Si Daeng

Haa

"You're going back again?", Red's mother sighed, hands wrung beneath the pull down kitchen table, scattered with offcuts of fabric from her small, home-run tailor business. "I don't understand it, Kanawut. That day you came back here battered and bruised, bloodied, covered in mud. A wolf attack, for heaven's sake! I thought that would finally be the end of that forest for this family - thought that Yaai would admit defeat of 'the old ways' and move here with me. But there the stubborn fool stays. And you? Suddenly you're back here weekly instead of monthly, and each day strolling in the woods like a simpleton sightseer. It's as if you're looking for trouble - and believe me, luk, trouble will find you...mark my words..." - Dara's impassioned tirade trailing off as she focused to peer through one-armed spectacles, threading the eye of the black and gold sewing machine's needle with a thimbled finger.

How could Red tell her? Delineate something that he himself had no firm grasp of...

The fact that he had found himself, night upon shivering night in the drafty dorm he shared with fellow live-in workers, dreaming about a wolf. Because in those dreams the creature licked the puncture wounds on the backs of his hands clean - the tickle of a pink, velvety tongue. He carried him on his back as he slept, hand drum heartbeat syncing with Red's own through warm fur. He swam with him in the mirror-glass pools of the woodland stream, gemstone dragonflies darting and gliding between.

But the beast never looked directly into his eyes - not once.

And every dream ended the same way, frustration bubbling to eruption within the slumbering man - tossing and turning on his creaking lower bunk - until at last he blurted out:

"Show yourself!"

To which the silver wolf would only turn silently away, paws leaping with awesome agility from rivulet's stepping stone to stepping stone and up onto the mossy bank, vanishing beyond forest curtain's veil of pine and fir.

Red alone...wanting to follow but suddenly unable to move, feet rooted, frozen and fixed.

Then waking to reality with a jolt, toes ice cold as they protruded out from the bottom of a too-short, threadbare old moth-eaten quilt.

The days were no better. Mind invaded - wherever he was, whatever he was doing - by visions of unreadable amber orbs and tugs of that magnetic pull to follow. Wanting to simply down tools - or beers in the bar with workmates, as a pretty girl wound her way up and down his numb body on the pulsating dance floor - and go to that place to be looked upon by, and look upon, those eyes.

It was...damn irritating. Fuck.

What did he even want? To fight the wolf again? A rematch? To befriend the beast? Did he have some long forgotten and deep-buried boyhood ambition to become a zoologist? Yet it was he himself who had walked away that day without looking back. He didn't understand what his unconscious was whispering, what exactly it was that his body sought.

So just as his mae said, as late Autumn gales blew them through New Year and into deepest winter blizzard, he had found himself boarding the aching old cross country commuter train - snow plough braced - not monthly, but after three weeks, then two, and finally, one.

Every weekend he was there in Bang Haeng - at first under the official line of diligently visiting his yaai, but then, after an intervention of sorts from teamed up generations of Traipi women, an acknowledgment that there was more beneath the surface of that frozen lake of Red.

Only Moon seemed to be in step, the thick-maned, tabby Siberian Forest Cat padding along beside him on many such random rambles. The strange duo returning, over and over and over again until at last, on a day on which the forest's first snowdrop bloomed in a quiet, secluded glade - purest, delicate white petals heralding Spring amidst the glittering guard of March snow - the man in the ruby red jacket fell to his knees on the forest's twiggy bed and shouted out to anyone who could hear:

"Fucking show yourself! I know you're watching, I can feel it - I've always felt it. What do you...want? Shiaaaaa!"

Words ricocheting back as a choir of chaotic echoes from totem pole-like rocks around. Unanswered.

Yet that night...

Red dreamed that he rose from his iron bedstead to walk barefoot - trance like - down the cracked communal staircase of the condo complex. Out into deserted, moonlit streets, across nature's border and into the forest that beckoned and coaxed. And the ringing that had been in his ears for months gone by and he only now heard, grew louder. Louder and louder until the atmosphere about imploded into cataclysmic nothingness - leaving behind only a simple woodland clearing, a man at either end.

But it...wasn't a dream. A grandmother's remembered plea flashing in warning across the mind of one:

"Promise me you won't come into the woods at night, Red. Don't set one foot in this realm once the moon has harnessed the sun to drag him under each day, ok? Will you promise, child?"

Some promises are made to be broken.