ALEX
We head back to our hometown in Ratchaburi. The bus rattles and shakes as we take on the mountainous roads, the scenery getting familiar by the second. The mounds of green outside the window. The abandoned school outside our town. Sparkling freshwater rivers that empty into the Andaman Sea. Men bent over rice fields and women gossiping outside their homes. We pass a Shinto shrine, the last landmark that signifies we are finally home.
After Aunt Luna cast her spell, I was not sure what to expect. Maybe some sort of a light show as she uttered her incantation that supposedly freed me and my brother from our mother’s binding. Or maybe a feeling that something changed, like how Buddha achieved enlightenment under a fig tree. But there was nothing. Although the red string in my wrist fee
