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The man with a strange accent

After small talking about how quickly the village was changing since the highway cleft the middle mountains, every now and then when Yuma was alone in the upland orchard, lazing in the daisies, an old man with a strange accent and tattered white uniform and a broad-brimmed hat pulled over his jaundice-yellow eyes would appear, and ask Yuma, after looking over both shoulders, what the Jiang’s house was like on the inside.

This started happening just after she moved to her grandmother’s home, and in each case she felt the same chilly breeze overtake the haunt. And the wide-eyed daisies would look away like fickle friends.

The problem was — she had no idea who Mrs. Jiang was.

So, she hedged as her mother taught her to do with strangers. Meanwhile, she sat up stiffly, hoping against hope that someone she knew might wander by. But that was why she climbed there — no one but the aging group of secret weavers knew about it. There, at the top of a trail thick with nettles, her aging grandmother, along with the other women in the village, had stashed the looms when the viceroy outlawed weaving during Japanese rule. Not even the sons of samurais could find that place, hidden behind the pendulous branches of a banyan tree, on a bed of fragrant red-pine needles.

Yellow jackets swarmed his straggly gray brows that curtained his eyes like ficus vines.

“I don’t know,” Yuma said, nervously twirling her tassel.

And the ones lingering near his mouth – he swallowed.

“What’s wrong?” her grandmother asked as she stormed into the abode moments later, eyes bloated with fear.

But the words never came.

Gossip — a morbid flower that blooms in fearful climates— is often watered by a single, scheming hand. The only antidote to its poison is trust and fearless speech. But this wasn’t an age for that. And deep down, Yuma feared that this was all happening because of something she did on her first day in the middle mountains: in a momentary lapse, she failed to obey her mother’s simple orders not to indulge her telltale curiosity — and wander off into the forbidden forest. So, Yuma kept his visits secret. And as it goes with childhood secrets, her terror grew fangs: the peach orchard she once loved now tormented her, she no longer went for walks there. Her wide world shrunk, and after the old man’s third appearance at her hiding place, she avoided the quiet seclusion of the uplands altogether. Because whatever monster was feeding on her fears and on all the other recent troubles on the mountain, kept a lair, she was sure, wherever that old man came from.

 
  1. lettersiwrotetosomedude posted this