By Kimberly Gibson-Tran
It was noon and scorching, but my sister wouldn’t budge from the pleather backseat of the white Mitsubishi. This was the first time we’d been back to the temple since childhood, but this fact didn’t move her. And she was supposed to be our eyes with her expensive journalism school camera. Trying to recall her lesson to me on shutter speed, I took the strap from her shoulder, tracked the dusty trail to Wat Pho. In the archway emerald with Bodhi leaves, I snap a photo of two young monks—nejns—shoulder-toe in the orange robes of their order. Their shaved heads bend together. The backs of their sandals slap the packed dirt. I do not approach them. As I am a woman, they shouldn’t talk to me, and, as I am a Christian, I have no cause to bother them. I’ve come, like everyone who comes here, to be enlightened by the dark things, so I look up.
Khangkhao Mae Kai, Pteropus lylei, Lyle’s flying fox. They are big for bats—the biggest, in fact—wingspans of a full meter. Faces puff out of their black rubber arms in tufts of orange-brown. Suckling their little pups upside down, the colony, which can also be called a cloud, chitters and cackles like a village at market.
Banshee by Jennifer Weigel
When we moved away from Bang Khla, we almost never saw bats, not in their night swarms anyway, those thousand bodies outdoing the birds as they spewed from the trees in the Halloween purple of dusk. How did Katie get to be so afraid of them?
Who isn’t afraid of the dark, even without ghosts, even with prayers lodged in the throat and brain? Children of missionaries were trained back then to deal in the spiritual shadows. It was called warfare. In church, in America, when I was fourteen and newly moved from the tropical latitude of Thailand to the unenriched clay of Texas, the other kids laughed off the parts of the New Testament about demonic possession. God didn’t work in those ways here. If only, I thought, these worshippers under the spotlights of their basketball-court-convertible sanctuary could sense the incense infused air of the goldleaf and glass kaleidoscopic temples. There is a voice that calls us from the open and into the corners, recesses, bushes, far fields. What do they call it here?
In 2007, when I was a teenager in College Station, Texas, the vampire craze hit. For my birthday, a pretty, red-headed classmate gave me a thick paperback of Twilight. I didn’t read it—I admit, I don’t read books gifted to me. But I read her note inside the cover—a cursive rendering of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. Maybe my sister read the book, which, I learned from the Robert Pattinson movie, demystifies the lust-sick vampire into simply another kind of wounded human.
I trace my vampiric trauma to the source of most of my nightmares—The Animal Planet, whose educational programs in the 90s included, between filler material of seal and walrus footage set to Beach Boys soundtracks, the dangerous conservation adventures of Steve Irwin, crocodile hunter, and straight nature documentary—harrowing animal tales narrated by the likes of Leonard Nimoy or other fringe celebrities. These nature documentaries would cover a region—the Kenyan Great Rift Valley or the South American Amazon—and toggle between footage of different species. The narrative was always a variation on the big theme: survival, aka death, aka predation. There I learned about the vampire bat, which pierces the warm hide of a cow before licking the wound in little laps of pink triangle tongue, not unlike the little impish dagger my sister carried when she would cut in to report one of my wrongs.
Through the TV box I saw the moonlight catching in the wrinkles of the squished, piggish faces, nothing like the friendly dog-snouts of the flying foxes of Wat Pho, wolfish as they were. The worst the foxes would do is steal from the orchards, copper fur matted with banana mash or mango, though, my doctor dad reminds me, they do spread rabies through urine on occasion.
One time, after we’d moved from central to northern Thailand, to a valley surrounded by green mountains, I was riding my bike around the compound. It was night and the air was still suspended with rain. It was quiet and very dark, and away from the lights left on at my parents’ clinic, I could hardly see in front of me. I had to look down for what little light escaped the concrete when suddenly out of the infinite nowhere something big and black flew into me, shocking me alive. It felt like the slap of a furry umbrella. Everything was fine. I didn’t fall. I peddled home.
Prayer by Jennifer Weigel
Why couldn’t Katie get out of the car? At the root of this inquiry is the fact that I have never understood my sister. She, my only sibling, does not see memory like I do. She asked me sometime last year or the year before if I would go with her and her husband on a vacation to Thailand—play guide and interpreter for them. I, who can only ever go back. She, who can only ever go forward. I said yes, but we never bought any tickets.
She seemed to adapt more easily to America. Top grades, top social circle, pretty. Not that I wasn’t those things, just in different ways. We used to fight with kicks, fly at each other like bats out of hell, someone in Texas might say. What was it she never got? What have I always been trying to get out of her?
A chance discovery home from a college break: her diary. I expected the usual mourning over a crush, but it was over me: “Kimberly is so perfect with her long golden-brown hair, the way it tumbles down in waves. She walks so tall and smooth with her shoulders back. She’s so popular and beautiful. I want to be just like her. I want to look like her, talk like her, walk like her.” It was the first time I read myself as a character of hers. I felt more than ever that we had missed each other at some crucial juncture.
But then there are the things we’ll always know. The data we could present, and sometimes have presented, on each other, ripples in the fond reflections. The things I know she fears irrationally. This dark knowledge a sort of intimacy beyond words.
One night, when I was twelve and Katie was ten, and we were sleeping in my room, she got up and went down the stairs grumbling. My mother, working late at the dining room table, saw first my sister’s flushed, chubby cheeks—what everyone noticed—then the bulge of black armor, the stinger bobbing from the six inches of scorpion on her chest.
The summer after my high school graduation in Texas, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight dominated the box office. I went to the midnight show with my dad. He liked the action. I liked the symbolism, the moral quandaries Batman’s enemies always seemed so intent on placing him in. Batman, hoard of one, no matter his intent, is a dark agent. Chaos and order both, like the spiral cloud of bats which so traumatized him in childhood, impressing upon him the need to become the fear rather than overcome it.
Sometimes you look inside and want to find the animal. This thing of pure instinct that we cannot but tame into symbol. What did it mean when I tore at the flesh of my sister’s scalp? Was I, as the Buddhist might say, shackled by desire? Or was it jealousy old as Cain and Able? When the scorpion stung my sister, it left a mark. All the while I was in my bed, dreaming on the top bunk, cocooned in my own arms.
They call them “loners” or “lone wolves” in the news coverage. Unable to find the darkness in their skin, we summon other powers of assumption. We scrutinize the details, lay blame at the door of the parent, therapist, or dumping girlfriend. He’d dyed his hair red-orange, a joker. Armor cloaked him like a Batman fan, fooling the audience that he was part of the midnight premier act. Then he lit up the place. During his flight, we almost took him for a police officer.
When my family drove by Aurora, Colorado in 2012, it was only a place. Another land to contrast with the mountains and fields in our memories. My sister was working at the big YMCA in Colorado that summer. She was changing, growing, my parents and I remarked, trying to know who she was.
On a recent return to my childhood home in Bang Khla, I brought my Texan roommate. One of my parents’ old friends, a missionary I’d known as a child, played host to us, driving us around town in her mission-donated white Mitsubishi. Some things stay the same, like the bat temple. Same rusty dirt, same Buddhas in the shrine, what look to be the same young monks, the Bodhi tree canopy, and the gibbering cloud bespeckling the noon light. How at once they allow you to believe in them and their vibrant reverse world. A mother with her pups hidden under an umbrella wing. Another bat, blackened utterly, hangs electrified from the telephone line. My friend is awed, snaps dozens of photos that can never get close enough. Then she’s done and, looking around again, finds the place creepy, says she’s ready to go when I am.
Maybe my sister, unlike me, knows how to leave a scab alone. Maybe she knows something I don’t about wounding. She is, after all, a nurse now, like our mother before her, our mother who shouted over and over for our father to bring the surgical Kelly clamps from the bathroom, which he did, swiftly locking down on the monster’s spike. In the memory that is not my own, it bucks and writhes like a nightmare fiend, like a strip of purest nerve, a live wire, a struck patch of blackness I would do best to leave alone.
About the Author
Kimberly Gibson-Tran studied linguistics and creative writing at Baylor and the University of North Texas. She's written critically about poems with "Lines by Someone Else" and has recent writing in Anodyne Magazine, Passengers Journal, Elysium Review, and The Common Language Project. Raised by medical missionaries in Thailand, she now lives in Princeton, Texas, and works in college counseling.
About the Artist
Jennifer Weigel is a multi-disciplinary mixed media conceptual artist. Weigel utilizes a wide range of media to convey her ideas, including assemblage, drawing, fibers, installation, jewelry, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video and writing. Much of her work touches on themes of beauty, identity (especially gender identity), memory & forgetting, and institutional critique. Weigel’s art has been exhibited nationally in all 50 states and has won numerous awards.