The Water Sprite of the Old Neighborhood

Once Hall the fisherman had finished casting his two nets, he sat on the bank of the small tributary of the River next to his friend Phi. As usual, she refused the coffee he offered from his thermos. That morning, nostalgia overcame him and so he felt like speaking with her about the past fifty years he had lived in that isolated area of the city.

The last ten years had seen great changes in the small neighborhood. There was still a small clientele that was loyal to the family-run store. They would regularly stop in to buy a bottle of water or other small items. The store for the most part didn’t sell industrially manufactured and prepackaged food, but rather snacks from the agrarian economy of the countryside surrounding the city. These remaining customers were the few who cared enough to support the store that they had frequented since they had been children who used to stop in to buy chewing gum or caramels on their return home from school.

Their conversation was interrupted by two men who Hall, lost in reverie, did not see approaching. One of them shouted: “The money by tonight or I’ll break ******g your face!” They were the enforcers of a small local group that had been charging him a permission fee to fish there for the past year. He had been paying them monthly since then due to his reluctance to receive yet another severe beating. However his earnings had recently become too meager to continue. With his eyes to the ground and holding back tears, he promised them that he would have the money soon. Phi stood up and stared furiously into the eyes of the aggressor who was yelling. Oblivious to her presence, he merely shouted a last insult before trudging off with his partner through the mud.

Saddened and shaken up, Hall continued to tell his story to Phi. There was a time decades past, when the news of the community was transmitted to the inhabitants through the method of tranquil conversations within the small community store. The children that he had grown up with years long ago, and who at that moment felt the weight that time imposes on tired bodies, remembered how, at an era as forgotten as the lullabies that used to allow them to sleep at night, they could look up and see adults and the elders of the community happily interact.

Back then, the gossip over heavy local tales of human struggle and accounts of light-hearted smile-provoking marriages were of quantity non-negligible. It wasn’t like, as woe would have it, the convenient stores of today, one on almost every languor-filled fifth street corner it would seem. The convenient stores operated by a large multinational were overflowing with bright neon lights, immaculate rows of snacks in shiny plastic packaging, and unidentifiable clients and clerks, each staring into the emptiness but never at each other. “Capitalism is replacing community,” he told Phi with a vivid chill.

Phi listened to Hall while smiling and occasionally nodding her head, though she couldn’t relate to what he was saying since she had never been in a store. Yes indeed, the last thirty years had seen great changes in the now modern city, though that neighborhood was one of the last to be spared from its megalopolis-type development. This ran through his mind once again, as Phi noticed a tear running down his face. The day before, he had by chance met his old friend Ace whom he hadn’t seen since he was fifteen. His childhood friend had parked his Mercedes-Benz AMG BT in front of a small wooden house to pay a quick visit to his elderly mother. Standing next to his friend who was dressed in a tan suit, Hall had felt ashamed of his flip flops, muddy shorts and sweat-stained linen shirt.

Ace still lived in the city, but this neighborhood was far out of the way from the prosperous central business district where he worked and lived. The day before, in a crisis of conscience, he decided that he had received more than his fill of the lifestyle that is solely based on monetary accumulation, and so called in sick from work to visit his mother. This is because after he got out of his king-sized bed, he pondered about his futures trading profession and was suddenly flabbergasted upon seeing the face of a stranger staring back at him in the mirror. And so, he set out to look for answers by driving to the neighborhood of his childhood origin and to visit his mother whom he hadn’t seen in over thirty-five years.

When he had arrived in his old neighborhood, Ace drove along the main boulevard and then through several of the small adjacent side streets. Several of them had as of yet not been paved. He had been unsuccessful in finding familiar faces. It had thus been impossible for him to actively and joyfully reminisce over his early earthly experiences. For all of the money that he had, he had been feeling glum, greatly alone and empty. The hundreds of thousands that he earned every month, soon to surpass one million per month in the near future, could not make him find what he had previously experienced for free.

His old friends had been great, he thought as he turned through the musty time-yellowed pages of his memory: “Not like the people I run with now, these toolboxes I try to manipulate and who try to manipulate me, all smirks and ******g cheers.” When he was a child, there was never really a need for him to justify himself in front of his old friends or to confirm his friendship by boasting about success through well thought-out phrases.

They used to just show up at the far end of the market and talk for hours. Every day after school, he could count on spending the remainder of the afternoon with at least two of his friends, until the fall of the evening called each one to attend to their respective familial chores. Every time a festival was held, to venerate a hope-inspiring statue, he would enjoy breaching the night air as he looked up nigh to see both of his parents smiling, each one gently expressing the happiness of being surrounded by their family members and by the people they had known since their own school years – the people who had made the transition into full maturity and, in many cases, into advanced ago with them.

The day before, Ace parked his car at the entrance of the small dirt side street in front of the house he had grown up in. He looked at it dreamily. The garden that his mother had so laboriously worked on in her spare time throughout the years now supported the weight of two heavy cylindrical water containers. They reminded him of shiny metallic flowers that had blossomed from the ground to shine under the Sun. He knew that the force that had decided to create his mother would soon come to the conclusion that the time to reclaim her had finally come. Thirty-five years ago, he and his father had moved far away to reside in a small country house located in the southernmost coastal region.

He thought how odd it was for him to barely be able to recognize the street of his former house. He closed his eyes and saw his mother welcome him back from school, her arms spread as wide as the cloudless sky above, as the smell of the curried rice she had been preparing for dinner permeated the air that was dreamily thick with humidity. Upon exiting his mother’s house, Ace was startled as a middle-aged man dressed in tattered clothes turned the corner and stopped in front of him. It was his former best friend Hall! After a quick exchange, Ace declined Hall’s invitation for coffee, abruptly entered his car and headed back to the gleaming towers of the central business district.

Sitting on the muddy bank with Phi, Hall felt overcome with sadness about how Ace no longer thought him respectable enough to be his friend, even after thirty-five years. The neighborhood that had once been the stronghold of his comfort and familial warmth had in such a manner grown sterile. A modern and unwelcoming force around it had become larger than him. Yet his remembrance compelled him to the place that had so changed, only to reveal the face of abandonment. However, he accepted that it was the way it had to be. That was simply the way things had turned out. A thought suddenly occurred to him and compelled him to jump up with excitement.

“Phi, you know so much! You’re the wisest person I know! Please tell me. How can I make money, how could I become rich?”

She placed her arm around his shoulders and questioned him in her soft voice. “Those small things made out of paper? I saw you pull some out of your pocket before, when you said that money comes from selling the fish you catch. You said you give some of the paper to the orphanage you used to live in and keep the little left for yourself. Also, you should probably keep the fish you catch instead of giving them away for that useless paper. You should probably give the fish instead of those small papers to the orphanage too. You never seemed to care or complain about those papers since I have known you. Why do you ask me now?”

He tried to explain the concept of money to her in a way that she could understand. “Listen carefully Phi. If I get many, many more of those papers, that means that I would be rich. Surely, Ace would want be my friend again if I became rich! Please think. How can I get more money… more of those papers?”

“Oh Hall. I have been telling you when to expect rain and Sun, gentle breezes and stormy weather. I could also still tell you where a school of fish happens to be feeding. But I don’t know how to do what you’re asking for. I would tell you if I understood how to hoard that paper, but I do not know the ways of your kind. Also, it gets soggy too fast, so it is completely useless. I don’t know why Ace would be your friend again if you had more of that paper.”

She then paused and held out a thin silver bracelet that she had forgotten about. “Don’t be sad, Hall. This might make you happy because it’s so pretty. I found it eight Moons ago. I kept it because I like the ways it shines.”

That evening, Hall decided to take his small wooden fishing boat out. The small motor that his father had purchased when he was still alive had burned out years ago, so he had to row. Being surrounded by water when the Sun was setting always calmed him. He felt that he was more than ever in need of that after being snubbed by Ace the day before. As he cast his net, he saw a loud speedboat approaching in the distance.

Phi sat and watched him by the reeds, a few yards away from the small shantytown overlooking the riverbank. It was the only shantytown that remained in that section of the city. She thought that the water seemed more polluted than ever. There was indeed refuse such as empty water bottles and various plastic wrappers floating on the surface. In the distance, she noticed the tall and gleaming buildings that had been erected, thinking that all the raw excrement that their pipes spewed into the sewers contributed to the River’s murkiness that she no longer cared to visit. She wearily looked at the two bare-chested men from earlier that day speeding towards Hall who was fumbling with a fishing net.

Out of the evening monsoon season mist, a chest-high wave capsized the speedboat. Down and down the two men were pulled despite their frantic struggling. And the more aggressive one who had been shouting threats and insults earlier that day saw Phi for the first time. As his eyes filled with terror at the sight of her slender body and angry yet beautiful face, he gasped one last time before his lungs filled with water.

The next morning, Hall was nervously sipping his first cup of coffee when Phi emerged to sit next to him. They were silent for several minutes.

“You didn’t need to kill them,” said Hall hesitantly. He tried to convince her of his religious beliefs. “Life is valuable, life is beautiful.”

“But they were wicked men, with mean intentions, and they wished pain and death upon you,” she softly replied.

“Well regardless, they work with three men who will come looking for me to kill me because of this. I’m a dead man.”

“No one will come looking for you. After drowning the bad men who wanted to hurt you, I searched for those other bad men for hours yesterday night. I finally found the bad men, drunk, laughing on a big white boat at the bay. I took the three bad men under with me too.”

“You did what? Phi! Life is valuable! Life is beautiful!”

After a few minutes of silence, he came to the realization that he could not change her point of view. Tired and resigned, he laid on his back and asked out of curiosity: “Where did you get the silver anyway?”

“Silver?”

“Yes, the shiny bracelet that you gave me yesterday.”

“I found that at the bottom, near that bend over there eight Moons ago. I also found many other things that shine; rings with decorations on top that let the light pass through, coins, necklaces. Other beautiful things too. I decided to start collecting the shiny things many years before your great-great-great grandfather was born. He was a fisherman, just like you, but he lived a day North up the River. Some people dropped them near the riverbanks while eating with friends, others lost a lot of them when their ships much bigger than yours sank. Others fell with them in their pockets or around their wrists and necks after killing each other with swords and spears, then with the sticks that make the loud noise and flash fire. Some of the things I found have more of a yellow shiny color to them. I like looking at those too. I have more than I know what to do with in my lair. I could bring you most of them if the way that they shine in the Sun and the Moon makes you happy too.”

Hall never saw Ace ever again, having realized that friendship can never be bought through the boasting of wealth. In fact, he realized, only the opposite could come from that. The residents of the neighborhood soon saw their dilapidated shanties upgraded by Hall to equally small but luxurious ones. He never told them that he and Phi were the ones to be thanked for their improved living conditions. They would have thought that he was crazy if he mentioned her to anyone anyway.

Hall continued his routine of having coffee with her on the riverbank before spreading his fishing nets, though on a more modern boat with luxurious living quarters below deck. And before demanding the final rest from the weight of years, the lives of all those who remained in the neighborhood merely followed the routine of the alternation between the shimmering of the Moon and the brightness of the Sun that of the waves brightens the crests.