Tuan knew why he hated the two prep school girls the sixth time he saw them on the 35 Jane bus. Until then, his hatred was a diffuse thing that hung about them like a veil of mist. He’d hated the way they buttered their lips pink with glosses they pulled from soft nooks in their backpacks. He’d hated their unsheathed knees; their disdain for hosiery; their rolled-down socks like wooly anklets; their Caribbean tans in January. He’d hated their mean, empty conversation and their dolphin laughs, their crested blazers and their flat black shoes. He’d hated the sheen of unkemptness they sported like sloppy was the fashion, their shirttails hanging loose from the waistbands of their kilts. And he’d hated their houses, their hulking houses that said, Tuan, go on to school. You don’t belong here. The only way you’ll ever be in this neighborhood is passing through on a public bus.
But, until the sixth time he saw the two prep school girls, the fact of his hatred and the fuzziness of the why of it had gnawed at him; it wasn’t right to hate without a reason. And he did not subscribe to Occam’s Razor in this case; the reason for his hatred could not be, simply, jealousy. He was not that sort of person. The reason lay deeper. The reason had something to do with the value of the girls’ souls not being equal to the value of their clothes. This was a truth that sat in him like a stone: his hatred was the result – the solution to the equation – but it was in want of what Dr. Lo called an elegant proof.
Dr. Lo kept a handsome scholar’s rock in the corner of his office that Tuan had openly admired and asked about several times. The rock, he’d explained, was a gift from his father, given to him when he first received tenure. His father had kept it in his own office when Dr. Lo was a boy, and Dr. Lo – David, then – had spent hours just staring at the rock, sometimes running his tiny hands over and inside it. There were four elements that contributed to the beauty and value of a scholar’s rock: thinness, openness, perforations, and wrinkling. This rock embodied the best of all four. It was a milky white formation, two sharp croppings wisping around a hollow space and meeting in a twisted embrace at the top. The rock was four-and-a-half feet tall on its rosewood pedestal; the first time Dr. Lo saw it, it was taller than him. His father had said the rock was older than the first settlements in America and had been passed down in their family from scholar to scholar. He’d also said, it’s good you’re fascinated with it. This means you’re going to be a scholar, too. Tuan wondered if his own fascination with the rock might mean something. If he, too, was destined for an office in a university, for tenure, to teach a course on the Mathematics of Beauty.
But Dr. Lo often chastised Tuan for rushing to the solution, to the X and the Y of things. The beauty is in the proof, he’d say. And Tuan would hunch over his work, hands fumbling his mechanical pencil, and worry about beauty and elegance, about the lack of them. About whether the lack of these qualities would mean the lack of a scholarship next semester, even when he arrived at the correct answer. His parents never understood this, had never understood why his grades were in danger when he was always right. To them, you sewed the garment and it was whole, you cooked the vegetables and they were food; you were paid for this work. This is what his father had done for seven years after he emigrated from Ho Chi Minh City, until he could afford to sponsor his wife, and then his mother. This is what Tuan was expected to do: sponsor a cousin. Sponsor an aunt. Maybe sponsor a future wife.
The reason for his hatred unfurled itself the sixth time he saw the prep school girls on the 35 Jane bus because Tuan shared a two-seat bench with an old Jamaican woman in a pink straw hat, whom he often saw in his neighborhood, and who was reading a lurid two-page article on local murderers. The two prep school girls reclined on the bench in front of him. One flipped her long blond ponytail over the edge of the seat and the other, whose brown ringlets shuddered from the growl of the motor, began complaining about a girl in their class: a Tess, who thought she was the shit. She lies, she said, about, fucking, everything.
The other girl sighed.
I can’t stand her stupid voice, said the ringletted girl. I don’t even know why we’re still friends with her.
And the other girl sighed. You know, she said, flipping her ponytail, her dad’s not going to win that case.
Tuan looked up from his notebook. The ringletted girl was looking, curious, at the ponytailed girl.
Why? Asked the ringletted girl.
Because, I just know.
Why? Asked the ringletted girl. She tugged on her friend’s ponytail. Why?
Because, stupid, said the ponytailed girl. She ran her ponytail through her hand like a length of silky rope. She sighed. My dad’s the judge. Remember?
Heat rose in Tuan as he watched the prep school girls’ pinked lips curl into ugly smiles. So many dark possibilities bloomed in Tuan’s mind as the bus muscled closer to the subway station: bribery and blackmail, personal vendettas. Tuan pictured the fat judge and his family seated around the dinner table, passing the lobster, laughing about the day’s court proceedings, about the judge’s opinions. Or, worst of all, he pictured the ponytailed girl whispering insults about Tess into the judge’s ear, the judge conjugating his daughter’s meanness into a courtroom decision: the outrageous possibility of that injustice.
The girls still carried their secret smiles with them as they exited the bus and squeezed through the turnstiles and disappeared past him onto the subway platform; he took this proof with him to school and he took it with him to Dr. Lo’s classroom and he took it with him to the exam, where it huddled close to his heart like a talisman. But he found himself, still, rushing towards an answer where questions asked him to flesh out his proofs. Too soon he would arrive at X and Y. He looked up, despairing, from his paper and thought he could see the topology of other students’ thoughts, their beautiful proofs floating just over their heads like halos. He wanted to snatch them down. He wanted to snap them apart.
*
Dr. Lo noticed the tiny women first, edging their way down a crag on the scholar’s rock with thimble-sized baskets perched on their little heads. They were singing a Chinese traditional song in high peeps like baby birds. Some laughed and glanced back at the others. Some strode forward. One lost her sandal on a nub of stone and had to bend down to retrieve it. The procession of tiny women snaked its way around the rock and disappeared into one of its many recesses, and then there was Dr. Lo, bent over in the corner of his office next to his bookshelf, squinting at his scholar’s rock.
But there were other tiny people. There were men and children and elders. Sometimes they’d peek out of one of the rock’s pores and sometimes they’d sit on the edge of one of its protrusions, dangling their legs. None seemed to notice him. Dr. Lo would always catch them out of the corner of his eye while he was busy at work on a theorem or reading a student’s paper. Once, while he was grading a test, a rangy brindled dog trotted around the side of the scholar’s rock and lifted his leg. When Dr. Lo leaned in to pluck the dog from the rock between his thumb and forefinger, it dashed away.
Though Dr. Lo was surprised by the existence of the tiny villagers, he found that he was not afraid of them. His concern was not the village in the rock, but the welfare of the village. It seemed to be suffering from a plague. Every now and then, the village doctor would rush from one pore to another, dangling a tiny sack full of tinctures that tinkled like a pixie bell when it shook. Sometimes sick townspeople would be carried up or down the rock on litters, babbling feverishly.
Had his father known the village? If he had, he’d never told his son about this enchantment. If he had, surely he’d seen the village through hardships like this before, as had his grandfather and his great-grandfather and all the scholars who’d been steward to the people of the scholar’s rock. But Dr. Lo didn’t know what to do, how to save the townspeople from dying. He left bottle caps full of fresh water at the base of the rock and sometimes they’d be gone the next day and sometimes they’d still be sitting there.
Dr. Lo was considering taking the rock to a specialist – a spiritualist? Someone who could see the village, maybe treat it – when a student arrived for his office hours, clutching his much-clutched exam. This student, Tuan, came to his office every week, always wearing a look of anxiety. As hard as he tried, Dr. Lo couldn’t nudge Tuan in the right direction. He began to suspect this was because he was not capable of doing so. The things he was asking Tuan to do were second nature to him, like breathing. He didn’t know how to explain them except to say, feel. And Tuan resisted feeling. He pushed himself too hard. He pushed himself to numbness.
Tuan sat across from Dr. Lo and opened up his exam to places he’d starred and highlighted himself, his long fingers skittering over his poor performance. And Dr. Lo tried to concentrate his attention on Tuan, tried to focus everything again on explaining the necessity of feeling, but he was distracted. Two townspeople had emerged from a pore in the scholar’s rock carrying a man on a litter. When they reached the farthest outcropping, they set the litter down, dumped the man onto the ground, and hurried away. The man lay in a tangle and struggled to breathe.
Dr. Lo wanted to creep over to the scholar’s rock and rearrange the dying man, make him more comfortable. But Tuan was begging him to explain, again, what was wrong with his proof.
You’re not being asked here to find the simplest or most perfunctory route, said Dr. Lo.
And Tuan sunk his face into his hands.
The dying man let out a miserable groan.
I’m going to lose my scholarship, said Tuan. I have to get an A in this course.
Dr. Lo had heard this before, many times, from many students. It hardly touched him now. Even their tears had little effect. Tuan tried to hide his, to blink them away, but Dr. Lo could always tell when a student was crying, even when the student was bent over a test while he feigned working out some line of arithmetic.
Please, can I do extra work? Can I write another test? I’ll do anything.
The dying man arched his back. He seemed to be suffering from cramps about his spine. He glistened with sweat. Dr. Lo watched, helpless, as he writhed. Tuan quivered in front of him. Compared to the dying man, Tuan’s suffering was a small thing. Perhaps it would even be good for him, this failure. Dr. Lo had seen many students like Tuan pass through his classes. Tuan would survive this. Even still, he considered, for a moment, himself at Tuan’s age; he never failed a course. When he worried about failure, his father was always there to assure him that he wouldn’t flounder, that scholarship was in his flesh and his bones. He assured him by saying, you will not. He assured him by saying, not my son.
I’m sorry, said Dr. Lo. If I gave you special treatment, I’d have to give it to everyone.
Tuan closed his exam booklet and stuffed it into his knapsack. Without a word, he left, and shut the door behind him.
Dr. Lo rushed over to the scholar’s rock, but the man had already died. He lay, unmoving, on the crag. Though Dr. Lo knew he could give the man a nice burial in the soil around his ficus, he hesitated to touch him. Instead, he watched as the dead man was discovered by one from the village: a woman, in simple work clothes, who came out from one of the rock’s deep fissures carrying an empty bottle cap. When she saw the dead man, she dropped the cap; it tumbled to the carpeted floor and rolled under Dr. Lo’s desk.
Dr. Lo watched as she sank to her knees beside the dead man, as she stroked his blue face and his thick black hair and rested one tiny hand over his heart. He watched her shut his eyes with her fingers and weight them with pebbles she drew out of a crack in the rock he’d only be able to probe with the end of a toothpick. And he watched as she craned her neck, illuminating her face by the cold sun of the office’s fluorescence, and let out the longest, softest howl of pain.
*
When Jocelyn’s dad gets home from work, all he wants is quiet. That’s the way it usually is when he’s working on a hard trial, but he’s wanted it quieter this time than it’s ever been before. He wants total silence. Mark and Jocelyn always take off their shoes at the door but now Dad says he can hear them creeping around in their bedrooms, hear their socked feet pressing on the carpet. Jocelyn lies on her bed, still in her uniform, and fills her headphones with music. She twitches her toes to the beat, and then worries he can hear her twitching her toes.
At dinner, Mom stands behind Dad and rubs his shoulders while he presses his eyes. She loops her arms around his neck and rests her head on his shoulder and he holds her hand. Mom and Dad have never done this before. Once they held hands at Jocelyn’s half-sister’s wedding.
It’s the videos Dad has to watch for the trial. He’ll have to watch them while the prosecution shows them to the jury, and he had to watch them in his chambers. Snuff films, says Mark. You know what those are? He flips the record on his turntable. His SAT practice worksheets are fanned out across his bed and Jocelyn’s sitting on them, crushing them, and she’s surprised he’s not complaining. Of course I do, she says. But she doesn’t.
It really messes you up, having to watch that kind of thing, says Mark. Messes you up permanently. Be nice to Dad, OK? And then he says, Can you get out of my room?
When Jocelyn gets off Mark’s bed she lets his papers slide and tear under her weight. Hey! He says. She doesn’t apologize. It makes her feel a little zing of electricity.
Her dad’s trial is a famous trial. It revolves around a gorgeous couple from Niagara Falls who killed so many girls. Everyone remembers this, especially girls her age, because there was a time when these killers were loose and when no one knew who they were or where they were or exactly what they wanted. Everyone just knew girls were going missing in towns and cities within two hundred miles each way of Niagara, and every girl who lived in any of those towns or cities felt a little like a magnet, ready to pull in some kind of death. First they snatched girls from mini-malls and late-night parties. Later, they took the wife’s sister.
Now Jocelyn learns what snuff films are, because there’s an article in the paper about the ones these killers made, about how there was debate about whether showing them would permanently scar the jury. She reads and rereads and rereads the story, trains her eyes on the courtroom sketches of this beautiful couple, their handsome faces and non-displaced hair, and the judge, her dad, his bald head and his glasses, and how he seems to be melting them with his look.
Tess’s dad was the one at the head of the debate, arguing against these tapes being entered as evidence. He’s defending the gorgeous couple. It’s made him very famous as a lawyer, taking on these clients. And it makes Jocelyn look at Tess funny, like maybe she’s not supposed to like her, shouldn’t hang out with her anymore. Tess pretends she doesn’t like the attention she gets from girls at school when they talk about seeing her dad interviewed on TV, but she clearly does. She smiles and nods and digs into her locker. She also talks about the trial a lot with Jocelyn and Emma and the girls at school, even though she doesn’t really know any more about it than they do. She says things like reduced sentences and medium security like she knows what she’s talking about. She tries to talk to Jocelyn like she should know these things, too. Sometimes Jocelyn wishes it was OK to just stuff a gym sock in another girl’s mouth.
Jocelyn lies on her bed and listens to music and thinks about all those dead girls, about how beautiful and young this couple is in all the photos and the drawings, like Barbie and Ken, and how getting into the car with them must have felt amazing to those girls until the moment they knew they were in danger. To be wanted by a couple so beautiful, to be asked to join that: it’s special. Thinking about it almost makes her feel like she should be worried for herself. She’d get into the car, she thinks. And it makes her wonder about Tess, too. About whether she’s as worried as her. She thinks of Tess’s dad sitting next to this couple in court. And she thinks of him at the Father-Daughter dance, swinging Tess around, laughing, while she and her own dad watched and ate canapés from the seats. She couldn’t get her dad to dance.
Would Tess get in the car?
When she heads downstairs for a snack, Dad is in his study and the door is open. He’s reading. His green floor lamp is on, and he’s wearing his half-lenses, lying back in his chair with his feet propped up. She goes into his study, even though she knows she’s not supposed to bother him in there. And he doesn’t stop her. He lowers his book. He doesn’t stop her when she climbs into his chair beside him and he doesn’t stop her when she rests her head on his shoulder, even though she hasn’t done this since she was a little girl.
Why’re you making all those people watch those tapes?
For a minute he’s quiet, and she wonders if he’s going to get mad at her.
Because it’s important that people understand the case, he says.
Why can’t they just be told what’s on the tapes, instead of showing them?
We’re not going to talk about this, Jocelyn.
OK. She waits for him to shrug her out of the chair, but he doesn’t.
Do you like Tess’s dad?
He lets out a puff of air, adjusts his glasses on his nose. Yes. I’ve known him for twenty years.
Jocelyn expected him to say this.
What happens if he wins? She asks. Will you still like him?
He’s not going to win. It’s not about winning or losing. This is about sentencing. And that’s all we’re going to say about it tonight.
Dad, she says. She wants to say, what would you do if I were one of those girls? But she doesn’t. She can already imagine what he’d say. He’d say, You weren’t.
She says, Do you want some cookies? I’m getting some. She slips out of the chair.
No, he says.
The next day, Tess comes up to Jocelyn and Emma between Writer’s Craft and Calc. Watson is such a bitch, she says. She told me to shut up in her classroom and then threw chalk at me.
Emma turns to Jocelyn and rolls her eyes. Yeah, well, that’s Watson for you, she says.
And she feels it in her chest: the kind of meanness she’s held back pretty well since she was little, since the times when she didn’t know any better. Since the times she’d pinch Mark in the garden or push another girl down the slide. It’s rising from her stomach to her throat like she’s going to hurl, and this time she doesn’t try to stop it.
Well, she says. She folds her sweater. Maybe you should. Shut up more often.
Joss! Says Emma.
What? Isn’t that what you were just saying this morning?
Tess stands there for a second, sways, with a dumb look on her face. Fuck you, she says. Jocelyn watches Tess push her way out of the locker room, and as Emma swats her on the shoulder and then lets out a little giggle, she thinks she feels the magnet pull.
*
Tuan still holds the exam paper as he rushes from the math building and he still holds the exam paper as he slices across the green quad, dotted with students like grazing sheep, and he still holds the exam paper as he leaves campus, as he worms down into the station, as he rockets below the city. All the time, the paper in his hands is transmuting into a creased rag. The longer Tuan holds it the less it becomes, until it begins to tear at the edges where he’s worried it. When he gets out at his station, the exam is all but gone. He drops it into a trash bin. He goes to wait for the bus.
This is not his usual time for going home. If today had been a usual day, if he weren’t a failure today, he’d be in the lecture hall now, and he’d wait for the bus late at night with the shift workers and the truant teenage boys. The sun resting on the tips of the neighborhood houses is a new sight for him; he’s never returned before dark. The people, too, are new: Ukrainian grandmothers with mesh sacks full of carrots; tired nurses in scrubs; high schoolers with their overstuffed knapsacks and their cell phones; rolled down knee socks, a high-cut kilt, a blazer, a soft ponytail.
She stands alone on the bus shoulder, tipping her toes over the edge. When she tips too far, she steps down into the driveway to regain her balance. Tuan watches her from the crowd. She’s waiting in just the place to be first onto the bus, ahead of the grandmothers and the nurses.
He watches her board the bus and he sits across from her and watches her kick her legs out into the aisle and back, watches her float her gaze from window to window. He still feels it, the hatred, but he thinks now maybe it’s a baser thing. Now, maybe, it is plain jealousy. He wants what she has. She has no fear, no consequences, no pressing needs. He wonders what it would be like to disembark at her stop, at the old gates that open onto the old brick road that corkscrews into the old neighborhood. What would it be like to walk down that old road, shaded by the old trees and the old houses, knowing that home was one of these houses? What would it be like for the trees to whisper about him overhead? He wonders these things and he wonders these things and then he finds that he’s done it, that he’s walking the old brick road, and the ponytailed girl is twenty paces ahead. At first there’s the hot wash of shame, fear of being collared and expelled. But no one stops him: not the gardener raking a lawn nearby, not the Filipina nannies who push strollers full of doughy white babies, who must smell their own neighborhood on him. He goes freely forward. Up ahead is the ponytailed girl.
*
Tiny buzzards wheel around the scholar’s rock, ripping tiny hunks of meat off the tiny corpse. Dr. Lo snatches at the buzzards like he’s snatching at flies, but they zip just out of reach every time. He leaves his office to escape the gruesome miniature, buys a coffee at the Student Center, watches the students mill around him. When he returns, the corpse’s flesh has disappeared. In its place, a sun-bleached skeleton, hardly visible against the white of the stone. Time moves faster on the scholar’s rock, the way time must move faster to the drones in an anthill. One minute to Dr. Lo might be a week to his tiny villagers. One day to Dr. Lo might be a month.
He lifts the tiny skeleton off the rock with a sheet of printer paper. He buries it below his ficus, in a hole he’s dug out with his fingers.
*
Tuan follows the ponytailed girl deep into the neighborhood, her yellow ponytail a standard, leading him on. The trees hiss and crackle and send down their brittle leaves. The neighborhood cuts into a ravine, where tall pines grow. It cuts farther and farther back, so far back Tuan can’t imagine its boundaries. He wonders where her house is. He wonders how far she walks every day.
The ponytailed girl stops at the edge of the ravine, in a tree-thicked place where the closest house is half a block away. There’s a moment where she stands still, and then she turns to face Tuan, like she’s known he was there all along. Fear needles his heart; he quick-steps backwards, ready to bolt, but she motions for him to come closer. Against the trees she’s a pale ghost. He approaches her, slow.
Hello, says Tuan, sheepish.
*
The judge gets home early. There are no cars in the drive and there is no one in the house; his wife is on an errand. His son is with his SAT tutor. His daughter is just leaving school.
As much as he demands silence, sometimes silence is too thick. Silence lays a soft carpet of grass for his dark thoughts to run on. Against silence, the shutting door is a thunderclap. Against silence, the whistling teakettle is a scream. He needs a prickly baseline of white noise: his wife, opening and shutting the sliding glass door, the footfall of his kids, getting older up there in their rooms. He turns on the radio. On the talk station they’re discussing the trials, the tapes. The host asks, what punishment do you want to see? And callers let forth a stream of bile and imagined violence, eye-for-an-eye. The judge changes the station. The soft notefall of Chopin.
There’s a bay window in his study. The window is the reason he bought the house. In the mid 70s, he and his first wife and their toddler stood in front of the window and looked out at the few other houses on this stretch, on the ravine at the end of the block, emerald and wild. Yes, they’d thought, this was the view they wanted from their living room. They raised his older daughter in that living room. She grew up and moved away, as daughters do.
In the mid-80s, when he married his second wife, when he made partner, he needed a quiet space where he could work. The house was rearranged. The living room was moved to the back of the house. And the view was his.
And now he stands at the window, with his tea and the soft patter of Chopin about the room, and his view, and there is the wild ravine, its old trees, leaves on fire, bowing and swaying.
And there, in his view, is his unmistakable Jocelyn: her rumpled uniform, her soft loose ponytail, her overstuffed backpack. She wouldn’t like to be told she’s funny. She wouldn’t like to be told much of anything, he thinks, but sometimes it tickles him: the largeness of her backpack compared to her lovely slight body.
She is walking with a boy he’s never seen before. A much older boy. And the boy wears a look he has seen before, in the courtroom, on the faces of accusers and the accused, their families and friends. Anger and contempt and something deeper.
The judge learned from his first daughter that a father should only interfere when he knows for certain something is wrong. Is something wrong? It’s so hard to tell with Jocelyn. She holds her secrets tight. Even if he needed to, if it were a matter of life or death, he doesn’t know that he could get at them. He stays where he is. There’s something in the act of watching, in just knowing what’s happening to your child; that’s a father’s job, too.
Right now, as she glances toward his window: does she see him?
*
The ponytailed girl steps forward. For the first time, Tuan looks her in the face, not sideways on or in stolen glances. She’s plain. He’s seen prettier girls Sundays at his parents’ church. Her face is wide and milky. Her eyebrows and eyelashes are so light they want to recede into her skin. Her lips are pale. Her eyes are copper coins.
What are you going to do to me? She asks.
What? Asks Tuan.
You followed me here. What are you going to do to me? She steps closer. Tuan could reach an arm out and brush her with his fingers.
The question hangs between them. Tuan wants to snatch it out of the air, throw it down, crush it under his foot. He is not. He would not. Of course she assumes.
But here he is, and he’s followed her.
Nothing, he says. I’m just walking.
Really? She steps closer. Close enough that, if he wanted to, Tuan could reach out and fit his hands around her neck. A girl who was afraid wouldn’t come this close. He’d seen girls in his neighborhood scoot from the bus stop to their apartment towers with their heads tucked in to their chests. The ponytailed girl’s boldness is alarming.
But, beneath her boldness, in the tree-shade, she’s close enough that Tuan can see she’s shaking. He recognizes the pleading in her eyes. She needs something. He doesn’t know what. If he knew, he might like to deny her it. But he can’t, so he has to feel for an answer.
Really, he says. He backs off a pace. Go home.
She waits.
Go home, says Tuan. It’s getting late.
And he turns away, and he starts back the way he came. When he glances over his shoulder, she’s still there at the edge of the ravine, hunched under the weight of her knapsack. He walks as far as he can before the ravine edge will disappear from sight, past jack-o-lantern leaf bags slouching on lawns and netless basketball hoops in flagstone driveways. When he looks back again, she’s gone. She might have slipped into the ravine or she might have headed for home. Tuan wonders what it means for her to get what she wants. He’s afraid for how she might get it.
*
Jocelyn heads back towards the house. When he sees this, the judge sits in his chair, turns on his lamp, picks up his magazine, waits for the sound of her entrance. She drops her backpack at the door. She kicks off her shoes; they thump against the baseboard. There’s a moment where she lingers in the hall, and there’s a moment where she follows the music to the door of the study.
You’re home early, she says.
The judge looks up at his daughter. Her hair is mussed and wilting away from her ponytail; her undereyes are pillows.
Everything OK? He asks. It might not be the right thing to say.
Yeah, she says. She casts her eyes up towards the corner of the room, and the judge isn’t sure whether she’s hiding away tears or whether she’s just gazing at the corner of the room.
I’m going upstairs, she says. I’ll be quiet.
And then she’s gone.
*
Dr. Lo tucks his books and papers away into his briefcase, cleans and straightens his desk. Outside, the afternoon is purpling into evening. As he puts on his jacket and makes to turn out the lights, a tiny noise from the scholar’s rock. A procession of villagers is climbing the rock, scrabbling up its rough edges, pushing each other forward. A man reaches the pinnacle and unfurls a rope of bright prayer flags. He attaches it to the tip of the rock, where the two croppings twist together, and the other villagers pull the loose end down to a lower point, secure it there. Then they retreat into a pore, and all that’s left are the flags.
Dr. Lo watches them. By tomorrow, they’ll be faded to white. Maybe they will have already fallen away. But, now, they flutter in whatever breeze secrets around the scholar’s rock, kicking their prayers out towards everything: blue, white, red, green, yellow.
This story originally appeared in and has been reprinted with permission of the author.
