Insignia (2 page)

“I collect bones. I read bones. You know, a
bone soothsayer. My clod of a son thinks I am dabbling with evil
jinn and dark magic. But it runs in my family, bone reading does. I
know how old a thing is by looking at a bone. If you shine light
through it, it glows.”

Tiger demoness!

Frightened, I dare not say anything.

“You like to observe things, don't you,
little one?”

I nod slowly, wonderingly. How did she know?
Did the bones tell her?

“There is nothing to eat here.” The old
woman sighs. “I make do with what I have. Even the marrow inside
the bones.” In her hand rests a mortar stone, round with years of
repeated use. She takes one chicken bone.
Kerunch
. “Try it.
It's food. Nourishment. Eat.”
Kerunch
.

I stare at the smashed splinters, at the
dark red marrow oozing out like red bean paste. She watches me, the
old lady. The tiger demoness in disguise.

The marrow tastes mealy and bloody, but so
rich it fills my mouth and wakes my senses. So rich. I eat some
more, grateful for the nourishment. So rich and delicious.

When spring arrived, with the festive sounds
of the Lunar New Year, the old lady was gone. Disappeared, said the
men in the tea houses.
Like magic. Like a jinn.
The rice
shack became just an empty hut, bereft of fire and life. She took
everything.

Their chicken and ducks came back too. The
farmers found their coops and backyards filled with healthy
clucking fowl.

With the promise of fresh eggs and steamed
chicken on New Year tables, thoughts of tiger demonesses and
knuckle-bones faded away, like the soft footsteps of an old lady
traveling down the melting snow.

She taught me so many things. Bones. The
stripping of bones. The reading of bones. The light shining through
bones. She taught me many secret things, things passed down from
mother to daughter in her family. The bloodline ended with the
birth of her son. She was getting old. She wanted to teach me.

I wanted to learn.

She also taught me the filling of bones. Her
little rice shack suddenly filled with birds. The fluttering of
feathers, the noises of pecking, of strutting. The bones giving
life. Flesh.

It was a mystery.

As I grew older, I began to collect bones
too. I gazed at the bones, the candlelight turning the white
translucent. They whispered to me about secret lives.
Mysteries.

And I always knew that when winter arrived,
I would have nourishment and life.

The End

The old man is watching me. A pair of brown
eyes set in a face crisscrossed with wrinkles. His hands rest
somewhat elegantly on the walking cane knob. I blink. A dragon. The
knob was carved in the shape of a Chinese dragon: curled beard,
bulging pearl eyes and open-fanged maw.

Mind you, he looks really nondescript. Your
typical
ah pek
, out on a MRT jaunt, probably going to the
kopitiam
for a cup of
kopi
and coffee house
politics.

It's the eyes. Dragon eyes. A
tian
lung
is looking at me.

I stare back, typical teenager bravado. And
mind you, I am not
ah lian
material, either.

The old
tian lung
smiles at me,
baring his teeth–or lack of. Gold flashes at me. I close my eyes,
pretending to listen to gothic metal. The joys of using an ipod. In
my mind's eye, in the aether that binds space and Myriad together,
I confront the
tian lung
.

"Far from home, old one," I say politely.
Respect your elders, even though they are not of your kind.

"I have been watching you for a long time,"
the serpentine shape spirals lazily in figure eights. Silver scales
glisten, like
arowana
scales. "You have barely fledged."

Self-consciously, I look at my feathers.
Gold, green and red. The blue is starting to come true. I am a late
bloomer, unlike my sisters.

"Little phoenix, you are in trouble."

I bristle instantly. Fear reflex. "What did
you say?"

"You are in trouble."

The beeping of the closing MRT door startles
me back into my human body. I blink. Uniform: check. Name-tag:
check. Self: check. I watch the old man wave at me on the platform
as the train pulls away.

I am late for school.

I am in trouble.

And oh boy, I am really in trouble. I hate
seeing the snooty prefect whose smirk I want to slap off. Oh
boy.

As I run down the path leading up to the
back gate, my cell phone beeps. It is Claris, my best friend.

“I kissed him! I kissed him!” Her voice is
breathless. Typical fox. Boys on the mind and nothing else.

“Wait, who's 'him'?” I ask. There. The
snooty, cocky prefect. I am so down for detention.

“Michael!”

I feel as if my heart is squeezed in a vice.
Michael. The boy from Sec 3A. My crush. Now Claris has made the
move on him.

The school bell rings. Too late. I am in
real trouble.

Claris and I know each other from way back,
all the way from kindergarten when she kicked a boy who was teasing
me. She is part of the foxes, the
Hu
, who form one of the
major Myriad groups in Singapore. Me? I am a phoenix, a
Feng
, as all my family are all
Feng.
Sometimes, I
want to hug Claris because she is all brightness and courage.
Sometimes, I want to kick her. She can be so...single-minded.

I sulk when I slink into class. I am due for
detention, thanks to the stupid prefect. My mom will scream at me.
I hate it.

Claris sits beside me, bright-eyed and
bushy-tailed. She is good at Social Studies. It is her forte. Mrs.
Liu likes praising her. I suppose I should be happy for her and
Michael. She kissed him. But then, she is always the pretty
one.

“I saw a
tian lung
,” I whisper to her
when we are handed yet another source-based question.

“Oh, so rare!” Claris hisses back. Mrs. Liu
is staring at me with gimlet eyes. I swear she hates me. She
probably eats thumbtacks for breakfast. Fortunately, she is plain
human. Not a single hint of being Myriad.

“Typical
ah-pek
type,” I pretend to
leaf through the textbook. We are revising Separation and Merger,
yet again. Mrs. Liu loves the topic to bits.

“Oh.” Claris is now writing. She is quick
when it comes to inferential questions.

“Chun Ming!”

It is Mrs. Liu.

I am having a really bad day.

After detention and netball, I drag myself
home. I look around for any
ah-pek tian lung
and find none.
I have had enough bad things in one day. I want it to end quickly.
Ugh. Horrible.

Nobody is home when I open the door. Ping
Jie is off to fetch her son. Mom is probably at her knitting
class.

For a house of
Feng
, there is almost
nothing to indicate our phoenix-ness. Only the painting of two
phoenixes–the
Feng Huang
–hangs on the wall. Even then a
casual observer would never know he has entered a
Feng
house. I know we are so boring that our family hardly matters in
things Myriad–or the term used to describe us “not” humans.

I have a bit of greasy
chak kway tiao
before settling to tackle the source-based question. As usual, my
eyes glaze over at the inferential question (“What does the picture
tell about the Merger?”) and droop down...

...and descends into not-sleep, not-dream
either. This time, my feathers are bright–gold, green and red. I am
surrounded by spider-webs. Intricate, disgusting spider-webs that
stick to my frills and feathers. A bit of sun-fire destroys the
webs and I hear the cries of a woman, as if she is distressed.
Not my children! Not my children!

Don't look for trouble, a sagely voice
whispers and I hate it because it reminds me of the
tian lung
ah-pek
.

I wake with a start and find that I am
drooling over the worksheet. Cursing (and glad that Mom isn't
around), I mop up the mess with a tissue and write complete
nonsense.

The family gathers for dinner later. Mom
makes sure everyone sits at the table. Nobody does that anymore,
she claims. All work, work, work, and nothing else. She makes sure
that we chat over rice and her stir-fried chives and fish cakes,
discuss our day over bowls of steaming-hot herbal soup (with
dong gwai
), and joke about boring stuff over orange slices.
I glance at Ping who shrugs and continues feeding her son. She is
my eldest sister and I know she was a superhero of some sort in her
younger days.

“I saw a
tian lung
.” I open my mouth
and shut it again. Everyone stares at me. Pa has his mouth full of
orange slices. “On the train today.”

Mom fixes me with a stare, like she is a
raptor staring down a mouse. “The
Lung
are so rare. They
hide from us. Seeing one is of great significance.”

“He told me to expect trouble.” I stuff
fruit in my mouth and swallow hard.

The silence around the table is so tangible
I can cut it with a knife and serve it as dessert. Like
guilin
gao
. All sweet and bitter at the same time.

“Trouble?” Ping Jie speaks up then.

“He was being cryptic.” My words feel lame,
weak. Ping Jie and Mom eye me quietly. My other sisters–Ying and
Ming–edge close for the potential showdown.

“Listen to a
tian lung's
words.” Pa's
voice breaks the uncomfortable silence. Suddenly everybody starts
talking again.

The MRT station is packed as usual. Someone
I know describes the crowd as the wildebeest migration on the move.
This is not the Serengeti. This is Singapore. I manage to squeeze
in an already-packed compartment, ignoring the glares of office
workers and other students. I just want to be early, for once, and
skip detention. I hate detention and Mr. Tan, the teacher-in-charge
and discipline master.

Claris is already in school. She is lucky;
her dad fetches her in a shiny black European car. She is sending
me irate text messages. I mutter curses and hurry on.

Then I see her.

She is a slim figure ducking into the
abandoned bungalow next to the field. Ordinary tee and jeans, she
looks vaguely Chinese. The abandoned bungalow is rumored to be
haunted. Then again all abandoned buildings and schools in
Singapore are haunted. I am a
Feng
. I am not scared of
ye
gui
or wild ghosts. I mean, Ping Jie dealt with
gui
of
all shapes and sizes when she was a teenager. It's in my blood.
It's in my genes.

I walk into a huge spider-web.

After a lot of screaming and brushing my
hair, I manage to make my way to the school gate. I am early.

The dream and the
tian lung's
words
haunt me for the rest of the day. I end up being scolded by Mrs.
Liu again.

End of school brings some relief and I find
myself dragging Claris to the abandoned house. We tiptoe into the
forest fragment, conscious of mosquitoes and snakes. Someone saw an
Equatorial cobra once and made a fuss about it. The humidity soaks
through our uniforms, drips down our necks and makes our
exploration through the overgrown morning glory vines and shrubs
unpleasant.

There it is–the abandoned whatever it
is.

“Colonial,” Claris supplies helpfully.
“Probably turn of the century.”

“How do you know?” I dart a look at her.

“I read.”

The sun happens to break through the cloud
cover and for a moment, we are surrounded by glittering
strands…

…of spider-webs.

I stifle Claris' scream with my hand and
clamp down my automatic urge to run.

“I saw a woman walk in,” I say, feeling
Claris tremble beside me. Her eyes are a fox-amber.

“Not a ghost?”

“We are Myriad, of the old blood. We are not
scared of
gui
.”

“Well, I am. My mom tells me not to trifle
with spirits.”

And for good reason too. Mom warns me all
the time. I get the lecture once a month and more during the Ghost
Month.

We step forward tentatively.

It is much worse inside.

Webs, gossamer-thin and flimsy in the subtle
breeze, hang from the ceiling, clustered in the corners of the
house. Does the house breathe? I keep having the impression of a
huge being breathing quietly, together with my own breaths. Is the
house alive? I hold onto Claris' hand, noticing that it has gone
cold and clammy.

“Gross, who would want to live in a place
like this?” Claris says.

“It's an abandoned house...” I am about to
say, when I see the dark figure. My heart almost flies out of my
chest. Claris spots it and actually squeals.

The dark figure steps into a pool of
sunlight streaming in from the broken roof. It is
her
. The
woman. Chinese, but...

... Spider-jinn.

Oh, the old folks like to talk about the
spider-jinn. A long time ago, the spiders broke the accord of
harmony with the rest and became jinn. Demons. They suck the souls
of men and lay their eggs in the bodies of their poor defensive
hosts.
Feng
lore hates them and in turn, many generations of
Feng
grow up hating them.

“Please don't kill my babies,” the woman is
saying in heavily accented Mandarin Chinese. Beijing?

I notice my right palm lighting up with a
blaze of orange flame. Claris stares at me, mouth open, but then
she is spotting fox-amber eyes and sharp canine teeth.

“Spider-jinn!”

I am not sure who has just yelled. Claris is
as frightened out of her wits as I am.