Evil Spirits

"I will cane you and you see if I won't!"

Bibi advances threateningly with her dark hands akimbo on her hips, her lips twisted into an ugly rope knotted with tension. The white of her eyes protrude glaringly at Sam as the air is whipped with fear.

The local fair had come to town. Racing the herd home so that he could make it just in time to watch the elephant show, Sam had left a calf behind, being in such a hurry that he did not count the animals in the stall. After all, he had done it many times, hadn't he, shepherding the animals forth and nothing had happened before? Ok-once Sam had been careless and had left a nursing cow out in the fields while he shooed the rest back home. The newborn calf had died in the night. But Danny, his older brother, in a fit of protection from the wrath of Bibi because Sam was still 'young', in his opinion, had quickly got the cow home, and broke his money bag to present to Bibi the coins he had gotten from 'selling' the calf because he noticed it was getting 'sick'. Both of them narrowly missed Bibi's hellfire judgment after bearing the scrutiny of her piercing eyes, for after all, since when had her boys become so concerned with money for the home?

But Danny was not there to help Sam this time. They had had a fight-he had caught Sam taking money from the money bag that Danny had been saving in from harvesting for a new motorized airplane toy that he had planned on buying at the fair. Danny had caught Sam, smacked him upside down before Bibi hollored from inside the thatched house for them to 'watch it', snatched the money and headed off alone to the fair. How Sam wished for Danny to be there now. Bibi, in her characteristic sadistic way, would march Danny to look for the 'biggest and fattest' stick from the forest for her to strike Sam with, and Danny, in his usual protective but helpless stance, would be careful to choose the thinest one that he could possibly get by without being under suspicion as an ally. Michael, his other younger brother, would have gleefully cantered off to search for something that amounted to a mini tree trunk which could have pinned a medium-sized animal down. At least that was what Sam had done for Michael on a number of occasions when instructed to by Bibi. No, Danny would have been on Sam's side. How unfortunate that we would steal from somebody in whose good-naturedness we most trust.

Sam's heart raced as his eyes lingered on the big stick that Bibi brandished in her hands. Oh how he wished that he had just done the usual to count, how he wished that his mind was not so on the elephant show in town! The tension now became worse than seconds ago when he was listening miserably in a corner at the echo of  the thundering footsteps of Bibi as she had stomped off in anger to hunt down a stick for the deed.

"You have an evil spirit in you", Bibi whispered as she came upon Sam, pushing him under the table. He looked wildly through the legs of the table and chairs in a bid to make a dash for another empty space. "And I am goin to cane it out of  you!" Bibi's voice suddenly rose to a fiery height as her strong brown arms lashed down on Sam's scrambling legs.

"I am goin to cane out the spirit of evil! Do you know how long we had waited for that calf to be born? We need a male calf  munggu damn ni! Come here I am goin to give you spirit of meekness and curse out this evil one!" 

Sam fet tears welling in the corner of his eyes as his calves and feet and arms bore the brunt of lash after lash. The excitment of the elephant show faded away as the searing pain slapped him after the whipping sound of the stick cut abruptly through the air seconds before it hit flesh. At the back of his mind he thought about the jeers that he would get the next day in school with all the stick marks. Oh how he hated the cows and elephants now.

Love Hurts

~by Isaac

   ~by Isaac

The crude wire fences sheltered the village from the ghost children of the forest beyond.

Now a seemingly peaceful and tranquil landscape littered with the ever accommodating though reserved locals, Missa would never have thought that the poor village has seen through such a devastating event-not of the war, unfortunately, because to have been suffering from the war would have been just another recounted tale of hapless victimhood-because she had never accounted or thought to expect the wilful self-destructive tendencies of the people she had ever faced.

Missa had been trekking along the trail leading through from the small town to the Cambodian countryside, with much foolishness I fear to add, never heeding to or even hearing of warnings of unexploded landmines all around. Having wandered into one of the bare and harshly pieced together wooden houses in search of tea, she was met with the woman of the house who had been sick and could not join her husband to the plantations that day. Her belly was swollen with a seven month old pregnancy.

The tea was sipped in silence and appreciation; Missa never having learnt the local langauge enough to hold a conversation but the amiability has been enforced with eyes that met and resultant smiles. Like most weather-beaten women, her hostess had crows' feet whenever she grinned agreeably though she never gazed full into Missa's face for too long-like a swan who has swam up to the outstretched palm and quickly turned away at the last minute from fear and distrust, or just plain shyness.

Having wandered out of the house after much curtsies of thanks, she noticed the entire area encompassing several similar looking wooden houses on crude stilts surrounded by wire fences. Clothes of varying sizes, but ostensibly that of children were draped intermittently along the fences, and old though they were, they looked comfortable and well-worn with their faded colors, the long of the pants and the sleeves of the shirts swaying lazily in the hot wind. They hung expectantly as if awaiting the childish and impatient tug from the wire fences to be donned on, untattered if they are lucky, the bodies of children in a haste to continue with their play.

But play there wasn't. The village was empty of children. Missa pointed to the fence and gestured low down to her hips, querying the whereabouts of the children by outlining their small statures. The lady shook for a moment and did Missa notice a chilled breeze through her skin?-no-that would have been odd, chilled breeze would never take the place of the hot wind in that part of the world, or so Missa thought.

The lady hobbled back into the thatched house-only now did Missa notice her limp which had not been apparent before when they were sitting or walking slowly-and emerged with a black and white picture of  boy with a tattooed body. He gazed blankly at the camera, as if taken from a bygone age similar to the stern countenances of our grandparents connoting sobriety. The tattoos on his body were mesmerizing: a geometrical pattern of a temple-like structure imprinted across the chest, which Missa, upon staring harder, realised it to be resembling that of a breastplate. There were sun-like patterns on each of his forearms followed by long lines of inscriptions of words. At the bottom of the picture Missa realised it was inscripted: 13 Feb 1953-24 June 1968. He died when he was 15 years old.

Missa looked up and saw the clothes fluttering again-strongly this time-along with the renewed wind, as if to fly away but was pinned back by the sharp hooks protruding on the wire-like fences and saw and understood the silence of the clothes caught by the fences of each house. But Missa, looking for sorrow in the lady's eyes after having imparted such a painful revelation to a stranger, saw only joy, or what she perceived to be joy as easily recognized from the upward curve of the lady's lips. The lady took the picture back and hobbled painfully back into the house.