Princess Of Chopsticks

More about Princess Of Chopsticks

In the old quarter where the moon hung above the pagodas like a lantern forgotten by God, there lived a girl who could catch flies with chopsticks. People traveled from river villages and distant harbors just to witness it. Some said she had learned from blind monks who ate in silence beneath volcanic mountains. Others believed she was descended from dragons, because no ordinary human hand could move with such impossible calm.

But the Princess of Chop Sticks herself never explained anything.

She lived in a crooked apartment above a noodle shop where steam climbed the stairwell like ghosts escaping soup. The walls were covered with fading posters, broken radios, tiny televisions without sound, and painted saints whose eyes had turned yellow from tobacco smoke. Every evening she sat beneath a red lamp waiting for the flies to arrive with the dusk.

They came in clouds during the summer.

The city was old and damp and smelled faintly of oranges and gasoline. The flies entered through cracked windows and circled the room like black punctuation marks searching for a sentence. The Princess waited without impatience. Her chopsticks rested in her fingers as lightly as reeds floating on water.

Then came the sound.

Snap.

Always a single sound.

People who watched her felt embarrassed afterward, because they realized they had been holding their breath the entire time. She never missed. Not once. Some swore the flies froze in the air willingly, surrendering themselves like tiny disciples.

One rainy season a gambler arrived carrying a suitcase full of money wrapped in newspaper. He challenged her publicly inside a crowded tea house. He released seven flies at once and announced that no human being could catch all seven before they touched the lanterns.

The Princess looked almost saddened by the challenge.

The room fell silent except for the dripping rain.

Then the chopsticks began to move.

Not quickly. Not violently. They moved with the slow certainty of planets crossing the night sky. One by one the flies vanished between the lacquered sticks until only silence remained. When she opened her hand, the seven insects rested unharmed upon the table as though sleeping.

The gambler left behind his suitcase and disappeared forever into the flooded streets.

Years later people no longer remembered his name, but they still spoke of the Princess. Children drew her image on alley walls. Old women burned incense beneath her portrait. Taxi drivers claimed she could catch bad luck itself if it buzzed too close to the heart.

And on humid evenings, when the city lights dissolved into the fog, some said they could still hear it through open windows across the rooftops:

Snap.