THE OMEN GIRL | Wattys 2020 Winner

𝟏𝟎

The week comes to a close. I still haven't chosen a star.

My scab has been a sleepy thing, drained, though thinking about the Choosing jolts it and sends it quivering over my shoulder blade.

When it's like this, I remember that night at the pit.

I recall lifting off the ground and into the air, and feeling no pain. I recall cutting through and through the air with Naqi, with his laughs whistling by me, and just like that, my omen stain settles into something like sleep.

I spend most of my days in the archives now, mostly alone, with my turtle inkstone and brush and sheaves and sheaves of calligraphy paper. Sister Ena coos at my company and offers me butter cookies that I turn down, because I don't want crumbs on my pages.

I memorize the shapes of the lines and their sounds, and their meanings. I memorize them even though there's no racing in the second stage if I can't pass the first.

There's albash, ugly. Nabal, foolish. Kahah, weak. Sister Ena sees the list of words I am compiling and shakes her head, and insists that I cease learning only mean words, sad words.

I pause, because I didn't even realize I was doing it.

So I learn beautiful, kind, strong. I learn yir, bird. Hra, flower.

If I am to win the second stage, I would need to write a line that impresses and exhilarates. The line for fireworks, maybe. The line for capsule-coin. Can a whistling star write that? What would the word for capsules be? Or would it need to be the word for wealth?

I wonder if there is a word for Omens.

I've been wondering that for a while. The thought like a weed roots into me. I ask Sister Ena, and she tells me that there is no such word, not in the starsong language.

"Why do you ask?" she says.

And I think about it, and say, "If starsongs are like spells, couldn't we write the stain away?"

Sister Ena coos. If only it worked that way, she says. There are songs of healing, yes, but stains are not broken bones. Stains are not punctured flesh. Omens bubble forth from deep within, from the Ahs written in our souls, and so washing away one's stain would require seeing which Ah it has corrupted.

"Even then," she flaps a hand, "there is no word for Omen, so all this talk is moot."

Moot, she says. Still the thought of it all clings to me, stains into me, like cigarette smoke in hair.

When Sister Ena is busy with something or someone else, I look in secret through bamboo scroll after scroll; I do not want to deal with her questioning my search.

I find the words for disease, for sickness, for dirtiness, for scar. I find the words for sin, for crime, for wrongdoing, for murder. The lines for these words are ugly things, crooked and full of breaks, like I am looking at a reflection.

I think about what it is to be Omen.

I think about making up my own word.

Ten people could commit the same crime, yet only one will be marked, stained, exposed. So I dig for that line – exposed. I find it.

Exposed, arah – a corkscrew, a zigzag, another corkscrew.

Sin, avah – a corkscrew, a harsh 'v', another corkscrew.

Perhaps this is what the word for Omen is, someone whose sin is exposed.

The more time I spend in the archives, and the more words and lines I memorize, the more I wonder with something like awe at Naqi, at the breadth of the claims made about him.