Bones of Peace

From the reek of rotting smoke drifting out of the Longyou military camp to the scorched earth of villages in Sili where every household had been wiped out; from the hands of peasant mothers clutching scissors after eating their own children to the pus and blood licked by the young Son of Heaven on the Dragon Throne. When a hundred thousand believers cried, “The Yellow Heaven shall rise!” and charged the imperial troops, Taiping seemed to hear his mother’s dying whispers drifting through the wind and sand: “Stay alive… Don’t starve… Be a good person…” Now he holds a carving knife, engraving the word “live” again and again on bamboo slips wrapped around the dead, for the displaced. As the blade cuts across the slips, shavings scatter like snow, just like the half a crumb of bread his mother saved for him that year.