Assistant Editor Rome Hernández Morgan: Dang’s “After After” captures the reverberating effects of violence. Echoing the surrealism of war, the manipulation of time in this short story allows the dead to walk and sparrows to remain in a perpetual state of vanishing. I’m continuing to think about this piece long after my first read, which I think is a testament both to the power of this story and to the potential of fiction to fill in gaps that historical accounts cannot capture, gaps where we find the complex and paradoxical nature of our humanity.
After After
The Reforms came to Vietnam and all the birds started to vanish. By that time Ong Noi had already died, took to smoking in the camps. When he got out, his lungs were pitched so black that ash rained out his mouth. He was survived by a sparrow with a broken wing. A few years back, right when the war ended, he thought it would have fled too so he snapped its wing. After it healed, the bones jutted out like piano keys. When he returned from the camps, the bird was in the same place he left it, on the concrete sill of an open window, and Ong Noi said: Look how loyal it is. For years the bird remained there, wearing its wing like a sleeve, secrets tunneling out as wind.
Uyen Phuong Dang is a Vietnamese American writer born in Saigon, Vietnam. Her short stories have appeared and are forthcoming in Exposition Review, X-R-A-Y, Passages North, among other venues. She is currently back in Saigon, researching gods and ghosts. You can follow her work at uyenpdang.com.
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