Little Bee by Chris Cleave Page A

finished falling there was nothing
there. The girl with no name, she was just smiling at a bright beam of sunlight
on the clean gray-painted floor. There were tears falling from her eyes. My child, she said, and she held her arms outstretched
toward the beam of light. I watched her fingers trembling.
    I
looked at Yevette and the sari girl. The sari girl looked down at the floor. Yevette
shrugged at me. I looked back at the girl with no name and I spoke to her.
    “What
is your child’s name?”
    The
girl with no name smiled. Her face shone.
    “This
is Aabirah. She is my youngest. Isn’t she beautiful?”
    I
looked at the place she was looking.
    “Yes.
She is lovely.”
    I
looked at Yevette and made my eyes wide at her.
    “Isn’t
she lovely, Yevette?”
    “Oh.
Yeah. Sure. She a rill heartbrekka. What yu say yu
callin her?”
    “Aabirah.”
    “Dat’s
nice. Lissen, Aa-BI-rah, why don’t yu come wid me, an help me chase de fowls outta dis barn?”
    And
so Yevette and the sari girl and the youngest daughter of the girl with no
name, they started chasing the hens out of the building. Me, I sat and held the
hand of the girl with no name. I said, Your daughter is very helpful. Look how she chases those hens. The girl with no name, she was smiling. I was smiling too. I think it was nice
for both of us that she had her daughter back.
    If
I was telling this story to the girls from back home, then one of the new words
I would have to explain to them is efficiency. We
refugees are very efficient. We do not have the things we need—our children,
for example—and so we are clever at making things stretch a little further. Just
see what that girl with no name could make out of one little patch of sunlight.
Or look how the sari girl could fit the entire color of yellow into one empty
see-through plastic bag.
    I
lay back on the bed and looked up at the chains. I was thinking, That sunshine, that color yellow, maybe I will not see very much of these now. Maybe the new color of my life was gray. Two years in the gray detention
center, and now I was an illegal immigrant. That means , you are free until they catch you. That means , you
live in a gray area. I thought about how I was going to live. I thought about
the years, living as quiet as could be. Hiding my colors and living in the
twilight and the shadows. I sighed, and I tried to breathe deeply. I wanted to
cry when I looked up at those chains and thought about the color gray.
    I
was thinking, if the head of the United Nations telephoned one morning and
said, Greetings, Little Bee, to you falls the great honor
of designing a national flag for all the world’s refugees, then the flag
I would make would be gray. You would not need any particular fabric to make
it. I would say that the flag could be any shape and it could be made with
anything you had. A worn-out old brassiere, for example, that has been washed
so many times it has become gray. You could fly it on the end of a broom
handle, if you did not have a flagpole. Although if you did have a spare
flagpole, for example in that line of tall white flagpoles outside the United
Nations building in New York City, then I think that old gray brassiere would
make a fine spectacle, flying in the long colorful line of flags. I would fly
it between the Stars and Stripes and the big red Chinese flag. That would be a
good trick. Thinking about this, I made myself laugh.
    “What
de hell you laughin at, Bug?”
    “I
was thinking about the color gray.”
    Yevette
frowned.
    “Don’t
yu go crazy too please, Bug,” she said.
    I
lay back on the bed and I looked up to the ceiling, but all that was there were
those long chains dangling down. I thought , I could hang myself by the neck from those, no problem.
    In
the afternoon the farmer’s wife came. She brought food. There was bread and
cheese in a basket, and a sharp knife to cut the bread with. I thought , I can cut open my veins with that knife,
if the men come. The farmer’s wife was