Page 65 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
There’s not a lot she can do about it.
She says, finally, “See you in the morning, daughter.”
“Good night.” And you turn on your heel, feeling pettily victorious.
21ISLAND DREAMS
Thirty-three years ago…
You wake abruptly in the middle of the night.
The walls and roof and ceiling are the same; the bed you lie in is unchanged from when you fell asleep. Yet something feels different, feels off. A flicking tail catches your eye; you are startled to see the little white cat, which you’ve occasionally spotted around the island. He (for it seems to you like a “he”) is sitting at the end of your bed, gazing with an unnerving intensity.
How did he get in here? Very strange. You reach a tentative hand forward, curious to see if he’ll let you stroke.
A voice beside you says, “Little sister? Are you up?”
You jerk abruptly and turn over.
Someone else is lying in the bed behind you; a young girl. She looks frightened. Her face is familiar; like your mother’s face, but younger, softened by childhood. She is the spitting image of the photograph that you found in the dresser, many days ago.
“Who—” You gasp, then stop, caught off guard by another shock.
The voice coming out of your throat is not your own. It is reedy and high-pitched, the voice of a child. Lift your hands; look at them. They are not yours, either. Small hands, short and stubby. Look down at your clothes: fisher-girl trousers and loose top. A braid swings from your scalp, neat and tightly pulled.
This is a dream. Of someone else’s life, someone else’s time, from years distant.
But whose dream? And why are you seeing it?
“Daiyu?” you say, cautiously, because the girl next to you looks so much like your mother, and you are sure she’s the girl in the old photo.
“I’m here,” she says, and you realize she’s trying to soothe you, though she is just a child herself. “It will be okay.”
“What will?”
The door bursts open and a frightened-looking old woman comes into the room, her gray hair drawn into a tight bun.
“Ahpo!” Daiyu exclaims. “What’s happening?”
“We must go, we must go,” your grandmother says, and takes each of you by the hand. “Hurry, they are very angry!”
There are voices, you realize suddenly; men shouting outside the house. The words are indistinct but the threat of them carries, clear and stark.
“Why are they angry?” you say, unnerved by the strangeness.
“The men think you have cursed them.” Ahpo half-drags, half-pulls the pair of you toward the back of the house. “They want us to leave. We must go, or the men may be violent!”
How strange, you think dizzily. This is just like the folktale your mother recited once, about the girl who was chased away by superstitious villagers. But how did it end again—
The front door caves, forced open by red-faced fishermen waving sticks and other implements.
Cursed child! Bad-luck demon girl! Storm bringer, ghost talker, ugly bad-luck sorceress!
You know their faces, and feel a wash of anger. These are the men who killed your cat, because they blame you for typhoons and revile you for speaking with ghosts. Youknowthey did it, because the cat told you so. When he came back from the dead.
Where is he now? His ghost should still be around.
“Run!” Ahpo says, breaking your chain of thoughts, and the three of you do. Out the back of the house, into the mangroves. Away from the furious, violent, unreasonable villagers.
