The Bone Sparrow

by Zana Fraillon

  But that bored is getting to me now. Grinding at me. I sit outside for a while and watch the drops of sweat race down my elbow. I keep picking the losing sweat drop though. I hate this feeling of not knowing what to do. I never felt like this when Eli was in Family with me. Eli always had something going on. I start Fence Walking, thinking on Jimmie, and I’ve just finished my fourth lap when Nasir calls me over to Family Three.

  Nasir lives in Family Three with us. He’s one of the oldest in here. He’s been here the longest of anyone too. He’s here with his granddaughter and nephew now, but when he first came, he was all alone for a long time. I guess it must have smudged him up to see other people come and go and wonder why he couldn’t. The Jackets say he has an “adverse risk assessment.” But the Jackets also say they can’t send him back to where he came from because he’s been given refugee status. So he’s stuck. Stuck in the camp until they decide he’s not a risk anymore. They don’t even say why he’s a risk, or what he’s supposed to have done. Now almost none of us get sent anywhere, so I guess now we’re all smudging up and wondering why together. Some days Nasir is just how he used to be, but other days he gets confused. His brain isn’t so sharp anymore, is the way Harvey puts it. “A few bricks shy of a load,” he says.

  When I was really little, I would curl up in Nasir’s lap, and me and Maá would talk with him for hours. Maá would tell him things, all about places and people, and even though Nasir didn’t know who or where Maá was talking about, he would still nod and smile and say, “I remember.” Nasir understands that sometimes memories have to be made. He also tells the best stories of anyone in the camp and showed us kids a whole bunch of games to play when the days get too long and the same, and taught us how to build dams when it rains, to trap the water.

  Nasir smiles when I come over. “Happy birthday, my Subhi!” he says in his soft croak.

  I can tell straight off from the way he’s talking that he’s having a good day today. His eyes smile along with his mouth, and even with that ache of sad about them, there isn’t the wide-open scared that he gets when he can’t remember where he is or why he’s here or where the rest of his family is.

  “Hey, Nasir,” I say. “Did you get to breakfast today?”

  Nasir nods. “Human Rights Watch, I think,” he says, and licks his lips. “I sure they be ’round soon ’nough to take their notes. Are you having good day?” I shrug, thinking of Eli, my eyes watching Maá, still asleep, and Nasir leans over and squeezes my shoulder. “Come sit with me, Subhi.”

  Nasir hops on his crutch over to his bed. He’s only got one leg. He used to have a plastic one to go with his real one, but the Jackets took that away when he got here and never gave it back. Nasir says he doesn’t mind so much about his leg. He says it is worse for people like Fara, who is deaf and had her hearing aid taken, so that now she can’t hear the memories people tell each other to keep themselves alive in here. Or the ones like Remi, who needs medicine every day and had that taken away by the Jackets, and even the letter from his doctor was destroyed. Remi has these fits and headaches that make him scream so hard it cuts through your thinking. He says all he needs is his medicine. “I thought you would help me.” He says that over and over again. I don’t know who he’s talking to though.

  When I sit down, Nasir shuffles around in his things. “I have present. For you.” He hands me a small stone. Black and shiny and as smooth as silk. I know how smooth silk is because once Nasir took me with him when he went to look through his Belongings Box. He showed me his wife’s scarf, which was silk and all he had to remind him of her. He didn’t have anything else in his Belongings Box, and it seemed kind of silly to me to go to all the trouble of filling in the forms and waiting to be put on the list so we could look through his belongings if there was only one thing to look at. But that scarf was super smooth and full of colors, and even though when I smelled it, it just smelled of wet and mold and rats, when Nasir smelled it, he said it still smelled of his wife.

  I know right off what the stone is. It’s a Pebble of Happy. Nasir taught me all about them too.

  “Thank you, Nasir. It’s wonderful.”

  And it really is. I do it just like Nasir taught me. I hold that pebble in my hand and think of the happiest thought I can. Each pebble can only hold one thought, so I have to think of the best one right off. I try to think of my ba and the places we’ll go and the things we’ll do when he gets here, but instead my brain takes over and suddenly I’m thinking of Jimmie and of a baby born from an egg, and I’m feeling that excited waiting right down in my belly, thinking when I might see her again.

  This is my fifth Pebble of Happy. They’re hard to find. But I think this is just about the happiest pebble I have. Nasir must know because he’s smiling at me and laughing the soft laugh of his that makes me feel safe all over when I hear it.

  “Now every time you hold your pebble, you remember your think and smile.”

  I know I will too.

  After that, Nasir and I talk a bit and I tell him all about Eli getting moved to Alpha. Nasir shakes his head and looks so sad that I wish I had never mentioned it. We must have been sat there for a while chatting, because pretty soon Nasir’s eyes start to get that blurry look and I can feel him smudging up. Queeny said I should just leave him be when he’s like that, but I think Nasir likes me being there with him because when I put his hand on mine he doesn’t move it away.

  I sit with him and tell him back some of the stories he’s told me and I get the Pebbles of Happy Nasir has for himself and close his hand around them so he can feel his own happy thoughts. When I’ve done that, he stops whimpering and falls asleep, his pebbles in one hand, and his other holding my fingers so tight that it hurts. I lean in close then, and I tell him all about Jimmie, and all about her book. “I’ll tell you every story there is in that book, Nasir. I promise.”

  Just before I leave, I put Jimmie’s feather in his hand so he’ll see the colors when he wakes up. I bet he knows a bunch of games with feathers.

  That night, I lean into Maá and tell her all about my birthday. “They made me scrambled eggs for breakfast, Maá, and we had real fruit at lunch and sausages for dinner. I saved my second sausage for you, Maá. It’s here if you get hungry. Harvey says they did that all for me, Maá. For my birthday.” Maá’s breathing isn’t heavy, and her eyes open for a bit and look at me, but I don’t think she’s really awake.

  But then her eyes get sharper and she’s looking at me, really looking at me. Her fingers come up and touch my cheek, so soft it’s almost not even there, and she smiles. “My Subhi,” she whispers. I help her to sit up and she drinks a whole half bottle of water. When I wave the sausage under her nose though, she pushes it away with her hand. “I’ll put it under your pillow so the rats don’t get it, okay, Maá?” She doesn’t say okay, but she doesn’t stop me either.

  Then she looks at me and says, “Is it rain?”

  And it is. Rain. Real rain. The kind that pours from the sky like it will never end. The kind that thumps through your body and pounds on your head with those big, fat drops that splat and tickle down your face and into your ears.

  I link Maá’s arm through mine and help her out into the rain and we stand there, the two of us, not even noticing all the others about, laughing and calling up to the sky. We stand there, letting that rain soak into us.

  “Long time back,” Maá says, her voice quiet, “there no rain here, in this country. Many years, no rain. Then you be born, Subhi, and that rain fall from sky. Just like this. Just like it be waiting to flood on you head. Just like whole country waiting. Just for you.” Maá looks at me again, her smile big and wide this time, so I can see it for sure, even through the tired. I’ve never heard that story before.

  Then the bell rings for curfew and the Jackets come around to check our ID numbers, and Maá goes back to bed. She says she needs some sleep. Before she lies down, I check under her pillow, but the sausage is already gone.

  Maá lies down
and her eyes close and she sighs. “Maá?” I whisper. “I measured. I’m twenty-one fence diamonds high. Maá?”

  But now her breathing is slow and she’s definitely asleep again. “Maá? Can you tell me one of your Listen Now stories? Just the one?”

  She doesn’t answer. I didn’t think she would.

  We’re waiting for Jimmie, me and the Shakespeare duck. We sit back in the blind-spot corner while we wait. Even though we didn’t say it last time, I figure this will be where she comes. I hope so anyway, because I’ve been waiting here the last three nights with the duck. And now my brain is starting to peck at me that maybe she won’t come back.

  While we’re waiting, I’m showing the duck how to play Towers of Rah. I’m up to eleven stones, which is my record so far. Eli is the champion. He got twenty-three stones balanced once. The duck says it’s not much of a game, but he doesn’t have any hands to balance rocks with, so I don’t think he really gets it.

  There’s a trick to the balancing. You’ve got to find the right stones. The long, flat ones balance best but are hardest to find. A big, heavy one on the bottom of the stack helps too. Big stones are also good if you’re going for the highest tower instead of the most stones, but little ones are good if you can balance them on the side of a bigger stone because then they count for more.

  My favorite game with stones is Target. That’s where a big stone is thrown and then you have to try and get your little stones as close as you can to the big one. I’m best at that. Even better than Eli, although Queeny said he was just letting me win, which I reckoned was probably right because Eli didn’t ever get beaten by anyone else. I asked Queeny if she was just letting me win as well and she didn’t answer. That means no.

  I’ve just balanced fourteen rocks and even the duck is getting a bit excited, saying, “Go, kid! You are on a roll!” when Jimmie appears and makes me jump so that I knock over my tower before I can balance number fifteen.

  “Whoops. Sorry!” she whispers.

  Even though I’ve been trying all my life to get to fifteen because Queeny’s record is fourteen, I don’t care about that tower when I see Jimmie.

  It’s not just the book and flashlight she’s brought tonight, but a thermos as well. I know about thermoses, because some days the Jackets bring them in filled with wonderful smells that I never knew even existed, and they sip away at those smells and yo-yo their keys, and all I can do is watch. Queeny gets right mad when they do that, but that just makes them laugh. They don’t laugh with their eyes though, and soon enough they move away or put the lids back on the thermoses. I don’t mind it. With smells, if you close your eyes and breathe as deep as you can, they turn into a taste right at the back of your throat, and then you can almost pretend that the thermos was brought in for you as well.

  “Hiya,” Jimmie says, and her whole face shines like someone’s lit a candle in her cheeks. “I brought some hot chocolate.” As she takes off the lid, the steam whispers away into the night. I wonder if it’s as good as the hot chocolate Eli told me about. I wonder if that steam will make it all the way into the clouds. If it did, then it really would rain down hot chocolate, like Eli said.

  “I’ve got a joke for the duck,” Jimmie says. “What do you call a box of ducks?”

  The duck doesn’t answer. He’s just sat there pretending he’s an everyday ordinary rubber duck. “What?” I ask instead and Jimmie turns back to me. “A box of quackers.”

  I don’t get it, even when she explains to me why it’s funny.

  “All right, then. Another. What do you call a duck who steals?”

  Even though I didn’t get the last joke, my mouth is already smiling in waiting. “What?”

  “A robber duck.” Now I’m laughing for real.

  “What grows down as it grows up?” I ask her back.

  It only takes Jimmie a second before she answers. “Duh. A duck. Kind of obvious.”

  I don’t tell her it took me a whole week and a bunch of clues from Harvey before I worked that one out.

  Jimmie passes me the thermos and I let the hot chocolate bump against my lips and dribble onto my tongue. The sweet is so strong it fills my mouth with a cloud of warm that sets my tongue tingling. It’s nothing like I’ve ever tasted, and I close my eyes and tell my brain to remember this forever. Then, without meaning to, my mouth is gulping at the hot chocolate, not pausing for even a breath until I see that Jimmie is laughing at me and I have hot chocolate running down the corners of my mouth and dripping into the dirt. “Good thing I brought the big thermos,” she says, and takes it from me. “Watch this, then.”

  Jimmie takes a sip from the thermos, closes her eyes, and moves her jaw in and out, and then hot chocolate streams out of her nose. She smiles and lets it dribble back into her mouth before she chokes from laughing.

  She says she could teach me, but there’s no way I’m about to waste my hot chocolate by making it come out of my nose. I tell her to pull my finger instead, which was something Eli did to me once, but Jimmie already knows that one. I thought Eli had made it up.

  Then Jimmie brings out a black pen. “Do you want a tattoo?” she says. I nod, even though I don’t really want one. “You can’t look until it’s finished, okay?”

  She pulls the sleeve of my shirt all the way up. The pen scratches at the skin on my arm, and I bite my lip to stop from telling her that it hurts. She takes her time. When she’s done, I look down at what she’s drawn.

  “It’s meant to be a dragon, but it kind of looks more like a duck. Sorry about that.”

  The duck cheers from my pocket.

  “I think it looks like a dragon,” I say, and looking at it upside down it really does. Kind of.

  “It’s meant to be like this dragon poster I have in my room,” Jimmie says, looking at the tattoo with her eyebrows bunched. “Maybe I should have practiced first…”

  In my head I’m trying to imagine a room with a dragon poster, but all I can imagine is a container room like the ones in Hard Road. “What’s it like?” I say. “Your room?”

  Jimmie looks at me then, her face sort of squished. When she answers, her voice is all soft, like she’s not sure she really wants to be telling. “Well, I have my bed in the corner, and when I’m lying on the bed I can look out the window to our back garden and the washing line. I have four pillows on my bed and a photo of my mum on the nightstand next to it. I have the dragon poster and my other stuff, like my soccer ball and my school bag.” She shrugs. “That’s kind of it. And the walls are green.”

  But I want more. When other people tell me their stories, they’re from far away. Stories from other countries and other times. Stories of getting here. But no one has a story from just Outside. None of us knows what it is like just on the other side of the fences. But Jimmie does.

  “What about Outside? Past the fences? What’s there?”

  And this time when Jimmie tells me, her voice isn’t soft anymore. This time there is an excitement in her voice and a light in her eyes. “I’ll show you all over someday, Subhi,” Jimmie says. “I know this place better than anyone. And someday I’ll take you everywhere there is to take and we’ll explore together everything there is to explore. I promise, okay?”

  When I nod, Jimmie nods back. I know for sure that Jimmie is the kind of person that keeps a promise.

  Jimmie gives me the pen then and says I’m to do a tattoo on her, and to make it good because it’s permanent marker. The duck says she should have mentioned that before she drew her dragon-duck all over my arm.

  I draw a picture of my shell from the Night Sea and Eli’s whale coming up out of it. She looks at it for a long time when I’m done, without saying anything, and I’m beginning to worry about that permanent marker bit when she says, “I love it. I’m going to take a photo and get it done as a real tattoo when I’m older.” I don’t know if she’s joking or not. “What’s it from?” she asks. So I tell her Eli’s story.

  “A long way back, when the world was nothing but sea, t
here lived a whale,” I start. “The biggest, hugest whale in the ocean. The whale was as old as the universe and as big as this whole country. Every night, the whale would rise to the surface and sing his song to the moon. One night…”

  And I tell it just the way Eli did.

  Jimmie looks at me after, and touches her tattoo. “It’s perfect,” she says.

  The wind picks up and bangs away at the tents so that our voices can hardly be heard over the top of the racket it’s making. Jimmie hands me the book. “Now it’s time for Mum’s story,” she says.

  And I read.

  Oto and Anka were inseparable. From the moment the sun rose in the morning to the oranged tinge of evening, Oto and Anka were together. At first, Oto helped to raise the baby, much in the way an older cousin or brother would care for his sibling. But as time went on and Anka grew, their relationship changed. Soon Oto found that Anka was teaching him the ways of the world, rather than the other way around.

  Everyone agreed that Anka was a remarkable child. “Pah,” Guntis spat. “She’s nothing but trouble.” But even he could not stop a smile breaking out when he thought no one could see.

  Mirka too spent many hours with the child. Anka would sit on Mirka’s knee, her fingers rubbing the Bone Sparrow necklace worn around Mirka’s neck as though she were committing the shape deep into the darkness of her mind.

  Anka taught herself how to navigate through her sightless world by clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth and listening for the echo to guide her. She had no fear and could easily do everything a fully sighted child could do, and more.

  She had a voice that caused the goats to pause in their chewing so that they might hear her song better, a voice which folk claimed could change one’s very soul. When she cooked, her food could fill even the most cold and weary traveler with a warmth and happiness that was impossible to deny.