Mad sisters of esi, p.26
Mad Sisters of Esi, page 26
Jinn pulls his hand away. He keeps eating.
Jinn!
He goes to the Kilta cottage. He knows this is silly: it only strengthens the story that Wisa has turned both him and Magali mad. What he should do is stay away and be as normal as possible, so that all hint of suspicion lifts. But it is not physically possible—his feet lead him back to her.
When Magali is inside the house, he sits at the garden wall. When Magali is out, he has tea with Kua.
Once, Kua says gently: You shouldn’t come.
Jinn’s throat closes; he wants to weep. Is this what Kua thinks of him? That coming here is a burden for Jinn, and he needs to be released?
How do you tell the grandfather of the woman you love that if you stopped coming to their cottage just to be in the same space as the people who once loved you for all that you were, you would crumble? Jinn doesn’t have the words. So he holds his emotion in his throat and shakes his head—a small shake, which is all he can manage.
Kua understands. In that moment, Jinn imagines Kua’s estimation of him changes, although he cannot tell for sure; maybe he is just desperate for Kua to like him because Magali no longer does. But in truth, he wants Kua to like him because he likes Kua. Because this is the house of Wisa and Magali, and it has their qualities: a kind of burnished honesty, a lack of guile and a willingness to love with everything one has. And Jinn knows that comes from Kua.
The colony still looks up to you, Jinn whispers. They don’t blame you for Wisa; they know you have a big heart.
It is the only time Kua smiles, as if to say “I appreciate it” and “I wasn’t worried about their opinions.” It makes Jinn feel better, like the Kua they remembered is there somewhere, underneath the sadness.
For a year, Jinn climbs the eucalyptus tree alone. Ava invites him to the dances; Ori calls him on the evenings they drink fenni. He goes sometimes, but not always. What he wants is the sisters. To climb a tree and touch the clouds, but still look farther. To be all of yourself with friends so completely you don’t know you’re doing it. He thinks about his great-grandmother. She was a giant of a woman, big-boned and resilient, always looking at life like she could squeeze a bit more juice out of it. He imagines her watching him in the tree, brows furrowed.
What are you doing up there? she’d shout. What you want is on the ground. Go get it!
Esi is turning into water. This is the only way Jinn knows how to describe it—like they are all floating on a lake that was once a pond and that will grow into a sea. Like nothing knows how to be solid anymore. Sometimes he dreams of the future, but then he catches himself. Who knows how the festival will change them? What the future looks like? There will be a fault line in time, a crack that means the present no longer flows from the past and the future no longer comes from the present. He is sure of it. It takes great imagination to look at the other side of the fault line. He doesn’t have it.
But if everything is turning into water, then he wants a raft with the people he cares about on it. He knows this. He is sure of it.
His great-grandmother barks: Come down, boy! Go get it!
• • •
And so here he is, standing under the mango tree, staring at Magali as she clings to a branch. For a moment he thinks she is Wisa, and then he realizes why that is—Magali is so gaunt, she looks like Wisa when she first came to the colony.
His rage comes from everywhere, at once. Magali is climbing down from the tree slowly, as if she doesn’t trust her limbs. Stubborn, frustrating, ridiculous Magali—punishing herself and him and the whole damn world, always. Slicing him out, carving his heart into pieces—and for what?
Are we going to talk about it? he shouts.
Magali’s foot has barely touched the ground. She stumbles, taken aback by his anger, deeper than anything she thought him capable of. Good. He steps closer. Wisa leaves and then you disappear too—poof!, not a word, no explanation. What? Her name stings you? It hurts to say it out loud? It must because no one says it anymore. It’s like she never lived. I didn’t dream her, you know. Her paint mark is on that mango tree. She’s your sister.
Her face opens in shock. How dare you—
He cuts her off. It’s not right to slice her out! Burn her from conversations. When my great-grandmother died, my mother wouldn’t talk about the stories she told me. If I mentioned them, she pretended she didn’t hear. So I stopped talking about them but it made my great-grandmother smaller, trapped in some corner of my head. You can forget things, Magali, if you don’t talk about them. They can disappear. Do you want her to disappear?
How could he even ask that? Magali wants to hit him, to cry. She wants to say he doesn’t know what she has been through, but then she realizes he probably does. If there is one person, apart from Grandpa, who knows what she has been through, it is Jinn.
Jinn is still shouting. So she went away! he says. So what? She’ll come back or we’ll go find her. You don’t just . . . You’re Magali Kilta! You don’t just fade.
It’s our fault, she yells back, wanting this conversation to be over. My fault. That night, in the forest; if we hadn’t got caught up, if I had paid more attention . . .
She expects this to cut him to the bone. But he only looks incredulous.
You’re joking, right? You have to be joking. Because if this is why you’ve been ignoring me for one year, Magali, I swear—
—I had a responsibility—
—You’re mad! You think if you were there that night, she would have stayed? This is Wisa! She does what she wants. And if you had only talked to me, I could have told you that. Told you how incredibly stupid this is. I am here, Magali! I’ve been here all this time. I knew her too. I was friends with her too. But you won’t see that because you’re obsessed with suffering alone. Needing someone isn’t a weakness, and I don’t know how to make you see that.
Magali closes her eyes. He is right, and she doesn’t know what to do with it. God, what she put him through this year: running away from him, pretending to see through him. Her shame is hot and deep.
I am sorry, she whispers.
It’s not enough, he says. This is the second time you’ve done this. Promise me you won’t keep burning us to the ground. I can’t keep . . . coming back.
She reaches for his hand, then stops herself. I promise.
In the stories, mended friendships are bright and eager; each friend unburdens secrets they have been yearning to share in their time apart. But this mending is only awkward. The hurt lingers, as do the uglier and angrier echoes of themselves.
I should go back, Magali says when the silence stretches. I promised I’d pluck the brinjals before dinner.
Wait! Jinn doesn’t want her to leave. He rummages around in his pockets and with a soft aha! pulls out a stone egg. I found it in the river, he says, while listening to the fish. You know, like Wisa taught us? They’re a strange lot, let me tell you—not very nice at all. Anyway, I got it for you. Ishita, the drifter, not the weird fruit lady at Boba market, she says there are probably more like this along the island. They’re just . . . I thought you’d like it.
Jinn is lying. He didn’t just find the stone egg on the riverbed; he spent weeks hunting for it. It is the rock his great-grandmother described to him once: the Esi stone egg. He remembers her saying she gave it to a traveler to cheer him up, and the traveler told her about the changing Esi maps. She called it her good luck charm. Jinn hopes it can be his good luck charm too.
Magali holds the stone egg on her palm. It is blue-green, smooth to the touch. She lifts it up, into the sunlight, and it . . . moves. Light runs off it, flaring on flecks of gold. Inside the stone, there’s a sea. Magali twists it, this way and that, and the colors move with the light—jade, sea green, aqua and black swirling into each other like ocean currents viewed from above. It’s wonderful.
And now Magali is crying, great heaving sobs she can’t contain, and Jinn is holding her close to him with relief. He says softly and happily, I knew you’d like it.
• • •
After that, Magali is happy. She is happy even though she feels guilty for it, but she has been starved of light for so long that she clutches this happiness and refuses to let go. She may not deserve this, but she needs it. Jinn and she spend every evening together, and in his company, she feels some of herself return. Jinn was right. He knew Wisa, and he knows Magali. She can be all of herself with him.
Her happiness infects Grandpa. He is still older than she ever remembered him looking, but he smiles now too. Slowly and more rarely than before, but it is there. They say Wisa’s name again. Jinn comes over for tea, and they talk about her. Jinn and Magali tell Grandpa about the mango tree and the night of climbing. They laugh about how Wisa followed Ava once, slipping milows down her dress. Grandpa tells them about the time Wisa snuck into Old Silu’s house and stole her prized figs.
But Jinn is wise. He knows it is not enough for the three of them to form a shelter of their own. The festival is three years away now, and like it or not, the luddite colony is their refuge. They live in a society. You need to meet the others, he tells Magali. Sia, Ori, the rest of them. They need to see you for themselves. You have to put their minds at ease.
They don’t want to see me.
How would you know? You haven’t spoken to anyone in a year.
Magali is resistant to the idea. But Jinn goes to Grandpa, who then sits her down and explains, over elderflower tea, why she should do it. It is important for the colony to remember her as she was.
Part of her wants to remind Grandpa of the terrible things the colony said last year. She wants to say, I don’t want to be the old Magali. I want to be the person Wisa made me.
But she knows they are right. So she goes for fenni nights with Jinn and is startled by how everyone receives her. People used to cross the alleyway to avoid her. Now when she smiles at them, they smile back.
Of course people weren’t avoiding you! Jinn says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. You were just terrifying for a while. Sia used to shiver and shake every time you looked at her.
Magali doesn’t know if she believes him. Still, the luddite colony holds its love and its suspicion in equal measure, as simultaneous truths that don’t contradict each other. So when she smiles, old friends open their arms to welcome her back. Jinn introduces her like a rare bird just returned from tropical lands.
Look who’s here! he shouts. I told you she wasn’t gone.
Her peers laugh; they talk to her like the last year hasn’t happened. No one mentions Wisa, but Magali doesn’t expect them to. She didn’t even expect this much.
Some people still avoid her. Ava walks away when she approaches; Freyn always follows. But the others make fun of them for it. Ava’s been seeing madness everywhere, Sia says, winking at Magali. It’s a wonder she’s not crazy herself.
And as her peers change, so do the adults. Magali opens her cottage door to find neighbors on the doorstep, plying her and Grandpa with food. It’s my secret recipe, Dazane says, bringing over roast loomirs and trying to fit the dish through the door. Welcome back, dear. Don’t tell anyone the recipe or I’ll have to bury you.
All Magali can see for miles is love. She doesn’t understand how it happened, but it is there. She doesn’t know if her own grief blinded her to it, if the colony has changed its narrative again or if it was only a few people who thought her mad last year, and the rest kept their opinions to themselves. She can’t tell. She doesn’t care. This is good enough.
It is good enough even when Ava hisses to her, You can’t fool me. It is good enough even when Jinn’s mother catches her outside their cottage and digs her nails into her wrist. You’re not mad, yes? she asks.
Magali is alarmed. Lira looks terrible, her skin clammy and fish-like, her eyes darting from side to side. The question comes out of nowhere; Magali is here to collect a sprig of red cabbage and see if she can catch a glimpse of Jinn. She is still holding the cabbage.
Lira chuckles, and the sound crawls up Magali’s spine. Don’t be upset, don’t be upset, she says. Only have to ask. It runs in your family.
No, Magali says cautiously. Not mad.
Don’t be upset, Lira says again. You’re making my son mad, you know. What kind of a mother would I be if I didn’t ask? I have to ask, don’t I?
The wounds from Lira’s nails stay for days afterward.
Jinn finds out. Magali doesn’t know how, but here he is, bounding up their steps to apologize. There is an urgency to him, as if he’s afraid Magali won’t be there if he tarries for too long. As if she will have shut him out again.
It is my great-grandmother, he says. I think she told my mum the same stories and they sit in her. She is easily scared but she doesn’t mean harm. Honestly. She won’t do it again.
He says this earnestly, looking her in the eye. He wears his heart so openly, her own twists. How can anyone this soft and good survive?
Magali?
She takes his hand in hers. Forget it, she says, and she puts all the love she can into those two words. She doesn’t say, I wasn’t upset; I am only worried about your mother. But he seems to hear it anyway, for he bows his head and covers her hand with his.
Thank you, he whispers.
It is difficult to say how time stitches things, in what pattern. You look up one day and think, oh, I have everything I wanted, and you don’t know how it happened. Or you look across to the person you hold dear and whom you now share most of your time with, and try to remember a time when they were foreign to you, when you grew in different soils and toward different skies. It is often unimaginable.
This is how it is with her and Jinn. It is not the amount of time they spend together, although they do spend most of their days together. It is as if Wisa’s leaving tied a thread between them that binds them forever. No one sees Magali as clearly as Jinn can. And she loves him in the same way—with a sharpness that observes a person as a whole, good and bad, and loves all of it.
She doesn’t tell him that, of course.
It feels strange to say it in words. Jinn has been a friend so long, and occasionally an enemy, that to ask him do you think we’re lovers? is mortifying. Especially after the night they shared in the forest, and then her decision to ignore him for a year. She doesn’t deserve him. The friendship is enough, Magali tells herself. I am content.
But, of course, she isn’t and so she spends a lot of time dropping hints. She asks if it is true he and Ava were once promised to each other. If Sia and him were lovers during the year that Magali was considered mad by the colony. Or is there someone else he loves? He can tell her. She’ll help him—that is what friends are for.
It is childish. She knows this, but she cannot help herself. It is as if the words arrive on their own. Jinn spends a lot of time laughing easily and ignoring these statements. He’s developed a new calmness around her, an ease of self that is attractive and irritating. Magali wants him to be as agitated as her. It annoys her when he isn’t. Wisa would know what to do, Magali thinks and her pain is there, although not as sharp. She wonders where her sister is. She hopes she is okay.
You know, she says to Jinn one day when they’re sitting on the tree that skims along the river, I thought you’d be the one to leave. Out of the three of us. Because you—oh, it’s stupid, but because you disappeared when we were young.
When I told you I didn’t know my great-grandmother’s stories?
It seems like such a small thing now. Magali feels foolish for mentioning it. She doesn’t confirm or deny it, just dips her big toe into the water and makes lazy circles with it.
I never left, Jinn says. I was right here. You stopped talking to me.
You were different, Magali says.
She sneaks a sidelong glance at him. He looks contemplative, as if he cannot deny this. Then he closes his eyes and lies down on the branch. The sun catches his eyelashes, and Magali fights the urge to run her fingertip along them. If Wisa were here, she’d definitely laugh at her sister.
I don’t think I’ll ever leave, Jinn says lightly, his eyes still closed. I suspect I love you.
He never says it again. But once is enough for Magali, as is the hard, answering joy in her.
And so another two years pass. The colony falls back into its seasonal rhythms, even as the island falls apart around them. Jinn spends most evenings at Magali’s house; she knows Grandpa is glad of the company. Grandpa calls them gemels: two trees grown so entwined that they’ve grafted onto each other. He says it softly, with a secret smile he doesn’t try to hide, and Magali’s happiness is hushed and hard. It’s real.
They go back to the cave only once. They look at the pattern with changed eyes.
What do you think she was looking for? Jinn asks.
I don’t know, Magali says. But I hope she finds it.
Myung’s Diaries
No. CM
Kilam birds are teal, with crimson tails more than twice their length. When they dance, they take to the skies above cliffs, and the rough winds contort these tails into astonishing shapes.
The bird chroniclers draw these dances in charcoal, in powerful brushstrokes and light lines. Alone on these cliffs, they have grown attached to their subjects. Involved. Ask them and they tell you that mankind is not separate from nature but a part; birds imitate us as we imitate them; the past can be found anywhere.
For kilam birds do not only dance to mate. Flocks of them dance in thunderstorms, where thunder cracks the sky and lightning shows us new ways of seeing. In the sketches, the birds’ wings are bent in intensity, their eyes feverishly human. When the storm ends, the kilam birds descend to the beach and remain there for days; they are shaken. Life returns to normal only slowly and it is some time before the birds are wheeling in the clouds again.
For some birds, however, life has never been normal. These are the kilam birds who dance without storms. They dance until they are exhausted, then they drop to the ground, rest and dance again. Day and night, they do this. Some of them forget to eat. Others plummet from the sky into the ocean and drown. On mooned nights, you can see bird bodies contorting into shapes not meant for their species, straining for a glimpse of a foreign life.
