Three Flames. Alan Lightman

       (2012)

      Ryna had just finished putting a quarter kilo of pork and a half dozen rambutan into her burlap shopping bag, wondering if her husband would scold her for spending too much, when she saw the man who had murdered her father. At first she wasn’t sure. She hadn’t seen the man for thirty-three years, since she was twelve years old, and he was now whitened and bent over and barely able to support his skinny body with a walking stick. But he had the same crooked mouth and angular cheeks that she remembered, the same mole above his left eye, and as she studied him from three stalls away, she became more and more certain. Many times over the years since the war, she had imagined what she would do if she ever saw him again. What she had most wished for was some catastrophe to permanently separate him from his family, as had happened to her family, or for him to be stricken with cancer and die a slow and painful death.

      That evening, after her husband had finished eating his dinner, Ryna said to him, “I think I saw Touch Pheng in the market this morning.” The smell of the pork blended with the odor of mildew, always present during the rainy season, when nothing could be kept dry.

      “Who?” said Pich, wiping his mouth.

      “The commander of the camp at Sopheak Mongkol.”

      She looked over at Pich through the dim yellow light and tried to read his expression. The one room of the house was lit only by a single bulb, which dangled from wires that ran along the tin roof, down a wall made of packed palm leaves, around the two storage bags of corn and rice, and finally to a car battery in the corner.

      “Why are you talking about that?” said Pich, annoyed. “And anyway, how do you know it was him? It’s been so many years.”

      “Do you remember when I saw Cousin Mala after forty years? You didn’t believe me then either.”

      Pich didn’t bother replying. He was sharpening the blade of his plow, which he would need to finish preparing his fields for planting. Sharpening blades was their son Kamal’s job, but Kamal was out as usual, drinking cheap wine in the rain with his friends.

      Pich stood and began putting his tools away. He was not much taller than his wife and almost as thin, with fleshy lips, perpetually bloodshot eyes, and a scar on his cheek where he’d been gored by a neighbor’s ox. Now the rain was pinging like gunshots on the tin roof, causing the two oxen under the house to shuffle nervously. Ryna could look down between the bamboo poles of the floor and see their shadowy forms fidgeting below.

      “What should we do?” said Ryna.

      “What’s there to do? Why do you want to think about such a useless thing? It’s a waste