Free Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien

own age, who preferred to sit at home with his records, had an instinct for the wild. With the dentist’s son Oun, and a few of the village boys, he choked rabbits, twisted their necks, pulled them inside out. When we had meat, if for a moment I felt full, daylight seemed to expand again, colours returned and melted the tightness in my chest.
    One of the mulatan , an old woman, tried to keep us occupied. She gave us seeds and spoke kindly about soil and water. She said the war had left Cambodia in disrepair. The Americans had bombed our schools, our roads and reservoirs. To survive, we had to feed our country. Food was our first defence, our most powerful weapon.
    The seeds were like letters in my hands. Day after day, I knelt in the dirt, dragging weeds from the ground, imagining the beans, peppers, and cucumbers that would tangle around us.
    “Feel my hands,” my brother said one morning, nearly crying. “See how they’re breaking.” We were working together in the garden.
    His hands were scratched and rough.
    “You’re imagining things,” I told him. “They’re just the same as always.”
    “If we had a gun,” my brother said, “we could have all the food we wanted. If I had a rope …”
    “Then what?”
    Sopham wiped the sweat and tears from his face. After a moment, he said, “If Kosal could give you anything, what would you ask for?”
    The sun was crawling up. In the fullness of a banana tree, I saw a figure reaching up into the leaves, trying to grasp the fruit, mistaking it for the sun. The picture, hallucinatory, swam in the air.
    “Ask for something you can use,” he said thoughtfully. “It’s no good asking for the impossible.”
    But we had a home, I thought, a life. Why should we be ashamed? Kosal’s world was the dream, I knew. Soon we would open our eyes and all of this would cease to be. I saw my father laughing, his stories like a page turning. I closed my eyes and willed him to keep walking, to come nearer.
    I heard my brother’s voice. “Ask to be a mulatan , and not one of us. The mulatan always have enough. They have food they can’t even finish.”
    In small groups, the older children were sent away. The driver and his wife, the machinist and two of his boys, became sick and died. The students, the teachers, thebanker, they vanished. If a family asked for a missing person, Kosal answered them by saying, “I don’t know who you mean. I don’t know this person.” He had a cunning, dry expression in his eyes. He spoke slowly as if his words held threads of gold, he spoke softly and we had to lean in close to hear. “Why do you worry?” he would ask, a smile shading his face. “At oy té.”
    One night, we were called to a meeting. Kosal stood before us. An old man, the hotel manager, knelt on the ground.
    “Tell us,” Kosal said.
    I saw sweat gleaming on the man’s face. He said, “What would you have me say, Teacher?”
    “Tell us about your life.”
    The old man stared up, uncomprehending.
    Beside them, the teenager, Prasith, carried a length of rope hung diagonally across his chest, worn like an ammunition belt. He handled the rope in his hands obsessively, fitfully, winding the end around one wrist, letting it fall slack, then taking it up again. The old man begged forgiveness. “You were happy then, weren’t you?” Kosal said, interrupting him. “In the old society.” There was a tokoe , a gecko on the wall clicking and clicking. “You think you’re suffering now,” Kosal said. He spoke as if he were feverish and light and faultless. “You think you understand, but what do you know about pain? I had to add everything together. There was a cost to your happiness.” My mother tried to turn ourfaces away but Kosal rebuked her in his smooth, begging voice. He told us to pay attention, to learn from this man’s example. He said that we must make ourselves strong and self-sufficient, we must never rely on anyone else, we must be clean inside because purity was