Christopher SchutziusBy April the stone at Phimai Historical Park gives off its own heat. The carved lintels hold the sun long after noon, and the air between the columns thickens rather than moves. In Phimai the roads pale by midday, and even the shade feels used.
Nothing urgent begins in April. People say, “After Songkran,” and the phrase suspends decisions. Shop doors hang half-open. Paperwork waits beneath paperweights shaped like fruit. Engines idle without destination.
I had been invited up from the city by a co-worker. She told me that during Songkran the younger generation washes the hands and feet of their elders, I nodded as if I understood the meaning of that.
The morning of the ceremony her mother sat on a low plastic chair in the shade of the house. Age had bent her forward. The daughter knelt, adjusted the hem of her skirt, and poured scented water slowly over her mother’s hands. She bowed her head—not theatrically, not dutifully, but with a steadiness that made my earlier assumptions feel hurried. When she looked up, she was smiling in a way I had not seen in classrooms.
I had expected irony. There was none.
Later that day they handed me a long bamboo pole with a wire hook tied to the end and pointed toward the mango tree behind the house. My height, which normally makes me conspicuous, made me useful. I pulled fruit from branches the others could not reach. Mangoes thudded into the grass. For an hour I was not decorative.
By the next morning I was decorative again.
The shirts came out of closets as if they had been waiting all year—hibiscus the size of dinner plates, improbable turquoise, yellows that would strain an office light. Men who wore beige eleven months of the year bloomed suddenly. Bank clerks bloomed. Grandfathers bloomed. I bloomed with them. For three days the town looked louder than it was.
Water arrived without warning but without malice. Buckets. Hoses. Plastic bowls dipped into blue barrels that had been warming in the sun since morning. The first splash lay flat against the chest and slid down the ribs before the body decided whether to flinch. A falang standing in the street is an easy target; the buckets tilted toward me more often than toward the others. Children shrieked when the water hit. I learned to laugh before it did.
Some households had gone further. In a few barrels, blocks of ice knocked dully against plastic. You could hear the difference before you felt it. When that water struck, it drew a sound from the throat that was half protest, half gratitude. The shock vanished almost immediately, swallowed by the heat, but for a second the skin remembered something colder.
Powder drifted everywhere—fine white talc pressed between palms and smeared onto cheeks in broad, careless circles. It softened the light and settled into eyebrows. The water washed it off; the sun dried it back on. For three days, touching someone’s face required no explanation.
I stood near the road where the traffic slowed almost to walking speed, taller than most, easy to find. Pickup trucks crawled past, crowded with cousins or classmates or neighbors—it was impossible to tell which in a town that small. In the bed of one truck, a young man in a red-and-green shirt leaned over the side and began to mark the faces within his reach.
He had found a rhythm.
Palm.
Laugh.
Smear.
Step.
He did not discriminate. An older woman leaning against the tailgate received the same quick circle as a boy his own age. A middle-aged man ducked and rose again with a white handprint blooming across both cheeks. The gesture was intimate only in theory. In practice it was public, repetitive, almost mechanical.
Palm.
Laugh.
Smear.
Step.
Behind him a bucket tipped and warm water darkened the hibiscus on his back. He did not turn. He laughed without looking and kept moving down the line of faces as the truck crept forward.
Then another pickup approached, slower than the rest, crowded and noisy. Near the tailgate stood a girl steadying herself with one hand on the metal rail. Powder already ghosted her cheeks. She glanced toward him before he reached her—not boldly, just enough to register recognition.
He marked the first boy beside her. Quick. Efficient. He marked an older woman. Laughter rose from somewhere behind me as another bucket found its target.
Then he reached her.
The rhythm altered. Not stopped. Altered.
His hand rose with the same practiced motion. The powder was already in his palm. He placed it against her cheek and pressed—not harder, not visibly longer, but the movement lost its haste. His thumb traced slightly nearer to her ear than it had on the others. For a fraction of a second his hand seemed to settle there, as if testing the boundary of what the day allowed.
She did not step back. She did not lean in. She held still. Her eyes met his, and then the truck moved forward, carrying her out of reach.
Palm.
Laugh.
Smear.
Step.
The traffic closed the gap. Another face presented itself. Another white circle bloomed and dissolved.
But in the heat, in the floral noise, in a town where doors seldom close and privacy thins to almost nothing, his hand remained on her cheek just a touch longer than the others.
Just a second.
But I felt it.Next Story →