The Bones in the Corner

In the deepest part of the night, Ye Xian dreamed. An old man, with hair as white as river mist, came down the hill from the waste behind the house and stood beside her straw. He was dressed in a rough cloth, and he did not look angry; he looked, rather, as though he had been waiting a long time to give her a message.

"Do not weep for the fish," he said. "It was not what it seemed. It had been sent to you, because you were kind to it when it had no other friend. It is dead now, but it is not gone. Its bones are in the midden behind the kitchen. Dig them up. Keep them wrapped, and say nothing to the woman who rules this house. Whatever you ask of the bones, they will grant you."

Ye Xian woke. The old man was gone. She lay in the dark and thought about what he had said, and about the golden fish that had taken food from her hand. Before dawn she crept out to the midden, dug in the refuse with her bare hands, and found the small heap of fish-bones, still warm, or so it seemed to her, in the early earth.

She wrapped them in a corner of her own tattered cloak and hid them under the stones of her sleeping-place. She said nothing to the stepmother. She went about her work as she always had, and the stepmother, seeing her as quiet and as broken as any orphan girl should be, forgot her suspicions.

The bones kept their word. When Ye Xian, that evening, sat alone and whispered that she was hungry, a small bowl of hot rice appeared beside her, as if it had been put there by a hand she could not see. When her cloak, the next winter, became too thin to keep the rain out, she whispered her need into the wrapped bundle, and by the morning a warmer garment lay folded on the stones.

She did not ask for finery. She was a child who had learned to want little, and the bones, which seemed to know her mind, gave her only what she needed: food when she was hungry, dry straw when the roof leaked, a quiet courage when the stepmother's voice was hardest.

The stepmother noticed that the girl grew thin in the cheek but did not weaken in the arm; that she never complained of cold, though her cloak was still the old one. She watched her more closely, but she never saw the girl take anything from anywhere, and she could make nothing of it.

So the winter passed. The spring came early to the southern hills. The villagers began to speak of the New Year festival, when the young men and women of the valley would walk together up to the temple on the ridge, and sing, and watch the dancers, and choose, in the old unspoken way, the partners they would dance with.

The stepmother prepared herself and her own daughter for the festival. She put on her best coat, painted her daughter's face, and told Ye Xian, in the doorway, that she was to stay at home and tend the fire. There was no place, she said, for a servant girl at the festival.

Ye Xian bent her head and said nothing. But when the two women had gone, their footsteps loud and cheerful on the path, she crept to her stones, unwrapped the bones, and whispered, very quietly, what she had never dared to whisper before.