(Originally Published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 2022)
Starved and emaciated, kneeling in the shallow inlet of the Lake, I prayed for a son.
The water rippled from the Lake’s center, and the sound of a tiny cry emerged from the dark watery depths. Had the Goddess finally heard me?
The pain struck above my left temple, and I clutched my head in the cold marsh. The spirit climbed from the Lake’s bottomless waters, deeper still from the cycle of souls, to the surface, into me.
When I woke hours later, the Lake’s frigid water lapping up against my face, I was a father.
I caressed the warm, doughy bud on my temple. Within it, I could feel his faint heartbeat. A head-child was rare, the hardest to carry and raise. Of course, I’d wanted a hip-child or belly-child, but the Lake had granted me a head-child.
The far banks carried the Lake’s whisper. The child is not yours to keep. One day he will return to me.
I raised my clenched fist. After three moons of prayer and penance, I’d earned the child. A constellation of planets, pinpoint jewels of blue, purple, and red shone in the early dawn—all extremely auspicious for the conception of my son.
For the first three days after my return, I rested. My wife, Savitri, made goat curry flavored with cumin and cinnamon, a layer of fat glistening over the surface of the pot. She massaged my neck each night, her soft sari falling against my chaffed skin, her black hair blanketing me in the scent of jasmine. We named him Varun.
The fourth morning, I was up frying dosa. My two girls, Spandana and Lakshmi, ages six and eight, touched the warm, thick-skinned bud on my left temple. “Papa, we can feel his heart beating.” They giggled.
Freshly braided hair, dressed in white uniforms with blue ribbons on their lapels, their knapsacks filled with books, they were the pride of the neighborhood. Both girls had grown from Savitri’s hip. Hip-children were never colicky. They ate like jackals. Their cheeks were full and dimpled after three months.
Savitri drank her customary glass of warm water before nibbling at her breakfast. Dressed in a crisp wool salwar and gray shawl, with her brown hair pulled into a bun, and a sharpened pencil behind her ear, her narrow face was alert, her eyes lively and full of energy. I caressed her back and kissed her caramel shoulder.
I was a lowly butcher by birth, and she was from Letters.
Our village of Nyasi was hidden in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains. The clouds often took our Goddess’s form, breasts heavy with moisture, white snow that fell like mother’s milk and melted into fast rivers that fill the Lake. We were bound to this place, hidden forever on her land. Her Lake granted us our children and our souls returned to the Lake in death. Wild things roamed the Lake’s shores—crocodiles, tigers, water buffalo, and gazelles. But not all were ordinary animals.
None of us wanted a child that grew too close to the wild.
After a week I returned to the butcher shop. I’d learned to read and write and married a woman of Letters, but the butchers, the town, my long-dead ancestors whose expectations were very much alive, expected me to behead chickens and mince hearts.
Asam, the chief butcher of Nyasi, stared at the thick-skinned, walnut-colored sac on my temple. The iron scent of congealed blood filled the shop. “Are you mad to have another child! The Goddess punishes greed.”
“I wanted a son.”
“All men want a son, but not all men should get one.”
I made a Namaste to the direction of our Lake. “The Lake of souls heard my prayers.”
With a heavy thud, he cleaved a pig shank clear in two. “And look what the Goddess has given you—a head-child.”
I caressed the sac. “My son will be strong.”
“He will need to be to become a butcher.”
I stiffened and glared at him. Everything in my heart rejected that caste and family predetermine Varun’s life. He would have the freedom to be what he wanted.
“Your father’s father was a butcher. Your father was a butcher. You-”
“My wife is in Letters,” I said.
“A son takes after his father. You were a head-child as well.” Asam raised his cleaver and pulled over another frozen shank. “My wife had one hip-child, but I kill too many animals to bring another into the world. Our job is to be butchers. You would do well to remember that.”
“You’ll be getting on in years by then. You won’t have a say in the matter,” I replied.
“You think the town butcher decides the fates of a boy?” he scoffed. “Every day you walk into the coup, chop off their heads, pluck their feathers, and throw them in salt. Then you skin the fresh kills and grind bones. It is your routine, not mine.”
I stayed quiet and gritted my teeth as I entered the chicken coop, also knowing that he was right. The rules that were unwritten, hidden in tradition, were the hardest to break. I stretched the first long neck on the wooden stump and cut clean through the delicate spine, while the chickens watched on and waited for what they could not see coming.
At the four-week mark, the spasms started at my temple and spread through my sinuses. It felt like a mortar was crushing seeds inside my skull.
Savitri could not stay and comfort me. She couldn’t jeopardize her position drafting letters. The girls began walking themselves to school.
Most days I could do little but lay in bed, waiting for the next attack. I’d wrap my hands around the growing sac, now the size of a grapefruit, feeling his knobby bones and the firmness of his skull. Despite the pain, my determination grew. I was going to provide something better for my son. But the idea of change was daunting. I’d already made it further than expected for a lowly butcher. I’d married a woman of Letters. My girls were training to be in Letters. Did I even deserve more? To want more change, to crave more freedom, to fight against our system too hard might endanger us.
Over another two months, the sac grew to the size of a coconut.
I looked in the mirror one morning and saw a rakshasa with two heads. He’d been kicking and wrestling for days, non-stop, unrelenting, pounding my head like a soldier in prison. That night, I woke to the trickle of warm blood down my neck.
“Savitri,” I whispered. “Savitri!”
She bolted up at ninety degrees, the whites of her eyes gleaming in the dim lamplight. She brought over the lamp and gasped. A red film of sac blood covered my chest.
She raced to the kitchen and returned with a knife. “Be still. He’s ready.”
“Should we call the healer?”
“We didn’t need one for the last two. And he looks to be half their size,” she said.
I flung aside the pillow and laid straight like a plank. “I’m ready.”
“I know you are. Our son will do well.”
Savitri spread a field of towels and rubbed down the sac with clean water and soap. She sterilized the blade and gave me a thick piece of cinnamon bark to bite down on. She was caring and smart, able to help people with her words and actions. Caring and smart for a butcher meant killing faster, finding more meat on the carcass.
As she started to probe the sac for the right place to cut, my fists clenched. The feel of the cold blade against taut skin. Then the raw pain surging through my head. I screamed and bit down, the taste of bitter cinnamon spreading to my throat.
For long moments, her hands pressed, pulled, tugged, and yanked. As the pain subsided, I opened my eyes and saw her cradling Varun in her hands. He cried briefly, nothing extravagant, just a short announcement that he’d arrived.
She kissed him and nestled him on my non-bloody side. He was small but proportional, his black eyes already opening and closing like little seeds. He was healthy. He was ours.
**
After two moon cycles we made a pilgrimage to the Lake. Each of us wore a holy thread crossing our chest and a long flame bhindi in the center of our forehead. We lit a camphor fire and chanted sloka that the Goddess herself had once shared with the wild things of the shore, who had in turned shared with the first women.
The spring winds gusted in swirls, picking up dried leaves and twigs. Our girls, weak and dizzy from the morning fast, leaned against thin saplings to stay upright.
After an hour reciting the birth chant, we heard a strange wail carry across the waters. A moment later, a second wail rang out, this one long and piercing. It sounded human but from the throat of a wolf. We hurriedly packed up our belongings and left the offerings of fresh coconut pulp and fruits by her pebbly shore.
The noises picked up from around the shores, sailing across the surface of the waters. A cacophony of grunts, howls, chirps, and guffaws.
We scampered up the hill towards our wagon. The girls clutched each of Savitri’s hands. Wild things were unpredictable, dangerous.
For the first time I noticed Varun wiggling ever so lightly in the satchel that kept him firmly against my chest. With each wail or roar, his tiny feet kicked. His eyes were open, the pupils big and dark like blots of ink. He was listening to the sounds of the wild.
The colic started after a few weeks. The cry would begin as a tiny yelp, the yelps accelerating into a throaty wail. Each time we held our breath hoping against hope that the bout would subside. But it never did.
Unrelenting screams, with only tiny sips of air that gave him more fuel to cry. His mouth stretched wider and wider until it swallowed his face.
It kept on and on. Indiscriminate of the hour. The time of day.
By the third month, after he’d gotten a bit more durable, we built a mud house in the backyard, beyond which was a pasture. Four walls and a tiny room, a small opening covered with a plank. We took turns sleeping with him while he wailed and cried.
At least by moving him outdoors, Spandana and Lakshmi were able to sleep. As the days passed, they stopped resenting him. But they didn’t like him, even knowing that the colic wasn’t his fault. He was very hard to like.
At least they didn’t want to drown him in the well to stop the wailing. The inconsolable screaming was a far cry from the tender adoration that we’d had with our daughters. But he’d come from me, and I had to endure. I could never share those feelings with anybody, not even Savitri. A good parent should never feel that way.
In the mornings, my neighbors, now accustomed to the screaming, would walk by with pitying looks. A head-kid they would mutter and shake their own heads in consolation.
Varun wailed in one form or another until the age of four. At first it was colic. Then tantrums. By then our family had turned deaf from the wails and mute from the sleepless nights. Spandana and Lakshmi had grown quieter and more studious, often locking themselves in their rooms after dinner and not emerging until school the next day. Varun had broken our will.
That winter, a deep cold descended over our village. We woke to clear dawns of powdery snow and sunlight reflecting off pale blue, glacial sheets.
The morning of our departure for a short holiday, Savitri packed our meats, rice, pots, and furs and loaded them onto our sled. At the bottom of the steeps, at the edge of Nyasi’s impenetrable white blanket of fog, there were a dozen or so cabins. It was warmer there and the snow would be softer. The girls could sled and snowshoe across the plains.
Four abrasive knocks sounded at the front door. Varun scampered over and twisted open the handle. Asam stood in the entranceway and behind him was a town elder who I recognized as Sa, an ageless woman with silver hair and a round moon face. A cold gust blew into the warm den, and the fire flickered taller with the fresh air.
They remained in the doorway offering a polite greeting. Asam cleared his throat and said, “An expedition of hunters will travel to the outskirts of Nyasi. An elk herd has wandered into our hills.”
“I am not a hunter.”
“They need rations. Three goats must be slaughtered, cured, and smoked.”
“These are days of rest. The elders themselves made the decree,” I protested.
“The herd was only spotted last night,” Asam said.
I glanced back at Savitri and the girls who stood immobilized, listening by the pile of satchels and bags. Varun was rummaging around his mud hut, banging sticks against bricks.
“The apprentices are both not well, some sort of chest sickness,” Asam said.
“You are the hand that feeds us. Your hand is needed,” Sa said.
Savitri smiled understandingly and said, “We will survive without you for a couple days.”
“Please, take the sled down to the cabins. I will join you,” I said.
If it had just been Asam, Savitri would have had choice words for him. That’s why he had brought Sa. They closed the door and the cold wind vanished. Savitri and the girls glanced at each other nervously.
“What choice do I have? The lowland herds rarely venture into Nyasi,” I said.
“It’s not that,” Savitri said.
“We understand the work needs to be done. Hopefully you’ll come by tomorrow night,” Spandana said.
The flames crackled and they remained motionless. After a moment, with a heavy voice, Savitri said, “Varun?”
I peered out the window where he played barefoot in the snow. “I see.”
The girls stayed quiet. The morning fire crackled on.
“I’ll keep him. He can spend the day with me at the butchers.”‘
“Thank you, papa!” Lakshmi reddened with embarrassment. “I mean not in that way.”
We finished loading the sled and Varun crawled up my leg and settled on my left shoulder as we waved goodbye. For now, with my time and attention, he was content.
Varun skipped ahead on the road to the butchers. I followed behind, aching, wishing I could be with my girls. I watched their sled, little more than a dark fleck, as it carved a line in the snow towards the lowland plains.
By the age of eight, Varun’s eyes gleamed with something savage from the moment he woke in the morning to the late hour that he fell asleep, often under the open starlit sky. He was dark and wiry, his hair densely curled. Naughty didn’t do him justice. It would be like calling the tigers that roamed the mountains, toothy. He stole sweets, toys, sandals, once a little parrot from the marketplace. He’d already tried his hand at picking fights.
In the start of this eighth year, the elders arrived for his Duty Ceremony.
There were always five elders in Nyasi, their lineage derived from that of the first women. They spent their youth learning politics, leadership, and ethics to maintain the social fabric. Of course, that fabric seemed to fit them and those of higher caste rather snugly. They came on a day when Varun had just gotten thrashed by a couple kids. I’d washed and combed his hair with a neat side part. Savitri had dressed him in a button-up shirt. Despite the dark purple lip and shiny bruises, he looked smart and handsome.
In our family room, Savitri served chai and pakora. I sat on the mat furthest from them, my hands and feet nowhere near the food and drink. My hands were after all lowly butchers’ hands, not fit to touch the food they ate.
I tried to get Varun to say a few words, but mostly he stuffed his face with pakora and belched. He stared longingly out the window to the distant forests.
After an hour, the chief elder, Sa, spoke with a rather forced reverence. “The cycle which guides our lives is not something we can always see. To have three children is rare, a blessing of fertility. Varun takes after his father’s lineage. A head-child does not stray far from their parent’s nature. The boy needs structure. He will begin his training at the butchers under Asam. That is our decision.”
I nearly choked on chai steam. “He is too young to decide with such certainty. Give him more time to figure out who he is.”
She smiled that wise, all-knowing smile. “Sometimes we are blind to the things closest to us. He has told us that and more.”
“His mother is from Letters! Their family is erudite and scholarly.”
“Like your daughters,” Sa said.
“Like Varun!”
“A child’s nature is not always what a parent wishes it to be. This is only our guidance. Even the Goddess does not control fate, but do not anger her.”
Anger her. I’d broken free of a butcher’s life, created a home filled with books, learning, and prestige, but so quickly they could put me in a box and cut off my air.
They rose and Savitri handed each of them a sari and milksweet, which all combined was likely worth an entire week of wages, but these too were customs we could not escape.
After they left, I ran back to the family room to explain to Varun that he still had a chance to do and be something other than a butcher. The window was flung open, and he was already out roaming the forests.
We had a right to disagree, but I didn’t have the courage to disobey. It was rumored that disobeying the elders might bring the wrath of the Goddess herself on our family. Varun had already turned us into the talk of the town and not in a good way.
A week later, Asam summoned us to the shop. He stood just outside the door, basking in the morning sun like a crocodile. A lazy gray eye watched us turn the corner into the butcher’s alley.
“This is my son, Varun.”
“I know him. He snoops around here, takes scraps and bones, after we’ve closed the shop. Even steals the leftover meat on the carcass.”
I laughed, but then saw that Asam was serious. I grabbed Varun’s shoulders. “Is that true?”
“Only the meat they waste,” Varun said.
“For what?”
He shrugged. “I take it to kebab-alley, and they cook it for me.”
“You shouldn’t steal from anyone, especially not the butchers!”
Asam smirked. “Keep better track of your head-child.”
I blushed and turned away, hiding my embarrassment.
Most people hated to see their food killed. The last second before a kill produced all sorts of terrible things—the strange bleat of the goat, the squeal of the pig, the vacant eye of the rooster. Varun didn’t seem to have any discomfort with the sounds and sights of death, but he wasn’t happy here, often staring outdoors, muttering curses, and putting his full restless energy on display. But over the next few weeks, he managed his way around the barn and the shop, cleaning the counters and tending to the livestock well enough that even Asam was satisfied.
“He’s a natural,” Asam said.
I put my hand on Varun’s shoulder and squeezed affectionately. “He won’t be here often. He has other duties, his schoolwork.”
Varun looked at me with anxious eyes and asked if we could leave. The tinge of desperation, of childish vulnerability felt good, like he needed me. The work was nearly done, so I grabbed my bag and pay for the week, and we started to return home.
As we walked, I felt something wet at the small of my back, sticky and cold. To my surprise the bottom of the leather satchel was soaked through. I rummaged past my aprons and pulled out a purple goat heart.
“Varun! You can’t keep stealing!”
He snatched the heart and ran off. I called after him, only to watch him disappear down the trail that led to the forests.
**
Over the following years, Varun developed an insatiable craving for meat. Under Asam’s inscrutable eye, he’d learned how to skin the carcass, cure the organs, and tenderize the bones, but he stole more, coming home with a set of ribs, a small shank, a bag of chicken livers. I scolded him, tried to lock him indoors, but nothing worked. Asam docked his pay.
I felt powerless to give him some other alternative, other than the butcher shop. Just like I’d always been trapped, he was too. There would be no Savitri to save Varun from this role, and he knew it.
I was the one who’d prayed and begged the Lake for a child. I’d wanted my son’s life to be filled with the choices I’d never had. Varun felt like my mistake. My love for him was sadly divorced of tenderness, fondness, trust, but I’d learned to worry about him more than myself, to put his well-being above mine.
When he was fifteen, sprouting hair on his upper lip, legs solid like tree trunks from all his hiking, I found a cow bone in his bag one morning. I couldn’t make sense of it, except that maybe he planned to make a fire and cook the marrow.
After he left the house, I followed his tracks, which he’d made no attempt to conceal. Close on his trail, I could hear him rampaging through the underbrush like a lost elephant.
We arrived at a spot not far from the Lake, a rocky bluff lit up orange with the dawn. My breath misted in the spring cold. In the distance our Goddess of clouds stretched in salutation to the sun.
Varun stopped at a small fire pit that he presumably came to often. He gathered his tinder, lit a fire, and reclined on a worn boulder. From an opening in the trees—a picture of the oblong Lake stretching towards the mountain, the frothy river cascading from the snowcaps.
I was about to confront Varun when I heard a moan from the cave mouth. My heart began to gallop. I’d heard that sound before.
In the dawn light, a sleepy tigress, a juvenile, not yet at full maturity, stretched luxuriously. She yawned, exposing canines the size of knives. She ambled down the rockface, the sleep still on her oddly pretty face, and collapsed violently near the firepit.
Varun watched her intently, his hand gripping a burning torch. He looked like a man, thick, hairy arms, any remnants of rounded cheeks and dimples replaced with a hardened jawline and angular brow. He didn’t look like Varun. I realized how little time I’d spent just watching him. I was either scolding or growing enraged or yelling, but rarely watching.
Varun remained motionless for many moments while the tigress licked her paws. To intervene now might endanger us both. Languidly, she rose and trotted around the fire towards him. Only a meter away, Varun pulled the bone from his bag. He held it out firmly, his black eyes filled with an adrenaline fire. She approached and fastened her teeth on one end. Her golden eyes fixed on him.
I held my breath. I suspect Varun did as well, but after a moment, he released the bone. Pleased with the offering, she trotted back up to her den. A moment later, the sound of cracking bones rolled down the hillside.
After that I came to see Varun differently. The words I’d used to think about him. Naughty. Mischievous. Thief. They felt inaccurate. I realized now he was wild. Wild in a way that I had never been, that I had never seen, and that I would never know.
I arrived home to find Savitri waiting in our cold courtyard. The stars had formed a dome of lights above the mountains. We held each other tightly, watching shooting stars, and trying to comprehend the vast beauty, but all the while feeling small and so helpless.
At the age of seventeen, Varun stole from Asam for the last time. He returned with a long gash on his forearm, leaving a trail of blood along the street. Asam warned him next time it would be a finger, then a hand.
In the kitchen, over a wide ceramic bowl, I rubbed his dark skin with alcohol. I could hear his teeth grinding as he smoldered, not in pain, but in anger.
“You did steal from the butchers. Over and over. Probably have stolen an entire herd of goats by now,” I said.
“I only took what they couldn’t sell, or the bones and bad meat that’s given to the dogs,” he said.
“So you say, but it doesn’t belong to you,” I said.
“I feel like I can’t breathe. I never asked to be there,” he muttered.
“You don’t need to be a butcher. Neither Asam nor the elders should decide your life for you. But you’ve got to change, work at being something different.” I brought forth a bottle of fenny from the cabinet and poured a shot.
But he pushed it back. “It makes me sick.”
I nodded, feeling a little pleased with his choice. I numbed his skin with a medicinal root and stitched the wound closed. Fourteen stitches in total. I forced him to take a dose of the fungal powder from the bark of the forest trees.
“We have more money now. Your sisters are both working in Letters. We can buy you more meat.”
He shrugged. “I need to be outside. That’s what I need.”
“I know what you’re thinking. Can we buy enough for the tigress?”
A wry smile crossed his face. The first time in a long while I’d seen him smile. “I knew you followed me. She’s still out there, but she’s too dangerous now.”
“Maybe it’s time to find a more appropriate girl.”
“Look at me! I have no future, no place here. What girl would want me.”
Tears brimmed with surprising speed. He was my child. He was tangled into me. His name, his cry, his colic, his anger, his thieving, his running away, his wildness—all tangled into me. I’d wanted to understand what he was feeling and thinking, so that I wasn’t perpetually disapproving and angry. But what I’d wanted him to be—educated, respected, wise—was never in his nature. The hammer of our customs and traditions had so carelessly crushed what I’d wanted for him. He’d seen it happen. So, he’d forged his solitary way.
A couple weeks later, watching lazy flakes of snow drift outside the bedroom windowsill, I heard a clamor from the small mud hut. Varun had moved into the tiny hut years ago, preferring to sleep under the open air in summer and huddled in the den during the long winters. In the thin silvery light of dawn, Varun streaked along the road. It wasn’t unusual for him to sneak off, day or night, but some parental instinct told me that this was different.
I pulled on a lambskin jacket and boots and followed his footprints that matted the dewy bunch grass. Occasionally I caught his scent. For a moment I felt young, on the chase, after the person who had once mattered the most to me.
At the Southern edge of the Lake, flocks of waterfowl remained asleep at the shore, bobbing in the calm waters. The hungry eyes of weasels and foxes in the underbrush watched patiently.
Varun stood there on the rocks. From his satchel, he pulled forth a goat heart. His breath steamed in the cold air as he tore into it. For a long while, he gorged and choked on the dark red meat, but he managed to eat half of the heart.
Wading into the water, rinsing his bloody face, he growled, wailed, and moaned. Until finally he found what he was looking for. He roared. It was the only sound over the waters for what seemed like a long time.
He plunged the heart into the water. I felt my chest cracking like it was my heart beneath the surface. I imagined it falling into the depths of the Lake, past the layers of cold into the deep part of the world that was warm all the time.
He stripped off his clothes and floated in the water until he too was submerged.
“Varun!” I raced along the pebbly beach, scattering flocks of birds, until I reached the spot where he’d entered. I called over the waters. I looked for bubbles, for his shadow, but the surface was still.
Then on the opposing shore some one hundred meters away I saw him emerge, hunched over on all fours, his skin and hair orange and gold in the morning light.
“Varun!”
He glanced over his shoulder but kept on into the tree line.
I splashed around the edge of the inlet and plunged through the underbrush, emerging into a canopy where rays of light pierced the barren, gnarled branches.
The tiger stared at me with dark, golden eyes, full of pride. Loud, milky breaths exploded from his nares.
I fell to my knees, arms by my side. The tiger approached until he was a meter away. He growled menacingly and sniffed my hair and neck. He seemed to recognize my scent.
I started to reach out, but he barred his fangs as a warning. I waited, barely breathing, on my knees. After a languid circle, he knocked me to the ground with a gentle swat and stood over me, a heavy paw on my chest.
“Varun,” I whispered.
He licked the side of my face with a sandpaper tongue and lowered himself to the ground. His weight pressed against me, but my fears eased as I basked in the beast’s warmth.
When he rose and faced me again, this time his golden eyes reflected only the wild. Without another glance, he trotted into the forest. My son had only needed me for a short while. After that he’d needed to be wild.
I reached home to find Savitri and the girls waiting quietly near the warm embers of the fireplace. I sat beside Savitri and held her trembling hand. I didn’t need to say anything. We wept together. He was still our son, their little brother.
The girls wiped their tears and prepared for a day of Letters.
“Will he just be forgotten?” Savitri asked from the doorway before she left to her office.
I noticed the sunlight streaming into the house through the windows. In the courtyard his small hut stood with the plank door broken askew. Our memories of him would permeate our home forever, but that he was gone seemed somehow fitting. “He’s still with us.”
“He is your son, always,” she said.
I gathered a satchel and a sharp axe and strode right to the butcher’s shop.
Asam stood in the doorway chewing paan and staining the road red. “Just you today, better that way.”
Inside the slaughterhouse, I breathed in the bitter metallic air and felt humbled. So much of my life I’d spent here, never daring to leave. Humbled by the power of tradition and custom.
Asam slammed the door shut behind us. “There’s work to be done. Do not let your son’s madness consume you.”
“He is wild now.”
Asam’s next words caught like he’d swallowed chicken bones. His version of a condolence.
“I failed him. We all failed him,” I said.
I raised my axe and began to cleave apart a shank. I gathered the flesh and bones into a satchel. Asam started to protest, but I raised a palm to silence him. That would be my last moment as a butcher.
I returned to the Lake, through the thawing fields, and the hordes of flies that rose from the ground to live and die, all in a short day. I followed the forest trails that my son had taken for so many years. He was no longer mine, but I would not forget him.
There at the lip of the Lake, I laid out the offering of meat. I splashed my face and drank from her clear basin. She was quiet, unforgiving as winter. She’d warned me once and I’d ignored her.
I knelt in the waters, my feet turning blue, but in the sunny afternoon I remembered him, letting my mind drift through the years. And despite how hard it had been, I quickly settled on a moment of joy. He’d been about eight and we’d gone walking. In a grove of ironwoods, we found a nest of snow pigeons. He shushed me and watched them in rapture, and for the next few weeks, he fed them until they flew off at the start of winter. And after that memory, the others emerged and sailed one by one through my mind.
In the distance I heard a roar. On the far banks, I saw him weaving between the pine trees and leaping over boulders. And, what’s this, close behind him, I saw her. The tigress had waited for him. I smiled, nearly laughed, as I watched them frolicking as only young tigers could.
I called back, praying that he might catch my scent and remember us, as he roamed the Lake’s cold shores.
END