A Day in the Death, Part 1.

The one called Grandpa Corpse wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist. He dared not touch his hands to his face, for they were caked in dirt and lurid honey. He stood up straight--or at least as straight as he could stand those days--and packed the earth flat with his feet. Then he took up his digging stick and cast it into the trees with a curse. He listened to the crack and clatter of it rebounding through the boughs, and waited until the rustling of leaves and underbrush quieted. The susurrations of the nearby river regained its prominence.

He found a rounded stone at its banks with which to scrub, and he did not stop until his hands were rubbed bright and raw. His feet he stamped in the shallows for some time, until the cold creeping into his joints finally forced him to quit, and to decide that he had done all he could. One last time he surveyed the area for any shards of glass or fragments of pottery. Satisfied that he had left nothing remaining of any jar or bottle, the old man took up his old staff. He apologized to the trees of that place as he left, explaining why he had chosen that spot, and promising them that they would not come to much harm from the toxins.

The sun had begun to rise by then. He could hear the fat red and green rooster crowing at his distant post, and the first villagers rousing themselves in reply. He would not return to the village- there was no need to, after they had agreed to take the young men in. He had seen to each of them personally, and the folk of that place trusted his word when he said that they would convalesce before long. They would work to make the riverbank a safer place.

A lone coffin stood nestled against a split tree. He approached it and ran his hands over its weathered surface, brushing some light debris from it and then kissing its face. There came a gentle tapping from within, and so he held his ear to the old wood. Then it knocked, much harder and louder, and he stepped away from it with a chuckle. He offered it teasing platitudes as he reached down and grasped its trailing rope, which he wrapped around one hand several times before giving it a pull. Once it was eased down onto the broad, flattened expanse of his shoulders, he hefted its weight with a soft grunt.

Cautious, halting steps and hard leaning upon his staff gave way to a slow but relaxed pace as he finally left that river north of the mangrove forests.

The sun was still rising, so he decided that he should rise with it. He turned west, toward the hills, and began to walk. He walked over brush, and along the dirt roads of the people. He walked through fields of taro, and along the narrow bridges woven across flooded terraces of deep-rice. He never walked through the shadow of a fruit tree sapling, and he always walked the long way around a den of animals. The walk turned into a climb, and by mid-morning when he could look out across the canopy below and watch the mist as it rose twisting and evaporating in the sunlight, he decided that he had punished himself enough.

He still needed the strength to settle down, after all.

Crimson Honey (2/2).

Click here for Part 1.



I keep scooping.

The crying recedes into the distance. The mists begin to close in around the riverbank once more, choking the sounds around us except for our own groaning. Most of us stop shaking, and the river reeds take our place.

I keep scooping.

I see myself, and my mother. I am young, and she is not dead yet. She hugs me, and I fling myself from the side of a cliff. The skin on my back peels away--more than it already is--and I sprout wings. I claw out the eyes of the village boys, and then I fly to where the rivers pour out of the sky. The water smells like dog.

There is a hard crack, and this time the pain throbs inside of me. I lean over and cough. Fragments of tooth litter my lap. The molar finally finished crumbling. I rub some honey against the hole. It bleeds, but the blood mingles with the honey and I stop noticing.

The crying stops, but something else takes its place. The sound of wind, and churning water. The branches weeping over the river flail and bend, making way for the mist as it flees back down the current. I turn my head, and I can see the boat over my shoulder, naked and still in the waters. The pale man is speaking now, and the laughing man is arguing with him over something. They thrust their poles into the riverbed, but the boat doesn't budge. They strain and push. The aft end rises up and the prow dips, but they go nowhere. I see clutching, scrabbling little things clinging to the bottom of the boat. They look like waterlogged hands, and overgrown fingernails.

I hesitate, and keep scooping.

The wing blows harder, howls louder, and we hunker down and cry, or shout and leap up into it to be bowled over. The trees bend and rattle, and people are screaming in the village up the bank. My hands squeeze tightly around the jar, and I hold it to my heart.

Then everything is still. The wind dies. People lift their heads again.

There is someone else out on the river. He is looking at the men in the boat. But he is not in a boat. The surface of the water is breaking beneath his bare old feet, and gnarled bones are clutching at them, propping him up. He is wearing faded old green and blue that blinds me to look at, and his staff is as black as a yawning pit in the earth that I could fall into. He lifts the staff up, and the men in the boat start to shout or move. They do not finish whatever they are doing before the thunder cracks.

His staff hits the water, and it splits open.

The boat splits open, and the chest splits open.

All of the jars come crashing down into the hole in the river, and we hear the shattering of glass beneath the splintering of wood. We hold out our hands and cry in anguish. Some of us that can still walk leap down into the shallows and try to wade out toward the red-dinged water. More grabbing little things reach up out of the silt and stop them, hold them, and keep them from thrashing.

The laughing one and the pale one are clinging to the sinking halves of the boat. They are shouting out and cursing at the man now. I do not see the man that they were taking away any longer.

He breaks his silence, and the boom of his voice makes my ears throb. He speaks like us, but he is not like us. He looks like the old grandfathers in the village, but he is not bent by time.

His eyes are so bright.

They hurt the most to look at.

I stop scooping.

One of them swings a pole at him, and he raises his hand to meet it. The wood cracks in half and splits down the middle, and the laughing man falls down into the water with a shout. They are all yelling now, but the wind and the river grow louder. The current swells, and a wave rises up to scatter the last pieces of the boat. The laughing man and the pale one cough and sputter, and climb up onto the bank. They drag themselves into the forest.

The water glints and glimmers with honey and coins until they all wash away.

The old man is looking at us now. He is dragging the honey-drinker by his collar as he walks across the bones in front of him. He is coming toward us, and the hands in the shallows stop grabbing at us.

But they take our jars with them. Bony fingertips and split nails scratch over the glass and clay and pull them into the earth like it was sand, and we bloody our hands trying to dig them back out of the dirt.

I try to pull a root out of the way, but it is too deep, and my knuckles feel like they are going to pop. My face is wet now. I am sobbing into the dirt.

The man is standing over me when I look back up.

He is tutting at me, but he is smiling.

He says he is sorry that he has arrived so late. That he will do what he can.

The swirls start to fade from behind my eyes, leaving only the blur of my tears, and the pain comes back. It hurts less than it usually does. I can lift my arms when the old man extends his gnarled hand.

I take it.

Crimson Honey (1/2).

We always know they've come when we hear the laughter.

When the fishermen draw their nets in from the river and the village matrons usher the children indoors. When the mist settles so heavily over us that we can barely see our shaking hands in front of us. When the raft people have long since left, for fear of those cursed evenings.

This is the time when they come to us. This is the time when we go out to meet them again.

We come out from many places. Most of us have no homes anymore. No families. We crawl down out of mangroves, or up out of covered ditches. The way toward the river brings us down the path through the village. Candles are snuffed out. Children cry or question.

Families shut their doors and cover their windows before they even see us. They don't like to look at us. They stopped wanting to look long ago.

We walk in a line down toward the bank. We always move slowly. Most of us can no longer walk straight. We do not help the ones who trip and stumble. They will have to crawl after us, and then we will get first pick.

The laughter comes again, louder and closer. It laughs at nothing, and everything. The boat's hull pushes aside the reeds and strikes the side of the dock. Ropes tighten and creak. Bottles clink and rattle, and our ashy mouths water until our cheeks ache.

The mist slowly peels away to reveal them. They stand as they always do. They tower over us, even sitting down in their little boat. They are always taller when we fall to our knees.

Words form out of the laughter, as the one with a face like an elbow rubbed raw looks to us. He folds back the sleeves of his neat robe and slowly opens one basket. We don't need to look inside to know what it is. The smell wafts over us.

Sickening sweetness coats our throats, and we choke.

He asks us how we have been. If we are all still here. Someone lifts their head to tell him that Sibe has died. He feigns sorrow, and then asks how it happened. How much it hurt. Where the body was now.

No one says anything, and no one looks up to see the smile we all know he has.

The boat rocks, and the other stands up with his stick and his tablet. He is so pale, we all thought he was a ghost at first. Now we know that he is something worse. He taps the stick upon a bottle impatiently, and all our hands fumble.

Coins spill out onto the sagging pier beneath us. Stones and cowries clatter together on strings. A grey ring, still with a finger attached, is lifted up in bloodied palms beside me.

The laughing man collects, offering congratulations at bigger piles, and tutting at the small. He does not stop or look at the ones who bury their faces in the wood, weeping and empty-handed. He stops to look down at me for a long time. If the hairs had not fallen out of my skin a long time ago, they would all stand on end beneath his gaze.

I know not what the thing I hold is.

Only that it is made of metal, and glass, and that it has a weight which makes me hope for its value.

He asks me how I came by it. I spare no detail.

The raft man had separated from his fellows to walk through the trees. I tackled him and came down hard on top of him, grabbing for the knife that they all carried with them at their hips. But it was dull, and the point was broken. Twenty-eight times before he stopped moving, and I could take my hand away from his mouth. I took the thing from around his neck. I lie and tell myself that I don't know why I counted the stabs.

I know why.

The man delights. He takes the thing from me and clasps his hand upon my shoulder. I recoil, but I start breathing again at his passing.

When his hands are filled, he turns and walks back to the boat. He empties them into a chest which weighs the aft end down and thrusts the prow upward. The pale man makes more marks in his tablet and nods or shakes his head. Coins and cowries land upon many more of the same.

We are not their first stop today, and we will not be their last.

One by one we stand up and step into line. It is the longest walk to the end of the dock. Tremors run through us. The one in front of me doubles over and vomits. The tight skin of his back stretches and then tears around a sore next to his backbones. It oozes. I walk through his puddle as the line moves.

Golden-red at the edges of the vessel, darkening to a deep, bloody red at its deepest. Murky, and always swirling. Glowing in the dim light. The cork and one side of the neck sticky and slimy, insects landing upon it and then falling off dead.

Before he lets me have it, the pale man grabs my jaw. I open my mouth and he peers in. He counts my teeth, checks my arms and legs. I turn around once for him, raise my fingers up to my nose. He grunts and then lifts the bottle up with a gloved hand.

When the bottle comes into my hands I have to force myself to stop shaking. I can't drop it. I turn and hold it close to my heart as I hurry back onto the dirt. Others are already sprawled out with their own bottles. Some get it thicker, if they've done well. The ones who brought less get the bottles that are cut with water. The ones who brought nothing at all are still crying on the dock.

The stupid ones pull the corks out and tip them right back, drinking it like they would water.

I squat down and use my fingers to spoon it up a bit at a time. That way it will last longer. Last me until the next time they come.

I suck my fingers clean. Something comes off in my mouth. After swallowing the honey, I spit the thing out. I've lost another fingernail. There is no blood this time. The hole underneath it looks like it should hurt. But the honey is working, and I don't feel anything at all.

I keep scooping.

Old Koge falls down in front of me. He can't drink anymore. It makes him sick, and if he vomits he loses all of the honey in it, even if he tries to scoop it back up. So he uncorks his honey and brings the neck up close to his cheekbone. Old Koge leans back and holds the mouth of the bottle over his eye- the one that doesn't see anymore. I can see his eyelid open through the murk. It takes him a few seconds to cry out in pain, but he holds it until enough of it absorbs, and the pain stops. He brings the bottle back down, honey running down his cheek. I don't know if it is honey or blood in his eye.

He across grins at me.

One voice is louder now. I look up, and everything leaves a trail of color behind my eyes when it moves. A man whose name I do not know is raising his palms toward the laughing man. He is begging. He says that he cannot bring enough anymore, not without his leg. I did not notice the festering wound until now.

The laughing man puts a hand on the top of his head and pats him. He tells him that there is a way. He takes his hand and helps him up. The pale man moves things around on the boat, emptying a space. He brings the man down into the boat and sits him there, but he ties his hands together before he can reach for the honey. He will come with them back to where they come from, and where the honey is made. He says that there will be plenty.

We all know what will happen. We will not see him again.

I keep scooping.

The line is gone now. We are all taking our honey. The laughing man holds his hands on his hips and smiles. He smiles when he is disgusted. He always smiles. The pale man finishes his writing. He puts the tablet away under a sheaf of dried leaves. He takes a new one out. He speaks to the laughing man in their tongue. The laughing man barks something back at him.

They argue.

The laughing man grabs the handle of the bullwhip he wears like a belt. The pale man lifts his coat to show all of his gleaming knives.

They both stop, and start to laugh together.

The boat pushes away from the dock. The crying man is crying harder now.

The laughing man waves his hand and begins to bid us all farewell.

His hand blurs into a smear of fuzzy light, and his voice is like the sound of bullfrogs in the swamp.

My toes tingle, and I start to taste orange.

The color. Not the fruit.

The mist begins to cloak them again.

I keep scooping.



Click here for Part 2.