She Weeps Each Time You're Born

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Book: Read She Weeps Each Time You're Born for Free Online
Authors: Quan Barry
began pulling himself back across to where the two women stood waiting. He didn’t know where they were headed, but he couldn’t leave them stranded. As he neared the other shore and gazed on the burned huts dotting the riverbank, he thought of the little girl and her grandfather, the fisherman who’d been killed in the fire. He wondered what happened to the silvery bird the man was always seen with, the bird as if carved from ice.
    When he arrived back where he’d started, the women were still huddled in the shadows. There is nothing over there, he said to the old woman, nothing but death. At the word
death
the feral girl clamored into the boat. Tu was panting but not from exertion, the image of himself as an old man still in his mind. The old woman handed him his clothes and crawled in next to the girl. Even with the added weight the boat rode high in the water.
    Crossing the river with the two women, Tu thought of hell and the childhood stories of the places that befell the body after life. He pulled the rope as hard as he could. If they capsized—he wouldn’t let himself think of it. The underworld was said to be a festering blister, the darkness so cold it turned the skin blue. When he looked back across the river, he thought he could see someone standing on the shore they had just come from, the figure small like a child, its hair in braids.
    On the other side they scrambled out one at a time. As he held the boat steady for the girl, Tu realized there was a smell coming from her. He didn’t know what it could be. He imagined it had something to do with sorrow, though, despite the grimness of her physical appearance, the girl seemed animated and darkly beautiful, as if she were on her way to the happiest day of her life, her happiness in stark contrast to the landscape. Everywhere the world was charred. The bones of trees stood like primordial signposts warning of pestilence and death. In the moonlight the earth looked blackened like the skin of a fish.
    The three of them walked single file without speaking. At one point they passed a burned shack with one of its walls caved in as if a car had driven into it. In spots the ground was still smoldering. Tu had to hold his hand up in front of his nose. It was obvious there were bodies inside.
    A few hundred feet down the road something glimmered in the distance, but he couldn’t be sure what it was. When they got closer, he could see it was a dead pig, the body completely charred, the long gleaming tusks exposed all the way up to the root where they were fused tight to the yellow jaw. The old woman picked up a stick and whacked it on the flank. From somewhere deep inside the animal Tu could hear things stirring. By the time he realized what was happening, they were already pouring out through the desiccated orifices of the face. A few streamed out of the shriveled ears. Bees. Honey bees. In the moonlight each one silvery like a coin. The sound of the bees’ thrumming a dark electricity.
    The air filled with the vibrating swarm, the bees pouring out, the pulsing mass coming on and on without end. Tu could feel their papery wings brushing against his face. It lasted only a minute, and yet it seemed like hours, their wings soft as wind. He had heard of such things happening in the land of the dead.Quickly he touched the side of his neck to make sure his heart was still beating. He found it easily, his pulse hammering.
    None of them were stung.
    Finally there was the same bend in the road, the one he always remembered coming around on his way home from the fields. He thought of the last time he’d been there. How he had arrived at night, the darkness like a cloak, and how he found her sitting under a sugar-apple tree singing softly to herself. And here he was again. There was the same sugar apple she’d been sitting under and beside it a mound of fresh earth, an empty rice bowl propped in the dirt.
    The simple wooden hut he’d built

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