And what is my name, you might ask? Some call me as I am, my name by birthright, out there in those faraway stars, stars you’ve never seen, though may in time.
Yet, this is not my only name. There are others who know me as—
FLY, my mind said. FLY.
Aeliana, I’m coming.
Life at the Lake’s Shore
By Alex Shvartsman
Fyodor clutched the glass jar pilfered from his mother’s kitchen. She would no doubt notice, and then there’d be hell to pay, but it was going to be worth it. With great care he tied a cord around the jar’s narrow opening, just like his father had taught him. He tested the cord until he was satisfied it would hold, then dipped it partially into the lake and scooped up some water. He watched the bread crumbs bloat and rise from the bottom of the jar.
“That’s a stupid way to catch fish” decreed his friend Kostya when Fyodor let slip this part of his plan. “A jar is small. You’ll trap useless, tiny fish that are no good for eating, and that’s if you manage to catch anything at all. You should use a rod like everybody else.” Kostya was almost a year Fyodor’s senior and pretty smart, but surely he didn’t know as much as Fyodor’s dad, who taught him the jar trick before he went off to war. Besides, it’s not like Fyodor was planning to eat the fish, or hurt it with the sharp hook.
Fyodor cast the jar as deep as he dared into the lake and waited.
#
Fyodor was born on October 25, 1917. While a midwife ministered to Fyodor’s sweat-drenched mother, a ship called Aurora fired its cannon in faraway St. Petersburg to launch the assault on the Winter Palace and herald the Bolshevik revolution. His parents learned of the coincidence years later when a small troupe of soldiers calling themselves a part of the Red Army came to their village.
Fyodor was only four years old at the time and didn’t remember much, but he did remember their leader. The man had steely, unkind eyes and the brusque manner of a gendarme. He spoke with great passion about the plight of the poor, quoting from thick books and painting a rosy picture of a communist future where everyone would be equal and no one would be hungry. Many in the village were swayed. Fyodor’s father, who was hardly considered an equal by anyone and who knew hunger all too well, became an instant convert.
The Red Army men shot the richest farmer in the village and badly beat up the priest. They redistributed the land and set up a committee to run things on behalf of the new government. There was some talk of Fyodor’s father being appointed, but in the end he wasn’t. Instead, he and a few other men were recruited into the Red Army. The soldiers left to fight their enemies, and Fyodor’s father left with them. He’d been gone for an entire year now.
Every night, as Fyodor was getting ready for bed, he asked his mother for any news. She sighed and told him that his father was going to come home very soon with a chest full of medals befitting a war hero. She then leafed through a dog-eared book of Pushkin’s fairy tales, her prized possession, and read to Fyodor from it until he fell asleep.
Fyodor’s favorite was “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish.”It was a story about a kindly old fisherman who caught a magical golden fish in his net. The fish could talk and it begged for its life, promising the fisherman any reward he wanted in exchange for its freedom. Unwilling to harm such a being, the fisherman let it go asking for nothing in return. His wife was not so charitable—she jeered the fisherman and nagged at him until he agreed to go out to sea and ask the golden fish for a new washboard. His wish was granted, but the fishwife’s greed was not easily satiated. She kept asking for greater miracles, until finally the golden fish had had enough and withdrew all of her gifts, leaving the old couple where they started—with nothing at all.
Fyodor thought he was smarter than the fishwife. When he managed to catch the golden fish he would not ask for riches and titles. He would not pester it with unreasonable requests. He wanted but one simple miracle.
The trick to trapping the fish, his father had taught him, was to yank the jar out of the water quickly. Once it swam into the jar to feed on the bread crumbs, the fish would not find an exit fast enough and would itself become dinner.
Fyodor pulled the cord with both hands, in a smooth motion he’d spent a few days practicing. The jar emerged, splashing some cool lake water on Fyodor’s shirt. He balanced the jar and lifted it, staring into the mix of water, bread crumbs and dirt. His heart skipped—there it was; a small fish, perhaps the size of his index finger, trapped inside.
He set the jar gently on the ground and waited for the dirt to settle so he could see the fish more clearly. He was disappointed that it wasn’t golden—but of a regular fish color. It was the lake, he told himself, and not the sea. Magical fish are different here. When he stared especially hard at the fish, he thought he spied little golden specs reflecting from its scales.
“Hello, magical fish,” he addressed the jar. “Don’t worry; I’m not going to hurt you. Honest.” He sidled up to the jar and whispered into the water. “I caught you fair and square and when I let you go, you have to fulfill my wish. I want my dad to come back home. Send him home, please?” And with that he tipped the jar over the lake’s edge, slowly spilling the water.
The fish did not have to be asked twice. It dove into the lake and disappeared without as much as a word of thanks. Fyodor stared at the lake for a while longer, for the first time experiencing some doubt. His mother was going to punish him severely for taking the jar, and now it didn’t look as though he’d have anything to show for it.
Fyodor walked home slowly, trying to come up with some great excuse that might get him out of trouble. When he got home, the jar was the furthest thing from his mother’s mind; his father had returned.
#
For years, Fyodor had avoided the lake. He grew into a young man, discarding the naïve notions of Pushkin’s fairy tales along the way, but he could never discount his experience on that summer day of ’22 as a coincidence. The malevolent power that he’d somehow tapped into exacted a steep price in exchange for fulfilling his wish.
His father had returned home a broken man. He had lost both legs on the battlefield, which in itself was a tragedy Fyodor could cope with. Worse yet, his father seemed to have lost his soul. The man who returned wasn’t at all the same person that Fyodor remembered. He became short-tempered and crude, perpetually angry at the world. In his eyes, anyone else’s happiness was a personal affront. He drowned his sorrows in moonshine when he could afford it and settled for shouting abuse at his family when he couldn’t. Although Fyodor felt deeply ashamed at the thought, he sometimes dreamt of a better life where his father had never returned at all.
It was the fish’s fault. It must have taken offense at being captured by something as crude as a glass jar. It resented his demand for a miracle. It found a way to mock him, to give him what he had asked for in an evil and underhanded way. So he kept away from the lake and swore off any more wishes. He thought that he could never want anything in life badly enough to risk paying the sort of price the fish would exact.
He was wrong.
Her name was Maria. Nothing else in the world mattered to him as much as her smile. He saw her face whenever he closed his eyes, and her slender form haunted his dreams. He walked around in a daze, thinking only of her, his longing physically painful. Maria liked him well enough, but she had other suitors.
His most intense competition was with Dimitry, and Fyodor was losing. Rumor had it that Dimitry was getting ready to propose. The thought of letting Maria slip away was unbearable.
For the first time in nineteen years, Fyodor made a trip to the lake, and he asked for another miracle. It was June 21, 1941. On the following day the Germans invaded.
#
As the fifty-six year old Fyodor stood on the lake’s shore for the first time since the Second World War, he reflected that the most dangerous thing in the world was love.
It was love for his father that caused him to seek supernatural help as a young boy.
His wish was fulfilled, but he had to pay dearly. A bargain he would not have agreed to beforehand.
It was love for Maria that pushed him to return, and though he’d suspected the price would be high, in his wildest dreams he did not imagine it would be so enormous. The death and suffering he saw during the war was only a prelude to years of guilt, knowing that he was the cause of so much misery.
He came back from the war in ’45. Dimitry never did. Maria and Fyodor were married a year later. It wasn’t an easy life, but it was a good one. Fyodor wanted desperately to share his story with Maria, but he loved her too much to burden her conscience.
Love for his father. Love for Maria. And now, for the final time, it was a love for their son that forced him to seek out the golden fish for the third time. Vladimir was a smart young man, but too outspoken for his own good. A careless proclamation, an inappropriate joke, or simply bad luck saw to it that KGB agents came to the house in the dead of night and whisked Vladimir away. His fate was undecided as yet, but precious few men arrested for political reasons were ever released. Although things had improved since Stalin’s time, a convict rarely survived a sentence of more than a year or two in the north.
“Please hear me,” Fyodor addressed the lake. “I beg of you another miracle. Not for myself this time, but for my son. He is an innocent man, wrongly accused, and all I want is for the investigators to realize this.
“I’ve asked miracles of you in the past for selfish reasons, and you punished me by making sure that the price was too high. But not this time. If any bargain is to be struck, I will pay for it. Take my life. Do with me what you will, but know that if you wish to cause pain to anyone else, I will not accept your help. Vladimir wouldn’t want to be saved at the expense of anyone else’s involuntary suffering.”
Fyodor stared at the perfectly still water, willing the magical fish to appear.
“Come on,” he shouted. “You’ve already taken my childhood and my happiness. Now accept the damn bargain and take my life!”
Fyodor stumbled as he suddenly lost his balance. A sharp pain like a lightning strike inside his head brought him to his knees. As the world spun around him, Fyodor thought he saw the lake’s waters swell up and a large silver fish with specks of gold glittering on its scales staring at him with sad, knowing eyes.
#
The funeral was a brief affair. Despite living in the same village all of his life, Fyodor had made few friends. Fewer still were willing to walk all the way out to the lake in the rain.
“Your grandfather was a prickly one,” said Kostya, an ancient and nearly blind man who’d braved the bad weather despite having one foot in the grave himself. “He was obsessed with this sorry puddle. No wonder he asked to be buried here.”
“Yeah, it was strange,” admitted Sergey. “You know, he chose the very spot where he had that massive stroke.”
“Yes, I remember,” Kostya said. “He was a miserable bastard afterward, half his body paralyzed, unable to speak coherently, all that memory loss, too. That’s not a life. I would have probably offed myself, in his place. But no, he stuck around to see his seventy-fourth birthday. Every day he spent hours to make his way out to this spot and mutter something at the lake.”
“He loved this place,” Sergey said.
“I’m not so sure,” replied Kostya. “He was drawn to it, yes, but somehow I don’t think he loved it.”
The two of them stood in silence over the fresh grave as the raindrops disturbed the lake’s otherwise still surface.
“Only one good thing ever happened for him here. When he survived the stroke, they let your dad go. Vladimir was sent home to take care of his war hero father instead of being shipped off to Siberia. Guess that makes you lucky too, for being born,” the old man chuckled.
“He must have loved it,” Sergey insisted. “I think he used to come here to watch for fish in the water. He was trying to tell me something about the fish in the lake, toward the very end, but he didn’t have the strength.”
“Fish? Bah.” Kostya snorted dismissively. “Ever since they built the factory upriver in ’71 it’s been dumping chemicals right into the stream. There’s been nothing alive down there for the last twenty years.”
The old man patted Sergey’s shoulder and turned to begin a slow walk back to the village.
Aliens
By Fiona Mae Villamor
The first time I met an alien, I was mildly disappointed.
For one, he—it—looked just like the rest of us: no slimy skin, no bug-shaped eyes, and no major deformities whatsoever. For another, he didn’t come in a spaceship, at least none that I knew of. He announced his arrival through a mere knock on our door, accompanied by a heartfelt plea and a small canvas bag that he slung across his shoulder.
“Good morning ma’am,” he had said to my mother. “Would you happen to know the quickest way to the city?”
My mother smiled at him. After chiding him jokingly about calling her ma’am, she said, “Of course, dong. Just get a ride to the port and the boats there can take you to the mainland, where you can catch a fast craft headed to the city.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I appreciate it.”
“But our fiesta is in a few days, so you might want to stay for the fun.”
“Thank you, ma’am, but I have to be on my way as soon as possible.” He tipped his hat and went on his way before my mother could ask any more questions.
At that time, I did not tell my mother, for fear that she would rouse something careless, but I already knew that he was an alien. I watched him as he asked for directions and I watched him later on as he circled our little barangay, inspecting everything that he encountered along the way.
It did not take long for the village to notice him. People would call out to him in the midst of fiesta preparations as he walked on our streets.
“Are you from the census, sir?”
“Why don’t you come join us in a meal?”
“What are you doing, walking around under the sun like that?”
“Do you need to go anywhere, sir? I have a trusty ride back at our house.”
“Stay around for the fiesta!”
He always smiled at my neighbors, politely declining their inquiries and offers. From the time he knocked on our doors to the time the sun hid behind the mountains, the alien just roamed around.
On the second day since his arrival, he was already on our streets before anyone rose for the morning—and when fiestas were imminent, people woke up significantly earlier. He inspected what he saw, declined offers of breakfast, and smoothly refused any questions. People had grown used to the sight of his walks, but that didn’t stop the speculations surrounding him to spread. No one knew, for instance, where he had retired for the night.
“He asked me directions to the city,” my mother was telling her friends as we sat together making banderitas in a little hut near the square. “I told him this and that, but he just wandered around for the rest of the day. I wonder what he’s doing.”
“He doesn’t even answer any questions,” one of her friends said. “I say we should let the kapitan question him.”
“There’s no need. My husband says that he hasn’t done anything wrong.” said the barangay captain’s wife.
“Well, should we wait until he does?” one of the women quipped up.
“Nonsense,” my mother said. “I’m sure he means no harm.” she said, waving to the subject of their conversation as he passed their way.
On the third day, the alien didn’t make his usual rounds. In fact, everyone in the village thought he had already gone on his way. I knew he was still nearby, though. So after breakfast, I kissed my mom on the cheek and said that I wanted to play with my neighbor, Karen, today. We want to make some kites, I said, I’ve always wanted to fly a kite.
“Don’t go too far though, ok?” Mother said, giving me a small backpack with some sandwiches and juice.
“Okay.”
With everyone focused on th
e fiesta, it was easy to slip by unnoticed. There was a little clearing off to the west of our barangay, after some patches of trees and a steep slope up. It was a beautiful place, one that I’ve always considered my safe haven. Today, I had a strong feeling that the alien was seeking refuge there, too.
Sure enough, he was.
“Hello,” I said.
He turned around, looking startled. He was sitting on a mat and his backpack was sprawled beside it. There was an opened lunch box before him, which he was eating out of when I arrived.
“I’m sorry, did I disturb you?”
“Not at all,” the alien said. He looked at me warily, as if I would attack him any second.
“I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just... curious about you.”
The alien didn’t say anything. And when he saw that all I could do was stare at him, he turned his back on me and resumed his meal.
I moved gingerly forward, noticing more and more details about him as I did. In his lunchbox was a perfect balanced meal—any dietician would applaud it. His backpack was filled to the brim with tools, gears, and rations that would help any man last long in the wild. To the common eye, he looked like any other explorer. But I noticed the awkward way he held his utensils, and I noticed his stiff Indian squat, and I noticed the way he never blinked.
“You don’t look comfortable in your own skin,” I said. I was directly behind him now.
“What makes you think so?” He said, still preoccupied with eating.
“I don’t think you’re from here or anywhere near here for that matter.”
He had finished eating and was cleaning up, closing his backpack as he did. He then stood up and looked at me. “Explain yourself,” he said nonchalantly.
I resisted the urge to avoid his gaze. “You did not offer me food, or invite me to eat with you. Everyone here does that.”
OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology Page 43
