floats to the left of her head. He walks up to her. He walks up to his mother with music in his arms, shaking. She’s hunched, distorted, tiny, as if crushed by the air alone.

“I hate you,” he says.

He studies her, to see what language can do — but she doesn’t flinch. Only halfway turns her head. The cigarette, its ember bead, rises to her lips, then flutters near her chin.

“I don’t want you to be my mom anymore.” His voice strangely deeper, more full.

“You hear me? You’re a monster —”

And with that her head is lopped off its shoulders.

No, she’s bending over, examining something between her feet. The cigarette hangs in the air. He reaches for it. The burn he expects doesn’t come. Instead, his hand crawls. Opening his palm, he discov­ers the firefly’s severed torso, the green blood darkening on his skin. He looks up — it’s just him and the radio standing beside a flat bas­ketball in the middle of summer. The dogs now silent. And full.

“Ma,” he says to no one, his eyes filling, “I didn’t mean it.”

“Ma!” he calls out, taking a few clipped steps. He drops the ra­dio, it falls mouth-down in the dirt, and turns toward the house. “Ma!” He runs back inside, his hand still wet with a single-use life, looking for her.

 

From On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Ocean Vuong, 2019.

For more information, please visit: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600633/on-earth-were-briefly-go...

Contributor: 

Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His writings have also been featured in The AtlanticHarper'sThe NationNew RepublicThe New Yorker, and The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is his first novel. Photo credit by Tom Hines.

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