Laugh with the Moon

by Shana Burg

  Think. Think! I order myself. Fun. Fun. Fun. I grab on to my pendant and stick my teeth into the groove.

  “What about Simon Says?” Mom suggests. “You always liked that when you were in kindergarten, Clare.”

  “Zikomo,” I whisper.

  Mom looks puzzled.

  “It means ‘thanks’,” I say.

  I tell Mr. Special Kingsley that Simon Says is a fun game lots of kids in my country like to play.

  “Very well, Clare,” Mr. Special Kingsley says. “But I must ask you, who is Simon and what does he say?”

  “I’m not really sure exactly who he is, but he tells you what to do. It’s the name of the game—Simon Says.”

  “Ahh,” Mr. Special Kingsley says. “A game called Simon. Chonde! Teach the children Simon.”

  I explain the directions: “Do what I say, not what I do. And only if Simon says it first.” Mr. Special Kingsley translates into Chichewa.

  But when a boy in the middle of the room tries to touch his toes, he sends half of the class tumbling over like dominoes. And everyone is copying what I’m doing instead of doing what I’m saying. Plus, there are so many kids in the room that it’s impossible to see when someone is out. And I’m really sweating.

  Mental note: Teachers need double deodorant.

  The game is a disaster, but half an hour later, with Mr. Special Kingsley’s help, we’re singing the song “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” in a four-part round. And honestly, it sounds amazing!

  The students sing it twice through before Mr. Special Kingsley tells me he will now teach the standard one math lesson. “A fine beginning, Clare,” he says. “You have planted a hundred seventy-six flowers this morning.”

  “A hundred seventy-six!” I exclaim. I’m shocked. My hand will fall off if I even try to make enough Bingo cards for the students to work in pairs.

  “That is the number enrolled in this classroom. Of course, they are not all here every day. Students come from many villages throughout Machinga district. Attendance depends on the rains, the sickness, the harvest. I shall see you back tomorrow,” he says. “I do give thanks for your tremendous and most illuminating service.”

  “You’re welcome, sir,” I say, and turn to head back to the standard eight classroom. But I’m not even through the doorway when I spin back around.

  “Here,” I say to Mr. Special Kingsley. I hand him the stack of Bingo cards. “You might need this paper to write some important letters.”

  Mr. Special Kingsley turns the cards over and looks through my designs while the standard one students stare at us both with great curiosity.

  “Ahhh!” he says, and pushes his glasses up his nose to get a better look. “Magnificent! I … I … I do not have words for this marvelous gift you make for your headmaster. Zikomo kwambiri!”

  I gasp. My headmaster just broke his own rule! Only the smallest children in the school are allowed to speak Chichewa. Everyone knows that.

  “I do apologize,” he says. “It is just that the beauty of your gift sent me back to the native tongue. Please do not tell my secret to the older students,” he says, and smiles.

  “Yes, sir,” I say. “I mean, no, sir. I mean, yes, sir, I won’t tell, sir.” I’m all mixed up and I’ve taught my class and now I really need to go.

  As I hike across the field to the standard eight classroom, I remind myself that Mr. Special Kingsley said I was tremendous and illuminating, but I’m still trembling like I survived an encounter with a wild beast.

  That doesn’t really happen, though, until an hour later.

  Mrs. Tomasi is wrapped in green and purple cloths, looking very much like an eggplant while she talks to everyone under the blue gum tree. I flop onto the ground beside Memory, feeling soggy and listless from my first day on the job. Mrs. Tomasi’s explaining that we’re going to build things called anemometers.

  “What?” I whisper.

  “Anemometers,” Memory whispers back. “To measure wind.”

  After Mrs. Tomasi finishes giving the instructions, we all traipse toward the bush in search of our materials: bamboo, sticks, and calabash. “What about the leopard?” I ask, pausing at the edge of the thicket.

  “That was long time ago,” Memory says. “Leopards move quick. No new reports. It is certainly gone.” She pushes aside a tangle of vines and steps into the forest. A second later, I hear a noise.

  I jump. “What is it?” I ask.

  “What is what?” Memory says.

  “That noise.”

  “There is no noise,” she says. “Only noise in the mind. Now do tell me”—she grabs a bamboo stalk—“how is the teacher?” She tries to snap the stalk in half, but it’s too thick to break. “Saidi! Saidi!” she calls.

  A second later he thrashes through the bramble. Memory points to the bamboo, and Saidi fishes a small knife out of his pants pocket while she tells him, “This girl teach school today.”

  It hits me: I actually did. I taught school. I really am a teacher!

  “We must take the teacher to the lake.”

  “Awesome!” I say. “I mean, yaboo!”

  Agnes pops through the branches of the bush behind us. “Yaboo?” she asks. “What is yaboo?”

  Saidi saws the bamboo stalk with his knife. “What is awesome,” he tells Agnes, “is that Memory, Innocent, and myself—the one, the only Saidi Tembo—shall take our new American friend to Lake Malombe this weekend.”

  “I do love the lake!” Agnes says. She jumps over the plant leaves into the clearing, looks up at Saidi, and bats her eyelashes. “Should you desire my company, I shall be obliged to attend.”

  Memory answers for him. For us. “No!” she says. On that note, the bamboo stalk cracks and we all jump out of the way.

  Saidi picks up one end of the pole and drags it toward the blue gum tree. Agnes follows close behind.

  Memory and I venture deeper into the bush to search for calabash. We walk for more than ten minutes through dappled green leaves and scarlet wildflowers. We arrive at a river, and Memory points to a patch of swollen green squash that hangs from a vine by the bank. I push through the thicket and place both my hands on a gourd. It feels hot, like a chunk of sun has fallen right inside of it.

  But how can a calabash measure the wind? I’m about to ask Memory this when I hear someone trumpet. I glance down the river and gasp: It shimmers, silver in the sunlight. It dunks under the water. When it comes up, its huge ears slap drops of elephant water onto the river. The sun catches its eye and turns it ruby red.

  “Tibwerere,” Memory says quietly. “Let us return.”

  But I don’t move. Can’t move. The incredible creature bends its leathery trunk in a loop. An instant later, a smell more foul than dead fish fills the air. The elephant, still luxuriating in her bath, doesn’t seem to notice.

  Memory pinches her nostrils with one hand. With the other, she grabs my wrist and pulls me into the bush. “Gas of the elephant,” she says.

  “Ewww!” I shriek.

  Once we can’t see the river anymore, Memory stops to rest. We’re both huffing and puffing. “Never get this close to elephant,” she says. She waves her hand in front of her face. Clutching my side and giggling, I follow her back to the blue gum tree.

  “It is a serious thing,” she says, gasping.

  “The gas of the elephant?” I ask.

  “No,” Memory says. “Elephant …” She lifts her flip-flop and stomps it onto the ground like she’s killing a bug. “Mother elephant do that … on person who go close to the baby. We do not see baby elephant, so we do not know if we are close or far.”

  “Oh,” I say. It’s not funny, but I can’t stop laughing until Mrs. Tomasi orders us to begin building our anemometers. First, we cut our calabashes in half with the knives Saidi and Norman keep in their pockets. Next, we scoop the warm, squishy pulp out with our bare hands. The pulp sticks in our fingernails, turning them an orangey, burnt sienna color. After that, we take two sticks and attach one empty half t
o each of the four ends. Then, finally, we hammer our bamboo pole into the ground with a large rock so it’s standing straight up.

  “Now I shall demonstrate,” Mrs. Tomasi says. She picks up our sticks and crosses them at the center. Norman gives her one of the nails he’s carved out of bamboo with his pocketknife. Mrs. Tomasi holds the crossed sticks at the top of the bamboo pole. “Clare, please do hammer the nail into place,” she says. But I can’t reach the top of the pole, so Norman goes into the classroom and carries a bench outside for me to stand on.

  No sooner do I pound in the nail with a rock than the wind blows, our anemometer spins, and an incredible feeling pinwheels through my chest.

  After school, I tell Mrs. Bwanali about my first day of teaching, and during dinner, I tell Dad. “Not only do you look like your mother,” he says, and smiles, “but now you’re acting like her too.” Dad says we should go to the trading center and get a candy bar at the Slow but Sure Shop to celebrate.

  “Sounds good to me!” I say, because everyone knows there’s no happy occasion complete without some chocolate. And what better way to help the chocolate go down than a nice bottle of grape Fanta?

  Dad and I stand together outside the shop. “Your mother would kill me for giving you so much sugar,” he says. He presses his fingers into the corners of his eyes and shakes his head.

  “What’s wrong, Dad?” I ask. But I know what’s wrong. I raise my glass bottle. “To the future. To adventures. To our family,” I say, because even though Mom isn’t right here with us at the Slow but Sure Shop, who’s to say she’s not somewhere nearby? And even though it’s only Dad and me, maybe two people can be enough for a family after all.

  Dad presses his lips together. “To our family,” he says softly, and we clink our bottles together and guzzle them down.

  The grape soda is delicious, but I should have predicted I’d need the bathroom seconds after I finish it. Still, why use the pit latrine behind the shops when we’ve got a perfectly good marble seat at our house? Dad and I give Mr. Khumala, the shopkeeper, our empty bottles and get back in the Land Rover.

  As if it isn’t strange enough to live in a country where big monkeys walk the roads and girls press their dresses with hot rocks, things turn even weirder tonight as we’re riding back from town.

  “Now, tell me,” Dad says as he navigates the bumpy road, “what about that project for Mrs. Middleton?”

  I don’t say anything.

  “We’ve been here two and a half weeks.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know.”

  “Better get started, kiddo,” he says. “Mrs. Middleton’s going to want to see something of quality.”

  I can only grunt, because I’ve already tried to write a report and a rap, but it’s impossible to find the words to explain what it’s like to drive through Kenmore Square to the airport one day and land on what feels like a whole other planet the next.

  Dad hasn’t even pulled all the way into the gravel driveway, but I open the door of the Land Rover anyway. I need to get away from this conversation almost as much as I need to go to the bathroom. I run in the dark through the yard, and I’m almost at the front door when something slithers around my ankle.

  “Ahhh!” I shriek.

  “What? What?” Dad comes running.

  I’m dizzy with fear. “Ma … mamba!” I shout. I feel the deadly snake on my ankle. I try not to do my business right on its head. That might only make things worse.

  “Stay calm,” Dad says. “Walk … slowly … to the …” His voice fades into the background. I step backward. The vicious reptile’s not letting go.

  “Stay still,” Dad whispers.

  “Can’t!” I croak. I shake my leg furiously to get the hideous cold-blooded hose full of poison off me, when suddenly there’s a noise.

  “Huh?” Dad says.

  We hear it again.

  “Huh?” I say.

  For the third time, Dad and I hear the sound: not a venomous hiss but a seriously annoyed cluck.

  We look down, and as our eyes adjust to the dark, we see the offender: a chicken! His beady eyes twinkle in the moonlight. His leg is tied to a rope—a rope that feels just like a snake.

  “What’re you doing here?” I shriek. “You scared me to death, you stupid thing!”

  “You really think it understands English, Clare?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. Do you think he speaks Chicken?”

  “Possibly Chicken,” Dad says. “Or Chichewa.” He unties the end of the rope from the door handle. “Well, that was a close call,” he says. I turn in circles as Dad untangles my leg from the rope. Then he walks the chicken into the house like it’s a pet dog on a leash.

  When Dad flicks the switch, the fluorescent lights buzz. The chicken flaps its wings like mad while I run past him to the bathroom.

  By the time I get back to the living room, the chicken has managed to fly onto the brown couch.

  “Now, who in the world would leave us a chicken?” I ask, finally chilling out a bit.

  Dad hands me the end of the chicken leash. “Must be some type of gift,” he says, and pads away into the kitchen.

  I tie one end of the rope to the leg of the coffee table.

  “So, what do you think, Clare?” Dad says as he clangs around with the pots and pans. “Sweet and sour? Fried? Betcha Mrs. Bwanali can fix up something terrific tomorrow.”

  Well, our new chicken may not speak English, but for sure he understands it. He flies around the sofa frantically. Then he stops cold turkey, cocks his head to the side, and stares straight into my eyes. There’s no doubt about it: this chicken is begging for his life!

  Dad marches back into the living room, an enormous knife in his hand. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll take it out back.”

  I freeze.

  “Gimme the rope, Clare.”

  I untie the rope from the leg of the coffee table reeeaaal sloooow to give me enough time to think. I need to think. Think about what to do. But then the rope is untied and there’s no time left to think. Only to act boldly and swiftly, like Wonder Woman confronting the Legion of Doom.

  I scoop the poor piece of poultry off the sofa, sprint to my bedroom, and slam the door. I lean against it while the chicken breathes heavily in my hands. In. Out. In. Out. His heart pounds triple-time. Ba-boom. Ba-boom. Ba-boom. The beat of my own heart marches along with his.

  “Clare,” Dad calls through the door. “Open up.”

  I tell myself not to show fear. Superheroes never do. It’s part of what helps them psych out the enemy. I take a breath, get a grip. “We will not eat Fred,” I state firmly.

  “Fred?” Dad asks.

  My room glows. Through the window screen, I see stars. Not just one, but a million. And all of a sudden, I know that this country does strange stuff to people. It’s made Dad a little more normal. It’s made me rescue a chicken.

  “Yes, Fred!” I shout. I never planned this fate, but now here I am, Chicken Rescue Girl. I look at Fred. His brown feathers are silky soft. His life is literally in my hands.

  Before I begin negotiations, I close my eyes and wish on a star that Fred will have a long and happy life. “Repeat after me,” I say.

  My father doesn’t answer.

  “I will never touch a feather on this chicken’s head,” I say louder, in case he’s having trouble hearing through the door. While I wait for Dad to give his solemn oath to respect Fred’s life, I look into Fred’s beady eyes. He looks like a scared little baby, even though I’m pretty sure he’s all grown up.

  Fred clucks.

  I rub my cheek against his feathers.

  Fred squawks.

  “Sorry,” I whisper. “For a second I was thinking you were a dog or something. But listen up, Fred.” His little head cocks to the side. “I won’t leave you. Ever!” I tell him.

  I hear Dad sigh. It’s one of those loud, exaggerated sighs that means your opponent is finally giving up. “We did it,” I whisper to Fred.

  Right on cu
e, Dad says, “Okay, okay. I won’t kill it. Promise. We’ll keep it around as a … a …”

  For all of Dad’s faults, one thing he doesn’t do is lie, so I fearlessly set Fred down and open the bedroom door. “Say hello to our new pet chicken!” I say.

  “Moni,” Dad mumbles before he goes into the kitchen and heats up the nsima, ndiwo, and beans that Mrs. Bwanali left on the stove for our dinner again. Meanwhile, Chicken Rescue Girl, aka me, walks Fred around the house to give him a little exercise. We prance right past Dad to the screened-in veranda, where the sound of crickets and bullfrogs is so loud that it’s insane.

  “You can sleep here in the fresh air,” I tell Fred. He flies onto the puffy green chair. “Try not to scratch up the furniture.”

  It’s completely obvious: Fred feels right at home. Maybe too much at home. “You cannot make chicken poop on the chair!” I say.

  Dad peeks into the veranda from the kitchen. “I sure hope you’re not expecting Fred to make lizard poop,” he says.

  “Very funny,” I say, and he tosses me a rag.

  After I clean up the poop, I wash my hands three times with soap. Then I get the empty cardboard box Dad used to pack his medical books for the trip here. By the time I get back to the veranda, though, Fred has done it again.

  I point to the poop. Fred cocks his head to the side and blinks guiltily.

  “Smelly!” Dad says, and tosses me another rag.

  Fred and I exchange a worried look. We both know his life is on the line. “You need to get yourself potty-trained ASAP if you know what’s good for you,” I whisper. Then I lift my feathered friend and put him down inside the box. “Your very own pit latrine,” I say. “From now on, you need to do it here.”

  In the morning, I’ve just put on my school uniform when I get an idea: I tie my bright purple scarf with blue stars around my waist. After all, if I’m going to be a teacher, I can’t wear the exact same uniform as all my students.

  Once I’m dressed, I check on Fred. That’s when I get a big surprise: an egg is lying in the corner of the green chair. It’s a perfect, tan-colored oval egg, exactly like you’d see on a TV commercial. I reach over and pick it up. It’s still warm. “Wow, Fred!” I say. “You’re a girl!”