Table of Contents

Short Stories from Africa-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2

The Museum-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3-5
Civil Peace----------------——————---------------------------------------------------------------6-9
The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away----------------------------------------------------10-14
Sweat-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------15-19
I Am Not My Skin--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------20-28

Short Stories from East Asian Literature ---------------------------------------------------------------

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Short Stories from Europian Literature------------------------------------------------------------- 2

The Museum-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3-5
Civil Peace----------------——————---------------------------------------------------------------6-9
The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away----------------------------------------------------10-14
Sweat-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------15-19
I Am Not My Skin--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------20-28

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 Five (5) Short Stories from Africa

THE MUSEUM
By: Leila Aboulela

‘They are telling lies in this museum,’ – Leila Aboulela (‘The Museum’ 18)

It was in my fourth year of university that I came across Leila Aboulela, shelved under
‘suggested further reading’ for a seminar on a Postcolonialism course. Indeed, before taking this
course, my exposure to non-western writers within required reading was limited to the obligatory
inclusion of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in my second year. Although Aboulela’s
novel The Translator occasionally crops up on postcolonial syllabi, it is her unflinching approach
to colonialism in ‘The Museum’ that captured my attention and caused me to question museum
ethics and neutrality. The 1997 short story’s value has not gone unrecognised elsewhere: it was
the first winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000. The 19-page tale paints the story
of Shadia, a Sudanese woman studying at Aberdeen, and her acquaintance with a fellow student
– a long-haired Scot named Bryan. The predominant theme of the story is the struggle of
communication between colonialism’s ‘predetermined groups’, and while Bryan and Shadia
begin to bridge the gap in communication, this is halted when they visit a local museum at the
story’s denouement, culminating with Shadia’s announcement, ‘I shouldn’t be here with you.
You shouldn’t talk to me…’(Aboulela18).

Aboulela may raise questions about the relationship between formerly colonised and coloniser,
but she does not offer answers. Instead, she points towards bastions of power imbalance,
indicating the role of institutions such as museums in continuing a colonial legacy. The act of
collecting and archiving is inherently imperialist, demonstrating what Stuart Hall terms ‘the
symbolic power to order knowledge, to rank, classify and arrange, and thus to give meaning to
objects and things through imposition’ (4). In Aboulela’s museum, artifacts are removed from
their original systems of meaning and displaced as Other—a spectacle within the display case—
instead becoming ‘disconnected objects out of place and time’ (15). The agency of the artifact—
and, by extension, the culture it originates from—is diminished, and replaced by the dominant
voice of the coloniser. Labels and descriptions within the story’s museum record only a colonial
narrative, claiming ‘northeast Scotland made a disproportionate impact on the world at large by
contributing so many skilled and committed individuals,’ and thereby omitting the African voice
and participating in the ‘widespread selective amnesia and disavowal’ of Empire (Aboulela 15;
Hall 7). The Africa of the exhibition is rendered devoid of humanity: the ‘real’ Africa is ‘jungle
inhabited only by game’, therein removing the presence and agency of its native people
altogether (Aboulela 18). Aboulela draws attention to the disparity between the imperial museum
and Shadia’s life in Khartoum, in which she goes to weddings in her fiancé’s Mercedes and is
served lemonade with ice by waiters dressed in white: Shadia ‘would not make a good exhibit.

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 She wasn’t right, she was too modern’ (4,16).

Nonetheless, Shadia internalises the narrative shown in the museum, as evidenced by her own
anxieties and conflicted self-identity. Although she does not identify with the savage African
presented in the museum, she measures herself by the same ideology which produced such an
exhibition: her values are legacies of colonialism. As a child, Shadia envied her doll’s hair; ‘she
had longed for such straight hair,’ a longing which lasts into adulthood and manifests in her
preoccupation with Bryan’s ponytail and her own hair straightening (Aboulela 2). Hair
straightening has a long history for black women living in Western societies who ‘hoped…to
approximate white standards’: it was an action that ‘could be taken to win respect despite living
in a hostile environment’ (White and White 171). While it is now widely accepted that black
women’s hair choices are their own, Shadia’s hair straightening corresponds to her view of kinky
hair as inferior. She finds that ‘her hair depressed her’ and that ‘she didn’t like this style, her
corrugated hair’, indicating her internalisation of white supremacy. This internalisation is a
consequence of the ideology promoted in the imperial museum, resulting in Shadia’s alienation
and identity struggle.

As a site of imperial memory, the museum serves to preserve and continue colonial narratives.
While these narratives are still presented as the norm, ‘postcolonial’ remains a myth and
effective communication between colonised and coloniser is futile: ‘If she had not been small in
the museum,’ Shadia ‘would have patiently taught him another language…she would have
shown him that words could be read from right to left’ (Aboulela 19). As I’ve mentioned,
Aboulela does not offer a solution, but she instead leaves it to the reader to climb the ‘steep path’
to decolonisation.

A place for ‘The Museum’ on university curricula would be a progression along this path. Like
museum exhibitions, reading lists are curated, and the absence of non-western narratives and
perspectives results in universities populated by Bryans who ‘don’t understand’ (Aboulela 18).
The inclusion of the themes and issues raised in ‘The Museum’ in academic discussion is
imperative, as they pertain to academia itself. In order to decolonise sites of power imbalance
such as museums or universities, it is necessary to start from within, dismantling systems of
white elitism through diversification and intersectionality.

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 Civil Peace

By: Chinua Anchebe

Jonathan Iwegbu counted himself extra-ordinarily lucky. 'Happy survival!' meant so

much more to him than just a current fashion of greeting old friends in the first hazy days of
peace. It went deep to his heart. He had come out of the war with five inestimable blessings--his
head, his wife Maria's head and the heads of three out of their four children. As a bonus he also
had his old bicycle--a miracle too but naturally not to be compared to the safety of five human
heads. The bicycle had a little history of its own. One day at the height of the war it was
commandeered 'for urgent military action'. Hard as its loss would have been to him he would still
have let it go without a thought had he not had some doubts about the genuineness of the officer.
It wasn't his disreputable rags, nor the toes peeping out of one blue and one brown canvas shoes,
nor yet the two stars of his rank done obviously in a hurry in biro, that troubled Jonathan; many
good and heroic soldiers looked the same or worse. It was rather a certain lack of grip and
firmness in his manner. So Jonathan, suspecting he might be amenable to influence, rummaged
in his raffia bag and produced the two pounds with which he had been going to buy firewood
which his wife, Maria, retailed to camp officials for extra stock-fish and corn meal, and got his
bicycle back. That night he buried it in the little clearing in the bush where the dead of the camp,
including his own youngest son, were buried. When he dug it up again a year later after the
surrender all it needed was a little palm-oil greasing. 'Nothing puzzles God,' he said in wonder.

He put it to immediate use as a taxi and accumulated a small pile of Biafran money
ferrying camp officials and their families across the four-mile stretch to the nearest tarred road.
His standard charge per trip was six pounds and those who had the money were only glad to be
rid of some of it in this way. At the end of a fortnight he had made a small fortune of one
hundred and fifteen pounds.

Then he made the journey to Enugu and found another miracle waiting for him. It was
unbelievable. He rubbed his eyes and looked again and it was still standing there before him. But,
needless to say, even that monumental blessing must be accounted also totally inferior to the five
heads in the family. This newest miracle was his little house in Ogui Overside. Indeed nothing
puzzles God! Only two houses away a huge concrete edifice some wealthy contractor had put up

4
just before the war was a mountain of rubble. And here was Jonathan's little zinc house of no
regrets built with mud blocks quite intact! Of course the doors and windows were missing and
five sheets off the roof. But what was that? And anyhow he had returned to Enugu early enough
to pick up bits of old zinc and wood and soggy sheets of cardboard lying around the
neighbourhood before thousands more came out of their forest holes looking for the same things.
He got a destitute carpenter with one old hammer, a blunt plane and a few bent and rusty nails in
his tool bag to turn this assortment of wood, paper and metal into door and window shutters for
five Nigerian shillings or fifty Biafran pounds. He paid the pounds, and moved in with his
overjoyed family carrying five heads on their shoulders

. His children picked mangoes near the military cemetery and sold them to soldiers' wives
for a few pennies--real pennies this time--and his wife started making breakfast akara balls for
neighbours in a hurry to start life again. With his family earnings he took his bicycle to the
villages around and bought fresh palm-wine which he mixed generously in his rooms with the
water which had recently started running again in the public tap down the road, and opened up a
bar for soldiers and other lucky people with good money.

At first he went daily, then every other day and finally once a week, to the offices of the
Coal Corporation where he used to be a miner, to find out what was what. The only thing he did
find out in the end was that that little house of his was even a greater blessing than he had
thought. Some of his fellow ex-miners who had nowhere to return at the end of the day's waiting
just slept outside the doors of the offices and cooked what meal they could scrounge together in
Bournvita tins. As the weeks lengthened and still nobody could say what was what Jonathan
discontinued his weekly visits altogether and faced his palm-wine bar.

But nothing puzzles God. Came the day of the windfall when after five days of endless
scuffles in queues and counter-queues in the sun outside the Treasury he had twenty pounds
counted into his palms as exgratia award for the rebel money he had turned in. It was like
Christmas for him and for many others like him when the payments began. They called it (since
few could manage its proper official name) _egg-rasher_. As soon as the pound notes were
placed in his palm Jonathan simply closed it tight over them and buried fist and money inside his
trouser pocket. He had to be extra careful because he had seen a man a couple of days earlier
collapse into near-madness in an instant before that oceanic crowd because no sooner had he got

5
his twenty pounds than some heartless ruffian picked it off him. Though it was not right that a
man in such an extremity of agony should be blamed yet many in the queues that day were able
to remark quietly on the victim's carelessness, especially after he pulled out the innards of his
pocket and revealed a hole in it big enough to pass a thief's head. But of course he had insisted
that the money had been in the other pocket, pulling it out too to show its comparative wholeness.
So one had to be careful.

Jonathan soon transferred the money to his left hand and pocket so as to leave his right
free for shaking hands should the need arise, though by fixing his gaze at such an elevation as to
miss all approaching human faces he made sure that the need did not arise, until he got home.

He was normally a heavy sleeper but that night he heard all the neighbourhood noises die
down one after another. Even the night watchman who knocked the hour on some metal
somewhere in the distance had fallen silent after knocking one o'clock. That must have been the
last thought in Jonathan's mind before he was finally carried away himself. He couldn't have
been gone for long, though, when he was violently awakened again. 'Who is knocking?'
whispered his wife lying beside him on the floor. 'I don't know,' he whispered back breathlessly.

The second time the knocking came it was so loud and imperious that the rickety old door
could have fallen down. 'Who is knocking?' he asked then, his voice parched and trembling. 'Na
tief-man and him people,' came the cool reply. 'Make you hopen de door.' This was followed by
the heaviest knocking of all. Maria was the first to raise the alarm, then he followed and all their
children. Police-o! Thieves-o! Neighbours-o! Police-o! We are lost! We are dead! Neighbours,
are you asleep? Wake up! Police-o!'_ This went on for a long time and then stopped suddenly.
Perhaps they had scared the thief away. There was total silence. But only for a short while. 'You
done finish?' asked the voice outside. 'Make we help you small. Oya, everybody!' _'Police-o!
Tief-man-o! Neighbours-o! we done loss-o! Police-o!...'_

There were at least five other voices besides the leader's. Jonathan and his family were
now completely paralysed by terror. Maria and the children sobbed inaudibly like lost souls.
Jonathan groaned continuously. The silence that followed the thieves' alarm vibrated horribly.
Jonathan all but begged their leader to speak again and be done with it. 'My frien,' said he at long
last, 'we don try our best for call dem but I tink say dem all done sleep-o... So wetin we go do
now? Sometaim you wan call soja? Or you wan make we call dem for you? Soja better pass

6
police. No be so?' 'Na so!' replied his men. Jonathan thought he heard even more voices now
than before and groaned heavily. His legs were sagging under him and his throat felt like
sandpaper. 'My frien, why you no de talk again. I de ask you say you wan make we call soja?'
'No'. 'Awrighto. Now make we talk business. We no be bad tief. We no like for make trouble.
Trouble done finish. War done finish and all the katakata wey de for inside. No Civil War again.
This time na Civil Peace. No be so?' 'Na so!' answered the horrible chorus. 'What do you want
from me? I am a poor man. Everything I had went with this war. Why do you come to me? You
know people who have money. We...' 'Awright! We know say you no get plenty money. But we
sef no get even anini. So derefore make you open dis window and give us one hundred pound
and we go commot. Orderwise we de come for inside now to show you guitar-boy like dis...' A
volley of automatic fire rang through the sky. Maria and the children began to weep aloud again.
'Ah, missisi de cry again. No need for dat. We done talk say we na good tief. We just take our
small money and go nwayorly. No molest. Abi we de molest?' 'At all!' sang the chorus. 'My
friends,' began Jonathan hoarsely. 'I hear what you say and I thank you. If I had one hundred
pounds...' 'Lookia my frien, no be play we come play for your house. If we make mistake and
step for inside you no go like am-o. So derefore...' 'To God who made me; if you come inside
and find one hundred pounds, take it and shoot me and shoot my wife and children. I swear to
God. The only money I have in this life is this twenty-pounds _egg-rasher_ they gave me
today...' 'OK. Time de go. Make you open dis window and bring the twenty pound. We go
manage am like dat.' There were now loud murmurs of dissent among the chorus: 'Na lie de man
de lie; e get plenty money... Make we go inside and search properly well... Wetin be twenty
pound?...''Shurrup!' rang the leader's voice like a lone shot in the sky and silenced the murmuring
at once. 'Are you dere? Bring the money quick!' 'I am coming,' said Jonathan fumbling in the
darkness with the key of the small wooden box he kept by his side on the mat.

At the first sign of light as neighbours and others assembled to commiserate with him he
was already strapping his five-gallon demijohn to his bicycle carrier and his wife, sweating in the
open fire, was turning over akara balls in a wide clay bowl of boiling oil. In the corner his eldest
son was rinsing out dregs of yesterday's palm wine from old beer bottles. 'I count it as nothing,'
he told his sympathizers, his eyes on the rope he was tying. 'What is _egg-rasher_? Did I depend
on it last week? Or is it greater than other things that went with the war? I say, let _egg-rasher_
perish in the flames! Let it go where everything else has gone. Nothing puzzles God.'

7
 The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away
By: Bushra al-Fadil
Translated by Max Shmookler

There I was, cutting through a strange market crowd – not just people shopping for their
salad greens, but beggars and butchers and thieves, prancers and Prophet-praisers and soft-sided
soldiers, the newly-arrived and the just-retired, the flabby and the flimsy, sellers roaming and
street kids groaning, god-damners, bus-waiters and white-robed traders, elegant and fumbling.
And there in the midst, our elected representatives, chasing women with their eyes and hands
and whole bodies, with those who couldn’t give chase keeping pace with an indiscrete and
sensual attention, or lost in a daydream. I cut, sharp-toothed, carving a path through the crowd
when a passerby clutched his shoulder in pain, followed by a ‘Forgive me!’ Then a scratch on a
lady’s toe was followed with a quick ‘Oh no!’ Then a slap to another’s cheek, after which was
heard ‘Forgiveness is all I seek!’ So lost in dreams I could not wait for their reply to my apology.
The day was fresher than a normal summer day, and I could feel delight turbaned around
my head, like a Bedouin on his second visit to the city. The working women were not happy like
me, nor were the housewives. I was the son of the Central Station, spider-pocketed, craning my
neck to see a car accident or the commotion of a thief being caught. I was awake, descending
into the street, convulsing from hunger and the hopeless search for work in the ‘cow’s muzzle’,
as
we say. I suppressed my unrest. The oppressed son of the oppressed but despite all of that –
happy. Could the wretched wrest my happiness from me? Hardly. Without meaning to, I
wandered through these thoughts. The people around me were a pile of human watermelons,
every pile awaiting its bus. I approached one of the piles and pulled out my queuing tools – an
elbow and the palm of my hand – and then together they helped my legs to hold up my daily
depleted and yearly defeated body. I pulled out my eyes and began to look... and look... in all
directions and to store away what I saw. I saw a blind man looking out before him as if he were
reading from that divine book which preceded all books, that book of all fates. He kept to
himself as he passed before me but still I felt the coins in my pocket disappear. Then I saw a
woman who was so plump that when she called out to her son – ‘Oh Hisham’ – you could feel
the greasy resonance of the ‘H’ in your ears. I saw a frowning man, a boy weaving an empty tin
can along the ground with his feet. I saw voices and heard boundless scents and then, suddenly,
in the midst of all of that, I saw her. The dervish in my heart jumped.1 I saw her: soaring without
swaying, her skin the colour of wheat –not as we know it but rather as if the wheat were
imitating her tone. She had the swagger of a soldier, the true heart of the people. And if you saw
her, you’d never be satiated.
I said to myself, ‘This is the girl whose birds flew away.’ Her round face looked like this:
Her nose was like a fresh vegetable and by God, what eyes! A pharaonic neck with two taut
slender chords, only visible when she turned her head. And when she turned her head, I thought
all the women selling their mashed beans and salted sunflower seeds would flee, the whole street
would pick up and leave only ruts where they had been, the fetid stench of blood would abandon

8
the places where meat was sold. My thoughts fled to a future I longed for. And if you poured
water over the crown of her head, it would flow down past her forehead. She walked in waves, as
if her body were an auger spiralling through a cord of wood She approached me. I looked myself
over and straightened myself out. As she drew closer, I saw she was holding tight to a little girl
who resembled her in every way but with a child’s chubbiness. Their hands were woven together
as if they had been fashioned precisely in that manner, as if they were keeping each other from
straying. They both knit their eyebrows nonchalantly, such that their eyes flashed, seeming to
cleanse their faces from the famished stares of those around them.‘This is the girl whose birds
flew away,’ I said. I turned to her sister and said, ‘And this must be the talisman she’s brought to
steer her
away from evil. How quickly her calm flew from her palm.’ I stared at them until I realized how
loathsome I was in comparison. It was this that startled me, not them. I looked carefully at the
talisman. Her mouth was elegant and precise as if she never ate the stewed okra that was slowly
poisoning me. I glanced around and then I looked back at them, looked and looked – oh how I
looked! – until a bus idled up and abruptly saved the day. Although it was not their custom, the
people made way for the two unfamiliar women, and they just hopped aboard. Through the dust
kicked up by the competition around the door I found myself on the bus as well.
We lumbered forward. The man next to me was smoking and the man next to him
smelled as if he were stuffed with onions. If the day were not so fresh, and were it not for the girl
and her talisman and their aforementioned beauty, I would have gotten off that wretched bus
without a word of apology. After five minutes, the onionised man lowed to the driver: ‘This’s my
stop, buddy.’ He got off and slammed the door in a way that suggested the two of them had a
long and violent history.
The driver rubbed his right cheek as if the door had been slammed on him. He
grumbled to himself, ‘People without a shred of mercy.’ The onion man reeled back around and
threw a red eye at the driver. ‘What?’ he exploded. ‘What’d you say?’ ‘Get going, by God!’ I
yelled. ‘He wasn’t talking about you. ’As the bus pulled away, the unionised man’s insults and
curses blended with the whine of the motor. As if the driver wanted to torment us, he continued
the argument as a monologue, beginning, ‘People are animals...’ He blamed the matter on human
nature, such as it was, and railed and cursed until we hit a pothole in the main road. The bus
hopped up like a frog, croaking until he floored the gas and it bolted forward, roaring ‘Zamjara
zamjara’ like some wild animal. The cruel movements of the bus began to hurt my back. But
when I looked over at the girls, I figured they must have taken the shape of their seats, as they
did not seem to be in pain nor was their flesh being shaken from the bone. Finally we arrived.
They got off and I followed, unable to hear their footsteps over the sound of my own hooves,
audible to all. I nearly reached for my ears. Had they grown longer? I trailed behind them. This
was not the Sudanese way, and before I saw them, I would always walk alongside my fellow
pedestrians. Yet they seemed to be walking to the rhythm of my thoughts, so I said to myself, let
them walk ahead. The rhythm should lead the tune anyway. They walked in front, a music of
excessive beauty, and I walked behind, confused and off-beat. Then suddenly they spun round,
beautiful, their faces colored with an ornate rage. The older said, ‘What’s with you? Why’re you
following us?’
‘No, no, my cousin,’ I said, trying to loosen the strings of their fury. ‘I already have someone just

9
as beautiful as you. And anyways I am not the kind to chase after beauty in the
streets with a rifle. We’ve heard that a thousand times!’ she said. You don’t believe me. I was
trying to say that I already have a girl. I love her and she loves me and my camel loves her she-
camel.2 A thousand times I’ve come to her angry and left with a smile, as if she lived in some
sort of joy factory. This morning, I left so full of her that people catcalled me in the street.’
Instead of laughter, a pure melody slipped out of the throat of the girl whose birds flew
away. Then we fell silent. My mind turned to the memory of my beloved. What a devilish afreet
she was!3 So sure of herself, that girl, so confident. Once, when the summer was at its most
intense, she said to me as we were returning from a concert: ‘My grandmother was so beautiful
that Suror himself used to sing to her.’4‘Suror and the other singers were slowly crushed by the
Haqiba poets,’5I told her, ‘until they began to moan and cry and oscillate as if enchanted by the
melodic rounds and dirty words.’ ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘Their poets are like butchers
selling women by the pound. When a man goes down to the butcher’s shop, he hears a voice
singing and hollering “Breast! Breast! Cheek! Cheek!” So he rifles through the selection of
female parts, turning over those bits that please him while the voice draws his attention to the
beauty of those pieces he may have missed. He leaves after buying abreast with onion or a flank
garnished with arugula, and those who have guests would buy a whole rump.’ My love said,
‘Knock off that dirty talk and pull back your tongue. Have you forgotten that Khalil Farah6 was
one of the singers?’
She left me speechless. That must have been my daydreams returning because when I
looked around I could not find a trace of the girl whose birds flew away nor her sister.
I turned my senses into a tracking device. My ears became two microphones, my eyes
two cameras, my nose a chemlab and my tongue a newscast. The device worked perfectly,
unlike the products made in our factories these days. From there I monitored the situation like a
mouse following the movements of its age-old enemy in order to protect itself. But then the girl’s
radar picked me up. I quickened my step afraid she would insult me, but she ran behind me,
saying, ‘You’ve been tormenting me. What do you want?’ ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘except to see you.
To sing of you and dream of you! There’s no need for pain between us. There’s no doubt that it’s
a one-sided attraction, for I’m enamoured of one like you but I feel in front of her a certain...
inferiority.’ The girl laughed and scrutinized me, as if seeking to identify what it was that was
strange about me, and so I persisted: ‘Made of red blood, are you? And was your heart a single
rose struck by tragedy after tragedy until it folded back upon itself?’ She laughed again and my
heart felt the soothing snow of contentment and joy. ‘A poet?’ she asked. ‘So they say,’ I said,
adding: ‘Who told you?’ ‘We’ve heard,’ she said. ‘And who’s with you such that you address
yourself in the plural? Why, your face is light and your voice light and you a mirror suspended in
my tears illuminated, and so I cry.’ ‘Beautiful,’ she said dryly. ‘I had misunderstood you but now
the truth comes out. You know the young men these days, so inane and brazen.’ ‘But dig deep
and you’ll find precious metals not found on the surface,’ I said. ‘My friends are more numerous
than the ants and most of them understand and are understood.’ The girl whose birds flew away
skipped ahead out of joy. Her form wavered until she disappeared, the sweet ring of her bells still
in my ear. The image of her eyes remained in my mind, growing bright then dim then bright
again, her face still nourishing my memory with joy. Her birds flew away. Away. Away. And
just like that we became friends. For an entire month our meetings continued in the streets:

10
skipping, laughing, discussing – without reaching her true depths – and fearing she had only
touched my surface. And so, one Wednesday, I asked her: ‘Who is that little girl on your right?’
‘My sister,’ she said. ‘I need her when we’re walking in the markets. She protects me from the
evil of the cars.’ ‘A talisman?’ I asked. ‘What?’ she said. ‘Like a charm or a spell. She protects
you from envious eyes, no?’ Then I said to myself: But if death has already sunk its claws in, no
talisman will help. I stared in the faces of the two beautiful girls for a long moment. The younger
one shrunk away, her strength drained like an ox at the water wheel. No doubt her endless chores
had made her grow old before her years.
I got on board the bus with them again. The passengers’ eyes, like glass saws, flew over
the thighs and eyes and faces of the young girls. I turned. All around me, the passengers’ mouths
gaped like empty salt dishes. Their eyes had taken flight, leaving two holes in every face. My
glasses may have held back my eyes, but they could not hold back my innate curiosity and the
deep pleasure I took in statistics: On their bodies I counted a total of 99 round eyes. Strange, I
thought, to add up to an odd number, until I looked around and saw a man with only one eye.
I returned home angry and rummaged through my papers until I found what I had been looking
for. I resolved to return immediately. It was already midday. The sun was wide awake and I was
furious. I found the bus door flung open like a gaping maw and entered. It was like Noah’s Ark
inside. Every face imaginable. All kinds of peoples. Once seated, it was easy to slip into
distracted daydreaming. I sat down and released my strong-hooved stallions from their stables to
gallivant through the fields of my imagination and fantasy. It was as if I had lost my voice. As if
it had evaporated. My worries barked and yapped at me but neither my own two eyes nor anyone
else’s woke me. I was the son of the heaping portion, the steaming dinner plate, but they filled
me with despair instead of millet and milk.7In return, I filled others with joy, for my fate was
miserable while theirs was better (and good for them!). It was as if I had been created to ensure
their survival and they survive to torment me. And yes, I am the comatose son of sleep, the son
of long anticipation and unfulfilled promises. A beloved I have in memory and longing only.
Someone like me only hopes for someone like her. And someone like her would never be
satisfied with someone like me. So who am I like? You cow, I said to myself, you beast. Man
stuffed with disease, with bacteria, with transformations and shake-ups, with ascents and long,
tumbling falls. Women searching for happiness clamour around him only to find suffering under
the whip. Those searching for a friend he treats as an enemy; and around him gather those
women whose birds have flown away – and yet, there is nothing around which he clamours. And
despite all of this, he claims that he is one who understands, who is aware, who has chosen to
pick a fight and rebel.
I returned to my state of despair to find myself still on the damn bus, the people around
me butting heads and locking horns, the men refusing to relinquish their seats to the women, the
women not sparing the men a single curse from the dictionary. I needed to get off before
Bagheeti Station and when I did, I saw before me a train of humanity propelled by curiosity
towards the hospital. My own curiosity was no less than theirs but perhaps I was more arrogant. I
rode the wave of the crowd after I had exhausted every expression and exclamation of surprise.
‘What’s going on?’ I yelled, but my question was lost in the din of similar questions.
Several interpretations came to me, each independent of the next, pulling together certain details
and disregarding others. The responses of onlookers did nothing but catapult me forward, toward

11
the source of my curiosity. I was swept away by the crush of the people around the vortex, closer
and closer until
I screamed –‘Blood!’ It was as if a razor had cut the light from my eyes. As if I had died.
A bloodbath. A bath whose dye was blood and impact. The talisman stained with blood and
terror. And the blood of two girls just like them – the dye of henna. Blood on their hands like
murderers, and on their legs like the murdered, and elsewhere, everywhere, such that you could
not tell from where it was seeping. I said out loud: ‘Must’ve been a traffic accident, no doubt.’
‘No way,’ yelled an agitated man with a rounded face. ‘What, then?’ I asked myself. I turned
with the rest of the gaping onlookers to a calm-voiced boy. ‘They were on the beach,’ he said.
‘Twisted just like that and unconscious. A heavyset man found them and went to the police
station.’ ‘It was a traffic accident!’ I screamed. My neighbour, who happened to be among the
crowd, turned to me. ‘Have you gone mad?’ he demanded. ‘A traffic accident on the beach?
What the hell does that mean? A boat collided with them? Or perhaps a fish jumped from the
water and smacked into them?’
A traffic accident, no doubt, I said to myself. Then I turned towards the wide avenue,
calling out in a laughing scream, a sobbing, playful sermon: ‘No, no, no. No! Her birds flew
away!
Her birds flew away! Her birds flew... flew... flew…’
Some of the passersby glanced at me, shaking their heads, and then, certain I was mad,
they turned away. ‘Flew... flew... flew’ A man stopped his car. His jugular bulged with laughter
as he asked me, ‘What flew off?’ ‘Her birds…’ I replied. The driver laughed until the tarmac
shook and the car stalled and emitted a cloud of fumes. He restarted the engine and disappeared.
Flew... flew... flew... Could it be? It must be that some force took them to that place.
Some sort of deception, some trickery. Did I not see the terror and fear on their faces? The terror
of the talisman and the shock of the girl whose birds flew away? No... she landed... landed...
landed.
Around me a crowd had gathered. They were all staring at me as if I were responsible for
the accident. I nearly screamed at them: ‘They flew away! She flew away!’ But the tarmac
spread
before me and so I began to walk. And walk and walk. That terrible day! I did not reach the
wellspring of my dreams, nor my house. The river was closer and the eyes of the lovers there
more
reassuring. So I decided to go there, perhaps to cleanse myself or lay my head in the darkness of
their pupils and sleep in their solid whiteness. He filled my void and arose from sleep to fight
what
had been ordained for me. As long as the innocent birds were struck with stones and selfish
desires, they would continue to land in such ugly places against their will, in patches full of
violence and hate.

12
 I AM NOT MY SKIN
By: Neema Komba
12 January 2017
What is a one-arm Zeruzeru doing at a security guard interview? I could sense their
disbelief but I didn’t let their gaze deter me. I had travelled far for this job. I needed it.

I’d put on my best outfit – a dark blue polo shirt tucked in my combat-green cadet
trousers. I adjusted my sun hat and waited in line.

‘Yona Kazadi,’ the receptionist called.

My heart was thumping but with my head held high, I walked into the interview room.
Two men sat beside a woman behind a large wooden table. They had stacks of paper in front of
them. I held out my hand to greet them. The woman asked me to sit. I took off my sunglasses
and sun hat, and sat on the wooden chair in front of them. The room was quiet except for the
buzz of the ceiling fan, as its blades sliced through the heat of the room.

Dressed in a yellow hijab and a dark blue long sleeved dress, the woman introduced
herself as Miriam, the human resources manager. The men were superintendents. From the way
they looked at me, I knew they wanted to know just one thing: what in the hell made me – a man
with a missing arm – want to be a security guard?

‘Tell us about yourself,’ the woman said.

And so, I sat before them and told them.

It was the dead of the night, I said. I lay awake on my thin sponge Dodoma mattress
listening to the sound of rats running on the plywood above me. I tried to force myself to sleep. I
had been having trouble sleeping since Baba Joseph told me it was time to move out of the home.
I was almost 18, he explained – an adult in the eyes of the law, and old enough to survive the
streets. But I wasn’t ready; I didn’t know what I would do to survive in Serema – a town seething
with hate for people of my kind.

The faint squeak of the rusting hinges of our front gate broke into my thoughts. It might
have been my mind playing tricks. It’s hard not to be paranoid when you’ve been hunted all your
life. I heard footsteps outside my window. I held my breath and forced myself to lay still. Sweat

13
ran down my brow, and my mind began to churn with images of the massacre of the thirty
children asleep in the rooms of this asylum – and me, Yona Kazadi, unable to protect them.

I tried to pray but God has always been elusive to me, even though my grandmother and
Baba Joseph, our guardian, insisted he was real.

From infancy, I was called a child of the devil. They said my mother slept with Shetani,
which is why my skin and eyes are pale, and my hair the colour of maize. People pointed when I
passed and called me Zeruzeru. They spat into their clothing whenever they were close, to
protect themselves from the evil they thought I carried. They feared my blinking eyes, and the
wobbling of my head.

But that night I clutched the rosary beads my grandmother gave me, and said, ‘God, if
you exist, if you hear me, protect us.’

It felt like a defeat – an acceptance of my own weakness – but I wanted to believe that
someone out there was more powerful than the evil in the hearts of men. Where was God all
these years we have been ridiculed and killed? Where was his power when machetes chopped off
our limbs? And when he created us, did he run out of melanin?

The abduction and killings had started with people calling albinos dili. Witch doctors had
told them that potions made with albino bones could make them rich, and the younger
the zeruzeru, the more potent the potion.

I was living with Bibi Ghasia, my grandmother, in Siwanda when the rumour started.
Siwanda was a village on the plains, with a handful of trees and red mud huts with thatched grass
roofs. The red plains rolled all the way into the clouds.

We lived on one of the hills, kept chickens, grew cassava and cultivated millet on a small
patch of land in front of our house. Abandoned pits of old gold mines pockmarked the bare
valley beneath us. In the distance, we could see the shiny aluminium roofs of Victoria Gold – the
Mzungu’s mine. People weren’t allowed near it but, occasionally, locals broke in to steal gold.

I’d just started primary school when news of albino abductions became commonplace.
The prime minister begged people to stop the killings, but that didn’t help.

14
 My school was 5 kilometres from our house on the other side of the valley, where the
Christian mission and the church were. With a khanga draped over my head to protect me from
the sun, my grandmother walked me to school every morning. She was old but strong, and was
never without her panga – a machete secured to her waist by a tight khanga. She wore a red
rosary on her neck. I always felt safe with her. People feared her; they called her a witch. But
Bibi told me to ignore them. One day they will get tired of their own ignorance.

It wasn’t long before the superstition about albinos reached Siwanda. Impoverished
miners began seeking our bones.

My grandmother and I were walking to school one morning when two miners wielding
machetes launched themselves at us from a fence. I can still hear the scream from my
grandmother when they caught me. I remember her charging with her panga, and trying to drag
me from their hands. I remember the crack of bones as a blunt panga shredded my flesh. I
remember the blood, the sharp dizzying pain, and my grandmother’s shivering body against mine.
I remember the silence from her God.

A worker from the mission found me later – my grandmother had died protecting me.
They said it was a miracle I was alive. My forearm was barely attached to my elbow. They
brought me to Lubondo hospital where, they said, it had to be amputated. I was later taken to
Kivulini asylum.

Kivulini means ‘under the shade’. I was nine years old when they took me to live there. It
was in the outskirts of Serema. A red-bricked wall topped with broken glass enclosed a half-acre
compound, which consisted of a large dormitory for children, a few classrooms, a chicken hut, a
pigsty, and a small vegetable garden. Baba Joseph opened the doors to this place in 2007, after
his wife and son had been murdered by a gang of men. He doesn’t talk about what happened, but
I’d seen the story in the newspaper. We all have similar stories: fugitives running from human
poachers – some even from their own parents.

I got up from my mattress; I couldn’t just lay there and wait for something to happen.

‘Courage is not the absence of fear, my children,’ Baba Joseph told us. ‘I know you are
afraid, but you must learn to live even when you are afraid.’

15
 I tiptoed to the corner of the room and grabbed a spear from the stash of weapons I kept
there. A machete would make me more like them, and I refused to be like them. I tiptoed to the
door, and with a shaking hand, I turned the key of the Solex padlock. The door opened into the
room where all the boys slept. The girls’ dormitory was on the other side of the wall, but they
left and entered through a different door. Sophia, the only other adult, took care of the girls and
helped in the kitchen.

I thought about alerting the children and Baba Joseph – whose house was just beyond the
walls of the asylum – by blowing the whistle that I kept around my neck. But I decided that this
was my chance to prove that I was man enough to stand on my own. I sneaked my way to the
guard’s post – a thatched gazebo near the metal gate. Saimoni, our watchman, wasn’t there. The
gate was slightly open, and the padlock and key were hanging on the open latch. He’d clearly let
the intruder in.

My heart was somersaulting with fear, but I resolved that I wasn’t the one dying that
night. I eased the gate close, put the latch and padlock in place, and stashed the key in my pocket.
Then I began tiptoeing around the house.

There was no one in sight. The bright moonlight cast thick shadows of the trees on the
ground.

I went around the children’s classrooms. They were all locked. I looked in the chicken
hut and the piggery, but the animals looked undisturbed. There was no one at the garbage pit, or
in the vegetable garden. The only place left was the graveyard.

A little girl, Lina, had died of malaria a week before. We had buried her bondeni on the
south side of the compound, behind the chicken hut under the big mkungu tree. The poachers
exhumed our dead too, and took away their body parts. Lina’s mother had brought her to the
asylum when she was two months old. She was among the few children that had all their limbs
intact. The asylum kept her safe from people outside but it couldn’t protect her from the
mosquitoes.

At the burial, her mother had cried inconsolably at the loss of her child. I doubted her
sincerity. She, like my mother, had abandoned her offspring. In the four years Lina had lived
with us, the woman had never once visited. It was Sophia who had bathed her when she was sick,

16
and tried to nurse her back to health. It was Sophia, who – despite the risks – had taken the child
to the Serema hospital and stayed with her until she took her last breath.

The other children had cried for Lina. Some were too young to understand death; some
had mourned briefly and moved on with life. I felt sad for Lina but also relieved that she had
died a normal death. I hoped for that kind of death myself – the kind that doesn’t befall me
because of my skin.

The thought of Saimoni and the intruder digging up Lina’s body made my stomach churn.

The intruder was a woman. She was swaying as if rocking a child to sleep while Saimoni
dug. Their backs were turned to me. I could hear the woman sobbing softly, and the sound of her
whimpering enraged me. I couldn’t decide who to kill first – our gatekeeper, or the woman.

I stood there for what felt like an eternity until I couldn’t bear it anymore. I took aim, and
launched the spear. It struck Saimoni in the back, glanced off his body and hit the ground. He
screamed, dropped the shovel and fell writhing. The woman offered him no help. She simply
remained where she was, sobbing while holding on to something wrapped in a khanga.

I had imagined a different reaction – perhaps guilt, or shame; even rage. But the
gatekeeper, struggling to get back on his feet, looked shocked and terrified. The woman simply
stared. I retrieved the blood-stained weapon and aimed it again at Saimoni. But I couldn’t kill
him. I sprinted towards the house blowing on the whistle.

Children ran about the dorm crying. Many had been attacked before, so the old demons
came back. I ordered them to assemble in the dining room. Sophia and the older girls watched
over them while the boys gathered weapons and stood guard at the door. Baba Joseph came
running with some neighbours. He carried a rifle in his hands. I let them in and locked the gate
again.

Breathless, I told them about Saimoni and the woman. Baba Joseph phoned the police.

We found the two at the same spot. Saimoni was on his knees, his face twisted in pain.
‘Please don’t kill us; I can explain,’ he cried.

Baba Joseph stood back, rifle at the ready, and let him talk.

17
 The woman had walked 20 kilometres from Kanzera to the asylum with the body of her
three-week-old son, he told us. It was election season, and baby parts were in high demand. Her
husband had wanted to sell the corpse. The midwife had told her about Kivulini, and so she took
her child and left at nightfall. He was only helping her.

When the police arrived, they buried the child, took Saimoni to the hospital, and left to
arrest the husband and the witch doctor.

It was almost 4 in the morning when we put the children back to bed. After they’d all
gone back to sleep, I sat at the guard post and watched the sunrise. Though the sun is my enemy,
dawn always holds a promise of better things to come. Perhaps Baba Joseph was right. Perhaps it
was time for me to step beyond the safety of these walls.

I’d heard of a man who travelled around villages asking people to touch his skin.

‘I am human,’ he told them. ‘What wealth could there be in my limbs if I am poor myself?
I carry no evil. I carry no magic. I blink because of the brightness of the sun. I am not my skin.’

Maybe that is what it meant to be brave – to look your enemy in the eye, let them see the
human in you.

In the morning, I told Baba Joseph I was going to Dar – the city where anything is
possible. He said I’d be safe with his relative in Mbagala.

In the bus, I sat beside a Masai man who worked as a security guard. He told me there
were plenty of security jobs in the city. I applied. Now here I am.

After the interview, I went to the bus station to board a daladala to Mbagala. It was
buzzing with people and vehicles. I found myself in the middle of the crush. No one looked at
me; no one cared about my arm, or my skin. There was something magical about being ignored,
something extraordinary about being ordinary. And there, in a bus full of strangers, I felt for the
first, time, human.*

It was a long month until Sekei Security called me back. They had decided to give me a
chance. I told them that a chance is all anyone could ask for.

Edited by Jacob Ross

18
 “Sweat”
By: Zora Neale Hurston
It was eleven o’clock of a Spring night in Florida. It was Sunday. Any other night, Delia Jones
would have been in bed for two hours by this time. But she was a wash-woman, and Monday morning
meant a great deal to her. So she collected the soiled clothes on Saturday when she returned the clean
things. Sunday night after church, she sorted them and put the white things to soak. It saved her almost a
half day’s start. A great hamper in the bedroom held the clothes that she brought home. It was so much
neater than a number of bundles lying around.
She squatted in the kitchen floor beside the great pile of clothes, sorting them into small heaps
according to color, and humming a song in a mournful key, but wondering through it all where Sykes, her
husband, had gone with her horse and buckboard.
Just then something long, round, limp and black fell upon her shoulders and slithered to the floor
beside her. A great terror took hold of her. It softened her knees and dried her mouth so that it was a full
minute before she could cry out or move. Then she saw that it was the big bull whip her husband liked to
carry when he drove.
She lifted her eyes to the door and saw him standing there bent over with laughter at her fright.
She screamed at him.
“Sykes, what you throw dat whip on me like dat? You know it would skeer me–looks just like a
snake, an’ you knows how skeered Ah is of snakes.”
“Course Ah knowed it! That’s how come Ah done it.” He slapped his leg with his hand and
almost rolled on the ground in his mirth. “If you such a big fool dat you got to have a fit over a earth
worm or a string, Ah don’t keer how bad Ah skeer you.”
“You aint got no business doing it. Gawd knows it’s a sin. Some day Ah’m goin’ tuh drop dead
from some of yo’ foolishness. ‘Nother thing, where you been wid mah rig? Ah feeds dat pony. He aint fuh
you to be drivin’ wid no bull whip.”
“You sho is one aggravatin’ nigger woman!” he declared and stepped into the room. She resumed
her work and did not answer him at once. “Ah done tole you time and again to keep them white folks’
clothes outa dis house.”
He picked up the whip and glared down at her. Delia went on with her work. She went out into
the yard and returned with a galvanized tub and set it on the washbench. She saw that Sykes had kicked
all of the clothes together again, and now stood in her way truculently, his whole manner hoping, praying,
for an argument. But she walked calmly around him and commenced to re-sort the things.
“Next time, Ah’m gointer kick ’em outdoors,” he threatened as he struck a match along the leg of
his corduroy breeches.
Delia never looked up from her work, and her thin, stooped shoulders sagged further.
“Ah aint for no fuss t’night Sykes. Ah just come from taking sacrament at the church house.”
He snorted scornfully. “Yeah, you just come from de church house on a Sunday night, but heah
you is gone to work on them clothes. You ain’t nothing but a hypocrite. One of them amen-corner
Christians–sing, whoop, and shout, then come home and wash white folks clothes on the Sabbath.”

19
 He stepped roughly upon the whitest pile of things, kicking them helter-skelter as he crossed the
room. His wife gave a little scream of dismay, and quickly gathered them together again.
“Sykes, you quit grindin’ dirt into these clothes! How can Ah git through by Sat’day if Ah don’t
start on Sunday?”
“Ah don’t keer if you never git through. Anyhow, Ah done promised Gawd and a couple of other
men, Ah aint gointer have it in mah house. Don’t gimme no lip neither, else Ah’ll throw ’em out and put
mah fist up side yo’ head to boot.”
Delia’s habitual meekness seemed to slip from her shoulders like a blown scarf. She was on her
feet; her poor little body, her bare knuckly hands bravely defying the strapping hulk before her.
“Looka heah, Sykes, you done gone too fur. Ah been married to you fur fifteen years, and Ah
been takin’ in washin’ for fifteen years. Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and
sweat!”
“What’s that got to do with me?” he asked brutally.
“What’s it got to do with you, Sykes? Mah tub of suds is filled yo’ belly with vittles more times
than yo’ hands is filled it. Mah sweat is done paid for this house and Ah reckon Ah kin keep on sweatin’
in it.”
She seized the iron skillet from the stove and struck a defensive pose, which act surprised him
greatly, coming from her. It cowed him and he did not strike her as he usually did.
“Naw you won’t,” she panted, “that ole snaggle-toothed black woman you runnin’ with aint
comin’ heah to pile up on mah sweat and blood. You aint paid for nothin’ on this place, and Ah’m gointer
stay right heah till Ah’m toted out foot foremost.”
“Well, you better quit gittin’ me riled up, else they’ll be totin’ you out sooner than you expect.
Ah’m so tired of you Ah don’t know whut to do. Gawd! how Ah hates skinny wimmen!”
A little awed by this new Delia, he sidled out of the door and slammed the back gate after him.
He did not say where he had gone, but she knew too well. She knew very well that he would not return
until nearly daybreak also. Her work over, she went on to bed but not to sleep at once. Things had come
to a pretty pass!
She lay awake, gazing upon the debris that cluttered their matrimonial trail. Not an image left
standing along the way. Anything like flowers had long ago been drowned in the salty stream that had
been pressed from her heart. Her tears, her sweat, her blood. She had brought love to the union and he had
brought a longing after the flesh. Two months after the wedding, he had given her the first brutal beating.
She had the memory of his numerous trips to Orlando with all of his wages when he had returned to her
penniless, even before the first year had passed. She was young and soft then, but now she thought of her
knotty, muscled limbs, her harsh knuckly hands, and drew herself up into an unhappy little ball in the
middle of the big feather bed. Too late now to hope for love, even if it were not Bertha it would be
someone else. This case differed from the others only in that she was bolder than the others. Too late for
everything except her little home. She had built it for her old days, and planted one by one the trees and
flowers there. It was lovely to her, lovely.
Somehow, before sleep came, she found herself saying aloud: “Oh well, whatever goes over the
Devil’s back, is got to come under his belly. Sometime or ruther, Sykes, like everybody else, is gointer

20
reap his sowing.” After that she was able to build a spiritual earthworks against her husband. His shells
could no longer reach her. Amen. She went to sleep and slept until he announced his presence in bed by
kicking her feet and rudely snatching the covers away.
“Gimme some kivah heah, an’ git yo’ damn foots over on yo’ own side! Ah oughter mash you in
yo’ mouf fuh drawing dat skillet on me.”
Delia went clear to the rail without answering him. A triumphant indifference to all that he was or
did.
The week was as full of work for Delia as all other weeks, and Saturday found her behind her
little pony, collecting and delivering clothes.
It was a hot, hot day near the end of July. The village men on Joe Clarke’s porch even chewed
cane listlessly. They did not hurl the cane-knots as usual. They let them dribble over the edge of the porch.
Even conversation had collapsed under the heat.
“Heah come Delia Jones,” Jim Merchant said, as the shaggy pony came ’round the bend of the
road toward them. The rusty buckboard was heaped with baskets of crisp, clean laundry.
“Yep,” Joe Lindsay agreed. “Hot or col’, rain or shine, jes ez reg’lar ez de weeks roll roun’ Delia
carries ’em an’ fetches ’em on Sat’day.”
“She better if she wanter eat,” said Moss. “Syke Jones aint wuth de shot an’ powder hit would tek
tuh kill ’em. Not to huh he aint. ”
“He sho’ aint,” Walter Thomas chimed in. “It’s too bad, too, cause she wuz a right pritty lil trick
when he got huh. Ah’d uh mah’ied huh mahseff if he hadnter beat me to it.”
Delia nodded briefly at the men as she drove past.
“Too much knockin’ will ruin any ‘oman. He done beat huh ‘nough tuh kill three women, let
‘lone change they looks,” said Elijah Moseley. “How Syke kin stommuck dat big black greasy Mogul
he’s layin’ roun wid, gits me. Ah swear dat eight-rock couldn’t kiss a sardine can Ah done throwed out de
back do’ ‘way las’ yeah.”
“Aw, she’s fat, thass how come. He’s allus been crazy ’bout fat women,” put in Merchant. “He’d
a’ been tied up wid one long time ago if he could a’ found one tuh have him. Did Ah tell yuh ’bout him
come sidlin’ roun’ mah wife–bringin’ her a basket uh pecans outa his yard fuh a present? Yessir, mah
wife! She tol’ him tuh take ’em right straight back home, cause Delia works so hard ovah dat washtub she
reckon everything on de place taste lak sweat an’ soapsuds. Ah jus’ wisht Ah’d a’ caught ‘im ‘dere! Ah’d
a’ made his hips ketch on fiah down dat shell road.”
“Ah know he done it, too. Ah sees ‘im grinnin’ at every ‘oman dat passes,” Walter Thomas said.
“But even so, he useter eat some mighty big hunks uh humble pie tuh git dat lil ‘oman he got. She wuz ez
pritty ez a speckled pup! Dat wuz fifteen yeahs ago. He useter be so skeered uh losin’ huh, she could
make him do some parts of a husband’s duty. Dey never wuz de same in de mind.”
“There oughter be a law about him,” said Lindsay. “He aint fit tuh carry guts tuh a bear.”
Clarke spoke for the first time. “Taint no law on earth dat kin make a man be decent if it aint in
‘im. There’s plenty men dat takes a wife lak dey do a joint uh sugar-cane. It’s round, juicy an’ sweet
when dey gits it. But dey squeeze an’ grind, squeeze an’ grind an’ wring tell dey wring every drop uh

21
pleasure dat’s in ’em out. When dey’s satisfied dat dey is wrung dry, dey treats ’em jes lak dey do a cane-
chew. Dey throws em away. Dey knows whut dey is doin’ while dey is at it, an’ hates theirselves fuh it
but they keeps on hangin’ after huh tell she’s empty. Den dey hates huh fuh bein’ a cane-chew an’ in de
way.”
“We oughter take Syke an’ dat stray ‘oman uh his’n down in Lake Howell swamp an’ lay on de
rawhide till they cain’t say Lawd a’ mussy.’ He allus wuz uh ovahbearin’ niggah, but since dat white
‘oman from up north done teached ‘im how to run a automobile, he done got too biggety to live–an’ we
oughter kill ‘im,” Old Man Anderson advised.
A grunt of approval went around the porch. But the heat was melting their civic virtue, and Elijah
Moseley began to bait Joe Clarke.
“Come on, Joe, git a melon outa dere an’ slice it up for yo’ customers. We’se all sufferin’ wid de
heat. De bear’s done got me!”
“Thass right, Joe, a watermelon is jes’ whut Ah needs tuh cure de eppizudicks,” Walter Thomas
joined forces with Moseley. “Come on dere, Joe. We all is steady customers an’ you aint set us up in a
long time. Ah chooses dat long, bowlegged Floridy favorite.”
“A god, an’ be dough. You all gimme twenty cents and slice way,” Clarke retorted. “Ah needs a
col’ slice m’self. Heah, everybody chip in. Ah’ll lend y’ll mah meat knife.”
The money was quickly subscribed and the huge melon brought forth. At that moment, Sykes and
Bertha arrived. A determined silence fell on the porch and the melon was put away again.
Merchant snapped down the blade of his jackknife and moved toward the store door.
“Come on in, Joe, an’ gimme a slab uh sow belly an’ uh pound uh coffee–almost fuhgot ’twas
Sat’day. Got to git on home.” Most of the men left also.
Just then Delia drove past on her way home, as Sykes was ordering magnificently for Bertha. It
pleased him for Delia to see.
“Git whutsoever yo’ heart desires, Honey. Wait a minute, Joe. Give huh two bottles uh strawberry
soda-water, uh quart uh parched ground-peas, an’ a block uh chewin’ gum.”
With all this they left the store, with Sykes reminding Bertha that this was his town and she could
have it if she wanted it.
The men returned soon after they left, and held their watermelon feast.
“Where did Syke Jones git da ‘oman from nohow?” Lindsay asked.
“Ovah Apopka. Guess dey musta been cleanin’ out de town when she lef’. She don’t look lak a
thing but a hunk uh liver wid hair on it.”
“Well, she sho’ kin squall,” Dave Carter contributed. “When she gits ready tuh laff, she jes’
opens huh mouf an’ latches it back tuh de las’ notch. No ole grandpa alligator down in Lake Bell ain’t got
nothin’ on huh.”
Bertha had been in town three months now. Sykes was still paying her room rent at Della Lewis’–
the only house in town that would have taken her in. Sykes took her frequently to Winter Park to
“stomps.” He still assured her that he was the swellest man in the state.

22
 “Sho’ you kin have dat lil’ ole house soon’s Ah kin git dat ‘oman outa dere. Everything b’longs
tuh me an’ you sho’ kin have it. Ah sho’ ‘bominates uh skinny ‘oman. Lawdy, you sho’ is got one portly
shape on you! You kin git anything you wants. Dis is mah town an’ you sho’ kin have it.”
Delia’s work-worn knees crawled over the earth in Gethsemane and up the rocks of Calvary
many, many times during these months. She avoided the villagers and meeting places in her efforts to be
blind and deaf. But Bertha nullified this to a degree, by coming to Delia’s house to call Sykes out to her at
the gate.
Delia and Sykes fought all the time now with no peaceful interludes. They slept and ate in silence.
Two or three times Delia had attempted a timid friendliness, but she was repulsed each time. It was plain
that the breaches must remain agape.
The sun had burned July to August. The heat streamed down like a million hot arrows, smiting all
things living upon the earth. Grass withered, leaves browned, snakes went blind in shedding and men and
dogs went mad. Dog days!
Delia came home one day and found Sykes there before her. She wondered, but started to go on
into the house without speaking, even though he was standing in the kitchen door and she must either
stoop under his arm or ask him to move. He made no room for her. She noticed a soap box beside the
steps, but paid no particular attention to it, knowing that he must have brought it there. As she was
stooping to pass under his outstretched arm, he suddenly pushed her backward, laughingly.
“Look in de box dere Delia, Ah done brung yuh somethin’!”
She nearly fell upon the box in her stumbling, and when she saw what it held, she all but fainted
outright.
“Syke! Syke, mah Gawd! You take dat rattlesnake ‘way from heah! You gottuh. Oh, Jesus, have
mussy!”
“Ah aint gut tuh do nuthin’ uh de kin’–fact is Ah aint got tuh do nothin’ but die. Taint no use uh
you puttin’ on airs makin’ out lak you skeered uh dat snake–he’s gointer stay right heah tell he die. He
wouldn’t bite me cause Ah knows how tuh handle ‘im. Nohow he wouldn’t risk breakin’ out his fangs
‘gin yo’ skinny laigs.”
“Naw, now Syke, don’t keep dat thing ‘roun’ heah tuh skeer me tuh death. You knows Ah’m
even feared uh earth worms. Thass de biggest snake Ah evah did see. Kill ‘im Syke, please.”
“Doan ast me tuh do nothin’ fuh yuh. Goin’ roun’ trying’ tuh be so damn asterperious. Naw, Ah
aint gonna kill it. Ah think uh damn sight mo’ uh him dan you! Dat’s a nice snake an’ anybody doan lak
‘im kin jes’ hit de grit.”
The village soon heard that Sykes had the snake, and came to see and ask questions.
“How de hen-fire did you ketch dat six-foot rattler, Syke?” Thomas asked.
“He’s full uh frogs so he caint hardly move, thass how. Ah eased up on ‘m. But Ah’m a snake
charmer an’ knows how tuh handle ’em. Shux, dat aint nothin’. Ah could ketch one eve’y day if Ah so
wanted tuh.”
“Whut he needs is a heavy hick’ry club leaned real heavy on his head. Dat’s de bes ‘way tuh
charm a rattlesnake.”

23
 “Naw, Walt, y’ll jes’ don’t understand dese diamon’ backs lak Ah do,” said Sykes in a superior
tone of voice.
The village agreed with Walter, but the snake stayed on. His box remained by the kitchen door
with its screen wire covering. Two or three days later it had digested its meal of frogs and literally came
to life. It rattled at every movement in the kitchen or the yard. One day as Delia came down the kitchen
steps she saw his chalky-white fangs curved like scimitars hung in the wire meshes. This time she did not
run away with averted eyes as usual. She stood for a long time in the doorway in a red fury that grew
bloodier for every second that she regarded the creature that was her torment.
That night she broached the subject as soon as Sykes sat down to the table.
“Syke, Ah wants you tuh take dat snake ‘way fum heah. You done starved me an’ Ah put up
widcher, you done beat me an Ah took dat, but you done kilt all mah insides bringin’ dat varmint heah.”
Sykes poured out a saucer full of coffee and drank it deliberately before he answered her.
“A whole lot Ah keer ’bout how you feels inside uh out. Dat snake aint goin’ no damn wheah till
Ah gits ready fuh ‘im tuh go. So fur as beatin’ is concerned, yuh aint took near all dat you gointer take ef
yuh stay ‘roun’ me.”
Delia pushed back her plate and got up from the table. “Ah hates you, Sykes,” she said calmly.
“Ah hates you tuh de same degree dat Ah useter love yuh. Ah done took an’ took till mah belly is full up
tuh mah neck. Dat’s de reason Ah got mah letter fum de church an’ moved mah membership tuh
Woodbridge–so Ah don’t haf tuh take no sacrament wid yuh. Ah don’t wantuh see yuh ‘roun’ me atall.
Lay ‘roun’ wid dat ‘oman all yuh wants tuh, but gwan ‘way fum me an’ mah house. Ah hates yuh lak uh
suck-egg dog.”
Sykes almost let the huge wad of corn bread and collard greens he was chewing fall out of his
mouth in amazement. He had a hard time whipping himself up to the proper fury to try to answer Delia.
“Well, Ah’m glad you does hate me. Ah’m sho’ tiahed uh you hangin’ ontuh me. Ah don’t want
yuh. Look at yuh stringey ole neck! Yo’ rawbony laigs an’ arms is enough tuh cut uh man tuh death. You
looks jes’ lak de devvul’s doll-baby tuh me. You cain’t hate me no worse dan Ah hates you. Ah been
hatin’ you fuh years.”
“Yo’ ole black hide don’t look lak nothin’ tuh me, but uh passle uh wrinkled up rubber, wid yo’
big ole yeahs flappin’ on each side lak uh paih uh buzzard wings. Don’t think Ah’m gointuh be run ‘way
fum mah house neither. Ah’m goin’ tuh de white folks bout you, mah young man, de very nex’ time you
lay yo’ han’s on me. Mah cup is done run ovah.” Delia said this with no signs of fear and Sykes departed
from the house, threatening her, but made not the slightest move to carry out any of them.
That night he did not return at all, and the next day being Sunday, Delia was glad she did not have
to quarrel before she hitched up her pony and drove the four miles to Woodbridge.
She stayed to the night service–“love feast”–which was very warm and full of spirit. In the
emotional winds her domestic trials were borne far and wide so that she sang as she drove homeward.
“Jurden water, black an’ col’
Chills de body, not de soul
An’ Ah wantah cross Jurden in uh calm time.”

24
 She came from the barn to the kitchen door and stopped.
“Whut’s de mattah, ol’ satan, you aint kickin’ up yo’ racket?” She addressed the snake’s box.
Complete silence. She went on into the house with a new hope in its birth struggles. Perhaps her threat to
go to the white folks had frightened Sykes! Perhaps he was sorry! Fifteen years of misery and suppression
had brought Delia to the place where she would hope anything that looked towards a way over or through
her wall of inhibitions.
She felt in the match safe behind the stove at once for a match. There was only one there.
“Dat niggah wouldn’t fetch nothin’ heah tuh save his rotten neck, but he kin run thew whut Ah
brings quick enough. Now he done toted off nigh on tuh haff uh box uh matches. He done had dat ‘oman
heah in mah house, too.”
Nobody but a woman could tell how she knew this even before she struck the match. But she did
and it put her into a new fury.
Presently she brought in the tubs to put the white things to soak. This time she decided she need
not bring the hamper out of the bedroom; she would go in there and do the sorting. She picked up the pot-
bellied lamp and went in. The room was small and the hamper stood hard by the foot of the white iron bed.
She could sit and reach through the bedposts–resting as she worked.
“Ah wantah cross Jurden in uh calm time,” she was singing again. The mood of the “love feast”
had returned. She threw back the lid of the basket almost gaily. Then, moved by both horror and terror,
she sprang back toward the door. There lay the snake in the basket! He moved sluggishly at first, but even
as she turned round and round, jumped up and down in an insanity of fear, he began to stir vigorously.
She saw him pouring his awful beauty from the basket upon the bed, then she seized the lamp and ran as
fast as she could to the kitchen. The wind from the open door blew out the light and the darkness added to
her terror. She sped to the darkness of the yard, slamming the door after her before she thought to set
down the lamp. She did not feel safe even on the ground, so she climbed up in the hay barn.
There for an hour or more she lay sprawled upon the hay a gibbering wreck.
Finally, she grew quiet, and after that, coherent thought. With this, stalked through her a cold,
bloody rage. Hours of this. A period of introspection, a space of retrospection, then a mixture of both. Out
of this an awful calm.
“Well, Ah done de bes’ Ah could. If things aint right, Gawd knows taint mah fault.”
She went to sleep–a twitch sleep–and woke up to a faint gray sky. There was a loud hollow sound
below. She peered out. Sykes was at the wood-pile, demolishing a wire-covered box.
He hurried to the kitchen door, but hung outside there some minutes before he entered, and stood
some minutes more inside before he closed it after him.
The gray in the sky was spreading. Delia descended without fear now, and crouched beneath the
low bedroom window. The drawn shade shut out the dawn, shut in the night. But the thin walls held back
no sound.
“Dat ol’ scratch is woke up now!” She mused at the tremendous whirr inside, which every
woodsman knows, is one of the sound illusions. The rattler is a ventriloquist. His whirr sounds to the right,
to the left, straight ahead, behind, close under foot–everywhere but where it is. Woe to him who guesses

25
wrong unless he is prepared to hold up his end of the argument! Sometimes he strikes without rattling at
all.
Inside, Sykes heard nothing until he knocked a pot lid off the stove while trying to reach the
match safe in the dark. He had emptied his pockets at Bertha’s.
The snake seemed to wake up under the stove and Sykes made a quick leap into the bedroom. In
spite of the gin he had had, his head was clearing now.
“‘Mah Gawd!” he chattered, “ef Ah could on’y strack uh light!”
The rattling ceased for a moment as he stood paralyzed. He waited. It seemed that the snake
waited also.
“Oh, fuh de light! Ah thought he’d be too sick”–Sykes was muttering to himself when the whirr
began again, closer, right underfoot this time. Long before this, Sykes’ ability to think had been flattened
down to primitive instinct and he leaped–onto the bed.
Outside Delia heard a cry that might have come from a maddened chimpanzee, a stricken gorilla.
All the terror, all the horror, all the rage that man possibly could express, without a recognizable human
sound.
A tremendous stir inside there, another series of animal screams, the intermittent whirr of the
reptile. The shade torn violently down from the window, letting in the red dawn, a huge brown hand
seizing the window stick, great dull blows upon the wooden floor punctuating the gibberish of sound long
after the rattle of the snake had abruptly subsided. All this Delia could see and hear from her place
beneath the window, and it made her ill. She crept over to the four-o’clocks and stretched herself on the
cool earth to recover.
She lay there. “Delia. Delia!” She could hear Sykes calling in a most despairing tone as one who
expected no answer. The sun crept on up, and he called. Delia could not move–her legs were gone flabby.
She never moved, he called, and the sun kept rising.
“Mah Gawd!” She heard him moan, “Mah Gawd fum Heben!” She heard him stumbling about
and got up from her flower-bed. The sun was growing warm. As she approached the door she heard him
call out hopefully, “Delia, is dat you Ah heah?”
She saw him on his hands and knees as soon as she reached the door. He crept an inch or two
toward her–all that he was able, and she saw his horribly swollen neck and his one open eye shining with
hope. A surge of pity too strong to support bore her away from that eye that must, could not, fail to see
the tubs. He would see the lamp. Orlando with its doctors was too far. She could scarcely reach the
Chinaberry tree, where she waited in the growing heat while inside she knew the cold river was creeping
up and up to extinguish that eye which must know by now that she knew.

26
 Five (5) Short Stories from East Asian Literature

28 Letters

A gem can not be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.

Sejong swept his books off the shelf. Rain pelted the world outside. The king opened one
of his many works, the spine of it splitting under his force, and read off a page. Nongsa jikseol,
methods of cultivation in agriculture. A guidebook to farming in Korea’s geography. Words that
could keep his people from famine.

He threw it into the rain.

It splashed against the mud-coated field, water distorting the ink. A second book
followed, sliding against the ground, into a puddle. A third. A fourth. They piled in the courtyard,
works he had commissioned to better Korea’s people. To educate the illiterate.

Worthless.

What good is knowledge that can not be read?

Music echoed inside the palace. String instruments, a wavering bamboo flute, the quick
beat of a drum. A compliment to the heavy rain. On his way to his chambers, Sejong passed a
woman humming along. She sat on the wooden floor with a script out in front of her, writing out
poetry, stopping to bow.

The king raised a hand in dismissal. The woman’s poems would do nothing for their
culture, written in Chinese characters. A waste of paper—none other than the privileged could
read it. The words would have no meaning for the common people.

He stepped into his chambers. Lamps glowed with dim flames, and rain tapped against
the roof. His wife stood, her smile fading at the sight of seeing the king so tired. She hurried over
and guided him to sit. Her dress, red and gold, flowed behind her.

“What worries you, my husband?”

27
 Sejong exhaled. He considered himself a scholar, yet his kingdom could not read or
write.

“There are voices I will never hear,” he said. “Farmers who don’t have the wealth or
status to learn to read. Children who cannot grow into scholars, and workers who can’t write
their concerns. My people lack the gift of education, and I lack the means to educate them.”

The queen took his hand. A soft, calming touch.

“And what shall you do?” she asked.

He ran his fingers through his beard. Sejong took time to think, then turned his head to
the queen.

“My people need a new system of writing, and I will craft one for them myself. A script a
wise man can acquaint himself with before the morning is over, and a fool can learn in the space
of ten days.”

At dawn, Sejong sat alone in a common room. Sunlight shone through the open windows,
ethereal motes of dust dancing in the light. Scrolls, ink, and books surrounded him. Panels of
artwork—birds and flowers—enveloped the room. Sejong spent the morning reading of
phonetics, of alphabets with fifty letters, and others with seventy.

Too many relied on complex lettering.

He would keep his simple for the busiest of men.

Around midday, he painted hundreds of symbols. He started with one stroke of the brush,

ㄱ, ㄴ,ㅣ. Two strokes for ㄷ, ㅋ, ㅅ. Three for ㅎ,ㄹ,ㅈ. Never going above four. He hung

papers upon the walls, blocking the sunlight. He crossed out any he deemed too complicated.

Servants left food outside the door as he worked.

By dusk, he walked through the courtyard, stars glistening above. Sejong spoke words to
himself. He singled out their noises and pointed out the vowels. Oak, oath, oasis. Yam, yarn,
yang. Water, wasp, wary. He pressed fingers into his mouth, feeling his teeth and tongue move at

28
the pronunciations. His lips separated for a shh noise, but closed for ph. Some required more air,
others less.

The days passed, and a concerned adviser sought him out.

“ The dynasty will not agree with your choice,” the adviser said. “Knowing Chinese is

what puts them above the common man. Your choice to create this script will cause an uproar,
your majesty. It could divide our kingdom.”

“Let it be so,” Sejong said, looking up from his script, “as I will no longer be cut off from

my people. Understand it is not knowledge that ruins the world; it falls to those pointing fingers
for selfish gain.”

Dozens of sheets lined the walls. Ink stained his hands. Crumpled-up papers littered the
room, drafts he deemed failures, too complex. His wife told the council members he had fallen ill,
and he needed time to recover as he crafted his script.

Sejong spoke until his throat grew sore, attaching noises like ‘ch’ and ‘tah’ to some
symbols while discarding others entirely. He kept his work common and crude, strong and tough,
easy and efficient.

He had to write letters that would last a thousand years.

The vowels remained as lines and dots. A silent ‘ㅇ’ shape came before each to signify an

open mouth. Consonants followed suit. ‘ㄴ’, an ‘n’ sound, signified the tongue touching the back

of one’s teeth. ‘ㄱ’, a ‘kuh’ noise, showed a raised tongue blocking air from one’s throat.

Lingual, dental, molar and glottal sounds made up for his script of twenty-eight letters.
Seventeen consonants and eleven vowels, blocked together for organization, compared to the
thousands needed for Chinese.

He wrote short sentences from top to bottom. Candles melted down beside him. Incense
burned, releasing the scent of sandalwood throughout his chambers, and Sejong sat cross-legged
on the floor. Weeks of work came down to reading aloud.

29
 남자는 인내했다 - The man persevered.

The language flowed off his tongue like water.

He presented his script to the council at first light. Two charts, one for consonants and the
other for vowels, each letter with its phonetic equal written next to it. Easy to follow stroke
orders. He sat upon his throne, royals whispering before him.

“ Chinese characters,” he said, his voice echoing in the throne room, “are incapable of

capturing our unique meanings. Many of our common people have no way to express their
thoughts and feelings. Out of my sympathy for their difficulties, I have created a set of twenty-
eight letters.

“They are very easy to learn, and it is my hope that they improve the quality of life of all

people.”

Not a soul agreed.

They shouted their concerns.

The Chinese would perceive it as a threat. It would be the end of Confucianism. Korea’s
social hierarchy would fall. The scripts would have to be burnt, down to ashes, to prevent an
uprising. The dynasty erased the twenty-eight letters and deemed them a worthless use of time.

Yet, for the good of his people, Sejong persevered.

He taught the language to any who wanted to learn. In turn, they carried it throughout the
land. Women found their voices, teaching children the simplicity of the symbols. Men stood
straight, proud to have a language of their own. Monks wrote prayers in the sand. Merchants kept
records of their stock, and artists could sign their names.

The letters birthed poets, playwrights, and philosophers. Astronomers learned to write the
names of constellations. Winemakers created labels. Apothecaries devised written names for
their medicines.

Sejong ordered for his books to be rewritten.

30
 The dynasty failed to suppress the flow of knowledge—Korea’s illiteracy ceased to exist
as the letters blossomed within the country. The script billowed in use after Sejong’s death, four
years later, as the great king ushered his people into a golden age of culture and literature.

A land where every soul could read and write.

Where all could learn the teachings of the wise.

31
 Anand's Lamp
Anand knew the snake wanted to eat him, even if his mother said it only ate the cats and dogs
scurrying over the trash pile. Anand held up one open hand, and then a single finger on the other,
examining the years of his life in nicked and dirty scars.
His family was Dalit, the untouchables, only suited to garbage collection, or cleaning toilets, as
anything they touched turned to trash. He wanted to get to two full hands, and then he could join
the men picking up the trash in town and not battle against the snake for its treasures
Slithering scales moved just under the surface, the trash shifted beneath his bare feet. Eyes wide,
his body froze. A movement against his leg caused a lightning bolt of fear to erupt into a scream.
“Anand , you fool!” The slap on the back of his head knocked him down into the trash pile.
“Maa-” Anand cried, “I saw the snake-”
“-You spend too much time in dreams.” His mother’s bright eyes glared at him under her green
hijab. “Show me what you found.”
Lost in his battle against the snake, he hadn’t even looked for treasures. One hand, buried in the
pile, pressed on something hard. He offered it up. The sun glinted off the tarnished metal cup,
big in his tiny hand, with a flat, thin handle.
“I found this.” He hoped it would be enough to make her happy.
His mother snatched it, brought it to her eyes to squint at it. “Is it for a candle, like a lamp?”
Anand ’s eyes went wide, a lamp- maybe it is magic! He remembered the story his father told
him of a magic lamp that gave out three wishes. He imagined himself a prince, in shoes, and a
glittering gold suit, riding an elephant. He wished to be off this pile and safe from the snake.
His mothers fingers, with better vision than her eyes, turned it around, found scratched letters on
the thin handle.
“Oh no, it’s a measuring cup. At least it is metal, go sell it to Bhediya.” She threw it at his feet
and left, off on her own search.
Anand shivered at the name of the man who bought the treasures his family found. He had only
ever gone with his brother to see him, never by himself, but that was before.
The possibilities of a magic lamp vibrated in his head, erasing any fears. He could never let
Bhediya have this wonder. Anand kneeled down to stare at it, scared to touch it. What should he
wish for?

32
 Always hungry, his stomach clenched. Naan! Just the idea of the soft bread made his mouth
water. He remembered the naan and samosas they had from the cart vendor, a few weeks ago. He
didn’t believe his brother, Sona when he told him his plan.
Careful of police, they found a street vendor who preferred to sip from his bottle of Feni then
attend to his cart. Sona showed him how to touch the samosas, fingering each one, then to breath
on the naan, with big huffs. Anand had to get on his tiptoes to get over the side of the cart, just
up for a minute until the shouts began.
Then they ran! Anand flew, almost keeping up with Sona, diving between legs, and carts. The
dogs joined them for the game, running alongside with joyful barks. The police cursed and threw
rocks, but Sona knew a hiding place through an alley that stunk worse than the trash pile.
They waited until dark and the vendor carts left. Sona knew just where to look too, finding it in a
garbage pile. Real food, just thrown away! Kicking away the rats, they ate until their stomachs
burst, deep fried samosas, and pillowy, fresh naan, so much of it they brought more home for
Maa. He wanted to eat like that again.
He closed his eyes and wished for naan, and samosas but nothing happened.
Anand tried to remember fathers’ story. He had to rub it, yes, that was what made the genie come
out. The story reminded him of his father’s warm hands, and leaning against his thin body.
His father was the strongest person Anand knew, until the day he started coughing, struggling to
even breathe with the sickness. Then his body became still, only the rumbling breath proving he
was alive. Finally the light left his eyes, gone to be reborn in a better life.
Anand held his magic lamp in one hand while he wiped his damp face. He should not be so
selfish, he should make a wish for someone else. Sona, his older brother, and best friend, now
had the same disease as their father, slowly wasting away. All night he coughed, making Maa cry,
and forget she had another son. If Sona was better-
Anand rubbed the metal lamp with his hand, his thoughts on his brother, wishing he was healthy.
A small plastic bottle appeared in the magic lamp, yellow with a white cap. Anand’s mouth
dropped open. He picked it up, to feel it's physical existence. Examining it closely, he saw
writing on the side, a magical code holding secrets he wished he understood. He tried to open the
top but it just spun. He prodded, twisted and pushed until finally the bottle opened. Many white
little balls rolled inside. How does this help? He put his nose in and found a sugary smell. He
tried one, frowning at the gritty, sour taste. He swallowed it quickly, but his stomach only

33
 growled. The magic bottle must be a sign that Sona was better!
Anand leapt up to run to his home in the multi-colored cloths stretched between the bent poles.
“Sona, are you cured?” Anand needed only a glance to see he was no better, on the ground pale
and gaunt. Anand stood and stared at his still form, the heavy rumbling breath. He pushed on
Sona's shoulder until he saw his wet eyes, showed him the magic bottle, and then left the
tent. What else? He should wish for money, to make his mother happy.
He closed his eyes and wished for rupees, for the air to be as thick and full of the yellow, blue
and green paper as a monsoon pouring down on him, and the trash pile turned to a hill of gold
and silver coins.
Anand rubbed hard, using his full palm. This time a small plastic card appeared in the small
metal lamp, with raised numbers and words.
Anand picked it up and turned it around. Not rupees, not gold, just a piece of plastic, a black strip
on the back.
He gritted his teeth. The trash pile was full of plastic. He couldn't even sell this to Bhediya. He
might as well sell the lamp, it obviously didn’t work.
Maa had more things to sell to Bhediya, and Anand walked slow through the narrow street,
dragging his fear along with the weight of the bag.
Bhediya had black narrow eyes, and a huge nose. His tongue licked his teeth as
Anand approached, keeping a safe distance.
“Is this all you have, boy?” Bhediya picked through the Anand's bag of treasures, each dark
finger ending in a sharp claw.
“I have one more thing of metal, a small lamp.” Anand ’s eyes were glued to the talons.
“Show me.” Bhediya growled.
“I thought it was a magic lamp, but it doesn’t work-” Anand stepped closer to show the man.
Bhediya sneered, his black eyes glancing at the small object before going Anand, moving up and
down. “It is only a cup for measuring, rice or flour.”
Bhediya snatched Anand ’s arm in a vice grip and held him tight. “ I do have need of a boy
though, one with a pretty face.” A single claw caressed Anand’s cheek. “I have a very important
buyer who would like you very much.” Bhediya bared his teeth.
Anand knew of boys who went with Bhediya, like his cousin PK, who left and never came back.
Anand closed his eyes and rubbed the magic lamp, his fingers desperate. He had one last wish.

34
Anand felt the power course through his body, changing him. He leapt toward Bhediya, to touch
him, his fangs tasting Bhediya’s neck. He twisted and coiled around him, squeezing the light
from him, before he released to slither down onto the side of the road. In a wide grin, his tongue
flicked in and out, tasting the air and freedom.

35
 Whiskers In The Wind

It had been three days since Ojisan passed.

Legs curled, proper and quiet against the shuttered rooftops. Sora couldn’t bring himself to leave.
If he sat still enough, the morning breeze, the first waft of spring and blossom, reminded him of
Ojisan’s warm breath against his whiskers. He had been there all night, curled carefully within
the man’s arms as he swayed against his rocking chair. For the first time since he knew Ojisan,
the radio was not tuned to his favourite station, but instead packed and stowed underneath the
dining table.
Did Ojisan know he was dying?
The sun rose again. He had seen the sun rise the same way three times so far. He was
uninterested at the first, bored at the second, and now positively agitated at the third. How dare
the sun continue to rise and fall like nothing had happened? How dare the universe continue
spinning about its business when he had just lost the one person he cared for the most?
Was Ojisan happy? Did he appreciate his company, as wordless and feline as it were?
A force like lightning prickled against his spine. Twitching tail. Fleeting fur. He felt his vision
narrow and ears sharpen, almost involuntarily, knowing immediately that he was not alone on
this unkempt, slanted rooftop.
“Ohayou, Sora.”
There were many peculiar things to pinpoint from the visitor’s appearance, from his unusually
vermilion coat and bushy tail which looked like a bundle of fire. Sora however, noticed the curve
of his snout first, longer and more striking than any cat he had ever seen. With piercing amber
eyes which seemed to hold both ancient knowledge and a mischievous spark, there was
something regal about the way he carried himself.
“Ohayou,” Sora purred reluctantly, feeling judged for having splotchy grey hair and untrimmed
paws.
Sora noted the lack of a collar.
“Are you..? You’re not from here.”
“Oh my, is it that obvious?”
“No, I just know every other cat in the neighbourhood. You’re not one of them.”
The stranger tilted his head curiously, a sliver of a smile creeping upon his lips.

36
 “You must get around often then.”
Sora thought back to the last year of his life - many months spent at the comfort of home.
Ojisan’s dorayaki store was attached at the front of his residence which attracted a wide
assortment of visitors, from blue collar workers needing a sweet snack before returning home
and rowdy middle school kids who spent too little for how long they occupied the seats. The
ingredients for pancake batter and sweet bean paste were delivered to his door by a young
handsome milkman while local policemen helped with any other groceries and requests that
Ojisan needed.
That was when his legs were starting to grow week.
Even then, without setting foot outside home for nearly a year, Ojisan was well-known
throughout the prefecture for his sincere optimism and scrumptious dorayaki fillings.
“No, we’ve just had a lot of visitors here.” Sora was blunt in his response, realising he spent a bit
too long reminiscing of simpler, warmer times.
“So you’ve been here all your life?”
“Well, not here per se,” the cat turned towards the flowers, candles, and picture frames piling
against Ojisan’s front door - a faint smoky blur of incense lifting towards his nose, “but I have
been here - Kyoto - a long while.”
“You must show me around then.”
“W-What?”
“As you mentioned, I’m not from here.” The visitor remarked, “I’m new to this city. I must
know what’s in it.
The morning sun seemed slower today. It crept over the horizon like a toddler reaching towards
the ceiling, imposing soft rays of light against the simplicity of suburban Kyoto. For just one-
and-a-half blinks, Sora could make out some kind of glimmer against the visitor’s neck, as if he
were wearing a necklace or necktie of some sort. It was most assuredly yellow, possibly gold,
curved like a gyoza or wedge of rice.
A brief flicker, surely. A trick of the light. After all, Sora hadn’t had proper sleep in the last three
days.
“Sure, I’ll take you around.” The words tingled uncomfortably on his whiskers.
He wasn’t sure why he said it, but knew that anything would be better than sitting atop Ojisan’s
now-empty adobe.

37
 The stranger looked pleased to be catered to. “I’m Yori, by the way.”
“Mhm. Sora.”
And with that, the two cats made their way.
***
Sora was a slim cat, but this did not translate to athletic ability. His footwork was out of practice,
his tail not as primed as it used to be. With great struggle, he wove clumsily between the stalls,
ducking under hanging lanterns and dodging licks of metal and flame. Yori however, despite his
considerably larger size and impressive mane of fluff, had a much easier time interweaving
through the madness, like butter in a pan.
Bustling and chaotic, Nishiki Market was a long corridor of rowdy tourists, merry vendors, and
lines and lines of produce. The crisp aroma of Japanese snacks and goodies - takoyaki, yakitori,
curried croquettes, assorted sea treasures pierced and roasted on a stick, floated to the technicolor
ceiling which flashed a brilliant red, blue and yellow. Bubbling oil and sizzling seafood, Sora
had never seen so much tantalising tastes in one spot.
His attention however was ensnared by one chef in particular. A serious-looking man who
reminded him deeply of Ojisan if he were at least twenty years younger and still had complete
mastery of his limbs. An apron against his wide body and an outrageously unpractical hat, the
man held a knife so glistening and polished it was almost a perfect mirror. It was his paintbrush,
and the ruby red tuna which sat at his kitchen top was the canvas.
Fluid and precise, the fish seemed to yield willingly, as if aware of the honour bestowed upon it -
to be prepared by a man so dedicated to his craft.
Sora’s mouth watered as the chef revealed the perfect cross-section of the tuna’s meat, its
wagyu-like marbling a testament to its quality.
“Hey.”
Yori sets down a plate of what could only be assorted seafood. Sora’s nose twitched with
curiosity. The succulent slices of salmon and tuna glistened like jewels, the red-and-white prawn
looked like candy, and there was something strange and mustard-like in the middle with such a
pungent but delicious aroma.
“Uni! My favourite!” Sora yelped far too excitedly for his liking, before narrowing his eyes at
his peculiar companion. “How did you get this?”
“I have my ways, but please,” Yori shrugged, before pointing his snout back at the colourful don

38
 of fishes, “Let’s dig in, Sora.”
Sora didn’t need to be told twice. Together, they devoured the bowl like they would never eat
again, licking every drop of sticky juice off the plate.
***
Having stuffed themselves full of seafood and sake and having just about enough of the
clamorous crowd, Sora and Yori retreated towards somewhere more tranquil. Their adventure led
them to the Gion District, a serene neighbourhood of narrow streets lined with cobblestone
pavements and wooden machiya houses. A serene and refined place, Sora couldn’t help but
inhale the fresh air, which smelt faintly of damp grass and mildew originating from Kamo River.
Traditional and timeless, the outside world seemed to fade away as the two walked down the
well-trodden roads, exclusive to man and animal alike.
“Sora, look at that.”
Sora heard rustling at first. Fabric against fabric. Followed by the click-clack of wooden sandals
against stone. Slowly, he turned to meet the most beautiful human he had ever seen.
At least, he believed she was human, but she could very well be something else entirely. Her face
obscured by a white veil. Her body enveloped by an exquisite kimono adorned with sakura
blossoms, fluttering in the wind like a butterfly. Only her hands were exposed, pale and pristine
and perfect, gripping a simple paper parasol that only multiplied her grace. Utterly enamoured,
Sora couldn’t take his eyes off her, only regaining his senses when she turned the corner. A
fleeting visit from a goddess.
“You’ve never seen a geisha have you?”
“Not in person,” Sora heaved, realising he had been holding his breath the whole encounter,
“I’ve seen them on television. Also, I’ve seen them on the calendars that Ojisan buys. He always
buys geisha-themed calendars.”
“Hm, your Ojisan must have good taste.”
Sora thought about Ojisan. The carefulness of his hands, the warmth of his lap, the infrequent
thumps of his heart as Sora curled into his chest at night. Many evenings, dwindling away, doing
nothing at all. They accompanied one another - the drone of television commercials and the
rickety ceiling fan.
It wasn’t much.
But it was so abundantly enough.

39
 “Yeah, I think he does.”
“That’s lovely to hear. It reflects on you too.”
Sora turned towards his still-mysterious companion. “What does that mean?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
***
Pillars and sunset. A warm golden glow. Orange hues filtered through the swaying stalks of
bamboo. Slender shadows cast against the granular gravel, which crumpled and crunched
beneath their footsteps.
The Arashiyama Bamboo Forest was a shutter of green, taller and further out than even Sora’s
keen eyes could see.
“It’s… quiet.”
Yori shrugged. “Hm, I wouldn’t say that.”
The birds may have been asleep, but the rustling leaves continued to sing their melody - cackling
like a distant applause.
“You know what it is though? It’s boring.”
“I wouldn’t call it…” Sora considered the thought - Nishiki Market was choked full of vendors
and visitors and a multitude of tantalising tastes and twinges. The Gion District was a step back
in time where Sora had met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Arashiyama was an
otherworldly place, but…
“…if something interesting was meant to happen. It should have happened by now.” Yori argued
with a sly, almost mischievous pout.
Sora couldn’t help but notice how good the smirk looked on him - how wickedly fitting it was.
And in his brief moment of blank-mindedness, Yori nudged Sora’s body with his long snout.
“Tag! You’re it!”
Before Sora could say anything, Yori transformed into a crimson blur, darting through and across
the valley of bamboos as if it were an obstacle course. “Wait!” Sora called out, noticing that his
feet had also picked up in movement. Gale and debris brushed against his face as he too became
a fast-moving buzz of fur, whether intended or not.
“That’s not fair!” He cried out, thoroughly outclassed and partly jealous of Yori’s natural agility
and grace. If Yori was an arrow, Sora was a lobbed rock. Fast and true against inaccurate and
clumsy. Fortunately though, rocks are exceedingly resilient things.

40
 After a full minute of fearsome chase, Sora found himself at some kind of clearing. A circular,
open-space away from the overgrown forest of bamboo. Judging from the lack of footsteps in the
uncultured dirt, it wasn’t a tourist area either. With no sense of where he came from, Sora
realised he was cleanly and utterly lost.
Instead, what stood before him was a grandiose vermilion structure.
A torii gate, he thought, recognising its towering archway and slanted roof from pictures Ojisan
used to show him. Like his encounter with the geisha, it was astoundingly more magical and
majestic seeing it in person.
The gate was marked with numerous ema, small wooden plaques with wishes and prayers
written by visitors to the shrine… but where was the shrine? A faint bout of incense seemed to
drift towards him, as though inviting him, guiding him through the gate and into a sacred space
beyond.
He approached. Nervously. Cautiously. As he passed through its imposing slats, the land itself
seemed to creak and groan, as though awakening from a long slumber.
***
“Ohayou, Sora.”
Raspy. Wise. A treble that was so excitedly familiar.
Sora was in a sprawling valley. Sakura petals danced in bloom. Freckles of pink against
mountains of green. The air was warm and sweet-smelling, like freshly cooked dorayaki bundled
in paper.
Ojisan.
He could sense his presence, but could not see him.
Ojisan’s weathered voice echoed across the landscape as if it were an enclosed church.
“Thank you for being with me in my last moments.”
Sora’s mind was an ocean of sentences. He had so much to say and yet, as he dipped his paws in
the proverbial water, clawing desperately for the words to come out - he found them empty, wet
and wanting.
“You might not remember this, but I made a promise to you on the day we met.”
You did?
“I knew that my days were limited. I knew that you would outlive me.
You… knew?

41
 “And so I promised you, my little Sora-chan, to do everything I could to make sure you were
cared for.”
Suddenly, Sora’s legs felt weak, as if they had turned to jelly. His balance off-centre and tipsy.
This sakura-filled valley was not somewhere he was meant to be.
“Are you satisfied with your care, Sora? Did I do well?”
Yes! Of course! I’m indebted to you. I owe you everything. You are everything to me.
“I hope I did.”
Please don’t ask this, Ojisan. I know you care for me. You know I care for you. It’s everything I
have ever wanted and more.
“And I hope wherever you go, you’ll be happy too. Happier even.”

42
 Water Freezes at 150mph

by Kenneth Bryan Villagoneza

Living almost my whole life as an orphan, I am fascinated watching how family’s bond
get so strong. How sometimes they bicker on simple things. How they grow apart and live with a
family of their own, then miss each other but during reunions all they talk about is how to divide
their inheritance. Why would the eldest gets to own the family business? How the youngest has
lived his life away from the responsibilities and that he does not deserve a single penny from the
inheritance. Relatives that looks down on you. Sometimes blood isn't thicker than water.
Hopefully, most of the time it is. People like me could yearn for family and other people could
take it for granted. Is it greed? Is it the love for earthly belongings?

Well, I wouldn’t understand because I grew up as an orphan and I have no concept of the
term family or relatives, whatsoever. The closest I have learned to the true meaning of family is
when my friend Yolanda told me a story of her fruitful encounter with a simple family. Yolanda
and I stayed in the same orphanage for quite some time. And this is how the story goes.

The whistling kettle brought Inday’s consciousness back to the land of the living. The hot
water will be emptied sooner than it was boiled and fill the mugs of instant coffee on the dining
table. The old table would rock unbalanced if it is not for the rubber cut from an old slipper and
slipped under one of the table’s legs that kept the furniture in place. Breads inside a brown paper
bag will be dipped in the coffee and eaten soaked. It is the usual breakfast of the family of seven.

In the Philippines, living in one of the slum areas in the city, bread and coffee is how the
day starts. It will then be followed by the annoying sound from the neighbor’s sound system in a
frequency that even the deaf could hear. This boosts self-pride and trigger the envy ears of the
neighbors even if the stereo was only bought in installment with a past due payment for a month
or two. Some unfortunate days, another neighbor would compete with a stereo bought by the
foreign remittance of the eldest daughter who decided to work as a caregiver somewhere in the
Middle East to help her family.

Although it was already July of 2013, the summer heat has no intention of leaving the
country. The blaring sound and the busy neighborhood intensified the heat that even hell
wouldn’t want to compete.

43
 “I’ll have to go. These past few months, orders kept coming and this day won’t be any
different,” her husband Mario said after sipping the last drop of coffee from his mug. Mario
drives a dropside truck delivering water for a small refilling station in the city.

“As long as you put food on the table, do what you want,” Inday’s face was far from that
righteous being kneeling inside the church every Sunday.

The husband left just when their eldest daughter, Nene was coming in from her graveyard
shift. Nene decided to quit school and worked as a call center agent to give way to her younger
siblings’ education. She was just in the training stage of her career, which will soon turn her into
a full-pledged fraud, scamming old people’s pocket into giving donations for the breast cancer
victims or the military veterans. Only God knows where these donations go after they leave the
bank accounts of these clueless people. Nene went straight to her bed which was actually an inch
thick foam laid in the floor inside a room shared with the entire family. She would sleep
unperturbed even against the combined sound of Mariah Carey’s voice threatening to escape the
neighbor’s speaker box and her three siblings’ noisy footsteps on the bamboo floor while
preparing themselves to school.

“Mother!” said the three in unison while lifting up their opened palm as if beggars asking
for alms.

“Here you go,” said Inday as she handed five peso coins to each of her child.

“Don’t buy those stupid spiders again, Toto. I’ll make you eat them if I see them again
next time!” Inday berated.

“I’ll make sure you won’t find any next time, mother.” Toto replied with a mischievous
smile.

“Ana, you better finish that packed lunch. You’ll have your dinner with your father's
chickens if there is even a bit of food left on your lunch box.” Inday added, the wrinkles evident
on her forehead.

“Jojo, you take care of your younger siblings!” she chased as they were leaving the front
door.

44
 As the three minions left, Inday handed a bottle of milk to her youngest two year old who
was busy playing with a toy. The toy was a freebie from a fast food restaurant they got the last
time their family went together after church. She then proceeded making ice and iced water in a
plastic bag which occupies almost seventy-five percent of their old refrigerator apart from the
used ice cream container with half a kilo of raw fish inside.

Working in a water refilling station, her husband gets purified water in a much lower
price than regular customers. When she’s not busy gossiping with her neighbors, she made it a
past time to sell ice and iced water to quench the thirst of the neighbors. In fact, only one
container of water which her husband gets for ten pesos could fill sixty plastics which she could
sell as ice for five peso each. Her ten peso and an old refrigerator can produce three hundred
pesos in less than a day. Exploitative yet genius. One might think she was Bill Gates in her past
life. And she's one of the reason why aliens visit earth and study human minds.

“Inday! Three packs of ice please!” yelled her fat neighbor Linda outside their doorstep.

Inday left what she was doing and took three packs of ice and put it on a used plastic bag.
She handed them to Linda.

“Do you know what’s latest?” Inday asked her neighbor.

“Spill it out,” replied Linda which is the famous response for this question coming from
their kind.

“The eldest daughter of Maria is pregnant. That poor child, she was on the top of their
class,” Inday sighed in dismay. Genuinity is evident in her face, or the lack thereof.

“Children nowadays. If that happens to my daughter, I will surely disown her,” says the
fat neighbor who had her first child in the age of seventeen.

“And here’s another juicy one,” added Inday and you can neither tell if she’s talking
about a medium rare steak or a freshly picked orange, “Isko, Sita’s son who failed his Electrical
Engineering board exam and can’t find a decent job is now living with a gay man.” Oh, that's
what she meant when she mentioned juicy.

“No one ever knows what one can do for the sake of money,” Linda replied.

45
 They’ve talked a lot about other people’s lives that Linda’s packs of ice already turned to
water. Going to church every Sunday and talking behind other people’s back on the remaining
six days of the week is their kind of thing. It seems like listening about the failure of others
makes them a better person. And it was not just the two of them. They are actually a highly
organized group & Inday’s house is the rendezvous. They can see and hear rumors about their
neighbor even way before CCTV cameras were invented.

“I have to go, my friend,” Linda said her goodbye.

“Bye!” replied Inday in a tone as if her daily mission has been fulfilled thinking that it
isn’t even half of the day.

Inday went back to her golden duty. A few minutes of packing ice, there was a knock at
the door.

“Linda? Are you back?” she asked.

“No, my name is Yolanda,” a child’s voice replied.

“What do you want, child? You are so dirty, you’re scaring away the customers,” the
words that came from the mouth of a regular church-goer.

“Auntie, I saw from your signage that you are selling iced water. I’ve been walking all
day and the street felt like a desert. I have no money, but can you please give me something to
drink?” asked the girl.

“No, our water is not for free, go ask someone else. Don’t you have parents?” the angry
voice of Inday.

“I’m sorry, but no. I am an orphan. So please, can you give me a glass of water. My
throat feels dry,” Yolanda begged.

“I’m sorry but we are out of water. You see, the neighbors already bought them all,”
replied Inday as she shooed the poor girl away.

“Oh, you are out of water, auntie? I am so sad for you. You must be thirsty as well. Don’t
you worry, when I get the chance, I will be back one day and bring you lots of water so you will
be quenched,” said the child before walking away.

46
 Inday went back inside the house and tried to forget the annoying child. Time passed by
quickly and July turned to August and August turned to September. When the “ber” months
entered, Christmas decorations filled the crowded neighborhood along with the entire country.
Christmas for Filipinos starts when the spelling of the month ends in “ber”. Being a Christian is
one of the footprints left by the Spaniards to the Filipinos. The voice of Mariah Carey from the
neighbor’s stereo was replaced by a local singer, Jose Mari Chan. Inday had her husband Mario,
hang last year’s Christmas lights outside the house. Christmas means giving and sharing.
Neighbor's would even give you a cooked pasta out of nowhere and as perfectionist as you are,
you'd claim that it got bland taste that it made you feel afraid of being infected with Covid.

With the holiday season, there is always hope everywhere and it should be felt in the air.
The scorching summer heat was even replaced by the cold air of the "ber" months. Parents buy
new clothes for their children. Children starts getting excited about the Christmas vacation. It is
also a pleasant time to brag about the gifts of a family member working abroad. A much bigger
and louder 15 inch speaker box to wake up the neighbors. Neighbors giving out foods out of the
kindness of their heart. If you smell that delicious roasted meat on your neighbors front lawn and
you feel like they wouldn't invite you, take initiative and return that hammer you borrowed last
week. They'd feel embarrass not to invite you for dinner when you are already there. What an
exciting part of the year. Every Filipinos yearn for the "ber" months to come

But then came November. Out of nowhere, Inday’s old friend Yolanda returned with her
promise. Water was available to quench their thirst. This time, she was not a beggar anymore.
She was confident and fierce. Nearing Christmas season, she came with the gift of water but
nobody felt grateful. Nobody laughed nor smile. Nobody was angry to the dirty child begging for
a glass of water. The only pauper who was begging is you. And instead of water quenching your
thirst, you'd ask for canned goods, noodles, relief goods and anything the government's disaster
risk team could offer. Gone was the hope brought by the Christmas air. The day Yolanda came
back dancing in a swirling motion brought horror not only on Inday’s face. . . her family. . .her
gossiping friends. . .the annoying neighbors. . . the entire country. . . and maybe half the rest of
the world. This is because the girl that Inday and her neighbors knew locally as Yolanda is
known internationally as Haiyan.

47
 Typhoon Yolanda shared her waters throughout the Philippine archipelago. It has killed
more than 6,000 people in that country alone. It was supposed to be a time of nostalgia. It was
almost Christmas. The time of the year when a certain Inday would be generous enough to share
a glass of water to a stranger. When a certain Mario would feel excited in receiving his
Christmas bonus and thirteenth month pay. When a certain Nene has the freedom to choose,
either enjoying the holidays with her colleagues or preparing herself in going back to school.
When all children are longing for gifts and the tastiest of ham and meat that could only be seen
on their table this time of the year.

Instead, what people had is chaos, death and sorrow. Not all family stood intact in such a
cruel disaster. Gone is the sister you like to take your anger away. Gone is the strict mother
whom you wished to be replaced by someone else's mother just because she couldn't buy you a
gown for the Christmas Dance at school. Gone is the pet dog you always forget to feed because
you'd rather hang along your neighbor's house playing video games.

And as much as we want to make ourselves believe that Yolanda is a natural calamity, it
is actually man-made. It is brought about by people’s greed. Even though we can’t accept it, it is
a fact that we took more than what we need from nature. And nature wanted to take it back

48
 Star Switches

“Jiejie (姐姐), I think someone turned off the stars,”

Xing whispered to me as he wrapped his fingers around my hand and chewed on a stick of sugar
cane. I looked at my little brother and gave him a small, half-smile.
“Don’t be silly Xingxing, we’ll be fine,” I brushed the dust and ash from his face with his cheeks
streaked with dirt. His eyes widened slightly, searching mine for reassurance, all I could do was
wear a mask of joy which thankfully, he bought. Xing mumbled something under his breath and
started to sway back and forth. I chuckled and picked him up to carry him on my back. “Is the
little soldier boy getting tired?”
I felt his small head nod, his exhaustion evident in the way he nestled in my shoulder. I followed
the footsteps of the wind until I arrived upon a cherry blossom tree, its buds still closed. The
wind had stopped blowing, the leaves stopped rustling. My arms carried my brother onto my lap
and I let him fall asleep as my back was pressed against the rough bark of the tree. I sat for some
time looking into the empty sky, devoid of stars - devoid of direction. My eyelids gradually felt
heavy and fatigue gnawed on my bones, then, I finally succumbed to sleep.
After some time, I used both of my hands to rub my eyes groggily as I felt something sharp
poking on my back…
There’s something sharp poking on my back?!
Instinctively, I pulled Xing closer to my body but I looked down and he wasn’t there. My body
jolted up on its feet and I looked around feeling my heart plummet. It was the dead of night and
there was barely any light how on Earth could I find a missing child–
“You shouldn’t be here,” I heard someone say with a foreign accent lingering between their
words. “Outsider,”
Fear held me in its grip, paralyzing me with its icy fingers as I stood rooted to the spot with my
heart racing in my ears. After what felt like hours, I found the courage to turn around to the
source of the voice.
He was a boy. Dark hair, dark eyes; he looked just like my people - he looked just like me but
there was something different about him, despite the uncanny resemblance. His back was straight
and he stood tall, holding himself with much pride in his own nation. My eyes diverted down to

49
his hands, he was holding a gun in one and… my brother in another. Xing didn’t seem to mind
being that close to something that could take his life in mere seconds; he was too young and
naive but at the same time, he didn’t seem to mind being close to a stranger. Xing’s small hands
both clutched the stranger’s arm and his face was painted with his signature childlike grin.
“Outsider,” The hostile voice repeated again with disdain as the foreign accent draped over the
syllables like a dark omen. My lips dried and my mouth uttered no words as uncertainty churned
within me. How could this stranger, who bore such a striking resemblance to my own people,
brand me as an outsider?
“Jiejie, he told me where the stars went!” My brother’s voice crashed my train of thoughts and
pierced through the tension like sunlight after a storm.
For a moment, I allowed myself to let go of the fear that had seized me, to revel in the simple joy
of seeing my brother's face light up with excitement. But even as I smiled at him, a nagging
sense of unease lingered at the back of my mind, a reminder of the dangers that lurked in the
darkness.
“Where did the stars go, Xingxing?” I asked softly with a cautious gaze never leaving the
stranger.
“He says they’re hiding,” Xing said and looked up at the taller stranger with much admiration.
“But they’ll come back soon, jiejie. He promised,”
I nodded, acknowledging the words my brother had spoken but this wasn’t the time for me to
worry about a starless night. The stranger’s unwavering cold stare gazed at me, we waited for the
other to say something… Anything.
“Give me back my brother,” I pleaded softly as my eyes darted from his weapon to Xing.
The stranger’s hand let go of the weapon and with a small thud, it fell lifeless onto the dirt
beneath. “The kid’s getting weaker than he shows. I’ll take you to my village… It wouldn’t be
wise to be wandering in the woods like this,” The stranger spoke quietly, his voice still tense. His
offer took me by surprise and I hesitated to give him an answer.
“They’ll kill us, they’ll kill me and my brother,” I repeated, my voice barely above a whisper as I
searched the stranger's face for some sign of reassurance. But all I found was a steely resolve, a
determination that bordered on urgency. “I wouldn’t want to step foot in–”
“Just trust me. They wouldn’t know the difference, as long as you don’t speak,” he interjected,
his tone firm yet strangely comforting. His words hung in the air like a heavy cloak, wrapping

50
around me with a sense of inevitability that I couldn't shake.
What did he mean by ‘they wouldn’t know the difference?” That would be impossible, wouldn’t
it?
“You don’t know the woods and who knows how long the stars would hide for. Everyone knows
your people are helpless without them,”
Helpless without them. The words echoed in my mind, a painful reminder of the truth that lay at
the heart of our existence. In a world where the movements of the celestial bodies dictated our
fate, to be without the guidance of the stars was to be lost in a sea of darkness, adrift and alone.
If death came whilst we were at the village, at least it would be more merciful than starvation.
As I nodded my head in reluctant agreement, the older boy hoisted Xing onto his back, the
weight of my brother resting heavily between his shoulders, and he dozed off again. I looked
back at the weapon and raised an eyebrow as to why he would not pick it up. I wanted to ask
about it, but another part of me feared the answer. I walked silently by his side as he strode
through the woods, his gaze flickered towards me but his expression became concealed by the
dim light of the moon.
"He's a brave one," he said, his voice softer now, tinged with a hint of admiration. "Not many
would be so fearless in the face of the unknown."
As I listened to the older boy's words, a sense of pride swelled within me, mingled with a twinge
of worry for my sleeping brother. Xing had always been adventurous, unafraid to embrace the
unknown with open arms. But in a world filled with dangers and uncertainties, his bravery could
easily become his downfall.
“He’s just a child,” I whispered gently as I watched my brother’s peaceful form slumbering on
the older boy’s back. “He doesn’t understand about the dangers,”
A fleeting glimpse of sympathy crosses his features before he quickly masks it with a stoic
facade. “None of us truly do,” he murmured, his voice tinged with a hint of regret. “But
sometimes, it’s the innocence of youth that gives us strength to keep moving forward, even in the
shrouded darkness,”
***
The village was peaceful, there were nothing more but chatters of women as they walked through
the paths while the men were nowhere to be found. There were signs and characters painted on
the walls and some of their characters were legible in my language but others were foreign and

51
unfamiliar, their meanings lost to me. I was about to open my mouth to ask a question but then a
woman approached the older boy.
She studied me but the demeanor of the boy stayed calm and he put a protective arm in front of
me, a silent reminder to stay quiet and cautious. They exchanged words in a language that was
foreign to my ears, each syllable was short and flat. I strained to catch snippets of their
conversation, but their words remained as elusive as the wind, slipping through my grasp like
sand through an open palm.
After what felt like an eternity, the woman came to an understanding and gave me a pleasant
smile. The older boy must have been an impeccable liar as he had made an impression. Earning
us a reprieve from whatever suspicions the woman had initially passed upon us. As the woman
turned to leave, her footsteps echoing softly on the cobblestone path, I couldn’t shake the feeling
that we were walking on thin ice; teetering on the edge of a precipice that threatened to crumble
beneath our feet at any moment.
Weeks passed since I had arrived and the older boy's deception had held firm. To the villagers, I
was nothing more than a mute; I didn’t speak a word of their language because quite frankly, I
couldn’t. I’d never let any words slip out, I was too afraid of the consequences. The older boy
knew that - we’d go talk in the depths of the forest for hours with no witnesses but the trees and
the moon. This village was superstitious you see, he said they’d tell stories of bad spirits lurking
in the woods if you wandered into them in the middle of the night.
The nights never went by easily, Xing was always fast asleep though, his energy drained from
playing with the village kids all day. One night I found myself sitting on the wooden platform in
front of the house hugging my knees against my chest, looking at the sky which was starless
once again. I whispered a silent prayer into the night and closed my eyes.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and I turned around, it was the older boy, his gesture was a silent
invitation to follow him. Without hesitation, I rose to my feet and took his hand.
In the stillness of the night, we walked through the winding paths and ventured out of the heart
of the village and to the woods. We emerged into a small clearing bathed in the soft glow of the
cold lights emitted, there was a stream and the water posed as a mirror.
“Look,” the boy spoke, his voice barely above a whisper, his accent shortening the rhythm of
every syllable of my language. It has become something I have grown to adore. He pointed
upwards and I tilted my head towards that direction.

52
Above us, a tapestry of stars stretched out as far as the eye could see, each celestial body cast a
soft light upon the world below. It was something that would give anyone a sense of peace; it
gave me a sense of direction.
I felt his hand give mine a light squeeze. “The moon is beautiful isn’t it?” He remarked, but he
wasn’t looking at the moon.
“It always has been,” I whispered as I felt his gaze linger on my face. When I caught his stare, he
looked away from me, smiling. We stood in the comforting quiescence surrounded by the soft
murmurs of the night.
The silent language of the stars had woven an unspoken connection, perhaps a realisation?
All of a sudden, the violent sound of running trampled across the Earth, and the boy’s hold on
my hand tightened, his fingers digging into mine with a sense of urgency. Panic surged through
me as I scanned the darkness and I felt a light push on my back, accompanied by a whispered
command.
“Hide,”
My eyes widened. What was he so afraid of?
“What about you?”
He shook his head dismissively. “I know what I’m doing, just go,” he insisted, his eyes settled
with a fierce fire that left me no room for argument. With a final squeeze of his hand, I
reluctantly let go and slipped into the cover of the trees.
As I crouched behind a thick trunk, the low voice of a man echoed through the night, his angry
shouts causing the branches to quiver in fear.
“My own son,” The man uttered angrily as his words sparked his fuse, “My own son is a traitor
to our kind,”
“I don’t know what you’re–”
“Don’t lie to me! I heard you speak that foul language, where is she,” the man’s voice crackled
with barely contained fury, his anger even palpable from where I was hiding.
The older boy’s attempt at an innocent facade swiftly vanished as his expression darkened. It was
as though a storm had swept across his features, erasing any trace of the calm exterior he had
previously presented.
“Father, you couldn’t even tell that she was not one of us,” he retorted, his voice laced with a
mixture of frustration and defiance with an underlining of desperation. As I watched him, a sense

53
of unease settled in the pit of my stomach.
The man continued to bellow in rage about unity and loyalty, his hand was inching dangerously
close to his weapon. “I will not have someone of tainted blood walking around free in my village!
Where is she!”
I remained hidden behind the tree, every instinct screamed at me to run, to flee, but I had once
again become rooted in the spot. I looked away to divert my attention to something else. The
shouting was incoherent to me but you didn’t need to know what words spewed out to realize
that this man was furious. I was powerless to intervene, to defuse the situation unfolding. What
could I do? If I ran in right now I’d be killed on the spot, and if I ran away I’d never forgive
myself for leaving the older boy in such a situation. I tried to cover my ears to–
Bang.
The reality hit me like a physical blow, leaving me reeling in shock and disbelief - surely my
own senses had to be lying to me. I turned around immediately and I was about to get up on my
feet until I was met with the sight of the older boy on his knees clutching onto his chest. He was
looking straight at me through the cover of the leaves.
Don’t.
He mouthed before his body went limp, collapsing onto the floor. His silent plea echoed in my
mind, a desperate plea for me to stay hidden, to preserve my own safety in the face of danger.
The colour drained from the man’s face, the rage that had consumed him moments before
seemed to evaporate into thin air. In its place was a haunting emptiness, a void that mirrored the
loss that now hung heavy. The grip on the man’s weapon loosened, and with a trembling hand,
he threw it with all his strength, the metal clattering against rocks as it landed on the other side of
the rushing stream. He did not give his dying son one last look before he ran, the ghost of his
crimes following him through the darkness.
“Hoshi!” I yelled and scrambled onto my feet. I ran towards him and knelt, scraping my knees on
the rocks. His dark hair spilled over his pained face as his breathing faltered. I held his face in
my hands and caressed his cheek comfortingly like I would with Xing when he cried. “Stay…
Please,” desperation clawed my throat as I struggled to find words of solace in the face of such
senseless violence. It was hopeless, I knew that.
“Go to Xing,” his response came weakly, barely a whisper against the backdrop of the night. “Go
home.” With a trembling hand, I brushed the hair away from his face, my fingers lingering

54
against his cheek for a moment longer. His gaze fixed on the starless sky above. "You have to,"
he insisted.
"I can't leave you," I choked. "Not like this."
He gave me a smile that felt like shards of glass had finally cut through his bravery. He
whispered as eyelids threatened to close, coffin-shut.
“Oh darling, I think someone’s turning off the stars…”

55
 A Silent Intelligencer

"Cheat, steal, lie but don't get caught doing it." Is what my instructor always told me. In this
industry, you have to do whatever it takes to survive and get the job done. Or meet your
gruesome end, by getting killed while doing it. As an agent in the SIA [Secret Intelligence
Agency] my role is to take pictures and provide the other agents with information of criminals.
The tricky part is doing it without getting caught. Getting caught could mean torture or
worse....death. But in case we do get caught and have the chance, we're authorized to harm or kill
the criminal in order to escape.
"Lee Sa-Yeon! The commander wants to see you." Deputy commander Baek stood in front of
my desk, staring at me with eyes as cold as ice. His pale skin made it seem like he was always on
the verge of death, but his sharp gaze made up for it. "Yes sir." I instantly got up from my chair,
and made my way to the commander's office. Thoughts of what I could've possibly done wrong
filled my head.
Once I arrived to the commander's door I knocked three times, and three times only. I took this
precaution to avoid annoying him. "You may enter." A honeyed voice responded from within the
room. Unlike the deputy commander, the commander was a lot friendlier. Nonetheless, he was
also capable of being frightening, to a point where you'd think you were better off dead.
"Ah. Agent Lee!" The commander gave me a bright smile. I nodded and bowed my head. "I
heard you needed me, sir?" Seeing that I wasn't cracking a smile, the commander chuckled. "Still
on guard aren't you?" He swiftly got up from his desk, heading over to where I was with some
documents in hand. "No sir, not at all." That was a lie, but it's better to be safe than sorry. Even if
he had a warm aura, he was still dangerous. "Now, let's cut to the chase." The commander's face
and tone switched to a more serious one. He handed me the documents as he spoke. "In here is
all the information you need to find out about the criminal's whereabouts and plans."
I took the papers and skimmed through them. "A nineteen year old, male, college student. His
name is Kim Seo-Jun." I read out loud. Huh.....he's only a year older than I am. And yet he still
made it to the 'most wanted criminal' list, at such a young age. How peculiar. The commander
placed his hand on my shoulder and returned to his honeyed voice. "This mission is probably one
of the most difficult ones you'll take on. So don't die, it'd be a shame to lose such a young and
promising agent so early. Good luck~" he added. "Yes sir. I will be careful." I bowed my head

56
again and left. "A shame" my ass. I bet you wouldn't even give a damn if I really did die.
I scoffed as I marched to my desk, and flung my computer open. I started by scanning the
documents the commander gave me, before getting to work. "First things first. Criminal Kim
Seo-Jun is a college student. So I should start by hacking into security cameras from every
college in South Korea." Even though it'll take a while, it's still the fastest way to find him. I
should probably use more than only one computer, though. To make the process faster.
After 2 hours of searching I finally found his location. "Yusang International College, and he
lives five minutes away from there." I mumbled. Since he's only five minutes away from his
school, I highly doubt he drives there. So tracking his car wouldn't be of any use. For now, I have
a better idea. Not even fifteen minutes later I found myself sitting on the rooftop of his college
building. Since it was nighttime, I wore black military style pants and boots. As for the other half
of my body, I wore a simple black turtleneck and a long coat. Black is an efficient color. It
doesn't attract too much attention at night. Furthermore, if I get stained with blood no one will
notice. Anyway, I should start tailing him.
The most tedious part of my job is having to watch someone from a distance for a long time.
This simple task could take up to three or five hours. But luckily, since I arrived around the time
students left to go home, I didn't wait long. I kept a picture of the young man near me to verify
that I had found my target. "Bingo." I smirked. A tall black haired man appeared, as he exited the
building. He had rather refined facial features. Skin as white as snow, but rosy lips and cheeks.
Eyes that could pass as charcoal, but charming at the same time. Overall, he had an alluring
appearance. But what attracted my attention the most is that he didn't look like a criminal at all. I
guess what they say is true, you should never judge a book by its cover.
I shrugged, and rushed down from the rooftop. I put a baseball cap on while pulling it over my
eyes to hide my face. As I walked behind Kim Seo-Jun, I made sure to keep my distance in order
to prevent getting caught. Although, I didn't leave too much distance between us. I could lose
track of him if I do that. I carefully took out my camera to take pictures of him. After
successfully taking a couple pictures, I hid my camera back in my coat as I sighed in relief.
When I looked up I realized he was gone. As a result, I quickly snuck behind a trash can in an
alleyway.
CrapCrapCrapCrapCrapCrap....What if he found me? I messed up big time. I heard heavy
footsteps near my hiding spot. I suppressed the sound of my breathing and got ready to make a

57
run for it. Just as I got out of my hiding spot I heard a gunshot. I observed as my baseball cap
flew off of my head. One centimeter closer and I would've been dead. I didn't have much time to
wrap my head around what just happened. I spun around only to realize that the one holding the
gun was Kim Seo-Jun. I knitted my eyebrows, and subsequently got into a fighting stance. My
heart pumped faster as I caught my breath. The odds of winning are close to forty percent. I've
received close combat training before, but it isn't my forte. So the only way to win is to buy some
time and call for backup.
I analyzed my surroundings in order to come up with a plan. This alleyway is quite narrow. So, I
could use the walls to jump off of them and corner him. There are also stairs...which could prove
useful. I turned my attention back to Kim Seo-Jun. He hadn't moved an inch since he shot a
bullet near my head. Instead, he was holding his gun firmly with both hands, pointing at my head.
His grip on the gun was so tight I could see his knuckles turn white. Seeing that he wasn't
moving, I slowly took out my phone to call for backup. Only to have it destroyed by a bullet
again. "Well shit....there goes my only chance to get help." I grumbled, annoyed.
I glared at Kim Seo-Jun and took out my gun. Both of us remained in the same fighting stance
for a while. Guns pointed at each other's head, not daring to move a muscle. First one to move is
dead. The silence was deafening. I could feel the bitterly cold air wrapping around my body,
slowly turn warmer. The smell of debris mixed with burnt cigarettes filled the alleyway to the
brim. It was as if all my senses were growing more powerful by the minute. After an
excruciatingly long time Kim Seo-Jun finally spoke. "Who sent you?" he interrogated me. "Take
a guess." I was concentrating on his movements so much that my voice was barely above a
whisper.
He most likely wants me to let my guard down. I guess he's a little worn out because we've
stayed in the same position for over twenty minutes. This is also getting on my nerves, so let's
end this quickly. I slowly lowered my gun and spoke in an orotund voice. "I'm getting tired of
this, and I bet you're feeling the same way. So why don't we play a little game? Before I proceed
to explain what I have in mind. I'll drop my gun and you'll do the same. Deal?" My lips curved
into a sinister smile.
He sighed, nodding slowly. I'm taking a big risk since I know he doesn't trust me. But it's still
worth a shot. I let go of my gun. It fell to the rugged ground. In addition, I kicked it away to
ensure I wouldn't be able to grab it anytime soon. "Your turn." looked at Kim Seo-Jun

58
expectingly. And as promised, he did the exact same action as I. "It's good to see we're on the
same page."
I adopted the same tone of voice I had before. "Now, here's what we're going to do. You and I
shall stand back to back with our guns in hand. We're each going to take ten steps away from
each other at the same time. After we do that, we'll turn around as quickly as possible and pull
the trigger. Fastest person wins." I again gave him an insincere smile. "Does that sound doable to
you?" He wiped the sweat off his brow and responded with a "Yes." I clasped my hands together.
"Good, then let's start~"
I confidently walked over to my gun and picked it up. I might not be the best when it comes to
physical strength. But I'm quick both mentally and physically. Our backs lightly brushed against
each other as we got into position. I proceeded to count "One...two...three...four...five!" Right
after the sound finished coming out of my mouth I spun around. "BANG!" My gun fell to the
ground. Had Kim Seo-Jun shot me? No. He missed, the bullet pierced through the wall behind
me.
The only way he missed such an easy shot, was because I blinded him. The gun I had in my hand
wasn't just any ordinary gun. It was a laser gun. So instead of shooting him directly, I shot a
mirror that happened to be right in front of him. The mirror was perfectly positioned in a way
that when I pulled the trigger, the laser beam reflected off of it. Hitting him square in the eyes.
I spared him no time to recover as ran to where he was, and delivered the finishing blow. I made
sure to punch him in the jaw, resulting to a quick knockout. He stumbled back a little before
collapsing onto the ground. I used up so much energy that the instant after I delivered the punch,
I too, keeled over. I lay on my back, the dirty yet cold ground cooling me down. For once, this
sensation felt pleasant.
After this draining mission, everything feels nice. Seeing that I had won, there's nothing to fear
now. It's going to be a long way back to the SIA's headquarters. But none of that matters now, as
long as I got the job done. My eyes fluttered shut for a couple seconds. A sense of relief washed
over me.

59
 Five (5) Short Stories from European Literature
The Cook’s Big Fish
AUTHOR: GEORGES F. SCHULTZ

TU SAN2 of the land of the Trinh considered himself a disciple of Confucius3.

One day his cook was enticed into a game of chance, and lost the money that had been
entrusted to him for the day’s purchases at the market. Fearful of being punished should he
return home with empty hands, he invented the following story.

“This morning on arriving at the market, I noticed a large fish for sale. It was fat and fresh —
in short, a superb fish. For the sake of curiosity I asked the price. It was only one bill, although
the fish was easily worth two or three. It was a real bargain and thinking only of the fine dish that
it would make for you, I did not hesitate to spend the money for today’s provisions.

“Halfway home, the fish, which I was carrying on a line through the gills, began to stiffen as in
death. I recalled the old adage: ‘A fish out of water is a dead fish,’ and as I happened to be
passing a pond, I made haste to plunge it into the water, hoping to revive it under the influence of
its natural element.
“A moment later, seeing it was still lifeless, I took it off the line and held it in my two hands.
Soon it stirred a little, yawned, and then with a quick movement slipped from my grasp. I
plunged my arm into the water to seize it again, but with a flick of the tail it was gone. I confess
that I have been very stupid.”
When the cook had finished his tale, TU SAN clapped his hands and said: “That’s perfect!
That’s perfect!”
He was thinking of the fish’s bold escape.
But the cook failed to understand this point and left, laughing up his sleeve. Then he went about
telling his friends with a triumphant air: “Who says my master is so wise? I lost all the market
money at cards. Then I invented a story, and he swallowed it whole. Who says my master is so
wise?”

MENCIUS4, the philosopher, once said “A plausible lie can deceive even a superior intellect.”

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 The Shard, The Tissue, An Affair
by Andrew Lam

Not that the glass shard had any business with the sole of his foot; nevertheless, it made itself
familiar. And it was an unending story of how he teased and squeezed and how it refuted his
negotiations. But finally, the shard—so small, smaller than the tiniest teardrop—was retrieved
and he, pained still, examined it for a brief moment against the halogen lamp before flicking it to
hurl like a comet out my window.

On my bed he sat, a teary-eyed Shiva, his wounded foot raised in the air, kicking, kicking.

I should have swept carefully. This was no way to welcome a poet. I should have mopped,
waxed. Something. Now I watched as he wiped the wound with a tissue paper and felt awkward,
like a caught voyeur. But then he looked up and smiled. Come here, he said.

We had seduced each other over the phone and via emails a year before we actually met. An
essay of mine had found its way to his part of the world and he took the initiative of sending me
an e-mail full of compliments. I replied, thanking him for his kind words, and discretely enclosed
my number.

He called.

We talked.

Mostly of home, of our tropical Vietnamese childhood. He named for me seasons half-forgotten,
our childhood fruits, fruits eaten in stealth and ecstasy. Remember the green mango? Sweet and
sour and crunchy, eaten with salt and red chilly pepper or even fish sauce, hidden under the
student desks while an old geezer of a teacher droned on. And the durian, loaves of yellow brain
eaten with glee by the entire family after dinner, fingers digging through a split thorny shell the
size of a skull, family brain surgery, that's what it was, a ceremony of shared flesh. And what a
smell! Rotten flesh fragrance, its pungent aroma remaining for days in your hair, your nostrils,
your breath. And the milk apple, green and purple outside, milky white inside, to be eaten after
siesta, its cool and smooth texture sliding against your throat like sweet ice. Afterwards, washing
the milky sap off your lips, scrubbing real hard, and seeing how raw they looked in the mirror, as
if from too much kissing.

I, in turn, recounted for him the flame trees that blossomed in the courtyard of my elementary
school, red and green, glowing to the point of blindness under an unforgiving sun, its black fruits,
hard shells that fit perfectly in a child's palm, turned into swords for the boys to duel with. I
recalled a summer villa veiled in a cloud of red bougainvillea by the ocean in Nha-Trang. The
way I slept in the afternoon on the second floor, soundly, insulated in my parents' rhapsodic
laughter, which echoed like shattered crystals from room to room (and how I loved the roaring
sound of waves out the tall French windows that made me dream of tigers). My favorite
childhood smells: the sea, of course, with faint suggestions of kelps and dead fish, ripened rice

61
field at dusk, my grandmother's eucalyptus ointment to ward against evil winds, the sweetness of
sandalwood incense burnt by my pious mother nightly.

On the phone late one autumn evening, I whispered, Read me a poem. Out on the bay the
foghorn wailed mournfully. A poem, please.

I don't know, said he. You were supposed to send a photo, remember?

I'm sorry. I'll send one tomorrow. I swear. Poem, please.

Hmm...

Read, please.

Leaving

Mother burns pages of albums

wedding day, first child, father's

funeral, Tet

quick, she says, hurry, pack,

prepare

we'll sail away

down river

to sea ... Saigon in April

A season of smoke

His poetry went on to speak of a perilous journey, one full of wonders and griefs.

So I took my chance: Will you come for a visit?

To your city? He asked.

Of course, I said. By the sea. You can see sailboats every morning out my window. Hear the
cable cars go rumbling-clanging by. Feel the sea breeze on your skin, taste its salt ...

To fall in love is to have one's sense of geography grafted onto another's, no matter how tenuous,
so as to form a new country. I saw Houston in my mind, a city of strip malls, grand old homes
and gleaming glass-and-steel skyscrapers that coexist cheek by jowl. He, in turn, imagined San

62
Francisco with its Transamerica Pyramid poking the blue sky, windblown hills the color of
ember at twilight, sailboats gliding on the bay like playful white butterflies; he imagined—and I
could tell this from his voice—that there was freedom somewhere in the next valley.

Alright, he said, I'll come. In December, at the beginning of Winter.

Then he stepped on the shard. And had trouble walking the next day, his new boots, bought a
week before, unyielding, his dye-stained socks kept sliding downward inside. He walked the city,
my city, with a slightest of a limp.

We were otherwise chirpy as songbirds that first day. At lunch, we held hands under the table at
Cafe Claude while I introduced him to friends, and afterward walking home, we broke into an
old folk song about rice harvesting, a song learned so long ago and so meaningless now that
neither one of us knows its lyric entirely.

Day two: To Carmel. I drove, my hand resting sporadically in his, Cesoria Evora cooing
nostalgic ballads of love. The night before, under a flapping red awning of a stucco apartment
building somewhere on Russian Hill, we kissed and I, impulsively, beckoned him to move in
with me. He stared out to the dark water and contemplated the offer. Then before I could speak
he kissed me again and shut me up.

He contemplated the sea now, a glittering sheet of silver lamé that stretches back to the past. It
must be strange for him to see the Pacific once more, so long hidden from him in Texas, the
ocean a reminder of that terrible flight on that crowded boat full of refugees from Saigon. He
relives it all once more. He sees the small of his mother's back as she huddles her children in the
corner of a dark and crowded and stinking hull. He wanted to take her place so that she could rise
to the upper deck and smell the fresh air, even if only just once. But she never did. The journey
she kept her lioness vigilance over a sickly brood. It was him who begged for water, who
gathered bad news. It was him who told them how blue the sky, how vast the sea.

His siblings are grown now, his mother well-past middle age and half-crazed, and he, like a
benevolent spirit, still needs to watch over her, over them, lest he would somehow lose all
purposes and meanings, though how he yearns for freedom, god only knows, a nightly defeat.

He turns to me then, the wind in his hair, the sea a blur in the corner of his eye: I want to. I really
do.

Day three: Something has changed. A shadow has flown across my window, a movement in the
stars. The initial delight of recognition shifts to the fact of too many details; we fall into routine.
He sleeps on my favorite side of the bed, my left arm hurts from the weight of his handsome
head. The way he throws the scarf over his shoulder vaguely bothers me and I can't say why.
Sometimes he has this sad look, a poet's melancholy, I suppose, and is unreachable. He wears it
too often, like a geisha, its his powder. I look at him now insulated in sadness and wonder how
his books could possibly fit in my apartment when my shelves have no more space for V.S.
Naipaul's collected works?

63
Day four: He discovers an unfinished poem on my desk, an ode to his beauty. He says nothing
but I can tell he doesn't really like it. It's not jealousy, it's the fact that I have moved into his
"territory," even if to woo him. Something in his sigh I recognize too well: it's claustrophobia.

Day five: Or rather night. Rain. A chorus of remembrances. Fifteen years and he is tonight as he
was then, a moist-eyed boy standing in the refugee camp watching his mother hugging her sickly
brother, her youngest pup dying of pneumonia before her eyes. He is drunk, not from the alcohol,
but from trusting, and grief. He stares out the window and speaks of leaving, of wanting to leave,
leaving his mother, which is impossible, leaving his siblings, who have already left him, leaving
Texas which he didn't care for, leaving everything, his memory, his sadness, what owns him.

We buried Little Binh in Guam. Around the grave we stood and sang his favorite song then left
his plastic dog on the mound until the rain washed it away. My sister went back to look for the
grave last year but she couldn't find it. Some morning my mother stares out the window and cries
as if it had just happened last night.

Listening to him I suddenly am also overwhelmed by a particular memory. It was in the summer
of 1973, a year after the ARVN and Americans recaptured the city of Quang-Tri near the DMZ. I
had visited it with my father via helicopter, a rather strange excursion. The city was destroyed in
the recapturing, reduced to piles of rubble by B-52 bombs that left deep holes that, after the
monsoon, turned into swimming pools for the children who survived. I walked about. Behind a
broken window of a house sat an old woman. She sat as she must have as always, with an ease of
years, but she stared out to nothing now, the old neighborhood is gone, and the wall that held her
window was the only thing left standing of the old house. I remember waving to her. She did not
wave back.

Day six: I want to tell him, the angel sleeping on my shoulder, that it's strange how love between
two exiles can be thwarted by the hunger of memories, that Vietnam remains, in many ways, an
unfinished country between us—even now, body to body, lips to lips.

Day seven: She needs me, he says. You're lucky. You're free.

And, therefore, I thought, utterly alone.

On the way back from the airport it suddenly occurs to me how the tiny shard came to be there
on my floor. A thin crystal vase that held a dozen white tulips toppled over one windy evening
last spring. I remember holding the flowers upside down, drunk and out of breath, a lake of sharp
crystals lapping at my feet, water dripping from the grieving bulbs like melted snow.

A month, and still no news. His phone is disconnected. This morning I found the wrinkled tissue
dotted with dry blood under my bed, my own shroud of Turin. He is so far away now, hidden
across time zones, cocooned in requiems; I walk barefoot in my apartment, hoping another shard
would pierce me too. But I'm not made for such a thing, alas, and must resort to keeping under
my cool blue satin pillow the blood-stained tissue, remnant of an uneasy dream of communion
whose yearning is long.

64
 Run, Dad!
AUTHOR: Kim Aeran
Translated by Kevin O’Rourke
Icried a lot when I was a fetus. I cried because I was scared of the tiny darkness within my seed-
small womb. I was diminutive; I had miniscule wrinkles, a small, rapidly beating heart and a
body that didn’t know what language was. I’m talking about a time without yesterdays or
tomorrows. I came like something in the mail, my arrival announced by mom, a parcel of flesh
without language. Mom gave birth to me in a semi-basement room where summer sunlight rough
as sandpaper shone relentlessly. She flailed around with only a shirt to cover her. And with no
hand to hold onto, she simply grabbed a scissors. Outside the window she could see the feet of
people walking by. Every time she felt she wanted to die, she stabbed the floor with the scissors.
This went on for hours. In the end, she didn’t kill herself; instead she cut my umbilical cord.
Here I was, newly arrived in the world, and I couldn’t hear mom’s heart beating. The silence
made me think I was deaf! T he first light I saw as a newborn was window-sized. I knew it
existed outside of me. I don’t remember where my dad was. He was always someplace else, or
he was late, or he didn’t come at all. Mom and I held onto each other, heart against rapidly
beating heart. Mom, naked, looked down at my solemn face and wiped it several times with her
big hand. I liked my mom, but I didn’t know how to tell her; I just frowned all 227 Azalea Run,
Dad!: Kim Aeran the time. I discovered that mom laughed a lot when my face puckered with
wrinkles. I think I concluded that love was not so much two people laughing together as one
looking funny to the other. Mom fell asleep and I was left on my own. The world was quiet; the
sunlight lay over there on the floor like a polite “Dear John” letter, the first unpleasant note I
received in this world. I had no pockets. So I clenched my fists. • When I picture dad, it’s always
against the same background: he’s running resolutely somewhere. He’s wearing luminous pink
shorts and has thin, hairy legs, and he’s running straight-backed with a high knee action. He
looks like a referee who’s enforcing rules no one cares about. So he cuts a comical figure. I guess
he’s been running for twenty years, his posture and face always the same: a laughing red
countenance sporting a row of yellow teeth like a bad painting someone stuck on him. It’s not
just dad, though. Everyone playing the exercise game looks funny. It embarrasses me when I see
middle-aged men in the park bouncing their bellies off the trunks of pine trees, or middleaged

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 women clapping their hands as they walk. They’re always so serious about what they’re doing
and so enthusiastic. As if getting healthy entails looking more and more ridiculous. I’ve never
really seen dad running, but as far as I’m concerned he’s been running all his life. I may have
gotten this idea from something mom told me long ago. When she first told me this story, she
had a washboard stuck in the V between her legs. She was scrubbing laundry in a welter of soapy
suds and breathing so hard she looked very angry. Mom says dad never ran to her. He wasn’t the
kind of man to come running: not when she said they should break up, not when she said she
missed him, not even when I was born. People called him a gentleman; mom thought he was a
fool. If mom made up her 228mind to wait for him on a certain day, he’d show up the next. And
when he arrived late, he looked haggard. She always had a joke to greet her diffident lover—with
his inevitable late-schoolboy look. He made no excuses, used no big words to explain himself.
He just “came” with his thin lips and his dark face. I imagine he was afraid of rejection. He was
the kind of man whose sense of guilt just wouldn’t let him come. And guilt generated more guilt.
In the end he felt so bad he decided that being bad was better than being a fool. This decision to
be bad, I believe, removed him from the ranks of the gentle. When he behaved badly he made
others feel bad, which probably means he was a bad man. I think of him as the worst man in the
world, and at the same time as the most pitiable. But I don’t really know what sort of man he was.
A few facts are all he left behind. And if facts give us the reality of a man, dad was bad. If they
don’t, well, I don’t really know him. Anyway, the important thing is that my always-late dad
ONCE mustered all his energy for a race. It happened a few months after he moved to Seoul to
make some money. Dad got a job in a furniture factory. Leaving home to make money in Seoul
was a strange thing for him to do. That’s how I see it. But he was just following the crowd. Dad
and mom exchanged letters from time to time. His letter was always longer. Because mom was
angry with him for going to Seoul in the first place. One day mom came to dad’s rented room in
Seoul. She’d had a huge fight with her father—their relationship had always been bad— and
made up her mind to leave home. With dad’s address written on an envelope, she combed
through a maze of twisty alleys until she found him. She had nowhere to go and planned to stay
for a few days. Dad, of course, had different ideas. The day she arrived he launched a whirlwind
courtship. A young man living with a girl he liked and sleeping separately? It was all so
predictable. Dad’s pleading, his cries of frustration, his blustering went on for several days. Mom
was touched. Maybe she thought she wanted to carry him on her belly for the rest of her life.

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 Eventually she said OK, but on one condition: she 229 Azalea Run, Dad!: Kim Aeran would
share his bed if he bought her birth control pills. T hat’s when he started to run. He ran full speed
from the top of Moon Village to the pharmacy downtown, red in the face as if bursting to pee
and laughing enough to crack his lips. A dog began to bark at the sight of him and soon every
dog in the neighborhood was barking. Dad ran and ran. Red-faced, hair flying, he jumped over
stairwells as he sliced his way through the dark. He ran faster than the wind and in his haste
tripped and fell into a heap of coal briquette ash. Covered head to foot with white ash, he shot
back up on his feet and ran on as if his life depended on it, as if bound for places unknown. Did
he ever run as fast again? The image of dad running through Moon Village for a love tryst with
mom made me want to shout, “Dad, you run a lot better than I thought,” though I knew he
couldn’t see me or hear me. Anyway, he ran so fast he forgot to get the instructions for the pills.
Mom asked her ash-covered lover how many she should take. He scratched his head. “I think
they said two,” he replied. For two months mom says she took two pills religiously every day.
And for two months the sky was yellow and she felt nauseous all the time. Strange, she thought.
So she asked the pharmacist and he told her to reduce the dose to one. One day, she had to break
the ice in the bucket in the moonlit yard to wash her private parts, and she was so numb with
cold that she forgot to take the pill. That was the night she got pregnant. Dad’s face got paler and
paler as he watched her tummy swell. He left the day before he became a dad and never came
back. Jogging is the most popular sport there is; it doesn’t matter where you are or how old you
are. A blend of walking and running, jogging provides appropriate stimulation for heart and
lungs. It’s a complete body exercise that enhances your stamina. It doesn’t require any special
skills or high speeds and has the added advantage of not being restricted by place or weather.
They say running demands stamina. What else does it demand? I don’t know. Nor do I know
230how to interpret the mind—and the energy—of someone who left me but keeps on running in
the space he left behind. Dad left home so that he could run. That’s what I want to believe. He
didn’t leave to go to war, or to get a new wife, or to sink an oil pipeline in the desert of a foreign
country. And when he left home, he didn’t take a watch. I don’t have a father. That’s not to say
he doesn’t exist. I see him in his luminous pink shorts. He’s in Fukuoka, he’s traveling through
Borneo, he’s running toward the observatory in Greenwich. I see him turning by the left foot of
the Sphinx, slipping into bathroom 110 in the Empire State Building, crossing the Guadarramas
in Spain. I can make out his figure clearly in the dark. His luminous shorts glow. He’s running.

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But no one’s applauding. • Mom raised me with a joke on her lips. When I’d get depressed, she’d
lift me up with her wicked wit, which was often very vulgar, especially when I asked about dad.
Not that he was a forbidden subject. He just wasn’t that important to us, so we didn’t talk about
him much. And when we did, mom often indicated she was bored with the topic. “Have you
any idea how often I’ve told you about your father? Any idea?” she asked. “Alji—I know,” I said
diffidently. “Alji,” she said gruffly, “is a bare bollix.” And she laughed wildly. From then on I
associated alji (knowing) with something vaguely obscene. T he biggest thing I inherited from
mom was the ability not to feel sorry for myself. She didn’t treat me as if she owed me anything,
or as if I was to be pitied. I was always grateful to her for this. When folks ask me how I am, I
know they’re just interested in how they are themselves. Mom and I had a sturdy no frills
relationship that demanded neither sympathy nor understanding. 231 Azalea Run, Dad!: Kim
Aeran Whenever I asked mom about sex, she always answered with style. Not having a dad I
was curious about many things. Once after an accident that left a man lame I asked, “How does
he manage with his wife?” “Does he do it with his foot?” she said curtly. And when my young
nipples began to develop, mom reacted not with alarm but with a sense of fun. She’d pretend to
link her arm in mine and then jab her elbow into my breast. I’d run away from her with a shriek,
but I liked the tingling sensation that spread across my chest. T here was only one other person in
the world who was aware of mom’s charm, and that was her father, and their relationship was
bad until the day he died. I don’t remember much about him except that he never spoke to me—I
was a fatherless child after all—and that he invariably tore mom apart with his foul curses. I
liked my handsome grandfather, but he neither made me his pet, nor gave me a hard time. Maybe
I was so small that he didn’t even see me. Once, however, he did speak to me. He’d been
drinking poppy tea and was in good spirits. He looked intently at me and asked, “Whose child
are you?” “Cho Chaok’s” I answered loudly. He asked again as if he hadn’t heard. “Whose girl
are you?” This time I answered in an even louder voice, “Cho Chaok’s!” And as if he were deaf,
he asked again, slyly, “What? Whose girl?” I jumped up and down with frustration and cried as
loudly as I could, “Cho Chaok’s, Cho Chaok’s.” I could shout as much as I wanted in the
concrete yard of my childhood. Granddad said, “Ah, ah, you’re Chaok’s girl.” His face darkened.
“Have you any idea what a terrible bitch she is?” he said suddenly. He sat me down in front of
him and regaled me with a litany of mom’s childhood misdeeds. With big blinking eyes I
listened to everything he said. He kept disparaging her, describing how she 232always

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 counterattacked when he bad-mouthed her, not like my docile older aunt who was a wonderful
daughter. T here was another side to the story. One of the things mom said to me most often was,
“A good family is very important.” If she hadn’t left home after the fight with her father, she said,
things would have been very different. I’d sit there, eyes blinking, listening quietly to her
complaints just as I listened to granddad. Forget how much they hated each other; forget how
granddad ridiculed her for having a fatherless child; forget how much she resented him for
making granny wash his concubine’s drawers. Forget all that. I still had a reason to respect him:
something he said a few days before he died. For someone who had dropped in casually, he sat
there for an awfully long time until suddenly he grew awkward in the face of the inference of
mom’s silence, which was that surely now he had exhausted all areas for trivial complaint and
interference. He thought for a moment about what to say and then began another harangue on the
virtues of my docile aunt in comparison with mom. Having exhausted all the resources of foul
language, again he found himself at a loss in the face of mom’s silence. He fidgeted with his cup
of juice, reached for his hat and stood up. Mom and I saw him off politely. He hesitated in front
of the gate before throwing a strange parting shot over his shoulder. “You know if it was love I
was after, I’d pick the younger bitch over the older one.” Granddad died a few days later. I think
he knew the little secret of mom’s charm. With granddad gone, I’m the only one left that knows
it. • Mom’s a taxi driver. At first I figured she took the job so she could keep an eye on me as she
threaded her way through the streets of Seoul. Then one day I surmised that maybe she drove a
taxi because she wanted to run faster than dad. I imagined the two of them 233 Azalea Run, Dad!:
Kim Aeran running side by side, now one in the lead, now the other. Racketing through my
mind were images of mom’s face, twenty years of resentment stamped on it as she hit the
accelerator, and dad’s face when his whereabouts were discovered. Maybe mom thought that the
best revenge wasn’t catching him, but running faster. Mom found the taxi job tough. The distrust
directed at an underpaid woman driver and the ridicule of drunken passengers were hard to take.
It didn’t stop me though from asking her regularly for money. Had I plastered politeness on top
of my inscrutability, I think mom would have felt even worse. Of course, she never gave me
more money because she felt she owed it to me. She gave me what I asked for, but I didn’t forget
what she said: “Everything I earn goes up the kid’s hole while I fuck myself trying to make a
living.” It had been a normal run-of-the-mill day for me. I got lectured by mom for eating with
the TV on. I had to listen silently to her long-winded account of a fight with a passenger the

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 night before. She got so worked up telling the story that she threw down her spoon and cried,
“Fuck it, was I so wrong?” She was looking for solidarity from me, so I had to give a good
answer. And as I slipped into my runners, I had to explain to her how I proposed to use the
10,000 won I had asked her for. Half-slumped over my desk at school, I watched the trainee
teacher struggling to swallow his nonexistent saliva. For a fatherless child, there was nothing
particularly bad or different about this very ordinary day. At least not until I got home. Mom was
sitting glum-faced in the middle of the room. She had a one-page letter in her hand. The
envelope, torn open roughly, lay on the floor, the same floor she had once stabbed with the
scissors. I knew from the address that it had been sent airmail. Mom couldn’t read the letter, but
she sat there looking at it, filled with a strange feeling of foreboding. Her face betrayed her
unease; she was like a woman from the country who didn’t know what to do. “How long has she
been like this?” I muttered to myself, snatching the letter. 234“What does it say?” she asked,
looking at me intently. T he letter was in English. I began a groping explanation of its contents,
aware that it involved some loss of face for me. At first I didn’t understand, but after reading it
two or three times, I realized that it held very important news for us. “What does it say?” she
asked again. I swallowed. “It says dad’s dead.” She looked at me with the darkest of dark faces.
Mom always reacted with a witty remark when I wore that kind of expression. I wanted to say
something witty too, but I couldn’t think of anything appropriate. In a way, dad had come
home—gossamer like—in the mail, twenty years late. Dad had come home—like a statement of
good will, motivation unknown—like thunderous applause at the end of an interminable play. A
death notice with a strange intonation. In the end, maybe dad’s reason for running to the four
corners of the earth was to tell us that he was dead. He had traveled to distant places and had
come back now to tell us he was dead. But dad hadn’t really been racing around the world; he’d
been living in America. Dad’s son sent the letter, which I deciphered in bed with the help of a
dictionary. This is what it said. Dad married in America. I was a bit surprised by this. I couldn’t
understand why he had abandoned mom unless he didn’t want a family. Either he loved the
second woman a lot, or it wasn’t as easy to run away in America. A few years later he got
divorced. The exact reason for the divorce wasn’t specified, but I guessed it had to do with his
basic incompetence. His wife demanded alimony. Dad hadn’t a penny so he offered to cut her
grass every weekend. I remember hearing that in America you could get reported to the
authorities by your neighbors for not cutting your grass. She promptly married a man with a lawn

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 the size of a football field. Every week dad pressed the doorbell as promised, stuck his face in
front of the security camera, said “Hello,” and trudged in 235 Azalea Run, Dad!: Kim Aeran to
cut the grass. Imagine it. While she sat cozily in the living room drinking beer with her new
husband, he crouched down outside tinkering with the lawnmower. In the beginning they might
have been a bit put off by him, but I’m sure she said to her husband, “Don’t pass any remarks,
John.” Dad soon became irrelevant. When he looked through the thick glass wall of the living
room and saw them making out, he revved the engine and strode up and down outside. The boy
who sent the letter insisted that this is what dad did—maybe he wanted to give his dad’s
bereaved foreign family some words of comfort. What kind of kid, I wondered, would write so
pryingly and in such detail? Obviously he didn’t think he was anything like his dad. I imagined
the pair’s lovemaking in the living room. Nipple and breath stuck fast to the glass; the blinds
hurriedly pulled down. I look at them from a great distance, my eyes slit in a frown. Brrrng! Dad
charges with his lawnmower. But his attack peters out, and he goes back to striding impatiently
up and down outside. When the woman couldn’t take it anymore, she gave him the latest
automatic gasoline model as a present. But dad insisted on using the old model in the shed. He
went around the garden making the same awful din. One day dad and the new husband had a
fight. It began when the new husband started criticizing the way dad was cutting the grass. Dad
held his tongue though it was killing him; he just kept cutting the grass. The new husband’s
griping went on and on; eventually he began to curse. All this time dad had been silently cutting
the grass. Suddenly he lifted the old lawnmower with its furiously whirring blade and charged.
The new husband slumped to the ground in a blue paroxysm of fear. I don’t think dad had any
intention of hurting him, but unfortunately, he did get hurt. Now it was dad’s turn to react with
shocked dismay. At the sight of his own blood the injured man lost all control. Every curse in the
language poured from his lips and he ended up reporting dad to the police. Dad took fright. He
hesitated for a moment, then ran to the shed, saw the new lawnmower in the corner, hopped on it
like a gunman 236jumping on his horse in a western, and with his heart pounding, switched on
the ignition, spurred the mower out of the shed and dashed out onto the road. Dad fled at the top
speed the mower could muster, scattering the smell of fresh grass cuttings behind him. Where
was he heading? T he letter ended by saying that dad was killed in a traffic accident. The son
said the family had been truly saddened by his death. They held a simple service at the cemetery.
Regrettably, the son said, he never liked dad very much. When he was a kid, he said, dad left him

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 in front of the TV to go to work and he used to wait there all day. That’s how he grew up. He
was hoping now he would be able to forget dad. Though he had never met his foreign halfsister,
he wanted me to know that he also grew up waiting for dad, so he knew the pain. “I found your
address in my dad’s belongings,” he continued. “My mom doesn’t know I’m writing this letter.”
It all seemed like lies. Actually I was the real liar. I told mom that dad had been killed in a traffic
accident, but I didn’t tell her what kind of accident. “Why is the letter so long?” she asked.
“English is always longer than Korean,” I said. T hen she asked if there was anything else in it.
How he lived, who he lived with? Was there really nothing else? No one knew the answers to
these questions. She probably wanted to ask why he’d left home that night. But then again maybe
that was the one thing she really didn’t want to ask. “Dad . . .” I began. She looked at me with
the expression of a whipped puppy. “Dad always felt bad,” I said. “He felt guilty all his life.
That’s what it says here.” Her eyes danced. I chanced a further comment. “And mom, this bit
was really lovely.” “Which bit?” she asked with trembling voice. I showed her the bit that said
he came to his wife’s house every week to cut the grass. “This bit here,” I said. Mom looked like
she would burst into tears as she looked at the part of the letter I indicated and rubbed it fondly.
It was the first time I ever saw my witty mom who never cried with a lump in her throat. 237 T
hat night mom didn’t come home until dawn. I lay in bed with the covers pulled up under my
chin and thought about dad, about his life and death, and about cutting the grass, that sort of
thing. Azalea Run, Dad!: Kim Aeran But still he keeps running around inside my head. Images
that have been in there for so long aren’t going to disappear that quickly. It occurred to me that I
kept imagining him because I could not forgive him. Maybe the reason I kept him running in my
mind was that I was afraid I would charge at him and kill him the moment he stopped. I felt sad.
I better go to sleep, I thought, before this sadness dupes me. • Mom came home after the peak-
fare time ended. I thought she’d try not to wake me, that she wouldn’t put on the light, that she’d
take off her clothes very carefully. Instead she poked me in the ribs. “Ya!” she cried. “Are you
asleep?” I stuck my head out from under the covers. “Are you crazy? My God! The taxi driver’s
drunk!” Mom said nothing. She just laughed and tumbled down on the covers. She curled up
small like a clenched fist. I thought of tossing the bedcovers over her but didn’t. In a little while,
she slid in under them, maybe because she was cold. In the dark mom’s breathing gradually got
gentler. She smelt of cigarettes. I was angry with her. You’re bad, I thought, folding my arms.
Mom had her back to me, sleeping like a shrimp. I was staring up at the ceiling. The long

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 stillness caressed her breathing. I thought she was asleep, but suddenly she spoke, curling up
even more tightly into a ball. There was no trace of malice toward the dead man in what she said.
“So, what do you think, is he rotting OK?” I didn’t close my eyes all night long. I kept looking at
the ceiling, reviewing the various images of dad in my imagination. I saw him in Fukuoka,
crossing Borneo, approaching the Greenwich 238Observatory, turning by the foot of the Sphinx,
going through the Empire State Building, climbing the Guaddaramas. My laughing, racing dad.
Suddenly I realized that all this time he had been running in the blazing sun. I thought I’d
imagined everything he needed for running. I dressed him in those luminous pink shorts, put on
his cushion-soled runners and his airy running vest. But isn’t it strange that I’d never thought of
giving him sunglasses? I’d forgotten that even the most rubbishy man in the world gets sick like
everyone else, likes the things everyone else likes. All those years I was picturing dad in my
mind, he was always running, his eyes sore and swollen from the blazing sun. So I decided
tonight to put sunglasses on him. I imagined his face. He wore a little smile; he was filled with
anticipation but trying hard to conceal it. He closed his eyes, like a boy waiting for a kiss. With
my two big hands I put the sunglasses on him. They suited him really well. He’ll run better now,
I thought.

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A Shower (소나기 )

By Hwang Sun-Won (1953)

As soon as the boy saw the girl beside the stream, he realized that she must be the great-
granddaughter of Master Yun. She had her hands in the water and was splashing it about.
Probably she had never seen a stream like that in Seoul.

She had been playing with the water in the same manner for several days now, on the way home
from school. Until the previous day she had played at the edge of the stream, but today she is
right in the middle of the stepping-stones.

The boy sat down on the bank. He decided to wait until she got out of the way.

As it happened, someone came along and she made way.

The next day, he arrived at the stream a little later. This time he found her washing her face,
sitting there in the middle of the stepping-stones. In contrast to her pink jumper with its sleeves
rolled up, the nape of her neck was very white.
After washing her face for a while, she stares intently into the water. She must be looking at her
reflection. She makes a sudden grab at the water. Perhaps some baby fish were swimming by.

There is no knowing if the girl is aware or not of the boy sitting on the bank as she goes on
making nimble grabs at the water. But each time to no effect. She simply keeps grabbing at the
water as if for the sheer fun of it. It looks as though she will only get out of the way if there’s
someone crossing the stream, as on the previous day.

Then she plucks something from the water. It was a white pebble. After that, she stands up and
goes skipping lightly across the stepping-stones.

Once across, she turns round : " Hey, you."

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The white pebble came flying over.

The boy found himself standing up.

Shaking her bobbed hair, she goes running off. She took the path between the reed beds. Then
there was nothing but pale reed heads shining bright in the clear autumn sunlight.

The girl would soon reappear on the far side of the reeds. Then he began to think she was taking
a long time. Still she did not appear. He stood on tiptoe. And he began to think she was taking an
extremely long time.

Far away on the other side of the patch of reeds, a bunch of reeds was moving. The girl was
hugging the reeds. Now she was walking slowly. The exceptionally bright sunshine shone on the
girl’s reed-like hair. It was as if a reed, not the girl, was walking across the fields.

The boy remains standing there until that reed can no longer be seen. Suddenly he looked down
at the pebble she had thrown at him. The moisture had dried. He picked it up and put it in his
pocket.

Starting the next day, he came down to the stream a little later. There was no trace of her. A good
thing, too.

It was strange, though. As the days without a sign of her went by, somewhere in the boy’s breast
a feeling of loneliness was growing. He got into the habit of fingering the pebble in his pocket.

One day, the boy sat down in the middle of the stepping stones, just where the girl had sat
playing with the water. He dipped his hand in the water. He wiped his face. He stared into the
water. His darkly tanned face looked back at him. He hated it.

The boy grabbed at the face in the water with both hands. Several times he grabbed at it. Then he
suddenly sprang up in surprise. Why, the girl is coming, walking in this direction!

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‘She was hiding, watching what I was doing.’ The boy started to run. He missed his step on a
stone. One foot went into the water. He ran faster.

If only there was somewhere he could hide. On this side there are no reeds. Just buckwheat fields.
He had the impression the perfume from the buckwheat flowers was pricking his nostrils as
never before. His head was spinning. A salty fluid seeped between his lips into his mouth. His
nose was bleeding.

Blocking his bleeding nose with one hand, the boy went running on. He had the impression of a
voice following him, repeatedly calling out, ‘Silly boy, silly boy.’

Saturday came.

When he reached the edge of the stream, the girl, whom he had not seen for several days, was
sitting beside the stream playing with the water. He started to cross the stepping stones,
pretending to ignore her. A few days previously, he had simply made a fool of himself in front of
the girl, so today he crossed the stepping stones cautiously, whereas before he had walked across
them as if they were a highway.

‘Hey!’

He pretended not to hear. He climbed up the bank and stopped.

‘Hey, what kind of shell is this?’

Unthinkingly, he turned round. He found himself facing the girl’s bright dark eyes. He quickly
turned his gaze to the girl’s palm.

‘It’s a butterfly clam.’

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‘That’s a pretty name.’

They reached the point where the path divided. From here the girl has to go a mile or so downhill,
the boy two or three miles uphill.

The girl stopped and said, ‘Have you ever been beyond that hill?’

She pointed beyond the end of the fields.

‘Never.’

‘Why don’t we go? Down here in the country, it’s so boring I can’t stand it.’ ‘It’s a long way,
anyway.’

‘How far do you mean by far? Up in Seoul we used walk a long way on picnics.’ The girl’s eyes
seemed to be saying, ‘Silly boy! Silly boy!’

They took a path between two paddy fields. They passed close to where the autumn harvest was
under way.

A scarecrow was standing there. The boy shook its straw rope. A few sparrows go flying off. The
thought comes to him that he was supposed to go home early today to scare the sparrows from
their main paddy field.

‘This is fun!’

The girl is holding the scarecrow’s rope and is tugging at it. The scarecrow sways, seems to be
dancing. A light dimple appeared on the girl’s left cheek.

A bit further away there is another scarecrow. The girl goes running toward it. The boy is
running behind her. It’s as if he’s trying to forget that today he was supposed to go home early

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and help with the work.

He just runs on close beside the girl. Grasshoppers strike their faces and leave them stinging. The
perfectly clear azure sky of autumn starts to turn before the boy’s eyes. He is dizzy. It’s because
that eagle up there, that eagle up there, that eagle up there is turning.

Looking behind, the girl is shaking the scarecrow he has just run past. It sways better than the
other one. At the place where the rice fields ended was a ditch. The girl jumped across it first.

From there as far as the foot of the hills was all fields.

They passed the top of a field where millet stalks were stacked together.

‘What’s that?’

‘A shelter.’

‘Look, little yellow melons. Are they good?’

‘Sure, they’re alright, but water melons taste better.’

‘If only I could eat one . . .’

The boy went into the field where white radishes have been sown among the remains of the
melon plants and came back with two radishes he’d pulled up. They were still not fully grown.
After he had twisted off and thrown aside the leaves, he handed one to the girl. Then, as if to say
‘this is how you eat it,’ after taking a bite at the larger end he peeled away a strip of the peel with
his nails and bit into the flesh beneath.

The girl followed suit. But before even three mouthfuls, she exclaimed, ‘Oh, it’s peppery and it
stinks,’ and hurled it from her.

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‘It tastes awful, I can’t eat mine either.’

The boy threw his even further.

The hills had come nearer.

Colored autumn leaves drew close to their eyes.

‘Yah!’

The girl went running toward the hills. Now the boy was not running behind her any more.
Instead, he was picking more flowers than the girl had gathered.

‘This is chrysanthemum, this is bush clover, this is bellflower . . . ‘

‘I never realized that bellflowers could be so pretty. I love purple! . . . But this flower like a
sunshade, what is that?’

‘That’s valerian.’

The girl pretends to be holding the valerian like a parasol. At the same time, the delicate dimple
appears in her slightly flushed face.

Again the boy picked a handful of flower for her. He selects only fresh flowers to give her.

But the girl says: ‘Don’t throw even one of them away.’

They climbed up by way of the ridge.

On the slopes of the valley opposite, a few thatched cottages were grouped harmoniously.

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Neither said anything, but they sat down side by side straddling a rock. All around them seemed
exceptionally quiet. The hot autumn sunshine was spreading the fragrance of grass drying, that
was all.

‘What kind of flower is that?’

On a rather steep incline, the last flowers of the season were blooming on a tangled arrowroot
creeper.

‘It looks just like wisteria. There was a big wisteria in our school up in Seoul. Seeing those
flowers makes me think of the friends I used to play with underneath it.’

The girl stands up and heads for the slope. She seizes a creeper where there are many flowers
blooming and starts to tug at it. It does not snap easily. Making more of an effort, she ends up
slipping. She grabbed hold of an arrowroot vine.

The boy, alarmed, came running over. The girl held out a hand. As he was pulling her up by the
hand, the boy apologizes that he would have picked it for her. Drops of blood were seeping from
the girl’s right knee. Automatically the boy applied his lips to the scratch and began to suck.
Then, struck by some thought, he rose and went running a little way off.

Returning a moment later, out of breath, the boy said: ‘If you spread this over it, it’ll get better.’

After he had spread pine resin over the scratch, he went running to the place where the arrowroot
vines were and bit off with his teeth several that had a lot of flowers; these he brought back up to
her. Then he said: ‘There’s a calf over there. Come on.’

It was a yellowish calf. It had not yet had its nose pierced with a ring.

The boy seized the bridle tightly, pretended to scratch its back and mounted it with a bound. The

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calf bucks and begins to turn in circles.

The girl’s pale face, pink jumper, indigo skirt, together with the flowers she is holding all turn
into a blur. It all looks like a great bunch of flowers. He feels dizzy. But he’s not going to get off.
He was proud. Here was something the girl could never imitate, that only he could do.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

A farmer was coming up through the high grass.

He leaped off the calf’s back. He expects to be scolded – ‘Suppose you hurt the calf’s back by
riding it, what then?’

But the long-bearded farmer merely glanced once toward the girl, grabbed the calf by the halter,
and said, ‘You’d best get home fast. There’s a shower coming up.’

Indeed, a dark cloud is rising over their heads. They suddenly find themselves surrounded on all
sides by noises. The wind blows past with a rustling sound. In a flash everything around them
turned dark purple. As they make their way downhill, raindrops can be heard striking the oak
leaves. Big raindrops. The napes of their necks felt cool. Then in an instant a curtain of rain bars
the way ahead. Through the rain, they could see a shack standing in a field. They would have go
and shelter there. But the pillars were all aslant and the roofing was in tatters. He helped the girl
up, pointing out a spot where the roof was leaking less.

Her lips had gone blue. Her shoulders kept trembling.

He took off his cotton jacket and wrapped it round the girl’s shoulders. She raised her eyes and
simply looked at him; she remained silent, letting him do as he wished. Next, he drew from the
bunch of flowers she had been hugging those with broken stems and crushed flowers, that he
spread under her feet. Rain soon began to drip onto the spot where she was standing. They could
not shelter there any longer.

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After looking outside, the boy went running toward the millet field, as if struck by a thought. He
pushed apart one of the stacks formed by leaning the millet stalks together upright, then carried
over another stack and added it to the first. Then he parted the stalks again, before waving her to
come over.

The rain did not penetrate inside the stack of millet. It was a dark and very narrow space. The
boy sat beside the stack and let the rain soak him. Steam rose from his shoulders.

The girl told him, in a kind of whisper, that he should come and sit inside. I’m alright, he replied.
Again, the girl told him to come and sit inside.

He had no choice but to enter backwards. As he did so, he crushed the flowers the girl was still
holding. But the girl thought it did not matter. The stench from the boy’s wet body filled her
nostrils. But she did not turn her head aside. Rather, she felt that the trembling in her body was
diminishing on account of the warmth of the boy’s body.

Abruptly the noise on the millet leaves stopped. It was clearing up outside.

They emerged from among the millet stalks. Not far in front of them sunlight was already
shining down dazzlingly. Arriving at the ditch, they found a great flood of water filling it. In the
sunlight it shone red, a muddy torrent. They could not jump across it.

The boy turned his back to her. The girl obediently let him carry her. The water rose as far as the
boy’s rolled-up breeches.

The girl cried out, and clasped the boy’s neck.

Before they reached the stream, the autumn sky had cleared and soon it was completely blue,
cloudless, as if nothing had ever happened.

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After that there was no sign of the girl. Every day he ran to the stream to look, but she was not to
be seen. At break-time in school he used to search the playground. He even stole a secret glance
into the 5th-grade girls’ classroom. But she was not to be seen.

That day too the boy came out to the stream side, rubbing the white pebble in his pocket. Lo and
behold, if the girl was not sitting there on the bank of the stream!

The boy felt his heart begin to race.

‘I was sick all this while.’

Certainly, the girl’s face had grown paler.

‘Wasn’t it because you got wet that day, in the shower?’

The girl nodded silently.

‘Are you better now?’

‘Not yet . . .’

‘Then you ought to be lying down.’

‘It was too boring so I came out. . . . You know, it was fun, that day . . . only, somewhere that
day this got stained and it won’t come out.’

She looked down at the front of the pink jumper. It was stained with what looked like dark red
mud.

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The girl silently displayed her dimple, as she asked, ‘What kind of stain could it be?’

The boy was simply staring at the front of the jumper.

‘You know, I’ve figured it out. That day, when we crossed the ditch, I rode on your back, didn’t I?
This stain came off your back then.’

The boy felt his face flush. At the parting of the ways, the girl added: ‘Here, we picked the
jujubes up at our house this morning . . . . for the ancestral rites tomorrow . . .’ She offers him a
handful of jujubes. The boy hesitates.

‘Taste one. My great-grandfather planted the tree, he says. They’re very sweet.’ The boy held out
his hands cupped together, saying: ‘Why, they’re really big!’

“Then this time, after the ancestral rites, there’s something more. We’re vacating the house.’
Before the girl’s folk had moved down here, the boy had already heard his parents talking; he
knew how Master Yun’s grandson’s business in Seoul had failed, so that he was unable to return
to his home. It looked as though their family house was going to pass into other hands now.

‘For some reason, I hate the thought of moving house. It’s the parents’ decision, of course, so
there’s nothing I can do . . .’ For the first time, a sorrowful look came into the girl’s dark eyes.

On his way home after parting from the girl, the boy found himself repeating countless times to
himself, ‘The girl is moving house.’ He did not feel particularly regretful or sorrowful. However,
the boy was unaware of the sweetness of the jujube he was chewing.

That evening, the boy went in secret to old Deoksoi’s walnut orchard.

He climbed the tree he had singled out during the day. Then he began to beat at the branch he
had singled out with a pole. The sound of falling walnuts was strangely loud. His heart froze. But
the next moment he was wielding the pole with unsuspected vigor: You big nuts, lots of you,

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come on, fall down, lots of you, fall.

On the way back, he kept to the shadows cast by the nearly full moon. In two days’ time it would
be the autumn full moon. It was the first time he felt grateful for shadows.

He stroked his swollen pocket. He did not care a bit about the saying that peeling walnuts with
bare hands often brings up a rash. All he could think was that he must quickly give the girl a
taste of these walnuts from old Deoksoi’s trees, the finest in the whole village.

At that moment an alarming thought struck him. He had failed to tell the girl that once she was
better, before they moved away, he wanted her to come out one last time to the streamside. You
fool! You fool!

The next day, on returning home from school he found his father dressed in his best clothes,
holding a chicken.

He asked where he was going.

Without bothering to reply, his father weighed up the chicken he was holding: ‘Will one this size
do?’

His mother handed him a mesh bag: ‘It’s already been clucking and looking for a place to lay for
several days. It may not look very big, it must be fat.’ This time the boy tried asking his mother
where his father was going.

‘Why, he’s off to the house of Master Yun over in the valley by the old school. He can use it for
their offerings . . .’ ‘Then he should take a really big one. That speckled rooster . . .’ At those
words his father laughed out loud and said, ‘Hey, there’s flesh enough on this one.’

The boy felt abashed for no real reason, so he threw his school books down, went across to the
stable and gave the cow a good slap on the back as if he were killing a blowfly.

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The water in the stream matured daily.

The boy went up to the parting of the ways and turned downhill. The village round the old school
looked very near beneath the clear blue sky.

His parents had said that the girl’s family was moving to Yangpyong the next day. There, they
were going to run a tiny store.

Unthinkingly, the boy caressed the walnuts in his pocket while with the other hand he was
bending and breaking off a host of reeds.

That evening the boy kept returning to the same idea, even after he was lying down to sleep:
Tomorrow, suppose I went to see the girl’s family leaving. If I went, perhaps I might see her.

Then he must have drifted off to sleep, but then: ‘Well, really, what a world we live in . . .’

Father must have come back from the village. ‘Just look at the family of Master Yun, now. All
their fields sold off, the house they’ve lived in for generations handed over to other folk, and
then the child dying before the parents . . .’ His mother, sitting sewing in the lamplight, replied:
‘That great-granddaughter of his was theonly child, wasn’t she?’

‘Yes. There were two boys but they lost them both when they were still small . . .’ ‘How can a
family be so unblessed in its children?’

‘That’s a fact. The girl, now, she was sick for several days and they couldn’t even afford any
proper medicine. Now the whole family line of Master Yun is cut off. . . . But you know, that
little girl, don’t you think it’s a bit odd? Why, before she died, believe it or not it seems she said
that if she died, she wanted them to bury her in the clothes she’d been wearing every day, just as
they were. . .

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Reference:
The Museum:
https://projectmyopia.com/the-museum/
Civil Peace:
https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/d37a9b24-bc42-4cb1-ab3b-
3d1b21b01aec/downloads/beweporusigupuras.pdf
The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/565c3d39e4b027c789ba5b70/t/591a3b91ff7c50a929cb
f42d/1494891409152/The+Story+of+the+Girl.....pdf
Sweat:
https://biblioklept.org/2013/01/21/sweat-zora-neale-hurston/
I Am Not My Skin:
https://www.addastories.org/i-am-not-my-skin/
28 Letters:
https://blog.reedsy.com/short-story/jwcylk/
Anand’s Lamp:
https://blog.reedsy.com/short-story/9ogbai/
Whiskers In The Wind:
https://blog.reedsy.com/short-story/xwvsgv/
Water Freezes:
https://blog.reedsy.com/short-story/o0tfpl/
Star Wishes:
https://blog.reedsy.com/short-story/npiycj/
A Silent Intelligencer:
https://blog.reedsy.com/short-story/cx74oi/
The Cook’s Big Fish
NOTES:
◊ Source: Vietnamese Legends, GEORGES F. SCHULTZ, Printed – Copyright in Japan,
1965, by Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc.

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◊ All citations, italics texts and image sepiaized has been set by BAN TU THU.
https://holylandvietnamstudies.com/blog/some-vietnamese-short-stories-in-rich-meaning-
section-1/

The Shard, The Tissue, An Affair

https://saigoneer.com/vietnam-literature/25603-the-shard,-the-tissue,-an-affair-a-short-
story-by-andrew-lam

Run, Dad!
chrome-
extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.sejongculturalsociety.org/med
iafiles/resources/literature/run-dad.pdf

A Shower (소나기 )
https://www.scribd.com/document/420882659/A-Shower

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