Hungry Ghost by Victoria Ying EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Author: Victoria Ying
- Language: English
- Genre: Teen & Young Adult Fiction about Death
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Sometime in the 1940s, Trinidad
Four boys ventured to the river to perform a blood oath. Two brothers and
two cousins. The brothers were twins, both fifteen; the cousins, fourteen
and thirteen. They passed around a boning knife, making clean cuts across
their palms. The blood bubbled to the surface like their veins were boiling.
They let the blood drip into a stolen bottle of cow’s milk. They drank,
passing the bottle around until all was gone. Then they hugged each other, a
minute at a time, holding on tight as if the world were ending. When it was
over, the rains came down so hard that the four boys thought the clouds
would fall as well. The force of the water stung the wounds and washed
them clean.
‘Gonna have nothin more important than this,’ the twins told the
cousins.The older brother christened their union with a name: Corbeau, for the
large vulture, a carrion feeder, a bird that stays alive by seeking the dead.
Why not an ibis? Or a kingfisher? Or a peacock?
Because a corbeau will always be a corbeau, even if it trades its black
feathers for a peacock’s. It must eat corpses for breakfast, knowing to
savour bowels and maggoty flesh, realising those too are meals fit for kings.
For what is a king but one who is nourished by his kingdom? One that
circles overhead, making his presence known. A corbeau will always be a
corbeau – hated by the world that it will eventually eat.
The youngest boy was reluctant to identify with the scavenger bird until
hearing it put like that. He was an only child, frail but uncommonly
precocious. Large intelligent eyes. His nose deep in old, crumpled
magazines. The frown of an old holy man in these troubling times. Skin so
fair that the elders had said it was touched by the goddess Radha. He once
had hair like a wild child, a haven of lice. Never wanted it combed. Ruffled
it and teased it back out if anyone did.
This boy’s name was Krishna Saroop.
Krishna was from a family of three.
The father, Hans, was in his early thirties. Sunkissed skin. Palms like
pressed leather. He had eyes that smiled. The remnants of his marasmic
childhood still perceptible. Sometimes his limbs seemed more spindly than
they really were. But when he laboured in the canefields, he was as
handsome and strong and spirited as the war god Subrahmanya. Worked
hard his whole life for a pittance. Enough for a dust of flour from the
Chinese merchants, some Bermudez biscuits and a scoop of ghee. And
made do with it. For the past year, he’d worked on the Changoor estate,
where he built fences and repaired doors and maintained the land. His job
description changed every week because he could do everything.
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