Fata Morgana

Most of the soldiers – though they’ve long learned not to be superstitious – likened the sighting of the market in the distance to a will-o’-the-wisp, with its opaque golden glow that frayed at the edges like smoke, silver reflections flitting across domed glass.

Aksa always took it to be a sign of hope – a guide to the warm hearth of home no matter which city, which country they’d ended up in over the years.

Sori, on the other hand, saw it as a guide to death – the wispy silver halo the ghosts they thought they’d left behind, waiting for them to step into the hollow memory of that long lost idea of “home” …

Perhaps that was because how the markets were always nestled in the dark and narrow: under a canopy of dead woven branches beyond half-buried dirt paths in the heart of the woods, past claustrophobic alleyways of cobblestone that turned at sharp angles and snaked through minute gaps between buildings until the moonlight oil burned through the cracks and left you, alone, smothered in the shadows of the city.

The bright lights of a market were a beacon, at a time where every home had their curtains closed for fear of enemy fire – even after most families had had to sell their excess lamp oils to buy a mere bag of barley flour to feed seven or ten.

Even now, Sori couldn’t help but glance at the sky, the street behind her, as her eyes flitted too swiftly from one lit window to the next in the row of houses lining the main road. The squares of orange-gold fire seemingly drew their strength from the market just around the corner, which was still so bright even with the surrounding pollution of light that the moon seemed to be a freshly painted white dot dabbed over with cotton, its translucent edges even more frayed than the wispy threads emanating from the market’s beating fay heart.

In the darkened woods which the hand of war rarely touched; in the crossroads of a maze of alleyways where a soldier would find themselves stuck in a particularly harrowing tunnel before reinforcements could come, there wasn’t an actual need to whisper – to stay somber when you’re already worlds removed from a conflict that involved few but threatened many.

Now, with more breathing room to spare, the sellers’ voices echoed less but said a lot more, over and over again on top, under then weaving through the endless stream of their neighbors’ voices without resonating into their familiar cacophony. It was easier to discern, grabbing the end of any ribbon of words and to make out “butter tea and barley flour,” or “grass jelly and sugar syrup” under the nonetheless enticing chant of “food, food, food.”

A cloud of fine, yellow-tinted powder wafted up from one of the stalls near the entrance as its owner dug a deep bowl into a mound of millet flour, scooping the full serving into a drawstring bag that only sagged slightly before asking for more. Woven bamboo trays of barley, wheat, and yam flours balanced snugly on the edges of the trays below them, their slight gradations in color fading easily to sameness, to white, whenever the wind from a passing customer knocked a pinch onto the top of the mound below, and the rest, cascading in a flurry of tiny round drops before being flattened into streaks across the bamboo mat. Sitting on the pavement with a bright red, blue, or green scarf wrapped around their mouths and noses (to avoid inhaling the powder, and to block the almost direct heat from the red-hot glass and smelted metal under the pot instead of a direct fire), the tea sellers – who always stationed themselves next to the flour vendors, regardless if they’re already acquainted or not – ladled thermoses of rich butter tea, the steam rendering the surface white and the streaks silvery, from the big pot that’s been left to boil for years on end in the back kitchen of a nearby home then lugged over every evening onto the cobblestones as soon as the market started setting up its eaves.

A brief yet intense, saccharine scent exploded amongst the flyaway flour grains like the bubbles evanescing along the surface of the boiling drink. On the other side of the counter, between where the flour vendor was standing and the tea seller was sitting, a couple of deep bamboo baskets filled to the brim with flour mixture (the ratios differ according to each vendor’s unique recipe) laid encircled by a group of giggling children, their coats and aprons smeared with white and whose little hands had punched shallow craters into the moonlit surface of each flour mound. Pasty rocks from where tea met powder rolled into the potholes, digging each an inch deeper each time and revealing the hidden treasures lying underneath: ripe whole berries – a real mouthful with a casing of the buttery flour paste shielding its deep red, purple sheens, but small enough for the children to nibble slowly, satisfyingly, for their parents to toss a coin in the vendor’s direction and scurry swiftly away before their children could be released from their sweet reverie.

A father walked briskly back into the thick slurry of the crowd, his daughter just about finished in chewing the sweet that was probably about the size of her balled fist. She swallowed, then shot a toothy grin at Sori’s direction before the crowd pushed them beyond her reach and they were lost again into the fold of chattering and laughing and purposeful wandering (“which snack should we try first/next/all over again?”).

It's almost been a year since the war ended, but Sori still craved the simple foods most people had had to make do with at the time. She wasn’t picky; she’d eat anything that was given to her as long as it was edible and kept her strength up… Such was the mindset that most soldiers had had to cultivate if they wanted to be led by their brains – else, their guts, not their stomachs. But if she had to admit, she never particularly craved for anything sweet, nor something spicy, sour – anything too strongly flavored for that matter.

“You might as well eat snow.” Aksa used to tease her.

Well, if she had to, she could eat snow. Glancing up at the rooftops, with their light dusting of white baked by the golden heat from the lanterns notched onto the stalls’ rickety wooden pillars, she took in a sharp breath – and with it, the numbed memories of their last days at war carried by the cold winter air:

Red blooms in snow, but no matter how many tears fall onto the blank whiteness, they just disappear… Tears can become snow, but blood is just blood – and it’ll stay as blood no matter how much spills out and into the ground…

The breath shot out of her almost as quickly as she inhaled it – an excited elbow knocked onto her back and surged her forward out of the rapid current of limbs wadded in cotton and patchwork linen. The warmed air crystallized into a cloud – much denser yet more translucent than the puffs of flour blooming like cotton balls, replacing the snow that was early in coming and already finished for the year – veiling her vision to remind her of the memory that would soon slip out of her grasp to be replaced by the present momentarily—

“There’ll be nothing but snow to eat if you don’t come over soon, you know.”

The ends of her mouth twitched upwards, a hiss of air escaping from the thin gap between her parted lips and splitting the cloud straight right in the middle before it’s due to disappear.

“I could eat snow… We both could,” she replied as her vision widened to that of the square, with its makeshift wooden tables cozily sidling up with one another in claustrophobic clusters and pocket holes of bare, snow-covered cobblestones in between, then narrowed again to the table at the furthest edge where a steaming clay pot of black tea separated her seat – and where Aksa had already been sitting for, knowing him, probably close to half-an-hour.

His teasing grin tugged her forward, just like how she used to drag him through throngs of people in the direction of the only scent that reminded her of what “home” could be when she believed there was no such thing in the world…

#

           The red building with the red clay pot stood out in the snow like blood. With the right amount of sunlight, usually just before noon, its thick brick walls would be plunged in its own shadows – as if the world around it was overflowing with light and needed to store its darkness somewhere – and the color would deepen, curdle, until it became more the shade of dried rose petals: preserved red, not fresh, and with its cracks, wrinkles, frozen in time under sheets of ice and snow.

           The steam from the mouth would fog up the glass window, pockmarks of warmth receding into their centers on the clear surface until the pot coughed up yet another series of breaths – a wreath of fist-sized perennial blossoms to match the flurry of snowflakes outside.

           The tea was heated up every dawn and dusk, just as it had been for the last twenty years – or so they had been told – and every time the flames parted into its tendril-like petals, caressing the clay with red-tinted fingers, they left some of their color with it. Deepening it, curdling it. Like a drop of ink spreading in clear water until suddenly the entire pot was a shade darker and not just its scorched bottom. And with it the tea was richer, thickening into velvet just as its scarlet-tinged shade seemed to suggest to your tongue.

           And hot. Very hot. Just minutes removed from boiling even after a couple of hours sitting by the frosted window. Putting your graying, translucent palm over the surface of a cup, color seemed to spread back from the center to the tips of your fingers and down your wrists in heat-filled veins, and then could you wrap your fingers around it for a more direct heat – a bonfire in a tiny clay cup, filled with a few rock sugars the size of a teaspoon each.

           “Sugar is scarce during wartime, but we always have to have sugar with our tea. So, naturally, everyone only got a cup each of the former for a pot of the latter – it’s up to you to drink it as fast as possible if you want the sugar to last, or to start off sweet and end up with the already too far-boiled tea later… But, of course – years passed, and with it many, many wars, so that even in between it became a habit to drink it this way even when we have a sack load of sugar in the pantry just waiting for us to indulge ourselves with. You could call it frustration, impatience… For me, I’m just lazy.”

           Sori had watched, perpetually open-mouthed as she tried to cool off the tea as much as possible before taking her second, hopefully less painful sip, as the captain filled his cup for his third or fourth serving. Only a mere chunk had dissolved from a corner of one of the sugar pieces—

           “If you keep drinking it all then pouring a new cup, the remaining sugar will get too confused to melt away.”

           That partially explained why all the sugar would dissolve at once before Sori could finish her first cup – but also, mostly, she was just slow at drinking things when they’re too hot.

           “Snow would melt faster.”

           “I told you you might as well drink snow.”

           Sugar runs out, but not snow, after all. It was always there – at least, as long as the red brick building with the red clay pot was the place they’re supposed to return to. The flames of the stove that sprout anew every dawn and dusk, the glass window where steam dandelions stay afloat against the backdrop of winter rain – and the trail of crimson, like a Fata Morgana, budding on the pure white ground until its tendrils seeped into every flake and hollow, so that Sori thought she was already home…

#

           All of the sugar had already dissolved by the time she raised the cup to her lips. The surface of the tea reflected only a deep red at that short distance from her eyes, revealing nothing about what they’re holding – or what emotion exactly that they’re supposed to hold in this situation.

           “It’s the same. A market is a market.”

           A hiss of cold breath skated over the surface of the still hot tea, the steam purifying it back into a milky colorlessness. Sori set her teacup back onto the table.

           “A market that sells stolen things, weapons from a war already passed.” She glanced behind her, all around her, at the beaming families cupping their hands over steaming pots and sharing the warmth through joined hands, at the glint in their eyes as the skin around them crinkled like firework creases on crumpled paper, eyes reflecting the blues and purples beneath the shimmering golden light – Aksa’s rippling green flecks as she gazed into them for the first time since he poured her her first… and last cup of tea in a long while. “Pretty things – for a higher price.”

           Every market had been a black market then, but it was a market whose shelves were lined with leftover grains from broken burlap sacks passing by on soldier-manned carts, pots and pans soaked in soot that were salvaged from the piles and piles of metal in the factories just before all were smelted into a line of the same, horrible things, the few precious heirlooms that managed to retain some of their shine except for the sliver that was taken as a memory by the owner who hadn’t had a choice but to part with it…

           Aksa’s fingers were thin and bony, wrapping easily around her hand like a wiry scarf. His own had been pulled up well over his mouth, straddling the tip of his near-frostbitten nose, but mostly to hide the persistently pulsing rouge of his usually pale cheeks as they drifted through the crowd like shadows, latching to anybody whose pace suited them better at the moment. The cuffs of their uniforms made a faint scratching sound as they slid against one another and the cuffs of their similarly oversized coats, with their trailing skirts and sleeves that were just slightly longer – just enough to hide the circlet of fraying silver threads belonging, at a glance, to the dwindling army. And the two soldiers whose wrists were bound by them: freshly plucked from the battlefields to wander around aimlessly – anywhere but the fields – like the children they’re supposed to be.

           And, like a child, she saw it immediately: rippling green in a sea of gold. Just another flicker in a shelf of rows and rows of tiny glass beads, yet gleaming and glinting like the half-closed eyes that gazed down at her at the kitchen table as the candlelight hushed their shadows away, catching instead on the one upturned end of a teasing smile still unfolding in the dawn haze.

           “Pretty things can make a home.”

           In the circles of untouched snow – where the fay lights somehow shone brightest – music welled up like cascading tears from the strings of a violin, a lute, soon inviting laughter and much stumbling as people looked for hidden trails possibly left by the reinvigorated music for their feet to follow under the powdery snow.

           “Somewhere where we both can stay.”

           Where their feet dug into the whiteness and left smeared hollows, red seemed to well up into footprints – then branches and vines, binding ankles to concrete ground, and still no red building in sight.

           “Pretty things won’t make me stay… And if you’re doing it for me, then if I said stop… would you?”

           Even as the brightest fay light doused out every color but green from his eyes, she couldn’t ignore the shadows wrapping easily around the pair of those stolen glass beads with wiry fingers, reaching up from the heavy silk now visibly veiling that familiar, lopsided grin.

           The last of her tea gleamed red at the bottom of the cup, the smooth, darkened inside reflecting its coldness in a curdled, rose petal red. She left it as it was, striding to the center of the circle of light and movement and music without so much another glance behind her.

           “One last time – then we never look back.”

           Warmth shot through her fingertips as she pressed them tightly over his palm, the bones on the back of his long, wiry hands – stubbornly, at certain points, as if that’ll let her hold on to the green flecks wandering aimlessly in the flood of gold, drifting sooner away then back again like the pockmarks of light in a zoetrope as she ran up to reach them. Through heat-filled veins, spreading up her frost-tipped fingers and down her wrists, warmth radiating like a golden halo until their palms let go and the veins thinned into threads, threads frayed into smoke – the silvery air seeping through the cracks into a memory of snow.