Weathervane
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint was born in Yangon, Myanmar and grew up in Bangkok, Thailand and San José, California. She is the author of the lyric novel The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven (Noemi Press, 2018) and the family history project Zat Lun, which won the 2018 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and is forthcoming in early 2021. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, and Kenyon Review Online, among others. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant to Spain, residencies at Hedgebrook and Millay Colony, and fellowships from Tin House and Summer Literary Seminars. She holds a B.A. in literary arts from Brown University and an M.F.A. in prose from the University of Notre Dame. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver, the associate editor of the Denver Quarterly, and an instructor at Lighthouse Writer's Workshop.
The boy died in the fall. He went to the island with a shotgun by himself, for himself, the shotgun. He didn’t tell anyone he had left.
Where the boy went it was cold. The woods were wet and the bark of trees black like the way the boy remembered the city.
You told me this story about the boy. You said he had lived in a boarding house in the city: water pump in the yard and no heat until mid-winter. Curtains stapled to the windows. Co-ops like that swelled on the outskirts: in old barns, mills by dead rivers, small rail stations where the tracks ran nowhere.
I say the boy died in the fall because no one saw him again. His letters kept coming for months after. Magnolias bloomed, daylight stretched into the last hour of evening, and still the boy went on about the cold, the dark, the trees closing all around him.
You tell me this story of the boy because it is spring and I am thinking of our child. The boy isn’t dead, but our child is in his stead. You tell me a story of a dead boy because is it sadder than our story, because the boy is sadder than us.
That fall on the island, leaves fell from trees by the fistful and ice closed over the ground.
The boy sent letters to everyone he knew. He wrote of fish who slept in frozen sand and how he walked all around the island in winter, trespassing on private beaches. He wrote of bluffs crumbling along the water, trees hanging on edge. Around the island nine times, the boy went, and into the woods.
What is your favorite kind of earth? he wrote, What kind of heart are you?
You copy his best lines into your novel, working in our fire hazard of a basement, with branches taped to the ceiling and the bedframe in the stairway. We sit on the mattress and you are writing of stalactites and sea monsters, and driftwood white like bones. I am reading over your shoulder. The sitar is a sweet and painful needle in my eye.
It is spring in the city and there is rain in the gutters, rain in the eaves, rain in the trees. We stand at the threshold of our building, where we’ve often stood before, where we stood one night under the portico and you asked if I could hear it, the highway.
It sounds like the ocean, you had said.
The trees made watery shadows that night on the wall of a neighboring building. The highway lay far away.
I can hear it, I had said, and though you were the one holding the door, I could distinctly feel its weight.
We stand there now, under the portico again. It rains.
The boy dies and his death is like a heavy door that you hold open for me to step through. His death like all the things that happened to us, and like nothing happened at all.
In the city where we live, the city where I was born, no one dies. What I mean is, no one really lives. I will go over to my grandmother’s house sometimes and my parents will be younger than I ever remembered. My sister will be glutted with children. Everyone will be jogging around the lake, rollerblading, riding their bikes, walking their dogs, and the evening will be so healthful and good and swaying so gently in the wind that I want only to bite off my hand, and throw it at the canopy of some passing stroller.
You won’t come out of our basement sometimes, and I don’t blame you.
The city is all neat blocks and numbered streets. Yellow brick fire station. The high school like a monolith.
As the snow banks were melting on the city streets, there appeared a darkness in the boy’s letters. Grotesque shapes that meant nothing or too much. The boy wrote that he was afraid to stop praying. He said he wasn’t sure what would happen, if angels would descend from the sky wielding swords.
And if a boy has prayed every day of his life, if he has kept the strictest precepts, indeed, what terrible things would happen if he stopped: either to him, or the universe.
The darkness extended in his letters, dark like the universe choking on its surfeit of creation, like the terror of a boy who had stopped praying, or a boy who had stopped to pray. Either way, they foretold the end of something, his letters; and because he was just a boy, and he was alone and unwell, it was the end of his life.
In every story someone dies. The boy is dead and the woods are heavy with the weight of his body hanging from the trees. His body, like a weathervane spinning where the wind blows.
I thought he shot himself, I say.
Same thing, you say.
In the novel you are writing, we are driving through the night, except you are not yourself, and I am the one who is dead. In your novel, there are precipices, and docks rotting by the water, and bridges drawn up to the sky. There are streets that thicken and change names and cross rivers and lie black and glossy in the winter, but in the summer are mirages. There is and isn’t some kind of constellation in the sky. The moon, or the many moons you’ve made, rise and set as they please, float through the wide and generous streets.
It is always night and you are always alone. You never run out of gas, you never feel hungry or thirsty or tired, and the sun never rises.
Issue 5.2