[story] to a stranger
Mar. 26th, 2012 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ib_archiveauthor: untrainedviolin
She had found something in her house, a door that led to nowhere. At least, she thought it was nowhere. One day she stepped further than she ought to and found herself somewhere, unfamiliar and warm, warmer than her house or the grounds outside it. There were trees, and there were rice fields, but she did not feel like she belonged. There was one tree that looked familiar, and with a shock she realized that it was the tree that grew outside her bedroom window. But where was her house? Had she traveled back in time? But that was impossible—her house was old, old as her father. She began to be frightened, and realized that she had no idea how to get back. She began to run.
There are legends in his village, some of them old as the land they tilled, some younger than the newborn’s tooth. Tomas knew them all, yet just the knowing dissatisfied him. He was restless, known to disappear in the land beyond the fields, the land no one dared stray into lest they be lost (for it was forest, wild and untamed, and the trees stretched high beyond your head to link with each other’s branches, so that no sunlight could fall to the ground below). But he always came back. He wanted to be a legend, himself, and in the legends the men always came back. Save one.
Among the stories they told in the dark was that, sometimes, rarely, there would be one more of them than was accounted for. They were a small village, they knew themselves and each other. But on those times, a girl would walk among them, ghost-white and moving through their ranks. She was not always young. Sometimes she was old. But Manuel’s grandfather boasted he had seen her thrice—twice as a young girl, and once an old lady. “How could you tell?” asked the children. “How could you tell it was the same person?”
“Because,” replied Manuel’s grandfather, who had seen sixty harvest-times, “her eyes. They were sad. They were always so sad.”
This story haunted the young Tomas. He was eight years old, and he slept beside his big brothers, each promising to be a large man when he grew up, and dreamed of a girl in white with the saddest eyes. When he was thirteen he stopped dreaming.
When she was young, her aunts had tutted over her. Serious, you are too serious, they clucked, flapping their floury aprons at her in an effort to make her laugh. They only made her sneeze. Why don’t you laugh, hija? Why don’t you laugh more? She had tired of them at an early age. Life was not all about laughter.
Her aunts were a fat lot, red-cheeked and hearty about life and its secret disappointments. Their husbands were loafers and lived on the sweat of their brother-in-law, who despised them openly. They apologized to their brother frequently, and helped around the house, filling the kitchen with their laughter. She was raised in their care, her mother having died in the birthing of her, and they said it was the this death which made the child so sad and serious.
No boy will marry you, they said, elbow-deep in dough. A girl as sad as you. What a man wants is someone to light up their lives with happiness. After this statement they would always laugh as one, and the pots and pans would ring with their joy. She was never sure if they were laughing at her, or for her. She knew that they were never earnest.
She turned into a woman overnight, and this disappointed her. She had thought that growing up would take time. She had never imagined that women were made by the bloodstains on their sheets. Her father was blank-faced at the news. The aunts tutted at him too. Your daughter is a woman! they screeched. Are you not proud?
It was bound to happen, sooner or later,said her blank-faced father.
The day before he saw his eighteenth harvest-time, his father gifted him with half a field. “You are a man by law now,” said his father, “but you have not proven yourself. It is customary for a boy—man,” he corrected himself hastily, and Tomas looked at him with something akin to disappointment (he had thought that this would be more special to his father, at last, his youngest son a man and no longer the raw-faced boy rushing through the rice fields), “a man to receive half a field from his father, to prove himself. You know what you must do.”
Tomas nodded, swallowing his dull anger. He had to till the field himself. He was to start at dawn tomorrow, and if he was not done by the time the sun set, he was not yet fit to be called a man and move out of his parents’ home.
The next day he took his father’s carabao and he set off for the field—half, he said, half, you are not a man yet—his father had given to him. He knew he could do it. All his brothers had, all five of them, but Miguel had nearly failed. Tomas swallowed, more nervous than he cared to admit.
The field was far away, on the very edge of the fields, nearest to the forest. It was situated at the base of the hills, which obscured the village from his view. Tomas wondered what had driven his father to get this particular field for him, but remembered that his father was a thoughtful man. He knew Tomas loved the forest, although the very thought of it baffled him. No one went into the forest. No one save Tomas.
He set to work, harnessing the carabao to the plough and driving the beast until the soil was tilled. He took the first of the sacks which contained the seedlings, and began his work. He felt sure he would be done by the afternoon.
There were ten sacks, for the field, even halved, was large. Tomas’s family was not poor, and his father had made sure to get something worthy of their status. By noon he was nowhere near half done, and he began to feel the first stirrings of doubt in himself. He stopped to rest, as his mouth was parched and his back ached. The wind was strong—that, he was grateful for.
“Why are you doing that?”
Tomas laughed without turning around. “Because I am a man today, and I must prove it to the rest of the village. Otherwise I remain a boy in their eyes forever.”
“May I help?”
At this he turned. “No,” he said without even thinking. “I must do it myself.” Then his brain caught up with his eyes and he realized what he was seeing.
A girl stood before him, in a dress as white as the moon on nights when it swelled full and pregnant and the dogs howled to see it before them. Her hair was dark, and dropped to her waist in curling lines. She was tanned, as they were all tanned, but her skin was a lighter shade, as if she spent more time indoors than they did. He scoffed to see that. In his mind, the only worthwhile things were outside. Inside was for rest and people who rested in the middle of the day when there was work to be done were lazy.
The girl regarded him dispassionately. Her eyes were a light brown he had never seen before, so light they seemed like mere glass tinted with the faintest shade of hazel. He shook his head—he did not understand poetry.
“I must go back to work now,” he told her, wondering what to do. He had never seen her in the village before, and wondered if she came from one of the neighboring towns some miles over—visitors were few and far in between, but the villagers were no strangers to such events. Still, he thought, she looks familiar.
She nodded, then turned and ran off into the trees behind her. “Wait!” he shouted, unable to stop himself. “It’s dangerous in there!” But she was gone.
It was well of him to say so, he realized, seeing as he himself was never there less than twice a week.
He sighed and turned back to his work. What happened to her was none of his business. He had things to prove.
She was not sent to school. She had nothing to prove, insisted the aunts. Was her father not the richest man in the village? His daughter did not need to work.
It is not work, her father replied. It is knowledge. And will I still be the richest man, if your husbands are eating us out of house and home?
The aunts faltered. A governess, at least,they said at last. The richest man’s daughters must not be seen mingling with the commoners’ children.
She had been hoping to be able to spend time with other children. The house bored her, and it was too familiar. She would have welcomed a change of scene, but instead she was forced to welcome a stranger. She disliked strangers.
The governess remained unnamed to her, only to be called Miss. She was very strict on that, and was otherwise lenient in other matters. She was allowed by the governess to play whenever she liked, and was only occasionally called into the house to receive lessons she did not understand. Once she was made to walk across the room with a stack of books balanced upon her head.
It improves your posture, said the governess. She did not explain what posture meant.
Pos•ture – the relative disposition of the parts of something
So she walked, and the stack of books grew heavy on her head, and her spine began to hurt.
It’s for the best, said the governess.
They had started in the middle of the afternoon. By nightfall the governess was done with her. Her head was sore and her spine felt worse. She hated the books that the governess replaced in their shelves with such care. They were so heavy.
Tomorrow we begin again, said the governess. Look, you have not learned a thing. A stick was found and rapped sharply at her spine. She straightened her back with a jerk. She was unused to being hurt. At that moment she was not sure which she hated more, the governess or the books.
She sat up through the night, trying to think where she could hide tomorrow. She was thirteen and old enough to know that there were things that had to be faced. She was thirteen and young enough to know that some battles were best chosen carefully.
By morning, the governess had searched for her high and low. Soon she had recruited the aunts to her cause, and they had turned the house upside down. But they would not find what they were looking for.
At nightfall Tomas was done. His father, if all had gone well, should be preparing the feast that signified the passing of one of his sons into adulthood. He strutted, grinning, proud a young new rooster that had just beaten another in a fight. He tugged the carabao forward, and the animal obligingly speeded up its pace, content from having wallowed in the mud for hours. It nearly skewered Tomas with its horns when the boy—a man now, a man—stopped short.
Before him were ashes. Ashes and cinders and thin, weak sticks where once a whole village stood. The ground beneath his feet was black and still warm to the touch. Dimly he wondered why he had not noticed or smelled the smoke all day, and then realized that the wind was blowing in the opposite direction. It would have taken the smoke away from him, so that he had neither smelled nor seen it. He cursed it, but he did not weep. He still did not understand what had happened. Then he saw the circle in the middle of the village square, and he knew. He could see it, as clearly as if he were there.
His father, watching him from the top of the hills, would have seen that he was nearly done. Beaming, he walked back to the village, calling to his wife to prepare the suckling pig for roasting, and the chickens as well. The children would have tripped over themselves gathering wood for the bonfire, his bonfire, since there was always a great celebration when one of them, girl or boy, grew into adulthood. With a girl it was the coming of the blood on her thighs, on the mats and sheets where she lay. His parents would have been smiling, proud of him, and as sunset neared they would have lit the bonfire. The wind was strong. They would have had difficulty, but they would not have waited for it to die down—the feast had to be at least halfway ready before he made it back. It was a long walk from where he was back to the village, but his parents were cautious people, they would not have chanced it. So they lit the bonfire, and the wind blew a spark, or a smoldering piece of wood, to rest against the wooden walls of a house, or on its thatch roof. The weather was dry; it was summer, the sun had been merciless all day. It would have been easy for a fire to start up, and easier for it to spread.
His throat was dry.
What was he going to do now?
She watched him from behind a tree. This was the first time that she had seen this happen, and she began to suspect that perhaps time was not a straight line. It unsettled her, although she should have realized it from the first. (The next time she returned, six months later, the village would be whole again, and she would see this same boy, laughing and happy, and she would know her suspicions were true.) She felt sorry for him. He had been so proud of himself this morning. Or had it been afternoon? She never could tell. He turned suddenly, and caught sight of her. She turned and began to run.
“Wait!” he shouted, once more. She ignored him again and kept running, counting on his exhaustion to keep him from catching her. She was not eager to get back to the aunts or the governess or her silent father, but it was better than being caught by this boy.
She found the gap between the trees easily. She knew what she was looking for—something door-shaped, where everything between was slightly blurred, as if you were looking through a foggy window. She rushed through it just as the boy’s hand caught at the sash of her dress. Thankfully it slipped through its loops easily as the silk it was. She refused to be that girl Alice in the stories the governess sometimes read aloud to her.
She would be reprimanded severely later, but she accepted it.
Tomas stood there, baffled, his grimy hand clenched around the strange, soft length of fabric he had snatched from the girl’s dress. Unthinkingly he raised it to his cheek and rubbed it against his skin. Soft. Delicate. Just like the girl he had seen vanish between those trees.
He wanted to go through, just like her. After all, he had nothing to lose. Fear held him back, though. Fear and the hope of survivors. Surely not everyone had been caught in the fire? He turned back. The sun had set in earnest now, and the first stars had long since been joined by others of their kind. Perhaps now he would become a legend? The boy who lived. A grim fulfillment of his childhood ambitions, but he felt he should accept it – that it was his duty and destiny as an adult to remain in the world he had unwittingly created.
He looked back at the gap between the trees and squinted. Was that bush behind it sort of…blurry? He couldn’t tell in the dark. After a long look, he turned away and headed back toward what was left of his village.
At least now he knew legends existed.
She had found something in her house, a door that led to nowhere. At least, she thought it was nowhere. One day she stepped further than she ought to and found herself somewhere, unfamiliar and warm, warmer than her house or the grounds outside it. There were trees, and there were rice fields, but she did not feel like she belonged. There was one tree that looked familiar, and with a shock she realized that it was the tree that grew outside her bedroom window. But where was her house? Had she traveled back in time? But that was impossible—her house was old, old as her father. She began to be frightened, and realized that she had no idea how to get back. She began to run.
There are legends in his village, some of them old as the land they tilled, some younger than the newborn’s tooth. Tomas knew them all, yet just the knowing dissatisfied him. He was restless, known to disappear in the land beyond the fields, the land no one dared stray into lest they be lost (for it was forest, wild and untamed, and the trees stretched high beyond your head to link with each other’s branches, so that no sunlight could fall to the ground below). But he always came back. He wanted to be a legend, himself, and in the legends the men always came back. Save one.
Among the stories they told in the dark was that, sometimes, rarely, there would be one more of them than was accounted for. They were a small village, they knew themselves and each other. But on those times, a girl would walk among them, ghost-white and moving through their ranks. She was not always young. Sometimes she was old. But Manuel’s grandfather boasted he had seen her thrice—twice as a young girl, and once an old lady. “How could you tell?” asked the children. “How could you tell it was the same person?”
“Because,” replied Manuel’s grandfather, who had seen sixty harvest-times, “her eyes. They were sad. They were always so sad.”
This story haunted the young Tomas. He was eight years old, and he slept beside his big brothers, each promising to be a large man when he grew up, and dreamed of a girl in white with the saddest eyes. When he was thirteen he stopped dreaming.
When she was young, her aunts had tutted over her. Serious, you are too serious, they clucked, flapping their floury aprons at her in an effort to make her laugh. They only made her sneeze. Why don’t you laugh, hija? Why don’t you laugh more? She had tired of them at an early age. Life was not all about laughter.
Her aunts were a fat lot, red-cheeked and hearty about life and its secret disappointments. Their husbands were loafers and lived on the sweat of their brother-in-law, who despised them openly. They apologized to their brother frequently, and helped around the house, filling the kitchen with their laughter. She was raised in their care, her mother having died in the birthing of her, and they said it was the this death which made the child so sad and serious.
No boy will marry you, they said, elbow-deep in dough. A girl as sad as you. What a man wants is someone to light up their lives with happiness. After this statement they would always laugh as one, and the pots and pans would ring with their joy. She was never sure if they were laughing at her, or for her. She knew that they were never earnest.
She turned into a woman overnight, and this disappointed her. She had thought that growing up would take time. She had never imagined that women were made by the bloodstains on their sheets. Her father was blank-faced at the news. The aunts tutted at him too. Your daughter is a woman! they screeched. Are you not proud?
It was bound to happen, sooner or later,said her blank-faced father.
The day before he saw his eighteenth harvest-time, his father gifted him with half a field. “You are a man by law now,” said his father, “but you have not proven yourself. It is customary for a boy—man,” he corrected himself hastily, and Tomas looked at him with something akin to disappointment (he had thought that this would be more special to his father, at last, his youngest son a man and no longer the raw-faced boy rushing through the rice fields), “a man to receive half a field from his father, to prove himself. You know what you must do.”
Tomas nodded, swallowing his dull anger. He had to till the field himself. He was to start at dawn tomorrow, and if he was not done by the time the sun set, he was not yet fit to be called a man and move out of his parents’ home.
The next day he took his father’s carabao and he set off for the field—half, he said, half, you are not a man yet—his father had given to him. He knew he could do it. All his brothers had, all five of them, but Miguel had nearly failed. Tomas swallowed, more nervous than he cared to admit.
The field was far away, on the very edge of the fields, nearest to the forest. It was situated at the base of the hills, which obscured the village from his view. Tomas wondered what had driven his father to get this particular field for him, but remembered that his father was a thoughtful man. He knew Tomas loved the forest, although the very thought of it baffled him. No one went into the forest. No one save Tomas.
He set to work, harnessing the carabao to the plough and driving the beast until the soil was tilled. He took the first of the sacks which contained the seedlings, and began his work. He felt sure he would be done by the afternoon.
There were ten sacks, for the field, even halved, was large. Tomas’s family was not poor, and his father had made sure to get something worthy of their status. By noon he was nowhere near half done, and he began to feel the first stirrings of doubt in himself. He stopped to rest, as his mouth was parched and his back ached. The wind was strong—that, he was grateful for.
“Why are you doing that?”
Tomas laughed without turning around. “Because I am a man today, and I must prove it to the rest of the village. Otherwise I remain a boy in their eyes forever.”
“May I help?”
At this he turned. “No,” he said without even thinking. “I must do it myself.” Then his brain caught up with his eyes and he realized what he was seeing.
A girl stood before him, in a dress as white as the moon on nights when it swelled full and pregnant and the dogs howled to see it before them. Her hair was dark, and dropped to her waist in curling lines. She was tanned, as they were all tanned, but her skin was a lighter shade, as if she spent more time indoors than they did. He scoffed to see that. In his mind, the only worthwhile things were outside. Inside was for rest and people who rested in the middle of the day when there was work to be done were lazy.
The girl regarded him dispassionately. Her eyes were a light brown he had never seen before, so light they seemed like mere glass tinted with the faintest shade of hazel. He shook his head—he did not understand poetry.
“I must go back to work now,” he told her, wondering what to do. He had never seen her in the village before, and wondered if she came from one of the neighboring towns some miles over—visitors were few and far in between, but the villagers were no strangers to such events. Still, he thought, she looks familiar.
She nodded, then turned and ran off into the trees behind her. “Wait!” he shouted, unable to stop himself. “It’s dangerous in there!” But she was gone.
It was well of him to say so, he realized, seeing as he himself was never there less than twice a week.
He sighed and turned back to his work. What happened to her was none of his business. He had things to prove.
She was not sent to school. She had nothing to prove, insisted the aunts. Was her father not the richest man in the village? His daughter did not need to work.
It is not work, her father replied. It is knowledge. And will I still be the richest man, if your husbands are eating us out of house and home?
The aunts faltered. A governess, at least,they said at last. The richest man’s daughters must not be seen mingling with the commoners’ children.
She had been hoping to be able to spend time with other children. The house bored her, and it was too familiar. She would have welcomed a change of scene, but instead she was forced to welcome a stranger. She disliked strangers.
The governess remained unnamed to her, only to be called Miss. She was very strict on that, and was otherwise lenient in other matters. She was allowed by the governess to play whenever she liked, and was only occasionally called into the house to receive lessons she did not understand. Once she was made to walk across the room with a stack of books balanced upon her head.
It improves your posture, said the governess. She did not explain what posture meant.
Pos•ture – the relative disposition of the parts of something
So she walked, and the stack of books grew heavy on her head, and her spine began to hurt.
It’s for the best, said the governess.
They had started in the middle of the afternoon. By nightfall the governess was done with her. Her head was sore and her spine felt worse. She hated the books that the governess replaced in their shelves with such care. They were so heavy.
Tomorrow we begin again, said the governess. Look, you have not learned a thing. A stick was found and rapped sharply at her spine. She straightened her back with a jerk. She was unused to being hurt. At that moment she was not sure which she hated more, the governess or the books.
She sat up through the night, trying to think where she could hide tomorrow. She was thirteen and old enough to know that there were things that had to be faced. She was thirteen and young enough to know that some battles were best chosen carefully.
By morning, the governess had searched for her high and low. Soon she had recruited the aunts to her cause, and they had turned the house upside down. But they would not find what they were looking for.
At nightfall Tomas was done. His father, if all had gone well, should be preparing the feast that signified the passing of one of his sons into adulthood. He strutted, grinning, proud a young new rooster that had just beaten another in a fight. He tugged the carabao forward, and the animal obligingly speeded up its pace, content from having wallowed in the mud for hours. It nearly skewered Tomas with its horns when the boy—a man now, a man—stopped short.
Before him were ashes. Ashes and cinders and thin, weak sticks where once a whole village stood. The ground beneath his feet was black and still warm to the touch. Dimly he wondered why he had not noticed or smelled the smoke all day, and then realized that the wind was blowing in the opposite direction. It would have taken the smoke away from him, so that he had neither smelled nor seen it. He cursed it, but he did not weep. He still did not understand what had happened. Then he saw the circle in the middle of the village square, and he knew. He could see it, as clearly as if he were there.
His father, watching him from the top of the hills, would have seen that he was nearly done. Beaming, he walked back to the village, calling to his wife to prepare the suckling pig for roasting, and the chickens as well. The children would have tripped over themselves gathering wood for the bonfire, his bonfire, since there was always a great celebration when one of them, girl or boy, grew into adulthood. With a girl it was the coming of the blood on her thighs, on the mats and sheets where she lay. His parents would have been smiling, proud of him, and as sunset neared they would have lit the bonfire. The wind was strong. They would have had difficulty, but they would not have waited for it to die down—the feast had to be at least halfway ready before he made it back. It was a long walk from where he was back to the village, but his parents were cautious people, they would not have chanced it. So they lit the bonfire, and the wind blew a spark, or a smoldering piece of wood, to rest against the wooden walls of a house, or on its thatch roof. The weather was dry; it was summer, the sun had been merciless all day. It would have been easy for a fire to start up, and easier for it to spread.
His throat was dry.
What was he going to do now?
She watched him from behind a tree. This was the first time that she had seen this happen, and she began to suspect that perhaps time was not a straight line. It unsettled her, although she should have realized it from the first. (The next time she returned, six months later, the village would be whole again, and she would see this same boy, laughing and happy, and she would know her suspicions were true.) She felt sorry for him. He had been so proud of himself this morning. Or had it been afternoon? She never could tell. He turned suddenly, and caught sight of her. She turned and began to run.
“Wait!” he shouted, once more. She ignored him again and kept running, counting on his exhaustion to keep him from catching her. She was not eager to get back to the aunts or the governess or her silent father, but it was better than being caught by this boy.
She found the gap between the trees easily. She knew what she was looking for—something door-shaped, where everything between was slightly blurred, as if you were looking through a foggy window. She rushed through it just as the boy’s hand caught at the sash of her dress. Thankfully it slipped through its loops easily as the silk it was. She refused to be that girl Alice in the stories the governess sometimes read aloud to her.
She would be reprimanded severely later, but she accepted it.
Tomas stood there, baffled, his grimy hand clenched around the strange, soft length of fabric he had snatched from the girl’s dress. Unthinkingly he raised it to his cheek and rubbed it against his skin. Soft. Delicate. Just like the girl he had seen vanish between those trees.
He wanted to go through, just like her. After all, he had nothing to lose. Fear held him back, though. Fear and the hope of survivors. Surely not everyone had been caught in the fire? He turned back. The sun had set in earnest now, and the first stars had long since been joined by others of their kind. Perhaps now he would become a legend? The boy who lived. A grim fulfillment of his childhood ambitions, but he felt he should accept it – that it was his duty and destiny as an adult to remain in the world he had unwittingly created.
He looked back at the gap between the trees and squinted. Was that bush behind it sort of…blurry? He couldn’t tell in the dark. After a long look, he turned away and headed back toward what was left of his village.
At least now he knew legends existed.
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