Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold – Part Two

by S. B. Divya

Walter and his small gang visited as promised. Taking my mother’s advice, I told them I had failed. They delivered a beating, which I accepted while curled into a ball on the ground beside my mother, my hands tucked into my armpits to protect the cloth wrapping. Some of them stood apart and watched. I gathered from their words that they had come mostly for sport, including Konrad stewards-son. Walter had debts to the elder Konrad. He’d allowed too many of his pigs to sicken, and he hadn’t given the vassal his due share of ham.

“Do better by next week,” Walter said as they left.

They came back again and again, and I gave the same excuse and earned us the same beating, but over time their numbers dwindled. (Continue Reading…)

Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold – Part One

by S.B. Divya

My parents taught me to lie as soon as I could speak. Before I knew the meaning of the words, before I understood heat or fire, and long before I felt the pain of singed flesh, I learned to tell strangers that I burned myself by grasping a hot iron pot.

Once a day, my mother would pour water over my bare hands, then bandage each one down to the wrists, first with cloth of gold, then plain muslin. She had a technique for winding them in a way that left each finger separate but fully covered, and at no point would her skin come into contact with mine. When I was old enough, she taught me how to wrap them myself. By then, I also understood the danger that she had put herself in.

My parents allowed me to transform small items and only rarely, usually before we approached a large city where people would ask fewer questions about our wares. They let me play with other children, never roughly. After all, if I had burned myself, I would find it painful to use my hands. Other boys my age would wrestle and scuffle. I always ran from a fight. (Continue Reading…)

A Most Lovely Song

by Albert Chu

It’s 1939, and the drone of piston engines fills the sky over Chungking. The G3M bombers are right overhead, close enough for people to see the red hinomaru emblazoned beneath their wings. They release their bombs, one by one, and the explosions rattle the earth, and they flatten the buildings, and in their wake, they leave behind the dead.

Now, a boy cries, “Baba! Baba!”

He’s crouched by a pile of rubble, trying in vain to pull a lifeless arm out from under it. Nobody’s around; only the shattered buildings witness his struggle.

He doesn’t notice the straggling G3M until its shadow passes over him. As he looks up in alarm, he hears the whistle of the falling bomb. He’s stuck staring, frozen, at the sky. (Continue Reading…)