Today's Muse: This Gaping Hole in My Elbow

They love the baby girls in my family.

They're cooed at more. They get what they want all of the time. One of the first things they learn to say is "Pretty?" so they can ask the adults when showing off a new hair clip, a new dress...

They're also considered to be tiny luck bringers.

One year, one of my many nieces ran around repeating four numbers over and over. My older brother noted the numbers and used them to buy 4-D; he won a tidy sum.

My youngest niece was born on Friday the Thirteenth; her father seems to have had nothing but sucess since then.

There are other stories, some so vague that they can be dismissed as coincidence, others so weirdly accurate. It gets a bit mad, sometimes. Saturday night, while driving, the tot pointed out a "yellow taxi". Cue mad chase to try and catch the license plate number of said taxi for 4-D.

Now, it's not as though the boys are neglected. They get cooed at when they're tiny; it's just that no one asks them for lucky numbers.



Chinese New Year smells of salted pork and spring onions and fresh fish and tinned peaches. And layer cake. So much bloody cake. I'm shocked the oven hasn't exploded yet. It's been doing days like this for over ten bloody years, and every year I wait for it to explode but all it does is give a tiny shudder after the whole week-long ordeal and NOT EXPLODE.

I love this holiday.