by Eric Smith
By the time she spied the temple’s brick roof tiles above the bamboo groves, sweat drenched the old woman’s clothes. Her feet were bloody from open blisters, her back strained and stiff. The straps of the basket she had been carrying cut deep grooves into her shoulders. She limped forward toward the open doorway, her eyes stinging with tears of relief.
Inside, she was greeted by a large golden bell suspended from the ceiling. Scores of fish meticulously carved on its surface, forming a never-ending swirl of scales.
Below the bell, a burbling hot spring fed a small pond.
She walked closer to inspect it. Instead of water, the spring spewed forth a steady, thick sludge of black ink. It bubbled and flowed away from where the woman stood, forming a steady stream that disappeared into the mouth of a cave. She could not see beyond.
The old woman knelt by the spring and unstrapped the sleeping child from the basket.
She tried to remember her own mother’s instructions when she had first become pregnant. But her memories held only wordless echoes. Luckily, she had always been blessed with a son.
She spied a wooden mallet sitting at the edge of the pond. Picking it up, she rang the bell twice. A deep, rich chime reverberated into the cave, and the whole temple seemed to shake. The inky water began to churn.
The woman waited, whispering a quick prayer to the Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin, between her lips.
From the darkness, a slithering creature emerged from the cave. He looked half-fish and half-man. Iridescent scales covered his serpentine face, and long slits along his neck opened and closed like gills. He glided forward, his milky eyes roving around the temple until they fell on the baby.
San Mo-gwai, they called him—the mountain’s monster, the Fate-eater, the transporter of souls to lands beyond their reach.
The woman averted her eyes quickly and held the child out in offering.
The creature took the baby into his barnacled hands. Like a spider’s limbs, they curved around the slight body. He sighed. And when he sighed, a mournful wind whistled down the mountains.
“Does she have a name?” he asked. His voice came out as a multitude of whispers.
The old woman shuddered and shook her head no.
He sighed again. Far down in the valley below, a woman felt a chill wind. She clutched her blanket closer to herself. In that moment, she felt the absence in her womb like a gnawing chasm.
The creature gently submerged the child into the pond, letting the black liquid pour over her. The grandmother held back a cry. Did she bring the baby all this way only to have a monster drown it?
Just when she was about to protest, the creature lifted the child up again. A length of red thread emerged, tied to her right hand. He took the thread and pulled and pulled until a scroll of red paper also came out of the black abyss.
He handed the grandmother the scroll, and with a sharp fingernail, he cut the thread.
“What is this?” the old woman whispered, gingerly unrolling the paper.
The mo-gwai clamped a hand over hers, staying it. Its clammy skin clung to hers like a wet rag.
“The part of her that is always yours to have, whether you want it or not,” he said. “Keep it, give it to the mother, or burn it. I care not.”
The creature turned and began to depart with the child cradled between his arms.
“Where do you take them?” the old woman asked. Her throat suddenly tightened around a small regret that died on her tongue. The scroll burned like a heated brand in her palm.
“Where they are wanted,” came his reply. With that, the nameless girl disappeared inside the cave.
The grandmother gripped the slip of paper for the length of five breaths.
She wanted to call after him, but she held back.
She knelt back down at the pond. Dipping a tentative finger into the ink, she began to write. When she was done, she folded the paper into the shape of a small boat and placed it on the pond. She watched the eddies carry it away into the cave, trailing its original owner like an albatross.
Later, she would try to wash her hands in the nearby river.
To her surprise and secret relief, the ink stains would not wash from her hands.
For eighteen years, I have lived as a changeling child.
When the therapist looks down at her clipboard, I see her eyes scan over the name I’ve written in neat, capped letters on my form.
“Stacy Duchamp?”
My head rises, and my hand floats up to acknowledge her. I see the split-second readjustment she makes as the girl she expects disappears. The girl with the paler complexion fades into my sallow tones. Her rounder eyes reshape to fit mine. The brighter hair is spirited away, to be replaced by a blanket of black. But her ghost is always there, hovering behind the therapist’s compensating smile.
I don’t know who that Stacy Duchamp is. All I know is that I’ve stolen her place. And I’ve become accustomed to erasing this girl from other people’s minds.
I sit down on the sticky pleather chair on the other side of the desk. The air is desert-dry and stifling hot, as two space heaters war with each other in the corner. I eye the multiple tissue boxes laid out on the coffee table.
So this is a challenge.
“Comfortable?” the therapist asks. She wears a cowl-neck sweater that swallows her bird-thin frame. Behind her horn-rimmed glasses, there is a severity as sharp as broken glass.
Not in the least, I want to say. But I only nod politely. I lean back on the couch but sink too far back into the soft cushions. I elbow myself upright and try to find a neutral position instead.
“I see you come as a referral from Lenox Hill,” she remarks, as if this were a particularly interesting fact, like I’d just returned from an exotic tropical island and not a psychiatric ward.
“Yeah,” I respond. Already my mind is racing elsewhere, preoccupied with the unread email burning a hole in my inbox.
“I’ve gone over your records prior to our meeting, but I would like to hear everything from your perspective. I think it would help me understand how best to approach your treatment.”
The hands I’ve rested on my knees instinctively turn into fists, but I keep my voice calm.
“I’d rather not talk about it. I thought I made that clear in my exit interview.”
“That’s not how mental health works, Stacy,” the therapist says. “Recovery is both a biochemical and an emotional process. Your psychiatrist will prescribe you what you need in terms of medication, but with me, I’m here to listen.”
I stare at my fingernails, turning white from pressing so hard into my palms.
I let the silence gestate; it feeds on the discomfort crackling in the room.
“Your parents are worried about you,” she continues. “I understand they were the ones who set up this appointment. They want you to get better.”
Guilt slithers around the insides of my chest like a many-tentacled parasite. Giving up was always the easy part—my grades, my friends, my life. They slipped from my fingers as if they had never belonged to me. Everything that bound me to this world belonged to a girl named Stacy Duchamp. Hers was an identity I could wash away like face paint.
I think about the cold water of the East River enveloping me and the pressure building around my ears when I sank. I think how hard it was to make my body stay still, to stop the swimming lessons from kicking in.
But then to resurface an even bigger failure than before? To learn that a passing kayaker had fished me out? I woke to my mother’s worried face and red-rimmed eyes, my father clutching my hand. They loved their Stacy very much.
How could I tell them that their daughter was a husk? She had been replaced by a charred little creature that always lurked underneath her skin.
“Okay, let’s try it this way. We don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want t
o,” the therapist says. “Why don’t you fill me in on your background. Does anyone in your family have a history of mental illness?”
“I’m adopted,” I say. “So I wouldn’t know.”
“Ah, I see, that explains your name.” By the tone of her voice, I can tell that the therapist has flagged this as a significant note. She scribbles some words on her clipboard. I know she’ll want to come back and unpack this later. And if she’s very lucky, I’ll cry.
“Often, depression can manifest in feelings of not belonging and can trigger emotional crises. . .”
I want to kick over the coffee table and scream.
But instead, I say, “I’m sorry. May I use the restroom?”
Standing in front of the greasy restroom mirror, I close my eyes and collect my heartbeats. I open my eyes and look at my reflection, half expecting the other girl to reappear. But only my small dark eyes glare back.
The tidal wave rises up from afar, and I can see how my hateful thoughts will try to drown me where I stand. Like the time before, when I let my gremlin heart drag me to the bottom.
I count the four moles that dot my cheek like a reverse constellation. This is a face that does not belong to a Stacy Duchamp, but to that other one, lost in an unrealized timeline. This body was made to house her, its construction built according to an entirely different blueprint than the one I had lived.
Like a treasure hunter, I scour the landscape of my skin for a clue—some remnant that might remain of a mapmaker’s mark.
I stare until my vision blurs.
“Why does it cry, dear changeling?” a raspy voice singsongs in my ear.
I stifle a scream. In my peripherals, I can make out the humanoid shadow of the creature lingering at my side. My mouth fills with the taste of stagnant water and oily fish. I try to turn and face it, but my muscles won’t cooperate. My eyes are frozen on my reflection.
“Why are you here?” I hiss, still staring at myself. The slippery shape moves to my other ear.
“I don’t understand.” The creature sounds perplexed, as if trying to solve a logic puzzle. “I brought you to where you were wanted. Why don’t you want to stay?”
“I did not want myself,” I say. “I did not want my pain.”
The shadow is silent, his head nodding. “I have something for you, then.”
Two pale, calcified fingers appear from the folds of shadow. They hold out an origami boat folded from bright red paper. I gingerly grab it without touching the creature, surprised that the paper feels heavy and real.
I regain control of my arms and began to unfold the panels.
“She dipped her own fingers into the fate pond to write it,” the shadow muses, “even after I severed her thread to you.”
“What is it?” I ask, studying the fluid calligraphy filling every corner of the page. The ink dripped black, splashing hieroglyphs against the red paper.
I run my fingers over the symbols, feeling hooks inside me latch on to the strange characters. My heart clings to this paper. And though I cannot read her words, her intentions flow into me like a gentle tide of music—a song of sacrifice, guilt, and blind hope.
“Mind yourself, changeling,” the monster whispers. “She wanted you. She wanted you to go far.”
Julie Leung was raised in the sleepy suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, though it may be more accurate to say she grew up in Oz and came of age in Middle-earth. By day, she is a senior marketing manager for Random House’s sci-fi/fantasy imprint, Del Rey Books. She is also the mother of FictionToFashion.com, where she translates her favorite books into outfits. In her free time, she enjoys furtively sniffing books at used bookstores and winning at obscure board games. Her favorite mode of transportation is the library.
“To adopt and become someone’s family is to alter that person’s fate in the most fundamental way. Family, for good or bad, is a pillar of one’s identity. In my story, I wanted to explore the issue of cultural identity through this lens. Moved by an article I had read about a girl searching for her birth mother in China, I wanted to explore this life-altering severance from not only a birth family, but also one’s original culture.”
Upon the Horizon’s Verge
by Sangu Mandanna
“Between two worlds life hovers like a star,
’Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge.
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be!”
—Lord Byron, Don Juan
I fall asleep on the bus and miss my stop, so I get off at the pier instead. The salt and vinegar smell of seaside chips tickles my nose, and the baby kicks me pointedly in the ribs, the greedy little goblin, so I buy a cone of chips and walk to the fairground. I expect bright lights and cotton candy and shitty music, but instead the fairground is dull and quiet and looks as it has for years, a motley collection of rusted rides and seagulls.
This is weird. I was here only last year, and the rides were alive with noise and color then. When did they shut the fairground down? Why didn’t we hear about it?
The gates are open. There’s not a soul in sight. Just gulls and rust and the creak of old metal in the wind. It’s unnerving, but it’s also peaceful, the kind that draws you closer and shuts the rest of the noisy, messy world away. The baby kicks, hard, so hard I have to stop and kind of push back on her foot so that it goes back to a sensible place. And then it’s a battle, of course, her foot against my hand.
She wins. I let her win. I do that a lot. Probably out of some irrational hope that she’ll remember this and won’t think quite so badly of me later. Yeah, my mother gave me up, she’ll tell people, but she used to let me kick her however hard I liked, so that’s something.
I find the old carousel, relatively free of broken pieces and rusty edges, and pull my chips, my giant pregnant belly, and myself up onto a dusty white pony.
“That’s brave,” a girl’s voice remarks.
I am somewhat precariously perched on this horse, but I’m a dancer. I have an excellent sense of balance, even seven months pregnant. I look around to find the source of the voice and see that there’s a girl tucked into a ladybug’s hollowed-out body close by. She’s about my age, sixteen or seventeen, and she pops little white balls out of her ear. At first I think they’re cotton wool, but then I realize they’re headphones, some kind of supercool wireless type that I’ve never seen before. I think of my lame headphones with their perpetually tangled wires and feel instantly envious.
“I didn’t see you there.”
“I know,” she says. “I didn’t mean to startle you.” Her eyes drift again and again to my belly in a way that I’ve gotten used to over the past few months, only it’s not the usual rude judgy look I see in her eyes. It’s something else. “Can I have a chip?”
I hold out the cone, and she reaches over the ladybug’s head to take one. Her eyes are bright and clever, and they remind me of someone, but I can’t put my finger on whom. They dart to my belly again.
“Yes, I’m pregnant,” I say.
“Sorry,” she says sheepishly, and then, in a rush to explain herself, “My birth mother got pregnant with me when she was sixteen, so I can’t help noticing when I see people my age with, you know, a bump. It always makes me think of her.”
“Oh.” I pause, hesitate. “Were you adopted?”
She nods.
“Do you know her?”
She shakes her head, then says, “But that’s fine, because I don’t think I want to know her.”
“Oh,” I say again.
“I have a family already,” she says, rushing once again to explain herself. Killian. That’s who she reminds me of. Killian, with his bright, clever eyes and the smile that melts my heart to a puddle and that earnest desire to be liked, to be understood. “A big family, all messy and daft and really annoying sometimes. My parents split up when I
was six, so I have stepparents too and a stepbrother and new cousins and about twenty grandparents.” She smiles, but this time there’s something brittle and forced about it. “I mean, my family annoys me sometimes, and they don’t always get me, and I really, really wish my dad would stop trying to convince me to become an architect like him, but you know what? They love me; I know they do. There’s not one drop of blood shared between them and me and they love me anyway. So why would I want to know someone who never loved or wanted me just because we’ve got some of the same DNA?”
As she speaks, I reach absently for the pendant around my neck. Hidden under my oversized sweater, it’s a gold ballet slipper on a delicate gold chain. I run my thumb over it, one, two, three times. I watch the way the girl’s face softens when she talks about her family and how that softness vanishes when she talks about the birth mother who didn’t want her.
You see, I can almost hear my mother say, this is how your daughter will feel if you let her go. This is what I’ve been warning you about. You’ll regret it if you give her up—you know you will.
She’s a broken record these days. Five and a half months since I found out I was pregnant, five and a half months of my mother and sisters and everyone else telling me what I should and shouldn’t do. Five and a half months of my own doubts nagging and scratching at me, keeping me up at night, telling me I’ll regret it if I keep her, I’ll regret it if I give her up, I’ll regret it twenty years down the line when I wonder what became of her.
I’ve been quiet too long. The girl blinks at me, then awkwardly changes the subject. “So do you know if you’re having a boy or a girl?”
“A girl.”
“Cool! Do you know how you’re going to juggle everything once she’s here?” Her face brightens. “My cousin had a baby last year, and he drives her crazy, but she’s so happy. Do you think you—”
“I’m not,” I say. Bite the bullet, get it over with.
