Flower Swallow

by Alana Terry

  And that’s another thing that makes the sickness so bad. You know you’re headed that way, but the first couple weeks you still feel like yourself enough to wish you weren’t. I thought about Mama and Papa those days more than I had all year, and I wondered if they were already drowned, and maybe heaven was like what Grandmother said ’cause now living forever with my ancestors didn’t sound so bad, not if my parents and sister and Grandmother would already be there. Except I didn’t know about people all getting along so well in heaven, so I assumed my sister and I would still get into fights and wondered if I was bigger than her yet.

  Pastor says there’s lots of people in America who think that once you die you don’t know nothing no more, so you don’t even realize you’re dead. You just stop existing altogether, and eventually your body gets buried and rots, and when he said that, I told him that’s the saddest idea of them all. But then he said there’s one version even sadder, only it’s true, and that’s when people die before they get a chance to know all about Jesus. But I’m not gonna write any more about that here on account of all the good people I knowed back home who died that way. And maybe Pastor’s wrong ’cause in my opinion I’d rather turn into nothing than go through his version of it.

  Well, I was getting sicker now, and you’d think I’d be scared of dying, but more than that I was scared of The Stare and being mostly dead but my heart still going and my brain stuck in a body that didn’t work. ’Cause what if it wasn’t like sleeping the regular way where you don’t even know you’re doing it but more like them bad nightmares where you know it’s a dream but you can’t wake yourself up?

  So I was about halfway through the sickness. That’s a point when you’re always cold but sweaty too, and your legs feel like you got little demons on the inside poking out at you, and sometimes you can’t use the outhouse none, but then all of a sudden you gotta use it every ten minutes. And when I say use the outhouse, that’s just the polite way of putting it on account of there not being something like that at the train station for us flower swallows to use. And I couldn’t tell you how long it’d been since I ate, ’cause I didn’t have no energy to beg or steal none. The Pyongyang-perfect truth is I was so sick I’d stopped thinking about food altogether. All I knowed was I was cold, and I hoped I’d have a few more days ’til I took on The Stare on account of that part scaring me the most.

  Once Pastor read us a verse about not even a sparrow dying if God didn’t want it to, which sounds kinda mean the first time you hear it ’cause if that’s the case, why do any of them die at all? But Pastor went on to say the verse is supposed to make us feel brave. What he means is since you gotta die one day, isn’t it best knowing you ain’t gonna do it ’til God says it’s time? And when he said that, I got to thinking about me being a flower swallow and how close I got to dying. And everyone who saw me back then woulda expected that to happen, and I was expecting it too and just hoping The Stare part wasn’t quite so terrifying as it looked. But as Pastor would say, God musta had other plans on account of me not dying after all.

  The way it happened was two boys’d just come in from outside, and one of them said, “This has gotta be the coldest day of the year,” and I hadn’t come up to The Stare yet so my brain still worked all right except slower than normal. And when I heard him say that, I thought on what that blind old lady told me the year before when I started being a flower swallow in the first place. She said I’d find my healer on the coldest day of the year, except she didn’t say which year, and wouldn’t now be the perfect time for me to get myself healed?

  The only problem was I didn’t know where to look. I figured I had to do something, though, ’cause I was so near The Stare at that point. So I sat for a while mulling over it, and that’s harder to do than you might think on account of your brain feeling like icicles and your whole body aching so even when you try to think, half the time all you can do is wonder if you’ll still feel so awful-like once The Stare comes. But finally I figured I’d go look for the blind lady’s house again, and I hadn’t forgotten about her being an angel and not living there no more, but maybe she’d come back on account of today being the coldest day of the year like that boy said.

  The problem was I was so sick I didn’t get very far until my muscles sorta froze up, and my feet did too, and I had to sit down outside there in the cold. And that’s when I felt it coming on, The Stare I mean, ’cause all of a sudden I stopped caring about the angel and her blessing, and it was like my whole brain quit just like my body had. And I sat there, and I couldn’t tell you what I thought about on account of you not really thinking once you get to that point, and I’d never heard of nobody surviving The Stare, but I wasn’t thinking about that neither since my brain had shut off. That’s why when you catched me looking out the window in class the other day and asked me what I was thinking about, and I said nothing, and you said you can’t ever think about nothing, that’s not entirely true. Except I didn’t wanna argue with you right then on account of the rest of the class not needing to know about The Stare and getting frightened silly.

  Anyway, that’s what happened to me right before she came, Teacher, and I’d seen her before near about every day, the kokemi I mentioned earlier who stole the sickest and littlest and sold their meat to Crazy Wu. And she come up, only like I said, I was past the point of feeling scared no more, and you coulda told me I’d be soup by tomorrow, and I wouldn’t have blinked. That’s just the way it works when you’re inside The Stare. So the kokemi picked me up, and I already told you she didn’t carry a bag like a normal kokemi woulda, but she picked me up in her arms, only she couldn’t get me very far. She put me down and told me, “Wait here. I’ll get you some help.” And then do you know who came over? Crazy Wu. Only he didn’t turn me into soup, and he didn’t even laugh and show me those toothless gums like he sometimes did. He said, “Oh yeah, Miss, he’s right bad off. You sure you wanna take him back?” And she said, “We have to try.” So Crazy Wu (I found out later that his name was just plain Wu without the Crazy part attached, only I never did get used to it that way), well, he carried me to this building where they store the coal behind the train station, and the kokemi told him to put me down real careful-like, which he did.

  “You reckon he’s hungry?” Crazy Wu asked, and that’s another way you know I’d got all the way to The Stare by then on account of me not caring whether it was flower swallow soup or not the kokemi spooned into my mouth, but I ate some. It was good, too — not just tasty, but I could tell it was making me stronger on account of me snapping out of The Stare for a minute and realizing who I was with, and it wasn’t ’til then I got scared.

  “It’s all right,” the kokemi said. I wanted to believe her on account of it being too terrifying to imagine getting your whole body cut up and cooked into stew for Crazy Wu to sell. But if you’d lived months hearing every day that someone was a kokemi who chopped up kids and sold their meet to Crazy Wu, and then all of a sudden you snapped out of The Stare and found yourself trapped in a room with the kokemi and Crazy Wu both, I swear on the Dear Leader you’d be frightened, too.

  But she told me not to waste my energy being afraid. She was here to help me, and so was Wu. So after I’d eaten a little more, I asked her, “Are you a kokemi?” and she chuckled and said no. When I asked who she was really, she said, “You can call me Auntie,” so that’s what I did.

  Auntie kept on feeding me soup in little sips at a time, and she told me I was real sick, but maybe with rest and warmth and the right kind of food, I might start to feel better in a few weeks.

  And you know what, Teacher? That’s exactly what happened.

  CHAPTER 16

  I couldn’t tell you quite how long it took on account of me staying in that coal shed all the time and not really paying attention to when it was day and when it weren’t, but I got better by and by. I never went back to The Stare, but a few nights I had a fever so bad Crazy Wu said maybe I wasn’t gonna make it, except I did. And he stopped by every ev
ening with all the leftover soup he hadn’t sold to the travelers, and Auntie always said, “The Lord bless you,” in a way that was so nice it almost reminded me of the way that blind lady spoke when she put her hand on my forehead. Then Crazy Wu would answer back, “He certainly has, Miss,” which after a few times I figured was his funny way of blessing her back. And that made me feel sorta bad for him on account of the way we flower swallows treated him and spread rumors about his soup. And I found out it weren’t human meat at all. It was little bits of this and little bits of that Crazy Wu managed to hunt, ’cause whenever he said they were low on meat, Auntie would pray, and more often than not he’d come back with at least a sparrow or whatnot to make his next batch for us all.

  I wasn’t the only one Auntie took care of. The number was always changing, sometimes depending on how much food we got from Crazy Wu to spread around and sometimes depending on whether or not someone died. ’Cause Auntie wasn’t a kokemi or boogeyman like the others claimed, but it was true what they said about her taking the littlest and the sickest ones, except she did that to help nurse them instead of chopping them up into stew meat. And a lot of times she picked kids who wouldn’t have survived no matter how hearty the soup was. I was the only one who made a full recovery from The Stare for example, but others would at least stay alive a little longer than they woulda otherwise. Auntie always took time to pray over each one and tell them about Jesus and the real heaven (not the kind Grandmother talked about where all you do is sit around staring at your dead ancestors). And I think she did it that way — picked the sickest, I mean — on account of her knowing they didn’t have as much time as the others and wanting to make their last days a little nicer, and I thought that was awful good of her, don’t you? Well, I don’t think she expected me to survive at first, and I know Crazy Wu didn’t. But one morning I woke up and didn’t feel sick no more at all, and I ate two whole bowls of Crazy Wu’s soup, which today I’m ashamed of on account of that soup being intended for all of us. But Auntie weren’t too mad. She just said she was glad I got my strength back, but I couldn’t be greedy like that no more. So I tried hard not to be.

  Do you know much about that old guy Elijah? Well I was in Miss Sandy’s Sunday school class once (this was before the attendant told Pastor I was too big to go downstairs with the little kids), and she teached us the story of him getting fed by birds bringing him crumbs every day, and I remember thinking it was lucky Elijah knew to just eat the crumbs and not the birds themselves ’cause that’s what I woulda done if I was him. But Crazy Wu was sorta like them ravens on account of him bringing us his soup near every day. And sometimes I’d worry and ask Auntie what would happen if Crazy Wu didn’t find any birds or whatnot, ’cause it’s not like there was a whole lot of extra animals running or flying around Chongjin those days. But Auntie said God would take care of us, and sometimes he did right away and sometimes we ended up having to wait a day or two, but it was still more food than I was getting when I lived by myself at the train station.

  Me and Auntie and Crazy Wu and the other little ones, we sorta were our own kind of gang, except Auntie preferred calling us a family. But that makes sense too since there was so many kids and she was like the mama, which is funny since she wasn’t even married and still a teenager. And I guess family really is a better word for it than gang since Auntie didn’t believe in stealing. She said if God wanted us to eat, he’d show Crazy Wu where to find food for us, and sometimes Crazy Wu would come in tears and say, “I’m sorry, Miss, there’s nothing left for the children,” and she’d say, “God must have known someone else needed it more than we did.” And the way she talked, it got me so shamed I ever thought she was a kokemi, and I never told her what the other kids said about her, but I knowed the rumors was still going around on account of sometimes the new kids she brung home saying things like, “Please don’t eat me.”

  And Crazy Wu, I’d been wrong about him, too. I never learnt how he met Auntie or why he spent his days hunting food for all us blossoms (that’s what Auntie called us, her blossoms, I think on account of some of us thinking there was something shameful in being named flower swallows). But pretty soon I got to be the oldest one of Auntie’s blossoms and the one who’d been with her the longest. She gave me my own special name, Ginkgo, on account of her saying I was bright and perky like the leaves of a certain kind of tree, and that made me feel real special since not everyone got their own nickname. And sometimes Crazy Wu would take me hunting with him, and he teached me how to do all sorts of tricks like what to do with a bird if you catched one in a trap. I could tell you about it, but it might be a little distressing, so I won’t. But if there’s ever a famine or if you ever hafta know how to do it, come find me and I’ll show you then.

  I liked those days with Crazy Wu, especially since spring was coming, and everyone was talking about how maybe the worst of the famine was all over now. I’d ask Crazy Wu about his family, and he’d say things like, “Well, now, I got a brother in this province,” or, “My daughter lives there,” but I didn’t know none of the names on account of me never going out of Chongjin since the day I wound up onto Granny’s porch.

  I still thunk about that angel, about the one who took me to Granny’s and the one who came to me in the body of a blind woman, and I wondered sometimes if Auntie was the same angel, except she said she weren’t. I even asked Crazy Wu about it, too, on account of me thinking maybe Auntie really was an angel except she wasn’t allowed to say so, but Crazy Wu told me, “No, Sir.” That’s how he talked to everyone, you know, calling them sir or miss or whatnot. “She’s a good soul, she is, but she’s flesh and blood same as you and me.” And sometimes I believed him, like if Auntie was real tired by the end of the night and asked me to tell the other blossoms a story or two before bed on account of her not having no energy, but most of the time I figured Crazy Wu wasn’t giving me the Pyongyang-perfect truth and Auntie really was an angel, only she couldn’t say so outright.

  And I already told you about my days with Crazy Wu and how much I liked them, but I liked nights with Auntie even better. She believed in Jesus, by the way, her and Crazy Wu both, only I think you mighta already figured that out. But maybe you’d think with her being so into God and spending all that time and energy taking care of us blossoms, even the ones about to die and go to heaven, you might think she knowed all about the Bible and did devotions every morning like Pastor does where you read some verses and talk about them together and stuff and nonsense like that. Only that’s not how Auntie done it. She’d never even seen a Bible on account of those being pretty rare back home, and if you have one you might get sent to jail. So everything she knowed about God, she knowed from loving him so much, and the rest she learnt from Crazy Wu, who teached her. And he’d had a Bible once but lost it a long time ago when some police came and searched his house, and that Bible had come from this secret man Crazy Wu couldn’t tell me nothing about besides the fact he was the bravest Christian alive in North Korea, ’least Crazy Wu hoped he was still alive, since he hadn’t heard otherwise.

  So the interesting thing about that was whenever Auntie was teaching us about God, it was all from memory. And it weren’t Bible stories, neither, like Miss Sandy tells the little kids who get to go downstairs to Sunday school instead of sitting up in big church like I have to now that I’m bigger. In fact, once I met Pastor, I didn’t know the Bible really had so many stories in it at all other than the one about Jesus dying and coming back up out of the grave. Auntie knew that one real well, and she told it to us near every night. Sometimes she’d tell it short where we had to listen and then thank God for dying for us, and sometimes she’d tell it long where she’d put in the parts about the disciples running away and stuff and nonsense like that, and I always liked the longer version best, but sometimes she was too tired like I already mentioned.

  But even though Auntie didn’t know that many Bible stories on account of her not having read them herself, she talked about God all the time. She to
ld us how he created us and loved us and how he could clean away the sin in our hearts and how he promised if we needed something, all we had to do was ask him. What I always wanted to know was why Crazy Wu brought soup most days, except some days he didn’t even though we prayed for it. And Auntie said she didn’t know, but that didn’t mean God didn’t hear our prayers, ’cause what about me and how I shoulda died from the sickness, except that’s not what happened? And I felt bad for asking on account of feeling like she had more faith in things like that than me, but then sometimes she’d bring a new blossom to the coal shed, and he’d die in a day or two, and it wasn’t always the sickness, neither. Sometimes it was just the hunger-weakness that done it. So it didn’t make much sense to me. I asked Crazy Wu about it once on a hunting trip, asked him why God would let some of the blossoms die since we was all praying otherwise, and he said, “Ginkgo” — he’d taken to calling me that too on account of hearing Auntie use it so much — “Ginkgo, how big do you think God is?” So I said he was probably taller than the Dear Leader, weren’t he? And Wu explained how God’s even bigger than the sky, which stretches around the whole earth, except I couldn’t understand that part ’til I seen the globe in your classroom, and then it made more sense.