in the stream behind
your house we absconded
with one, he pinched
at my cupped palms
as we
...
[+]
Sasi leaves Vientiane past midnight. At what morning hour, she's not sure, only that she was pulled from sleep under a crescent moon. She takes the charge of lugging her family's largest ka-tip, used for steaming rice, now laden with clothing.
On the Mekong riverbank, hands protrude through the morning mist, stealing the ka-tip, then stealing her. Sasi climbs over the pointed knees of her older brothers, over her thin, crane-framed mother.
The vessel rocks. There's a river in this cloud, she thinks, nestling between her father's legs, his cane coming to rest over their laps, barring them in place.
***
One day ago
Flies swarm the undergrown, sun-pocked produce. The buckets behind their house contributed very little to the farm lot, though her mother took great care when slicing the bed nets to drape around the basil and heartleaf.
Look at them now, a crisp green, sold to the chef from downtown at a higher price than the browning chrysanthemum leaves. Sasi's father safekeeps the kip in his chest pocket, unbuttoning and buttoning with each purchase.
While her mother cooks khao piak sen for breakfast, her brothers continue to sleep before school. Her three brothers are relentless in their boyhood, kicking her off the floor mats in their sleep so that she ends up on the bare floor. Sasi feels relief when dawn arrives, and she can step outside with her father to tend to the market stand.
A guard in green uniform crawls the street, a ground soldier of the Pathet Lao. Sasi only catches a glimpse of the rifle strapped to the guard's back before her father presses on her head, making her hide beneath the table.
When the guard's dirt-caked boots stop in front of their market stand, Sasi doesn't breathe.
What stops you from serving the nation's army?
Her father clicks his cane on the floor, balancing on his good leg. The other one had been malformed since birth, shrunken and weak. I cannot walk or bend.
Is that so?
There's the sound of a thud when the guard pushes hard on her father's chest, laughing as her father teeters.
You're not a man. A man builds the nation. A man profits the nation. What use are you, old man?
Another push, and her father loses balance, collapsing. His cane bangs onto the floor, rolling within Sasi's reach. Her father looks at her, begging her to be quiet with his eyes.
He cries out, I'm loyal to my country! I pay my dues and I can't afford anything after!
Sasi thinks of every time her mother snapped at her to be quiet in public, of classmates crying because their fathers and brothers had been taken away. These men, shepherded outside the city, starved, forced to labor in the dense heat and dust, chopping lumber with guns to their backs.
You'll pay with service. You have sons, don't you? I see them fighting in the streets. They're strong, aren't they?
Please. How much do you want? Her father uses the table to slowly rise, one shaking hand digging into his chest pocket.
Sasi grips the cane, edging its handle towards the guard's ankle. She doesn't know what she's doing. Will she knock him down or will he only stumble? She knows only what cannot happen. Her brothers will not leave. Her family will not suffer.
But she doesn't get the chance to make her move. A loud blast down the streets distracts them all. Shouting and cursing ensue. The guard immediately runs towards it.
Sasi sees a crowd dispersing about a kilometer away. Has someone fallen? Her father wrenches her off the floor, ushers her into the house. The sound of him slamming the door knocks her off her feet.
Her mother emerges, asking what happened, where did her father go, and her brothers scramble awake. But Sasi lies there for a moment, a fallen, shaken thing, unsure what to say.
She learns later that her father hobbled halfway across the city that day, seeking out a friend with connections. While she went to school, checking over her shoulder for the guard in green uniform, her father spent most of their family's money on a boat ride across the Mekong and as many open beds as possible awaiting their arrival in Nong Khai.
All the things she learns, she learns later.
***
There are other children around her age at the camp, dirtied as though they had been rolling around outside. She watches three of them duck through a hole in the chain-link fence, a perfect, child-sized hole.
Sasi and her brothers follow them one day. Past homes and shops that look much like they did in Laos, all the way to a shallow lake that dried up and turned into more of a muddy pit. They splash and play as children should, and when they come back home, their appearances make her mother so furious that color returns to her face.
Sasi isn't sure what safe feels like. But she feels something, watching her father laugh at her mother's expression.
It's the feeling of tomorrow, she realizes. Tomorrow, she will wake up and remember the morning hours when she couldn't sleep, the bow of the boat splitting a path through the clouds, her father's chest hard like the bare floor beneath her head.