With a dozen guards surmounting the hill, you were nine months old when we handed you through the barbed wire fence marking the boundary between freedom and captivity. You squirmed, as evidenced by the scar across your hairline, hidden now by your nut-brown hair, but there even so.
We placed you into the weathered hands of your grandmother, under the high blue sky that reached everywhere we could not. Gunfire then, guards streaming over the hills, through long grasses that caught in boot laces. Your grandmother snatched you against her sunken chest and turned away even as your grandfather fell. She knew she could carry you (a bird, my young boy). She ran and her beloved fell–this was part of the price–his sweater snagging on the fence to shred bright lengths of blue wool into the wind as he sprawled to the spring grass.
The barbed wire bit into my hand and you reached for me with a child’s inclination to be back in his mother’s known arms. You were heedless of that sharp fence until your hand closed upon it and you shrieked. Shrieked as the hem of my skirt, as yellow as the butter I could remember from my childhood, curled into the air under a shockingly warm wind.
The fabric hid my father’s face, and so too my husband’s (fallen, fallen into the mud–had there been rain? I could smell it then), but yours remained clear as your grandmother pulled you bleeding from the fence, from all you had known, to carry you so far away they could not reach you. With me on this side of the fence, they did not pursue you–
Until now.
Beneath Simoundou’s blackest lake, the stone leopards slumber unknowing in blankets of algae and coral. Tomorrow, they will rise; tomorrow, the coral will crack to dust and tomorrow–it is said–will crack the world wide open. The soldiers will no longer keep their borders; they are coming and the leopards must rise.
But for now, you sleep much as they do, tangled in the warm hollows of your lover’s bed. Soon, Sampath will rise and make you the black coffee you love so well, but for now, he rocks a kiss into your scarred palm and moves slow against you, and I watch your shadows against the sheets, across the blue wall, with its peeling wallpaper that will be underwater tomorrow.
There is the echo of the lake in your coffee, the grounds at the cup’s bottom having fashioned themselves into a snarling maw. You stare at the beast and I whisper, “leopard,” in your ear and you try to shake it off, my voice a thing you have convinced yourself you should not remember–you were so little, grandmother said–but you still lift your eyes to mine as I circle the table.
“It isn’t vengeance,” you say.
Sampath sits across from you at the old pine table bearing flecks of old paint, coffee rings, and a deep burn where he sat a pan because he could not stop kissing you, your mouth twice as hot as anything that came from the kitchen.
“Is it not, Isuru?”
You cannot stop looking at the silver rings around his thick fingers, the way the cut-work of the ring you gifted to him catches the early morning sun and holds it in patterns against his brown skin. He is easily the most beautiful thing you have seen, even though you have not seen the leopards, have not seen the way they are said to be able to close a man’s head within their jaws
(hot saliva glints in the sun, painting a doorway between this reality and that)
before pressing down, before severing.
“It is only right,” you say.
Sampath reaches across the table to fold his hand around yours around the cup. Sampath has not seen the grounds and never looks inside your cups, be they of coffee or tea. He leaves these mysteries to you, as if he already knows these signs are not for him. Some things, he told you once, are for you alone, and though you were pressed flesh to flesh at the time, you suspect now he meant something entirely different from what you thought he meant.
Your hands drink in the heat of him; your pulse beats in the scar of your hand.
Sampath withdraws, moves back toward the stove where his strong hands scoop servings of kiribath onto chipped plates, topping each with a fried, sweet kokis. It is not new year, though it also is–they say it is so, when the leopards rise and reclaim all that was taken.
“That does not exclude vengeance,” he says.
And you, watching me-you-should-not-remember as I move toward the narrow balcony that overlooks a narrow street, wish you could convince yourself it did.
You were eight the first time you noticed the way your grandmother’s hands shook, but you did not wonder why until you were fourteen and she was near death in the bed you had once taken such joy jumping on. You liked it best when you could hit the low ceiling with your hands.
You wondered why–you remembered those hands as only strong, but now they shook as you took hold of them and roused the ghost of me within. You watched me float from my mother’s dying body, to rest against the ceiling while she laughed and said someday you would understand the price better than you did now, and you would not regret it–
Oh, you would, but I won’t tell, and Sampath won’t tell, and you–you will go silent, too, you who never cried once, not even when the barbed wire marked you twice. You remember a shriek, thinking every scar carries one, and when you look at the scar in your palm, at the scar against your temple, you think surely I cried out, but you did not, oh my lovely boy.
You held her hands as if you could stop her from going, but she had go to, just as your grandfather fourteen years before. She told you the way his sweater caught and unraveled in the barbed wire, and you see only my face, though you should not remember–
The blood is bright in your memory; your lying memory takes me to the ground gently and without explanation. Your lying memory erases the guards and the way they did not pursue you, given that I was within arm’s reach. You tell yourself I wore crimson flowers in my hair, that you remember the way the blossoms trailed down my cheek into the collar of my blouse. It was not blood and it was not the butt of a gun and it was not your father already dead at my feet.
Your grandmother’s hands were so strong, until the moment they slipped from yours. “Stay,” you said. But she defied you and went, and now, the night before the leopards are to rise, you remember these things. You look at me, but it is Sampath you turn to, his arms and belly you bury yourself into, because for me there will be time. After the leopards have swallowed the world.
Your grandmother has no ghost and this bothers you almost more than the idea of the leopards. You think if anyone should haunt you, it should be the woman who raised you, but it is the one who could not who lingers.
Sampath smooths your shirt over your shoulders as you stand before the mirror and you think it’s foolish he wanted to dress you, but you don’t say. You don’t say because you remember your grandfather’s sweater through your grandmother’s stories–she dressed him before they walked to the fence–and you know she would have gone back, would have taken those unraveled threads, but for the bundle of you she carried. So Sampath dresses you now, slow with each button because he knows and you know and there’s nothing to be done for it.
When the leopards come, the known world will flood. It is vengeance, but it is right, you tell yourself. How many fence lines and how many dead and how many yet live in captivity? How many are trapped beneath stone and water, how many are not yet free? You can free them, you tell yourself as you look in the mirror where Sampath and I both hover. His rings glint in the early morning light and he smells like sweet kiribath.
You do not ask him if he sees me in the glass, in the morning shadows, because you know; his eyes slant my direction and he tells you about the crimson flowers curling into my blouse. (He stumbles over “flowers,” as anyone would; he knows.)
And maybe it is your own memory that spills from him, memories you should not have, shared over the course of so many long nights that all seem fleeting now; maybe Sampath speaks the words as you did to him, giving them back the way they were given, but when you silence him with a kiss, you know. It is more than this.
He doesn’t want you to go, but never says. Sampath presses the blade into your palm, the blade he has used to make you every meal you’ve eaten for the past seven years. He lets you go from the small rooms you have shared, climbing to the roof while you walk barefoot to the lake where the leopards sleep. You feel as if you are two ends of a single cord, pulled tight and about to snap. The priests ring the lake, but you don’t care–you don’t look at them, don’t listen to them, because you know what needs doing.
You step into the water and it laps warm against your skin, the way the wind was that long ago day. It swallows you with its black mouth and you sink, digging Sampath’s blade into the scar that marks your palm. The skin splits as it did on the fence and your blood clouds (only flowers around your wrist, my son) the water. The leopards move as one, ancient stone snapping from sleep. Coral shatters as they swim free, strong bodies paddling to the lake surface. From every place they break loose, water floods as if from a vast underground well, rising to fill the world.
This was part of the price–grandmother gave up her beloved, and though you believe you have done so before (the crimson that flows from your hand is the crimson on my cheek), you are asked to do so again. Sampath will live; you can feel him on the tiles of the roof, but he will live without you and you without him, unless you can manage to haunt him the way you have been haunted, the way you have been pressed to do this thing–it is just blood, love, the drowned say. Just blood.
So you loose your blood into the waters until you’ve no more blood to give, to silence the drowned and those yet captive. And when you watch the leopards tear the barbed fences from the meadow ground, when you watch the leopards take those old soldiers between their jaws–hot saliva glints in the sun, painting a doorway between this reality and that–you know that you have flown from the lake, that you are no longer bound into flesh as you once were.
You soar, even drowned, and return to the small rooms you share with Sampath as he sleeps, wondering if he sleeps at all, or if he has fled–
But the rooms are empty of all but water, black lake waters licking the peeling wallpaper as you climb to the roof, to the still-warm tiles, to find your beloved curled there, kiribath left out as an offering, because the year is new–they say it is so.
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E. Catherine Tobler‘s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, F&SF, and others. Her novella, The Necessity of Stars, was a finalist for the Nebula Award. She currently edits The Deadlands. |