He wants to fold his body flat, make little cuts with scissors and unfold it into a paper–doll chain like a magician. This silver-streaked fritillary beast that is standing in his room covered in shadowed scars that look like barbed wire.
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Ah, the Emperor’s most favored cardamom buns. Balls of deep-fried rice flour formed into the hair-like shape of a swollen top-knot, browned to soggy perfection and glistened with coconut oil. Bunty hated the damned things with a passion they seldom held for any other food. And yet, Bunty’s mind⎯or perhaps their stomach⎯continued to crave the buns, drawn to them like a fly to a pile of shit.
While the sun god works, I weave its blanket, a fabric growing larger by the day but never faster than the expansion of the sun god’s domain. There is always something new it hasn’t touched before: mountains formed from magma rising and lifting the earth’s surface, cracks in the ground created by plates shifting, canyons carved by water deeper and deeper until the sun god can no longer reach, though it tries. There is always something new that needs blanketing. I warp the loom, pulling the strings tight. The threads are made from cloud bodies and pollen dusted off flowers with no trees to shield them.
In another world, death happened and the stars kept shining, the sun rose and set, the rain fell at the designated time, and dried soon after. Anything out of the ordinary was just that, an aberration that must be shoved under the carpet. But my mother’s death was different; the world had cracked open with us.
The flame dances in front of that last photo, distorting his smile. The corner catches and burns. The curling blackness consumes me first, eating at my unhappy face until I don’t have to look at it anymore. My shoulders relax.
But it keeps going. It takes my brother, too, and our out-of-focus parents hovering in the background. It goes and goes until there’s nothing left to hold.
“..word of my infamy had reached all ears among the Scholars, as had my frustrated vociferations when asked by kindly, wispy-haired professors why my work could not keep to the standards of my peers. (‘My work is wholly original and inventive, far superior to the derivative schlock or regurgitated waste those you applaud produce.’)”
“Then what do I do, huh?” Raja slammed the table, sending a confused groan through the drunken crowd. “Give up? And then what? Run away? Go join the army? Die fighting Kilav?” He turned back to Dhondo, waving a glimmering gold coin before his nose. “You see this. This is while I’m sneaking around with her. Imagine when we’re married.”
Sometimes people left their sadnesses outside the girl’s cave, where they played in the sand until the ocean spirits came to fetch them. Sometimes they waited, because their sadness was too heavy, or it did not wish to part. Those who waited were sometimes there for centuries, or came back every year as though on annual pilgrimage
The gods have always flitted in and out of my dreams, their words never making any sense to me – a lowly human. They never seem to detect me listening in the dark or, if they are aware of my presence, they do not care. Only on that hot, humid night did any of them try to speak to me.