Rose Mitchel

What Happens When Nothing Is Done

The worst kind of running away, he knows now, is that from your own country. Standing on the wooden dock of the cargo ship, a pack on his back, Hmin Myint Lu withered silently in the smoky winter air. No breeze blew to lighten his breath, so he felt for the last time the suffocating city smog, watched as the heat of the late afternoon shattered against the golden tip of the Shwedagon Pagoda. As the ship crept downriver, Hmin wondered if this was the last of Myanmar that King Thibaw and the beautiful Queen Supayalat had seen, too, upon their exile more than a century ago. The city of Yangon would’ve looked different then—no grand colonial buildings imposed in the centre; no rickety, low-cost development complexes cluttering the skyline; no glossy skyscrapers lifted in celebratory dominance—yet the unfaded green and gold, he knew, had been there, the brushes of jungle and glittered pagodas that endured war, earthquakes, democracy and dictatorship. Hmin wondered if the King and Queen had considered them all as he did now—lost to him yet timeless, as momentary flashes of the dearest memory. But his musings were short-lived, for he remembered that as captives of the British Empire the King and Queen must've been held below deck. So he watched it all shrink from view, and he knew then that his body, too, would stay suspended in this air—held as it was, burning and stifled, in the broken beams of the same, endless sun.