Amy Sue Nathan

Flash fiction

Photo Credit here

People chuckle at my “Kiss Me I’m Irish” button. They figure I got it from a friend in a St. Patrick’s Day unity effort and pinning it to my T-shirt indicates a politically correct spirit of diversity or a freckle-faced roommate, not heredity. Through my almond-shaped Irish eyes I look at each person. I don’t know what they are, but my appearance elicits assumptions that I like rice and am good with numbers. I can’t stand rice – not white rice or brown rice or sticky rice or sushi rice or rice pudding. Black people jump to this particular conclusion as much as anyone else, yet in high school when I asked a Black friend if he liked fried chicken he punched me in the arm. I just wanted to know if he liked fried chicken because I hoped to trade mine for his tuna sandwich.

I’m good with numbers because my parents are and because I studied my ass off in school. It’s nice to have assumed intelligence, though, and it makes me wonder if I had to work as hard as I did. My mother, in her Irish brogue, says that’s the immigrant mentality that comes with being the child of immigrants, which I am. My father has no accent. He paid someone to help him get rid of it so that he could make Partner in a law firm. When he agrees with my mother about immigrants, he sounds plain American.

I’m not sure why anyone would want to leave their birth country if it wasn’t so bad to begin with. But, my mother would not have met a Japanese man in Ireland and my father would not have met an Irish woman in Japan. They met in Newark. And that was a place they both wanted to leave.

There’s a pub in the corner of the station and I have forty-five minutes until my train to Manhattan. I walk through a batch of mid-day travelers who smile at my button, then search my face for Irish – or maybe they are checking their mental grocery lists.

I sit on a stool, ready for my drink. I think I like beer because I have Irish blood but it could be because I’m twenty-two and all twenty-two year olds like beer. I get carded but that’s not a big deal when you’re legal. I guess that goes for immigrants too.

The barkeep eyes my button, but not in a way that is inappropriate.

“Happy Saint Paddy’s Day,” he says.

He points to the pitcher of green beer and I nod. He is waiting for the after-work crowd and doesn’t care if I’m half-Irish or half-Martian as long as I have cash.