The Time of the Cassowary

The temple dogs had set up a yowling fuss, which was uncommon for those at Wat Kham in the languorous afternoons of the hot season, when they typically spent hours slumbering the heat away in the shade of the Bodhi tree. Two of the monks emerged from their quarters blinking in the sunlight, joined by the third from the cool sanctum of the temple, where his meditation had been interrupted by the ownerless mutts. 

A blue Isuzu pickup, all windows tinted black save for the windshield, was the center of canine attention. Its exterior was surprisingly dust-free in the parched lot, especially in comparison to the trucks in daily use by farmers in the village, and the youngish, well-dressed figure who popped out of it was clearly not the type who spent time working the land. His skin had the sort of pale hue it takes on with sun deprivation, like it had a coating of ultrafine white powder; his hair was long and tied back somewhat fashionably in a ponytail, and his Ray-Bans were as impenetrable as the truck windows. 

“You take care of animals that are left at the temple? That’s how it works, right?” He could barely be heard over the dogs, all of whom had been dropped off at the temple anonymously in the past, abandoned, to be cared for and raised by the monks. Those dogs were losing their minds at the moment, barking at a large wooden crate in the bed of the pickup. 

The monks nodded at the affluent youth, who they felt for certain was not from Nung or the nearby communities. They also knew that this individual knew that they were obligated to show compassion to any animal abandoned on the temple grounds, unable to turn away sentient beings in need.

“Great, my boss’ll be happy to have this off his hands, and that’ll make my day too.” He flashed white teeth. “You couldn’t give me a hand getting this down, could you?”

One of the monks clambered up into the bed, with some difficulty due to his robes, to lift the crate with the young man and pass it down to the others. Before they could lay hands on it, the item’s inhabitant scrabbled something sharp and hard against the inner wood. The monk tried to see through the cracks in the boards, but they were simply too narrow. 

“What’s in here?” he asked. “A dog?”

“No, not a dog.”

“Well it’s not a person, I hope,” said the monk, resentful of the other’s pompous vagueness.

“I’ll tell you what it is once we get it down.”

“I—we’d prefer now, please.”

“Look,” said the youth, “no matter what it is, you pretty much have to accept it, right? That’s the way this works?”

“Well, yes, but . . .”

“It’s not a person, okay. It’s a giant bird.”

“A giant bird? What kind of giant bird?”

“I don’t know, it’s a big, scary bird. From Australia or Brazil or some place like that.”

The monk, who despite not having had the opportunity to study much geography as a child, was puzzled. As far as he could recall, Australia and Brazil were quite unrelated to each other.

“Or Africa,” added the youth.

“Africa?”

“I don’t know, where are ostriches from?”

The two monks waiting to receive the crate spoke simultaneously, shocked: “It’s an ostrich?”

“No, no!” The black ponytail swung back and forth. “It’s a giant bird, like an ostrich, but it’s not an ostrich.” 

As they lifted the crate, the unseen bird inside threw itself with force against the walls of its prison. There was another of those scrabbling scratches—whether of a sharp beak or razor talons, none of the monks could tell. 

With the crate resting on the ground, and the holy men shooing in vain at the dogs crowding madly around it, the youth swiped his palms against each other theatrically, as though to announce that the burden had officially been transferred out of his hands. 

“Hang on a moment.”

“Gotta go. Listen, this thing is dangerous, so be super careful when you let it out. Maybe you’ll want to tie it in place or something.”

“Huh?” 

“Watch the toenails. That’s what it attacks with.”

The monks exchanged glances, questions bubbling rapidly to the surface. 

“How big is this thing?”

“Can it fly?”

“What’s it look like?”

“Umm . . .” said the youth, brow furrowing above his perfectly concealed eyes. The monks could see all three of themselves, and the crate, and the barking dogs leaping around it, in the lenses of his Ray-Bans. “Think Jurassic Park. You’ll see what I mean.” 

With that, he performed a brief wai to them, droning out a thanks, and leapt into the cab. He opened the window and leaned out as he started the engine. “By the way, probably best not to let the cops see this thing, if you even have cops around here. Up to you. I meant to drop the bird off in the middle of the night, but I’ve got a date, so . . . y’know.”

The monks stared at him in scrutiny. Two of them wanted to tell the little brat that no, they didn’t ‘know’. The youngest of them briefly regretted his vow of chastity, envying the ponytailed douchebag. 

 “I was never here. Got it? Thanks.” He rolled up the window and pulled away at speed, leaving the entire lot in cloud of dust that settled gradually over the red and gold walls of the temple. The back license plate, they saw, was concealed with black masking tape. 

***

There are outsiders who view Nung as paradisical. Some may conclude that people who live in paradise rarely realize it, while others contend that there are no paradises at all, only a vast spectrum of subjective viewpoints. Either way, it can be said that there are plenty of those born and raised in the village who find it far from idyllic. One of them was Thanathorn S., whose nickname was Gop, which means frog, and who got the moniker by insistence of an aunt who felt her face bore similarities to the aforementioned amphibian at birth. It was probably all done in good humor, but had an unfortunate and hopefully unintended irony attached, since frogs are notably strong jumpers, while Gop’s right leg was malformed from the moment she came into the world. The bones in that limb simply weren’t the same length as those in the left, and by the time she reached her adult height there was a four-inch difference between the two. 

It seemed to Gop that she’d heard the rumors from the time she could first understand words. They first came to her through whispers on the playground, kept aloft by the giddy cruelty of children. Even then, she sensed that her peers had to have picked it up from somewhere else, as the idea that she must have lived a sinful life before being reborn into this one, in order for karma to have delivered her back to Earth in a misshapen state, didn’t seem like the kind of thought that children her age would innately possess. Such an idea had never crossed her mind at all, even with her earlier familiarization with the concept of karma, until the whispers reached her. 

She’d secretly agreed with the playground consensus, though. She was ugly. Short and stocky, a wide mouth and widely-spaced eyes set in pudgy face—essence of frog. And of course she was uneven. Unbalanced. Asymmetrical. She couldn’t play sports, or tag, or any other activity that required speed and agility. She wore a homemade attachable platform that fit to the bottom of her shoe, made of numerous layers of cut-up rubber sandals, which effectively extended the sole and brought that leg closer to the height of the other—but it was a wobbly affair, made worse by the fact that the limb lacked the muscular strength and stability of its properly-formed counterpart. The bottom of the rubber platform naturally disintegrated over time, necessitating the creation of another. 

Nung may have been a reasonably comfortable place to live for Gop. It was exceedingly short on office jobs, and high on the necessity of physical labor for most to make a living, but the community tended to look out for one another well enough. At least she was known there, with no introductions needing to be made and no need to prove herself anymore. At the age of 40, unmarried and childless, she had as much a place in the village as she ever would, lugging goods around in a wagon for most of the local businesses, transporting whatever was unwieldly and needed to go from one place to another, whether from the back of a truck to a shop, the fresh market to the restaurants, the hardware shop to construction sites, the mechanic’s out to the fields, or anywhere else she could hobble to. The wagon was fitted with four wheelbarrow tires to keep it higher off the ground, enabling it to be drawn down rocky paths, across washed-out patches of road, and over any other uneven terrain she encountered. Unevenness, she concluded, was the hallmark of her first four decades of life, and would be for however many decades that remained. 

Until the day she found the discarded spirit house. 

She was transporting several bags of rice to the home of P. Lin, an elderly widow who lived outside the village in the home she and her husband had once shared. The house was tucked into a clearing at the end of a road that cut through a dense wood, and as Gop made her way up it she caught sight of a golden glint through the trees. Intrigued, she left the wagon and entered the wood, soon coming upon a dilapidated teakwood san phra phum—a spirit house—laying on its side with its pedestal nowhere to be seen. The little house, smaller even than the dusty box television set in her grandfather’s workshop, had surely once been the abode of a thewada, though whose property it could have been protecting, or where, she couldn’t guess. Surely P. Lin wouldn’t have disposed of a spirit house in such a manner, and besides, this one bore no resemblance to the one she was familiar with at the widow’s dwelling.

“Who threw you away?” she asked, crouching to turn the house upright, wary of possible snakes or scorpions that might have moved in. 

And who am I talking to? she wondered to herself. That’s the better question. Surely the guardian spirit, the angel, had vacated the little shelter before it was thrown away. That was just common sense. 

Then again, how could she be positive? 

Curiously, she noticed there was no gilding whatsoever on the house. It consisted entirely of unpainted wood, untreated and badly weathered at that. Yet the house wouldn’t have been visible to her at all, she thought, had she not seen the reflection of a sunray on some golden surface. That she was positive about. 

She brought her palms together and gave a wai to the house. 

“Did you send me a signal? Did you call me over? It’s not fair you’ve been left here like this. Not good at all.”

She was met with no reply, not even a falling leaf or sigh of wind through the canopy overhead. 

“Can I ask you a favor, if you’re really there? Okay, not a favor exactly. I’ll make you a deal. On way back from P.Lin’s, I’ll pick up your house and take you home in my wagon. I’ll give you a safe place out back of my folks’ place, maybe by the tobacco field. It’s sunny and quiet there. Someday we can even get a Brahmin priest to come and make sure everything’s okay with you.”

Gop rose and stumbled around the san phra phum in a tight circle, the platform glued to her sole in bad shape already and not coping well with the soft forest floor. Indeed, not a hint of gold to be seen. She returned to the front of it and lowered herself to her knees, hoping no creepy crawlies were hanging out under the leaves. 

“You’re an angel, so you must know a lot more than we humans do, right? My deal is, I’ll take you home and set you up there, but I want you to tell me what the meaning of my life is. I don’t mean you have to tell me with words. I guess you understand Thai, or maybe all languages, but I don’t expect you to talk to me. Maybe you could just give me some sign? If my life is meaningless, let me know somehow, and I won’t be sad or angry about it.”

The spirit house sat silent. A twig snapped somewhere, but Gop felt confident it was a squirrel and nothing more: a non-divine squirrel, totally untouched by the spirit world. 

“Look at me,” she said, aware of a tightness in her throat. “No man has ever wanted me. I’ll never have kids. I dropped out of school when I was sixteen, and I just drag this wagon all over town for people. I’ve got this stupid leg and no friends. If I died tomorrow, everyone in Nung would just say, ‘Well, no more Gop with her wagon,’ and they’d move on as soon as the cremation was over with. And outside town not a single soul would know one way or the other whether I was still in the world. So what meaning do I have?”

She caught herself on the verge of shouting and stopped, embarrassed. She could probably be heard all the way up at P. Lin’s , unless the old woman’s hearing was too far gone. She apologized hastily to the spirit, and returned to the road, nearly falling over in her hurry to excuse herself. She delivered the rice to P.Lin, and on the way back carried the lonely spirit house out of the woods and set it on her wagon, hoping to avoid too many eyes as she carted it home. 

She left it next to the outer wall of the house, under an overhang to shelter it in the unlikely event of rain. More importantly, her bed lay directly on the other side. She wanted to be close to the rescued san phra phum as she slept. 

Sleep did not come easy, though. Her mind buzzed and hummed that night as she lay in the dark, which was unusual for her after long days tugging her wagon under the open sky. Unable to turn off her thoughts, she noticed that they appeared to be swirling in some fashion, circling some central idea. Slowly, slowly, as first the minutes and then the hours trickled by, she understood what was at the center of her mental activity, tethered to all of it. 

Outside town . . .

They were the very words she’d spoken to the thewada in the woods that day, not even knowing whether it was there. 

Outside town not a single soul would know one way or the other whether I was still in the world. 

The thought pushed to the front of her mind, louder, larger, every word of it alive, determined to keep sleep at bay until it was accepted and interpreted it for what it was. 

“That’s it,” she whispered to the dark. “I need to go out into the world. I need to meet people. I need to know them and to be known.” 

She drifted off at last, and in the morning she went out to thank the angel, setting a few oranges and a strawberry Fanta in front of its house as an offering. 

By the time December came to an end a few weeks later, the weather dry and cool and beckoning for travelers to set out on their way, Gop had informed her family of her intention to depart and seek work elsewhere in the country, bringing her wagon service to a close. There was much fuss and arguing over the whole matter, her parents adamant that she was setting herself up to struggle and starve in her wanderings, but in the end they acquiesced, acknowledging she was a full-grown woman and without a husband or children that relied on her. 

On the day she was set to depart, her father dug out a collection of Buddhist amulets he’d collected over the years on his own forays away from the village. He chose five of particular rarity and protective strength, affixed each with a cord, and hung them around his daughter’s neck. They were fairly cumbersome things, each housed inside a protective plastic case that made them larger than they were, and they moved and rattled against her chest with her every limping step. She promised to wear them at all times anyway, removing them only to sleep and shower. 

Her final farewell was reserved for the thewada, explaining that she wouldn’t be able to leave gifts at its house anymore, or at least not until she returned. She invited it to come along with her, if indeed it could or wished to. The spirit house, as always, remained perfectly silent, giving no indication that any angel resided within, much less one that had heard her out. 

Heart heavy, yet fluttering with the anticipation of new horizons, Gop left Nung early one Saturday morning in January, taking to the open road on a scooter, headed south with her cash savings in a backpack. 

She began her odyssey in Chiang Mai, a tourist for the first time in her life, taking in not only historical wonders but also the fascinating alienness of its myriad foreign tourists. She was fearful of talking to the foreigners, not least because she possessed little more than a handful of words in English, and she didn’t feel such opportunities presented to her anyway, with most seeming oblivious to her presence. Nor was that solely a foreigner trait; she soon concluded that city people were vastly different to those in Nung, for here everyone was a stranger to everyone else, averse to eye contact, their attention fixed squarely on the interests of their own lives. Her finances had taken a hit by the time she putted out of the ancient northern capital, but she sensed that new wonders would be found away to the east, and she wended across the land in that direction until she reached distant Nong Khai on the banks of the Mekong.

Nong Khai was the land of the Phaya Naga. She was familiar with the mythical serpent, of course, but here its purported existence, somewhere beneath the muddy waters of the Mekong, took on a greater air of plausibility. Looking out over the river one evening, twin statues of the powerful creature rearing ornately at her back, she spoke aloud to the angel of the discarded spirit house, just in case it had accompanied her after all.

“I suppose you know the truths of the world,” she said, peering hard at ripples and the dark shapes of weeds across the top of the water, hoping for a glimpse of something gargantuan and serpentine, or even the emergence of the mysterious floating lights that locals called Naga fireballs. “So if the Naga is out there, it must be familiar to you. Maybe it’s a part of the world you came from. Any chance you’ll tell me if it’s truly out there or not, or is that something taken on faith?”

The breeze off the water battened her face, but it was no different from before she asked the question. Children played behind her, shouting happily as they chased one another around the base of the statues, and somewhere further along the riverside a street performer crooned along to his guitar. 

The amulets jangled with every step as she returned to the scooter, a sound that had become so familiar that it drifted below her notice most of the time. The same couldn’t be said of their weight. There was a slight ache in the back of her neck where the necklace cords tugged, gravity making itself known. It was the ache of accumulated time, thought Gop. Time passed and time ran out. Somehow she felt this wasn’t her place, and it was time to move. 

So she did. She rode south through the provinces of Isaan, until, in Sisaket, she ran the scooter into a ditch to avoid a truck that swerved into her lane. She emerged bruised but relatively unscathed, and in much better shape than the scooter, its handlebars mangled and front wheel crooked, among various cracks and shatters to much of its plastic components. She made sure to thank the thewada for protecting her from injury, and did the same to the amulets for good measure.

The costs for fixing the scooter would deplete most of the cash she carried. The head of the repair shop, meaning well in the face of her financial hesitation, took notice of her amulets and recommended a friend who traded in them. Gop said she’d think about it, and he scrawled the address across the back of an old receipt. 

She sought out the trader at his home on the other side of town, sticking her head into shops to ask directions along the way. He was expecting her, the mechanic having called ahead, and ushered her inside. She sat in his living room, hands folded on her lap, while he examined her amulets with a magnifying lens. After a series of sighs and grunts, he made an offer for each, all abysmally low. She tried to haggle and was met with a dismissive wave. Unfamiliar with the amulets’ history, origin, precise rarity or anything else about them, it was impossible to argue their true value, and she couldn’t bring herself to call her father in consultation, imagining the litany of criticisms that would follow about her choices, her driving, and her whole endeavor beyond the borders of Nung. How she’d be able to face him in the future, the amulets gone, she didn’t know. She only knew that she couldn’t burn through all her cash or the journey was at an end. 

Altogether they sold for slightly less than the cost of repairing the scooter. The release of their weight from her neck, rather than a relief, came back to stab at her heart. The growing strain she’d experienced was an indicator of time—all the time since she’d left the village, ever under the amulets’ protection—and without it that time was truly gone. She had nothing to show for it and had lost their power to shield her from iniquity.

As she made her way back to the repair shop, the glue holding the platform to her right shoe began to let go. 

No, she thought, aiming the plea at nothing and no one. Please, I can’t take this now. Already her right leg was paining her, a result of her spill into the ditch and trek to the trader’s home. If it were suddenly inches shorter, the ache would move swiftly into her hips and the shame of her lopsided walk would be unbearable. 

Passing a food cart parked on the sidewalk, she glanced up and caught the vendor eyeing her directly. A teenage girl, skin deeply sun-kissed like Gop’s own; she had a scattering of zits across her brow, with a few more on each cheek for good measure, but she radiated vitality and good health. 

So fit and perfectly formed, Gop thought bitterly. Not a care in the world. Looking at me like I’m the sorriest sack of—

“Hello,” said the girl brightly. “Want some Isaan sausage? Papaya salad? It’s super delicious, really.”

Gop stopped, almost glad for the excuse to rest. 

“I’m not hungry.”

“Are you sure? Maybe take something home for later?”

“You look too young for this to be your cart, so what do you care if I buy something or not?”

“Well, I . . . y’know, my boss wants me to sell, so I have to try. Sure you’re not hungry? I promise it’s good. I eat it myself.”

Gop realized that there was a screaming void in her stomach. In fact, she’d eaten little more than a couple skewers of pork balls the entire day. 

“Yeah, I’m hungry, but this isn’t the time for it.”

She shuffled on past, wincing at a fresh twinge in her thigh, hoping against hope that the glue would just hold until she got her scooter back. 

“Not the time for what?”

“For spending any more money!” Gop shouted, and felt tears threaten. 

Don’t you cry now, you pathetic buffalo. Not in front of this kid.

She set off down the street again, jaw clenched and swallowing hard, but some moments later there came the pavement-slapping patter of flip-flops behind her. 

“Hey.”

Gop whipped around. “What! You again? What now?” 

The teen held a bag out to her, full of plump Isaan sausage, thick slice of cabbage and some bird’s eye chilies. “I don’t really like my boss anyway, between you and me. He won’t notice if a little goes unaccounted for.”

Gop stared at her.  

“I mean, if you like Isaan sausage. It’s that or the salad, but you’ve gotta wait for me to make it if you want that.”

She continued to study the girl, lost for words and wondering if she was being messed with. Were this princess’s friends going to come swarming out of nowhere to jeer and pelt the cripple with dirt? What business did this kid have being generous? Maybe she’d spit on the sausages while Gop wasn’t looking, or dusted them with something nasty.

“You want to give me these?”

The girl nodded. “I got the feeling just now that you’re a traveler. You’re not from Isaan anyway,” she added with a smirk. “And travelling works up an appetite.”

“I…thank—I mean, you’re right, yes. Th-thank you.” Gop took the bag from her, the salty-sour aroma of the sausages teasing her nostrils. “I am a traveler, and I’m going to remember you.”

Back at the repair shop, she peeled the platform the rest of the way off her shoe. With renewed resolve, the edge taken off her hunger thanks to the teen, she requested the mechanic’s strongest industrial strength glue and cemented the extension back in place with it. With luck, she wouldn’t be down by four inches on that side anytime soon. 

I can do this, she thought. And I will. 

***

Few who saw Lom in the evenings knew his day job, and few who saw him in the daytime knew his night job. The amount of sleep he got was spotty, but he managed to catch enough snatches here and there to keep going. At any rate, both gigs made money and balanced each other out: he made more profit during his noisy, hot, hectic days, but the quiet cool nights kept his mind on an even keel. Nights are when he visited his past, or, it could be said, when his past visited him. 

He worked as a lone security guard from 6:00 pm to 5:00 am, on a premises located on a narrow dead-end side street, which branched off a busier side street, which branched off yet a wider side street, which branched off a main road. He knew little of the business that went on inside the facility during work hours, except that there were a lot of computers and other expensive equipment in there. The place had once served as a student dormitory, for a nearby school which had stopped operation more than a decade before.

There was a wooden desk and chair tucked off to the side of the main building, reserved for him to sit on. He brought with him a small radio, a plastic electric fan that had belonged to his daughter during her high school years, an extension cord, a wooden baton as a potential weapon (which he hoped never to require the use of), a bottle of water, a worn paperback book he never made any progress through, and sometimes a recent newspaper. The radio was the most important. He could manage giving up the other items at night, but he needed the radio. 

Save for the lingering chirps of birds wishing each other goodnight, and the ticks and chitters of insects in the bushes, the sounds of daily life—of passing motorbikes at the top of the street, of distant shouts and laughter—washed out of the world with the sun’s light. 

Lom turned the radio on, found his usual FM channel, on which a wistful pop song about an ex-lover was playing, and settled into the chair to begin his long shift. The fan was toy-like, a dusty red color with yellow blades. It was nearly inaudible as well, save for the sound of the weak breeze it emitted, but the soft and continuous breeze was all he needed for comfort. That the air was moving was enough. 

The fan and radio were both plugged into the extension cord, which ran most of its seven-meter length to an outdoor wall outlet. A single low-wattage light above the locked front door stayed on above him, creating a pool of orange around his desk and chair. 

The song ended, and the DJ came on, cracking tongue-in-cheek jokes and reading news headlines. The broadcast was from a city near Lom’s hometown in Isaan—the vast, economically depressed northeastern region of the Kingdom—and listening to it carried him away to that part of the country, where it felt he departed so long ago to leave the fields behind and work in Bangkok. He let his attention drift with the words of the DJ, smiling at some of his quips, sighing at the news of recent droughts and commentary on small towns emptying of young people across the provinces he knew so well.

He didn’t need to remain alert throughout his long post, more than aware that at his age of sixty-five years he was merely hired to be a nightly presence on the property—a discouragement to potential trespassers rather than an active defender. It was not a likely location for miscreants to seek out. 

As the night deepened his thoughts turned to the faces of the past, those who’d been torn away from him and whisked beneath the murky currents of time. His ghost night began, brought to him by ghost night radio. 

***

In the Pinklao area of Bangkok, a young American man, James, boarded a seven-baht Death Cab. The locals called these adapted pickups songthaews, so-named for the two bench seats facing each other in the back, but the ones that ran the route James took home each day could only be termed Death Cabs in his mind. A one-way ride, for as far as you wanted to travel along its circuitous route, ran you seven Thai baht. They were more convenient than buses, depending on where you were going, but how much more likely you were to die horribly mangled and smushed after a crash in one he had yet to determine; there could be official figures pertaining to it stowed away on some government hard drive, but somehow he doubted it. 

He got the last free spot, wedging himself between an ancient woman, who was propping upright a sack of leafy green vegetables on the floor between her feet, and a boy in a university student’s uniform. The old woman had laugh lines so numerous and deep that they seemed to spring from her features and run right around the sides of her head. She was chatting loudly to another elderly woman across from her. Both of them were laughing. They looked like they’d been laughing all their lives, just like that. The boy, on his other side, alternated between staring straight ahead and into his phone, but mostly the phone. 

The Death Cab pulled away from the stop with a jerk, and a moment later, switching into the relative clear of the next lane—which on this street, at this time of day, meant there were roughly 30 free meters between them and the vehicles ahead—the driver popped the truck into a higher gear, provoking a harried growl from the engine. A baby began to wail on the other side of the university boy, held in the arms of its mother. At the end of the row opposite sat another Westerner, a blond girl. James figured she must be new to the city or to this particular mode of transport. She had the candid look of concern bordering on condemnation some uninitiated foreigners display, as though she might reprimand the driver for his recklessness. She gripped the edge of the bench, white-knuckled.

James reached back to hold onto the bars of the cage, like most of the other passengers, as the Death Cab switched lanes again in a bid to weave around a couple cars onto the next clear stretch of asphalt, cutting one off by a number of feet and provoking a series of flabbergasted horn blasts. 

The Death Cab drivers drove like they had deadlines, but there were no deadlines and no schedules for them: they had only their objective, which was to pick up and drop off as many passengers in the course of a day as they possible could, for seven baht apiece. That added up, James guessed—or else it didn’t, really, and that’s why they had to speed and weave and gamble with the laws of physics.

They were flying now, barreling through traffic at seventy, eighty, ninety kilometers an hour. They were coming up to the big intersection where the driver would pull a sharp right turn, barely slowing, when it always felt that two wheels might be leaving the ground, and where if the Cab were imbalanced with too much weight on the left-side bench they might tip right over. It was at this point that James typically became aware of how cheap the metal making up the cage bars was. It would crumple like aluminum foil if they did tip over, or collide with another vehicle, or if any kind of sudden blunt force was applied to it at all.

The baby went on crying as the mother cooed, bracing herself as best she could. Conversation had dropped off. All eight passengers were holding onto something. 

The driver gunned it to make it through the green light, and then they were in the intersection. 

***

For fifteen-year-old Suda, Muay Thai had become a passion. Her town had one sizeable gym, open to all, where there was a fairly even mix of males and females, and where dedication to training varied wildly between individuals. There was a handful of chubby kids, goaded or forced into the martial art by their parents in a bid to help them shed weight, and a compliment of soft-around-the-middle adolescents and adults who determinedly puffed their way through sessions looking for the same results. There were the fit but casual regulars, representing the majority, who came as a means of keeping themselves in good shape, and then there were the hardcore trainees, lean and fierce, hoping to fight one day, or else already with a number of matches under their belts. These latter were mostly boys, some of whom had started when their age was in the single digits, and for a number of them the dream of one day becoming a Muay Thai champion had more to do with the prospect of earning money for their family than with personal glory. 

Suda was in the category of casual regulars. She had started going to the gym two years before, pushing herself hard, building greater and greater stamina, bruising her elbows, knees and shins only for them to heal up tougher than before, and maintaining a smooth muscularity in her arms, legs and abdomen. Muay Thai tested the whole body: the trainers admired her ferocity and encouraged it by challenging her relentlessly, swiping at her with their pads, aiming blows at her that she needed to dodge and respond to with counterattacks, all in order to not wobble away from the ring with new aches. 

A session consisted of five rounds with the trainers, plus all the bag work she wanted. It cost her 250 baht. At four sessions a week, it was more than she or her mother were able to spare for a non-necessity like practicing Muay Thai. 

Her mother insisted it was a boys’ sport, and that Suda could keep in shape just as well by jogging. She’d never seen the fire that sprung into her daughter’s eyes as she assaulted the trainers’ pads, with their peeling outer material that scratched angry red lines into her knees and elbows, and the tape that couldn’t prevent their stuffing from being smashed from torn seams into the air of the boxing ring. Her mother didn’t know the moments of satisfaction that roared in Suda’s chest as those bits of stuffing rained down around her and the trainer, as fragments of it dusted her face like a swarm of comets battening the ancient Earth. She’d never seen the violent, euphoric flush that came into Suda’s face as she sweated something like the ocean out of her body into briny puddles on the mats, then replaced it with fresh, pure water. 

Because they couldn’t afford her four weekly sessions, not just the two of them like it was, her grandfather made it possible. He worked in Bangkok, and sent cash each month, tucked into an envelope mailed through the regular post. 

But now the money had stopped coming. There had been an accident, and her grandfather had to pay to make amends. He believed he might have to work, and pay every baht he could spare, until he died. Only then could he make right what had happened, and only then, either by death or fulfillment of his debt, would he be able to forgive himself. 

On the day that Suda finished her last paid session at the gym, she informed her favorite of the trainers, swallowing at a lump in her throat, that it was the last time she’d be able to practice with him for the foreseeable future. 

The trainer was an ex-fighter, shorter in stature than Suda, but compact with a brutal lifetime’s worth of iron muscle, dense as a collapsed star, beneath a fleshy outer layer that had come to blanket it with age. He wore his hair in a top knot and had a permanent scar over one eyebrow where an opponent’s elbow, in some decades-old match, had split the flesh down to the bone. He never spoke of his glory days, if indeed he’d achieved true glory in his past, as was the same with many retired fighters. His nickname was Lek, and he never revealed his full one—at least not the students, who might be able to Google it for news archives spilling biographical information on his warrior past. 

“Ahhh,” he said. His gaze, like that of an old bull elephant, drifted from Suda’s face to take in some unperceivable sight far beyond the walls of the gym. Really, she knew, he was looking inward rather than out, turning things over in his mind, flipping rocks to peer beneath them, unlocking treasure chests with heavy golden keys. “Ah,” he said again, in a lower tone. 

Lek had taken a few too many strikes to the head in his time, Suda had heard from another student, and it had jostled loose some of the stitching in his brain.  

The old trainer brought his eyes back to hers. “Kicks are free,” he said. 

“Free?” she asked curiously.

“Yep.” 

He screwed up his eyes, leaping back to grasp at the thought that was eluding him. 

“Your best and worst, it’s your roundhouse kick,” he said after a fashion. “It’s your best because your technique is better than most, almost textbook, and worst because it could be much more powerful than it is. You need to master it.” 

“How? I won’t have all of you to teach me anymore.”

“You don’t need us to hold a pad for you and tell you when to do what.” 

He paused, jutted his jaw out to suck his top lip beneath his remaining bottom teeth, then let it go again. 

“You go find a banana tree,” he continued, “somewhere away from people, and kick it even if it feels like your shin bone will snap. Yell if you need to yell while you do it, and if you bleed, wrap your leg up in some bandages. You might get scars on your shins.”

“I don’t care.”

“Good. Then you keep kicking that banana tree like it’s your enemy, like it’s everything and everyone that ever hurt you. That’s how you get stronger. Kick it enough and someday you might break that banana tree. And then you find another one.”

“I will. I’ll do that.”

Lek nodded. “I thought so.”

“Kicks are free.”

“Of course they are.”

So Suda picked a banana tree that stood alone at the edge of the forest near her home. Tensing in anticipation of pain, she kicked its trunk in experimental slow motion. She tried again, with slightly more force, leveraging her body weight as she’d done tens of thousands of times before, then faster on the next strike, rotating her entire body to whip her shin down upon the hapless trunk with a sharp whump. This time pain splashed across the point of impact, but didn’t extend into her leg, as a break to the bone would do. This was surface pain. Below the skin, she was harder than the trunk. 

Suda kicked banana trees six evenings a week, and she picked up a part-time job with a sidewalk vendor papaya salad and Isaan sausage for three hours a day after school, stowing away some meager savings, until the owner of the food cart had to suddenly pack up, throw the stall and grill in the river, and get out of town overnight, telling her that, for her own good, if anyone asked she didn’t know him and had never sold a single sausage under his employ, and that she should insist under any and all circumstances that she’d been misidentified. He never told her where he was going or who the anyone was, and she didn’t hear from him again. 

***

Kamon arrived at Hat Yai airport, the gateway to Thailand’s far south, with the clothes on his back, the remainder of his life’s savings folded in his pants pocket, and a shoulder bag hastily stuffed with spare clothes. By the time he’d made his way into the next province, he had even less, having stamped his phone to pieces behind a 7-Eleven and run a 30-baht fridge magnet over the busted parts. He hadn’t considered it when fleeing town, but there was in fact no telling whether those sons of bitches might be able to track his location via the phone, regardless that he had blocked them on his apps. The Isaan Sky network, as innocuous as their name sounded, were known to be ruthless in collecting their dues, or, it was rumored, claiming lives as compensation. Damn if they didn’t maintain interest rates that put the banks to shame, though—it’d been enticing at the time, until the fields he bought dried up and blew away on the wind during two years of drought. 

They wouldn’t guess at him fleeing to the Red Zone of all places, or if they did they would bet on him returning before long. But it was Kamon’s steadfast conviction that anyone with a delicious enough idea and a touch of business savvy could carve out a living just about anywhere, extremist hotspot or not. 

He slept on a beach the first night, and awoke under the light of a full moon with nocturnal black crabs scrabbling about his legs, taking occasional nips at him. A coconut from the tree he was under had fallen, lodging itself in the sand inches from his head, and it could very well have killed him, he estimated, had it struck his skull. To be killed by a coconut would be a stupid death, he thought. There were more hanging in a bunch several meters above his head: another could have snapped free at any moment and done him in, so it seemed he had the crabs to thank for waking him prematurely and giving him a chance to move. As a reward he decided not to smash any of them, but the moment he wiggled his way into a sitting position they scuttled away with terrific speed, living droplets of moon shadow, and disappeared with spider-like haste into little holes they’d scooped out of the beach while he slept. 

Kamon felt utterly helpless, more so than he had at any point since ditching the poor girl, Suda, and getting the hell out of the northeast, leaving the town that raised him behind. The crabs were too fast, and he couldn’t have smashed one even if he wanted to. Any power he’d ever held had been stripped away. 

He arrived in the town of Yala the next day, determined to turn his life around. If not a reverse of fortunes, he might at least be able to give the wheels of fate a good spin. He wondered what kind of shit he’d pulled in his last life to find himself in these dire straits. Maybe he’d been a crab that pinched a sleeping monk—not to warn him about falling coconuts or anything, but just to be a nuisance. 

He had just under 10,000 baht to his name. He used 2,500 to buy a second-hand food cart he spotted in a welder’s shop. Its axels were rusty and two of its wheels had crazy wobbles to them (incidentally serving to balance each other out somewhat), but once he’d utilized the water hose at the gas station, blasting away pigeon splatter and a sedimentary layer of dust, he had a relatively hygienic looking piece of equipment. The next day he purchased a simple grill for a grand, much like the one he’d disposed of in the river back home, except it was sixth or seventh-hand by the look of it, bearing a coat of blackened fried grease substantial enough to induce carcinogen-related stomach cancer in a rhinoceros. He scrubbed it off with a steel-bristled brush that cost him an additional 150 baht. With that done, he purchased some charcoal, a mixing bowl, a spoon, wooden skewers, and at last the food ingredients he needed to start making Isaan sausage. He’d give these people sausage with heights of flavor that they’d never dreamed possible for a ten-baht meat product. But in the meantime, while fermentation was taking place, he needed to get selling. He bought some pork shoulder, green onion, fish sauce, limes, chilies, a bag of Ajinomoto MSG, and the rest of what he needed to make waterfall pork. When he’d saved up some money from the waterfall pork, as well as the Isaan sausage, he’d acquire the ingredients for his papaya salad. He’d make papaya salad that people would think about, tossing and turning, as they went to sleep; papaya salad that would make people ruminate on the years of life they wasted by not regularly eating Kamon’s signature papaya salad; papaya salad that they’d sell their gold for if they had no other way to acquire it. He was going to bring a taste of Isaan to Yala like it had never been brought before. 

Thinking these happy thoughts, Kamon, with 300 baht in his pocket, went to sleep on a park bench the night before the official opening of his food cart. The next morning he rolled up to a street corner that had caught his eye more than once as he hustled about on his shopping spree. Sun in the morning, shade in the afternoon. The perfect spot. 

Things progressed slowly at first. Most of the passerby, he discovered, refused to touch his pork in respect to their Islamic faith. After some days of gritting his teeth and purchasing chicken thighs to throw on his grill (not his specialty and never was), he forgave himself for not educating himself to any degree about Muslims before fleeing south, or before destroying his phone for that matter. Those in the Buddhist or more secular minority who took the culinary plunge, however, plunged hard. It was likely they were telling their friends, because his customer base expanded from those that were working nearby, or regularly commuting past, to individuals he only ever saw when they were there handing over money for the goodness he was peddling. 

The southerners were big spice fans. Some of them requested that their waterfall pork be spicier, while some practically demanded it. It was all the same to Kamon. He had the means to give them what they wanted. With a signature blend of dried and fresh chilies, he made waterfall pork so spicy that show-off daredevil teenagers all but choked on it in delirious bouts of lip-smacking ecstasy; so spicy that he watched a grown man lose control of his tear ducts and apologize to his disillusioned son for trying to look like a hero; so spicy that the 7-Eleven two blocks down began stacking bottled water in front of the store, in order that customers could pick them up and start drinking immediately on the way to the payment counter inside. So infernal, so merciless was the heat that his waterfall pork visited upon adventurous mouths that some of his initially hardcore customers lost their nerve and took to having him tone it down, citing fake-believe reasons like ulcerated stomachs and intolerable fire diarrhea. Others loved it. Some came back for more even after they were defeated once. They were masochists. They were fighters. They were endorphin addicts. Many were all three. 

His Isaan sausage, once his pride, was a modest hit when he rolled it out, but as the months went by it didn’t achieve the numbers of addicted consumers, the adoring fans, that his waterfall pork did. Nor was his papaya salad met with any great success. The sausage and papaya salad still sold is satisfactory amounts alongside his boring grilled chicken, supplementing his income well, but Kamon’s waterfall pork was the talk of the town. His profits expanded and his savings grew. 

One day a lone cop waltzed up to his stall, giving him some nonsense about his food cart being unregistered. Kamon was well aware there was no such official registration, but looking down at the man disaffectedly (for the cop was a few inches shorter), the heat from the sausage grill rippling the 30-degree air between them, he dug into his apron’s front pocket and produced five crisp 1000-baht banknotes. The cop’s eyes bugged out, so much that he didn’t even bother to look around him to see if anyone was watching—though, fortunately for him, Kamon had already done just that. He pushed the notes into the policeman’s hand, the owner of which seemed to be shrinking now right before his eyes.

“Do we still have a registration problem, officer?”

“N-no. I’ll . . . I will . . . inform the department that you’ve, er, been officially—”

“That’s great. Really great news,” said Kamon, holding the squirrel-sized authority figure with the fixed gaze of a rearing cobra. “And y’know what? Since I’m fortunate enough to have a moment of your time, I was thinking of putting a sign up here.” He jabbed a thumb at the brick wall behind him. “K’s Corner, I think it’ll say.” Like magic, two new 1000-baht notes flashed in his hands. “I wouldn’t face any registration problems now, would I?”

The cop eyed the money like a mouse surveying a peanut. “No sir, I can see quite clearly that this wall here doesn’t currently bear any signage, so I don’t foresee a community conflict.”

“Wonderful!” exclaimed Kamon, stuffing the notes into the officer’s eager hands. “Hey, do you like waterfall pork, sir?”

The officer snapped out of the daze his sudden financial enrichment appeared to have put him in. “I’m a Muslim,” he said. “I don’t eat pork.”

“Oh, of course,” said Kamon, flaring his nostrils as he drew in the aroma of succulence wafting off the grill. “It’s just that many find my cooking quite delicious, so I wouldn’t want our interaction today to dissuade you from trying it—on me, of course, to thank you for your explanation of the vendor registration protocols.”

The cop glanced around shiftily, as he might have done earlier, to note any possible witnesses of this interaction. 

“But anyway,” said Kamon with a shrug, “you don’t eat pork.”

“I’ll take some, for a friend,” said the officer quickly, the words spilling from his mouth like flood waters over a riverbank. “I can give it to a friend on my way home. Non-Muslim friend. Buddhist.”

“That’s a fine idea,” said Kamon, speaking with a flourish of Isaan dialect. “I’m sure he’ll like that.”

Not long after, Kamon had his “K’s Corner” sign displayed proudly above him. There was no more bother from the authorities, or from the old widow whose wall it was, for that matter—an occasional free lunch of chicken and papaya salad ensured that. 

He had what the people wanted, pure and simple. 

Kamon’s Isaan had come to Yala. 

***

The first thing the monstrous bird did was kill a temple dog. 

The monks had ferried the crate immediately around the back of the temple, out of sight of the road which served as the village’s main street. Fortunately, the creature had been dropped off under the burning sun of mid-afternoon, and it was April, the hottest month of the year, so most of the villagers were relaxing in pools of shade or dozing their way through the heat, trying to keep their movements to a minimum either way. It wasn’t a time that inspired curiosity.

One of them hid at the back of the crate under the excuse that he was holding it steady, while the other two, positioning themselves protectively at its sides, raised the large sliding door. The dogs were going berserk, hackles raised, lips pulled back, growling at what was emerging, but for a breathless instant the two monks who had lifted the door saw nothing. Sweat beaded across their bald heads, running down their faces and the back of the their necks, soaking into their robes. 

Then it stalked out of the box, and even the dogs shut-up, either in wonder or utter confusion at what was before them. 

The bird was some hellish yet fantastical creation, like a creature from the mythical Himmapan forest. It was indeed a bit like an ostrich or an emu in shape, but its body was covered with long, oily-looking black feathers that hung from it like fur, and from this sheeny puff rose a vivid blue neck, with red wattles hanging from the throat. Wild brown eyes blinked at the brightness with avian disorientation, and above them a massive bony crest was situated like a narrow war helmet. A long cruel beak seemed to frown at the world. The bird’s legs were frighteningly thick and strong. It took two steps and paused. 

The monk who had been cowering at the back of the crate, taking in the shocked hush that had fallen, came cautiously around the side, and he had only just laid eyes on the animal when the brief bi-species awe broke and one of the dogs, directly in the bird’s path, summoned his ancient ancestor and let out a howl that would once have signaled a wolf pack to advance upon its quarry. 

Before anyone knew what was happening, the bird took two more nimble steps and launched itself forward, legs a blur in front of it, and struck the dog. There was an immediate yelp of pain, and then the poor mutt was rolling on the ground in agony with its lifeblood pouring out of a gaping gash in its neck. The thirsty earth drank the blood as it thrashed, and the other dogs, whining in mortal terror, bolted away with tails between their legs. By the time the bird’s victim stopped its violent movements, only seconds later, its fur was red. It lay panting, tongue lolling in the dirt, and then with a final hitched breath it became still, eyes glazing. 

The bird watched dispassionately, standing motionless, then it turned around. The three monks put the crate between it and them so fast that later none of them actually remembered running back there. It was, for each of them, as though the dog had died, the bird had done a 180, and then, just like that, they were all squeezing as tightly as physically possible behind the crate, two of them looking around the edge with one eye each to track the beast’s movements. 

“Did you see its feet? Did you see its feet?” the youngest was gasping. 

“Shhh! Keep it down!”

“It knows exactly where we are!”

“Shush, both of you! It’s com—no, wait, it’s . . . I think it’s going back into the box.”

The youngest monk, who’d had the clearest look at the bird’s deadly toes, now plucked up some of the courage that had settled in the vicinity of his ankles, and said, “We have to slide the door down, trap it in there.”

They edged forward, and, seeing that the monster had indeed returned to the shelter of the crate, grabbed the sides of the door and slammed it down. 

They scooped up the blood-soaked earth with a shovel and immediately buried the dog in the field behind their living quarters. It would do no good for anyone in the village to know what had happened here, or to be aware of the animal they had in their possession, especially not the children, who might be tempted to sneak over for a close look, or—bless their hearts—to free the imprisoned creature. 

The rest of the dogs seemed to lose interest in the crate, which, as the sun waned into late afternoon, the trio placed in the lengthening shade along the back wall of the temple.

The monks retired to their quarters, where they were ruminating over what was to be done. They had one smartphone between them, and the youngest was typing the bird’s physical characteristics into a search engine. 

“A cassowary,” he announced at last. “It’s called a cassowary.”

“What’s it say about it?”

“That it’s the most dangerous bird in the world.”

“Oh dear.”

“Fairly evident…”

“It’s native to northeastern Australia.”

“Well how on earth did it get here then?”

“Who knows?”

“Probably came as an exotic pet. It might’ve been in its egg at the time. It comes from an egg like a chicken, right?”

“I don’t know, I’m still reading.”

“Imagine the size of that egg.”

The bird needed to eat, and despite the monks’ ill feelings toward it for killing the dog, at dawn the following morning they set about on their regular alms round through the village, hoping to garner some offerings it would find palatable. They received a few fresh eggs, as usual, at the Leelapun family’s open-air restaurant, where hens wandered about the grounds pursuing crickets and pecking at stones, and they were given a good amount of fresh fruit in addition to vegetables and rice, along with a baggie each of hot egg noodles. Returning to the temple, they nabbed a large brown spider which had been looming for days in a high corner of their toilet, but, after watching it scrabble pitifully against the inside of the glass jar, released it at the base of the Bodhi tree instead of condemning it to death-by-beak. 

They raised the crate’s door about a foot in height, all three crouching to get a view beneath. Through the opening the cassowary’s sturdy feet were visible, each with a freakishly long, spike-like inner toenail, a formidable elongated middle toe ending in another cruel claw, and a smaller outer toe bearing its own artery-severing tip.  

They decided to try the fruit first, having cut the flesh of a pineapple up into small chunks. They placed the chunks in a wooden bowl, and with a quick movement, all eyes on those deadly lighting-fast feet, slid the plate inside. 

There was no reaction from the bird at first. Its feet didn’t budge. It was as though the cassowary had frozen solid. After a breathless minute, a cautious head dropped into view, and a large bronze eye peered out at them. The cassowary nudged at the pineapple bits with its beak—tasting them, perhaps, though they couldn’t see its tongue—before taking some into its mouth. The head withdrew, but returned once the bird had swallowed, and it took another bite of the sweet yellow cubes. 

When the pineapple was gone, they retrieved the plate with the aid of a stick, none daring to stick their hand into the domain of the beast. They placed two of the fresh eggs on it and slid it back under.

This time the cassowary took longer to deliberate, poking at the eggs, taking a break, and leaning its heavy crested head down to poke again, until at last it broke a hole in one and jammed its beak into the golden contents, seeming to relish it. Having shattered both the eggs, it appeared to grow frustrated at not being able to lap up the spilled goo, and flipped the plate over. 

“Maybe we should boil them first,” said the youngest. 

Once again they retrieved the plate, loaded it this time with a pile of diced papaya, and slipped it back under to let the cassowary feast. Despite the murderous predisposition it had evinced, it appeared to be fine with a frugivorous lunch.  

Over the following days they experimented with various fruit, all which it consumed ravenously. The occasional visitor to the temple who by chance circumnavigated the building would stare curiously at the crate, but never approach close enough to touch it. If one of the monks was nearby he would continue on with his business as though not a single thing were notable about the presence of the mysterious wooden container, determined not to make eye contact with the onlooker so as not to invite questions. 

In the evenings, before sleep, they debated whether to inform the village headman about the cassowary, sometimes concluding that they very probably would consider it highly feasible on the morrow—but after their morning meditation, and alms collection in the pale dawn, telling the headman, who was dually renowned for both his honesty and his poignant lack of formal education, seemed like it would be a needless addition to his burden of political responsibility, considering that he was known to be deeply engaged at the time with the logistics and costs of developing a new playground for the local children. 

As it were, it was some of those very children who would be the undoing of the secret. As the weeks passed, word had gotten around the village about the big wooden box behind the temple, but it was hypothesized about most fantastically by the elementary school kids, who were on holiday that month and had time to spare, inventing wondrous rumors between their sweaty games of hide-and-seek and gleeful use of the large plastic curly slide, which was the first piece of equipment to arrive in the headman’s planned playground. Three fifth grade students, two boys and a girl, nicknamed Pon, Boss and Meow respectively, covertly resolved to find out once and for all what was in the crate, and rather than rudely press the monks for answers, they were determined to do so with their own eyes, under cover of night. 

They snuck out of their houses on the agreed-upon midnight. The sky was free of clouds, and a fat yellow moon hung over the land, making dark tidal waves out of the lush hills surrounding the village, as though the latter were dreaming soundly of an Atlantean fate, eternally paused in the moment before being swallowed. 

They shushed one another repeatedly, each stifling their own giggles as they made their way up the road, seeing first the high roof of the temple glittering in the buttermilk lunar glow, then the rest of it, as the jackfruit trees gave way to the main entrance. They had all been coming here since before they could remember, first brought along as babies in their parents’ arms, and hoped that the dogs, their sleeping forms scattered about the grounds like lumps of sod, would detect their familiar scents before panicking at the sound of intruders crossing the lot. Their bet paid off more or less: there was a short yip from one of the dogs furthest away, but others rose to their feet silently and trotted over to them without a sound, tails wagging. Some merely opened their eyes, observed them from afar, and went back to sleep again, content that their adopted home wasn’t being invaded by bad actors. In truth, this could partly be attributed to the fact that the last time they’d gotten their dander up in response to a suspicious being, it had ended with one of their companions whimpering its life out in a pool of hot blood, and they’d been significantly cowed concerning knee-jerk responses to the unknown since then. 

The kids went around the back of the temple to the crate, treading with extreme softness. They didn’t switch on the flashlight that Boss had filched from a shelf in his father’s motorbike repair shop (this was back when parents in the village thought the idea of buying smartphones for eleven-year-olds was fairly ludicrous, not to mention a pointless expense, so one traditional flashlight was all they had, as opposed to three phones with flashlight features). 

Though they’d never seen the crate opened, they’d noted the sliding panel on their daytime scouting missions and knew how they were going to go about it. Sidling up next to the crate, they placed their ears against the boards on one side. They didn’t hear anything coming from within, but as Pon started to whisper something, Boss suddenly shushed him. 

“What?” asked Pon, seeing Boss’s strange expression. 

“You didn’t hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“I don’t know . . . it’s gone now. It sounded like thunder.”

“Is there supposed to be rain tonight?” asked Meow.

“Don’t know,” said Pon. 

As planned beforehand, Meow crouched in her place a couple meters back from the panel, flashlight held at the end of an arm that was already beginning to tremble. Pon and Boss took hold of one side of the panel each and tested it, raising it by an inch. 

“See anything yet?” whispered Pon.

“No,” said Meow, clicking the light on at last. “Raise it more.”

The boys lifted the panel higher. It didn’t slide smoothly, the crate being of rough construction, and they had to jiggle it continuously. They stopped once the opening was about as high as their knees. 

“How about now?” said Boss. He couldn’t see Meow’s face clearly behind the sharp glare of the light, but if he had he would have seen her mixed expression of wonder and dawning fright. 

“Yeah, there’s . . . it’s like claws, I think.”

“Claws?”

“And lots of black stuff, like long hair—no, it’s not hair. What is this?”

“Is it moving?”

“I don’t know, raise it just a little more.”

“There’s that rumbling again,” said Boss.

“The thunder?” asked Pon. “I don’t hear anything.”

“No, listen,” hissed Meow. “I hear it too.”

But no sooner had Meow spoken than Pon got fed up with waiting. “This is stupid,” he said, his voice breaking just above a whisper. “I wanna see this thing, now.” He heaved on the panel, jiggling it impatiently, and Boss, not seeing a choice but to help, lifted and jiggled as well. In one final burst of effort they had raised it to the height of their chests. 

“Oh!” cried Meow, falling off her haunches and scrabbling backward in the dirt. The beam jittered spastically, light falling on the inhabitant of the crate in strobe-like flashes. 

“Hold it steady!” said Pon, as he and Boss craned their heads down to finally see what they’d come for. 

“What in the . . .” started Boss, and then the cassowary, still sitting, raised its crested head, its furious copper eyes staring into the light, pupils shrunk to soulless black dots. 

“Holy crap!” cried Pon. 

Meow was already on her feet. “C-close the door back down!”

But just as quickly as she’d stood, the cassowary also launched itself upright onto its scaly legs. 

“Screw this!” Boss burst out, and in a cloud of dust he was gone, bolting for the road. Meow and Pon tore across the lot behind him, not so much crying out as moaning at the edge of tears, sure that at any second they’d feel the claws of the creature digging into their backs. 

The dogs went mad at the commotion, sensing the children’s panic, and woke the monks at last. By the time the latter had thrown their robes on and stumbled out of their quarters at the far end of the grounds, the kids were long gone, but the dogs were still yipping and howling. Intuitively, they went to check on the cassowary’s crate, the moon lighting the night up bright enough that they needed no other illumination to take stock of the situation. 

The crate was gaping open. The cassowary was gone. 

***

Bangkok was chaos. Organized chaos, but chaos. It was to Chiang Mai what Chiang Mai was to Nung. Gop’s fingers and forearms ached from her tight grip on the scooter’s replacement handlebars. She felt metallic vehicle atoms dance with those of her own body as traffic shaved by. Trucks, cars and Range Rovers nipped at her rear tire. She felt death hovering close at all times and wished for the comforting jangle of her father’s amulets, missing the dull ache of their weight around her neck. She calmed her nerves with the thought of her guardian angel. Whether the thewada had accompanied her or not, perhaps its influence extended beyond its terrestrial location. 

“Maybe you were never there at all,” she said, barely able to hear her own words over the rush of wind in her ears. “But I feel like you were, and maybe that’s just as important, and if you ar—HOLY!” A mangy dog stepped gingerly into the street and she swerved over the center line to avoid it, crossing back just in time to miss an oncoming Honda.  

A rickety songthaew blew past her in a pulsating flurry of Isaan music, so close she could have high-fived any of the schoolgirls sitting on the bench seat nearest her.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m pushing my luck. Let’s get out of here.”

She passed out of Bangkok on a south-bound highway. There was a magnificence to the capital, no doubt, but it wasn’t for her. She couldn’t imagine working in such a place, or fitting into its frenetic bustle, or being in that traffic day after day. It would make a madwoman out of her. 

She had an idea of where she was going, for the Gulf was calling now. She had never been to the beach, never dipped her toes in salt water, never walked on true sand, unless the pulverized rock at a river’s bend back home counted as such.  

Cha-Am, Phetchaburi province. She knew it because Headman Sangsorn had taken his family on holiday there once and never shut-up about it. It was nice, apparently. Everyone should go if they got a chance. Great seafood. Something about eating a horseshoe crab (whatever that was), better prices than on some of those damn mafia islands, blah blah blah.  

She reached her destination a couple hours later, feeling chills of pleasure the first moment she stepped barefoot on the beach, and when those warm waters lapped over her toes, then around her legs. She forgot about how crookedly she stood without her shoe extension, what a spectacle it surely made to the gaggles of teenagers and beautiful families basking in the sun and surf. For the first time in her life, mesmerized by the interminable lines of gentle waves, and the small boats that slipped painterly across the horizon, she sensed a phantom potential for absolution from all the sufferings of life. 

“I was meant to be here, wasn’t I?” she asked her unseen angel. “Did you guide me here to give me new perspectives?”

The breeze continued off the water, unchanged. Families laughed. The boats followed their courses across the baby blue horizon. 

“Well, I’ll make my place here anyway,” she said, looking around. She saw an old woman making her way down the beach then, and further on a wiry man, both wearing shoes, both gloved and clothed up to their necks to protect against the sun, only their leathery faces exposed in shadow beneath wide-brimmed hats. The woman bore dozens of bags of cotton candy, strung in bundles from a rod that rested across the back of her shoulders. The man carried a sheet of wire mesh hung with dried squid for snacking. 

That’s what she could do. She would spend her days just so on the beach, sand underfoot in all its gritty softness, and cooling her feet in the vast, living Gulf. 

Gop waited until the old woman was returning up the beach before approaching her. The latter trudged with her head down, stopping to display her cotton candy to the visitors she was passing, moving on as soon as she was met with disinterest. 

“What? Where’re you from?” asked the woman, casting a suspicious glance at her from under the frayed straw brim of her hat. 

“Er, from Nung.”

“Huh?”

“Up north. Chiang Rai.”

“This job’s for locals. Beach jobs are for locals.” She softened a little. “That’s the way it is, deary. This ain’t your home, see?”

“But it could be.”

“Nuh uh. Could be, yeh. But not working the beach.” She looked up and took in Gop’s face for the first time, squinting, eyes milky and faded from cataracts. “Well you’re just a young thing, ain’t ya? Not a thousand years old like me. Got some prettiness about you. Why, you can get better work than this. Nothing fun about the beach. Been walking it twenty years, ever since my . . . well, since he died, y’see, my husband, and the grandkids never did that well for themselves, not enough to take care of grandma. It’s hot out here all the time. The sun just burns and burns. Beach isn’t the same for us as it is for you, a woman from the north…”

Gop lost track of what the ancient beach seller was saying, still thinking about how she’d been called pretty, even if it was only a little bit pretty. No one in her life had ever said such a thing to her, or even about her, as far as she was aware. 

“Pii,” she interrupted, returning her focus to what she determined had become rambling. “Where else could I work around here? Do you know anywhere hiring?”

The woman, unperturbed, perhaps even accustomed to being cut off amidst voicing her thoughts, appeared to size her up all over again. 

“Hmm, well now, let me think.” She turned her cloudy squint on the sparkling gulf, jaw moving up and down behind closed lips as though she were chewing some daydreamed morsel. “OK. There’s this wildlife refuge place, y’see? Not so far from here. Can’t walk it, but can drive. They’ve got elephants there and all kinds of other animals. Animals from all over, they say, like a zoo. Got some young foreigners out there volunteering for ‘em. Westerners love the elephants, see? Got big investors too, they say—rich old farang that want to help the elephants. Money just rolling through that place. As a Thai, you show up and prove yourself, maybe they’ll give you a job, yeah? Not volunteer. I mean, they’ll pay you, I guess. You speak English?”

“About ten words of it.”

“So no.”

“No.”

“Welp, you go and try anyway. See what you can do. If I was young and full o’ gumption like you, I’d do it too. Make friends with the elephants.”

Gop thanked the beach seller, went down to soak her feet in the salt water once again, then said farewell and see you again to the beach before returning to her scooter. 

Stopping for directions along the way, mostly from roadside pineapple vendors, it wasn’t hard to find the wildlife refuge. Dismounting the scooter in its modest dirt lot, the first thing she noticed was the sheer number of young Westerners, most in their 20s by the look of it, roaming about carrying tools, bags of feed, buckets, and pushing wheelbarrows full of what appeared from its fibrousness to be elephant droppings. The first one who saw her, blonde and sunburned, put down what she was carrying and offered her a bright sawasdee ka. 

“Sawasdee ka,” Gop responded. “Boss where?”

“Boss? Owainowatchameen—offisisrighdoverthere.”

Gop had little clue what smattering of words had just issued forth from the girl’s mouth, but she got the point that she should go through the door being motioned to.

There was a foreign boss and a Thai boss, joint owners of the refuge. The Thai boss, following an impromptu interview, agreed to hire her as a hand on a probationary basis, but she’d have to learn as she went and earn her place through a show of effort and dedication. 

“You’re going to have to work with elephants,” he explained. “And that means feeding, washing, shoveling dung, help with the construction of new enclosures—whatever’s asked of you, basically. Lots of other animals that need daily feeding and care as well. No downtime here. Understand?”

Gop assured that she did. 

She was given the grand tour that same afternoon. Besides the elephants, which were the main draw for visitors, the inhabitants of the refuge were a mix of abandoned exotic pets, illegally imported and seized wildlife, and injured animals either undergoing rehabilitation or enjoying a permanent stay. Gop was introduced to the resident sun bear, a tiger, an orangutan, a crocodile, gibbons, otters, parrots, iguanas and others. The elephants themselves had been rescued from the tourism and logging industries, save for a couple young ones that had been born there in recent years. The rescued individuals were typically quite old, having suffered abuse and hard labor for most of their lives. They displayed varying levels of trust toward humans and different volatilities of mood. 

Completing their winding circuit of the property, they approached a final enclosure cut into the jungle, down a short path from the workers’ dining area. 

“This one’s name is Seriphap,” said her new boss. “Latest arrival, so we keep her close to the HQ for better observation.”

Gop scanned the grounds beyond the fence. “I don’t even see her.”

“Right, that’s the thing about Seriphap. She stays behind that bend in the trees over there where there’s a wallow. We leave her food up here by the fence, and she comes up to eat in the middle of the night when its quietest. Turns tail and heads right back if she catches wind of anyone out here watching.”

“Why’s she like that?”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t trust us an inch. Humans, I mean. The riding zoo she was at couldn’t break her when she was younger, so they kept her hidden and chained up with a leg iron. Barely took it off her whole life.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Gets worse. They artificially inseminated her for decades to produce babies, but she started miscarrying too much and I guess they were planning to euthanize. We got tipped off anonymously about the whole thing, and they agreed to let us take her away in exchange for not getting the authorities involved.”

“Disgusting! Not the agreement. I mean the—”

“Yeah, it’s all messed up, but that’s how it is. We’re trying to earn her trust, but it’s going to happen on her own terms if it happens at all. She showed extreme aggression when we brought her in, so we don’t go walking too far into the enclosure to check on her. Remember that.”

Gop contacted her parents to let them know she’d found employment, and threw herself into her work. For weeks she dedicated herself to accumulating new skills, learning the ins and outs and idiosyncrasies of the animals. After some time, still having not laid eyes of Seriphap, she asked if she could be responsible for preparing and setting out the elephant’s food each evening. From that point on she did so, removing the iron deadbolt and letting herself through the gate into the enclosure, hauling in food and setting it neatly upon the ground near the entrance. When she had no subsequent chores to attend to, she bolted the heavy gate again and waited by the fence, watching for Seriphap until hunger or the evening mosquitos drove her away. The elephant never came while she was there, but like magic the food was always gone in the morning, with a scattering of wrinkly footprints and the occasional dung pile left in its place. 

Gop was apprehensive about dining with the foreign volunteers, worried that a group of them might try to engage her in conversation, only to laugh or grow flustered when she couldn’t understand. She always made her way to the dining area—an open-air deck with several long tables—just late enough that the majority of them had finished eating and gone on their way. 

One April evening, a couple months after starting at the refuge, she found herself alone as she finished her dinner. There had been much chatter going on earlier at one of the tables near the front, and as she approached it on her way out, she saw a copy of the Bangkok Post spread open upon it. 

Figures it’d be an English newspaper, she thought, regretful that she wouldn’t be able to take it away for some bedtime reading.   

As she drew up to the edge of the table, her gaze fell over the paper and her breath caught in her throat. There, on the center of the page and in high resolution, was the girl from Sisaket, the sausage-seller, flanked by a police officer on each side. Wondering if she was in trouble, Gop snatched up the paper to examine it more closely. Trouble didn’t exactly seem to be the case, as the police officers were smiling and so was the girl, albeit more subtly. She tried to puzzle out the headline. S-K-Y. Something about the sky. With a glance around, she slipped that page free from the rest of the paper, folding it carefully until it was small enough to slip into a pocket. She’d parse it more in her room tonight. 

Nightfall had mitigated the daytime’s oppressive heat, with the fragrant dark seeming to welcome her for a stroll. Still peckish, she took a brown-spotted banana from the communal fruit bowl and set off down the path toward Seriphap’s enclosure. She’d put the elephant’s food out at twilight, but wanted to return for a final peek before retiring for the night. 

Her steps on the footworn path were precarious even in daylight, so by night she hobbled with extra care, remembering where the dips and ruts were. She came to the fence and its bolted gate, beyond which the king’s feast of fruit and hay sat untouched as usual. 

A thought, one that had never come to her before, popped unbidden into her mind: I bridge the gap. 

What did that mean? she wondered. 

Then, all at once, she understood. It was she, Gop, who unlocked the gate and crossed into the Seriphap’s realm, leaving daily offerings of food. She traversed the space between the outside and the in, between this vaster world and that smaller one. 

She shuffled forward a step to lean against the fence. As she felt the bulge of the folded page in her pocket, a titanic extension of the first revelation struck her. She’d met the Sisaket girl, the girl of Sky, and the girl had gifted her with food. They’d connected, somehow, and now that girl was in the papers, to be known far and wide across the land. Her story could be playing on the evening news at that very moment. Thus Gop, through her, had connected Nung to the greater goings on of the country. She was the bridge. Even in her many years of ferrying goods in her wagon from person to person and place to place, she had always served as a fundamental element of connection. It was the hallmark of her life. 

I’ve always been the bridge, she thought, filled with an awe that moved in her like sun-warmed water through a cave. Leaving Nung, going south and east and south again, meeting the Sky girl, coming all the way here—it was all to show me what I already was and have always been. 

For a while she gazed up at the heavens, elbows resting on the fence. Creatures howled in the distance, night birds chirped, and insects flitted and sang, but before and around her all was still, like forces of calm had gathered in anticipation, waiting for her to speak. All in her imagination, surely, but she felt compelled to say something, if only for herself. 

“It’s okay that you were never there,” she told the thewada softly, lest her voice carry up to the workers quarters and she be taken for crazy. “I understand now. My life had meaning all along. And it’s such wonderful meaning. I’m not going to ask for any signs, because I don’t need one. I know what I know now.”

Upon her words, a shard of activity broke the stillness. Across the grassy expanse of the enclosure there was movement in the dark, dark against dark, slow, a plodding form drawing toward her. 

The elephant appeared old, for even from this distance Gop could see something was wrong with her walk. At any moment she expected the creature would spot her and make a hasty retreat. Perhaps Seriphap had poor eyesight. All was lit only by moonlight now, and Gop was small. 

It was a pronounced limp, she saw. The whole front of Seriphap’s body bobbed up and down with it, but she continued steadily forward, her details resolving more and more. 

Oh… 

All thoughts but one fled from Gop’s mind. She was fixated on the elephant’s front right leg, by far shorter than the other three. 

The leg iron. You were bound since you were young. It stunted you…

“Seriphap,” she said. “Are we so much the same? Are you another bridge?”

The great elephant stopped as it reached its food. She grazed the hay with the end of her trunk, holding Gop in her gaze, rust-colored eyes made black in the gloom. 

“Seriphap,” said Gop again. She held out the banana she’d carried. The elephant raised its trunk, and the finger at its tip found the fruit in Gop’s hand. Gop stroked the muscular appendage as it withdrew, feeling its power and intricacy.

“Thank you,” she whispered, whether to an angel or an elephant she couldn’t be sure. There were forces in the world meant to be interpreted, not understood, and they took as many forms as life itself.  

***

Lom didn’t allow himself to sleep while on duty. He could only say that he earned his rightful pay if he remained awake, regardless of how far his thoughts tended to drift, mingling with memories in a fog world not unlike that of half-recalled dreams. If he felt sleep threatening to overtake him, he would get up and walk about, stretching his legs and performing exercises that were supposed to keep him limber into the twilight of old age. 

As the witching hour approached, the late-night radio host finished his shift, leaving a playlist of songs to run until dawn. An old Isaan love song was on now, one that was first popular in Lom’s early twenties. It was about a man with a hot temper lambasting his young wife in frustration for acting distant, unaware that she’s been diagnosed with a terminal illness which she can’t bring herself to speak to him about, her dreams of the long married life they’d so recently begun now shattered. A longtime user of transistor radios, Lom used to hear the song often as he walked between his father’s fields, as he fished for giant river prawns on lazy afternoons, and as he washed himself after long days toiling under the baking sun, able to enjoy the sad and beautiful drama of the story and its sentiments by virtue of it being no closer to his life than tales about the Phaya Naga serpent in the Mekong. He didn’t know at the time, of course, how that song foreshadowed events to come, even though he was preparing to propose to his sweetheart in those days and was conscious of how quick to anger he could be. 

The first ghost to visit, he knew, would be that of his wife, dead thirty years. He could already feel her drawing close, floating beneath the night’s solemn darkness, its soft tranquility, preparing to reveal herself to him. 

The song wound down, ended, and the next picked up immediately, another hit from those days, the kind that Lom once danced to after knocking back lao khao whisky with a gaggle of friends. It could have been released years after the first, but it belonged, amidst the fleeting history of his youth, to the same era. Tonight Lom barely registered its words, gazing distantly at the iron gate of the property, which could deny only the passage of the living. Eyes swam out of the gloom between the bars, and he cried out, not in fear but in misery, regret, utter sadness. They were the same eyes that had haunted the stony corridors of his soul since long before her death—before even the birth of their son. 

They were hurt, those eyes. So deeply, confusedly hurt. Betrayed but not vengeful, disillusioned but not bearing hate—the light of a young woman’s dreams dimmed in them for all time. She’d never understood what it was she did wrong. She hadn’t understood, because she’d in truth done nothing to earn his malevolence, nothing that deserved his foul rage, his blows, his words that tore her down, stripped her naked and ravaged the beauty in her mind, below the face whose suppleness diminished to give way not to laugh lines, but frown lines, under a head of hair which thinned prematurely as she descended, for her remaining days, into a vortex from which she could not re-emerge. She’d swirled about, lost and disoriented, trying to please him when she could summon the lucidity of will to try again, to find the love which was all she wanted from him in the end—but through the maw of that starless void he’d only hold out a regretful hand, which she was too fearful to take hold of lest it tighten back into a fist. 

Lom shook his head, pleading with those eyes before him, burnt black coals suffering in an unspeaking, unmoving face, which would never give an answer, would never feign to hint at the transformation he was pleading for—because it wasn’t forgiveness he wanted, only for her to be happy, to experience the surety for one final instant that she was loved by the one she’d once given her whole heart to. He wanted to reverse time, and carry her side-saddle once more on the back of his bicycle, when they were deliriously joyful at a future they had faith in, before either of them knew who he’d grow into. He wanted what no person could ever have. 

He’d beat her. Cursed her. Something evil took hold of him when he felt ignored, when he felt back-talked to, when too much liquor and beer put fire into his veins, when a hundred other excuses presented themselves. He saw defiance and sarcasm in her every action, and rained punishment upon her. He withheld his fists after the pregnancy started, and for a period of time after their son came into the world, but it wasn’t long after, when the boy was still young enough to nurse at her breast, that he took to correcting her insolence once again. 

And she would look at him from the floor, their son squalling in the other room. She would look at him with those eyes, fighting to claw her way out of the black vortex before she lost the light of the sky at its top for good. She’d fought with herself to find the love she’d locked away for safe keeping, like links of gold chain in a teak wood box that has gone missing. She would have made a gift of them to him if she could only find it. 

It was his own mother, the biological one, that he was angry at. He’d come to understand that after many years, once it was far too late. She’d given him up for adoption at the age of two, phantom imprint of her left on a cave wall at the base of his memories, leaving him to be raised in the home of a drunk and his wife. The drunk beat his wife when he wasn’t attacking young Lom, who’d been forced to inherit the monster’s surname. He’d spent all his childhood and adolescence fearing that he’d be given up again, despite his wretched situation, because all he knew was that once you were abandoned things got worse. As he’d fallen helplessly in love with his future wife, he’d feared, in the lightless cellar of his heart, that she would abandon him one day too, destroying him for good as she snapped his love over her knee like a dry stick, and so he had to destroy her first, to make her incapable of doing so. When his son was born, his fear bled into panic for the boy, in whom he saw himself to a degree he could never have imagined, and his intent only became more dire to prevent the broken, haunted woman, whom he loved only in his terror of not being loved, from disappearing on them both.

The pancreatic cancer that took her came on swiftly and stealthily. Seven months after diagnosis, she was gone, leaving Lom and their ten-year-old son alone in a way he’d never foreseen, abandonment forced on them by the universe itself. Karma had caught up to him at last, denying in the same stroke his wife her life and his son a mother, in order to deliver the retribution he deserved.

He’d been at the side of her hospital bed the night she expired. Her last words to him hadn’t been ones of love or forgiveness. She’d looked at him with her hurt eyes, sunk within bruised-looking sockets and welling with the terror of the unknown. “I’m going back into the earth,” she said, and wept the last of her tears with a sob. She didn’t hold his hand until the final moments, when she took it in her sleepy fog of sedation and squeezed. He felt her fear one last time. Her hand had looked like it belonged to someone twice her age. 

Lom’s heart broke into pieces for the first of two times that night. The second time came twenty-three years later, during the Songkran festival in April, when his granddaughter was only eight. His son had been visiting a friend’s farm and was driving home. There were no surviving witnesses to what happened, as both he and the intoxicated driver in the other car were killed on impact, but police had pieced together from evidence at the scene that the other driver had swerved suddenly into the oncoming lane at upwards of 140 kilometers per hour. 

Son joined mother beside Lom in the orange pool of light, the former more indistinct, like an upright shadow. Lom sensed his presence more than he actually saw him. Flickering spots ran through the pool of light as moths threw themselves against the bulb above. The two shades of Lom’s unrecoverable life flickered with it. 

The radio droned a song of love and loss, the plastic fan blew, and he felt the green breeze of the town and countryside that had made him, that had hardened his bones and gave rise to the handful of people that had provided his life with any meaning at all. 

His granddaughter loved Muay Thai. He was told, by acquaintances from his old town, that she trained like there was a tiger inside her. To her he sent the money he made in the city, every baht he could spare, so that she could continue going to her sessions. She would know how to fight. Would know how to fight back. She would never be beaten, at least for long, by a future husband, or boyfriend, or anyone, if there were others out there like himself as a younger man, waiting to compensate for their own terrors by terrorizing another. Or if she was attacked the damage would at least go two ways.

And he vowed, for his son, that he would never ever drive drunk. 

***

The Death Cab sailed through the intersection, turning at such momentum that it really did bank for a second or two, the body of the vehicle groaning. The blonde woman shrieked and held onto the cage for dear life. Two Thais sitting on her side exchanged knowing, subtly amused looks. Then the vehicle resettled onto all four wheels and they raced out of the intersection, barreling down the street between more safety-minded, or perhaps less determined, drivers.

“My God,” the woman exclaimed, searching the faces around her, hungry for expressions of common indignation. Eyes flicked to her, then back to phone screens, a sack of vegetables, a drooling baby, or the red button stuck to the roof with a black wire trailing from it that led into the cab of the truck. The university boy rose off the bench to press said button, signaling to get off at the next disembarkation point, and a deafening buzzer blared from the back of the cab, the whine of it like a chainsaw tearing through a fissure in spacetime next to them. This was, James supposed, to ensure that the alert was heard by the driver no matter how loud the surrounding traffic was, no matter if he was eighty percent deaf, no matter, in fact, if an asteroid were colliding at that very moment with Bangkok. 

In a final burst of dedication, the driver swung the songthaew across two improvised lanes of same-way traffic and up to the curb in front of the Central department store. About half the riders were getting off here as usual, including James and the fellow foreigner. 

“Never in my life,” she was saying pointedly behind him, as though he were obligated to concur with her by virtue of his Western origins. 

James reached through the passenger side window and dropped his seven baht, in the form of three coins, into the gnarled hand of the driver, who nodded in appreciation of receiving the exact change. His narrow face was worn and a bit gaunt, his chest sunken with age, but his eyes bore a glum kindliness that contrasted sharply with what felt like the driving of an angry and harried madman. 

The blonde woman forked over a 100-baht note, waiting for change with her arms folded. “Never in America,” she announced to James, her voice as loud as the Death Cab buzzer. “Never in a million years would this fly. Complete insanity.”

“Yeah, well, welcome to Bangkok,” said James with a shrug. 

She studied him for a moment, trying to determine whether he was being flippant (he was) or empathetic (he wasn’t). Apparently undecided, she produced the briefest of laughs, which held all the sincerity of an ambivalently texted LOL. 

James strode off for Central as their ride pulled away from the curb, but whipped around a second later at a screech of tires and the dull sound of an impact. A collective gasp rose from people on the sidewalk, and James looked just in time to see a man stumbling backward at high speed from the front of the Death Cab, before inertia overcame his ragdoll body. He went down flat on his back and his head hit the pavement with an ominous plonk.

“Oh my God, oh my God!” cried the American woman, rushing down the sidewalk.

The old driver leapt out of the songthaew and came to the prostrate victim’s side. A hesitant crowd was already gathering around the still form. A pool of dark blood was growing around his head. 

“What did you do?” the woman was shrieking. “What did you do!” She spoke everything double, as though by repeating herself she would drive the semantics of her English into the surrounding brains. 

The driver took the victim’s hand in his own, mumbling to himself, as James reached the surrounding huddle of onlookers. The man on the ground opened his eyes suddenly, staring straight into the sky. He shook his head slowly back and forth, wetting his ears in the pool of blood, which only seemed to expand faster. 

“Mai pen rai,” assured the old driver, patting the back of the hand he held. It’s okay. 

Spit bubbles frothed from the bleeding man’s mouth. He moaned wordlessly, eyes still vacant, blind, head shaking back and forth in its black halo. 

“What’s the number!” The woman was fumbling the phone out of her purse, oblivious to the several others dialing emergency services around her. She located James and turned her gaze accusingly on him. “What’s the number? Is it 911 here? Answer me!” she demanded when James didn’t reply. “Don’t you know? Don’t you know, Mr. Bangkok?”

***

Suda’s mother asked her to go to Bangkok and bring grandpa home. Thus, at the expense of their savings, she was on the long taxi ride to Sisaket Bus Terminal, from which she would embark on a far longer road journey yet. 

The man he’d hit with his songthaew had stepped suddenly into the street to hail an approaching cab. Witnesses to the accident claimed that the vehicle had accelerated too quickly, in spite of the crowded sidewalk on one side and congested lanes on the other, and that it could have just as easily been a young child that ran unaware into the path of danger. The victim had survived, but with severe brain damage. The back of his skull had been cracked into pieces. Suda’s grandfather and the man’s family had come to a private agreement to split the medical and caretaking costs over time, up to a total of two million baht on her grandfather’s side. It was more money than he could possibly manage.

He hadn’t been drinking, he told Suda and her mother repeatedly over the phone—not a drop, just as he’d sworn to himself. He hadn’t touched alcohol for seven years. It was as though he couldn’t believe such an accident could happen without the driver being intoxicated. He’d constructed himself a matrix out of that conviction. Even through the phone, with its patchy connection quality, it was clear that he was broken. Defeated. Two lives had been shattered in a single catastrophic instant. 

So her mother had asked him to come home. It was time for him to rest, she said; with Suda old enough to take care of herself, her mother would find a second job, and they would scrimp and save until they’d paid off their financial debt to the victim’s family. Grandpa refused, arguing he’d be nothing but a burden to them, that it would be better for him to beg until he died a rightful death on the streets, and so Suda was to convince him in person to move back to their hometown for good. She was, her mother knew, the old man’s soft spot—the only reason he worked in the city at all, and perhaps the only reason he hadn’t given up on this life after the death of his son. 

The taxi had just passed through a village, having stopped off to fill the gas tank. The sun was dipping fast toward the horizon, painting the atmosphere, with its ragged blanket of high clouds to the west, in a fleeting patchwork of oranges and purples. 

“That’s weird,” said the driver. 

“What?”

“Engine light came on. Haven’t had that happen before.”

A few moments later the car began to stutter and stall. The driver swore and pulled to the side of the road just in time for the engine to die. He tried to get it running again, but to no avail. 

“Don’t know what all this is about,” he said, issuing a string of cuss words under his breath as he took off his seatbelt. “Might have to get towed at this rate.”

“But I need to take the 7 o’clock bus.”

“Sorry, but it can’t be helped. Look, I’ll try to get you another—oh!” He swiveled around in his seat to look out the back window, while Suda watched in the rearview mirror what had caught his attention. A taxi had just turned out of the village’s main street onto the highway and was cruising in their direction. 

They both jumped out, Suda hailing the oncoming cab, whose availability light was glowing behind the windshield. She waved her arm, while the other, leveraging his status as a fellow taxi driver, merely raised his arm and made a come-hither motion with his hand, smiling a bit sheepishly. 

The driver of the new cab rolled down his window as he pulled up. The road ran flat in either direction and there was no other traffic on it, so he had no need to pull off it to speak. “What’s the problem?” he asked. He wore large sunglasses, despite the dusky air.

“Engine just cut out on me. Damnedest thing. This girl’s on the way to the bus terminal.”

“Sure, gotcha,” said the other—almost too eagerly, Suda thought. “I can take her. Hop in, Miss.”

“Looks like you’ll be making your bus,” said the first driver, offering her a brief smile. 

“Thanks,” said Suda, and moved her suitcase into the new taxi, sliding into the backseat with it. 

“Hey, could you call me tow truck?”

“Aww, no can do, friend.”

The first driver looked puzzled. “You have the number of a garage nearby that I can call?”

“It’s not too far a walk,” laughed the second cabbie, throwing the taxi into drive. “You’ll be all right!” He chortled at the stranded man’s fishlike expression as he pulled away. 

“Why don’t you help him?” asked Suda. 

“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” said the driver, his grin melting away as his sunglasses leveled on her in the rearview mirror. “You shut your damn mouth.”

Fear forced icy sweat through Suda’s pores. “I want to get out.”

“Hah!”

“I’ll pay you the fare to the city, but I want out.”

“Oh, girl, what do you think this is?” He took the sunglasses off, revealing icy, malicious eyes. “You thought you could get away from the Isaan Sky? Stupid bitch.”

“What? Stop this, I don’t know what y—” 

“Think this is my first time? We topped off that moron’s tank with water.”

The world outside was draining rapidly of the day’s last light, deepening to the color of dead rose petals. 

“I don’t understand,” cried Suda, resisting the tears that were threatening. 

“We’ve been watching you for a while. Kamon Charoensuk got away, but you’re not going to.”

“Kamon…you mean from the food cart?”

“Don’t play dumb. Where is he now? Where did he go?”

“I don’t know!”

“Where were you off to?”

“Tonight? To Bangkok.”

“So he’s in Bangkok.”

“No—I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know anything about him.”

“You know he owes us half a million baht.”

“N-no!” she sputtered. “I don’t know about any of that!”

“You worked for him right up until he ran.”

“So what? I…” She suddenly remembered what Kamon had told before he skipped town, that she should insist she’d been misidentified if anyone asked about her working for him, no matter what. It’d seemed so silly that she’d put it out of her mind, and it seemed ridiculous even still. “I…” she started again, but stopped. Her tears of helplessness had been reabsorbed on their way to her eyes. Rage boiled up inside her. Her muscles burned as some ferocious force took hold of them. “All I did was sell sausages from his cart, you stupid buffalo.”

“What’d you just say to me?”

“I said I sold sausages from his cart.”

“No,” growled the shark. “No, you bitch, you’d better take back what you just said, before I make you take it back.”

“I take the truth back, then.”

He slammed the brakes, the tires screeching torturously as the car skidded sideways. Suda had anticipated such a reaction and braced herself against the seat in front of her. 

No sooner had they come to stop than a knife appeared in the shark’s hand. His jaw was trembling with rage, while his eyes had transformed into lightless marbles. “If I’m not getting my money back,” he spat, “then I’m taking you as payment.”

“Stay away from me!” 

The shark leapt out of the car and wrenched the back door open. Brandishing the knife in one hand, he shot the other into the backseat. Suda scrambled back, but the man grabbed her ankle, dragging her with savage strength. Panicking, she ground her other shoe against his fingers, the only thing she could think of to do. He let go with a roar of pain and she scrambled to the opposite door, bolting through it onto the empty highway. 

The dead-rose purple had given way to dark. She could run into the field, she thought, and maybe get away—but he was probably fast enough to catch her. Then what?

The shark was already rushing around the back of the car, and she fled into the headlights, exposing herself but also drawing him into full visibility. 

“You’re in trouble now,” he said, stepping into the light. “Worse than you’ve ever been. You might as well just let me take what I’m owed, and maybe you’ll see tomorrow’s sun.” 

The headlights morphed his face into a ghoulish sidelong rictus. He was only a hair taller than her, she noted, thanks to her recent growth spurt. But he was stocky, drawing a long step closer for each of hers as she shuffled away. The blade glinted, imbued with sheer menace. 

She felt the grip of her sneakers on the pavement. Too strong. She continued back toward the shoulder of dry dirt, where she’d be able to pivot her left foot. 

“This is your last chance to back off,” she said. 

The shark paused. His elongated mouth-shadow rippled, and a hole opened in his face as he burst into a laugh. “My last chance! Little girl, you have no idea.” 

One day at the gym, after a round with Lek, the old trainer had told her something that she’d never forgotten. She’d been struggling to catch her breath, hands on her knees as she sucked in air, whilst that faraway expression washed over his features. In an emergency, he said, it didn’t matter how much muscle or fat your opponent had on you, because—and he’d touched two fingers to her temple, then her brow—no one can get bigger here. 

Suda’s feet found the shoulder. The gravelly earth rolled beneath the treads of her sneakers. “You have no idea,” she whispered. 

Two days before, she’d toppled a banana tree with her right shin. 

The shark charged forward, as though to tackle her. He hunched his shoulders with the movement, bringing his head slightly lower. That was good. With her final step back, Suda had already positioned herself to unleash, and at the same moment he charged she was already twisting, rotating her hip with more brute force than ever before, driven by the rush of adrenaline that rises in the face of oncoming destruction. Her leg swung like a sledgehammer, forming a high arc, and she aimed her shin not at his head, but at an invisible target, a ghostly banana tree, on the other side of it. Even that head would not bar her from following through. 

There was a crack as her leg met the side of the shark’s skull, dulled in Suda’s ears by the monumental torrent of her own pulse. His momentum carried him on to crash past her, unconscious, into the wet ditch.

She walked back to the village in the dark, passing through occasional pools of streetlight. The police later found that the shark had tumbled onto his own knife, and the snarky headline about it in the Bangkok Post read that the sky was falling. 

***

It had thundered and rained all night, alternately torrential and misting, and the day dawned humid, soupy, the last of the flooding that had swamped the night streets emptying into the embattled sewer grates. Faisal, tired and baggy-eyed from a sleepless night spent staring at the bomb in his living room, prepared to fit the device into his old backpack, which had never seen much use. He’d leapt in fright with every rolling blast from the sky during the night, anticipating that the explosive would malfunction and blow him away long before his time, before he’d proven himself by carving a mark upon this nation of unbelievers. 

The bomb had been dropped off just after sunset by two men from an RKK cell operating in the city, their faces covered with balaclavas, so that even if Faisal were caught afterward he wouldn’t be able to identify them. They’d looked like motorbike taxi drivers, who often masked themselves the same way to keep the sun off during their long days under the open sky. Faisal didn’t know whether they were the very ones whom he’d been messaging with online for weeks. They said nothing about his previous correspondence with the cell, just showed him how to activate the timer on the bomb, double-checked his understanding, offered him a blessing and left the house. They had agreed that his purpose was just. 

With the device tucked snugly into the pack, and the pack gently slung over one shoulder, he left the house, splashing through the puddles that remained on the sidewalk. Swishes and swashes came from here and there, melding with hints of petrichor in the air, as some early bird business owners on adjacent streets swept such puddles away from their shop entrances with grass brooms. 

It was Saturday, so Kamon of K’s Corner wouldn’t arrive with his food cart until around 8:00 am, not needing to catch customers from the early morning school commute. Also beneficial for Faisal was the flooding from the previous night, which was slowing up people’s start to the day.

He made his way to the street which Kamon had come from Isaan to infest, seething with renewed anger at what the northern rat had done, popularizing the consumption of pork in this neighborhood in a way that had never been done. His rotten sausages and spicy-sour chunks of that impure flesh had become all the rage. At first only local infidels partook in such sin, but gradually, to Faisal’s shock and disgust, the supposedly devout followers of Islam had succumbed to temptation—or curiosity—as well. He had it on good authority that even officer Masrin had been spotted totting a bag of Kamon’s blasphemous product. They all said the same thing when confronted: they were buying it for a friend, they were transporting a bag of it for a secular acquaintance, they were this, they were that—well were they consuming and digesting it for their unbeliever pals as well then? They whisked those parcels back to the privacy of their homes, where they imagined reprehensibly that even God wouldn’t know of their business. 

K’s Corner (Faisal was ashamed for even thinking of it by that name) was deserted when he arrived, save for a smattering of vehicles trundling up and down the street.

The previous year, the city council had placed large flowerpots along the sidewalks on this side of the street, filled with hibiscus and marigolds, in an effort to beautify it. A few months later a tumultuous monsoon had blown through Yala, with high winds that knocked several of the pots over, spilling their contents while the accompanying flood waters whisked the soil and flowers into the sewers. To this day no one had gotten around to refilling those pots, one of which sat directly in front of the pork-peddler’s corner. 

With a glance around, Faisal slipped the backpack off, heart hammering against the jail bars of his ribs. Sweat poured down his brow, drops of it stinging his eyes as he unzipped the top of the pack and set the timer on the bomb for ninety minutes. He watched as the first five seconds ticked down, feeling, as he had all throughout his long night, that it might detonate right then and there. Hurriedly, he zipped the bag back up, and, as casually as he could, as though being practically unaware of what his arm was doing, lowered the bag to the bottom of the empty flowerpot. 

He scampered across the street, failing to look as nonchalant as he’d intended, and entered an alley on the other side. From there he went through a vacant shophouse’s back entrance, climbing a dusty wooden stairwell to the third floor. The building’s owner lived up in Hat Yai and had years ago given up trying to rent out the dingy apartment on this floor. Seldom visiting the property, he was probably unaware that young people had broken the lock to the back door long ago and now used these unfurnished rooms as their private hangout, doing God knew what. He glimpsed a makeshift nest of blankets at the back wall of one room, pillows included, and shuddered at the thought of teenagers fornicating upon it with sweaty abandon. 

At the end of the hallway was a window that looked over the street. Faisal retrieved a lowly wooden stool stashed in a corner of the adjacent room, seating himself on it at this window, watching the first of the Saturday morning bustle. He checked his watch. The bomb would go off at exactly 8:45.

He sat. 

And waited. 

His heart continued to hammer, less violently now, but with a dull clamor like that of a prisoner in his cell, beating uselessly at the walls, hate welling up inside until it spilled out of him as blood spills from split knuckles. He felt his malice form an aura of greyness around him, and he projected it on the spot where Kamon would soon roll his food cart and insolently begin grilling the meat of swine. Faisal’s abhorrence, his cloud of loathing, would be realized in the righteous fire to come. It was necessary to shred Kamon’s body into pieces, as he so justly deserved. 

Up the street hobbled an elderly woman, whose name Faisal couldn’t recall, but who was immediately familiar. Trying to place her, he remembered lying in a ditch, with a crashed motorcycle on its side in front of him, chrome gleaming, front tire still spinning lazily. This was when he was fourteen or fifteen, when in a defiant huff he’d stolen the bike from his uncle’s house and tried to take it out of the city on a joyride that held no real joy, but rather unmitigated teenage angst. He’d meant to leave for a long enough stretch that his parents would be sick and grieving with worry by the time he returned, as an act of revenge for forbidding him to walk home from school with a non-Muslim girl he’d somehow developed a crush on. His uncle was an innocent party in that circumstance, but he’d left the motorcycle parked with the key in the ignition, and so it had become an angst-ride vengeance vehicle. 

Faisal hadn’t even left the city limits that day before he came upon a long snake sunning itself on the pavement. Swerving to avoid it, he’d hit a nasty pothole, lost control of the bike and crashed it into the ditch. And it was that old woman, a decade and a half younger, whose house had been nearby and who’d rushed as fast as she could to the ditch to help him. He hadn’t been badly hurt, but she tended to his scrapes with rubbing alcohol, gave him a cold wet cloth from the refrigerator with which to cool his forehead, and offered him all the water with ice cubes he could drink. She let him call his parents on her phone, and even told them, with conviction, that she’d seen Faisal steer the motorcycle into a ditch to avoid an oncoming truck which had drifted directly into his lane. They’d been furious, not to mention his uncle when he found out, but the belief that their son had faced certain death replaced the sharp spines of their anger with relief. 

The old woman was walking right past K’s Corner. Faisal was suddenly shaken: what if the bomb were to go off early and kill the woman? How could he ever make peace with such guilt that would follow? Could he justify it to himself by believing that his intentions had been pure? 

The woman passed by the corner, but more people came up and down the sidewalk now, their numbers increasing steadily. A knot of dread grew in Faisal’s stomach, nauseating him. He recognized many of these faces, even if, like the old woman, he couldn’t place their names. 

At last, shortly after 8:00, the bastard Kamon came rolling up with his cart and grill, a cooler loaded with pork atop it, which he held steady with one hand. He got himself set up, working methodically below the cursed painted sign that signified, infuriatingly, that the corner had been made his. By what means! By mere fact that people were enthralled with the taste of his diseased preparations? 

The smoke started to rise from the first sausages and slabs of pork on the grill. Kamon was meanwhile busying himself with slicing ginger and chopping up a head of cabbage. The street grew ever busier, more so than Faisal had anticipated it would be, and for the first time it dawned on him that collateral damage was not some kind of outside possibility, but an inevitability. He was going to kill others. But would they be customers of Kamon’s? he wondered. Would they deserve it? 

Mumin Phetkaemthong crossed the street, making a beeline for the corner. Kamon greeted him with a broad toothy smile. Mumin stood next to the cart, arms folded across his broad, fleshy chest, chatting with the northerner as he surveyed the flower sellers, the morning traffic, and other faces from the neighborhood, all caught in golden rays of sun which were drying up the remaining dampness of their surroundings. 

Mumin was a science and math teacher at Faisal’s former high school. Of course, back then Faisal had always addressed him as Teacher, and truth be told would feel compelled to do so still if he bumped into him on the street. Mumin had tried to convince Faisal to stay in high school for his senior year, and to progress on to university, perhaps even in another part of the country for the sake of experience, but Faisal’s obsession with the idea of Islamic separatism from the Thai state, by then kicking up sparks within him like a bonfire, led him to ignore his teacher’s council. 

“I’m just looking out for you,” the teacher had told him on multiple occasions. “Nothing is more valuable than a good education.”

But Faisal had assured him he had all the knowledge he needed, and any other necessary wisdom could be acquired online, or through what he referred to as his people, here in the deep south.

That’s why his once-new backpack had never seen more than a month of use before being relegated to a closet. How would poor Mumin react, besides running, if knew that same backpack was at the bottom of the flowerpot only a couple meters from him, packed with an explosive intended to kill the man he was speaking with?

Faisal looked at his watch and a tremor shot through him all the way to his bones. It was 8:24. Only twenty-one minutes to detonation. 

Get on, go! he mouthed, directing his thoughts on Mumin. Get out of there!

And presently Mumin did bid farewell to Kamon, having not made a purchase, but no sooner had he walked away than Parama Lateh came up the street pushing his fruit cart.

Parama! 

He’d been selling fruit on the streets of Yala since Faisal’s earliest childhood. His parents used to take him to buy papaya or pineapple or sliced sour mango all the time. How he loved Parama, who would sometimes cut into an additional fruit to slip a few more chunks into your bag, just as a bonus, and to Faisal as a child that had somehow enriched the taste of every bite. 

Parama’s skin was a deep chestnut brown, weathered from decades spent pushing his cart in the sun. He peeled and cut fruit with the most practiced of hands, acts of flawless muscle memory reminiscent of a skilled craftsman. His glass display case looked the same now as it had all of Faisal’s life: the fruit carefully arranged, bright and colorful atop of bed of crisp white ice, like a sweet and cool slice of rainbow that was floated through the hot streets. 

Faisal was relatively poor, but he had once been poorer, in his early twenties when his mother and father forced him to leave home, no longer able to tolerate his fiery rhetoric. Devout as his parents were, his convictions had become too extreme for them. In those days, Parama, commenting in a candid grandfatherly way on Faisal’s sunken cheeks and overall thinness, gave him free fruit on numerous occasions—big bags containing salads of guava, watermelon, rose apple and more, topped with heaps of his homemade chili-sugar-salt mix. He never had to ask if Faisal was hungry, nor did he ever ask for compensation when they’d seen each other in the following years, after Faisal had improved his financial situation. 

And now—Faisal stared into his watch, the face of which seemed enormous, wider than the hallway, sneering at him with its ceaseless ticking—now there were only fifteen minutes left! It couldn’t be right! But sure enough, it was 8:30 on the dot. No line had ever seemed so hideous, so much a soulless portent of destruction, as the line formed by that minute hand passing over the center of the six.  

His intestines rebelled, gurgling and swelling, like rough hands were rummaging through them and twisting at the coils. He felt the need to defecate, but it was out of the question. He squeezed his sphincter, drinking in with dry eyes the flowerpot that contained only death. His stomach roiled with bile and he tasted acid at the base of his tongue. 

Keep going! he pleaded silently. Don’t stop, Parama. Please. 

Faisal’s face was beaded with sweat now. His clothes clung to him in great dark spots spread across his chest, his back, below his armpits. 

Blessedly, Parama merely nodded to Kamon and continued on past the corner.

Kamon’s slabs of pork, along with his first sausages of the day, had finished grilling. Kids came up the street, running and skipping ahead of their parents; a street sweeper came ambling as well, towing a garbage bag of fallen leaves and grinning in anticipation of her morning snack; one of the 7-Eleven clerks on his way to work, already in uniform, hungrily examined the fare on the grill; and an ancient woman, bent over at the waist with age, who must have been old when Faisal was a babe in arms, emerged from the dimness of a nearby alley, taking her place in the growing queue. 

Kamon’s eyes dropped helplessly to his watch. How was there already only ten minutes left? He was ready to stand and sprint, down the hall, the stairs, into the alley and out to the street screaming for everyone to run. But he couldn’t, he couldn’t! Not now! There was Kamon, this cursed creature, another infidel, feeding pig flesh to the people for handfuls of ill-gotten baht, here on rightful Muslim soil! And there, at this very moment a woman in hijab was approaching, laughing along with her uncovered friend. 

Eight minutes.

The uncovered woman was familiar. Not only familiar, but impossible to mistake as she drew nearer. Her beauty blew upon a coal deep in Faisal’s heart, one he’d thought was dead for so long that he’d forgotten its existence, bringing it back to a glow. That glow, however, was quickly replaced by a new level of horror. 

Nureesan. Her name was Nureesan. Once upon a time, when Faisal was young, he had walked home from school with her, infatuated, falling in love, and for that he’d been admonished by his parents, made ashamed, and forbidden from ever doing so again. In rebellion he had stolen the motorcycle, so much had he burned with anger, furious at a world so dismissive of his heart, what was good and right inside him—what he had believed was good! What he’d believed to be right! But it was all naivety. It had to be, because—

He lost sight of Nureesan’s face, as she turned away and joined the line with her friend. 

“Go!” he shouted, the sight of all of them down on the street doubling and blurring. “Go, you idiots!”

He thought that one of them, a child, might have heard, for the boy turned around and momentarily studied the building Faisal was in, but only the ground level. Faisal remained unseen, unnoticed, a phantom leering from a high window. Life went on below, content without him, and it was life that he would be responsible for taking away. 

He kneaded his clothes, whimpering. The last children left with their food, Kamon pocketing their parents’ money in his apron’s front pouch with a sparkling smile. Then the street sweeper departed, followed by the 7-Eleven boy, and the ancient woman, whose humped spine was apparent through the thin shawl she wore. 

Now just Nureesan and her friend remained. Faisal didn’t need to look at his watch to know there was less than five minutes until detonation, maybe only one or two. 

“Inshallah,” he squeaked. His knees seemed to have locked. He was wooden. His guts were a squirming ball of snakes, turning to tree roots as they ate their way out of him, latching onto the stool. He wasn’t allowed to leave. It was his duty to observe the final outcome of what he’d set into motion. 

As though in a dream, he came to observe himself, fastened to the stool at the window, outlined in light. Even as he witnessed his trembling body, he continued to look out through its eyes at the women as they waited for their food. They watched Kamon put the Isaan sausages into a clear bag. In slow motion, he plucked sliced ginger out of a water-filled bowl, crystalline drops flying off them like dew shaken from blades of grass, and slipped them into the bag with the sausages. Next came a fingerful of green bird’s eye chilies, and leaves of pale cabbage, all of it in hyper-clarity, closer and clearer than should have been possible when viewed through a dirty, grime-streaked window at this distance. Faisal was not looking through only his own eyes, and not only through his ghost’s eyes at his own pathetic foolish form, but through Nureesan’s as well. 

“Please,” he shouted, his voice breaking as he shot up from the stool. A wail rose mournfully in his throat. He was unable to turn away, hands pressed to the glass hard enough that he felt it might shatter. He closed his eyes, unable to look any longer, and pressed his forehead across that hot surface, ready for the blast to send shrapnel through his body if it was mighty enough, to kill him too and remove him from this world. In that instant he no longer cared whether he was granted eternity in those gardens beneath which rivers flow. His earthly life had been for naught. 

Long seconds passed. A minute. More. 

Faisal opened his eyes, took in the corner where Kamon was once again alone with his cart, and lifted his heavy wrist with a gasp, blinking several times at what he saw. The time was 8:48. 

8:48!

The bomb had malfunctioned! A dud! 

Faisal ran down the hall, weeping. “Allahu akbar!” he cried out. “Allahu akbar!” He tore down the stairs and out the back door, into the alley, close to laughter in his joy, at the perfection of the Lord’s deliberations. “Allahu akbar!” he sang out again as he burst from the alley onto the street, the words leaping through every molecule of his being, for God truly was the greatest: in His infinite wisdom He had spared the wicked to save the good. 

Kamon heard him, looking up as Faisal crossed the street, and Faisal, as he cried those holy words once more, saw the vendor’s face turn to puzzlement. 

Then the blast came. 

The flowerpot was blown into dust and the food cart ripped apart. It rained bits of pork and charred human flesh fifty meters away in either direction, and officer Masrin, who closed off the street with police tape that morning, would recall for the rest of his life that he’d often been unable to determine which was which.  

***

Headman Sangsorn sat in his office sipping a 3-in-1 coffee, trying to remember whether there was a village festival today, or even a parade. For the last half hour or so he’d been hearing giddy laughter, unintelligible shouts, and the patter of young feet bolting up the main street in front of the administration building. He called for his secretary, and she popped her head around the side of the door. 

“Yes, sir? Another coffee?”

“No, no. Actually yes, I’ll take one.”

“Right away.”

“Hang on. Is there any celebration scheduled for today? A party? A wedding? You understand it’s important for me to at least make an appearance if so.”

“Umm,” said the secretary, “I don’t think so. Is there anything on the calendar?”

“Ooo, I’ll check that. Good thinking.”

The secretary ducked back out of sight and Sangsorn consulted his desktop calendar, which was open on the month of August due to a little holiday in Chiang Mai he’d been planning. He flipped back to April. 

The Songkran holidays, marking the Thai New Year, were well over. He had dinner and drinks planned in two days time with the local farmers association. The day after that, he needed to call in on Leelapun family, probably by way of he and his family having a nice meal at their restaurant. Being the most popular casual dining spot around, the Leelapun’s political opinions worked their way via mealtime conversation into much of the public consciousness over time, so keeping on their good side would help shore up support before next year’s vote.  

It was true that Sangsorn hadn’t received much education, very little past elementary school, in fact, as he’d been needed to help in the planting and harvesting cycles after his father’s injury. That was a different time, and these days he’d committed himself to helping ensure the village children were able to stay in school, or at least received the materials they needed to study part time. The little public library next to the post office had been the crowning achievement of his first two years in office. If only his father could see him now, how proud he’d be that his son, in middle age, had come to lead all of Nung and the surrounding county. 

Besides the farmers dinner and visit to the Leelapuns, the few remaining days of April on his calendar were blank. 

How strange, then, that the distant shouts of excitement were continuing even now. 

With a heave, Sangsorn pushed himself out of his chair and came into the reception area, where the secretary was busy tapping away at her phone. Noticing his presence, she placed the device facedown on the table in one inconspicuous motion and turned her attention to her computer monitor, cradling her chin thoughtfully in her hand. 

“Time to go see what all the ruckus is about,” he said, passing her desk.

Opening the door he was hit with a humid blast of heat, normally stifling at this time of the year, but not unpleasant after an hour spent in well-conditioned air that morning. A wiry boy of eight or nine was running past on nimble legs. 

“Hang on there,” called Sangsorn gruffly. “Where’re you hurrying off to?

The boy slowed and spun around reluctantly, still jogging backwards. “There’s a dinosaur!” 

Sangsorn thought he must have misheard, or else the boy was speaking in code. “A what?”

“A dinosaur!” The boy galloped off again, but added with a shout, “The monks were hiding it!”

Sangsorn shuffled back into the building, wiping his brow with his sleeve as the glass door swung shut behind him. 

“Sir?” asked the secretary. “Something wrong? You look—”

“We have a situation of sorts,” said the headman. “It could be serious. Call up Deputy Juntasa.”

Juntasa answered after a few rings.

“Deputy, do you know anything about the commotion this morning?”

“Not much, sir. Some of my kids’ friends came by the house this morning and they took off at a run.”

“For what, do you know?”

“Something about an escaped animal. Quite odd. Apparently they’re all off looking for it. Don’t know how safe it all is, but kids’ll be kids aftera—”

“But you don’t know what kind of animal it is?”

“Not a clue. Apparently it’s something the monks had over at the temple.”

“I’ll have to go speak with them then,” harrumphed Sangsorn, meaning to suggest that the deputy should have already been on it. 

“Good on you, sir. Just as soon as I finish my breakfast I’ll be heading out to—”

Sangsorn slammed the phone back down, chewing on his bottom lip as he gazed out the big front windows. 

The secretary spoke hesitantly. “Is there anything I can do, sir?”

“For now just stay alert. I’ll need you here at the office to handle communications while I’m sorting this matter out. I need to head to the temple immediately.”

“What do you think this is really all about?”

“Hopefully we’ll know soon.”

He retrieved his trusty sunglasses off the desk, which he always wore when outdoors on official headman business, but had no sooner reached the door than he staggered back from it in shock. 

The secretary jumped to her feet. “Sir!”—and then she saw it too. 

An alien beast had stalked into view, right in the center of the street. Its physiology was avian, in the way a rooster was, but it was no large rooster. That blue serpentine neck, the bony crest atop its head, those scaly legs and massive three-toed feet—and the claws at the end of them: it was as reptilian as it was birdlike. It was, thought Sangsorn, mouth agape in wonder and horror, a creature left over from another time. 

The beast paused, right in front of the windows, straightening up as though listening to something. An enormous bronze eye drank them in with the calculated savagery of a tiger. 

“So this is what they were hiding,” breathed Sangsorn.

“What do we do,” whispered the secretary.

“Do you have the number for the military?”

“N-no . . .”

“Then . . . then . . .” He ran mental computations on his different options. Never, he was certain, had any headman in all the country, or the world, faced a moment quite like this one. He remembered his honeymoon down in Cha-am years before, when he and his wife had visited an elephant and wildlife refuge. They’d been taking care of all kinds of animals there. “A wildlife refuge,” he said. “Go online and get the number of the nearest wildlife refuge.”

The secretary opened a browser and tapped away frantically on the keyboard. Outside, the great crested head swiveled and the beast looked at them straight on. Somewhere far away came excited hoots, not just of children, but adults as well. The creature, evidently hearing this, began to walk down the street again, slowly at first and then faster. 

“Here, here! It’s ringing!” The secretary held out the office phone’s receiver and the headman snatched it up. 

“This is Headman Sangsorn, calling from Nung. We need your help.”

“With what?” asked a sleepy-sounding man on the other end. 

“There’s a, erm . . . there’s a dinosaur walking around the village. The kind with two legs.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Then: “Is this a joke? We’re very busy here.”

“Just get some of your guys out here and bring a net!” barked Sangsorn. “Before someone gets killed by this thing.”

He tossed the receiver back to the secretary, who apologized into it, repeated their location and stressed the urgency of the situation before hanging up. 

“That was very forceful of you,” she said, impressed. “Authoritative.”

“That’s my job,” said Sangsorn coolly, a manner in which he didn’t think he’d ever spoken before in his life. Then he froze. “It’s heading that way,” he said, less to the secretary than to himself. “The new playground.”

“Oh my!”

Ever since the curly slide had been set up there were kids playing on it at all hours of the day—children with no idea what was now coming their way.

Sangsorn charged back into his office and grabbed the gleaming golf club leaning in one corner of it. He’d never played golf—didn’t even know how—but the club had been gifted to him by another headman several years before as some kind of prestige item. It was heavy and made of steel, which was all that mattered. 

“Call the deputy,” he said as he blew through the reception area, club in hand. “He needs to stop everyone he can from pursuing the dinosaur.”

“Right away, sir!” 

Sangsorn emerged onto the street and started to jog in the direction of the playground, aware of eyes peering at him from shop doorways and market stalls. “Everyone stay where you are,” he panted. “Stay put until we”—he gulped down another breath, unaccustomed to the cardiovascular exercise—“have things under control.”

He was nearing the playground. His heart leapt into this throat, jackhammering, as a chorus of children’s squeals came to his ears. He rounded a corner and the wide earthen lot destined to become a playground came into full view. There was the monster! And just beyond it, the sole piece of current equipment, the big colorful curly slide. It was crammed full with half a dozen children, four packed tight on the top platform and two on the slide itself, holding themselves fast on it with their hands and feet, desperate not to let slip and go winding to the bottom where they would be at the mercy of the beast. 

“Hey!” Sangsorn bellowed. 

The dino arrested its predatory strut toward the slide. With hideous speed it raised and twitched its head to the side, drinking Sangsorn in once more with a merciless round eye. 

Sangsorn raised the golf club like a baseball bat, chrome gleaming in the sun. “Over here, reptile!” (At this at least two of the children on the slide exchanged confused glances). 

 The creature turned, and Sangsorn contemplated the cruel spike on each of its inside toes. Was that, he wondered, the means by which he would die? 

“Not today,” he murmured, and strode forth toward destiny, readying his weapon. 

A girl on the slide shrieked. 

“Headman Sangsorn! Headman, please stop!”

Sangsorn halted, risking a look back at where the voice was coming from.

The three monks from the temple were rushing onto the lot as fast as their robes would allow. Behind them came Deputy Juntasa, followed by a gaggle of wide-eyed onlookers. 

“Headman, please don’t hurt it,” wheezed the senior monk. “It’ll fight if it’s scared, but it’s not a meat eater. Look!”

The youngest monk pulled back his robe to reveal his alms bowl, brimming with fruit. He came up next to the headman, and, breaking a well-ripened papaya in two with his hands, tossed the pieces to the ground before the creature. The beast set upon the chunks immediately, scarfing them down one after the other. 

“Now would you look at that,” said Sangsorn, awestruck. “It’s like a heron swallowing frogs.”

“Sir,” said Deputy Juntasa in a low voice, sidling up next to him. “You’re aware that this is a bird, right?”

Sangsorn gulped heftily. “Of course,” he said, feeling fire come into his already hot cheeks. The children on the slide were watching him. The crowd that had filed onto the lot behind them, speaking in hushed voices, was as well. All eyes, at this moment, were on the headman.

He turned to address the monks directly, clearing his throat. “You were keeping this bird at the temple, I understand?”

“Yes, sir. It was dropped off for us to care for.”

“And what is this, um, bird called?”

The youngest monk piped up, eyes sparkling. “It’s from Australia. It’s called a cassowary.”

“A what?”

“A cas-so-wa-ry,” repeated the monk, and so saying, tossed a whole mango to the bird, which scooped it up and swallowed it. 

“Woahhh,” cried the children on the slide, as every pair of eyes traced the path of the round lump down the long blue throat. 

“A cassowary!” trumpeted Headman Sangsorn to all who had gathered. He dropped his golf club, not without some embarrassment. “A cassowary all the way from—where was it?—yes, Australia! This amazing bird from Australia has wound up all the way here in Nung! Now this is a day to be remembered!”

***

There’s not much more to tell. Under the monks’ bidding, remembering all too keenly the fate of the dog, the children were taken off the slide and everyone moved cautiously back to give the cassowary the run of the lot, kept contented there by a steady supply of fruit thrown to it. A truck was dispatched to the temple and the crate was transported to the site of the future playground, whereupon the great bird was lured back into it with a trail of papaya chunks. Some thought it remained inside quite willingly while the big side panel was slid closed, the animal relieved, perhaps, to have shelter from the relentless sun. 

A team from the wildlife reserve arrived that evening, having driven a couple hundred kilometers, and they took the crate and its exotic inhabitant away for good. 

The events of that day were discussed fondly by the villagers in the weeks that followed, as children and adults alike recalled where and how they heard that morning of the bird—or in a few cases, dinosaur—and the nature of its disappearance from the temple. They told elaborate tales and exaggerated their accounts of the search for the cassowary that morning, and hypothesized about the means by which it had evaded detection and made it all the way to Main Street before Headman Sangsorn spotted it through the window. Kids devised shivery stories about other strange and abandoned creatures that had secretly escaped the temple in the past, and which could still be lurking around the outskirts of the village. 

It was soon common knowledge that the monks had been in possession of the cassowary for weeks before the night of its escape (enabled by a well-scolded trio who were by then student celebrities), and, as time wore on, the holy men’s stories from that sultry and secretive April, the giddy search for the creature, the heroics of Sangsorn, and the recovery of the bird at the unfinished playground, all became cherished escapades in the village’s collective memory, gathering the first mossy hints of local legend. For those whose lives were rooted to the fertile earth of that place, where the months and seasons fade into one another as easily as day fades to dusk, the cassowary seemed to become something totemic, representative of the unknowns and soft wonders that life can bestow upon people and the places they inhabit.

Uncountable other dramas, small and large, unfolded across the country that month. There was an accident involving a songthaew in Bangkok; the driver involved had been sober, but sleep-deprived and driving recklessly, rushing to maximize profit from his route. A teenager in Isaan knocked out a violent thug with a kick to the head, sparking a purge by local authorities of a powerful loan sharking network. In Yala an extremist’s bomb went off, killing two; and one of Nung’s own daughters, a thousand kilometers from home, befriended an elephant that had known only misery. These happenings, whether blurbs in the swirl of news or not, went mostly unnoticed in the village, where life continued much as it had over the course of previous decades, colored by reminiscences of the time that a most curious piece of the world had found its way to them.

Not many domestic tourists end up in Nung. More frequent are foreign travelers, who pass through riding rented motorbikes, always on the way to somewhere else. They catch sight of the shining red and gold temple, pause to snap a few photos, and drive off when the resident dogs start yapping and howling. Occasionally, rather than zip past unaware, one will catch sight of the Leelapun family’s restaurant, with its chickens poking around the tables, and pull over to brave ordering some truly rural food, already considering how they’ll caption the photos of their meal on social media: this village nestled among the hills, this little open-air eatery, with an old raisin of a grandmother, a daughter and grandson all cooking and serving together—this here, they muse, is the real Thailand.

Even more rarely will such a visitor, brow running with sweat from the chilies they insisted they could handle, take note of the faded life-size painting on the wall of a nearby storage shed, and a collection of yellowed children’s drawings which are tacked to the wooden rafters. 

“What are those?” they’ll ask through a mouthful of noodles or pork belly. “Ostriches? Emus?”

And if there is someone about who can muster up a bit of English, they’ll come over, with a shy smile dancing in their eyes, and tell their guest about the time of the cassowary.