I remember the time our village had warm loamy soil and a pond where the children would wade into in the summer, to play in until their mothers would drag them out at sundown. That was before the drought had settled upon the village like a dark rain cloud. 

A curse, the villagers whispered.

It was like a scourge had gripped the land, crops had withered and trees had dried up. The pond had drunk its own water and the sun had scorched the earth’s cracked corners. I was born before the drought and its ensuing famine, saved by the fact that I was a boy. I’d seen my mother suffocate her infant daughter in the first year of the famine. 

With nothing to eat except the dried, pickled prunes my mother had managed to preserve, I spent my time listening to the stories my best friend; Luen told me. Luen was from a rich family, and their coin had shielded them from hunger. After catching a few villagers in their pantry, Luen’s father had hired guards that only allowed me entrance.

The day Luen told me the story was warm, bereft of the punishing heat the sun usually inflicted. He was in his bed, sipping his red rice porridge and had given me a box full of compressed cabbage fermented in salt. 

“You are so funny,” he commented when he saw me take a cube and stuff it into my mouth, it was salty and had the beginnings of rot crawling over but it was nourishment.

“HMfh?” I questioned through my half stuffed face.

“The way you eat,” he clarified, “is funny. You must eat slowly to digest your food.”

The rotting food I’d eaten would only wish to be digested, but my failing body cared not much. Luen’s words made me want to reach over and pick his teeth out.

“I have another story for you,” he whispered, a conspiratorial grin on his face, “My father told me last night as we supped.”

Supper… it was a foreign word. My mother and I would only have one meal a day, and once our small stache of wrinkled pumpkins depleted… I shuddered to think of it.

“Tell me,” I smiled with salt-stained teeth. 

“It's about a wicker basket my great grandmother had,” he burped, his lips wet with porridge, “It could do anything you wanted it to, you just had to place one piece of something you loved in it everytime you wished.”

“Is that how you have so much food?” I asked curiously.

“No,” he wiped his mouth, “We have food because Father works hard and Mother does the books. But nevermind that, my Father also told me that the basket was cursed. Whoever learned of it wanted to own it and whoever had it was always in danger of death.”

I could understand why, even though it vexed Luen.

“My great grandmother was a witch,” he hissed in disgust, “She made the basket from the skin of her infant daughter and blessed it with the essence of a dark god. She used it to terrorise the good villagers until my great grandfather tricked her into falling in love and marrying him. After she’d had his son, he poisoned her. But he knew she would return for revenge, so he cleaved her apart until she was no bigger than cubed pig and spread her remains in the forest far from the village.”

“Your grandfather sounds just.”

“He was,” Luen’s face lit up at the mention of his family’s honor, “The witch came back to haunt his eldest son, almost killed him. Said that she had her rights as a mother, but my great grandfather banished her to the forest with his holy scriptures. He gave his son the basket she had held dear so that a piece of her would stay with him, even though she was an evil hag, she had been his wife and the bearer of his son. My father says that only someone who murders the true carrier of the basket can own it, and even then the witch’s ghost will haunt you.”

“But wasn’t she banished?”

“She cannot harm you, but her rotten breath will creep down you’re spine when you try to sleep. And she will whisper frightening things to you when you are alone.”

I absently picked at another leaf of cabbage, “Does your family still have the basket?”

Luen shrugged, “I wouldn’t know.”

“But if you did have it, you would be to inherit it, right?” 

He seemed to think before giving a slow nod.

—--------------------------

It has been twelve days since the famine ended. Twelve days since Luen and his father went missing and his mother left the village, distraught with the absence of her two great loves. My mother had cried of joy, finally able to spend her internal water when rain had come down upon the cracked earth, a gift from the heavens.

And I had eaten pork floss for the first time in three years, with a silvery spectre of a woman beside me. Her teeth were crooked and yellow, her eyes a bulging red and her hair matted with cow’s blood.

Every night, I would offer her a small piece of her great grandson, a nail or a piece of coagulated blood and she would wail in contempt. My mother, fed and peaceful, never heard. And every night, I would wish more of the famine away with the things I loved the most.