She Weeps Each Time You're Born by Quan Barry Read Free Book Online

front of her chest as though cradling something until the two old women followed her out to the grave.
    It was impossible, but finally Tu allowed himself to acknowledge what he was hearing. From the doorway he stood and watched the women massing in the yard. Something dove past his head. He turned and ripped a plank from one of the ragged walls and marched toward the grave. The women stepped back. He began shoveling the earth with the board. The fresh dirt moved easily. In less than ten minutes he hit something.
    A box. Look closer and realize it has been hastily nailed together with sun-bleached planks from the one-room house where your mother lived with your grandmother, the old woman’s eyes knitted with clouds. Wait until the top of the box has been lifted off, the body bag unzippered to fill your tiny lungs with the first clean air you have ever inhaled, breath sugary sweet. Know that the world doesn’t always smell like this, ashand soot, though every time you smell it you will flash on the sudden feeling of lying on someone’s stony breast. Let the man who is your father lift you out of the darkness and up into the moonlight. Look closely at his face, the birthmark on the edge of his scalp. You will not see him again for many years if at all.
    See these four faces as they peer at you, one of the old women with tears in her ruined eyes. Wonder who all the other faces belong to who are crowding in to see your perfect form. Wonder why you have been chosen to speak for all of them, tens of hundreds of thousands of millions. In a country full of ghosts, begin learning how to distinguish between the voices of the bodied and the voices of the spectral.
    Tu bent over to zipper the bag closed. He was careful not to look at the face of his beloved, her hair pooling like a dark star behind her head. Under the full rabbit moon he caught a glimpse of her hand gleaming in the moonlight. He touched her finger, a small bead glistening on the tip. He picked up her cold hand and put it to his lips. It was honey.

    In the beginning the words were all in her head along with memories of sulfurous clouds and leaf-nosed bats blessing her with their leathery wings. Perhaps we are the reason she didn’t utter a single word for so long. The truth is during those first years of total silence, people hardly noticed. Why talk to the living when she had us? And if they had noticed her lack of speech, if they had wondered, what would they have seen? The way at dusk this baby girl would sometimes look at empty air, nothing there at all, and begin to weep?

 
    S OMETHING WAS WRONG WITH THE LEFT SIDE OF BÀ’S BODY , and they were still hours from the coast. We should have left sooner, Huyen grumbled, eyeing the sun, her cheek packed with old betel leaves she’d already chewed. At this rate they wouldn’t reach the highway by nightfall and would have to sleep outside again. Huyen wasn’t even sure she wanted to reach the highway at all and now this—Bà with a sudden inclination to walk to the left, body listing like a boat. It was gradual. If the path were straight, within a few hundred yards she would be on the verge of walking off the trail as if headed into the muddy waters of the Serepok.
    Huyen had first noticed a change days earlier as they packed up their belongings beside Lak Lake. Qui had been sitting under a palm tree plaiting her endless hair into two thick braids, the baby nested in her lap. In the distance a trio of elephants trundled across the shallows, their handlers nowhere to be seen. A canoe floated by carrying some of the local M’Nong people, the boat weighted down with housewares and livestock. It was then as Bà bustled around the yard loading the two-wheeled cart that Huyen noticed how the left side of her face appeared as if melting, the skin going slack. It’s just age, Huyen thought, and put it from her mind.
    In their two rooms by the shores of Lak Lake she and Bà