News of Pol Pot’s Capture

That night the moon over New Hampshire wore a face I knew in high school of a pudgy boy whose mother was a singer and whose sister was once trapped in a burning building. When she was a girl, my sister and 17 of her classmates could not leave school because the janitor ran amok. The moonlight on the lake glides like Persian slippers wingtipping on the surface of the water. And the road with its arms around the lake is silent and American. In Thai,Sasithon stands for full moon, a name for a woman who once saw a pair of hands on the dashboard of my car. Not hers, but of another who died a violent death. In the whir of static between Top Forty and twang, I listened to the news report of Pol Pot’s capture. And like a man whose bowl of soup has grown too cold to eat, I realized that I had overdriven— missed the road I was supposed to turn into. In a false memory, I look back at the burning building that claimed my classmate’s sister. I see her moonface veiled in blue— blue as a flame of a lit match telling me the road I missed on the map. I could pull over and rest my eyes. I could sleep like an entire race of bones underneath the tall grasses where a man hacks and hacks at something in the heat. Once in a while he might stop to examine the pattern of a tattered fabric suspended on the tip of his machete, and try to remember his wife.