Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING
not to get away. They were hurrying to shore. Maybe my husband
told them to do this. Everyone listens to the headman and doesn’t ar­
gue. Maybe he said, We’ll work the pipeline and make another plan
later. Whatever he said, I saw them climbing the banks. They were
sticking together, because that’s how we are. And I would have done
that, too, but I had to find Loot and Bootie first. The Great God told
me I had to do this.
So I stayed in the water by the Great God’s will and against my
own. Only one soldier tipped his rifle nose at me, but he was very
young, and instead of a little sneeze, his rifle made a big one, so he
couldn’t shoot anything but the sky. I saw our village was already on
fire. The thatch of the houses was burning, the rice sheds, too, black
smoke rising. I saw my family and the other villagers crawling on
knees and hands toward the soldiers. My husband, my daughter, her
husband, my other daughter, the four sons of my rice-pounding sis­
ter, her husband, who was still looking back to see where she was. I
saw some of them fall flat onto their faces. I thought they had been
kicked. One by one, they fell. One by one, I shouted, Ai! One by one,
I was leaving them. And even if I had tried to swim back, the stream
was too fast, and it carried me away, like an empty boat.
I was going to tip myself over and fall to the bottom of the river.
But then I heard them, Loot and Bootie. They were laughing like the
tinkling bells of a singing shawl. They were still on the pallet, spin­
ning in an eddy. After I reached them and checked them twice for
holes, I cried and cried for I was so happy, and then I cried and cried
again for I was so sad.
That was the day I knew Loot and Bootie had the power to both
resist bullets and disappear. That’s why the soldiers never saw them.
That’s why they’re still here. They’re divinities, descended from the
Younger White Brother, who also knew how to disappear. Of course,
Loot and Bootie are still children and quite naughty at that, so
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