Fiction: Group 4
Pearl River Delta
Island School, Ng, Karen - 14, Fiction: Group 4
trange density –
the air is thick with voices. My chest is constricted, my heart is paused in rhythm and
song is stopped in sense. There is a haze, and I am confused by the dimness above the grey...
Halt! Is there a lighter way to go? My hands fumble through my skin: I have been to the casinos, the
memorial hall, the skyscrapers, the villages, the farms but oh! Not one is like this. Something grey enfolds
me and I am boiling in the wind. The cars are flying past.
Here some years ago I lay in the sea, floating on the water cool and catching. It shone like the earliest times
of the moon: dimmed by the stars beside, and like the vague gaze admist the purple sky...What stars are
there to be seen now? And the wind was aloof – unaware, unknowing, untold of what was to come. Its
change! Its demise –
and how soon it came! A time cannot last so long until it is changed. The air is now
tainted –
it is foul and sunless, and the wind blows a cheerless blight at me, and I float
–
too aware of what is
here and what is to come.
I think I have stopped breathing, but my heart remains alive...The fish swim towards a haven, but it is afar;
away from me and me and me. Through my eyelids I see the village from whence I came –
the wooden
houses lined in chaos, the black hairs on my sister’s head covered by dust... The lands I walked on all are
faint now. The once spry and pleasant is now overcome and claimed by this strange distant density, clouding
our thinking, dyeing our due wonder and herding us into the sea...
I used to lie in this sea, with unbounded wonder crossing my eyes, waiting until the rainwater had filled my
wooden pails. I would heft them on a stick –
a stronger stick every day from the oak I planted a flower
below every day. A gift for a gift...And I gave the oak a seed this time, because there are no more flowers
around the Pearl River Delta...
I reach out, my fingers lacing round crumpled paper. Red words, red faces –
all a blur in my eyes as my
mind cries and tries to grasp a memory...But my heart remembers too much! I feel pain in this peace...There
were brown doors and paths joined by grass yellow and green and almost insubstantial...
A light scent roams me now and I am quietly startled –
I look at the haven. I try to see it. I can only see its
outline, and I am crying under the water...It is glowing, and the trees are growing taller as I stare. My heart
slows. Their roots are beating to the north...
S
