Chapter 2: The Centipede in the Choi

 Mommy sat one the couch with little Enkidu while Baba sat opposite her. Between then was a well word coffee table which served as the dinner table most nights. Interestingly, there was a very sturdy very expensive restaurant caliber table which they had taken home when a friend's restaurant had closed down, but at the moment the coffee table was in front of the couch, which was in front of the TV playing worn, pirated, copied, recopied, and recopied over VHS tapes of a television series from the Hong Kong. Baba was watching intently as he ate the rice and the dishes he had cooked hastily but skillfully as cooking was his trade and had been his trade when he worked on a ship to arrive here in the first place, whenever that was, before Enkidu was born. But Enkidu didn't have a concept of a time before he was born really. The television show which was a period piece was a time before he was born, and Baba on a ship was a time before his time and Mommy travelling the world was a time before his time and might as well all have been the same thing. Whether it was gritty Kowloon or a silk dressed Kung Fu couple in the snow. on  a set filmed indoors, all of that might as well have been equally as real. 

Enkidu picked up pieces of the salty fish and the vegetables into his little bowl when he found a strange centipede looking creature that crawled from under the leaf. 

"Baba what's this?" 

"Oh.....Baba forgot to wash the vegetables."

"Eww is it alive?"

"No honey it's cooked you can eat it." Mommy said.

"No No don't eat it."

"Is it poisonous?" Mommy continued

"Only little bit."

"So we can eat the vegetables still?"

"Hmm" Baba grunted which meant yes, as he plucked up the creature with his fingers and tossed it into a house plant."

"What was that Baba?"

Baba waved his hand in the air and said, "chung"

"I thought Chung meant worm?" Mommy said

"I thought Chung was our last name!" Enkidu giggled with laughter.

The creature stirred because it was not really a normal insect, but a bamboo spirit insect. Which means that it could not die in quite the same way a normal insect died. It had magical powers. And connecting with the soil of the house plant it burrowed it's way in slowly and began to slowly gain life back and plan its escape.