Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 4 - 7 2018 | Page 171

New Journeys to the West
St. Paul's Co-educational College, Chong, Yan Hei Kylie - 14
1.
A
charred tree stump sits across from me, painfully twisted and pointed. Billowing tents partially
obscure it from my view, all so caked with dirt that they only way you could tell it used to be white
is if you were here when you put them up. They clump together in tight little rows under the
dust-filled desolate air, and if you didn’t know better, you would think that they were looking down at a
battlefield hospital.
The woman perched delicately there is haggard. She doesn’t seem it, at first; an undiscerning observer would
be perfectly correct in saying that she looks nothing like a conventional refugee. She’s meticulously
groomed, in clean if worn clothes, long hair still damp from the shower, and not obviously malnourished.
Her porcelain skin is almost as white as her perfectly straight teeth.
But nobody can hide the trauma of what they’ve left behind: the sound your house makes as it collapses
around your loved ones. The memory of the dirt that collects, bit by infuriating bit, in your skin, until it
makes you want to scream and scrub savagely at yourself with seawater and your bare hands, but even the
slightest movement may tip your pathetic rubber dinghy and send thousands of others into watery graves.
The ink on your hand that marks you as a legitimate resident of the camp, a livestock brand that you cannot
bring yourself to wash off no matter how hideously the ink starts to bleed into your skin, because it is your
one source of fleeting safety.
The stack of used paper beside her grows smaller as two, five, ten wrinkled, bedraggled birds join her on the
wizened wood, balancing one on top of the other as they pile up on her lap. I would like to imagine that
they provide a jolt of color to the otherwise ashen landscape, but it’s all the same to me. The world seems
inexpressibly gloomer when you see it in shades of grey. Except her. She’s… warmer than everything else.
I close my notebook on this sentiment and stand up. She lifts her head to watch me as I draw closer and
sweep by. Later, I try to decide whether I am relieved or disappointed that she did not speak to me.
2.
“You got spare paper?” I stop as I’m about to pass the woman and rip out a scribbled-over piece of paper
from my notebook. She licks her fingers and starts to fold, the inviting pat on the tree trunk coming almost
as an afterthought.
The ridges and bumps dig into my skin as I gingerly sit down beside her. She smooths the paper out to read
my now-obsolete list of possible countries and raises an eyebrow at me. “Aiming high, huh.”
“All or nothing, right? And since I got nothing back home-” I shrug. “Might as well.”
“Might as well.” She repeats pensively, her fingers working absentmindedly at the paper, creasing it,
refolding it, pressing down hard on the fold with a bitten-down nail. She looks out across the camp with
eyes of flint. “I’m getting out of here if it kills me.”
She has her own notebook in her lap, a little black thing with a pencil and eraser placed on top of it. I look
around the oppressively familiar landscape for a while as she folds: the clouds of dirt billowing in the far
distance, little grey puffs of powder against the horizon. The distant hum and chatter of the forgotten camp
around us.