Crossing Read Online Free PDF

against a rusty pipe, a fork dragged hard against a car’s iced-over windscreen. Mr. Matthewman’s face said it all, a look of surprised agony.
    “What in…?”
    I held up my hand pathetically. “I’m sorry, Mr. Matthewman. I…I think I can do better.” I looked down at the music sheets. “Please, sir, I think I can do better.”
    “Is this some sick joke?” His eyes were smoldering pieces of coal. “Get out!”
    “Please, Mr. Matthewman!” It was the loudest I’d ever spoken to a teacher. “Give me just one last shot.”
    There must have been something in my voice, some look in my face, because he did just that. He gave me one last chance.
    But when I opened my mouth to sing, out came the pigeon’s beak, the glass shard, the fork. All came tumbling out.
     
     
    Trey Logan and his gang were gone by the time I walked out of the music room, not that I cared anymore. I felt strangely discombobulated. It wasn’t until I splashed water on my face in the restroom that I was able to put a label to my knotted feelings.
    I was angry at my failure.
    The audition was only a stupid thing I had to do. A cowardly way of escape in an unwelcoming burrow as I waited for predators to pass on by outside. Yet why was the crumpled paper still in my hand, why my refusal to throw it away?
    I looked down at it. The notes were still nothing more than black ink marks. My hands crushed the sheet into a ball, crinkling it, the sound filling the hollow right angles of the tiled room.
    I heard the soft piano notes in my mind. They were coming back to me, their gentle initial cadence. It was cold in the bathroom, but my insides were hot with frustration. The notes. I was hearing them now. The way I should have heard them. Not trying to match them up with the black ink on paper. I reached for the light switch and turned it off. Curtains of darkness fell all around me. Still not dark enough. I shut my eyes.
    This was how I had sung during those two awful weeks when I crossed the seas to America. In total darkness. On a cargo ship, locked in with dozens of others in a container. It had been stifling hot in that tin can, suffocating; but what I remember most was not the heat but the darkness. An endless black night without moon, without stars, the allure of America almost lost in the stench of human perspiration, desperation, urine, and worse. Tired yet unable to sleep, my parents would ask me to sing, as they had on stifling summer nights before. I was happy to oblige. Timidly at first, afraid of the darkness, of the faceless voices barking and crying in the black void, I would whisper out a few lines. But they would quiet whenever I began to sing, until—but for the occasional cough or sneeze in the hot darkness—a hush would befall us. In that hush, I sang. And it was as if cool mountain breezes came upon us; as if river waters suddenly flowed over our toes; as if the graceful dusk sun splashed down on our uplifted faces.
    “Sing ‘Autumn Moon on the Calm Lake,’” they would request of me. “Sing ‘The Glow of the Setting Sun on the Lei Fong Pagoda.’ Now sing ‘Orioles Singing in the Willows.’” Always I did. “Sing ‘Snow on the Broken Bridge.’ ‘Evening Knell on the Nan Ping.’ ‘Viewing Fish in Huagang.’” And I did. Over and over. I never sang as beautifully as I did in those two weeks.
    And now for the first time in years, I felt a trembling in me again. With one hand pressed against the cold, tiled wall, I sealed my eyes shut. I replayed the gentle cadence in my head, the prodding of piano notes. The pitch. And the cold of the restroom began to recede, the sound of notes sharpening.
    Now , I told myself. Now .
    A long-lost voice sprang out of me. The windows shook in astonishment.
    And I sang. I felt the words arch up out of me like molten ore. All these years, bottled within, germinating, now finding release. The music vibrated in me, a jaunty horse restless to be released. I felt the cadence of the song, a