leave. I… I thought you were dead. I didn’t know what to tell people.”
Trey stared at his friend openly with a fondness that hadn’t been there before. Greg noticed it and his eyes widened. Then his face went serious and he wiped his cheeks.
“How can you be alive?”
Trey shook his head. “I have no idea, man. All I know right now is that I love you for waiting.”
“Yecch,” Greg said, poking his tongue between his lips and smiling. “You gay or something?”
Trey looked off toward the community dock and began to paddle. “Naw. Just happy to be here.”
His grandpa used to say that.
***
Story Notes: Catfish Gods was written at one sitting during a thunderstorm in 1999. Darktales had already approached me about making Scary Rednecks be their first published book (it ended up being the third book for marketing reasons) and I needed to write six stories in six weeks. Of course if writing were really as easy as writing a story a night, this wouldn’t be my first solo collection. But the idea of grandfathers and unconditional love had been sticking with me. I’d lost my grandfather a few years previously and was recently divorced and away from my kids. I knew the difference between unconditional love and conditional love and wanted to somehow tie it into fishing, which was a bond my grandfather and I held (and also shared by my father and me, but that story has yet to be written). The basis and the setup for the story really happened. Everything was exactly as it really was right up until the point where the character goes down deep into the water. Fans of Scarecrow Gods will also recognize the location.
NOW SHOWING ON SCREEN 7
Forever Beneath
the Scorpion Tree
Starring Bao-yu as a stranger in a strange land
“Yet another reason why the decadent West should be avoided at all costs. What happens to our good comrade could happen to us all.”
– People’s Liberation Army Magazine
A Matte Finished Film
The tree spoke, fed by memories. Soon, it would flower and blossom, become that which it was. Until then, it would need those like her, those who were desperate, lost, hurt and forgotten; those whose memories could nourish back to health that which had been torn asunder by the unfaithful servants of a fickle god.
***
She huddled beneath a cloak as the storm raged above her, two spinning, snapping, clawing clouds of light and dark, each whirling like a flock of birds, flipping, turning, twisting, biting. One moment they came together in a heart-stopping screech, the next they separated, spiraling away in opposite trajectories, soaring as if they’d never encountered one another, and free to never again be confronted.
***
Her name was Bao-yu, which meant precious jade in her native language. Her father had named her when she’d been born and had thought of her as anything but precious while he’d been alive. Finally the police had come and taken him. Then they sent a bill for his death along with the bullet they used to execute him. Then her mother had died in a fire. It hadn’t taken long for Bao-yu to realize that she was no longer precious. After all, how precious could she be if everyone who’d ever known her had died?
Still, she was rare, all the more because she was lost in a desert far across an ocean. She was Chinese, and desperate, and running, and the Mexican desert was the last place she thought she’d ever be.
“¿Quieres un poco de agua?” the old man had asked, while they both huddled in the shade of a giant boulder.
She’d stared at him incomprehensively, not understanding what he’d said, her eyes darting from his mouth to his hands, well aware that if he tried to do something, she’d be ill prepared to stop him. But he’d noticed her fear and had pressed his hands softly against the air as if to say, I won’t do anything to harm you. She’d had little choice but to believe him. Other than the two young Mexican men, he was the only one she’d seen after the rest were killed. Plus, he was a Laoren, an old man, and of all the people she’d traveled with during the long journey from northern China, he was the least threatening.
Her journey had begun like so many others. With nothing to lose and little to gain by staying in a country where her value was marked in heads of cabbage, she sought out those who made it their job