Turtle fell asleep, clenching the blanket. Mother was distracted, worried about Father and Chung-hee, hands full with the baby, but she would notice if I stayed away all night. I slid from under the blanket and left Turtle sleeping in the empty chicken coop.
The next morning, Turtle was gone. The straw was patted down like an animal’s nest, leaving the shape of where he had laid in the night.
Outside the chicken house, yesterday’s half-melted snow had frozen too hard to leave any footprints. I raced out the courtyard gate and looked up and down the empty street. Had Chung-hee found Turtle sleeping in our shed? I told myself Chung-hee wouldn’t have hurt him.
A strong gust of wind bit through my sweater, blowing away the gray clouds and the recent snows. The gate of Hye-su’s house next door banged back against the courtyard wall. My heart jumped with relief. That gate had been latched ever since Hye-su and her family had packed up and headed for the train station at the end of summer. But now it was loose. Someone had been inside.
I ran through the gate. Hye-su’s courtyard was exactly the way I remembered. One small window was broken. Snow piled in the north-facing corners and where it had blown off the roof. I wondered why Turtle had come here, why he hadn’t stayed safe and warm in our chicken coop.
A shadow moved inside Hye-su’s house, passing quickly in front of the window.
I stepped closer. “Turtle?” I whispered.
A hand shot out of the doorway and grabbed my arm. I screamed, and the hand spun me around.
“What are you doing sneaking around here?” Chung-hee demanded.
I stared at my big brother. I didn’t know what he was doing in Hye-su’s old house, but I knew he was up to no good. I wished I could tell him about Turtle; Chung-hee would be able to help me search faster. He would know more places where a boy might hide.
“I know you have a boyfriend,” he said. He tightened his grip on my arm, twisting the skin under my sweater. His eyes were so brown and hard, like flat river stones faraway under the water. I wanted to tell my brother that he wasn’t alone. That everything he had seen, I had seen, too.
“I didn’t think you were old enough.” Chung-hee’s harsh black eyebrows bristled together, like angry caterpillars. “But now that you are, you can help put rice in our bowls.”
I remembered the girl in the alley by the sock factory. I jerked my arm back, and shoved Chung-hee hard in the chest.
He laughed in my face, his mouth wide open. Even his breath had changed. It was a man’s breath, a hot stinky blast of smoke and old food. He twisted my arm behind my back. “You’re as bony as a crow, Min-hee. But you’re young, and that counts for something.”
I was crying. I couldn’t understand what had become of my brother. I spat in his face.
Chung-hee’s fist knocked me in the jaw.
I fell, and he leaned over me, ready to hit me again. He was breathing hard, his face red and ugly.
A plane buzzed over the mountains north of us, followed by a dull thud. There was a low whistle from the street, and Dong-sun, the butcher’s son, poked his head over the wall. “Let’s go,” he called to Chung-hee.
My brother turned his back on me and ran after Dong-sun.
I stood. My mouth was full of blood and snot, and one of my front teeth felt loose. A shell exploded a few houses away, rattling the ground. I thought of Turtle wandering in his bare feet, alone, unable to ask or explain. I ran out of Hye-su’s yard, calling his name.
I found Turtle on the edge of town where walled houses gave way to open fields and scattered farms bordered by the mountains. I had no idea how he had gotten there. Turtle, in his flimsy shirt and pants, with Chung-hee’s blanket wrapped around him, was staring off over the rocky, snow-covered fields. His face was no longer flushed with fever, but his eyes glowed with bright determination, like a boy on the day of an important exam.
As soon as he saw me, his hands flew into action, kneading the air. Images flickered between his hands like the propeller on a plane, too fast to see any single blade.
“Slow down,” I said. “Just do one at a time.” I put my hand on his shoulder.
I knew he couldn’t understand me, but the tone of my voice must have reached him. He breathed out, long and hard. Then, with his hands, he stretched and pulled, and landscapes unrolled between his palms. Turtle’s eyes were intent on me, urgent. There were no cornfields or big blue skies. No red-painted barns or black and white cows. Just one picture after another of winter woods, and mud, and broken trees. At first I didn’t recognize them.
“Wait,” I said. “Go back.” There had been something familiar in the last scene.
I waved my hand in a circle, like a clock circling backward.
He shuffled the scenes between his hands.
“Stop!”
He held the picture still. The trees were broken, the ground churned into deep, hardened ruts. It took me time to recognize it because it had changed so much. But I did know it. It was the woods near the Parks’ farm.
We headed west out of town, toward the granite mountains. The winter sun glowed a pale yellow that heated my skin under my scratchy sweater as we jogged along the deserted streets. We crossed the railroad tracks and traveled out into the open country.
The Parks’ farm lay in the next valley over. The mountains fed a stream that watered their pumpkin fields and flowed all the way down to the sea thirty miles away. We crossed the open fields, trampling the dried grasses. Blood surged into my face where Chung-hee had hit me, swelling my lip.
Ahead, fog swirled out of a thick forest of pines. I stopped at the edge of the woods and turned to the boy. I dialed my hand forward, telling him to show me the next picture. He showed me a stream, rushing with water. A slab of granite, glazed with ice, rose above the current.
I knew that rock. In the summer we dove from its flat top, splashing into the clear, cold pool. Its surface was pocked with holes all over, like the spots on a frog’s back. The holes filled with water when it rained and seemed to stare up like a hundred liquid eyes.
I tried to remember the way to the rock. I had only been to the river in summer. It was all so different now. Mist filled the woods, and I didn’t want to step inside. I wondered why Turtle wanted so badly to come here and how he knew what it looked like.
We climbed up the rocky spine of a ridge and stumbled down the other side, through the splintered, broken trunks of what used to be a grove of beautiful, tall birch trees. The armies had crossed back and forth over these hills for weeks and had left behind a trail of ruined equipment—shredded tires, ragged camouflage nets, even a tank sitting lopsided in deep, churned ruts.
Though he must have been weak from his fever and at least as hungry as I was, Turtle kept pace. Halfway down, the spring that fed the stream burst from a cleft in the granite, and we followed the spill of its waters to the bottom of the valley.
We walked downstream, picking our way over the slick rocks. Up ahead, the stream churned through a narrow channel, then widened and slowed. A tall, strong pine grew beside the pool, its drooping branches brushing the flat top of a granite boulder. The stream had carved away the bank beneath, leaving the mottled red slab to stretch out over the calm, deep pool.
Turtle came forward and clutched my arm, looking past me at the rock as if he were afraid.
I remembered what the old people said about the rock, that a spirit lived inside it, looking out at the world through its hundred eyes. Once, Hye-su, Chung-hee, and I and some others had come to the stream to swim, and had found an orange and a handful of rice on top of the rock, left as an offering t
o the spirit.
Bumps stood out on Turtle’s thin wrists. Under Chung-hee’s blanket, he shook from the cold. His look said that he didn’t know any more about what was going on than I did.
I let go of Turtle’s hand and climbed up on the rock.
And stopped. A dead man slumped against the other side. His still arms were wrapped around his middle, his green soldier’s uniform soaked through with blood. The blood was on his sleeves, on his bare hands, on his trousers, and on the stones and snow below him. It was old blood, brown and congealed. His soldier’s helmet lay on the ground beside him, and his head drooped loose on his neck. The dead man’s hair was the same color as Turtle’s, the same shade of red-bean porridge.
Turtle shouted “Pa!” and ran toward the man, dropping Chung-hee’s blanket on the snowy ground.
I had no idea how Turtle had appeared in my courtyard three nights ago, or what had pulled him out of his bed an ocean away and led him to his father’s body here in the blasted forest, but it wasn’t natural.
“We should go,” I said.
Turtle didn’t move.
The man on the ground opened his eyes.
Very slowly, the soldier raised his head and settled it back upright on his neck. His skin was gray-white and his lips blue. But his eyes focused on Turtle. There was no doubt that he recognized his son.
The man’s mouth moved, and he tried to smile.
The soldier unfolded his arms. It was no good, I could see that at once. He must have been in so much pain. When his arms moved away from his body, I saw the hole torn in his side. I could see right through his bloody uniform, right through his ragged skin to the shiny red, white, and black bloody insides of him. But he stretched his arms wider.
Turtle stepped toward him, then stopped and turned back to me. Turtle’s eyes met mine, and he pressed both hands flat against his chest.
Then Turtle went to his father, knelt, and stepped between his outstretched hands.
The soldier folded his arms around Turtle, pulling him into an embrace. Before I had a chance to say good-bye, the edges of the boy rolled up and he collapsed from the inside like a building falling in on itself.
The soldier’s arms dropped onto his chest, limp and lifeless. His head lolled against the rough granite. The stream rushed past, seeking the sea, the spray licking the toes of the dead man’s boots, casting them with ice. There was no trace of Turtle. He had gone, evaporated like the food in my stomach.
I dropped down on the riverbank in the snow, and cried into the neck of my sweater. Turtle was gone, and I was alone again. My own world that I had thought solid and indivisible, the world where Father sat at the head of the table, and Mother sang songs from the radio, and Chung-hee carried me on his bike, had disappeared forever. There was no longer any trace of the family we had been, no more than there was a piece of Turtle’s sail-patterned shirt or his red-porridge hair left behind on the trampled snow in front of me.
The wet tracks of my tears stung my face with cold. It was getting dark under the trees, and the forest no longer held anything for me. I stood, and my eyes caught a fleck of white atop the rock, near the soldier’s open, staring eyes. A cigarette, the edges pink with blood. The wet paper had disintegrated and flakes of loose tobacco scattered across the stone, falling damply into the hundred pools.
I wrapped Chung-hee’s blanket tighter around my shoulders. The world I had always known had been shattered like a late winter pumpkin on the Parks’ farm, but there were other worlds: Turtle had come from a different world, far away on the other side of the ocean. And maybe he had been helped by the ancient world of gwishin, demons, and hungry-mouthed spirits that dwell in rock. There were ways to get from one world to another. I started back up the hill, pushing hard through the deep snow.
Stars shone in the twilit sky when I arrived on our street. I could just make out the shapes of the chicken coop and the outhouse, our roof, and a withered curl of smoke rising from the ondol against the darker trees behind.
Inside, Mother argued with Chung-hee. She had the baby on her back and held the handle of a pot with a folded rag, scolding him to save some food for me. He laughed and snatched the pot from her hand, filling his bowl to the brim. I had thought about it on the long walk back. Why should people like my brother be the only ones who could create a new world and escape into it? The waegukin army had boats farther down the coast, and a new world at the end of them. I didn’t have to stay in this broken world, picking among the scattered seeds.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, pushing into the room. “We’re going to meet the boats at Wonsan.”
Chung-hee acted as if I hadn’t spoken. Setting his bowl on the table, he shrugged out of his soldier’s coat and tossed it at Mother. She sat down obediently to fix the tear in the shoulder. She threaded a needle, and with her head bent over the rough wool, said, “If we went away, your father would never find us. Our whole family would become missing persons.”
“If we stay, he won’t find us either,” I argued. “Are you the same wife that he left? Am I the same daughter? What will we be like in another six months?”
I didn’t mention Chung-hee, but Mother’s eyes darted in his direction. She tied off the thread and pushed the coat back to him. Her ropy hands rested flat on the scarred table. My beautiful mother had become an old woman. Her skin was rough and chapped. Even the lobes of her ears seemed to sag lower and looser.
I went into the other room and, making sure that Chung-hee wasn’t looking, lifted Mother’s jeweled hair clip from under the loose board and slipped it in my waistband. I gathered clothes for both of us and, back in the kitchen, scraped the last grains of millet from the bottom of the jar.
“It’s too far, Min-hee,” Mother said. “Too dangerous.”
I bundled the supplies into Turtle’s blanket and hung it over my shoulder.
“There won’t be room for us on the boats,” Mother said. But when I took the baby from her, she didn’t resist.
A massive shell landed somewhere on the outskirts of town and shook the ground beneath us. I looked at my brother, one last time. Chung-hee leaned back against the wall, the collar of his soldier’s coat turned up around his skinny neck. He held his bowl with both hands, and loudly slurped his soup—the soup that should have been mine.
So be it, I thought. He had chosen his world, now I had chosen mine.
Those waegukin boats we were heading for might get blown apart by a Chinese shell and take us to a world at the bottom of the Yellow Sea. Or the boats would travel south, and we would step ashore into a world I couldn’t imagine. But now that I knew there were other worlds, I wouldn’t stay in this one, flapping my wings like a homeless chicken.
I tied my baby brother onto my back, took Mother’s hand, and we stepped out into the night.
Scavengers
written by
Shannon Peavey
illustrated by
JAMES J. EADS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shannon Peavey was born and raised in a suburb of Seattle, Washington. The oldest of three girls, she mostly used her vivid imagination to terrify her siblings: telling them that she’d been replaced by an evil twin from an alternate dimension, or that eating crab apples gave a person magical powers. They have since forgiven her.
After receiving a degree in English from Mount Holyoke College, she returned to the Pacific Northwest and began writing in earnest. She tries to bring the unique flavor of the west coast, its history and unexplored places, to her writing.
Shannon particularly credits Robin McKinley and Lloyd Alexander for instilling in her an appreciation
for strong heroines, vivid new worlds, and beautiful words.
When not writing, Shannon works as a horse trainer and continually attempts mastery of the piano (so far, the piano is winning). Her Writers of the Future win is her first published work.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
James J. Eads is a freelance illustrator and art instructor from Orange County, California. He received his BA from California State University, Fullerton and began his career as a public school teacher, until he was quickly hired away as a graphic designer for the furniture industry, where he worked for the next fifteen years.
James became the owner and head designer for VIP Arts, a rubber art stamp and craft supply company. With VIP, he had the opportunity to teach art classes across the country. Once again, teaching became an important part of his life, leading him to teach art to the incarcerated juveniles and adults at Santa Ana Jail. For the past decade, James has worked at creating an art program for elementary schools, working with children grades K–6, as well as special needs classes. He has recently retired to work on more personal projects.
James works primarily in pen-and-ink and watercolor, but is not above drawing in crayon with his granddaughter. He is honored to be among the Illustrators of the Future, and is already hard at work on writing and illustrating children’s books.
Scavengers
Keera leaned back to peer at the sky, shading her eyes with one hand, a turnip hanging by its fringe in the other. Mara glanced over at her sister and wondered what she saw.
Writers of the Future, Volume 29 Page 28
