She Weeps Each Time You're Born Read Online Free PDF Page A

spit. Inside their patchwork of sticks and canvas, Qui had fallen asleep on a ragged mat. Yesterday Huyen had kicked the girl awake and sent her out alone with an empty jar to check the hives down along the river. The girl didn’t say a word as she took the jar and headed off. She never spoke anymore. The front of her black shirt was always damp and sour smelling, her long tangled hair falling all the way to the backs of her knees. Despite her wan complexion, there was a savage beauty in her face, bones chiseled like a deer’s.
    In the distance Huyen could see one last group of villagers slipping through the landscape, the sound of their wooden wheels rutting the earth. The whole village had emptied, her neighbors simply draining away. She knew they had left her and Qui behind on purpose. They didn’t want to be around old Huyen and her sharp tongue and bloody teeth.
    Toward dusk the leaf-nosed bats began to appear. Huyen opened her eyes. She didn’t remember closing them. The moon was out. Qui was sitting beside her, the front of her black shirt damp as if she had spilled something on herself, a sourness wafting up off her chest. The girl was holding a jar of honeyand tipping it from side to side, the honey rumbling back and forth.
    Together they sat, grandmother and granddaughter, waiting for a sign as to what they should do, anything to spur them into action.
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, snarled Huyen, addressing Qui with the word meant for small children, though Qui was too old for it. Huyen cleared her throat and moved the lump of betel leaves she was chewing to the other side of her cheek. From time to time she would pose a question to her granddaughter in the hope of lulling the girl out of her silence. King, father, mother, child, went sailing in one boat, Huyen said, met a storm and sank. It was an old Confucian riddle.
Who would you save from drowning and in what order?
    Qui never took her eyes off the jar she was holding. The honey gleamed in the moonlight. On the ground her long black hair pooled like a hole. Through the empty village the sound of a door creaked painfully in the wind. As if to answer her grandmother, Qui put a hand on her belly, but Huyen reached over and swatted her hand away.
    Dark clouds were racing overhead, the moon in and out of shadow when the woman arrived, the cuffs of her loose black pants caked with dirt. She looked as if she had been to the ends of the earth and back. There was no emotion in her eyes. Later, Huyen would recall that it had seemed as if she were floating, the stranger motionless in the moonlight. Overhead the leaf-nosed bats were spinning themselves into a frenzy.
    The woman took off her hat. Her scalp gleamed through her patchy hair. Everywhere shadows massed on her face. Slowly, as if yawning, she opened her mouth and pulled something off her tongue. The object flashed in her fingers. She placed it in Huyen’s wrinkled palm. It was a silver coin. Stamped on oneside were two flowery dragons chasing each other’s tails, on the other, a man with a Confucian-style beard. Grandmother, the woman said, her voice echoing inside Huyen’s head as if the old honey seller were simply thinking the words to herself. In the next life I will serve you.
    Then the woman turned her sunken eyes on Qui. The moon revealed itself from behind a cloud. The stranger bent down and kissed the ragged girl on the forehead. Lovingly she swept back the long black curtain of Qui’s tangled hair and whispered in her ear. With her left hand the woman pressed her thumb and third finger together. The air filled with the sound of ringing, like a needle imperceptibly vibrating with human electricity, or a fly’s wings beating to keep it aloft.
    Under a nimbus of leaf-nosed bats, the woman held out her hand. There was nothing imploring in the gesture. Qui placed the jar of honey she’d been holding in the stranger’s dirty palm. The woman tucked the jar in her shirt.
    Huyen opened her