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They ate chicken and chilli bean tacos at the café by the beach while the storm built up over the mountains. The motorbike was parked outside like a small spaceship waiting for the rain and the matron brought them two bottles of local beer and two glasses with ice, as sweat beads formed and rolled down their arms and mosquitoes bit at their exposed ankles.
They ate the tacos and drank the beer and the sky got darker, the rain coming down like a warm shower, droplets thick as sauce.
Her insectoid sunglasses inadequately shielded her eyes. Steam came off the road. They put on their plastic bags and rode out of town toward the mountain. After a while the rain let up and the day was hot again.
She drank a whole bottle of water and at the service station they let her use the bathroom while he smoked a cigarette on the idling motorcycle and thought about bees. There had been honey in his banana shake that morning and it had left a good feeling. A very good feeling.
Daddy Long Legs, she sometimes called him. Over breakfast when she told him he had legs like spider webs he removed the note of paper money she’d been using for a bookmark in the book she was reading and left it for a tip.
Thunder rolled down off the mountain like a shower of granite marbles. They were riding to see the Champa temples on the hill that overlooked the bay and the city.
The temples waited like stone uncles with vines in their hair and bats in their empty high-vaulted craniums. He stood on the hill looking down onto the plain and tried to imagine the ghosts of the Champa but instead could hear only the cries of tropical insects in the weeds and the creaks of sweat flowing in rivulets down the small of his back.
She posed for several photographs and whistled disconsolate tunes all the while tasting the taco on her stinging lips.
And where were the bees?
The day wore on. They walked around some, ran their fingers over the rough blocks of stone, sat in contemplation on the temple steps, and drove back to Quy Nhon.
They wore swimmers under their clothes so they could swim in the ocean afterwards but soon it was dark and the rain came back. It didn’t matter. They went anyway. They left the motorcycle under a tree and walked down to the empty beach in their wet clothes and stood shivering on the sand.
How many jellyfish can the world hold in the small of her hand? she wanted to know, but he could only sob with the repeated rends of lightning and the stinging drops of rain.
The lights of fishing boats bobbed in the tide like a sister city of mermaid people who did everything backwards like a watery mirror image.
Afterwards they drove blindly through the rain and into the supermarket where they left their motorcycle in the fish sauce isle and made love desperately in the bathroom stall while the store clerk watched over their dripping helmets and ate from a can of bean sauce with a strange expression on his face. And drawing closer on the wind, a sound, like a swarm of angry bees.
About Tayne Ephraim
Tayne Ephraim is a writer and English teacher hailing from Wollongong, Australia. He is based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and his work has appeared in Voiceworks, The Suburban Review, Seizure, and Stilts, amongst others.
