Lost Children Archive: A Novel by Valeria Luiselli

Author:Valeria Luiselli [Valeria Luiselli]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780525520610
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2019-02-12T05:00:00+00:00

Though curious and also desperately hungry, they’d dared not touch it. Others like them, after them, perhaps sensed the same dark something in that strange fruit, because days and then weeks passed and the orange remained there, round, untouched, molding green and showing white rings on the outside, fermenting first sweet and then bitter inside, then gradually blackening, shrinking, shriveling, until it disappeared into the gravel during a long midsummer rainstorm.

The only yard people who didn’t curse, didn’t trick, didn’t ask for anything in return were three young girls with long obsidian braids who carried buckets of powdered magnesium. For free, the three girls offered to tend to the children’s ravaged feet, the heels and balls pulpy and bursting open like boiled tomatoes. The girls sat beside them and reached their cupped hands into metal buckets. They powdered the children’s soles and insteps, and later used tattered cloths or scraps of towels to wrap ripped skin. They used pumice stones to reduce tough calluses, careful not to rub the skin raw, and massaged contracted calf muscles with their small but firm thumbs. They offered to puncture bellying blisters using a sterilized needle. “See the small flame of this match?” one of them said, and then explained that when the flame touched the needle, the needle got clean. And last, the youngest of the bucket-girls, the one with the best eyes—big black almonds—showed the children a set of contorted metal hangers and a pair of large clippers that she pulled from inside her bucket, and with them offered to relieve the deeper, more desperate pain of ingrown or half-hanging toenails.

Only one boy, boy six, said yes, yes please. He was not one of the younger ones, nor was he the eldest. He had seen the large clippers offered to him and had remembered the lobsters. He remembered his grandfather walking out of the sea on unsteady twiggy legs, carrying the lobsters inside a net mended twice or thrice with double knots and drops of candle wax. The old man would stand by the shore, his back curved forward to balance the weight of the catch, and call out his name. Always he had run to the shore at his grandfather’s call, offered to carry the net for him. And as they made their way from the hard, wet sands nearer to the shore toward the dry, higher dunes, and then crossed the road and boarded the passenger bus, he would peek now and then into the net. He’d observe that death-nest of lobsters crawling over lobsters, speculating how much will we earn, counting how many did we catch, watching the little beasts opening and closing their pincher claws as if they were all uttering sad thoughts to one another in sign language.

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