86 IRA SUKRUNGRUANG The White Snake • here was a day when the birds spoke to me. The house finch nestled in petunias said, “You look sad and a bird should not know this kind of sadness. A bird should know flight and food and the pleasures of a fountain.” The bluebird building a nest in the hanging gourd said, “Too many invaders. Too many come to take our home away.” The robin who walked with an air of pomposity repeated, “Where are you, friend? Where are you?” And then I knew I had left this world, or the world had left me, and I could see myself from outside myself, and I could see my home from outside my home, and my son stood outside trying to call me back—“Daddy! Daddy!”—his voice rising and rising and rising, until it became a shrill buzz. Then he was a speck below me, alone and looking up. ‘ There once was a father as dependable as the gulls who led sailors to land. Each morning the father would wake with the warmth of his son next to him, this warmth a secret balm that kept him rooted. His son, who did not know the world would soon break, gazed at his father and saw, perhaps, the first fissures of his face. The son thought, I can fix him, and reached with small fingers to touch the cheek, the brow, the nose. His father’s face was rough like the grit of concrete, yet malleable. The son could mold the face into whatever expression he wished. “Daddy, you are so old!” the son laughed. “You are older than the oldest tree.” ‘ t 87 The son lived in a home with no exits. It was a home like any other home, nothing particularly impressive. It had rooms where the son left random stuffed animals. The great white owl perched on a shelf in the basement; the emperor penguin peeked from a toy chest in the living room; the cardinal so small it could fit in the palm of his hand slid accidentally underneath his bed and would not be found until years later when the son was still a son but bigger. The son’s home had a yard, and like his home, the yard had no exits. Together they comprised the son’s small kingdom. In that yard, there was a garden. The son remembered a time when he had helped his father plant sunflowers. His father had held a speck of a seed between his fingers and told the son that this seed would grow tall, taller than the son, taller than even him, and birds—“Like that one,” he pointed— would feed from the flower’s face. The son had followed the trail of the bird flitting from flower to flower, lost in its flight, unaware of the boundary he was about to cross until he felt a hand on his shoulder. When he looked up, it was his father, his father with the smile he would come to miss. “Do not cross the borders of our home,” he said. “Why not?” the son asked. “The white snake,” the father said. “It coils around the heart. It steals breath.” The son had heard of the white snake, how it slithered and struck those who were defenseless. It was the white snake who had taken his freedom away. It took many things. Eventually, even his father. “I hate the white snake,” the son had sneered. The father squeezed the son’s shoulder. “Is it not strange to hate something you cannot see?” ‘ Because of his father, the son could hear the birds, too. His ears rang with their talk. His eyes opened, his mouth opened, his heart opened. Now the son understood time. Time played with the trees and the wind in the trees and the leaves that began to drop from the tree branches. Time was the new words that sprang from his mouth, and the 88 long hours his dog spent asleep in her plush bed, and the colorful spinning tops he received on the day of his birth, and the tops’ long rotations, spinning and spinning and spinning, until...