THE REVOLUTION ACCORDING TO RAYMUNDO MATA BY GINA APOSTOL

Gina Apostol’s The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, which won the Philippine National Book
Award, is a story about a story. The book is the fictional memoir of Raymundo Mata, a half-blind, self-
professed bookworm who comes from a family of dramatists and publishes political pamphlets. Mata’s
memoir explores the transition between the Spanish and American colonial wars in the Philippines, but
there’s more. The memoir’s Filipino editor, anonymous translator, and American critic debate the historical
accuracy and quality of Mata’s work in the preface, footnotes, and postscript. These complex, interrupting
layers produce a hyper metafiction that is playful and ironic like Cervantes’s Don Quixote and satirize
social critiques and political violence like Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.  

Apostol’s narrative fracturing, perpetuated by external voices that edit, erase, and opine, parallels the
violence forced upon the Philippines by foreign powers, the hostile Spanish and American takeovers
exasperating its ever-shifting identity. As a result, Mata’s memoir is a pastiche of his life and of national
history. It seems no coincidence that Mata writes in Spanish, Tagalog, and English, native tongue celled
between colonial linguistic prowess, his authorial voice pushed and pulled between external forces.

While Mata organizes his memoir into a kind of origin story that moves from his birthplace and family to
his participation in the resistance, the influence of the historical figure and revolutionary author José Rizal
drives the narrative. Once the protagonist reads Rizal’s illicit novel Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not)
gifted to him by a priest named Pío Valenzuela, he begins his quest to find the national hero. Here, fact and
fiction intersect, both Mata and Rizal eventually colliding on the page. As Mata’s translator writes in her
introduction to the manuscript, “Our notion of freedom began with fiction, which may explain why it
remains an illusion.” Even the translator’s name seems to play with the idea of fiction reflecting a
collective imagination and a nation’s disillusion, her surname espejo meaning mirror in Spanish. Apostol
writes in her precursory Author’s Note, “two things shape the Filipino: puns and José Rizal,” less a wink to
readers and more an invitation to a challenging jigsaw puzzle from the outset.

The manuscript’s three critics reveal that Mata meets with Rizal early on, as they debate the veracity of the
meeting. Rizal resides exiled on an island under Spanish watch, and the three resurface this detail in
footnotes so many times that when the event does take place, the anticipation has been built up—we want
to see for ourselves just what happens between these two revolutionary writers. It’s quite possibly the best
sequence of scenes in the novel, history and fiction—represented in Rizal and Mata—threaded so tightly
together that they, for a moment, defragment and coalesce as one.

This interweaving recalls the Spanish word historia, which can mean either history or story depending on
the context; Apostol writes the Philippines’ nineteenth-century historia by exploiting history in frontmatter,
footnotes, and postscripts, and tethering fictionalized historical figures with fictional characters on a single
plane. But this game of metafiction comes at a price, the illusion the translator speaks of. When Mata
comes face to face with Rizal and, observing how he and others engage the living legend, says, “It’s true.
His bones did not matter. We wanted of him what was air and nothing, such as his name, a ghost louse-
scratch.” The promise of revolution is fleeting. We know the Philippines won’t win their revolution, but
Mata doesn’t know, his memoir a revisited national memory that almost reaches its goal of winning the
war, its independence, but never does.

There’s a Sisyphean struggle between this hope and disappointment in the book, and in this struggle, there
are no easy answers. Instead, there’s missing fragments, alleged mistranslations and misinterpretations. As
we volley between footnotes and source text, opinions and first-hand experience, fact and fiction, it
becomes clear that Apostol’s novel requires us to sit up, lean in, and study. It demands our active
participation. In the end, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata is intended for a Filipino audience
first— with inside jokes, play on words, and regional references—and American audiences second. And
that’s a definitive reason to pick it up. Apostol holds a mirror to American exceptionalism and forces us to
look.

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The Revolution is a work intended for a Filipino audience first, with inside jokes, plays on words, and
regional references, and American audiences second. Apostol holds a mirror to American exceptionalism.
It’s a penance academics realize through postcolonial studies like the American critic analyzing Mata’s
memoir. The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, like the effects of the wars, is never really finished
—there’s missing fragments, alleged mistranslations, and misinterpretations—and readers may not connect
all the puzzle pieces, which just might be the point,

APO ON THE WALL BY BJ PATINO

There’s this man’s photo on the wall

Of my father’s office at home, you
Know, where father brings his work,
Where he doesn’t look strange
Still wearing his green uniform
And colored breast plates, where,
To prove that he works hard, he

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 Also brought a photo of his boss
Whom he calls Apo, so Apo could
You know, hang around on the wall
Behind him and look over his shoulders
To make sure he’s snappy and all.
Father snapped at me once, caught me
Sneaking around his office at home
Looking at the stuff on his wall-handguns’
Plaques, a sword, medals a rifle-
Told me that was no place for a boy
Only men, when he didn’t really
Have to tell me because, you know,
That photo of Apo on the wall was already
Looking at me around,
His eyes following me like he was
That scary Jesus in the hallway, saying
I know what you’re doing.

THE SAFE HOUSE BY SANDRA ROLDAN

from the street, it is one box among many. Beneath terracotta roof tiles baking uniformly in the sweltering
noon the building/s grey concrete face stares out impassively in straight lines and angles. Its walls are high
and wide, as good walls should be. A four-storey building with four units to a floor. At dusk, the square
glass windows glitter like the compound eyes of insects, revealing little of what happens inside. There is
not much else to see.

And so this house seems in every way identical to all the other houses in all the thirty-odd other buildings
nestled within the gates of this complex. It is the First Lady’s pride and joy, a housing project designed for
genteel middle class living. There is a clubhouse, a swimming pool, a tennis court. A few residents drive
luxury cars. People walk purebred dogs in the morning. Trees shade the narrow paths and the flowering
hedges that border each building give the neighborhood a hushed, cozy feel. It is easy to get lost here.

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But those who need to come here know what to look for-the swinging gate, the twisting butterfly tree, the
cyclone-wire fence. A curtained window glows with the yellow light of a lamp perpetually left on. Visitors
count the steps up each flight of stairs. They do not stumble in the dark. They know which door will be
opened to them, day or night. They will be fed, sometimes given money. Wounds will be treated, bandages
changed. They carry nothing-no books, no bags, or papers. What they do bring is locked inside their heads,
the safest of places. They arrive one at a time, or in couples, over a span of several hours. They are careful
not to attract attention. They listen for the reassuring yelps of squabbling children before they raise their
hands to knock.

It is 1982. The girl who lives here does not care too much for the people who visit. She is five. Two uncles
and an aunt dropped by the other day. Three aunts and two uncles slept over the night before. It is
impossible to remember all of them. There are too many names, too many faces. And they all look the
same-too tall, too old, too serious, too many. They surround the small dining table, the yellow lamp above
throwing and tilting shadows against freshly-painted cream walls.

They crowd the already cramped living room with their books and papers, hissing at her to keep quiet, they
are talking about important things. So she keeps quiet. The flock of new relatives recedes into the
background as she fights with her brother over who gets to sit closer to the television. It is tuned in to
Sesame Street on Channel 9. The small black and white screen makes Ernie and Bert shiver and glow like
ghosts. Many of these visitors she will never see again. If she does, she will probably not remember them.

She wakes up one night. Through the thin walls, she hears the visitors arguing. She can easily pick out one
particular uncle’s voice, rumbling through the dark like thunder. He is one of her newer relatives, having
arrived only that morning. All grown-ups are tall but this new uncle is a giant who towers over everyone
else. His big feet look pale in their rubber slippers, a band-aid where each toenail should have been. He
never takes off his dark glasses, not even at night. She wonders if he can see in the dark. Maybe he has
laser vision like Superman. Or, maybe-like a pirate, he has only one eye. She presses her ear against the
wall. If she closes her eyes and listens carefully, she can make out the words: sundalo, kasama, talahib. The
last word she hears clearly is katawan. The visitors are now quiet but still she cannot sleep. From the living
room, there are sounds like small animals crying.

She comes home from school the next day to see the visitors crowded around the television. She wants to
change the channel, watch the late afternoon cartoons but they wave her away. The grown-up’s are all
quiet. Something is different. Something is about to explode. So she stays away, peering up at them from
under the dining table. On the TV screen is the President, hisface glowing blue and wrinkly like an-old
monkey’s. His voice wavers in the afternoon air, sharp and high like the sound of something breaking. The
room erupts in a volley of curses: Humanda ka na, Makoy! Mamatay ka! Pinapatay mo asawa ko!
Mamamatay ka rin P%t@ng*n@ ka! Humanda ka, papatayin din kita!The girl watches quietly from under
the table. She is trying very hard not to blink.

It is 1983. They come more often now. They begin to treat the apartment like their own house. They hold
meetings under the guise of children’s parties. Every week, someone’s son or daughter has a birthday. The
girl and her brother often make a game of sitting on the limp balloons always floating in inch from the
floor. The small explosions like-guns going off. She wonders why her mother serves the visitors dusty beer
bottles that are never opened.

She is surprised to see the grownups playing make-believe out on the balcony. Her new uncles pretend to
drink from the unopened bottles and begin a Laughing Game. Whoever laughs loudest wins. She thinks her
mother plays the game badly because instead of joining in. Her mother is always crying quietly in the
kitchen. Sometimes the girl sits beside her mother on the floor, listening to words she doesn’t really
understand: Underground, resolution, taxes, bills. She plays with her mother’s hair while the men on the
balcony continue their game. When she falls asleep, they are still laughing.

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The mother leaves the house soon after. She will never return. The two children now spend most afternoons
playing with their neighbors. After an hour of hide-and-seek, the girl comes home one day to find the small
apartment even smaller. Something heavy hangs in the air like smoke. Dolls and crayons and storybooks
fight for space with plans and papers piled on the tables. Once, she finds a drawing of a triangle and
recognizes a word: class. She thinks of typhoons and floods and no classes.

 The visitors keep reading from a small red book, which they hide under their clothes when sheapproached.
She tries to see why they like it so much. Maybe it also has good pictures like the books her father brought
home from, China. Her favorite has zoo animals working together to build a new bridge after the river had
swallowed the old one. She sneaks a look over their shoulders and sees a picture of a fat Chinese man
wearing a cap. Spiky shapes run up and down the page. She walks away disappointed. She sits in the
balcony and reads another picture book from China. It is about a girl who cuts her hair to help save her
village from Japanese soldiers. The title is Mine Warfare.

 It is 1984. The father is arrested right outside their house. It happens one August afternoon, with all the
neighbors watching. They look at the uniformed men with cropped hair and shiny boots. Guns bulging
under their clothes. Everyone is quiet afraid to make a sound. The handcuffs shine like silver in the sun.
When the soldiers drive away, the murmuring begins. Words like insects escaping from cupped hands. It
grows louder and fills the sky. It is like this whenever disaster happens. When fire devours a house two
streets away, people in the compound come out to stand on their balconies. Everyone points at the pillar of
smoke rising from the horizon.

 This is the year she and her brother come to live with their grandparents, having no parents to care for
them at home. The grandparents tell them a story of lovebirds: Soldiers troop into their house one summer
day in 1974. Yes, balasang k4 this very same house. Muddy boots on the bridge over the koi pond,
strangers poking guns through the water lilies. They are looking for guns and papers, they are ready to
destroy the house. Before the colonel can give his order, they see The Aviary. A small sunlit room with a
hundred lovebirds twittering inside. A rainbow of colors. Eyes like tiny glass beads. One soldier opens the
aviary door, releases a flurry of wings and feathers. Where are they now? the girl asks. The birds are long
gone, the grandparents say, eaten by a wayward cat. But as you can see, the soldiers are still here. The two
children watch them at their father’s court trials. A soldier waves a guru says it is their father’s. He stutters
while explaining why the gun has his own name on it.

 They visit her father at his new house in Camp Crame. It is a long walk from the gate, past wide green
lawns. In the hot surrey everything looks green. There are soldiers everywhere. Papa lives in that long low
building under the armpit of the big gymnasium. Because the girl can write her name, the guards make her
sign the big notebooks. She writes her name so many times, the S gets tired and curls on its side to sleep.
She enters amaze the size of the playground at school, but with tall barriers making her turn left, right, left,
right. Barbed wire forms a dense jungle around the detention center. She meets other children there: some
just visiting, others lucky enough to stay with their parents all the time.

On weekends, the girl sleeps in her father’s cell. There is a double-deck bed and a chair. A noisy electric
fan stirs the muggy air. There, she often gets nightmares about losing her home: She would be walking
down the paths, under the trees of their compound, past the row of stores, the same grey buildings. She
turns a corner and finds a swamp or a rice paddy where her real house should be.

 One night, she dreams of war. She comes home from school to find a blood orange sky where bedroom
and living room should be. The creamy walls are gone. Broken plywood and planks swing crazily in what
used to be the dining room. Nothing in the kitchen but a sea green refrigerator; paint and rust flaking off in
patches as large as thumbnails. To make her home livable again, she paints it blue and pink and yellow. She
knows she has to work fast. Before night falls, she has painted a sun, a moon and a star on the red floor. So
she would have light. Each painted shape is as big as a bed. In the dark, she curls herself over the crescent
moon on the floor and waits for morning.There is no one else in the dream.

5
 Years later, when times are different, she will think of those visitors and wonder about them. By then, she
will know they aren’t really relatives, and had told her namesnot really their own. To a grownup, an old
friend’s face can never really change; in achild’s fluid memory, it can take any shape. She believes that-
people stay alive so long as another chooses to remember them. But she cannot help those visitors even in
that small way. She grows accustomed to the smiles of middle aged strangers on the street, who talk about
how it was when she was thishigh. She learns not to mind the enforced closeness, sometimes even smiles
back. But she does not really know them. Though she understands the fire behind their words, she remains
a stranger to their world’ she has never read the little red book.

 Late one night, she will hear someone knocking on the door.It is a different door now, made from solid
varnished mahogany blocks. The old chocolate brown ply board that kept them safe all those years ago has
long since yielded to warp and weather. She will look through the peephole and see a face last seen fifteen
years before. It is older, ravaged but somehow same. She willbe surprised to even remember the name that
goes with it. By then, the girl would know about danger, and will not know whom to trust. No house, not
even this one, is safe enough.

 The door will be opened a crack. He will ask about her father, she will say he no longer lives there. As
expected, he will look surprised and disappointed. She may even read a flash of fear before his face
wrinkles into a smile. He will apologize, step back. Before he disappears into the shadowy corridor, she
will notice his worn rubber slippers, the mud caked between his toes. His heavy bag. She knows he has
nowhere else to go. Still, she will shut the door and push the bolt firmly into place.

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 BANANA HEART SUMMER BY MERLINDA BOBIS

Chapter One

For those who love to love and eat

For those who long to love and eat

When we laid my baby sister in a shoebox, when all the banana hearts in our street were stolen, when Tiyo
Anding stepped out of a window perhaps to fly, when I saw guavas peeking from Manolito's shorts and felt
I'd die of shame, when Roy Orbison went as crazy as Patsy Cline and lovers eloped, sparking a scandal so
fiery that even the volcano erupted and, as a consequence, my siblings tasted their first American corned
beef, then Mother looked at me again, that was the summer I ate the heart of the matter.

So how did it all begin?

With this lesson about the banana heart from Nana Dora, the chef of all the sweet snacks that flavored our
street every afternoon, except Sundays.

"Close to midnight, when the heart bows from its stem, wait for its first dew. It will drop like a gem. Catch
it with your tongue. When you eat the heart of the matter, you'll never grow hungry again." From the site of
her remark, I will take you through a tour of our street and I will tell you its stories. Ay, my street of
wishful sweets and spices. All those wishes to appease stomachs and make hearts fat with pleasure. And
perhaps sweeten tempers or even spice up a storyteller's tongue.

Let's begin with appeasement, my first serious business venture long ago. Let's begin with a makeshift
kitchen, a hut with no walls, under banana trees in bloom. Here, Nana Dora parked her fragrant wok at two
in the afternoon. By three, the hungry queue began.

Chapter Two

Turon: the melody

The sound of deep frying was a delectable melody. Instantly loud and aggressive when the turon hit the
pool of boiling coconut oil, then pulling back. The percussion was inspired to be subtle.

"Ay, it sounds and smells like happiness," I said, nose and ears as primed as my sweetened tongue.
Happiness that is not subtle at all, I could have added. Such is the fact about the turon, which is half a slice
of sugar banana and a strip of jackfruit rolled in paper-thin rice wrapping, then dusted with palm sugar and
fried to a crisp brown. How could such fragrance be subtle? My nose twitched, my mouth watered, my
stomach said, buy, buy.

"So you're an expert on happiness?" Nana Dora asked. Her face glowed with more than sweat and the fire
from her stove.

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"Believe me, your cooking is music, Nana Dora."

"Hoy, don't flatter me, Nenita." She made a face. But I could see the flush deepening on her cheeks, the
hand patting wisps of hair in place and the coy turning of the neck, as if a lover had just whispered sweet
nothings to her ear.

I hovered closer, bent towards the wok, no, bowed, paying obeisance to its melody: mi-fa-so-la . . . no,
definitely a high "do." There were about five turones harmonizing in the deep wok. The aroma climbed the
scales, happiness from rung to rung. Can I get one on credit? I wanted to ask, but only managed, "Can I
help you roll, Nana Dora?"

"So you want to burn your nose or flavor my turon with your grease?" she scolded.

I withdrew the endangered appendage from the wok's edge, along with my grease, or sweat, which I
imagined was what she meant. She stared at me, sizing me up in my dress that was once blue.

"I'm just saying hello, Nana Dora," I explained. "If you must know, I'm actually off to a . . . a business
venture." And I'll be earning soon, so can I get one on credit? But the question drowned in the pool in my
mouth. I swallowed, but another wave washed over my tongue, my belly made fainting cries, like little
notes plummeting, and my esophagus lengthened. "When you feel it lengthen, you know it's really, really
bad." Who said that first? Nilo, my fourth sibling, or Junior, the second, maybe Claro, the third one, or
perhaps Lydia? There were six of us, so it was difficult to tell who said or felt it first. Not that we called it
esophagus then. We just said "it" and motioned with our hands from the throat to sometimes beyond the
stomach. Then we squatted for a long time, "to arrest the lengthening." Better than saying we were feeling
too faint with hunger to keep on our feet.

"Business venture, hah!" Nana Dora snapped.

Of course she meant, leave business to me, girl, as she wrapped a turon in a banana leaf and handed it to a
customer right under my nose. I kept my hand in my pocket.

"Hoy, aren't you supposed to be in school?" Of course she meant, school is your business and don't you
forget that! But I was unfazed as I listened to the sweet noises behind me,

"PRELUDES" BY DARYLL DELGADO PUBLISHED ON 12/16/2016

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This was an assignment assigned to me to make a report about the story. One of our subjects includes 21st
Century Literature, and it's quite amazing how these stories hold some hidden agendas (even if I'm just
being too imaginative).

Preludes is a 21st Century short story written by Daryll Delgado, a Filipino writer. The story was set in a
natural setting with its distinct culture, with a theme of one of the issues in the Philippines: Gender
Inequality.

Reading the story alone, I couldn't really find signs that it was about Gender Inequality. It was only the
background before the story that said it's related to gender inequality. Our book was quite a spoiler, but it
helped me concerning my analysis.

What does the story have to do with gender inequality? That was my first question. The story only
delivered what had happened in a single point of view-Nenita, the wife. She showed a behavior of not
minding the actions of her husband, by taking him back whenever her husband's affairs with other women
become sour. She never asks, seemingly never cares. But it cannot be considered as completely not caring
for the husband-she still took care of him.

Nenita was also aware of how her husband's siblings always reminding him that he should've been a better
man if he had chosen his decisions wisely, which also concerns his decision of marrying Nenita. She did
not feel that sorry or feel that much grief when her husband's siblings died, save for one. She was also fond
of [1]Willy Revillame, a host she had watched on TV, and whom she always waited for in her dreams. This
had also showed her unfaithfulness towards her husband, how she wanted to take a glimpse of Willy on TV
or in her dreams.

When Nenita suddenly woke up from her nap which she shouldn't have, she felt the presence of her
husband and had thought that he swore at her-even though he was at the Municipal Hall attending the death
anniversary of the judge. Why? It wasn't mentioned. But that must be the gender inequality there. It can be
assumed that her husband does not like Nenita enjoying the presence of other men, even though he himself
had been having affairs with other women and Nenita just kept taking him back.

In the introductory part of the story, it was mentioned that Nenita did not feel comfortable around the wife
of the judge because of some rumors about her, even though she did not really care. In a single read-
through, it cannot be easily noticed. A few reads later had made things quite clear. There had been rumors
about Nenita's husband having an affair with the judge's wife. Again, she didn't care, took him back, and
nursed him back to health.

Those were some information I point out to be weird. Because reading it alone would make the story quite
peculiar. Now our book had guide questions after the story, and question number 7 caught my attention.

Who killed the man? Explain your answer.

So there was actually a murder happened! The only character who died was Nenita's husband. The very
beginning of the story started as "A man died singing", and the story went back earlier that day and led it
back to the beginning, of how the man died, which was not really stated and can only be assumed that he
died from his illness. And so I studied further, until I came to a conclusion.

How come Nenita didn't really care when her husband had affairs with different women, and taking him
back with no questions? This aroused a few more questions. Did Nenita gave up on her husband? If so, why
would she openly take him back and nurse him back to health?

There were times when Nenita listened to the beats and murmurs of her husband's heart at night. When she
heard his singing voice from the Municipal Hall, she almost caught the sound of his labored breathing, and

9
his heart's irregular beating. She always nursed him back to health, but why wasn't she showing any sings
of concern or worry whatsoever?

This brought me to the conclusion. Nenita killed her own husband.

How? That was the question. That conclusion matched the behavior of Nenita, however, which
strengthened my claim. Firstly, Nenita didn't seem to mind about nursing him back to health. Why would
she feel nothing and still nurse him back to health when she knew her husband's been with other women?
That was my first clue. And it coincides with a paragraph somewhere near the ending:

"She could have prepared him then that other brew her [2]herbalista friend had suggested at the time, the
one that would make his balls shrink, give him hallucinations, make his blood boil until his veins popped.
But she didn't, of course."

She didn't. Of course. Because she wouldn't want the murder to be noticeable. Although this could be
considered as her small way of expressing her frustration towards her husband, it's still like a black print
among the white words. Moreover, she didn't seem to be so concerned about her husband when she heard
him choke.

She knew of his condition. But she still laughed at her silliness for applauding along with the audience in
the Hall. That moment, she went back inside the house, emphasizing that it was getting very hot outside,
certainly hot enough to boil an old

man's blood and pop his veins, she added in her thoughts. She knew. It was her. She

killed her own husband.

Shocking. To think that a story like that could hide something sinister, but it could be the possible effects of
gender inequality. It's plainly amazing. It may not be a happy ending, but I don't think it's a sad ending
either.

I praise Daryll Delgado for her fascinating work. I recommend you "Preludes".

THE LOVE OF BOOKS BY LACAMBRA YPIL

My body will be mine when I’m thin. I will eat a little at a time, small bites. I will vanquish ice cream. I
will purge with green juices. I will see chocolate as poison and pasta as a form of self-punishment. I will
work not to feel full again. Always moving toward full, approaching full butnever really full. I will
embrace my emptiness; I will ride it into holy zones. Let me be hungry. Letme starve. Please. Bread is
Satan. I stop eating bread. This is the same as not eating food. Four days in, a scrawny actress friend tells
me, “Eve, your stomach has nothing to do with diet.” What? “It’s the change of life,” she says. “All you
need is some testosterone.” I try to imagine what I would be ike, totally bread deprived and shot up with
testosterone. “Serial killer” comes to mind. I’m walking—actually, I’m limping—down a New York City
street, and I catch a glimpse of this blond, pointy-breasted, raisin-a-day-stomached smiling girl on the cover
of Cosmo magazine. She is there every minute, somewhere in the world, smiling down on me, on all of us.
She’s omnipresent. She’s the American Dream, my personal nightmare. Pumped straight from the
publishing power plant into the bloodstream of our culture and neurosis. She is multiplying on every cover.

10
She was passed through my mother’s milk and so I don’t even know that I’m contaminated. I just want to
be like her. I want to be Barbie. And it doesn’t matter that if I were anatomically structured like Barbie I
would be unable to walk and would be forced to crawl on all fours. Don’t get me wrong, I’m my own
perpetrator, I’m my own victim. I pick up the magazines. No, no, no. It’s the possibility of being skinny
good that keeps me buying. Oh, God, I discover a Starbucks maple walnut scone expanding in me, creeping
out.

My body will be mine when I’m thin. I will eat a little at a time, small bites. I will vanquish ice cream. I
will purge with green juices. I will see chocolate as poison and pasta as a form of self-punishment. I will
work not to feel full again. Always moving toward full, approaching full but never really full. I will
embrace my emptiness; I will ride it into holy zones. Let me be hungry. Let me starve. Please.

Bread is Satan. I stop eating bread. This is the same as not eating food. Four days in, a scrawny actress
friend tells me, “Eve, your stomach has nothing to do with diet.” What? “It’s the change of life,” she says.
“All you need is some testosterone.” I try to imagine what I would be like, totally bread deprived and shot
up with testosterone. “Serial killer” comes to mind.I’m walking—actually, I’m limping—down a New
York City street, and I catch a glimpse of this blond, pointy-breasted, raisin-a-day-stomached smiling
girl on the cover of Cosmo magazine. She is there every minute, somewhere in the world, smiling down
on me, on all of us. She’s omnipresent. She’s the American Dream, my personal nightmare.
Pumped straight from the publishing power plant into the bloodstream of our culture and neurosis. She is
multiplying on every cover. She was passed through my mother’s milk and so I don’t even know that I’m
contaminated. I just want to be like her. I want to be Barbie. And it doesn’t matter that if I were
anatomically structured like Barbie I would be unable to walk and would be forced to crawl on all fours.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m my own perpetrator, I’m my own victim. I pick up the magazines. No, no, no. It’s
the possibility of being skinny good that keeps me buying. Oh, God, I discover a Starbucks maple walnut
scone expanding in me, creeping out.Flabby age leaking through the cracks. Big Macs, French fries, Pizza
Land, four helpings, can’t stop. My stomach is chicken wings, dipping butter, fried shrimp, fried zucchini,
fried ice cream, fried dumplings, fried anything, fried right. My stomach is America. I want to drown in the
cement. There’s obviously something I’m just not getting. I am going to go and find the woman who
thought this up. Maybe if I listen carefully, she’ll reveal the secret.

WAITING BY RON DARVIN

I know it was really Isabel’s fault having no time for her family and the reason why her husband commit a
sin. Isabelle said, “I’ve sacrifice for you and for our family and that is the reason why I work hard”. And
Miguel replied, “You abandoned me for 7 years and your entire image began to fade. I could no longer
remember what it was like. Working here in Canada destroyed our happy family and where is everything
that you said”. Miguel didn’t feel the love of his mother even a little time for bonding, his mother can’t
give it.

When I was young, my Mother plans to work abroad but my father strongly disagree of her decision. Me
too is against with the plan of my Mother. I don’t really want her to go away from me because I don’t want
her to get sick and it makes me feel hurt.

If you were in the position of Miguel, what will you do? I know it’s hard for the part of Miguel seeing her
mother who doesn’t care about him even in attending school meetings. I also figured out that the parents of
Miguel got separated because Isabela found out that her husband had an affair. If you were in the position
of Isabela what will you do?

11
There is a conflict between Isabela and Miguel and because of that their relationship will never be as close
as bestfriend. Miguel will go back to the place where he belongs were he would feel the happiness of a real
family.He would leave his mother alone.

CRONULLA BEACH BY JOSE WENDELL P. CAPILLI

In Sydney's Cronulla Beach, more than 5,000 white Australians descended on the sands, attacking anybody
who looked Middle Eastern or Asian Revenge followed: Men of color rampaged through Cronulla with
baseball bats, smashing storefronts and windshields. Early morning news, 12 December 2005

Blood surges rapidly

Along Cronulla Beach.
Armed with bats,
White bodies are mad
Replications of tents,
Parasols and sunblinds
Spreading all over
What used to be kurranulla?
Abroginal landscapes,
The place of pink seashells.
There is no chieftain
On the shore, no starfish
Where dominion shatters,

12
 Not too far behind,
Thugs and their hand
Maids constrict exquisite
Shades of perplexity
To keep generations
Pure and sterile.
Spaces beneath vestiges
Of hanlets from long ago
Have become driftwood,
Shells, cleavers of melting
Pots and succession.
They are swaying eerily
Translucent as postcards
Bereft of scintillating light
In the heated-up weather.
So racializing, this soap.

FLICKER FADE GONE BY: CARL JOE JAVIER

He brought the pistol up to shoulder level, let his right hand fingers wrap smoothly around it, put the palm
of his left-hand on the butt for support. The gun was light in his hand as he swung it from left to right,
clearing the perimeter while he zoomed into the grocery store.

He’d been througuh this before, but he still tensed as he slid through the store’s shattered glass door. He
went over themission’s specs in his head: at least 30 perps in the store, plus threeemployees still inside.

Bang,bang, bang, three to the chest. Reload. One had jumped in front of him as he stepped through the
diaper aisle.Next aisle, canned goods, three perps, one holding a knife to a hostage. His arm glided from
left to right, bang bang, twoin the chest, perp down. Bang, headshot. Reload. Last crook on the right with
the hostage: one to the leg, hostage runs,bang, headshot. Reload.He went through the rest of the grocery in
the same methodical manner. Bang, bang, bang, reload; bang bang bang,reload: bang bang bang, reload: it
was a rhythm that he’d developed over the years. Cutting down the perps gave him arush, but his
adrenaline got pumping whenever there was a hostage to save.

As he went through the cashier’s counters he could hear his heartbeat pounding in his ears and feel the
pistol gettingslippery from his sweating palm. One more hostage, he thought.ALL HOSTAGES SAVED.
He smiled, put the pistol back in his holster and wiped his palms on his pants. He watchedonscreen as his
statistics were tallied: Hits Taken: 1; Hostages Saved: 3; Shots Taken: 105; Hits: 97; Accuracy: 92%.
Notbad, he said to himself.

He left the machine and paced around the empty arcade trying to decide what enemies he’d face next.
He took the nylon string necklace that served as a key chain off. In his right hand he played with the master
key, sliding it through hisfingers. With it he was the master of the arcade; with one turn of the key he could
become Spiderman or Cyclops, aWorld War II pilot, an F-1 racer; or he could take up a gun and shoot
down secret agents, terrorists, terminators,zombies, dinosaurs. He played almost all the games, and the
games where there were people to save drew him most.

13
He felt that he came alive only after a turn of the key, when he was in a game. He could feel himself fading,
knew thatpeople were looking past him, seeing only the key that hung around his neck. So he waited until
there was no one left inthe arcade.He waited until he was alone so that he could turn the key and come alive
again. This wasn’t the world for him, and as he turned the key he knew which one was. He stared into the
screen, watched as his face began fading away, waiteduntil it had disappeared.

And as he saw the game start and he wrapped his right hand fingers around the pistol and puthis left hand
up to the butt he felt himself coming alive. As he approached the grocery store and started firing, bangbang
bang, he could feel himself gaining substance, not being blank anymore.

In the morning the guard came to find a gun hanging from its arcade machine. A copy of the arcade’s
master’s key wasstuck in the machine’s slot. He figured the last man working the night shift had forgotten
it so he returned it to thearcade’s owner.

The owner asked if the guard had noticed the late shift worker leave, the guard said he hadn’t. He assumed
that the boyhadn’t shown up for work, shrugged his shoulders, and thought to himself that it was time to
call up the agency foranother guy. He thought about the boy who’d worked for him these past years. The
peculiar thing was that he couldn’t even remember what the boy looked like.

Later that week, the owner had to replace one of the machines in the arcade. Since that night the boy hadn’t
shown uphe’d been having a problem with that machine the guard had found the master key in. It wouldn’t
accept tokens, and
the game would go on start to end, with the display following a distinct rhythm: bang bang bang, reload

14
 VIRTUAL CENTER BY RAISSA CLAIRE U. RIVERA

The story is set approximately 60 to 70 years from now (2060s-2070s), sometime in the relatively near
future. Delia, the central character, is young, educated, and part of the disenfranchised, working class;
underprivileged and therefore has narrowed options because of lack of education, financial/economic
constraints, social status/ class. Delia’s job, along with many other people like her at that time, is to act as
caretakers and attendants of the bodies of those who have chosen to live a virtual life at the “Virtual
Center.” Majority of the population, those who are not able to afford it from the start, aspire and work their
ass off all their lives to be able to avail of this virtual life when they retire.

This majority includes Delia. The Virtual Center here is the symbolic representation of ‘heaven’ or
‘nirvana,’ the release from the pain of real, material life. The story later on reveals how Delia falls in love
with the body she attends to, and is therefore a slave to, everyday. His name is Art, a musician who has
chosen to sign over his body to the Virtual Center at the decline of his career.

Delia attends to his every need, willingly, as if a real relationship was at stake between them, until one day
the virtual center was bombed and destroyed by rebelling forces headed by Delia’s brother Nick. Nick has
been rebelling against the law ever since he was a boy. By sheer critical insight he becomes conscious that
it is the desire for a virtual life and the Virtual Center itself that has been oppressing people like him and
Delia, and it frustrates him that no one else could see it his way.

In a rage, Nick starts disconnecting the bodies hooked to the machines at the Virtual Center, berating Delia
with his nihilistic sentiments as he went along: “If every one was living in a virtual world, who would keep
people alive?” Nick yankedoff the last of the electrodes on Art and started working on his straps. “They’ve
set up the systemin such a way that we can’t ever get out, so we’ll always be there to look after them. Why
do youthink higher education is so expensive? So the lower classes won’t learn how to
operatesupercomputers and complex machines. And we can’t sabotage them either. And of course, we
aretaught by our middle-class teachers who have been bribed by the promise of an eternal virtual lifeafter
the retirement that the system is perfect. Perfect for these people maybe, but not for us.” Heremoved Art’s
mask and gave his shoulder a shake.

“Come on, buddy, it’s time to see what’shappened to the real world since you’ve gone.” Art rolled over and
fell on the floor. “Ow!” heyelled, and sat up and rubbed his eyes. Nick went on to free the politician while
Delia knelt at Art’s side. “Don’t be scared,” she said

Reluctantly, Art wakes up to the real world with very little clue as to what was happening to the world
around him. Without much of a choice, Art and Delia run away to a remote island where the government
eyes and ears cannot follow, hoping that they could “live off the land” peacefully.

Unfortunately, the story ends on note of regret and uncertainty on Delia’s part. What started out as an ideal
and romantic relationship with Art has become boring and pathetic for Delia. She starts to wonder whether
they really had a better lot; she longs for her brother and father. She worries that she might be cheating the
child she carries of a life that is better than what she and Art chose to live. Surely, Art loved her, but Delia
realizes that it takes more than love to live a good life.

15
 MARTINES BY ANNA FELICIA SANCHEZ

Anna Felicia Sanchez’ short horror story starts with an opening anecdote of Richard Servacio’s father
telling a myth of a secret to immortality that “kept the land from drying, from crumbling under the weather
of a world that had lost its way along its own axis. With this knowledge, the rest of the land could be saved
from drowning in the color of blood, there would be no need for the shadows of things long gone… there
would be life…” and so the story continues with Richard and his cousin, Totoy, driving a “grimy” owner-
type jeep on the way to an isolated forest – which was once a village – in the jungles of Batangas. Richard,
who was a 25-year-old corporate speech trainer suffering from a quarter-life crisis – after being told a
“lousy” motivational speaker by his boss for the fifth time. Because of this, he hoped to seek comfort of the
countryside view of Batangas and after Totoy promised him that Martinés – their destination – would
change his life forever.

But rather the trip seemed to have worsened his emotional state by the bumpy ride and the nuisance of his
cousin’s company. The awful journey had put him to sleep in which he dreams of a myth where a
mysterious stranger in his father’s once infertile village appeared. The stranger blessed the lands with
bountiful nature that fulfilled the village. Because of the miracles brought by the stranger, the villagers
begged her to stay but she could not for she has other villages to visit.

So instead, she made them sign a contract with a condition of remembering so that the village would
continue to flourish. The head of the village worried that what if they could not remember? The stranger
then answered that their offspring should be told… and if they forget, then “they shall be reminded.” The
stranger dispersed into a thousand birds and flew down the edge of the village where grew a young acacia
tree. Richard was awakened when his cousin parked the jeep.

He accompanied Totoy to catch a live monitor lizard to offer to Martinés. He was distracted with the
appearance of a black bird with a crest on its head. Totoy rather continued telling Richard a trivia about
him being the oldest in their generation next to Tata Onsing – their great grandfather – who was dying. The
next scene reveals the sequel to Richard’s dream where the leader of the village died.

The villagers turned to the oldest of the youngest of the members of his family who could remember that
must take the ancestor’s place as keeper of the burden of remembering. The village lived in abundance until
one day, the last person who could remember died. Everyone came to forget until no one could take up the
burden. When they could not fulfill the contract, tragedy began to torment the village so strong that the
waters colored the rocks with blood.

The stranger returned and bestowed her final gift. She called to one of the black birds in the acacia, snipped
its tongue and declared that this is how they shall be reminded. If the contractis broken once again, the
stranger promised to come back to drain the land. The mystery unfolds as Richard and Totoy draw deeper
into the forest. As they wander along the forest, Totoy keeps stating that Richard doesn’t know anything.
Richard’s perplexity about the place and his family history alters as he comes to realize the disturbing
darkness of the forest when they approached a large acacia tree where dwell the thousand black birds.

Totoy explains that these birds are called “Martinés”. When they are young, people can teach them to speak
by snipping their tongues bit by bit. The details of the place and the myth. the red rocks, the acacia tree, the
martinés, “the oldest of the youngest must take up the burden”, “memory is a fragile thing” unlocked the
horrifying mystery of his destiny. Richard was about to run away when Totoy hit him with a steel knocking
him unconscious. Later, he wakes up in the darkness with his arms and feet bounded. He asked Totoy for
light and then he saw the remains of the lizard fed by the martinés and Tata Onsing, moaning in pain,
welcoming his death. Totoy left the place leaving Richard behind.

The bird fed on his knees making him cry in pain causing him to open his mouth and the bird snipped his
tongue. The martinés bent to his ear and spoke of the secret memory.

16
 END OF SERVICE BY GABRIELA LEE

“End of Service” focuses on Aya, whose mother, an overseas Filipino worker, dies while abroad. We are
very excited to have Gabriela here at Rich in Color to talk about OFWs, her experiences in Singapore, and
writing “End of Service.”Imagine being told by your mother or your father that you need to grow up with
just one parent, or that you need to live with your aunt or uncle, your grandparents, some distant relative.
And that it’s not because your parents are splitting up, or because they aren’t getting along. It’s because
they have to work. And their job requires them to be overseas: cleaning someone else’s kitchen, driving
someone else’s car, sailing someone else’s ship, looking after someone else’s children.

There are about 96 million Filipinos, according to the 2013 census. Roughly 2.2 million of them are
overseas Filipino workers, commonly abbreviated to OFWs. Out of these, about 51% of them are
women, and most of them are working as laborers or unskilled workers. This means that many of them are
working as domestic helpers, caretakers, and other service jobs — the jobs that many people are not

17
interested in doing. And because these are jobs that pretty much scrape the bottom of the barrel, it’s not
surprising to know that they’re not treated well.

We hear stories about them all the time: how an OFW was beaten by her employer, earning her bruises that
stretch across her back like continents. How they are underfed and overworked, denied a single day off to
rest or to socialize. How stricter measures are in place: to deny them entry in a mall because their
congregation frightens other shoppers, to bar them from meeting in public places because it sullies the
streets. Their services are sold legally (for the most part), but it’s easy enough to commodify them; after all,
many agencies reason, there are more desperate men and women willing to do anything to work abroad and
give their families a better life. Bodies of OFWs are sent back in boxes, kept in refridgerated storage in
Manila, waiting for their families to come and pick them up.

Some of them have been waiting for a long, long time.

Of course, this is just one of the symptoms of a greater problem, one that has to do with Philippine
governance and economics and the great postcolonial problem of colonized states — especially since the
Philippines was thrice-colonized by Spain, the United States, and Japan. (You can look it up, if you want
to: Jose Antonio Vargas’ essay, “My Life As An Undocumented Immigrant” is a great place to start. Other
good reads are Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Vicente L. Rafael’s Contracting
Colonialism.) But this was where I wanted to start: talking about why Filipinos thought that it was the
highest honor to be able to work Abroad, as in, with a captial A.

They said that everything would be better Abroad; life would be easier Abroad; there would be no more
problems like lack of food or shelter or basic health services Abroad.

Of course, it helped that I worked abroad for about four years, during my mid-twenties. I worked in
Singapore, which is close enough to the Philippines that I could fly home more than once every year. And
unlike many of my kababayans, I had a relatively comfortable job as a content creator for a online gaming
platform. I had friends who are Singaporeans, Malaysians, South Asians. I spoke and wrote English well
enough to be mistaken as not Filipino.

But I also knew that as soon as I stepped inside the immigration offices for the renewal of my work visa,
everything changed. By virtue of carrying a Philippine passport, I was branded as an OFW. Never mind
that I wasn’t working for my family, or for a better life, or for the hundred thousand other reasons that most
OFWs have. I was seen as a domestic worker, a caretaker, household help.

And I felt humbled, and guilty, and helpless.

When I came back to teach at the University of the Philippines, I was intensely aware that the world had
shifted. More and more Filipinos were deployed abroad, legally or illegally, with every passing week.
Aya’s story in “End of Service” started out as a reflection of my students, those whose parents or relatives
or siblings were working as OFWs. Once they had known that I also worked in Singapore, their stories
spilled out — in class discussion, in their own writing. I could feel the mingled pride and pain, the struggles
and the sacrifices and yes, even the selfishness that they dealt with every day.

I also wondered how far we would go, as Filipinos, in order to sacrifice ourselves in order to make sure that
our loved ones would have a better life; how far the Philippine government might go in encouraging
Filipinos to pursue work abroad and contribute to the country’s economy. OFW remittances were the
biggest contributor to the Philippines’ GDP in the past few years. Who knows the lengths a country’s
government might go in order to encourage this kind of economic growth?

I wrote “End of Service” about two days before the deadline. Two stories influenced me in writing this: the
excellent “Woman in a Box” by Jose Dalisay Jr., which became the first chapter of his Man Asia-longlisted

18
novel, Soledad’s Sister, and “Feasting” by Joshua Lim So, from Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 2,
which is a fantastically horrific tale that spins Filipino mythic tropes into a story about biting the hand that
feeds you (quite literally). Both stories talked, directly and indirectly, about the OFW experience and I
wanted to continue the discussion and carry it into a more distinctive and urban SF-y vein.

The process of writing was both cathartic and frightening. I wrote the story during the time when my
boyfriend’s good friend had just died and we were attending the wake for three evenings straight, going
home in the early hours of the morning, and then staggering to school to teach. Aya was an amalgamation
of students, both real and imagined: I knew that she had to be aware of her mother’s sacrifice, but she was
also selfish in her own way. After all, she was receiving the bulk of her mother’s largesse without any of
the labor that went along with it. So this was a chance to see how she would deal with the fact that first, she
thought her mother was dead, and second, that her mother would continue to support her — but at a price.

The ending was the real struggle for me. In fact, that part was where I continuously revised, even after
Alisa and Julia, the editors of Kaleidoscope, accepted the manuscript, simply because bits and pieces were
still falling off from it. I’m actually pretty thankful that they worked intensively with me on it, and I think
it’s better now in it’s final form than it was when it started. (Of course, I say that now, but each round of
editing left me weeping and gnashing my teeth, wondering how I was going to pull off another minor
miracle.)

Ultimately, I wanted to write this story for Filipino readers: for the teenagers and adults who had
experienced what Aya experienced, even for just a fraction of it, and perhaps feel that they are not alone in
this world. I also wanted to write it for others, for non-Filipinos, who might have encountered an OFW
working alongside them, with them, and particularly, for them. Maybe it will remind the reader that they
aren’t just a set of hands and feet, but people with thoughts and feelings and history, and treat them as they
would any other human being. And not just Filipinos, but workers and laborers who made the godawful
decision of having to leave their families and homes behind, not because they wanted to, but because it
became a decision between life and death.

19
 THE PENOLOPIAD BY MARGARET ARTWOOD

Now that I’m dead I know everything. This is what I wished would happen, but like so many of my wishes
it failed to come true. I know only a few factoids that I didn’t know before. It’s much too high a price to
pay for the satisfaction of curiosity, needless to say.
Since being dead — since achieving this state of bonelessness, liplessness, breastlessness — I’ve learned
some things I would rather not know, as one does when listening at windows or opening other people’s
letters. You think you’d like to read minds? Think again.

Down here everyone arrives with a sack, like the sacks used to keep the winds in, but each of these sacks is
full of words — words you’ve spoken, words you’ve heard, words that have been said about you. Some
sacks are very small, others large; my own is of a reasonable size, though a lot of the words in it concern
my eminent husband. What a fool he made of me, some say. It was a specialty of his: making fools. He got
away with everything, which was another of his specialties: getting away.

He was always so plausible. Many people have believed that his version of events was the true one, give or
take a few murders, a few beautiful seductresses, a few one-eyed monsters. Even I believed him, from time
to time. I knew he was tricky and a liar, I just didn’t think he would play his tricks and try out his lies on
me. Hadn’t I been faithful? Hadn’t I waited, and waited, and waited, despite the temptation — almost the
compulsion — to do otherwise? And what did I amount to, once the official version gained ground? An
edifying legend. A stick used to beat other women with. Why couldn’t they be as considerate, as
trustworthy, as all-suffering as I had been? That was the line they took, the singers, the yarn-spinners.
Don’t follow my example, I want to scream in your ears — yes, yours! But when I try to scream, I sound
like an owl.

Of course I had inklings, about his slipperiness, his wiliness, his foxiness, his — how can I put this? — his
unscrupulousness, but I turned a blind eye. I kept my mouth shut; or, if I opened it, I sang his praises. I
didn’t contradict, I didn’t ask awkward questions, I didn’t dig deep. I wanted happy endings in those days,
and happy endings are best achieved by keeping the right doors locked and going to sleep during the
rampages.

But after the main events were over and things had become less legendary, I realized how many people
were laughing at me behind my back — how they were jeering, making jokes about me, jokes both clean
and dirty; how they were turning me into a story, or into several stories, though not the kind of stories I’d
prefer to hear about myself. What can a woman do when scandalous gossip travels the world? If she
defends herself she sounds guilty. So I waited some more.

20
Now that all the others have run out of air, it’s my turn to do a little story-making. I owe it to myself. I’ve
had to work myself up to it: it’s a low art, tale-telling. Old women go in for it, strolling beggars, blind
singers, maidservants, children — folks with time on their hands. Once, people would have laughed if I’d
tried to play the minstrel — there’s nothing more preposterous than an aristocrat fumbling around with the
arts — but who cares about public opinion now? The opinion of the people down here: the opinion of
shadows, of echoes. So I’ll spin a thread of my own.

The difficulty is that I have no mouth through which I can speak. I can’t make myself understood, not in
your world, the world of bodies, of tongues and fingers; and most of the time I have no listeners, not on
your side of the river. Those of you who may catch the odd whisper, the odd squeak, so easily mistake my
words for breezes rustling the dry reeds, for bats at twilight, for bad dreams.

But I’ve always been of a determined nature. Patient, they used to call me. I like to see a thing through to
the end.

21
 MALINCHE BY LAURA ESQUIVEL

Malinche tells the story of the “passionate love affair” between Malinalli and Cortés. Malinalli gets sold
into slavery at age 5, continuing to get shifted around to different owners until her adolescence, when she’s
given to the Spaniards. She starts out by working for one of Cortés’s men, and as her gift with languages
becomes clear, she moves up in status to become the Spaniards’ interpreter.

By then she has caught Cortés’s eye, and the two develop a secret attraction to one another. Taking
advantage of the situation one day when he sees her bathing alone in a lake, Cortés rapes Malinalli, then
reassigns her to be his woman. This is one of the many major disconnects in the story. She falls in love with
him, though they have a tempestuous “relationship” (I say “relationship” because it is clear throughout the
book that she is still his slave, and he is still the one with all the power). After bearing witness to his thirst
for power and the brutal slaughter of thousands of people, Malinalli is left trying to reconcile her love for
this man and her horror at his actions, as well as the role she has played in helping him. There is no
believable love story here; it’s all about rape, abuse, control, and victimization.

The story was intriguing and filled with wonderful details of Malinalli’s life as both a child and an adult,
the novel itself is a little too meandering as it weaves back and forth in time. However, the story is so
unique and refreshing a topic that it is hard to put down. After reading Malinche, I had gained new
knowledge about the history of Mexico and the New World, and felt compelled to learn more.

Malinche is a remarkable book for those who enjoy historical novels. While the events are based on actual
facts, the story of Malinalli and Hernan is fictionalized. Laura Esquivel writes these history-based
characters in a way that that allows the reader to get into their minds, fostering an understanding of what
prompted these two people to get together and make the choices they did. It is also a fascinating tale of a
woman whose fate was sealed when she became the translator for Hernan Cortes, a pivotal point in history.

THE GOOD BODY BY EVE ENSLER

22
CHAPTER ONE

When I was a little girl people used to ask me, What do you want to be when you grow up? Good, I would
say. I want to be good. Becoming good was harder than becoming a doctor or an astronaut or a lifeguard.
There are tests to pass to become those things–you have to learn dissection or conquer gravity or practice
treading water.

Becoming good was not like that. It was abstract. It felt completely out of reach. It became the only thing
that mattered to me. If I could be good, everything would be all right. I would fit in. I would be popular. I
would skip death and go straight to heaven. If you asked me now what this means, to be good, I still don’t
know exactly.

When I was growing up in the fifties, “good” was simply what girls were supposed to be. They were good.
They were pretty, perky. They had a blond Clairol wave in their hair. They wore girdles and waist cinchers
and pumps. They got married. They looked married.
They waited to be given permission. They kept their legs together, even during sex.

In recent years, good girls join the Army. They climb the corporate ladder. They go to the gym. They
accessorize. They wear pointy, painful shoes. They wear lipstick if they’re lesbians; they wear lipstick if
they’re not. They don’t eat too much. They don’t eat at all. They stay perfect. They stay thin. I could never
be good.

This feeling of badness lives in every part of my being. Call it anxiety or despair. Call it guilt or shame. It
occupies me everywhere. The older, seemingly clearer and wiser I get, the more devious, globalized, and
terrorist the badness becomes. I think for many of us–well, for most of us–well, maybe for all of us–there is
one particular part of our body where the badness manifests itself, our thighs, our butt, our breasts, our hair,
our nose, our little toe. You know what I’m talking about?

It doesn’t matter where I’ve been in the world, whether it’s Tehran where women are–smashing and
remodeling their noses to looks less Iranian, or in Beijing where they are breaking their legs and adding
bone to be taller, or in Dallas where they are surgically whittling their feet in order to fit into Manolo
Blahniks or Jimmy Choos.

Everywhere, the women I meet generally hate one particular part of their bodies. They spend most of their
lives fixing it, shrinking it. They have medicine cabinets with products devoted to transforming it. They
have closets full of clothes that cover or enhance it. It’s as if they’ve been given their own little country
called their body, which they get to tyrannize, clean up, or control while they lose all sight of the world.

What I can’t believe is that someone like me, a radical feminist for nearly thirty years, could spend this
much time thinking about my stomach. It has become my tormentor, my distracter; it’s my most serious
committed relationship. It has protruded through my clothes, my confidence, and my ability to work. I’ve
tried to sedate it, educate it, embrace it, and most of all, erase it.

THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME (A NOVEL BY MARK

HADDON)

It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs
Shears' house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they
think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There
was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the

23
dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I decided that the dog was probably killed
with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a
garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer for example, or a road accident.
But I could not be certain about this.

I went through Mrs Shears' gate, closing it behind me. I walked onto her lawn and knelt beside the dog. I
put my hand on the muzzle of the dog. It was still warm.

The dog was called Wellington. It belonged to Mrs Shears who was our friend. She lived on the opposite
side of the road, two houses to the left.

Wellington was a poodle. Not one of the small poodles that have hairstyles but a big poodle. It had curly
black fur, but when you got close you could see that the skin underneath the fur was a very pale yellow,
like chicken.

I stroked Wellington and wondered who had killed him, and why.

My name is Christopher John Francis Boone. I know all the countries of the world and their capital cities
and every prime number up to 7,057.

Eight years ago, when I first met Siobhan, she showed me this picture

and I knew that it meant 'sad,' which is what I felt when I found the dead dog.

Then she showed me this picture

and I knew that it meant 'happy', like when I'm reading about the Apollo space missions, or when I am still
awake at 3 am or 4 am in the morning and I can walk up and down the street and pretend that I am the only
person in the whole world.

Then she drew some other pictures

24
but I was unable to say what these meant.

I got Siobhan to draw lots of these faces and then write down next to them exactly what they meant. I kept
the piece the piece of paper in my pocket and took it out when I didn't understand what someone was
saying. But it was very difficult to decide which of the diagrams was most like the face they were making
because people's faces move very quickly.

When I told Siobhan that I was doing this, she got out a pencil and another piece of paper and said it
probably made people feel very

and then she laughed. So I tore the original piece of paper up and threw it away. And Siobhan apologised.
And now if I don't know what someone is saying I ask them what they mean or I walk away.

I pulled the fork out of the dog and lifted him into my arms and hugged him. He was leaking blood from
the fork-holes.

I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and
concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.

I had been hugging the dog for 4 minutes when I heard screaming. I looked up and saw Mrs Shears running
towards me from the patio. She was wearing pyjamas and a housecoat. Her toenails were painted bright
pink and she had no shoes on.

She was shouting, 'What in fuck's name have you done to my dog?'.

I do not like people shouting at me. It makes me scared that they are going to hit me or touch me and I do
not know what is going to happen.

'Let go of the dog,' she shouted. 'Let go of the fucking dog for Christ's sake.'

I put the dog down on the lawn and moved back 2 metres.

She bent down. I thought she was going to pick the dog up herself, but she didn't. Perhaps she noticed how
much blood there was and didn't want to get dirty. Instead, she started screaming again.

I put my hands over my ears and closed my eyes and rolled forward till I was hunched up with my forehead
pressed onto the grass. The grass was wet and cold. It was nice.

25
This is a murder mystery novel.

Siobhan said that I should write something I would want to read myself. Mostly I read books about science
and maths. I do not like proper novels. In proper novels people say things like, 'I am veined with iron, with
silver and with streaks of common mud. I cannot contract into the firm fist which those clench who do not
depend on stimulus'1 . What does this mean? I do not know. Nor does Father. Nor do Siobhan or Mr
Jeavons. I have asked them.

Siobhan has long blonde hair and wears glasses which are made of green plastic. And Mr Jeavons smells of
soap and wears brown shoes that have approximately 60 tiny circular holes in each of them.

But I do like murder mystery novels. So I am writing a murder mystery novel.

In a murder mystery novel someone has to work out who the murderer is and then catch them. It is a
puzzle. If it is a good puzzle you can sometimes work out the answer before the end of the book.

Siobhan said that the book should begin with something to grab people's attention. That is why I started
with the dog. I also started with the dog because it happened to me and I find it hard to imagine things
which did not happen to me.

Siobhan read the first page and said that it was different. She put this word into inverted commas by
making the wiggly quotation sign with her first and second fingers. She said that it was usually people who
were killed in murder mystery novels. I said that two dogs were killed in The Hound of the Baskervilles,
the hound itself and James Mortimer's spaniel, but Siobhan said they weren't the victims of the murder, Sir
Charles Baskerville was. She said that this was because readers cared more about people than dogs, so if a
person was killed in the book readers would want to carry on reading.

I said that I wanted to write about something real and I knew people who had died but I did not know any
people who had been killed, except Edward's father from school, Mr Paulson, and that was a gliding
accident, not murder, and I didn't really know him. I also said that I cared about dogs because they were
faithful and honest, and some dogs were cleverer and more interesting than some people. Steve, for
example, who comes to centre on Thursdays, needs help to eat his food and could not even fetch a stick.
Siobhan asked me not to say this to Steve's mother.

Then the police arrived. I like the police. They have uniforms and numbers and you know what they are
meant to be doing. There was a policewoman and a policeman. The policewoman had a little hole in her
tights on her left ankle and a red scratch in the middle of the hole. The policeman had a big orange leaf
stuck to the bottom of his shoe which was poking out from one side.

The policewoman put her arms round Mrs Shears and led her back towards the house.

I lifted my head off the grass.

The policeman squatted down beside me and said, 'Would you like to tell me what's going on here, young
man?'.

I sat up and said 'The dog is dead.'

'I'd got that far,' he said.

I said, 'I think someone killed the dog.'

'How old are you?' he asked.

I replied, 'I am 15 years and 3 months and 2 days.'

26
'And what, precisely, were you doing in the garden?' he asked.

'I was holding the dog,' I replied.

'And why were you holding the dog?' he asked.

This was a difficult question. It was something I wanted to do. I like dogs. It made me sad to see that the
dog was dead.

I like policemen, too, and I wanted to answer the question properly, but the policeman did not give me
enough time to work out the correct answer.

'Why were you holding the dog?' he asked again.

'I like dogs,' I said.

'Did you kill the dog?' he asked.

I said, 'I did not kill the dog.'

'Is this your fork?' he asked.

I said, 'No.'

'You seem very upset about this,' he said.

He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly. They were stacking up in my head
like loaves in the factory where Uncle Terry works. The factory is a bakery and he operates the slicing
machines. And sometimes the slicer is not working fast enough but the bread keeps coming and there is a
blockage. I sometimes think of my mind as a machine, but not always as a bread-slicing machine. It makes
it easier to explain to other people what is going on inside it.

The policeman said, 'I am going to ask you once again…'

I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father
calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside
world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway
between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is
all you can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else.

The policeman took hold of my arm and lifted me onto my feet.

I didn't like him touching me like this.

And this is when I hit him.

This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them. Here is a joke, as an
example. It is one of Father's.

His face was drawn but the curtains were real.

I know why this is meant to be funny. I asked. It is because drawn has three meanings, and they
are 1) drawn with a pencil, 2) exhausted, and 3) pulled across a window, and meaning 1 refers to both the
face and the curtains, meaning 2 refers only to the face, and meaning 3 refers only to the curtains.

27
If I try to say the joke to myself, making the word mean the three different things at the same time, it is like
hearing three different pieces of music at the same time which is uncomfortable and confusing and not nice
like white noise. It is like three people trying to talk to you at the same time about different things.

And that is why there are no jokes in this book.

The policeman looked at me for a while without speaking. Then he said, 'I am arresting you for assaulting a
police officer.'

This made me feel a lot calmer because it is what policeman say on television and in films.

Then he said, 'I strongly advise you to get into the back of the police car because if you try any of that
monkey-business again, you little shit, I will seriously lose my rag. Is that understood?'.

I walked over to the police car which was parked just outside the gate. He opened the back door and I got
inside. He climbed into the driver's seat and made a call on his radio to the policewoman who was still
inside the house. He said, 'The little bugger just had a pop at me, Kate. Can you hang on with Mrs S while I
drop him off at the station? I'll get Tony to swing by and pick you up.'

And she said, 'Sure. I'll catch you later.'

The policeman said, 'Okey-doke,' and we drove off.

The police car smelt of hot plastic and aftershave and take-away chips.

I watched the sky as we drove towards the town centre. It was a clear night and you could see the Milky
Way.

Some people think the Milky Way is a long line of stars, but it isn't. Our galaxy is a huge disc of stars
millions of light years across and the solar system is somewhere near the outside edge of the disc.

When you look in direction A, at 90º to the disc, you don't see many stars. But when you look in direction
B, you see lots more stars because you are looking into the main body of the galaxy, and because the
galaxy is a disc you see a stripe of stars.

And then I thought about how, for a long time scientists were puzzled by the fact that the sky is dark at
night, even though there are billions of stars in the universe and there must be stars in every direction you

28
look, so that the sky should be full of starlight because there is very little in the way to stop the light
reaching earth.

Then they worked out that the universe was expanding, that the stars were all rushing away from one
another after the Big Bang, and the further the stars were away from us the faster they were moving, some
of them nearly as fast as the speed of light, which was why their light never reached us.

I like this fact. It is something you can work out in your own mind just by looking at the sky above your
head at night and thinking without having to ask anyone.

And when the universe has finished exploding all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been thrown
into the air, and they will come to a halt and they will all begin to fall towards the centre of the universe
again. And then there will be nothing to stop us seeing all the stars in the world because they will all be
moving towards us, gradually faster and faster, and we will know that the world is going to end soon
because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions
and billions of stars, all falling.

Except that no one will see this because there will be no people left on the earth to see it. They will
probably have become extinct by then. And even if there are people still in existence they will not see it
because the light will be so bright and hot that everyone will be burnt to death, even if they live in tunnels.

Chapters in books are usually given the cardinal numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and so on. But I have decided to
give my chapters prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and so on because I like prime numbers.

This is how you work out what prime numbers are.

First, you write down all the positive whole numbers in the world.

Then you take away all the numbers that are multiples of 2. Then you take away all the numbers that are
multiples of 3. Then you take away all the numbers that are multiples of 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 and so on. The
numbers that are left are the prime numbers.

29
The rule for working out prime numbers is really simple, but no one has ever worked out a simple formula
for telling you whether a very big number is a prime number or what the next one will be. If a number is
really, really big, it can take a computer years to work out whether it is a prime number.

Prime numbers are useful for writing codes and in America they are classed as Military Material and if you
find one over 100 digits long you have to tell the CIA and they buy it off you for $10,000. But it would not
be a very good way of making a living.

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like
life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking
about them.

When I got to the police station they made me take the laces out of my shoes and empty my pockets at the
front desk in case I had anything in them that I could use to kill myself or escape or attack a policeman
with.

The sergeant behind the desk had very hairy hands and he had bitten his nails so much that they had bled.

This is what I had in my pockets:

1. A Swiss Army Knife with 13 attachments including a wire-stripper and a saw and a toothpick and
tweezers.
2. A piece of string.
3. A piece of a wooden puzzle which looked like this
4. 3 pellets of rat food for Toby, my rat.
5. £1.47 (this was made up of a £1 coin, a 20p coin, two 10p coins, a 5p coin and a 2p coin)
6. A red paperclip
7. A key for the front door.

I was also wearing my watch and they wanted me to leave this at the desk as well but I said that I needed to
keep my watch on because I needed to know exactly what time it was. And when they tried to take it off me
I screamed, so they let me keep it on.

They asked me if I had any family. I said I did. They asked me who my family was. I said it was Father, but
Mother was dead. And I said it was also Uncle Terry but he was in Sunderland and he was Father's brother,
and it was my grandparents, too, but three of them were dead and Grandma Burton was in a home because
she had senile dementia and thought that I was someone on television.

Then they asked me for Father's phone number.

30
I told them that he had two numbers, one for at home and one which was a mobile phone and I said both of
them.

It was nice in the police cell. It was almost a perfect cube, 2 metres long by 2 metres wide by 2 metres high.
It contained approximately 8 cubic metres of air. It had a small window with bars and, on the opposite side,
a metal door with a long, thin hatch near the floor for sliding trays of food into the cell and a sliding hatch
higher up so that policemen could look in and check that prisoners hadn't escaped or committed suicide.
There was also a padded bench.

I wondered how I would escape if I was in a story. It would be difficult because the only things I had were
my clothes and my shoes which had no laces in them.

I decided that my best plan would be to wait for a really sunny day and then use my glasses to focus the
sunlight on a piece of my clothing and start a fire. I would then make my escape when they saw the smoke
and took me out of the cell. And if they didn't notice I would be able to wee on the clothes and put them
out.

I wondered whether Mrs Shears had told the police that I had killed Wellington and whether, when the
police found out that she had lied, she would go to prison. Because telling lies about people is
called Slander.

I find people confusing.

This is for two main reasons.

The first main reason is that people do a lot of talking without using any words. Siobhan says that if you
raise one eyebrow it can mean lots of different things. It can mean 'I want to do sex with you' and it can
also mean 'I think that what you just said was very stupid.'

Siobhan also says that if you close your mouth and breath out loudly through your nose it can mean that
you are relaxed, or that you are bored, or that you are angry and it all depends on how much air comes out
of your nose and how fast and what shape your mouth is when you do it and how you are sitting and what
you said just before and hundreds of other things which are too complicated to work out in a few seconds.

The second main reason is that people often talk using metaphors. These are examples of metaphors

I laughed my socks off.

He was the apple of her eye.
They had a skeleton in the cupboard.
We had a real pig of a day.
The dog was stone dead.

The word metaphor means carrying something from one place to another, and it comes from the Greek
words meta (which means from one place to another) and ferein (which means to carry) and it is when
you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word metaphor is a
metaphor.

I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people do not have skeletons in their
cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because

31
imagining an apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes
you forget what the person was talking about.

My name is a metaphor. It means carrying Christ and it comes from the Greek words cristos (which

means Jesus Christ) and ferein and it was the name given to St Christopher because he carried Jesus Christ
across a river.

This makes you wonder` what he was called before he carried Christ across the river. But he wasn't called
anything because this is an apocryphal story which means that it is a lie, too.

Mother used to say that it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and
helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean
me.

It was 1:12 am when Father arrived at the police station. I did not see him until 1:28 am but I knew he was
there because I could hear him.

He was shouting, 'I want to see my son,' and 'Why the hell is he locked up?' and, 'Of course I'm bloody
angry.'

Then I heard a policeman telling him to calm down. Then I heard nothing for a long while.

At 1:28 am a policeman opened the door of the cell and told me that there was someone to see me.

I stepped outside. Father was standing in the corridor. He held up his right hand and spread his fingers out
in a fan. I held up my left hand and spread my fingers out in a fan and we made our fingers and thumbs
touch each other. We do this because sometimes Father wants to give me a hug, but I do not like hugging
people, so we do this instead, and it means that he loves me.

Then the policeman told us to follow him down the corridor to another room. In the room was a table and
three chairs. He told us to sit down on the far side of the table and he sat down on the other side. There was
a tape recorder on the table and I asked whether I was going to be interviewed and he was going to record
the interview.

He said, 'I don't think there will be any need for that.'

He was an inspector. I could tell because he wasn't wearing a uniform. He also had a very hairy nose. It
looked as if there were two very small mice hiding in his nostrils2 .

He said, 'I have spoken to your father and he says that you didn't mean to hit the policeman.'

I didn't say anything because this wasn't a question.

He said, 'Did you mean to hit the policeman?'.

I said, 'Yes.'

He squeezed his face and said, 'But you didn't meant to hurt the policeman?'.

I thought about this and said, 'No. I didn't meant to hurt the policeman. I just wanted him to stop touching
me.'

Then he said, 'You know that it is wrong to hit a policeman, don't you?'.

32
I said , 'I do.'

He was quiet for a few seconds, then he asked, 'Did you kill the dog, Christopher?'.

I said, 'I didn't kill the dog.'

He said, 'Do you know that it is wrong to lie to a policeman and that you can get into a very great deal of
trouble if you do?'.

I said, 'Yes.'

He said, 'So, do you know who killed the dog?'.

I said, 'No.'

He said, 'Are you telling the truth?'.

I said, 'Yes. I always tell the truth.'

And he said, 'Right. I am going to give you a caution.'

I asked, 'Is that going to be on a piece of paper like a certificate I can keep?'

He replied, 'No, a caution means that we are going to keep a record of what you did, that you hit a
policeman but that it was an accident and that you didn't mean to hurt the policeman.'

I said 'But it wasn't an accident.'

And Father said, 'Christopher, please.'

The policeman closed his mouth and breathed out loudly through his nose and said, 'If you get into any
more trouble we will take out this record and see that you have been given a caution and we will take things
much more seriously. Do you understand what I'm saying?'.

I said that I understood.

Then he said that we could go and he stood up and opened the door and we walked out into the corridor and
back to the front desk where I picked up my Swiss Army Knife and my piece of string and the piece of the
wooden puzzle and the 3 pellets of rat food for Toby and my £1.47 and the paperclip and my front door key
which were all in a little plastic bag and we went out to Father's car which was parked outside and we drove
home.

I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was a good person. But it is not because I am a
good person. It is because I can't tell lies.

Mother was a small person who smelt nice. And she sometimes wore a fleece with a zip down the front
which was pink and it had a tiny label which said Berghaus on the left bosom.

A lie is when you say something happened which didn't happen. But there is only ever one thing which
happened at a particular time and a particular place. And there are an infinite number of things which didn't
happen at that time and that place. And if I think about something which didn't happen I start thinking
about all the other things which didn't happen.

For example, this morning for breakfast I had Ready Brek and some hot raspberry milkshake. But if I say
that I actually had Shreddies and a mug of tea 3 I start thinking about Coco-Pops and lemonade and Porridge

33
and Dr Pepper and how I wasn't eating my breakfast in Egypt and there wasn't a rhinoceros in the room and
Father wasn't wearing a diving suit and so on and even writing this makes me feel shaky and scared, like I
do when I'm standing on the top of a very tall building and there are thousands of houses and cars and
people below me and my head is so full of all these things that I'm afraid that I'm going to forget to stand
up straight and hang onto the rail and I'm going to fall over and be killed.

This is another reason why I don't like proper novels, because they are lies about things which didn't
happen and they make me feel shaky and scared.

A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS (A NOVEL BY KHALED HOSSEINI)

Mariam was five years old the first time she heard the word harami.

It happened on a Thursday. It must have, because Mariam remembered that she had been restless and
preoccupied that day, the way she was only on Thursdays, the day when Jalil visited her at the kolba. To
pass the time until the moment that she would see him at last, crossing the knee-high grass in the clearing
and waving, Mariam had climbed a chair and taken down her mother's Chinese tea set. The tea set was the
sole relic that Mariam's mother, Nana, had of her own mother, who had died when Nana was two. Nana
cherished each blue-and-white porcelain piece, the graceful curve of the pot's spout, the hand-painted
finches and chrysanthemums, the dragon on the sugar bowl, meant to ward off evil.

It was this last piece that slipped from Mariam's fingers, that fell to the wooden floorboards of the kolba
and shattered.

When Nana saw the bowl, her face flushed red and her upper lip shivered, and her eyes, both the lazy one
and the good, settled on Mariam in a flat, unblinking way. Nana looked so mad that Mariam feared the jinn
would enter her mother's body again. But the jinn didn't come, not that time. Instead, Nana grabbed Mariam
by the wrists, pulled her close, and, through gritted teeth, said, "You are a clumsy little harami. This is my
reward for everything I've endured. An heirloom-breaking, clumsy little harami."

At the time, Mariam did not understand. She did not know what this word haramibastardmeant. Nor was
she old enough to appreciate the injustice, to see that it is the creators of the harami who are culpable, not
the harami, whose only sin is being born. Mariam did surmise, by the way Nana said the word, that it was
an ugly, loathsome thing to be a harami, like an insect, like the scurrying cockroaches Nana was always
cursing and sweeping out of the kolba.

Later, when she was older, Mariam did understand. It was the way Nana uttered the wordnot so much

34
saying it as spitting it at herthat made Mariam feel the full sting of it. She understood then what Nana
meant, that a harami was an unwanted thing; that she, Mariam, was an illegitimate person who would never
have legitimate claim to the things other people had, things such as love, family, home, acceptance.

Jalil never called Mariam this name. Jalil said she was his little flower. He was fond of sitting her on his lap
and telling her stories, like the time he told her that Herat, the city where Mariam was born, in 1959, had
once been the cradle of Persian culture, the home of writers, painters, and Sufis.

"You couldn't stretch a leg here without poking a poet in the ass," he laughed. Jalil told her the story of
Queen Gauhar Shad, who had raised the famous minarets as her loving ode to Herat back in the fifteenth
century. He described to her the green wheat fields of Herat, the orchards, the vines pregnant with plump
grapes, the city's crowded, vaulted bazaars.

"There is a pistachio tree," Jalil said one day, "and beneath it, Mariam jo, is buried none other than the great
poet Jami." He leaned in and whispered, "Jami lived over five hundred years ago. He did. I took you there
once, to the tree. You were little. You wouldn't remember."

It was true. Mariam didn't remember. And though she would live the first fifteen years of her life within
walking distance of Herat, Mariam would never see this storied tree. She would never see the famous
minarets up close, and she would never pick fruit from Herat's orchards or stroll in its fields of wheat. But
whenever Jalil talked like this, Mariam would listen with enchantment. She would admire Jalil for his vast
and worldly knowledge. She would quiver with pride to have a father who knew such things.

"What rich lies!" Nana said after Jalil left. "Rich man telling rich lies. He never took you to any tree. And
don't let him charm you. He betrayed us, your beloved father. He cast us out. He cast us out of his big fancy
house like we were nothing to him. He did it happily." Mariam would listen dutifully to this. She never
dared say to Nana how much she disliked her talking this way about Jalil. The truth was that around Jalil,
Mariam did not feel at all like a harami. For an hour or two every Thursday, when Jalil came to see her, all
smiles and gifts and endearments, Mariam felt deserving of all the beauty and bounty that life had to give.
And, for this, Mariam loved Jalil.

Even if she had to share him.

Jalil had three wives and nine children, nine legitimate children, all of whom were strangers to Mariam. He
was one of Herat's wealthiest men. He owned a cinema, which Mariam had never seen, but at her insistence
Jalil had described it to her, and so she knew that the façade was made of blue-and-tan terra-cotta tiles, that
it had private balcony seats and a trellised ceiling. Double swinging doors opened into a tiled lobby, where
posters of Hindi films were encased in glass displays. On Tuesdays, Jalil said one day, kids got free ice
cream at the concession stand.

Nana smiled demurely when he said this. She waited until he had left the kolba, before snickering and
saying, "The children of strangers get ice cream. What do you get, Mariam? Stories of ice cream."

In addition to the cinema, Jalil owned land in Karokh, land in Farah, three carpet stores, a clothing shop,
and a black 1956 Buick Roadmaster. He was one of Herat's best-connected men, friend of the mayor and
the provincial governor. He had a cook, a driver, and three housekeepers.

Nana had been one of the housekeepers. Until her belly began to swell.

When that happened, Nana said, the collective gasp of Jalil's family sucked the air out of Herat. His in-laws
swore blood would flow. The wives demanded that he throw her out. Nana's own father, who was a lowly
stone carver in the nearby village of Gul Daman, disowned her. Disgraced, he packed his things and
boarded a bus to Iran, never to be seen or heard from again.

"Sometimes," Nana said early one morning, as she was feeding the chickens outside the kolba, "I wish my
father had had the stomach to sharpen one of his knives and do the honorable thing. It might have been

35
better for me." She tossed another handful of seeds into the coop, paused, and looked at Mariam. "Better for
you too, maybe. It would have spared you the grief of knowing that you are what you are. But he was a
coward, my father. He didn't have the dil, the heart, for it."

Jalil didn't have the dil either, Nana said, to do the honorable thing. To stand up to his family, to his wives
and in-laws, and accept responsibility for what he had done. Instead, behind closed doors, a face-saving
deal had quickly been struck. The next day, he had made her gather her few things from the servants'
quarters, where she'd been living, and sent her off.

"You know what he told his wives by way of defense? That I forced myself on him. That it was my fault.
Didi? You see? This is what it means to be a woman in this world." Nana put down the bowl of chicken
feed. She lifted Mariam's chin with a finger. "Look at me, Mariam."

Reluctantly, Mariam did.

Nana said, "Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man's
accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam."

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY ( A NOVEL BY NEIL GAIMAN)

36
 Part One
The Escape Artist

In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention,
Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy,
sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by
dreams of Harry Houdini. "To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were
one and the same thing," he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angouleme or to the editor of
Comics Journal. "You weren't the same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdini's first
magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started. It was called 'Metamorphosis': It was never
just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation." The truth was that, as a kid, Sammy had
only a casual interest, at best, in Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great heroes were Nikola Tesla,
Louis Pasteur, and Jack London. Yet his account of his role--of the role of his own imagination--in the
Escapist's birth, like all of his best fabulations, rang true. His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they
were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.

Houdini was a hero to little men, city boys, and Jews; Samuel Louis Klayman was all three. He was
seventeen when the adventures began: bigmouthed, perhaps not quite as quick on his feet as he liked to
imagine, and tending to be, like many optimists, a little excitable. he was not, in any conventional way,
handsome. His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin pointed, with pouting lips and a blunt,
quarrelsome nose. He slouched, and wore clothes badly: he always looked as though he had just been
jumped for his lunch money. He went forward each morning with the hairless cheek of innocence itself, but
by noon a clean shave was no more than a memory, a hoboish penumbra on the jaw not quite sufficient to
make him look tough. He thought of himself as ugly, but this was because he had never seen his face in
repose. He had delivered the Eagle for most of 1931 in order to afford a set of dumbbells, which he had
hefted every morning for the next eight years until his arms, chest, and shoulders were ropy and strong;
polio had left him with the legs of a delicate boy. He stood, in his socks, five feet five inches tall. Like all
of his friends, he considered it a compliment when somebody called him a wiseass. He possessed an
incorrect but fervent understanding of the workings of television, atom power, and antigravity, and
harbored the ambition--one of a thousand--of ending his days on the warm sunny beaches of the Great
Polar Ocean of Venus. An omnivorous reader with a self-improving streak, cozy with Stevenson, London,
and Wells, dutiful about Wolfe, Dreiser, and Dos Passos, idolatrous of S. J. Perelman, his self-improvement
regime masked the usual guilty appetite. In his case the covert passion--one of them, at any rate--was for
those two-bit argosies of blood and wonder, the pulps. He had tracked down and read every biweekly issue
of The Shadow going back to 1933, and he was well on his way to amassing complete runs of The Avenger
and Doc Savage.

The long run of Kavalier & Clay--and the true history of the Escapists birth--began in 1939, toward the end
of October, on the night that Sammy's mother burst into his bedroom, applied the ring and iron knuckles of
her left hand to the side of his cranium, and told him to move over and make room in the bed for his cousin
from Prague. Sammy sat up, heart pounding in the hinges of his jaw. In the livid light of the fluorescent
tube over the kitchen sink, he made out a slender young man of about his own age, slumped like a question
mark against the doorframe, a disheveled pile of newspapers pinned under one arm, the other thrown as if
in shame across his face. This, Mrs. Klayman said, giving Sammy a helpful shove toward the wall, was
Josef Kavalier, her brother Emil's son, who had arrived in Brooklyn tonight on a Greyhound bus, all the
way from San Francisco.

"What's the matter with him?" Sammy said. He slid over until his shoulders touched cold plaster. He was
careful to take both of the pillows with him. "Is he sick?"

"What do you think?" said his mother, slapping now at the vacated expanse of bedsheet, as if to scatter any
offending particles of himself that Sammy might have left behind. She had just come home from her last
night on a two-week graveyard rotation at Bellevue, where she worked as a psychiatric nurse. The stale
breath of the hospital was on her, but the open throat of her uniform gave off a faint whiff of the lavender
water in which she bathed her tiny frame. The natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like
fresh pencil shavings. "He can barely stand on his own two feet"

37
Sammy peered over his mother, trying to get a better look at poor Josef Kavalier in his baggy wool suit. He
had known, dimly, that he had Czech cousins. But his mother had not said a word about any of them
coming to visit, let alone to share Sammy's bed. He wasn't sure just how San Francisco fitted in to the story.

"There you are," his mother said, standing up straight again, apparently satisfied at having driven Sammy
onto the easternmost five inches of the mattress. She turned to Josef Kavalier. "Come here. I want to tell
you something." She grabbed hold of his ears as if taking a jug by the handles, and crushed each of his
cheeks in turn with her lips. "You made it. All right? You're here."

"All right," said her nephew. He did not sound unconvinced.

She handed him a washcloth and went out. As soon as she left, Sammy reclaimed a few precious inches of
mattress while his cousin stood there, rubbing at his mauled cheeks. After a moment, Mrs. Klayman
switched off the light in the kitchen, and they were left in darkness. Sammy heard his cousin take a deep
breath and slowly let it out The stack of newsprint rattled and then hit the floor with a heavy thud of defeat.
His jacket buttons clicked against the back of a chair; his trousers rustled as he stepped out of them; he let
fall one shoe, then the other. His wristwatch chimed against the water glass on the nightstand. Then he and
a gust of chilly air got in under the covers, bearing with them an odor of cigarette, armpit, damp wool, and
something sweet and somehow nostalgic that Sammy presently identified as the smell, on his cousin's
breath, of prunes from the leftover ingot of his mother's "special" meatloaf--prunes were only a small part
of what made it so very special--which he had seen her wrap like a parcel in a sheet of wax paper and set on
a plate in the Frigidaire. So she had known that her nephew would be arriving tonight, had even been
expecting him for supper, and had said nothing about it to Sammy.

Josef Kavalier settled back against the mattress, cleared his throat once, tucked his arms under his head,
and then, as if he had been unplugged, stopped moving. He neither tossed nor fidgeted nor even so much as
flexed a toe. The Big Ben on the nightstand ticked loudly. Josef's breathing thickened and slowed. Sammy
was just wondering if anyone could possibly fall asleep with such abandon when his cousin spoke.

"As soon as I can fetch some money, I will find a lodging, and leave the bed," he said. His accent was
vaguely German, furrowed with an odd Scots pleat.

"That would be nice," Sammy said. "You speak good English."

"Thank you"

"Where'd you learn it?"

"I prefer not to say."

"It's a secret?"

"It is a personal matter."

"Can you tell me what you were doing in California?" said Sammy. "Or is that confidential information
too?"

"I was crossing over from Japan!'

"Japan!" Sammy was sick with envy. He had never gone farther on his soda-straw legs than Buffalo, never
undertaken any crossing more treacherous than the flatulent poison-green ribbon that separated Brooklyn
from Manhattan Island. In that narrow bed, in that bedroom hardly wider than the bed itself, at the back of
an apartment in a solidly lower-middle-class building on Ocean Avenue, with his grandmother's snoring
shaking the walls like a passing trolley, Sammy dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and
transformation and escape. He dreamed with fierce contrivance, transmuting himself into a major American

38
novelist, or a famous smart person, like Clifton Fadiman, or perhaps into a heroic doctor; or developing,
through practice and sheer force of will, the mental powers that would give him a preternatural control over
the hearts and minds of men. In his desk drawer lay--and had lain for some time--the first eleven pages of a
massive autobiographical novel to be entitled either (in the Perelmanian mode) Through Abe Glass,
Darkly or (in the Dreiserian) American Disillusionment (a subject of which he was still by and large
ignorant). He had devoted an embarrassing number of hours of mute concentration--brow furrowed, breath
held--to the development of his brain's latent powers of telepathy and mind control. And he had thrilled to
that Iliad of medical heroics, The Microbe Hunters, ten times at least. But like most natives of Brooklyn,
Sammy considered himself a realist, and in general his escape plans centered around the attainment of
fabulous sums of money.

From the age of six, he had sold seeds, candy bars, houseplants, cleaning fluids, metal polish, magazine
subscriptions, unbreakable combs, and shoelaces door-to-door. In a Zharkov's laboratory on the kitchen
table, he had invented almost functional button-reattachers, tandem bottle openers, and heatless clothes
irons. In more recent years, Sammy's commercial attention had been arrested by the field of professional
illustration. The great commercial illustrators and cartoonists--Rockwell, Leyendecker, Raymond, Caniff--
were at their zenith, and there was a general impression abroad that, at the drawing board, a man could not
only make a good living but alter the very texture and tone of the national mood. In Sammy's closet were
stacked dozens of pads of coarse newsprint, filled with horses, Indians, football heroes, sentient apes,
Fokkers, nymphs, moon rockets, buckaroos, Saracens, tropic jungles, grizzlies, studies of the folds in
women's clothing, the dents in men's hats, the lights in human irises, clouds in the western sky. His grasp of
perspective was tenuous, his knowledge of human anatomy dubious, his line often sketchy--but he was an
enterprising thief. He clipped favorite pages and panels out of newspapers and comic books and pasted
them into a fat notebook: a thousand different exemplary poses and styles. He had made extensive use of
his bible of clippings in concocting a counterfeit Terry and the Pirates strip called South China Sea, drawn
in faithful imitation of the great Caniff. He had knocked off Raymond in something he called Pimpernel of
the Planets, and Chester Gould in a lockjawed G-man strip called Knuckle Duster Doyle. He had tried
swiping from Hogarth and Lee Falk, from George Herriman, Harold Gray, and Elzie Segar. He kept his
sample strips in a fat cardboard portfolio under his bed, waiting for an opportunity, for his main chance, to
present itself.

"Japan!" he said again, reeling at the exotic Caniffian perfume that hung over the name. "What were you
doing there?"

"Mostly I was suffering from the intestinal complaint," Josef Kavalier said. "and I suffer still. Particular in
the night."

Sammy pondered this information for a moment, then moved a little nearer to the wall.

"Tell me, Samuel," Josef Kavalier said. "How many examples must I have in my portfolio?"

"Not Samuel. Sammy. No, call me Sam."

"Sam."

"What portfolio is that?"

"My portfolio of drawings. To show your employer. Sadly, I am obligated to leave behind all of my work
in Prague, but I can very quickly do much more that will be frightfully good."

"To show my boss?" Sammy said, sensing in his own confusion the persistent trace of his mother's
handiwork. "What are you talking about?"

"Your mother suggested that you might to help me get a job in the company where you work. I am an artist,
like you."

39
"An artist." Again Sammy envied his cousin. This was statement he himself would never have been able to
utter without lowering his fraudulent gaze to his show tops. "My mother told you I was an artist?"

"A commercial artist, yes. For the Empire Novelties Incorporated Company."

For an instant Sammy cupped the tiny flame this secondhand compliment lit within him. Then he blew it
out.

"She was talking through her hat," he said.

"Sorry?"

"She was full of it."

"Full of...?"

"I'm an inventory clerk. Sometimes they let me do pasteup for an ad. Or when they add a new item to the
line, I get to do the illustration. For that, they pay me two dollars per."

"Ah." Josef Kavalier let out another long breath. He still had not moved a muscle. Sammy couldn't decide if
this apparent utter motionlessness was the product of unbearable tension or a marvelous calm. "She wrote a
letter to my father," Josef tried. "I remember she said you create designs of superb new inventions and
devices."

"Guess what?"

"She talked into her hat."

Sammy sighed, as if to suggest that this was unfortunately the case; a regretful sigh, long-suffering---and
false. No doubt, his mother writing to her brother in Prague, had believed that she was making an accurate
report; it was Sammy who had been talking through his hat for the last year, embroidering, not only for her
benefit but to anyone who would listen, the menial nature of his position at Empire Novelties. Sammy was
briefly embarrassed, not so much at being caught out and having to confess his lowly status to his cousin,
as at this evidence of a flaw in the omniscient maternal loupe. Then he wondered if his mother, far from
being hoodwinked by his boasting, had not in fact been counting on his having grossly exaggerated the
degree of his influence over Sheldon Anapol, the owner of Empire Novelties. If he were to keep up the
pretense to which he had devoted so much wind and invention, then he was all but obliged to come home
from work tomorrow night clutching a job for Josef Kavalier in his grubby little stock clerk's fingers.

"I'll try," he said, and it was then that he felt the first spark, the tickling finger of possibility along his spine.
For another long while, neither of them spoke. This time, Sammy could feel that Josef was still awake,
could almost hear the capillary trickle of doubt seeping in, weighing the kid down. Sammy felt sorry for
him. "Can I ask you a question?" he said.

"Ask me what?"

"What was with all the newspapers?"

"They are your New York newspapers. I bought them at the Grand Central Station."

"How many?"

For the first time, he noticed, Josef Kavalier twitched. "Eleven."

Sammy quickly calculated on his ringers: there were eight metropolitan dailies. Ten if you counted the
Eagle and the Home News. "I'm missing one."

40
"Missing...?"

"Times, Herald Tribune," he touched two fingertips, "World-Telegram, Journal-American, Sun." He

switched hands. "News, Post. Uh, Wall Street Journal. And the Brooklyn Eagle. And the Home News in the
Bronx." He dropped his hands to the mattress. "What's eleven?"

"The Woman's Daily Wearing."

"Women's Wear Daily?"

"I didn't know it was like that. For the garments." He laughed at himself, a series of brief, throat-clearing
rasps. "I was looking for something about Prague."

"Did you find anything? They must have had something in the Times."

"Something. A little. Nothing about the Jews."

"The Jews," said Sammy, beginning to understand. It wasn't the latest diplomatic maneuverings in London
and Berlin, or the most recent bit of brutal posturing by Adolf Hitler, that Josef was hoping to get news of.
He was looking for an item detailing the condition of the Kavalier family. "You know Jewish? Yiddish.
You know it?"

"No."

"That's too bad. We got four Jewish newspapers in New York. They'd probably have something."

"What about German newspapers?"

"I don't know, but I'd imagine so. We certainly have a lot of Germans. They've been marching and having
rallies all over town."

"I see."

"You're worried about your family?"

There was no reply.

"They couldn't get out?"

"No. Not yet" Sammy felt Josef give his head a sharp shake, as if to end the discussion. "I find I have
smoked all my cigarettes," he went on, in a neutral, phrase-book tone. "Perhaps you could-"

"You know, I smoked my last one before bed," said Sammy. "Hey, how'd you know I smoke? Do I smell?"

"Sammy," his mother called, "sleep."

Sammy sniffed himself. "Huh. I wonder if Ethel can smell it. She doesn't like it. I want to smoke, I've got to
go out the window, there, onto the fire escape."

"No smoking in bed," Josef said. "The more reason then for me to leave it."

"You don't have to tell me," Sammy said. "I'm dying to have a place of my own."

They lay there for a few minutes, longing for cigarettes and for all the things that this longing, in its perfect

41
frustration, seemed to condense and embody.

"Your ash holder," Josef said finally. "Ashtray!'

"On the fire escape. It's a plant!"

"It might be filled with the ... spacek? ... kippe? ... the stubbles?"

"The butts, you mean?"

"The butts."

"Yeah, I guess. Don't tell me you'd smoke-"

Without warning, in a kind of kinetic discharge of activity that seemed to be both the counterpart and the
product of the state of perfect indolence that had immediately preceded it, Josef rolled over and out of the
bed. Sammy's eyes had by now adjusted to the darkness of his room, which was always, at any rate,
incomplete. A selvage of gray-blue radiation from the kitchen tube fringed the bedroom door and mingled
with a pale shaft of nocturnal Brooklyn, a compound derived from the haloes of streetlights, the headlamps
of trolleys and cars, the fires of the borough's three active steel mills, and the shed luster of the island
kingdom to the west, that came slanting in through a parting in the curtains. In this faint glow that was, to
Sammy, the sickly steady light of insomnia itself, he could see his cousin going methodically through the
pockets of the clothes he had earlier hung so carefully from the back of the chair.

"The lamp?" Josef whispered.

Sammy shook his head. "The mother," he said.

Josef came back to the bed and sat down. "Then we must to work in the darkness."

He held between the first fingers of his left hand a pleated leaf of cigarette paper. Sammy understood. He
sat up on one arm, and with the other tugged the curtains apart, slowly so as not to produce the telltale
creak. Then, gritting his teeth, he raised the sash of the window beside his bed, letting in a chilly hum of
traffic and a murmuring blast of cold March midnight. Sammy's "ashtray" was an oblong terra-cotta pot,
vaguely Mexican, filled with a sterile compound of potting soil and soot and the semipetrified skeleton,
appropriately enough, of a cineraria that had gone unsold during Sammy's houseplant days and thus
predated his smoking habit, still a fairly recent acquisition, by about three years. A dozen stubbed-out ends
of Old Golds squirmed around the base of the withered plant, and Sammy distastefully plucked a handful of
them--they were slightly damp--as if gathering night crawlers, then handed them in to his cousin, who
traded him for a box of matches that evocatively encouraged him to EAT AT JOE'S CRAB ON
FISHERMAN'S WHARF, in which only one match remained.

Quickly, but not without a certain showiness, Josef split open seven butts, one-handed, and tipped the
resultant mass of pulpy threads into the wrinkled scrap of Zig Zag. After half a minute's work, he had
manufactured them a smoke.

"Come," he said. He walked on his knees across the bed to the window, where Sammy joined him, and they
wriggled through the sash and thrust their heads and upper bodies out of the building. He handed the
cigarette to Sammy and, in the precious flare of the match, as Sammy nervously sheltered it from the wind,
he saw that Josef had prestidigitated a perfect cylinder, as thick and straight and nearly as smooth as if
rolled by machine. Sammy took a long drag of True Virginia Flavor and then passed the magic cigarette
back to its crafter, and they smoked it in silence, until only a hot quarter inch remained. Then they climbed
back inside, lowered the sash and the blinds, and lay back, bedmates, reeking of smoke.

"You know," Sammy said, "we're, uh, we've all been really worried ... about Hitler... and the way he's
treating the Jews and ... and all that. When they, when you were ... invaded.... My mom was ... we all..." He

42
shook his own head, not sure what he was trying to say. "Here." He sat up a little, and tugged one of the
pillows out from under the back of his head.

Josef Kavalier lifted his own head from the mattress and stuffed the pillow beneath it. "Thank you," he
said, then lay still once more.

Presently, his breathing grew steady and slowed to a congested rattle, leaving Sammy to ponder alone, as
he did every night, the usual caterpillar schemes. But in his imaginings, Sammy found that, for the first
time in years, he was able to avail himself of the help of a confederate.

CORALINE (A NOVEL BY NEIL GAIMAN)

Chapter I.
Coraline discovered the door a little while after they moved into the house.

It was a very old house – it had an attic under the roof and a cellar under the ground and an overgrown
garden with huge old trees in it.

Coraline's family didn't own all of the house, it was too big for that. Instead they owned part of it.

There were other people who lived in the old house.

Miss Spink and Miss Forcible lived in the flat below Coraline’s, on the ground floor. They were both old
and round, and they lived in their flat with a number of ageing highland terriers who had names like
Hamish and Andrew and Jock. Once upon a time Miss Spink and Miss Forcible had been actresses, as Miss

43
Spink told Coraline the first time she met her.

"You see, Caroline," Miss Spink said, getting Coraline's name wrong, "Both myself and Miss Forcible were
famous actresses, in our time. We trod the boards, luvvy. Oh, don't let Hamish eat the fruit cake, or he'll be
up all night with his tummy."

"It's Coraline. Not Caroline. Coraline," said Coraline.

In the flat above Coraline’s, under the roof, was a crazy old man with a big moustache. He told Coraline
that he was training a mouse circus. He wouldn't let anyone see it.

"One day, little Caroline, when they are all ready, everyone in the whole world will see the wonders of my
mouse circus. You ask me why you cannot see it now. Is that what you asked me?"

"No," said Coraline quietly, "I asked you not to call me Caroline. It's Coraline."

"The reason you cannot see the Mouse Circus," said the man upstairs, "is that the mice are not yet ready
and rehearsed. Also, they refuse to play the songs I have written for them. All the songs I have written for
the mice to play go oompah oompah. But the white mice will only play toodle oodle, like that. I am
thinking of trying them on different types of cheese."

Coraline didn't think there really was a mouse circus. She thought the old man was probably making it up.

The day after they moved in, Coraline went exploring.

She explored the garden. It was a big garden: at the very back was an old tennis court, but no one in the
house played tennis and the fence around the court had holes in it and the net had mostly rotted away; there
was an old rose garden, filled with stunted, flyblown rose bushes; there was a rockery that was all rocks;
there was a fairy ring, made of squidgy brown toadstools which smelled dreadful if you accidentally trod
on them.

There was also a well. Miss Spink and Miss Forcible made a point of telling Coraline how dangerous the
well was, on the first day Coraline’s family moved in, and warned her to be sure she kept away from it. So
Coraline set off to explore for it, so that she knew where it was, to keep away from it properly.

She found it on the third day, in an overgrown meadow beside the tennis court, behind a clump of trees – a
low brick circle almost hidden in the high grass. The well had been covered up by wooden boards, to stop
anyone falling in. There was a small knot-hole in one of the boards, and Coraline spent an afternoon
dropping pebbles and acorns through the hole, and waiting, and counting, until she heard the plop as they
hit the water, far below.

Coraline also explored for animals. She found a hedgehog, and a snake-skin (but no snake), and a rock that
looked just like a frog, and a toad that looked just like a rock.

There was also a haughty black cat, who would sit on walls and tree stumps, and watch her; but would slip
away if ever she went over to try to play with it.

That was how she spent her first two weeks in the house – exploring the garden and the grounds.

Her mother made her come back inside for dinner, and for lunch; and Coraline had to make sure she
dressed up warm before she went out, for it was a very cold summer that year; but go out she did,
exploring, every day until the day it rained, when Coraline had to stay inside.

"What should I do?" asked Coraline.

"Read a book," said her mother. "Watch a video. Play with your toys. Go and pester Miss Spink or Miss

44
Forcible, or the crazy old man upstairs."

"No," said Coraline. "I don't want to do those things. I want to explore."

"I don't really mind what you do," said Coraline's mother, "as long as you don't make a mess."

Coraline went over to the window and watched the rain come down. It wasn't the kind of rain you could go
out in, it was the other kind, the kind that threw itself down from the sky and splashed where it landed. It
was rain that meant business, and currently its business was turning the garden into a muddy, wet soup.

Coraline had watched all the videos. She was bored with her toys, and she'd read all her books.

She turned on the television. She went from channel to channel to channel, but there was nothing on but
men in suits talking about the stock market, and schools programmes. Eventually, she found something to
watch: it was the last half of a natural history programme about something called protective coloration. She
watched animals, birds and insects which disguised themselves as leaves or twigs or other animals to
escape from things that could hurt them. She enjoyed it, but it ended too soon, and was followed by a
programme about a cake factory.

It was time to talk to her father.

Coraline's father was home. Both of her parents worked, doing things on computers, which meant that they
were home a lot of the time. Each of them had their own study.

"Hello Coraline," he said when she came in, without turning round.

"Mmph," said Coraline. "It's raining."

"Yup," said her father. "It's bucketing down."

"No," said Coraline, "It's just raining. Can I go outside?"

"What does your mother say?"

"She says you're not going out in weather like that, Coraline Jones."

"Then, no."

"But I want to carry on exploring."

"Then explore the flat," suggested her father. "Look, here's a piece of paper and a pen. Count all the doors
and windows. List everything blue. Mount an expedition to discover the hot-water tank. And leave me
alone to work."

"Can I go into the drawing room?" The drawing room was where the Jones's kept the expensive (and
uncomfortable) furniture Coraline's grandmother had left them when she died. Coraline wasn't allowed in
there. Nobody went in there. It was only for best.

"If you don't make a mess. And you don't touch anything."

Coraline considered this carefully, then she took the paper and pen and went off to explore the inside of the
flat.

She discovered the hot water tank (it was in a cupboard in the kitchen).

She counted everything blue (153).

45
She counted the windows (21).

She counted the doors (14).

Of the doors that she found, thirteen opened and closed. The other, the big, carved, brown wooden door at
the far corner of the drawing room, was locked.

She said to her mother, "Where does that door go?"

"Nowhere, dear."

"It has to go somewhere."

Her mother shook her head. "Look," she told Coraline.

She reached up, and took a string of keys from the top of the kitchen door frame. She sorted through them
carefully, and selected the oldest, biggest, blackest, rustiest key. They went into the drawing room. She
unlocked the door with the key.

The door swung open.

Her mother was right. The door didn't go anywhere. It opened onto a brick wall.

"When this place was just one house," said Coraline's mother, "that door went somewhere. When they
turned the house into flats, they simply bricked it up. The other side is the empty flat on the other side of
the house, the one that's still for sale."

She shut the door, and put the string of keys back on top of the kitchen door frame.

"You didn't lock it," said Coraline.

Her mother shrugged. "Why should I lock it?" she asked "It doesn't go anywhere."

Coraline didn't say anything.

It was nearly dark outside now, and the rain was still coming down, pattering against the windows and
blurring the lights of the cars in the street outside.

Coraline's father stopped working, and made them all dinner.

Coraline was disgusted. "Daddy," she said, "you've made a recipe again."

"It's leek and potato stew, with a tarragon garnish, and melted Gruyere cheese," he admitted.

Coraline sighed. Then she went to the freezer, and got out some microwave chips, and a microwave mini
pizza.

"You know I don't like recipes," she told her father, while her dinner went around and around, and the little
red numbers on the microwave oven counted down to zero.

"If you tried it, maybe you'd like it," said Coraline's father, but she shook her head.

That night, Coraline lay awake in her bed. The rain had stopped, and she was almost asleep when
something went tatatatatat. She sat up in bed.

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Something went Kreeee ...

....aaaak

Coraline got out of bed and looked down the hall, but saw nothing strange. She walked down the hall. From
her parents' bedroom came a low snoring – that was her father – and an occasional sleeping mutter – that
was her mother.

Coraline wondered if she'd dreamed it, whatever it was.

Something moved.

It was little more than a shadow, and it scuttled down the darkened hall fast, like a little patch of night.

She hoped it wasn't a spider. Spiders made Coraline intensely uncomfortable.

The black shape went into the drawing room, and Coraline followed it in, a little nervously.

The room was dark: the only light came from the hall, and Coraline, who was standing in the doorway, cast
a huge and distorted shadow onto the drawing room carpet: she looked like a thin giant woman.

Coraline was just wondering whether or not she ought to turn on the lights when she saw the black shape
edge slowly out from beneath the sofa. It paused, and then dashed silently across the carpet toward the
farthest corner of the room.

There was no furniture in that corner of the room.

Coraline turned on the light.

There was nothing in the corner. Nothing but the old door that opened onto the brick wall.

She was sure that her mother had shut the door, but now it was ever so slightly open. Just a crack. Coraline
went over to it, and looked in. There was nothing there – just a wall, built of red bricks.

Coraline closed the old wooden door, turned out the light, and went to bed.

She dreamed of black shapes that slid from place to place, avoiding the light, until they were all gathered
together under the moon. Little black shapes with little red eyes and sharp yellow teeth.

They started to sing, i> We are small but we are many

We are many we are small

We were here before you rose

We will be here when you fall.

Their voices were high and whispering and slightly whiney. They made Coraline feel uncomfortable.

Then Coraline dreamed a few commercials, and after that she dreamed of nothing at all.

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 THE FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH (A NOVEL BY CARRIE RYAN)

My mother used to tell me about the ocean. She said there was a place where there was nothing
but water as far as you could see and that it was always moving, rushing toward you and then away. She
once showed me a picture that she said was my great-great-great-grandmother standing in the ocean as a
child. It has been years since, and the picture was lost to fire long ago, but I remember it, faded and worn.
A little girl surrounded by nothingness.

In my mother's stories, passed down from her many-greats-grandmother, the ocean sounded like the wind
through the trees and men used to ride the water. Once, when I was older and our village was suffering
through a drought, I asked my mother why, if so much water existed, were there years when our own
streams ran almost dry? She told me that the ocean was not for drinking--that the water was filled with salt.
That is when I stopped believing her about the ocean. How could there be so much salt in the universe and
how could God allow so much water to become useless?

But there are times when I stand at the edge of the Forest of Hands and Teeth and look out at the wilderness
that stretches on forever and wonder what it would be like if it were all water. I close my eyes and listen to
the wind in the trees and imagine a world of nothing but water closing over my head.

It would be a world without the Unconsecrated, a world without the Forest of Hands and Teeth.

Often, my mother stands next to me holding her hand up over her eyes to block the sun and looking out
past the fences and into the trees and brush, waiting to see if her husband will come home to her.

She is the only one who believes that he has not turned--that he might come home the same man he was
when he left. I gave up on my father months ago and buried the pain of losing him as deeply as possible so
that I could continue with my daily life. Now I sometimes fear coming to the edge of the Forest and looking
past the fence. I am afraid I will see him there with the others: tattered clothes, sagging skin, the horrible
pleading moan and the fingers scraped raw from pulling at the metal fences.

That no one has seen him gives my mother hope. At night she prays to God that he has found some sort of
enclave similar to our village. That somewhere in the dense Forest he has found safety. But no one else has
any hope. The Sisters tell us that ours is the only village left in the world.

My brother Jed has taken to volunteering extra shifts for the Guardian patrols that monitor the fence line. I
know that, like me, he thinks our father is lost to the Unconsecrated and that he hopes to find him during
the patrol of the perimeter and kill him before our mother sees what her husband has become.

People in our village have gone mad from seeing their loved ones as Unconsecrated. It was a woman--a
mother--horrified at the sight of her son infected during a patrol, who set herself on fire and burned half of
our town. That was the fire that destroyed my family's heirlooms when I was a child, that obliterated our
only ties to who we were as a people before the Return, though most were so corroded by then that they left
only wisps of memories.

Jed and I watch our mother closely now and we never allow her to approach the fence line unaccompanied.
At times  Jed's wife Beth used to join us on these vigils until she was sent to bed rest with her first child.
Now it is just us.

And then one day Beth's brother catches up with me while I am dunking our laundry in the stream that
branches off the big river. For as long as I can remember Harold has been a friend of mine, one of the few
in the village my age. He trades me a handful of wildflowers for my sopping sheets and we sit and watch
the water flow over the rocks as he twists the sheets in complicated patterns to dry them out.

"How is your mother?" he asks me, because he is nothing if not polite.

I duck my head and wash my hands in the water. I know I should be getting back to her, that I have already

48
taken too much time for myself today and that she is probably pacing, waiting for me. Jed is off on a long-
term patrol of the perimeter, checking the strength of the fences, and my mother likes to spend her
afternoons near the Forest looking for my father. I need to be there to comfort her just in case. To hold her
back from the fences if she finds him. "She's still holding out hope," I say.

Harry clucks his tongue in sympathy. We both know there is little hope.

His hands seek out and cover mine under the water. I have known this was coming for months. I have seen
the way he looks at me now, how his eyes have changed. How tension has crept into our friendship. We are
no longer children and haven't been for years.

"Mary, I_._._." He pauses for a second. "I was hoping that you would go with me to the Harvest
Celebration next weekend."

I look down at our hands in the water. I can feel my fingertips wrinkling in the cold and his skin feels soft
and fleshy. I consider his offer. The Harvest Celebration is the time in the fall when those of marrying age
declare themselves to one another. It is the beginning of the courtship, the time during the short winter days
when the couple determines whether they will make a suitable match. Almost always the courtship will end
in spring with Brethlaw--the weeklong celebration of wedding vows and christenings. It's very rare that a
courtship fails. Marriage in our village is not about love--it is about commitment.

Every year I wonder at the couples pairing up around me. At how my former childhood friends suddenly
find partners, bond, prepare for the next step. Pledge themselves to one another and begin their courtships. I
always assumed the same would happen to me when my time approached. That because of the sickness that
wiped out so many of my peers when I was a child, it would be even more important that those of us of
marrying age find a mate. So important that there wouldn't be enough girls to spare for a life with the
Sisterhood.

I even hoped that perhaps I would be lucky enough to find more than just a mate, to eventually find love
like my mother and father.

And yet, even though I have been one of the few eligible during the past two years, I've been left aside.

I have spent the last weeks dealing with my father's absence beyond the fences. Dealing with my mother's
despair and desolation. With my own grief and mourning. Until this moment it hasn't occurred to me that I
might be the last one asked to the Harvest Celebration. Or that I might be left unclaimed.

49