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

her up in the light of the full rabbit moon. Love, he whispered.
Ai
. The air glittered with soot. He held her high above his head, letting the silver light bathe every inch of her. The goddess be praised, said Bà, bowing her head and clapping her hands in prayer. Huyen and Qui stood silent. Ash drifted through the sky, sparkling as if sprinkled with mica, then going leaden as it hit the earth.
    When Tu brought the baby down out of the moonlight, she was completely clean. No blood or waxy yellow slick coated her skin, everything just soft and shining, her small cap of black hair fragrant as honey.
    That night standing by the grave Huyen had spit a long dark stream in the dirt. Love, she growled. She reached over and took the baby from Tu, then handed it roughly to Qui. You name your child Love and the gods will be jealous, she said. The way she looked at him, the heavy furrows gathering between her eyes. As if to say, don’t you know anything?
    Tu didn’t argue. His true love lay cold and dead in a makeshift wooden box at his dirty feet, her head resting in the bowl of her hat. A piece of ash blew into his ear. Frantically he tipped his head. As he pawed at his ear, he didn’t see the ring of white words beaming up into the night, the poem he had paid for long ago in its entirety.
In the long river, fish swim off without a trace / Fated in love, we can wait a thousand years / Who tends the paddy, repairs its dike / Whoever has true love shall meet / But when?
    Tu looked to his mother, her gray eyes shining. She had a way of knowing things she shouldn’t know. Already the baby was cooing in Qui’s arms. A piece of ash landed on the baby’s forehead. Bà nodded. It was settled. No one would ever call the child Love.
    Qui swooped down and picked up the pale blue rice bowl half buried in the dirt and turned back to the hut. The baby suckled on her nipple. The young girl’s face went rapt, the feeling as if a ray of light were being drawn out of her body. For the moment the memory of the thing her grandmother had done to her was forgotten.
    Huyen watched her granddaughter walk back into the hut. Already the girl was cutting a path through the world like a mother bear, already her appearance less deranged. Huyen grunted, satisfied. She was the oldest among them, older even than Bà by some years. It was right for the others to defer to her. It was how she negotiated the world, how she’d lasted. If you showed any attachment to things, you risked the gods’ wrath. It was best to act as if the objects closest to you were of no consequence. Indifference kept the pain from shattering you when ordinarily you should have shattered.
    And so the night of the child’s arrival passed like a dream. Inside the dismantled hut, the fire burned down in the fire pit. In the distance no blue flames danced on the broken mountain. In less than a week Tu was gone, back to his days in the jungle passing messages and parts of heavy artillery along the network.
    Even during the few days he was with them, watching Qui handle the baby out of the corner of his eye, they had begun calling her Rabbit, naming her for the full moon that had licked her clean. The rabbit with its innocence, its youthfulness, its long bright ears that hear everything in the realms of both the living and the dead. Rabbit because the world is full of rabbits. Rabbit because by sheer force of numbers, the rabbit walks among us unnoticed but pandemic.
    And even now on the trail east to the highway that will take them south, the baby sits in the lap of the old honey seller, the woman like a second grandmother to her. On Rabbit’s face is a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose and cheeks asif someone has dusted her with flecks of cinnamon. From time to time across the highlands she will rub her ears as if trying to clear them of something. She can hear the old honey seller’s heart beating, the sound filling her small