Tom Is Handsome Vi Khi Nao

Tom Is Handsome

                                              Vi Khi Nao
Tom is obsessed about losing his body parts. This obsession percolates through his waking system like
a memory. He wakes up with it and it breathes with him. This morning Tom washes the dishes. He
glances down at the cutting board and imagines his left arm chopped off by a sharp, ubiquitous blade.
Tom is quite handsome. In being handsome, he withdraws his hand immediately from the sink and
hides his wet fingers in his shirt. They press against his warm belly. The knife, all the knives of the
household, are tucked away in a drawer and lie quietly like assassins beneath the folded hand towels.
The hand towels are white like a blanket of snow. In a few seconds, his hand returns to the soap and
to the spoons and the forks. He lifts each utensil up and in a perfunctory fashion rinses them of their
sodium hydroxide.
When Tom is finished with slaying his phantom limbs in his mind and laying all the dishes on the
drying rack, he squeezes the sponge and scrubs the sink and the counter. When that task is completed,
he removes the strainer from the bottom of the sink. He beats it inside the trash bag until all the grime
is removed. He normally inserts the strainer into the sink bottom with his bare hand, but today he
fears that the compost grinder, in his imagination, acquired a new neck, would lift up its metal jugular
mouth and grab a hold of his hand and grate it away. When compared with a strawberry smoothie,
Tom thinks that there wouldn’t be much of a difference. Tom is quite handsome. So instead, he tosses
the grinder into the kitchen sink. Like a topspin in a glass, the metal strainer lands miraculously in the
center, locking it in place.
Tom ties the trash bag near the refrigerator and drags it down to the garage. The garage houses the
biggest garbage can in the house. Tom is happy that he has taken care of the chores and his wife,
Katie, will be more than pleased. He walks to the coffee table and retrieves a piece of notebook paper.
It contains a list of baby names Tom and Katie have started. They already asked the physician not to
disclose the gender of the baby as both Tom and Katie love surprises. He sees the name Alexis jotted at
the left corner of the piece of paper. He grabs the pen from the table and scratches the name off the list.
He specifically requests his wife to ignore all names that end with the letter ‘s’. This is important to him
as one day he will have to use the name in writing or in a sentence and he wants it to be grammatically
correct. After all, he holds a doctorate degree in food poisoning, but for the life of him, he doesn’t know
how to spell or understand the esoteric rules of grammar. Tom is handsome.
Tom expects, with his peregrinating job, Katie and he will be putting things into boxes a lot. What will
he do if he has to label the boxes? He and Katie will be completely fine: Katie’s baseball cards and Tom’s
ties. But what about a son or daughter named Alexis? Will it be Alexis’ toys or Alexis’s toys? Which
one is it? A name shouldn’t be a gambling game. Heads or tails, Dr. Kent. But he can’t walk through all
of his life and the child’s life labeling things in full length. It’s understandable to say parents of Alexis
instead of Alexis’ parents or Alexis’s parents, but it would be ridiculous to ask him to classify it ‘toys
of Alexis.’ Every time he scribbles the designation down, he thinks he is a lawyer working on a child
murder case and presenting before the jury evidence of the child’s recreational activities. This won’t do.
Katie will have to come up with another reasonable name.
He walks to the balcony. His mind is so occupied with racking up a name for the child that he doesn’t
notice that he is at the ledge of the balcony. Tom is afraid of heights and the phobia is provoked largely
by his mania for fallen body parts, another facet of his obsession with losing body parts. After all, falling
thirty feet damages all body parts. This is not, however, his greatest fear. Losing all is significantly better
than losing just one finger or one limb. Tom backs slowly away from the balcony. His fear is that there
might be a faulty part in his brain, the area that regulates and governs motor skills. One that is excited
and is encouraged by a rage of ecstasy so that seconds later he would find himself and his limbs leaping
over the railings of the balcony. He won’t allow it. Tom’s head orders all of his phobias to appear
before him and to line themselves up like an assembly line before a marine officer. Fear of height. Fear

of weight. Fear of losing body parts. Fear of names’ ‘s’ endings. Fear of gutters. Fear of gluttony. Fear
of losing his striking, drop-dead gorgeous face.
Tom is handsome. He’s happy that his wife is responsible for amassing all the weight and the child for
them both. After all, he wants to be as slim as possible. Tom works out six days a week. Tom begins
to question if the propagation of the child is responsible for the assembly line of phobias. After all,
his logic tells him much about Newton’s third law. For every action, there is an equal and opposite
reaction. So, if his child were growing a limb then the only possible response, opposite and collinear,
would be that he loses a limb. Now limbs do not just evaporate or disappear or go underground just
all by themselves. They need an auxiliary friend, an assistant, or something like a cleaver, a butcher’s
knife, or simply a meat cutter. The fact that Tom is a poison specialist implies that he doesn’t work for
a meat plant. Working at a meat plant usually means that his handsome hand would cut, give or take,
at least two thousand chicken thighs a day. Tom does not cut two thousand chicken thighs a day. Yet
the fear, appropriate for a meat plant worker, exists in him and exists throughout him. His rationality
is that all friends are helpful in the decomposition or the walking away of limbs. Tom is okay with
the child gaining weight. Which means he will lose weight. The child is only three weeks old so there’s
plenty of time for Tom to sketch a plan of defense against the conspiracy of the physical body in the
Newtonian world.
The first time he feels an ache in his stomach, Tom is alerted to the reality that his child is growing
a kidney and that his child is taking his kidney from him. Now Tom’s only strategic plan, concocted
months ahead while the child was the size of a pea, was to blackmail and manipulate the child every
evening before going to bed. He lies supine in bed with Katie surrounded with fluffy, white pillows and
watches her soporific eyelids drop like the butter compartment in a refrigerator. And as soon as she
disappears into her subconscious, he has a one-to-one, but not a vis-à-vis, talk with the child. Now, you
little rascal, if you take away any of my body parts, I will shred you apart like beef jerky the moment
you exit your mother’s basket of woven flesh. You hear me, child? Now I know you need body parts
to survive in this cruel, brutal world, but there are plenty of relatives in your mother’s family, and
including my side of the family, who is happy to donate a few of their organs, eyes, lips, mouths, thighs,
gallbladders for you. You simply just ask them. You simply just tell them your title, your origin, where
in the family tree your little leaf flutters in the wind, and they will be more than happy to hand over
their body parts.
Grandpa Gene, from your mother’s side of the family, has excellent toes. At 77 years old, they are still
so youthful and healthy like ripe serrano peppers. They have these beautiful pointy tips like they have
been manicured by a beauty salon called Happy Nails. You should ask for them. My nose is awful.
Aunt Dorothy has the best nose on my side of the family. Other family members describe her nose as
aquiline, but I think it’s shaped like a Hershey kiss. Just ask her to blow a kiss your way and don’t ask
me for any. She loves to endorse her assembly line of nostril mania. Now, you must be careful about
Uncle Billy. Just because he gives his fingers away like tootsie rolls, it doesn’t mean that they are good.
You must decline vehemently. Those fingers stink like wiggling maggots from a trash compost or poking
your fingers through poor quality toilet paper.
Now your Uncle Tim is dead, but he has the best lungs on your mother’s side of the family. He can
play the trumpet like no one can play the trumpet. Ask him anyway because you never know if lungs
and other body parts are like naming or calling things. The moment they exit your lips, there they are.
They simply exist. You don’t need lungs to grow. You simply need them to exist in your tiny body.
Leave the rest to your mother. She’s very good at rearranging things. She’ll put your body all very nicely
together as if it were a to-go order from Buffalo Wings. Your mother used to work for a fast food chain
store to pay for college tuition and with it comes pay back maternal instinct. She has it from arranging
everything together with spicy chicken wings, plastic knives and forks, napkins, and red sauce tucked in
a cardboard box to arranging your body parts. Piece of cake. She will know where to insert your femur
and where to place your eyelids. Mothers know these things. Trust her.
Now, this has gotten long. Just to recapture. Don’t take any of my body parts. Good night, child.

Tom wakes up the next morning with a latent pain, which he diagnoses as a possible kidney extraction
from his child while he fell fast asleep. He feels like J. Edgar Hoover, in an epistolary note, threatening
Martin Luther King that he would expose him if he doesn’t refuse the Nobel Peace prize. His child, in
this case, accepts the Nobel Peace prize. He’s wheeled from the ambulance into the hospital for severe
stomach pain. Later, from his physician, he discovers the source of the pain arises from the appendix.
The physician coerces him into a surgery as his life depends on it. Before the cutting table and before
the arrival of the anesthesiologist, he fumes up and down how he’s going to cut the child into pieces.
Tom does not know that the human appendix is a vestigial organ. Had he known this important piece of
information, a false biological conclusion, he may not contort on the operating table like a child during
seizure. Sometime later, Tom will learn that noting and naming things as useless or unproductive or
ineffectual will allow him to let go of things faster.
It takes Tom approximately several weeks to heal after the surgery. During this convalescent period,
Tom begins his first premeditated strategy on how to cut his child into pieces. Now, how is the child
going to learn the karmic, moral law of the universe outside of the womb if he doesn’t follow through
with his words, Tom thinks? Tom is not only handsome; Tom is a gentleman. A gentleman follows
through with his words. Once there is a verbal contract, a contract Tom believes that the child and him
have agreed on, he can’t remove their words from the solo tongue by simply ignoring it. Tom thinks
there is complication to the chopping and the mincing. After all, it’s easier to chop someone in broad
daylight, as everyone will ignore it. It’s a lot harder to destroy someone in a cave or in a womb, as it
can be quite dark in there. And, of course, rather dicey.
Having not destroyed someone before, Tom doesn’t know how to navigate. After all, there is of course
his wife’s body that’s the biggest source of conflict: how to annihilate the child without inflicting pain
on his wife and without ultimately killing her. Life generates quite a few roadblocks this way. Tom is
intellectually clueless about how to proceed. Tom is still quite handsome.
As Tom lifts his body from its resting state and walks toward the bathroom, he looks at his handsome
face in the mirror. At a quarter of a century, there are hardly any crowsfeet when he smiles and his teeth
are perfectly aligned in his mouth like stars. When he talks as he talks to himself often in front of the
mirror, he reflects on his talking. Each time he talks he thinks he is moving the galaxy around with his
mouth, his tongue the gravity belt that shifts the physical mass of the universe. Whenever he accelerates
his tongue by speaking faster, he realizes that sound is mesmerizing and perhaps even hypnotic. And
although sound doesn’t travel as fast as light, the message that arrives to his face is slightly delayed. In
this case, it’s Tom. Tom’s interpretation of God’s message is that if he wants a message to arrive for
him with urgency it would be through an image siphoned by light. Now, God’s message to Tom the
morning he gazes at his handsome face arrives to Tom through Tom’s mouth, a sound that cracks like
bones. Tom’s construal understanding of this message is that because it arrives through the method of
sound, it cannot be that urgent nor can it be that important. God’s message to Tom is relayed below:

The sound instills doubt in Tom’s reasoning. It does occur to him, in his mind’s logical faculty, that it’s
impossible for the child to senesce and for him to return to his youth by aging. It pricks in his conscience
that perhaps there is something terribly wrong with his reasoning. It does not occur to Tom that doubt
is a check and balance scheme that protects the human existence from harm. Tom ignores the message as
it does not systemize in his head well and returns to bed to manipulate his wife into having an abortion.
TOM:          Kate, do you think we ought to have this child?
KATE:         Tom! Of course we do! We have been planning for ages. What has gotten into you?
TOM:          Nothing. I was just thinking we haven’t traveled at all and the baby could get in the way.

I mean we may not get a vacation for eighteen years. Have you thought about that?
KATE:         We always make things work and fit all the travel plans in. Also, we have been waiting for
you finish your doctorate degree so we can do this. And now you got your doctorate, nothing is going
to stop us.
Tom is handsome. And being quite a handsome man, he must take matters in his own hands and deploy
the attack on the child alone. But how does one carve the seeds from a pumpkin without cutting into
it and without Kate knowing? It’s impossible. Must he wait for more than five months for the child to
arrive before he can do something about it? Tom struggles with thinking outside of the box. It’s always
Kate’s duty, but she is no longer his ally. Tom’s fear begins to escalate at an enormous proportion.
The longer the child exists in Kate’s stomach, the more risky it is for his body parts. It’s the survival of
the fittest. Him or the child. He has considered, with considerable note, that his specialization in food
poisoning may assist him in the mincing, chopping of this death task. But as his extensive schooling and
common sense have taught him about food poisoning, there is no method of capitalizing on its virtue
without grave, irreversible consequences. After all, he is not Juliet’s Friar Laurence, and even if the
child-extraction poison potion does work, there is always the tragic that permeates the souls of those
who manipulate fate.
Tom’s only option, it seems, is to introduce the plague to the child. Wasn’t this how the colonized British
drove the Indians off their land? The plague hurt the red people, but it didn’t seem to hurt the land.
Without consulting his wife, Tom books his ticket to Africa. Does he intend on bringing back both the
plagues: malaria and AIDS? Although AIDS is, technically, not a bacteria (it’s a virus), it behaves like
bacteria. It’s unclear in Tom’s mind what kind of material he’s going to introduce to the United States,
but he must bring back something.
Because Kate does not know Tom is flying to Africa, Tom feels compelled to inform someone of his
whereabouts in the upcoming week. He has read somewhere on the internet that when traveling abroad,
it’s important to inform others of travel plans. Tom decides that his mother is the most trusted species.
Because Kate and his mother do not get along, he feels his disclosure will remain confidential. Little does
he know that the people who hate each other still tell each other things.
Tom stops by the grocery to make a copy of the password to give to his mother. He calls to tell his
mother that he will arrive.
MOM:          While you are at it, do you mind trimming my lawn?
TOM:          No, not at all. I’ll bring a copy of my passport for you to keep.
Sanitation is important to Tom. Tom plans on making his mother’s hill billy front lawn pristine. He
plans on trimming it immaculately. Tom rationalizes that sterilization is important to the welfare of
foreign-born super friendly diseases. Tom feels that all of America should abide to this lawn formality.
Tom feels that he doesn’t have the convincing power to persuade the whole nation to this, but Tom can
act as a role model for this.
Tom drives the Hybrid over to his mother’s house, drives into her garage, and wheels out her automatic
lawnmower. He likes the design of this machine as it roars a little before it trims. The machine sounds
like modern man before he shaves himself each morning. Tom feels that the lawnmower and him can
relate. The lawnmower can relate to Tom on many levels. The lawnmower always needs a constant
and consistent push before it performs to its full function. Tom pushes the lawnmower up to the top
edge of hill at the corner where the corner fence divides his mother’s house from her neighbor’s. With
Africa behaving like a security blanket, Tom feels liberated for the first time from all his fears. Tom
enjoys the meditative and serene environ of his pushing and the luxurious smell of the grass. Tom wants
to trim his mother’s lawn well and meticulously. It’s always difficult to mow the corners of the fence
with the chunky body of the lawnmower. At the corners of this fence, Tom has used the handheld
trimmer to get the job done. Perhaps it’s joy or laziness or manliness or the desire to be heroic and

overcoming the impossible that Tom feels compelled to trim to the edge of the corner fence without the
handheld trimmer. The lawnmower lies on the hilly grass at a tipping angle. Tom backs the running
lawnmower from the fence. With a hard thrusting forward motion, Tom pushes the lawnmower forward
and upward. His weight pushes the handle down. It creates a seesaw effect: the body and engine of
the lawnmower leaps into the air, does a back flip, and the handle lands near Tom’s feet. When the
lawnmower flips through the air, it parts the atmospheric curtains of grass, aroma, and blade so that it
looks like a magic trick done in slow motion. It still runs and hums as Tom’s hands are locked into the
handle. The lawnmower floats moments before knocking Tom’s body down. The lawnmower lands on
his handsome face before trimming it carelessly. Pain rushes toward his face. Tom releases his hands.
The blades stop spinning in circles.

Vi Khi Nao is a current MFA Brown University student living in Providence, RI with her grapefruit and typewriter. Her
work has appeared in NOON, Alice Blue Review, elimae, and is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and Black
Warrior Review. She has been so afraid of her first book, The Vanishing Point of Desire, published by Fugue State Press
because its content was so raw. She is not afraid of it any more and is willing to give her tall and skinny book a small, quiet
hug. “Tom Is Handsome” was written based on an assignment and prompt given by her fiction professor, Carole Maso.