After the screaming and the unimaginable pain and the gritted teeth, the contractions and pushing, a little girl fell into the world. Crying and slick and sparkling with some unreal internal glow, since nothing in this world could be the same as it had once been. But Liyana held her daughter, and cried unabashed tears of joy. This was her girl. She was alive and in the world, however warped that world had become. She was human. She was magic.
BONES OF GOSSAMER
HUGH HOWEY
Hugh Howey is the New York Times bestselling author of Wool, Sand, Beacon 23, and Half Way Home. His books have been translated into more than forty languages. His latest, Machine Learning, collects his short fiction into one volume. He is also the co-editor (with Gary Whitta and Christie Yant) of the ACLU charity anthology Resist: Tales From a Future Worth Fighting Against and (with John Joseph Adams) of The Apocalypse Triptych. He currently lives on a catamaran that he’s sailing around the world.
There’s a cave behind our house with the bones of those we’ve eaten. It’s been many years since anyone was put inside, but I pass this cave every day on the trail back to the cassava patch. Mid-morning, the sun lances in at the right angle and white bone gleams in the darkness. Hollow-sad eyes peer out—the skulls of those who wish we’d eaten more cassava in their day.
We stopped eating people before I was born, but only barely. Our chief is ninety-two, and human flesh has passed his lips. We like to think the past is further away than it really is, but the past is like the killer in a movie that you know is standing right behind someone, if they’d just turn around and look. It’s dangerous not to look. That’s when the past will get you.
I grew up on a small island in the Lau Group of the Fijian archipelago. When I was a young boy, I discovered movies and got addicted for a spell. We watched them on a battered cell phone charged by a solar panel, me and my best friend Tui, one ear bud each, sharing laughs and ear wax. There was no cell service here, of course. Never has been and never will be. The past and the present are fast friends in the Lau. You can hardly tell them apart.
I was in my twenties when the first tourists visited our island. Before this, they were not allowed, even as cruise ships and resorts filled the rest of Fiji far to the north. Our small islands were farther away and deemed special. Special meant no development, no jobs, no civilization. It meant cleaning the family solar panel with a wet rag, topping up an old car battery with boiled water, and learning how to wire up a voltage regulator—all so we could have light in our home after sunset in the winter.
The handful of tourists who eventually came arrived by small boat, much as our ancestors did. The islands of the Lau are a pain to reach; a strong wind blows without pause in the wrong direction. They call these “trade winds,” but it must mean trade for someone else. These winds have kept us isolated as the rest of Fiji became a giant resort. The winds blow and blow, always in one direction. The palm trees here lean north like they’re yearning for elsewhere.
The arrival of white people caused a stir. They came from places we’d heard of but never dreamed of visiting: France, Germany, America. People with pale skin had showed up here before, hundreds of years ago. They taught us religion, that we should to dress from ankle to wrist, and to please not eat each other. Especially not them. Some of their bones are in the cave behind my house.
I think about those people on their boats when I pull up cassava and when I help with the fishing. Ours was a host family, which meant making these wayward sailors feel welcome, showing them around, giving them cassava and fish and coconuts. They’d often see the cave and peer inside and ask how old the bones were, how long since the last time we practiced our old ways.
“Not since Tuesday,” we’d tell them. And then we’d laugh, our faces all teeth, while their eyes went wide for a moment. It takes a while to get our sense of humor. But that’s no worry; all we have is time.
The supply ship teaches us patience. Once a month the big boat steams toward us under a chimney of gray smoke, its rusty bow burying into steep seas. It’s a torturous journey. I’ve made it six times, and I’ll never do it again.
When I was twenty-three I left for Suva to get a job and find a wife. Suva is the “big city,” the only place with work and where we might meet a spouse who hasn’t known us since we were born. Someone not a cousin.
But then I got married, and my beautiful Maru got pregnant, and we took a supply ship home to have our first child. This is what we do. We drop off our kids with our parents and leave them to grow like buried cassava. Our parents look after them just as our grandparents looked after us.
We skip a generation here. People who don’t know their own grandparents judge us. It’s different is all. My grandchildren are my everything, just as my grandparents were my sun and moon. I saw my parents at Christmas. That’s when I see my children now.
In this way, an entire generation goes missing from our island: the generation in the middle. Suva is no place to raise kids. Children in the city can’t even open a coconut, and people there pay money for fish that someone else caught! No, our children are born and raised in Fulaga. They go to school until we run out of things to teach them. Afterward, some go off to college in Suva, but not many. Just a few. Most are like me and go there for work one day, or to see what the city is like, or to visit an older brother or sister. Someone has to make money and send it back home. These are the missing. The people in their prime.
When we get old and tired of work and the whizzing cars, we return to the island where we grew up. Just in time for our children to leave us. Families like skipping stones.
The things that bored us as children are all we care about now that we’re old: dragging nets through schools of fish, spearing an octopus, sitting through a long sermon with our feet in the soil, lounging in the shade and watching the cassava grow, grandparents smiling at grandchildren. The middle generation sending money and flour and whatever we beg for on the supply ships, which come once a month.
Except for the months they don’t. And then we manage. We get by.
Once, when I was a boy, we went three months between supply ships. Three months in a row, and nothing came. The flour and sugar were all gone by the end of the first month. That’s as long as we ever prepare for. So no kava root for drinking the worry away. No lollies for the kids. And no word from our families.
This was before the satellite phone was installed at the school so we could get a warning and ration our things. This was back when cyclones would hit without notice. What seems like just another strong wind grows into something more and more. A rustle, a beating, a whipping, a fury. Step by step, like how empires fall.
All I knew as a young boy was to stop asking if we could eat anything different. Fish and coconuts for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Years later I would see tourists in Suva rave about the dish I hoped to never see again. In Suva I grew fat on pizza and curries and Coca-Cola. I said I’d never be like my grandfather, who idled in the patch trying to grow pumpkin, happily slurping the last of the coconut milk from yet another bowl of fish stew.