THE OMEN GIRL | Wattys 2020 Winner

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No one had come for me. I am still hidden. I am still safe.

The days pass. They come and go mostly without trouble, except for Lumi. I don't know why.

Ever since the sand baths, Lumi's fixation for me has been stoked into something like a passion. She's been trying to get me alone, at the training fields after lessons, or in the classrooms after meditations. She makes an effort of sitting beside me in the mess hall, or in the baths, or by the gardens as we're crouched in the earth.

She says hello, and asks me to stay, and I never do.

The days pass. We train and meditate, and the air trills with quiet anticipation. We sleep lightly. We eat lightly. Then, at long last, the end of the week arrives.

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The Joining celebrations are a spectacle of tents and sails, vibrant on red. It is a market of delights, full of stalls selling stinky tofu or red bean pastries, or treats like blown sugar and powdered mochi. Canvas sails like entire rivers – lipstick red and marigold yellow – soar above the crowds for shade. Banners and ribbons in the shapes of stars snap in the wind. They are hoisted high up on poles, and like the tails of kites, their stardust tails stream.

I see parents with their children holding colourful masks in their hands, masks of smiling sirens and scowling titans. I see a path full of festival games – goldfish fishing and balloon popping and streetside mahjong. Another path is full of dancers. They twirl in their ao-dais – tight-fitting silk dresses that flutter about the legs – to the tune of bamboo flutes and chimes and drums. Their sleeves have been sown on special, and their dancing in them is like looking at long drawn brushstrokes. It is mesmerizing.

Here, there, begging by the sides of the paths, are Omens.

I see a man with one milky eye, blind, because his stain had spilled over it. I see another with a crumpled hand, the way a hand crumples up after a stroke, because his stain had clustered tight over it.

My scab hasn't deformed me yet, but I imagine it will one day.

I know Esp can't hear out of her right ear because her scab has grown over it, and if her stain continues to spread up into her hair and over her head, she might begin to lose her memories, or her mind.

We've all seen Omens like that, ones that hear things and see things that are not there at all. You catch them sometimes, ambling from alleyway to alleyway, cackling at the face of the moon.

People say it's what we deserve, for having done the things we have done.

I wish I could remember what it is I had done that first time, my first immoral act, the one that made my mother and father believe I was no longer worth keeping.

I pass under a vast shadow, and look up.

We are outside the white walls of the Temple of Celestial Ichor, at the base of it, where the Joining festivities are hosted every decade. The walls loom the way ancient things do. They cut arrogant into the center of the festival.

I don't know if anyone else notices. I don't see why they would – the colours and smells and music of the festival is arresting. But I look up at the wall and there, up that impossible height and impossible white, is a break in the stones from where the temple garden, walled inside, decided it did not want to be inside anymore. It peeks through with its roots and branches, staining the stones green. Its vines droop like ropes.

My stain itches. It's bizarre to me, seeing that gap marring the holy walls, like seeing a mimic of my own disfigured body.

Far beneath that hole in the wall is the House of Stars. The Joining will take place there.