Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell Read Free Book Online Page A

combination gives rise to a ferocious kind of caring. She’s tender with the little ones, but if an older
joko
plummets into a mood or ill health, she’ll scream at us until our ears split. Furious, I suppose, at her inability to defend us from ourselves.
    “The others also suffered in their pasts,” she says. “But we sleep, we get up, we go to work, some crawl forward if there is no other way …”
    “I’m not like the others,” I insist, hating the baleful note in my voice but desperate to make Dai understand this. Is Dai blind to the contrast? Can she not see that the innocent recruits—theones who were signed over to the Agent by their fathers and their brothers—produce pure colors, in radiant hues? Whereas my thread looks rotten, greeny-black.
    “Sleep can’t wipe me clean like them. I chose this fate. I can’t blame a greedy uncle, a gullible father. I drank the tea of my own free will.”
    “Your free will,” says Dai, so slowly that I’m sure she’s about to mock me; then her eyes widen with something like joy. “Ah! So: use that to stop drinking it at night, in your memory. Use your will to stop thinking about the Agent.”
    Dai is smiling down at me like she’s won the argument.
    “Oh, yes, very simple!” I laugh angrily. “I’ll just stop. Why didn’t I think of that? Say, here’s one for you, Dai,” I snap. “Stop reeling for the Agent at your workbench. Stop making the thread in your gut. Try that, I’m sure you’ll feel better.”
    Then we are shouting at each other, our first true fight; Dai doesn’t understand that this memory reassembles itself in me mechanically, just as the thread swells in our new bodies. It’s nothing I control. I see the Agent arrive; my hand trembling; the ink lacing my name across the contract. My regret: I know I’ll never get to the bottom of it. I’ll never escape either place, Nowhere Mill or Gifu. Every night, the cup refills in my mind.
    “Go reel for the empire, Dai. Make more silk for him to sell. Go throw the little girls another party! Make believe we’re not slaves here.”
    Dai storms off, and I feel a mean little pleasure.
    For two days we don’t speak, until I worry that we never will again. But on the second night, Dai finds me. She leans in and whispers that she has accepted my challenge. At first I am so happy to hear her voice that I only laugh, take her hand. “What challenge? What are you talking about?”
    “I thought about what you said,” she tells me. She talks about her samurai father’s last stand, the Satsuma Rebellion. In thecountryside, she says, there are peasant armies who protest “the blood tax,” refuse to sow new crops. I nod with my eyes shut, watching my grandfather’s hat floating through our fields in Gifu.
    “And you’re right, Kitsune—we have to stop reeling. If we don’t, he’ll get every year of our futures. He’ll get our last breaths. The silk belongs to us,
we
make it. We can use that to bargain with the Agent.”
    The following morning, Dai announces that she won’t move from her mat.
    “I’m on strike,” she says. “No more reeling.”
    By the second day, her belly has grown so bloated with thread that we are begging her to work. The mulberry leaves arrive, and she refuses to eat them.
    “No more room for that.” She smiles.
    Dai’s face is so swollen that she can’t open one eye. She lies with her arms crossed over her chest, her belly heaving.
    By the fourth day, I can barely look at her.
    “You’ll die,” I whisper.
    She nods resolutely.
    “I’m escaping. He might still stop me. But I’ll do my best.”
    We send a note for the Agent with the blind woman. “Please tell him to come.”
    “Join me,” Dai begs us, and our eyes dull and lower, we sway. For five days, Dai doesn’t reel. She never eats. Some of us, I’m sure, don’t mind the extra fistful of leaves. (A tiny voice I can’t gag begins to babble in the background:
If x-many others strike, Kitsune, there