University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Theses and Dissertations 5-8-2015 Natural Predators Marie-Claire Churchouse University of South Carolina - Columbia Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd Part of the Fiction Commons Recommended Citation Churchouse, M.(2015). Natural Predators. (Master's thesis). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/3055 This Open Access Thesis is brought to you by Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Natural Predators by Marie-Claire Churchouse Bachelor of Arts Skidmore College, 2011 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing College of Arts and Sciences University of South Carolina 2015 Accepted by: Elise Blackwell, Director of Thesis David Bajo, Reader Anne Gulick, Reader Jessica Barnes, Reader Lacy Ford, Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies © Copyright by Marie-Claire Churchouse, 2015 All Rights Reserved. ii Dedication To mum and dad, thank you for all the support. To my dear friend Sally Thomp- son, thank you for giving me the confidence to write. iii Acknowledgments With grateful thanks to Professors Elise Blackwell and David Bajo, your advice and support has proved invaluable. Special thanks to Professors Anne Gulick and Jessica Barnes for being part of my defense committee and offering generous and insightful feedback. And finally, thanks to Ajit Dhillon, my first and last reader. iv Abstract Natural Predators is a collection of short stories that take place in various coun- tries including Japan, Russia, Hong Kong, and England. Though the stories are not ex- plicitly linked, they share themes of violence, power dynamics, and the failures of com- munity. The collection begins with the story that features the youngest protagonist, and ends with the eldest. Food, animals, and the human relationship with nature are also ma- jor themes throughout the collection. v Table of Contents Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...iii Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..iv Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………v 1. Stray…………………………………………………………………………………….1 2. Water Children……………………………………………………………………..….48 3.All Flowers are Beautiful……………….……………………………….………..……64 4. Natural Predators…………………………………………………………...……..…111 5. Saccharin……………………………………………………………………….…….128 6. We Leave at the Thaw………………………………………………………...……..154 vi 1. Stray Part One During the last ice age, the island of Hong Kong didn’t exist. Nor did Peng Chau, Cheung Chau, Lantau, or Lamma, the islands that gave the houses in my school their name. My teacher taped a map onto the blackboard one day and showed us how during the last ice age people could walk from place to place. There are cave paintings on some of the outlying islands made by people who lived there long before us. When the ice melted and flooded the valleys, only the highest peaks remained above sea level forming a collection of small islands. Upon learning this, the whole class was silent for a rare moment, but all too soon it was as though we had always known that we lived on top of mountains. The summer I set fire to my ballet shoes, a series of murders occurred in my neighbourhood, so that by the time school began again in September I had seen three sav- aged feline bodies. A neighbourhood initiative years before had cleared the area of stray dogs, and the cats had moved in soon after. The people of Jade Valley Court received these new creatures with grace, convinced that cats were no bad addition to an area of Hong Kong that had something of a snake problem. Only the year before, the family in G/F Block D had been startled by the screams of their maid, who discovered a sleeping 1 python beneath the sofa while vacuuming. The father, upon realizing that he, his wife, his two-year-old, and his baby, had been sharing their living room with a large serpent all winter, sold the place and moved the family to a thirtieth-story flat in Mid-Levels. While a cat would be no match for a python, the adults believed that the smaller snakes might sense the feline presence and lay their eggs elsewhere. They were wrong. It was a favourite game of mine to steal a pair of rubber gloves from the kitchen and seek out snake nests beneath loose garden tiles and abandoned plant pots, and poke at the eggs. But never take them home, the lesson learned from a strange tadpole incident, for things that seem small and harmless in nature often grow into something else. The sum- mer the murders occurred I had more time than ever to seek out the things that crept and slithered around Jade Valley, my freedom from days filled with dance lessons, art classes, drama clubs, swim teams, and conversational Mandarin groups, won by a symbolic act that all the tears, tantrums, and pleading in the world had not achieved. The row that followed my mother’s discovery of my smoldering ballet shoes on the terrace, the delightful pink reduced to grey, had to be seen to be believed, but I emerged from it triumphant. Skin still smarting where the hard plastic hairbrush had been brought down on it, I sought out Sonklin in the kitchen, who chided me a little and then handed me a piece of dried mango. She was a tiny person of fifty, only a little taller than me by the time I turned eight, her feet the same size as mine. She had a round face that was too big for her body, and she always smelled of herbs and soap. It didn’t occur to me that by placing myself in her care for the summer I’d given her a lot of extra work. “Don’t you dare complain to us when you’re bored” was all my father said to me of the 2 matter, and later that night I overheard him telling my mother that it was the French in me, which I got from her side of the family. On the days when Sonklin was less busy, she took me with her when she went to the supermarket, or to the beach at the bottom of the hill to play. Sometimes we met other amahs from our block at the beach, the women who’d watched and clapped as I learnt to ride a bike the previous winter and who often leaned out of their kitchen windows to hand me something to eat or drink. Seeing them at the beach gave the trips a festive feel, the same feeling I would later experience when I saw friends from Hong Kong in foreign countries, a welcome meeting across the seas. Sonklin sat beneath the trees during these beach trips while I ran in and out of the waves, too frightened to swim properly. Some- times I convinced her to help me build fanciful structures in the rough sand but only once she had covered her head with a scarf to protect her skin from the sun. She huffed when- ever a woman walked by in a bikini, though it was not until many years later that I under- stood her disdain. While on a beach near Bangkok not driven by tourism, I saw that most of the Thai girls wore shorts and t-shirts to swim, and the ones that did wear revealing swim wear prompted my companion to say “bad girl” and giggle. Sonklin always bought me a cream soda from the vending machines when we went to the beach, forbidden in our house, so I tried to persuade her to take me often. After one of these trips we decided to take the minibus home rather than walk for it was about as hot as it can get in Hong Kong and I was sunburnt. “What happens when your mama sees you?” 3 I didn’t say anything. Each jolt of the minibus as it sped around the corners knocked my sore shoulders into the seat, Hong Kong minibus drivers notorious for their rejection of the speed limit. “You never listen to me. I always tell you to wear your shirt.” “I’m sorry.” I sniffed. “Tsst tsst, silly pineapple,” she said, using one of her many pet names for me. She blew cold air onto my back. The walk down the driveway was agony. There was no shade from the sun and my burn itched and stung. Now that I was almost home I realised that my mother was go- ing to be furious when she saw my skin. I forgot my pain the moment we saw the cat stretched out on the wall that ran along the road. It might have been sleeping had it not been for the huge wound in its side. Something or someone had torn away an oval patch of skin exposing what was beneath. It was as though someone or something had carefully cut a window to the cat’s insides, the organs bulging from the hole, intact and glistening in the sun. I stared at it. I was more disturbed by the eyes than the pink brown things that nearly spilled out from its stomach. Sonklin hissed something in Thai and I looked up and saw a stranger there next to me. The clothes were Sonklin’s but the face belonged to someone I didn’t recognize. “Sonklin?” I tugged at her shirt and she was Sonklin again. She ran down the road dragging me behind her, the sound of our sandals echoing loud against the row of apart- ments. Once inside, she ran a cold bath and ordered me to sit in it before going back out- side.