Help the Shoots Grow, Pull Them
by Ploi Pirapokin
Fay Ku, Vampire Birds, graphite, oil paint, and glitter on cut and layered translucent drafting film, 20 x 30 inches, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
HELP THE SHOOTS GROW,
PULL THEM
PLOI PIRAPOKIN / DEC 2021 / ISSUE 12
Part IV of IV
1994.
I’d last seen Lily and Sprout naked almost half a year ago, wading into a stream on a summer day before our ice-cream parlor jobs began. Their butts were fuller, lapping the surface of the water as they lowered themselves in. Their torsos had shortened to accommodate wider hips, and thin long hairs trailed from their pubic bone, lining their belly buttons. Our breasts hung differently, with Sprout’s being soft and round, while Lily’s erupted like heavy ovals, and mine were upright and muscular. We didn’t have the words to mourn our explosion from fry to fish, unable to fit the tails, fins, and gills back to fry. No language to articulate that these differences made us proud and insecure at the same time; that our figures compelled us to compare what we had yet made it possible to envy our different shapes.
Sprout, tip-toeing underwater, leaned back to wet her hair. “I dreamt of rabbits again.”
“What did they say this time?” Lily paddled over.
“It wasn’t what they said, it was what they did. They petted, rubbed, and licked me.” Her smile fell. “I’m only telling you two because I don’t know who else to tell.”
She was testing us. We either fulfilled our parts as confidantes or she’d withdraw.
“I’ve dreamt of handsome sex rabbits too,” I said, sending them both into a giggling fit.
Lily’s reactions to Sprout only confirmed our complicity. I lied because I was resentful. I, too, dreamt of fluffy white bunnies that glowed in the dark, thanks to Sprout’s ramblings. Though still recognizably bunnies, if they brushed up against me, I’d notice that everything was off. I’d catch one with three long hind legs. Another with two wagging tail feathers and a single eyeball. Four more with beak-like noses. Instead of espousing wisdom and nuzzling me with moist noses like Sprout’s rabbits, mine scurried atop my chest and pressed their paws on my face. They swarmed, writhing, and kicking into the crevices of my body, their gleaming fur stifling and blinding me.
Each of us bent our truths to suit the other, all to sustain a sense of harmony that went against one’s own interest. Only Sprout had broken free of that hold. I found her ruthless and admirable at the same time.
2021.
Dan zig-zagged through the mountains without caring about a single tree, animal, or person we could’ve hit in our path.
Lily groaned upfront, turning her head back for validation. “We should’ve come here in the first place. I don’t know why we thought talking to Andre was a good idea. We should’ve gone to Baz first! We should’ve asked Sprout right when she came back, whatever happened in high school.”
“We had to confirm where she was,” I said. “What if she really was kidnapped?”
“We’ve always known where she was, we just didn’t want to accept it.”
“I can’t believe she’d walk out on everyone like that.”
Dan parked the pickup truck a few steps away from the entrance of the Khmu village where Sprout was found. The moon shone brightly in the dusk, spotlighting a path through the wooden gates left to rot outside of the tourist destination.
A tiny white rabbit scurried over my feet.
“Lils, do you remember the summer we began working at Baskin and Robbins? When we were by the waterfall?” My eyes trailed after the cottontail.
“Where we got heatstroke and almost died?”
“Was that heatstroke?”
Lily scanned my face. “What else could have explained it?”
What was once a hilltop tribe with traditional bamboo-thatched stilt houses and free-roaming chickens had expanded into a temple with several gold painted pagodas. Speakers, hastily pitched on skinny trees with drooping wires, blared crackling prayers that scratched my ears, nostrils, and throat. Marble plateaus and raised, stone platforms flattened the uneven hillside. Caretakers in sarongs and a few visitors in traditional tribe tunics, ambled by. Buddha statues and animal deities with bulging veins were erected along pointed roofs, as though they tightroped across the peach horizon. A setting sun illuminated our foreheads, casting long shadows behind us.
“How do we even summon the Star People?” Lily asked. “Does our fear draw them out like leopards?”
“Remember glow-in-the-dark rabbits?” I chuckled nervously. “Maybe we need to ask them. I saw one putter by my feet near the car.”
The prayers from the speakers resonated less like melodic Pali, dimming into a single, monotone pitch. It gripped me, leading me where I needed to be. Was this what Sprout said purpose felt like? How was this relieving? How could it feel like anything but duress?
I refused to surrender to the unknown, even for a moment. Submitting to this felt like bondage. Even though my mind was jerked around by alien song, my blood, guts, and bones—they were still mine to feel. I pinched myself to sober up.
We circled back to the car, with Dan shaking his head, “I’m not talking to rabbits.” Turning a corner, a stream of chalky velvety rumps moseyed in a row, fading into a thicket of trees. They glowed—not flashlight bright but pulsing like a bulb being twisted in a lamp for the first time. I blinked harder and motioned for Lily and Dan to follow. Before walking ahead, Lily placed her hand on my shoulder.
We’ve found them.
Her lips didn’t move, but I could hear her. I realized, all the people who had nodded our way and greeted us—their lips were sealed too.
The words surged from my sternum into the air. Sprout told the truth the whole time. They never touched her. Never did anything inappropriate. Why did they take her then? Why?
Dan joined us in sweeping low dangling branches aside, skulking on foamy, mushy forest ground, strung along by our white fluffy companions. We stumbled into a clearing, caused by a fallen tree whose carcass laid bare for all to see. The blanched floor was carpeted with rabbits swelling and weaving to the core.
I squinted. A circle of human-sized glowing rabbits convened in the center. Elongated bunnies, with broad hinged skulls, extended ears, and bushes for tails. They throbbed, twitched their whiskers, and stumped their legs. Rabbits, I remembered, slept with their eyes open. They got wind of our exhales from miles away. Sniffed our body odors. Tasted our guilt. They were guarding someone or something.
Sprout’s greying bob poked out from the middle.
1994.
The day Lily and I had forgotten at the waterfall scalded us like an electric current. We had hauled ourselves out of the stream when Sprout confessed that she’d taken a glow-in-the-dark rabbit home.
I gulped. “You’ve kept one of them all this time?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t talk to me alone at home,” she said, handing us our water bottles.
“Where’d you find it?” Lily asked. “Why don’t you let it go?”
“I thought it would tell me more about what happened,” Sprout shrugged. “Why they chose me.”
Our fingers touched, and we would never be able to discern whether it was because we touched, or because it was the right time, but a balmy, dizzying pulse rushed through our veins.
Sweat beaded on our philtrums. Temples. Back of our necks. Sprout and Lily, as if underwater, blurred into one tan mass. Widening my eyes, I captured the trees, rocks, and pummeling waterfall behind them. They doubled. Two waterfalls. Then four Sprouts and Lilies.
I scrunched my eyes. We became frogspawn, proliferating underneath lily pads. Tadpoles, breaking out of our jellied shells. My stomach somersaulted. Nauseated, I couldn’t hold it in, peeing and shitting at the same time. Our joints ruptured and arched in opposite directions. Our backs, itchy while budding feathers, flared out into wings. We were ostriches, tossing all sorts of eggs into a nest to incubate together. Ostriches, pulling our heads out of sand. We couldn’t mitigate the terror of shrinking into rabbits, rolling, and tumbling across green hills, zipping to our dens.
Every time I snapped apart, I wailed. Sprout and Lily mutated with me. I didn’t see them, but their responses converged with mine.
We became one voice, bellowing with certainty, “Chase, don’t run.” One throat, gulping rugged boulders, one right after the other, stuffing the past we craved to change below, believing what had happened could be excreted or excised by force, but instead, carted them with us into the present where we remained immersed.
We found ourselves on our backs, dazed atop a weathered limestone boulder. The uneven surface cut into our delts.
“Are you okay?” A drunk smile washed over Sprout’s face.
“The fuck was that?” I gasped.
“Heat stroke,” Lily asserted.
We scrambled home immediately. My parents berated me for not keeping my flip phone on. “Only helicopters could’ve reached you three!” they howled, red in the face. But no one could’ve touched us. We were already grounded when stripped of our desires, our dreams, and our predispositions. We were compacted tiny light bulbs, shooting electric currents around us, igniting what came before us and everything that was to come.
2021.
Sprout’s expression was miserable, unlike the dopey smile she exuded when we found her as children in Marco Polo. When she waved at us after the school bell rang. Horizontal on her twin bed frame. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and she heaved.
From the side, I saw Lily steel herself. She shouldered up and around these humanoid rabbits, bobbing to their movements as if they shared the same vein. The air smelled damp and leafy, the first sign of fall or the combination of matte fur, forest floor, and sweat. They whirred, softened by contact.
Sprout, are you okay? Lily’s voice broke out.
A chorus thundered: They are here to collect you.
Pricked by the sounds, my skin peeled back, tightening as if I were tanning. My eyes watered. Then my bladder exploded. Black round eyes popped out from the undulating shallow alabaster pool we were submerged in. Rabbits crooked their necks to eye us, pawing our ankles, slinking over to massage their bellies on our feet.
Come, please take her.
This eerie yet ethereal tone embraced me. Their voices wrapped around our legs like plant tendrils, lugging us closer. It was an overwhelming sensation of acceptance, of love. There were too many dire questions: Why did you come back? Are you angry at Sprout, at us? What have you done? My eyes watered. I recalled all the time their presence, their history, and their actions have derailed Sprout—they altered our friendship, and rooted themselves into our lives, breaking all the ways we tried to contain them.
Sprout, come with us, Lily called.
Come with, ricocheted off tree trunks as though in a tunnel.
I mustered all the courage I had. Are you done with her?
The humanoid rabbits faced us, gleaming with phosphorescence. Lily shielded her face, and I couldn’t find Dan. I cowered.
Done? What is done?
The blanket of rabbits below us started squeaking and hissing. They thumped the floor, beating their butts and hind legs angrily. All around us, bones cracked, and joints contorted, bashing against each other like rocks.
Sorry humans, we have been gone eternities ago.
Then everything vanished in a blink, as though a contract had been fulfilled. Our feet, planted on grass and dried leaves, could move again without kicking small animals. My thighs were drenched. The dark, cool clearing came abuzz again with crickets, chicken clucks, and the toll of the temple bell.
We never saw fur, fluff, and glowing rabbits again.
Sprout was folded over Lily, panting. Dan, who I had forgotten was with us, barreled over, sopping with sweat. The prayers from the speakers began to make sense, the consonants forming words in my mind. There was a resounding relief in Sprout’s sputtering cries, and a sadness too. An emptiness took over that no longer felt like a void but permitted us to float.
Lily was patting Sprout’s back as she wailed. “How could I be so stupid? I’d live my whole life waiting about this moment, this—”
“This is the beginning of the rest of our lives.”
Wrapping my arms around Lily and Dan, I shushed Sprout. I pressed my forehead onto hers, hoping my thoughts would transmit, through our interconnected past, through our beating veins. I can’t believe you kept one of them! But my mouth had dried like sand. Words like, “Finally over,” and “Found,” tumbled out, and Dan apologized again and again for not being stronger. We idled back to the pickup truck, holding each other up and rolled into the seats.
The drive down the mountain was silent. Lily kept reaching her hand back to rub Sprout’s knee. Dan twisted the radio knob higher, blasting K-pop to revive us.
“Sprout, what ever happened to one of the rabbits you kept?” my shaky voice punctured the stale air.
“I released it into the wild, well, back at the temple after that day by the waterfall,” Sprout said, facing out the window.
“Then?”
“I’d go back to visit it. But then there were so many after all these years. The temple custodians simply assumed it was part of their wildlife and charity.” She sighed, then continued. “This whole time, I thought there was something better outside of me. Something to look forward to, answers. But when they found me again this time, the Star People told me they didn’t remember me at all. That I wasn’t special. They did this to every human they encountered.”
“Maybe that’s just what they do,” I said. “Every year, when I’m back for the holidays, my parents still take me to donate things we don’t use to rural villages nearby. Perhaps the Star People are alleviating their guilt on Earth somehow, for watching us as rabbits.”
From the back of her head, I saw Sprout in her fifteen-year-old form. Our hair was smooth and black again. Our jowls taut. Our eyebags deflated and evenly colored. Our breasts strapped to our chests and our collarbones sharp. I thought, how lucky we were to see each other today, with grey hair, with ideas and dreams of our own, shaped by where we came from.
I’ve kept both Sprout and Lily in my mind like that this entire time.
Perhaps what I thought we were chasing, was already good and contained within us.
A pulse. Sweat. Blood. Everything in our world depends on one another. Our families, Our friends. Our love. A shoot cannot grow without soil, sun, and water. A shoot cannot bloom without help, at least not the kind of help that pulls you. Our formlessness, our changing shapes, our rousing natures: this is our final form. The Star People? They have nothing to do with us. If anything, they spurned us to acknowledge that we are what is around us. Do we need to grow and bear shoots to know we are doing well? No, think about what exists in you that wouldn’t be possible without the other.
Ploi Pirapokin is a Thai writer from Hong Kong. She is the Nonfiction Editor at Newfound Journal, and the Co-Editor of The Greenest Gecko: An Anthology of New Asian Fantasy forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. Her work is featured in Tor.com, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, Gulf Stream Magazine, The Offing, and more.
Fay Ku is a Taiwan-born, New York City-based artist whose work is figurative, narrative and connects with past and present cultural histories. She is the recipient of a 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant and 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship grant. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions at the Honolulu Museum of Art ( Honolulu, Hawaii) New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, CT) and Snite Museum of Art (South Bend, IN); she has also participated in several artist residencies including Wave Hill (The Bronx, NY), Lower East Side Printshop (New York, NY), Tamarind Institute (Albuquerque, NV), and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE). She attended Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont for her BA and holds both a MFA Studio Art and MS Art History from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY.