Chapter 20 …Jiaoren?
… JIAOREN?
Thirty-three years ago …
A woman lurks beneath the ocean surface.
Skin the color of palest jade, delicate as a paper lantern.
Eyes that are solid white and glistening.
Clouds of black hair unspool around her head.
She sweeps away errant, floating strands with hands that are long as your foot, the bones strangely elongated.
Each finger is tipped with claw-like nails.
In her mouth is the hardness of teeth, too many for a human and jagged as a shark’s.
Her feet are long and flat like a pair of fins, with webbed toes.
Far from land, nearly drowned, bleeding still; inches away from a monster. You should be screaming. You should be a gibbering mess. Instead, you are only amazed.
Even … awestruck.
For she is beautiful, in a twisted way, and something about her sorrowful, ferocious expression moves you to a mix of pity and wonder.
“Jiaoren,” you manage to croak out, dumbstruck and overwhelmed. “Jiaoren!”
What else could she be but one of the so-called flood dragon people—the magical women and men of ancient legend, who live beneath the waves in their own undersea kingdoms? Whose tears become pearls, whose love is legendary, and whose vengeance is relentless?
Everything makes sense. The decrepit signs in the fields, the ocean your mother is nervous of, the temple built for sea-dwelling people. The aura of beauty around this place. Even the strange storm, an act of supernatural influence. This woman—no, this jiaoren—is at the heart of it all.
On an island full of faded, chittering ghosts, her monstrous nature is bright and fierce and full of verve. Like a vibrant bird, flying above a field of dry bones.
It’s then that you realize how cold and weak you are, strength sapped by fighting the tides, shivering in the water despite the warm sun above. The burst of adrenaline is gone and with its passing, your legs slow, ceasing to tread; you slip once more beneath the surface.
One of her hands darts through the green and grabs a fistful of camisole, her nails slicing inadvertently through fabric. She holds you tight, face-to-face with her in the waves.
Those shark teeth. Those pearlescent eyes.
You’re spellbound and dazed. A glimpse of her form, ravaged and unpleasantly starved beneath the rags she wears—doesn’t she eat?
Surely one like her is a predator—with all her bones on display, ribs protruding and hips like axe blades. Nothing about her is soft, or safe.
Time stretches as you hang in the water and she reaches out, so gently, to touch the tip of your nose with her other hand. One nail traces a cheek and, despite the lack of verbal communication, you sense her shock.
Hold on, she says, or at least, you think she is speaking. Her lips move and you understand what she means, which is almost the same thing.
Abruptly, she wraps both arms around you and launches into a swim. Starved or not, she’s strong as a horse. No, a dolphin. You clutch at her wrists, hanging tight as she torpedoes through the waves.
It’s exhilarating. Fear melts like spring frost as water parts around you both. Glimpses of fish, something that might have actually been a shark, sand and rocks, liquid emerald everywhere.
Dip and dive through glassy water, disrupting schools of fish, skirting typhoon-hit wrecks, dart through waving seagrass and clustered coral.
Urchins roll like spiky balls, shunted by the force of your passage.
She lets you surface to catch your breath before diving again, and keeps you safe as she glides through unknowable waters.
Soon enough, she reaches the shore where you first entered the sea earlier.
No signal, no warning, no discussion. One moment you’re tunneling through the green, as close to a fish as you’ll ever get.
The next she flings you from her with insane strength, strong as the ocean itself, and you’re cresting through the surf to wash up like beach detritus.
Air! Warmth! Dryness! Joy expands in your chest as you lie back on the sand, foam surging round your limbs and the blessedly warm sun soaking in.
After those long minutes beneath the surface, the world above feels almost too bright, too clear; unnaturally hot and dry.
As if the water were a place you halfway belong, now, having nearly died in it.
“Hello?” Sit up, look up; you’re alone. “Hey! Sea Sister, are you there?” Sea Sister. Why not. It’s a polite enough honorific, since you don’t know her name.
A glimpse of something pale and fast in the waves. Fleeing, or lurking? Scramble to standing, and leap back into the water, putting your head beneath it.
That moment. Where sound plunges into a muted dullness, where the raw noise of the atmosphere above is softened by the sea.
She’s there, your rescuer, your personal fantasy: a little farther away where the water is deeper. Watching you as if transfixed. The jiaoren seems startled, though she’s alien enough in appearance that it’s hard to read her expression.
“Sea Sister!” you call out again, this time underwater. Forcing your voice to make sense in a liquid environment.
She turns uneasy circles, giving a good view of her ravaged form.
The rags that barely hide her bones, the feet and hands so unusually proportioned.
She looks hungry, lonely, haunted; an isolated legend, living among ghosts.
Yet she is inexplicably beautiful despite the monstrous traits and the painful starvation.
The jiaoren stops circling and swims toward you, cautious and hesitant. She seems to be waiting for something. An invitation, maybe?
“Swim with me again,” you yell underwater, expelling all the air from your lungs to enunciate-shout the words. Needing breath, you stand up in the chest-deep waves, gulp oxygen, and duck back down again. “We can be friends,” you plead.
She watches, unblinking and statue-still despite the fast-moving tide.
“Are you hungry?” you bellow, feeling stupid and rude for shouting, but it’s not possible to speak underwater otherwise. Assuming she can understand you at all. “Can I get you food?”
At your question, her face changes, lips drawing back and teeth clacking. A long, black tongue flickers, the surface of it covered in tiny suckers like an octopus’s tentacle. Her dark eyes squeeze shut, then reopen, and she drifts close, so close the tip of her nose brushes against yours.
Unwittingly, you gulp. Not afraid, exactly, but definitely intimidated.
She pulls backward, shakes her head, and smiles—or bares her teeth, you’re not sure which—as she takes your small, suntanned hand in hers, bony fingers rigid against your palm.
Come back tomorrow, Shore Sister.
Tomorrow, you mouth back, exaggerating the lip movements. Showing her you understand.
The jiaoren bares her teeth again, and flashes away. Faster than a motorboat, melting into the depths.
Despite her instruction, you climb out and wait around on the beach for a little bit anyhow, telling yourself it’s better to dry off. Trying to understand what’s happened to you, why it doesn’t faze you like it should. Ghosts are one thing; this experience was something else entirely.
Other people would be afraid, but the things you fear and the things you love have never quite lined up with the fears and loves of other people.
The island, the beach—it’s like all of this was fate, like everything that has happened till now was just a series of steps allowing you to move onto this path, and meet Sea Sister.
Destiny is unfolding. You still don’t know what the future will bring, and hate to guess. But for the first time in years, that isn’t a worry.
The sun is setting, you are famished, and it’s a long trudge back. Time to go home, for now. It has been one wild day.
As you set off for the house, the small white cat watches you from the shadows, its whiskers quivering.
I watch, too, but you do not see me at all.
The walk back just about dries your cami and drawers, enough to throw on the shirt and loose slacks that you left on the sand. Conveniently, the longer clothes hide your scraped thigh (barnacles), scuffed shins (rocks), and scratched arms (monster claws).
Inside, your heart is broken open from too many new experiences, brain thrumming with awe and overwhelm. Lost in your own thoughts, you don’t pay attention to your surroundings for most of the walk.
The whitewashed walls of your house emerge quietly from the greenery as you draw closer to home, and it’s only when you’re a dozen yards away that you finally notice the low but audible murmur of talking. Something else, too: music playing.
What the hell.
Then you see her, through the front window. You see your mother.
Some of the ghosts are dancing and some are playing spirit instruments (where did they get those from?) in the background while Mami watches, hands clapping to the rhythm and a smile on her face.
She bounces from foot to foot, not quite dancing.
This is no traditional performance, but a modern dance, of the kind one might have found in a Shanghai jazz bar before the bombs wiped it away.
You recognize the tune as one she used to hum sometimes, while doing her chores.
Has she taught these ghosts to play modern music? Surely not.
The sight is unnerving. You stand there for a good ten minutes, roiling with uneasy emotions, until she notices you with a jolt through the window and straightens guiltily.
By the time you come through the front door, Mami is in the kitchen, make-work tidying as if nothing unusual happened. The only tell is a guilty flush to her cheeks. The ghosts are present, doing chores and milling around, but the instruments and music are gone.
You could swear the ghosts speak louder than they did before. Some of them are definitely more active than they used to be. You wonder uneasily if Mami has been feeding them, and if so, on what; there is nothing on the shrine, no bowls of food with joss sticks.