Helen

A Prisoner's Dream

Her hair is as fine as Iowa corn silk. She is twenty-three years old, Helen will always be that age to Prisoner Song. He has dreamed of her every night since he arrived in the laogai.

“Dance with me,” Prisoner Song says.

From her seat on his cot, Helen holds out one thin hand. He marvels at its paleness, the hint of blue blood under the surface of her chalk white skin. As a child in China, he was taught that white was the color of death, of mourning, of unhappy endings. In America, he learned to see white as normal. There was a time when white was all Song desired.

Here, in the laogai, everything is grey: the bayonets, the concertina wire, the skin on Song’s neck. Reform is the official aim of this labor camp though death would seem to be the faster outcome. Song cradles Helen’s cool, dry fingers in his cracked and dirt-lined palm. Once, quickly, he squeezes hard and pulls her to her feet.

Helen and Song jitterbug in the prisoners’ barracks. They can dance to anything, Benny Goodman or Cab Calloway or the humming under Song’s breath. Up one row and down another, they rock and step, zig and zag, among the one hundred cots and two hundred men who live in these barracks.

At the end of the aisle, Song dips Helen so low that her hair brushes the pounded earth floor. She laughs.

“Hush,” Song says. “Don’t wake the other prisoners.”

The prisoners won’t wake. The new ones dream of their own Helens: mothers and daughters and the occasional wife. The ones who have been in the laogai longer than memory can think only of food. In their sleep, they chew and chew and chew a meal that will never nourish.

The stench of all those open mouths offends Song. Besides, he hates to dance indoors where there is never enough room for a proper foxtrot. He steers Helen out the barracks door, past Guard Mo whose nostrils flare at Helen’s gardenia scent.

Song and Helen are crazy about dance. He is stronger than his size would suggest and she can dance on air. Song leads her in a quick-step promenade around the day’s pyre, digging up with the heel of his foot the ashes and smoke of the dead.

When Helen turned twenty-two, Prisoner Song took her nipple into his mouth for the first time. He marveled then at its nubbiness, the way it swelled on his tongue, but above all the inexactness of its shade. Was it a peach flush with dew or an ember before it dies? Song never could properly place the hue or glow of Helen’s nipples. All he knew and still remembers today is that Chinese women do not have nipples the color of Helen’s.

No one was allowed to know of their love. Not her family back in Ames. Not his family, what was left of it, waiting for his return to Shanghai. Even their friends struggled to approve but they were too modern to say so. America was, after all, a free country. Among right-minded people, there was nothing at all wrong with a yellow man and a white woman. Song and Helen believed in that future and yet here he is, back where he started.

Song cannot dance as long as he once could. He invites Helen to rest on the trash heap behind the latrines. She wrinkles her lips into a pink moue until Song gallantly removes his threadbare shirt for Helen to sit. Her tongue creeps into the corner of her smile, a promise of things to come.

Frankly, Song is not in the mood. He longs every night for Helen’s arrival but not in the way he used to do. Helen, as always, understands. She knows him better than anyone. She knows that, after dancing, Song loves most to talk.

He was shy when they first met, embarrassed by his accent and the rough edges of a vocabulary learned from sailors trans-shipping through Shanghai. Helen took pity on the poor exchange student to feed him words by hand like seeds to a songbird. She praised him so that he would say more and rewarded him with her body when he did.

These days, Helen rarely speaks. She has intuited that words are not permitted to prisoners like Song. Not on the trash heap or inside the barracks or out in the fields. Only the guards are rationed words, sharp and pointed. Since these are not the words Song and Helen like to exchange, they prefer to remain silent.

Quietly, Song and Helen hold hands on the trash heap. Slyly, Helen drags one manicured fingernail down Song’s naked arm. She tucks her cheek into his neck and, despite the stench of the trash heap, Song can smell her face powder.

Helen tries all the tricks she once used to entice him, not that she needed to try very hard. Of all the things Song loves in this world, after dancing and talking, comes Helen’s body. Yet try as he will, Song finds himself distracted. By the changing of the guards, by the rustling inside the trash heap, by the knowledge that a colony of rats must be near.

Song cannot help himself. His eyes veer away from Helen’s limpid blue orbs. He searches the jagged edges of the trash heap for any sign of a snout, a paw, a long sinuous tail.

Helen pouts. She says, “The least you could do is exert yourself.”

Song lies back on the rustling trash heap to cradle Helen in his arms. He brushes the corn silk from her eyes. With one dirty finger, he traces the outline of her beloved lips, lips he knows better than his own. He asks, “Did you know that butterflies taste with their feet?”

Helen smiles. “Where did you learn that?”

She raises one thin hand to stroke Song’s cheek. He kisses her fingertips one by one. He takes them all into his mouth and Helen moans, softly.

She must have eaten before she came. She must have forgotten to wash her hands. Helen should have known better but now it’s too late. Song grips her wrist and bites down, hard, on all five fingers.

Helen’s left ring finger cracks off. The crunch is delightful. The salty spurt of blood reminds Song of the sea. He wishes he could savor the taste but he is so very hungry. He crunches and sucks, licks and slurps, until he has consumed all five fingers of Helen’s left hand.

Helen whimpers but she does not complain. She is here, after all, to fulfill his desires. She would happily offer up her other five fingers but she, too, can be distracted.

A new guard has taken up the post by the barracks door, the one that Helen likes. He’s younger than the others and reminds her of Song in the early days of their courtship though his face was never so blemished. She likes to show off for the pock-faced guard the way she once did for Song.

“Let’s dance,” Helen says to Song.

She doesn’t need fingers for the one-step. She drapes her left hand over Song’s naked shoulder, leaking blood down his back. He doesn’t mind. He may be able to scrape some off later with a stick that he can suckle it like a teet.

Song steers Helen toward the camp gates, where the spotlights are the brightest. His energy returns and he lifts Helen for a series of jumps and twists. They kick up enough dust that the pock-faced guard stands, rubs his eyes, raises his rifle.

Helen laughs. Her mood always improves when more than one man looks her way. It’s almost as if she wants the guard to shoot but how could that be? Song is not ready to die. He has a row of millet to harvest, a letter to write home.

She frowns at the word home. By now, Helen knows that Song does not mean her or America. Song is thinking about the daughter another woman gave him. A woman whose nipples are not the color of peaches.

Helen pulls away. Her pout sags into a snarl. Her face powder chalks around her eyes, betraying her crow’s nests. As age spots multiply along her hairline, dark beneath the Iowa corn silk, she says, “Goodbye.”

Song stands alone in the night, far too close to the camp gates. His back is bare and stained with blood where the rats have taken the first bite.

The pock-faced guard cocks his trigger. “What are you doing outside the barracks?”

Song’s chest gleams white in the glare of the spotlight. He’s an easy mark, one bullet would be enough. He stretches out both arms. “Dance with me,” he says.

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With this short story from her unpublished work we want to honor the memory of Karen Kao. Helen was meant to be part of the final volume of Karen’s Shanghai series, a collection of short stories all set in a Laogai, a prison camp in China, in the fifties.

In other news: Sweet Lit, where Karen won the 2024 Sweet Flash Nonfiction Contest, which will be renamed after Karen in her honor, has published an interview with Karen’s husband about Karen’s life and work.