#ga:zigsa

The first time your feet touch the ground—the real one, baking above the molten core of the earth—your nose bleeds.

Letting it trickle down your face and darting out your tongue to taste, you ask as any curious ten-year-old would if it’s got something to do with the heat, or the heaviness. Your body movements have slowed (more than usual), and you’re breaking out into a sweat despite walking at a snail’s pace.

It’s normal, you’re told. In fact, for most folks it goes the other way around. They go up and they’ll run out of air, feel lightheaded. Can’t handle the sudden change and so instead of being flown up by bison many opt to journey by foot, adjusting themselves bit by bit.

“Bleed like a bunch of fat leeches.” Your father says this with a wry smile before he unceremoniously plugs your nostrils with two fingers and laughs. “Kind of like you!”

/\/\/\

You’ve shed off your excess weight by your second descent. Your nose doesn’t bleed this time but these days you’re more prone to tears. When your feet touch the ground you’re inevitably reminded of that day and the days since and you swell with feeling. You take care of business before your function tonight. Exiting the washroom with a half-wet sniffle and your usual foolhardy smile, you sit down for dinner with the Beifongs.

Your chopsticks rattle against the artfully glazed plate before you. What you’ve acquired in outward presentation you still lack in etiquette, and the head of the table, a mustachioed patriarch who to your dismay looks the very spitting image of your father, casts upon you a look more condemning than any temple monk has extended in the sixteen years you’ve been (reciprocally) doling out mischief. So you’re a leech wherever you go.

The last sliver of lamb glints in jeweled pink luster. The triplet sitting directly across from you eyes it too, but you’re still hungry and you’re also somehow at home with the prospect of making life harder for yourself. You’ve grown accustomed to being belittled that you’ve developed some foolproof coping tactics to deal with the precipitant insecurities. So what if your family is dependent, or that you’re moving in next month, and to the Republic City next year.

You’ll make nice eventually. Today it’s important that you assert yourself.

There’s an opening and you take it, loosening your grip on the upper chopstick so that the triplet on the offensive’s slides through. You angle your chopstick downward and snatch the lamb, inserting it into your mouth without so much as a swish in the hotpot.

Your tongue wraps around the slimy morsel and you savor every last bit of blood and fat that seeps between your teeth. The triplet’s chopsticks clatter in defeat.

/\/\/\

Yesterday you woke up in a shack with your hair knotted in hay and neck pressed painfully against the shack’s damp wood panelling. Today you wake up in a cell with your hands wrapped in bandages and you still ache just as terribly.

You’re surprised you’re unbound—chains or cuffs would be fitting for a cage like this—but the guard that jiggles the cell door open and jolts you awake instructs you to get out, there’s someone here for you. Of course. You’d been running but with a giant mammal at your side and your gusty escapes you weren’t exactly the most slippery dignitary around. They found you easily and you were still bound to them after all.

Your friends stir at your side. This is when the realization dawns on you that a different sort of fate awaits them. That because they lacked a name they were likely to remain in indefinite, perfunctory purgatory while you attended to your duties under the sun, maybe for a steaming afternoon or two before you up and evaporated again into thin air, free to roam whatever bubble has been set up for you, to feel the skin of your feet tearing against hot pavement while you imagine instead that it is coarse desert sand or jagged river rocks. And then to be found again and be dragged back by the leash.