That Moment When: An Anthology of Young Adult Fiction

by A. M. Lalonde

  He recently released Risuko, his first novel, and is hard at work on Bright Eyes, the sequel.

  LEARNING TO FLY

  Laura Diamond

  BLURB: In Ming Dynasty China, fifteen-year-old Jung discovers the nightmares cursing him are really the dreams of the slumbering dragon within. Waking the beast may free him, but taking flight means he’ll have to give up all he’s ever known and loved.

  * * *

  “Get your head out of the clouds, Jung, the rice is down here on the ground with the rest of us,” my sister, Na, chides me, her russet eyes searching my emerald green ones for the waking dream she knows is playing in my fanciful imagination.

  The sun beats on our sweaty backs, pushing us closer to the quietly growing paddies, its rays hitting us like lashes from a whip. Na is bent over, her indigo-dyed cotton sleeves billowing around her tiny arms as she plucks, plucks, plucks. Her chin is already tucked toward her chest so she can better see her quarry. So focused on work, she’s probably already forgotten her reminder for me to keep working even though her voice is still ringing in my disgruntled ears.

  Rice. Our food and our life. The multi-level terraces provide sustenance for the entire village, and mostly the entire village is here harvesting the crop.

  I lift a water-logged foot out of the mid-shin deep water (which is knee deep for everyone else), resenting the mud underneath trying so desperately to hold on. Perhaps it thinks my soles will spontaneously sprout roots and lock me to the soil like the rice plants.

  A sigh rushes out of me. What a cruel thing life is, tethering us to the earth, forever allowing us to watch the sky but never giving us the gift of flight or the ability to soar along its gentle blue currents. The truth is, I am chained to the ground, trapped in my body, assigned a life as a land-dweller, with only my dreams as a means of escape.

  I consider raising a long arm up, up, up, fingers splayed, a prayer on my lips, but I can’t risk attracting attention of the villagers working the paddy. My otherness does that enough as it is. I’m graced with the only green eyes in the village (my mother suffered many accusations for that one) and I’m the tallest. By a lot.

  Na quickly responds to my second sigh by whacking my shin with the back of her hand. “Stop breathing, start working.”

  I give a sarcastic laugh. “I have to breathe in order to work.”

  “Well do them both at the same time.” She goes back to harvesting. Pluck, pluck, pluck.

  Her baskets hold twice the amount of rice as mine because I spend half my time daydreaming. Biting back yet another exasperated huff, I bend toward the delicate stalks, matching my sister pluck for pluck.

  For a long while, the only movements are the synchronized swing of arms and grabbing of mature rice paddy by calloused fingers along with the varied sounds of panting villagers and the contented buzzing of flying insects dappled with the shrill chatter of hungry birds.

  It’s midday when Na and I reach the far end of our terrace.

  Finally, because she’s out of rice to harvest, she rises, plants her fists at her hips, and stretches her back, lifting her face to the azure sky. Her cheeks are red and beads of sweat cling to her porcelain skin. She retreats a step to edge out of my shadow. Though she’s older than me by three years, I stand over a foot taller than her.

  “Giant,” she says, though her tone is playful.

  Still, I earn a few anxious glances from the other villagers nearby. They hesitate for the briefest of moments to eye me, take stock of my height even though they see me every day and it hasn’t changed in the last, oh, month or so, then rush back to their work, as if they’ve embarrassed themselves by pausing.

  Na removes her dǒulì and spins the conical-shaped bamboo hat in her hands. It means she’s thinking, and that’s never good, because what usually follows is how I should be more concerned about things like family, food, and working hard rather than daydreaming about flying and spending time with the clouds.

  She wouldn’t be wrong. My waking dreams are extensions of my agitated nightmares. At night, I soar over the paddies, but the sensation frightens me until I plummet to the earth and crash against the rocks. During the day, the idea of flying appeals, entices, and tempts me. I’m not sure why, except that maybe I’m fighting the two halves of Yin and Yang—Yin ruling my fitful nightly dreams and Yang my hopeful daytime fantasies—leaving me unable to reconcile why I’m different and unable to accept it.

  “Perhaps if you stooped a bit, you wouldn’t look so tall and people wouldn’t be wary of you,” she says. The advice is sincere, and I know she offers it—freely, lucky me—because she cares about me. But the truth behind it is she’s embarrassed by me too. I’m the tallest in the village and being the “-est” of something is never a good idea. Somehow, my ever-elongating bones have become fodder for rumor (in the form of hushed whispers, hissed hexes, and darting glances) ever since I can remember. Some say I am cursed, and, by extension, so is my family. I have no idea what my forefathers or ancestors did that convinced the elements to punish me, or why they did it in such an obvious way.

  “We spend all day hunched over already,” I complain, gesturing to the optimistic blades of green spreading their happiness along the mountainside, thrilled by their half-aquatic, half-sunbaked lives, despite the fact that they will soon be ripped out of their cozy bed to dry out in the same sun that gave them life until they can be cooked to give us life. I suppose they’re martyrs, albeit ignorant of their sacrifice.

  I shake my head. There goes my wild, stupid imagination again. They’re plants. They don’t think.

  “When you’re not harvesting, then,” she argues, as if her suggestion is the most obvious thing and I’m too soft in the head to understand. I’d agree with her; sometimes I feel like my brain is mushier than the mud squishing under my large feet.

  “If I stoop all day I’ll get a backache on top of my backache. Besides, I cannot change my eye color.”

  “Keep your eyes squinted and your brim low,” Na says.

  “I cannot do that forever.” Or for even a moment longer. I scrunch my nose, shoving off my own dǒulì to free my sopping hair from spending yet another torturous moment trapped in a cocoon of bamboo. The cord tying my hat in place so it doesn’t fall and plop onto the sopping paddy slides up to my throat, nearly choking me. I ignore it, much more irritated by the day’s stillness. Monsoon season has ended and the days burn on, relentless without reprieve.

  Too bad there isn’t a breeze to shift the humid air.

  “Wind, where are you?” I ask, lifting the corner of my mouth in a little rebellious smile, amused by my own boldness in calling out an element by name.

  Na frowns at me, placing her hat squarely on her head. Break time is over. “You cannot call the elements. They do what they will. We’re insignificant to them.”

  She adds an eye roll and the message is clear: Stop daydreaming, Jung. It’s not productive.

  “Sometimes they listen,” I counter, though I don’t really believe it. If Wind really did listen, it’d help me out by drying up my nightmares and giving me wings to fly.

  Na raises her eyebrows, wrinkling her forehead with disagreement.

  “Let’s head up to the top paddy,” I suggest, already extending a long leg for the next terrace. A cluster of workers scramble to either side, giving me a wide berth, as if my gangly-ness is catching, or in the very least poisonous. They don’t want to be contaminated by my curse.

  Na manages to deepen her frown to a full-on scowl, but she follows me up anyway, straight to the top of the mountain. Harvesters part for us, like water from the Chang Jiang flees the prow of a swiftly moving canoe. Na greets them in her curt, but friendly way, an effort to smooth tense relations between our family and everyone else—again, my fault—but I ignore them. They don’t like talking to me anyway, so it’s for the best. They think I’m a devil and fear I’ll hurl some curse at them instead of saying good morning or hello. Reason number two of a million why I don’t like conve
rsation.

  The first reason? I’d rather stay inside my head. Like a grain of rice safely nestled in its protective husk, I’m more content within the confines of my own mind. I am a solitary creature in a world where sameness and assimilation is vital.

  Na grabs my elbow. “This is the top terrace. Can’t go any farther, Jung. Honestly, if you didn’t have me to watch out for you I bet you’d walk right off the edge. You don’t think you can walk on air, do you?”

  “No.” My heart drops at the reminder. Yet my eyes remain locked onto the sky, the wispy clouds overhead, and the far off peaks of the sprawling mountain range cut in half by the mighty Chang Jiang.

  She lowers her baskets and promptly gets to plucking. “Jung. Work.”

  “Fine, fine,” I reply, resentful she refuses to take in the beauty around her. She’ll live her life this way, gaze trained on the ground beneath her feet, focused only on what’s in front of her nose, missing out on the gifts of the wide world. A twinge of sadness tightens my chest for all the missed opportunities she’s had—and will continue to have—to experience awe, joy, contentedness, and peace. All those things you feel when you recognize your connection to nature. And not just in the form of plant-harvest-eat-survive, but in the form of there’s-something-bigger-than-this-and-I-can-join-it-if-I-wish-it-hard-enough.

  “Jung,” Na prods.

  At least no one else is up here with us to hear her admonish me. They don’t need more reasons to hate me.

  I tug my dǒulì over my head and bend to join Na. It’s painful, tearing my gaze from the sky. “Wind, I wish you would answer me,” I mutter.

  My words fall dead on the paddy. Then, a blade of a rice plant twitches. And another, and another. Soon, the bit of paddy surrounding me is swaying back and forth, dancing. The silent celebration spreads to Na. She pauses mid-pluck, arm frozen half-bent, fingers tightly curled around the rice plants she’s just yanked from the ground.

  “Jung?” she asks, uncertain.

  I know why. This is no ordinary breeze. The way it glides in some silent rhythm to music only it hears. The way it caresses the paddy. The way it tickles my nose and tugs at my dǒulì. A normal breeze is ignorant, unknowing of what it touches, blind to its power. This wind is playing with us.

  “Jung?” Na asks again, this time drawing my name out slowly, clearly disturbed by what’s happening.

  “What?” I say, shrugging my shoulders, but she’s not looking at me. Rather, she’s watching the undulating waves gliding across our terrace.

  “It’s the element,” she says.

  I stand straight, letting my full height free, my gaze extending to the terraces below, along all the bent backs and round, tan dǒulì polka-dotting the green paddies.

  Na tosses back her hat and props her fists on her hips, dark eyes flashing with a bit of fear and a lot of anger. “What have you done?”

  I gape at her. “Me? What’re you talking about?”

  “You called Wind.”

  I shook my head. Nope, no way. “Uh-uh. I didn’t.”

  “I heard you muttering, Jung, and look what’s happened.” Her sharp tone sparks with pure accusation.

  “I thought you said the elements don’t care about us,” I sputter, clearly losing ground, though I don’t know how it happened so quickly.

  She lowers her gaze. “They don’t, but…”

  “What?” I reach out to her, but she shies from me before my long fingers can touch her skin.

  “The elements…”

  “Na,” I say, imploring, questioning. “Do you believe?”

  Can I dare to hope I’m not the only one prone to such whimsical ideas?

  “I believe you need to be careful.” Her voice is soft, almost carried away by the dancing element. “We don’t know how the curse will show itself.”

  Curse. The word—the mark that has tarnished me for my entire life—so casually released by my sister. The word, up until now, she’d been careful to avoid and quick to dismiss if uttered by another.

  “Y-you think I’m cursed?”

  “I think the family is cursed and you’re the one showing it.”

  “But why? How? What have we done? Our ancestors?”

  A quick adjustment of her dǒulì and my stern, hard-working sister is firmly planted inside her stoic, unruffled mind again. The thin line of her mouth tells me she has no intention of answering.

  I stare at her, slack-jawed and heart bleeding into the water at my feet as if Na had stabbed me straight in the chest. She bends to the paddy, ignoring the swaying blades still whirling to Wind’s song.

  * * *

  Wind keeps dancing through dinner, after sunset, and well into the night. During it all, the village carried on as usual, but my mind swirled with possibility. And it still does. While the rest of the village sleeps, my thoughts mingle with the steady snores of my brothers and sisters and parents. They bounce off the mudbrick walls and thatched roof before finally settling onto the straw beds and mess of blankets making up our communal bed.

  Only Na is silent. She doesn’t snore or dream.

  I, on the other hand, tend to be a light sleeper and my frequent nightmares are violent enough to disturb the entire family. Perhaps it’s part of the curse that Na confessed she believes in.

  Lucky for my family that tonight is a sleepless night for me. Tomorrow will be challenging as I hunch over the paddies, drugged by insomnia, but rice doesn’t care whether or not I’m well rested when it comes to harvesting. I am at least grateful my siblings will be alert enough to attempt keeping up with Na. If it weren’t for her and the immense work she accomplishes in the paddies, I suspect we’d be banished from the village to subsist in the surrounding wilds on our own.

  Part of me longs for the cleansing monsoons of spring and summer, the constant whoosh of water pelting the ground and saturating the soil, filling the terraces with much needed water for growing rice. The drumming sound usually lulls me to sleep when nothing else—including Mother’s calming tea paired with a litany of lullabies—works. Despite the rain’s destructive tendencies, it also brings life, the promise of a large crop, and often swells the village with hope for a bountiful season.

  Thick clouds left with the dying rains, leaving a clear night sky to stare boldly back at us. I wish the stars were my friends. I wish they could extend an icy arm down to me and lift me up to carry me across the heavens. I imagine the stars live in a cold place, they hang so high, so far away from the earth’s warmth, but I don’t really know.

  I sure would like to find out, though.

  “Wind, I wish you would let me fly,” I whisper, hoping my request floats out the window and touches the ears of the fickle element.

  A boasting moon, round with pride, peeks through the window. The star sitting next to it winks at me.

  Come outside, the moon whispers. I have a secret to tell you.

  The winking star laughs. Yes, yes, join us.

  Though I’m not sure I should answer, my body decides for me and before I know it, I’m stepping quietly over my siblings and sneaking out the front door.

  Barefoot, I walk the narrow path between houses, past the deep channels dug by flood waters, ignoring the empty spaces where huts used to squat but were washed away by the monsoon, imagining all the villagers tucked as carefully as fine porcelain tea cups in their beds, arms wrapped around one another. Mothers embracing fathers, spoiled younger brothers shoving older sisters aside for more space, and warmth and love seeping into every pore, like a fire’s smoke invades the skin if you stand too close for too long.

  No fires burn now. It’s too late, too deep in the night. I am the only one awake. The only wanderer, the only odd one, set apart from his family, apart from his village, apart from his earthly home.

  A dreamer.

  A sibling of the sky, hobbled to spend his life on the ground.

  Is it a curse to be so painfully aware of my plight or is it a curse that I’m grounded?

  I leave the secure co
nfines of the village and take the exposed path toward the paddies, bathed in pale blue moonlight. Leaning into the steep slope, I spread my arms, greeting the moon with an embrace and a smile as if we’re long lost brothers separated at birth.

  “What is it you’d like to tell me, Moon? Do you have a message from Wind?” I ask, using my normal voice rather than a whisper or a shout.

  A kiss of a warm breeze answers. It blows against my arms, lifting them higher, giving them a buoyancy I’ve never experienced before.

  I laugh, delighted.

  Wind gets stronger, tussling my hair and tugging at my jacket and pants, already too short for my growing frame. Mother says she can’t make garments fast enough to keep up with my lengthening body, so she waits until the faintest sliver of my belly shows at my waist before letting out the hem and crafting new clothes for me, pieced together from castoffs as my other siblings grow. Sometimes there are more stitches in the patchwork pieces than at the hem and seams. My jacket and pants end up with a pocked effect from the mishmash of fabrics, some frayed, some thinned, some dyed different shades, some faded from too much sun, some stained. It adds to my leper-like status in the village.

  More stars join the moon, twinkling with the same joy infusing my laugh. If Na were here, she’d think I’d gone mad or that a ghostly spirit had inhabited my body.

  But I’m alone and I can behave as I want. No one to see me. No one to judge. As close to freedom as I’ve been in a long time.

  Discard your earthly worries and embrace your true nature. A whisper. A beckoning.

  I startle, dropping my arms to my side and whirling in a circle. Where’d that come from? Not my own mind. I know the voice of my thoughts and they’d never suggest throwing away my concerns so flippantly.

  “Hello?” I call. The sound echoes around the paddies.

  I step up to the first terrace, dunking my feet in the cool water with a soft ker-plunk. I shudder, partly from the temperature and partly from the request.