A handshake with sadness

Sadness isn't bad, it's a part of life.

*cover art, “Lagi cafe” by Vietnamese artist Hoàng Thiện Phúc

When she married Ham, Barb’d already went through three divorces. They didn’t drink, they didn’t gamble, and they were a bunch of hard-workers. But they split, because she couldn’t bear them children. And surely, it was her fault, for the women her ex-husbands ended up with all got pregnant before too long. “I’m used to it,” Barb would say to herself, a defence mechanism of sorts that did nothing more than sandpapered her heart every time it was uttered. Barb didn’t believe in the hospitals, who said she “was fine” and just “had to be patient.” Barb didn’t believe those fortune-tellers either, who asked her to “wait.” She waited, four husband worth of time in fact, but no flower sprouted in the desert.

The one good thing that came from all this, was that with each divorce, she would get half of her husband’s assets. Now, she’s a proud owner of a two-storied house, selling books and stationaries on the first floor, and living on the second. At the age of 30, her 12 years as a wife with no children also meant her looks were also fortunately sustained, and once in a while men would frequent her stores for the owner rather than the wares. One of them was different, Ham, who had his eyes glued to her gold necklace rather than her breasts. Barb liked the practical man, and he wasn’t bad to look at. She used to be poor, so she knew his gaze well.

Turned out, Ham wasn’t only poor, he was lazy. While the whole village, even old man Larry, sent out their applications, Ham asked his father if he could sell gold. “Which gold?” his father would ask. Ham couldn’t answer, he only heard through the grapevines that selling gold was a quick way to get rich without much work. “Mrs Barb has a lot of gold.”

Love found its way. Somehow, the rich, beautiful bookstore owner got into a relationship with the useless village’s fool, and he naturally become the owner himself. Barb, despite what she said, wanted a child herself more than anything. Ham himself, she couldn’t say, so she asked him only for his companion, not his hands in marriage. If he didn’t like it, he could leave anytime. But Ham stayed, for he would truly have been a fool if he left the wealth he fell ass-backwards onto. Soon, he could even sell gold.

One day, the village heard news of a newly discovered gold mine, and the people who failed to get a job in the city were now back, even old man Larry who was recently accepted into a bank. The more people went to the mine, the less they worried about books and pens. Even most of the kids came to help their parents. And now that Barb got a man, it was again, natural, that the shop was void of customers. “Why not go there ourselves,” Ham said.

--

A gold mine had little difference from a gym: men and women sweated from forehead to feet, telling themselves to push harder despite the pain. The ever lazy Ham could hardly lift a gold pan, let alone a pickaxe. And the crazed, suffocating greed of the lifelong poor created a tension that made you feel like wading through butter. Greed sucked people in like magnets, and the mine quickly become a jungle where the strong survives while the weak resorted to cheap tricks.

Ham and Barb didn’t have any of that. But they weren’t poor. At the best of time, they wouldn’t be considered intelligent, but in that mess of yellow and red, the couple was geniuses. Ham, in his ever wrongfully invested energy and brainpower run through life, also found out a lot about gold on the internet in pursue of his dream.

“Just trust me this one time, Barb. Go back and asked Jim, you know, the one kid who actually bought books at the shop to come and help us. Tell him you’ll pay him two bucks an hour. And get me another 500.”

“What on God’s green Earth would you need 500 for?”

“The bouncers.”

When it came to money, humans and dogs weren’t much different. One sniff of the thing, and we go wild, worse than mongrels. That’s why the “bouncers” were there, the professionals who made sure no one left the vicinity without coughing out their hard-earned profit for the landlord. They are dogs themselves in the end, however, and with the cash, they not only helped Ham and Barb found a river nearby (“We’re not here for the gold, just want to be part of the community), but also set up their tent. Before long, Ham was able to go back home, fished out a knuckle full of shiny nuggets, and said to his father “THIS gold.”

All good things come to an end, and the constant fighting, harassment, drugs, and overall chaos of the mine reached the local government, and they closed it down. While other risked jail time for another day or two inside the mine, Barb and Ham left without a second thought.

A lot of the villagers died in that mine, and the few who lived never found out about what the bookshop couple were doing behind closed tent. Except for Jim. But poor, young Jim got a taste of money too soon for his age, and soon was addicted to every type of drugs the city folks brought back. Before he truly lost his mind at the age of 14, Jim told the landlord’s son about Barb and Ham, and soon everyone in the village was talking about how the couple “lived of their dead relatives” and “they should give them some of the gold as compensation.” By then, Bard and Ham’s finished packing their truck and moved to the city.

Barb’s dream came true soon after her husband’s. Two kids, two years apart, a boy and a girl. And Brad and Augine lived nepotism to the fullest, because at the age of 18 and 16, one of them was recently back from juvie and the other shivved their classmate with compass.

“I kinda missed juvvie” – Brad would say to whoever dare come close to his sister.

If her brother wasn’t there, Augine would simply asked her parents to pay the victim’s family. Money, of course, was no problem. Ham and Barb would have been happy if they found out Augine and Brad was smoking cigarettes behind their backs. But the smell around the house and the syringes told them otherwise.

“What happened to them, they were such nice kids.” – The people were talking.

“Karma.”

“The poor kids turned out bad. The rich kids turned out bad. What sort of karma is that? I would have loved the same karma.”

Everyone at the café nodded in agreement.