by Various
When the cloud of white tufts cleared, Huiling was gone. I stood there, hunched over, holding my arms close and breathing heavily.
The tiny fangs hadn’t hurt me. I hadn’t felt them at all. But as the last one faded away, its jaws still working viciously at my forearm, I wished more than anything that I had.
• • •
Huiling’s leviathan regards me through bulletproof glass. I am almost at an angle where I can see the security lines, but by the time I reach the wall of the terminal, she has already shown her passport and been ushered through.
My stomach squeezes. It can’t end like this. I don’t even know her new address. Why did I wait so long to decide that I needed one last chance, one last talk with her?
I don’t even know what I want to say. Scenes from the past four years flicker in my mind like a movie reel. Our first kiss. The first day of school. Bats against my window. Holding her. Sitting at the back of an auditorium, watching her dance. Finding out through Margaret that Huiling had flunked her Advanced Maths O Level.
I turn around and sprint for the terminal entrance. My heart is pounding and my lungs are burning, but I don’t slow down. This feels like it may be the most important moment of my life.
I emerge into the midday heat. Compared to the air-conditioned terminal, it’s like walking into an oven. I dart past taxi drivers and chauffeurs. I leap over a chain, and nearly stumble on a drainage grate.
Someone once told me this: There is one special person out there for everyone. Be patient. Don’t worry and don’t rush. When you find her, you’ll know.
I try to swallow, but my throat is dry, and it turns into a cough. I have to spend a few moments with my hands on my knees, panting. A colony of big black ants swarms the sidewalk near my feet.
I squeeze my eyes shut, and my eyes burn like they’re trying to cry. I already found that person. It was obvious. In my mind, two cockatrices goose-step between school desks, flaunting their tailfeathers.
Congratulations, read the letter from the Ministry of Education when I got my results in the mail. You scored among the top ten percent of students in the MSCE ‘O’ Level Exams. High-performing students like you are a boon to our country and our society. We trust that you will go on to achieve great things in the future.
I limp my way towards a hillock at the edge of the parking lot, next to the two-storey fence that surrounds the runway. When I reach it, I grasp the fence in my hands and stare out at the runway, at the planes lined up in rows. Little boxlike trucks zip around like important bees. I think I see Huiling’s plane, a blue-and-gold jumbo jet with the Singapore Airlines logo.
They tell you these things before the tests. Before the judgments. Before the fights and crying and breakups. Before you grapple with expectations, disappointments, and constant feelings of futility. Before the world sets in and you realize that despite your hopes, griffons and basilisks only share one thing in common. They’re both mythical.
Huiling was the only other person who could see my summons. I kick the fence, hard. Why didn’t that count for something?
Fifteen minutes passes. Half an hour. When I see the plane I think is Huiling’s move off from its gate and reverse onto the runway, I suck in my breath and push harder than I ever have.
A magnificent, glowing phoenix erupts from the tips of my fingers, ten times bigger than any phoenix I have ever summoned. And as Huiling’s plane begins its trundle down the runway, my phoenix cuts across the tarmac to circle alongside it, sending sheets of golden flame billowing into the morning sky.
The scene is not quite as majestic as I imagined. The phoenix is still small, compared to the plane. I don’t know if Huiling can see it. I don’t know what side she’s sitting on, or even if she’s near a window. She might be looking at a magazine, or maybe she’s not even on this plane.
Still, my phoenix circles. The plane taxis, gains speed, and tilts itself up into the blue sky. My phoenix follows, pumping its wings to keep speed until both plane and bird are so small that I can hardly make them out against the glare of the sun.
I hope she saw it. I really do. I hope she was filled with emotion, and shed a tear like the ones running down my cheeks now. I hope she thinks of the tiny phoenixes I summoned for her, the I love you’s from the 28th floor.
I want to tell myself that she’ll find happiness in England. That she’ll find friends, fulfillment, even love. I want to tell myself that I will, too. But it sounds too much like another story. Another myth that we tell ourselves, despite reality.
For now, I can only hope.
SKYBREAK
by Jeremy Sim
First published in Cicada (May 2013), edited by Deborah Vetter
• • • •
THE STELES standing in the cemetery outside our town are five feet high, huge flat chunks of beautiful dark stone that loom like sentinels amid fields of long grass. They litter the hillside with no self-restraint: one here, a weathered chunk crumbled out of its side; one there, square and glossy and perfect—a recent addition.
When I was young, appa told me that the steles were the bodies of those who once flew against heaven, turned to stone and cast down to earth where they belonged. He whispered that this was why some of the steles stood at a slant: they had fallen at a trajectory, rocketing down from the sky like granite knives. I remember the gleam in his eyes, the assurance of his breath on my ear—it is one of the things I still remember of appa, now that he has joined the stele-legions in eternal rest.
At the head of each stele is a large octagonal hole shaped like the one in the middle of a bronze coin. In the warm autumn nights we knot long red ribbons through each eye, letting the tails trail up to the sky and flutter in the wind. Gold foil trims the edges of these ribbons; from afar they ripple like red dragons.
When I was a little older I would bring Ji-won to see the steles, lifting him up so he could climb. His little fingers would scrabble against the stone, as if he were afraid I’d drop him. He’d squirm through the eye and clamber up to sit on the stele’s head, laughing and kicking. Then I’d vault up to sit on one of the other steles, and we’d balance on the heads like twin lion statues, brothers six years and one stele apart.
• • •
On the day of Skybreak I am aboveground in the morning wet, picking white mulberries for umma’s medicine. I have grown taller over the years, but still I stand on my tiptoes to push the shiny leaves aside, separating the soft white fruits from their stalks. It is a quiet day, and I am unprepared for the signal when it comes: in the corner of my eye, a burning ball sails silently upward on the wind, flaming across the sky like a sunset in reverse.
When I see the second burning ball, a mass of flaming silk swept up on the tail of a red signal kite, a knot of fear tightens inside me. If this is a drill, there will be only two flares. But I am far from the city’s entrances, and I must return now. I drop the basket, letting white mulberries flood out over the ground. I start to jog, then sprint, towards home.
By the time the third burning ball goes up, there are shapes in the sky, dark against the horizon.
• • •
The wind whips the grass around my feet as I race uphill towards home. I hear yelling. I hear the sound of metal on metal, the creak of bamboo. I smell clean oil and smoke.
It is not a drill.
Somewhere in the tunnels of home, I know Ji-won is squirming into his bamboo mail. The thought makes my breath catch in my chest, and I struggle to plant my feet in the loose soil, heading to the nearest town entrance. The sight of it, carved into the side of the hill like a stone mouth, urges me on.
“Hurry!” A boy in a mail shirt beckons from the entrance. An older woman, the green silk hem of her chima dragging against the grass, scampers down the slope. She is aided by the soldiers, who guide her inside.
A soldier grabs my arm and pulls me in. Five or six of them crowd around the entrance, facing out, shuffling their sandals and bamboo shields uncertainly. They are barely older tha
n Ji-won, the bunch of them, and it is surely their first Skybreak.
I run into the tunnel, my sandals slapping against the hard dirt. Sunlight turns to familiar lamplight as I head down a side corridor, away from the crowd.
The tunnels stretch for miles under the hilltop’s protective shield. This is a city built by our grandparents’ grandparents, hollowed carefully into the land like a child scooping the insides of a melon. There are tunnels so old that we cannot read the writing carved into the earthy walls. But we know one thing for sure: as long as the sky has broken, our people have taken refuge in the ground.
“Oi! Don’t run!”
I know I’m not supposed to be running. I should be keeping to the wall like everyone else, letting the soldiers run through to the outside. But I’m not a child anymore. And sometimes adults have to make choices outside the rules.
I pass baskets of dried fish, stacks of half-peeled bamboo, ricepaper lamps flickering orange in the darkness. I nearly trip over a pile of twine as high as my waist, and a merchant screams at me as I race past. I know him: he is angry because he has no one to help him pack away his goods and bar the door, and because in the last Skybreak, he lost his second son.
I slide around another bend in the tunnel and reach my hiding place: from under a bundle of grass blankets I pull a sheathed knife, a stone-knotted rope and a dirt-stained shirt of bamboo mail. And my shield, sturdy bamboo strips stretched over a frame I glued together from kite materials in the workshop.
Even from where I am, I can hear the fighting start. The low rumble of yelling. A distant screech, faint and inhuman.
I stand, dislodging a white mulberry that has caught in the hem of my shirt. It bounces a little, then comes to rest on the rocky ground.
I head back up the tunnel, towards the sound.
• • •
I remember the sound of Ji-won’s voice, young and pure, from a more innocent time. A more measured afternoon.
“Hyung? Why did you run away from umma this morning?”
We are sitting outside the village and Ji-won looks at me with a child’s eyes, wide and wondering. He has always called me hyung, big brother, instead of Ji-sung, my name.
My heart falls. I don’t want to set a bad example for him.
I pick my words carefully. “Sometimes umma gets frustrated. I come out here to give her time to calm down.”
The wind catches my words; I almost cannot hear my own voice. The air is cold between us, and smells of mulberry blossoms.
“Is she frustrated at you?”
“Yes.”
Ji-won laughs, sitting on his stele, running his hand along the ripples in the red ribbon. “Maybe she needs a hug.”
I don’t answer. The anger is still a hot coal in my chest.
But watching Ji-won makes the anger dissipate. When Ji-won grows up, he’s not going to help umma in the shop, like me. He’s going to be a soldier, like all second-borns. He’s going to wear a mail shirt, carry a shield, and fight heaven.
It makes my heart ache just thinking about it.
Ji-won laughs, the red ribbon tickling him as it wraps around his wrist. His injustice makes my own injustices seem small.
• • •
I follow the sound of fighting through the tunnels, ducking out of the way of an uncle and two aunties heading inward. I am sure they recognize me as a non-soldier, but I am past them before they can think to call out to me.
Ji-won is the youngest in his regiment. He is assigned to one of the south entrances, so that’s the way I head. I pass houses, their ricepaper doors ajar. It has been years since the akma were able to break through the second-borns’ defenses and enter the city, but the people take precautions nonetheless. Mothers shush children across rooms, squeezing them into little shelves dug into the walls just for such an occasion. Fathers, domesticated first- and third-borns, muster broomsticks and cooking pots. It is their duty to stay inside the village now, to carry on the family line while the second-borns die up on the surface. People tell me that is my duty as well.
There is a little surface tunnel on the south side of town that few people use and is too small for an akma to fit through. When I reach it I drop to my hands and knees, scraping my elbows on the dirt. I squeeze through the opening like it is the eye of a stele, leading with my arms.
I roll out into long grass and sunlight on the hillside, making sure that I’ve still got my rope and knife. Blinking in the brightness, I seek out the dark shapes in the sky. They are big, almost the size of a human. They fill the sky nearly to the horizon, swooping and dancing in the air like carrion crows. There is a tightness to the air, like the breeze before a storm.
As I watch, a hundred dark shapes break from the circling flock and plummet towards earth. I have never been outside the city during Skybreak. But I have heard of this, from the mumbled stories of old uncles and the exaggerated shudders that go through umma’s auntie-friends when they are talking in the tea-room.
The akma are attacking.
Soon chaos will descend on our village, black feathers spiraling to the ground alongside broken spears and empty helmets. They do not come to feed, or nest, or steal. They come simply to destroy.
I feel something cold and wet on my wrist and look down—it is a droplet of blood, bright crimson against my skin, in the shape of a comet. An akma wheels high in the air above me, its wingbeats quick and powerful. Maybe even triumphant.
I stagger up the side of the hill, fueled by a sudden surge of courage. I don’t want Ji-won to be out here. He is young and frail; he should be at home, with umma. It is me who should be here.
On the flat top of the hill, the kites are going up. Enormous diamond-shaped kites flop wildly in the wind and then catch it, the green silk on the top sides billowing up like bubbles of hot glue. Strapped securely against the blue silk on the bottom are mail-shirted soldiers, holding iron-weighted ropes and nets; I watch as they rise fearlessly to the sky—ten, twenty, thirty kites.
The kite handlers maneuver their charges nimbly, positioning them above the circling akma. Akma are vicious predators, but the mind of a predator is flat and arrogant; they are not accustomed to attacks from above. Ropes and barbed nets burst outward like fireworks; I see one handler swoop his soldier down to lash out with his mokpa, the three-pronged tip nearly taking off the tip of an akma’s wing.
An akma struggles in the hooks of a weighted net, plummeting as the knives cut into its wings and body.
An akma shrieks and surges toward a kite-soldier, knocking his mokpa aside, tearing at his eyes and face with a ferocity that makes me squeeze my eyes shut. I cannot hear the man’s screams over the sounds of fighting.
I can’t stop now. I have to find and protect Ji-won. I made this decision long ago.
Trudging upward through the soft dirt I pass a large stone stele, its ribbon swirling above me in the wind.
• • •
With glue from the hot clay pot I stick silk scraps to the bamboo frame. Umma helps me bend the bamboo backbone to hold the kite stiff.
“Mm,” says umma, holding up my kite when it is finished. She does not say it’s good, because it’s not. One silk edge is already peeling from the frame, because I cut the silk diamond too small. She turns away and puts it carefully in the corner of the kitchen, in a stack of bad kites I made. Annoyance stirs in me—she always treats me like this, like the son she is forced to put up with, the good-for-nothing child that is no replacement for appa. I feel a sudden urge to run away again, to just run until my heart hurts and the feeling is gone.
Ji-won is practicing his spear forms clumsily in the courtyard. Lantern light gives the iron-coated tips of his little wooden mokpa a dull, burning look. He jabs the trident into a straw bale, spins in a poorly-practiced movement and jabs it again.
The mokpa clatters to the ground; Ji-won is overcome by a fit of coughing. He puts a hand on the packed dirt of the courtyard wall, steadying himself. Umma rushes out to him, her legs moving fast under the s
ilk of her billowing chima, her mouth a hard line.
Umma leads Ji-won back into the kitchen and sits him down, pushing my glue-pot to one side.
Ji-won, his coughing fit ended, leans over and touches the edge of the new kite I have made. “Umma, isn’t hyung’s kite pretty?”
“Yes,” says umma, without looking.
In the evening, as I am splitting bamboo stalks with a sharp knife, umma cleans a small chicken and places it into a claypot with red dates, garlic, ginseng and sticky rice. I smile when I see this; umma’s samgyetang is delicious. But her eyes are distant and she does not smile back at me. I know what she is afraid of: she is afraid that Ji-won has inherited her frailty, those fits of coughing that overcome her whenever the weather is wet.
I pick bamboo pieces off the table and leave the house, looking for my friends. I tell myself that there is nothing frail about me, that I’ve inherited appa’s strength and maybe just a little bit of umma’s stubbornness.
Ji-won, though, seems to have inherited nothing from appa except his second-bornness.
• • •
The akma are swarming, looping through the sky in crazy circles. The air is thick with them. There are more of them descending from the clouds, three for every kite-soldier in the air. They emerge from the clouds like black sesame seeds, flocking, biting, tearing.
Four akma rip at a single kite-warrior, whose arms hang limply.
I crest the hilltop and see what looks like hundreds of akma swarming the ground like an army of fleas; soldiers swat at them, holding them off with their shields and mokpa. Fifty yards from me, a group of soldiers is holding a rice field against them, wading between the stalks to make themselves smaller targets. Akma peck disdainfully at the ripe rice stalks, scattering the grains; soldiers shout and charge them, shields raised.
Is this Ji-won’s regiment?
Across the hilltop the sharp heads of mokpa bristle out from the entrances to the underground village, driving back any akma that approach.
