Let me tell you about the summer the devil came to town. Not with a clatter of hooves or the ramming of horns, but unnoticed, slipping through cracks in the earth where a harvest had once been planted. He breathed into the mouths of all things, contaminating and turning it all bad. I hadn’t realised how many parts of life there were until each had revealed its capacity for destruction.
One May morning I woke to find the fields stripped bare—wheat and rice stalks turned brittle and fruitless, like bones left behind. By mid-morning the scent of scorched earth crept through my window. I stretched my neck out, catching sight of men in conical hats wading barefoot onto the plains. They walked with the calmness of priests in procession, spraying lighter fluid like water, matches flicking to life in their hands and falling to the ground. By noon, the flames rose to the sky. The burning season had begun.
In Vietnam there are two seasons, the season of rain and the season of fire. Rain softens the edges of everything, invites rot, renewal, and the first shoots of green. But fire—fire is meant to cleanse. The husks of last year’s work are fed to flames so the soil might breathe again. Smoke climbs the dry sky in ghostly tendrils. The air grows heavy with ash, and the light flees before it. Farmers hang their hats by the door and retreat inside for fresher air. By the end of the first week the grit had settled into the creases of my knuckles, into the seams of my teeth. It clung to everything—the backs of my sandals, the hem of my shirt, the pages of my books. There was no escape from the residue of endings.
At the time, I believed the fires were a spectacle of practicality, no more. This was the kind of cleansing farmers had done for centuries, a tradition meant to return balance to the land. By June I began to suspect otherwise. Death had arrived disguised as an ordinary traveler: a fallen hive, a child at play, a swim in the ocean, a drive on the highway. A stray spark ignited a blaze that summer—maybe there was lighter fluid involved—coaxing the flames to spread into the streets, cleansing the ground and lifting the dead up to the sky.
…
First, it was the beehive. From above my doorstep the colony dislodged and squashed itself across my terracotta patio. The neighbor’s dog went after it. The bees swarmed and died defending their ruined home from the mutt, who in turn was stung so many times, it died too. The surviving bees became lost and later stiffened with lack of purpose. That same week, a tabby cat mistimed its dash across the train tracks and lost to the 9:15 arriving three minutes early. In the evening of the same day, my bus driver clutched his chest mid-route, veering suddenly towards the hospital.
By late June I began counting losses on my fingers. The ocean claimed two boys who had gone shrimp fishing in a rogue current without life jackets. They had been students of mine. I was reassured by many that drowning is common in Vietnam; most children don’t know how to swim. As if this fact would rid me of grief and ghosts.
One humid evening on the coastal highway, a family on a motorbike was clipped by a car.
I was coming home from work when I saw the baby go flying out of the mother’s arms into the ashen sky. The parents lay scattered over the pavement like debris for hours. I supposed they no longer worried what may befall them, the worst had happened. Traffic never really stopped, nor did the car that had caused the calamity. Drivers swerved around the wreckage, indifferent.
By July, the losses grew personal. She was eleven, a neighborhood girl whose mother sold me eggs every morning. I knew her family in the way you come to know neighbors in a
foreign place—through gestures and smiles. Her name was Mai, the youngest of five. One evening, playing ball in the street with her four siblings, Mai ran into the path of a motorbike rounding a corner a little too fast. The crash echoed down the block, but no one came running. Her mother and brother placed her body on the back of their bike and sped away. The stove was still on. The rest of the children went back to playing in the street.
I hadn’t gone looking for grim truths. I had come to Vietnam seeking an interlude, a gap wide enough to slip through. In my naivete, I clung to the foreigner’s illusion of invincibility behind eyes that desired only to glance at the loveliest of things. But the longer I stayed, the more porous I became. The ash of burning wheat and rice worked its way into my skin. What lived truthfully beyond the bridge of my nose became clear. The grief of my neighbors—visible in their bowed shoulders, in their daily prayers, in the way they howled like the street dogs—became my own. Death dismantled my illusions under skies that darkened ever more deeply with smoke.
I brought flowers to Hue International Hospital and milled about the room. Mai lay in a coma, her face bruised and her breath shallow. Stern-faced family members examined her wounds, poking her bruised skin. As if a stare could bring her back to waking reality. As if a touch of love upon her cheek could cure her. As if amidst irrevocable tragedy, a prayer could manufacture reversible resolutions. I watched, knowing they wouldn’t. And they never did.
In the weeks that followed, her mother took to calling the surviving children “Mai,” as though renaming the living could resurrect the dead. She denied her youngest daughter’s absence for three weeks, insisting every morning, when I bought my eggs, that Mai was inside, getting ready for school.
“Mai’s eating breakfast now. Want to say hi?”
“Mai got an A on her English Verbal exams last week.”
“That’s great! She was always a good student.”
“Mai wants to speak with you. Practice her English.”
“Have her come to my house at dinner time. I can help her then.” I ran out of avoidant excuses and started playing into the fantasy. I admit I also wanted to speak with Mai. Though, I preferred she send her mother a message, one of reassurance that would rouse her from illusions of blue summer skies to the realities of the burning season.
When the fourth week came, I watched the lie slip from the mother’s face. I heard howls from the house that mimicked those of the street dogs. The illusions had died and blame had taken its place, embroidering grief with guilt of her self–proclaimed hand in the family’s tragedy. It is true, she had opened the door to let the children out to play. Though she affirmed her hands had been wielded by the devil. The children did not go to school. I ate oranges instead of eggs.
…
In dismal heat that frenzied the mind, I hadn’t expected to find a world, like the fields, so vulnerable to peril and so shrouded in prayer. I spent my weekends consulting monks and fortune tellers, visiting open caskets—standing in the backrooms of family houses, unable to breathe above the crowds, the loud sobs and the smokey joss of jasmine incense. Gongs split the air and made my head spin. I lost my footing while singing karaoke, everyone drinking heavily, and fell, cajoled by ballads sung at cremation receptions.
I woke at sunrise to the jaunty melodies of funeral processions marching down my street.
Impersonating parades, the coffins lay in beds of trucks bedecked in yellow and blue silks and drowning in red and white roses, tailed by marching bands beating drums and clanging cymbals. Such music seemed to force listeners to surrender collective pretenses we had wrapped ourselves within. By September, I knew the walking songs by heart.
I would sit on my patio and watch the processions rattle down Hoang Quoc Street. Past the edge of town where the cemeteries waited, their tombs stacked upon one another, marooned like islands among the wheat and rice fields, shrouded in a cloud so thick and unmoving it seemed to be rooted into the ashen soil. I always wondered about the gravediggers, about their lungs straining for breath in the thin air.
The mourners never hesitated. One by one they marched into the cloud. I’d sit still, listening, waiting for the moment when their clamor disappeared altogether, dissolved into the thick silence. At night, I dreamt of Hoang Quoc as something alive—not a road, but a mouth with eyes like a street dog and a beak like a hunting bird. It yawned open only on the hottest months, its breath foul and sticky, drawing the living and the dead alike to descend down its staircase gullet.
…
Fear burrowed into me like weeds curling into dry cracks. Dread kept me expecting to hear the collapsing of burning, the swarming of a hive, or metal hitting skin. Come August, a city-wide propitiation occurred. On every block bells rang and prayers rose on the smoke of jasmine incense. Fear sacrificed whole chickens, various fruits and bowls of fresh white rice on altars crowding the streets at dusk. Prayer papers burned and flew into a red and orange sun, indistinguishable from the ash that drifted in from the fields. People wore beads and stayed home.
Hope is but a working song for the farmer. Hope reassures the destructor that the land will grant renewal, forgetting the fires and forgiving the hands who sprayed lighter fluid. The farmer casts seeds into the scorched earth, not because they know something will sprout, but because to do otherwise would be to accept the silence of the fields forever. The city clung to hope, despair had no fruit to offer, spreading prayers and sacrifices like seeds for a season we couldn’t yet see. I had to believe that after the long, blistering season, from the blackened ground, something good might finally grow. But maybe we hoped too hard. The city grew doubtful that prayers and sacrifices could make a god’s will turn just. I understood no turmeric salve or bowing stick of incense or thunderhead shanti could rouse Mai or reassemble a beehive.
…
Somewhere, as the last of the ash fell from the sky, summer ended. The land laid down in quiet anticipation. The trade winds blew the smoke east, clearing the sky to blue. The ashen grounds were seeded like the farmers promised. Everything grew quiet. Then the rains arrived and fell as they always had in autumn’s past, washing the streets of residue-–the dust, the ash, the motor oil and the prayer papers—away into gullies and canals that ran out to the rivers and down towards the ocean. When the rain kept, the water pooled in alleyways and rose above the knees of children wading through streets. It swelled the rivers and flooded the fields—saturating the earth so entirely that even the graves in their cemeteries, old and new, couldn’t hold the dead.
In November the rains bore fruit. Mangoes ripened overnight, their skins swelling gold. The sweet weight of papayas bent the branches they grew on. Men with conical hats walk among the rows, picking bananas from trees. Newly expecting mothers ate kiwis and avocados to grow babies soft as milk. The world was dark like it had been before, but now everything was clean and the air fresh with the scent of innocence.
I started buying eggs again from Mai’s mother, though now she only spoke in numbers. A young colony began to build a hive in the same spot above my doorstep. New puppies were born and roamed the street curiously yapping at the insects and garbage. The two lost boys were never talked about at school again. I had seen their mothers kneeling in the sand out by the beach; their heads turned to the ocean, hair and dress unruly, as if they had been sitting there since summer, scanning the horizon for things that bobbed. These were my only reminders.
Because, I forgot what it all felt like—the sting of smoke and the grime of city streets. I forgot the smell of jasmine and sorrow’s throng, swaying hymns and clanging gongs. I forgot the marching band’s tunes. I stopped dreaming of Hoang Quoc’s eyes and snapping beak. I stopped wondering about the gasping gravediggers. I stopped thinking about the bees and the dog, the boys and Mai, the swarming buzz of fear, I forgot the devil and his many hands. In a year, it was as if my mind had overgrown with vines, wheat reeds, papaya, and banana trees. I had forgotten it all just in time for May, for the farmers to return to fields now teeming with harvest, quickly gut them and spray lighter fluid like holy water, strike matches and let them fall down to the
deadened ground.
Sophia Hoag (she/her) is a Seattle-born writer based in Hue, Vietnam. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Pinch Journal, Snaggletooth Magazine, Midsummer Magazine, and Swing The Fly, where she is currently a contributing writer. Deeply influenced by her roots in the Pacific Northwest and her current life in rural Vietnam, Hoag’s writing blends investigative journalism with poetic prose to examine the inimitable wonder of human and natural interdependence, and to hopefully inspire environmental reflections and advocacy.
