Water Washes Clean: A Fable
The purple burns Mom marked on my brother's cheek, however, stubbornly stayed for weeks, like a caterpillar's venomous hair on the victim's body.
My teacher punishes me for not wearing a decent white shirt to class.
Here, teachers are lords of their little kingdoms, bullying us over their idea of pity education. What can I do, for detergent costs more than my younger brother's lunch, and we haven't had a fulfilling meal for so long as I remember?
I do not argue about her priorities versus mine. I walk out, thirty-four pairs of my classmates' piteous eyes sticking behind my back. Those eyes are capable of pushing peers off the cliff of humiliation since sensitive kids do not have the nerve to wreck the demeaning crowd. Nobody says a word, but everybody has some claws of slander.
I lie down inside the high bank of the ditch right above water level. I fall asleep instead of digging dirt and filling in the water hole as per her punishment.
Educated people do not like ditches. Mosquitoes, flies, and maggots multiply and fester any living things. They are associated with burial holes, in which death lingers. That is why pupils get the punishment of digging and covering ditches behind the schoolyard. One arrow for two [spoiled] birds, as our school president put it when he announced the discipline method in front of 300 parents of ours. Nobody objected, so be it.
A frog jumps on my chest, and I briefly think of skinning it and frying it in mom's coal stove for my brother a decent meal. But this frog, with a yellow-spotted gray and polished skin, indifferently opens his mouth with the best idea:
"Why don't you steal some white shirts on the way home? Problem solved."
I am surprised by this open-minded suggestion, leaving it for my own interpretation and daring to act. While I am drowsy, it picks mosquitoes and midges droning around and targeting me. It leaves after feasting on the attackers, using me as bait.
In the afternoon, leaving the ditch after sweating out shoveling and digging, I climb up the barbed wire fences of my teacher's house and sweep all her daughter's bleached white shirts. I shove them into my tattered school bag and walk home without a glance back.
My younger brother is hungry, but I spared the frog's life, so he can't have frog meat tonight. He chews a spoonful of rice and salty peanut powder and signals that the peanut is good enough.
Beside the weakened oil lamp, I ripped the pink and yellow bows and embroidered flowers from the white shirts. The pungent detergent scent chilled by the nape. These white shirts will satisfy my teacher's unrelenting passion for uniform cleanness. Our polished look is for the provincial officials visiting this far-flung border school, a 12-hour boat ride from the closest village.
Our village only had a decent secondary school here two years ago, when I was in sixth-grade class. My teacher claimed to sacrifice her privilege of teaching in big cities to bring the light of education to illiterate children in isolated communities.
She did not mention that her pay grades would be tripled as she signed the contract to teach in remote areas for five years with free housing and multiple bonuses. If my teacher maintains her class as a "successful model" every semester, her income will double year on year. She needs me to eloquently solve algebra problems to impress officials in stiff suits who decide her payroll, but she dislikes that I look dirty poor in a pig's tripe soup color shirt. She disgusts the face of poverty from which she comes here to rescue us.
My brother finishes his dry dinner and washes his mouth with rainwater from the clay jar. He comes to lie next to me.
His snore floats me into a hazy dream of bleached white cranes. One big crane launches itself into the depth of my eyes, picking one of my eyeballs, throwing it into the air, and swallowing it. I panic and try to cover my empty eye socket with my palms. But from inside, there is nothing, just a void of screeching sound. My other eye rolls maniacally until it stops at the glaring slanted eyes of the fat eels boiling under the water. The eels coil up, stiffening their spine, and stand straight up, wearing polished suits and grinning at me with their blunt teeth.
The water drops carved moving circles through a wooden crack under our floor. I wake up with my hands on my eye socket; the eels' cold skin still haunts.
It is five in the morning. The cocks hammer their crowing and curses into the river mist. Mom blows into the stove; the coal fire licks the iron pot, billowing the sweet rice scent. She says they will be out of town for a week. The fishing season is here, and they must be at the river mouth to work in a fish factory.
There, my parents chop thousands of fish heads, cut off the fins and bones, and throw all the raw, beautiful white meat in metal containers. Undeterred killing. They need work to feed us, growing like uncontrollable eels wiggling in our muddy future.
Mom's cheekbones are sharper, and her eyes sink deeper like a well that I avoided jumping into. Her mouth hollows when she sleeps and grasps for breath. She gives me a rice bowl and asks me to take my younger brother to our grandfather's house after school and stay there.