Meiko Ko night before she’d been in the dorm with us. It was near lights out and all of us were in singlets and shorts, on our bunk beds, and only Jo wore none but shorts. Every night it had been so because they’d forgotten to give her any. She only had a school pinafore uniform and two T-shirts and sweatpants, and it took time to wash and line dry them. She had lain below me playing with a Rubik’s Cube, and Aberdeen had not done so for a long time but had come in to check on us, arms crossed and the shawl wrapped around her, her Clarks shoes noiseless on the gray floors. When she was at my bunk her eyes widened, like mothballs. Jo’s gaunt, breastless body had provoked Aberdeen in a strange way. Maybe because it was young, it had a future, it had more years ahead to live, but Aberdeen was in her forty-year-old unhappy one, which might not have this and that in life, might not escape or see her hometown again, and she could not entertain the thought of a young body fulfilling its wishes, future, hope. This sounded like misery to her, and if she could choose someone to love it’d always be a boy or man, not the girls who stayed the longest, and if she could not have a future why should others. They must be stopped. Stunted at childhood to dampen, cast doubt, to ensure that she was remembered all through Jo’s life as one of the most powerful gatekeepers to her happiness, which was the poorest argument of those who’d never admit to being cowards, so she called out, “You naughty child!” And she yanked Jo out of the bed and the bunk sprang and I jumped a little. And she shook Jo roughly, like she was a tree, saying, “This is indecent! Why are you flaunting your body?” She shook for a long time. Five or ten minutes, it seemed, that if Jo wore leaves like those advertised in the green theme park, they’d have dropped from her body. Jo let her. She was sick and tired of everything and she had not told us yet what had happened in her past life that made her older than her years, that had forced her to see the world in its naked brutality, so soon, just a twelveyear-old, who saw, knew, shut up and bore. It wasn’t the first time a rude adult had shaken her like a tree. And we were just as bored as she was. For there was nothing to see in Aberdeen when we knew what was eating her: she was bitter. Life wasn’t going anywhere for her. One day we’d blossom and be out of Angel of Mercy, having an adventure, and even if that journey didn’t turn out well and life disappointed us, it was still there, waiting, latent, possible, for she’d said so often, without knowing she was heard, when to her we had no ears and were only stupid and nonsensical: “You children are liars.” “You brought me to Angel of Mercy and gave me nothing, and now I’m stuck here, serving all of you.” And being cooped so long in this small orphanage she’d grown afraid and was only talking to herself, choice and hope were not understood for her as for us, that even if we grew into nobodies like cashiers, or receptionists or waitresses or a page in a library, or a secretary broken by the betrayals of life, Aberdeen would still serve as the lesson not to be, if we were strong enough. She was only a graveyard. Someone full of loneliness. Which she was trying to turn Jo and us into because she had not lived. And she was afraid to lay alone in her grave.
Crab Orchard Review
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