Almond Joy
American candy
I have the same dream every night: I dream I’m an architect. I’m never standing at a drafting table or sitting in front of a computer; I’m always outside, at a construction site, watching one of my designs being erected. I’m looking up, past the peak of my white hard hat, watching the finishing touches being applied as cranes hoist great, sinuous sheets of pearlescent marble cladding up to the highest curves, where men crawl like termites among the concrete and girders.
I don’t think you can use marble as exterior cladding on a skyscraper. My intuition is it would be too heavy, but I don’t know, because I never studied materials. I never got to study anything. I didn’t spend a single day at university. If I’d started my architecture degree when I meant to, I could have graduated by now: I might be a junior designer for Võ Trọng Nghĩa, sitting in an office, dreaming of the day I could be out on site watching a crew build one of my own statuesque designs.
I had a sketchbook once, filled with beautiful renditions of my ambition: nature’s forms reimagined in concrete, steel, stone, and glass. So many ideas. I forget most of them. I remember a cathedral, its vaulted ceilings draped like hoa sứ blossoms; a gargantuan bạch trinh biển flower, supporting suspended living on its wide-spread legs; a cluster of buttressed towers in the style of cây gòn trees, their connecting branches bearing a thousand dangling office pods, all clad in white, like kapok.
My bà ngoại — my mother’s mother — used to say, “Đền cây đa, ma cây gòn,” ‘The spirits live in the banyan tree, the ghosts in the kapok’. She probably still says that, but all my ghosts live in my head.
I never think about buildings when I’m awake; I don’t have time for dreams. When I’m working, I mostly think about candy. American candy.
After every client, while I’m washing, and dressing, and fixing my makeup, and changing the linen, and spraying jasmine-scented freshener to clear the air of sour smells, I’ll remember Kisses, and Butterfingers, and Mounds, and Milky Ways.
I miss Almond Joy the most: soft but brittle, its sweetness subdued by the richness of the nut.
Author’s Notes
In March and April, Tantalizing Tales ran a ‘loss’ prompt. I searched stock photo sites for inspiring pictures. I found a dozen or so, but wrote only five of their stories. This is one of the unused pictures, and the story I didn’t write for it. It’s barely a story at all — more a sliver of life that’s heavier on allusion than explanation — but I like it, so I share it with you.
This is such a beautiful, painful story and definitely meets the theme of loss. I'm so glad you decided to share it with us. Thank you!