---

Fording the Milky Way

by Megan Ng

There’s a festival celebrated in China that’s dedicated to young lovers. It is not one celebrated here, but Ma tells me about it all the same. Storytelling is our way of killing time as she makes supper for the ranch hands or patches Pa’s shirts, and whenever she’s sitting comfortably with her hands full I know I’m about to hear something interesting. Ma’s stories aren’t like the ones in books– hers seem more thrilling and real, even though I know she’s making most of them up.

She tells me a story about a beautiful weaver girl who lives among the stars and falls in love with a human cowherd. She tells me about a vengeful mother goddess who rips the sky in two with a hairpin to keep the lovers apart forevermore.

On the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, the Jade Emperor takes pity on them, Ma says. He allows all the magpies of the world to form a bridge between the heavens, so that the weaver and her cowherd can see each other for a single night.

Truth be told, I’m not quite listening to her. Pa’s not at home– he’s supervising a cattle drive to Kansas and won’t be back for days. That means we can stargaze tonight, and I’ve spent the whole morning going through my squirrelled-away pile of astrological charts.

“We can see them tonight,” Ma tells me. Her needle darts up-and-down, a silver fish in a dark sea.

“Who?” I’m currently trying to copy two maps onto one sheet of paper, so I won’t have to bring them both outside.

“The weaver and the cowherd. They’re over here.” She leans forward and taps my sheet. “Vega and Altair.”

I peer downwards. She’s right. Vega and Altair, and the Milky Way between them.

“It’s a little sad, isn’t it?”

Ma’s needle pauses. “Yes. Yes, it is.”

---

My father returns from Kansas a week later, and Ma makes a pie with the last of the late-July peaches. We eat silently, and I can tell that Pa’s thinking about Deneb again.

Deneb is a giant. Eighteen hands tall, but he’s not slow, like a horse that size would normally be. He’s a little too fast, actually. Loose-legged, with his body leaning forward at all times, like he’s trying to get somewhere right that instant and can’t stand the wait.

Pa brought Deneb home one day, and Ma pursed her lips but didn’t say much. We didn’t have any use for a horse like that– still don’t, I guess. And Deneb’s never really warmed up to Pa, who insists on riding him even though Ma says he’s going to break his neck, going on like that.

Pa’s the kind of person who does what he wants. He jumps from one thing to another. According to Ma, this ranch is the longest he’s stuck at anything– we’ve lived here for eight years. Well, Ma likes to say, at least he’s not in Mississippi, panning for gold.

The ranch hands don’t respect him, not even when he started parading around on Deneb. They don’t like him tagging along on the cattle drives. I know that, and Ma knows that; it’s only Pa who hasn’t really caught up.

---

When I was little, I used to think my mother and father were in love, because they would read together in bed every night before going to sleep.

Sometimes I would watch them from a crack in the door. They’d sit side by side in the big double bed with the patchwork quilt thrown over their knees. Pa would read ranch handbooks or newspapers. He’d shuffle his pillows around every few seconds. Small changes, minute ones, but enough to irritate him. He had a crick in his neck that never un-cricked itself, and he could never quite lie comfortably. Eventually, he’d throw down his papers and go to sleep.

On his left, my mom was as still as anything. Only her eyes and fingertips moved. She would read whatever my father had just finished reading, which amused him. Paper would pass from one side of the bed to the other in a constant, streaming flow.

It was only when I was older that I noticed how Pa never asked Ma when she’d like to go to sleep. It was always his decision– a rustle of papers and the quick extinguishing of light. She always sat in the dark for a little while afterwards, and then, as always, she’d pick up Auntie Zhinü’s picture from her nightstand and study it closely.

I’ve seen the photograph many times. It’s in a glass frame and shows a woman with dark hair sitting on a horse, turned away from the camera. Auntie Zhinü was my Ma’s girlhood friend. Pa snorts at her funny name and Ma’s sentimentality, but the picture’s never moved from her nightstand for as long as I can remember.

Sometimes she traces her finger over it, or brings it to her mouth. That’s when I normally leave off watching. Some moments are too private, even for a daughter to see.

Here is a secret: Sometimes Ma sneaks out to stargaze without me and only comes back in the early hours of the morning. Sometimes I see her bringing the picture along.

I don’t rat her out to Pa, of course. I stopped believing my parents were in love a long time ago.

---

Ma’s the one who taught me astronomy, how to read a lunar calendar and pick out constellations. She taught me how to write, too– don’t know she found the time in between feeding the chickens and raking the garden, cooking and housework. Her hands scrub at dishes as she tells me about a man who paints the eyes on dragons and an archer who shot down nine suns.

The one thing she won’t tell me about is Auntie Zhinü. I often find that my parents are reflections of each other. Opposites. Pa doesn’t like to tell me about anything other than himself, or the things that surround him– how he made Deneb jump over a stile yesterday, or how his spring cattle roundup was the best for miles around. Ma spins me yarns about the stars and never glances back down to Earth.

She talks to the birds and leaves them heels of bread or scraps of leather. Sometimes, they bring her back rings and necklaces or their own black-and-white feathers. She takes whatever they give her, weaving the silvery stones into her yellow braid, where they shimmer like the sheen on a cup of milk.

I don’t think Pa’s ever noticed that Ma doesn’t wear the pewter lockets he gives her. I don’t think he’s ever looked at her long enough to know that.

The ranch hands like Ma, because she’s the one who brings the food to their bunkhouse. She harnesses their horses and fixes their clothes when she can find the time. Sometimes they sing songs on slower afternoons, and I creep out and listen.

It’s on one of those afternoons that we discover Deneb’s true talent.

The summer sun in the grasslands is always scorching hot, and maybe Pa made the mistake of trying to rein him in a little too tightly– who knows what happened. But suddenly there’s a shout and a splash and they’re both wrong-side up in the pond.

One of the ranch hands is beside Pa in a flash, trying to help him up without laughing. The other is trying to coax Deneb out of the water, but it’s not working. Deneb’s paddling backwards and forwards like he was born to be a water-creature and not a stallion. I’ve never seen him look so happy.

Pa’s red as the setting sun, and I know we’ll be getting an earful at dinner tonight.

Ma would love this, I think. But when I look back towards the house, she’s standing by the doorway with a plate in her hand, and her gaze isn’t anywhere near Pa.

Instead, she’s staring hard at our semi-aquatic fish-horse, her gaze alight with something I can’t name.

---

That night, I wake a few hours before dawn. Ma’s a silhouette in the backyard, her head tilted, reading the waning moon like it’s something important. I watch her through the window. Her mouth moves in silence.

---

Three days later, Pa breaks his leg in the darkness of the new-moon night. August’s end-of-summer haze is beginning to set into the air. The ranch hands help carry his groaning body into bed, where Ma cleans his face with a washcloth and doesn’t say I told you so, although I can tell she wants to.

Ma goes to town with a ranch hand the next day to get a physician. She rides Deneb comfortably in her blue linen dress.

That week, I spend more time with Pa than I ever have in thirteen years of life. I bring him newspapers and oatmeal, blackberry tea and lemonade. He sinks further and further into the pillows, too proud to ask me to uncrick his neck.

Ma doesn’t sleep anymore. She doesn’t even go into the bedroom. During the day, she works on the ranch and plans the autumn roundup season. At night, she speaks to birds and kicks up dust clouds on Deneb’s back. Once I caught her trying on Pa’s boots.

Pa holds out until the end of the week, when the physician tells him that he’s got more than two months left until he gets better. That night, he asks me to bring Ma into the bedroom. I listen with my ear against the door.

We don’t belong here, Pa says. I’ve been neglecting my own family, haven’t I? We aren’t ranch folks. Sorry it took so long for me to realise.

We’ve spent eight years here, Ma replies. It’s our home. You want us to go back to the cattle towns? That’s no place to raise a child.

Better than staying in the middle of nowhere to rot.

Ma pauses, and I can hear a rustle of clothing. She loves it here. I love it here. The town’s so smoky you can barely see the stars. I’m not making our child live on a railhead.

When the hell did you get to make all these decisions? Pa snorts. Don’t think I know what you do every night, sneakin’ out to see that–

A scuffle and a muffled shout. The sound of breaking glass. I dart back into the kitchen, just in time to see Ma storm out of the door like a whirlwind.

Pa’s collapsed back into the pillows, one arm over his eyes.

Auntie Zhinü’s picture lies shattered on the floor.

---

Ma doesn’t go back to clean up the broken glass. Instead, she snatches Pa’s boots from the hallway and gestures for me to follow. We run a helter-skelter flight from the house, even though we know nobody’s chasing us.

The night’s pitch-dark, no grains of starlight, and I think for a second that Pa’s managed to do it, he’s managed to pick up our entire ranch and drop it into a smoky cattle town by sheer force of will. But Ma stretches her arms out, and the blackness fractures, cracks, like a mosaic or a pane of glass, revealing white bellies and beady eyes and so many feathers that I feel nauseous just looking up.

The birds rise, a tornado of black and white. Slowly, their numbers thin out. Some get so high that they disappear entirely, while others glide close to the ground and stand still as they can, treading air.

It’s a dance, I realise. They’re arranging themselves into position. It’s a shape, a wide spiral that shoots up into the night like a corkscrew. In the middle of the storm of wings is the fingernail-moon that marks the early stages of a new lunar month. It’s the sixth– no, the seventh.

The seventh night of the seventh lunar month. Ma’s left me standing in front of the house with my mouth open while she bridles Deneb.

I’ve never seen a magpie in real life before– our grasslands are too hot and scrabbly for that. But as I watch thousands of birds arrange themselves into a curling staircase, I think I might know what they look like now.

Deneb hurtles over to me, Ma on his back. He’s trying his best not to paw the ground in excitement, and failing splendidly.

Ma’s gaze is iron-hard. She’s not only taken Pa’s boots, but his hat and belt as well. I guess he won’t be needing them anymore.

She doesn’t speak, just holds out a hand to me. And it’s strange how such a crucial and momentous few seconds can bend into the neatest of binary decisions, a yes or no in its lowest, most simplified form.

I think of my parents, side-by-side in the double bed. My father passing newspapers to his left, always his left, never looking up to see if Ma’s interested in what he’s giving her. His neck always hurts, no matter which way he sleeps. I don’t think he’ll ever be satisfied.

The binary collapses to a single point.

I take my mother’s hand and vault onto our horse.

---

I don’t know how long we ride for, but when I open my eyes again, the ground is nothing more than a smear of red earth below. An afterthought. I’ve grown used to the curious sensation of Deneb’s hooves landing on soft feathers, and the fluttering sound that arises when the old sections of our bridge decide to depart.

The Milky Way stands in front of us, silver and threatening, the embodiment of celestial will. It’s untouchable, fast-moving, deeper than any pond or trench. A river of bleeding stars slashed into the flank of the night.

The Jade Emperor was crafty, it seems. The magpie bridge stops a few feet over the river itself, leaving a vast expanse of galaxy before us. Just enough space to see someone standing on the opposite side and hear the faint echoes of their shouting. No way to cross.

Ma doesn’t pause, doesn’t think, just leans forward.

A lesser horse would have been swept away instantly, and we’d tumble out of the sky once the water came to an end. But Deneb holds his ground, paddling frantically, and we ford the Milky Way in tiny, terrible inches. Every star, every eye in the Universe is upon us.

Everyone is watching as the cowherd fights for her weaver.

Deneb doesn’t show any signs of getting tired, and I think: we’re going to do it.

But then the darkness above us shudders, like it’s turning over in its sleep. Tiny white stars storm down like pebbled hail and send jets of boiling water into the air.

One of these grazes Deneb’s side, and he shrieks, losing the rhythm. We’re borne downstream, falling like a comet. I bury my face in Ma’s dress until I feel a shake to my shoulders.

Ma’s turned around, her Stetson pulled low over her eyes. She’s saying something, but I can’t hear her over the river’s roaring.

She bends closer to me. VEGA, Ma hollers. WHICH ONE IS VEGA?

My star maps, scattered across our kitchen table. All those nights of astrology and the sleepy-eyed mornings that followed. I lean forward, squint against the glare.

THAT ONE, I cry. And my mother’s lasso is a bulls-eye shot, a dark needle whirling towards the single pinpoint vulnerability in the celestial bank.

Vega.

The lasso falls over the bluish shine, and Ma grabs the rope and pulls it tight. We’re okay, I’m okay. I’m seven years old again and wobbling on a pony as Ma shows me how to pull just-so, hard enough that the cow comes back to you, but not so hard that it hurts. I disregard all those lessons. My mother’s eyes are shining with silver water, glistening with determination and love.

And now we’re pulling, pulling, my arms straining and Deneb pushing as fast as we can, as the silver-tinted river rears against us. The dead stars in the water trail around my nightdress, burning hot, and I know Ma’s calves must hurt but she’s not saying anything.

Bit by bit we lurch over the Milky Way.

And just as my arms give out and Ma heaves for the last time against Vega’s deadweight, I feel something soft fall over us.

It’s a net, I realise. Fine silver mesh woven inescapably tightly, falling down upon us like summer rain. I think of the cruel mother-goddess and flail, terrified that she’s going to bear down with her razor-sharp hairpin. Ma grabs me before I can fall off Deneb, and suddenly we’re being pulled to shore like fish for the market, trying to keep our chins above the river in a cyclone of horse tails and leather boots and nightgowns.

A hand grabs me and yanks me out of the water, and I stare for the first time at the weaver who lives in the sky, the woman who prevented my mother from ever belonging on the ground below.

Auntie Zhinü.

She’s not young or even beautiful, like I expected a goddess to be. Her black hair is streaked with grey, like Ma’s is, and wrinkles line her face like comet trails.

But her elegant sleeves drip with river water as she hauls Deneb out of the netting, and her eyes are a galaxy of kindness as she takes Ma’s hand. And suddenly my mother’s a blushing girl again, someone with the whole world in her arms and a future close enough to bite at.

Ma takes off her hat and hugs it to her chest, embarrassed, while Zhinü strokes Deneb’s neck. “He’s taller than I remember,” she says. “Did you have trouble finding him again?”

“I’m sorry I took so long,” Ma says. “There was– more on the line than I thought.”

“I can see,” she replies, turning to smile at me.

And suddenly she stretches her other hand out, a waiting invitation.

“Shall we go?”