Night Without Stars

When my father told me that the twinkling lights in the night sky were the eyes of our ancestor tigers, I would not believe him. No one did, not after the old dirt roads and their wheel ruts were paved flat, and not after the first rain drained down those new, red clay shingles on the roof.

I still remember how they clacked together when I handed them one by one to father, watching him piece together the home that we would have shared with mother. He said that she, too, watched us with glittering eyes. But that was twenty years ago. Everyone smiled twenty years ago.

That was because everything was new back then, including me, barely five and so late to speak the village wives secretly gambled over if I was mute for life. My hand grasped the hem of father's shorts and the hairs on his legs pricked my wrist. Like this, I could walk past their pitying eyes without looking up even once. I felt like I was more than a piece of meat as long as I had father's tattered khakis tight in my fingers.

Spring monsoons turned the path we used to muck. Mud squealched between our toes and I sank into the mess up to my knees. Father would sit me down after the hour-long walk and draw a bucket of water from the river. There on the deck of his dock, he rinsed away the grime, singing,

"Ten young tigers went to sea,
one fell down and broke his knee.
Two ran yelling into a wave,
but three others weren't as brave."

“There’s still four,” I’d say. “What happened to them?”

He looked up from where he squatted and showed me his tobacco-yellowed teeth, his voice low and hoarse but as quiet as a predator’s paws.

“Well, my young cub. What do you think happened to them?” Though I never replied, he always heard me. He always listened to my stillness.

All day, I watched his sun-browned back heaving the raft out to mid-river. His tiger stripe tattoos moved with the powerful ripples of his muscles while his long bamboo poles swished through the air and sagged under their own weights like bent, old men. Cicadas roused so loudly that sleeping was but a waking dream. Silently, we spent those humid, unchanging days.

The red shingles are gray now. The fork in the road where the women gossiped has become a pharmacy. The familiar elephant tracks have been replaced by tire streaks and the pungent, rainbowy ripples of gasoline in puddles. The dull violet night stumbles like a drunkard till day breaks again.

I wander the long, neon-splattered sidewalks, clenching a soul that is not there in the center of my palm. No one calls my father's name or greets me as his cub. No one smiles. No one sees. No one remembers twenty years ago. No one listens to the cicadas.

Tomorrow, I return my father's body to the ashes of his birth. But I can't remain here.

I can't live under a sky without my father's stars.