Si Daeng

Song

Red hissed as he threaded lunar, cool metal of twinned barbells through pink nipple buds, screwing fastening balls tightly with deft, slender fingers. Standing back to wink at his own reflected image in the standing mirror, dragging those fingers through waves of crowning dark hair that teased his cheekbones too much of late.

"Get a haircut, Kanawut" - he addressed himself aloud bluntly, before reaching to pull a crumpled white T-shirt over the ink and metal of his decorated torso. Black skinny jeans clothing never ending legs, with the clink of a closing belt buckle as he grabbed a leather jacket hanging from his bedpost to make his way down the narrow hall, nose chasing that temptress of cinnamon as she meandered her warm path about the confines of the cramped condo.

"You remembered!" - his mother's soft surprise, rising onto tiptoes to plant a morning's kiss upon her son's cheek as he stooped, entering the kitchen.

"Ugh", nodding darkly, suppressing a yawn, "it's too damn early, Mae..."

"Shai, but you can never refuse your Yaai Chanthira, can you Luk? I've baked some plushki for you to take to her...there's a basket...", the familiar, gentle bustle of his mother as slippered feet padded about the tiled space, organising busily.

Suddenly a tail winding about Red's ankles, vibrations of low purrs with feline, emerald eyes locking his own as he crouched to tickle the cat at the shaggy mane of her neck...

"Hello P'Moon, did we interrupt your hunting on the terrace? You came for milk and buns?"

The elder woman bending too, placing a chipped china saucer on the floor beside them, "You spoil that grumpy old cat, Red"

"And you don't?"

"Remember when you were still a boy, you used to say she bewitched you..."

Nostalgic humour twinkling both sets of brown eyes even as he rolled his at hers, before-

-"Luk, not that one", gesturing towards his studded leather jacket, handing over the wicker basket of snug treats - "Wear the one Yaii gave to you, the ruby red one..."

//

The second his feet touched tarmac of the street outside, an instant shift in the demeanour - the aura entire - of the 23-year old. Familial warmth extinguished from Red's eyes and replaced by a mask of cool and bristling indifference, a kind of aggressive apathy. He lit a cigarette, smoke trailing camouflaged with the heavy, monotone overcast of the sky above, icy bites of sleet stinging at exposed cheeks as he navigated the concrete maze of the neighbourhood.

It was a satellite town to the nation's capital, where they lived. A wonky collage of faded tower blocks with grills at grim-faced windows, rusting metal bars telling their own tales of economic loss and criminal gain. It wasn't a place of community, though, cameraderie in the face of life's struggles. But rather an archipelago of isolated units that strove only to avoid eye contact with one another, for fear of seeing something that they shouldn't.

This place, Bang Haeng, had been Red's primary home since he was six - the year his father left. Left in the banal sense of walking out of the front door in his grey chauffeur's uniform one morning and never turning back, never coming back. With rent fixed at almost double in the postcodes of the capital, his mother Dara had moved the two of them out, truth proudly - if crudely - dissolved by declarations of a sudden desire to live closer to Yaai Chanthira. Little Red, of course, playing along for his mae's sake...

Grandmother lived in the forest - those acres of impenetrable fir and pine, cloaked either in permanent mists or eternal mystery, or both. It was the borderland between city and slum, yet no modern roads dissected - all skirting widely in detour, as if reluctant to enter themselves. But within those depths, one small cottage remained, defiant wood smoke spiralling from its chimney and flickering golden candlelight at every window.

It was there that Red visited his Yaai, the stoic last of the historic forest dwellers, on his monthly trips back to Bang Haeng from the internship he had begun the previous year. And on this day he had promised to come early, 'this day' being her birthday, so began that seemingly simple quest, universe's cogs turning, clunking, as fate's precious die were cast...

"Be careful in the woods, Red", his mother had cried out behind, words almost stolen away by the howling of a wounded, banshee wind between strangling air channels of towerblocks.

"Why? Will I be devoured by her mythical beasts?"

"Hoy! Don't play, you know the stories"

Stories...yes. Legends that haunted the dreams of children on both sides of the woodland border...

Glowing, amber eyes. Snarling, razor canines splattered with blood that dripped as the ebbing of life and any humanity. And a desolate howling not of wind's voice, but from a beast - pooled in the silver moonlight of a forest clearing - calling unanswered for his mate, the only one to sate the aching hunger of that contorting soul.

He would feast on lost children until he found what he had lost himself - or so the bed time story, and finger-wagging threats of many a frazzled parent, warned across decades.

But Red was all grown and no stranger to those trees. Hell, he had been treading the dirt track since boyhood, with a glare so fierce and ferocious that majestic elk scattered in his path, antlers bowed in deferent 'wai'.

So as he reached the edge of the woods he took a final, harsh drag on dying embers of bitter tobacco, tossed the cigarette butt to merciless pavement crushing at the heel of his own boot, and stepped over the boundary from modern concrete to ancient earth.

And amber eyes watched him come.