towards him, snatched up the rock, and began to pummel his face and head. He screamed for her to stop, and tried to push her away, but he hadn’t the strength of her fury.
She swung with an emotion that had begun to grow the night her mother had told her she hadn’t been the firstborn. She’d been the second born and been left in a back alley to die, her father’s desperate response to China’s One-Child Policy, its exception to allow two children if the first was a girl, and his selfishness at desiring a son. But the true tragedy of that day wasn’t her own. Within six hours of her father abandoning her to the harsh elements of a northern Chinese winter, her sister was struck by a bus as she kneeled on the sidewalk to tie her shoes in front of their apartment building. According to her mother’s tale, her father had gone back to search for her in the alley, finally finding her swathed in dirty blankets, rescued by a homeless porcelain repairman and his family. It had cost her father a week’s salary to buy her back, but the alternative had been impossible to comprehend. After all, he was willing to accept the loss of one girl, but not two. And her name? Her fucking precious name? She never did find out what she had been named when she was born. Instead, she’d been given the name of her dead sister. How precious could she really be if she was made of counterfeit jade?
She finally stopped swinging when Laoren’s face had gone to pulp. She could no longer recognize his features. Where his nose, eyes and mouth had been was now a topographical lesson in what stone could do to flesh. She squatted beside him. Absently she dropped the rock and grabbed one of the sticks of roasted cactus. She bit into it, suddenly ravenous. She didn’t even notice when the spines tore into her face. She was too intent on remembering her father, wondering what her sister would have looked like, and whether she would have traveled to America if she’d had a sister with whom to spend her life instead of being all alone in the northern Chinese city of Harbin.
She wondered what her name had really been.
***
The clicking drew Bao-yu through the darkness. She was surrounded by darkness. Before her was a portal of light. She walked towards it, but it didn’t seem to get any closer. Plodding, one foot in front of the other, plodding with her hands gripping the cloth, pulling it tight around her, plodding, as if it would take forever to reach wherever it was she was going. Then as suddenly as she’d thought about the tree, she was there.
The clicking was deafening. She tried to block her ears, but couldn’t because she refused to let go of the cloth. So her head wobbled left and right, first pressing into one shoulder, then the other, unable to find a place where the noise could be staunched. She scraped her cheeks where the cactus spines had found a home, sending shivers of pain through her lips. There must have been two dozen of them poking out of her. Odd that she’d never thought to remove them.
Everything was now in full view. The sky behind the tree was a rusted yellow. The ground beneath it was a deep green, with white and gray jutting bone. The tree itself was deep black, like the cloth she wore, and vaguely man-shaped, arms outstretched becoming limbs, and sprouting red leaves the color of the money envelopes she’d receive every New Years. The round red leaves seemed to drip from the branches, never quite falling.
And hanging from the tree were things that were too many to count, light brown, clinging with their tails, their pinchers click-clicking madly.
And they clicked until their incoherence melted and she understood the message.
***
She jerked awake to the sound of a helicopter. It roared low, north of her. She lurched to her feet, letting the cloth slide down her body. She was naked beneath. What had happened to her clothes? Strangely, it didn’t matter. She had the cloak and wore it like a second skin.
Her face pulsed with pain. She’d ceased trying to touch it, the spikes irrevocably sunk into the skin of her lips, her cheeks, her neck. She’d never thought that she’d become used to it, but in the last few days she’d become used to so many things.