Sunspot Jungle

by Bill Campbell

She is stripping meat off bones. Cooking meat sizzles on hot coals. I watch her fingers, so gnarled and delicate, peel off the meat in red ribbons. And for a horrible moment, I know that she is going to eat the bones. Like peanuts or pumpkin seeds. Kerunch. Kerunch. Kerunch.

  I continue to watch. The meat is making me salivate.

  She is done with the bones now, carefully arranging them on the floor. Her expression.

  Concentration, as if she is reading. Her eyes are closed. Her mouth moves.

  A cluck-cluck-cluck almost scares me half to death. I look at the rooster strutting in front of me, all colorful feathers and brilliantly red floppy comb.

  Would he end up being her dinner?

  Lee Jian and his farmer cronies complained loudly about their missing chicken and ducks. This late in autumn with the first frost on the ground. They needed the meat and the eggs, the latter to make salted eggs to sell in the markets and feed their families. Their families were always hungry.

  Meanwhile, everyone prepared for winter. Mothers brought out the thick winter clothing and mended old garments. The village would soon become silent, covered with snow.

  Children listened to the stories of tigress demonesses feasting on knuckle bones and felt hungry-sad-scared. They slept fitfully as the snow began to fall in flurries of white.

  Wrapped in thick fleece, I struggle towards the rice shack. There is the smell of fire and the tantalizing aroma of roasting meat. My stomach growls.

  When I peek in, she is hanging bones. They swing slightly, stirred by some invisible breeze. They are white, the color of snow. Tiny gwei. Tiny ghosts bereft of feathers and skin. She lifts one bone up, a tiny bone the size of my finger, and gazes at it. The fire in the rice shackle crackles, casting jittery shadows on the rush walls. More bones, more skeletons: birds.

  Don’t eat the bones, don’t eat the bones, I think, remembering, shivering, my skin chapped by the cold. I am hungry. Always hungry.

  “I know you are outside, little girl,” the old woman turns around, and her smile is warm like the fire. “Come in, come in.”

  Tiger demoness!

  Trapped, I have no way to go. I duck into … a fragrant warmth, redolent of the best food I have eaten. The fire is so inviting …

  The bones. The bones. The bones.

  “Come, eat,” the old woman gestures with a wrinkled hand, placing a stick of freshly roasted meat into my numb hand. I sniff at it. Chicken. I take one tentative bite. Soon I am taking larger and large bites, chewing and swallowing. The juice is so sweet! I lick my fingers, hungry for more.

  “Never easy being an old woman thrown out by an unfilial son,” the old woman says, sitting down wearily. I wince, listening to her knees creak alarmingly. “And food is so scarce these days.

  “I take what I can,” she continues, sipping something from a chipped porcelain cup. I realize most of the things she has in the rice shackles are discards. She must have salvaged the cups and the plates. Here a bowl of old dumplings. There a plate of moldy-looking meat buns. And the bones. Too many bones.

  She hands me another stick of meat. I eat more slowly now, intrigued by her words. Her eyes are not amber. They are a faded brown.

  “You must be wondering about the bones,” the old woman smiles, her teeth showing gaps. Yet her smile is genuine. A grandmother’s smile.

  “I collect bones. I read bones. You know, a bone soothsayer. The clod of a son thinks I am dabbling with evil jin and dark magic. But it runs in my family, bone reading is. I know how old a thing is by looking at a bone. If you shine light through it, it glows.”

  Tiger demoness!

  Frightened, I dare not say anything.

  “You like to observe things, don’t you, little one?”

  I nod slowly, wonderingly. How did she know? Did the bones tell her?

  “There is nothing to eat here,” the old woman sighs. “I make do with what I have. Even the marrow inside the bones.” In her hand rests a mortar stone round with years of repeated use. She takes one chicken bone. Kerunch. “Try it. It’s food. Nourishment. Eat.” Kerunch.

  I stare at the smashed splinters, at the dark red marrow oozing out like red bean paste. She watches me, the old lady, the tiger demoness in disguise.

  The marrow tastes mealy and bloody. But so rich it fills my mouth and wakes my senses. So rich. I eat some more, grateful for the nourishment. So rich and delicious.

  When spring arrived with the festive sounds of the Lunar New Year, the old lady was gone. Disappeared, said the men in the tea houses. Like magic. Like a jin. The rice shack became just an empty hut bereft of fire and life. She took everything.

  Their chicken and ducks came back, too. The farmers found their coops and backyards filled with healthy clucking fowl.

  With the promise of fresh eggs and steamed chicken on New Year tables, thoughts of tiger demonesses and bone knuckles faded away like the soft footsteps of an old lady travelling down the melting snow.

  She has taught me so many things. Bones. The stripping of bones. The reading of bones. The light shining through bones. She has taught me many secret things, things passed down from mother to daughter in her family. The bloodline ended with the birth of her son. She was getting old. She wanted to teach me.

  I wanted to learn.

  She has also taught me the filling of bones. Her little rice shack suddenly filled with birds. The fluttering of feathers, the noises of pecking, of strutting. The bones given life, flesh.

  It was a mystery.

  When I grew older, I began to collect bones, too. I gazed at the bones, the candlelight turning the white translucent. They whispered to me about secret lives. Mysteries.

  I know that when winter arrives, I would have nourishment and life.

  Ana’s Tag

  William Alexander

  Ana and Rico walked on the very edge of the road where the pavement slumped and crumbled. They were on their way to buy sodas, and there were no sidewalks. They made it as far as the spot where the old meat-packing factory had burned down when Deputy Chad drove up and coasted his car alongside at a walking pace.

  Ana was just tall enough to see the deputy through his car window and the empty space of the passenger seat. Her brother, Rico, was taller, but he wasn’t trying to look through the car window. Rico was staring straight ahead of him.

  “Hi, kids,” said Deputy Chad.

  “Hi,” said Ana.

  “I need to ask you both about the incident at the school,” the deputy said.

  “Okay,” said Ana when Rico didn’t say anything.

  “It’s very important,” the deputy said. “This is the first sign of gang activity. Everyone knows that. Gang activity.” He tried to arch one eyebrow; but it didn’t really work, and his forehead scrunched.

  Other cars slowed to line up behind the squad car, coasting along.

  “What’s the second sign?” Ana asked.

  “The second sign,” said Deputy Chad, taking a deep breath, “happens at night on the highway. It involves headlights. Do you know that keeping your high beams on at night can blind oncoming traffic?”

  Ana didn’t. She nodded anyway.

  “Usually a driver has just forgotten to turn them off, and the way to let them know is to flash your own high beams, just briefly. But they drive around with the high beams on deliberately. If you flash at one of their cars, they pull a quick and violent U-turn and follow you, very close. Sometimes they just do it to see where you live. Sometimes they run you off the road. Bam!” He smacked the top of his steering wheel.

  Ana jumped. He grinned at her, and she grinned back.

  “What’s the third sign?” Rico asked, without grinning.

  “I can’t tell you that,” said Deputy Chad. “Ask your parents. It is the last ceremony of initiation, and it involves blonde ten-year-olds.”

  “I’m ten,” said Ana.

  “You’re not blonde, so you’re probably safe. Probably.”

  “Oh,” said Ana. “Good.”

&n
bsp; The line behind Deputy Chad was now seven cars long, coasting slowly. None of them dared to pass a cop.

  “So,” said the deputy. “You can see why we need to put a stop to this kind of thing right away before it escalates. Do you know anything about the incident at school?”

  “No,” said Rico.

  “What’s the graffiti of?” asked Ana.

  “It is deliberately illegible,” said the deputy. “It’s in code. Probably a street name. A tag. Graffiti is often somebody’s tag, delineating whose turf is whose. It looks like it could be in Spanish.”

  Ana and Rico’s parents spoke Spanish. They used it as their secret language and slipped into Spanish whisperings whenever they didn’t want Ana or Rico to understand them. Sometimes in public, Ana and Rico liked to pretend they could speak it, too. They would toss together random words and gibberish and use an accent because both of them could fake a pretty good one. They hadn’t played that game for a while.

  Rico bent forward a little, so he could look through the passenger window. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything about it,” he said.

  “Good boy,” said the deputy, and smiled a satisfied smile. “Be safe, now.” He drove off. Cars followed him like ducklings.

  “Perro muerto,” said Ana. It meant dead dog, or maybe dead hair. It was one of their nonsense curses. “He thinks you did it.”

  “Yeah,” said Rico.

  “Did you?” Ana asked.

  “Yeah,” said Rico.

  “Oh. What does it say?”

  “Not telling.”

  “Oh,” said Ana. Rico pushed Ana to his right side, so he could walk between her and the moving cars, and then he made a sign with his left hand. He tried not to let Ana see him do it. She saw anyway, but she didn’t ask. She cared more about the graffiti. “I’ll do all the dishes if you tell me what it says.”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” Ana thought about how long it would take to get to the East Wells high school, try to read the painted wall, write down all of her guesses, and walk home. She decided she could make it before dinner. Maybe Rico would tell her if she guessed right.

  They were almost to the gas station, which had a much better selection of soda to pick from than the corner store. The last part of the walk was uphill, and Ana had to work harder to keep up with her brother.

  “Do you think there really are gangs?” she asked.

  Rico shrugged and smiled a little. “Gangs of what?”

  “I don’t know. Gangs.”

  “I doubt it,” he said. “East Wells isn’t big enough to put together a gang of anything bigger than two people. Deputy Chad is just really, really bored.” He reached up and twisted his new earring stud. He’d pierced it himself with a sewing needle. Ana had held the swabs and rubbing alcohol while he did it. She’d felt obliged to help because she already had pierced ears, so she could offer him the benefit of her knowledge.

  “Don’t forget to clean that when we get home,” she said.

  “I won’t,” he said. He sounded annoyed. Ana decided to change the subject to something casual and harmless.

  “Why isn’t there a West Wells?” she asked.

  Rico stopped walking. They were in the gas station parking lot, only a few steps away from soda and air conditioning. Ana turned around. Her brother was staring at her.

  “What did you say?”

  “West Wells,” she said again, trying to be extra casual and harmless. “We live in East Wells, but it isn’t actually east of anything. There’s just, you know, the woods by the school and then endless fields of grain on all sides. There’s no West Wells.”

  Rico exhaled, loudly. “That’s right,” he said. “There is nothing to the west of this dinky little town. You are absolutely right.” He walked by her and went inside. Ana followed. She had questions, endless questions bubbling up somewhere near her stomach, and she had to swallow to keep them there because Rico was definitely not in an answering kind of mood.

  She shivered in the air conditioning even though she’d been looking forward to it. Rico knew which soda he wanted, but Ana took a long time to choose.

  Ana got her cat backpack from her bedroom closet. It was brown and furry and had two triangular ears sewn onto the top. She pulled a stack of library books out of it and replaced them with a flashlight, rope, chocolate-chip granola bars, Band-Aids, a notebook, and Magic Markers. She filled up the small, square canteen that had been Tio Frankie’s with water and packed that, too. Then she took out the flashlight because it was summer and it didn’t get dark outside until long after dinnertime and she needed to be back by dinner anyway.

  “Did you clean your ear?” she asked Rico’s bedroom door.

  “No,” he said from behind it.

  “Don’t forget. You don’t want it to get infected.”

  “I won’t forget,” he said.

  She walked to the East Wells high school, taking a shortcut through two cornfields to keep off the highway. It wasn’t a long walk, but during the school year almost everybody took the bus anyway because of the highway and the lack of sidewalks. Rico liked walking, even in wintertime. Ana saw him sometimes through the bus window on her way to East Wells Elementary.

  She walked between cornrows and underneath three billboards. Two of them said something about the Bible. One was an ad for a bat cave ten miles farther down the road. Ana had never seen the bat cave. Rico said it wasn’t much to see, but she still wanted to go.

  Ana crossed the empty parking lot in front of the high school and skirted around the athletic field to the back of the gym. She knew where to find the gym because it doubled as a theater and last summer a troupe of traveling actors had put on The Pirates of Penzance. After the show Ana had decided to become a traveling actor. Then she decided that what she really wanted to be was a pirate king.

  A little strip of mowed lawn separated the gym from the western woods.

  Three of Rico’s friends were there, standing in front of the graffiti. Ana could see green paint behind them. They were smoking, of course. Julia and Nick smoked cloves, sweet-smelling. Garth wore a Marlboro Man kind of hat, so he was probably smoking that kind of cigarette. His weren’t sweet-smelling.

  “Hey,” Ana said.

  “Hey,” said Julia. Ana liked Julia.

  “Hey,” said Nick. Nick was Julia’s boyfriend. Ana was pretty sure that her brother was jealous of this. Nick and Julia were both in Rico’s band, and both of them were really, really tall. They were taller than Rico and much taller than Garth.

  Garth didn’t say anything. He chose that moment to take a long drag on his cigarette, probably to demonstrate that he wasn’t saying anything. Garth was short and stocky and scruffy. He wasn’t in the band. He had a kind of beard but only in some places. He also had a new piercing in his eyebrow. It was shaped like the tusk from a very small elephant. The skin around it was red and swollen and painful-looking.

  Ana thought eyebrow rings were stupid. She liked earrings, and she could understand nose rings, belly-button rings, and even pierced tongues, but metal sticking out of random facial places like eyebrows just looked to her like shrapnel from a booby-trapped jewelry box. She didn’t like it. The fact that Garth’s eyebrow was obviously infected proved that she was right and that the universe didn’t like it either.

  “You should use silver for a new piercing,” Ana told him. “And you need to keep it clean.”

  “This is silver,” said Garth. He didn’t look at her as he said it. He looked at the tops of trees.

  “Don’t worry about him,” said Nick. “He likes pain. He gets confused and grumpy if something doesn’t hurt.”

  “Oh,” said Ana. She edged around them, trying to get a better look at the wall and the paint.

  Garth threw down his cigarette, stepped on it, and reached out to knock the cloves from Nick’s and Julia’s hands. “Bertha’s coming,” he said.

  Bertha walked around the corner. She was the groundskeeper. Rico used to help her mow the schoo
l lawn as a summer job, but this year he hadn’t bothered. Her name wasn’t really Bertha, and Ana didn’t want to ever call her that; but she didn’t know what Bertha’s name really was.

  Bertha sniffed and smiled. Her hair was a big, feathered mullet.

  “One of you isn’t smoking cloves,” she said. “One of you is smoking real cigarettes, and I am going to bet it isn’t the one with the kitten backpack. One of you is gonna buy my silence. ‘Why, no, officer, I sure didn’t see any young hooligans smoking near your site of vandalism.’”

  Ana, Nick, and Julia all looked at Garth. Garth grunted, handed over his pack of cigarettes, and walked away. He walked away into the woods.

  “Bye, Ana,” Julia said. “Say hi to Rico. Tell him we need to rehearse.” She took Nick’s arm, and the two of them followed Garth.

  Ana could see the graffiti now. It was red and green, and it wasn’t anything Ana knew how to decipher. Parts of it were swoofy, and other parts had sharp, edgy bits. It looked like it was made up of letters, but she wasn’t sure which letters they were.

  Bertha lit one of Garth’s cigarettes. “Gonna have to rent a sandblaster,” she said. “Won’t come off without a sandblaster. And it’s brick, so I can’t just paint over it.”

  “Deputy Chad thinks it was gangs that did it,” Ana said.

  Bertha snorted. “Town isn’t big enough for gangs,” she said. “Doesn’t matter, anyway. This is just somebody marking their territory. This is colored piss with artistic pretensions.”

  Ana took out her notebook, but she didn’t have any guesses to write down yet. “How’s the novel?” she asked Bertha. This was the usual thing to ask. Bertha had always been writing a novel.

  “Terrible,” Bertha said.

  “Sorry,” said Ana. She wondered if it was better to be a novelist or a traveling actor and decided it would still be better to be a pirate king.

  “What’s with the notebook?” Bertha asked. She flicked her cigarette butt at the graffiti, and it hit the bricks above the paint with a shower of orange sparks.

  “I’m going to draw it,” Ana said, “I’ll take it home and figure out what it says, and then … then maybe I’ll know who did it. I’ll solve the mystery.”