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Jakarta Post

The girl who swallowed the sun

I found the girl who swallowed the sun hiding at the bottom of a dried-up well, crying her heart out

by O Thiam Chin (The Jakarta Post)
Sun, January 24, 2010

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The girl who swallowed the sun

I

found the girl who swallowed the sun hiding at the bottom of a dried-up well, crying her heart out. Around her lay a deep pool of darkness; she had her palms to her face, and was holding back the tears and the bright light seeping through the slits between her fingers. The shadows danced around her, on the walls, flickering like an orchestra of ghosts, evasive and haunting. Her heart-choking cries filled the silence around her like a flood washing over the plains, devastating, ruinous. She didn't hear me descending on the rope or approaching her in the dark. Every step I took towards her felt like a tentative push along the edge of a precipice, a potential fall into the unknown, unfathomable.

When I lay my hand on her, she jerked up and turned around to face me. The burst of light that beamed from her eyes blinded me like a sharp blade. Everything in my sight turned a glowing white, a blank landscape. I staggered and gripped her instinctively, and I could hear her gasp in surprise.

"Oh, it's you! How did you know where I was?" Her words came out in a flurry, dry and hoarse, and I was glad to hear her voice, the cadence of it ringing in my ears like an assurance.

"I just knew. It's not that hard, really," I said, failing to moderate the excitement in my voice. It had been a tough search, despite my ability, and right now, with her close to me, knowing that she was safe from danger, I could finally let my guard down, exhausted but brimming with relief and joy.

In response, her cries returned, bouncing off the dark walls of the well, in resounding echoes.

"They will kill me when they find out what I did."

"They won't, they still don't know a thing." Doubt seeped through my words, tainting the stale air around us.

"But they will, soon, very soon. They will hunt me down and kill me, right?"

I didn't reply; I had no answer. The blanket of whiteness in my eyes began to disperse, like the splitting of clouds, and I could slowly make out the blurry outline of the girl. I let go of my hand. She had turned her back to me, her head bent slightly, retreated into her silence. I waited alongside her, unable to move away. When she spoke again, she didn't look at me; instead she fixed her stare on the brick wall in front of her, casting a strong halo of light that exposed the crumbling, wrecked surface of the wall.

"I shouldn't have done it. I should have just backed out."

"You didn't know what you were doing. They must have made you do it."

"No, I did it on my own accord. Nobody forced me."

She sat down on the gravel ground, bleeding light as she blinked and cried with a renewed passion. The sound of her bitter, lonesome cries formed a skin round the hollow darkness, physical and protective, and I imagined it gliding upwards, out of the well, into the open air, merging with the heartbeat of the night, beating its own rhythm. I soaked it in, and looked up into the pinhole of the well opening, into a different world, a new world without a sun, without any warmth, and I felt the chill of the cold air touching me, for the first time. My body trembled, and I edged closer to her; she smelled floral, light and ethereal, her body radiating the warm nimbus of a sunburn.

I was all too familiar with how she smelled; we had been classmates for four years, studying in the same secondary school. Though she sat three rows in front of me in class, we hardly talked to one another, and even then, it was all done in perfunctory courtesy when our paths happened to cross. From the insulated safety of distance, I studied and observed her, and over the years, had gotten to know all her smells; there was not one smell that I had not pored over, repeatedly, in the inner chamber of my senses, before finally storing it away in my head, like a precious gem, each one of them. I had become so used to her scent - unique, unmaskable, like an olfactory thumbprint - that I was able to smell her out anywhere, within a radius of 4 kilometers, so far the farthest distance that I was able to pick up her scent and track her down. Once, in fact, I bumped into her, coming out of Starbucks, and had to find a silly excuse on the spot to explain my sudden appearance. But still I prided myself for being able to find her in a crowd of hundreds, maybe even thousands. I knew I would never lose her and the thought brought me inexplicable gratification.

So when I couldn't find her after school today, at the bus stop where she would usually take bus number 13 home every day - I'd be standing a short distance away, breathing her in - I roused into a state of panic. I went around the school, scouring the classrooms and laboratories, before I finally gave up and took the courage to ask her clique of friends for her whereabouts, and it was how I heard about the dare she had taken on, against the taunting from another rival group of girls, a dare to prove them wrong, to stand up for herself. As the only girl in a family of five boys - I eavesdropped on her conversation during recess one day - she had to do anything within her means to survive, to not be a pushover, a weakling.

To take down the sun, to do the impossible; it was easy for her, given her special ability. She had once plucked a star out of the night sky and eaten it up in a single gulp; it happened on the last day of our class camping trip as we sat around the campfire, nudging one another to show off the skills each of us possessed.

So this was how I found her, at the bottom of the well: I closed my eyes and summoned up, from the depth of my consciousness, all the smells that I had collected over my 16 years of existence, into the outer realm of senses, and slowly began to distill and filter her unique scent from the random, cluster-mess of smells, from my childhood, my past, the grime and dust of the old estate where I lived, until I was able to distinguish and separate her scent from the rest, allowing it to fill me, inundate my entire being, snaking through my body, like a charmed, intoxicating spirit.

Once I latched on her scent, my sense started to quicken, like an engine suddenly jostled alive, and I could smell her all around, light and faint at first, from the things she had touched, the ground she had treaded, and then slowly it'd get stronger and richer, as I got nearer to her. It was not easy, but still I managed to locate her, hiding out in the dark, in a deep well in the middle of nowhere.

"You can't hide here in the well forever; you know that, don't you?" I said. The skin of the darkness pulsated intermittently with short, sharp bursts of light, as she opened her eyes and wiped away the tears.

"But what can I do? Where can I go?" she said.

"Just come with me. We'll decide later."

For a long while, the well remained pitch black, weighing on us with its intimidating presence. Nothing stirred. I tried to breathe evenly; every breath was full of her, of sunlight and invisible particles, charged with life. She was thinking hard, her body tensed up beside me, like a coiled spring. Then two spotlights broke out on the wall opposite us, intense and resolute, and she grabbed my hand firmly.

"OK, I'll go with you."

With that, we climbed up the well on the rope and entered into a deeper shade of night, the cold misty air enveloping us in a tight embrace as we fled like fugitives into an unknown future, unsure how our lives would unravel.

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