I crawl out of the persimmon, and it isn’t pretty. A grown woman unfolding from a fruit that could fit into your hand: sinew restringing itself, organs inflating, nails clawing at the floor. My skin glistens wet and gold by the lamplight, smeared as I am with fruit pulp and resurrection. I smell like divinity itself; you’d never know how many times death had me in its jaws.
The old woman comes back into the room and starts screaming to high heavens.
“Wait,” I slur, my mandibular joint still not quite in place. I jam my shoulders unceremoniously back into their sockets, one after another. “Wait—I won’t hurt you. I came out of the golden apple you picked. I’m the king’s wife.”
She falls against the wall, clutching her chest with rigid fingers. Shit. This wasn’t the plan. The plan was to wait for her to leave in the morning, then come out of the persimmon and clean the house. Show my gratitude with old-fashioned elbow grease, get her invested before the big reveal. I was just too impatient to wait. I was just too damn tired of being dead.
The first time, Cám and her mother got me fair and square, by which I mean they lied through their scarlet teeth. Oh, we’re out of betel nuts, Tấm; oh, you’re the best climber, Chị Tấm. Best climber, my ass. Then again, what would you do, if you were my stepmother? If the only thing standing between you and the life of your dreams was one death? Surely you’d tell a lie. Surely you’d craft one little deception to persuade your sweet-eyed little stepdaughter to climb the slender trunk of the areca palm, right into your hands. I never was the sharpest girl in the village, and I hadn’t gotten wiser just by marrying up. On that bright morning, the day of my father’s memorial, I climbed the tree. I did it for the same reason I had returned to that cruel house at all, well after I ought to have gotten away clean: I still thought life was about kindness. I still thought I owed them something. I trusted them right up until my stepmother cut the damn tree out from under me.
At least it was a clean death. Neck snapped against the earth, the last thing in my vision the blue sweep of the sky. I would have appreciated it more at the time if I’d known how bad the next few were going to be.
Once upon a time, the way they usually tell it, there lived two half-sisters, and the kinder one married a king. Once upon a time, the way they usually tell it, I returned to life again and again, too devoted to my husband to ever truly be killed. Let me tell it a little differently. Let me tell you, I did come back, but not with kindness, and not with love. Mostly, I just came back angry.
The second time I died, it was Cám slitting my throat in the palace gardens. She’d married into my place at court, exactly as my stepmother wanted. As for me, I had come back as an oriole. Not the most defensible position, but resurrection beggars can’t be resurrection choosers. My wings flapped weakly in her grip and my tiny bird heart hammered a frantic rhythm, pumping my blood all over her fingers. Where was my husband the king while my half-sister was getting her hands dirty, you might ask? Wonderful question. Listen, if I know one thing, it’s that devotion didn’t bring me back. Devotion never brought me anything except heartache.
The third time, Cám hacked me down with a handaxe. It was heavy work—I wouldn’t have guessed she had it in her. My mistake, little sister. In the spot where she’d buried the oriole’s feathers and bones, I’d sprung up as two peach trees, so I felt every blow as I was cut down, first one trunk and then the other. It didn’t escape my notice that my husband, who had enjoyed the shade of my spreading branches each afternoon, was off to parts unknown the day I needed someone watching over me.
The fourth and final time, Cám burned me. I’ll admit to antagonizing her. She’d had the peach wood crafted into a loom, and it was easy for me to pull the wind through the strings until it soughed with the timbre of my old voice.
She’d been weaving a shirt for the king—everything we did was for him, in those days, because we were fools.
You bitch, I sighed through the loom strings.
She stiffened. “Chị hả?”
The moment I get thumbs again, it’s over for you. I’m going to eat you alive.
Her voice wavered. “You’re dead. You’re gone. I’m the king’s wife now. He’s in love with me.”
I snapped a string against her finger, drawing a drop of blood. Eyes to marrow, kiddo. Right down my throat like soup.
It was a petty triumph, but such are your options when you’re an inanimate household object. Cám, bless her vicious heart, retaliated by smashing the loom with a rock and burning the pieces to ashes in the garden. Fragmented, I twisted and danced in the flame. I felt the searing heat, the scorching agony of it, the cells of my broken body popping one by one, and then nothing at all.
The wind stirred the ashes, blew them beyond the palace gardens, planted me like a seed by the side of a dirt road. Tree roots drank me up, passed me along trunk and branch, built a shining golden fruit to house my spirit. But I felt none of that. I was dead, after all.
The old woman’s heart has stopped. This is unfortunate. I really was grateful to her for not eating me right away.
Based on the sorry state of her house, there isn’t anyone in this village who cares enough about her to attend a funeral, so I hold a quiet little rite for her in the yard while the chickens peck at my bare toes. It feels good to have hands and feet again. For a moment I imagine spending the rest of my days in this little hut. Leaving my past in the past, to rot as it will, and living a simple life, a good life, a life where I can rediscover in myself the capacity for kindness.
Oh, but there are things I want more than a good and kind life. The next morning, I pack a lunch and head to the palace on foot.
The king is overjoyed.
Freshly arrayed in palace finery, my regrown feet shod in silk slippers, and my patience only slightly frayed from having to scheme and steal my way past a dozen layers of palace security, I allow him to clasp my hands in both of his.
He sinks to his knees in horror and guilt when he learns that Cám, the spitting image of me, the sister he married out of the goodness of his royal heart, is the one who’s been repeatedly picking me off the face of the earth. When I tell him I only want his blessing to mete out justice to my family as I see fit, he’s all too eager to agree to a bargain that will cost him nothing.
I have the soldiers dig a pit in the garden, just a few feet away from where Cám snared and butchered the oriole-me. I have them heat a huge cauldron of water until it churns and roils. Hot enough to melt meat off bone, which is exactly the idea.
I call my sister to me.
Of course, she comes. I’m the queen, back from the dead, the sun of my husband’s heart, the moon that lights his worshipful eyes. There’s no power on earth that can’t be moved by me.
And maybe she reminds herself that between her and her mother, they’ve already killed me four times. Maybe she tells herself she can get the best of me again. Maybe that’s why she plays along when I tell her the secret to endless beauty is at the bottom of a hole in the ground.
Surely, I tell myself, she isn’t stupid enough to believe me. Surely she isn’t naive enough to trust me just because we’re sisters. Surely she’s learned from my mistakes.
Cám and I really do look alike—both of us carry our father’s features so prominently, you wouldn’t ever guess we were of different mothers. He died before she was old enough to remember, but I still recall how we used to drift off to sleep with our cold toes tucked into the warmth of each other’s knees, while our father spun out some ridiculous thread of a bedtime story. We used to be inseparable, Cám and I, when we were very young. After our father died, I thought it would be us against the world. But as it turned out, my stepmother had determined it would in fact be me against her, and Cám had planted herself squarely behind enemy lines.
Really, Cám had been lost to me from the moment we lit our father’s funerary incense, and it just took me my whole first life to realize it. I had to die to get it through my skull that she was gone, that I couldn’t earn her back with the work of my hands and the bruises on my skin. There’s no buying love with a lifetime of misery, no matter if you think it’d be worth it.
I send Cám back to her mother in a clay jar. It’s possible that I mislabel the jar.
A few weeks later a messenger informs me, with courteous sorrow, that my stepmother is reported to have died very suddenly while eating dinner. Her plate half-finished, the nearly-empty sauce jar knocked on its side. The doctors agreed it was shock that killed her.
If you count the old woman whose name I never did learn, that’s three.
But I died four times.
So the gods owe me one more.
The king and I stand on a balcony overlooking the palace grounds. Far below us, the west garden drowses serenely in the moonlight. They’ve pulled out the peach tree stumps and replaced them with peonies. Refilled the pit where Cám met her end. The moon paints everything in silver and pearl, and you’d never know how many deaths this place witnessed.
“Tấm,” he says, and takes my hand. “I’ll give thanks the rest of my life for the strength of our bond, for the fact that your love brought you back to me. I ached for you each day we were apart. I married your sister believing it was what you would have wished, but my heart was with you, truly. Each time you returned to me, no matter the form, I knew in my soul it was you, and it wounded me anew to lose you again and again.”
His fingers are warm against mine, rough where they’re callused from the sword drills he performs every morning with the troops. A good king should lead by example, he used to say, rising from bed, accepting a steaming cup of tea—poured by me, risen much earlier, by the way. A good wife should lead by example.
Come, my love, help me dress, he used to say, and then off he would go to do whatever it is that men do when they are not thinking of you.
My hands have more calluses than his, but I got mine from housework. A good daughter should lead by example. Holding a knife, an ax, a weaving shuttle. Holding my breath through a beating. This body I hatched from the persimmon has kept my childhood scars. Let it be known that Tấm is tired of leading by example.
“You were supposed to protect me,” I say. I miss my father, which hasn’t happened in a long time—I learned early on there was no use in missing the dead, who mostly don’t come back. Nearly all my life I’ve been alone. Then I married this man and found I was still just as alone as I ever was.
He stares. “Protect you from what?”
“From being killed,” I seethe. I pull my hand out of his. “I loved you! I came back for you! I sang for you as a bird. I bowed for you as a tree. Even as an object, I was put to use for you.”
“I never asked you to do any of those things,” he protests.
“You were there to hear the song. You were there to sleep in the shade! Where were you when I was getting fucking murdered?”
“Please calm down, my darling.” He turns away from me, leans out over the balcony railing. His jaw trembles in the moonlight. Sorrow renders his voice ragged. “You can’t imagine what I went through, realizing too late—each time—that I had lost you again. You have no idea what it’s like to grieve as a king. I have countless duties calling my attention, broken heart or no. How could I have known what your sister intended? She truly acted just like you, my love—she was sweet, kind, soft-spoken. She seemed utterly harmless.”
His back is to me, as he bows forward beneath the weight of his grief. I’m unimpressed; I was there, in one form or another, to see it each time he mourned. Oh, mourn he certainly did. Every time, he shed his royal tears, and returned to his royal duties, and forgot to fight for me the next chance he got.
“Of course you’d think we were harmless,” I say, and I push him off the balcony.
I only half-catch the sound of him cracking his skull open on the stones below, as I’m immediately swarmed by the quartet of palace guards who saw it happen through the balcony doorway. I might have opposable thumbs again, but I’m still sapling-short and cornered, and they get my arms pinned without much trouble.
Not my best plan, pulling a stunt like this. Then again, I was never one for thinking far ahead. Cám and I are similar in that way—reactive. It was my stepmother who knew how to plan, instead of just frantically surviving moment to moment. She had Cám’s whole life laid out: every stepping stone, every master play, every instance of screwing me over to get ahead.
I hope she put all the pieces together, right at the end. I hope she knew exactly what she’d been tasting.
The guards are about to sound the alarm to the rest of the palace when something rattles below us. A hollow, knocking sound. The scrape of something on stone. A wail floats on the night air, eerie enough to get them to draw the weapons they hadn’t needed to subdue me, and on the echo of that wail, swinging up over the edge of the balcony, is Cám.
Well. What’s left of her, anyway. Did I mention the boiling water? My little sister swings onto the balcony and she’s nothing but bones, a ragged skeleton held together by what I imagine is pure spite. No head, because I put her skull into that jar of boiled-down flesh, just to give my stepmother a little scare when she got to the bottom. She’s lacquered silver by the moonlight, gleaming like something holy, but the scent of the flowers below can’t cover up the smell of rot.
She talks in a whistle, dragging air through the cracks in her bones. “You tricked me,” her femur howls. Her vertebrae make a horrible susurrus of a sound, a whispery background chorus. “You made my mother eat me.”
First of all, while I was a bird, Cám grilled my body and ate me, so. Glass house, stones.
The guards have let go of me, due to the much louder and more immediate threat. They fan out, trying to surround Cám. I could have told them that was a bad idea, but then again, nobody asked me.
One of them shouts a panicked order, but she’s already moving. She gets the first guard through the throat with a splintered ulna. He goes down in a fountain of arterial blood and she tumbles away, a whirl of silvery limbs, osseous and furious. The second guard has the presence of mind to run for reinforcements; Cám catches him just on the threshold of the door, rips half the skin off his face with bony claws. He chokes on a scream and flails blindly with his sword, and as she punches a spiked knee through his chest the third guard comes up behind her and clubs her to the ground.
I take a step forward, I don’t know for what, and someone grabs my hair and throws me against the balcony rail. The fourth guard. Learn to count, Tấm.
“Traitor,” he spits. If he’s at all perturbed by the revenant that just killed two of his fellows, he certainly doesn’t let it distract him from the task at hand. Admirable. Fucking inconvenient for me, though. His sword licks a streak of etched silver through the scented night air, and I wonder if this is it, my last time going into the grave. If, with my husband gone, there’s no longer any reason for the heavens to tether me to this world, bringing me back again and again.
As he raises his sword for a killing strike, Cám’s headless spine rears up behind him and clamps down over his torso. Her arms, unhindered by tendon or ligament, spin like the blades on a mill. He doesn’t have time to scream before an elbow goes into his stomach and the razored edge of a radial bone cleaves his head half off his shoulders.
Cám unfolds the jaw of her spine from the corpse. She crouches, scapula heaving, ribs splitting open, half her pelvis shattered from the fight with the other guard.
“If anyone’s going to kill you,” she rages, “it’s me.”
I scramble to my feet. Blood all over my beautiful gold robes, sticking to my skin, like I’m fresh out of the persimmon again. “You’ve already done that, remember?”
“I only wanted what you had.” Her skeleton is crumbling. She sobs through new fractures in the bone. She doesn’t have long left in this form. “You had everything!”
“I had everything? I had everything? I waited on you my entire life! Your mother gave you everything and she gave me scraps!”
“Oh, fuck you,” her bones snarl. “Holding a grudge over what—grains of rice? A new blouse? When you had everyone’s heart. Even the king loved you more! You were dead and he was mine and he still loved you more! Mother was the only person in this world who loved me more than they loved you—”
“She beat me every time I breathed the wrong way. She treated me like dirt and you let her do it!”
“I didn’t know what to do. Chị, please. Chị Tấm.” She calls me her older sister like it’s a curse and a bribe both, like forgiveness could come as easily to us as knowing where to sink the knife. Her hands come up to the space where her skull should be, like she’d be clawing at her own face if she could. Chips of bone flake off the phalanges, the metacarpals. She’s dissolving before my eyes. “I was scared of her, I was so scared, you don’t know how much, you couldn’t know.”
“Oh, I understand just fine,” I hiss. “You were a coward.”
“She would have stopped loving me!” Cám screams. Her knees hit the stone tiles. “Don’t you understand? Didn’t you want to be loved?”
“Every day,” I say, and I am cracked clean through, I am ash from the tree, pulp from the fruit, blood from the girl. “Every day, I wanted and wanted.”
I used to clean her knees when she scraped them in the dirt. I used to let her win races and blame me for broken dishes. I used to brush her hair every night and give her the best thing out of my bowl, even when her mother already had me on half-rations. Gods, I used to carry her like she was a piece of my own heart.
“You ruined everything,” says the piece of my own heart.
“I wanted it to be us against the world,” I say, so soft it’s almost lost to the night, and I can’t tell whether the tremor that runs through her bones is just because they’re falling apart.
The wind stirs through her, playing her ribs like chimes even as it dissolves them. “I’ll kill you,” she chokes out. “I’ll come back and kill you. I won’t ever let you alone.”
I know right then, as sure as I know Cám is coming back to haunt me, that the guards could have run me through and I would have still returned. Sometimes we make mistakes about what holds us to this world. After all, if it were up to the man I just pushed to a fragrant death in the garden below, I’d be long-gone and he’d be long moved on. But it wasn’t. There is no royal edict, no marriage vow, no king on mortal throne, capable of pinning me to this life the way I pinned myself to winning my little sister back, years and years and deaths and deaths ago.
Where was my husband each time I died? Off doing whatever it is kings do when you aren’t looking at them, I suppose. But Cám was right there. She might’ve aimed the knife and the ax and the torch, but—well, she aimed for me, didn’t she?
You can win someone over to your side, as long as they care enough to be in the fight.
“I’ll be waiting,” I say. Unbelievably, something near enough to peace descends upon me. I’m tired of being dead. But maybe I’m more tired of being angry. “Come find me when you wake up.”
