The Bone Sparrow

by Zana Fraillon

  I still haven’t told Eli about her. We don’t get much time alone to talk now that he’s in Alpha. He’s made sure to meet me at the fence every day, and we chat, but it’s not like before. Now wherever we are, there are eyes on us and ears pricked even though nothing we’ve got to say is very interesting anyway.

  Maybe I am going crazy. Maybe a cockroach has climbed all the way in my ears like they do sometimes, except this time I didn’t notice quick enough to get the doc to tweezer it out. Maybe it climbed all the way in and all the way down to my brain and it’s making me see and hear things.

  Just as I’m telling the duck that I’ve had about enough of waiting and I must be going crazy thinking some girl could have magicked right through those fences when there’s no way she could have done, and the Shakespeare duck is saying right back that the only crazy bit is sitting and talking to a rubber duck, then there she is. As real and beautiful as I remember, even in the deep dark.

  “That’s her!” the Shakespeare duck quacks. I reckon he’s more excited even than me. “Don’t forget to find out her name this time,” he reminds me. He’s getting kind of bossy for a rubber duck.

  The girl sits down next to me and wipes her nose on her arm so the silver trail from it glints in the light from the moon. “Is that your duck?” she asks, her voice all whispery so we won’t be heard. I don’t even have time to shove him in my pocket.

  When I don’t answer, she nods like I’ve explained the whole lot myself. She twirls a big black feather around and around in her fingers and all I can do is watch the way that feather spins through the dark, like it has its own light shining up out of it.

  “So, how long have you been in here for?”

  “Forever,” I say, my shoulders shrugging off her question like it makes no difference. “I was born here.”

  After that she doesn’t say much for a bit, just keeps twirling that feather around while I watch. It catches the light from the moon, a smudge of a whole rainbow of colors caught inside that one feather.

  “What about your family?”

  “I’ve got a sister, Queeny, but she’s pretty crap mostly. And my maá. And my ba is on his way, but not here yet. And Eli is my best friend and just as good as a brother. Better than Queeny.”

  The girl nods some more. “My mum’s dead,” she says. “She got this fever one time and something in her brain just popped, that’s how the doctors said. And that was it. She was just dead, sitting right there on the bathroom floor.”

  “Oh,” I say, and try not to think what that might have looked like.

  “I also have a brother, Jonah. He’s sixteen and meant to be in charge when my dad works his long shifts. Jonah’s not much good at it though. When his friends come around they always end up drinking too much beer and he forgets that he’s meant to look out for me. He’s an all right brother though. He always brings me a chocolate bar to say sorry, and he’s going to get me a bike for my birthday. He promised. And anyway, I wouldn’t really care about being on my own, except that there’s no one else around for miles. Sometimes I think that there’s someone outside coming to get me, and that no one would hear my screams. I guess maybe I’ve watched too many horror movies with Jonah. Oh, I’m Jimmie, by the way.” She picks up my hand and shakes it up and down. “Nice to meet ya.”

  From inside my pocket I hear the duck say, “My, my. She’s quite the talker, isn’t she?”

  “Anyway.” Jimmie pulls out a flashlight from her pocket. It’s much smaller than the ones the Jackets carry, but when she turns it on, it shines a light so bright that I grab at it and shove it down into the dirt.

  “Someone’ll see!” I hiss. “Only the Jackets have flashlights.” It’s a good thing that Jimmie can’t hear the duck talking because what he’s saying isn’t particularly friendly.

  “Well, where can we go, then?”

  The two of us look at each other and I get to feeling that maybe I’m not understanding this girl so well, because I have no idea what she’s talking about.

  “Go?” I say.

  Then she reaches into her pocket and waves her book under my face.

  I’ve read everything there is to read in Family, even the books with the endings ripped out and the magazines from before I was born and the stuff I don’t really understand and the stuff that’s really boring, like the folder with emergency phone numbers and instructions. Once I got so bursting to read that I swiped the instruction manual for installing the new container block for the Rec Room. By the time I finished, I was even more bored than when I started. But I could see straight off where the Outside men had built it all wrong. They always use Outside men to build stuff even though people in here want to help. We’re not allowed to use tools.

  “To read my mum’s stories. You said you could read.” Jimmie looks at me now, as though maybe I can’t read, as though maybe I tricked her. “I don’t have long, ’kay?” She stands and pulls me up by my shirt. At least she’s turned her flashlight off.

  The only place I can think to go is to the blind spot over by Alpha. I haven’t been back to that corner since Beaver found me, but at least the cameras can’t see and the bushes will hide the flashlight.

  “Come on, then,” I say. I take Jimmie’s wrist in the dark and lead her around the back of the tents, keeping right close to the canvas so we can’t be spotted in the shadows. The duck shouts at me from my pocket, “Are you sure this is sensible? This doesn’t seem very sensible. It’s only a book of stories. I can tell you a story when you’re nice and safe and tucked up in bed. Listen, here we go. Once upon a time, there was a duck…”

  But knowing that Jimmie has a whole real book in her hands gives me a sort of brave that I haven’t felt since Eli got taken. My fingers are tingling just thinking about touching those pages.

  I pull Jimmie into the corner and lean against the brick, still warm from being soaked in the sun all day. Now that I’ve stopped, my legs start shaking and I have to squeeze them together to keep them still. I guess they aren’t feeling as brave as the rest of me. From here we can see the Jackets’ Rec Room and can spot their flashlights as soon as they come out for their rounds. I’ll have time to scoot around back to Family Tent Three and get into bed before they’ve even left Family One. I reckon Jimmie will be okay on her own—she seems like the kind of kid to have a plan.

  We sit down in the dirt, squashed in together behind the bush, and Jimmie stares at the book in her hands for a while. “It’s Mum’s.”

  She’s said that already, but I don’t say. I wonder how it would feel to have a book of my ba’s stories and poems and no ba to tell them, not ever. Not even Someday.

  Jimmie keeps staring at the book like she’s trying to decide if she’s ready to hand it over or not. The cover is torn and the pages are all brown and curling over from its being so old and touched. The whole thing is stitched together with string that seems thin enough to break just from being looked at.

  “This was Mum’s too.”

  The girl fiddles with something hanging around her neck. I shine the flashlight on it, just for a second, my fingers covering most of the light. It’s a bird, its wings spread out and flying high on the wind. The only thing I can think of is the bird sitting waiting for me on my pillow and what Queeny said that meant. When Jimmie says, “It’s a sparrow carved from bone,” my breath pulls in tight. I drop the flashlight and move away so quickly that my head smacks back on the brick wall Beaver shoved me into and sends a sick feeling all the way down to my toes.

  Jimmie looks at the scared on my face and laughs. “It’s not that bad. Although I guess its eye is kind of creepy.”

  She picks up the flashlight and shines it back on the bird, and even though I don’t want to look, my eyes are sucking it up and holding me there. That bone bird makes me feel strange all over, and my brain gets to thinking that Queeny is right, that the sparrow in the house meant death and here it is, come to collect me now. I can feel my skin turning cold and wet. A tingle creeps up my neck and m
akes me shiver even with my back right up against the hot of those bricks, and I wonder if maybe I shouldn’t be sitting out here in the dark by myself with a girl I don’t know, wearing a symbol of death around her neck.

  The duck hisses, “I told you so! But you never listen. No, no, no,” and now I can feel my throat catching so that when I try to talk my voice comes out all wobbly and strangled.

  “Does it mean death or something?”

  Jimmie just laughs.

  “’Course not. Why would it? Because it’s bone? Mum said it gives us luck and protection. She said all the souls of everyone in our family, all our stories and everything, rub right into that bone and he keeps us together. But then she went and died. That’s pretty crappy protection in my opinion, and not very good luck. It’s probably just a stupid story anyway.”

  “So why do you wear it?” I ask.

  “I guess just in case maybe? Maybe if Mum wasn’t wearing it, she would have died even sooner. Maybe it’s a different kind of luck. I don’t know, do I?”

  I have nothing to say to that. For a moment, we’re just quiet. Neither one saying a thing, and that quiet ballooning up and filling the air around us. My breath has gone back to normal, and my heart isn’t pounding quite so hard, but I’m still not sure about that bird.

  Finally, I touch the book. “Jimmie? Can we read some of your mum’s stories now?”

  And without saying another word, Jimmie hands me the book and closes her eyes to listen.

  This is a tale from long, long ago.

  Anka was born from an egg.

  I stop reading and look at Jimmie. This is just the kind of story that would drive Queeny wild. She’d scream and rage about how stupid it was, and that no one could be born from an egg, and why would you waste head space with stuff like that? But Jimmie is staring at me with a kind of hungry in her eyes, one fist clenched tight around the Bone Sparrow and her other hand still twirling her feather. Jimmie isn’t anything like Queeny.

  “Anka was my great-great-great-grandmother,” she says. “Hurry up, will you? Stories don’t work if you stop all the time. Don’t you know about reading?”

  Maybe she is like Queeny, just a bit.

  No one knew where she had come from. But there she was, cradled by a nest, halfway down the old well, with fragments of broken shell sticking to her hair and skin. Some people thought she had been dropped by a passing traveler, happy to be rid of a child covered in hair that looked more like feathers than the soft hair of a newborn baby.

  “Leave it down there,” spat Guntis. He was the oldest man in the town, although certainly not the wisest. But in a town where age was respected above wisdom, his word was often obeyed. His nose was red and blistered from too many summers under the hot sun, and he walked with a stick he used often to prod others into action. “Who are we to mess with the gods? Pah.” He shook his head as he peered down at the mewling child stuck in the well, and scowled.

  “What nonsense you talk, old man,” said Mirka. “This is clearly the work of a person, not a god. Now stop your talking and someone get that child out of there so we can all go home.”

  Guntis may have been the oldest man in the town, but Mirka was the oldest woman. Her nose wasn’t quite as red as Guntis’s, despite having spent more summers in the sun than her brother. And she was certainly considered wise. She was also the only one who could override her brother’s decision.

  The townspeople jumped into action. The only one small and thin enough to fit down the well was Oto, a six-year-old boy. Slowly, Oto was lowered by rope into the well, where he picked up the baby and held her tightly to his chest. An undeniable surge of love for the girl filled Oto’s chest. Before he had even been pulled back from the darkness of the well, he had vowed to protect this child, no matter what she might face.

  As Oto and the baby came into the light, Oto raised his chin in determination. “Her name is Anka,” he said, and his eyes flashed, daring anyone to argue.

  Guntis and Mirka looked at each other. There was no question in either of their minds as to the fate of the two children, destined to follow a path strewn with hardships. Guntis looked down at Anka, cradled in the arms of the small boy. “Pft.” He spat a wet glob of chewed tobacco onto the ground by Oto’s feet. “She’s as blind as a bat, that one. She’ll never see a thing.” And he shook his head again and walked away.

  It was only Mirka, who knew her brother too well, who saw him cast a final look back at the children, with a mixture of hope and sadness etched across his face.

  Mirka picked a piece of shell from the baby’s hair. “He’s right,” she said. “The girl is blind. But, Oto”—she lowered her voice so that only the boy could hear—“this girl is destined to see more than most.” And with that, she followed her brother out of the town square.

  I turn the page, but the story stops. How can someone do that? Stop a story just like that? The next page is a list written in blue pen of the top ten places to visit before you die. I wonder how many Jimmie’s mum had visited.

  Jimmie looks at the Bone Sparrow in her hands. Her cheeks are glinting wet.

  “Should I keep reading?” I ask, fingering the pages to try and find more of the story while all the words wash through my head. I can see the baby down the well, and the feathers all over it, and the little boy Oto cradling that baby in his arms.

  But Jimmie shakes her head. “I want to save the stories. Make them last long, you know?” I nod, and she stands up and says, “All right, then.” She takes back the book and the flashlight from me and hands me her feather instead. “Thanks, Subhi.”

  And then she leaves, disappearing into the dark and the dirt, and the moon disappears with her.

  Watching her go, something in my chest explodes. Now there’s a tightness in there that I can’t shake, no matter how many breaths I suck in, and an exciting rush in my legs, tingling through to my toes.

  I wonder when she’ll come back, Jimmie.

  From my pocket, I hear the Shakespeare duck. “And the duck was the most magnificent duck the world had ever seen….”

  Jimmie stops outside the fence and lets the story work its way through her mind. Jimmie’s mum had told her that story so many times that she knew the words by heart. But this was the first time since her mum’s death that she had thought to remember it. The first time that she had heard the whisper of her mum’s voice. It was perfect.

  Jonah had told their mum that those stories were garbage, and Jimmie had echoed him, trying to sound tough and grown-up like her brother. “Ah, but it was back in the old country,” her mum had said. “And a long time ago. Don’t forget, things were different back then. Back then, anything was possible.”

  Jonah had only laughed and Jimmie had joined in, and after a while her mum stopped trying to tell them the stories. Jimmie hated that she’d done that to her mum. But her mum must have known somehow that Jimmie did believe. Because the nights when Jimmie helicoptered on her bed, trying to find sleep, her mum had come and whispered the stories to her, her fingers tracing patterns on her back until her body settled and she fell asleep.

  Jimmie lets the bone touch her lips and squeezes the book against her chest before heading back up the hill.

  That night, tucked safely in bed, Jimmie can’t stop smiling. And for the first time in three years, Jimmie sleeps the long, deep sleep of someone who has finally found what they are looking for.

  It’s still dark when Harvey comes in. “Happy birthday, kiddo.” He says it so soft, I know he doesn’t want me to wake up, but I’m already awake, thinking of Jimmie and her book of stories.

  I wait until Harvey’s gone, feeling the weight of something on my legs. Even though it’s too dark to see, I know what the present from Harvey is. I know because every year since turning five, he brings me the same perfect gift, sneaking it into the tent so no one knows who left it.

  My fingers pull at the box and slide over the top of the pencils. Twelve colors, itching at me to start drawing, and a whole book full
of empty white, waiting to be filled. Harvey told me once that when he was a kid he thought he was going to be an artist like his dad. He doesn’t tell me how he ended up here instead.

  And without seeing, because of the dark, I draw.

  When the light is strong enough to wake us up, I open my eyes and look at my picture. That feather, it has all the colors pushing out of the page right at me. Even the colors that pencils aren’t made in.

  Queeny wakes up and sings me “Happy Birthday.” She reaches under her pillow and pulls out a pair of pants.

  “These ones will fit better. They’re from Maá.”

  Maá is still asleep, rolled over on her side so she doesn’t wake. And when I kiss her on her cheek, just the whisper of a word comes out. I’m pretty sure she is saying happy birthday in Rohingya.

  Maá doesn’t come to breakfast though. I guess she still isn’t hungry much.

  There must be a bit of birthday luck flying about the place, because when Queeny and I get our breakfast, we know straightaway what it is. There’s no playing Guess the Food this morning, because our plates are piled high with scrambled eggs and toast. Real eggs and real toast. We both look at each other and smile. We’ve got Guests in the camp today.

  “Government people,” Queeny says, her mouth open and the egg flying in spits onto the table. But I reckon it’s the Human Rightsers. The food is always the tastiest when they come, and this is just about the best I can remember. I wish Maá was here to taste it. I look down at my food so Queeny doesn’t see my eyes filling.

  I don’t even wait for Queeny to finish. As soon as I’ve had my last mouthful, I’m out of the tent and running toward the fence. I need to tell Eli about Jimmie and the stories. He said he’d be here waiting for me after breakfast to say happy birthday. But when I get to the fence the only thing there is a small piece of string, tied in a bow. I tie it around my finger and wait, until the sun gets that hot that I can’t see right. I guess Eli got held up. Or distracted, is all. I guess I’ll tell him later.