Page 114 - RKJ 2019 Online Flip Version
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addressing a goblin, Tseng decided to play it suit was understandably daunting - and said, newborn babies and weddings and dead folks
safe, and bowed deeply, saying nothing. He “Excuse me, but don’t I know you? You look laid out in their coffins. While she was still
couldn’t tear his eyes from those noodle-white familiar.” learning how to use her new camera she’d
hands and that little machine. He’d never seen The goblin’s hair was thinner, and his sent him a picture she‘d taken of herself and
one before, but he could guess what it was. his mother, slightly out of focus, stiff hair, stiff
waistline had expanded, but his eyes were still
The stranger noticed his interest. blindly blue. postures, stiff smiles. He kept it in a drawer in
“Camera,” he said, and then made a gesture “I knew you were going places as soon as I his apartment.
that was the universal language for come here, saw your exam results,” he said. “That was With subsequent paychecks he had bought
take a look. his mother a bigger house - more fields -
some score you racked up. Did you know it’s
Curiosity triumphed over wariness. Tseng never been beaten?” strong arms to work in the fields, and help
came closer, and the stranger showed him He did not ask to sit down. Tseng did not around the house. Twice he’d been back to
where to put his eye to the glass window, and suggest it. They chatted, awkwardly, for a see her. She looked smaller each time. On
how pressing a button would make a little door couple of minutes. It had been easier when both occasions she had berated him: “Where is
flick open and shut so fast that if you blinked they did not speak the same language. Finally my daughter-in-law? Where are my
you missed it. Which was all very interesting, the stranger said, “Well, must get back to work. grandsons?” The visits had ended in tears.
but what Tseng really wanted to know was how Oh, by the way, I still have a print of that photo After his grandmother died, he didn’t go back
did it actually work, inside? He could only you took. If I can find it, I’ll put it in your any more.
imagine it like an eye holding a memory. But pigeonhole.”
how did it hold them? Where did it store them?
And how did you get the memories out of this The man was as good as his word. And so
machine and onto paper? Tseng set the photo in the camphorwood
frame, which had been made in Wutai but
Just then his grandmother appeared which he’d bought at the Marroniers
around the corner. The stranger said department store in Sector Eight, and placed it
something which Tseng interpreted as go on, on his desk, where he could look at it when he
try it. So he did. The camera beeped and the was in the mood to remember.
shutter whirred.
The night before he’d left home, he and his
“Foreign devil!” she cried, waving her fist at grandmother had stayed up packing. His
them.
mother, exhausted from weeping, had fallen
The stranger looked alarmed. He probably asleep in the next room. Making sure that she
thought she was angry. But Tseng could see could not hear him, Tseng asked his
she was laughing. She walked up, took the grandmother, “Why doesn’t she marry again?
camera, turned it over and over in her hands, She’s still young. She could have more
examining it. “I could make a fortune with one children.”
of these,” she grinned, showing all her missing “That one is unlucky. All her men either die
teeth. “When you are a rich foreign devil, my or they leave her. No man wants that curse on
boy, I want you to buy me one.”
his head. If you’d stayed here, you’d have
ended up unlucky too. It's better to take your
-------------------------------------------
fate into your own hands. I think you’ve made
Seven years later, and three weeks after he the smart choice.”
had begun to work for Shinra, Tseng was Out of his first paycheck he bought his
sitting eating lunch in the company cafeteria grandmother the camera she’d asked for, and
when a middle aged man wearing a Human over the years that followed she made, if not
Resources Department tie approached him - quite the fortune she’d predicted, at least a
rather tentatively, as people were wont to do; decent income, recording memories of
the combination of Wuteng features and Turk
