that this universal love was so pure that it was colorless and
translucent. He believed that it was so ubiquitous and protecting like
a mosquito net around the world, but alive, sensitive, and full of
feeling; and that from it came the babies...the babies. Certainly as
the years were placed on the tables like plates of rice and bowls of
noodle soup it was harder to believe that brotherly love was equally
dispersed among mankind. It seemed that the darker the pigment of a
Thai, the more likely he was to do his menial tasks and the whiter he
was, the more such Thais seemed to own the enterprises of the country.
To his brother, Kumpee, like the father, he had existed as a verbal
punching bag to relieve stress. "Night sports" was the term that Kazem
called his form of brotherly love.
"Now..." scoffed the mosquito as it smiled maliciously, "Now, you
know the truth. The truth shall set you free. Babies come from the
desire to both eat healthy human flesh and crawl and slither around in
its beautiful skin."
He woke up startled to a void and a room that was at first
unfamiliar in the darkness until memory seeped in and he knew where he
was at. As he was feeling depressed looking at this basement room
where they were caged and smelling the stagnancy of air stinking of
mens' bodies more eclectically than just their armpits, he fought with
the rectangular window to which leaned weeds and grass. He barely
budged it open. The patch of greenery flushed its grassy smells as
well as the urinary ones with a gust of wind. Even decay was in the
grass and such smells were beautiful. He watched the blades moving.
They whispered of impermanence. They reminded him that as dictators
die, civilizations ultimately become nothing but a few buried artifacts
and bones, and palaces crumble, he would not stay in this cell forever.
Everything would change; and change at times had its advantage.
And yet the child in him resisted change. It yearned to declare