Free God's Fool by Mark Slouka

claimed, years later, that he talked to us almost to the end, reassuring us, comforting us, cleaning himself as best he could until he couldn’t raise his head or his arms and asked my mother not to let us in the room anymore. He was a strong man, and disrespectful of death.
    I killed the week it took him to die. I killed him too. Killed him retching over the pot, then shaking his head and trying to smile. Killed him making his little jokes while holding the wall to keep from slumping off the bucket. I buried him so deep that a full thirty years would pass before I saw him again.
    On a night in America, as far from Muang Tai as I would ever come, I woke in a house my brother and I would come to call our own to the talk of far-off thunder in a dream and, waking, couldn’t tell whether it was mumbling over the hills at our back or over the giant steps of the rice paddies thirty years ago. The rain never came, so perhaps the thunder I heard really was over Bangkok.
    I remember thinking how strange it was that I should dream of him after so many years. I couldn’t remember his face or his voice, and yet he had seemed so familiar, so utterly and completely alive, that I was struck with the thought that death is less than we make of it, that perhaps we simply live on—singing, arguing, swatting at flies—in other people’s dreams.
    It was night in Meklong. My brother and I were children again. We were in our houseboat. I could see a baby sleeping on a bamboo mat, our brother Nai eating jun fruit out of a wooden bowl. I could hear a baby crying, a man arguing with his wife. That must be Wei-Ling, I remember saying to myself. His houseboat is next to ours.
    Mother was in the dream, scooping pieces of fish and rice into the clay pot with her fingers. “Your father will be home soon,” she said to the fire, and I wondered to myself by what accident we had found ourselves home again. Just then the house rocked slightly and he walked in. I knew him instantly—his wide, kind face, his eyes, his movements. Hisfamiliarity broke my heart. He bent down to touch his sweating forehead to ours and I could smell the river. I looked past the netting. On the outside selling table, gleaming in the moonlight, was a small mountain of silvery fish.
    We sat down at the table. I looked at my father’s hands and started to cry. They were fisherman’s hands, with constellations of thin white cuts and miniature crosses and puckered scars. A fresh cut on the knuckle of his thumb was bleeding.
    “What is it?” he said to me. He noticed the cut. “This?” He began to suck on it.
    “I’m afraid,” I said.
    He put down his bowl and smiled. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said.
    I looked out the door. Past the selling table, I could see vast rice paddies, striped with water. Mountain terraces dropped down to a long, narrow valley. A fire burned on the horizon. My father saw it too, and put down his food. He turned to my mother. “I’m sorry,” he said.
    And then we were in the paddies. The houseboat was gone. I could see the dark spears of the rice plants, like rents in the sky. The stars wavered and blurred and were still. In the distance the fire still burned, larger now.
    I tried to say something, but tears choked my throat. “I have to go,” he said. He smiled. “A nuisance is all it is,” he said, tipping his head toward the fire gusting up in the darkness, and his courage gripped my chest like a giant fist. “My brave boys,” he said, looking at us, then touched our faces, turned quickly, and started off, pushing hard through the knee-deep water, scattering stars. The night sky closed seamlessly behind him.
    I woke crying from my dreams for the first time in my life. Eng was awake. “Would you like to get some water?” he asked.
    “I’m fine,” I said. “I had a dream about Father.”
    He was silent.
    “Do you remember him?” I asked.
    “Hardly at all.”
    “Anything?”
    I felt him shrug. “I remember