Quan Barry - She Weeps Each Time You're Born

In the distance Huyen could see one last group of villagers slipping through the landscape, the sound of their wooden wheels rutting the earth. The whole village had emptied, her neighbors simply draining away. She knew they had left her and Qui behind on purpose. They didn’t want to be around old Huyen and her sharp tongue and bloody teeth.

Toward dusk the leaf-nosed bats began to appear. Huyen opened her eyes. She didn’t remember closing them. The moon was out. Qui was sitting beside her, the front of her black shirt damp as if she had spilled something on herself, a sourness wafting up off her chest. The girl was holding a jar of honey and tipping it from side to side, the honey rumbling back and forth.

Together they sat, grandmother and granddaughter, waiting for a sign as to what they should do, anything to spur them into action. Em , snarled Huyen, addressing Qui with the word meant for small children, though Qui was too old for it. Huyen cleared her throat and moved the lump of betel leaves she was chewing to the other side of her cheek. From time to time she would pose a question to her granddaughter in the hope of lulling the girl out of her silence. King, father, mother, child, went sailing in one boat, Huyen said, met a storm and sank. It was an old Confucian riddle. Who would you save from drowning and in what order?

Qui never took her eyes off the jar she was holding. The honey gleamed in the moonlight. On the ground her long black hair pooled like a hole. Through the empty village the sound of a door creaked painfully in the wind. As if to answer her grandmother, Qui put a hand on her belly, but Huyen reached over and swatted her hand away.

Dark clouds were racing overhead, the moon in and out of shadow when the woman arrived, the cuffs of her loose black pants caked with dirt. She looked as if she had been to the ends of the earth and back. There was no emotion in her eyes. Later, Huyen would recall that it had seemed as if she were floating, the stranger motionless in the moonlight. Overhead the leaf-nosed bats were spinning themselves into a frenzy.

The woman took off her hat. Her scalp gleamed through her patchy hair. Everywhere shadows massed on her face. Slowly, as if yawning, she opened her mouth and pulled something off her tongue. The object flashed in her fingers. She placed it in Huyen’s wrinkled palm. It was a silver coin. Stamped on one side were two flowery dragons chasing each other’s tails, on the other, a man with a Confucian-style beard. Grandmother, the woman said, her voice echoing inside Huyen’s head as if the old honey seller were simply thinking the words to herself. In the next life I will serve you.

Then the woman turned her sunken eyes on Qui. The moon revealed itself from behind a cloud. The stranger bent down and kissed the ragged girl on the forehead. Lovingly she swept back the long black curtain of Qui’s tangled hair and whispered in her ear. With her left hand the woman pressed her thumb and third finger together. The air filled with the sound of ringing, like a needle imperceptibly vibrating with human electricity, or a fly’s wings beating to keep it aloft.

Under a nimbus of leaf-nosed bats, the woman held out her hand. There was nothing imploring in the gesture. Qui placed the jar of honey she’d been holding in the stranger’s dirty palm. The woman tucked the jar in her shirt.

Huyen opened her eyes. Hadn’t she just opened them? The woman with the hollow face was gone. Everywhere the sounds of the empty village echoed in the night. The old honey seller began to wonder if it had all been a dream. In the sky a few clouds shrouded the moon. She turned to her granddaughter. What did she say to you, Huyen demanded. The accusation in her voice masked a deeper fear.

Qui sat with her hands at her chest as if still holding the jar of honey and tipping it from side to side. Huyen wasn’t expecting an answer. The girl hadn’t spoken since the night Huyen had ruined her. When it came, she didn’t even recognize her own granddaughter’s voice.

Qui pressed the imaginary jar to her heart. She said be her mother , Qui whispered. Overhead a bat went spiraling through the night like a falling star. The old woman reached over and eased the imaginary jar out of her granddaughter’s hands. It was the last thing Qui ever said.

In the morning Qui roused her grandmother. The girl moved with a newfound energy she hadn’t shown in months. The front of her shirt was damp as if she had pressed two wet hands to her chest. Is it time, said Huyen. Qui nodded. Together they packed up their meager belongings and set out. Huyen followed without question. She had known this day was coming. After last night, the bats thronging in the air, she knew the moment had arrived. In some ways it felt good to hand over the burden of being the one in charge. Huyen smiled, her bloody teeth flashing. Maybe that was what had made her cruel. After everything she had done to Qui, it was only right that now she should serve her granddaughter. They were already in the next life.

Three things cannot be hidden long: the sun, the moon, and the truth. Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened .

TU SAT UP IN THE TREE WHERE HE WAS WAITING AND ROLLED up his pant leg. A small dark sack clung to his calf, the thing almost as big as a rambutan, but the skin was smooth and rubbery. He poked it with his finger and watched it toll like a bell. He was lucky. It was only the second one that day. It was almost done feeding and would drop off soon enough. He didn’t have any salt, plus he didn’t want to use up a match. In a way it was part of him. He stroked it with his finger. With his eyes closed it almost felt like a hot pearl or a young girl’s innocence. For a moment he considered keeping it and somehow presenting it to her as a gift. This is my blood, he would say. When I am away from you, know that I am here. He laughed at the idea, knew it would be a twisted thing to do, to give your love a jungle leech bursting with your own blood, but he also knew if he did, she would nod solemnly in that way she had and hold out her cupped hand as if she were receiving the Buddha’s unpolluted heart. She would treasure it until it was just a piece of shriveled skin. She would never throw it away.

Even lazing in the branches of a tamarind tree on the edge of the strategic hamlet, he was sweating. In the days and weeks after the monsoon, the humidity had emerged as if reestablishing its domain. From his perch on the edge of the jungle he could see the untended paddies, water buffalo wandering through the landscape at will. Yesterday he had watched an old man and a young woman having sex by the stream. As he watched, he made up a story in his mind, how the woman was actually the wife of the man’s adult son but how she had fallen for the father because in her eyes he was the man the son should have been. Long after the man and woman had risen from the grass, Tu kept developing the plot, the son running off to join the northern army, then later killing his father in battle but only realizing what he’d done well after the fact.

Tu stretched himself to full length. There was nothing else to do but dream. In Cong Heo there was no reason to work. Mostly the peasants sat around and drank a fermented rice wine dark as soy sauce. The Americans would provide everything, and why labor in the paddies when you might be relocated again at any moment? When someone could walk through the fields that you had planted by hand and with a flamethrower reduce all your work to ash in a matter of seconds?

Suddenly the leech dropped off his leg. He looked for it on the tree limb, but when he didn’t find it, he realized it must have fallen all the way down to the ground, somewhere down there his blood pointlessly coating the grass. He tried not to see it as an omen, but there was no way his wife and mother could stay on in the free-fire zone, not after a full night of bombing. He could feel the birthmark on his face begin to smolder. Through the peasants in Cong Heo he had left word that if his family arrived, someone was to come find him. He would hug his mother and receive her blessing, then whisk his bride away deep into the jungle, maybe to the cave he had found by the falls. Afterward, they would wash each other in the thundering water. She would kiss the diamond red birthmark on the edge of his scalp, and then he would probably want her all over again.