Near a city in the jungle, the old man made his way along the shore of a green river, now and again stopping to shade his eyes and gaze into the afternoon sky's placid blue depths. The tears came quickly, without surprise.
"Why do you cry, Jchee ta?" One of the city's inexhaustible supply of street children sat at the edge of the river's oily waters, poking a paper longtail boat with a stick. He wasn't the old man's grandson, merely a fistful of bones wrapped by skin the color of whatever dirt heap he'd slept in last night. "Are you sad to be so wrinkled and bent? Jchee ta? Did someone steal your pension check?"
The old man wiped his eyes.
"Jchee ta? you cry too much," the boy commented, giving the longtail boat another poke.
Only because I have no choice, the old man thought. The years did that to you. They eroded the strength of will, peeled away the emotional armor until anything--a fragrance, a melody, a fleeting scrap of memory--opened the floodgates and left you helpless.
Blinking away more tears, he stole another glimpse of the empty sky and remembered darkness, hot wind, blood pounding in his ears. Forty-seven years ago something terrible happened in the night. He'd seen it. He'd been there. That's why he came to the river today. To recall the past.
"I seek an angel," he said, very slowly, struggling for each word. "I need to tell her how?" The old man's clarity abruptly fled. This was another curse of age, never knowing when the mind would falter and grow murky, when time itself would fall apart. He'd lost days, sometimes weeks this way. Once almost a year.
Focus, he commanded himself. Think.
The ragged boy laughed. "My friend, Phong, says there are no such things as angels. They're bullshit make-believe for babies who don't know any better. And old men, too, I guess," he added maliciously.
"Such a lovely angel," the old man said. He'd stopped seeing the ragged boy and spoke to himself. For a few moments the past became a book that he could read. Each word burned with fire.
"She was an angel in pain and I saved her."
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