by Various
My flesh has swallowed itself, scar-skin deaf and mute. Sometimes it feels more plant than human, an unthinking thing that understands only sun and water, all green and empty.
I do not try to eat.
I stretch my arms, until they are through the temple gate, and there’s no resistance, there is only hot Songkran air new and stark.
Holiness is so quiet.
There are novices in the courtyard sweeping leaves and detritus. I look down at my hands and wonder, what color is my skin now, is it the gray of corpse, the blisters of rot? My eyes are not to be trusted anymore. The novices take no heed of me.
Neither do the old grandmothers and grandfathers who have risen early.
Neither does the luangpor that comes to greet them with loud blessings.
Neither does my mother, who wanders the temple grounds with grief in the creases of her eyes, of outliving one’s child.
I forget courtesy, I forget decency; I pound on doors and run with my muddy feet through the prayer hall, through the scriptorium where no woman is allowed to trespass. Every door opens to me, every bolt slides aside to admit me, but no living sees or acknowledges my voice, my empty belly, my feet like drums.
When I am ragged I return to the river, where my lover waits, where my lover acknowledges me with her skin and her scales, where my lover makes me real again, fleshed and haired, reflected in the slit mirrors of her eyes.
It cannot be my fault, my crime, that I went into the earth with a womb full.
The accounting of the wheel must be fairer than that.
• • •
Today my husband returns.
The knowledge sits taut under my ribs, for today I may not leave the house. Today I pace its periphery, but I cannot seek the riverbank, I cannot dangle my feet among the frogs and sing quietly to my heart-wife of insights like a phra pothisat’s and lips like a kinnaree’s.
In the corner of the house the child-that-is-not curls, its mouth red with viscera, its head thick with feathers. While I wasn’t looking it grew. Not a baby, not anymore. Its toddler fists clench and unclench around chicken bones.
I’ve begun to contemplate its death. Only it is a ghost, like me, with me. It swims like a fish, has weathered its bout with the chicken unscathed; what else can it do? Will it burn? Will I burn with it?
Mosquitoes pass me by. Dead flesh isn’t much good, and my veins haven’t much blood.
I greet Mak on the steps of our house. He does not speak; he weeps in my lap, because that is what wives are for. He does not ask after my pregnancy, because that is what men are like, and might well have ignored the monster. It does not tolerate ignoring, and while the salt is still thick on his cheeks it erupts into a scream that is not child or human. Mak hears what he will hear, and sees what he will see: and what he sees is a red-cheeked baby, radiantly healthy and brown as laughter. He goes to it, cooing affection through his sword-grief, the grief of flies clustering thick in the midday sun on bodies sunken into mud.
By the next day he no longer looks like a soldier, having stripped to his waist and having asked me to trim his hair, neatened by the buffalo-horn comb he gave as one of my wedding gifts. It took him so long to put together the dowry, and he does not deserve a wife who never intended fidelity, a bride in love with another long before she clasped eyes upon him. This guilt drove me to bear the child; this guilt was my murder-suicide.
Mak doesn’t talk much of the war, saying only that we’ve won and that it is over.
“There will always be fighting,” I say, though I do not mean anything by it. But he blanches.
If I cannot be alive, I should strive to be comforting.
He leaves the house to reacquaint himself with the busyness of the market, the opulence of his brother’s family, the brother who inherited everything and who sells phasin threaded in gold and silver to city ladies.
They will regard him with quiet terror, for who will be the first to tell? Your wife has passed, your child with her, your house stands empty. They will close ranks, and wait for someone else to find courage. I try to remember if he has enemies, for memories recede by the moment. He must have. Who does not? I had suitors, didn’t I, two or three?
I must have chosen Mak out of them, for a reason. Was it because he was handsomer? No: nothing could be more beautiful to me than the snake who stole my heart and knotted my dreams. But he was gentle, yes, that would be why. So quiet a boy. Never getting into a fight. Until this, this call to battle, this demand of duty.
• • •
It has been a week, and no one has shattered his domestic delight.
This cannot be merely a matter of cowardice. If none musters the bravery, one or another would have mustered malice. So when he comes home one evening I ask him, “Has anyone told you odd things?”
From his expression: yes. I can tell that he did not believe it. He grins, brittle unease. “Nothing. I picked mangoes from my brother’s garden.”
The next day my lover comes to me, leaning in from the window; I know her lower half is serpentine, coil upon brilliant coil twining up the house-stilt, such gravity of being that I imagine my bare feet may feel its weight through the wood. “Why don’t you come to see me anymore?”
I show her my wrists, which are fettered in shimmering birth-cords, far too long to be true, far too thick to be real. They wind around me, clenching muscled around my stretched stomach. “Oh,” she murmurs and blows on the fleshy gray ropes. They fray and fall thumping like hearts; the baby hisses. “Leave it. Leave him. I’ve asked my mother, and her mother, and her sisters.”
“For what?”
She pushes herself further into the house, her hair sliding wetly. “For you to become one of us and live.”
“But you are holy.” I cannot imagine being clean ever again, let alone so elevated and pure as she.
“You are my wife of body and heart. All that’s missing is the name, and we require new blood now and then to strengthen us. It would violate the order of things were I to have turned you when you were living, but now it’s merely to hurry you along the path of rebirth.”
“It can’t be that easy.”
“It will be. I know these things, my Nak, my brave, lovely Nak.” She laughs, and finger-writes out the nak that she is and my name side by side. Alike in sound despite one letter’s difference. “We will rid you of that creature, and that will be that.”
“How?” She is wise; her mother must be doubly so. In my chest, the cavity that once housed ventricles, excitement palpitates.
She puts her lips to my cheek, her hands to my face. “We will find a way.”
• • •
Howling dogs in the night. I’ve always been told they can see the deceased more clearly than any other beast of the low order, and it is true, they see through the blush of health my lover has given me, the nimbleness of my limbs; they smell decay held off by the width of a pulse, disintegration kept at bay by the length of a prayer.
It is a toothed sound, their howling. Out of terror, it’s said. That is wrong; hounds large or small are territorial. Even the most cowardly have jaws made for tearing, and despite my lover’s aegis I am only flesh. There are times when even that lapses and I see myself luminescent and pallid, not yet so far gone that larvae dribble from the corners of my mouth, but unhumanly textured and fibrous like the inside of young bamboo. My eyes shrink deep-set, my face protrudes all skull. It speaks for her sinuous strength that she has been able to anchor me all this time.
Often I lose count of the days. It’s hard, to recall precisely how long you’ve been dead. One day slides into the next with not much to separate each. The motion of sun and stars ceases to signify. The day sheds warmth, but none for me.
Staying downwind I avoid the dogs. Behind me my phasbai streams. This is a dark for storms, blistering heat waiting for the rain to whip it apart. At my hip the child rides swaddled, heavy and heavier. Its limbs have lengthened, thick with tendons from the meat that has served its gluttony.
The features are no longer muffled under baby-fat; they have gained sharp edges, and its eyes—immense—are ovoid black, mirrored and mirroring.
For the moment it is quiet; for the moment it is sated. I’ll need to find something wild, for it loves nothing that grows from the earth. Only things hot will do, with viscera inside and hide outside. Was I taught to set snares? It’s difficult to recall childhood. Difficult to recall anything older than this state of being, anything earlier than waking to find myself not in the afterlife but trapped inside a cage of my own ribs and entrails.
The night splutters thunder. A buffalo crouches before me. It glistens like glass, with horns like blades, no more a living animal than am I a living woman.
It turns, and I follow.
The shaman stands limned in storm-light.
“I thought,” I say, surprised that I still have the capability for surprise, “you’d be an uncle. Not an aunt.”
Her mouth pulls back to bare betel-stained teeth. The buffalo returns to her hand, clay again, inert once more. “Come in from the rain, dead daughter. That soldier boy’s wife, aren’t you?”
To be received like a living woman. To have a phakhaoma passed over so I may be rid of the worst of the wet. My condition dulls all feelings, but at that moment I miss my mother and aunts with a wrenching desperation. Tears have crusted to salt behind my eyes, but the urge is not gone with their drying. I give wai to the shaman, who is Mor-phee Pim.
She hardly heeds the monster. Her house brims with paraphernalia, and she is herself draped in black beads, a small knife hanging from her neck. When she sits she does cross-legged, not womanly at all, in a way my mother would have gently cuffed me for—we were trying hard to rise above our station; she wanted me to find a Krungthep husband and in preparation for that tutored me in numbers. Instead Mak came and a dowry happened.
Obligation drove me to that. A lack of it would have driven me into scaled arms, where I might have lived by her side in a scorpion-tail, playing on a drum and making a living by weaving reeds into baskets and toys. But I couldn’t have done that; I couldn’t have broken Mother’s heart.
“Did someone come to you on my behalf, auntie?” I would have said my lover, but who admits that, especially to an aunt so gray of hair, so severe of jaw?
Mor-phee Pim snorts. “Your paramour. I have little patience for those unable to keep faith with their spouses. Yes, the paya-nak came. Meddling, the lot of them, and what they want they will want without stopping to think if it’s good for anyone. Wisdom! Not the young ones, for sure.”
“Will you help?” I search the shelves, the shrines to house-spirits, the effigies of her servants.
“You don’t have a kumarnthong.” A stillborn child makes a fine familiar.
“And I don’t want one, daughter. I’ve more than enough to serve, and I’m not the sort of mor-phee who must accumulate more and more to show power. You do know the sin of dying with a child will haunt you, and you’ll have to carry that debt into your next life?”
“I wanted to live. I didn’t try to die. It’s not my fault.”
“Who says being a woman is fair? Your mother must’ve taught you injustice is your natural state and hers.” She grimaces. “No one gets everything they want. Except those higher beings, like a paya-nak. Leave that thing with me. I’ll see if I may tame it, but I promise nothing. Remember, abandoning your own is grievous, and you’ll pay for lives to come. Such is how the world turns.”
I give her the baby. She wraps it, over and over, in blessed threads. It wails. It screams for me and for the first time there is a word: Mother.
With the speed only a dead woman may know, on legs that do not tire, I flee from the shaman’s house. I am free. I am free.
• • •
“What will you do if I am gone, Mak?”
He looks up from his books. Of late he’s been obsessed with those, learning to read in toddling steps, letter by letter and vowel by vowel: the language of the capital and officials. Perhaps it is an escape from the recall of steel going through flesh, of limbs being shorn cleanly off like errant shrubs. When he asked me where our child is, I told him that an elder relative is taking care of it. Mak thinks it is a son, so a son it is; I indulge. “Don’t say that. It’s bad luck.”
That he can see me is a puzzle. Is it because the monster is partly of his flesh; is that the logic of the wheel, the covenant between skin and ghost? “I’ve never had the stoutest heart, dear one. What if some terrible sickness strikes me down?”
His breath shortens, as though I’ve put my hands around his throat and closed them tight. “Please don’t talk like that.”
So I don’t. Our house has always been built on words unsaid and truths held back, then pressed into little woven baskets until they are packed hard as earth. Why would that change now, just because I’m no longer among the living? Perhaps all marriages function in much the same way. I imagine that under each house a woman has buried wicker boxes, just as I have, and each would be as full as mine—not of steamed sticky rice, as they do in the north, but full of secrets. This idea soothes, for if all wives do the same, then who can blame me?
Sometimes just for comfort I would sit here, by my window, and reach below to pat where I dug and whispered my desires into the soil. To extend my arms long as the house-stilts must look grotesque, but my lover finds it wonderful to see my limbs flexible as hers, to see my frame transcend the confines of its human shape. “You’re learning to become one of mine,” she would say. “You see? It’s not so hard.”
Pressing myself against the floorboard I shut my eyes and feel for that patch of land.
There is one last obligation to discharge, one last farewell to make.
Night falls: it is my time, loud with screaming dogs and waters lapping at morning glory waiting to be picked at dawn. Much has sloughed from my recollection, but not the path from here to there. The way to the home into which I was born.
The house’s grown, Younger-Brother Sitt having married and brought his wife into the family. Two houses on their long, long legs and chicken coops underneath them—half bred for food, the other for cockfighting, my father’s passion.
I look in on Older-Sister Pha, who sleeps alone surrounded by her woodwork. It’s an embarrassment, to have wedded before she, and her still a maid if not in the most technical sense more than two years after I found Mak. She is so tall, her arms so corded, that few men find her a suitable bride. Publicly this shames her; in private she waves her hand and says she’s escaped, and besides, “Someone needs to take care of the children,” of which Sitt and his wife Jai are expected to have plenty.
Moonlight on mosquito net on my parents. They’ve become very old. By their mat I fold myself, and at their feet I touch my brow to the boards. “Forgive me, Mother, Father. I’m sorry I couldn’t be the daughter you deserved. I’m sorry I couldn’t stay to take care of you. I’m sorry I didn’t give you grandchildren. In the next life I will repay you.”
They don’t wake; they don’t hear. I stay to watch Older-Sister rise—she is earlier than anyone, up to chisel and later to pound niello sheets into tableaus of legend and piety she sells upriver to the rich. When the sun dawns gold and red I take my leave; I like to think that she looked up once, startled by a noise she couldn’t quite hear.
• • •
It is late, and Mak has not come home.
Even before I died we coincided so rarely on the sleeping mat, and in matters as lie between men and women I was distant. He noticed and did not press. I managed to fall pregnant, and that was that. Any number of things could keep a husband out well into the night. I do not fault him. How can I, when I’ve been faithless from the first?
My lover has been five days gone, busy making an egg for me from stones and scales, held together by dew collected from Himmapan, the forest of her birth. “When we are done with this,” she told me, “I’ll bring you there and show you all the secret places of my girlhood. Only promise you’ll spurn the ups
orn-sriha when they make eyes at you.”
To that I laughed. Who would make eyes at me?
She’s given me venom, sweetened by ripe mangoes, for me to take thrice a day. It will purge me of impurities, prepare me for the change. I told her I wasn’t afraid but I am, yet I’m already dead, so what more could go wrong?
Under the mango her venom scorches like the scorpion whiskey I once gulped on Sitt’s dare. Half the bottle is left, which means five more days stretch ahead of me.
Setting down the bottle I hear voices; peering out the window I see slashes of torchlight, and men putting up a fence of rods and holy thread. I look on for a time, uncomprehending, until I see the oil they’ve brought to pour on the stilts and the steps of this house. They’ve come to burn it; they’ve come to burn me.
Perhaps it was the dead chickens. Perhaps someone saw me with the not-child.
I climb out, thinking that I’m invisible to them. The cries tell me I am wrong.
Only a thread, stretching so taut and white. I need only to step over it, and I cannot: this sliver of holiness impedes better than an iron gate. The men fling their torches. One lands at my feet, sizzling. I look at it, and at them. Some blanch. Others grip their machetes.
Behind me—around me—the flame pours. Heat brushes my cheek; my skin feels like sand. I measure my steps, waiting for the thread to burn and fall apart, for that must happen long before the house crumbles. Above the hissing and crackling I call out, “Where is Mak?”
“Safe.” I don’t recognize the speaker, but then it’s hard to recognize any face now. “You’re dead, Nak. Ghosts should be with ghosts, the living with the living.”
“I do not want to be with him,” I say distantly, and the Chaopraya rises.
• • •
The river swallowed much: the house, the torches, though not the men. The weight of my sin is already thick without adding their deaths to it. Paya-nak venom burns bright in my stomach, which has become as warm and full as though time has turned back and I am with child again, alive again. The Chaopraya listens when its mistresses call, and who reign over it firmer than the rulers of serpentkind?
