by Various
Is the twig to blame for the fact that it chose to snap at that precise moment and play such a pivotal role in the destruction and creation of so many lives in northern Thailand? Be that as it may, it happened, and the echo reverberated in Tangmoo’s ringing ears.
“What was that!” the Puu Yaybaan cried.
“Here!” Sûa said, triumphant. Two strong hands, quick as snakes, darted into the bushes and grabbed Tangmoo by the scruff of his neck, dragging him out. “An eavesdropper! What’re you doing here, you little fraud?”
“I … nothing,” Tangmoo stammered. “I was just … thinking.”
“In the bushes?” the Puu Yaybaan said dubiously.
Mongkut glanced around nervously. “How long has he been here?”
“He heard everything,” the village chief hissed.
“I … no, really, I have no idea what you were talking about,” Tangmoo said. He tried to free his arm. “I think I should go back to the temple square now, or my mom will…”
“He’s going to tell them everything,” Sûa said, tightening his hold on the boy’s arm. “We need to do something.”
“No, I truly don’t know what you…”
“Liar! Traitor!” Sûa fumed suddenly, spraying Tangmoo’s face with foul strings of saliva.
“We can’t give him a chance to ruin everything,” the Puu Yaybaan decided in a whisper. Even more than Sûa’s uncontrolled outburst, this was a signal for Tangmoo to yank himself free with a rip and a twist, and to start running like mad.
“Hey!” Sûa shouted.
“After him!” Mongkut yelled.
“Take care of this,” the Puu Yaybaan barked at Sûa. “Am I making myself clear? Mongkut and I will begin the ceremony, before people start wondering what’s keeping us.”
Fumbling blind, Tangmoo ran through the darkness. Sûa ran after him. They sped across the winding path away from the temple, through the woods, across the thickets. Sûa was right behind him, growling like a feral cat, while not four hundred yards away from them in the temple square all the wish balloons had been lit and were starting to fill up with hot air. Loud cheers rose up as the wooden Phra Mae Khongkha was rolled out into the square, and no one heard Sûa’s insane roars: “GET BACK HERE, YOU MISERABLE LIAR! HAVEN’T YOU DONE ENOUGH?”
Finally, the moonlit path opened out. Feet splashed through water. Dismayed, Tangmoo realized he had reached the river. He turned to his assailant at the same time that his little sister Noi turned around on the podium outside the temple. She had been chosen to play the role of Neng Tanapong this year, beaming proudly in her beautiful costume. Undoubtedly Noi was thinking of her big brother, somewhere out there in the frenzied crowd.
“Now I’ve got you.” Sûa grinned, wading into the shallow riverbed.
“Listen,” Tangmoo wept, stumbling backward, up to his thighs in the water now. “I have no idea what you were talking about. How could I talk about something I don’t know?”
“Little boy,” the tiger said, “it doesn’t matter what you know.”
Snarling, he threw himself at Tangmoo, his saffron robes billowing on the water like a cloud of blood: no, no, no, no, the gigantic wooden arm of the river goddess descended on little Noi and she looked up with a gasp, the crowd cheered with so much excitement and so little restraint that they seemed to be going mad; yes, yes, yes, yes, the river foamed over Tangmoo, flashes lit up the night, fireworks crackled, spattered, whirled, feet kicked desperately, dislodging starfish from the riverbed, smothered cries rose in bubbles to the surface, popping soundlessly; help, help, help, help, little Neng Tanapong drowned in satin fabric as thousands of khom loi all rose up simultaneously, the crowd fell to their knees, looking up in tears toward the fiery miracle, wishes filled the night, the stone phallus shrank in shame, and Tangmoo drowned in the river.
But not without a witness.
Because from the shadows by the riverbank one shade extricated itself, bigger than all the others. This was, of course, Phra Mae Khongkha who, after bestowing life on the river a long time ago, had stopped for a breather in the riverbed. And so it happened that Sûa the monk, dripping wet and flushed with exertion, glanced over his shoulder and saw his fondest wish fulfilled, even though he did not believe what he was seeing. His body was found downstream the next day, but not his ripped-off hands. They were never found.
And Tangmoo?
I’m sure that if you had looked closely, you could have seen a tiny speck of light rise from the river. It fluttered up into the night sky, hastily climbing past a swarm of surprised purple swamp hens, and then joined the khom loi. That’s where the little light found peace. In Tangmoo’s dead eyes on the bottom of the river you could see a starry sky full of wishes reflected. Around him whirled running tendrils of ink, and he read them all.
Next day around noon there was a crack when the dead branch on the teng-rang tree sagged, but there was no one to prop it back up. Two days later it finally snapped off and destroyed besides the house also the part of Tangmoo’s father’s brain that was responsible for redirecting grief. From then on Gaew, who had been inconsolable after the death of his son, devoted his deliriously happy life to his remaining children, aided by his wife who admitted to herself sadly: Thinking that life is good is better than not living at all.
The collapse of the damnable branch had the added consequence that now, every morning, a particularly bothersome ray of sunlight tormented the eye of the philosophical and always death-wishing irrigator Daeng, causing uncontrollable screaming fits and severe sleep deprivation. It was not long, therefore, before Daeng nodded off behind the wheel while driving along the main road. He rammed a truck full of pigs on their way to the slaughterhouse, rolled fourteen times, and found new joy in life when he realized he had survived the crash without a scratch. Contrary to the pigs. So lugubrious was the scene of the accident—chunks of bloody pork all over the place—that it made the news broadcasts all over Southeast Asia. Even in Singapore, where Om had been working at a Thai restaurant for six years and sending a monthly email to his mourning grandmother Isra, who had no email address. Om then wrote her a letter, saying: I’m doing fine, Grandmother. I have a PhD in computer and I’m making lots of money now. Here, have some—and added his tips to the envelope. When Isra found the letter in her mailbox a week later, she died of happiness.
Wishes, wishes, wishes everywhere. The well-mannered crab huntress Kulap found some scrap metal from Daeng’s wrecked truck in the rice field and used it to forge a gong. When she sounded it one night, she touched such a probing frequency that every man in Doi Saket was enchanted and lured toward her little house. As soon as the well-bellied weed exterminator Uan saw her, he fell head over heels in love. Kulap, not a bad sort, gave him a cursory embrace, and at least the idea of love.
Wishes, like pearls on a string of cause and effect. Kulap’s gong kept chiming across the rice fields for nights on end, finally resonating in the blood supply to Somchai’s husband’s failing manhood and dislodging something in the veins. He immediately ravaged her with all the lust that had been denied him all these years, and Somchai was engulfed in waves of coital energy that were tangible for miles around—even as far as Chiang Mai, where legs were spread, thighs were kneaded, and orgasms were shrieked out. All over northern Thailand wishes came true. Bonds of love were forged. Children were being born. Kemkhaeng broke his leg.
And maybe this was all coincidence, like so much in life.
But let me tell you that, somewhere, a tiny little light had found its swarm. It let itself drift along on the winds toward the west. All the while, it wished and wished and wished. And so, wishing, the light and its wishes flew toward the edge of the universe and beyond.
Copyright (C) 2013 by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Art copyright (C) 2013 by Victo Ngai
1Uan means “hugely fat” in Thai – not necessarily an insult
2“Turtle”
3“Real woman”
4“Red”
5“Wild goat
”
6“Beanpole”
7The Thai custom of addressing one another by nicknames is meant to remember oneself better and to fool the spirits into forgetting people’s real names. As do the Thai themselves, for that matter. Irrespective of how unflattering the nickname may be, it is freely used in everyday life and no longer necessarily has a traditional origin. The wayward harvester driver Sungkaew, for instance, named his daughter Loli, after Marlboro Lights, and the unemployed mushroom picker Pakpao named her son Ham, after David Beckham. (Until his classmates discovered that in the mountain dialect “Ham” means “sack full of testicles,” causing his well-meaning mother, unable to resist his ceaseless badgering, to rename him Porn.)
8“Tiger”
9“Watermelon”
10Wish lanterns made of rice paper with a burning firelighter underneath
11About 650 dollars
12“Mighty warrior;” the Abbot is the head monk of the temple
13Small lizards intelligent enough to articulate their own name
LEANNA RENEE HIEBER
Too Fond
illustration by
SAM WOLFE CONNELLY
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Contents
Begin Reading
When Mr. McGill, the mill owner, bought the lovely Bloomsbury townhouse across from Eloise’s shop, her heart—an instrument that she’d begun to think was made of lead—buoyed. She could feel its pulse again. He was handsome, tall, perfectly framed, his frock-coat silhouette that of a catalogue feature. The gleam of his green eyes and the gamesome sweep of his russet hair were not the whole of her joy. It was that he was so taken with her work.
While he’d entered the shop to “procure a pretty bauble,” he soon abandoned his quest for a trinket, seeming rendered breathless by Eloise’s craft and stating that he wished he’d saved something of his mother’s locks so he might have presented her with a commission. While no purchases were made that afternoon, there were significant gains: McGill his first neighborhood friend, Eloise a blush.
Mr. Browne didn’t mind that his daughter had begun to outshine him so long as she outsold his jewelry business. Eloise Browne’s memento mori were renowned throughout London. Particularly since the death of Prince Albert, mourning accessories were all the rage, Her Majesty having a most difficult time with her husband’s passing.
Mr. McGill told Eloise that he believed, like she did, that human hair was indeed a priceless treasure, and that the wondrous pieces of remembrance and romance she wove into intricate patterns and pressed safely behind glass lockets like insects trapped in amber contained not just the base material of human remains, but a sliver of the subject’s soul. McGill insisted Eloise’s success was due to her belief in the inherent magic of the process, her ardent confidence that captured bits of soul lived on inside her work. At her core, he claimed, she must be magical.
“Little sorceress,” he called her, in an accent that bounced and tripped like her heartbeat did when he entered, sending the bells on her shop door jingling. Scottish, she assumed from his brogue. He was a bit too forward with her, always leaning a little too close over the glass counters full of ornately set gems and empty lockets waiting to receive tresses of hair transformed into sculptural masterpieces. He stared at her a little too long and a little too intently, as she imagined an artist might gaze upon his model. She wondered if the models ever blushed like she did.
Perhaps the Scots were a more forward people in general. Eloise didn’t know; her social circle was miniscule and she was shy. Her mother had long since died and her father had given up trying to marry her off. He was relatively content now that the growing cachet of his daughter’s jewelry brought in income.
Eloise had last been so affected by the charming broker who had handled the sale of their Bloomsbury property. The business having done well enough to allow for an expansion, a whole side of the shop could now be devoted purely to her delicate craft. But the broker died, unexpectedly, and it was Eloise’s greatest regret that she had not obtained a lock of his hair so that she might wind it into a fragile bow, press it in glass, and wear it against her heart, so that his base materials might warm that lonely organ. Perhaps she might have even entwined strands of his hair with her own. Nothing could possibly be more intimate. Perhaps this McGill was her second chance.
As McGill’s townhouse was being renovated and its rooms fitted entirely with gas pipes, he’d frequently pass the time in her ground-floor shop. He sang her ballads and sea shanties as she worked, blushing, never having felt so alive as she sat weaving the hair of the dead in her trembling fingers. The other shopgirls, who didn’t work near the hours Eloise put in, would gossip about McGill loud enough for her to hear, but left her well-enough alone. They thought Eloise, and her work, too morbid. That suited Eloise fine; she didn’t like them either.
Fearing she’d not see him nearly so often once he settled in, Eloise hoped the renovations would go on indefinitely. Silently she prayed he’d ask her to share his home. The words “Mrs. McGill” sent thrills up her spine when she whispered them to her bedroom mirror as she unpinned her hair from its prison atop her head.
But in due time the townhouse was fully equipped with gas fixtures and all manner of modern conveniences, ready for permanent occupancy.
Soon after, he brought her into the shop. Beautiful and flame-haired.
Mrs. McGill.
She was fresh off the boat from some small Scottish village and very recently wed to the carefree man Eloise so admired; their swift nuptials were evidenced by Mr. McGill’s needing to buy his lovely young bride a ring. Eloise pretended that she had business in the back of the store and had her father help them find something suitable.
She stood at the storeroom door and waited for McGill’s booming voice and his wife’s lilting one—her accent far thicker than his—to recede, for silence to again comfortably overtake her one small corner amidst London’s loud chaos.
“Lovely couple,” her father exclaimed once he’d seen them off, bursting into the back room and startling Eloise, who had begun to feel safe in the shadows. “Why can’t you find a man like that?”
“Haven’t a clue…” Eloise murmured, pretending that she’d needed a box of clasps and taking them to her worktable.
She hoped that the parents of the dead little girl whose black hair she braided and formed into the figure of a bird didn’t mind if there were a few tears mixed in among the locks.
It was unchristian to be jealous, and so she tried dearly not to be. Attempting to alter the bent of her heart like alchemists of old, she tried transforming the green-eyed monster into a substance more charitable. But all she could think of was how much she yearned for McGill’s green eyes to look upon and possess her.
A crushing guilt seized her, then, when she swelled with hope the moment Mr. McGill entered the very next day. He looked haunted and terrible. Had something happened? Had Mrs. McGill broken his heart and left him?
“She…I…I didn’t think to tell her…” Mr. McGill murmured, clearly in the first throes of shock and grief. His face was ashen, his lips moved in numb confession. “I just…didn’t think…she…blew out the gas lamp before going to sleep. We were to honeymoon on the morrow and I was out, making the last of our travel arrangements…I stopped by the mill to receive congratulations from my foremen—admittedly the hour grew a bit late…I should have said—warned her…but she blew them out. I found her lying upstair
s peacefully, beautifully. Dead. Drifted off to a sleep from which she’ll never awake…”
These tragic mistakes had been quite common in London when gas pipes first were fitted into hotels and homes; people simply didn’t know better. To them, a flame was a flame. People didn’t normally sleep with a lit flame beside them, so they blew it out and laid their heads confidently against their pillows while the escaping gas sent them quietly to eternal rest.
“We take it for granted now, but she didn’t know. Her little cottage didn’t have such luxury, none of the village did—How could I be so daft?!” McGill cried, raking a violent hand through his russet hair, a clump coming loose and catching in his jagged, bitten fingernails. Eloise quelled the urge to dart to his side and gather the strands. “I must…make arrangements…a funeral…” He stumbled to the door, opening it, the bells’ jingling a jarring slam against the glass.
“I could…make a locket for you,” Eloise blurted. “Just…bring me her…”
McGill did not turn around, only nodded. “Yes, yes. Thank you, Miss Browne. I would like that.”
That evening Eloise watched from her window as a carriage unloaded a coffin. A parade of top-hatted men, likely foremen and solicitors from his mill, moved in a steady stream up and down the townhouse stoop.
Her guilt was mixed in equal part with joy, which only heightened the guilt in a sickening pendulum. If she could just help him through this pain…She better than anyone understood death and loss, she was best equipped. She was his little sorceress…just what this fresh widower needed.
The coffin was carted away, heavier than when it had arrived, weighted with the lifeless mass of the fiery redhead who had stepped so daintily into her store.