A Thousand Beginnings and Endings

by Ellen Oh

  “I don’t . . . ,” I said. “Home is not . . . I just . . . I want it to mean something. I mean, we’re not fighters. We’re not immense giants. Or snake people with what I can only assume is powerful snake venom in their fangs. My friend here can’t even hold a spear! And you want us to fight for you? Why? Would it even matter?”

  The charioteer looked at me. “It would,” he said. “If you died here, it would matter more than you can imagine. The fate of the universe, it in some way depends on your choosing to die for this. It’s a combining and commingling of energies. Without this expenditure of forces, everything you know and love will dwindle and die. I tried to show you—”

  “Maybe you could show me the vision again?” I said.

  Then there was a clap of thunder in the distance, and I saw four other chariots race out from our army and pull ahead, right out into the space between the armies. The archer shot a single arrow up into the air, far ahead of us, and then he shouted something.

  “No,” the charioteer said. “Time to decide.”

  I looked back. The crab locked his odd googly eyes on me, and then he threw the arrowhead down onto the ground. “Come down,” he said. “We will face this battle together.”

  But I was afraid, and the moment passed. As I waited, the chariot raced ahead. I shrank down, and the battle began to rage around me.

  I was only on that chariot for a few moments, but I saw terrible things. Swirls of mystic energy. The crash of powerful forces. Thousands of arrows. Spears. Swords. Screams. Every second, hundreds died. And I knew I’d not survive.

  There, crouching down on the sideboard, with my arms locked around the chariot’s flagstaff, I very carefully jabbed the arrowhead into the palm of my hand.

  When I opened my eyes, I was back in my car.

  And, of course, an arrow had stapled my hand to the steering wheel.

  At first I screamed, but screaming got me nowhere.

  The windshield was covered in leaves, and cold air blew in through the window. I would have died there, maybe, bleeding out slowly, except that my key was still in the ignition. Thank God I had an old beater that still used an actual key in the ignition, or I would’ve been trapped here because the fob would’ve been in my pocket, on that battlefield, along with my other shit.

  I broke the shaft of the arrow, and I carefully pulled my hand off of the bloody shard of wood. Then, holding the bleeding appendage clenched in my lap, I reached over, putting the car into reverse.

  The road behind me was a big commuter road. Lots of cars, and I had to wait a long time for an opening to pull out. Blood streamed into my lap. The drive to the hospital was long and confused; I had no phone, so I followed my memory and the highway signs, rolling across sparse roads for ten minutes before I finally got it right. Shock faded, and pain sizzled through all my synapses, rising and falling.

  I got to the hospital in time, of course, and they bandaged me up just fine.

  The doctors didn’t believe me, but my parents did, because they believe in mystical stuff like God and karma and fate and the battle of cosmic good versus cosmic evil. Most people do, I’ve found. After I came home, my parents had lots of questions for me, but I eventually shut them up by saying I didn’t like to think about what happened (though of course that’s not true).

  On the surface, nothing has changed for me: I’m still pretty quiet; I still don’t have many friends; and I still sit alone in the afternoon in my car. But whenever something goes wrong with the world—whenever there’s a disaster or a bombing or an injustice—I do wonder, sometimes, if one more corpse on that distant battlefield might somehow have changed everything.

  The Mahabharata

  A South Asian Epic

  With more than two hundred thousand lines of verse, the Mahabharata is the longest poem that’s ever been written, and it’s all about a conflict between two sets of cousins over who’s going to inherit the kingdom of Hastinapura. According to the text, something on the order of five million people participate in the battle that concludes the epic. And of those, only twelve survive. Which as a child was something that struck me very deeply. I was like, Wut? Huh? What happened to all those people? What did they die for?

  It’s very easy to be cynical and say, “Well, they died for nothing. This is a story about hereditary nobles who’re engaged in a dynastic squabble.” But great stories, like the Mahabharata (or the Iliad or Gilgamesh), endure because of their complexities, and this exact question, “Why are we fighting?” is one that the Mahabharata engages with very deeply.

  In fact, on the eve of this battle the hero of the whole epic, Arjuna, says to his charioteer, the god Krishna: “Honor forbids us to kill our cousins” and “How can we know happiness if we kill our own kinsmen?”

  Krishna’s answer to this question forms the bulk of the most famous book in the Mahabharata, the “Bhagavad Gita,” which is basically Hinduism’s answer to a timeless question: What’s the point?

  I’m no guru, and I can’t explicate an entire religion for you, but basically, Krishna says: “He who thinks the self is a killer / and he who thinks it killed / both fail to understand / [the self] does not kill, nor is it killed.”

  Arjuna’s anguish, Krishna explains, is built on a false understanding of the universe. He sees individual people arrayed in battle against one other, but that’s not the reality of the situation. This universe is so complex, and we are only a part of it. These bodies are forms that we take up or cast off, but the spirit inside is eternal. And war might seem like pain and suffering and violence, but really it’s only a process that the spirit is going through.

  That explanation was enough for Arjuna, as it would’ve been for me (I mean, Krishna also throws in some magical razzle-dazzle). But “Spear Carrier” was inspired by the other five million people on that battlefield. I wondered where they’d come from, and why they fought, and whether anyone had ever stopped to explain to them the purpose of the lives they were about to lose.

  —Rahul Kanakia

  Code of Honor

  Melissa De La Cruz

  I almost murdered a girl yesterday.

  Literally.

  When I opened my locker between periods, I discovered that my diary had gone missing. I knew exactly who had stolen it, but I couldn’t say anything. Lilah Samson, the most feared and envied girl at the Duchesne School, hates me. I wanted to tear out her shiny hair with my bare hands. I wanted to claw at her porcelain skin. Thinking about someone trying to read the pages spilling with all my secrets made my skin burn.

  No one can know who I really am.

  Too bad for her. It’s charmed shut. No human can read it. But that doesn’t make me any less angry. Ever since I started at Duchesne, Lilah has been trying to nose her way into my personal life. Why does she even care? I’m just an outsider.

  Muttering her name under my breath, I slammed my locker shut. A younger girl named Constance was walking by and overheard, and she stopped in the middle of the hallway. “You should really watch out for her, Aida,” she said. “Lilah’s a piece of work.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said, my veins throbbing with fury. “Does she always act like this toward new students? Or am I just a special case?”

  I’m already prone to attacks of rage, and having to deal with her hazing ever since I arrived at Duchesne hasn’t made controlling them any easier. I’ve only been here a couple of months, and Lilah already knows exactly how to push my buttons.

  “It’s not that Lilah stabs people in the back,” Constance said. “She just has a reputation for making people earn their place. You can’t earn her trust fast.”

  “You mean she stabs them in the front,” I replied.

  Lilah and her group of friends are stylish, confident, and beautiful. Rich beyond imagining, their families have ruled New York forever. They’re nothing like me, a loner from nowhere.

  Standing in the hallway, I thought about leaving Duchesne, but I’ve run from so many things in my life already. I need
to stand my ground, not let my anger over some girl’s immature behavior drive me to fly away. If I leave, I may never discover my destiny. I’m up for her challenge. Life isn’t easy for people like me. Not that there are many like me. . . . I might be immortal and feed on blood, but I’m not the usual vampire. I’m also a shape-shifter and a daywalker. Where I come from, they call us aswangs. Vampire witches. The sun doesn’t burn my skin. I can go about by day like any other normal sixteen-year-old girl, but once the sun dips down below the horizon, I fly around the city hunting for my prey.

  My mother was also an aswang. We lived in a small village on the island of Mindanao, in the southernmost part of the Philippines, and she raised me by herself. She refused to tell me about our family, thinking that keeping our identity a secret would keep us safe. She would kill chickens and any other animal she could find for me at night and bring the flesh home, until one night the villagers caught her stealing a hog and murdered her. Burned with the white fire. The only way to kill one of us. I realized that whether the villagers discovered my identity or not, I would never be safe on the island again.

  My magical blood bound me to secrecy. I had to leave Mindanao before I could be discovered. I flew away that night to Vietnam and slowly made my way to New Delhi, where I tried to settle down. But soon I realized that I was forever destined to be a wanderer, an orphan; to never know my family, my bloodline, or my true origins.

  My anger at my mother for keeping our family’s past a secret burned inside as the years slowly passed. Though I stopped aging at sixteen, I felt old. I grew weary of feeding on human flesh, leaving a blood trail of friends and lovers behind. It’s lonely to be a person—a creature—like me.

  That’s why I developed a code of honor. I used to feed on people, but I couldn’t help myself from killing those I loved most. It’s only one rule, the golden one: what you wish upon others, you wish upon yourself—which is a lot easier said than done. I only eat animals now, and only as much as I need to survive. I try not to let myself get angry because that’s when I most desire human flesh. You can see why I need to keep myself under control. If not for my code of honor, I actually might have murdered Lilah.

  After discovering the diary was missing, I couldn’t get myself to calm down, which could have been dangerous for me—and for anyone nearby. It’s difficult to be honorable at your worst moment and to forgive those who do you wrong, to have to battle what comes naturally to you. But that’s what it takes to be a monster living among mortals.

  If I was going to stick to my code, I had to remove myself from the situation, so I told a teacher that my aunt Girlie was sick and that I needed to leave school to take care of her. Everyone at Duchesne thinks my parents passed away in a tragic boating accident and that I live with my old spinster aunt. The truth is, Aunt Girlie doesn’t actually exist. I have no one, nobody.

  I left the school still in a rage. I waited until night fell, shifted into my bird form, and flew around the city, trying to get my pulse under control. There are six flocks of sheep just outside the city. I dropped by for a newborn’s liver. It’s cruel to rip one out, but better little lambs than Duchesne’s most popular girls.

  Perspective, you know?

  Standing on the front porch of the mansion, I open the door to the Duchesne School. I’m feeling better now that I’ve had a night to cool down, but I have to arm myself for the day with a mantra. I take a deep breath. Don’t let those girls get to you. Don’t give in.

  When I first arrived, I thought life in New York City was going to be perfect. I’ve traveled all over the world—New Delhi, Tokyo, Milan, London, Cairo, Manila—searching for a place I would truly belong, but none of them ever felt right. Last year, I was living in a shabby little room near Oxford University that I adored, but I was getting restless again. I was preparing to leave for Morocco the next week when I overheard two professors speaking to each other about a theory that an American colleague from New York had presented at a conference.

  They said that the American’s paper featured recently discovered documents revealing that a coven of supernatural creatures—who were rumored to drink human blood—had settled in New York before the Revolutionary War. Afraid of tarnished reputations, and wanting to avoid persecution, they’d kept their ancestry completely secret for hundreds of years.

  The professors dismissed the discovery as a tall tale made up by Protestants to keep their parishioners in line, but their conversation had sparked something inside me. My intuition told me that I needed to change my plans—that there was a hint of truth behind that tale. Early America was a place where those who felt they had been persecuted for their religious beliefs had gone to seek freedom. It wouldn’t be a stretch to think that maybe some people like me had ended up there for similar reasons. Maybe I could find some of them. New York, the mysterious city of dreamers and misfits, was calling me.

  I had been a nomad for a long time, but my heart began to yearn for America. The same way it had told me to leave behind the Philippines, the place of my birth, in order to find my true home. But here I was, and I’d had no luck finding anyone like me yet. I have to accept that I may never find anyone like me. And that’s why I need to keep my code of honor and work on making actual human friends. They might be the only chance I’ll ever have to feel like I belong.

  I walk toward the marble staircase that leads up to the humanities classrooms. The Duchesne School once belonged to Captain Armstrong Flood, an oil magnate, whose widow bequeathed their home to Mademoiselle Duchesne to open up the school. While some modern concessions have been made for the students, including rows of metal lockers lining the hallways, the original furnishings of the mansion are still here, which makes entering the building seem like stepping back into a slice of history. Honor, however, is in short supply at Duchesne, despite the fact so many students can trace their bloodlines all the way back to the founding of America. They are a closed circle; no one gets in.

  A few paintings hang along the staircase wall. Three girls gossip beneath the life-size portrait of the Flood heiresses, their lips sparkling with gloss and sarcasm. Gemma Browne, the school’s resident exposé-a-la-Instagram-photog, whispers something to Marnie Wilder, a senior girl who can’t leave her house without wearing a pair of sky-high stilettos. They’re both standing next to none other than Lilah, who, judging from the poorly veiled glare on her icy porcelain face, still hates me. Just my luck.

  “You’re back.” Gemma snaps a pic. “For my Insta.”

  “Do you have to?” I grumble.

  Gemma’s eyes widen long enough for me to know I’m under her skin. She ignores my comment anyway. “We sort of thought you might have transferred after . . .” She trails off, realizing she’s about to stick her foot right into her mouth. She has to at least keep up the pretense of having manners. “We’re glad you’re back.”

  “Yeah. We’re glad,” Marnie adds. “Where were you? Bobby Livingston was looking for you. He had your diary. He said he found it in the art room.”

  I’m not dumb. I know already that they stole it. Once she discovered that the diary wouldn’t open, Lilah must have discarded it for someone else to find and return. What’s she after? Maybe she senses I have a double life, but there’s no way she could suspect anything close to the truth. Before I knew what I really was, I didn’t even think the superstitions of the villagers in my town were true. Lilah probably thinks I’m lying about my parents being dead and wants to figure out what I’m hiding so she can blackmail me.

  “Thanks. I’ll find him. You know I’d never think of leaving,” I say. “My aunt is sick. I had to go home to take care of her.”

  Gemma nods unconvincingly. If she knew how much I love gorging on raw liver, she would probably puke all over her Chanel purse. What a sight that would be.

  Lilah rolls her eyes. “Your aunt seems to get sick a lot,” she says. “Didn’t you use that excuse a couple weeks ago when she didn’t come to back-to-school night?”

  “She’s old,�
�� I said. “Like you care about my aunt.”

  “If you really have an aunt,” Lilah says with a raised eyebrow.

  I hate her. I wish I could pop her eyeballs out of her head and lick the blood in those sclera vessels clean. I’m about to give up the conversation and head upstairs for class when Mrs. Stratemeyer, one of the teachers, opens the front door.

  “Aida.” She says my name like I’m in trouble as she shakes the water off her umbrella. She’s a stout woman with a strict demeanor. “Is your aunt feeling better?”

  “Yes. Much better,” I reply. “She’s a fighter.”

  “That’s nice to hear.” Mrs. Stratemeyer takes a step up the stairs. “I’d love to meet her sometime. You should bring her to the next open house.”

  I nod. I’m not naturally a quiet person, but providing as little information as possible is the best way to keep a low profile. I’m beginning to doubt the feeling in my blood that I needed to come to New York City to stop running and settle down. This doesn’t feel like home. Maybe I used the conversation I overheard at the library as an excuse, as a way to justify getting even farther away from the Philippines, the source of my anguish. Was I just running away from my grief over my mother’s death and my anger at her for keeping secrets about our origins?

  Mrs. Stratemeyer disappears up the stairs.

  I breathe a sigh of relief, but Marnie is back in my face again. “Where were you, actually?” She’s so close I can almost taste the blood being filtered through her kidneys.

  “You’re so mysterious,” Gemma adds with enough sarcasm to make my veins throb.

  Marnie pulls her purse up onto her shoulder and shifts her weight onto her left stiletto. “Everyone makes up stories about you,” she says.

  “What stories?” I ask.

  “Just that you’re probably one of . . .” Marnie trails off.