jingwei

My curiosity was piqued largely due to the fact how the boy sitting across me cut through his hard toasts. He held a non-serrated knife in one hand and a fork in the other. A firm thrust through the hardcore crust. They crackled, sounding delightfully poetic. But the boy, buckled under this sweaty chore of bread-cutting, managing after about several attempts of steady back and forth movement of the knife, finally, forking a small piece, and mouthing it without much ado.

I watched him every day across the same distance of the ship’s deck, clawing around the taffrail, I perched on, a raging ocean underneath my talons; the boy tackling this petrified piece of bread. He could have used his front teeth instead which protruded out of his lips. They were quite large compared to his mouth. He didn’t use them — just his destiny. “What’s wrong with this knife?” He ranted and gauged it with a quick finger run of his index over its blade. Sharp though, it shouldn’t be this difficult to cut through this bread in two. Yet, it was. That was just in the nature of the bread — soggy and soft when it is not toasted, crispy and hard on the flip side.

The next day, same place, the same moment, I found him, still struggling, yet with another slice. It flew through the space and descended on the floor at the foot of his stool. He bent to seize it and placed it back on his plate. A small frown appeared on his forehead with a grimace. I smiled at his demeanor of discontent; he resumed with the incisions around the edges, in the middle, this way or that until a puny piece, was forked again between his frontals.

“Bloody hell!” he swore under his breath. “Why is it so hard to cut a piece of bread? Did I require a saw instead?” he looked at his knife and said. “Is this a rock or what?”

I tapped on the taffrail. A devilish glint in his eyes as much as they were subtly innocuous. The way he looked at me then averted his gaze to focus on the crackled bread as though he tackled the waves — his soft arms were sinewy and without any hair. Hairless, but badly bruised as though he tried using them in forklifting. He continued unhindered — struggling, and then finally cutting a piece until the bread was all gone.

The boy wore a duff cap. He would be fifteen at the most. His freckled cheeks were flushed. His shoes had some ugly holes. Still, they protected his socked feet and kept them warm. He looked out at the waves. A jingwei divided them as the ship tossed around. Black thunder was over us. The boy went pale, he left his table and came to stand next to me. In the wavering movement of the ship, the cutlery was lost in the sea. 

“What is it with you?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Why? Was that so hard a piece to work that knife through?”

He laughed.“True. Nothing compared to this brew.” 

He looked up at the storm, as though he knew.

“Where are you off to?”

“A sailor’s destination, who knows, I get off at every port seeking fortune.”

“You, a sailor?” I asked.

“Aye, onboard,” he said and touched his duff in a manner of a salute.

He took his cap off and held it folded in his hand.

“Where’re you off to?” he asked me.

“To the next port,” I answered.

When the next port arrived, the boy had disappeared. I looked around and saw no boys, only middle-aged men on a sinking board. The ocean mirrored a reflection — a superimposed beak over a full protrusion of incisors and a duff-head — the jingwei frolicked on the waves. Fifty thousand years of hard toasts of dire predicament blended. I swallowed a sob lumped in my throat, the narrative locked, in the memory of a metamorph: the jingwei danced, working the waves in search of pure Nirvana. A way out — you and I were both tied pinpointed cyclically and precisely, where death had occurred, and a beginning of a new life had followed.