Get ready for some turkeys, but not in The Great BR Year of the Dragon Contest for November : )

Happy last day of October. Hope you all had a great month. Guess what? Give up? Okay, we’re opening up the word limit to 200 words this month. Yeah baby! This is in honor of how stuffed you’ll feel later this month.

The eight triggers for November are:

From BAMBOO RIDGE Issue Number 44, Fall 1989, Last Quarter:

Trigger #1. “To My Mother,” by Zou Difan, translated by Margaret Sinclair
#2 “Something of Ours,” by Robin Lim
#3. “An Image of the Good Times,” by Wing Tek Lum
#4. “An Infinitely Subtle Shame,” by Bill Miyasato

Here’s Robin Lim’s “Something of Ours”:

For a long time after — after you,
years maybe,
I had a small white clock with a
brick colored smudge on the top,
to one side.
Just a thing with a face.

How many hours were counted before and during?
How many intimacies does a clock witness, before
it tires of ticking?
Boredon and passage, measured in standard.
The grey gears inside, patient, tightening, relaxing.
With teeth.

Now — I remember; and bend close to see, it is a dried
rusty fingerprint. Ridges.
On the morning our daughter was born, in our bed,
you checked the time.
Your hand wet,
with my blood.

From BAMBOO RIDGE Issue Number 45/46: Last Days Here, by Eric Chock:

Trigger #5. “Confession”
#6. “Allowance”
#7. “We Knew”
#8. “And More”

Here’s Eric Chock’s “Confession”:

I thought we were poor, our family.
There were so many things I couldn’t have,
like the lacquered bamboo fishing pole twelve feet long
that could hold the bait out far enough
to where the big ones lived,
deeper than I could see;
or the bicycle I rode down the hill
in my dreams, before I ever knew how;
or the pure white racing pigeon
who almost flew away, but who stayed
and hatched me half a flock
that we could carry by car
to the other side of the island,
and still they’d beat us home.

All these things somehow gave me courage
to sit on the edge of my mother’s new bed
and calmly tell her why we didn’t need
and more babies in our family.
I was sincere. Almost pleading.
But just acted like she had been waiting
all her life to answer me.
She just looked at me, almost sadly,
and said that when people have babies
it just shows how much they love each other.

I wanted to die.
How could I have known that, in time,
all those things I wanted would come to me?
At that age, how could I know the meaning of babies?
All it made me realize was the meaning
of her breasts when, accidentally
I saw her that time,
silhouetted against the afternoon light
that glowed in the Venetian blinds
and into my eyes, her hair falling
across her bare shoulders
as she toweled it dry before
my father came home.

Use one of the eight prompts to trigger your 200-word piece.