Anshū: Dark Sorrow

  Born of fire, fire my element, Himiko, child of fire, my name. “Don’t play with fire!” Mama said. “Do you want to get burned?” I loved fire. Played with it every chance I could. My parents worried that I might get hurt, burn the house down, or destroy the cane fields that took years to grow, and all that the sugar-plantation-camp people had worked for would go up in smoke. Worst of all, kill someone if not myself. Early one morning, just after Papa left the house to work in the cane field to clear the weeds, I took some old Japanese newspapers from a bin near the wood-burning stove in the kitchen and rushed downstairs to make a crumpled paper mountain in a corner under the house. That done, I hastened upstairs to take the box of cowboy matches from the ledge above the stove, then ran into my parents’ bedroom to steal Mama’s prayer beads. Downstairs once more, I struck a matchstick on my geta, the way I had seen Papa scrape the soles of his boots to light his pipe. No luck. I looked around and dragged the fat match head on one of the rough beams that held up the house. The gritty head caught fire. It rasped, looked close to dying, then flared. I cupped the flickering head and lowered it to the base of the Japanese newspaper pile. Old and dried, the papers caught fire instantly. With flames crackling, parts of the newspaper crinkled, rose, then fell into wisps of fragile gray ash, the heat destroying the long thread of ideograms, the stories—curled incantations, old murmurings—going up in smoke. It was magic. I mumbled na-man dabs, na-man dabs, like the bald Buddhist priests at the temple, with the prayer beads I stole from Mama draped over my hands. Fire spoke to me. I clapped my hands, made wild-animal kicks, and scattered dirt into the air. Twirling in the dust like a frenzied death-spirit dancer and placing my hands toward the heel of the runaway flames, I lifted them up to circle the air and, like a child shaman, conducted the spirit forces around me. Fueled, the flames grew into a spindly tree, and the long pointy leaves brushed against my threadbare dress. I was on fire. I ran out from under the house. I rolled on the ground and shielded my face.