I felt their gaze blazing on my skin; bearing down on me; urging me to spend more time; asking me not to leave because leaving meant leaving them again to their silence; to the hushed voices that were haunting their minds and telling them what they already knew- This is not us.
Like other twelve-year olds, the emperor has a taste for the unusual. A flock of geese fly overhead. It's a common enough sight in this part of China, but these geese are harnessed to a kite the size of a rice field. Thirteen eunuchs hold up a canopy that covers the emperor's sedan chair to keep their master from being bombarded by the offal from the geese.
When we finish, I see he has the gun, so I can’t do anything, like get away, which was what I was hoping for, and he ties me up again. Afterwards, because it’s drier down there, he slides back underneath the platform.
“I’m going back out to look for her,” Elena said. He looked up from his desk and saw her backlit in the doorway of his office. “You want to come with me?”
My mother had said we should be careful how we moved about in Ama, because the bad men were on rampage. Every mother sang it like a song to their children.
I lay in the center of the nest with the women curled on their sides around me like mother cats and every night they woke me up and carried me to the tub, which was always full with tepid water.
We stop. It’s at least ninety degrees outside and we are at an impasse. There is a boy in the road. He is wearing a puffy black coat. Gaines is silent, always silent. James speaks up, Jandi, Ogoff terra amie. He yells and raises his gun.
Robin thinks of going to work. Phones his office and tells them he’s sick. They try to sound understanding. Say they hope he’s feeling better by tomorrow. But both he and they are bored with this game.
Today a man drove by when I was on my bike near the bus stop on Elmridge Drive and shouted ‘Hey Paki! Go back where you came from!’ I yelled ‘stupid’ as loud as I could.
“One, two, three, four, five.” She counted the ribs leading from her collarbone to her sternum with her index finger. “Five ribs above the line. You always want five, if possible six.” She dropped her cigarette in the toilet and startled Lilly by unbuttoning her shirt. She counted Lillie’s ribs too. “One, two, three.”