Caught in Possession

Two Dreams

As I've mentioned, this story is heavier and darker in tone!! But we will head to brighter days ❤️

Warnings:

Storyline of childhood trauma, financial stress and modern slavery explored in this chapter.
Flashback to physical pain (branding).
Death of family member.

See 'end notes' for the happier news!

~~

Pain. Pain. Wretched pain...

He could smell the searing of his own young flesh as delicate skin crackled beneath the torturous, dull weight of the branding iron. Anonymous hands restrained him roughly, forcing him down. They weren't needed - he didn't writhe or thrash, didn't even scream out through the ragged, engine oil streaked cloth that had been thrown his way to bite down onto as a casual afterthought.

Because, in his mind, Gulf was somewhere else entirely. Somewhere where the aroma that cloyed his nostrils was of fresh, sweet pork grilling on a garden barbecue as smoke trailed hazily up into the fading blue sky. Where he heard the melodic giggling of his sister as she tripped over a mischievous, exposed tree root to spill iced tea from the overly full jug she carried - the affectionate, playful scolding of his parents as they suppressed their own laughter. Gulf was there, not here.

Repressive compartmentalising.

//

He had been ten years old when they saw their ancestral land and farm for the last time. What was left of it by then.

It is often said that a farmer could plant a pencil in the soil of the Chiangmai region and it would grow. Yet one drastically poor harvest was all it had taken for hundreds of years of family toil and pride to evaporate into mere local hearsay and sepia-tinged memories. Edited from the agricultural history chapters into nothing and nowhere and nobody.

Money loaned between friends as a short term solution by Gulf's father, Sunti, quickly became debt owed to a collector, and as the Traipipattanapong family clambered desperately up the precarious ladder of financial dependence, it wasn't long until promised repayments were missed, further payday loans acquired, and they fell fatefully to the mercy of the notorious (name that dared not be spoken) Lang family.

How to escape?

It was Gulf's Mae, Isra, who lit the match to start the fire. The four standing as statues in the paralysis of mourning as scorching, red-eyed, ravenous flame demons devoured their home. Then even as they wept, they stole hurriedly away into the night with only the bags on their backs - penniless, homeless, nameless - to board the midnight Chiangmai-Bangkok coach.

False dawn: The plan seemed to have worked for some, hopeful months. A sympathetic cousin of Isra had agreed to shelter them, Bow and Gulf enrolled at the local school, their parents finding work in the factories on the outskirts of the bustling city.

But there came a day when the front door was rapped sharply, a business-like, cold voice said "Good evening...Mr Traipipattanapong. Long time, no see", and Gulf and Bow clung to one another, cowering behind the sofa their mother had ushered them urgently to, wild-eyed in panic. The crack of their Phor's skull was felt through the wall against which they huddled, the thud of his body to the floorboards as he fell reverberating, and then just a deadening numbness and ringing in Gulf's ears. The abrupt end to the memory - because that was the exact, precise moment that his 'repressive compartmentalising' began.

The beating that night hadn't killed his father - spirit dampened beyond restoration - but the stroke and subsequent heart attack he suffered two months later did.