She cast a haggard look at the doleful, forlone roses that were in her mild hand. Then she threw them all, with a vague regret, into the trash can in the garden corner.
She replaced them with the freshest ones she just picked from various bunches on the table corner.
The room turned bright. Her eyes were filled with great excitement, quite different from her opposite mood a short time earlier that still lingered and then melted with a light sigh.
She directed an eye, out of habit, to the old chair which he used to sit on, as if to get a shared mood in an impressive silence. She would lean her head against his chest waiting for his caress-ing hand, listening to his earnest breaths. Both of them would admire the fresh flowers on the table recalling their successful performance together.
When the velvet curtain closed, they both forgot all about their fatigue, with sweat dropping down their cheeks, extended their hands for the bouquets reserved for them from their fans.
Owing to their inborn talents, their professional passions, and skills learned from foreign institutes, they had soon asserted themselves and achieved unrivaled successes that others couldn't have dreamed of.
They always danced in a pair as a couple of inseparable lovers, otherwise irreplaceable, when one of them was missing.
And as such, the lovely loving couple, in their own sweet time, were engrossed in the splendid limelight together with rounds of applause and bouquets from the enchanted spectators. And their only aspiration was to serve the country's performing arts with all their contributions.
As a talented dancing artiste, she clearly realized that she was climbing a ladder without its last rung, which was her happiness and at the same time her misfortune that anyone whose heart was for arts got to understand to a certain extent. That was to toil both physically and mentally to its own rules.
She never got, on the other hand, to understand that her noble passion was quietly wearing away her female physiological capacity.
Like any other woman, she strongly desired to have a baby. But she hesitated, it being an obstacle, she was afraid, though temporary, to the glory available to him only thanks to her part.
Then one day, with roses in her hand, she vaguely realized that what hidden behind this glory the real beauty of its own was.
She also realized that she was not the same person she had been a long time before. Even her potential capacity to be a mother had long gone exhausted. To her, it was really too late to do anything about it.
Confronted with that ruthless reality, he silently looked in her eyes in despair. For the first time, she noticed the absence of his sympathy.
As usual, she came back to her room after the performance to find it ancient and familiar as it always was to her. She cast a haggard look at the doleful, forlone roses and at the chair which he used to sit on. Unconsciously, she caressed them with her mild hand. The room was full of baby cries. She passionately glanced at its chubby face, and plump cheeks, and its smiling lips like those roses. The baby was soundly sleeping, at times with a grin. It was taught to give such a grin by mother - goddess, she thought. All of a sudden and quietly, she sang a lullaby that she had learned when she didn't know. She hugged it in her bosom, panicstricken with the presentiment that that slight happiness would entirely disappear. She madly kissed all its face, leaned her face against its belly… and slept into a strange dream. Not until she felt a lasting sting in her arm did she wake up startled. In her soft and warm hand were doleful roses, some of their petals scattered on the table corner. Her two arms were aching, scratched by sharp thorns, oozing in lines of red blood.
And the chair on which he used to sit now became an endless void never to be fulfilled.
- Phùng Cao Bảng