Daughter of the Monkey God
“Daughter of the Monkey God”, which appeared in SCI FICTION in 2003, was M.K. Hobson’s first professional sale. Since then, her work has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Interzone, and other publications and anthologies. She has a story forthcoming in the anthology Haunted Legends edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas.
Her first novel, The Native Star, is coming out in 2010. She lives in Oregon with her husband and daughter.
“Daughter of the Monkey God” movingly reflects the continued exploitation of developing countries by richer ones.
For the hundredth time, Sel noted the peculiar smell. It poured out of the shattered windows of the Mercedes, borne on licking yellow flames and fat billows of black oily smoke. It was actually three smells tightly knotted: the smell of the car’s champagne leather interior roasting and curling, the acrid smell of motor oil sizzling against hot metal, and the smell of burning flesh.
It was a terrible smell.
Sel pressed a tiny phone against her recently shaven cheek, smelling her own whiskey-tainted breath on the plastic. Her throat was raw and coated with something gritty and astringent. Every breath was like inhaling powdered glass. She was screaming into the phone, screaming words in English. She didn’t speak English, but she could feel the meaning of the words that were tumbling from her mouth, “ . . . you have to get here quickly! My wife . . . my wife is trapped inside and I can’t get her out . . . ”
Sel did not want to see the old man’s wife die again, stretched out on the rain-shiny pavement, dark men in yellow slickers bending over her. She did not want to see the stiff, charred limbs black-bright in the spinning lights of the emergency vehicles. Sel did not want to process this memory any more. But that was her job. She worked in a Solace Factory.
It was not your fault, you must forgive yourself. She repeated it to the old man wearily, for the hundredth time.
While she processed, she was in two places. In one place, the place inside her mind that was rented out to process the traumatic memories of a man named McDermott, James, she was screaming into a tiny cell phone for help that would not come in time. In that place, she could feel the heat from the flames drying out her wrinkled white skin. She could feel her old-man’s heart pounding frantically, ready to burst.
In the other place, in her life that was real, she was in a humid old factory in Katunayake, Colombo’s big industrial district, sitting in the slanted sunlight that poured down from the high grimy windows. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She reached up and dashed them away. How she hated those bothersome tears. No one else at the Solace Factory cried like she did, and because she wept so much they called her childish. Aňda-bala. Crybaby.
Having brought her consciousness out of the Lump far enough to wipe the tears from her face, she noticed that the muscles of her thigh were contracting painfully. Once again, she’d sat too long without moving. All the other workers in the factory remembered to move once in a while, to stretch occasionally. Most didn’t even have to stop processing while they did so. But not her. She was slow. She could not think of too many things at once. Her head did not always work right.
She jiggled her leg against the rough mat of woven banana fibers, her fingertips brushing along the edge of the sock that covered the amputated place just above where her knee used to be. She dug her fingers into the muscle, massaging it. She eased carefully back into the processing while she did this; Manuela the floor boss had an eagle eye, and the fat old clayball would be over to poke her with a stick if she sensed any inattention. Manuela was Sinhalese, and she hated Tamils, called them sneaky, cheating blacks, filthy little temple monkeys, uppity low-caste slaves brought from India to sweat for the British.
Every time there was a Black Tiger bombing in Colombo, the words came a little more loudly to Sel’s ears. She wondered why the ugly talk did not bother her more. Perhaps it was because she heard so much of it since she’d come to work in the South. Perhaps it was because her father had taught her not to listen too closely to the words of the Sinhalese.
“The Sinhalese are small people, hateful people, jealous people.” She remembered her father’s dark face, as smooth and shining as if it had been carved from teak.
“But the Tamils are an ancient race,” he said one night long ago, as they’d sat together watching fireflies. “A people with gods and kings as ancestors, with a lineage that can be traced back to the ancient days when shining King Rama sent Hanuman the Monkey God and his vast monkey armies to reclaim his beautiful wife from the devil who had stolen her. The Tamils, my precious gem, are the descendants of Hanuman’s divine army. We are beloved of Hanuman, and that is why, even to this day, we are known for our cleverness. Is it not a fact that Tamil children learn to read most quickly? That Tamils take the best grades at university? And is it not always Tamils who leave Sri Lanka to become programmers and engineers in the faraway West? We are the children of the Monkey God, and monkeys are the cleverest of animals.”
And that was why the war was being fought, her father said, why the Tamils bombed the Sinhalese and the Sinhalese bombed the Tamils. Jealousy. The jealousy of the small toward the large.
Her father would have hated Manuela, would have hated the fact that his daughter, his precious gem, had to come to the South to work in a Solace Factory. But Sel felt nothing. She did not feel proud to be Tamil, nor did she hate the Sinhalese. She longed to be nothing in particular, simply there, a lump of flesh just like the Lumps of flesh that contained the memories they processed.
She returned to the ruined Mercedes and the raging fire and McDermott, James and his wife who was dying while the old man watched helplessly. Sel took the guilt into herself for the hundredth time, absorbed it like it was greasy fried fish and she the newspaper. She had already tried this a hundred ways, a hundred times. But no matter how hard she worked, the pain that had been born on that terrible night was intractable.
It was not your fault, you must forgive yourself, she told him again, knowing it would do no good.
The only one who did not call her Crybaby was Dhuraimurugan. He was Tamil, too, and Tamils in Colombo stuck together. He always called her by her full name, Selvakumari, which was the name her mother had given her. Her mother still lived in Jaffna, in a hospital. Sel sent her money from her wages at the Solace Factory, but she had not seen her mother for a long time.
Dhuraimurugan was slim and small, like an animal meant to live in a tree. He looked very much like a monkey, and that was why whenever Manuela called him a dirty little macaque, he just smiled at her as if they’d shared a joke. Dhuraimurugan liked jokes.
The first day he had come to work at the Solace Factory, he had come to sit next to her at lunch, perhaps hoping to find a friend in the factory’s only other Tamil. He followed her as she hobbled to her own spot under the red jasmine tree at the corner of the trash-strewn back field where the processors ate their lunches.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Dhuraimurugan said as he sat down next to her. There was no indication that the question was anything but rhetorical.
She watched him from the corner of her eye as he unpacked his lunch from a many-times-used brown paper bag. He took each item out swiftly, without rustling the paper, then folded the bag into a perfect little square and tucked it back into his pocket. His movements were swift and nimble, beautiful to watch.
She was not the only one who thought so. A little band of monkeys had come to sit on top of the high cinderblock wall that ran around the back of the factory. The monkeys sat in a straight line, looking down at them. Their black eyes were bright above their white cheeks. Usually the creatures were either shrieking at one another or clambering down to beg or steal food. But that day they sat quiet and still. They seemed subdued. Respectful, almost.
Dhuraimurugan had a plastic container of rice and mallung. He poked at it with a plastic fork as he scrutinized her. He looked at her hard, as if he were going to try to draw her afterward with an ink pen. That was when he had asked her name. After some thought, as if she were trying to remember it herself, she gave it to him.
“Selvakumari is a very practical name!” he said, highly pleased for no reason Sel could fathom. Dhuraimurugan, as she would discover, followed no logical laws of conversation, preferring instead to always say the first thing that leapt into his mind.
“Analyzed numerically, it demonstrates that you have an efficient and capable nature. But too serious. You are hardheaded. You do not show love and tenderness to those close to you. There is much misunderstanding and unhappiness in your personal life as a result.” He paused, pushed a sticky ball of rice into his mouth, chewed it with large white teeth. “You could suffer constipation, growths, or serious female disorders.”
He ate cheerfully, robustly, digging with the plastic fork like a farmer turning soil. She was suddenly annoyed, though she hardly knew why.
“What does your name mean?” she said, still not looking at him. “Analyzed numerically.”
At first she didn’t think he’d heard her question. She was used to her words going unnoticed. The explosion that had taken her leg had also scarred her throat, and she could hardly speak above a whisper. But he heard. He winked at her as he used a tine of the fork to pull some mallung from between his teeth.
“Dhuraimurugan is a very mercurial name. A name of energy, impatience, mental flexibility. It is a name that can be too outspoken, too conceited. Probably a name you don’t want around. Trouble written in large letters.”
Without realizing it, she smiled. He saw, and smiled back.
Sel did not know very much about McDermott, James. What she did know about him she had pieced together from the brittle scraps of memory contained in the Lump that had been sent from the States for processing. He was rich. He was old. He drank too much. He wasn’t a very good driver.
She looked at the Lump. It was a hairy ball of flesh, grown from McDermott, James’s own cells. She touched it, let her hand rest on it. It was warm, as if the fires of the night contained within it were banked around its core.
It was not your fault, you must forgive yourself.
Sel found herself thinking again of her father’s old stories, told on nights when the moon hung low and golden on the horizon and the air smelled of cardamom and temple flowers. Stories about King Rama’s beautiful wife Sita, kidnapped and imprisoned by the devil-king. McDermott, James had been kidnapped, too, Sel realized suddenly. Kidnapped by his own guilt. Kidnapped and imprisoned in a night that leaped with fire and billows of smoke.
But how was she to set him free?
The morning after his first day at the Solace Factory, Dhuraimurugan took a mat next to her, and from then on, that was his mat. It worried Sel, for she found that Dhuraimurugan loved nothing more than talking. He talked constantly, even when he was processing. He talked an incessant stream of nonsense, bad jokes, lines from Bollywood blockbusters, ancient poetry. If Manuela caught them speaking, she would dock their pay. Enough times, and she would fire them. Troublemaking Tamils. Dhuraimurugan did not seem to care.
“You know, they grow these things in vats in laboratories,” Dhuraimurugan whispered to her one day, patting his Lump, his current work assignment, in a way that was badly irreverent and overfamiliar. He was processing the trauma of an old woman who’d lost her only daughter to inoperable brain cancer. Dhuraimurugan had taken a liking to the old woman and referred to her as “granny.”
“Shh,” Sel told him, her hands still on the Lump of McDermott, James. How many days had she been processing his memory! And she wouldn’t ever finish it with Dhuraimurugan whispering to her all the time.
“Once we’re finished processing the memories, you know what happens to the Lumps?”
“They are sent back,” Sel murmured.
“They are sent back, and do you know what the sad people do with them?” Dhuraimurugan’s voice took on a conspiratorial cast, and he shifted over a little closer to her. “They eat them!”
Sel looked at him sidelong, raising a skeptical eyebrow. Dhuraimurugan nodded once, curtly.
“It is so! They cook up the Lumps and eat them. In that way they absorb the memories we have reconditioned for them. We do all the work, teach them to forgive themselves, and they have only to chew and swallow to obtain absolution.” He paused, shaking his head.
Sel pondered his words; they spun through her head despite her best effort to shut them out. Chew and swallow. It’s not your fault, you must forgive yourself.
“And they are so expensive, Selvakumari!” he continued, his whispered words breaking through her thoughts. “The price of one of these could buy us a house, a farm, and a car. And they have only one use. To suck out sad thoughts and send them to us.”
“Shh,” Sel said again. Then she returned to McDermott, James.
It was not your fault, you must forgive yourself. Sel repeated the mantra again, dully.
She took the moment they pulled his wife from the car, reconditioned it as she had done so many times before. She concentrated on the sweet smell of her red jasmine tree; its perfume was strong enough to cut through even the thickest, blackest, oiliest emotions. But she’d been working McDermott, James’s memories for so many days. They just would not smooth. Every time she climbed herself into the Lump, it was like she hadn’t done anything the day before.
Sel’s face was wet, and her head was aching.
It was not your fault, you stupid old man.
Sudden rage and frustration burned through her. She wished that she could take the damned fool by the arms and shake him. She wished she could slap his face again and again. It was not your fault, you arrogant white bastard. That is what you have paid to believe. And even if it was your fault, I will keep telling you it wasn’t until you believe it. Until you believe it right down to your cells, you filthy old devil. You must forgive yourself . . . or at least believe that you are forgiven, though you never will be, never should be. Allow yourself to be deluded, old man. You’ve paid for it. How easy it will be to chew and swallow your guilt away . . . chew and swallow, chew and swallow . . .
She felt someone touching her arm. She jerked away from the touch and bared her teeth, glaring. It was Dhuraimurugan. His eyes were concerned.
“You’ll hurt yourself,” he said, quietly. She tasted blood in her mouth. She ran her tongue over her lower lip and realized that she’d bitten deep into it.
Dhuraimurugan cast a furtive look toward Manuela to see if she was watching. Luckily, she wasn’t.
“Listen, take granny,” Dhuraimurugan whispered hurriedly, pushing his Lump toward Sel. “Take granny, and I’ll take that old man off your hands. Granny’s easy.”
Sel wanted to accept his offer. She felt her hands trembling on McDermott, James’s Lump, itching to throw it at Dhuraimurugan, run as far away from it as she could get. But she couldn’t. It was strictly forbidden. Dhuraimurugan had no idea of the risk he was suggesting, but wasn’t that just like him? He didn’t take life seriously. He sat on mats and gossiped and winked and told jokes. He was a silly man, silly and frivolous.
“No,” she said, in a low voice, keeping her eyes on Manuela.
“Why is he so hard?”
“His wife died in an accident . . . ” She jerked her head angrily. “I have told him again and again that it is not his fault. That he must forgive himself.”
“But how can he believe you?” Dhuraimurugan asked softly, “When you will not forgive him? When you have never forgiven anyone, not even yourself?”
Sel wrinkled her forehead distastefully. Silly man.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
Dhuraimurugan closed his eyes, put his hands back on Granny, and sighed contentedly.
“Yes, you do,” Dhuraimurugan said.
Sel wanted to spit at him for thinking he knew so many answers. She slapped her hands down onto McDermott, James and closed her eyes.
I will teach you about forgiveness, old man . . . She sneered, hard and furious.
In the rented part of her mind, there was a flash, and the smell of burning petroleum. Sel relaxed into these with ugly glee. This time, she wanted to see the old man’s wife die. This time, she wanted to revel in his pain, dance in it with bare feet.
She was staring at a bright, hot light. There was the sound of faraway screams.
But the Mercedes was not there, nor the yellow flames, nor the billowing black smoke. The light was coming from flares, hundreds of flares like little suns, flares that illuminated the movement of jets dragging long fluffy tails . . .
She was in Jaffna.
She tried to backpedal quickly. Not this memory, she thought, her heart thudding. No, not this memory . . .
Her little sister was crying.
They’d run out from their mother’s house into the streets, with dozens of their neighbors. Already, and nearby, there were the sounds of explosions, distant rocking thunder. Her little sister was so afraid of those explosions. Sel cradled her in her arms, looking for her mother.
Her little sister clung to her tightly. Sel could feel the bones of her arms, the little ridges of her spine and ribs through her light evening sarong. The last thing Sel remembered seeing was a tear, her own tear, sparkling on the skin of her little sister’s shoulder like a perfect diamond in the harsh brilliance of the magnesium flares.
Then nothing: no cries, no pain, no sound at all.
Just white, white light.
She shook the memory off so hard it hurt. Drops flew from her face as if she were a wet dog shaking off water. The thick dusky light of the Solace Factory resolved around her slowly, a jumble of spinning images. She felt sick. She trembled violently, as if the bombs at Jaffna were exploding within her.
But something was strange. Dhuraimurugan was crouched beside her, his entire body tense, but he was not looking at her. He was looking at all the other factory workers. They had gathered at the windows, pushing against each other for a better view. They all stood with the peculiar twitchiness of people ready to duck.
“What happened?” Selvakumari said.
“You didn’t hear that?” Dhuraimurugan looked down at her in astonishment. “A big explosion. Loud one; close, too, by the sound of it. A bomb, I think.”
There was chatter and talk and then suddenly a young man ran in with an air of great self-importance and spoke in hushed tones with Manuela.
Manuela got up on a rickety chair.
“Work’s over today,” she said loudly. “Go home now. Go home.”
“Come on,” Dhuraimurugan said. There was an anxious look on his face. “We’d better go quickly. I’ll walk you home.”
“You think you know so many answers,” Sel spat at him, her teeth clenched. “Walk yourself home, if you are lucky enough to have one. Go climb a tree. Find someone else to chatter to.”
And she hobbled away, leaving him standing in the middle of the Solace Factory.
After she was outside, Sel thought about going back to the house she shared with seven other women. The house was a concrete box with a concrete floor where they slept on mats and hauled water from a well for bathing and cooking. Going home was the safe thing to do. But Sel didn’t want to go back there. So she hobbled back to sit under her red jasmine tree and watched the emergency trucks coming and going, their lights spinning and flashing.
She felt along the edge of her amputated leg, fingering the thick puckers of flesh along the bottom.
She remembered white trucks, men in white, their dark faces caked with soot and blood. She remembered a feeling of ringing in her entire body, and the feeling that the world had been turned upside down, except that it was really her that had been turned upside down. After the explosion in Jaffna she had landed on her back against a corrugated wall. Blood had streamed down the back of her throat, choking her. Her little sister lay a ways off. Her little sister did not move.
Sel remembered that her mother had come to kneel between them. Her hands had darted out tenuously, as if she wanted to touch them both but dared not. Sel remembered wishing that her mother would touch her. Her mother had sagged like a dead plant, her forehead on the ground. Sel had wished that her mother would not be so still. But then she saw that her mother was not still at all. She was crying, crying silently, each tear falling to the ground in a little explosion of dust.
The little explosions terrified Sel more than the big one had, for her mother had never cried. Her mother had not cried when the soldiers had taken Sel’s father and older brothers. She had not cried when the men never came back.
“Did you know, the island of Ceylon is shaped like a teardrop?” Dhuraimurugan’s voice came from behind her. Quickly, he slid down next to her. He had food, warm little ulundu vadai cakes from a nearby vendor.
“They are doing a brisk business. Everyone likes to hang around when there’s been a suicide bombing. They like to see how the body parts scatter themselves out.”
Suicide bombing. That meant there would be a curfew. And house-to-house searches.
“You shouldn’t have,” she said, as he handed her the warm cakes. “You don’t have any more money than I do.”
“Sure I do,” he said. “I don’t have to send any money home.”
“You don’t have any family?”
“No,” he said.
She was silent. She ate the cakes; they were hot and spicy and slightly sweet from the coconut oil they’d been fried in. Chew and swallow, she thought. Chew and swallow. In the trees above them, she could hear monkeys moving between the branches.
She leaned against him a little, letting a little more of her shoulder touch his.
“You know why we all process so well?” he said. “You know why there are so many Solace Factories in Sri Lanka? Because it has been shown that children raised in war zones make the best processors. Our brains are damaged in just the right way.” His voice was bitter. She had not heard bitterness in his voice before. It made her feel strangely desolate. She felt tears rise in her eyes. Dhuraimurugan saw them and gave her a nudge. The smile came back to his face.
“But that doesn’t mean it can’t change someday, right? Maybe we can change it for our children, eh?”
He was a silly man, always playing. How could he play when everything around them was forever falling apart? She did not look at him. He was silent for a while, chewing on his lip.
“You want to know a joke?” he said. Sel didn’t. But he continued anyway.
“Guess what they tell their rich customers . . . the ones they make the Lumps for. They tell them that we are serene Buddhist monks. We processors, I mean. They tell them we’re priests, holy people who can absolve them. Can you imagine me, sitting on a white snowy peak, my face serene and my farts like flowers?”
“You should be inside somewhere,” she said. “They will be searching.”
“We should both be inside,” he said. “That’s why I came to find you. I wanted to make sure you were safe.”
“They can’t take anything from me, so I am always safe.”
He looked at her.
“What a thing to say!” he said. “What about the man you will marry, the children you will laugh at? They are who you must protect yourself for.”
“I cannot lose what will never be,” Sel snapped angrily. She shoved the wrapper of vadai cakes back into his hands. She planted her old, worn crutch firmly and struggled to climb up it, but in her haste she slipped and landed heavily on her backside. The humiliation made fresh tears sting her eyes. “You shouldn’t make fun. Go play with one of the pretty Sinhalese girls if you want to play games.”
“I’m not making fun,” Dhuraimurugan said. He was silent for a moment. Then he looked at her sidelong. “You’re the only one that weeps, Selvakumari. That makes you the prettiest girl in the Solace Factory.”
Sel didn’t say anything. Slowly, thoughtfully, Dhuraimurugan ate the vadai cakes he had taken from her. Then he put his hand on hers. It was still warm from the cakes. He leaned back against the tree, looked up into the branches where the monkeys hid. Then he closed his eyes, breathing deeply.
It was not your fault. The thoughts were Dhuraimurugan’s. His thoughts smelled like mist and vadai cakes. You must forgive yourself.
They sat together that way for a while, until Dhuraimurugan started up suddenly, frenetically.
“We must go back,” he said. “I will take you home.”
Sel said nothing, but rose carefully. She leaned on her crutch, but saw that Dhuraimurugan was offering her his arm. She had never leaned on anyone. But she decided that this time, she would.
When they came to the boarding house in where Sel lived, soldiers were coming out. Dhuraimurugan stopped. Sel felt him take a breath. But they could not run; the soldiers were coming down the walk of the house. The soldiers were speaking between themselves, laughing.
Sel froze, as if that would make them invisible, but it did not. One of the soldiers saw her, and saw Dhuraimurugan. He gestured to the men around him, and they brought their rifles up.
“You’re out too late,” the soldier said in clipped Sinhala. He put a hand on Dhuraimurugan’s shoulder, pulled him forward. Dhuraimurugan fell to the ground, and Sel, still leaning on him, fell, too. Fell heavily onto the damp, cracked pavement. It made the soldiers laugh.
Dhuraimurugan screeched angrily, grabbing one of the soldiers by his leg and toppling him to the ground. He moved so swiftly, Sel hardly saw his fist as it smashed the soldier’s nose. The man tried to crawl away, crawl backward like a crab, but everywhere he moved, Dhuraimurugan was there, his little fists flying.
There was the clack of rifle bolts sliding into place. Sel wanted to scream but could not, the sound clamped inside her throat as if a hand were holding it down.
Two soldiers got their arms around Dhuraimurugan and lifted him up, holding him as he scuffled and struggled. Then another soldier hit him across the face with the butt of his rifle. Dhuraimurugan went still, and the soldier hit him again and again, until Sel could smell the blood.
“Crazy animal,” the soldier said, breathing hard. “Filthy monkey.”
The scream that had been building in Sel’s throat tore free, a corporeal thing, meant to lash out and tear the men to bits, flay them, explode them in white light. She threw herself at them, scrabbling uselessly on her hands and knees, but they laughed at her again. One soldier pushed her back down with his foot. Dhuraimurugan stirred, tried to move. A low sound came from the middle of his chest. The soldiers lowered him to his knees. He sagged there, forehead almost touching the ground, little drops of blood gathering on the tip of his nose. One of the soldiers put his gun to the back of Dhuraimurugan’s head.
Remember, beloved.
Mist and vadai cakes.
Remember who you are.
And then, the sound. The sound of a small echoing pop, tiny as a tear dropping into dust, loud as the explosions at Jaffna that still echoed within her chest. There was the smell of blood, and the sound of something dropping heavily on the ground. She looked up at the trees, so that she would not have to see. And before night closed completely around them, something caught Sel’s eye.
A large dark shadow, swift and nimble, moving through the branches of the red jasmine trees above.
The shrieks of the monkeys followed Selvakumari as she limped slowly back to the Solace Factory later that night, after the big golden moon had risen, after the soldiers had gone, after the blood had dried. The tap-shuffle, tap-shuffle of her gait echoed against the dark silent buildings, little lost plosives of sound. There were only one or two following her at first, but as she walked, tap-shuffle, tap-shuffle, the numbers grew, and by the time she reached the factory, there were a hundred monkeys following her, loping along high walls, swinging from trees, clustering at her heels.
When she came to the factory, she broke a window and climbed through it awkwardly, not caring much when she cut her hand. The monkeys clambered after her, agile and swift, tails curling up like incense smoke into the heavy night air.
She watched them moving around her, watched them from the corners of her eyes. She thought of the swift dark shadow, moving through the branches that swayed in the warm wind. She thought of Dhuraimurugan’s quick, nimble movements.
She thought of the stories her father had told her. Of King Rama and his wife and the devil who had stolen her. Of Hanuman, the Monkey God, who brought his army of monkeys to set her free.
The devil can only take what we allow him to take. This was what she would tell the old man. And what he takes, we may reclaim, not with one strong arm, but with a thousand small hands, quick and nimble. A thousand small moments, moments of contentment and cakes, red jasmine and jokes, hope and solace. A thousand small moments put together are strong enough. This is what you have paid to know. This is all I can tell you.
Inside the factory, it was black as dripping oil. She crawled to her mat and took up the Lump of McDermott, James. The monkeys clustered around her, warm and chattering, brilliant little eyes glowing like fireflies in the darkness.
She clutched the Lump to her chest, held it tight. And in that moment, all the words she’d brought with her flew away like birds, leaving her with only one single message.
Even if it was your fault, I forgive you, she thought, squeezing her eyes tightly shut.
Who are you? McDermott, James asked her as she stood before him, stood between him and the wrecked Mercedes. She saw herself through his eyes. Illuminated in the dying flames, she was small and lithe and whole.
I am the daughter of the Monkey God, she said, extending her arm to him. I have been sent to save you.
And she drew the old man in and cradled him, crooning to him in the rain-slicked darkness. In the pine trees overhead, monkeys watched, still and silent. And the old man’s tears flooded through her, washing her clean.