They say the wolf ate the magician.
They find the man lying on the stone floor, chunks of his flesh unfurled around him like oversized rose petals, torn apart by thorny fangs. Broken bottles litter the shelves of his home, caught in liquid pools of strange colors that hiss and spread like angry tears. Tattered black books pattern the floor, spines up and pages squashed, sprawled open like dead crows.
They said Nimol could walk on water, and perform other miracles, in his youth; but when he went blind and failed to regain his sight, the villagers ceased believing in his divinity and derided his words. He retired alone to the hills beyond the farms.
When he returned to the village as an old man, most of the people who knew him in his youth were dead. He descended the hills and emerged from the trees beyond the fields, and many watched his progress along the road, which he achieved with the assistance of a staff carved from the root of a banyan tree.
Continue reading “The Kite People of Ang Thom by Lawrence Buentello”
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