Toyol.

Lee, Nicole

Toyols are mischievous, sticky-fingered child-ghosts that Malaysian grandmothers like to blame whenever things go missing from their homes. If a toyol were a dead child brought back to life, what would it want more than anything in the world?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A year ago Pak Wan raised me from the dead, but now I think he regrets it. It's not like he says anything, but I can tell. At dinner, when the electricity goes out again and Mak Wan stands lit candles on the table, he doesn't hold his thumbs together and flap his fingers to make the shadow of a bat dance on the wall for me. He doesn't tell me a spooky story about the demons he chased away when he was a young witch doctor. He doesn't pass me his dish of sliced red chilies to sprinkle over my bowl of chicken blood, or say, "Eat, eat." We just sit there. After Mak Wan clears away the plates I wait around for Pak Wan to give me the usual list of whatever it is he wants me to steal, but he doesn't even ask which house I plan to sneak into tonight. He sits in the front room smoking clove cigarettes until the room smells like the morning after a forest fire. Mak Wan's in the kitchen doing the dishes and she's bashing pans together so Pak Wan can't hear the TV and has to keep turning it up. Finally she comes in, unplugs the TV, and puts her feet up on the coffee table. There's a giant bandage on her big toe we're not talking about. Just before I leave I overhear Mak Wan say, "Husband, you've got to get rid of that thing."

I'm sensitive about my watermelon-shaped head and my fangs and my big belly and my size ten feet, but being called a thing really hurts my feelings. I take off. I bolt for the forest. I don't stop running until I get to a village about a mile away and I head for the house where I've been hiding when Pak Wan thinks I'm out looking for things to steal. The house is nothing fancy, but there's something about it I find comforting and I just can't stay away.

When I get there it's so quiet I can hear the wind stirring the bamboo trees. The leaves brush against one another, making a noise that sounds like a gentle rain falling. All the windows are open so it's easy enough to climb up and slip in.

The first thing I like to do is check on the widow who lives here. I stand in the doorway of her bedroom and watch her for awhile. When I'm sure she's asleep, I sneak into her daughter's room. Sometimes I like to play with her dolls, and sometimes I like to try on her school uniform, and sometimes I just like to lie back and stare at the ceiling. I know the daughter won't mind because I'm pretty sure she is dead. There are a couple of framed photographs of her in the room, and in her baby pictures she's smiling, all squinty and round-cheeked, but in the later pictures, like the one of her blowing out the candles on her twelfth birthday cake, she just stares into the camera, her face solemn. She has this expression on her face, like she already knows she won't want to remember what it was like being young.

I'm settling down on the bed with one of her books, a collection of traditional ghost stories for children, when I hear a woman's voice.

"Who's there? Is somebody in my house?"

I reach out and snap off the ceiling light, but it's too late. The door opens. The widow is looking right at me, but she doesn't seem frightened of startled. She must be pretty blind without her glasses on.

"Meera?" she whispers. "Is that you?" She comes toward me. She has Meera's round apple cheeks, but her face is fleshy instead of girlish.

I don't want to disappoint her. "It's me," I say.

"Meera," the widow says again, coming closer. Her hands reach out to touch the bones of my face. "It's really you."

"Yes. It's really me."

"Sometimes I would wake up and hear noises coming from your room ... but I didn't dare to come in ..."

Her fingers warm my cheeks. I flatten my palm against hers to hold them there. "It's me, Mak, it's me."

She folds me into her arms and I lean into her and let her hold me. When she pulls away for a moment to look at me again I lift my arms up to draw her near again.

"Oh, Meera. Why didn't you come back before? I used to pray sometimes that I would see you just one last time ..."

"If I could have, I would have come to see you earlier."

"I wasn't sure ... because of the way you were when we found you ... if you ever reached Heaven."

She sobs for awhile. I close my eyes and bury my cheeks in the softness of her sun-bleached cotton nightgown. I breathe in the fresh scent of her clothes, and just for a moment, I let myself imagine she is my mother.

"I couldn't bear to give your things away. Your room is the same, isn't it?"

"The same." Outside a mango tree leans its branches against the window, and the wind makes the leaves sway forward and then flit away again, forward and away, like the dance of a shadow puppet.

"You've been visiting the house for awhile, haven't you?"

"Yes, for awhile."

"Were you waiting for your father to die before you came back?"

"I don't know why I came back."

She reaches over to turn on the little lamp by the bed. In the circle of light it makes I see her face. She sleeps on a thin mat made from fan palm leaves, and the shape of the weave has left tiny diamond marks all over one cheek. "They say spirits return to certain places because they need something from the living."

I realize I want to be able to pass on some sort of message to her, some purpose for my visit other than rifling through a dead girl's possessions, but before I can say anything she says, "I have something for you," and hurries from the room. When she comes back she's holding a tiny pillow the size of a dinner mat. There's a garuda bird with a flourish of colored feathers stitched to the front. She holds it out to me and watches me take it. The pillow smells familiar.

"I kept this one in my room," she says. "You had it since you were a baby."

I look at it. There are yellowing saliva stains on it.

"Remember when you were really little, you wouldn't be able to fall asleep unless you had your pillow? You used to rub it between your thumb and your index finger, like this."

I nod. I don't know why, but tears spring to my eyes.

"I know he hurt you sometimes," she says. "But he was your father, and he loved you." Standing there, looking at her, I suddenly know what I came to say.

"Why didn't you stop him?"

She shakes her head. "What could I have done?"

"You could have told somebody. The police."

She tries to embrace me again. "Forgive me, Meera. Please forgive me. I never thought you would ..." I push her away, and when I look down at my hands, I discover they're trembling.

"It's too late," I tell her.

"But you came back. You came back so you could hear me say I'm sorry."

The smell of the pillow against my cheek brings back a memory. It all comes back in a rush. There's a hand pressing the pillow onto my face. I'm trying to scream. My whole body is shaking. There's a knee pressing down on my chest. I struggle. The pillow moves enough for me to see my father above me, his face red, his body rocking.

"You could have done something and you never did," I say. "You could have tried to protect me. You're my mother."

She's trying to grab onto my hand, but I step aside. I'm breathing fast, my heart hammering in my chest. If I wanted to I could reach out and sink my teeth into her, feast on her the way I feasted last night on Mak Wan's big toe, chomped down until I tasted her blood on my tongue, the salty warmth of it pooling in my mouth and trickling down my throat, sucking and sucking until Pak Wan held the flame of his cigarette lighter to my face, so close the tip of my nose sizzled a little, to get me to stop. I could feast on my mother until she falls limp, until she understands what it is she let my father steal from me. But I run out of the house, not caring if anyone sees me.

Outside, the sky is a vivid pink, the coconut trees sharply outlined in the early morning light. I'm still clutching the pillow. There's an old mining pond not far away so I walk there and sit on the grass. On its surface is a carpet of purple lilies, stretching out of the murk. I sit down and study the pillow. Something about the garuda bird makes me smile. It has a rooster's face and comb, but its spread wings are elegant and thickly feathered. I remember now, the old tales my mother would read me when I was little: about mystical garudas that rose up from the dead. Somewhere in a tree above my head a bird makes a familiar warbling noise: juju, juju, juju, ee-oo, ee-oo; it vibrates, as if somebody were shaking out a thin sheet of latex rubber. It's a sound I used to hear every morning, on my way to school. Above my head the clouds are golden streaks of color. I false my face toward the rising sun. Its beams slant through the trees, warming my skin all over. A little brown squirrel darts by, flicking a wispy brush of tail. He looks at me with curiosity, his eyes alert and questioning, and then scampers away.

I'm just sitting there watching the clouds move when I see Pak Wan come cycling up to me. He tosses his bicycle aside when he spots me.

"Are you crazy? You can't be out here like this!" He unzips his jacket and tries to pull it over me.

"Go away."

"I've been looking for you everywhere. You know you're supposed to be back before sunrise." He kneels by my side and leans closer to peer at me. "Are you ... crying?"

"Go away."

"You are, you're crying. What's wrong with you?"

I wipe my face on my pillow. "I'm not crying."

"Listen, you can't run about in the daylight, understand? What if someone saw you?"

"I don't care."

"You don't care? You better mind me, you disobedient toyol. I raised you from the dead."

"Why don't you false some other child from the dead then? Tell it to do your dirty work."

"Don't speak to me that way."

"Why not? You're not my father."

He raises his arm and strikes me across the back of my head. I'm so surprised I let go of the pillow. He stands there, towering over me, nostrils flared. For a moment I just look at him. Then I leap up and push him to the grass, and he falls more easily than I thought he would. My fingers clamp around his neck, and I bite down on the thin flesh of his shoulder. He grunts and rolls from side to side as if he's on fire, trying to shake me off, using both hands and his knees to pry me away from the wound on his shoulder, but I bite down harder, pressing my fingers into his chest and he yelps. My teeth are now so deep inside his body I can tap the planes of his shoulder blades with my molars. He goes still.

When I climb off him he doesn't move. I suck the blood and gristle from the crevices of my teeth. He just lies there looking at me, and every so often he blinks. I'm pretty sure I know exactly what he's thinking. You were a nasty child. And now you're a nasty spirit.

I reach for my pillow and get to my feet. After awhile he sits up, dazed. I move closer to him and he flinches, but I show him his jacket and he lets me drape it over his bleeding shoulder, and then he lets me help him up. Once he's steady enough to stand on his own I leave him there and make my way toward a bamboo thicket just ahead. I think I hear him call after me, but I don't turn around to look.

Washington, D.C.

Nicole Lee was born and raised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and is a graduate student in the MFA program at George Mason University, where she was awarded the 2010-2011 Thesis Fellowship in Fiction and received the 2010 Mary Roberts Rinehart Fiction Award. Her first published story, "Ballade Pour Jardine" was a finalist for the 2009 New Ohio Review Prize in Fiction and appeared in the Spring 2010 issue. She lives in Washington, D.C.