The Lạc River never slept. It flowed past the village with the patient endurance of something that had witnessed countless lives being born, then laid to rest beneath grass-covered graves. In this impoverished countryside—where even the call of a cuckoo striking the hardened earth sounded harsher than usual—the river was the only presence that felt gentle. But to Tiểu Hạ, it was more than that. It was a boundary: on one side, a suffocating peace; on the other, dreams stained with vanity, dreams she and Quốc Khải whispered to each other every dusk.
Tiểu Hạ sat on the Lạc ferry pier, her bare, pale feet dangling, lightly touching the silt-red water. She was seventeen—the age people said was the most beautiful in a girl's life—yet Hạ's beauty resembled a wildflower growing between cracks of stone: resilient, quiet, and faintly sorrowful. Her long black hair was not scented with oils nor adorned with glittering pins; it was hastily tied with a wooden hairpin carved by her father, ông Diên, from leftover wood of a coffin order for someone in the village.
"Hạ, the water's already up to your calves. You'll catch a cold."
A low voice rose amid the rustling of the old bamboo grove. Without turning around, Tiểu Hạ knew who it was. Quốc Khải had a scent unmistakably his own—a blend of salty sweat, sun-baked fields, and the lingering smoke of kitchen fires clinging to his worn shirt.
Quốc Khải walked over and sat beside her. He didn't look at her right away, instead fixing his gaze on the distance, where hazy mountain ranges concealed what people called "the other side of the world." Khải was nineteen, tall and lean, yet solid like an old ironwood tree. His eyes lacked the naïveté of other village boys. They were the eyes of someone who yearned for something far greater than plow furrows and failed harvests.
"Brother Khải, why are you late today?" Tiểu Hạ asked softly, her fingers fidgeting with the faded hem of her shirt.
Khải sighed and pulled a bamboo flute from his cloth bundle. He had made it himself; the finger holes were uneven, yet the sound it produced could tighten the listener's chest.
"Ông Diên's coughing again, isn't he? I could hear it from the end of the lane," Khải said, sidestepping her question and striking straight at the worry clouding Hạ's eyes.
Tiểu Hạ fell silent. Her father, once the finest carpenter in the area, had spent a lifetime breathing sawdust and cheap paint fumes, which had drained his lungs dry. The cough that stretched from autumn into winter hollowed out his chest, and every time she saw him cough up blood, Hạ felt as if her heart were being crushed.
"Father said… the tuition for my next term… he probably won't be able to manage it," she murmured, bowing her head as hot tears fell and dissolved into the Lạc River.
Suddenly, Quốc Khải took her hand. His palm was rough, calloused from hauling water and doing odd jobs, yet at that moment it became her only anchor.
"Don't cry. I told you—I'll take care of it. Tomorrow I'll go to the district town to look for more work. They say there's a big construction project up there. They need porters. The pay is three times what you make plowing fields here."
"But what about your studies?" Hạ looked up at him, anxious.
Khải smiled—a crooked, bitter smile. "Studying? In a village like this, what's studying good for when your stomach is still empty? I'll go, Hạ. Not just to the town. I want to go to the city. I want to stand in the highest place, where the electric lights blaze so brightly that no one can see the mud on their feet anymore."
Hạ froze. She knew Khải was ambitious, but this was the first time he spoke of the city with such fire in his eyes. In that moment, he felt strangely unfamiliar. The boy beside her was still Quốc Khải—the one who had picked sweet wild berries for her, who had carried her across flooded fields—but his soul already seemed to belong somewhere else.
"The city… it's far, isn't it?" she whispered.
"Far. But only there can I give you and chú Diên a real life. Hạ—do you believe in me?"
Tiểu Hạ looked deep into Khải's dark eyes. In the stillness of dusk, as the mournful cry of the bittern echoed, she nodded gently. She believed him with all the innocence of a seventeen-year-old girl who had never stepped beyond the village bamboo hedges.
Quốc Khải raised the flute to his lips. The melody flowed out, slipping through leaves and floating over the river's surface. It had no name, yet it carried the breath of earth and water, and vows never spoken aloud. His flute that day was not only sorrowful—it held a fierce resolve, like a farewell to a life of poverty.
In the distance, bà Ngỏ—the village's madwoman—staggered along the dike. She stopped, stared at the two youths, then burst into shrill laughter."Light! The light will devour you! Don't go! Don't seek the sun when your eyes aren't used to fire!"
Tiểu Hạ shuddered and pressed closer to Khải's shoulder.
"Don't listen to her. She's crazy," Khải said, trying to reassure her, yet his hand clenched the flute as if he might snap it in two.
That night, Tiểu Hạ lay on her creaking bamboo bed, listening to her father's dry coughing from the next room. She gazed through the window at the moonlight illuminating piles of leftover wood scattered across the yard. She dreamed of herself and Khải standing amid a forest of towering buildings. No matter how she called out, Khải kept walking forward, his back dissolving into blazing neon lights, leaving her stranded among unfamiliar faces.
She woke with a start, her back drenched in sweat. Outside, the Lạc River continued to flow, the water lapping against the boat's side like the sigh of fate.