“I’m light, Dara.”
I tried pressing my own palms against the tower, but theyremained disappointingly flesh-colored. “Do it again,” I said. She did. Herhands glowed as long as she touched the power lines, then a while longer. Aftera few minutes the glow softened, then went out. That night, sneaking back home,we found out the bunched ropes of wire could hold our weight if we crossed oneat a time, clinging to the poles in the middle with fingers and toes, callingacross the night to one another. Sopha’s hands made the wires glow so we couldsee our way back.
We snuck out to hop the wires whenever we could, after that.At first we thought we had to be careful; we waited until we heard Ming snoringin her hammock, we tiptoed. But Ming was ignoring everything else—thesnakeskins tied to the roof, the bruises on Sopha’s body—and we realized shewould ignore the wire-hopping too.
All the risks we took, the trouble we found, I thought wewere having fun. I didn’t realize that Sopha was figuring out what it meant tobe a haunted child. What separated her from the ghosts. What made her the same.
I want to reach through time to tuck Sopha back inside thestilt-house and discourage her from doing anything that might part her soulfrom her body. I want to let the boys bloody our noses and blacken our eyes.Anything but that glow on Sopha’s palms and that shine in her eyes, anythingbut that thrill we felt as we carried our light home.
◊
The night after the ap murdered one of their men, theforeigners saw something moving along the power lines. They wouldn’t say ghost,they would only admit to a glow.
“Like your neighbors report seeing,” Kao translated for me.“A white light.”
The province police had been called, but, as usual, refusedto show. Even if the drive hadn’t been a long one on rough roads, policemenwith batons and cattle-prods couldn’t hurt vengeful spirits. I told the crewnot to expect the police anytime soon. Then I told them how we stayed safehere: we stayed inside at night. We let our fires and lamps die early so theghosts would not see us. We burnt money and food for our dead, so they wouldthink well of us. We built spirit houses far from our own dwellings and burnedincense to guide the ghosts home. We tied red strings around our wrists so ourspirits wouldn’t be carried away.
One of the cameramen nodded to my wrists, a tangle ofhastily-knotted threads, and said something to his friends, then laughed. Kaopursed his lips. I thought of the meals at stake and made myself smile.
“Have they hurt or insulted anyone since they came here?” Isaid.
The foreigners squirmed when Kao translated my question.“They say they haven’t,” Kao told me. “But they talk about your aunt. They sayshe needs to go to the police.”
They must not have understood when I’d said that the policerefused to come here. “About what?”
“What happened,” the translator said, frowning. “With yourfamily.”
“My sister let herself be taken to the spirit world,” Isaid.
“That’s not what your aunt believes.” He spoke in English tothe crew. One of the men produced a camera with a screen built into the back.
On the film, Ming faced the camera with a hard stare. Theframe was so narrow that only the creases of her face and the white cloud ofher hair appeared. “We are under a curse here, the lights, the people, all thesame thing. You think it is a mistake that ghosts roam freely here?
Everywhere else they go to the spirit houses and leave thepeople alone; here they scream so loud we can’t sleep, they mock us with theirglow in the darkness, they kill our children. We can do nothing for fear ofthem except kill more of each other. I know our neighbors killed my niece, theythought the ghosts would go, the curse would lift, but nothing will lift thisfrom us.”
“Please stop,” I said. “I don’t want to hear more.”
◊
The list of things I thought I knew about Sopha’sdisappearance was always small.
1. She left sometime between sunset, when Ming poured dirton the fire and sent us to our hammock, and sunrise, when I woke feeling coldair on my skin instead of Sopha’s bony elbows.
2. She wore her orange dress and her pink rubber flip-flopsand the silver stud earrings that used to be Mak’s once. Nothing else wasmissing from the clothesline.
3. She did not wear the red strings on her wrists. Those,she left in a heap on the floor.
As soon as Ming saw the bundle of red strings on the floor,she knew Sopha had decided to abandon Psaodung and us for the spirit world.“What happened to her yesterday?” she cried, shaking me by the shoulders. “Didyou talk her into this?”
“No,” I said. “She didn’t tell me anything.” I knew in mygut that Sopha was gone forever, but I couldn’t stop myself from looking forher. For days I searched. I went everywhere I thought she would go besides thepowerlines. I was afraid to climb the tower and hop the lines without Sopha.Finally, Ming made a sacrifice so generous that we didn’t eat square meals fora month, and told me there was nothing else we could do.
Knowing Sopha had gone to the spirit world made me feel likePsaodung wasn’t really my home anymore. I only belonged here as long as I had abody tying me down. I left school. I stopped selling snake skins. I took infishing nets at the dock until the men got too rough for me to tolerate andthen I sliced mangoes at the stand across the street until the stand lost toomuch business for them to tolerate. And then, when Ming borrowed money—fromwhere, I was scared to ask—I got my own stand further down the road, wherepeople didn’t know me, with a yellow umbrella to shade my face and a wire rackfor hanging strips of
