At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories (6 page)

The boy looked up at a darkened room of the house. I saw a form there, robes shifting softly, and I realized it was Shikibu watching but too aware of the proprieties to come down and greet her husband in front of so many people. The boy straightened. “Where is this son of yours?”

“Over there,” my husband said, pointing at the storehouse.

They saw me then. “A fox!” one man shouted, and they all took up the cry: “A fox! A fox!” Men ran toward me and the storehouse, carrying sticks and torches.

“Husband!” I screamed. “Stop them!”

He hesitated, obviously confused. “Wife?” he asked unsteadily.

“A fox!” the people yelled.

“Please stay with me!” I held out my arms to him. He stepped toward me. The boy threw himself into Yoshifuji’s arms, overbalancing him.

I looked up at the house again in the instant before the men caught up to me, and for the first time I saw her face clearly, where she stood on the veranda. I saw tears on her face. I knew that she, alone of everyone here save my lord, saw me for a woman.

They chased us, the men. They stuck their torches down so they could see under the storehouse floor and poked around with their sticks, and my family fled in all directions: even my son, who was only half-grown. They followed me until I threw off even the seeming of my woman’s body in blind panic. The pain drove me out of consciousness, but my fox’s body ran anyway on its bloody pads.

I came back to my woman’s shape much later, when I was sick from the fear that had choked me. My house was empty save for the servants, who brought me clean robes and food.

I have waited since then. My family has not returned. My grandfather was old, and I don’t know if he could have lived through the heart-bursting panic of the chase. My mother, my brother, and my son are all gone. I hope they are together but I fear they are scattered.

Yoshifuji wept for many days. I heard him when I crawled through the darkness to his door, calling my name and the name of our son. The household summoned priests and a yin-yang diviner to purge my husband of his “enchantment,” but they say its hold has been strong. Recently, I heard him say that he is over his sickness, but I don’t know what to believe. It didn’t seem like a sickness to me and he does not sound over it.

Without my family, it’s hard to maintain the house and the servants. The garden is already gone, faded like mist. The house dissolves room by room. I don’t leave my wing much, not wanting to see how far it has come, this melting of my home. My servants are fewer now and they are even more silent than they were before. I have thought of leaving, stripping off the humanness one more time and running in the woods again. I know I can’t. I am no longer simply a fox.

But I am not simply a woman, either. I know it is a woman’s role to wait, always lost in the shadows, patient for her lord. I know the old tales would have me wait until my death after such a thing as this. But I have waited so long already, alone, tossing my ball, puzzling over Yoshifuji’s diary. I am so tired of this.

I have a plan, if a simple one. It was summer, the thirteen days he spent with me. Now it is winter. The first snow has fallen today, a cold cloud as deep as my wooden clogs. I know him so well. He will come out into the garden tonight to write about the snow and the moon. And I will roll my white ball across his path. If he still misses me, he will see it for what it is and find me, and we will be happy: no false lives this time, no waiting in the darkness, no magic but that which will keep us either human or fox together, according to our choice. And if he truly is content there with Shikibu and the boy, it will only seem another piece of the snow.

I think he will see the ball.

I have just thought of something:

Fox magic:
Priests, you can cure him of everything

but love.

I think this is a poem.

Names for Water

Hala is running for class when her cell phone rings. She slows to take it from her pocket, glances at the screen: unknown caller. It rings again. She does not pick up calls when she doesn’t know who it is, but this time she hits talk, not sure what’s different except that she is late for a class she dreads, and this call delays the moment when she must sit down and be overwhelmed.

“Hello,” she says.

No one speaks. There is only the white noise that is always in the background of cell phone calls. It could be the result of a flaw in the tiny cheap speaker but is probably microwaves, though she likes to imagine it is the whisper of air molecules across all the thousands of miles between two people talking.

The hiss in her ear: she walks across the commons of the Engineering building, a high-ceilinged room crowded with students shaking water from their jackets and umbrellas as they run to class. Some look as overwhelmed as she feels. It is nearly finals and they are probably not sleeping any more than she is.

Beyond the glass wall it is raining. Across the wet quad, cars pass on Loughlin Street. Water sprays from their wheels.

Her schoolwork is not going well. It is her third year toward an engineering degree, but just now that seems an unreachable goal. The science is simple enough, but the mathematics has been hard and she is losing herself in the tricky mazes of Complex Variables. She thinks of dropping the class and switching her major to something simpler, but if she doesn’t become an engineer what will she do instead?

“This is Hala,” she says, her voice sharper. “Who is this?” It is the last thing she needs right now: a forgotten phone in a backpack, crushed against a text book and accidentally speed-dialing her; or worse, someone’s idea of a prank. She listens for breathing but hears only the constant hiss. No, it is not quite steady, or perhaps she has never before listened carefully. It changes, grows louder and softer like traffic passing, as though someone has dropped a phone onto the sidewalk of a busy street.

She wonders about the street, if it is a street—where in the city it is, what cars and buses and bicycles travel it. Or it might be in another city, even somewhere distant and fabulous. Mumbai. Tokyo. Wellington. Santiago. The names are like charms that summon unknown places, unfamiliar smells, the tastes of new foods.

Class time. Students pool in the doorways and pour through. She should join them, find a seat, turn on her laptop, but she is reluctant to let go of this strange moment for something so prosaic. She puts down her bag and holds the phone closer.

The sound in her ear ebbs and flows. No, it is not a street. The cell phone is a shell held to her ear, and she knows with the logic of dreams or exhaustion that it is water she hears: surf rolling against a beach, an ocean perhaps. No one talks or breathes into the phone because it is the water itself that speaks to her.

She says aloud, “The Pacific Ocean.” It is the ocean closest to her, the one she knows best. It pounds against the coast an hour from the university. On weekends back when school was not so hard, she walked through the thick-leaved plants that grew on its cliffs. The waves threw themselves against the rocks and burst into spray that made the air taste of salt and ozone. Looking west at dusk, the Pacific seemed endless but it was not: six thousand miles to the nearest land, ninety million miles to the sun where it dropped below the horizon, and beyond that, to the first star, a vast—but measurable—distance.

Hala likes the sudden idea that if she calls the water by its right name, it will reply in more than this hiss. “The Atlantic Ocean,” she says. She imagines waters deep with fish, floored with eyeless crabs and abandoned telecommunication cables. “The Arctic. The Indian Ocean.” Blue ice; tunnies in shoals.

The waves keep their counsel. She has not named them properly.

She speaks the names of seas: the Mediterranean, the Baltic, the Great Bight of Australia, the Red and Black and Dead Seas. They form an incantation filled with the rumble of great ships and the silence of corals and anemones.

When these do not work, she speaks the words for such lakes as she remembers. “Superior. Victoria. Titicaca.” They have waves, as well. Water brushes their shores, pushed by winds more than the moon’s inconstant face. Birds rise at dusk from the rushes along shoreline marshes and return at dawn. Eagles ride the thermals above basalt cliffs and watch for fish. “Baikal. The Great Bear. Malawi.”

The halls are empty now. Perhaps she is wrong about what sort of water it is, and so she tries other words. Streams, brooks, kills, runs, rills: water summoned by gravity, coaxed or seduced or forced from one place to the next. Estuaries. Dew ponds and pools. Snow and steam. “Cumulus,” she says, and thinks of the clouds mounding over Kansas on summer afternoons. “Stratus. Altostratus.” Typhoons, waterspouts. There is so much water, so many possibilities, but even if she knew the names of each raindrop and every word in every language for ice, she would be wrong. It is not these things.

She remembers the sleet that cakes on her car’s windshield when she visits her parents in Wisconsin in winter. A stream she remembers from when she was a child, minnows shining uncatchable just under the surface. The Mississippi, broad as a lake where it passes St. Louis; in August, it is the color of
café au lait
and smells of mud and diesel exhaust. Hoarfrost coats a century-old window in starbursts. Bathtubs fill with blue-tinted bubbles that smell of lavender. These are real things, but they are wrong. They are not names but memories.

It is not the water of the world,
she thinks. It is perhaps the water of dreams. “Memory,” she says, naming a hidden ocean of the heart. “Longing, death, joy.” The sound in her ear changes a little, as though the wind in that distant place has grown stronger or the tide has turned, but it is still not enough. “The womb. Love. Hope.” She repeats, “Hope, hope,” until it becomes a sound without meaning.

It is not the water of
this
world,
she thinks.

This is the truth. It is water rolling against an ocean’s sandy shore, but it is alien sand on another world, impossibly distant. It is unknown, unknowable, a riddle she will never answer in a foreign tongue she will never hear.

It is also an illusion brought on by exhaustion. She knows the sound is just white noise. She’s known that all along. But she wanted it to mean something, enough so that she was willing to pretend to herself, because just now she needs a charm against the sense that she is drowning in schoolwork and uncertainty about her future.

Tears burn her eyes. “Fine,” she says, like a hurt child; “You’re not even there.” She presses end and the phone goes silent, a shell of dead plastic filled with circuit boards. It is empty.

Complex Variables. She’ll never understand today’s lesson after coming in ten minutes late. She shoulders her bag to leave the building. She forgot her umbrella so she’ll be soaked before she gets to the bus. She leans forward hoping her hair will shield her face and steps out into the rain.

The bus she just misses drives through a puddle, and the splash is an elegant complex shape, a high-order Bézier curve. The rain whispers on the lawn, chatters in the gutters and drains.

The oceans of the heart.

She finds unknown caller in her call history and presses talk. The phone rings once, twice. Someone—something—picks up.

“Hala,” she says to the hiss of cosmic microwaves, of space. “Your name is Hala.”

“Hala,” a voice says very loud and close. It is the unsuppressed echo common to local calls. She knows this. But she also knows that it is real, a voice from a place unimaginably distant, but attainable. It is the future.

She will pass Complex Variables with a C+. She will change her major to physics, graduate, and go to grad school to study astrophysics. Seven years from now, as part of her dissertation she will write a program that searches the data that will come from the Webb telescope, which will have been launched in 2014. Eleven years and six months from now, her team of five will discover water’s fingerprint splashed across the results matrix from a planet circling Beta Leonis, fifty light-years away: a star ignored for decades because of its type. The presence of phyllosilicates will indicate that the water is liquid. Eighteen months later, their results will be verified.

One hundred and forty-six years from now, the first men and women will stand beneath the bright white sun of Beta Leonis, and they will name the ocean Hala.

Hala doesn’t know this. But she snaps the phone shut and runs for class.

The Bitey Cat

Sarah has a cat. She’s only three but it’s just hers. Everyone agrees. No one else even likes the cat. Everyone just calls her the bitey cat even though Sarah knows she’s not really a cat. She’s a monster.

Mom and dad are mad at each other all the time. Sarah never cries but it makes her scream and run and kick things. If she doesn’t she feels sick and then she throws up and then mom and dad get mad at her too even though they act like they don’t.

Mom and dad yell at each other at night when Sarah and Paul are supposed to be asleep. Sarah’s supposed to stay in bed but sometimes when they yell she gets out of bed with her pooh bear and her blanket and she lies in her doorway where the hall light shines. Sometimes she goes all the way down the stairs and into the back hall because they won’t notice anyway but she wishes they would.