She ran. The hissing was so loud overhead that it hurt Gzifa’s ears. She was shouting, breathless, shouting the story. In this story, she shouted, in this story the children find the bread crumbs easily. In this story, it never gets dark at all. In this story, the children get sent to bed early, get up in the bright sun of morning. In this story—she crashed into the thick trunk of a rubbery tree. She heard a low rumbling sound. She ran on, into the dark, into the hissing, until she suddenly saw it: the blue glow of the sensors.
Blue after blue, she matched her steps to each, heard the pulsing beeps on her tracker. Her tears stopped. Her breathing slowed. The story was still there, underneath. And the children, she whispered, found the bread crumbs. Boot down, boot down, she made her way back to the ship. They saw their home, she said. Gzifa saw the hatch opening, saw the lights of the console. Her father’s laugh burst from her. She would find the seeds in the spaceship and she would plant them. She was a person who meant to survive. I’m sending you, her father told her, because you did what your sister and I could not. You lived.
She climbed up the ladder, didn’t notice the slight waver, the glow around the spaceship’s surface that came from nowhere at all. She pulled herself up and into the ship’s interior—into absolute darkness. The trees leaned. The ship’s maw widened. She screamed. This isn’t the story! The trees wound around her, green over silver. They squeezed.
The earth already told us the story of humans, they hissed.
After a time, the trees returned their gaze to the deep pool of sky. They drank it in, satisfied, noting the winking light of Earth far off, across the wide bowl of space beyond.
3
Fingers
RACHEL HENG
The villagers lived in attap houses perched on high wooden stilts, the land by the sea being soft and shifting as it was. That, at least, was the official reason for the stilts.
Yet the children often suffered the unpleasant sensation of having one leg sink knee-deep into the squelching, bubbling mud. As they were pulling their legs out, they’d feel it: gentle fingers wrapping around their plump, sun-browned calves. They’d shriek and jerk their legs up more quickly, and the fingers would slip away.
Parents dismissed these rumors, citing seagrass, mudskippers, and trapped pockets of air as possible culprits for what the children insisted were fingers. But the children saw how their parents scrutinized the earth as they went about their daily chores. They noticed new designated areas marked with orange tape tied to little metal sticks driven into the ground. Once an area was designated, it was off-limits.
Soon the orange tape was everywhere. It resembled a twisting, winding maze. One might be obliged to take a circuitous route across the entire village just to get to their neighbor’s house. It got to the point where everyone added an extra half hour to any journey they had to take. Still, the parents would not admit that the situation was dire. They went about their daily activities with new vigor, often jogging from one place to another in order to make up for the lost time caused by the orange tape.
The children decided that something had to be done. If their parents would not face the fearsome truth lurking beneath their very feet, then they would.
On the appointed night, at the appointed hour, they stole out of their houses. Little shadows came from everywhere in the village, weaving through bushes and trees and orange tape, all heading to the oldest, deepest mud spot in town, one of the first ever designated areas. In their arms, the children carried bedsheets, ragged towels, strips of gunnysacks, old tattered samfu bottoms. They worked quickly, twisting each item into a rope and tying them together. The moonlight that shone down on them gave a pallor to their hands, and their fingers appeared a ghostly white as they knotted and pulled, knotted and pulled.
They looped the rope around the waist of the strongest boy in the village, and then the waist of the next strongest boy, and the next, and the next, until all the children were strung together, and then they tied the end of the rope to one of the sturdy stilts of a nearby house. The idea being that the first boy would lower himself into the mud, allow the fingers to wrap themselves around his calves, but then, instead of jerking away, let them take hold of him. Once the creature had its grip, the boy would plunge his hands into the mud, and grab the fingers around his legs. With their collective strength, they would pull the creature out of hiding. Several of the children from fishing families had snuck nets from their fathers’ boats and would have these at the ready for when the monster emerged. It would then be up to the children of the butchers and fishmongers. In their hands glinted their parents’ sharpest knives, stolen from busy kitchens and market stalls earlier that day.
The children checked the ropes, the nets, the knives. Everything was ready. They watched as the strongest boy stepped one foot over the orange tape, then the other. Nothing happened at first, and they thought perhaps that patch had dried over, become regular solid ground. But then he began to sink, the mud sending up soft burps around him. He held his arms out high above his head as he sank, as if getting into position for his mother to undress him before bed.
When he had sunk thigh-deep, his face changed, and the children knew that the fingers were creeping across his skin. The boy grimaced and his eyes widened, but being brave as he was, he stayed put, sinking
