The Garlic Ballads

cellmate was doubled over with dry heaves, her mouth spread wide, so she shuffled across the cell and began patting her on the back. After wiping the spitde from the corners of her mouth, the woman lay back wearily and closed her eyes; she was gasping for breath.
    “You’re not … you know, are you?” Fourth Aunt asked.
    The woman opened her dull, lifeless eyes and tried to focus on Fourth Aunt’s face, not understanding the question.
    “I asked if you’re expecting.”
    The woman responded by opening her mouth and wailing, “My baby” and “My little Aiguo.”
    “Please, Sister-in-Law, stop. No more of that,” Fourth Aunt urged. “Tell me what’s bothering you. Don’t keep it bottied up inside.”
    “Auntie … my littie Aiguo is dead I saw it in a dream … head cracked open … blood all over his face … chubby little angel turned into a lifeless bag of bones … like when you were killing those lice…. I held him in my arms, called to him … his rosy cheeks, pretty big eyes … so black you could see yourself in them … flowers all over the riverbank, purple wild eggplants and white wither gourds and bitter fruits the color of egg yolks and pink hibiscus … my Aiguo, a little boy who loved flowers more than girls do, picking those flowers to make a bouquet and stick it under my nose. ‘Smell these, Mommy, aren’t they pretty?’ They’re like perfume,’ I said. He picked a white one and said, ‘Kneel down, Mommy’ I asked him why. He told me just to kneel down. My Aiguo could cry at the drop of a hat, so I knelt down, and he stuck that white flower in my hair. ‘Mommy’s got a flower in her hair!’ I said people are supposed to wear red flowers in their hair—white flowers are unlucky, and you only wear them when someone dies. That scared Aiguo. He started crying. ‘Mommy, I don’t want you to die. I can die, but not you.
    By this time the poor woman was sobbing uncontrollably. The cell door opened with a loud clang, and an armed guard stood in the doorway with a slip of paper in his hand. “Number Forty-six, come with us!” he ordered.
    The woman stopped crying, although her shoulders continued to heave, and her cheeks were still wet with tears. The guard was flanked by white-uniformed police officers. The one to the left, a man, held a pair of brass handcuffs, like golden bracelets; the other one was a short, broad-beamed woman with a pimply face and a hairy black mole at the corner of her mouth.
    “Number Forty-six, come with us!”
    The woman slipped her feet into her shoes and shuffled toward the door, where the policeman snapped the golden bracelets onto her wrists. “Let’s go.”
    She turned to look at Fourth Aunt. There was no life in her eyes, nothing. Fourth Aunt was so frightened by that look she couldn’t move, and when she heard the cell door clang shut she could no longer see anything—not the guard, not the guard’s shiny bayonet, not the white police officers nor the gray woman. Her eyes burned, and the cell went dark.

3.

    Where are they taking her? Fourth Aunt wondered, listening for signs; but all she heard were the crickets outside her steel cage and, from farther off—possibly from the public highway—the sounds of metal banging against metal. The cell was getting lighter; bottleneck flies darted around like blue-green meteors.
    With the departure of her cellmate, Fourth Aunt experienced the anxieties of loneliness. She sat on Number Forty-six’s cot, until she vaguely recalled being told by the pretty guard that inmates were not allowed to sit on any cot but their own. She shook open her cellmate’s blanket and was hit in the face by a blast of foul air. It was coated with dark spots like droppings or dried blood, and when she scraped it with her fingernail, a horde of lice scurried out of the folds. She popped some of them into her mouth, bit down, and started to cry. She was thinking about Fourth Uncle and the way he caught lice.

    Fourth Uncle sat against the wall in the sun-baked yard, stripped to the waist, his jacket draped across his knees as he picked lice out of the folds and flipped them into a chipped bowl filled with water. “Get all you can, old man,” Fourth Aunt said. “When you’ve got a bowlful, I’ll fry them to go with your wine.”
    Jinju, still a little girl, stuck close to her father. “How come you’ve got so many lice, Daddy?”
    “The poor get lice, the rich get scabies,” he said, flipping a particularly fat