By Crystal Koo
Compulsion defined us; we transformed every whim that gripped us into reality. We were vagrants now, but haven’t we always been, even when our billboard-tarped edifices had stood upright?
So while others pitched movable tents in the wasteland, we lashed together everything we could find. A taxidermied fox, a beheaded chess piece, a gas mask — they accumulated into a pillar, into a crown, a shape we couldn’t fully see but trusted. The green lens of a traffic light, a rusted door handle, until what we were making finally revealed itself to us: a pair of enormous hands, rising from the earth from their wrists, palms flat and fingers half-curled in supplication. We grooved each fingertip with a whorl.
The bandits came. They had seen our praying hands from far away, like a beacon. They tore them down until there was nothing but wrists jutting out of the earth, electric-cable veins dangling in the wind. Then they came for us.
They left us on a heap of debris and took nothing with them. Our blood soaked into the empty sockets of a doll’s head, collecting in a ruptured fuel tank, in the drum of a broken washing machine.
At sundown, a single trolley caster swivelled, as if it had decided to. And then the rest began.
Later other nomads will come. They will build their own settlement and they will not find us here, not a shard of bone. There will only ever be two enormous hands rising out of the earth, cupping the light of the sun.
About the Author
Crystal Koo was born and raised in Manila and is currently based in Hong Kong.
Her short fiction has been published in a variety of venues including Lightspeed Magazine and The Apex Book of World SF 3; she has also won the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature and the Hong Kong Top Story award.
She reads for the Bridport Prize and the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize and has recently finished her first novel.
Crystal can be found on <http://cgskoo.wordpress.com/publications> and on IG @anewartistry.
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