A long, long time ago, in a small fishing village not too far away, there lived a newly married couple. The husband rose before dawn each morning and went out to sea in his sampan. He cast his net in the dark green water and waited, squatting at the stern. When it was time he pulled up the net that was heavy with tail-flipping fish. Their slippery silver bodies squiggled under the sun.
The husband sold the fish to the local market. His wife worked at home, growing silk worms, feeding them big green Mulberry leaves. After the silk worms spun themselves into cocoons she boiled them in a large pot of water, then brushed, and pulled the single strand out of each one, winding the silk on a reel. Life was hard, but they were happy and content, especially after their baby was born.
One morning, the husband went out in his boat as all the other fishermen. But by evening, when everyone returned to the village, the husband was missing among them.
“Where’s my husband?” The woman asked all the fishermen. They had not seen him. The woman was frantic. She must look for him. She put the baby on her back in a cloth pack and climbed up a green hill overlooking the harbor. In the twilight oil lamps lit up in the fishing boats. The rising moon and the shower of stars kept the woman company. The first ray of sun found her standing in attention. Atnoonthe heat was unbearable. Her clothes were soaked in sweat. The woman didn’t seem to notice. Time passed, and rain came. Time passed, a typhoon tore through the village, causing flooding and mudslides. Time passed. Howling wind, thunder, lightening, each had taken a turn to visit, to threaten, to damage. The woman stood. The frog buttons on her Mandarin tunic came loose, and a gust of wind carried her tattered clothing into the sea. Her skin and flesh had turned black and tough as leather. Time passed. Pigeons and sea gulls stood on her head and shoulders. Their droppings mixed with pee formed a crust covering mother and child. Time passed. Mud, dirt, pebbles, sand and shells, layers upon layers compressed together, changing their forms into a big piece of rock. Fishermen looking toward the village from their boats would point at her silhouette and tell her story; although these were not the same fishermen from her generation. Those people were long dead and gone.
No one could say the woman and her baby were dead. For all you know their hearts could still be beating under the petrified crust. Who can say her husband won’t appear at the horizon one day, and she and her baby won’t burst through the rock to embrace him? A legend is a story that lives forever.
Lovely! Have I heard you read this at Grounds or the Salon? The story seems very familiar to me.
Thank you! I remember reading it once, years ago, at Sacred.