Sisira Holbrook

Every morning since I’d been in Phuket, my mom and I had woken up to staggeringly bright sun strewn across the bedroom and dead animals outside. A crushed snail smeared across the walkway tile. A garden snake overheated on the asphalt edge of the road to the beach. But my mom and I were getting along so well. Everything else was so idyllic. At first we didn’t talk about it.

The day after I arrived, my mom walked me down to the waterfront 7-Eleven where our old house used to be, where we’d both grown up, and we snorkeled barefoot at dawn among the mangroves across the street. I told her about how mangroves channel all the salt in their stems to a few leaves, which yellow and die so the rest of the plant can survive, and she seemed truly interested. I was twenty-nine now, and this friendly fascination was a kindness she’d never granted me in the past. She was so kind recently.

We left our shoes on the side of the road, which had never been paved when we lived there before. There had been a faucet and a cracked slab of concrete where we’d washed our feet and a slippery furrow in the earth tracing down to the sea, but now there was a row of parking spots. The morning was quiet, save for a couple of construction workers in sweat-soaked shirts exiting the 7-Eleven with hot dogs and cigarettes when we got there. They were laughing in Thai at some 

couple arguing in the chip aisle. One of the men knew my mom and called out to her, called her auntie. When she smiled and called back, she called him little brother.

My mom was sixty, and when I helped her down to the water she held my hand loosely enough to make it clear she wasn’t relying on it. Two minutes later we encountered a young shark, the size of my arm, floating belly-up between the red columned roots, cavities in its flesh and fins where the ocean had begun to digest it.

My mom turned to me underwater, took my arm gently, and pulled me away, as if I were a child whose mind death had never crossed. We didn’t talk about the shark, but the termites swarmed that night until we shut off the lights to go to sleep, and in the morning I woke and my mom was sweeping their fragile bodies from the porch tiles into the grass. An hour later a thunderstorm washed them into clumps amid the green. Their soggy yellow wings caught the daylight at ugly angles.

The third day, there was a frog in our driveway, maimed nearly beyond recognition by a cat or some other predator in the night.

“Sure,” I murmured, still staring at the wet brown welt of its body. “Mom—” (she’d been there a few months) “—are there always so many dead things around here?”

“Probably, luuk,” she said. She started to kneel to the gravel, banana leaf in hand with which to wrap the frog. “I’m not superstitious.”

But the next day it was hundreds of minnows dead on the beach, and the day after that it was a centipede torn in two on the street in front of the garbage cans, and the day after that it was an oriole on our front steps with its wings paralyzed yellow as sacrificed mangrove leaves, and so my mom buried the bird, asked if I was free, and then drove us to the temple on her new purple moped.

“It doesn’t hurt to go, Pan,” she said, almost ashamed.

My mom still made me wear a helmet, but in front of me she sat helmetless. Her hair was in a bun, black with nearly-white gray stripes like a sky streaked with comet tails. She was still sickeningly beautiful—the kind of beauty that tortured me when I was young, the whole world rushing to tell her how good she looked all the time, and how effortless. I was acne-covered and awkward, every one of her perfect features warped on my face thanks to my white dad. So in every way I looked just like her— just a little bit worse. Beautiful in the way of a bird. I never even knew what that was supposed to mean.

 of my name, leaving just the bird. When I was young she told me her skin never broke out and then pointed out to me every day how greasy my face was, mottled with a pink palimpsest of pustules and scars. I’d spend an hour at the bathroom mirror searching for another pore to strangle with my fingernails. She’d look at the topography of my forehead, shake her head and say, “Pan, I really don’t know what’s wrong with you.”

We sped through the sois and up the mountains in our temple dress. My mom and I circled the golden spire that scattered panes of sun off its mosaic facets, and we read the chants from the fill-in-the-blank prayer papers we held between our fingers with the incense and the candles and the lotus. I heard my mom asking for no more death so close to the house, and I asked for that too, but also for clarity. I was thinking about my husband and my dad. Last time we’d come to Thailand, I’d texted my dad photos nearly every day.

Now, I glanced over and my mom’s hair had fallen in an elegant cascade out of her bun. I remembered how once, when I was nine, she had trimmed my bangs and I asked her if next time she wouldn’t make them so short, and she picked the scissors up again and sliced them off entirely. I remembered fumbling with bobby pins every morning as the hair grew back in ragged bristles around my forehead. She was just trying to teach me a lesson, I understood. Now, her head was bowed so close to the incense that the smoke licked at her glamorous flyaways. I continued to read off the chant and ask for clarity.

My mom knelt in the temple to talk to a monk while I used the bathroom. We didn’t want to risk the monk addressing me. My mom always told me I couldn’t talk to monks: not that I was forbidden, but that I was not capable, and I think that was true—we moved to America when I was young and I knew no formal, mature Thai—but it was one of those things she said that as a teenager would make me cry.

I waited outside by her shoes—knock-off Adidas slides from the market. She’d become a true local since she’d moved back. I watched as the monk spoke to her and smiled, marigold silk draped over his frail shoulders. My mom glowed in the golden-and-wooden room, too, and she was also frail, but her wrapped skirt fit her beautifully as she bowed to him in thanks.

Before we left, we found the place where you could shake fortunes out of red bamboo cups: เซียมซี. My stick and hers clattered gracelessly out of our bamboo chalices at once: hers was fourteen and mine was six. She retrieved the corresponding papers.

“How is yours?” I asked. She was reading before she even gave me mine. She frowned. “It’s okay.”

I peered over, saw the Thai numeral six at the top of the leaflet. “Mom, I was six. That one’s mine.”

She blinked and shook her head. “Oh, you’re right, luuk. Here—” She glanced at it again. “—it’s great. Very auspicious.”

In Thai tradition, we hold the number six as the unluckiest number. I sounded out the fortune when she turned away:

All struggles are cut away, like dead branches sheared from the fruit tree. You will grow. Do not be afraid. But you may still not learn to make the right decision for the heart. Today, this number comes with some misery. You lack the spirit of a child.

I sighed and folded it as gently as possible into my pocket. A few years ago I’d realized I had no idea how to be a good Buddhist, and so I figured I just wouldn’t be Buddhist. My mom never really practiced; there were only the traditions I remembered from my grandmother taking me to the temple when I was a kid. So I wasn’t religious, and I wasn’t really superstitious either, but with the fortune in my pocket, I knew already it would be impossible not to dwell on every line.

Very auspicious, my mom had said. She was trying to be so nice now. I didn’t understand. The next thing she said: “Pan, do you want to get pedicures?”

Ever since I was nine, we would always get pedicures when we came back to Thailand every other summer on our mother-daughter trips. We saw family and visited old haunts of our homeland and stopped on drives around town for pedicures and massages—they were spectacularly cheap there, and my mom maintained them as our girls’ traditions, a rare tenderness: she said she wanted to slow down and hear about my life, especially as I grew older, quieter around her. It had gotten to the point where I never really knew what to say. My friends, my grade school or college love interests, my studies, my art—there was nothing I wasn’t embarrassed to tell her about, nothing that seemed large enough for her, or otherwise nothing she wouldn’t judge. But at the nail salon, as our ankles were scrubbed and our soles softened, at least she really did listen, and so it was my favorite part of our vacations—mother-daughter bonding while my dad was back working in America. We’d text him photos of the process, to which he’d reply without fail from twelve time zones away with a flurry of heart-eyed and star-eyed emojis.

Three summers ago as my mom and I got our toes done a couple days before our flight back, my then-boyfriend-now-husband Henry texted me something about a road trip and stargazing. My mom began to talk about her road trips with my dad before I was born, how he’d proposed under the stars in the desolation of Northern California as fog started to blur the sky: I imagined it, the moon like a drop of bleach on speckled denim and the glint of the diamond just another star. He’d planned the proposal around the constellation she was named after, but the whole night it was obscured by clouds.

“But he just didn’t worry about it. Your dad lets these things roll right off him,” my mom said. “There aren’t a lot of people like that. He doesn’t ever complain. You should take that from him. You always let things affect you so much.”

Knowing she would turn critical, I had mostly stopped listening as soon as she finished the story. I swiped away Henry’s text and smiled. Between photos of my soaking feet in the family group chat I texted my dad individually:

don’t you know some places where you can see the stars really bright?

Also, what do you and Mom want for dinner your first night home?

part. My mom and I sent more pedicure photos, and my dad sent more emojis, but I never called him, and I forgot to ask my mom what she wanted to eat when we got back, and then he didn’t ask again the next day because he didn’t text at all the next day because he had a stroke and the neighbors called 911 but it was too late and then my mom and I just got on our plane the next morning to our empty American home. I tried to watch a movie on the plane but I couldn’t, and so I just cried the whole flight back, rereading our last texts.

There was no more American home. There was a front porch cluttered with cracked summer acorns and my dad’s tennis shoes. There were rooms that made sense for a family of three, or a couple whose daughter had moved out, but not for my mom, alone. At first I had to convince her to throw away even his old half-opened beef jerky in the cabinets, but eventually she was sending all his things to his parents and selling everything else, indiscriminately, as if she needed to get rid of it all at once, before she had time to change her mind. She kept her clothes, some books and a couple of my paintings. None of my good ones—just two family portraits from middle school and high school. She listed the house.

A few weeks later I went home to Henry, and he was perfect: stoic and sad. He sat with me on the phone with my mom as she fought with the realtor. There were myriad little issues, and my mom declined my advice on all of them: I didn’t know what I was doing, she said; I didn’t understand what my dad would have wanted for the place. She took a break from angry emails to the realtor, instead yelling at me until she sobbed into the receiver. We both pretended I couldn’t tell. Henry laced his fingers through mine and squeezed.

Sometimes I was almost relieved when she screamed through the phone. She had always been so nice in front of Henry that he never understood how I could dread going home. Henry’s parents were out of kid’s television: dysfunctional, quirky, sweet—almost creepily happy. I’d asked him once whether they were like that all the time. He didn’t understand.

While I grieved, Henry couldn’t stop apologizing. It baffled me. I had grown up speaking English but I think the Thai conventions haunted me: it only made sense to me to say

 if you were at fault. In Thai, in the case of grief, there was a separate phrase, to the effect of 

, เสยีใจด้วย. Direct translation: my heart rots too. But this was a blameless pain, and my heart rotted alone.

There was a night when my phone was growing cold in my hand with the awareness that I’d never text my dad again and Henry came and sat beside me on the bed. I stared at the untouched messages for a second; then I collapsed in tears in his arms and he kissed my head. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

Something twisted in my chest, and I felt myself jerk away. I glared at him. “Oh my God, would you stop saying that?”

His eyes widened for a second but he just frowned and nodded. “Yeah, I’m…” He swallowed 

. “Yeah. Whatever you need, Pan, I’m here.”

When my mom sold the American house, she found a place by the water in Phuket and moved back. She said she’d find a job at a hotel or an animal shelter or something, but as of now she still didn’t work. Meanwhile, I had a month off work to visit. I hadn’t seen her since my dad’s funeral. Henry dropped me off at the airport, and I waved to him at the door. It was the same door where I waved goodbye to my dad for the last time. I tried not to think about it.

On the plane, I’d found a Thai book of baby names that Henry had slipped into my carry-on. We’d been talking a lot about kids recently; I started to see a daughter in all my dreams. It seemed like it would be so perfect. I’d brought it up first, and the more we talked, the more it seemed like there were no downsides. We had space. We had an extra bedroom where Henry imagined a kid’s bed positioned beside the low square window that faced sunrise. We had time. We were comfortable. We were happy. We were ready.

And I knew Henry would be a good dad, a good white dad like I’d had. He’d grown up kind, soft. He never needed to be anything else. But sometimes he would say something and I would answer him sharply and get startled at the sound of my own voice—how much, even in English, the cadence matched my mom’s. And now I was beginning to feel that there was more to consider than could ever cross his mind. He’d gotten more and more excited about a baby, but sometimes when he brought it up I felt like I was sinking into the floor. I couldn’t explain it. The more we talked about it, the more it sounded like a good thing. The day before my flight I told him I wanted to take the vacation to consider it myself, to be sure. I wanted to think about it alone for a bit.

“Sure,” he’d said. “No rush. We can think and then talk about it again when you get back, if you want.”

There wasn’t much else in my carry-on. Only an empty water bottle, spare underwear, and some toiletries. I could feel the weight of the book shift as I walked through the terminal and knocked against the sides of the suitcase when I stopped.

The name Henry liked was Pendara. He only read through the P names because he wanted it to match mine, and this one was easy enough on the American tongue— it kind of rhymes with Kendra. I’d gotten home one day a few months ago and found Henry lounging across our bed reading the book for the first time. He had me read the name Pendara in Thai, and the meaning in Thai.

“เพญ็ ดารา: เต็มไปด้วยดวงดาว.”

“You sound just like your mom speaking Thai,” he laughed, not looking up.

your mom,” he said, and I felt a twist in my stomach. My mom’s name: Kattika, an old Thai word for the Pleiades.

He looked up, tried to read my expression. “Or is that not good? Sorry. I get if that’s strange.”

It shouldn’t have been strange. It made sense. I just thought of how when I met Henry’s mom, she had the warmth of the Food Network chefs my mom watched on Sunday mornings. You looked up at her and just felt calm, safe. I looked at my mom and I couldn’t put into words the tension in my shoulders, the sudden awareness I had of the way I was sitting, speaking, breathing beside her.

I kind of shrugged. “Pendara,” I considered. I didn’t feel anything when I pronounced it. I just felt nervous.

“No, I do. I do. It’s really cute.”

My mom used to talk about my future kids all the time. She’d wanted three but could only have me. Since seeing my Amazon receipt for the baby name book in the email we’d shared as a family, she was increasingly excited. Increasingly, when I thought of children I felt a pit deepening in my stomach.

I think I lied earlier. I did text my dad again, not long before coming to Phuket. The time and date of our last conversation floated near the top of the screen, impossibly distant, growing farther. I typed,

                                                       do you think I could ever be a good mother?

After a week with no answer, I deleted it.

My mom wanted to go snorkeling again when we got back home, and on the walk to the beach there were countless stray dogs, running along the road or napping at the edge of the jungle or under storefronts or on restaurant floors.

“When you leave, I’m going to get a dog,” said my mom.

“Cool,” I said. “But that’s also what you said when I went to college.”

“Well, that was pretty lonely. You’ll understand when you’re a mother, too. But still, I wasn’t all alone then.”

When we came to the end of the road and removed our shoes, my mom and I were careful to avoid the pearly blisters stippling the shore: the beach was marbled with washed-up jellyfish, some of their bodies torn or distended, some beginning to shrivel in the sun. She tiptoed between the glistening puddles and the streaks of their tentacles splayed out across the sand but was quiet. I was quiet, too, trailing behind her, following her . I tried to disappear my footprints in hers, but my feet were too large; it wouldn’t work.

We stripped down to our swimsuits near the water’s edge. My mom’s swimsuits from when she was twenty had still not fallen apart, and there were no hand-me-downs for me because she could still fit all of them. She wore short, flowered tankinis at sixty and it worked. She saw my one-piece and the way it clung just not quite right at my hips but she said nothing. If this were ten years ago, she would have told me it fit poorly, that it was ugly, that I should change and not come out looking like this. But she said nothing, and we waded into the water silently, the sun glittering on the rumpled sheet of waves.

We snorkeled for an hour in stirring currents before I scraped my hand on fire coral and then, in my panic, jerked it sideways and ran it into a sea urchin. I shrieked and I waited for my mom to yell at me to calm down, grow up, but she was relaxed. She rubbed my back as I tried not to cry and walked with me back home as blood dripped from around a segment of sea urchin spine, crescent moon-sharp and new moon-dark on my palm. The tide had risen quickly, flushed the jellyfish back into the ocean.

I couldn’t slow my breathing. “Do you remember what Dad used to say about how you can’t extract the spine? You have to just, like, crush it up under your skin with the back of a hot spoon or something so it’ll dissolve faster in your blood?”

“Oh, luuk, don’t worry. It’s not buried, so I can get it. And then with the butterfly bandages just pull it all together. Pan, please try to breathe. I promise it will be okay.” I tried to breathe.

We stood at the kitchen sink dripping saltwater on newspapers; my mom had them there to protect the carpet from splattering grease but she’d stopped putting them away after cooking meals. She was working at the spine with tweezers and said, out of silence, “Your uncle told me there were times I was so mean.”

“When you were younger. He said I was so mean to you, he and your grandmother would talk about convincing me to let you move away to live with them.”

I felt my shoulders stiffen. It had been so long. I had gone to college, worked hard to forget and mostly forgotten, except when I was back with her. And now she was nothing but kind and I wanted to keep forgetting. “Oh,” I said.

“I feel really bad. I never realized I was being mean. And I was thinking I’d like to know the things I did and said. I feel like I should know.”

I stared at her thin fingers on the silver of the tweezers, gingerly grasping at the urchin spine. I imagined if she’d asked me this before, when I was fourteen sobbing into my closet every night, tearing pinprick stars into my skin with the Swiss Army knife my dad gave me when I was into camping. The fourteen-year-old me frothed at the back of my throat, teeming with answers I didn’t want to remember.

“I don’t even remember,” I said. “I think maybe I tried to forget.”

“Well,” I sighed. “It’s over now.”

She drew back suddenly, and the point of the tweezers raked across my palm for a split second. “Excuse me?” she said.

“It’s over,” I said, confused. My hand was stinging.

“‘It’s over’? I just made a huge apology and you can’t give your mom an ‘It’s okay’?”

I shook my head and stared at her. A minute after asking me about all the things she’d done before, this felt so cruel I almost wondered if she was joking.

Sisira Holbrook

Sisira Holbrook

Fiction

Summer 2026

Thong Fah