By Tunvey Mou

My mother tends to cry just as the river swells with the monsoon rains. She cannot explain why, not really, just that something about the gray-storm clouds looming over the horizon makes her inexplicably sad. The tears fall, no matter if she is reading the newspaper over our shoulder or peeling pomegranates for us, in a pewter bowl, or embroidering our names in small lettering into cotton handkerchiefs. There, I can trace my name, hidden amongst a clump of pink-and-yellow threaded blossoms, crinkled with unnamed grief.

Both my mother and my aunt had been born in the month of peak monsoon, barely a year apart, amidst the worst floods our village had ever seen. River-born, they were called. Everyone knew river-born girls were special. Or rather strange. River-born girls had an affinity for guiding boats back safely through troubled waters and could fill barren shoals with fish and pearls. Midwives whispered that river-born girls did not bleed their mother dry, even as they came into the world, but rather slipped out easily, with hair dark and slippery as riverweed.

Everyone knew river-born girls could love none but the river, yet it did not stop people from wanting them anyway.

There have been attempts before; to pilfer their affection away, direct it towards other, safer channels. You can lock up your wife in a stilt manse, far away from the river, soak her for hours under the sun and hang her out to dry upon a balcony blooming with dahlias and geraniums, but one day you will come to find her drowned in her own bathtub, driven mad with river-longing. That is how my aunt died, an open secret in the village, but my mother spins the tale with a different yarn, blooming darker with each telling. “The river,” she says, laughing with an odd, manic gleam in her eye. “It wormed its way between her thighs, crimson until the day she died.”

My father and I are patient. He cuts up pale-bellied fish and sets them on her tongue, slices thin enough that she can swallow them whole and pretend they are blessings. I spend hours searching for stones, worn smooth by the river, laying them over my mother’s spine, a whispered prayer over each. When the tide rises, we carefully escort her to the shore, letting her bury her toes in the soft mud as the waves wash over her. 

“In the olden days, the river-born girls were returned back to the river’s safekeeping, bundled up in a basket,” my father says later, as we launder her clothes, picking out the bits of gold amongst the silt-ridden folds. “There is no need to worry. The river takes care of its own.”

Everyone knew that river-born girls would leave you one day, but that did not stop people from loving them anyway.

My mother rages as we pack her things in a faded yellow suitcase: the enamel sewing-kit dearer to her than either of us, the cheap romantic novels she loved so much, and lastly a handful of river stones— a talisman to protect her in the hollow halls of the asylum. 

“I cannot,” she blubbers, suddenly so much like a child. “I cannot. The river.”

“There is no river,” my father roars, making my mother jump. “The river is not there anymore, how many times do I have to tell you that? There is just you, me, and our daughter—” his voice cracks now, the rage evaporating as he turns to me with defeated, pitying eyes, but he need not worry. Girls, river-born or otherwise, always grow up fast.

“The river,” Mother’s wail rises from a bellyful of maddening want. “The river is in me. It rages, it roils, it spills out, and there is nothing I can do to change it and neither can you!”

Everyone knew a river-born girl could not exist apart from the river. Yet, what was the harm in trying?

I think of my own girl now: a perfect summer child, christened in the hymns of cicadas and the water of my willing womb, who cries herself to sleep, night after night.

I collect brochures from all the adolescent mental health specialists in the area, only to ball them up and toss them in the bin. I burn herbs in the house: witch-hazel and sage and lemongrass, until I cannot smell anything without my nostrils stinging. I cup her wan, tear-washed face in my palms and ask her softly, very softly, “What is it my darling, what is it, tell me, tell me please, tell me so I can fix it.”

“I do not know, Ma,” she tells me in a broken sob, a rote answer by now. I hear all that she does not say: it is the sky, it is the air, it is the river, the river.  

I close my eyes and I see my mother laughing as the cold walls of the asylum closed round her, pressing her flat between them; merry still, dry-eyed and accusing. I close my eyes and I see the sky darkening overhead: fate and omen and a warning, a warning. I close my eyes and there is the river, the blue of old sorrows, gnawing at the bank, over and over again, until there is nothing left.