"Buffeted by the chopper's reverberating
growl and factory workers' shouts, Suki scraped up machine-chewed
feathers, meat, and bones and dumped them into a bucket. The stair's
metal railing slipped under her fingers. She gripped it until the
cold burned, and she hauled bucket and shop broom up onto the catwalk
over the Duck Plucker's blades. "
"Unsui believes in the sound of her
own voice, how it carries across the wind and turns the heads of
men she has never met. She believes in the tone and the melody,
and the harmony she creates even though she has always been alone."
The Dragonwife
By S. Evans
"'Po Hua was twelve the first time she saw the dragonwife with
her ten thousand sons. She had seen the wormlings before, of course;
in the spring, the shallow lake flooded with them. They swam down
the irrigation channels into the rice paddies to live amongst the
roots and puddles, sparkling with false-fire in the water and mud.
Their numbers slowly decreased as they grew larger and gained color;
by midsummer, the few dozen that were left were the length of a
child's foot. By summer's end when the firedrakes began to fly south
toward the sea, they had all disappeared. The next year, they would
reappear again a few weeks after the spring equinox, when the Yellow
Dragon flew through the sky to visit his spouse."
