“America has its own memories. It’s a land of desperation. You know about desperation, don’t you?”
She’d nodded.
“Then you understand that you might be going into a place with its own memories.”
She’d shrugged. “Anything is better than what I have in here,” she’d said, stabbing at her head with her forefinger until it left a red, round mark.
***
She dragged the young man away, moving swiftly through the brush. With both hands gripping his head, she chewed on an ear as she ran, the rest of him hanging limply behind her. He tasted of fear, and she found herself licking the salt from his skin.
The others shouted for her to stop. They started to run after her, then crashed to a stop as they saw her horrific visage.
She laughed into the night as she ran, ignoring the others. A howl escaped her lips. She felt all-powerful, stronger than the strongest of them, her hunger for their memories driving her on. Like a ghost, she was eager to feed on fear.
One threw something at her and still she ignored them… for now. She might return, once she’d fed. By their crying and their screams, they probably tasted just as sweet.
Like that irreversible moment when she’d set fire to her mother as she’d sat drunk and rambling on the kitchen chair. Her mother’s eyes had shot open when her precious jade had poured the rest of the liquor on her and lit her afire. Her nightclothes were engulfed almost too quickly for her to hear her daughter scream, ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you keep it all to yourself? Why did you let him make me her?’
But even if her mother had heard, her only answer was a single quick scream. The fire ate her from the outside in, its ravenous destructive force too furious for any words that could be comprehended. Still, Bao-yu had clapped joyously at the way her mother’s legs and arms had curled into themselves, twisting into an origami farce of retribution and remembrance of how things should have been, much like she imagined her father’s body shriveling as he lay charcoaling in the prison’s incinerator.
She spied the helicopter again. It was coming back, swinging low over the ground, its light searching and roving. She suddenly felt vulnerable, knowing that if the light found her that everything would change. She dropped the young man and loped off into the darkness, the snake, pads and hand flopping against her legs as she ran. Cacti stabbed her, adding their spines to the hundreds of others that now sprouted from her skin.
She found a low place near the base of a rock. She flew into it, rolled herself in her cloak, and hid beneath the fabric. The sound of the helicopter came near. She could almost feel the light creeping across the desert, searching, seeking, hunting for her. Then suddenly it was there. Although the fabric was impervious to anything, she’d left a single imperfect seam where the ground met the cloak near her feet. She stared at the blinding white that seeped in and…
The storm returned. The spinning, snapping, clawing clouds of light and dark, each whirling like a flock of birds, flipping, turning, twisting, biting. But the dark cloud was so small now it was virtually non-existent. It fought only when it had to, pausing to fight only as a strategy to allow it to try and escape. Soon the light took it from the sky and broke it into a hundred pieces, the darkness scattering across the desert. Then the white flock merged into a single entity and flew towards her. It came fast and hard until it struck, exploding in a cascade of light and sound until she was all but blind.
***
Then there was nothing for awhile except the memory of her father and how he used to come into her room at night. She never knew when it started. She was too young to notice. But when she was five and a thunderstorm raged outside, it was his face that would light with every crack of lightning. His glare was one of abject hatred, something he’d mastered when she was born. After that she watched him watch her every night, sometimes wide awake until one of them was forced to give up in the wee hours of the morning.