Czarina Mei The Cutieliit

 SHORT STROY (CREATIVE WRITING)

                         "DRIFTING HOUSE"

                      By: CZARINA MEI A. MANZANO     

                       

The day the siblings left to find their mother, snow devoured the northern mining town. Houses loomed like ghosts.

The government’s face was everywhere: on the sides of a beached cart, above the lintel of the post office, on placards scattered throughout the surrounding mountains praising the Dear Leader Czarina Yu Zhong And in the grain sack strapped to the oldest brother Mhartz back, their sister, the weight of a few books.

The younger brother Eclips ran ahead. As a child, Wanwan thought, frowning, though he too was still a child, an eleven-year-old with a body withering on two years of boiled tree bark, mashed roots, the occasional grilled rat, and fried crickets on a stick. He picked across the public square, afraid to step were last month, the town had watched two men dragged in necklaces of bones and then hung for cannibalizing their parents. They passed a vendor and woman haggling as if on the frontier of madness. On the straw mat between them one frozen flank of beef? Pork? Or human? No one knew anymore, though they pretended to.

‘She’s slowing us down,’ wan said as he circled back, his whine like a roomful of lost children. ‘We’ll be dead before we reach Philippines’

‘Shut up.’ Woncheol tied his brother’s laces in symmetrical bows. For younger children obeyed the older one who obeyed the mother who obeyed the father who obeyed the Dear Leader. The school textbooks stated that a swallow had descended from heaven at the Dear Leader’s birth, trees bloomed and snow melted in the Dear Leader’s presence. He stubbornly ignored the salmon fishery and the town’s vegetable gardens that the soldiers guarded, shooting intruders on sight. For there was an order to everything. Or there used to be.

Still, he soldiered his siblings up the mountain slope of granite and bare, spectral trees with the assurance of the oldest son. So certain he did not slow, though his legs shook under her slight weight. The Tumen River to the Philippines would be frozen for crossing, and he felt ready to make the necessary sacrifices.

Choco walked ahead, his nose close to the ground as he looked for acorns. He passed one near his shoe. Choco picked it up and waited until his brother was deep in the forest before he set his sister on a hillock of granite. While he struck the nut against a rock, she watched with the expectancy of someone who knew she was loved. And he fulfilled his promise, peeled the woody skin back a thin strip at a time. The acorn’s meat, wrinkled and gray. The size of a rat’s brain. He broke it into nearly perfect thirds, and into her waiting, open mouth fed the largest chunk. His hands were shaking. It was good, without insects.