The Vagrants

The match burned Bashi's finger and he flipped it away. He half squatted beside the body for a moment and started to gag. It had been a long day and he had nothing left to throw up. Still, he coughed and retched until his face was smeared with tears and bile dribbled down his chin. After a while, he calmed down and grabbed some snow to clean up his face. He wrapped the body up in the burlap sacks and tried to put back the boulders, but his arms and legs were shaking too hard. He spread dead tree branches and dry grass on top of the body, and when he felt sure the body was concealed well enough, he sat down and panted again, then cried.

The walk back home was exhausting. A few blocks away from his house, Bashi saw the dog, Ear, run by. He shouted at it and tried to muster his last energy to kick it. The dog yelped and ran away, dropping something by the roadside.

Bashi picked it up. It was a woman's shoe, the sole worn through with a hole. Bashi aimed it at a garbage can, but missed. “The world is becoming a hell of a place,” he said to no one in particular.

THE WIND HOWLED all evening, shaking windows, seizing loose tiles from roofs and hurling them across the empty yards and alleys. Kwen's black dog, tied to his post, whined and shivered, but his suffering meant little to the world, let alone to his master, who dozed off in the small cubelike janitor's shack, an empty flask on the floor next to his feet.

Elsewhere Mrs. Hua sipped from a chipped cup the rice liquor that her husband had poured for her earlier to numb the throbbing pain in her palm, and listened to the whistling of the wind through the woods. Old Hua and Mrs. Hua had sorted bottles and paper all afternoon and evening, and it was at the very end, when she was lost in her reverie, that she punched her palm with half of a broken bottle. There was not much bleeding, her aged body having little to offer now. Her husband washed it with saltwater and then poured a cup of rice liquor for her. They did not touch alcohol often, but a bottle had always been around, kept with the iodine and the rags they cleaned and boiled; it was the best medicine they could get, and once when Old Hua had had to remove gangrene from his leg by himself, he had downed half a bottle and later poured the other half onto the cut.

How was her hand? Old Hua asked, sitting down in his chair. Unless it was necessary they did not light the kerosene lamp, and she replied in the darkness that there was little to worry about. He nodded and did not talk for a while, and she felt the hard liquor slowly warming her body. Morning Glory, Mrs. Hua said, the name of their first daughter; did he want to talk about Morning Glory? The baby had been found on a summer dawn when morning glories, pink and blue and white and purple, had taken over the wilderness outside the mountain village where the Huas had passed through as beggars. The dew had soaked the rags that were bundling the little creature, her bluish gray face cold to the touch. For a moment Mrs. Hua thought it was another baby who had died before having ever enjoyed a day of her life, but her husband was the one to notice the small lips sucking.

Old Hua lit the tobacco pipe now and inhaled. The amber-colored tip flickered, the only light in the room. What's there to talk about? he asked, more out of resignation than rebuttal. Earlier that afternoon she had told Old Hua, while they were sorting, that it was time they began to tell themselves the stories of the seven daughters, before old age wiped out their memories. Neither Old Hua nor Mrs. Hua could read or write, and already Mrs. Hua had been frustrated when one girl's face was overlapped by another's in her dreams.

They could start with Morning Glory, Mrs. Hua said now, but she was momentarily confused. Where would they begin? When they had picked the bundle up from the grass, or when she had been sneaked out of the village before daybreak by her helpless mother? Mrs. Hua and her husband had looked for anything left by the parents—a name, a birthday, or a message they could later find people to read for them—but the rags that swaddled the baby, ripped from old sheets and worn-out undershirts, had said enough about the reason she had been discarded.

She was the prettiest, Old Hua said. He was as biased as a father could be, Mrs. Hua thought, but did not point it out to him. Morning Glory had been seventeen when Mr. and Mrs. Hua were forced to give up the girls. Seventeen was old enough for a girl to become a wife; still, when they found a family who was willing to take Morning Glory in as a child bride for one of their grown-up sons, they made the family swear to wait until Morning Glory turned eighteen before they would let the husband touch her. Mrs. Hua wondered aloud how well the other parents had kept their promises; they had had daughters themselves, she said, and as parents of girls they must have understood.