by Anthology
There were only a handful of survivors.
Would it be enough?
It must be.
It had to be.
Gaston stood watching Mr. Arsenault put things away in the apartment below the shoppe. He looked everywhere but at Gaston.
“What did you want to ask me today?”
Mr. Arsenault shrugged. His struggle played over his face. “Why do you continue to sit here, day after day?”
“You already asked me that. I mean, what did youreally want to ask?”
“Well, I mean…Why would you stay here with me? I’m just a cigar shoppe owner.”
Gaston walked over to him and held the man’s face in his articulated metal fingers. “No one is ever ‘just’ anything. If you haven’t figured out by now why I stick around, I don’t feel inclined to tell you. Except for this.”
Gaston lifted the mirror visor from his face and kissed dear sweet Mr. Arsenault, with his off-center mustache. And he was kissed back, for quite a long time.
“Love is the only thing that becomes more valuable the more you remember it,” Gaston said.
Gently, he reached behind Mr. Arsenault’s neck and tapped a discrete button to shut him down for the night. With a twist, he removed the robot’s head and held it to his chest and rocked.
“And I have a whole planet devoted just to remembering you,” Gaston whispered, “and how you saved me, long ago.”
The parts of Mr. Arsenault were lovingly packed away in a special box to recharge until tomorrow.
When he was done, Gaston removed the metal devices and plastics attached to his body. Where they had been embedded into his skin, he watched as his pierced flesh regenerated.
The dead cells fell to the floor and became dust.
No one asks why a robot doesn’t age.
Gaston erased the unimportant memories of his day. Then, one by one, he shuttled the ones he wanted to treasure into the virtual wormhole leading to his backup, which for the last several decades had been a gas giant planet in the Europa cluster.
Nin Harris
http://www.mythopoetica.com
Sang Rimau and the Medicine Woman(Short story)
by Nin Harris
Lackington's Magazine
Prologue
Sang Rimau stopped visiting a decade ago. Some days, Cempaka wondered if there were any were-tigers left at all. She chanted prayers, incantations, and set out unholy brews by the salt licks of the forest, but Sang Rimau never returned. He never came back to deliver the Empress’s retribution. She waited in vain to be collected like a bad debt.
The potency of Cempaka’s remedies never ceased to draw unwarranted attention. She had learned over the years to grow crafty in the dispensing of her potions and balms. One did not want to induce or encourage accusations of heresy, even if bomohs and medicine women were part and parcel of their heritage. She learned to utter euphemisms when necessary. She would need to constantly explain that her secrets were holy secrets. If pressed, she would say that the djinns that came to aid her were really Islamic djinns. She would recite chapter and verse from the Holy Book.
There were many things that were unsaid and unknown by both sides: the New Faithful who had returned from abroad with their convictions, and the Old Faithful who merrily combined animism and skulduggery with their version of faith. Cempaka still had her uses in a world caught between the two schools. She kept both thieves and insects away with her spells. She found lost items. She made people fall in love. She plied her craft with smooth words and poems, the way that bunian courtier so many generations ago romanced her unnamed ancestor.
– 1 –
“Definitely his progeny, we’d recognize that nose anywhere,” the Empress of the bunian had said to one of the admirals, her eyes appraising the sixteen-year-old girl attempting to hide beneath the shelter of a banana tree.
The Empress was swathed in songket cloth—an elegant weave of gold, purple and green threads. More gold of a diaphanous nature covered her bare shoulders, and made a halo around the thick black waves of her hair. Her hooded eyes fixed upon Cempaka’s face. She made a patrician gesture with her right hand, the nails of which were glistening and looked as painfully sharp as knives.
Filaments of light knit together in an image of an elaborate palace with arched eaves of gold or golden wood, of upward-curving roofs, of stilts that were as sturdy and as tall as tree-trunks. From the palace, immeasurable gold steps curved downwards to the undergrowth. Three claw-footed Khinnaree admirals stood guard at the base of the ornate gold staircase, their handsome heads crested with silver and gold songket tengkoloks. Cempaka knew they were admirals because of the shape of their tengkolok, but she had never seen women wear the tengkolok—it jarred with her understanding of the world. She also knew this woman was too grand to be merely a queen. No, she was an empress, supreme, and she was to be both adored and feared.
Music unfamiliar, mathematical in precision and painfully perfect inflicted itself upon Cempaka’s hearing. The music drew her forward, and she stepped out from beneath the sheltering leaves of the banana tree into the clearing before the palace. The admirals responded to her presence by walking towards her. She immediately retreated into the undergrowth, still too lulled by the music to feel terror, but not so lulled that her instincts for self-preservation did not take over.
“What do you want me to do with her, Your Majesty? Would you like to collect the debt now?” asked First Admiral, whose tengkolok was grander than the other two, positioned on her head in stiffly starched magnificence.
“Leave her,” said the Empress, before she second-guessed herself. “No, wait, let us give her this.”
First Admiral turned towards the Empress, who held out a curved hand. Cempaka craned her head forward to see what was going on. She tried to speak. Shyness and a profound feeling of unworthiness shrank her tongue, making it impossible for her to breathe. She gulped a little, hoping the action would allow the air egress into her body. It was not much help. She watched as something took shape in the Empress’s curved palm, that same hand that almost made to beckon in Cempaka’s direction. It was a mango that was partially yellow, and partially the bashful blush of a mawar blossom. Cempaka yearned for that fruit.
Nothing in her life had ever looked so perfectly shaped, so luminous and yet so solid all at once.
“Your Majesty,” Cempaka finally said, “I am not worthy. I am a beast of burden, fit only to bear your rags. By Allah I will do all that you ask of me. I do not deserve such wonders.”
The Empress smiled. “Oh, but we know you do not deserve it. Nevertheless, you must take this fruit, or you will offend us.”
Cempaka trembled but obeyed the Empress, moving closer, close enough to touch her.
“Give us your hand,” the Empress commanded. She beckoned. The gesture hung mid-air with a swoop of her forearm, and lay suspended there before the woman moved her arm back to her flank, those fingers now curved around her own hip. Her eyes fixed on Cempaka—the intense focus of her gaze was hypnotic, but the half-formed beckoning gesture felt like a rejection.
This rejection stung her more than Awang Puteh deciding her cousin was prettier than her, or her father bringing her younger sister to town instead of her last week. This rejection felt like nothing she had ever experienced. It did not make her feel fit to be on the earth.
Entranced, she moved closer to the Empress, her bare feet cringing against the slimy feel of mud on the undergrowth. Her hands extended, she accepted the fruit. It felt as heavy as lead on her trembling palms. The weight and the impact of that fruit coupled with the overpowering influence of that music were such that her precarious balance on the mud failed. Cempaka fell down on her bottom with a loud thud, hurting her ankle in the process.
The pain weakened her, but her eyes were replete with light and colour, her ears with music. Her heart was a huge, hungry gnawing hole. She needed more. A glimpse was all she was allowed, in the end.
***
The dr
izzle abated. With the disappearance of the rain came the abrupt disappearance of the palace, and that of the Empress. The sun had vanished behind the clouds. The fruit remained on the ground right beside her, luring her with its perfection. Cempaka grabbed the fruit and wiped it on her sarong. She did not wait to bring it home. The skin looked just as luscious as the flesh, a succulent yellow tinted with the faintest blush of a mawar. She sank her teeth into the fruit, her tastebuds encountering the first bite of tart, bitter skin and sweet, juicy mango flesh. Her eyes rolled back.
The taste of the fruit was like the music. With every bite it felt as though the celestial music was invading her. The music deployed texture and colour to her world: feathery hues of peach, and mawar, and saffron. The colours that she tasted played beneath her eyelids in patterns of pigments and grainy textures. She chewed, sometimes slowly, sometimes greedily. She could not decide if there was greater pleasure in gulping all of that flavour in one go, or in extending the pleasure, not wanting it to end. But the end did come. Her face was wet with mango pulp and juice.
The seed she planted right next to where she was seated. The after-effects of the Empress’s enchantment lingered here. She hoped against all hope that this would encourage the seed to grow into a tree, and that she would have more of the fruit to eat. She licked the pulp and juice off her face by extending her tongue forward, and she sucked her fingers till they hurt.
When even the dregs of the fruit were gone, she was beset by a dreadful hollowness. The fruit was not all the Empress had left her. There was also certain knowledge that what she had seen was real. This was the only thing she could keep. It was a wicked gift, just like the Empress’s half-extended hand, with its painful, inviting claws.
“Cempaka! Oi Cempaka! Ke mana perginya budak ini? Where have you gone? All afternoon I have been waiting for you!”
Cempaka could hear her mother calling out for her. She attempted to stand, and then cried out in shock. Masya-Allah, it hurt. Her ankle hurt so much. Her fall had not left her unscathed. She felt half-deformed. Tiny machetes of agony ran up her left calf and thigh. She hobbled towards home, anticipating twisted ears because she had missed her Quranic reading class again, and because she had hurt her ankle. She entered the clearing where her brother was polishing the handles of his bicycle while he whistled a cheeky love-song.
Cempaka’s mother stood with a lidi broom in one hand, and the other braced on her sarong-clad hip. She gasped at the sight of her daughter, bent with pain.
“You’ve fractured your foot! I should have known something was up when you were gone for so long. Abang! Come and help me with your foolish daughter!” Her mother’s keen eyes knew the difference between a sprain and a fracture. It was an ability that Cempaka would inherit when she too became the village’s medicine woman.
Later that evening, when her mother had bandaged her foot, and her father had left for his evening prayers at the mosque, she sat watching the shadows that flickered around the kerosene lamp set in the middle of the living space. Her brothers had helped with the chores that night, following strict instructions to leave her alone. Now, her mother sat down beside her and looked urgently into her eyes.
“What happened back there in the jungle, Cempaka? You were as pale as a winding sheet, earlier!”
“It was a palace, ibu. A bunian palace, floating in the air. The Empress. She looked at me, and gave me fruit, ’bu. She said she recognized my nose. What does it all mean? She was so beautiful and so cruel. And the music, it felt like it was eating my brain, ’bu…”
She expected her mother to scoff at her answer. She expected to be disbelieved. Instead, her mother clutched her daughter to her in a protective gesture.
“Masya-Allah! The Empress has come for you! I have been hearing horror stories about her since I was a young girl. I never believed it, except once when the langsui came for me and a golden mousedeer chased them away. But the bunian saved me that night. They could have taken me, but they saved me. Why did they come for you?”
“They didn’t come for me, ’bu. They just gave me fruit.”
Her mother’s look was resigned.
“And so you ate the fruit? You didn’t think that there would be a jampi on it?”
“I ate the fruit, ’bu. And I planted the seed! I can show you where!”
“No, ’nak…not now. You are hurt. You rest. When you get better we will look for the seed together-lah. But you need to know that the Empress feels that we owe her a debt. And we have been waiting all of these years for her to collect. Please don’t let it be you, ’nak! I cannot lose my anak bongsu!”
Her mother hugged Cempaka to her with a fierce affection that she had never before displayed. She was not to know that the words she uttered had thrilled her daughter.
It was a story that more than one mother in her lineage had reluctantly told her children. Cempaka would not tell any children the story. She was the last of her line. She was the only one to taste the fruit of another world.
She was the daughter who was left waiting.
– 2 –
The world outside was at war. The Germans had invaded France, although the villagers were not entirely sure how the Germans were different from the French, except that the one had agitated their colonial masters. Of the other, they knew nothing at all.
A bombing had happened, somewhere beyond the Indian Ocean, so far away that they could barely imagine the world existing there. The medicine woman found war to be a concept that was difficult to understand. Cempaka had seen men die, but not on the scale being described. Bombs that fell down from the sky sounded like divine punishment, and more.
Above her, the tree-demons heckled for her attention. The song the grasshoppers made was as deafening as ever, but the years had desensitized her ears. Her arthritic digits unearthed a red-leafed plant loved by the djinn of the loamy forest. She would need its roots. She dug with fingers that no longer had the elasticity of youth, letting the earth seep in the cracks between broken nails and finger-pads.
***
It took twenty years for the seed that Cempaka had planted to grow into a tree. It blossomed the night she met Sang Rimau for the first time. It fruited two years later, when she was well into her third decade of life. Perhaps it would have grown faster if her bunian blood were not so diluted.
The tree she planted yielded a different kind of fruit—the slightly tart mangoes worked no wonder upon her, but helped in the crafting of the most effective love-spells, particularly when combined with noxious oils from graves that were but seven days old. The fruit opened Cempaka’s eyes up to the world, allowing her to discern sinew, and texture, and the properties of plants in ways her ancestors would have envied.
– 3 –
Generations ago, another girl had plucked herbs in a tender gap between the majestic giants of the Belum-Temenggor rainforest, the meranti. Her name could have been Melur, or Melati, or even Cempaka. Cempaka’s mother had never told her the name of this ancestor who challenged the Empress of the phantom-folk.
This ancestor picked kacip fatimah for the strengthening of feminine parts, daun panjang umur for the cleansing of the blood, betel nut leaves to be ground in a special container for her near-toothless great-grandmother. That afternoon, she noticed a kemboja tree growing right in the middle of the forest clearing. Kemboja trees were not altogether rare but they did not grow like this, alone, surrounded by grass and undergrowth. Its frangipani blooms seemed to glow with iridescent light, and with a golden heart that pulsed within each bloom.
The girl found to her delight that the branches reached down to her shoulders. She extended her right arm. She had plucked a frangipani bloom, but barely one, when a shining man gracefully climbed down from the tree, resplendent in golden songket-cloth, his tengkolok perched with precise elegance on a head of wavy black hair, the pleats of cloth geometrically perfect, the pointy edge of the headpiece stiff as though carved from wood. The man’s brow was broad and his eyes the deep brown of aged coffe
e beans, a colour that seemed to embrace and absorb light without being affected by it at all.
“This bush is mine. By plucking a kemboja blossom you have consigned yourself to my care,” he said, in a paternalistic tone of voice that was half-bluster.
She laughed. The preposterousness of his claim reminded her of the claims of the boys in the village that she occasionally had to dodge when she went about on her errands for her family. Her laughter astounded the shining man. He was even more determined to win the regard of this brave girl with dirty, calloused feet and knots in her ikal mayang hair. The shining man wooed the curiously unfrightened girl with mellifluous ghazals, resplendent with imagery of fantastical lands, but she ran away, straight to her mother’s home on the fringe of the village.
The beauty of the ghazals brought her back the next day, and the day after that. The shining man did not lay a finger on the girl. He had long-term plans. Instead, he wooed her with songs, and with gifts of flowers infused with the essence of kayangan: luminous melur, with petals as delicate as the moon’s rays, fragrant kenanga, the richness of the perfume that infused the soul with yearning, and vibrant cempaka, a scent that lifted the mind to thoughts of immortality and the secrets of worlds that lay beyond the veil of human existence.
It did not take long before the girl was won over by his persuasion. In fact, it did not take a week, which was a very good thing, because the shining man was living on borrowed time. He wanted freedom from the bunian kingdom.
When the maiden’s eyes were liquid with longing, he said, “My love, if we are to be united in a way that is sanctioned by the Almighty, we must be wed. And for us to be wed, I must become mortal, like you. You will need to turn me human, my love. You must free me from my servitude to the Empress of my people.”
The man never told her why he wanted to be free of the Empress, nor was the Empress ever seen by the girl, except as an unbearable light that cast a shadow on her and her suitor when she hugged him to her fiercely, stubbornly, one night when the moon hung so low in the sky it seemed like a red ball waiting to consume the Belum-Temenggor rainforest.