Blossoms of Phnom Pehn

(I can still remember the blossoms of Phnom Pehn.

 

I think about them now.

 

You cannot take this away. Stomachs may shrink, shackles may chafe, wife and children may and raped beaten and burned, but the single image of a blossom in bloom, a face cupped, the stem leaning, like a woman bent over the wash, is unassailable. Pretty little things. Pink and fresh, like the cheeks of girls not yet spoken for. Dropped from the pagan fingertips of the trees as the spring cocoons itself in the heat of another humid summer.

 

It is strange. I no longer think about the food. Food is a painful and distant memory. It is easier to think about the blossoms of Phnom Pehn or the feeling of your brother's breath or fishing poles on the shores of a village, standing out along the banks like accusatory fingers. It is easier to reinvent the world – the world before you existed. Before your soldiers. Before the exodus. Before the anthems and the freedom. It may agitate you to know that I have rejected you and your reality. You are nothing more than faded ghostdwellers. I walk among you, but you are a waterpainting. You are a reflection. I can see through you, skin transparent as lacewing. Strangers in the red dust.

 

You haunt me, nonetheless.

 

Tagalong, poltergeist. Earthly trouble. Earthly nonsense.

 

I no longer think about the pain.

 

The pain in the stomach, crowing, vast, emptying. The pain behind the eyes. The gray skin. The yellow gums and the teeth, black and aligned like railroadworkers. Eyes deep and old. We might blow away. Tumble away. Our bodies like kiteskins. Spread your arms and the lazy, browsing wind will scoop you up, collect you, ferry you.

 

But you have the wind, don't you?

 

You own it all.

 

You own my very heartbeat.

 

We do not need mirrors here. We are all the same person now. Tallman. Thinman. Newperson. Gray and dim-eyed in the mist, like dethroned noblemen. To have you is no benefit, you say. To destroy you is no loss. You have taxed us. You have embargoed the soul, the breath, the smile. Tariff on the touch of a loved one. Amendments on the poetry of a conversation.

 

It is only in the thoughts of a mother's skirts that there is any sanctuary. In the way the house smells after a home-cooked meal. In the way sugarcane break under my grip and in the way a betrothed smiles quietly at you through a folded photograph, tucked under your foot in your shoe. Her face like a blossom in spring, opening, divulging.

 

The bees, the bees. Come industrialize your tears, darling. Make something. Make something out of nothing. Out of sorrow. Out of sorrow and dust.

 

It is only in these thoughts. It is only in these thoughts that there is asylum. A nursery of sensation and remembrance. Quiet place, quiet shores. It is here that I smell the blossoms of Phnom Pehn. It is here that I live.)

 

 

*

 

 

They stand at the edge of the hole they dug themselves, like words on the tip of a tongue, all twenty-nine of them. The dirt is a fresh and heavy clay. It is in their fingernails. They can smell it in the air. A dozen Khmer Rouge – young men in uniforms that hang on them like foreign skins – sit around with guns and cigarettes and harsh words. They sit and laugh as a captain inspects the men lined up along the ridge, with his proud red sash and his face bruised with liverspots. It is unbearably hot. The heat speaks with a buzzing dialect. Flies at the edges of their eyes. Flies on their lips. Greedy, already, for their nutrionless insides. Attracted by the preamble of a dying man.

 

They stand in a field. A field of red dirt. The trees have been hacked down to thumbless stumps. The birds hang in the sky listless and homeless, silent and dark as clergymen. The men sweat. There are no women or children, because they were killed the day before. Their bodies hang from the trees on the outskirts of the field, gutless and naked. The birds roost on their limbs and squabble over their eyes. The Khmer Rouge joke around and wave the bloody dresses of the women in front of the men, like the capes of toreadors.

 

The captain stops at the end of the line. Twenty-nine men. They are silent and expressionless. They are holding the shovels they used to dig this pit, and they are asked to drop the tools. They are all yellow and their faces are too tight on their skulls.

 

The captain looks at the dozen Khmer Rouge. They stand up and fix their guns.

 

The trees on the outskirts wave, like the hands of favored pupils, ready with their answers.

 

Except, there are no answers.

 

There are only gunshots, and then men drop silently into the pit.

Reviews

[W.k.kortas]

Umm, there is a bit going on here, isn't there? Like the wise Emily, I went back to Masters--although in my case, it was Lucinda Matlock ('It takes life to love Life"), or perhaps Blake's observation that the mind is its own place, or perhaps still Andreyev's condemned anarchist who, in her prison cell, has something approximating epiphany and the transcendence of matters relating to the here and now. The first, parenthetical section runs the gamut--from the desire to embrace beauty and its memory, to musing on daily sustenance, from there to death and dust, and finally back to the blossoms. The second section deals with the brutal atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, who took revolutionary principles--ideas ostensibly for the betterment of everyman--to horrible and absurdly twisted ends. They, in the end, "have no answers." The piece is philsophically and artistically weighty, but the writing is light in touch--superbly detailed, with wonderful images, and pitch-perfect pacing. If there has been a better piece of fiction posted on this site, I've certainly missed it.

[Marie Anzalone]

I had the wonderfully blessed fortune of meeting Loung Ung, survivor of the Pol Pot regime, former conscripted child soldier, author, new restaurant ownder, and humanitarian. Oh yes. She's a year older than I am, too. Your words could be a journey into her very thoughts that she describes in news-like brutality in her books. Reading this, I am there, I am in that field, next to that pit. I am an anonymous one of the thousands who have died this way- in Cambodia, in Hungary, in Guatemala. I am there, and I am here, hoping thaeir memories never get erased completely, and that blossoms do get the chance to bloom somewhere else. A haunting, tragic, and uplifting piece.

Please, get your works published.

[Samuel Dickens]

I won't pretend to have understood it all, but it is raw, intense and atmospheric. A lot of really good passages--one I like is "faces too tight on their skulls"--very descriptive and image-conjuring.
The heartbreak of that war yet lingers. Powerful writing, Kylan.

[R J Askew]

I am out of sorts with the human race. We know we are destroying our atmosphere yet we do little to change our ways. Do we deserve to survive? I doubt it. When I read about the KR I don't see them as some separate species of monsters, but rather I see myself as one of them, a potentially dangerous creature capable of great callousness. I feel the same about the SS the -- if I can spell it and I can't -- intra-ahanwi. I am ashamed to be human at times. We are an unedifying species. Our thinking so often goes to badly wrong. Religion, Marxism, Capitalism. All seem to lead us into some dark places. We start of with and idea and then we go wrong. And then one group of men who couldn't care less end up killing another group. And there is a pit. There always seems to be a pit. Forcing those who are about to die to dig their own pit seems to be an essential part of part of the humiliation process, a kind of foreplay. Wouldn't it be nice to spit in the faces of Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, Mao and all other tyrants on behalf of those who end in their pits.

[Raef C. Boylan]

Wow. It felt that the first part, in parenthesis, was actually addressed to Pol Pot? Even so many years later it feels like a courageous, dangerous move, for our narrator to say to him what they actually think.

Like everyone else, I have very high praise for this piece. The poetry is a detailed narrative; the prose is poetic - thus the crossover is made simple for the reader.

You were not afraid to be graphic, you refused to dumb down.
So many images and turns of phrase to be proud of in this piece - you are, I hope?

Re: the topic, I did some research for myself on Cambodia a few years ago because I was shocked that so little was known by people in general of atrocities on such a scale. I wasn't there, but what I know corresponds to everything you've created here. Your words ring as true as a historical account, only with humanity's angle casting extra light.

"Amendments on the poetry of a conversation" - this aspect of dictators is, in a way, the one that repulses me the most; to want to control people to that extent, so that they're afraid to think and speak...it angers, scares and disgusts me. This line says so much, so brilliantly.

Overall, an excellent write. Thank you for sharing it with us.
Thank you to Emily Burns for sending me here.

p.s.
"wife and children may [?] and raped beaten and burned" - is there a word/phrase missing, or is the disjointness deliberate to show how we can't always finish sentences when they contain such horror?

[Kevin Vorshak]

Man, what an extremely powerful, and emotional, piece of writing. I can't even described how much I enjoyed this piece. The reflection at the beginning of someone unwilling to allow what is about to happen destroy who they are and the coldness of those who hand out their misplaced form of justice. This is on an entirely different level than I've seen on this site. I look forward to enjoying more of your writing.

[Hedra Helix]

You're brilliant. I hope you're doing something focused with your visions. ;)

[Butterflymom]

What an intense, and profound piece! Your talent is absolutely brilliant. You tell of the horror''s that many repress, and won't speak about. You expressed this with such beauty, grace, and dignity. I am impressed by your amazing talent, and look forward to reading more of your work. Also, I want to thank you for telling the story least anyone forget the costs of war.

[Alaska Frost]

I once wrote a report and made a poster on the Cambodian Genocide...i looked through hundreds of horrifying images and read so many accounts on it, but i could find the words that would truly describe the atrocities that Pol Pot set on the innocent people....but here they are.



Please, publish this.

-Alaska Frost

[Ed Hart]

you best be careful here, i hear people can actually die of praise...