Loc and the River of Stars

About this story

An old night fisherman rides the last ferry out to his favorite bend to sit with his unbaited line, because on the rarest wet-season nights the deep water there turns faintly green with drifting light. The grandmother waits with her boat tied to his while the rain eases, the river begins its slow glowing, and the two elders watch the light pass beneath their hulls, wanting nothing from it, until watching becomes drowsing.

The wonder of a rare gentle thing witnessed without needing to catch it.

Some lights only show themselves to the patient dark.

Read the beginning

For the third night in a row, old fisherman Tam's net came up out of the wide brown Mekong holding nothing but water, and Loc and his quick little river otter Song were leaning over the side of the sampan watching it drip. Three nights, and not one fish. Then Song stiffened, chirped, and pointed his whole whiskery face straight down, and Loc looked, and his heart forgot to beat. Far below the boat, deep in the dark water, one small green-gold light went sliding past, like a fallen star that had learned to swim. "Grandfather," Loc whispered, "there is a star under our boat."

High over the river bend a glossy black raven crossed the darkening sky, slow and calm, turned one wide circle above the sampan, and the boy, and the small pointing otter, and came to rest on the tall stern post, the way it does just before a story begins.

But old Tam did not look down. He only folded his empty net, the worried way he had folded it three nights running, and stared out at the rain clouds walking in over the flooded orchards. "Lantern light in your eyes, child," he said. "When I was small, the old people told of the River Mother, who keeps a garden of stars somewhere under this river, and moves it where she pleases. But I have fished this bend for sixty years, and I will tell you what is true: the river has gone empty, and empty is empty." And he said it the heavy way worried grown-ups say things, with his eyes on his net and never once on the water.

Then the light came back, and it was not one light now but a whole thin thread of them, winking and sliding away under the dark water, down toward the drowned mango orchards where nobody fished at all. Song was halfway over the side already, squeaking, and Loc made up his mind the way seven-year-olds do, all at once and all the way. "The star is leaving, Grandfather. Somebody has to wonder where it goes." So while old Tam tied up the sampan and shook his tired head, Loc slid his own little round basket boat onto the water, and Song leapt in, and the two of them went after the light, with the raven drifting quiet above.

The first warm rain of the evening came whispering down as they slipped in among the drowned mango trees, where the flood stood right up in the branches and fireflies burned soft holes in the dark. Song hung half out of the basket boat, nose to the water, following the winking thread of light the way another otter might follow a smell. Deeper and deeper into the flooded orchard it led them, past sleeping stilt houses, past lotus buds shut up tight for the night, green-gold sparks blinking always just ahead.

And then Loc got greedy the way even good hearts do. The lights were so close, so nearly his, that he dug his paddle in hard and fast, smack, smack, smack, and called out loud across the water, "Wait, stars, wait for me!" And at the very first smack, the thread of lights shivered. At the second, it thinned. And at the third it went out, all of it, everywhere, like a lamp blown flat, and the whole flooded orchard went black as the inside of a pocket.

The story goes on in the video.