Candle in the Attic Window(68)
creaking.
Mary E. Choo’s speculative poetry and fiction has been published in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies, as well as online and electronic publications. She is a two-time Aurora finalist, and has received a number of honourable mentions in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and The Best Horror of the Year (online lists). Her short story, “The Man Who Loved Lightning”, appears in the anthology of fusion fiction, Like Water for Quarks.
Liminal Medicine
By Jesse Bullington
After the journalists discovered the killing fields and Tuol Sleng, the whole world knew about our ghosts. The metaphor is a strong one, I’ll allow: Just as the spectre of Nanking haunts the Japanese and Mao’s revolt made the tale of the hungry ghost more palpable, so, too, did the Rouge grant us our own haunted legacy. Movies and books and articles and television and a rather morbid tourism industry all parade the ghosts of Cambodia before the pitying eyes of the world, and even down all these years local witticisms, such as It is better to lose one leg than both, remind me that countless landmines wait like vipers in the fields, that the phantom of the Khmer Rouge will haunt my country for many lifetimes. The summer I returned home, the news fixated on the arrest of a deranged American murderer and I thus discovered another appropriate allegory for what the Khmer Rouge did to my country – cannibalism.
My grandfather, like many Cambodians, had a ghost arm; unlike many, he lost his during the civil war and not afterward. He claimed that, had he found and cremated the limb, it would not have haunted him, but even as a child, I suspected this tale was told for my amusement, the waxy stump wiggling for my edification alone. After my uncle whisked me out of the village and bounced me from town to Phnom Penh to border to Bangkok to University, I ran across an article on the phantom limb phenomenon. I translated and copied it to show my grandfather, but by the time I graduated and returned home, he had found his way back to the arm the Khmer Rouge had taken so many years before.
After the train and boat and taxi and bus and rickshaw, I found myself on the familiar road home, debating how to approach my grandmother, as a cat mewled somewhere in the cab and insects hummed and the mud squelched under the tires and the jungle pulsed with all the sultry wetness of summer. Much to the curiosity of the two well-dressed men sharing the vehicle with me, I made the driver stop a kilometer outside the village to walk the rest of the way in; the lengthy journey from my new life back to my old had not been nearly long enough to prepare myself, and I thought returning as I had thousands of times before might help. Naturally, as soon as the mud coated my sneakers and the taxi resumed bouncing down the road to deliver my bags, I regretted my decision, the heat turning my dress to sticky rice paper.
I paused in the shade of the mango tree overlooking my village and smiled. Unlike many of my scholastic compatriots, I felt no shame regarding my rural upbringing and, after the intensity of Bangkok, I relished the notion of a neighbourhood not constantly throbbing with noise, traffic and electricity. Had I any intention of staying longer than the summer, I might have thought differently. That in itself was strange, I ruminated, that the one place I always considered home I now saw for what it was – a quaint and antiquated little hamlet that would likely become intolerable within a few months.
The mango tree above me wilted pregnant over the road, its fruit crowning down, almost within reach. City living had not made me too proud to hop in the mud like a gibbon and soon, I netted my fingers over a plump, ruddy orb and rent the fruit loose of its moorings. My heel slipped in the muck as I landed and I fell backwards, knocking the wind out of myself as I slapped down in the road. My initial panic at how my grandmother would react to my soiled dress brought on a giggling fit – that particular mango tree had brought on more than one lashing from similar circumstances.
“Are you a bitch, cooling yourself in the mud?” the thick country accent made it impossible for me to tell if the speaker was male or female, and I scrambled to my feet in embarrassment.
“I fell picking –” but I stopped as I turned and saw the witch scowling at me, her own dress blackened with mud halfway up her spindly legs. A basket hung against the sharp jag of her knees and she looked even more horrible than she had when I was a child, if such a thing were possible. Yet, I was no longer a child and studying medicine, I had of course thought often of this poor, maligned woman whom the village shunned, yet turned to in place of real medical attention. “Hello, ma’am. It’s good to see you, again.”
“Eh.” She squinted at me then cracked a yellow-toothed leer. “Jorani’s granddaughter.”
“Yes, ma’am. My name’s Malis,” I said, resolute to make up for –
“You used to throw rotten mangoes at my house,” she said, warily eyeing the fruit still clenched in my hand. “And worse. You and that Phirun child.”
“I’m sorry ma’am,” I said. “We were just –”
“Nasty little things,” she muttered. “You know how he ended up after you left, that boy you ran with? You hear the bad end he came to?”
My grandmother had answered every letter I wrote and while, over the last few years, I had not found the time to write as often, she had never mentioned anything happening to Phirun in her replies. We had terrorized this lonely old woman, Phirun and I, and gauging by the sadistic glitter in her eye, something dire had happened indeed. Perhaps noticing the worry on my face, she grinned even wider and fumbled in her basket.