Bit by bit, the green beneath her feet gave way to smooth and earthy brown. The sound of the creek, which had been in her ears since she stepped into the trees, became too loud to ignore, as did the good, clean smells of mud and water. Janie had nearly wept the first time she set foot in a ceramics class. It had smelled, so amazingly, like coming home.
Finally, she lifted her eyes, and there it was: her second mother, the reason she had wanted to go to a college close to home, even knowing that the threat of princes would be great there for a frog like her, who should have chosen a college that could bring her into princesshood without anyone’s lips touching hers.
The creek was five feet across at its widest point—an infinity once, when she was smaller and the world was larger. Now she could span the whole thing with her outstretched hands when she floated in the exact center, placing the fingertips of her right and the fingertips of her left on opposite banks. It was still wide enough to let her place her inner tube in the cool water, and deep enough that her butt didn’t quite brush the bottom when her weight pushed the inflatable circle down.
“Hello, ma’am,” she said to the creek, with the same ritual politeness she’d been using since she was a very little girl. The creek glittered silver in the light that filtered through the branches overhead, seeming to appreciate her manners. She stepped forward just a little more, letting her toes slide into the cool water. A crawfish went skittering off, vanishing under a big flat rock and leaving only a runnel of silt behind.
“I had a bad day, and I thought I’d come to see you,” Janie continued, after tracking the progress of the crawfish. She set her inner tube down on the surface of the water. “You always know what to say.”
The creek, glittering silver and bright and perfect, said nothing.
#
Oh, child.
You were always going to come to me.
#
Janie floated in the exact center of the creek, her hands trailing in the water for curious fish to nibble, her toes just barely touching the bottom. It had seemed like such a long way down when she was little, and now it seemed like no distance at all. Her mother’s long-ago warnings that one day she’d be a drowned girl if she didn’t learn to play on dry land held no strength, not here, not now. Not with the scarlet “F” blazoned bright across her mind, not with Danny’s kiss aching on her lips.
“I don’t know what to do,” she murmured. The sun was warm where it touched her face, and the water was cool where it held her. “It all got so…so complicated, somewhere along the line. It shouldn’t be so complicated.” Life had been simpler when she’d spent all her days down at the creek, either with homework in tow, to be completed on the hard-packed mud of the bank, or floating in her inner tube. The future had seemed so big, and so untouchably grand.
But bit by bit, the future had gotten smaller, just like the creek had. Unthinkingly, Janie reached out to touch the opposing banks, expecting her fingertips to find resistance. They found only empty air. Janie frowned, fumbling a little, and still found nothing.
Janie opened her eyes.
She was still floating at the dead center of the creek, still with her head turned upstream and her feet turned downstream and her shoulders to either bank. But the banks themselves had moved, somehow: the creek’s span was at least seven feet, putting even the nearest bit of land at least six inches outside of her reach. Janie sat up in her inner tube, briefly, bemusedly convinced that she was dreaming. Her mind had taken her back to an earlier, easier time, and she would find herself looking at her own childhood self, sitting on the bank, filling out a math worksheet.
But the bank was empty, save for her abandoned flip-flops, and she was still in an adult’s body, and the water around her seemed suddenly so very cold. It had never been that cold before.
Janie pushed her feet down, seeking the bottom. She would wade to shore if she had to. Creeks didn’t change their dimensions, not like this. Maybe there had been an earthquake? Maybe she had fallen asleep and it had jolted her awake, and this was a consequence, land erosion and decay. Never mind that the water was as clear as crystal, with none of the mud or cloudiness that would have accompanied that sort of shift.
Never mind that her feet didn’t find the bottom, but kicked, seemingly suspended in space, above the depth that had no end.
“Ma’am?” whispered Janie.
Something wrapped around her left wrist.
Dully, with a sort of inevitability, she turned and looked at the thing that was holding her. It was something like an octopus’s tentacle, but smooth, like glass, like crystal…like water. She could see tiny bubbles suspended inside it, and an infant crawdad, almost as clear as the tentacle around it, its little legs paddling as it looked for a rock to hide under.
hello child hello child hello child hello, chortled the water as it ran across the rocks upstream, and everything made sense, and nothing made sense, and it didn’t really matter, because Janie was never going to be a princess. She was always going to be a frog.
Maybe it was better to be a frog with someone to love you than a princess with nothing but a crown. Maybe this had been the only way out that had ever been really open to her. And maybe it was past the time for thinking those thoughts, because the inevitable was upon her, and Janie was going home.
“Hello, ma’am,” said Janie, recognition and longing and yes, quiet, beaten joy in her tone.
She didn’t scream when the water reached up and closed over her face, pulling her down, pulling her a long way down. It was a mother’s embrace, after all, for all that it was cold and formless and filled with little silver glimmers of light. It was love, of a kind…
And more, she would have needed air to scream.
#
Hello, child.
Hello, ma’am.
Welcome home.
#
They found her inner tube washed up against a bank; they didn’t find a body. Some people in the neighborhood said they weren’t surprised, that Janie had always been a drowning waiting to happen, but most of them didn’t say anything at all. They just looked toward the creek, remembering voices bubbling over the rocks when they were children, remembering how they had always felt safe there…until the day they didn’t. Until the day they’d grown up and left such things behind. Janie, for all that she’d been an old soul in a young body since she was born…Janie had never grown up. Not like that.
There was no body at the funeral. Danny didn’t attend. None of her friends from college did. What would have been the point?
Time moves differently, for water. It’s slow when the freeze comes and fast during the melt; it’s never still, and hard to keep track of. It was nearly six months before a hand broke the surface, clear as glass and filled with tiny eddies.
The creek watched approvingly as Janie pulled herself together. The girl used none of her original body; the bones were buried deep, the flesh long gone to feed the fish and crawdads a good meal. But she drew on the water and the weeds, and there was a big green bullfrog where her heart should have been, swimming lazy circles and occasionally rising to the surface of Janie’s rippling breast to steal another breath.
yes child go child I will be waiting, bubbled the water over the rocks, approving mother to the end.
Janie stood on tributary legs and waded toward the surface. It would be a long walk to the school, but she thought she could hold herself together that long, before her surface tension broke and she flowed downhill, back into her mother’s arms. There was a boy there who had broken her faith in the world, and she was grateful; he had been the one to drive her home. He had tried so hard to kiss her until she became a princess, even if he had never really loved her.
It was time for her to kiss him back, and see if she could turn a prince into a frog.
The creek laughed, and Janie walked on.
THE SNOW TRAIN
Ken Liu
Snowzilla is without a doubt the most
awesome piece of snow plowing machinery in use today. The city of Boston uses Snowzilla during the worst storms to clear commuter rails, usually the Mattapan line. Snowzilla is cool because it's large. It weighs 26,000 pounds. It's cool because it's old (thirty-two years old) yet reliable. But what REALLY makes Snowzilla cool is that Snowzilla is a snowplow powered by a jet engine.
Snowzilla's full name is Portec RMC Hurricane Jet Snow Blower, model RP-3. It uses an engine salvaged from a 1950's jet fighter plane to superheat air up to 1,000 degrees. The exhaust is sent through a tube to melt and blast away snow and ice. It uses up to 900 gallons of jet fuel in a single run. Needless to say, Snowzilla is only used during the worst snowstorms. It's not Boston's most graceful, glamorous, or efficient guardian—but it is its most stalwart guardian, taking on the worst that winter delivers.
***
“BIGGEST BLIZZARD TO HIT BOSTON SINCE 1935; 40 INCHES OF SNOW EXPECTED OVERNIGHT.” – The Boston Globe
School was canceled; the governor announced a state of emergency in anticipation of the storm, and told everyone to stay home or go home early. “We don’t need to have cars stuck on the highways. Be safe.”
Manoj’s foster mother was complaining again.
“The landlord said he’s going to fine us if you don’t take that blanket down.”
She was referring to the woven rectangle hanging over his window: dark blue, with red and yellow concentric diamonds formed from the weft yarn. The blanket was old, worn, and just big enough to cover the small window, or to wrap around a baby. He liked the way it scattered the cold winter light and brought a hint of warmth to his room. It was the only thing he had from his mother, his real mother.
“I don’t see why it bothers him so much.”
“He thinks it looks like some gang sign from the road, and our lease says we have to use white curtains to keep the building looking neat for prospective renters. Look, I don’t hang the laundry on the balcony any more, either. We all have to adapt.”
He took the blanket down, folded it, and put it away. It astounded him that the landlord would get mad at them for using one piece of fabric instead of another to cover his window, simply because one was sold for this purpose and another not. This country was full of such rules.
He did not want to stay in the apartment, did not want to hear his foster mother mutter about how he was by himself so much. But where could he go? There were no neighbors he knew by name, no friends whose homes he could take refuge in. This was America, a land where strangers lived next door to each other, and where a fourteen-year old boy could not live on his own.
He decided to take the T downtown to play tourist.
#
Manoj thought often about the refugee camp in Nepal: the crowded huts in the jungle, the daily queuing for water, the twice-monthly food delivery convoys, the hot and humid air, and the persistent feeling that life was on hold, that they were simply waiting.
He remembered nothing of the family’s flight from those who wished to kill them because of the land their ancestors had been born in, and he had only the vaguest memories of his parents before they died in the refugee camp. It was a blessing, in a way, because he had no nightmares of those times, as some of the older children in the camp did. But it was also a curse, as he could not call on hatred and thoughts of vengeance to sustain him during the long periods of lassitude and enforced torpor. A refugee camp was not a destination, not a home, just a transit hub where one waited.
He had been passed from family to family, none particularly interested in handling another child who cried at night and had never known what home meant. Finally, one family kept him because they heard that that UN prioritized resettling refugee families with many children.
Boredom meant that everyone had to be creative. A great deal of the supplies they received in camp was useless for their intended purpose. Some donors sent thick blankets and winter coats because they thought Nepal was a ‘Himalayan Kingdom’ and so the refugees must be buried in snow and ice. But the camps were located in the middle of a jungle, and the refugees took those coats and blankets and made them into insulation for the iceboxes. It was difficult getting reliable electricity in the camp, and so the refugees took the donated old laptops—useless—and turned them into batteries for storing up electricity to charge mobile phones. They took the boxes the UN sent supplies in and made them into cisterns and swimming pools for the children.
One of Manoj’s oldest memories involved the day the camp received a giant canvas bag of baseball caps from America—some team whose logo was an elaborate red “B” had donated them. None of the children knew what to do with them, but Manoj figured out how to clip two baseball caps together at the brim and make a cage for fireflies. The light leaking out of the mesh backs was soft and gentle, the color of nostalgia. That night, the camp was filled with children running through the dark, dragging flickering, meteoric tails.
What a wonderful place this America must be, he thought. They make homes for light.
When the waiting ended with the news that he and the family that had taken him in were to be resettled in the United States, it seemed like fate.
#
Even though the city was going to shut down early for the storm, it still bustled with activity. While the oppressive, grey sky loomed overhead, Manoj window-shopped at Faneuil Hall, gazed at the glass-walled federal courthouse, and watched people scurry around the city with grim faces, intent on their business.
His stomach growled. He counted the money in his pocket and decided that his best bet was to head to Chinatown for lunch.
Chinatown, the very existence of the place was a mockery of the high regard Americans had for their own country. While everyone congratulated each other over the election of a black president, here was a patch of the city, segregated, marked apart, a legacy of how people did not feel comfortable if they weren’t classified and put into their neat boxes. He had taken note of how the composition of the riders in the subway cars changed depending on the branch of the T he rode on and the stations the train stopped at, how the complexions of the people who sat in offices in the gleaming towers differed from those who cleaned the offices and took out the trash and brought them food, and above all, how nobody wanted to talk about these things.
But at least everyone else seemed to have a people, a place they were from.
He shivered—he would never get used to these winters—pulled the coat tighter around himself, and pushed open the door to a restaurant that looked cheap enough.
#
On a winter’s morning two years ago, Manoj and his foster family were brought to a suburb of Boston and told that this was their new home. The cold air had surprised him; he wished he had the useless coat from those donors.
That chilly feeling had continued in school.
With little knowledge of English, he had felt—not exactly deaf and mute, but—incomplete, stupid, inadequate. He sat quietly in class, counting down the minutes until dismissal, the incomprehensible goings on around him like some elaborate folk dance. He hated having to smile all the time, indicating that he did not comprehend; he hated having to pantomime like some idiot to make his few wants understood; he hated the giggles and whispers of the other students.
His foster family was no help at all. They kept him fed and warm, but they also had young children of their own to care for. Besides, the struggles of a boy in school hardly seemed as important as surviving and adapting, as starting a new life.
After a year, the natural resiliency of youth and many hours of television finally taught him enough English that he no longer felt entirely lost, but this hardly brought him the relief he had expected.
“Where are you from?” the other students asked.
He didn’t know what answer to give. “Bhutan” was listed on his documents, but that was a land of which he had no memories (and which he had been told had not wanted him). Nepal was the place he had spent the most time in, but could he
really be said to be “from” there when all he had seen was the inside of a refugee camp? And what was the point of giving either answer when his classmates would not know where to look on a map for both?
“Tibet,” he said, because that seemed like a place everyone knew.
“So you’re a Buddhist? You pray to the Dalai Lama?”
Again, he was stumped. He had deciphered enough of Social Studies to see that Americans liked to classify and label things: you were either Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist or some other capitalized word, either black or white, either American or foreign. But the stories of his childhood—a mélange of heroes, gods, buddhas, avatars and spirits—did not fit easily into the categories delineated in the textbooks.
Why does it matter so much where I’m from? he thought. The answer to that question had made him into a boy without a country in the first place.
Then came the bombs on that spring day in Boston, when people were supposed to be running a marathon. Later, it was discovered that the bombs were planted by a pair of brothers, foreigners who had come to America after escaping war in their homeland.
“You’re a refugee, too, aren’t you?” one of his classmates asked.
He wished he were back in the camp in Nepal then. But he understood that in America, you could not let others see how you really felt. This was a land that did not respect those who showed fear.
“Coming here and living off our money,” the boy said. “Hating us. Hating America.”
So he fought instead. He fought desperately, hopelessly, like how he had fought back at the camp sometimes when other children teased him about no family wanting him. He felt no pain until afterwards, until the teachers had separated them, until he had been told that he was being suspended, and then expelled.
Do I hate America? he thought. He could not tell. He was certain though, that he did not feel grateful.
Genius Loci Page 37